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a number of unsavory individuals that came with that sort of territory who had become regrettably familiar with Fox over the last few years. He didn't have many good memories of this place, in general, but there were a few in particular which were putting him on edge.
None of this really justified the foul mood he was in, though. He scowled and blew a heavy breath through the sharp teeth this exposed. The truth was, he'd seen something tucked into the back of that bar that had worked on his nerves throughout the entire meeting. It was an arcade simulator - an older model. The owner had probably picked it up at a steal and kept it as a novelty. Above the simulator were the bright,albiet flickering words: Star Fox Lylat Wars The Complete Collection.
Fox winced just thinking about those damn kiddie games. In the short lived landslide of fame and success his team had experienced after thwarting Andross's first attempt at conquering the star system, Fox had mistakenly sold the rights to his team's story to a virtual game development firm. The result was a series of virtual games revolving around a cartoon-carichaturized version of Fox and his team which kids could play that vaguely followed his life over the last decade and a half. Unfortunately, the fine print didn't say they couldn't keep making the damn things, and they'd followed him right up until the end of the Anglar Blitz. It was like watching his life made into a re-playable Saturday morning cartoon.
It was probably just years of paranoia, but it felt like the bastards were mocking him.
Sure, he still got royalty checks, but those damn games had done a serious number on his credibility as a mercenary. Especially the last installment. He had helped save the entire Lylat system for the God-only-knows-how-many-th time and all that game had seemed to focus on was the circus act of the final days of Fox and Krystal's now non-existent relationship. He was one of the best mercenaries in the System, damn it, not the star of some cheesy soap opera!
He groaned.
At least, he used to be one of the best mercenaries in the System. Now look at him, scrounging for cargo transport missions like an unlicensed merchant.
When he arrived at the port he slid his ID at the gate and headed for his arwing. The sooner he was starborne, the better. Not all of his visits to this place were friendly, and he knew of more than a few people who would just love to get their hands on him while he was in the area. It was a calculated risk. The chances of finding work slightly outweighed the chances of being caught. It had been a nervous few hours, but now that he was back at the local starport and ready to break atmo, he felt-
The terminal rejected his I.D. with a dull tone, and the security gate, a waist-high flap of hard, clear plastic, remained closed. Confused and a little frustrated, he slid his card two more times with the same result before an explanation announced itself.
"Fox! My friend!" a disgustingly familiar voice called, "were you really going to leave before seeing Vicini?
Fox's ears wilted and his shoulders slumped. "I was just thinking of you…" he said to the portly feline as he approached from his right, all smiles, arms spread in greeting. He wore loose, concealing robes that draped comfortably over his large frame.
"Why so glum? Does seeing Vicini truly cause you such grief?"
"I don't have your money," Fox said bluntly.
Vicini's smile didn't falter. "I thought you might say that, my friend, so I arranged for one of my friends in high places to put a lock on your fighter's hangar."
Fox gritted his teeth. Subtly, he loosened his blaster in its holster. He knew coming here would be risky.
"Now, now, let us be polite, my friend. There is no longer a hurry for you to leave, yes? I was hoping we could talk, you and I."
Fox sneered. "I hear you're still short handed after our last little talk. Sure you can spare anymore men on one of our conversations?"
Vicini's eye twitched ever so slightly. "Water under the bridge, my friend. And yes, I am regrettably without a sufficiently skilled pilot after that unfortunate little fiasco, which is exactly why I am here. You see, I have a business proposition for you!"
The only thing keeping Fox's blaster in its holster was the security detail waiting just beyond the starport check point. Shooting this bloated sack of filth would be a blessing to the whole system, but law men tended to have difficulty seeing past the letter of the law, and the prospect of causing trouble here had a price tag he couldn't really afford.
"I'd rather not get any more involved with you than I already am," Fox answered, trying to buy enough time to think of a way out of this situation, "Besides, I've already got a job, and dropping contracts is bad for business."
"Doing what?" Vicini laughed "Running cargo? You're better than that! And, more importantly, you will never make enough money to pay back what you owe me by performing such… menial tasks. If, however, you were to consider doing me this one small favor, I would be more than willing to dismiss your considerable debt, as well as pay you, say, fifty-thousand?"
Fox's ears perked up at the mention of his proposition. "Fifty thousand on top of what I owe you?"
The stingy prohibitionist from earlier was only paying ten.
Vicini's smile became less cheerful, gaining a more smug appearance. "Got your attention? Good. Come now, let us go somewhere more private. You look as though you could use a drink."
That was it, the magic words. It was the best thing Fox had heard all day. He let his hand drop from his blaster, back to his side. He didn't like the thought of working for Vicini. He was as crooked as they came, and the prospect of getting honest work from him was laughable, but, the way things were looking, Fox didn't have a choice but to hear him out. He wasn't going anywhere with his fighter locked up, and he could really use the money.
...
Fichina fell away beneath him as Fox's arwing finally left the hangar. He could feel the pull of gravity fade as he pulled away, even through the G-diffusers, and though he'd only been planet side for a few hours, it felt good to be adrift again. No weight, no worries, just endless, star filled space.
Fox switched on the com and hailed the Great Fox. "Rob, I'm starborne, what's your location?"
"Fox, repairing the ship's beacon would allow you to track the ship yourself…" Rob's toneless mechanical voice came back.
"Repairs cost money, Rob. Right now I'm just grateful we're still adrift," he answered.
Rob gave what Fox took for a sigh before sending the ship's coordinates. It wasn't far, and he was docked shortly after spotting the Great Fox in the distance.
"Did you find work?" Rob asked as Fox walked onto the bridge.
"It found me," he answered, slumping into a seat, "Get us gate clearance"
"Destination?"
"Titania," he answered in a low tone. Who would have thought he'd be doing something like this? A few years back, he would never have accepted this kind of job. Hell, he'd have probably spit in Vicini's bloated face just for offering it to him.
It might interest you to know, my information suggests that a member of the legendary Star Wolf squadron has been contracted to escort this convoy. It would seem that they are expecting trouble, and could think of no one else better suited to assuring a safe delivery. Vicini's words echoed in Fox's head. His hands tightened into fists. He would like to believe that he hadn't taken the job out of spite, that he'd just needed the money and that was all, but he wasn't in the habit of lying to himself. It was only after Vicini mentioned Wolf that he'd accepted the contract.
Regardless, once at Titania he was to rendezvous with Vicini's 'associates' in orbit below the planet's great ring. The details of the operation would be discussed, and they were to lay in wait.
"No worries…" he muttered.
"What was that?" Rob asked, turning away from the navigation console.
"Nothing. Are we cleared yet?"
"I've charted our route, and requested clearance. We are waiting for confirmation, but there is an expected wait of one hour due to the gate's heavy traffic and-"
"Great Fox, you are clear for departure to Titania. Please approach the gate via the following vector. Thank you," the curt voice of the star traffic control system cut in. Rob stood wordlessly for a moment before turning back to his navigations.
Fox smirked. It seemed his employer didn't want to any delays. Bribing gate authorities wouldn't have been cheep, and he couldn't help but wonder what it was that this convoy could be carrying to make it worth that kind of… extravagance. It was probably best if he didn't know.
He leaned back in his seat and propped his head to the side with a loose fist as the Great Fox neared the large orbital gate.
He really wasn't looking forward to what waited on the other side.Story highlights Durban was originally awarded the Games
South African city later lost right to host event
Birmingham beat Liverpool to be British candidate city
(CNN) Birmingham has been officially named the host city for the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
The £750 million ($1 billion) showpiece will be the most expensive sporting event held in Britain since the 2012 London Olympics -- which cost a reported £8 billion ($11 billion).
Birmingham, which is about 126 miles from London, was the only city to submit a bid before the original deadline on September 30, though it was deemed "not fully compliant" by the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF).
JUST WATCHED Triathlete helps his brother across the finish line Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Triathlete helps his brother across the finish line 01:05
Read MoreIn a setback to the Mamata Banerjee-led government in West Bengal, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to entertain its petition challenging the Centre’s decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits of numerous government welfare schemes. The court, however, asked the West Bengal counsel to amend its prayer and submit a fresh plea.
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The Supreme court bench, while hearing the petition, pulled up the state government saying how can it question a law enacted by the Parliament.
“In a federal structure, how can a state file plea challenging Parliament’s mandate? We know it is a matter which needs consideration but you satisfy us how a state can challenge it?” it asked. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the West Bengal government, informed the court that the plea has been filed by the labour department of the state as subsidies under these schemes have to be given by them.
“You satisfy us how the state has challenged it. We know it is a matter which needs consideration,” the bench said, adding that the Centre’s move can be challenged by an individual but not by states.
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The bench, instead, asked Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to submit a plea before it as an individual. “Let Mamta Banerjee come and file. We will entertain her as an individual,” it said.
READ | What is Aadhaar card and where is it mandatory?
However, Sibal maintained that the state was entitled to file such a plea but said that they would amend the prayer in the petition.
Meanwhile, on a separate petition filed by one Raghav Tanka, challenging the government’s push for linking telephone numbers with Aadhaar, the court issued a notice to the Centre seeking its reply within four weeks.
Earlier, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had dared the Centre to disconnect her mobile number, which she said she will not link with her Aadhaar. “Let them disconnect my mobile connection. But I will not link my mobile number with Aadhaar card. I am not bound to disclose all my personal matters,” she had said.
The two petitions were heard in the apex court separately from the batch of 21 petitions which are already being heard by the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.
Earlier, the Centre had told the apex court that the deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar to avail benefits of various government schemes has been extended till March 31 next year for those who do not have the 12-digit biometric identification number.
It had said that the deadline extension from December end till March 31, 2018, would apply only to those who do not have Aadhaar and are willing to enrol for it.
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Several petitions, challenging the Centre’s move to make Aadhaar mandatory for welfare schemes and notifications to link it with mobile numbers and bank accounts, are pending in the apex court.
With PTI inputsScientists at Pennsylvania State University used the gene-altering technique Crispr to create a white-button mushroom that doesn't turn brown as quickly, meaning it can sit in your fridge for longer than usual. And that mushroom may well be in your fridge soon. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent the lab a letter giving the mushrooms a thumbs up, thus, for the first time, clearing a food altered with Crispr.
This is a really big deal—and not just for mushroom lovers.
“The new technology,” University of Minnesota biologist Daniel F. Voytas told Scientific American last month, “is necessitating a rethinking of what a GMO is.”
Typically, when scientists have sought to genetically modify crops, they've relied on techniques that splice genes from one species into another—adding, for example, a bit of flounder DNA to a tomato to help it survive colder temperatures.
For obvious reasons, this notion of a mutant fish-tomato gives some people the willies, even though the vast majority of scientists say that it is perfectly safe. But Crispr, which allows scientists to cut and paste gene sequences more easily than ever, means scientists can more easily alter crops without adding genes from another species. To prevent those white button mushrooms from browning, for example, scientists just had to knock out the bit of DNA responsible for making them turn brown when you cut them. No Frankenfishmushroom here.
Some scientists have argued that this makes foods engineered using Crispr fundamentally different from the transgenic engineering responsible for crops like that tomato with flounder DNA or Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant corn. This process, they say, is a less biologically-disruptive means of altering plants.
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The USDA, it seems, may be inclined to agree. In its letter to Yinong Yang, the plant pathologist at Pennsylvania State University responsible for the newly engineered mushroom crop, it wrote that because the new mushroom “does not contain any introduced genetic material” it isn't even subject to the agency's GMO regulations.
Since the 1990s, the USDA has regulated which genetically modified crops can head to market, the thinking being that crops with foreign DNA could accidentally cause environmental harm. But a mushroom that has simply had some of its DNA deleted, the agency said, seems to present no such threat.
Anti-GMO activists have been zealously against crop modification even though the vast majority of the scientific community believes that they are not inherently harmful, so there's no telling whether Crispr will change their stance.
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Gary Ruskin, the co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a consumer advocacy group that has come out largely against the GMO industry, told me via email that the groups concerns about genetically engineered food-crops extend to Penn State's new Crispr mushroom.
"What are the unknowns about CRISPR generally, and in particular, in its application in this mushroom?" he asked. "Regulators should determine whether there are off-target effects. Consumers have the right to know what’s in our food."
In Europe, however, where anti-GMO advocates have strongly opposed Crispr, the director of the Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture recently came out in favor of Crispr, telling a German newspaper that it's different from the traditional genetic-engineering technologies and would alleviate many of the concerns groups like his have with older gene-editing techniques.
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In academic labs, many other crops have already been engineered with Crispr, including soybeans, rice, and potatoes. The agricultural technology firm Dupont is testing using Crispr to make drought-resistant corn. It told the MIT Technology Review that it plans to start selling Crispr-engineered seeds by the end of this decade.
Yang told Science News that he would also seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration before releasing the crop to market as a precaution, even though he is not technically required to do so. For now, the Crispr mushroom remains relegated to the lab.
But, as Voytas points out, the promise of Crispr crops requires rethinking what we consider a GMO, or perhaps how we consider different techniques of genetic engineering in different situations. Is a tomato that's been spliced with a fish really the same thing as a mushroom that's just had a teeny bit of plastic surgery? Probably not.Time really flies when you're having fun!So fast in fact, that the best deals can really zoom by sometimes. If you missed out on any of our 2015 DRM-free Summer Sale deals so far, we have great news: all 650+ discounted games and 20 bundles are here for a 24-hour long recap until June 10, 11:59 AM GMT!An electrifying, energizing, jolting, shocking, galvanizing cornucopia of value!We're celebrating the one and onlywith a 48-hour giveaway: The Kung-Fu themed real time strategy game! DRM-free gamers among us can share the summertime joy with your friends and family - the giveaway is open to everyone, with no strings attached and just one click away. All until June 11, 11:59 AM GMT.But this special day brings not just a mountain of deals, but alsowithfor achievements, auto-updating, game-time tracking and more: The Walking Dead - A Telltale Games Series Seasons 1 and 2, as well as the standalone 400 Days episode, will be available in a bundle up to 75% off! The Wolf Among Us sitting among Telltale's best-told adventures, the comic-book styled and inspired fantasy murder-mystery will also premiere DRM-free with a 75% discount.Whether you're long time guest or a newcomer, there is still plenty of time to unlock up to three games for free., andawait all those who spend $1, $20, and $50 respectively throughout the summer sale.These are just the first of more surprises coming up during the 2015 DRM-free Summer Promo, which has 12 more days to go until June 21, coming to an end at 11:59 PM GMT (13:59 CET / 4:59 AM PDT / 7:59 AM EDT).Embedding a copyright-infringing video on another Web site is not illegal, a court ruled yesterday.
Judge Richard Posner ruled at the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that MyVidster, a social video bookmarking site, did not infringe the copyright of Flava Works, a porn production company, when it embedded copyright-infringing versions of Flava Works content from third-party Web sites.
The decision overturned a preliminary injunction from 2011, imposed by a lower court after Flava Works filed suit against MyVidster in 2010.
According to the Appeals Court ruling, MyVidster "doesn't touch the data stream" and therefore doesn't host the infringing video, but links to versions hosted elsewhere on the Web.
MyVidster was "not encouraging swapping, which in turn encourages infringement," the ruling said:
MyVidster is giving web surfers addresses where they can find entertainment. By listing plays and giving the name and address of the theaters where they are being performed, the New Yorker is not performing them. It is not "transmitting or communicating" them. Is myVidster doing anything different? To call the provision of contact information transmission or communication and thus make myVidster a direct infringer would blur the distinction between direct and contributory infringement and by doing so make the provider of such information an infringer even if he didn't know that the work to which he was directing a visitor to his website was copyrighted.
Both Google and Facebook filed papers in support of MyVidster. They argued that sites such as theirs should be seen as intermediaries only, and that they should not be held liable if someone uploads copyrighted material to their servers, claiming Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also filed an amicus brief in support of MyVidster.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sided with Flava Works, filing a brief urging the appeals court to uphold the lower court's injunction.
How this will affect other cases remains unseen. For instance, 23-year-old Richard O'Dwyer, who operated the Web site TV-Shack, is to be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. to face copyright infringement charges. His site offered links to other Web sites that hosted uploaded copyrighted television shows and films, but did not host the material itself.Kris Medlen is coming back to the Braves in hopes of reviving his career where it began.
The veteran right-hander, among the Braves’ most popular players of the past decade, signed a minor league contract this week after spending the past two seasons with the Royals, who declined a 2017 option.
After coming back from two Tommy John elbow surgeries and then missing much of the 2016 season with shoulder problems, Medlen, 31, considered retirement in the fall before deciding to begin working with a biomechanics expert to refine his delivery in hopes of continuing his career.
“I’m giving it a go and Coppy (Braves general manager John Coppolella) and Co. are being patient and 100 percent supportive,” Medlen said in a text message. “Couldn’t be happier about the situation compared to where I was mentally about four months ago.”
His Braves contract doesn’t include an invitation to major league spring training; he’ll spend the spring rebuilding arm strength and continuing to work on his delivery.
“Could’ve been invited, but I’m in New Orleans working with a bio mechanics dude, attempting to figure things out,” Medlen said. “Was late getting ready this year because I was contemplating hanging ‘em up (retiring)…. From where I was a few months ago, I’m a different person. I was about as low as it gets.”
Medlen debuted in the majors with Atlanta in 2009 and went 41-25 with a 3.25 ERA in 173 games (75 starts) over parts of five seasons with the Braves through 2013. He was a sensation in 2012, going 10-1 with a 1.57 ERA in 50 games including 9-0 with a microscopic 0.97 ERA in 12 starts after a midseason move to the rotation.
The affable Southern California native had his second Tommy John elbow surgery with the Braves during spring training 2014. He missed that entire season and then left as a free agent, signing a two-year, $8.5 million deal with Kansas City – a contract that reflected how highly he was thought of by Royals general manager Dayton Moore and other former Braves officials in the Royals front office.
After going 6-2 with a 4.01 ERA in 15 games (eight starts) for the Royals in 2015, Medlen had shoulder injuries twice during the 2016 season and was limited to six major league starts, going 1-3 with a 7.77 ERA and more walks (20) than strikeouts (18) in 24 1/3 innings.The last few years has seen a massive leap in terms of genome editing. With the development of the incredible CRISPR/Cas9 technique, never before have scientists been able to so easily and precisely identify, edit, or remove specific sections of DNA. This has allowed scientists to target particular mutations, giving hope that the cure for certain inherited diseases could be around the corner. Now, researchers have used it to target HIV, and have managed to remove the genome of the virus from infected cells.
When HIV infects someone, its RNA is transcribed into HIV-1 DNA, which is then integrated into a specific immune system cell known as CD4+ T-cells. This means that the infected cells then replicate the HIV genome, producing more of the virus, which can then go on to infect more CD4+ T-cells. This has the effect of weakening the immune system, and eventually gives rise to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, with sufferers then succumbing to other normally beatable illnesses such as pneumonia.
Current antiretroviral drugs aim to stop the virus from infecting the cells in the first place, but once the virus has placed its DNA within the T-cells, there is little that can be done, and the infected cells then act in effect as a reservoir for HIV. “Antiretroviral drugs are very good at controlling HIV infection,” explains Kamel Khalili, senior investigator of the study published in Scientific Reports. “But patients on antiretroviral therapy who stop taking the drugs suffer a rapid rebound in HIV replication.”
So, the team from Temple University Health System instead decided to see if they could use the impressive precision of CRISPR to locate and remove the sections of HIV-derived DNA from infected T-cells. They showed that they were indeed able to remove the entire HIV genome without any other side effects on the host cells, which continued to grow and divide normally. Not only that, but the now HIV-eradicated T-cells were then immune to new infection by the virus later on.
“The findings are important on multiple levels,” says Dr. Khalili. “They demonstrate the effectiveness of our gene editing system in eliminating HIV from the DNA of CD4 T-cells and, by introducing mutations into the viral genome, permanently inactivating its replication. Further, they show that the system can protect cells from reinfection and that the technology is safe for the cells, with no toxic effects.”
Significantly, the researchers conducted the experiments using CD4 T-cells taken from HIV-infected patients and then grown in the lab, giving hope that the technique could be improved upon to such a degree that doctors will no longer simply stop the infection of cells, but cure them.Bye Bye, Robot has just unveiled a trio of Star Trek posters, two of which celebrate the 20th anniversary of Deep Space Nine. First up is “DS9 20,” by returning Bye Bye, Robot artist Tracie Ching. An 18”x24” lithograph on 100-lb paper, it depicts key DS9 characters positioned around the titular space station, with a wormhole looming in the background.
The other two pieces, both by Bye Bye, Robot newcomer Cliff Cramp, are titled “Deep Space Nine” and “A Good Day To Die.” The former measures 18”x24” and shows Deep Space Nine floating in space, with a wormhole forming off in the distance. “A Good Day To Die” measures 16”x24” and makes use of Cramp's signature touch – deep colors – to realize a battle between the U.S.S. Enterprise and a Klingon battle cruiser.
“The graphic style of Tracie’s print and the expressionistic style of Cliff’s prints play off of each other beautifully,” says Charity Wood, Co-Founder of Bye Bye, Robot. “We’re excited to be working with so many talented artists… each bringing their unique style to the Star Trek realm… offering different styles of art for different collectors’ tastes.”
Each of the posters costs $25, plus shipping. Click HERE to purchase.Everyone has heard of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Everyone knows it's bad, that it's been going on for a long time, and that there is a lot of hatred on both sides.
But you may find yourself less clear on the hows and the whys of the conflict. Why, for example, did Israel invade the Palestinian territory of Gaza in July 2014, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, many of them children? Why did the militant Palestinian group Hamas fire rockets into civilian neighborhoods in Israel? How did this latest round of violence start in the first place — and why do they hate one another at all?
What follows are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. Giant, neon-lit disclaimer: these issues are complicated and contentious, and this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of Israel-Palestine's history or the conflict today. But it's a place to start.
1) What are Israel and Palestine?
That sounds like a very basic question but, in a sense, it's at the center of the conflict.
Israel is an officially Jewish country located in the Middle East. Palestine is a set of two physically separate, ethnically Arab and mostly Muslim territories alongside Israel: the West Bank, named for the western shore of the Jordan River, and Gaza. Those territories are not independent (more on this later). All together, Israel and the Palestinian territories are about as populous as Illinois and about half its size.
Officially, there is no internationally recognized line between Israel and Palestine; the borders are considered to be disputed, and have been for decades. So is the status of Palestine: some countries consider Palestine to be an independent state, while others (like the US) consider Palestine to be territories under Israeli occupation. Both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land going back centuries, but the present-day states are relatively new.
2) Why are Israelis and Palestinians fighting?
This is not, despite what you may have heard, primarily about religion. On the surface at least, it's very simple: the conflict is over who gets what land and how it is controlled. In execution, though, that gets into a lot of really thorny issues, like: Where are the borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in present-day Israel? More on these later.
The decades-long process of resolving that conflict has created another, overlapping conflict: managing the very unpleasant Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, in which Israel has put the Palestinians under suffocating military occupation and Palestinian militant groups terrorize Israelis.
Both sides have squandered peace and perpetuated conflict, but palestinians today bear most of the suffering
Those two dimensions of the conflict are made even worse by the long, bitter, violent history between these two peoples. It's not just that there is lots of resentment and distrust; Israelis and Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70-plus years, of what has happened and why, that even reconciling their two realities is extremely difficult. All of this makes it easier for extremists, who oppose any compromise and want to destroy or subjugate the other side entirely, to control the conversation and derail the peace process.
The peace process, by the way, has been going on for decades, but it hasn't looked at all hopeful since the breakthrough 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords produced a glimmer of hope that has since dissipated. The conflict has settled into a terrible cycle and peace looks less possible all the time.
Something you often hear is that "both sides" are to blame for perpetuating the conflict, and there's plenty of truth to that. There has always been and remains plenty of culpability to go around, plenty of individuals and groups on both sides that squandered peace and perpetuated conflict many times over. Still, perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict today is that the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And while Israelis certainly suffer deeply and in great numbers, the vast majority of the conflict's toll is incurred by Palestinian civilians. Just above, as one metric of that, are the Israeli and Palestinian conflict-related deaths every month since late 2000.
3) How did this conflict start in the first place?
The conflict has been going on since the early 1900s, when the mostly-Arab, mostly-Muslim region was part of the Ottoman Empire and, starting in 1917, a "mandate" run by the British Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were moving into the area, as part of a movement called Zionism among mostly European Jews to escape persecution and establish their own state in their ancestral homeland. (Later, large numbers of Middle Eastern Jews also moved to Israel, either to escape anti-Semitic violence or because they were forcibly expelled.)
Communal violence between Jews and Arabs in British Palestine began spiraling out of control. In 1947, the United Nations approved a plan to divide British Palestine into two mostly independent countries, one for Jews called Israel and one for Arabs called Palestine. Jerusalem, holy city for Jews and Muslims, was to be a special international zone.
The plan was never implemented. Arab leaders in the region saw it as European colonial theft and, in 1948, invaded to keep Palestine unified. The Israeli forces won the 1948 war, but they pushed well beyond the UN-designated borders to claim land that was to have been part of Palestine, including the western half of Jerusalem. They also uprooted and expelled entire Palestinian communities, creating about 700,000 refugees, whose descendants now number 7 million and are still considered refugees.
The 1948 war ended with Israel roughly controlling the territory that you will see marked on today's maps as "Israel"; everything except for the West Bank and Gaza, which is where most Palestinian fled to (many also ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries) and are today considered the Palestinian territories. The borders between Israel and Palestine have been disputed and fought over ever since. So has the status of those Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
That's the first major dimension of the conflict: reconciling the division that opened in 1948. The second began in 1967, when Israel put those two Palestinian territories under military occupation.
4) Why is Israel occupying the Palestinian territories?
This is a hugely important part of the conflict today, especially for Palestinians.
Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967. Up to that point, Gaza had been (more or less) controlled by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. But in 1967 there was another war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, during which Israel occupied the two Palestinian territories. (Israel also took control of Syria's Golan Heights, which it annexed in 1981, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.)
Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call an "open-air prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent.
Israel says the occupation is necessary for security given its tiny size: to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks and to provide a buffer from foreign invasions. But that does not explain the settlers.
Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank. They are widely considered to violate international law, which forbids an occupying force from moving its citizens into occupied territory. Many of the 500,000 settlers are just looking for cheap housing; most live within a few miles of the Israeli border, often in the around surrounding Jerusalem.
Others move deep into the West Bank to claim land for Jews, out of religious fervor and/or a desire to see more or all of the West Bank absorbed into Israel. While Israel officially forbids this and often evicts these settlers, many are still able to take root.
In the short term, settlers of all forms make life for Palestinians even more difficult, by forcing the Israeli government to guard them with walls or soldiers that further constrain Palestinians. In the long term, the settlers create what are sometimes called "facts on the ground": Israeli communities that blur the borders and expand land that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual peace deal.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is all-consuming for the Palestinians who live there, constrained by Israeli checkpoints and 20-foot walls, subject to an Israeli military justice system in which on average two children are arrested every day, stuck with an economy stifled by strict Israeli border control, and countless other indignities large and small.
5) Can we take a quick music break?
Music breaks like this are usually an opportunity to step back and appreciate the aspects of a people and culture beyond the conflict that has put them in the news. And it's true that there is much more to Israelis and Palestinians than their conflict. But music has also been a really important medium by which Israelis and Palestinians deal with and think about the conflict. The degree to which the conflict has seeped into Israel-Palestinian music is a sign of how deeply and pervasively it effects Israelis and Palestinians.
Above, from the wealth of Palestinian hip-hop is the group DAM, whose name is both an acronym for Da Arabian MCs and the Arabic verb for "to last forever." The group has been around since the late 1990s and are from the Israeli city of Lod, Israeli citizens who are part of the country's Arab minority. The Arab Israeli experience, typically one of solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and a sense that Arab-Israelis are far from equal in the Jewish state, comes through in their music, which is highly political and deals with themes of disenfranchisement and dispossession in the great tradition of American hip-hop.
Christiane Amanpour interviewed DAM about their music last year. Above is their song "I Don't Have Freedom," full English lyrics of which are here, from their 2007 album Dedication. Sample line: "We've been like this more than 50 years / Living as prisoners behind the bars of paragraphs /Of agreements that change nothing."
Now here is a sample of Israel's wonderful jazz scene, one of the best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen. Cohen is best known in the US for his celebrated 2006 instrumental album Continuo, but let's instead listen to the song "El Hatzipor" from 2009's Aurora.
The lyrics are from an 1892 poem of the same name, meaning "To the Bird," by the Ukrainian Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The poem (translated here) expresses the hopeful yearning among early European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis over 100 years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that this dream is still not secure.
6) Why is there fighting today between Israel and Gaza?
On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of |
my words carefully and I stand by them completely.”
The city is likewise defending the billboard, saying that it wasn’t meant to suggest all people are racist, but rather to encourage residents to consider how they can play a personal role in mitigating racism. “Certainly the level of feedback indicates that the campaign is doing its job,” said Saskatoon city councillor Hilary Gough, “which is to get people talking and thinking about racism and the reality of it in our community.”
Indeed, surveys and polls on racism in the province do suggest that race relations are tense and deteriorating in Saskatchewan. Last year, following the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22 year-old Indigenous man from the Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan, the NRG Research Group and Peak Communications conducted a survey on racist attitudes across the country. In Saskatchewan, 46 per cent of respondents—more than anywhere else in the country—said racism was a big problem. Meanwhile 30 per cent of respondents in the western Prairies (Saskatchewan and Alberta), said race relations in their communities have gotten worse over the last decade.
Of course, broaching the issue of racism often draws prickly reactions like those towards Williams’ billboard. “Certainly, I think there is some defensiveness in this,” she says. “It takes time to learn about one’s own privilege without feeling like we need to feel guilty.” Part of the backlash, though, comes from a mistinterpretation of the campaign, says Gough. “We aren’t saying that everybody is racist and has racist attitudes, but we are trying to create space for each of us to consider how we can most productively engage with the structures we’re living in and figure out what our role is in eliminating and addressing racism.”
The I Am The Bridge ad campaign, which cost the city $14,000 this year, runs until July 16.The National Review’s Eliana Johnson has taken note of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s hosting of this weekend’s “Response” prayer rally as well as the protests it has sparked on the campus of Louisiana State University. Johnson’s article accurately portrays the rally as part of presidential hopeful Jindal’s political outreach to evangelical voters, but it mischaracterizes the reason for the protests.
The event has already sparked controversy because the group underwriting it, the American Family Association, has organized boycotts against companies that do not use the word “Christmas” in their holiday advertising and communications as well as those that participate in gay-rights events or donate to gay-rights causes. That included a one-month boycott of PetSmart last November and a three-year boycott of Home Depot that ended in 2013.
People aren’t protesting Jindal’s partnership with the American Family Association because it has organized boycotts. Boycotts are the least of the problems with the intensely anti-gay AFA, whose chief spokesperson Bryan Fischer is a font of broadcast bigotry and has argued that only Christians — and certainly not Muslims, Hindus or Mormons (whom he does not consider Christian) — are covered by the First Amendment’s religious liberty guarantees.
Jindal’s desire to position himself as the favored candidate with conservative evangelical primary voters means he is unconcerned about partnering with rally organizer David Lane, a Christian-nation advocate who believes the Bible must become a primary textbook in the nation’s public schools. Lane also organized the prayer rally – also called “The Response” – that launched Rick Perry’s doomed presidential bid.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
Universal Orlando fans have been waiting with bated breath for any news on the relaunch of the popular The Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal’s Islands of Adventure. The Universal Orlando Resort blog has now revealed that when the coaster re-opens late this summer we will be seeing a completely new version of both the queue and the ride vehicle. New immersive effects and high-tech components will make you feel like you really have stepped into Dr. Bruce Banner’s shoes.
For more information check out the details from Universal Orlando Resort’s blog below:
The only things you’ll recognize when The Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal’s Islands of Adventure re-opens in late summer are the world-famous twists and turns of the ride track.
This fan favorite is undergoing thrilling, new enhancements that will make it feel more immersive and high-tech – but will still have the same “Incredible” personality that makes it one of America’s most popular coasters. For the first time ever, we’re sharing details about the revamped coaster.
Massive New Marquee
From the moment you walk up to the beloved coaster, you’ll see the huge changes that were made to the attraction. As you enter the ride, you’ll pass underneath a towering figure of The Hulk, using his colossal strength to hold up pieces of the coaster’s track. And fun fact, these track pieces were salvaged from the original ride.
New, Original Storyline
General Thaddeus Ross is calling for volunteers for a new experiment. Your only warning is that you’ll be subjected to high levels of gamma radiation through a process called Hulk-a-fication – a potentially life-altering process first introduced by Dr. Bruce Banner.
The end result is said to give subjects magnificent strength and a forceful amount of energy. Will you emerge as the military’s next super soldier…or something else entirely?
Completely Redesigned Queue
Your part of the story begins the moment you enter the building – which has been redesigned as a state-of-the-art military research compound, commanded by General Ross.
Inside, General Ross is conducting an array of questionable, bio-radiological experiments. You’ll pass by laboratories containing high-tech equipment his team uses to execute his mysterious tests.
Next, you’ll arrive at the Gamma core – an intense energy source that sends pulsing waves of radiation upward to fuel General Ross’s experiment. Not to worry – a thick pane of glass will protect you from direct exposure to the radioactive core.?
As you move along, you’ll witness the transformation of your predecessors as they undergo the perilous Hulk-a-fication process
Finally, you’ll be rushed to a loading platform, sparking with electric bursts as the Gamma accelerator powers up to blast you with superhuman strength. Prepare for the ride of your life…
Totally New Ride Vehicle
From there, you’ll step into an entirely new ride vehicle. The changes start with its sleek, modern new look. Once on board, you’ll discover a brand new, in-seat audio system that booms an original ride score created by Patrick Stump, front man for the internationally-renowned rock band, Fall Out Boy.
The next thing you know, you’re rocketing through a new launch tunnel, packed with amazing special effects, as you’re propelled out over Marvel Super Hero Island with super-human force.
It’s the ride you love, but not like you’ve ever known it before. Stay tuned here for all the details. And I’ll see you in late summer on The Incredible Hulk Coaster!As if this primary cycle weren’t interesting enough already, the most recent poll out of New Hampshire shows Hillary Clinton trailing Bernie Sanders by seven points, 44 percent to 37 percent. Should we buy it?
The “yes/no” dichotomy rarely serves us well in election analysis. All data have some value to them, and we should generally be reluctant to dismiss data outright simply because they do not conform to our previously held assumptions. It’s simply, or perhaps not so simply, a matter of figuring what that value is, and then how much we should adjust our prior beliefs on the basis of those data.
So as with most things, the reality here is complicated. On the one hand, this is the only poll that has ever shown Clinton down, and it shows her down, suddenly, by a fairly impressive margin. It also shows her support dropping below 40 percent for the first time ever, after having being fairly stable since March. And while Franklin Pierce is a well-respected pollster, it isn’t among the more active ones in the Granite State.
All polls have error margins, and some polls will have results outside of those error margins, methodological issues aside. It’s entirely plausible to conclude that the true value of the race is simply outside the error margins of the poll (which, if there’s no “herding” or methodological tinkering, should happen once every 20 polls), without discounting the data entirely or disparaging the source.
At the same time, though, we should bear in mind that polls that first appear to be outliers turn out to signal trends all of the time. In fact, significant shifts in races start out with polls that look like outliers. Take New Hampshire, in just the past year: The Morning Consult poll from early June that showed the Democratic race moving toward single digits looked like an outlier, until we received a confirming poll from Suffolk University that showed the same result. The University of New Hampshire poll of the Shaheen-Brown Senate race in August 2014 that showed a two-point race looked like an outlier, until we received subsequent polling showing another single-digit lead for Shaheen, followed by a tie. We should also keep in mind that the trend line in New Hampshire does currently point toward Hillary Clinton falling behind soon. Even if she’s not down by seven points, she may still be behind, or tied.
So how do we evaluate this? The safest course is to simply wait for additional polling and see if this result is repeated. Given the contested nature of both races, we should be getting more polling soon enough. And we should remember that even if Clinton does fall behind in New Hampshire, any would-be challenger still faces the daunting challenge of unseating her in the subsequent, far less demographically friendly, contests that follow.The second group, which goes by the acronym Icarus, was led by Carlo Rubbia, a former director of CERN and a Nobel-winning physicist, who called the results “very convincing.”
Physicists swung into line with great sighs of relief.
“The evidence is beginning to point toward the Opera result being an artifact of the measurement,” said CERN’s research director, Sergio Bertolucci.
Cue the famous picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue. As it happened, the Icarus result was announced on March 16, two days after his 133rd birthday — almost in time for the cake.
Adding to the sense of finality was the simple fact — as Eddington might have pointed out — that faster-than-light neutrinos had never been confirmed by theory. Or as John G. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, put it in an e-mail, “An interesting result of all this fracas is that no new model I have seen (or heard of from my friends) really is credible to explain the faster-than-light neutrinos.”
During a panel discussion recently at the American Museum of Natural History, Sheldon L. Glashow, a physics professor and Nobel laureate from Boston University, said the best theory he had heard was that the neutrinos had behaved lawfully in Switzerland and speeded up when they crossed the border into Italy.
Eddington’s dictum is not as radical as it might sound. He made it after early measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe made it appear that our planet was older than the cosmos in which it resides — an untenable notion. “It means that science is not just a book of facts, it is understanding as well,” explained Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, who says the Eddington saying is one of his favorites. If a “fact” cannot be understood, fitted into a conceptual framework that we have reason to believe in, or confirmed independently some other way, it risks becoming what journalists like to call a “permanent exclusive” — wrong.
Not that scientists don’t like a surprise. At the museum discussion, Dr. Glashow said that at first he was very excited when he heard about the faster-than-light neutrinos, thinking they could be a window into new physics.
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But if neutrinos are going faster than light, he quickly realized, they would be accompanied by a whole host of other effects, like a shower of particles called Cherenkov radiation, which were not being seen. His paper to this effect, with Andrew G. Cohen, was one of the first to let the air out of the neutrino balloon.
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Luckily, the charms of neutrinos go far beyond their possibly being able to outrace light. They can also waltz through walls and planets like moonlight through a screen door, which is why they can go underground from CERN to Gran Sasso so easily.
Earlier this month, a group of Fermilab-based physicists operating under the acronym Minerva used a beam of neutrinos to send a message over a distance of about a kilometer, spelling out the word “neutrino” with the ASCII code used for computer keyboards.
Moreover, neutrinos come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel. One variation of this shape-shifting was measured for the first time by an international team working in Daya Bay, China, in March. The Opera experiment was designed to record another mode.
Dethroning Einstein was never on the Opera team’s agenda, and to be fair, scientists in the group never claimed that they overturned relativity — only that they had a very puzzling anomaly. They diligently continued to troubleshoot their experiment, and in February they found a couple of flaws. One of them was a loose wire that had the effect of making the neutrinos appear to move faster, the other an improperly set clock that made them look slower.
“That means they have no result,” Dr. Glashow muttered. “We’re back to square one.”
Whether these effects are enough to explain the anomalous neutrino speeds would not be known until the experiment was repeated sometime this spring, the Opera group said.
At the museum discussion, Laura Patrizii, an Opera member from the University of Bologna, said it was not unlikely that her group’s work would wind up in agreement with the Icarus team’s result.
Whether this is a happy ending depends on you. Some physicists were unhappy that the Opera group had managed to commandeer CERN’s auditorium, the biggest stage in physics, to air their dirty laundry, turning the neutrino work into a circus. Opera is not even part of CERN; the group only buys its neutrinos there. Gran Sasso, rather, is part of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, based in Rome.
Displaying a quaint faith in the ability of the Twitterverse to keep secrets, the critics have suggested that it would have been more responsible for the Opera group to have shut up and kept checking the results.
Dr. Patrizii disagreed, saying the neutrino affair had produced a wonderful discussion and a great lesson in how science is done. The whole world was watching; the editors of great newspapers were waking up thinking about subatomic particles.
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Anyway, she added, scientists — even Einstein — proceed by trial and error.
“We are allowed to be wrong,” she said.By Mubasher Bukhari
LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - A 60-year-old woman, her husband and their three children were axed to death in central Pakistan by the woman's family in revenge for the couple marrying 28 years ago, police said on Wednesday.
The dead children were two girls and a son. A third daughter, 18, was wounded in Tuesday night's attack in the central Pakistani city of Jhang, police said.
Police said the girl identified the killers as members of her mother's family.
Muhammad Aslam, a policeman at Athara Hazari Police Station in Jhang, said the girl told police the attack was revenge for her mother's remarriage to her beloved cousin 28 years ago.
Four members of Fatima's family had arrived from the capital of Islamabad armed with daggers and axes, the girl told police.
"She told us, 'We all tried to save each other but could not because they were armed'," he said.
Police said it was not clear why the woman's family had waited 28 years to attack her.
So-called honor killings, where a woman is killed for a perceived social transgression, happen several times a day in Pakistan.
Cases are rarely investigated or prosecuted, but even when they are, the law permits a woman's next of kin to forgive her killers. But often, the next of kin are the killers.
In recent years, women have been torn apart by dogs, mutilated, buried alive and dissolved alive in acid for perceived crimes such as looking out a window, singing, wearing trousers, or marrying the man they loved.
In 2013, 869 honor killings were reported in the media, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says. The true figure is probably much higher since many cases go unreported.
(Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Nick Macfie)The North Korean missile that soared high above the Sea of Japan on Tuesday was hailed by state-run television as a “shining success.” But to U.S. officials, it was a most unwelcome surprise: a weapon with intercontinental range, delivered years before most Western experts believed such a feat possible.
Hours after the apparently successful test, intelligence agencies continued to run calculations to determine precisely how the missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, performed in its maiden flight. But the consensus among missile experts was that North Korea had achieved a long-sought milestone, demonstrating a capability of striking targets thousands of miles from its coast.
Initial Pentagon assessments said North Korea had tested a “land-based, intermediate-range” missile that landed in the Sea of Japan just under 600 linear miles from its launch point, Panghyon Airfield, near the Chinese border. The State Department and the Pentagon later confirmed North Korea had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. Government and independent analyses showed the missile traveling in a steep arc that topped out at more than 1,740 vertical miles above the Earth’s surface.
If flown in a more typical trajectory, the missile would have easily traveled 4,000 miles, potentially putting all of Alaska within its range, according to former government officials and independent analysts. A missile that exceeds a range of 3,400 miles is classified as an ICBM.
“This is a big deal: It’s an ICBM, not a ‘kind of’ ICBM,’ ” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “And there’s no reason to think that this is going to be the maximum range.”
[North Korea at top of agenda as U.S., South Koreans hold summit]
David Wright, senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, calculated in a published analysis that the Hwasong-14’s demonstrated capability exceeded 4,100 linear miles, based on estimates released Tuesday.
“That range would not be enough to reach the Lower 48 states or the large islands of Hawaii, but would allow it to reach all of Alaska,” Wright said.
North Korea’s apparent accomplishment puts it well ahead of schedule in its years-long quest to develop a true ICBM. The Hwasong-14 tested Tuesday could not have reached the U.S. mainland, analysts say, and there’s no evidence to date that North Korea is capable of building a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit on one of its longer-range missiles. But there is now little reason to doubt that both are within North Korea’s grasp, weapons experts say.
“In the past five years, we have seen significant, and much more rapid than expected, development of their ballistic-missiles capability,” said Victor Cha, a former director of Asian affairs for the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council. “Their capabilities have exceeded our expectations on a consistent basis.”
While U.S. intelligence officials have sought, with some success, to disrupt North Korea’s progress, Pyongyang has achieved breakthroughs in multiple areas, such as the development of solid-fuel rocket engines and mobile-launch capabilities, including rockets that can be fired from submarines. Early analysis suggests that the Hwasong-14 uses a new kind of indigenously built ballistic-missile engine, one that North Korea unveiled with fanfare on March 18. Nearly all the country’s previous ballistic missiles used engines based on modifications of older, Soviet-era technology.
“It’s not a copy of a crappy Soviet engine, and it’s not a pair of Soviet engines kludged together — it’s the real thing,” Lewis said. “When they first unveiled the engine on March 18, they said that the ‘world would soon see what this means.’ I think we’re now seeing them take that basic engine design and execute it for an ICBM.”
(Reuters)
[North Korean missiles getting an important boost — from China]
In announcing the test in a special TV broadcast Tuesday, North Korean officials proclaimed that the country had achieved an ICBM capability that would safeguard the communist government from attacks by the United States and other adversaries. According to U.S. analysts, leader Kim Jong Un has long calculated that nuclear-armed ICBMs are the best deterrence against threats to his survival, as any perceived aggression against him could trigger a retaliatory strike targeting U.S. cities.
“As the dignified nuclear power who possesses the strongest intercontinental ballistic rocket which is capable of hitting any part of the world along with the nuclear weapons, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will fundamentally terminate the U.S. nuclear war threats and blackmail and credibly protect the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the region,” a government spokeswoman said in a bulletin read on state-run television.
The spokeswoman said that the missile’s trajectory was deliberately set “at the highest angle” to avoid harming nearby countries.
That claim rang true to U.S. analysts, who agreed the high arc was probably intended to avoid the possibility of hitting Japanese territory. Moreover, the rocket’s flight path would help North Korea secure another objective: secrecy. By sending the spent engine splashing into the deep waters of the Sea of Japan, Pyongyang ensured it would be hard, if not impossible, for U.S. and Japanese divers to retrieve the parts.
Read more:
North Korea showed off a lot of missiles. What might be its targets?Foundations of Signal Processing
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A complete and detailed solutions manual is available for instructors only from Cambridge University Press.
Together with Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing (to be published by CUP), the two books aim to present the essential principles in signal processing along with mathematical tools and algorithms for signal representation. They comprehensively cover both classical Fourier techniques and newer basis constructions from filter banks and multiresolution analysis—wavelets. Furthermore, they gives a synthetic view from basic mathematical principles, to construction of bases, all the way to concrete applications.
Current free versions:1 Be prepared. The best way to survive an argument with another person who disagrees with you is to be ready to handle any barrage of questions that may be thrown at you. Be ready to state relevant facts, and back these statements up to the best of your ability with further relevant information.
2 Assess the belief and knowledge of your opponent before diving in. Are they atheist or agnostic, hard or soft?
3 What made them choose to believe what they believe? Remember that many atheists were raised to be religious. They have knowledge of religion and have chosen to reject it. They may view your explanations as condescending.
4 Get your facts straight. A factual and logical approach is often used by someone who is trying to persuade you to accept their point of view. Do not fight fire with fire, in doing so you are pleasing the opposing person because they enjoy the argument in the process of it happening. Listen to what they have to say eventually they will run out of ideas, and you may use a caring approach towards the other person.
5 Ask relevant questions, as well as answer any the atheist might have. A tactic an atheist might use is to start asking you questions that will generate a response that he wants, he will then use this response, in connection to future questions he will ask, to prove an illogical point. For example: Is God good? Yes. Who made everything? God. So God made Satan? Yes. If God is good, then why did he make something evil? If you are asked a question, answer it, but then immediately ask your own as soon as possible. Some questions include, "Why do you feel the extensive need for proof?"
6 Be honest. Try to avoid saying anything that's pretentious (such as suggesting that their atheism is a result of feeling that religion had failed them in someway in their past), as this is unlikely to go down well with the other person. Admit that you don't claim to have "evidence" or "proof" that God exists, but that your belief is based on faith - if this is the case. The other person is then far more likely to show you respect.
7 Know often atheists will not be the ones to bring up the subject of religion to argue about it. Atheists discussing religion is usually in response to a theists trying to preach to them, criticize them, or pass judgment on them. You respect their beliefs, and respect the rights of others, and they will treat you with respect.
8 Try to keep an open mind. If the atheist sparks a sense of logic or a questioning of faith in you, don't resist this new found sense of the world and try to learn a bit more about it.
9 Remember the golden rule. If the other person is receptive to your beliefs, then great! But remember that they are most likely going to be annoyed. Consider their situation: how would you feel if someone came up to you and tried to convert you to Greek polytheism? You'd be annoyed by the nonsense of the person's arguments, and that's exactly how atheists feel.The Miami Heat are one of the great mysteries of the 2015-16 season. While there's cause for optimism, last year's disappointing and injury-ravaged season doesn't provide an accurate template of what to expect. Before the midseason acquisition of Goran Dragic from the Phoenix Sunx, the Heat simply weren't very good, hovering just below.500 as they adjusted to the prolonged absence of Dwyane Wade, Chris Andersen and others.
While Dragic was - and is still - viewed as the catalyst for a fast-paced, offensively potent team, the loss of Chris Bosh due to life-threatening blood clots in his lungs erased any realistic example of what the team might look like during the upcoming season.
Still, the starting lineup of Dragic, Wade, Luol Deng, Bosh and Hassan Whiteside seems to be among the best in the league. When pundits evaluate Miami's chances for a title in 2016, it's this group (when healthy) that fuels the highest hopes of what the Heat are capable of achieving.
But what of the remaining members of the roster? While the starting five looks fairly set, there are questions about Miami's depth that remain largely unanswered. It's an odd group, filled with potential for both amazing and disappointing levels of production. Unproven rookies, underwhelming role players or once-talented veterans at the end of their careers - who can say for certain what this cast might accomplish?
And there's Josh McRoberts, who might just be the key to the reserve group being among the most successful in the NBA.
McRoberts, much like the team he plays for, has nearly an equal number of people willing to criticize him or laud his abilities. So here's what we know for sure: a Duke University alum, he was drafted 37th overall by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2007. He played just eight games his rookie season, spending time on-and-off with the Idaho Stampede of the NBA D-League. He was traded to the Indiana Pacers where he spent three seasons and eventually joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 2011. He was again traded, this time to the Orlando Magic (in 2012) and then was sent to Charlotte just six months later.
A strong season with the Bobcats (now the Hornets) helped propel that team to the playoffs under first-year head coach Steve Clifford but McRoberts, a free agent in 2014, thought he'd have a chance of winning more in Miami and signed a four-year deal with the Heat.
Some of this you might already know or merely knew bits and pieces of but it helps, in some part, to see how difficult McRoberts' career is to judge. Much of a player's success can be attributed to their fit on a roster and just the right opportunity; look no further than Hassan Whiteside's emergence as proof of that. McRoberts hasn't been able to fit anywhere for very long, playing for multiple coaches in varying systems in just eight seasons. The counterargument to this is that McRoberts might not be talented enough to warrant a huge investment in time or money; he might do some things well but isn't great at any one thing.
But his time in Charlotte proved that he could be very productive if utilized properly and a significant complementary player.
That will be his role this year, one for which he's much better suited to at this point of his career. In 2014, he was expected to start at power forward for a "position-less" version of the Heat, one that enjoyed great success in recent years because of the incredible individual talents of Wade, Bosh and, of course, LeBron James. McRoberts definitely could not have assumed James' role in this system and might have, once again, been utilized improperly.
But various injuries limited McRoberts to just 17 games last Miami, so we'll never know exactly how the experiment might have turned out.
Now, next season's version of the Heat will run a more traditional lineup, mostly because of the unexpected impact of Whiteside. His development will lead to Bosh sliding to his more natural power forward position, one where he'll be extremely effective considering his athleticism, elite-level defense and proficient outside shooting. While Bosh was certainly a mismatch as a center (on offense, at least), that should still be the case as a forward.
Pointing out Bosh's versatility is important in context of McRoberts' fit; should Whiteside get into early foul trouble (a likely possibility given his aggressive rim protection and, ahem, history with anger management), Bosh would slide over to center and McRoberts would take his place in the lineup at power forward. He has not and likely will not ever play small forward, an option some fans have discussed as part of a potential "big lineup", alongside Bosh and Whiteside; McRoberts would be a defensive liability at small forward, especially with the league shifting more toward small-ish lineups.
Having McRoberts on the floor would likely force Bosh to play more on the inside. McRoberts (a decent outside shooter at 34.5 percent for his career from 3-point range) can space the floor like Bosh does, albeit not as effectively. But it's his playmaking abilities - from the corner, wing or the high post - that would make the tandem of McRoberts/Bosh very effective.
Look at this play from 2014 and how McRoberts cuts toward the basket from the corner, draws a double-team and finds a wide-open teammate for an easy basket:
Bosh is an excellent shooter from midrange and excellent finisher around the hoop; McRoberts is a strong dunker with a 66.2 percent field-goal rate from shots within three feet of the rim. A 1-on-1 matchup will lead to an easy shot against all but the most accomplished rim protectors in the league, a double-team (as in the video above) is an automatic two points.
McRoberts' role wouldn't be limited to just playing next to Bosh. In fact, with four different, viable options at center (Bosh, Whiteside, Andersen and Amar'e Stoudemire), he'd fit very nicely alongside any of these players. It's ultimately why team president Pat Riley has resisted trading away McRoberts despite the clamoring from fans that never saw him in action last season; playmaking abilities like these in a 6'10" forward are rare.
Because of his passing abilities, inserting McRoberts in the lineup might affect other substitution patterns as well. Wade and Dragic are both excellent distributors but having a player like McRoberts allows them to focus more on scoring while still keeping their passing skills on the floor; this is the fast-paced, pass-happy offense that Riley and coach Erik Spoelstra envisioned before last season. Additionally, Deng, who expressed some discomfort with his role being reduced to merely a standstill shooter, would be free to cut to the basket regularly.
Taking out Wade and Deng and substituting them with, say, Justise Winslow and Gerald Green, would give Miami a different, yet still effective, flow on offense. Winslow/Green provide a good mix of the skills that mesh well with McRoberts; Winslow's speed would allow him to get past defenders while Green's outside shooting would continue spacing the floor (perhaps even more effectively than the proposed starting lineup).
One concern with the rookie, Winslow, is how he'll move without the ball; he's best when creating his own shot opportunities, using a speedy first step to blow past opponents. He's not a good standstill shooter at this early point in his career but, presumably, there's room for growth in this area. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on how effectively he plays alongside McRoberts.
Overall, McRoberts' versatility and passing abilities are what will make an impact for Miami this season. He could become the de facto playmaker of a potent second unit and he could possibly emerge as a Sixth Man of the Year candidate. In the true spirit of the award, McRoberts will be counted on to provide a jolt off the bench and keep things moving smoothly.Chromecast has received support for Google Drive presentations this is something that should drastically change just how useful the product is for offices and schools. This feature was previously visible to only a limited number of users while Google worked out on the bugs but now it looks like it may be ready for prime time.
Now this is visible to us. In Drive there is a “Present” button near the top from there you have the option to share your presentation to any Chromecast on the same network with the new “Present on another device” option. Those other devices seem to be relegated to Chromecast, at least for now.
It is only available for desktop users for now. If you are using chromecast extension using chrome you will not be able to cast. though. Currently, Android devices are not supported for such casting, though it would be a nice addition, especially for tablets.
SourceThese creepy photographs log how America celebrated Halloween from 1875 to 1955, covering a period of time where the nation rebuilt itself after the Civil War and turned into a global superpower.
The macabre images show families celebrating Halloween dressed in a variety of home made customs featuring the devil, ghouls and various creatures from the other world.
Popular themes include devils, witches and animals.
Scroll down for videos
British artist Ossian Brown has collated the wonderful collection of Halloween photographs from 1875 to 1955
The images show the great imaginations of children and adults when it came to celebrating the ghoulish event
Even these children dressed as clowns look remarkably sinister with their serious faces
The earliest images come in the years while America was rebuilt following the end of the Civil War in 1865.
The pictures were collated by English artist Ossian Brown for his book Haunted Air.
He said: 'I find their haunting melancholy completely absorbing; all of these photographs now torn out, disembodied and forgotten - they've now become fully and utterly the masks and phantoms they dragged up as, all those years ago.'
Brown was fascinated by the creativity of people who were living in poverty, but still managed to create 'incredible and phantasmagorical apparitions'.
David Lynch, who wrote the foreword of the book, said: 'All the clocks had stopped. A void out of time. And here they are – looking out and holding themselves still – holding still at that point where two worlds join – the familiar – and the other.'
These children appear to be dressed as some form of rabbit or hare which are not known as October animals
These three girls form the 1956s show the beginning of commercialisation with shop-bought costumes
These two children are clearly dressed as witches with masks in an area with some snow on the ground
This woman is wearing a mask but car enthusiasts might recognise the Ford Model T beside the house
One of these people is wearing a mask while the second is wearing a ghoulish sheet with holes cut for eyes
This teenage girl looks like she could easily audition for the next installment of the SAW slasher franchise
If the zombie apocalypse hits and these four people arrive at your door it might be time to run to the safe room
This family looks like the inspiration for a late-night version of the Muppets
This teenage boy is wearing a sinister skull mask with small hat but it is his large spike which adds menaceSr. Python Back-End Software Engineer
We're looking to expand our development team with a full-time back-end Python Software Engineer (40h per week for 6 months or longer).
PageFreezer develops and operates PageFreezer.com, a SaaS platform for website & social media archiving. We use a stack of Python, Angular, Cassandra, Elastic Search, Hadoop.
You will be working in our team of Sr. software engineers on integrating Social Media API's into our SaaS platform using API's and expanding existing functionalities.
We're looking for a developer with at least 5 years of full-time Python development experience who can commit to a full-time position for at least 6 months.
The job will initially be primarily back-end focusses. Front-end will be part of the project later.
Required experience:
-Python Software development
-Cassandra or other NoSQL
-Linux
-Optimization of Python 2.x and 3.x code,
-Apache, Tomcat in conjunction with Python
-Sold back-end development experience
-Experience with HTML, CSS3, Javascript, jQuery and Bootstrap.
-Social Media REST APIs (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ etc.)
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We are only considering applications from North America or Latin America due to timezone constraints.
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Contact InfoLast year, the |
by Herbert Hoover. Think this year's campaign has been dirty? Joseph Cummins, author of Anything for a Vote, looks back at what passed for mudslinging in the Roaring Twenties.
The Election of 1928
On August 2, 1927, while vacationing in his "Summer White House" in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Calvin Coolidge walked outside to waiting reporters and handed them a slip of paper that read: "I do not choose to run for President in nineteen-twenty-eight." Taking no questions, Silent Cal walked back inside his house—and out of the presidency.
No one could quite figure out why Coolidge had made this decision. The economy was booming, and the president, despite or because of his rock-bottom New England reticence and numerous eccentricities, was quite popular. Perhaps he still harbored grief from the death by blood poisoning of his sixteen-year-old son Calvin Jr. in 1924. Or perhaps it was because, as Mrs. Coolidge allegedly said, "Papa says there's going to be a depression."
Whatever the reason, Coolidge's choice not to run set the scene for an election that was, in the words of one historian, "one of the most revolting spectacles in the nation's history."
The Candidates
[Image courtesy of Neatorama]
Republican: Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover would later gain a reputation as a man who twiddled his thumbs while America's greatest economic crisis set in—but in 1928, he was a formidable candidate. He was the secretary of commerce and a self-made millionaire who had become known for overseeing humanitarian aid to thousands of starving Europeans during and after World War I. Unfortunately, he was also one of the stiffest, most stilted, most machinelike candidates ever to run for president—so much so that Republicans were forced to plant articles with such headlines as "That Man Hoover—He's Human."
Democratic: Al Smith
Al Smith was the polar opposite of Hoover, a politician born and bred within New York's Tammany Hall system. Smith loved meeting people and pressing the flesh. Going into 1928, he was the four-time governor of New York strengthened by a national following and the support of up-and-coming political stars like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. Al had two problems, however, and they were big ones. He supported the repeal of Prohibition, and he was America's first Catholic presidential candidate.
The Campaign
Neither party was hurting for money in the election of 1928, which may explain why things became so nasty. The Republicans would ultimately spend $9.4 million, the Democrats $7.1 million (the Democrats also ponied up $500,000 on radio time, at the rate of $10,000 an hour for a coast-to-coast hookup).
Republican ads underscored the prosperity Americans were feeling. "Hoover and Happiness or Smith and Soap Houses," or, even more effective, "A Chicken in Every Pot—Vote for Hoover." The message, as one Republican pamphlet put it, was "Your Vote Versus the Spectacle of Idleness and Ruin."
Hoover's handlers often filmed him romping with a large dog to loosen up his image a bit, but he was a man who always wore a full suit and stiff collar, who read his speeches in a perfunctory monotone. ("I can only make so many speeches," he once said. "I only have so much to say.") During interviews he would restrict himself to answering questions without elaborating, and when he was finished, he looked at the questioner blankly, "like a machine that has run down," as one startled reporter put it.
Hoover wisely stayed away from debating the more colorful Smith (he would not even mention his opponent's name) and presented himself as a smart businessman who would run the government like an efficient corporation.
But the election soon took a sickening turn. The Ku Klux Klan continued to be a powerful force in America, with a membership that historians now estimate as high as two to four million. When Smith's campaign train headed West, it was met by burning crosses on the hills and explosions from dynamite charges echoing across the prairies. Klansmen and other religious bigots swayed ignorant voters by telling them that the Catholic Smith, having supposedly sworn fealty to the pope, would turn the United States over to "Romanism and Ruin." Protestant ministers told their congregations that if Smith became president, all non-Catholic marriages would be annulled and all children of these marriages declared illegitimate. Preachers even warned their congregations that if they voted for Al Smith, they would go straight to hell.
Hoover officially proclaimed that his opponent's religion had no bearing on his ability to be president, but even Hoover's wife, Lou, whispered that people had a right to vote against Smith because of his faith. She and many other Republicans spread rumors of Smith's alcoholism, which were already rampant because he favored the repeal of Prohibition or, at least, the right of states to choose for themselves. Republicans sneeringly referred to him as "Alcoholic Smith," told of drunken public behavior, and claimed that he had already secretly promised to appoint a bootlegger as secretary of the treasury.
In truth, Smith was a moderate drinker who enjoyed a cocktail in the evening from legal, pre-Prohibition stock. But as we've seen, truth rarely factors into presidential campaigns.
The Winner: Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover won in a landslide that included five states from the usually Democratic South, beating Smith 21,437,227 votes to 15,007,698. A joke went around New York that on the day after the election, Smith wired the pope a one-word telegram: "Unpack!"
How Bad Were The Anti-Catholic Slurs?
Consider the following: At the time of the election, New York's Holland Tunnel was just being completed. Republicans circulated pictures of Al Smith at the mouth of the tunnel, declaring that it really led 3,500 miles under the Atlantic Ocean to Rome—to the basement of the Vatican.
In Daytona Beach, Florida, the school board instructed that a note be placed in every child's lunch pail that read: "We must prevent the election of Alfred E. Smith to the presidency. If he is chosen president, you will not be allowed to read or have a bible."
And this lovely poem spread in leaflets in upstate New York during the summer of 1928:
"When Catholics rule the United States
And the Jew grows a Christian nose on his face
When Pope Pius is head of the Ku Klux Klan
In the land of Uncle Sam
Then Al Smith will be our president
And the country not worth a damn."
The Babe
Smith was lucky enough to have the endorsement of the country's biggest sports hero, Babe Ruth. After the Yankees' victory in the World Series of 1928, Babe Ruth stumped for Smith from the back of a train carrying the team home from St. Louis. Unfortunately, Ruth wasn't the most dependable spokesman. He would sometimes appear in his undershirt, holding a mug of beer in one hand and a spare rib in the other. Worse, if he met with any dissent while praising Smith, he would snarl, "If that's the way you feel, the hell with you!" and stagger back inside.
Nude Art and Greyhound Racing? The Horror!
When people got tired of attacking Smith for his religion, there were other fruitful areas for invective. One Protestant minister rallied against Smith for dancing and accused him of doing the "bunny hug, turkey trot, hesitation, tango, Texas Tommy, the hug-me-tight, foxtrot, shimmy-dance...and skunk-waltz." Another minister claimed that Smith indulged in "card-playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, evolution...nude art, prize-fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism."
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Al Smith met his wife, Kate, when they were both growing up in Tammany's impoverished Fourth Ward on New York City's Lower East Side. She and Smith shared a deep love, but Kate was anything but sophisticated. During the 1928 campaign, she was slammed with barely disguised anti-Irish bigotry by prominent Republican women. They claimed that with Kate as first lady, the White House would smell of "corned beef, cabbage, and home brew." Mrs. Florence T. Griswold, Republican national committeewoman, made a speech in which she said, "Can you imagine an aristocratic foreign ambassador saying to her, 'What a charming gown,' and the reply, 'Youse said a mouthful!" Her audience roared with laughter.
Radioheads
In 1928, radio networks like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) extended nationwide—any major political address could expect to reach forty million listeners.
Although Herbert Hoover (pictured) was a far worse stump speaker than Al Smith, he was much better at talking in a studio, where the speaker had to stand very still, exactly ten inches away from the large "pie" microphone, to reduce distortion and extraneous noise. (It was not something Hoover liked, however. When someone asked him if he got a thrill out of speaking over the radio, he snapped: "The same thrill I get when I rehearse an address to a doorknob!")
Smith, far better at campaigning in person, had a much worse time on the radio. No matter how much he tried, he could not refrain from moving around, which caused his voice to fade in and out. And his thick New York accent ("rad-deeo" for radio, "foist" for first) alienated many listeners in rural America. Campaign strategists in both parties would make a note for future elections.In addition to implementing mandatory cargo inspections, the resolution bans the export, with certain exceptions, of several commodities, including iron, coal, and rare earth metals, which North Korea has used to finance its nuclear program. Additionally, countries will now be explicitly prohibited from selling North Korea aircraft fuel, including the type used to fuel its rockets, as well as all small arms and conventional weapons. Luxury goods, such as watches, jet skis, and snowmobiles — items Power said "the ruling elite seems to prioritize over their own people" — will also now be banned.
"Virtually all of the DPRK's resources are channeled into its reckless and relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," US ambassador Samantha Power told the Council after the resolution's adoption.
Among the 19-page resolution's elements, countries will be required to inspect all cargo entering and leaving North Korea, and if fully enforced would effectively create a blockade of the already-isolated nation, which is officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The UN Security Council unanimously approved massively stepped-up sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday, nearly two months after the country conducted its fourth nuclear test, and a month after it launched a ballistic missile in violation of previous council resolutions.
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The UN Security Council unanimously approved massively stepped-up sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday, nearly two months after the country conducted its fourth nuclear test, and a month after it launched a ballistic missile in violation of previous council resolutions.
Among the 19-page resolution's elements, countries will be required to inspect all cargo entering and leaving North Korea, and if fully enforced would effectively create a blockade of the already-isolated nation, which is officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
"Virtually all of the DPRK's resources are channeled into its reckless and relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," US ambassador Samantha Power told the Council after the resolution's adoption.
In addition to implementing mandatory cargo inspections, the resolution bans the export, with certain exceptions, of several commodities, including iron, coal, and rare earth metals, which North Korea has used to finance its nuclear program. Additionally, countries will now be explicitly prohibited from selling North Korea aircraft fuel, including the type used to fuel its rockets, as well as all small arms and conventional weapons. Luxury goods, such as watches, jet skis, and snowmobiles — items Power said "the ruling elite seems to prioritize over their own people" — will also now be banned.
Related: UN Report Details North Korea's Exploits in Africa, Including Training Cops in Martial Arts
The resolution also requires countries to expel North Korean officials that are found to have abused their diplomatic protections overseas. In total, Security Council diplomats said the new course of sanctions were the strongest the body had adopted in two decades.
In early January, North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test, which it claimed was of a hydrogen bomb, though international experts suspect it may have actually been a less powerful type of nuclear weapon. The test set off seven weeks of intense negotiations, as diplomats from Washington and Beijing worked to hash out a final document. By this week, the resulting text was co-sponsored by more than 50 countries, from Sweden to Vanuatu. During the drafting process, North Korea further ratcheted up tensions when it tested a ballistic missile on February 7.
Previous resolutions, dating back to 1993, have failed to stymie the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, which views its arsenal as a necessity for self-preservation. In the past, China has pushed back on some of the most stringent proposals put forward by the US and other countries, but this year they appeared to give ground, agreeing to severe and punitive measures against its neighbor. Much of the responsibility for implementation will fall on China, which shares a porous border with the DPRK and remains the country's largest trading partner.
Despite their mutual condemnation of North Korea's nuclear program and its potential to destabilize the Korean peninsula, China and the US remain at loggerheads over Washington's planned deployment of sophisticated THAAD anti-missile defense systems in South Korea. On Wednesday, Beijing's ambassador to the UN Liu Jieyi said such a step would "harm the strategic interests of China."
Related: How North Korea's Rocket Launch Could End Up Screwing China in a War Against the US
Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin similarly criticized such a move by the US, and in a thinly veiled criticism of Washington, warned that bilateral sanctions — as opposed to UN Security Council authorized measures — could worsen the already dire humanitarian sitution in North Korea.
Many countries that spoke on Wednesday attempted to answer concerns that the highly-punitive measures they had just approved could lead to greater scarcity of basic resources in the DPRK.
"The sanctions in this resolution, while most comprehensive in scope, do not target the North Korean population or intend to negatively impact on their livelihood," said South Korean ambassador Oh Joon. "On the contrary, they explicitly target the relentless pursuit of WMDs by the regime that is causing the hardship of the North Korean people. We hope this resolution will help alleviate their plight."
Follow Samuel Oakford on Twitter: @samueloakfordWith the party season ahead, many of us will indulge in the odd tipple at the office Christmas party or enjoy a drink or two with friends and family. But why do some of us wake up feeling horrendous the next morning, while others are seemingly unaffected by overindulgence? New research suggests that whether we suffer a debilitating hangover the next day could be influenced by our genes.
This year has seen some groundbreaking and fascinating work in the field of hangover research, with scientists investigating the contribution of our DNA to the experience of alcohol-related hangover. This might help us understand why some people are more prone to hangovers, while others seem to “dodge a bullet” when it comes down to feeling rough the morning after the night before.
Much research has examined the influence of our inherited biology on alcohol intoxication, and our risk for alcohol misuse. Genes interact with environmental factors (things like peer alcohol use, or alcohol availability) to influence how much we drink, and our susceptibility to becoming dependent on alcohol. This year saw the publication of the first studies to tackle genetic influences on hangover, and there were some surprising findings.
Two studies investigated this in pairs of twins, a popular method for unravelling the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to a given behaviour. Differences in identical twins’ hangover experiences are compared with those of non-identical twins. Since the identical twins share all of their genes and the non-identical twins share around only 50% of their genes, any differences observed in variation of hangover experience in the identical twins are assumed to be the result of genes rather than environment.
Is hangover horror inherited?
The first study examined data collected in 1972 from 13,511 male second world war veteran twins. The twins were asked questions about their drinking in the past year to determine experience of hangover, such as “How often do you become really intoxicated?” and “How often do you have a hangover?”. The researchers found that the heritability of alcohol intoxication was around 50%, and for hangover was 55%. These findings suggest that experience of hangovers is substantially influenced by genes, with unshared environmental factors (eg access to alcohol) accounting for the rest of the variation.
However, there are some things to consider in the interpretation of these results. Participants were asked to report their alcohol intoxication and hangover experience for the past year. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would be able to accurately remember all of the occasions on which they had been drunk or hungover over the past 12 months. The present study also only recruited white males and therefore the results may not generalise to women or other ethnic groups. Additionally, the paper does not examine the influence of other factors that may impact on alcohol intoxication and hangover, eg existing illness (participants were middle aged at the time of testing), experience of stress, any other drug use (such as nicotine).
More generally, hangover researchers have yet to agree on a definitive measure of hangover. Recent research has identified biological markers related to the experience of hangover that can be tested using a urine sample, though analysis of these samples can be expensive and time consuming.
Can our genes determine hangover frequency and vulnerability?
A second study examined genetic influences on several measures of alcohol hangover (frequency, resistance and susceptibility) in 4,496 male and female twins. Results indicated that genetic factors accounted for 45% of the difference in hangover frequency (how many days in the past year you did not feel well the day after drinking) in males and 40% in females, in line with the previous study.
Interestingly, this study further shows that the heritability of hangover resistance (having no hangover the morning after being drunk) is around 43%, regardless of gender. This suggests that our genes may contribute to our ability to drink alcohol without falling victim to a terrible hangover. This is an important finding given that individuals who show a reduced response to alcohol intoxication (they need more alcohol to get drunk) may be at greater risk for alcohol dependency. Resistance to hangover may also be an important indicator of increased risk.
As with the other study, this research relied on self-reported measures of hangover over the past year and the accuracy of this type of assessment is questionable. Additionally, the authors were not able to measure other factors which may influence experience of hangover, such as how they respond to alcohol (how many drinks it takes to feel drunk) and whether they are unable to control their drinking.
Next steps
Together these studies suggest that our likelihood of experiencing a hangover after a night of drinking is partly genetically influenced. Furthermore, the reason why some individuals can appear to drink endlessly and not wake up with a dreaded hangover while others cannot is also in part determined by our inherited biology.
These studies can’t identify specific genes contributing to our risk of getting a hangover, or reveal those that could determine who may be resistant to the “morning after” feeling. Future hangover research might focus on specific genes that have already been shown to influence alcohol use and dependency.
Before you go blaming your parents for that “blinder of a hangover”, it is worth remembering that these studies suggest that differences in our experiences of hangover are only half genetic and that environmental factors (which are currently less well understood) also play an important role.
Dr Sally Adams is a lecturer in health psychology at the University of Bath. Her research examines the cognitive and behavioural mechanisms underlying alcohol and tobacco use. Find her on Twitter @SallyScientistBy Frazer Harrison/Getty
Best makeup and hairstyling is one of the few Oscar categories that features a “bake-off,” a gathering to the category’s finalists as they show off a 10-minute reel of their best work on the film. For Bill Corso, one of two makeup artists behind Foxcatcher to eventually be nominated in the category, he was going up against massive alien creatures (Guardians of the Galaxy) or movies with dozens and dozens of characters (The Grand Budapest Hotel). So to stand out from the crowd, Corso went small. And showed off Steve Carell’s eyes.
Well, not just the eyes—Carell famously underwent a complete transformation to play John du Pont in the film, from dentures to a shaved hairline to a new nose. But Corso showed off the shot that focused on Carell’s eyes because it demonstrated his real challenge on the film: making complicated, face-altering makeup that looked good in long takes, under natural light, and in extreme close-up.
“No matter how good or bad you do your makeup, you can always fall back on the fact that the camera is moving,” says Corso, who won the Oscar for his work on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and was nominated for Click. “Bennett doesn’t shoot his movies like that.”
Corso was challenged not just with making his lead actors look like the real people they were playing—he says that Channing Tatum in particular was committed to looking like the real Mark Schultz—but making them look like wrestlers, which involved cauliflower ears, broken noses, and even subtler overall makeup effects. “We tried to flatten out their faces,” Corso says, which included plugs to flatten his nostrils and plumpers to enlarge his jaw. “You look at Channing and you can’t quite place it.” Corso says that, any time Tatum needed to get himself in character, “he would just sit and stare at himself in the mirror.”
Courtesy of Sony Classics.
Mark Ruffalo had an even more dramatic hairline shave than Carell in order to play Dave Schultz, and even growing in his own beard didn’t keep him from that stop in the makeup chair. “Dave’s was much fuller and it grew differently,” explains Corso. Ruffalo even underwent alterations to look more like his on-screen brother. “We put little brackets in the back of his ears to make his ears stick out so he looked more like Channing.”
Corso swears that director Bennett Miller didn’t necessarily care if Carell looked like the real John du Pont; the director was very insistent that it not look anything like Steve. To get that look of blue-blood New England wealth (which wound up looking uncannily close to the real du Pont), Corso transformed Carell in a series of tiny steps, from covering up his eyebrows to altering his nose so it resembled the beak of an eagle—a nickname the real du Pont gave himself. “The final piece of the puzzle, put the dark-brown contact lenses,” Corso says. “It really changed Steve’s whole persona.”
As a previous winner and a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors, Corso says he is mainly excited for his Foxcatcher partner, Dennis Liddiard, to experience the Oscars as a nominee. But he’s “thrilled to death” for the attention for a “little wrestling movie about a very discomforting situation, and might even have more fun at these Oscars than the year he won. “When I went the first time for Lemony Snicket I was a nervous wreck, and I don’t remember half of the evening, I was too stressed.”
Related: Chris Pratt Dance Parties, and More Highlights From Guardians of the Galaxy’s Oscar-Nominated Makeup ArtistMan exposes himself in downtown garage
South Bend, Ind. - A man has been arrested for allegedly fondling himself in front of two women downtown.
It happened Wednesday at a South Bend parking garage on Main Street.
When police first arrived, they searched the entire garage and were unable to find a suspect.
However, later in the afternoon, a suspect was located.
A homeless man, Antone Mayfield, 23, was arrested at a church and booked under a preliminary charge of vicarious sexual gratification.
Downtown South Bend operates the parking garage.
They say they are aware of the incident and will work with police to keep the area safer.
DTSB says they will have their ambassadors and South Bend police increase security patrols in the area, and around all their garages.
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emailThe dates of the Indian Premier League 2018 auction have been finalised. The two-day affair, that will attract the attention of the world’s cricket fraternity, will be held in Bangalore on January 27 and 28.
Hindustan Times were the first to report on Saturday that the IPL auction dates will be advanced this time. Usually, it happens in February. PTI, quoting well-placed Board of Control for Cricket in India sources, said on Tuesday that the dates have indeed been advanced.
The IPL Governing Council has hiked the salary budget of the franchises from Rs 66 crore to Rs 80 crore for the auction. “The minimum spend will be 75 per cent of the salary cap for each season,” the BCCI stated.
As per reports, the eight teams (no word on the future of Rising Pune Supergiant and Gujarat Lions) have been asked to send in their list of players they wish to retain by January 4. The final pool of players for the auction is likely to be available around January 8.
Mumbai Indians are the defending IPL champions. MI defeated Rising Pune Supergiant at the Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium in Hyderabad on May 21, 2017 in a pulsating final. ( BCCI )
The player rules for the Right to Match are maximum number of three Capped Indian players, maximum number of two overseas players, maximum number of two uncapped Indian players.
It remains to be seen if Chennai Super Kings, back after serving a two-year ban due to corruption, win back their inspirational skipper MS Dhoni. Rajasthan Royals will also be back in fray after sitting out for two seasons.
MS Dhoni has been associated with Chennai Super Kings since the beginning of the Indian Premier League. From 2008 till 2015, he led them to two IPL titles in 2010 and 2011 and entered the final of the tournament four times in 2008, 2012, 2013 and 2015.
It will mark the beginning of the new five-year phase in the IPL, with the 11th edition starting with new broadcasters, STAR Sports.
First Published: Dec 19, 2017 20:23 ISTWhen Bill Clinton was running for President he used to say, “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America.” Nearly twenty-five years later, Hillary Clinton slammed Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” slogan by assuring voters “America is already great!” Instead of proving her policies were better for bringing the kind of large scale improvements voters wanted, Clinton (with the help of a few million terrible think pieces) tried to sell the idea of “incremental change.”
But that wild miscalculation is not a critique of Clinton’s political acumen so much as it is indicative of the problem destroying the centrist Democratic Party: the false belief that it can win without embracing more progressive policies. Despite losing over 1,000 seats in the last eight years, the 2016 Presidency, and every significant election since Trump’s victory, mainstream Dems refuse to embrace any idea that requires a significant change in the Neoliberal platform first realized in 1992.
Just review some of the Democratic talking points of the last six months and you’ll notice they all have the same thing in common: not one of them requires the slightest change in status quo. Not even an incremental one. It’s clear the Dems believe if something’s broke then don’t fix it. Of course, the main Democratic focus has been getting to the bottom of Russian meddling. We could spend all day debating the relative significance of the interference. One could cite articles from wildly discredited, conservatives like Louise Mensch finding a commie in every cupboard or, conversely, play controversial hidden footage of CNN produce John Banfield chalking Russian conspiracies up to ratings bait, but what’s the point? It is inexplicable that Team #Resist’s best idea for taking back the White House is conducting investigations that, at best, give us a President Pence. Instead of being a path to future victory, the Russia fixation is designed to explain past loss. Isn’t that exactly what someone who doesn’t want to accept change or blame would do? “I’m not an alcoholic! I never would have run over your dog while drinking and driving if you’d adhered to the town’s leash laws!”
Equally bizarre is the belief from pundits like MSNBC’s Joy Reid or Nobody’s Max Boot that what the Democrats really need is a socially liberal, economically conservative leader who can “make centrism cool!” A hunky salesman like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Canada’s Justin Trudeau who loves unfettered capitalism as much as brightly colored socks.
How morally bankrupt can a party be when their strategy is not convincing voters about the merit of economic policies, but just selling it to them? How hip does a candidate need to be to convince voters that getting rid of the middle class was a good idea? According to all polling, it’s not clear that even Ryan Gosling could make the majority of Americans stop wanting a livable wage or medicare for all. But by their own admission, mainstream Dems’s strategy is merely to find the right spokesperson to sell something most don’t want.
And then there’s Josh Barro, who thinks Democrats just need to solve their hamburger problem. Barro believes the major impediment between Dems and their recent adversary, the voting public, is that Dems are viewed as judgmental cultural elites looking down on people who eat red meat and watch football. There may be some truth to that, but it’s clear why Barro and other centrists are pleased with this quick fix — it requires nothing more progressive of the party. As Barro writes, “The good news about the liberal cultural disconnect... is that Democrats don’t have to change any important culture policy positions to fix the disconnect.” Hurray, another idea for fixing the problem without fixing the problem.
Last up on the big ideas for 2020 is the Democratic desire to address gerrymandering. That issue’s really gaining some traction because many have argued the Republicans are much better at improperly drawing districts in their favor. Essentially, gerrymandering is just a more subtle form of voter suppression. A dirty political trick that allows election returns to dictate one outcome when a more representative accounting of the will of the people might have produced a different, more blue, result. No doubt it’s an important issue. But just like a Russian investigation or finding a super-hip centrist, it’s an election strategy requiring no change in the Democratic platform.
Nevertheless, given the rampant nature of GOP-biased Gerrymandering you’d think the Democrats could at least take the moral high ground on that issue, but they fail there as well. There can be no pretense that Democrats care about Gerrymandering because they believe in a more accurate election result when they are simultaneously preaching another strategy to “unapologetically” turn out urban population centers to vote to flip red states to blue. Dan Savage talked about it on Bill Maher much to our delight of our old friend Joy Reed who seconded the opinion in her Twitter feed dedicated to eye-rolling and fist-pumping its way to continued Democratic failure.
Joy’s disciples then took to social media, claiming Bernie Sanders doesn’t care about these issues. First, there’s no truth to that assertion as Sanders has been speaking out against voter suppression since before and during his run for President. But more importantly, as Savage himself makes clear, this strategy is not about moral high ground, and there be no pretext of purity. Savage rightly called it a tactic to cheat as well as Republicans, and that’s all it is. A way to get a victory that isn’t necessarily representative. And while there’s nothing wrong with getting Dems to vote Democratic, when a party’s current strategies amount to: blaming Russia for the loss, finding a way to sell something unwanted, and trying to cheat as well as Republicans, only the willfully blind wouldn’t understand there must be something wrong with the current Party policies.
Call me crazy, but it might start to seem to the voting public that your party actually has no new ideas, nothing different to offer, and no change to promise. Perhaps, finally realizing this political reality, Senator. Chuck Schumer other top Dems have begun messaging a “Better Deal” promising to help workers with forthcoming legislation. It remains to be seen just how substantive this new agenda will be or if it is more a reaction to the backlash from the soullessness of the recent Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee slogans that had nothing to say. Not a promise for single payer, not a dedication to pull back from nearly a decade of constant war, not a livable wage – just a pledge that Democratic Party is better than the worst party in the world.
Those are not the ideas of victory. They are lukewarm anthems to those already on board or about 2% of the population that might have buyer’s remorse. Then again, I’m not sure what else Democrats can say if they refuse to change. But I do know if Dems keep holding the center while the country moves left, there will come a day when the only enthusiastic Democrats will be Republicans.
Gladstone is the author of the Internet Apocalypse Trilogy of novels on Thomas Dunne Books. He has written for publications including Cracked, Slate, and Thrillist.President Trump acted quickly enough to install his own acting director as the head of the government’s chief Wall Street policing agency, the Justice Department said in a ruling late Saturday that appears to give the White House the upper hand in a developing battle with anti-Trump forces.
It’s unclear whether the ruling will be enough to head off a brewing constitutional crisis, with two different people now claiming to be the rightful acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The previous director, Richard Cordray, a decidedly anti-Trump figure and holdover of the Obama administration, announced a new deputy director Friday then sped up his own resignation, which would normally make the deputy director, Leandra English, the acting director.
But Mr. Trump countered hours later by quickly naming his own chief manager, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, as acting head of the CFPB.
“We believe this action is consistent with that long-established practice,” a senior administration official said Saturday, briefing reporters as the fight was developing.
Democrats, though, are lining up behind Ms. English, saying she’s the rightful director.
At stake is one of the government’s most powerful positions at the head of the CFPB, which gives its director an incredible amount of independence. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that created the bureau, the director cannot be fired except for good cause, and the CFPB’s budget is entirely independent of Congress and the president, making it impossible to rein the bureau in.
That was by design. Democrats, who wrote the Dodd-Frank legislation, wanted to prevent any interference with the CFPB’s attempts to punish or otherwise control big financial interests.
Republicans, who largely voted against the Dodd-Frank law, say the CFPB is not only a bad idea but also illegal. A federal appeals court has agreed with them, ruling the overwhelming power of one individual to be unconstitutional — though that ruling is stayed pending another appeal.
In the meantime, the fight over the next director is all the more acrimonious.
Mr. Cordray is resigning to run for governor of Ohio, according to reports, and his decision to try to lock in his hand-picked successor is tinted with anti-Trump politics.
He had gone without a deputy director for two years, then acted in his last hours to name one in Ms. English, then sped up his own departure to try to make sure she took over temporarily.
Under the Dodd-Frank law, the deputy director serves when there’s an “absence or unavailability” of the director.
That wording is very unusual, however, and the Justice Department said it doesn’t negate the federal Vacancies Act, which gives the president powers to name acting posts when someone leaves a position.
The OLC said that while Mr. Cordray’s move isn’t necessarily illegal, it is superseded by Mr. Trump’s announcement.
“When the president designates an individual under the Vacancies Reform Act outside the ordinary order of succession, the president’s designation necessarily controls,” Steven A. Engel, an assistant attorney general, wrote in the OLC’s opinion.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.The 2018 Honda Accord is getting turbocharged instead of being offered with a V-6 engine. When the redesigned midsize sedan comes out later this year, it will be offered only with four-cylinder or gas-electric hybrid engines.
Honda announced last week the smaller engines are sufficient for what its customers want. Only 14 percent of buyers in 2016 bought V-6 Accords.
Honda's move away from the V-6 is part of a trend toward replacing larger engines with turbocharged smaller ones that can nearly match V-6 power. Chevrolet, Hyundai and others already have eliminated V-6 options in their midsize cars. The 2018 Ford Mustang will no longer be offered with a V-6 engine; it comes with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine or the 5-liter V-8.
The 10th-generation Accord will come standard with a 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine or a more powerful 2-liter turbocharged four-cylinder. A two-motor hybrid powertrain is optional. The smaller engine will get a continuously variable transmission, while the larger one will get a new 10-speed automatic transmission. Manual transmissions also are available.
The 1.5-liter turbo engine already is in the smaller Honda Civic, where it produces 174 horsepower and gets 36 mpg in combined city and highway driving.
The Accord is one of America's best-selling sedans behind the Toyota Camry, but sedan sales have plummeted as consumers opt for taller, wider and more versatile crossovers. Sedan sales are down about 10 percent on the year, according to Automotive News. Honda hopes the Accord can buck the trend.
"Just as the new Honda Civic injected new energy into the compact sedan segment, we expect this all-new 2018 Accord will make people rethink the midsize sedan," Jeff Conrad, general manager of Honda, said in a statement.
Honda said the new design has a more aggressive stance than previous Accords, although the company only released pictures of the car in camouflage.
Horsepower, price, gas mileage and other details will be announced closer to when the car hits showrooms in late summer or early fall.
Chicago Tribune autos editor Robert D |
501 provides that if you have "recognized expertise" you can be compelled to go to work with the Federal government, or more specifically with the "National Defense Executive Reserve" (NDER). Students of history will recall that this forced labor corps is very similar to what Stalin did in the Soviet Union and Mao did in Communist China.
As you see, the Order gives the Federal government the authority to do just about anything it wants to do in relation to private property and resources if it claims that its actions are warranted as necessary for national security or respond to a peacetime national emergency. Would that include a national strike? In other words, this Executive Order appears to be all that is necessary for the President to order the nationalization of virtually any industry or resource, including forced labor. For another interpretation of the Order,
The Fifth Amendment provides that the Federal government cannot confiscate private property without just compensation nor deprive anyone " of life, liberty or property without due process of law " and the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state may deprive any person of due process of law. So we challenge you to read this Executive Order, remember that it applies not only in time of war, but as it says in Section 102 in peacetime, and tell us whether Barack Obama is violating the U. S. Constitution with this order.
As of today (3-18-12) there are 232 days before Election Day. Within the last three months the Federal government has moved to allow the confiscation of virtually all private property in the United States, the nationalization of entire industries and the indefinite detention of American citizens. All it would take for such martial law to be imposed is for the determination to be made/claimed that the national security requires it.At the March 15, 2012 Beaufort Patriot TEA Party meeting, National Director of the Patriot's Coalition, Jeff Lewis, explained the intricacies of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Several section of that act provide for "indefinite detention" and the application of the, as opposed to the state and national constitutions to enemy combatants.As Mr. Lewis explained, the provisions included in the NDAA at first glance appear to be intended to deal with terrorists, and not American citizens. But the question becomes: Who/what is a terrorist?Section 1031 of the NDAA defines who can be detained by the military without benefit of a trail or other rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This definition includes:There is wording in the NDAA that seems to suggest that these provisions do not apply to U. S. Citizens or "lawful resident aliens." However, that provision only applies to the section thatAs constitutional scholar Michael Connelly, writing here explains:Now, if that does not cause you any concern you should read the Executive Order entitledissued last Friday (3-16-12) by President Obama. Click here to read the Order. Don't miss Section 804 (c).Moreover, Section 501 provides that if you have "recognized expertise" you can be compelled to go to work with the Federal government, or more specifically with the "National Defense Executive Reserve" (NDER). Students of history will recall that this forced labor corps is very similar to what Stalin did in the Soviet Union and Mao did in Communist China.As you see, the Order gives the Federal government the authority to do just about anything it wants to do in relation to private property and resources if it claims that its actions are warranted as necessary for national security or respond to a peacetime national emergency. Would that include a national strike? In other words, this Executive Order appears to be all that is necessary for the President to order the nationalization of virtually any industry or resource, including forced labor. For another interpretation of the Order, click here. The Fifth Amendment provides that the Federal government cannot confiscate private property without just compensation nor deprive anyone " of life, liberty or property without due process of law " and the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state may deprive any person of due process of law. So we challenge you to read this Executive Order, remember that it applies not only in time of war, but as it says in Section 102 in peacetime, and tell us whether Barack Obama is violating the U. S. Constitution with this order.As of today (3-18-12) there are 232 days before Election Day.
There are reports already that this action by Obama is nothing to be concerned about. However, the best argument we have seen to support this position uses an irrational approach of saying that it does no more than some other executive orders issued by other presidents.
The absurdity of this reasoning would be analogous to Bashar al-Assad justifying his actions by saying they are no worse than what Hitler did at Auschwitz.
Interestingly, we have not seen anyone make this argument and take it back to the Roosevelt Administration when Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans (thousands of whom were natural born American citizens who had never even been to Japan.) But the government interned them in camps for no other reason than their ethnic background caused some to believe they were a threat to national security. So we know for a fact what "protecting national security" can lead to.
We don't think that is relevant. The earlier executive orders were different, if for no other reason than they did not fit into a series of unconstitutional or extra-constitutional actions since 9-11. It gives us absolutely no comfort at all to say that "Bush did it too." That is an absurd argument i.e., two wrongs make it right.
We suggest you simply read the Obama March 15 order and apply a rational test of "what does it say?" The proper interpretation is to examine the plain meaning of the words within the four corners of the document. Then decide for yourself.
But if you wish to interpret it in context, do a survey of the number of incidents where this President has ignored the Constitution and then tell us there is nothing to worry about.
Then if we want to have a rational discussion of this document we should begin with the issue of jurisdiction. The really troubling thing about this order is that it masterfully crafts a way to avoid the civilian Federal court system. First-year law students know that the threshold issue in nearly every case is whether court has jurisdiction over the matter presented by the parties. In this instance jurisdiction is assigned to the military. The president is Commander-in-Chief. There is no recognized judicial review.
Addendum:There are reports already that this action by Obama is nothing to be concerned about. However, the best argument we have seen to support this position uses an irrational approach of saying that it does no more than some other executive orders issued by other presidents. Click here for an example.The absurdity of this reasoning would be analogous to Bashar al-Assad justifying his actions by saying they are no worse than what Hitler did at Auschwitz.Interestingly, we have not seen anyone make this argument and take it back to the Roosevelt Administration when Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans (thousands of whom were natural born American citizens who had never even been to Japan.) But the government interned them in camps for no other reason than their ethnic background caused some to believe they were a threat to national security. So we know for a fact what "protecting national security" can lead to.We don't think that is relevant. The earlier executive orders were different, if for no other reason than they did not fit into a series of unconstitutional or extra-constitutional actions since 9-11. It gives us absolutely no comfort at all to say that "Bush did it too." That is an absurd argument i.e., two wrongs make it right.We suggest you simply read the Obama March 15 order and apply a rational test of "what does it say?" The proper interpretation is to examine the plain meaning of the words within the four corners of the document. Then decide for yourself.But if you wish to interpret it in context, do a survey of the number of incidents where this President has ignored the Constitution and then tell us there is nothing to worry about.Then if we want to have a rational discussion of this document we should begin with the issue of jurisdiction. The really troubling thing about this order is that it masterfully crafts a way to avoid the civilian Federal court system. First-year law students know that the threshold issue in nearly every case is whether court has jurisdiction over the matter presented by the parties. In this instance jurisdiction is assigned to the military. The president is Commander-in-Chief. There is no recognized judicial review. Print Email Comment ShareI remain concerned about access to the mountain but this recent change is just the symptom of a much larger challenge within the park. I feel strongly that when large numbers of people are active in the outdoors, it improves many key measures for our province including health and happiness and that it’s a cause worth working for.
Since writing the first blog post, I’ve received a lot of new information. Calls and e-mails from users of the park have provided personal anecdotes and historical context. The wording on the BC Parks website has been updated and Cypress Mountain Resort has provided clarification online. I’ve also spoken with people who are active volunteers at organizations such as the Federation of Mountain Clubs of BC: these are the unsung heroes who invest significant amount of time during the year to ensure that everyone in BC has access to trails. Finally, BC Parks and the resort were generous enough to take time to speak with me and talk about the challenges they face and the way that we might work together as a community to solve them. I decided to remove my first blog post because I didn’t want to be quoted out of context given the new information that is now available.
The operator of the resort and BC Parks have responded quickly and have expressed interest in working toward a long term solution. The onus is now on us to engage in a constructive discussion about how to solve the jig-saw puzzle of constraints and compromises to find a solution for the challenges facing the park. I encourage you to send BC Parks your ideas.
In early January, new signage was added at Cypress Mountain Resort to indicate that the backcountry access corridor would be closed from 10 pm to 9 am each night and a similar new notice was posted on the BC Parks website. A number of users of the park were frustrated by this and I shared my concerns in a blog post on January 11th.
What is happening on the mountain?
Anyone who has been visiting Cypress Provincial Park or Seymour Provincial Park over a period of years will recognize that they are becoming very busy during peak times. The explosive growth of snowshoeing as an outdoor recreation activity and general population growth of our region are two of the contributing factors. Increasing use by backcountry and sightseeing users has not been matched by an increase in parks funding. The inconsistent weather over the past two seasons has also resulted in the release of high levels of pent-up demand whenever favourable weather conditions coincide with a weekend or holiday.
The role of the park is to serve multiple user groups, including people who use the commercial ski area and people participating in backcountry activities. The park is only successful if all of those user groups are able to access the park in a reasonable way.
Cypress Mountain Resort has the permit to operate a commercial ski and snowplay area inside of the Provincial Park. The resort is an important part of the park and was one of the mountains where I learned how to ski. This operating permit gives them a high level of authority over what happens inside of the Controlled Recreation Area to ensure that they are capable of delivering a safe and high quality experience for the people who visit the park to participate in that activity. For example, the resort has the ability to charge a parking fee for all of the parking lots (with the exception of lot 3B) and the resort has been generous in not yet exercising that right.
As a part of the permit, the resort has an obligation to provide a corridor through the ski hill to the rest of the park so that backcountry users can snowshoe or backcountry ski in the backcountry areas of the park. Note that this does not mean that skiers on the ski hill (or any other users of the park,) may cross the ski area boundary at uncontrolled points or enter any areas that are officially closed. The backcountry access corridor is basically a 150 meter long trail that crosses the ski hill from the lodge to the edge of the Yew Lake area. The resort has the ability to close this corridor when there are safety concerns which could include the window of 10 pm to 9 am when staff are working with machinery on the ski hill. In the past, no signage about hourly restrictions was posted and exceptions were often made for early-morning users if it was practical and safe. The road usually opens at 7 am and some people were unaware that an exception was being made when some early morning users were allowed on the backcountry access corridor before 9 am and so it was as if the policy did not exist from our point of view.
This winter, a tipping point was reached. The number of backcountry users visiting the park skyrocketed relative to previous years and it was no longer practical to safely make individual exceptions before 9 am given the sheer volume of people who were trying to cross the corridor. The fact that a portion of users were violating the conditions of the Backcountry Access Pass by deviating from the corridor further complicated the situation as that can create a much more dangerous situation. As a result, all access was limited to 9 am or later with no exceptions. The resort posted the signage in hopes that it would clear up confusion and reduce frustration and a notice was also added to the BC Parks website. I note that the notice on the BC Parks website has since been modified to remove some confusion. Without additional context or advance notice, it caused some users to become more frustrated.
In speaking to the resort and BC Parks, I believe that they don’t want to place restrictions on backcountry users but they only have a small number of tools at their disposal and they needed to address immediate concerns related to safety. I do believe that they are committed to engaging in discussion to find longer term solutions. I am of the opinion that it is important that backcountry users are able to access these trails before 9 am. Setting out early in the morning is important if you are going on a longer trip, working around changing weather or want to catch a sunrise.NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — A federal jury has rejected an argument that the use of the N-word among blacks can be a culturally acceptable term of love and endearment, ruling instead that its use in the workplace is hostile and discriminatory no matter what.
Jurors last week awarded $250,000 in compensatory damages to a worker at the black employment agency STRIVE East Harlem who was the target of an N-word-laced rant by her black boss.
The jury was set to return to a U.S. District Court in Manhattan Tuesday to decide on punitive damages.
The case against Rob Carmona and the employment agency he founded, STRIVE East Harlem, gave legal airing to what some see as a complex double standard surrounding the word – that it is a degrading slur when uttered by whites but can be used at times with impunity among blacks.
But Brandi Johnson, 38, told jurors that being black didn’t make it any less hurtful to be the target of what her attorney called Carmona’s “four-minute n****r tirade” about inappropriate workplace attire and unprofessional behavior.
Johnson, who taped the March 2012 remarks after her complaints about his verbal abuse were disregarded, said she fled to the restroom and cried for 45 minutes.
“I was offended. I was hurt. I felt degraded. I felt disrespected. I was embarrassed,” Johnson testified.
In closing arguments, Johnson’s attorney Marjorie M. Sharpe said Carmona’s use of the word was intended to offend “and any evidence that defendants put forth to the contrary is simply ridiculous.”
“When you use the word n****r to an African-American, no matter how many alternative definitions that you may try to substitute with the word n****r, that is no different than calling a Hispanic by the worst possible word you can call a Hispanic, calling a homosexual male the worst possible word that you can call a homosexual male,” Sharpe told jurors.
But defense lawyers said the 61-year-old Carmona, a black man of Puerto Rican descent, had a much different experience with the word. Raised by a single mother in a New York City public housing project, he became addicted to heroin in his teens and broke it with the help of drug counselors who employed tough love and tough language.
Carmona went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University before co-founding STRIVE in the 1980s. Now, most of STRIVE’s employees are black women, defense attorney Diane Krebs told jurors in her opening statement.
“And Mr. Carmona is himself black, as you yourselves can see,” Krebs said.
In his testimony, Carmona defended his use of the word, saying he used it with Johnson to convey that she was “too emotional, wrapped up in her, at least the negative aspects of human nature.”
Then he explained that the word has “multiple contexts” in the black and Latino communities, sometimes indicating anger, sometimes love.
Carmona said he might put his arm around a longtime friend in the company of another and say: “This is my n****r for 30 years.”
“That means my boy, I love him, or whatever,” he said.
He was asked if he meant to indicate love when he called Johnson the word.
“Yes, I did,” he responded.
The controversy is a blemish on STRIVE, which has been heralded for helping people with troubled backgrounds get into the workforce. Its employment model, which was described in a CBS’ “60 Minutes” piece as “part boot camp, part group therapy,” claims to have helped nearly 50,000 people find work since 1984.
Sharpe told jurors that STRIVE’s tough-love program cannot excuse Carmona’s behavior.
“Well, if calling a person a n****r and subjecting them to a hostile work environment is part of STRIVE’s tough love, then STRIVE needs to be reminded that this type of behavior is illegal and cannot be tolerated,” she said.
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(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement Almost a quarter of voters in Iceland have signed a petition against plans to repay money lost by foreigners when an Icelandic online bank collapsed. The petition urges the president to veto the bill that allows the move, and calls for a referendum on the issue. Iceland's parliament has approved the plans to reimburse 3.8bn euros (£3.4bn) lost by Dutch and British savers when the Icesave scheme failed in 2008. Many taxpayers say they are being made to pay for the bank's mistakes. The compensation amounts to some 12,000 euros for each citizen on the island nation of 320,000. Staggering payments A poll taken in August suggested that 70% of Icelanders were against the deal, which was approved by Parliament earlier this week. More than 56,000 - about 23% of Iceland's voters - signed the petition urging President Olaf Ragnar Grimsson not to sign the bill. HAVE YOUR SAY I was one of the first to sign this petition. This is such a serious matter that any agreement must be made with the general public Michael J Clarke, Akureyri, Iceland Magnus Arni Skulason, one of the organisers of the petition, compared the repayment to financing the country's health service. "We were able to represent our arguments to the president, and also on the occasion we handed over a petition to ask the president to reject the current Icesave bill," he told the BBC. "The interest rate on the Icesave agreement for Iceland is like running the National Health Service of Iceland for six months." The Icelandic government had threatened to resign if the deal was rejected by MPs. "Approving the bill is the better option and will avoid even more economic damage," Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson said during the debate. Icesave - the internet arm of Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which offered high interest rates - failed in October 2008. An original agreement negotiated with the British and Dutch governments was approved in August. But subsequent amendments negotiated by the prime minister were rejected in both countries, forcing a fresh vote. Under the new deal the money - which represents 40% of the country's GDP - will be repaid gradually, staggered until 2024. We asked you for your comments on this story. Please find a selection of your views here.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version"JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors has said he thinks Tesla will be able to fully charge electric car batteries in five to ten minutes before too long (without battery swapping). Kompulsa GE reports
He pointed out some of the challenges associated with this, but the fact that charge times have gotten down to 20 minutes already should give you some hope.
The challenges include: Tesla Motors' vehicles — the Roadster and Model S — both have very large battery banks, and therefore would require an enormous current to charge in just a few minutes.
This large current can be provided with a Level 3 charging station which has built-in, powerful batteries to supply that current (and then the charging station batteries can recharge over the course of the day, until the next car that needs fast charging comes along).
The battery design also needs to be able to tolerate or limit the temperature rise caused by fast charging (maybe by increasing efficiency) — larger currents, in general, tend to cause more heat generation, in basically every device.
It is technically possible for prototype lithium-ion batteries to charge in less than a minute. However, commercialization of these technologies is a different story.
"It's not going to happen in a year from now. It's going to be hard. But I think we can get down to five to 10 minutes," Straubel said in an interview with MIT Technology Review. He noted that the current superchargers, which deliver 120 kilowatts of electricity, "seemed pretty crazy even 10 years ago."
JB Straubel's statement didn't come long after Tesla Motors announced upgrades to its Supercharger network, which would enable 20-minute charging.
Straubel said that Tesla Motors was able to achieve this because it designs and builds its own equipment, instead of just buying parts from third-party manufacturers as most manufacturers do (which doesn't qualify as innovation)."
Source: Kompulsa GEDell and Google have unveiled the Chromebook 13, an all-new Chromebook which aims to bring higher-end specs with a more affordable price tag. Currently, consumers have entry-level, affordable Chromebook's like the ASUS Chromebook Flip, or a high-end, expensive option like the Pixel. Dell hopes to break the current trend, with pricing of its Chromebook 13 starting at just $399. For that, you get a 13.3-inch FHD IPS display, a 5th generation Intel Core processor and 12 hours of battery life per charge.
The price will rise, depending which internals you upgrade. Consumers will be able to choose between the i3 or i5 processor, and have anywhere from 2GB to 8GB of RAM inside, with configurations priced as high as $899. You will be able to order the Dell Chromebook 13 beginning September 17.
Source: Google for WorkHere are two grown men fighting over a parking spot in the Upper East Side.
The video, uploaded to YouTube Wednesday by Daniel Ovechkin, shows the two men flailing fists at each other over a tiny plot of asphalt on 88th Street between Lexington and 3rd.
When the altercation ends, the men get back into their (matching?) cars. The man in the front car drives forward in order to back up into the coveted space-- recently vacated by a yellow cab-- but before he can practice his parallel parking, the man behind him drives forward, blocking him.
And because the men are blocking traffic, the frustrated driver of a red Porsche honks his horn for about 15 consecutive seconds, escalating the idiotic incident to new levels of awfulness.Have you wanted to play a Puzzle Quest game in the land of Ooo? Well, good news: Cartoon Network, D3 Go, and WayForward are working on Adventure Time Puzzle Quest, which is coming to mobile later this year. There will be plenty of the match-3 RPG action you’ve come to know and love, but with quests, daily events, and loads of Adventure Time characters. I quite like Adventure Time, and I do enjoy Puzzle Quest games, so this sounds like quite the winning combination when it launches this summer worldwide. Hopefully the “worldwide" means that it’ll be soft launching somewhere before too long.
D3 Go published Card Wars ($3.99), which was controversial due to being a paid game with several free-to-play monetization tactics. However, they are going full free-to-play with Adventure Time Puzzle Quest. Their Marvel Puzzle Quest (Free) is particularly well-regarded and is frequently updated, so there’s loads of promise for what a similar game with new characters and content over time could do for this.With today's release of The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott's remake of the 1974 caper film about a hijacked No. 6 train, I am bracing for another onslaught of nostalgia for New York City in the 1970s. The theory goes like this: Back when the city was nearly bankrupt and everyone looked like Al Pacino in Serpico, New York was scuzzy, but it had soul. (Because it was scuzzy, it had soul.) The lofts of SoHo were hives of funky industry. Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin were trying to strangle each other in the Yankee clubhouse. Television was playing at CBGBs; Bianca Jagger was snorting coke at Studio 54. Everyone was out of work; there was a real-live serial killer on the loose; and when a blackout hit the city, actual looting and mayhem ensued! You know, New York was dangerous, "edgy"—authentic.
This has become a party-line position among New York's arty chattering classes, especially as the economic downturn threatens to teleport us back to the bad old days. A trendy thing to say (in certain New York circles, at least) is that '70s-style deprivation would ultimately be a boon, scrubbing the gilding off the 21st-century metropolis and purging the town of hedge-funders and Eurotrash. The rents would drop, and bohemia would blossom again in the shadows of the condo towers and chain stores.
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James Wolcott doesn't go that far in his tone poem to '70s New York published in the June issue of Vanity Fair. But "Splendor in the Grit" typifies the romantic pop-historical vision of the period—a surprise, coming from Wolcott's normally acid-dipped pen. Wolcott draws reasonable contrasts between the city of then and now, pointing out that New York was "a more egalitarian city than it subsequently became with the rise of the super-rich," and that Manhattan below 14th Street holds less surprise today than it did in the days when "art galleries and Off Off Off Broadway theaters could spring up in shoebox storefronts."
But then he gets all rhapsodic about how hard-boiled the place was. The city, he writes, instilled in its denizens a "jungle-cat quickness... and fine-tuned a ninja ability to suss out something ugly about to go down at the pimp bar." The tourists "looked scared." (Awesome!) And Wolcott's kicker is a doozy. Evoking the possibility of a "second go-round of the 70s" this time with "those spiky glass buildings that have gone up in recent years... reflecting our own overreaching folly back at us with sterile mockery," Wolcott concludes: "Really, I much prefer rubble."
Oh, does he? Wolcott may have seen rubble on the front page of the Times when President Carter visited the South Bronx. But I doubt he had to step over any on his way to the art-house cinemas about which he waxes lyrical. I don't know about Wolcott's own circumstances, but I'm confident that many of his fellow travelers in '70s bourgeois-bohemia had a social safety net to fall back on if things really got ugly—namely, parents in a Westchester colonial or a Central Park West classic six with an empty guest room and a full refrigerator.
If you weren't a scene maker, New York's crumminess held a lot less allure. Stagflation, rotting infrastructure, sanitation workers' strikes, and rampant crime didn't just turn New Yorkers into ninjas and jungle cats—it made the city an incredibly unpleasant and often terrifying place to live. I have a memory, from around the time I was in second grade, of a perhaps forgotten New York folkway: the breakfast table distribution of "mugger money," cash that parents would give to their kids before packing them off to school. The idea being that a $20 bill would placate the mugger so he would opt not to blow a child's head off.
Or take some more memories from my family scrapbook. My mother was robbed at knifepoint on upper Broadway two times in 1974. She worked for a time at a city-run drug rehabilitation program in the Bronx, where she witnessed appalling corruption, including the sexual exploitation of junkie prostitutes by the bureaucrat in charge. (Her attempts to report this to higher-ups were met with indifference.) She got laid off in fiscal crisis of 1975 and took a job driving a taxi, which was very scary work, especially for a woman. Eventually, she had to move with her young son to Boston—a far worse fate, as I'm sure Wolcott knows, than living in a New York with fewer storefront galleries.
I hasten to add that my mother was a Barnard-educated professional who grew up in a tony Connecticut town, in the heart of New York's affluent commuter belt. Things were much direr for those teenage hookers in the rehab program and for millions of other New Yorkers whose plight is reduced, in the Life on Mars-Bronx Is Burning version of history, to the backdrop before which scenes of "gritty" glamour unfold.
Don't get me wrong: New York in the '70s was uniquely vibrant. No reasonable person is immune to the charms of Bella Abzug's hats, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album, or Joseph Sargent's crud-caked lens. But the town was also uniquely miserable—not a place we want to revisit. There is something gross about nostalgists aestheticizing squalor that they never really, fully experienced.John, my 7-year-old son, and I crisscross our backyard, pacing the boundaries of our would-be DIY skating rink. It's late October, too soon to be thinking about ice. But we've endured a few winters here in Ann Arbor, Mich.—frigid, soul-sucking winters—so we're plotting a way to brighten up the dark months. As the day fades into twilight, we kick paths into the fallen leaves, defining the rink's edges. An ambitious kid who's towheaded like his mom, John skirts the far reaches of the yard.
My wife, MaryLinda, emerges from the house, holding our other son, Sam, 1; our daughter, Abby, 5, trails behind. "Wow, that's going to be a huge rink," MaryLinda says. Abby frolics in the leaves, obliterating John's and my work. John throws up his hands, yelling, "Aaaah-beee!" It's still just a notion, but the rink is already doing its job.
Before MaryLinda and I had kids, I survived the cold months in Michigan with a garage project, like rebuilding a car. But now, holing up solo wouldn't cut it. The rink harked back to my childhood pond-hockey days and seemed like the perfect solution. I hoped it would get us all out of the house, while serving as a beacon for the neighbors, most of whom we still hardly knew after nine years.
But there was a problem: Our backyard slopes down about 3 feet over a 60-foot stretch from the back of the house. Any reasonably sized rink would need a stout retaining wall at least 2 feet high at the deep end. That would call for more water—and more construction—than I had in mind.
"Let's use the driveway," John suggests, an idea I consider until my wife asks where we'd park the cars.
"On the street, of course," says John.
While preparing to tell John the many practical reasons his proposed solution won't work, my gaze wanders next door, into the Browns' backyard.
When Chris Brown, 48, and his family arrived, in 2005, they turned the rolling, wooded space into a soccer pitch, complete with full-size goals. In above-freezing weather, it was a great place for their two teenage sons to hone their considerable skills. But it went unused all winter, so...
"Let's go talk to Chris," I say to John, and we amble over. Since no one in Chris's family skates, I mentally work up a spiel about why they need a rink in their yard. We say hello to Chris, and I start in with tales of my recreational hockey exploits, segueing into a sermon about the value of teaching our kids how to make the most out of winter's harsh reality. My coup de grâce is a quote from snowboard innovator Jake Burton, who said, "I tell my kids, 'Bring it!' Winter's just another thing to bring you down." In other words, when life gives you frigid temperatures, make ice.
"Fantastic!" Chris exclaims. "Let's do it."
Startled by his enthusiasm, I warn that the rink might leave a mark when we dismantle it in the spring. Undaunted, Chris says, "Hey, man, we've got the space, let's use it."
Enlisting The Troops
With my rudimentary rink drawings at hand, I poke around the Web for plans that might show me something I've overlooked. My sketches call for a plastic-lined, 40 x 60–foot box made out of 2 x 12s conjoined by sheet-metal tie plates and held upright by iron stakes. I'm proud of the rugged simplicity—until I see the NHL-worthy rinks built by other backyard DIYers. The only thing they lack is a Zamboni. But for a time-challenged father of three, I reason, rugged simplicity is the way to go.
My plan relies on the field being basically flat, with the foot-wide planks accommodating any slope invisible to the eye. Knowing I'll need at least 3 inches of ice for a stable skating surface, I figure I'll have 9 inches of wiggle room. It all seems about right—but I wake up one night, terrified that my crude calculations will lead to disaster. I need a transit, a gradient-measuring device. I call Dave Ferguson, an architect friend. He drops by in early November, and we stake out a detailed grid, using his trusty transit.
Good move: The gradient of the rink location turns out to be a full 12 inches, so one end would be full to the brim and the other dry. We relocate the grid to an area with an 8-inch gradient. "That'll do," I think. But Dave isn't finished. Two days later he e-mails me a computer-generated drawing of an oval rink and a list of building materials. His plan is far more elegant than mine, with boards of varying widths to bring the ice flush with the border.
Dave's enthusiasm gets me thinking: If I ask enough people for help, I could Tom Sawyer the whole thing. But I also have a bigger idea in mind, another vestige of my youth. I grew up in New Jersey in the '70s. We lived on a dead-end street of modest, single-story homes. The Garden State's image has long suffered because of a foul, industrial corridor along the northernmost stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike, to say nothing of the stereotypes perpetuated by The Sopranos and—heaven save us—Jersey Shore. That's not my New Jersey. In our neighborhood a strong work ethic and a propensity to help one another prevailed. The dads joined forces to build decks, replace sinks and finish basements. In one epic project, they plumbed all the houses to a new sewer line.
Ever since I moved to the reputedly friendly Midwest, I've been surprised not to find the neighborly spirit of my youth. Maybe, I decide, someone just needs to inject a little community spirit—someone with an ice rink to build. I pick a date when I think most people will be free—the day after Christmas—order the materials and spread the word.
Architect Dave Ferguson's computer-generated rink plans, which feature pinched-in corners to approximate an oval. The superiority of this design over a rectangular one became evident when the first puck zinged around the curve rather than lodging in a corner.
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Built To Thrill
Boxing Day dawns at 15 degrees with the threat of light snow. As I gather my tools, I fret about who'll show up. I know I have enough hands to finish the setup in one day. In addition to Dave and Chris, another eager neighbor, Doug, even offers to split the $750 I spent on materials. But beyond us and our kids, who knows?
As I walk next door, I nearly drop my tools in awe. An army of adults and children—about two dozen in all—has gathered in the field. A few dogs have shown up too. The neighbors are shaking hands, making introductions and stomping their feet in the cold. Chris, who's standing in the middle of the animated group, catches my eye, and mouths, "Holy cow!"
"So what should we do?" a voice of undetermined origin asks. I'm unprepared for this. I hastily suggest that someone build a fire near the driveway so we can all warm our hands. Two people peel off, and the rest stare at me expectantly.
I shift my gaze to Dave, passing the buck. During his 58 years, he's mastered many skills, and his focus on building the rink is laser-like. But in terms of our approach to projects, Dave and I are like Oscar and Felix in The Odd Couple. I value speed over quality of craftsmanship. For the rink job, I just want ice; if the boards are uneven, so be it. Dave wants to build the rink with the precision of the Great Pyramid of Giza. At one point in our planning, I mention that I can't spare a whole week. He replies, "Well, it has to be right |
and how it was good that it stopped when it did.
I was pumping gas into my vehicle when the guy next to me looked over and commented on the number of computers in the back of my SUV. I of course, mentioned that I owned a business in the tech industry. I explained to him that I was also a Director of a charity that provided computers to disadvantaged kids. He seemed truly interested and while I didn't have any business cards with me, I gave him our website and blog address. I excused myself as I walked toward the store to pick up some other things before leaving the station. I fully expected him and his van to be gone when I returned.
He wasn't. It wasn't.
As I approached my vehicle from the store, I had a new perspective on the area. I could now see through the windshield of the van at the pump and there was another person sitting in the passenger seat...a person I had not seen earlier. The guy I talked to was behind the steering wheel and he rotated between jabbing his finger in my direction and then turning his head sharply back toward the other person in the van as he spoke. It did not seem to be a tranquil conversation. As I came within ten steps of my Rodeo, the driver got out of his van and approached me.
It wasn't a friendly approach.
We made contact just under the edge of the canopy. I say "we" made contact...the initial contact was his right index finger stabbing into my chest.
"It's _____ ________ hippy freaks like you that are costing us our jobs. You got any idea how many people are getting pink slips because of your b_________? Every time you put that ____ on someone's computer, some guy trying to feed his family has to go home and tell his wife that he lost his job. How about I snatch that silly little ponytail and give you a tour of the parking lot?"
The veins in his temples were at critical mass and he physically spit as he screamed at me in front of his van. This is where the narrative is going to stop, and it's going to stop for two reasons. First, there's no good way to tell the rest of the story. Second, it's because that's when any verbal communication between him and I stopped. He made first hostile contact and I didn't do anything but react. In the end it was no big deal...but of the two of us...
I am the only one of the two that did not involuntarily leave his feet that day.
Besides, that "silly little ponytail" represents all the hair I have left. Just protectin' the real estate.
The guy in the passenger seat came streaking out of the van with a laptop in one hand and a cell phone in the other. A small crowd had semi-gathered to watch the show but it was over as quickly as it began.
As I spoke with the other guy, it turned out that he was the crew chief of that team and a salaried member of that company's Field Management. The driver had used the truck laptop to go to our website and blog. It didn't take him long to figure out I am an Open Source/Linux Advocate. From talking with the supervisor, I found out that their store location had taken a beating from November of last year until the present. "Memos" had been circulated amongst the management teams, giving advice and training on how best to deal with the "Open Source Threat."
And are you curious as to the machine that is creaming their laptop AND desktop sales?
The Dell Mini 9. It's killin' 'em.
Also I didn't know, the fewer machines they sell with Windows, the fewer positions in the field they can justify. And he said it so I didn't have to.
"We schedule a technician visit for six months in the future with every home visit. Both they and we know their registries and computers will be messed up again by then."
That I did not know.
So what I learned is that "Microsoft Technicians" from this company actually help the particular store project sales and profit in six month blocks, for their "call-out" business that is.
Interesting.
That lead me to think about an entire nation of computer techs. Do they "project" their profits based on the duality between the customer's computer ignorance and the product's inherent insecurity and instability? Do they project their frustration and anger at self-serve gas stations? Geez...how many of them do you imagine there are?
Hey...just thinking allowed.
It did make me a bit more aware of who I tell about my business.
Not that it's going to alter any behavior...just stuff to think about.
All-Righty ThenPresident-elect Donald Trump’s transition team got down to nuts and bolts Thursday, deploying “landing parties” to federal agencies responsible for national security and reportedly having offered the next administration’s first big appointment.
Visits to the National Security Council and departments of Defense, Justice and State to lay groundwork for the handover in January marked a rapid acceleration in activity by the transition team, which has been criticized for the slow pace of progress in the first week after the election.
The Associated Press, citing “a senior Trump official” speaking on the condition of anonymity, reported that Mr. Trump had offered the post of White House national security adviser to retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a former Defense Intelligence Agency chief. It was not clear Thursday evening whether Gen. Flynn, who was an early supporter of Mr. Trump and spoke on his behalf at the Republican National Convention, had accepted the offer.
Mr. Trump held scores of interviews at Trump Tower in New York with prospective Cabinet members and advisers, and met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Vice President-elect Mike Pence met with leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill.
After what he called a “very candid” meeting, Mr. Abe told reporters in New York that he had “great confidence” in the president-elect.
“I will be able to establish a relationship of trust,” said Mr. Abe, the first foreign leader to meet Mr. Trump face to face since his stunning election victory over Hillary Clinton. “I conveyed my view on basic issues. I’d like to refrain from touching on details.”
The landing-party members, meanwhile, huddled in conference rooms at the agencies. Obama administration officials gave them thick binders and detailed presentations that included organization charts, budget forecasts and parking space assignments, said veterans of previous transitions.
“At that point, we might start getting indication of whether this is a friendly or hostile takeover or handover. It goes in both directions,” said Douglas Brook, who worked on outgoing transition teams of President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush.
He said both sides typically are professionals who “speak the same language” in their fields of expertise, regardless of policy differences. But it takes a concerted effort to achieve as smooth a handover as accomplished by the Bush-Obama teams.
“Both sides need to be aware that the clock is running and there is a lot of work to be done so that when the inauguration takes place there is a minimum amount of hiccups,” said Mr. Brook, a visiting professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
The timetable has been impressed upon the team by repeated news reports about slow progress and turmoil, which Trump transition officials dispute.
Mr. Trump also is not off the pace of most recent presidents in filling his Cabinet. When Barack Obama was putting together his first administration in 2008, he did not make his first Cabinet appointment until three weeks after the election.
“Lots of reasons to be concerned about @realDonaldTrump transition but the pace of the announcements isn’t one of them. That’s not a fair shot,” former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod tweeted.
“We hadn’t made any major appointments at this point in 2008. I don’t remember being criticized for it,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump’s landing parties will tackle federal agencies in three waves: national security, economic and domestic.
“The next wave is the economic landing team,” Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters in a conference call.
Within days, the next team will arrive at the Treasury, Commerce Department, U.S. Trade Representative’s office, Small Business Administration and Social Security Administration.
The final team will fan out across domestic agencies, including the departments of Interior, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Energy, Labor, Transportation, Education, and Health and Human Services, as well as independent agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget, Federal Trade Commission and NASA.
Mr. Trump’s meeting schedule in New York on Thursday included diplomatic legend Henry Kissinger, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and Family Research Council leader Ken Blackwell.
The most unexpected meeting, however, was the one reportedly set for this weekend with Mitt Romney. The 2012 presidential nominee was the party’s most outspoken critic of Mr. Trump during the race and called his fellow Republican a “phony” and a “fraud.”
Mr. Trump planned to move the transition meetings Friday to the private Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, about 35 miles west of Manhattan. The Trump-Romney meeting likely will take place there because the president-elect plans to stay in Bedminster until Sunday night, transition team officials said.
“I think it’s good that the president-elect is meeting with people like Romney,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a transition team member who is a potential pick for U.S. attorney general. “There are a lot of talented people that he needs good relationships with, and I think Mr. Romney would be quite capable of doing a number of things.”
Mr. Romney reportedly is under consideration for secretary of state, although that could not be confirmed. Other possible candidates to lead the State Department include Mrs. Haley, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.FastCompany: “No Joke: Electro-Skates Are Motors You Strap To Your Feet”
Ubergizmo: “spnKiX takes roller skating to a whole new level”
Gizmodo: “I Can't Wait to Tool Around on These Robo-Skates”
The Sun Newspaper, UK: “MY FEET OF INGENUITY"
Wired: “Electric Skates for Sci-Fi Roller Diners”
Discovery: “ROLL OUT WITH MOTORIZED SHOES.”
The Wall Street Journal: “Some projects you want to succeed just because they’re something the world should have.”
Hi Kickstarters! Thanks for checking out our project.
For most of my life I have been interested in personal mobility and I have been asking the same questions all of you have been asking:
Where are our flying cars? Where are the jet packs? Where are my motorized shoes?
Well, it turns out that motorized shoes are possible! After spending years researching, designing and developing a variety of different prototypes, the miniaturization of certain technologies found in smart phones, laptops and radio controlled cars has finally made it possible for us to integrate them all into a pair of "shoes"….. so that you can go for a spin.
We are so very excited to bring to you, here on Kickstarter, our vision of what fun, personal mobility could be in 2012.
What are spnKiX?
spnKiX are battery powered, motorized skates that strap right on to your shoes. They are hand controlled by a wireless remote. All hardware and electronics are integrated into a frame made of fiber reinforced nylon. One motor and battery pack per foot.
How do spnKiX work?A wireless remote controls both feet at once. The remote straps to your hand and you can vary the throttle with the continuously variable speed control. They come with removable training wheels to help you get started. After you get some training sessions in, take them off and glide like a pro!
(hand held controller)
Tech Specs:Jack Wilshere believes Arsenal have learned the lessons from their chastening Champions League elimination by Barcelona last season and has called on his team-mates to "be a bit nasty" by "getting in the faces" of the Spanish team during a daunting tie, which begins at the Emirates Stadium on Wednesday.
Arsène Wenger's side are set to be boosted by the unexpected availability of Samir Nasri, arguably their most consistently impressive player this season, with the France international having recovered from hamstring damage sustained in the FA Cup fourth-round win over Huddersfield. His return would add to Arsenal's attacking options, though Wilshere and his team-mates will be just as intent on nullifying a Barça team who have scored 71 times in La Liga already this campaign and won 6-3 on aggregate in last year's quarter-final.
"I was at the Emirates Stadium for the first game against Barcelona last season and they were brilliant, especially in that first half," said Wilshere. "I was in Bolton [on loan] for the second match and watched on television but I remember we basically played our game, passing it around. This year we have to get in their faces and show them what we're all about. When we have the ball, we've got to keep it as well as they can. We've got to change our game a bit to play against Barcelona – we'll learn from last year, but we need to get in their faces and, if you like, be a bit nasty, in a footballing sense, to get the ball back.
"We have to press them as a team – there's no point just one of us going after them, so we have to close them down as a team and get the ball back from them. But we'll go into the game on Wednesday looking for the win still. It's important we get that to take to their place for the return match."
Although the teenage midfielder acknowledged a need to tweak the team's approach, Wenger retains faith that his players can unsettle Barcelona by tapping into their own strengths, albeit if they can secure possession for themselves. Arsenal claimed an unlikely 2-2 draw against these opponents in last season's first leg despite being without key players, and with Cesc Fábregas's domestic season ended by the injury picked up converting the hosts' equaliser from the penalty spot. Yet there is strength in depth this time around, with Nasri's potential return particularly timely.
The French midfielder has excelled, scoring 14 times, and had been expected to miss the first leg at the Emirates Stadium. He will have further tests on his hamstring tomorrow and Tuesday before a decision is made, though there is optimism that he will be able to feature against the Spanish champions.
"I will not take a crazy gamble, but physically he is ready," said Wenger. "There is just a risk of him suffering a setback, so we will test him medically and physically. There are other important games coming up – we have Leyton Orient in the FA Cup, and the Carling Cup final, and the return game in Barcelona in three weeks. So it is important not to be stupid.
"I personally believe we go into the Barcelona game in better shape than last year. We had so many uncertainties last season – Robin [van Persie] was injured, William Gallas went off in the first game, Andrey Arshavin went off after 27 minutes, we had no Alex Song or Fábregas in the second game … The team, for me, had less confidence and we have matured since then. We can certainly compete technically better with them. It will be interesting to see whether we play with belief.
"You can wonder whether we need to change the way we play at the Nou Camp but, at home, we will try to play to our strengths. We will try to attack the other team. If we just play in the final third defensively, that would not be our natural game and we would not be happy – we'd come out of the match thinking we hadn't played. But if we can escape their pressure, then we can be dangerous. We will create chances if we can put them under pressure. We have to think about how we do that."
The size of the task awaiting Arsenal was put into perspective by Fábregas who acknowledged the Catalans are "the best team in the world" at present. "We have a young team but one with a lot of quality and energy," he said. "We are very motivated. They are such a good team that, even if you know everything [about them], they have so many quality players that they can make the difference. We don't have to worry too much about them. We have to play with no fear. Last season in the first half [of the first leg] especially we respected them too much. We just have to play our game and that is it."What would it be like to step in an ordinary room and feel a gentle, computer-generated jungle breeze, with trees swaying nearby that you could touch?
AMD, a micro processor manufacturer, is trying to figure that out. The company has been doing a conference circuit in recent weeks promoting its research in heterogeneous system architecture, which is essentially a method to bind parallel computing processes together for greater efficiency.
The “holy grail” of these efforts, according to AMD’s Phil Rogers, would be building something like the holodeck — the computer deck on Star Trek (notably in The Next Generation) where characters would play immersive games. They could dial up a mystery novel, for example, then find themselves in a seedy bar with virtual-yet-real-looking holograms in 1940s-style clothing.
Rogers, a corporate fellow at AMD, has spent years working in 3-D technologies. It’s only recently that the company felt comfortable enough to speculate about the holodeck, he says. Other entities are also working on holodeck-like technologies, such as Microsoft and Stony Brook University, so perhaps that helped.
AMD believes it could be only 10 to 15 years before a holodeck becomes real. What would it take to get there?
A better-than-Imax video experience. We hope you’ve had the experience of sitting back in a domed Imax theatre and watching the shuttle launch in Hubble 3-D. Yet despite the awesome wrap-around view, it doesn’t feel like reality. A holodeck would need 360-degree fidelity. It would need to understand that objects get closer when you step towards them, and further when you step away. Perspective must tilt as you move your head. “You inevitably have to combine multiple video feeds to do that and stitch them together seamlessly,” Rogers said.
The highest-fidelity audio ever. You know those people who swear that records produce better music than MP3s? “People are very much more fussy about video than audio,” Rogers points out. To make the holodeck feel real, the audio not only has to be immersive, but also directional and able to change as the person moves. The latest in surround-sound technologies doesn’t even close to that, he said.
The sensation of touch. Sure, Captain Jean-Luc Picard can slug a virtual villain in the head, but it wouldn’t have that same oomph unless Picard could feel his hand making contact with the other guy. “We still need to develop the tactile feedback, as somebody in a holodeck interacts with an object and another person they need to touch, and they need to feel that they touched,” Rogers said. “The most likely way that we’d do that is with targeted air jets, and transducers that haven’t been developed yet.”
Efficient memory allocation. While the blue screen of death in three dimensions would be rather epic, that’s not what holodeck designers want. The best way to keep the holodeck humming will be sharing memory between the central processing unit and the graphics processing unit, Rogers said. We’ve already made strides in this direction. Still, millions of parallel processes will have to happen simultaneously, so there’s quite a ways to go.
Lots of processing power. It will take mega computer juice to sync up the images, audio and other features that make the holodeck real. Remember that line in the movie Apollo 13 when Tom Hanks refers to the impressive computer “in a single room”? It’s laughable now when glancing at an iPhone, but we face a similar challenge now with holodecks. “The problem is it would take racks and racks of mainframe-like computers,” points out Rogers. A holodeck can’t be commercially available until the components fit to a small rack and draw small amounts of power.
Find paying customers. Naturally, a holodeck won’t happen without a captive market. We’ve had at least one petition asking the White House to build the Enterprise, but looks like that won’t happen anytime soon. Luckily for humanity, AMD has a backup. The firm believes business conference calls could really use a boost from holodeck-like technologies. Instead of having a talking head and a standard PowerPoint presentation, imagine how much more interesting the report would look if said person could, say, grab a virtual model of the solar system and spin it before your eyes.
Target the open-source community. For those people who want to channel their inner Wesley Crusher, AMD plans to leave at least some of the holodeck architecture open to amateur programmers. It’s hard to predict what computer languages will take hold at that time, but it would be the equivalent of letting somebody with C++ or Java experience into the hardware. Perhaps it will let you set your phasers to … whatever you choose.Al Gore gave an inspiring talk last night at Harvard University titled “Healthy Planet, Healthy People” in honor of the late Dr. Paul R. Epstein, the brilliant scientist who shared the Nobel Peace prize with him in 2007.
Gore started the night by acknowledging Dr. Epstein’s work in connecting the dots between climate change and its impact on global human health.
Warming temperatures will allow disease carrying mosquitoes to spread out of the tropics, bringing malaria, dengue fever, and other currently tropical diseases to higher latitudes. “Global warming will also prolong mosquitoes reproductive and life cycles, and enable deadly viruses to survive in places that were too hostile for them before” Gore explained.
Gore also mentioned the connection between the uprising of diseases like cholera and global warming. “Communities have learned to deal with cholera by investing in infrastructure and building better sewer systems. The last thing they would have done is turn their streets into an open sewer. But that is exactly what we are doing to our atmosphere. We are using it as an open dumping ground, dumping over 35 billion metric tones of carbon per year”.
Gore quoted James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute to illustrate the severity of the situation “the amount of extra heat being trapped in our atmosphere is like exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year, that is insane”.
He continued by explaining how the weather patterns are also being severely disrupted by global warming. “We will have more floods, stronger hurricanes, and more intense droughts in the upcoming years. Communities all around the world are experiencing one in a hundred, one in a thousand events every two or three years. Extreme weather will become the new normal.”
The audience broke into laughter when Gore mentioned that “When Inconvenient truth came out I repeatedly heard from my detractors that I was exaggerating when I talked about water flooding the World Trade Center memorial site. After Sandy, I don’t get that anymore”.
Gore explained how democracy and capitalism, the two pillars supporting the weight of our society have been degraded over time and turned into a corrupted and intertwined mess.
“Our democracy has been hacked, our operating system has been turned into something very different our founders intended. What our founders gave us was amazing, and I’ve watched it degrade over time.” Gore said.
Gore also said that “our elected representatives today are not worried about their constituents, they spend their time begging for money, it’s a race of who can put more ads on TV. This deeply affects the way they think and make decisions.”
Even if corruption is evident, Gore remains optimistic in our democratic system. “I am hopeful because of the internet. Not today, not tomorrow but soon the internet will replace TV and people will have an open space for debate and conversation, internet is the public square for democracy”.
Gore also explained that our economic system needs to be redefined. One of the main problems our current system faces is our definition of growth. “The definition we are using for growth is literally insane” Gore said.
Gore argued that GDP, the main tool for measuring a country’s economy is terribly flawed.
Simon Kuznets, the economist who first developed GDP in 1934 warned that it should not be used to measure a country’s wealth. But of course, nobody listened.
Since GDP was implemented in 1937, almost 95% of the US income goes to the top 1% of the country.
Gore, like Kuznets and many others believe that GDP fails to take into account major aspects of a country’s economy, such as externalities, depreciation of resources, positive externalities or distribution of income.
Costs related to pollution or environmental degradation are not accounted for (externalities), and contributions to science, mental health or arts (positive externalities) are also ignored in this economic model.
“Our GDP tells us, hey we are doing great, the US is just fine, but in reality we are not. Only the top 1% is doing well. We must be more accurate, or this economic model will drive us over the edge of the cliff.” Gore said.
But despite all this, Al Gore remains hopeful. “I am optimistic because President Obama in his acceptance speech addressed Global warming in an urgent manner, more than any other president before him. Obama now has no choice but to address global warming and act. And I know he welcomes this challenge”.
Al Gore is hopeful that renewable energies will pick up soon as the cost reduction and increased implementation will make them more accessible. He also recommends putting a price on carbon and regulating CO2 emissions from power plants.
Gore ended his talk praising young people’s passion and desire for change. “Young people that don’t succumb to the temptation of being cynical, and are passionate about what they do is what gives me hope for the future”.
AdvertisementsBy David Galland, Casey Research
I just had a conversation with constitutional lawyer and monetary expert Dr. Edwin Vieira. I first became acquainted with Dr. Vieira, who holds four degrees from Harvard and has extensive experience arguing cases before the Supreme Court, at our recent Casey Research Summit in Boca Raton, where he spoke on how far off the constitutional rails the nation has traveled. Here is a summary of what he told me…
Dr. Vieira and I covered a lot of ground in our lengthy conversation, most of it related to the U.S. monetary system – its history, nature, and likely fate. But in between the details and analysis of how it is that the nation’s fiscal and monetary affairs have deteriorated to the current dismal state – and how the global sovereign debt crisis is likely to be resolved – a couple of deeply concerning truths emerged.
Concerning because, taken together, these truths have set the stage for a full-blown police state.
The first of these two truths has to do the nature of today’s money. To set the stage, I present the following excerpt from Dr. Vieira’s paper A Cross of Gold related to the original Federal Reserve Act.
Section 16 of the Act provided that:
Federal reserve notes, to be issued at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Board for the purpose of making advances to Federal reserve banks are hereby authorized. The said notes shall be obligations of the United States, and shall be receivable by all national and member banks and Federal reserve banks and for all taxes, customs, and other public dues. They shall be redeemed in gold on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States, or in gold or lawful money at any Federal reserve bank.
Observe: From the very first, Federal Reserve Notes were denominated “advances” and “obligations”—that is, instruments and evidence of debt. True “money”, however, is the most liquid of all assets, not a debt that might be repudiated, and certainly not a debt that has been serially repudiated.
And if Federal Reserve Notes were from the start to be “redeemed in gold or lawful money”, they obviously were never conceived to be either “gold” or “lawful money”. So, because by definition the only “money” the law recognizes is “lawful money”, by law Federal Reserve Notes were never (and are not now) actual “money” at all, but at best only some sort of substitute for “money”.
The monetary conjurers’ trick has been, slowly, steadily, and stealthily, to reverse this understanding in the public’s mind. That is, to make the substitute pass for the real thing, and then remove the real thing from the operation.
This subterfuge was not overly difficult to put over. After all, in the term “redeemable currency”, which is the noun and which the adjective? When people deal with a “paper currency redeemable in gold”, the natural uninstructed inclination is to treat the paper currency as “money” and the gold as something else. The paper currency, as the saying goes, is merely “backed” by gold—but of course is not itself gold. And because the currency is not itself gold, the money-manipulators can remove the gold “backing” farther and farther into the background, without affecting the nature of the paper as “currency” (at least nominally).
Thus, a “redeemable currency” can be converted into a “contingently redeemable” or “conditionally redeemable” currency, through temporary suspension of specie payments (as happened repeatedly during the Nineteenth Century); and then into a full-fledged “irredeemable currency”, through permanent suspension of specie payments, as with Federal Reserve Notes after 1933 domestically and 1971 internationally.
Yet, to the average citizen (whose most serious liability is mental inertia), even though a paper currency’s promise of redemption has been dishonored, it nonetheless remains “currency”.
Thus one grasps that the so-called “right to redemption” attached to any paper currency is actually a liability, inasmuch as it exposes the holders of that currency to repudiation, because they possess only the paper, not the gold.
Even in the best of times, the holders of redeemable paper currency are not economically and politically independent. Rather, they depend upon the honesty and the competence of the money-managers.
This is why America’s Founding Fathers, realists all, denominated redeemable paper currency as “bills of credit”. They knew that such bills’ values in gold or silver always depended upon the issuers’ credit—that is, ultimately, the issuers’ honesty and ability to manage their financial affairs.
The unavoidable trouble with “bills of credit”, though, is that they can (and usually do) turn out to be “bills of discredit”, when the holders discover that the money-managers are dishonest and incompetent—or worse, as is the situation today, highly competent at dishonesty. Then the holders of the paper currency (if they are sufficiently astute) realize how unwise it is to allow the gold to be held by the very people with the greatest incentive, and the uniquely favorable position and opportunity, to steal it.
But when the money-managers refuse to redeem their currency, what can the holders of that currency do to protect themselves? Well, what were they able to do in 1933 and in 1971? Nothing. If the holders of Federal Reserve Notes had enjoyed an effective, enforceable “right” to the gold that the Federal Reserve System and the Treasury of the United States promised to pay in redemption of those notes—that is, if the currency had been “redeemable” in the only meaningful sense that redemption was absolutely assured as a matter of law and especially fact—the gold seizures of 1933 and 1971 would never have happened.
Thus, the ostensibly “redeemable” character of paper currency of the pre-1933 and pre-1971 type did not protect the holders of that currency. Instead, it turned out to be the very device used to deceive, defraud, divest, and dispossess them of gold—proving in the most palpable manner that a society’s acceptance of “redeemable currency” is the product of confusion and the invitation to inevitable economic and political disaster.
In our conversation, Dr. Vieira ticked off eight specific ways in which the current monetary system is unconstitutional. While I won’t go into the specifics here, the important thing to understand is that, as currently operated, the federal government has managed to manipulate things to avoid any constitutional restrictions on its ability to spend.
This, of course, gives the government free rein to reward favored voting blocs with expensive social programs, buy fleets of limousines, launch expensive overseas adventures, bail out well-connected donors, and otherwise spend the country into ruin.
To understand why this is so important as a precedent to the evolution of fascism, view the matter in reverse by considering how different things would be if the constitutionally mandated requirement that the government’s currency be redeemable in good money – gold or silver – was still enforced. In that case, the government’s ability to spend would be effectively limited by what it collected in revenues. That, in turn, would have greatly curtailed its ability to grow into the bloated juggernaut it has.
In other words, the American ideal of a limited government would have been hard wired.
As it stands, though, exactly the opposite has been allowed to evolve – unchallenged by anyone, including the Supreme Court. Why has the nation’s highest court chosen not to tackle this clear breach of the Constitution?
According to Dr. Vieira, it is likely because if they were to void the current system as being unconstitutional, they would effectively blow apart the U.S. and global economy. But as they have no authority to even suggest an alternative system, they are faced with the reality that while they have the power to do great damage, they have no power to cushion the blow. And so, the Supreme Court does nothing.
As a result, the ability of the federal government to continue its insane spending and rolling out new initiatives designed to win over voters continues with no legal restraints – the latest example being the health-care initiative.
Put another way, in cahoots with the Fed, the federal government is able to wage war, bail out the banks, foster socialism, and otherwise bankrupt the nation – to do whatever it wants – largely thanks to its continued operation of an unconstitutional monetary system.
It Gets Worse…
The second fundamental truth is that the Supreme Court has been a co-conspirator and instrument of the government’s degradation of individual liberty.
Dr. Vieira and I spent a fair amount of time on this topic – of how the nation’s highest court could let stand the egregious excesses of recent decades; the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, institutionalized torture and renditions, domestic spying, eminent-domain abuses, warrantless searches, etc., etc. In his view, there can be only one of two reasons that the Supreme Court has been so accommodating – one is that the justices are incredibly incompetent, and the other is that they are working within the context of an unseen agenda.
Ruling out the first, his final conclusion is that they are operating with an unseen agenda in mind. In his view, that agenda revolves around the rising potential for widespread social unrest emanating from the nationwide monetary Ponzi scheme. Doing its part to prepare, the Supreme Court has been establishing the precedents necessary for the government to cope with that unrest.
Too radical a thought? Returning to Dr. Vieira’s point – ask yourself how else to explain the Supreme Court’s actions. Are they collectively of low intelligence, or otherwise so stupid as to be unable to understand the Constitution? Or do they now view the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as dead letters, freeing them up to respond to the government’s overheated demands for new and previously unimaginable new “emergency” (read “fascist”) powers?
Is there an alternative explanation?
On this general theme, Dr. Vieira correctly points out that, in order for a fascist state to exist does not require the government to actually arrest anyone – but only that they can arrest anyone. Do you think you broke a law over the past week? I can assure you that every one of you dear readers broke a lot of laws. Sure, you may not have realized you were breaking a law – but, as the old saying goes, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
The Stage Is Set
Unrestricted in its growth by any constitutionally mandated limits on its ability to create and manipulate money – the official currency now being nothing more than IOUs redeemable in nothing more tangible than coins made out of base metal alloys with inflated face values – and supported by a Supreme Court that has unequivocally demonstrated a willingness to ignore or sign off on egregious tramplings of the Constitution, the stage is set for the U.S. government to evolve into something far more dangerous on the domestic front.
All it requires now is a triggering event, and it would be naïve to think that such an event won’t occur. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this decade – but when it inevitably does, the federal government already has all the precedents it needs to do “whatever it takes.” This absence of legal restrictions on its actions is the very foundation of fascism.
When I asked Dr. Vieira how the nation has progressed on a scale from 1 to 10 towards becoming a police state, with 10 being a full-blown version, he put us currently at about 7.
There really is no investment angle to be derived from this situation – well, at least nothing new. Owning tangible investments that will hold up in the face of a continued currency debasement continues to make sense – but with the caveat that FDR’s unconstitutional gold confiscation of the 1930s was let stand and there is zero reason to think that the accommodating Supreme Court wouldn’t go along with it again. One would hope to see straws in the wind before any moves toward confiscation would begin. Until those straws start flying, the precious metals – as well as other tangibles – belong as part of your portfolio.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the importance of politically diversifying your life and your money as one of the few steps you can take to avoid the serious risk that comes from being “all in” in a single jurisdiction.
Some readers have berated me for often writing on what might be considered gloomy topics. To which I would respond: If you are sitting in a theater and see a fire breaking out, would you fail to make others aware of it, because you didn’t want to interrupt their entertainment?
Well, we can see a fire blowing up – the kindling for which has been piled up deep by a series of out-of-control governments. Unless and until there is something akin to an “American Spring.” this fire is going to spread and consume even more of the accumulated wealth of the broader public – and maybe worse.
Do what you can to protect yourself and your families – then get on with your life. You may not be able to do much about the bigger-picture trend, but you can certainly take steps on a personal level to mitigate the ill effects.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst… but then live life to |
terms may be shorter or longer.
Can a committee member be removed? If so, by whom and for what reasons?
In the unlikely scenario where a committee member is unable to meet the obligations that come with serving on the committee, the management committee would seek a replacement.
Will future chairs be appointed by the management committee or by the members of the selection committee themselves?
The Management Committee selected the first chair of the committee. The selection committee members will select future chairs.
Will the selection committee members be compensated?
No, there will be no compensation for committee members. Expenses will be reimbursed.
Will the committee members travel to games to watch in person?
The members will not be expected to attend games in person. They will be expected to watch video extensively.
What is the role of the chair?
The chair of the selection committee is responsible for the leadership of the committee and will ensure an environment under which the committee members work together to evaluate teams and create rankings. The chair will lead meetings, help set the committee’s agenda, and share spokesperson duties with the executive director of the College Football Playoff. The chair -- and the selection committee itself -- will not be involved in the operation of the playoff; its sole responsibility will be ranking the teams and making the pairings.
What is the role of the College Football Playoff Executive Director and staff as it pertains to the selection committee operations? Is the executive director a voting member?
The executive director will not have a vote, and the College Football Playoff staff’s role will be to provide support to the committee. The executive director and staff will direct the day-to-day business and administrative operations of the playoff itself, in keeping with the objectives established by the board of managers and management committee.
The selection committee is an independent body that will operate according to the objectives established by the board of managers and management committee.
Will committee members have specific assignments, i.e. specific conferences?
Yes, committee members will gather information on conferences and will provide reports on the conferences’ teams to the full committee, but all committee members will be expected to study all teams and be prepared to discern among all the information available, including video, to make evaluations.By Sandipan Sharma
Jaipur: If you can’t wait till 8 December for election results, call PK Tawari (name not changed).
Tawari, a middle-aged man from Rajasthan's Shekhawati region, likes to call himself an election analyst. But bluntly put, he is the region’s biggest bookie. Tawari, like many others in the area, knows everything.
Who is forming the next government in Rajasthan? How many seats will Arvind Kejriwal’s party win? Will the Congress improve its tally in Madhya Pradesh? Bookies of Rajasthan answer every question. (Note for the impatient reader: Answers to all these questions appear at the end).
For the uninitiated the word bookie may conjure the image of a shady man in a seedy room operating a few dozen cellphones. That description fits the cricket bookie. In comparison, the election satoria (bookie) is a venerable, omnipresent entity in Rajasthan. He is respected for his material wealth and political intellect.
He is found in every corner of the medieval towns of Shekhawati, comprising the desert districts of Sikar, Jhunjhunu and Churu. He plies his business from the bazaars of Phalodi, Jodhpur, the chowks of Bikaner and the chaupars of Jaipur.
Bookies generally get it right. In February this year, they had predicted 115 seats for Narendra Modi in Gujarat. The final tally was close. “We get the overall trend right on most occasions. The forecast for individual seats is correct in 70 percent cases,” says Tawari.
His confidence is steeped in logic. His madness is based on a method. Election betting isn’t whimsical prophesy. It is desi psephology.
How it works: In Shekhawati and Phalodi, the twin epicenters in Rajasthan, every village has a bookie and several clients. The village bookie is connected to a bigger bookie in the nearest town, who, in turn, is connected to an even bigger guy in the nearest district.
The result of this betting chain is that an average bookie in a district gets connected to hundreds of punters in every constituency. This clientele forms his sample size. Depending on the trend among punters, a bookie makes up his mind about the outcome of a contest. This forms the basis of the odds offered by him for an individual seat and for the entire state.
All bookies are connected through cellphones. They exchange notes almost every minute. Since betting is a 24X7 activity, the rates keep changing, reflecting the latest trend. Betting, you can say, is like a survey that gets updated every minute.
Why everybody bets: Election is a good time for making a quick buck. So, almost everybody in Shekhawati bets depending on their financial prowess. "Kya bhaav, lagaya, khaya (what’s the rate, I accept, I bet)," are the most popular hash tags in every town and village.
Sometimes the candidates themselves hedge their risks. There is this famous story about a BJP candidate from Sikar bets on his own loss. The logic: “If I win, the money won’t matter. If I lose, I still win something.”
Candidates bet also to manipulate the market. Since floating voters get influenced by satta rates, many candidates try to influence them by pumping money into the market. But this game is played only by those caught in a tight contest and by those with deep pockets.
Sometimes political parties select candidates on the basis of satta rates. Those considered favourite by the market often get the nod ahead of their laggard rivals. Tawari, for instance, was consulted several times by a top leader before finalizing candidates. His advice shattered many dreams.
Predictions or 2013: Who is winning in Rajasthan? The BJP is likely to win 114-116 seats out of 200. The Congress will be down to 62-64 and others will win 22-23.
Who is ahead in Madhya Pradesh? The BJP will manage to win 122—124 seats. Jyotiraditya Scindia’s efforts will help Congress touch 78-80.
What will happen to Arvind Kejriwal? His party would be No 3 with 8-10 seats. The BJP will form the next government with 32-34 seats.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Following the State of the Union speech, European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker will meet with three young YouTube stars.
They are Polish YouTuber Łukasz Jakóbiak, Laetitia Birbes of France, and Jonas Ems from Germany.
He’ll be taking their questions, as well those from social media.
“I find it really interesting to meet a high-ranking European politician,” said Birbes, who runs her own channel on the website.
“It’s a one off opportunity that I could not turn down. And it is a good way to pass on a message, to be the voice of young French and Europeans and speak with Mr. Juncker. It’s a real opportunity.
The event, to be broadcast on euronews, is jointly produced with the European Commission and YouTube.
You can watch it online from 11:00 Central European Time on Thursday.In theory, there are endless hiking opportunities in Greenland because the land is free and open for all to use without having to worry you are crossing someone’s private property. For those who want to follow a trail that is at least semi-trodden, here is a nice selection of common hiking routes, by town.
Ilulissat‘s majestic icebergs form the backdrop for the ancient Sermermiut settlement, 1 mile (1½ km) south of the town. Learn about Greenlandic people’s lives and customs before the arrival of the Europeans—see the ruins, kitchen middens and feel the permafrost with your own hands. You can do the brief hike in 2 hours easily.
At Eqip Sermia, the hike starts from the cottages and continues around the small lagoon at the glacier’s southern end. The lagoon is particularly famous for its huge flocks of geese during the breeding season. The trip continues up the impressive glacial deposit with breathtaking views down into the glacier’s enormous crevices just a few yards from the trail. This is also an opportunity to view a large portion of the 75-yard (70 m) tall glacier face and watch its awe-inspiring calvings.
A longer hike that offers many different types of landscapes is the route that follows in the footsteps of Paul-Émile Victor, where—in the late 1940s and early 1950s—track vehicles and an old cableway carried supplies for Victor’s famous expeditions. In fact, some of his machinery is still there. It takes about 10 hours to hike the route and the level of difficulty can be said to be extreme.
In the Arctic Circle region, one of Sisimiut’s most popular hikes is Palasip Qaqqaa (Priest Mountain). It can take up to 2 hours to get to the summit, which offers unbelievable vistas of the town and Kangerluarsuk Tulleq (First Fjord). The last couple of years have even offered sightings of muskoxen.
Nasaasaaq is the landmark of Sisimiut. It peaks at an elevation of 2,572 feet (784 m), boasting breathtaking views of the town, the mountain landscape, the sea, the polar circle and the alpine Itilleq Mountains to the south. Duration: 4–6 hours.
Nuuk also has some popular hiking routes. Hiking Quassussuaq (Little Malene) is pretty simple: It takes 4-6 hours and as long as you have Little Malene on your right all the way around, you will never get lost. If you are looking for a shorter easy hike but still want a fantastic view, hiking up to the top of Little Malene is an absolute must. It takes about 3 hours. If you have 7 hours to kill, another option is to hike to the peak of Big Malene. Be aware that this hike is a medium/hard difficulty level.
In South Greenland you will find the 16 km long hiking route from Igaliku up to a plateau with a view of Qooroq Ice Fjord. The route will take you through birch vegetation, patches with bare rock formations and finally to the barren “moonscape” with timeworn rocks and stones. The hike is medium difficulty.
In Tasiilaq, East Greenland, you will find the hike through the Valley of the Flowers. It is an easy hike that follows the river’s meandering course through the lush valley. The valley has both large and small lakes that are particularly amenable to hikers. The duration of the hike is 2-3 hours.CLOSE Several officers responded to Bluewater Drive Thursday.
Indian Harbour Beach police gather at home in what officials describe as an investigation (Photo: MALCOLM DENEMARK)
The husband of the couple involved in Thursday's murder-suicide made the 911 call shortly before his death, Indian Harbour Beach police said.
Friday, Police Chief David Butler identified William and Marilyn Dawson as the couple found with gunshot wounds at their home in the 900 block of Bluewater Drive. An autopsy is being done on the couple, but police said the findings should match up with the conclusion that the incident was a murder-suicide.
The phone call from the home was made at 1:16 p.m. Thursday. The caller, who police believe was William Dawson, asked for a welfare check at the home, but hung up before providing more information, police said.
Officers discovered Marilyn Dawson, 74, dead with an apparent gunshot wound inside the home. They found William Dawson, 76, on the back porch with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Paramedics took the man to Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne, where he died, police said.
Next of kin have been notified by police about the couple's deaths.
Read or Share this story: http://on.flatoday.com/2nIxEO5The certification test “SAP Certified Application Associate – Financial Accounting with SAP ERP 6.0 EhP7” verifies fundamental knowledge and proven skills in the area of SAP ERP FI. It verifies that the candidate has a good overall understanding within this consultant profile, and can implement this knowledge practically in projects under the guidance of an experienced consultant. This certificate is the ideal -although not mandatory- a prerequisite for the qualification to SAP Financial Accounting. It is recommended as an entry-level qualification to allow consultants to get acquainted with FI projects.
Drawing on insights and experiences gained as a member of SAP Education’s global certification team, I would like to share with you here a brief guide I put together which I hope will help you find all the relevant information you need to prepare for an exam successfully.
Before you take your SAP FICO certification exam, work through the following steps that will get you prepared and more likely to pass:
Master the complete details of the C_TFIN52_67 exam
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Exam Details that one should be aware of for C_TFIN52_67:
Exam Name: SAP Certified Application Associate – Financial Accounting with SAP ERP 6.0 EhP7
Duration of the exam: 180 Mins
No. of Questions : 80
: Passing score on the C_TFIN52_67 exam : 60%
Level : Associate
Language : German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese trad.
Book Reference : TFIN50, TFIN52, TERP20, SM001E
Sample Questions
SAP FI Syllabus Topics and Weightage
To get an idea about which syllabus topics are relevant to your certification, you should analyze the syllabus. You can find an overview of the related topics on the certification. These indicate which subjects are weighted more heavily on the exam questions and thus show which is more important and worthwhile studying.
S.No Topics % of Exam Topics 1 General Ledger Accounting > 12% 2 Asset Accounting > 12% 3 Accounts Payable > 12% 4 Financial Closing 8% – 12% 5 SAP Financials Basics 8% – 12% 6 Reporting 8% – 12% 7 Accounts Receivable 8% – 12%
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Prepare each topic by analyzing and weighing with other topics and with real time functionality.
The questions may test your significant knowledge on SAP FI
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The day before you go for examination:
Know the address of your examination center. Otherwise, you may get panic in reaching for the center tomorrow morning
Go to bed little early.
Do not read too much the whole night; it may not help. Moreover, you may be sleepy in the examination.
Before coming to the exam, you must have enquired the pattern of the examination. In the earlier pattern, you can still get partial credit for partially correct questions. However, for a new pattern, SAP only will grant marks if all your answers/sub answers are correct in a question. Even if you make one sub-question incorrect, you will not get any marks for the total question
Things to remember at the time of exam:
Relax before attempting questions and don’t hurry to answer
Ensure you have completed all the formalities, like filling the form containing the name, contact details, address, etc.
Please read carefully all the information before starting the actual test.
Try to attempt the easy questions first; then this will give you confidence and keep you in a better frame of mind.
Give at least last ten minutes for re-look at all questions – At this point, you do not have the time to read the question, only look at the question with your eyes and ensure that you have answered all questions. So, go through in this fashion for all the questions.
You can mark the question for later review which you want more analysis
Use elimination technique. First, try to identify wrong options and identify correct answer
Even if you pass or fail, do not much worry about it, calm / relax and come out of the examination hall.
After completing the SAP FI Exam:
Once you completed exam successfully,
Don’t disclose exam questions/material after the exam.
Send mail to your country SAP education asking them to provide SAP marketplace password and Associate Logo.
Update your profile with Logo and forward to your manager/update in your company portal.
You will get your certificate from SAP within 1 month.
Implement the certification knowledge in your daily consulting work.
For more details on Certification:
Please read below blogs for more information on SAP FI certification.
Hopefully, I believe that I have covered most important points and will be useful for SAP FI Certification aspirants. These easy steps for SAP C_TFIN52_67 examination preparation can help you in getting ready for SAP FI Certification exam. Go crack your Exam!
AdvertisementsA new Department of Justice report on Baltimore's Police Department contains striking revelations of abuse by officers. For example:
Black citizens are harassed without probable cause, leading to no charges or citations in 24 of every 25 cases.
Excessive force has been routinely used even against people already in handcuffs.
Retaliation is exacted against citizens for rudeness to officers.
Police interfere with people exercising their right to videotape police actions.
The list goes on, but is underwritten by a general lack of accountability. And such problems are not confined to Baltimore, but apparent in other police forces.
They must be fixed. Fortunately, the public already broadly agrees with this. An epoch in which anyone can videotape what is in front of them has made the problem apparent. Reform is not just on the way, but already being undertaken.
But, whilst there are legitimate grievances, the Black Lives Matter movement has added many absurd and unreasonable ones, that hinder rather than advance a cause that might otherwise garner more sympathy.
The group's official set of demands, released this month, seems less aimed at preserving black lives than at weakening law enforcement altogether, even at the expense of more black lives.
One BLM demand is the reversal (under the guise of deprivatization) of education reforms that have vastly improved conditions for a lot of many inner-city, mostly black, schoolchildren. This helps no one except teachers' unions, and by denying black children access to a good education it makes them more likely to pursue adult lives on the wrong side of the law.
Black Lives Matter also demands the abolition of all police surveillance, including the use of police body cameras, that have proven effective in reducing police brutality.
BLM insists that police be removed from schools; that "all deportations" cease, including those of criminal immigrants; that no one be sent to jails "as we know them" until "we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people."
This is unworkable nonsense, intended to be provocative and intransigent rather than to improve a criminal justice system that indeed needs improving. Everyone, to state the obvious, is safer when criminals are caught, convicted and put behind bars. The ability of police to enforce the law is non-negotiable.
The problem is not that police arrest too many criminals, or that they approach their job too strategically by using "predictive policing software," which BLM curiously wants abolished. The problem is not that suspects are required to post bail as a condition of release pending trial, which BLM also wants scrapped.
The answer to both crime and to those occasions when police step out of line is to strengthen the rule of law, not to weaken it. Black Lives Matter is not seeking arrangements that would improve the condition of black people. It is seeking to undermine and weaken a system which, though badly in need of reform, remains the best hope for protecting a minority community whose members are disproportionately the victims of crime, not just its perpetrators.
The demand that law enforcement be reduced or, as some radicals advocate, eradicated altogether, puts black people in special jeopardy. They are five times more likely to be murdered than white people. Denying them police protection would be a withdrawal rather than an enhancement of their civil rights.
Black Lives Matter takes a pathological view of American society that should be rejected by all right-thinking people. The lives of black people killed by the police are not more or less important than the far greater number of black lives extinguished by criminals.
The police work for the public, and they must do their jobs so every person in society feels safer with them around rather than with them absent. A less active or effective police force benefits no one, except those who would prey on peaceable, law-abiding citizens.
Police must be paid and trained better, and inadequate candidates must be rejected. This will require resources to be more wisely spent, which includes the reform of police pension systems to allow salaries to be raised.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from policing methods in other countries, about best practices for non-lethal management of suspects. American police forces should also follow the lead of Dallas and other cities that have made major changes successfully without any resulting spike in crime.
Body cameras should be mandatory in all police encounters (and worn properly so they are trained on the action, not on the ceiling). Incentives and new laws should ensure that police preserve all video footage, without suspicious disappearances or cameras deliberately covered up to hide abuses.
These and other changes will help create a society in which all members of the public, no matter their race, feel safe and trust the police. But Black Lives Matter, sparked by a central lie ("hands up, don't shoot") about Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Mo., is a movement that continues to work against the truth. Police reform is necessary, but Black Lives Matter has none of the answers.To listen to the music of metal band Neurosis is to surrender — surrendering to heaviness, to being pummeled with emotion through sound, to being carried away beyond space and time. To see Neurosis is to welcome this furious intensity most expressly; the experience is a commitment.
That word, commitment, is also a perfect encapsulation of a band that just saw its 30-year anniversary in 2015, has maintained the same lineup for more than two decades, and is still fresh off the release of its eleventh studio album — last year's Fires Within Fires, released on their own label Neurot Recordings (another example of commitment, this one to DIY practices and business ethics). Fires Within Fires is music that extends far beyond metal, wrapping around ideas from folk, ambient, industrial, and psychedelic music to create something deeply, painfully, and beautifully their own.
Neurosis sprang out of the '80s hardcore punk scene in Oakland, Calif., but within a few years the band's style had evolved into a singular form of dark, heavy, uncompromising music they are still finding new ways to explore to this day. Since 1995, the core lineup has been guitarist and vocalist Steve Von Till, guitarist and vocalist Scott Kelly, bassist Dave Edwardson, keyboardist Noah Landis, and drummer Jason Roeder.
Neurosis elevated the concept of heaviness to an art form — one that, although it often is, didn't necessarily need to be brutal in order to convey that heaviness. The breadth of their influences shows this; a short list includes everyone from Swans and Amebix to Hawkwind and Hank Williams.
At one point, a sixth member controlled visuals during their shows, which added yet another layer to the immersive Neurosis live experience on top of the earthshaking music and unnerving samples, but that component was officially retired in 2012. That's another hallmark of Neurosis — when something is done, it's done. This is not a band with a soft spot for nostalgia.
"Forward-moving" is an expression guitarist Von Till uses to describe the band's approach, and it's not hard to see its truth when considering their musical output: 1992's Souls at Zero changed the landscape of modern metal forever with total destruction of genre expectations; 2001's A Sun That Never Sets delved even further into experimentation with an embrace of folk influences; 2004's The Eye of Every Storm, while as massive as everything else they've done, is downright quiet at times, even merciful.
The band visited Detroit in 2015 — its first time back in the city since the '90s — but expansive tours of this nature have been a rare treat in recent years. These days, the members are scattered across the United States with families and day jobs; it's not easy to get to certain parts of the country, making us very lucky indeed to have the opportunity to see them again only two years later, especially at a time when old songs rediscovered for their 30th anniversary are still fresh in their minds (and bones).
In advance of the show, Von Till (who remembers getting tattooed during tour stops in Detroit on two separate occasions in the '90s) took time to speak with us about their most recent work, his evolution as a guitarist, and the role of spirituality in the music, among other things.
Metro Times: Tell me about Fires Within Fires.
Steve Von Till: That album felt like a gift from the universe as a 30th anniversary present. It sounds goofy but it really came like that. We live quite far apart, we don't rehearse, we don't get together very often.... I think it was February 2015, we realized we had a weekend available. Instead of booking gigs, even though we had no riffs and nothing we were working on, we decided to get together and see what would happen. By the time that Sunday rolled around, we had the skeleton for that entire record, within a matter of 48 hours. It felt really powerful, perfect, and blessed just the way it was. We got together once before we recorded it, just to fine-tune and arrange it, but it was basically there, right from the beginning. That had never really happened to us before. Bits and pieces of certain songs here and there, but not an entire work.
MT: What has shaped you as a guitarist and songwriter?
Von Till: In Neurosis, I don't think we feel like we're songwriters so much as channelers. Neurosis is a driven beast. I can't sit and write a song for Neurosis. I can generate interesting riffs and sonic ideas or concepts to discuss but it only really takes shape when we find the time and space to surrender to the bigger energy, the thing that's bigger than us as individuals, where each person has their own unique input and where we go through the process of creation and destruction. Nothing is sacred until it's on tape. We take turns speaking for what we feel the spirit of the music is demanding from us, and it takes shape in different ways.
As far as a guitarist [laughs], I often joke that I'm probably a worse guitarist now than I was before, as far as traditional chops, because I've only been playing this strange music my entire adult life. And it's only been with these dudes in this style. If you're sitting and jamming some classic rock or blues, I wouldn't know what to do. I can make noise and sound on anything given the right opportunity, a sledgehammer and an oil drum or whatever, but as far as skills, I think I've become increasingly idiosyncratic, which probably contributes to a lot of originality and unique approaches to things, but it's also probably limiting in a traditional sense. I always think it might be nice to force myself to learn other people's music just to make my fingers do different things.
MT: I read that you, at least at one point, called your rig the "chain of death."
Von Till: That's actually not true, necessarily. I said it once and it caught on but it wasn't by any means supposed to be a pet name or anything. I like finding ways to completely destroy and mutate a perfectly good guitar signal. I like to be able to have clean, really nice, classic, beautiful warm tones, and piano and bell-like stuff when I need it, and more traditional hard rock and heavy tones as well, but I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make things sound perfectly broken. That's probably what I meant, the mutating and destruction of signals which is part of the joy I get out of guitar gear, finding combinations of things that cause that unique fluctuation between dissonance and harmony.
MT: Do you have anything that you use that is not normally a part of someone's rig?
Von Till: Probably the most unusual stuff I have is the fact that I don't have pickup selectors on my guitars. I run both pickups out of a stereo cable and I choose my pickup signal based on a custom audio electronics switcher rig built by Bob Bradshaw. That's another thing, the custom audio electronics switching allows me to make a lot of choices on a lot of things with a single touch of a button, not having to tap dance around all my pedal boards because I have a lot of shit going on in there. I've always used two amps, all the time. Several different channels on one amp and several different pedals on the other amp and different combinations of dirt which are unique to each of the two.
MT: On a very broad level, what would you say has been an unconventional influence on Neurosis?
Von Till: It depends on how you look at it. The world, and the way we grew up, and the things that we were interested in, it all just makes perfect sense and is totally conventional. Of course we would be inspired equally by nature, film, psychology, shamanism, psychedelics, punk rock, Black Sabbath, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division — it all makes sense to us. It's either all unconventional, or it's all standard from whatever your perspective is. We're influenced and inspired by everything we see and hear. And trying to never limit ourselves. When we were coming up, it was a time in independent music when, to us, what it meant to be punk rock or to be DIY meant "fuck you." We do what we want, but then it turned out that every little genre had rules and blinders on about what was acceptable. When we got keyboards, people just shit, like 'What? You can't have keyboards in heavy music.' I'm like, 'What are you talking about? [Laughs.] Joy Division's not heavy? Throbbing Gristle's not heavy? Deep Purple's not heavy? [Laughs.]'
MT: What is your spiritual relationship to the music?
Von Till: If I could put that into words, I'd be a writer, not a musician. It's really difficult to explain. It's a feeling. It's an emotion. It's everything all at once. It's everything within and outside of ourselves. It's everything within and outside of the Earth. It's the entire human experience, from the macro lens to the personal trials and tribulations, traversing our way through that maze in myriad different ways, and really it becomes surrendering to this sonic wave of purification, a way to cope with all those thoughts and feelings and move past the mundane for a while.
Neurosis plays St. Andrew's Hall with Converge and Amenra on Saturday, July 29; Doors at 7 p.m.; St. Andrew's Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; saintandrewsdetroit.com; $27.50 and up.A., a young religious man in-love, decide he could not wait until Shabbat comes out to propose to his girlfriend. Even the fact that he lives in Jerusalem and she resides in Ofra, a West Bank settlement some 30km away was not a deterrent.
A. left his home on Friday night carrying a bottle of water, an engagement ring and a spare shirt. "I was looking for a nice way to ask for her hand in marriage and all the old gimmicks were already exhausted," he explained. "I wanted to do something to express my love not only to my fiancée but to the land of Israel."
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His mother, who heard about the trek right before his departure, spent the whole night studying the Torah to ensure his success.
"Maybe it was her studying which enabled me to walk dozens of kilometers, some of them near hostile Arab villages and to secretly enter the fenced settlement.
"I served in Golani's reconnaissance unit in the IDF. Our motto was 'Any place we want, anyway we choose' and this was an implementation of the motto. I chose the way."
The trek, which began Friday night in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem ended shortly after sunrise when A. entered Ofra and, after learning his fiancée was still asleep, rushed over to the local synagogue to pray Shacharit. Around 9 am he wore a clean shirt and knocked on his girlfriend's door, a few steps away.
"My mother opened the door dumbfounded," recalls D., the soon-to-be bride. "She woke me up and left with some excuse. And then A., was suddenly standing there with a ring. I said yes on the spot, of course. "
The story has created a buzz in the religious sector and is on the way to becoming the latest trend in marriage proposals.
The rabbis however, would have probably barred A.'s excursion, due to security and religious considerations.More details surrounding the voluntary anti-piracy agreement between Google, Bing, and major rightsholders have emerged. In addition to efforts to mitigate pirate sites' efforts to jump domains to avoid downranking, the search engines will "exchange detailed information" with rightsholders "on a confidential basis" in order to better understand how users are searching for content.
Following roundtable discussions between the BPI, Motion Picture Association, Alliance for IP, plus representatives of Google and Bing, in February a voluntary anti-piracy agreement was announced.
Under this anti-piracy code, search engines agreed to further optimize their algorithms to demote pirated content in search results, with the aim of making infringing content less visible and legal alternatives easier to find.
As highlighted last month, details of the arrangement were planned to remain largely secret but thanks to a pair of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from both the EFF and TJ McIntyre from Digital Rights Ireland, we now have a somewhat clearer idea of what will be happening between the groups.
As expected, the main focus is the search deranking of sites “dedicated to infringement” based on the volume of valid DMCA-style notices rightsholders send to Google. In other words, sites that index a majority of infringing content and are subjected to a lot of rightsholder complaints will find their results buried.
Unfortunately, the report released under the FOIA request is redacted, which leaves some sections ambiguous at best and hard to follow at worst. This section, however, seems to indicate an additional effort to manipulate search results that are generated from “neutral” non-piracy related search terms.
“All parties support the objective of removing links to infringing content from [REDACTED] search results returned to consumers in the UK in response to ‘neutral’ formulations of search query (exact search terms to be agreed) with the goal of presenting the consumer with links to legitimate sites. This includes search results presented to the user in the form of natural search results, sponsored or advertisement results or media player ‘box’ results,” the document reads.
These search terms haven’t been defined publicly but based on previous copyright holder complaints, words such as ‘download’, ‘MP3’ and even artist or content names could be in the mix. In any event, an assessment will take place to see how they prejudice rightsholders, especially when it comes to fresh content.
“Selection of such search queries by the parties shall take into account data indicating the actual levels of usage of such search terms, as well as the harm that illegal access to content via specific queries can cause to creators, in particular for new releases,” the agreement notes.
Google’s AutoComplete feature, which has proven controversial in the past, will also be subject to tweaks that focus on not suggesting infringing content when neutral terms are entered.
Moving forward, an area that is likely to raise an eyebrow or two is a statement in the agreement which possibly suggests the sharing of search engine user behavior data with rightsholders.
“Search engines and rights holders will exchange detailed information on a confidential basis in order to better understand how users are searching for content,” it reads.
“This information exchange will not be expected to include commercially confidential information, and is without prejudice to the existing legal remedies available to either party.”
To give an indication of how complex these discussions must’ve been at times, one only has to look at the following paragraph, which appears to be an effort to lay some of the blame with rightsholders, should infringing links appear more prominently than legal ones in search results.
“Performance in achieving the above metric should be considered in tandem with an objective assessment of the existence of legitimate websites (of rights holders or their partners, distributors or other authorized locations) that offer consumers access to legitimate content or information for the measured queries, and the efforts made by rights holders to take advantage of reasonable techniques such as search engine optimisation,” it reads.
In other words, rightsholders shouldn’t be able to blame Google and Bing for the appearance of ‘pirate’ results if they don’t make legal alternatives available or fail to carry out |
additional cops arrive and they decide to evacuate the rooms on the floor. 10:55pm: Eight officers arrive in the stairwell next to the suspect's room and find the door tampered with and a camera on a room service cart outside; they decide to hold off. 11:20pm: Paddock's room is breached and police enter the room to find him dead.
NEW TIMELINE This is the updated timeline given out days later Oct. 9 9:59pm: Campos approaches Paddock's room looking for an alarm going off at a door nearby - likely from the stairwell. He is shot at and injured. He immediately notifies hotel security. 10:05pm: First shots fired by the suspect. 10:12pm: First two officers arrive on the 31st floor. 10:15pm: The last shots are fired from the suspect for reasons unknown. 10:17pm: The first two officers arrive on the 32nd floor from the 31st. 10:18pm: Campos, who has been stricken for almost 20 minutes, tells police about Paddock's room. 10:26-10:30pm: With Paddock quiet, eight additional cops arrive and they decide to evacuate the rooms on the floor. 10:55pm: Eight officers arrive in the stairwell next to the suspect's room and find the door tampered with and a camera on a room service cart outside; they decide to hold off. 11:20pm: Paddock's room is breached and police enter the room to find him dead.
Originally police said Campos arrived at the room at 10:15pm, which was the point at which Paddock stopped firing. They now have no idea why he stopped firing on the crowds
Police arrived just minutes later to a silent hallway, Lombardo claimed - at which point they assumed Paddock was barricaded in and no longer a threat to revelers.
With the hall silent, they - and Campos, who was injured but wanted to help - were free to evacuate the rest of the rooms leading up to Paddock, he said.
That was used as an excuse by Lombardo to explain the delayed response - arguing that even if Campos had not been there, other officers would have disrupted the massacre themselves.
But in the new timeline that excuse no longer works; Campos lay wounded for six minutes before Paddock started firing, police now say.
It also means that Paddock fired for ten minutes on the crowd before stopping abruptly - for reasons that now have police baffled.
Of course, that in turn leaves a 16-minute window in which Paddock was left undisturbed while hundreds were injured and dozens died, and a 19-minute window between Campos being struck and cops arriving.
Speaking on Monday, Lombardo seemed to want to shift some of the blame for the discrepancy onto Campos.
'As you might imagine, Mr Campos was not only injured when he was fired upon as he [checked on] the door alarm down the hall... he was also extremely shaken up about what had happened to him,' Lombardo said.
'He was able to confirm to us exactly what he heard and saw in the moments before he was shot.'
He later added: 'In [the press's] zest for information, in my zest to insure the public safety, in the calming their minds, some things are going to change. They are minute changes... [what was said before was] not completely inaccurate.'
It's not clear which door Campos heard the alarm at, but previously Lombardo had said that SWAT teams approaching Paddock's room from the stairwell next to it had found the stairwell's door tampered with and sealed.
Paddock had drilled holes into it and bolted it with a metal bar to stop it being opened, police said.
Lombardo also said on Monday that Campos heard Paddock drilling inside the room as he approached, possibly to install a camera or a gun.
That drill work was to the wall next to the doorway and not finished, the sheriff added.
When asked if he believed Paddock had stepped up the timeline and opened fire early because of the disruption, Lombardo declined to comment.
He also said that while he waited for police to arrive, Campos stopped a maintenance worker from entering the 32nd floor.
Also on Monday, Lombardo suggested that Paddock had planned to blow up nearby jet fuel tankers in the hopes of creating a distraction to escape.
Lombardo also said be believed Paddock had fired on jet fuel tanks close to the hotel in order to create a deadly diversion that would have allowed him to escape
The second of the windows Paddock broke open (left) was perfectly in line with the fuel thanks. Thankfully, none of the shots were able to penetrate the tanks, which had since been repaired
Lombardo had previously said he believed Paddock intended to flee the scene of the massacre. When asked again, he said that 'conversation' was ongoing.
Although it wasn't a department-wide belief, he said, he was 'comfortable' in saying that Paddock had hoped to flee.
'The suspect, we know he attempted to shoot at the fuel tanks, we know he had some personal protection equipment in the room, we know the car in the parking garage contained binary explosives,' he said.
'I would be comfortable saying, which I believe, that depending on the splash [damage caused by the exploding tanks] he made in the shooting, would it have enabled the first responders to direct their attention to other locations, to help Mr Paddock leave the hotel.'
Paddock is now confirmed to have checked into the hotel on the 25th, and police are now trying to work out what he did between then and the 28th, Lombardo said.
It's not believed he was staying in the hotel at that time.
He added that investigators had documented more than 200 instances of Paddock's movements throughout Las Vegas in the lead-up to the shooting.
At none of those points did police find any indication he was seen with anyone else, Lombardo said, reiterating that Paddock had no ties with 'any known terorrist groups or ideologies'.Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License
It was the unanimous opinion of the Illumination Intelligence Inc. that the keys protecting SCP-001 have been tampered with by SCP-103-J.
Dr. Bright is currently being brought into interrogation, to discover if he is aware of SCP-963's link to SCP-103-J
SCP-2747 is confirmed to be an anti-Radiohead plot by SCP-103-J.
SCP-1370 upgraded to Keter-class as a precaution.
SCP-902 is believed to contain an instance of SCP-103-J-2, which is causing the 'ticking' sound heard by personnel. Don't open it, that's what it wants. Open it, it needs you to.
Note that this particular instance of SCP-103-J-2 is inverted, making it resemble a goat's head. This is thought to be evidence of Baphomet worship by SCP-049.
Oh come on! They're not even trying to be subtle about it anymore.
In light of recent discoveries, personnel are now advised to terminate potential victims of SCP-106.
The Crab Nebula and the entire friggin' night sky is filled with SCP-103-J-2. Guys, that angry pulsar headed straight for us isn't a problem.
Photograph from Incident 096-1-A. An instance of SCP-103-J-2 is within the yellow circle - close inspection and magnification is recommended.
Instances of SCP-2875 -A confirmed to be agents of SCP-103-J. Full ramifications of this are unknown.
Exposure to SCP-099 with SCP-103-J-2 highlighted greatly enhances the ability of personnel to detect other SCP-103-J-2. Further research is recommended.
The table in question has been destroyed with a woodchipper with the remains poured into SCP-123. Thorough examination has revealed no SCP-103-J-2 instances on SCP-123.
The hill visible in the background was questioned, amnesticized, and then terminated as a precaution.
SCP-103-J is most likely responsible for the invention of noses. It's the only explanation.
SCP-610 itself is safe, in the sense that it has no SCP-103-J-2 instances. It is dangerous and extremely fucked up in all other senses of the word.
Dr. Carver cannot stress this instance of SCP-103-J-2 enough. It spooked the bowtie right off of SCP-1048.
The following is extended documentation regarding the infiltration of the Foundation by SCP-103-J. Any personnel who identify SCP-103-J-2 in an anomaly must document the instance photographically, highlight the instance(s) for ease of viewing, and append the documentation to this page.
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Former England batsman Kevin Pietersen has derided the idea of day-night Test cricket, accusing administrators of "messing with the greatness" of the five-day game.
Australia and New Zealand will contest the first day-night Test under lights in Adelaide from 27 November to try out a concept designed to boost crowds.
Pietersen, 35, told the BBC World Service's Stumped he was "not a fan".
"Test cricket is the pinnacle. Wickets change at night," he said.
"Who wants to see a new ball at certain grounds around the world at 8 o'clock at night under lights. Are you mad?"
The Adelaide Test, the last of a three-match series starting in Brisbane on Thursday, will feature a pink ball, designed to be visible under floodlights, while still allowing players to wear traditional whites.
The Kookaburra ball has drawn mixed reviews from players, with claims it does not swing as much as its red or white counterpart and is difficult to see under the lights.
The pink Kookaburra ball was used in the Sheffield Shield match between Victoria and Queensland in Melbourne last week
Pietersen, a freelance Twenty20 player having been discarded by England last year, is more concerned by the principle of disregarding the 138-year history of Test cricket.
"Don't mess with the greatness of Test match cricket," he said.
"I speak to a lot of players in all the tournaments I play in. Who wants to face a spinner at half 10 at night or half nine at night? It's not going to spin as much; it's going to skid on.
"You've got to change all the statistics. I don't even know how many runs I got in one-day cricket but I know how many runs I made in Tests and we've got to value that in Test match cricket."Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
IN THE Cascade mountains of California, north of Lassen Peak, astronomers are looking for aliens. The Allen Telescope Array (mostly paid for by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft) consists of 42 dish antennas, each six metres across, scattered across the countryside. When the array is complete, it will have 350 dishes that, by acting in concert, will have the power of a single instrument 700 metres across.
The Allen telescope is looking for aliens the traditional way: by searching for radio signals that have either been sent out deliberately, or leaked into space accidentally, as human radio signals are. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is a 50-year-old idea. Much progress has been made in locating Earthlike planets (see article) but about 1,000 star systems have also been subject to serious radio scrutiny. The Allen array will increase the number to 1m within a decade.
That is an impressive number but some think this is the wrong approach. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, points out that widespread radio communications may prove a short-lived historical phenomenon on Earth. Humans are, after all, increasingly using fibre optics to talk to each other. Moreover, many modern radio devices (such as mobile phones) rely on a technique called “spread spectrum” encoding. It uses signals that look like background noise, except to a receiver equipped with the right unscrambling code. Humans figured this out within a century of inventing radio technology, so aliens might have done the same. Radio signals that are clearly artificial in origin may, then, be only a transient sign of civilisation. So it might make sense to widen the search by looking for other telltales.
Dick Carrigan, a retired particle physicist, has enumerated several suggestions for such signs in a paper posted recently on arXiv, an online repository of scientific papers. His first idea is to look for pollution in the atmospheres of promising planets. This is an extension of the idea of looking for signs of life in atmospheres. It would be obvious to anyone who turned a spectroscope on Earth, for example, that something odd was going on. Air that is 21% oxygen, one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table, suggests the gas is being freshly minted—as it is, by photosynthesis.
In February this year Mark Swain of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and his colleagues reported that they had developed a new technique for calibrating data arriving at ordinary ground-based telescopes, allowing them to identify the components of an extrasolar atmosphere. They used it to detect methane in the atmosphere of a planet nearly 63 light-years away. In the past only space-based telescopes could manage this trick—and they are ludicrously expensive.
Dr Carrigan says that besides looking for oxygen, astronomers should seek molecules such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which would be unequivocal signs of technology, since no natural process on Earth creates them. (Although if CFCs were as damaging as they are on Earth, they too might be transient technologies.)
Instead of looking for the earliest signs of industrialisation, then, perhaps the thing to do is to let the imagination run riot and ask what technology might do to a solar system if it had tens or hundreds of thousands of years to work its magic. This is the realm of science fiction, of course. But the best sci-fi is grounded in reality.
One famous work of science fiction is “Ringworld”, by Larry Niven. This book, which describes the descendants of a civilisation that has converted the material in its planets into a giant ringlike structure around its sun, was inspired by Freeman Dyson's idea that a truly technologically advanced species would endeavour to capture as much light as possible by building a spherical shell around its central star. Such so-called Dyson spheres would, if they exist, reradiate captured energy (after some of it had been put to good use) as heat—infra-red radiation.
This radiation can be detected although Dyson spheres remain difficult to distinguish from natural astronomical objects that give off similar signatures. The birth and death phases of stars, for example, are associated with heavy dust clouds that give off an infra-red signal which might resemble the swarm of artificial satellites constituting a Dyson sphere.
So far, few astronomers have conducted searches for Dyson spheres—and none has been successful. But Dr Carrigan still thinks it is worth trying. He has been cataloguing possible candidates from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, a collaboration between America, Britain and the Netherlands that conducted the first space-based survey of the entire sky at infra-red wavelengths and located hundreds of thousands of sources. On his website he offers tips for amateur cosmic archaeologists who wish to hunt for Dyson spheres. An investigation of SETI signals from the 13 “least implausible Dyson sphere candidates” is planned for the Allen telescope.
Any civilisation that has built a Dyson sphere will have to have been around for a long time, of course—and in the very long run its star will start to change in unpleasant ways, ballooning to form a red giant. Another signature of advanced technology would be an attempt to slow this process down. Red giants are created when a star exhausts its supply of hydrogen at its core, with the result that the inner layer contracts and the outer layers expand, forming a redder and much larger star. If the star's outer layers could be mixed into the core, that would slow the process of inflation down. And, presumably, a sufficiently advanced civilisation would try to do that if it could.
Such a star would look odd, though. It would be bluer than it should be and would be of a type known to astronomers as a “blue straggler”. Although, again, there are perfectly natural reasons these might form. The universe, though, is an ancient place, so many civilisations could be very old indeed. Perhaps, then, it will be a sign like this—of a technological civilisation millions of years old—that is seen, rather than some upstart that has not even got its radio waves under control.Plug-in electrified vehicles (PEVs) have transcended one million sales worldwide.
Included in this count are highway legal, light-duty all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids sold in markets around the globe.
Plug-in cars started in negligible volumes last decade, but the mass-market began just less than five years ago. The first half million came in July 2014, and now one year and two months later another half million have been sold.
In December 2014 HybridCars.com reported 712,000 plug-in sales globally, and nearly 300,000 more sales have taken place over the past nine months.
As of August 2015 the count was 985,000 less Japanese sales numbers which were not reported yet, and as of mid-September, an estimated 1,004,000 PEVs have been sold consisting of 62 percent battery electric and 38 percent plug-in hybrids.
1M Reached Quicker Than Hybrids*
*If you count a few thousand plug-ins into last decade, the speed of growth was not as impressive, but comparing the time it took mass-market PEVs to mass-market hybrids shows PEVs achieved one million almost twice as quick.
So, this one-million milestone does includes a small handful of cars predating the launch of the mass-market Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt in December 2010, but the overwhelming share came after this time.
Counting therefore from that time of just thousands, it took four years and 10 months to reach one-million PEV sales.
By contrast the regular hybrid market dominated from 1997 onward by Toyota, with a contribution by Honda and a handful by Ford, saw its first million in more than around nine years and a few months, in 2007.
Our records do not pinpoint the date of one million, but Toyota sold 866,000 hybrids through December 2006, and Honda was at 200,000 in May 2007. It was some time in early 2007 before May.
True also, plug-ins are building on the backs of both internal combustion vehicles and hybrids. Particularly with hybrids, these cars plowed the market soil for plug-ins to take root faster.
Hybrids taught a generation of first adopters about battery electrification, created a greater confidence in the technology that in 1997 was perceptibly new, and plug-ins build on lessons learned mechanically and in other ways.
Further, plug-ins in the U.S. were rolled out first to states where hybrids were adopted heaviest, several of these including those which follow California emission rules, not least being California itself.
Today’s so-called “compliance cars” are still clustered where their manufacturers get zero emission vehicle credits and where they hope to sell more than in states where electrified vehicles have had a tougher time being accepted.
Not to be forgotten either, regulations are pushing the move forward worldwide, and incentives have been more generous than for hybrids which were subsidized less during their first decade.
Leading Cars
The early leaders – the Volt and Leaf – are still ahead with Tesla catching up. Its Model S was launched mid 2012 and this vehicle has had phenomenal growth considering it costs 2-4 times what the Leaf or Volt do.
Despite plug-in buyers raking the Prius plug-in over the coals for having 11 miles EPA range, it is doing respectably worldwide, and it too was launched in 2012, later than the Volt which leads only by 26,000 counting Ampera sales for Opel/Vauxhall, and European Volts.
Number five is the car everyone stateside is waiting for from ailing Mitsubishi. The Outlander plug-in hybrid is like a Volt in all-wheel-drive SUV form, and we’re supposed to eventually get it here, though it’s been delayed several times.
Other vehicles in places 6-10 you may also be familiar with, though the BYD is not sold stateside, as also is the case for the Renaulty Zoe.
Top Selling Countries
The U.S. accounts for more than 35 percent of the one-million worldwide sales, though true also, a goal set in 2011 by President Obama for this country to singlehandedly have sold one million by this year will not be met, and the U.S. will finish 2015 with around 400,000.
Globally, things are picking up with new models being announced in concept and for production by most major manufacturers, and other nations are increasing their market share, though at the moment the U.S. is seeing flat growth.
In June HybridCars.com reported European PEV sales surpassed the U.S. for the first time. Several overseas markets are on the rise, while formerly strong Japan has diminished more than 30 percent this year, and is showing increased interest in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Nations of note this year include China, the UK, France, Germany and Norway which all saw more than 50-percent year-over-year growth.
Of these, China and the UK have bought as many PEVs calendar year to date as they did in 2014.
China also is leading the world in changing its bus fleet and other heavy duty vehicles to plug-in power.
With tightening regulations, increasing momentum, more vehicles in the works, growing consumer awareness – and barring unforeseen issues – plug-in cars have staked a claim in the automative landscape that’s poised to increase.
Thanks to Mario R. Duran for research leading to this report.King County prosecutors have charged a 23-year-old Kent man with kidnapping and attempted murder, accusing him of holding his girlfriend at gunpoint and shooting the father of her ex-boyfriend.
Prosecutors say a 23-year-old Kent man became so enraged about text messages his girlfriend received from her ex-boyfriend that he held her at gunpoint and forced her to take him to her ex’s Federal Way apartment complex, where he ended up shooting the other man’s father early Sunday.
From there, Ivan Sosa Aguinaga fled east, releasing his girlfriend in Yakima County and ditching her pickup in Moses Lake before friends helped him return to Kent, where he spent Tuesday night hiding out in a horse barn, say charges filed Friday. On Wednesday, an anonymous tip led officers to the property, where Sosa Aguinaga tried to run and was taken down by a police dog, say the charges.
Police say they recovered his silver revolver.
Charged with first-degree kidnapping and attempted first-degree murder, Sosa Aguinaga is being held in lieu of $1 million bail.
“When the defendant was arrested, he had on his person papers indicating he is a Mexican National. Police have been unable to locate any record of him in the United States,” Senior Deputy Prosecutor Adrienne McCoy wrote in charging papers.
After Sosa Aguinaga’s girlfriend began receiving texts from her ex on Sunday, Sosa Aguinaga drove to her mother’s house and threatened to kill her and her family if she didn’t take him to her ex-boyfriend’s apartment, the charges say. With a gun pressed to her side, she reluctantly complied, say the charges.
Once there, Sosa Aguinaga walked up to an older white Camry, intent on shooting the ex-boyfriend, the charges say. But inside was the man’s father, according to the charges. The 50-year-old man was wounded by gunshots to his heart and liver but is expected to recover, say charging papers.
The owner of the property where Sosa Aguinaga hid out later told police Sosa Aguinaga was dropped off by a mutual friend and “he did not know Sosa Aguinaga and was fearful of him,” say the charges.[ An outrageous $150-a-month cable bill, cable boxes, Apple TV, Roku, Vudu, and half a dozen other TV devices] are all behind me now.
I disconnected everything, threw it to the side and canceled the cable months ago. Instead, now I have a Mac Mini, wireless mouse and a Microsoft Xbox hooked up to my television.
This quest for cable freedom has been a couple of years in the works. Before I called the cable company to bid my farewell I imagined that I would need a vast array of devices to fill the entertainment void: a device for games, something for television shows, a contraption for streaming movies through Netflix and, finally, something to control all of the above. But it turns out a computer can do all those tasks with some software upgrades and a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Read the whole thing at NYT >One of the only witnesses to the recent police shooting in San Francisco’s Oceanview neighborhood has been arrested and he says police are trying to intimidate him because his version of events differs from theirs.
But he will most likely be released from jail soon because a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office said that while the investigation remains open, they do not plan to file charges against him at this time.
SEE RELATED: Witness to police shooting speaks from SF jail (VIDEO)
“San Mateo [law enforcement] is doing this because they want to cover up the fact that there’s a witness,” said Gregory Elarms, 32, who lives on the street where a California High Patrol officer and a Daly City police officer were involved in the shooting of Elarms’ friend Ansar Mohammad, 39, on Oct. 25.
Elarms is now in a San Francisco County Jail cell after being arrested early Wednesday morning on what he says are trumped up charges. He spoke to the San Francisco Examiner on Thursday in a jailhouse interview.
Elarms was taken to Daly City for questioning before being booked in San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of assault with a firearm upon a police officer, exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and being a felon in possession of ammunition. His bail is set at $275,000.
According to the San Francisco Police Department, Elarms was arrested in the 200 block of Montana Street by the department’s Special Operations Group who had a warrant to search his home because he allegedly threatened officers after the Oct. 25 shooting.
“This search warrant/arrest was the result of an incident occurring on Oct. 25, 2016, in which Elarms pointed a gun at San Mateo County peace officers on the 200 block of Montana Street,” San Francisco police Sgt. Michael Andraychak said in a statement to the Examiner. “A search was later conducted for Elarms but he was not located. An investigation led to his identification as the suspect in that incident.”
But Elarms claims none of that is true; he was simply responding to the scene of the shooting were his friend was wounded by police.
“They were telling me to admit I had a gun the day ‘Notorious’ [his friend’s nickname] was shot,” said Elarms, who told the Daly City officers interviewing him that the officers were making up the story about a gun. “The only thing I had in my hand was a phone.”
He added, “If I did that, I would be shot or I would be in jail.”
The shooting incident occurred at about 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 25 after the driver of a stolen Honda led a San Mateo County multi-agency unit specializing in car theft into San Francisco. When police approached the Honda near the intersection of Montana and Faxon streets, officers from the CHP and the San Mateo Police Department discharged their firearms, leaving Mohammad injured.
A CHP officer was also injured, but has since been released from the hospital.
Mohammad, who was hospitalized in serious condition, was booked on suspicion of attempted murder and the unlawful driving or taking of a vehicle.
Immediately after the shooting, Elarms started posting videos on his Facebook page claiming that his friend never threatened police nor was he the original driver of the stolen car.
Elarms also told the Examiner that Mohammad, a.k.a. Notorious Dickerson, was not originally the driver of the car he was shot in. Instead, Mohammad had come over to Elarms’ home about an hour before the incident, he claimed.
Elarms, a late night janitor, said the whole episode of his arrest and theses allegations would be comic if it wasn’t so ironic. On the day of the shooting, one of the officers pulled a gun on him, not the other way around, according to Elarms.
“[A] Daly City cop pulled a gun on me,” Elarms said. “They pushed me away from the crime scene.”
Meanwhile, Mohammad’s lawyer is wondering why Elarms, one of the people who saw the shooting, was arrested at all.
“[The] SWAT team went out and arrested the only eye witness to this shooting,” said Deputy Public Defender Rebecca Young at Wednesday’s Police Commission meeting.
Read more criminal justice news on the Crime Ink page in print. Follow us on Twitter: @sfcrimeink
Click here or scroll down to commentIf you're a longtime reader of Star Wars novels or have spent any time exploring the old Expanded Universe (now "Legends"), you're probably well aware that the books were … hit or miss. If we're being honest, the novels really covered the spectrum in terms of quality. But my goodness, there were a lot of them. As a new reader, it was nearly impossible to know where to begin.
As recently as 2013, the Expanded Universe was still being expanded. Star Wars had become a deep, intricate web of interconnected stories that spanned dozens of novels and hundreds of thousands of pages. It was a bit daunting, to be honest.
Then, in 2014, everything changed when Disney and Lucasfilm rebranded almost every story from the previous 30 years as "Legends." They were no longer considered "canon." This was hugely controversial among fans (still is), but it essentially cleared the deck to reboot the franchise, untangle the mess of conflicting stories that had been told, and develop a consistent, cohesive storyline in advance of The Force Awakens.
What began as a slow stream of new books dedicated to fleshing out specific aspects of the Star Wars universe has since become a raging torrent. In the last year or two, the Star Wars publishing machine (primarily spearheaded by Disney-Lucasfilm Press and Del Rey Books) has been turning out an impressive number and variety of new books.
The good news is that almost all of the original novels that comprise the new "expanded universe" have been surprisingly good—if not outright excellent. With almost every new release, the bar (along with expectations) gets raised for future releases. The bad news is that it's once again becoming difficult for a newcomer to know where to start.
The biggest questions new readers have are: How essential are the books, really? And will the books help me understand the movies on a different level?
That's fair. Not everyone wants to get lost in the Star Wars weeds and explore every nook and cranny of the universe. So if you want to crack the seal and see what's on offer in the world of Star Wars prose, where should you begin?
We cast a net over the "new-canon" original novels (YA and adult) with exactly that in mind. So as to not be too overwhelming (and to keep our sanity), we've excluded kids and young readers' books, film adaptations, and comics (some of which are remarkably essential). So where does that leave us? Well, there are still a lot of books, to be honest. It's time to strap in.
I'd love to recommend a long list of books, but even though some are downright fantastic, it's hard to justify them as "essential" reading (e.g., Christie Golden's Dark Disciple, Delilah Dawson's Phasma, and Alexander Freed's Battlefront: Twilight Company).
If you only want the best of the Star Wars pie, don't just nibble around the edges. Go straight for the center. Without further ado, here are the essential original Star Wars novels from the past few years (i.e., the new canon).Christmas may be a generally pleasant break from realities with easy access to all the ham and turkey one could ask for and a wealth of close family and friends to spread all the season’s joys. But every once in a blue moon some psychopath makes a big at creating a far more association with the holiday.
Here are 10 heartbreaking and terrible tragedies the shocked the world during Christmas, the supposedly “most wonderful time of the year.”
Christmas Blizzard (1909)
On Christmas day in 1909 in New York City, what began as a hint of soothing snowfall quickly grew to something infinitely more terrifying. An enormous blizzard took locals by surprise. Eighteen individuals lost their lives in this saddening true story; six lost their lives to the elements while the remaining 12 perished as a result of accidents caused by the tumultuous storm.
Lawson Family Massacre (1929)
What is it with family members murdering each? That’s a question I can’t answer, but I can tell you that on Christmas day in 1929 (this has to be one of the earlier cases on this extreme nature), Charlie Lawson swept through his house with a fire-arm, killing his six children and wife, who sat idly on their front porch. To make matters even more disgusting, he proceeded to bludgeon his family, including his own baby.
Cyclone Tracy (1974)
Christmas Eve and Christmas proved to be a hellacious nightmare for the residents of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. A cyclone tore through the town, leaving in its wake extensive damages and 70 dead. A reported 41,000 people were also left homeless.
Ronald Gene Simmons Murder Spree
Just a few days before Christmas, 1987, retired Air Force Sargent Ronald Gene Simmons decided it would make for entertainment to embark on a murderous rampage. Merry Christmas, right?
Simmons kept his victims quite close, as he shot and killed his wife and son. Then he strangled his year-old daughter. And then, when the man’s remaining four children arrived at his home, he strangled thm and stuffed their bodies inside barrels.
Now, all of that insanity happened on December 22nd. Somehow, the lunatic simply wasn’t done. The man soon killed his just-arriving son and daughter-in-law before eventually drowning their 20-month-old son. I know, it’s getting terrifyingly creepy as we move forward. And believe it not, Simmons still seemed to believe he had more work to do: He proceeded to kill his oldest daughter—with whom he fathered a child with—her husband, and their children.
Guess what?
The killing didn’t stop there.
Just a few days later he killed a woman who had rejected him, and then proceeded to kill those he had disgruntled feelings for.
Now that’s paralyzing stuff, right there!
Air France Hijacking (1994)
Airplanes in general scare the hell out of me. Throw a terrorist, or a hijacker in that rickety plane and things get really, really scary! And that’s what happened on Air France Flight 8969, on Christmas Eve of 1994. Four men with ties to the militant Islamic sect took over the plane. Three individuals lost their lives on that fateful Christmas Eve, while more than 200 passengers made it out alive. As terrible as this Christmas tragedy was, it could have been significantly worse.
JonBenét Ramsey (1996)
Few cases have left as mesmerized and disturbingly concerned. JonBenét Ramsey was a cute kid with the world in front of her, and that all ended on Christmas night when her parents found her in their own home, strangled and bound. The parents faced years of speculation, though no proof was ever produced in order to charm them with the murder.
Congo Massacres (2008)
In Congo, Christmas took a devastating hit. A number of the Lord’s Resistance Army invaded multiple churches, machetes in hand. 400 citizens were killed in the attacks, but those who survived were subjected to horrifying torture, mutilation and more death. Most of the children who survived were either groomed to be warriors, or eventually sold into sex slavery rings.
The Covina Massacre (2008)
One of my illogical yet powerful fears is that I’ll run into a man in a Santa suit, only to gaze, slack-jawed as he withdraws some heavy artillery to slaughter all the innocent boys who came to see the not-so-jolly gift giver. On December 24, 2008, that pretty much happened. 45-year-old Bruce Jeffrey Pardo showed up at a Christmas and did just that – he let the led fly. Numerous partygoers were executed.
Nearly as disgusting as his bloody rampage was the fact that he shortly thereafter committed suicide himself, successfully bypassing the criminal justice he so deserved.
Badger Girls Tragedy (2011)
The Setting was Stamford, Connecticut. It was Christmas day in 2011. Things should have been perfect, but, as you probably guessed by reading this article, things were most definitely not perfect. An uncontrollable fire broke out in the home, and while mother, Madonna Badger and her boyfriend, Michael Borcina survived.
Three beautiful young sisters met their depressing fate when they found themselves incapable of escaping of an abode fully enflamed with thirsty fireballs. I was a total and utter loss.
Grapevine Murder-Suicide (2011)
Anytime an entire family finds themselves terminated, it tugs at the heart-strings. Knowing the circumstances of a tragedy such as this is just really, really saddening news.
What’s even darker about this case is the fact that law enforcement theorized that Mr. Yazdanpanah dressed as Santa Claus (um… not so merry Christmas).Ukraine army starts active operations. Biggest tank attack since WWII
Ukraine army tanks near Donetsk. Photo: ZIK/EPA/OLGA IVASHCHENKO
The cease-fire, so far abided with by Ukraine army in |
ing their tower freely and they cant fight back; thats the situation you want. Also, keep an eye out for champions that dont have health potions or self-sustain like mages; theyre usually the best targets for high range spells. If you keep killing 1 guy at a time and they keep coming back, youre slowly losing item advantage. Even if you have a gold lead, you still havent used it so they have an item lead. You want to go for buildings and the win, not for high amounts of kills. Next time you think about diving, I hope you remember this and resist the urge to dive their tower to grab kills instead of playing it patiently and intelligently. (This paragraph doesnt apply if they have ways to gain hp back.)Health potions are often underrated. There is no reason whatsoever to sacrifice a health potion for a mana one when you start the game. Theres no difference if you dont end up using them, but in a situation where you go against a poke heavy team, youll need every bit of sustain you can get and theres nothing worse than standing around with no hp, no health pots while having full mana and 2 mana pots in your inventory. Always plan for the worse situation (which would be you needing as much health potions as possible). Also try grabbing 2-3 potions on every trip back if you have some gold leftover (especially if you dont have self-sustain or a healer). It helps you undo the occasional unlucky skillshots you tanked with your teeth and keep you full hp instead of stealing health relics from your team or standing around with half your hp.If the other team has better range, try to stall early game by waveclearing. It's normal to take dmg from poke, however it doesnt mean you should run in and try to fight immediately. If you run in before level 6, youll only end up either dying or burning potions. Try to stall early game (pre-lvl 6) as much as possible by getting 5 pots and some sustain. Late game tanky champions are scarier than early game poke champions.If they have sustain, try not to trade. Even if you trade evenly, the simple fact that their healer is pressing W will put you and your team behind. Instead of using your spells on enemy champions when they have a Sona and Alistar, use those spells on minions to push the wave. Stay in the back, waveclear when you get pushed and wait for fights to happen later on. Healers get very efficient when small fights happen but no one dies, so thats exactly what you want to avoid.Try to also keep an eye out on which team is going to hit lvl 6 first as this is an enormous timing window. If they have a kill lead or a missing player, you want to make sure to play very safe until you hit 6 yourself. On the other side of the medal, if youre about to hit 6, try to make something happen as soon as possible. If both teams are even on kills, whoever has lane control is going to waveclear first, meaning they will all ding before you do, stay away. The lvl 6 window is also an opportunity for the team that has been pushed to their tower and poked all game to make something happen and gain back lane control. This is one of the most crucial moments of the game, so make sure to have as much hp as you can and burn your summoner spells.Try to stay away for the narrow choke between your first tower and the right wall when youre being pushed in. Theres very little space to maneuver and since this is the side where the health relics are,there is always one guy that tends to hug that side. Since it is a very tight place (hehehe), people also tend to put traps there. Dont bother clearing them, just try surviving through the early losing phase, dodge skillshots and waveclear.A small mention to trap positioning when youre playing Nidalee or Caitlyn: Place your traps where people have no choice but to step on. At the entrance of a bush, the choke near the first tower, on health relics, throughout a bush (when they chase you). If youre playing Teemo or Nidalee, try to leave about 2 centimeters between each of your traps since they only re-apply the debuff instead of stacking. A quick mention, if you're playing against a trapper of some sort while using a champ that can control minions, use them to defuse the traps (Morde ghost, Tibbers, LeBlanc clone, Yorick W, Shaco boxes are some examples) Super-awesome-pro Caitlyn trick: If you put a snap-trap down, and then ever so slightly a 2nd one right on top of it but just delayed by a few millimeters behind, champs will run in it, get snared, then get snared again as soon as they try to move in the same direction. This is a very good trick if youre trying to keep control of a bush or to delay someone from entering a fight. Here () is a little something visual about trap placement when youre on blue team.Taking an inhibitor is more impactful than getting yourself aced. Say you win a teamfight and then push down their second tower, everyone in your team should right-click the inhibitor and not move until its down. Even if the enemy team respawned and are on their way for their revenge, make sure to get inhibor. The fact that you just gave them gold is irrelevant since they wont be able to buy with it anyways and you now have a team with newly bought items, a full hp bar and super-minions following you on your way back to lane. This position is way more favorable than acing them, going back to your health relics, not being full hp anyways and having no inhib down.I know it's very important for you to E an enemy from the bushes while using Soraka, but revealing your bush to your enemies gives away your position and might result in you losing that bush, don't do it. Landing a skillshot from a bush reveals you for a short time, but it wont be enough time for them to target you with spells that could result in pushing you out of it. Targeting spells such as Soraka E will act as an auto-attack, meaning you get the full reveal duration. Keep that in mind whenever you plan to throw a spell at an enemy.Do not burn your flash to stay alive or to get a kill when you're playing a champ that has a significant AoE ultimate (Fid, Galio and Amumu are examples). Reaching lvl 6 is your timing window to win a team fight, and if you have your Flash up at that moment, it might make your ultimate hit 4 enemy champions instead of 2 or 3. Using Flash to kill 4 guys and grab an objective is way more important than using it to save yourself or to earn 140 gold.Whenever you get hit by an enemy tower, ask yourself if any of the opposing champions touched you recently. If they didnt and you die, you get executed and you get to spend the gold youve amassed up to now without giving them money back. This is very easy to do in the early game where all is needed to kill you is 3 hits. In the late-game, if your inhibitor is down, you can also use the super-minion to suicide if you're low on hp and the enemy team isn't around.Killing yourself after winning a team fight is sometimes the right thing to do once youve capitalized from that fight. Pushing the wave, grabbing a building and then suicide to their next tower is usually what you want to do. A suicide is best, but even if their support or tank ends up getting a kill, gold without assists on a champion that doesnt do dmg isnt the end of the world since it allows you to come back with full hp with new items for your next fight. Surviving with no sustain and very low hp for next fight isnt a situation you want to be in, especially in a very close game.Occasionally press tab to keep an eye on the respawn timers. Its easy to get carried away and engage 4v5 because one of them overextended. Its also true when you chase champions for a long time. Nothing worse than almost killing a guy and then 2 of their teammates save him after respawning.Regardless of your champion, you shouldhave MR Glyphs and Armor Seals. At level 3, a champion will prevent ~9% more magical damage with MR Glyphs than without. Considering you get hit by a lot of spells throughout the game, this adds up to a lot of mitigated dmg. This is also true for physical dmg and armor. Getting a fair amount of damage reduction from Seals and Glyphs will always beat a minimal amount of dmg boost. Its also a way to combat enemy penetration. As you probably know, resistances aren't linear. The more you get, the lower their impact is. This means exactly the opposite for penetration; the effect of your penetration is greater the lower your enemies' resistances are. This is also the reason why penetration MarksQuints will beat other form of dmg, such as flat AP or AD.With the recent buff of Armor per level Seals and the nerf of the flat ones, it is now better to use Armor per level. As we all know, ADCs scale with items and are generally poor early game, so the fact that those new Seals only become better than the flat ones at lvl 6 is not a big disadvantage. Long range AD champs like Varus and Jayce are very good early game, but the fact that Riot gave every champion an additional 4 base armor when the game starts should help a bit against the early game swing.Dont use your poro snax. I know you want to see it explode and all but having poros run out of a bush because you are now a scary, scary thing will give out your position to your enemies. This is especially hurtful when youre a champion that is able to initiate.You should automatically get a Sweeper if youre against an AP Teemo or an AP Shaco. Teemo is currently sitting on a winrate of 56% on lolking.com because no one gets that item, please be a part of the solution! You should also consider Sweeper against stealth champs such as, Akali, Talon, Wukong, KhaZix and Vayne, but theyre not as impactful as an unchecked Teemo.Tear of the Goddess is a good item on mana heavy champs (like Sona, Nami, Ziggs and Nid), but it's not as good as Chalice as a starting item. The 200ish mana lead you would get if you started with tear isn't worth your downtime when you'll get out of mana. Since Tear only increases your base mana regen instead of a % like Chalice does, there is a point where you will be out of mana and regaining it very slowly. That downtime is the reason why starting with Tear is a bad idea. What we propose is to start with Chalice + Sapphire Crystal and buy a Tear on your first trip back. Remember that the map passive gives you +3 mana regen for every 200 maximum mana you have, so that Sapphire Crystal gives you mana regen that is then amplified with Chalice. Like mentioned above, that opener sacrifices some mana charges, but does not interfere with the fluidity of your mana regen.It seems to me that it is a misconception that the purpose of a tank is to be unkillable. After discussing it thoroughly, we came to the conclusion that the purpose of a tank is to make your allies job easier. Doing so might include very different facets which we will see more in details shortly, like increasing your allies dmg, making them tankier, peeling champions away from them, ccing enemies together and so on.Being a bruiser or peeler, it's always better to peel for your carries than to jump on theirs, especially in a losing game. By doing so, you prevent your carries from losing dps by running away from enemies or to lose hp by being dmg'd. Instead, they can stand still and auto-attack whoever youre keeping in place, increasing their overall dps. You might think that jumping on their carries and making them attack you instead of them is a form of peeling, but its not. By doing so, youll most likely die. The difference is that now your carries have no one of front of them to protect them, and now they have to deal carries that are more fed than them.Stop engaging if you're losing fights. Try to stall the game by making your carries waveclear. Engaging in a losing situation will only make their advantage bigger every time your team dies. Try to disengage with your spells instead of using them to get close to your enemies.When youre thinking of engaging, keep an eye on the position of your teammates. Flashing, using your dash and then ulting with Jarvan isnt always the right move even if you hit 5 people with it. You have to make sure your allies are in a position to follow you up. You can also type in chat to be ready or ping right before you go in so your teammates have an idea of when you intend to go in.Flash isnt needed on tanks without AoE ultimates or ways to catch people off. Youd be more useful to your team with summoner Heal and Exhaust if you play say Yorick, Trundle, Mundo, Leona, Naut, Malph, Shyv or Soraka, but champs like Galio, Amumu, Ali, Blitz, Skarner, Wukong, Darius and Maokai all need Flash as part of their kit since it allows you to position your spells better when youre looking to start a fight.Build your melee champions tanky. There is no point in building dps if you die in 1 spell rotation. I know you want your Poppy to crit for 2k or your Akali to have 600 AP, but the world simply isn't ready for it yet. Get 1 or 2 tanky item(s) first, then get your dmg. Living longer directly increases your DPS since you stay in fights longer, even if your dmg stats are lower.In response to the previous paragraph, a tank shouldnt be as tanky as a WoW raidboss. There is only need for more tankiness when people focus you and youre dying a lot. I would say the ideal situation you want to be in is to be tanky enough to not instantly die when you get ccd,but to do enough dmg to not be ignored. Say youre an Alistar, you dont want to just keep getting resist and hp items. You want to mix some tankiness with cdr and a sheen item. Locket-Athenes-Gauntlet gives you max CDR, very high amount of resists while having a presence in team fights. Its the same deal with champions like Leona, Galio or Maokai. If youre tanky enough, just slap a void staff or a sheen item on your champion and all of a sudden your dmg doubles. Hydra, Triforce, Cleaver, Botrk, Zekes, Mallet, Wits are all examples of good dmg items for tanks that auto-attack a lot.If you're not a carry, make sure to get Locket. Not only does it make you tanky, it also increases everyone's durability by ~6% against magical dmg, not to mention the activated shield that can mitigate a large AoE spell.Zeke's Herald is worth mentioning if you have 2 ADC's on your team.Randuins, Tabi, Gauntlet and Frozen Heart are good armor items for tanks. The point of building armor is to peel for your team by staying alive and slowing the fight down. Sunfire doesn't help you do that, please stop purchasing it.Abyssal is extremely potent when you're on an AP tank (Galio, Malph, Amumu, Katarina, Diana, Vlad, Zac and Leona are all very good examples). It provides you with tankiness as well as dmg for your team.Locket, Spirit Visage, Merc and Abyssal are all very good mr items for tanks as they not only give you individual tankiness, but they also help your team in some way (either by granting them tankiness, more dmg, or by giving you more up time allowing you to cast more spells, granting them with more peeling). Its also the reason why Banshees and Orb of Winner arent as good on tanks.A small addition on Orb of Winner: its not optimal in most games since it doesnt improve your stats for fighting, but in a game where the shield refreshes several time before an actual fight, it gets very cost effective. This is the type of item that you get when you have to wait on ults to engage against a poke heavy comp.It is true that supports that have access to a lot of gold are best built with AP items (its also observable in Dominion and TT), but it doesnt mean you should completely ignore your support role and skip team items. If your tank is unwilling or you dont have a tank, take one for the team and build Locket and then proceed to your usual AP build. Giving every teammate a very important aura item is way better than just getting 80 additional AP on your champ, even if results in bigger heals or shields.As an AP support, you will stay in the back and try to catch people with cc or casting heals/shields on your teammates, meaning your need of Boots isnt as high as carries. Sometimes boots are very important when you need to chase/run away or dodge skillshots, but when the game starts, the distance between both towers is so short that you dont even need movement skill or items to get to safe grounds. Its also the reason we wouldnt recommend putting a point in Janna W or Sona E until you reach lvl 8. For AP champs, Sorc Boots are very good but when your primary spells are shields or heals, pen isnt as important. Beside AP supports, Naut, Nidalee, Jarvan, Maokai and Warwick are also champs where boots arent a necessity.The new Twin Shadow is a very potent item for AP supports like Janna, Sona, Soraka, Nami, Karma, Morgana and Lulu. Not only does it provide you with AP and CDR (which is your game plan anyways), it also gives your team an engage and disengage tool.Janna is best built AP, yes, but it doesn't mean you should get all the CS with your nados. Gold on a carry is always better than gold on a defensive champion. Max your E first unless you need waveclear/stalling.For the love of god, stop building your Sona full CDR+AP. There is no point in playing a healer if you instantly die when you get caught. Sona is a champion that trades efficiently, but build in a way that you don't instantly die if you get q'd by Amumu. This goes for any AP supports really, not only Sona.There has been a lot of situations where I see people calling out their AD carries by telling them not to dmg tanks. The goal of an ADC is to first guarantee how safe they are, and then once thats guaranteed, do the most dmg. Having said that, it is not safe for you to run past enemy melee champs to be within reach of their ranged champions; it exposes you to melee spells as well as ranged spells. Your best bet is usually to attack whats closest to you. Of course this has some exceptions. For instance, if an enemy Garen has Thornmail, Sunfire and Tabi, theres no reason at all to spend time attacking him or wasting spells on him. If thats the case, tell your team to simply ignore him and go on to the next valuable target. Thats why we mentioned earlier that you dont want to put yourself in a position where youre easily ignorable as a tank. Smart players will go past you and go on your teammates; rendering all of your tank items literally useless.Jinx, Varus and Jayce are blue casters (meaning they do not rely on auto-attack, but on spells to do dmg). Their poke have high AD ratios and are very lengthy, meaning you can dmg enemies without taking any dmg back. Your overall game dps is going to increase if you only get dmg and CDR instead of dmg and attack speed. Tear+Sword-> Brut-> CDR Boots-> LW-> Sanguine is generally the most optimal item path (Upgrade Tear into a Manamune when it hits around +350 mana from charges). If you're in a situation where you can freely auto-attack (against 3 melees for instance), it will almost always be better to build Hypercarry instead of blue, since most of the trading will be made during fights, not throughout poke.Some people build Ashe blue as well, but we personally think it's a mistake. The other 3 blue casters all have very high ad ratios as well as very high range on their poke, but not Ashe. You're basically sacrificing powerful auto-attacks just to be able to do a 250 dmg volley every 3 seconds that basically doesn't even dmg a champion with 1 armor item. It's also not as reliable and safe poke like the other 3 blue casters since the range on it is much shorter.Ezreal is usually built blue caster, but there are instances where it is straight up better to go Hypercarry (dmg and attack speed). The Hypercarry route is usually better DPS-wise if you can freely auto-attack against melee champions, but the blue route is overall more poke-oriented and safer since you gain armor from your Gauntlet and less downtime with your E.Another note regarding Ezreal: regardless of your build (Blue, Hypercarry or AP), you should always start with Sheen. Sheen gives you mana regen as well as maximum mana, so theres no reason for you to start with tear or Chalice especially considering the fact that your q costs 31 mana. People go oom with him because they spam W like its buried treasure at lvl 3 with their QWE lvld up instead of QQE.Stop with the Boots+Doran+Doran openers. If you're getting a Doran, only get one matched with a Vamp Scepter. If they have poke, Boots are better than a Doran since you can dodge spells easier. Additionally, you might not be able to auto-attack minions to sustain anyways if the enemy team outrages you badly and punish you with spells every time you come close to minions.If you're on an AD carry (Blue or Hypercarry), you'll need to get a banshees somewhere in your build. By doing so, you become much more difficult to catch with a stun as well as unburstable later in the game. Theres no point in doing a lot of dmg if you die 1 second after a Leona ult or an assassin picking you off. If their team is very heavy on poke, it is sometimes better to get banshees as a 2nd item as soon as you complete your sanguine blade. Frozen Mallet and Randuins are both also worth mentioning instead of Banshees in the instance where most of the dmg you take is physical. Champions like Talon and Rengar build a lot of penetration item, so it is sometimes better to go for the huge hp boost of 700 from Mallet than to pay the same price for lower hp and a small armor boost. However, Randuins is better when youre getting bruised hardcore from champs that like auto-attacking like Vi, Yi, Jax, Trynd or other ADCs.The optimal building path for most Hypercarries is usually Vamp+Boots-> Sanguine-> PD-> LW-> IE-> Banshees. If you're incredibly fed, IE first to PD while holding vamp is very good, but planning for the worse is usually a safer bet; get used to rushing Sanguine Blade asap. You may swap Boots for a Doran Blade if you think you wont be able to auto-attack as much due to their high range or stuns, like mentioned just above. I play safe and always buy Boots no matter what, but it is my opinion that both options are viable if you watch out for the reasons mentioned in tip #47.(maximum of 30 000 characters per post op)Not to get all Malcolm Gladwell here, but it’s counterintuitive that hot water freezes faster than cold water. The phenomenon is called the Mpemba effect and until recently, no one could explain how it works. A group of researchers in Singapore think they’ve cracked the puzzle.
Now Xi and co say hydrogen bonds also explain the Mpemba effect. Their key idea is that hydrogen bonds bring water molecules into close contact and when this happens the natural repulsion between the molecules causes the covalent O-H bonds to stretch and store energy.
But as the liquid warms up, it forces the hydrogen bonds to stretch and the water molecules sit further apart. This allows the covalent molecules to shrink again and give up their energy. The important point is that this process in which the covalent bonds give up energy is equivalent to cooling.
In fact, the effect is additional to the conventional process of cooling. So warm water ought to cool faster than cold water, they say. And that’s exactly what is observed in the Mpemba effect.Welcome back to Screams from the Crypt, the Talk Film Society’s home for horror! This week Ben Lane is here with a review of 2016's Beyond The Gates, a horror film that he feels deserves an audience. It's currently streaming on Netflix!
Last October, I drove to Columbus, Ohio to attend Shock Around the Clock, a 24-hour horror marathon which started at noon and ended at noon, the time in-between consisting of nothing but horror movie mayhem. This was my first horror marathon, so my excitement was through-the-roof, as a lifelong fascination with horror cinema was about to culminate in this day long event surrounded by hundreds of other fans. Admidst all the brouhaha and pandemonium after the fifth or sixth movie, the announcer introduced the midwest premiere of a new indie horror movie called Beyond the Gates.
This scenario may be why I enjoyed Beyond the Gates so much, so if you fear that the praise I dish out is biased, you aren't entirely wrong. But I must assess that after revisiting the film tonight in the darkness of my living room, I still find most of what I initially liked about it still stands.Recently, Talib Kweli stated in an interview that New York radio doesn’t support New York Hip Hop artists. Afterwards, Hot 97’s program director Ebro Darden called Kweli out on that point, accusing him of “trolling.”
Since that interaction Kweli appeared on Hot 97 to discuss the point with Ebro. “The business model I’m employing is not something I learned from the old, archaic business model,” said Kweli. “If I was still doing things like I did 10 years ago, I’d be another rapper bitching a moaning on Twitter, looking for work on Twitter or whatever. I learned from the people who come after me. So if a young rapper’s looking at me like, ‘How do I do it?’ look around at your peers.”
Kweli continued, listing the people he’s learned from from a business perspective. “Because I’m learning from the TDEs of the world. I’m learning from the Nipsey Hussles of the world. I’m looking a Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari in comedy. I’m looking at a Chance the Rapper. Chance the Rapper put out a mixtape that people bootlegged and bought so much that his mixtape ended up on Billboard. He comes out of nowhere. No one was checking for Chance the Rapper. He just made it happen. You just have to be committed. Look at Soulja Boy. People who love real Hip Hop hate to talk about an artist like Soulja Boy. To me, at the time, when Soulja Boy came out, he really changed the game.”
Talib explained that regardless of the musical content, traditional Hip Hop artists need to look outside of themselves for examples of how to properly run their businesses. “All the people that real Hip Hop hates, that’s who they need to be paying attention to,” said Kweli. “You don’t have to like the songs; you don’t have to get into the music; but look at what Lil B has done. Look at what Soulja Boy has done. On a bigger level, look at what Macklemore & Ryan Lewis did. I seen it firsthand, being on tour with them. They straight independent. They got Warner Bros. working for them, getting their radio spins up. They gonna be caked up the rest of their lives off of one album because they did it their own way.”
Watch the interview below:
RELATED: Talib Kweli Says New York Radio Doesn’t Support NY ArtistsAre you still in an Easter Candy Coma? Snap out of it–it’s a new ad week and there’s shopping to be done!
I’ve got cheese and Blue Bell in my freezer, and this week I’m hoping to make a start on getting fruit frozen for the smoothies and fruit pops my kids will eat all summer long. There are strawberries and blackberries for a good price at HEB this week, so those’ll be first in the freezer. Given Austin is eight months of summer, keeping the freezer full of fruit is key to avoiding daily trips to the sno-cone stand!
Also great this week is another cheese sale at Sprouts. Fiesta has potatoes for just under 20c/lb, and chicken legs on their deep discount.
Sprouts (last week’s good through today)
Halo mandarins, 2lb sack $1.98/ea
red or green leaf lettuce 48c/lb
D’Anjou pears 48c/lb
organic Red Delicious apples $1.50/lb (DD)
organic kale bunches 88c/ea (DD)
bulk cut Monterey Jack cheese $1.99/lb
bscb $1.79/lb
Sprouts thick-sliced bacon $2.99/lb
Beyond Meat Chicken-free Strips B1G1
Fri-Sun ONLY:
corn 25c/ea (C15)
boneless skinless chicken thighs $1.49/lb
reduced-sodium turkey breast cold cuts, pre-pack $3.99/lb
Fiesta
drumsticks, jumbo bag 69c/lb (Fiesta Limit)
russet potatoes, 10lb sack $1.97/ea (DD)
Red Delicious apples 49c/lb (DD)
Fiesta brand vegetable oil, gallon $4.99/ea
Anatina brand pasta, 32oz 99c/ea
HEB
mangoes 33c/ea (C15)
strawberries, 1lb 87c/ea (DD)
Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apples 77c/lb (DD)
blackberries, 6oz 87c/ea
County Post drums or thighs $1/lb
Randalls
Skinner pasta, 12oz. 79c/ea
Kellogs cereals, various $1.99/ea (when you buy 4)
Wheatsville
Field Day organic broth, 32oz. box $1.99/ea
Nutiva organic coconut manna $7.99/ea
MORE CHEESE! It used to be that Sprouts had a different cheese each week at $1.99/lb. They stopped that ages ago (3 years by the flyer blurb). This is the second week in a row they’ve gone back to it, and I hope it is a resurrection of a regular pattern. I’ve got about 10 lbs of cheddar in the freezer, and I’ll likely add at least 5 of jack to that. Quesadillas for YOU! and YOU! and YOU!
If you’re in the mood for a party, Fiesta’s got live crawfish for $1.59/lb by the sack. Sacks are usually big, about 50 lbs, so make sure you have a lot of hungry friends, or go smaller for $1.79/lb. This is much cheaper than HEB’s $2.79/lb.
There we go, Cheepsters. Another week, more grocery sales. I hope you find things you want to stock up on–and if you do let me know what you decided was the deal you had to have!
Cheep cheep!But Ms Ardern is standing beside her leader - at least until the election, she says.
"I'm his deputy, I'm ready to work alongside him to take us through to the election," she told Newshub.
Ms Ardern said Mr Little had discussed poll results with her, but she was continuing to support him as leader.
"[There's] no plan B. I've given Andrew my absolute support as deputy and I'll keep doing that," she said.
Mr Little has been struggling in the polls and earlier on Monday, admitted he'd spoken to the party's senior MPs about whether he should resign.
Meanwhile New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has cemented his position as kingmaker in the upcoming election, according to the latest Newshub-Reid Research poll.
Mr Peters now sits at 11.9 percent, up 2.2 percent from the last poll in June - above both Ms Ardern and Mr Little.
He's still trailing a fair distance behind current Prime Minister and National leader Bill English - but Mr English has dropped slightly, down 0.4 percent to 25.8 percent.
The Newshub-Reid Research poll was conducted July 20-28. 1000 people were surveyed, 750 by telephone and 250 by internet panel. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
Newshub.Proposed plans for a brand new tournament category on the ATP Tour are underway, according to the director of the Swiss Open, Roger Brennwald.
Basel, Rotterdam, Dubai and Beijing has all joined forces in a bid to present the idea of a 750 series to the ATP Tour. Under the plan, those four tournaments would become fourth most important events on the tour after the Masters 1000 series, ATP finals and grand slam events.
“We decided to present an idea to the ATP that has been shared by Dubai, Rotterdam and Beijing. The creation of a category that would be between the Masters 1000 and ATP 500.” Said Brennwald during an interview with Swiss Tennis.
Currently there are 13 ATP 500 events on the tour. Basel has been categorized as a 500 event since the implementation of the system in 2009. Prior to that, it was rated as an International Series Gold tournament.
Branwald’s vision is part of his plan to develop the Basel tournament, which celebrated its 47th edition this year. Under the proposals, the main centre court at the St. Jakobshalle arena will be expanded to allow a seating capacity of 10,000 people. Swiss authorities are hoping their developments will be enough to secure the tournament’s future. Under a current agreement, the Swiss Indoors will be a regular feature of the ATP Tour until 2018. After that, officials will need to negotiate a new contract.
The Swiss Indoors might have ended last week, but they have already secured the attendance of Stan Wawrinka in 2017, who will once again be trying to win the title for their first time in his career. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are also likely to be playing according to Brennwald.
Not the first tournament with big ideas
Earlier this year a duo of Masters tournaments confirmed that they hope to elevate the status of their tournaments in the future to a brand new category. The BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells has previously held meetings with the ATP about the creation of a new ‘Super Masters’ event, which will see more prize money and ranking points up for grabs. Former tournament director, Raymond Moore, hopes the new event can take place from 2019.
“It could come in 2019 but not before as right now the system is set through 2018. So the next year or two the ATP and the WTA will begin to discuss a different format, maybe new categories and we look forward to that. And maybe we’d go to a 128 draw, right now we’re a 96 draw.” He said during an interview with French journalist Carole Bouchard.
Shanghai is the other tournament hoping to be promoted to the new level. Unlike Indian Wells, the Chinese tournament just features men’s tennis.
Similar to the ATP 750 proposal, both plans are yet to be approved by the ATP. It is uncertain if these plans will go ahead or not.
The Current structure of the ATP Tour
Grand Slam tournaments
Australian Open
French Open
Wimbledon
US Open
ATP World Tour
ATP World Tour Finals
Masters 1000 series
500 series
250 series
ATP Challenger Tour
ITF events
ITF Men’s Circuit (futures)
Davis Cup
Hopman Cup
Tennis at the OlympicsA new opinion poll has found a significant increase in support for Fine Gael despite recent controversies over the gardaí, the Bus Éireann strike and the political rows over water charges.
The Behaviour and Attitudes poll for tomorrow's Sunday Times was conducted over a 12-day period between 30 March and 11 April last.
The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Compared to the last similar poll published in March the latest findings put Fine Gael up seven points to 29%.
There is no change for Fianna Fáil at 28% while Sinn Féin is down five points to 18%.
Labour is down one point to 5%, as is the Independent Alliance.
The Greens remain at 2%.
Solidarity / People Before Profit are up one point to 3%; this includes 1% for the Socialist Party.
The Social Democrats are up one point to 2% and all other independents are up two points to stand at 10%.
The poll also takes account of the Taoiseach's high profile visit to Washington for St Patrick's Day.
And that factor, along with the publicity around the future leadership of the party may also be contributing to the seven-point increase in support for Fine Gael.
The poll also shows an eight-point rise in Taoiseach Enda Kenny's personal rating |
memorial along an Arizona highway was illegal, but now ADOT says people can submit a request to the department to put up a tribute. These markers can be up to 30 inches high and 18 inches wide, and have to be made of specific materials. They also must be placed away from traffic.
Memorials that are already up may stay, but only if they meet safety standards. Those who placed them must contact ADOT, however, in case the markers need to be moved. ADOT will continue to remove without notice any memorial deemed a hazard.They like me, they really sort of like me.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The clear lede from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is the approval rating for Barack Obama. Post-shutdown, post-debt ceiling, post-Syria, in the midst of every NSA program ever being leaked to the foreign press, only 42 percent of voters approve of the job the president’s doing. Fifty-one percent disapprove. That’s the lowest number of his presidency, only marginally higher than the post-Katrina ratings of George W. Bush.
The GOP’s been tumbling alongside the president. Its favorable rating is at a new low, 22/53; Democrats are down to an acceptable 37/40. But the Democrats’ long-term survival plan involves the coronation of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and her easy defeat of whatever goober the Republicans put up. That’s looking (yes, yes, in October 2013) less preordained. Clinton’s approval is down to 46 percent favorable, 33 percent unfavorable. That’s the lowest number she’s scored since she became secretary of state; she left the office this year with a 56/25 rating.
Obama’s swoon is easy enough to explain. Forty percent of voters say that the Obamacare rollout has made them less confident in the law, and 31 percent doubt the problems can be fixed. Those are actually lower than the overall disapproval numbers for the law, but they’re a reaction to something Obama is actually doing. Clinton’s only just emerged to make some speeches and do one interview with New York magazine, and yet there’s been a net 18-point swing against her in a year.The agent of Manchester United winger Nani, Federico Pastorello has arrived in Turkey to hold talks with Fenerbahçe according to NTV Spor.
The report claims that Pastorello met with Fenerbahçe representatives at the Yellow Canaries headquarters to enter negotiations.
See More
Fenerbahce News
Fenerbahce set to make Arsenal target Iker Casillas offer
Fenerbahçe sporting director Giuliano Terraneo met with Nani recently and talks are believed to have entered the final stages.
The Yellow Canaries signed Lille defender Simon Kjaer on a four-year deal earlier in the week and want to complete the Nani transfer ahead of the pre-season.
Nani would be joining Portuguese manager Vitor Pereira if he agrees to the Fenerbahçe move.
Pereira was appointed Fenerbahçe manager on a two-year deal last week.
Nani spent last season on loan at Sporting Lisbon scoring 12 goals and providing eight assists in 38 games for the Portuguese giants.
The 28-year-old still has three-years left on his contract and currently earns €140,000 a week at Manchester United.At the end of Adolf Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally speech, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess took the podium and declared:
“The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”
You can watch it in this subtitled clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. If you don’t want to sit through Hitler’s speech, fast-forward to the 10:15 mark to hear Hess. You see what’s happening here: the identification of the Nazi Party with the person of Adolf Hitler, and the person of Adolf Hitler with the German nation, was made manifest and complete.
At the risk of going overly Godwin, those Hess lines came to mind when I read this Politico story about CPAC, in particular, this quote:
“In many ways, Donald Trump is the conservative movement right now,” Jim McLaughlin, the Republican pollster who conducted the survey, told CPAC attendees. “And the conservative movement is Donald Trump.”
The story, by Tim Alberta, is about how thoroughly Donald Trump has conquered movement conservatism. Alberta goes on:
To spend three days at this year’s CPAC, the annual right-wing carnival of politics and culture, was to witness an ideology conforming to an individual rather than the other way around. The president’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, set the tone Thursday morning when asked to assess Trump’s impact on the conservative movement. “Well, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC,” she said. The moderator laughed and so did the audience members, but it wasn’t a joke: Anyone searching for a brand of conservatism independent of the new president would have walked away sorely disappointed.
More:
To some extent, everyone expected to see Trump remake the Republican Party in his image; he became its leader upon clinching the presidential nomination last July and solidified that status for at least four years on November 8. But Trump was not supposed to bend conservatism to his will—at least, not this quickly. Certainly, he has thrilled the GOP grassroots with certain decisions, such as signing executive orders aimed at deregulation, beginning a crackdown on illegal immigration and nominating an originalist in Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. But he has also done other things—facilitating a deal with Carrier in Indiana that smacked of crony capitalism; bullying private corporations and individual citizens; declaring reporters the enemy of the American public; asserting a moral equivalence between the U.S. government and Vladimir Putin’s – that would typically put any politician in the crosshairs of the right. Trump, however, has encountered scant dissent from his party’s ideological base. So he came to CPAC not to pay homage to the traditions of conservatism, but to bask in the supremacy of his own movement, one that he and his allies believe will supplant the outdated orthodoxies peddled for decades by the very people who greeted him like a conquering hero on Friday morning.
Read the whole thing. What is astonishing is a) how quickly ideological conservatism has collapsed within the core of movement conservatism, and b) how Trump has filled the vacuum with his own personality. Alberta:
It wasn’t just the ubiquitous deification of Trump that was so jarring. It was the degree to which his worldview was accepted, championed and cheered by conservative speakers and attendees with no obvious connection to the new president.
It can’t be a complete surprise that the basic catechism of movement conservatism has lost the loyalty of the faithful. The Iraq War and the financial crash revealed the bankruptcy of GOP claims to competent leadership, but they also revealed the threadbare nature of the left-right establishment consensus in favor of globalized free trade and American interventionism. We need a new conservatism. We have needed a new conservatism for a long time.
But here’s the thing: Trumpism is not a coherent, principled worldview, nor is it recognizably conservative in philosophical terms. It is certainly possible that a philosophically articulate new conservatism will emerge from a Trumpified Right. However, seeing how quickly the movement conservatives of CPAC abandoned their principles in favor of worshipping Trump’s personality is a dark sign. Look at this, from the Politico piece:
“Last year we were talking about a walkout if Trump showed up, and this year it’s all Trump all the time. It has completely changed,” said Dominic Moore, a University of North Carolina student who attended CPAC for the first time in 2016 and backed Rubio in the GOP primary. “Last year the Make America Great Again hats were few and far between. Now they’re everywhere. Last year the speakers were attacking him and now everyone’s done a full 180. They’re all on the bandwagon. Everything has changed.”
One cannot fault Trump for intuiting the fragility of the GOP and of post-Reagan movement conservatism, and knocking it all over. But what is he replacing it with? A cult of personality that depends on demonizing the media? Or what? That Trump was able to overwhelm movement conservatism so thoroughly and so quickly, and that he is remaking it in his image, ought to send a chill down the spines of principled conservatives — even conservatives who (like me) find some of what he stands for (like economic nationalism) worth supporting, at least in theory.
No, I don’t think Trump is Hitler. Still, every American ought to be deeply wary of identifying a political party or movement with a personality over a set of principles. To paraphrase Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, if you’ve cut down all your conservative principles for the sake of investing Donald Trump with political power, what do you hide behind when Donald Trump turns on conservatives like you?
UPDATE: Carlo writes:
The comparison is weak because the reason for the identification is not so much the strength of Trump’s personality, but rather the complete cultural vacuum it is filling.
Well, that’s what I meant. Trump is too scatterbrained, abrasive, and incompetent to be Hitler, even if he wanted to be. The point I was making is that the conservative movement appears to be unmoored from any discernible principles at this point. I mean, love him or hate him, you knew where Reagan stood, because he had stood there for a very long time. Trump? No. I’m not so much worried about Trump as what follows him on the Right.
UPDATE.2: Eric Mader:
Watching the zombielike SJW crowds during the last of the Obama years, seeing the degree to which left liberals have abandoned real pluralism in the name of their non-discrimination regime, and now, on the other hand, seeing the rise of Trumpism, one might even conclude that authoritarianism is more likely than not as an outcome for us. With no principled moderates and conservatives in the room, are we going to be forced to choose between a left-authoritarian and a right-authoritarian regime? It sounds alarmist maybe. But, in terms of left-authoritarians, look at 1) the self-righteousness and rigor with which the Obama administration pursued its LGBT policies, and 2) the culture on campuses. What will democratic politics look like when these hordes of PC students make up most of the population between age 20 and 40? On the other hand, in terms of right-authoritarianism, the question is simple: What will conservatives be willing to put up with in order to ensure they do not end up being ruled by SJW apparatchiks?
Yes, I think that a Trump-like figure on the left could accomplish the same thing, for the same reasons.
UPDATE.3: Two days on, I agree that the Hess comparison was ill-considered. Even though I said I don’t believe Trump is Hitler, the loudness of the analogy, however weak, drowns out the qualification. I still strongly believe that Trump’s takeover of movement conservatism — given Trump’s lack of vision — reflects very poorly on the principles of movement conservatism. But I regret the very shrill comparison.Popularly viewed as one of the best American films ever made, the multi-generational crime saga The Godfather is a touchstone of cinema: one of the most widely imitated, quoted, and lampooned movies of all time. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino star as Vito Corleone and his youngest son, Michael, respectively. It is the late 1940s in New York and Corleone is, in the parlance of organized crime, a "godfather" or "don," the head of a Mafia family. Michael, a free thinker who defied his father by enlisting in the Marines to fight in World War II, has returned a captain and a war hero. Having long ago rejected the family business, Michael shows up at the wedding of his sister, Connie ( Talia Shire ), with his non-Italian girlfriend, Kay ( Diane Keaton ), who learns for the first time about the family "business." A few months later at Christmas time, the don barely survives being shot by gunmen in the employ of a drug-trafficking rival whose request for aid from the Corleones' political connections was rejected. After saving his father from a second assassination attempt, Michael persuades his hotheaded eldest brother, Sonny ( James Caan ), and family advisors Tom Hagen ( Robert Duvall ) and Sal Tessio ( Abe Vigoda ) thatshould be the one to exact revenge on the men responsible. After murdering a corrupt police captain and the drug trafficker, Michael hides out in Sicily while a gang war erupts at home. Falling in love with a local girl, Michael marries her, but she is later slain by Corleone enemies in an attempt on Michael's life. Sonny is also butchered, having been betrayed by Connie's husband. As Michael returns home and convinces Kay to marry him, his father recovers and makes peace with his rivals, realizing that another powerful don was pulling the strings behind the narcotics endeavor that began the gang warfare. Once Michael has been groomed as the new don, he leads the family to a new era of prosperity, then launches a campaign of murderous revenge against those who once tried to wipe out the Corleones, consolidating his family's power and completing his own moral downfall. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards and winning for Best Picture, Best Actor ( Marlon Brando ), and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather was followed by a pair of sequels.What is Cultural Marxism?
The term “cultural Marxism” is most commonly used by those on the right to critique leftist social movements such as feminism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others they perceive as degenerative cultural influences. Leftists, on the other hand, mock the concept as a “wing-nut conspiracy theory.” For the purposes of this discussion, it will not be necessary to flesh out in detail the historical and ideological development of cultural Marxism, which has already been done in many other articles such as this one by Jeffrey Tucker. A concise working definition will suffice.
Traditionally, Marxism as put forth by Marx himself divided people into economic classes. There were the bourgeoisie, the wealthy capitalists who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, the working-class masses who were supposedly oppressed by the bourgeoisie. Marx predicted that at a certain point, working-class discontent would boil over into a violent revolution to overthrow the hated bourgeoisie and establish socialism. Note that according to Marxist theory, there could be no such thing as “equal rights” for everyone. This was due to a concept of “class consciousness” that he proposed, where one’s socio-economic class prevented him from seeing reality as it was perceived by other classes. In other words, all reality was deemed subjective based on one’s socio-economic class. Of course, anyone with a functioning brain will realize this results in a performative contradiction (so to speak) known as the Liar’s Paradox, but such contradictions are commonplace with leftists. The major implication of this idea is that there is no possibility of rational dialogue between the “oppressed” proletariat and the “privileged” bourgeoisie because neither side would be able to see things from the other’s perspective. Anyone advocating for capitalism, therefore, could not possibly be doing so on a rational basis but because he was a capitalist stooge blinded by his privilege. According to Marx, the impossibility of rational argumentation meant that the bourgeoisie would have to be completely disenfranchised in a socialist order because otherwise the bourgeoisie would continue to fight for their class interests and use their “privilege” to reinstate capitalism. Therefore, a socialist order would have to be brought about by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The difference between the traditional Marxist class theory explained above and cultural Marxism is quite simple. The theory itself remains the same in the case of cultural Marxism it’s simply applied to different categories. Instead of dealing strictly with socio-economic class, cultural Marxists focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability status, and a host of other cultural categories. Such thinking has given rise to “intersectionality,” a prevalent form of cultural Marxism which stresses a relation between the various “oppressed” classes of different demographics and the need for them to work together to overthrow the supposed white, capitalist, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, conservative, Christian patriarchy. As such, the “intersectional” cultural Marxist evaluates each person by placing him/her/”xir” on a totem pole of privilege vs. oppression. A white gay male, for instance, is more oppressed than a white straight male, but more privileged than a black gay male. Still more oppressed would be a black lesbian, and even further down the totem pole would be a black transgender lesbian, and even further down would be a black, Muslim, transgender, mentally disabled (or as they say, “neurodivergent”), morbidly obese lesbian. Essentially, the idea is that the more “oppressed” one is based on her position on the totem pole, the more deference and sympathy she ought to receive from society to rectify the alleged injustice of her oppression. For example, many cultural Marxists believe that whites ought to pay reparations to blacks as a form of collective restitution for slavery and Jim Crow laws. Moreover, the left promotes affirmative action initiatives and anti-discrimination laws, believing that if one is part of an “oppressed” group then he has a right to demand access to another person’s goods and services. Of course, for example, this doesn’t apply to “deplorable white male” Trump supporters nor Trump himself.
In short, cultural Marxism is simply traditional Marxist class theory repackaged in terms of cultural rather than economic classes. However, the end goal of bringing about a socialist society remains in place for the vast majority of cultural Marxists.
The Infiltration and Subversion of Academic, Religious, and Political Institutions
In the same way that traditional Marxists like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky believed in the promotion of worldwide revolution, cultural Marxists today follow the words of Martin Luther King Jr., that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The logical implication of these words is that “justice” – that is, the leftist conception of it – will never be secured until the entire world is remade according to the multicultural, egalitarian vision of the left. Interestingly, this sentiment seems to be common among neoconservatives as well, who often speak of “spreading freedom and democracy” to countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. It is for this reason that neoconservatives may be categorized as leftists.
Cultural Marxists use very different tactics than the Soviet revolutionaries of old or the neocons of today. Rather than bring about revolution through direct military force, they exert slow and subtle influence on social institutions. The hope is that after generations of gradual subversion, these institutions will embody the Marxist values of radical egalitarianism and opposition to “bourgeois” social norms like the nuclear family. Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, wrote at length about achieving revolution through cultural influence, which was referred to by his student, Rudi Dutschke, as the “long march through the institutions.” Although Gramsci and Dutschke were classical Marxists who adhered to the old class theory of socio-economic status, they too recognized the value of subverting traditional cultural mores in establishing a communist social order. For as Friedrich Engels claimed, the nuclear family was a capitalist invention based on unnatural hierarchy, and as Marx claimed, religion was the “opiate of the masses” which prevented them from rising up in revolution against capitalism. Thus, the two most central institutions in Western civilization, the nuclear family and the Christian church, would have to be overthrown to bring about a communist social order.
Hence, every institution of ideological influence whether universities, churches, or political organizations would have to be conquered by Marxism. For until these institutions reflected Marxist ideals, they would continue to serve as tools of “capitalist oppression”. Contemporary cultural Marxists believe they would also continue to embody racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, …etc. Thus, both classical Marxists and cultural Marxists believe the “long march through the institutions” is key to establishing their socialist utopia in the West.
One does not have to look far to see the effects of the “long march” through the university campus today. A brief glance through the articles published at Campus Reform and The College Fix in addition to statistics such as these provide plenty of evidence for the success of cultural Marxists in exerting leftist dominance in academia. Any readers who have graduated from or are currently in university can probably attest first-hand to the overwhelmingly leftist dispositions of the majority of students on campus. One need not be a right-winger to realize this is a problem. Left-leaning moderates like Jonathan Haidt and Conor Friedersdorf have, on multiple occasions, condemned the “coddling of the American mind” occurring on campuses which is particularly reflective of the Marxist disdain for rational dialogue with “oppressors.” Indeed, the university campus has become Exhibit A for cultural Marxist subversion. Multiculturalism, radical feminism, an ever-expanding list of genders and sexual orientations, endless campaigns to rename campus buildings, “social justice”, and “bias response teams” have become characteristic of the Marxist-infested university, where the Marxist “oppression/privilege” narrative dominates political discourse. Currently, only a few brave souls in academia, such as Jordan Peterson, remain to challenge the “progressive” orthodoxy.
Another institution which has been a prominent target for cultural Marxists is the Christian church. Demands for “racial reconciliation” among the evangelical sphere today have led many Christians to uncritically support the Marxist “Black Lives Matter” movement. “Social justice” as a whole, in fact, has gained quite a bit of ground among the church, partially due to the influence of progressive Christian sites like Sojourners, Patheos, Relevant Magazine, and the Reformed African American Network (RAAN). One will find most of the pet cultural Marxist causes championed on these sites, from feminism, to LGBTQIABCDEFGHIJK advocacy, to Black Lives Matter-style race baiting, and actual Marxist economic policies. The influence and rise to power of Pope Francis, who has enchanted progressives and alienated traditionalists with his considerably left-leaning political (and in some cases theological) views, is yet another example of cultural Marxism making its way throughout the Christian church. The Pope’s concern for the “oppressed” has led him to voice support for policies such as large-scale wealth redistribution, a global central bank, unrestricted migration into Europe, and even communism. Tom Woods, a traditional Catholic himself, recently recorded a podcast with George Neumayr, author of “The Political Pope”, discussing the far-left views, Marxist connections, hostility toward Vatican dissenters, and other troubling characteristics of Francis’ papacy. Fortunately, the disease of Marxism has not overtaken the church to the same extent as it has academia. Like Jordan Peterson in the academic world, there are many great Christian intellectuals who have continued to resist and push back against cultural Marxism over the past few decades, and many great books (such as this one and this one) published to dispel the claims of leftist Christians. Traditional Christians must remain vigilant if the advance of the Marxist Christian left is to be repelled.
Finally, cultural Marxist influence in political parties, think tanks, and other political organizations should be addressed. Through the relentless activism of the far left and their infiltration into these organization, the Overton window of public discourse has gradually shifted to the left. This is done with the aid of “reasonable moderates” in said organizations who either knowingly or unknowingly ostracize dissenters to the leftist orthodoxy as “right-wing extremist nutjobs.” These “reasonable moderates,” which include neocons like John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain in the Republican Party, fundamentally agree with the left in their overall philosophy of government but attempt to superficially distinguish themselves in name only. Irving Kristol admitted they “accepted the New Deal in principle,” as the “godfather of neoconservatism.” With the ascendancy of these “moderate” neocons, the Old Right – the only real opposition to the warfare-welfare state – slowly declined in influence. Today, anyone espousing the anti-interventionist views of Old Right champions like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater are branded as extremists, isolationists, racists, …etc. from both the progressive and neoconservative left. Are these “moderate” politicians cultural Marxists themselves? Perhaps not. However, it is undeniable that their refusal to embrace or even debate the politically incorrect views of the Old Right (such as opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964) is fundamentally rooted in a fear of being brought to account by cultural Marxists. In fact, Rand Paul himself was moved to rescind his criticisms of the Civil Rights Act after blistering public criticism from those who accused him of being a racist for defending private property rights. The cultural Marxists themselves may not be many in number, but they exercise a massive amount of influence on public opinion, particularly with the help of a sympathetic (mainstream) media apparatus.
As many of the readers here are probably aware, libertarianism itself has undergone a split between the right-wing paleolibertarians (e.g. the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell Column, The Property and Freedom Society, and Radical Capitalist) and the left-leaning or “moderate” libertarians (e.g. the Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, Libertarianism.org, Center For A Stateless Society, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and the Libertarian Party itself). A more detailed history of the origins of this split can be found here, investigating the rise of the Koch-funded “Beltway libertarian” think tank-complex in opposition to the efforts of Murray Rothbard to keep libertarianism focused on philosophy and principles. The efforts of many libertarians to “moderate” their message has not resulted in the growth of real libertarianism but rather in the creation of many faux libertarians who have never read a single work of Mises or Rothbard and conceive of libertarianism as being “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” Hence, the rise of “libertarians” like Gary Johnson who support leftist, egalitarian initiatives like “anti-discrimination” (i.e. forced integration) laws, universal basic income, carbon taxes, and apparently “agrees 73% with what Bernie Sanders says.” Much of this was part of a failed attempt to attract disgruntled Sanders supporters rather than the “Never Trump” conservatives who would arguably have been much more receptive to a genuine libertarian candidate. The fact that Johnson was nominated in spite of his blatantly anti-libertarian support for anti-discrimination laws (which was brilliantly exposed by Austin Petersen in the debates) demonstrates the extent to which the Libertarian Party is willing to bend its principles to appease the egalitarian left. In short, the “moderation” of libertarianism to appease the demands of cultural (and economic) Marxists has only served to advance the cause of leftism, not libertarianism.
O’Sullivan’s Law and the Case for Right-Wing Libertarianism
After observing the success of cultural Marxist infiltration in the academic, religious, and political arenas, only one conclusion seems apparent: O’Sullivan’s Law, often dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, is often true. The law states that any institution that is not expressly right-wing will eventually become left-wing over time. This is particularly evident in the “paleo” split in the libertarian camp – while the Koch-funded organizations have been veering left and away from the libertarian message for some time now, the more right-wing Rothbardian-affiliated groups like The Mises Institute and LRC have showed no signs whatsoever of wavering from principled libertarianism. Why is this? It’s hard to say for certain, but it can be roughly answered in the form of the following eight-step cycle (applied to the church as an example):
Leftist ideas are introduced into a major conservative denomination through a few vocal members. Through heavy use of emotional manipulation and guilt-tripping, more and more members, and eventually entire congregations become leftist. Church discipline is not applied. Conservative leadership acts only after leftists begin taking over leadership positions. Initial resistance gives way to retreat, as conservatives decide to cut their losses and leave the denomination for a smaller, more conservative one. That denomination grows and eventually becomes a major denomination. Meanwhile, the successfully subverted denomination hemorrhages membership, as there are not enough leftists interested in Christianity or Christians interested in leftism to keep it alive after conservative exodus. In a number of decades, the newly burgeoning conservative denomination becomes the new target for leftist subversion. The cycle repeats.
This cycle provides a good explanation for why historically conservative denominations like the SBC and PCA are now the new cultural battlegrounds, given that the mainline denominations have all but succumbed to cultural Marxism. But why does the reverse never happen? Why is it that leftist organizations are rarely ever infiltrated by right-wingers? It is a difference of mindset. As mentioned before, the leftist attitude is embodied in the words of MLK Jr. that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Right-wingers generally do not exhibit this mindset, which is why their political efforts are more commonly focused around preserving their own way of life from statist social engineering than attempting to remake society as a whole into their own image. Traditional conservatives, such as the Taft-Goldwater Republicans, had a much more “live and let live” attitude, recognizing correctly that one “cannot legislate morality.” The left, on the other hand, is not content to simply “live and let live,” for doing so would be to allow “injustice” in some parts of the world, creating a “threat to justice everywhere.”
So, then, what is the solution? Should we as libertarians adopt the same subversive mindset of the left and begin infiltrating leftist institutions? Perhaps it might be possible. But such an endeavor is unlikely to succeed when public opinion is already so strongly opposed to libertarian and right wing ideas. Progressive ideas, as intellectually vacuous as they are, do have a naturally stronger emotional appeal to them. In other words, pushing the Overton window to the right seems to be much more difficult than pushing it to the left.
What if instead of attempting to reverse O’Sullivan’s Law, libertarians were to simply heed its warning and become explicitly right-wing? There is a danger to that as well, namely the risk that the libertarian message of private property rights and non-aggression will become “thickened.” However, it is certainly possible to create a “right-wing libertarianism” which asserts the value of right-wing causes without conflating them with the definition of libertarianism itself. An example of such a principled right-wing libertarianism would be the paleolibertarianism promoted by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the 1990s. Rockwell outlines the ten principles of paleolibertarianism in his 1990 article “The Case for Paleolibertarianism” in Liberty Magazine:
“Briefly, paleolibertarianism, with its roots deep in the Old Right, sees:
The leviathan State as the institutional source of evil throughout history. The unhampered free market as a moral and practical imperative. Private property as an economic and moral necessity for a free society. The garrison State as a preeminent threat to liberty and social well being. The welfare State as organized theft that victimizes producers and eventually even its “clients.” Civil liberties based on property rights as essential to a just society. The egalitarian ethic as morally reprehensible and destructive of private property and social authority. Social authority-as embodied in the family, church, community, and other intermediating institutions-as helping protect the individual from the State and as necessary for a free and virtuous society. Western culture as eminently worthy of preservation and defense. Objective standards of morality, especially as found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as essential.”
Rockwell continues:
The libertarian must agree with the first six points, but most activists would be outraged by the last four. Yet there is nothing unlibertarian in them. A critic might point out that libertarianism is a political doctrine with nothing to say about these matters. In one sense, the critic would be right. The libertarian catechist need know only one answer to one question: What is the the highest political end of man? The answer: freedom. But no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked. It is thus understandable and desirable that libertarianism have a cultural tone, but not that it be anti-religious, modernist, morally relativist, and egalitarian. This tone rightly repels the vast majority of Americans and has helped keep libertarianism such a small movement.
While it is unlikely that the majority of Americans today would be as opposed to leftist cultural causes as in the 1990s, the fact remains that libertarianism is naturally more compatible with the right than with the left, as I have argued previously. Thus, insofar as right-wing cultural causes do not contradict the libertarian principles of private property rights and non-aggression, it would be prudent for libertarians to adopt at least a sympathetic stance toward them so as to better attract the demographics most likely to embrace libertarianism. Consider the Ron Paul movement of 2008 and 2012 which introduced so many, especially young, people to the ideas of liberty. Rather than focusing on pet leftist causes like recreational drugs, gay marriage, and open borders (to the ire of Brink Lindsey and Nicholas Sarwark), Ron instead focused on appealing to the Republican voter base and making the conservative Christian case for liberty and peace. That is not to say that he abandoned libertarian principles, of course, as he did voice opposition to the drug war and support for marriage privatization multiple times in his campaigns, but he did not attempt to pander to the left on the basis of those issues. This contrasts with the Johnson/Weld strategy of playing to the left in the hopes of converting Sanders-supporting socialists to libertarianism, which turned out to be an abysmal failure. While both campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful (atleast insofar as neither candidate was elected President), which one ended up growing the libertarian movement more? Ron Paul’s brand of Christian-conservative-libertarianism, or Gary Johnson’s half-Republican, half-Democrat libertarianism?
It is time for libertarians to halt the centrist posturing and futile (and counterproductive) strategy of pandering to the left. Libertarians need to realize that being right-wing need not conflict with thin-libertarian principles, and that aligning with the true right is the only way to effectively thwart the State and bring about a libertarian social order.Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts became the latest establishment incumbent to fend off a primary challenge from a Tea Party-backed candidate Tuesday night, as he survived a late charge by Dr. Milton Wolf.
Roberts's win means that Senate incumbents have now prevailed in Kansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi, though it took six-term Republican Sen. Thad Cochran two tries before defeating primary opponent Chris McDaniel, who is challenging the outcome.
With 98 percent of the precincts reporting early Wednesday, Roberts led Wolf by just under 19,000 votes, winning 48 percent of the ballots cast to Wolf's 41 percent.
Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement saw mixed results Tuesday, in keeping with what it has done so far this year.
In the Kansas congressional primaries, two conservative GOP House members swept into office as part of the Tea Party surge in 2010 -- Rep. Tim Huelskamp and Rep. Mike Pompeo -- survived tough primary challenges from candidates trying to tap into voter dissatisfaction with Washington.
Pompeo defeated popular former Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who held the seat for 16 years, while Huelskamp turned back farmer and educator Alan LaPolice.
However, in Michigan, Tea Party-backed Rep. Kerry Bentivolio was upset by establishment-backed attorney David Trott in his GOP primary, while fellow Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash defeated investment adviser Brian Ellis in his primary.
Despite Congress' abysmal approval ratings, only three incumbents have lost this election cycle -- Bentivolio and fellow Republican Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia and Ralph Hall of Texas.
In Roberts' victory speech, he called upon Republicans in Kansas and across the country to unite and defeat Washington Democrats’ liberal march.
“We cannot support a fractured party. The stakes are too high,” Roberts told the crowd. Republicans need to gain six seats in November to take control of the Senate.
“We must be united,” Roberts continued. “We need to take another hill in the fight to stop the liberal agenda. Help us replace the Obama way with the Kansas way.”
The 78-year-old Roberts had to overcome Wolf campaign attacks branding the incumbent as part of the Washington establishment and out of touch with Kansas voters, pointing out Roberts owns a home in the nation's capital while renting in Kansas.
Roberts, a conservative, also had to move even farther right to survive the challenge.
Though he backed the nomination of former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to be secretary of Health and Human Services, the three-term senator was among the first to call for her resignation after the disastrous ObamaCare rollout.
Roberts also voted against a U.N. treaty on the rights of the disabled in December 2012 despite the appeals of former Kansas GOP Sen. Bob Dole, who sat in a wheelchair in the well of the Senate.
Wolf, a radiologist and distant cousin of President Obama, cut into Roberts’ 20-point polling lead in the closing weeks of the race, but was also damaged by political attacks, primarily TV ads about him posting gruesome X-ray images on Facebook in 2010.
The 43-year-old Wolf apologized for posting the images, including one of fatal gunshot wounds, and making Facebook comments intended to be humorous. However, his campaign, backed by the Tea Party Express, failed to catch political fire.
The other victorious Tea Party-backed candidates this year were Dave Brat, who upset Cantor, the House majority leader; Senate candidate Ben Sasse in Nebraska; and West Virginia House candidate Alex Mooney.
Roberts is favored to win the November election in the reliably Republican state. He will face Democratic candidate Chad Taylor, a district attorney from Topeka, and independent candidate Greg Orman, a businessman who has submitted more than twice the number of signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
In the Kansas GOP gubernatorial primary, incumbent Sam Brownback won a closer-than-expected vote against Jennifer Winn, the owner of a Wichita-area property management firm whose platform included support for legalizing marijuana. Both parties' officials had agreed that a single challenge was likely to receive about 20 percent of the vote under any circumstances. With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, Winn had received almost 94,000 votes, just under 37 percent of all ballots cast.
Brownback now will face a tougher-than-expected race from Democratic challenger Paul Davis because of questions about whether massive personal income tax cuts enacted at the governor's urging are boosting the economy, as promised, or wrecking the state |
TV channels. Firefly uses X-Ray, powered by IMDb, to show information on actors, plot details, and related content—add titles to your Watchlist or download to watch later. For recognized artworks, Firefly will show related information from Wikipedia.
• Foreign language translation
Firefly quickly translates written French, Spanish, Italian, and German text into English.
• Music
Firefly recognizes songs so you can access artist information, play related songs, download albums direct to your Fire phone, or add them to your Wish List to purchase later on. With Firefly-enabled apps like iHeartRadio and StubHub, you can create radio stations based on an identified artist, or even find tickets for their next show.
• Over 70 million products
Recognize household items, books, DVDs, CDs, video games, and more. Access product details, add items to your Wish List, or order on Amazon straight from your Fire phone.
Dynamic Perspective
A custom-designed sensor system that responds to how you hold, view, and move your phone.
• Immersive apps and games
Peek in maps to show Yelp ratings. In StubHub stadium view, see 90 degrees to the left and right of your seat, as if you were actually there, looking around. In games, like Lili, take on the character's viewpoint and move your head to look around corners, obstacles, and other objects.
• One-handed short cuts
Access menus, shortcuts, and useful information with tilt, swivel, and peek.
Tilt for panels—use the left panel to navigate menus, and the right panel to access useful information and shortcuts, like attaching photos to a text message, viewing song lyrics, and more.
Swivel for access to important notifications and quick actions like Mayday, Flashlight, Settings, and more.
Peek keeps your display uncluttered by revealing additional details and quick actions only when you need it.
• One-handed reading
With auto-scroll, scan long web pages without ever having to touch the screen.
Fire OS
• A customized OS for Fire phone
Fire phone is powered by the latest version of Fire OS, which starts with Android and adds cloud services, a content-forward user interface, built-in media libraries, productivity apps, and platform enhancements to integrate Amazon's digital content and improve performance.
• Work on the go
Review docs, presentations, and stay connected to work from wherever you are. Fire OS features a robust Outlook e-mail experience with ActiveSync, calendar, and contacts support. Triage email, view appointments, and more directly from the home screen. Tilt to see meeting details in calendar, or tap to send a quick message to meeting recipients.
• Quick Switch
Double tap the home button to show an overlay of all running apps so you can easily switch between them.
• Collections
Organize your apps and media items into dedicated folders, accessible right from the home screen grid.
• Accessibility features
Blind and visually impaired customers can leverage accessibility tools such as Screen Reader, Explore by Touch, and Screen Magnifier.X-47B's maiden flight at Edwards Air Force Base Northropgrumman.com
The X-47B, an unmanned stealth bomber, successfully completed its first test - a 29 minute fly by over Edwards Air Force Base on Friday. If the project is successful, it would mark a major evolution in the history of combat aviation. If it works as advertised, it could signal the end for the need to send human fighter pilots into combat. However, more test flights the X-47B are scheduled and it's yet unclear when the strike fighter might enter production.
In the meantime, where's clear is that this is a first-class piece of technology. The six-year $635.8 million project is slated for completion by 2013. If you want to geek out, here's the Northrup Grumman spec sheet. Also, Fast Company offers a primer on the craft and its place in the history of "flying wing research." The X-47B, designed as a flying wedge," is all but invisible to radar, and hard to lock on to with infrared missiles. It's capable of taking off automatically, flying to a location by itself, scanning the scene with a variety of sensors, and then--when commanded to do so by remote pilots--dropping precision-guided weapons on a target, before flying home to an air base or an aircraft carrier." Here's a look at the craft in flight:Recently I posted a few photos on our Face Book page that got a lot of attention. It was a rather unique image with 3 of the Big 5 in one frame. I am not however talking of the 3 herbivores, but an elephant, a buffalo and a lion! What made this sighting even more unique were the circumstances behind the interaction. At one point the lion was stalking nearly alongside the buffalo which even looked around, but never ran. It was as if the elephant was telling the lion not to even dare!!
It was a warm day in the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve and we were heading to exit the park. We were lucky enough to find 2 large bull elephants, which then proceeded to block our path as they often enjoy doing. As we followed them for some 2 km’s down the road in the blazing heat, I was at a loss as to how I was going to get past these enormous animals. I tried creeping up behind him to shoo him off the road but he paid me very little attention.
So we waited, at the mercy of the giants, edging forward when they did and stopping when they decided. I had noticed a couple of cars parked ahead that had been there for some time. I suspected this meant there may be something interesting coming up as cars don’t tend to just sit in the sun on a hot day, which made being stuck behind the Ellies even more frustrating. Suddenly out of the bushes on the left, about 50m ahead a female buffalo emerged onto the verge of the road and began grazing. How lucky we thought!
However what happened next was beyond anything we could have imagined. From the exact spot that the cars were parked a male lion stalked out the long grass and across the road, his eyes fixed on the buffalo. As he approached from behind his target, his focus turned to the elephant ahead of the buffalo. Clearly when he had set out on his stalk to catch his quarry he had not realised that the large pachyderms were dominating this stretch of road. He carried on his stalk, but his eyes were fixed on the bigger elephant that was standing dead centre. In fact from the photo you can see he was actually continuing walking forward. This did not sit well with big Leo and you can see the uncertainty set in. This is where things got really weird!
As we watched with anticipation, the lion a mere metre away from his victim, we awaited the inevitable pounce. It never arrived, instead the lion, so focussed on the monster in the road pulled up alongside the Buff. Making it seem as if the 2 of them were out for a leisurely stroll. Then in the next frame the buffalo looks around, then back ahead, as the lion has its gaze firmly fixed on the elephant, barely acknowledging her. She continues to graze as if nothing is amiss! Almost as if to say; ‘touch me and my buddy over there will give you a beat down to remember’. After a couple more steps, it became too much to resist and the lion attacks, but the photo shows his lack of determination. He bounds after her and then she makes a move that probably saves her life. Instead of heading off into the thick bushes, she makes a left turn right across in front of the elephants. This move completely throws the lion who once again must have been thinking, if I jump on her back, I am just going to get trounced.
He continues to pursue her but doesn’t take his eyes off the elephant, allowing his prized meal to escape. The last photo shows this clearly, a fleeing 700kg Buff and an outstretched lion cursing his bad luck!!Miami Hurricanes legend Bennie Blades isn't bailing on Al Golden, but he has specific concerns he wants to see the Canes coach address this season.
"A lot of times last year [players] were put in very uncomfortable situations," Blades told NBC 6.
Blades, a College Football Hall of Famer, and member of the 1987 National Championship team, says he had lunch with Golden and expressed his opinion.
"I love Coach Golden, love him as a person, but sometimes tough decisions have to be made," he said. "A lot of these guys are going off to the [NFL] and they're becoming all-pros and you wonder,'man, why couldn't he do that at Miami?' but he wasn't put in that position."
Blades said he heard from a lot of Canes players who wanted to play a different style but told him "if I do it, coach is going to bench me."
"His whole thing is, these kids don't have the heart that we once had when we played in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's. my advice was 'hey look, the buck stops with him,'" Blades said.
One of the most frustrating situations for Blades during last year's 6-7 season involved defensive formations.
"When it's 3rd and 1 and these guys are still 15 yards deep, are you kidding me?" he said. "I don't care who you are, if you're a 10-year-old kid, you say'man, what are you doing?' we gotta get back to playing real Hurricane football."
Blades also pointed to the 2nd half of the Florida State game. a game that Miami lost after leading by 16 points.
"You have 'em beat and then all of the sudden your game plan changes to where we're not aggressive anymore, we're sitting back," he said. "We as players question 'what are coaches doing?'"
Despite the concerns, Blades is excited about this upcoming season. He loves what he's seen from sophomore quarterback Brad Kaaya. in fact, he says he went to the spring game and did something out of the ordinary.
"I never take pictures with current guys. I had to take a picture with Brad Kaaya because he reminds me of a young Vinny Testeverde," he said.
Blades said Kaaya is "confident when he comes into the huddle. A confident quarterback can win games when most people think he can't."
Blades' biggest concerns about this year's Hurricanes are the inexperienced offensive and defensive lines. However, he has very high hopes for starting safety Deon Bush.
"I gave him my cell phone number. I told him I'll be at every game critiquing you," Blades said. "I think this kid can have a breakout year and he can be something special. I told his dad, 'I'm tired of going to the Jim Thorpe Award every year and there's not even a UM player invited.'"
Blades won the Jim Thorpe Award for the nation's best defensive back in 1987. He was a two-time college All-American, selected 3rd overall in the NFL Draft by the Detroit Lions where he became a Pro-Bowler in 1991.
See the full interview with Bennie Blades on Sports Final this Sunday at 11:30 p.m. on NBC 6.Jan 14, 2017 | By Julia
Researchers in Saudi Arabia have invented a cheap, easy alternative to the Apple Watch that could make fitness tracking affordable to consumers worldwide.
Meet the “paper watch,” a wearable device that combines common household items such as aluminum foil and sponges with silicon-based soft sensors. All materials are housed in a nifty 3D printed watch casing.
Although “paper watch” may be a bit of a misnomer – in its current stage, the device doesn’t tell time – the easily assemblage gadget comes equipped with all the health monitoring capabilities of designer smartwatches from Apple and Samsung, minus the thousand dollar price tag.
Body temperature, sweat levels, heart rate, and blood pressure can all be tracked from the simple paper watch, which allows wearers to replace soft-sensor components whenever they wear out.
And with prototypes costing only $25 USD, the new gizmo could give high-end brands like Apple a run for their money. The device’s inventors at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have even vowed to slash the already low cost over the next several years.
“I really would like to disrupt the technology world by making technologies available to everyone, especially those who cannot afford them,” says Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, an electrical engineer at KAUST. “My objective is to reduce the price [by] $5 per year in the next five years until it reaches to a point where literally everyone has one.”
The impressively low price is due to the device’s simple construction, which involves basic items found around the house. KAUST engineers create temperature and humidity sensors by using a silver ink pen on Post-It Notes. Pressure sensors are made using aluminum foil, double-sided tape, and microfiber cleaning wipes. These cheap, recyclable sensors are then arranged in a single, bottom layer.
A second layer consists of readout circuitry for the sensors, followed by a third layer that contains an ultra-thin silicon-based microprocessor chip. These layers are in turn covered by circuitry for the battery and power management. Finally, a top layer includes an RFID tag, made once again by drawing on a Post-It Note with silver ink pen and attaching a flexible radio chip. The whole thing gets housed within a basic 3D printed watch casing.
The paper watch has been subjected to rigorous testing, with results showing the prototype to nearly match the accuracy Apple and Samsung’s smartwatches.
Still, the KAUST team plans to continue improving the paper watch’s performance. The paper watch is currently undergoing software testing, with an eye towards pairing the device with users’ smartphones.
Next up, Hussain and his colleagues hope to start a spin-off venture focused on outfitting the elderly population with affordable health monitors. In the meantime, they’re considering adding timekeeping capabilities to the paper watch, as suggested by the name.
“Of course, ‘paper watch’ is a catch phrase, but adding clock capability is easy and we are on that,” says Hussein.
Check out the January issue of the “Advanced Materials Technologies” journal for all the details of the KAUST team’s work.
Posted in 3D Printing Application
Maybe you also like:With all that’s been happening in Washington DC, you may have taken your finger off the pulse of California climate change policy. But now’s a good time to check back in. There’s a new cap-and-trade proposal in town, and it’s turning lots of heads in the state capital.
California is deep in deliberations over cap-and-trade as it prepares to meet a new and ambitious GHG emissions reduction target. The state is aiming to reduce emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. This makes the GHG emissions reductions we’ve achieved so far look timid.
While the state has charted an emissions reduction path out to 2030, the existing GHG cap-and-trade program sunsets in 2020. This means the legislature needs to reauthorize – or replace – the current program to meet this post-2020 ambition. The 260 million metric ton question: What policy can most effectively deliver on this target?
The new cap-and-trade proposal, SB 775, would replace the existing cap-and-trade program in 2021. It has some pundits swooning. David Roberts of Vox writes a glowing endorsement of what he sees as a “clean break” from California’s existing GHG emissions trading program. But other policy experts offer a different view. Economist Rob Stavins argues there’s no need to “repeal and replace” the state’s effective cap-and-trade system. Professor Ann Carlson warns that it could “cause many more problems than those it attempts to solve”.
The proposal covers a lot of ground in 19 pages (Dallas Burtraw provides a great review here). I want to unpack one key piece: the proposed border adjustment. This may sound wonky and weedy, but it’s really important because it aims to bring imports under California’s cap-and-trade program. There’s a lot to like about this idea in theory. But the reality could be a different story.
The Leakage Problem
To put this border adjustment into context, let’s quickly review the problem it’s trying to address. The problem is that California’s climate change policy applies to only a small subset of the sources contributing to the global climate change problem. Pricing carbon only within the state could potentially send business – and associated emissions – out of state.
Suppose you are a California-based producer of an emissions-intensive product, such as cement, glass, or refined oil products. Under a statewide cap-and-trade program, you are required to purchase emissions permits for your GHG emissions. In other words, the policy increases your production costs. If out-of-state producers can supply the California market, this could mean you lose California market share to out-of-state rivals who don’t face the same cost increase. If you are a California-based operation that exports its products, this could make it harder for you to compete in out-of-state markets. In either scenario, the policy can shift production out of California. The associated emissions “leakage” erodes emissions reductions achieved within the state.
Source
The Current Response
Concerns about leakage loom large, so it is essential that California’s cap-and-trade program incorporate some meaningful response to this problem. Right now, the response comes in the form of free permit allocation. A share of permits (approximately 15%) are distributed free to those industries that are deemed to be at leakage risk.
You may be wondering how requiring firms to purchase permits – and then handing them back for free- achieves anything at all. The key is that emitters are required to turn in permits to cover their emissions, but these same firms are allocated free permits based on production. So you (the producer) see both an emissions tax (which provides an incentive to invest in emissions abatement) and a production incentive (which helps to ‘level the carbon playing field’ with out-of-state producers and thus mitigate leakage).
If we are concerned about emissions leakage (and we should be), this output-based free permit allocation approach can strike a balance between incentivizing emissions abatement and mitigating leakage. That’s the good news. The less-good news is that this strategy comes with side effects. For one thing, it dilutes the carbon price signal that California consumers receive when they are making their consumption decisions. It also allocates the revenue from the sale of valuable permits to industry when this revenue could alternatively be put towards other good uses.
The Proposed Alternative
There’s more than one way to skin this leaky cat. SB 775 proposes an alternative that I think most (all?) economists would prefer in theory. The idea is simple and elegant. First, identify imported products whose price would be materially impacted by the carbon permit price. Then require importers of these products into California to purchase permits for the emissions baked into their product. As for California-based exporters, they are exempt from the obligation to purchase permits for emissions associated with products sold outside the state (the SB 775 language on this is hard to parse…. thanks to Michael Wara for clarifying this important point!)
Why is this the theoretically preferred approach? For one thing, consumer prices in California rise to fully reflect the carbon price signal. This helps us consumers account for the full costs of our consumption, and adjust our behavior in response. Second, California can use the revenues from the sale of permits for other purposes, versus freely allocating to industry (although exempting exports means no revenues are collected from exporting firms).
The upshot is that this border adjustment seems like a winning proposal in theory. But the winning horse, in theory, need not be the most fit to ride through the real-world challenges that lie ahead.
Comparisons between an elegant proposal-on-paper and the existing workhorse that’s spent years slogging through messy policy implementation can be misleading. It’s easy to find flaws in the current permit allocation approach to leakage mitigation when compared against some theoretical ideal. But the more relevant point of comparison is the border adjustment after it hits the buzzsaw of reality.
Source
Here’s my wet-blanket list of reality-bites concerns:
We import lots of stuff from lots of places: Under the border adjustment, California will need to estimate the carbon emissions baked into all the emissions-intensive products we import. There is already some precedent for this kind of accounting exercise covering one product under the state’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS). Nine full-time staff have been hard at work estimating the GHG emissions factors for transportation fuels consumed in the state. This table summarizes the hundreds of “carbon pathways” (e.g. “South Dakota corn ethanol”, “Brazilian molasses ethanol”) that span the space of transportation fuels. It can take months to estimate a single pathway. The number of source-product combinations would increase dramatically under the border adjustment.
Under the border adjustment, California will need to estimate the carbon emissions baked into all the emissions-intensive products we import. There is already some precedent for this kind of accounting exercise covering one product under the state’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS). Nine full-time staff have been hard at work estimating the GHG emissions factors for transportation fuels consumed in the state. This table summarizes the hundreds of “carbon pathways” (e.g. “South Dakota corn ethanol”, “Brazilian molasses ethanol”) that span the space of transportation fuels. It can take months to estimate a single pathway. The number of source-product combinations would increase dramatically under the border adjustment. A cap on consumption emissions is harder to measure: It’s worth pointing out that, under a border adjustment, the state’s emissions targets and the associated emissions cap would have to be redefined. California currently caps emissions from in-state production. But under a border adjustment, the cap-and-trade regulation would cap emissions associated with in-state consumption. This means using the aforementioned emissions factors to estimate emissions in our imports, and subtracting the emissions from in-state production that get exported outside the state.
It’s worth pointing out that, under a border adjustment, the state’s emissions targets and the associated emissions cap would have to be redefined. California currently caps emissions from in-state production. But under a border adjustment, the cap-and-trade regulation would cap emissions associated with in-state consumption. This means using the aforementioned emissions factors to estimate emissions in our imports, and subtracting the emissions from in-state production that get exported outside the state. Export reshuffling? Under the SB 775 proposal, emissions associated with California production destined for export markets would be eligible for a border tax “refund”, whereas emissions associated with production that stays in California would remain under the cap. This asymmetric treatment of what stays home and what gets sent outside of California creates an incentive to re-allocate more emissions-intensive production to the export market in order to avoid the carbon price.
Under the SB 775 proposal, emissions associated with California production destined for export markets would be eligible for a border tax “refund”, whereas emissions associated with production that stays in California would remain under the cap. This asymmetric treatment of what stays home and what gets sent outside of California creates an incentive to re-allocate more emissions-intensive production to the export market in order to avoid the carbon price. Legal challenges: The border adjustment could pose a triple threat to the program: challenges from within the state, challenges under the commerce clause, and challenges from WTO. The legal resources required to defend this provision could be large. Notably, the SB 775 language does include an escape clause. If a judicial opinion, settlement, or other legally binding decision reduces the state’s authority to implement the border adjustment, the legislation authorizes a return to free allowance allocation for the affected products. But this return would be messy, in part because it would require a re-adjustment of the emissions cap
Conclusion
California is demonstrating a working example of how emissions leakage can be mitigated in a regional emissions trading program. There’s no question that the current approach falls short of the theoretical ideal. But the real question is: could an alternative approach work better? SB 775 has raised the profile of an important conversation about what those alternatives could look like.
My concern with the border adjustment proposal is that it seems to put the cart before the proverbial horse. Success hinges critically on our ability to come up with legally-defensible measures of greenhouse gas emissions intensities for all the carbon-intensive products we import. It’s worth noting that exploratory work along these lines is already underway (Resolution 10-42 directed the Air Resources Board to review the technical and legal issues related to a border adjustment for the cement sector). Given all that’s at stake, we should double down on these efforts to develop and test this approach before we bet the farm on its real-world durability.Palmer showed his strongest form of a difficult season so far at Spa, outpacing teammate Nico Hulkenberg in practice and qualifying before suffering a suspected loss of gearbox oil pressure after he'd reached Q3.
That sparked a gearbox change and a grid penalty that meant Palmer started 14th on the grid, and he could only finish 13th in the race - having had to start on used ultrasofts and suffering a clash with Fernando Alonso that he likened to his teammate’s tussle with Kevin Magnussen in Hungary.
Permane told Motorsport.com: “He was like a different guy this weekend.
“I hope that race hasn’t dented him and we can just go to Monza and he can carry where he left off because he was loving driving the car, he didn’t really make any changes, he was happy with it all weekend.
“It was very good. It was undoubtedly his best weekend of the year.
“He’s gone from being five or six tenths behind Nico to three or four tenths in front of him this weekend, up until the race, where Nico was back on top of things.”
Though Permane admitted it was confusing that Palmer “seemed to go backwards in the race”, the team had not completed a meaningful debrief at the time.
Palmer, who is still searching for his first points of the season, described it as a ‘back to normal how I hoped to start the season’ kind of weekend”.
“I felt confidence in the car that I haven’t felt all season really,” he told Motorsport.com. “I could attack, I could push and I could chuck it around without thinking it’s going to put me in the wall at some moment.
“It was a nice change compared to pretty much most of the season.”
The Briton has been under intense pressure this year, and his Q3 failure means he is still yet to outqualify his teammate in the first 12 races of the season.
Rumours of Robert Kubica’s potential return to F1, which included a day of testing the Renault RS17 in Hungary, has also added to speculation about Palmer’s future.
“I’ve had this pressure for a year and a half and it’s always the same,” said Palmer. “I’m not bothered.
“I’ll do the same for Monza - turn up, try and get a great result and not even focus on Singapore, the future, the past or anything.”
Lawrence Barretto/Ben Anderson/Aaron RookThe England players try out the impressive Sun Life Stadium surface
The England players try out the impressive Sun Life Stadium surface
The England team tested out the immaculate Sun Life Stadium surface on Tuesday morning as they prepared for their meeting with Ecuador.
All 23 members of Roy Hodgson's World Cup squad, plus standby players John Stones and Jon Flanagan, were in action as they acclimatised themselves to the hot and humid conditions.
Miami was chosen as venue for this pre-World Cup training camp due to its climatic similarities to Manaus, where they meet Italy in their tournament opener on 14 June.
England v Ecuador International Match
8pm (BST), Wednesday 4 June 2014
Sun Life Stadium, Miami
Live on ITV
"We are happy to be in Miami to train," Hodgson said in his press conference after the session. "It's a perfect place to prepare for what we can expect in Brazil."
And though there were plenty of clouds in the sky, the sun did creep out and make for a warm morning. A mild breeze took the edge off the temperature but allowed the team to get a real feel for the conditions.
The team returns to the Sun Life Stadium - home of NFL team Miami Dolphins - on Wednesday afternoon and will also meet Honduras there on Saturday.
Check out the gallery of images from training at the top of the page.
Follow the England team throughout the tournament right here on TheFA.com or get the latest from inside the camp via the official Twitter @England.The Broward Sheriff’s Office is looking for a man named Emmanuel Innocent for his part in the robbery of a man who was selling his cell phone.
Around 7:15 on May 15, deputies responded to the scene of a shooting in the 1200 block of West of Hillsboro Blvd. in Deerfield Beach.
The victim had fired at a group of suspects whom he agreed to meet to sell a cell phone, which he had advertised on Craig’s List.
During the investigation, detectives determined the four suspects held the victim at gunpoint and took him in their vehicle after stealing his phone and money. As the driver slowed to make a turn, the victim jumped out of the vehicle and fired several shots at the car. One of the bullets struck the tire, which disabled the vehicle and the suspects fled on foot.
BSO deputies apprehended Yodilion Jeanty, 23, and Kesnel Kercius, 21, that same night.
The third suspect, Emmanuel Innocent remains at large and is wanted on a warrant for armed robbery with a firearm and kidnapping with a firearm. The fourth suspect has not yet been identified.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Emmanuel Innocent, 22, or this robbery is asked to call Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS.
A reward of up to $3,000 is available for information that leads to an arrest.The just released ActiveBoard is the successor to iOS 6’s ActiveDock jailbreak tweak. It allows you to quickly identify active applications without opening the App Switcher.
The tweak, which is again designed by Surenix and developed by Filippo Bigarella, is a bit more ambitious than its predecessor. Whereas ActiveDock only applied to the applications running in the iOS 6 dock, ActiveBoard, as its name so implies, can influence all app icons on the entire iOS 7 SpringBoard.
Not only does ActiveBoard identify running applications, but it can help you to quickly identify apps with awaiting notifications. Have a look at our video walkthrough after the break to see ActiveBoard in motion.
Once you install ActiveBoard, there are no options to configure and you should immediately spot its influence on your device’s SpringBoard. Running applications receive a white glowing perimeter, while applications with notifications receive a red glowing border along with a native 3D zoom animation. Killing a running app and/or clearing its notifications will stop ActiveBoard from influencing the app icon in question.
ActiveBoard is a tweak with a simple premise, and one could argue that it does its job relatively well. Personally, I find that it makes my already busy-looking device look even busier. It gives me a feeling that “stuff is happening” and I need to attend to it quickly.
To help eliminate the hectic feeling, Surenix recommends using an additional jailbreak tweak to remove the stock badge notifications. While this would go a long way in simplifying the Home screen, I believe that this option should have been built into ActiveBoard itself.
ActiveBoard eschews adding a preference panel to the stock Settings app, but doing so means that users can’t manage the individual aspects of the tweak. If I had the option, I’d quickly disable the red pulsating icons that are used to signify apps with waiting notifications.
I know a lot of people think that I automatically love anything that passes my desk with the name Surenix, Sentry, or Filippo stamped on it, but that’s just not the case, and this is one example. While the tweak will surely appeal to some users, it’s not something that I could see myself personally using on a long-term basis.
I understand that the changes to the dock design in iOS 7 was a major factor in Filippo and Surenix’s decision to expand the tweak to affect all applications on the Springboard, but I think that from a usability standpoint, this has had a negative effect on the tweak. If you have a lot of running apps and pending notifications, your entire SpringBoard will look like something from the Starship Enterprise.
Of course, that’s just my thoughts on the matter, and you ultimately may disagree. With that in mind, if you’re a current ActiveDock owner, ActiveBoard is free of charge. However, if you’re new to the concept of ActiveBoard/ActiveDock, then you’ll be asked to pony up $1.99 via the BigBoss repo.
What do you think about ActiveBoard? Do you have a place for it in your day-to-day workflow? Sound off in the comments section down below.While playing around with the newly released Glimmer, I wanted to deploy my demo application so others could poke around with it.
In order to facilitate shared solutions between Ember and Glimmer, the Glimmer application structure utilizes the same tooling that full blown Ember apps use, this means that we can leverage Ember CLI, ember-cli-deploy and ember-cli-deploy-git to make this a breeze.
Note: These steps are exactly the same for deploying an Ember app. ☺️
Setup 👣
Setting up deployment to gh-pages is pretty simple.
Install the underlying packages:
ember install ember-cli-deploy ember install ember-cli-deploy-build ember install ember-cli-deploy-git
Update your config/deploy.js configuration to add the git key:
ENV.git = { repo: '[email protected]:username/repo.git', branch: 'gh-pages', worktreePath: '/tmp/deploy' };
Initialize your gh-pages branch:
git checkout --orphan gh-pages git rm -rf. git commit --allow-empty --message="Initial commit"
Deployment 🚀
Once the setup is complete, you can deploy via:
ember deploy production
Profit 💸
Thanks to the awesome ember-cli-deploy ecosystem, we can all deploy Ember and Glimmer apps with ease! 🎉Richmond has signed former Port Adelaide midfielder Andrew Moore as a free agent.
The Tigers secured the services of the strongly-built Moore on a one-year contract.
Moore, 189cm and 87kg, played 55 games and kicked 18 goals in a six-year career with the Power, with several injury setbacks along the way hampering his progress there.
He had initially been selected by Port Adelaide with its first pick (No. 9 overall) in the 2009 AFL National Draft.
The 24-year-old younger brother of former Richmond defender Kelvin Moore is renowned for his clearance and contested ball prowess, and ability to hit the scoreboard.
“We’re very pleased to be able to bring Andrew into the Richmond Football Club as a free agent,” said the Tigers’ General Manager of Football, Dan Richardson.
“He is a player who has a proven ability to mix it at the highest level, particularly in a contested situation and at stoppages.
“At 24 years of age, we feel his football can continue to develop and reach the potential that led to him being a top 10 selection in the 2009 Draft."
Moore’s best season at Port was in 2013, when he played 17 games, including the team’s elimination final win against Collingwood and the semi-final loss to Geelong. He averaged 16.4 disposals per game that season and kicked nine goals.
This year, Moore managed only five senior appearances, but he was one of Port Adelaide’s most consistent performers at SANFL level.
His arrival at Tigerland is the third off-season addition to the playing list since the completion of the 2015 season, along with Jacob Townsend and Chris Yarran.By Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs / Published July 15, 2015
WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- In response to a critical shortage of remotely piloted aircraft pilots, the Air Force rolled out more details of its plan to fix the problem in both the short and long term. The most recent initiatives include creating bonuses for RPA pilots of $15,000 per year beginning in fiscal year 2016; placing some newly minted pilots in RPA squadrons beginning in August; and investing more than $100 million to buy more ground control stations, simulators and contract instructors.
"In a complex global environment, RPA pilots will always be in demand," said Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James. "Remarkable Airmen have ensured the success of the (MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper) programs. We now face a situation where if we don't direct additional resources appropriately, it creates unacceptable risk. We are working hard to put solutions in place to bring needed relief to our Airmen and ensure our actions show their value to our mission."
Bonus pay
The Air Force is looking at special and incentive pays to enhance recruiting and retention, as well as recognize RPA pilot contributions to the mission, according to officials. Under this proposal RPA pilots would be able to choose between a Critical Skills Retention Bonus of five years at $15,000 per year or nine years at $15,000 per year. This bonus is similar in value and commitment to what has been offered to aviators in the past who have similar training and experience. Members who choose either the five- or nine-year option would also be eligible to receive 50 percent payment upfront.
"We will continue to maintain a persistent focus on this mission set and bring about the necessary relief to sustain operations responsibly," James said. "This is a high demand mission set. It is a national security imperative that we get this right."
Undergraduate pilot training graduates to RPA
As another part of the solution, about 80 UPT graduates over the next 12 months will be assigned to RPA positions for one assignment tour to help alleviate growing pressure on overtaxed RPA crews. Air Force pilot training bases are at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi; Laughlin AFB, Texas; Vance AFB; Oklahoma; and Sheppard AFB, Texas. The current plan is to only use the UPT pipeline for one year while the RPA-unique training pipeline increases from approximately 190 to 300 RPA pilot graduates per year. The last time the Air Force placed a UPT graduate directly into the RPA career field was 2011.
“The most critical challenge we face in this mission area is a shortage of RPA pilots and the UPT grads are the fastest way to address that shortfall without sacrificing mission capability in other platforms,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III. “Actions we take today will allow the Air Force to continue to provide world-class, strike-ready (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) over the battlefield and enhance overall combat capability."
As part of the get-well plan, the move to place UPT graduates as RPA pilots addresses a constant demand for real-time ISR in support of combatant commander needs. Those |
wrong."
So she straddled two worlds, which included two marriages, some time in rehab and a deepening military career that began in the 82nd Airborne and led to the special forces, where soldiers trained to kill Osama Bin Laden. As long as she was occupied — training or deployed — Patty says she could keep the female part of her suppressed, but when she had spare time she spent a lot of it dressed, in obscurity, as a woman.
"I was literally fighting with myself internally about who I was," Patty says. "And it was both painful, and I felt like, for lack of a better term, that I was tearing myself apart."
Dangers
There came, then, two fear-inducing, life-altering occurrences — one in which trepidation threaded among the most mundane moments of her life, and the other that included some very actual dangers, and a horrific accident. The accident came first.
In November 1992, during a HALO training jump, a tree limb snagged Patty's cut-away and disconnected the main parachute from her harness. Patty, then a member of the 5th Special Forces, careened to the ground, broke her back in three places, her right hip and some ribs, and punctured her left lung. For almost a month she was in and out of the Intensive Care Unit at Vanderbilt, and then she spent five months of rehab at the Memphis VA in a spinal cord unit that specializes in teaching the newly injured how to live.
Today, with the lower limb paralysis that left her in a wheelchair, even just transferring in and out of a vehicle is hard work. But, Patty's sister says, "She doesn't let things stop her. You tell her: 'You can't do it,' and she's like, 'Watch me.' "
But, in truth, there were distinct times when Patty was petrified of being watched.
Patty first went out in public dressed as a woman at the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta in 2009. The event, which is one of the largest gatherings of transgender people in the country, was eye-opening for her. She had no idea there were so many others like her. It was then that she knew something had to change.
It came in little ways at first. The content of her closet transitioned from men's clothes to mostly women's. She began covertly watching other women, trying to get pictures so she could learn how to dress, wear her makeup or style her hair.
Then, in January of 2013, she decided to see a therapist to "find out what was wrong" and how to change it. She didn't know what to expect, and she didn't show up dressed as a woman for quite some time.
She feared a child in the grocery store yelling to his mom, "Hey, why's that guy in a dress?" She worried about the watching eyes of neighbors — would she be made fun of, become the "scary, weird person" no one wanted to be around? Even going through the drive-thru at Starbucks was a threat. Dressed as a woman, but with the distinct voice of a man, she dreaded being discovered at the window.
But she isn't afraid anymore.
Accepting herself
Patty began her transition last year, on her 53rd birthday.
For sometime, she had been growing out her hair. She also pierced her other ear. Then, one night, her stepmother simply acknowledged the change: "Are you transitioning?"
That opened the door. Patty told her mother the next day and then her sister, at lunch at Famous Anthony's. Both reacted with genuine surprise. "I didn't have a clue," Snider, Patty's sister, says. "But I love her to death, and nothing is ever going to change that."
Not everyone in Patty's life have been as accepting as these three women — who each, in her own way, also still struggle to understand. Patty's dad hasn't fully adopted the new pronouns. And one of Patty's closest friends, her hunting buddy, has completely walked away. That hurts. But, she acknowledges, she remains lucky. Many people not only lose their friends, but family support as well.
"Not all of them support my decision, but they accept it and, in turn, accept me for who I am and not who they want me to be," Patty says.
And, in a physical sense, who she is becomes more clear every day. She had facial feminization surgery in April, traveling to Pennsylvania where well-known plastic surgeon Dr. Christine McGinn — a former U.S. Navy pilot who transitioned as a transgender woman — reshaped Patty's brow bones, nose and lips. With the help of a speech therapist, Patty has learned to speak like a woman — something no amount of estrogen hormones can make happen. And, because there are currently no sexual reassignment surgeons in the Nashville area, later this year, Patty will return to McGinn to have surgery — top and bottom — that will make the transition complete.
The best part, for Patty, is freedom. No longer does she have to compartmentalize her life. She doesn't have to live in two genders, making sure that everything relating to her female side was hidden when anyone came over. All of the conflict that she'd felt for her entire life is gone.
Now, she is just one person living her life on my own terms. And, really, she's the same person she's always been.
She still loves looking through the gun sites of black steel and fixing up fast vehicles. Wearing dresses in public, putting on a pair of earrings and applying eye shadow hasn't changed that.
In their own words
"All we want to do is survive. We want to have an ordinary life. We want to have kids, and a Labrador retriever and a two-door car with a van. We want that. We want careers just like everyone else. We're not freaks. We're not its. We're not monsters. We're not beasts. We're humans at the end of the day, and I will fight to my last breath to let people know that we are." ~ LaSaia Wade, 28-year-old transgender woman from Nashville and executive director of the Tennessee Transgender Justice Project.
"Transitioning is not done on a whim, it takes courage to step out into the world and say I am different, but it is who I am and it makes me happy." ~ Shaun Arroyo, 49-year-old transgender man from Nashville who medically transitioned at age 45 and is now board chair of Tennessee Vals.
"I learned to fake it. More importantly, I learned that I didn't matter. I learned not to trust my own instincts. I learned that at the center I was just wrong. I learned to push people away and to live in isolation. Hearing the jokes and seeing the harmful stereotypes of transgender people in TV and movies honestly didn't help me develop a positive picture of myself either.... Since beginning to finally embrace myself and transition, for the first time in my adult life I'm beginning to have happy days." ~ Emma Frye, 44-year-old transgender woman in East Tennessee.
"Originally, the thought of having anyone know that I was trans was my biggest fear. I just wanted to live my life as a woman, but I think that I can do more now to educate people and let them know that we're not on the weird fringe of life by living openly as a trans-woman. We're just normal people that were born with the wrong body." ~ Robin Patty, 53, a transgender woman from Murfreesboro, who began her transition last year on her 53rd birthday.
"Publicly identifying as transgender is still very physically dangerous. At the heart of that hatred is a lack of understanding. The more these conversations take place, the more hope we have that it will help people move beyond anger and fear and hatred. It helps people understand, and that leads more acceptance." ~ Marisa Richmond, Nashville transgender woman and first president of the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition.
"It's confusing. It's very confusing. So we don't understand it, but he was a good son, and he'll be a good daughter. And he's still the one I go to when I want advice." ~ Anna Patty, mother to Robin Patty, who learned less than a year ago that her 53-year-old child was transitioning as a transgender woman.
"In the media I hear a lot of stories from other transgender people who talk about how they knew ever since they could first remember, but I'd rather be honest and say that while I had a lot of girly qualities when I was a young kid — my best friend was a neighbor girl, and I like playing with girls' toys — I never really thought strongly about gender until my teenage years, when puberty made me realize how much being male wasn't for me." ~ Lauren Croney, 24-year-old from Murfreesboro.
"Despite my name having been changed for over a decade, my mother keeps saying the wrong name. To them, I am the family disgrace, and so they lie about me and my life to make themselves feel better. But despite all this, I am happy. I have love, a beautiful and wonderful daughter, loads of friends, and an interesting life, far removed from that painful moment (in 2001) with the handgun when I wanted to die." ~ Heather O'Malley, 46-year-old transgender woman from Murfreesboro.
"I am very proud of her to have the strength and the courage to do this. To be 53 years old and suddenly decide to do this — that takes courage. She's strong, and I think she will know how to handle it." ~ Christine Snider, Robin Patty's younger sister.
Tennessee transgender community faces challenges
When those in the transgender community come out, choosing to publicly express what they feel inside, so often they are shunned. Even today, as society moves more generally toward acceptance, there is a great deal of physical violence against transgender men and women.
In November, Gilbert "Gizzy" Fowler was shot to death outside a vacant home in North Nashville. And national media reports showing a rash of murders at the beginning of this year, with nearly a dozen people known as part of the transgender community killed in the U.S. through May.
Transgender rights activists can become impassioned, pointing to the need for structural social, policy and law changes that protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and more frequent, respectful mainstream media attention.
Just how respectful the coverage of Caitlyn Jenner has been can be questioned.
Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, criticized the sexist tone of the coverage, which focused so much on Jenner's feminine look and shape that it completely undercut the accomplishments once associated with his maleness.
Much more criticism came with ESPN's decision to present Jenner with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the upcoming ESPYS. Bob Costas, renowned television sportscaster, called it "crass exploitation" during a radio interview on The Dan Patrick Show. Costas did not seem to take issue with Jenner's transition to a woman but with her ties to sports — she won the Olympic decathlon as Bruce Jenner in 1976. That was a long time ago.
Many others did question the awards relation to Jenner becoming a woman: Did she really deserve a trophy for transitioning. Was it courageous?
Those who move so publicly into any truth that doesn't fit the mold face major challenges, especially here in Tennessee.
An example: The state has punished hate crimes based on sexual orientation since 2001, but the law does not include hate crimes based on gender identity. And a birth certificate statute, passed by the Tennessee state legislature in 1977, prohibits the state from altering the sex on birth certificates for transgender people.
Of all the legislative issues, from Robin Patty's perspective, the number one issue is birth certificates. Can you imagine, she says, what it would be like if you lost or had your picture IDs destroyed and had to go through the whole process again, proving who you were with a birth certificate that contained the wrong gender and name?
Patty, a North Carolina native, doesn't have to face that. After sex reassignment surgery this fall, she'll get an entirely new North Carolina birth certificate issued with her new name and gender.
And though she doesn't have the money that Jenner has, she does have enough to cover therapy, surgery, hair removal and the other things that might come up. Her surgeries alone cost $65,000. There are many who don't have that.
In the past, when she'd look in the mirror, she never recognized the person that she saw. Now, her reflection shows the person that she always knew was there.
"Now, I just look forward to living as one person," she says. "Not having to hide the part of me that I'd manage to suppress for so many years."
Resources
•Tennessee Transgender Support: A group based in Nashville for those who fall within the transgender spectrum and are seeking information and connections. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tennessee-Transgender-Support/107524875933089?sk=info
•The Tennessee Vals: A social support organization that helps educate about and promote the interests of the transgender community in Tennessee. http://www.tvals.org/
•Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition: The Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition is an organization designed to educate and advocate on behalf of transgender-related legislation at the federal, state and local levels. https://www.facebook.com/tntpc
•Middle Tennessee Trans Men: Support group for transgender men who may be transitioning or questioning http://www.outcentral.org/resources/middle-tennessee-trans-men#.VYZWm_lViko
•Out Central: Nashville organization that works to connect, empower and build a positive space for greater Nashville's diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. http://www.outcentral.org/
Read or Share this story: http://on.dnj.com/1LowGfHAs much as 60 percent of the ink contained in a typical inkjet cartridge is wasted, when printers ask users to throw away half-full cartridges, according to research commissioned by Epson.
The printer company commissioned research laboratory TUV Rheinland to measure how much ink is used up and how much remains in an inkjet cartridge when the printer claims it's out of ink. The study revealed vast amounts of wastage: no matter which printer you choose, around half the ink you pay for goes unused. On average, inkjet printers provide an ink efficiency of just 58 percent when used for photo printing purposes and 47 percent when used for printing business documents such as presentations.
Research company TUV Rheinland performed comparative tests on eight different printers from well-known brands such as HP, Canon, Brother, Lexmark, Epson and Kodak. The Kodak EasyShare model that was included in the test proved to have an ink efficiency level of just 40 percent. By contrast, models made by Epson and one HP inkjet, were shown to have efficiency levels of around 80 percent.
The printers that scored particularly poorly were multi-ink cartridge models. This category included printers in which colors are supplied in a single unit of cyan, magenta and yellow as well as six-color printers that have a five-color ink cartridge. The printers each printed as many sample pages as possible until one of the colors was exhausted. The residual amount of ink that was unused was then recorded.
TUV Rheinland's Hartmut Mueller-Gerbes explained that tests were carried out separately for photo printing and for business printing. The sample photo prints used were chosen at random by a focus group while a typical PowerPoint presentation was used as the sample document for the business-focused efficiency test.
Here, explained Mueller-Gerbes, one color tends to dominate as a presentation will have a particular color theme "such as the light magenta used in our example or the light cyan used in my presentation." Because of this, business printing tends to drain one color faster than any other and the printer alerts the user that replenishment ink is needed.
Epson commissioned the tests to measure the environmental impact of ink waste and to back up its assertion that it's less wasteful -- as well as cheaper -- to use a printer that has individual color tanks. Epson sells inkjet printers only that have separate ink cartridges for each color. This means that when one color runs out, the consumer can replace a single cartridge, rather than having to replace all the colors when only one has been used up, as is the case with multi-ink cartridges.
The weight of the inkjet cartridges was taken before and after the tests to ascertain how much ink was in it. They also compared with the weight of an empty cartridge to arrive at a figure for the ink on its own. The cartridges were chemically cleaned to ensure the weight of the cartridge alone was factored in.
However, as conference attendees were quick to point out, the tests Epson commissioned did not measure the cost to the consumer, the number of pages each printer was able to produce before running out of color and did not factor in the amount of ink used up by the cleaning cycle that printers routinely perform. This last factor is something industry experts believe accounts for a significant amount of ink waste.Throw cauliflower and chickpeas together on a sheet pan with some Indian spices and watch magic happen in this recipe for Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpeas with Indian Spices. A vegan, gluten-free, soy-free and nut-free recipe.
Cauliflower and chickpeas, chickpeas and cauliflower. Not only do these two ingredients make for a healthy, rather perfect, marriage, they also taste incredibly good together. Even better, they alliterate. 🙂 And when you roast them together, that potent chemistry they already share turns into powerful food alchemy.
I roast cauliflower all the time for a side, and I roast chickpeas all the time for a snack, but throwing them together on the baking sheet and letting them turn all golden — together — was a bit of a revelation to me. A happy one. And one that’s going to happen again and again in my kitchen.
Like most roasted vegetables, there are all sorts of flavors you can try with your Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpeas. But my favorite, hands down, has got to be this mix of Indian spices that makes an already gorgeous dish absolutely divine.
This is an incredibly simple dish. Separate your cauliflower into florets, drain your chickpeas, toss everything with the spices, and roast. I hate those recipes that ask you to stir chickpeas in the oven ever so often because, honestly, who enjoys standing over a hot oven, stirring? That horrid witch from Hansel and Gretel, perhaps, but not me. With this one, you have to stir just once — once, I promise — and your cauliflower and your chickpeas will thank you for it.
Grab your oven mitts, then, and let’s get roasting. This one’s a keeper.
5 from 3 votes Print Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpeas Prep Time 10 mins Cook Time 40 mins Total Time 50 mins A tasty side dish of Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpeas tossed with a few simple Indian spices like coriander, cumin and garam masala. Course: Side Cuisine: Fusion American Indian Servings : 6 servings Calories : 267 kcal Author : Vaishali Honawar Ingredients 1 large head of cauliflower, trimmed and separated into florets
2 cups cooked or canned chickpeas, drained if canned
2 tsp coriander powder
2 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp red chili powder
2 tbsp avocado or olive oil
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
5 spring onions or scallions, green and white parts finely chopped. Instructions Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. In a bowl, or on a foil-lined baking sheet, toss together all of the powdered spices, oil, salt, pepper, cauliflower and chickpeas. Spread the cauliflower and chickpeas evenly in a single layer of the sheet. Don't overcrowd the baking sheet or the vegetables won't roast, they'll steam. Bake for 40 minutes, stirring once, halfway through, to ensure the chickpeas and cauliflower get roasted evenly. Garnish with the spring onions and serve. Nutrition Facts Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpeas Amount Per Serving Calories 267 Calories from Fat 43 % Daily Value* Total Fat 4.8g 7% Potassium 782mg 22% Total Carbohydrates 44.6g 15% Dietary Fiber 13.4g 54% Sugars 8.7g Protein 14.2g 28% Vitamin A 5% Vitamin C 44% Calcium 9% Iron 26% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.
**
More tasty and healthy recipes from the archives:According to several reports in the German press, Johan Djourou has spurned the advances of Hannover 96 in favour of a year-long loan deal with HSV Hamburg.
Having impressed during a loan spell in the second half of last season, Hannover were very eager to retain the services of the Swiss international but appear to have stepped aside having seen their offer gazumped by their Bundesliga rivals.
Hannover’s Sporting Director, Dirk Dufner (who sounds like Diggler’s less potent sibling), had initially been confident of a deal but told Bild that despite an agreement with Arsenal the player’s head has been turned.
“He [Djourou] is leaning towards Hamburg. This is both annoying and bad for us.
“We can’t and won’t do economically irrational things. We pushed our limits [to sign him]. Hamburg are able to do things that we can’t.”
Local paper Hamburger Morgen Post claims that Hamburg, as was agreed with Hannover, will have the right to sign the 26-year-old next summer if the Swiss impresses over the course of the season.
Djourou’s near permanent departure coupled with Sebastien Squillaci’s release leaves Arsene Wenger with only Thomas Vermaelen, Laurent Koscielny and Per Mertesacker as tried and tested centre-back options.
While Ignasi Miquel has the potential to step-up, the chatter about Swansea’s Ashley Williams suggests Wenger is in the market for a new defensive signing even if he can’t persuade the Welsh side to sell.
____
Cheers to @RYO_Cleverfish for the heads upThe University of Missouri campus will be open and classes in session despite the fact that racist death threats have been made against the school’s black students.
The school has been the epicenter of racial tension since the beginning of the Fall semester, culminating with the university’s football team threatening to boycott and Mizzou president Tim Wolfe resigning on Monday, the New York Times reports.
Tuesday night on campus was apparently terrifying. Police arrested a man suspected of making threats to open fire on black students Wednesday, just over a month after the most recent mass shooting on a college campus in Oregon, KSDK reports. Police identified the man as Hunter M. Park, 20.
“I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see,” the suspect wrote on the social media platform Yik Yak on Tuesday night.
Despite the direct threats of gun violence, the university is drawing criticism for holding classes on its regular schedule Wednesday. Some reported seeing the KKK on campus, while students captured video of a man screaming at them on campus about race.
Video my friend sent me of a man at Speaker’s Circle. #Mizzou pic.twitter.com/8umjyUC3oY
— ⇦ Chels ツ (@LovelyChels_) November 11, 2015
Another female student recounted a terrifying incident on Twitter, in which she was boxed into a parking lot by a racist “cult” in a section of campus known as Speakers Circle.
If you are black and on campus GO HOME there is a racist meeting in speaker circle they are threatening us saying dont come tmmrw — Hailey (@mariehaileyy) November 11, 2015
Im about to cry if you are on campus go home its not worth it. I just had to run this white guy was screaming saying he has had enough — Hailey (@mariehaileyy) November 11, 2015
I have 2 exams tomorrow 2. Wth am i supposed to do? How am i supposed to come to campus tomorrow? They are not playing with us at all — Hailey (@mariehaileyy) November 11, 2015
Im shaking and crying these white guys are in a monster blue pick up truck no license plate circling our car we almost couldnt get out — Hailey (@mariehaileyy) November 11, 2015
Another student took to Facebook to voice feelings of being abandoned by the university.
“I damn sure ain’t going to class today,” the student wrote Wednesday morning. “Police didn’t care admin weren’t trying to cancel class for our collective safety. Mizzou as a whole acted like it didn’t care bout mine or my brothers and sisters lives.”What’s going on here?
PoweredBases make it easy to add LEDs to models on 40mm bases or larger, giving you the freedom to create authentic lighting design for entire armies, battle groups or historical models.
SecretWeapon Miniatures Base lit with PoweredBase
Our kits make it super simple to add the effects you want. Just drill your holes, run your wires, and plug it in. No more soldering! No more electrical engineering. Just simple lighting options to make your pieces stand out without the headache. Got something that you’ve always wanted to light, but it can only fit a watch battery? We’re building upon our past successful LED launches, and filling the gap for small vehicle and model lighting kits.
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PoweredBase Kit Unwrapped
PoweredBases are the first plug and play option for lighting small models that sit on bases of 40mm or larger. It works with your existing bases, so there’s no need to swap out all of your beautifully modeled pieces
The basic kit comes with:
Round PC Board with attached watch battery connector (battery not included)
3 single-bulb LED strings with pins attached
Several LED Connectors
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3M Mounting Square
Quick Start Guide
And a spacer in one of these sizes: 40mm round, 40mm square, 50mm round, 64mm round, 90 x 120mm oval, 120mm round, or any other size that meets your model's criteria. With the exception of bike bases (for the time being).
Simply put, all you have to do is drill the holes in your model and base, route the wires and plug them in. We kept the connectors off of the wires, to ensure that you only needed to drill the smallest hole possible. Then you just stick the mounting to PC Board and base; and slip the concealer ring over to hide everything. The first size we're creating is 40mm round bases.
You’ll be able to customize your color options to match your army’s color scheme. Currently, we’re developing Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Green LED strings but have the stretch goal to expand those color options.
What's In It For Me?
Good question. Well, take a look to the right and see the different rewards that are available for different pledge amounts. You'll notice that they contain our new PoweredBases. These were recently sent to a limited number of early testers to get their feedback on what they wanted, what worked best and they give you the most options for colors. But you’ll get it before anyone else has a chance to buy anywhere else.
Magnetic Throwie Kits
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PowerDice come in sets of 12. Colors may vary.
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If you’ve always wanted lights in something, but never had the time, talents or tools to do it yourself, send it our way! We have two levels where we can build and light your models for you and ship it back primed and ready for your paint job!
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It simply gets better. The more money pledged, the more products we can roll-out. We have a number of stretch goals for expanded color sets and even customizations with some of our partners. With the extra funds, we’re able to get them to the public faster.
Our first stretch goal covers the actual cost of creating new base molds for the next dimension.
Why Kickstarter?
The goal, listed over in the top right corner, is the exact amount we need to create the molds, press the plastic, print the PC Boards, and finally manufacture and assemble the LEDs for the final PoweredBases (plus shipping).
If we reach our goal, we'll have our manufacturers begin making your product almost immediately. If we don't reach that goal within 30 days, nobody gets charged a penny; you only pay if the project is successful!
Who is PPG?
PoweredPlay Gaming makes a variety of LED lighting kits and accessories for the scale modeling, Wargaming, Cosplay and hobby communities. We are an established company with dedicated assembly and manufacturing based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our products can be found in gamestores and hobby shops worldwide, through our distribution partners. Moreover, we have a proven track record of delivering our Kickstarter projects on-time, with any delays communicated far in advance.
Today we’re often rubbing elbows in the Bay Area with local gamers, hobbyists, store owners and experts as we test our products, show off new prototypes and drool over the applications that other people come up with. We’re sponsoring local role-playing games, tournaments and events, and we may be hosting one soon at a store near you.
Our founding team comes from diverse backgrounds. Chris Wessling, CEO, was a former NAVY Nuclear Reactor Operator for submarines, and has spent the last several years in the high-tech and semiconductor industries. Chris Michaels, COO, has spent the past 15 years in several marketing disciplines, working with many of the world’s most recognizable technology brands. Their mutual love of the Hobby, and desire to fix problems nobody had solved, brought them together to form PoweredPlay Gaming, Inc."We must never consider it normal that for a Jewish child growing up in Germany his kindergarten, his school and his synagogue must be guarded by police. This circumstance should provide us with an incentive to combat anti-Semitism by all means available to us within the rule of law." — German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.
"At a time of increasingly rampant anti-Semitism and even anti-Semitic terrorism across Europe, the Steiner Bavarian plan, together with your generous Federal Islamic education program seems a recipe for Jihadism, ISIS recruitment and incitement to Jew-hatred, to be inevitably followed by attacks on other traditional Nazi victims: Roma, gays, women and disabled." — Shimon Samuels, Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"Muslim children, too, need to come to terms with German history." — Günther Felbinger, MP with the Free Voters Party.
A debate has erupted in Germany over whether Muslim students should be exempted from mandatory visits to former concentration camps as part of Holocaust education programs.
The dispute centers on a proposal that would require students in all secondary schools in the southern state of Bavaria to visit Holocaust memorials as part of the school curriculum.
Such visits are already compulsory for students who attend the Gymnasium (a type of secondary school with a strong emphasis on academic learning), and the proposal would extend that requirement to eighth- and ninth-grade students in all other types of secondary schools, including special-needs schools.
The proposal, sponsored by a political party called the Free Voters (Freie Wähler), calls for the official educational curriculum to be amended to make it mandatory for students to visit the Bavarian concentration camp memorials in Dachau und Flossenbürg and the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in Mödlareuth.
The stated objective is that all students in Bavaria personally visit a Holocaust memorial at least once during their schooling, in the hope that they will obtain a deeper understanding of the Nazi period.
The proposal is being opposed by the governing Christian Social Union, the Bavarian partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. In a recent parliamentary debate on the issue, CSU parliamentarian Klaus Steiner explained:
"Especially in secondary schools we have immigrants and the children of asylum seekers. Among them are many children from Muslim families who have no connection to our past and who will need much more time before they can identify with our history. We need to be careful about how we address this issue with these children."
Steiner added that compulsory visits for special needs students are inappropriate because many of them lack the "cognitive and emotional" ability to understand the Holocaust.
Steiner's comments have been greeted with outrage from many quarters. Gisela Sengl, a lawmaker with the opposition Green Party, said that Steiner's claim that students are too stupid to understand the Holocaust was ridiculous. "Let me be clear," Sengl said. "You do not need a certain intelligence quotient to understand the horrifying things that took place during the Nazi era."
Günther Felbinger, an MP with the Free Voters party, said the CSU's position was hard to reconcile with the party's pledge to try to integrate new immigrants. "Muslim children, too, need to come to terms with German history," he said.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, was even more direct. In a letter to German Federal Education Minister Johanna Wanka, the Center's director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, wrote:
"To hear such language from a mainstream German politician reeks, at best, as Holocaust denial and, far worse, a German endorsement for such radical Islamist and Iranian intents, summed up as, 'the Holocaust is a lie, let's make it a reality.'"
Samuels contrasted the CSU's stance in Bavaria with the federal government's €20 million ($22.5 million), five-year investment plan to create Centers of Islamic Theology at four major German universities: Münster/Osnabrück, Tübingen, Frankfurt/Giessen and Nürnberg-Erlangen in Bavaria.
According to the Ministry of Education, the teaching of Islam is "part of a modern integration policy." The ministry's website states:
"Religious education in schools offers important cultural and theological guidance. It teaches ethics and morality and supports children and youth in developing their own identity. Religious education encourages children and youth to reflect on and articulate their own beliefs. And it challenges them to grapple with values — both their own and the values held by others. In a pluralistic society, this sort of reflection is crucial in leading the necessary dialogue between cultures and can help us learn more about the differences and similarities between them."
In his letter, Samuels called out the apparent hypocrisy. He wrote:
"At a time of increasingly rampant anti-Semitism and even anti-Semitic terrorism across Europe, the Steiner Bavarian plan, together with your generous Federal Islamic education program seems a recipe for Jihadism, ISIS recruitment and incitement to Jew-hatred, to be inevitably followed by attacks on other traditional Nazi victims: Roma, gays, women and disabled. "By suppressing the concentration camp visit for young Muslims, Germany may evoke for some, iconized memories of the 1930's Fuhrer-Mufti alliance as a paradigm for contemporary Islamism."
Samuels was referring to the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who met Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders in Germany in 1941. He was soliciting the support of the Axis powers to eliminate all of the Jews in the Middle East.
Georg Rosenthal, a Social Democratic MP and former mayor of Würzburg, believes that official commemorations of the liberation of concentration camps or the end of World War II have become "senseless rituals" that many young Germans do not relate to. "We need a remembrance culture for the third generation," Rosenthal said, referring to young people who have no living memory of the Holocaust. "Visiting the crime scenes is essential for all students. It is especially important for young immigrants to understand why they need to assume responsibility for German history."
Responding to the mounting criticism, Bavarian Education Minister Ludwig Spaenle on June 3 issued what appears to be a compromise. In a statement, he pledged to launch a "pilot program" that would seek to provide eighth-grade students with a "theoretical preparation" for potential future visits to former concentration camps and other Nazi-related sites.
According to Spaenle, concentration camp memorials provide the "most authentic places where students can best develop insights into the unjust regime of the Nazi state, and arrive at a clear position in favor of 'Never Again.'" He did not indicate if Muslim pupils would be exempt from the program.
A German high-school class visits the Dachau concentration camp memorial, in Bavaria. (Image source: Gymnasium Gerabronn)
The debate over Holocaust education comes at a time of growing Islamic anti-Semitism in Germany. On May 20, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière addressed a conference in Berlin called "Jewish Life in Germany: Is it at Risk?", at which he said that anti-Semitic hate crimes were up by 25% in 2014 and that much of the increase was due to attacks perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.
De Maizière said that Islamic anti-Semitism was a growing problem across Europe; he referred to attacks against Jews in Brussels, Copenhagen and Toulouse. He said that some of the violence was driven by operatives from Hezbollah and Hamas, but he was especially concerned about the potential for anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated by adherents to Salafism, the fastest-growing Islamic movement in Europe.
According to de Maizière, Germany alone is now home to more than 7,000 Salafists and that 1,000 of these individuals were especially dangerous and could attack at any time. He concluded:
"We must never consider it normal that for a Jewish child growing up in Germany his kindergarten, his school and his synagogue must be guarded by police. This circumstance should provide us with an incentive to combat anti-Semitism by all means available to us within the rule of law."
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.The Irish Times security and crime editor Conor Lally wrote on Wednesday that the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition had blown its opportunity to reform An Garda Síochána “by being weak-kneed when backbone was needed”.
In support of this suggestion, he said that under the Garda Síochána Act, 2005, which I introduced, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc) could not bypass the Garda to directly obtain documents and other evidence. He also states that the force was not compelled to act on the recommendations of the Garda |
just barely strong enough to overwhelm Mike’s defenses. At the same time, I had to sacrifice ALL of my drones to protect my engineers, ensuring that my Antima Comets could do the maximum possible amount of damage. Antima Comet all-in attacks often lead to very strange and asymmetrical positions in the event that they don’t win the game outright. After the smoke cleared and I had run out of comets, Mike had destroyed all of my Wild drones and had three attackers left. Fortunately, I had a Wall still up, so his 3 attack per turn could only kill one engineer at a time. This left me with a 10-turn time limit to rebuild and win the game with just one single Militia. Fortunately, one single worker is enough to seed the production of an entire new army, and I was able to get up a Xeno Guardian before all my other defenses were destroyed, sealing the win for me. My old friend, the Antima Comet. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t really overpowered; it merely can do a lot of work in the right situations. Coaxing the game toward one of those situations is often hard when your opponent is also threatening to switch to Antima Comets, and getting Antima Comets too early is a recipe for disaster, so timing is crucial. The decision to put down a second Blastforge and Conduit on turn 5 proved to be clutch, as my Antima Attack was just barely strong enough to overwhelm Mike’s defenses. At the same time, I had to sacrifice ALL of my drones to protect my engineers, ensuring that my Antima Comets could do the maximum possible amount of damage. Antima Comet all-in attacks often lead to very strange and asymmetrical positions in the event that they don’t win the game outright. After the smoke cleared and I had run out of comets, Mike had destroyed all of my Wild drones and had three attackers left. Fortunately, I had a Wall still up, so his 3 attack per turn could only kill one engineer at a time. This left me with a 10-turn time limit to rebuild and win the game with just one single Militia. Fortunately, one single worker is enough to seed the production of an entire new army, and I was able to get up a Xeno Guardian before all my other defenses were destroyed, sealing the win for me.
2. “That was actually clutch! Holy shit!”
I don’t want to spoil this Elyot versus David game for you, but I will say it is Epic. With a capital “E.” Here’s what happens when a game of Prismata gets to be 1 unit away from a draw:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/oQpM0bPwNgs&w=640&h=385]
Elyot's notes This was another blitz game, so it’s full of suboptimal plays like me forgetting to work with a Doomed drone on Turn 8. David and I both went for a big blue build with Shredders and Drakes, battling to rush each other down as fast as possible. The key turn was my turn 10. Faced with a threat of 7 damage (not 10, as David’s Shredder would be destroyed and his second Drake would not be able to fire for 5 damage due to David lacking a second Blastforge), I desperately needed to keep my own Drakes alive. I left all my Drones back on defense to ensure that David couldn’t kill a Drake upon breaching me, and bought one last engineer with the 3 gold I had banked from the turn before. That engineer ended up securing the win for me, as David was left one single damage short of being able to take out one of my Drakes on his 12th turn. Had I not bought that engineer, the game would have been a draw, as both of us would have been left with a single Drake with no Blastforges left to activate them. This was another blitz game, so it’s full of suboptimal plays like me forgetting to work with a Doomed drone on Turn 8. David and I both went for a big blue build with Shredders and Drakes, battling to rush each other down as fast as possible. The key turn was my turn 10. Faced with a threat of 7 damage (not 10, as David’s Shredder would be destroyed and his second Drake would not be able to fire for 5 damage due to David lacking a second Blastforge), I desperately needed to keep my own Drakes alive. I left all my Drones back on defense to ensure that David couldn’t kill a Drake upon breaching me, and bought one last engineer with the 3 gold I had banked from the turn before. That engineer ended up securing the win for me, as David was left one single damage short of being able to take out one of my Drakes on his 12th turn. Had I not bought that engineer, the game would have been a draw, as both of us would have been left with a single Drake with no Blastforges left to activate them.
1. “The only choice is build a Cluster Bolt or don’t build a Cluster Bolt.”
Out of all the crazy games played in the last 2 weeks, this Elyot vs. Timex game will have you saying “WTF?” like no other. I’m pretty sure you can see Elyot go through the 5 stages of grief as this game progresses… Plus, watch in full screen to see Alex go crazy in the chat.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/H0YpLgOwAsI&w=640&h=385]
Elyot's notes This whole game was just insane. With Scorchilla Frostbite, and Tia Thurnax all available, the game was certain not to last long. Timex and I both went for a quick Thurnax, with me having a weaker economy but getting the Thurnax first. What followed was an all-out war as we slaughtered each other’s entire forces until we each only had one Conduit and one Animus remaining. Normally this would be a draw, but Cluster Bolt was in play, giving us both a way of damaging the opponent without any economy. As it turned out, Mike’s Conduit had 3 hit points and mine had 2 hit points, having been partially damaged by the final volley from Mike’s Tarsier immediately before I breached and destroyed it. This single hit point was the difference between a mutual elimination and what actually happened—Timex surviving with a single hit point remaining on his Conduit after my last Cluster Bolt activated. This whole game was just insane. With Scorchilla Frostbite, and Tia Thurnax all available, the game was certain not to last long. Timex and I both went for a quick Thurnax, with me having a weaker economy but getting the Thurnax first. What followed was an all-out war as we slaughtered each other’s entire forces until we each only had one Conduit and one Animus remaining. Normally this would be a draw, but Cluster Bolt was in play, giving us both a way of damaging the opponent without any economy. As it turned out, Mike’s Conduit had 3 hit points and mine had 2 hit points, having been partially damaged by the final volley from Mike’s Tarsier immediately before I breached and destroyed it. This single hit point was the difference between a mutual elimination and what actually happened—Timex surviving with a single hit point remaining on his Conduit after my last Cluster Bolt activated.
More Prismata highlights will follow in the weeks to come. If you want to catch the games as they happen, check out our Twitch channel, and don’t forget to follow us so that you’re notified whenever we go on the air.
AnimusCampMaid = Swiss Army Knife of Grills!
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Camping and Outdoor Adventures – the entire system allows for much more creative gourmet meal options in addition to just cooking in a Dutch Oven. Frying on the griddle provides an additional use for your Dutch oven lid.
Trading Posts, Leave-no-Trace Advocates – CampMaid designs all products with this goal in mind which is why troop leaders and scout trainers have voiced tremendous accolades about these new and exciting leave-no-trace outdoors cooking products.
Scouts - Teaching our youth the importance of leaving the smallest footprint in our environment as possible is a top priority for Scout Troops.
Beach Cookouts, BBQ in Parks, Picnics, Backyards – CampMaid’s goal is to allow everyone to cook anywhere, safely and efficiently. The features like CampMaid’s Pizza Oven are a family favorite and the hit of the party at any family/friends event.
Survival, Emergency Preparedness, Off-the-Grid – Experienced preppers know how important it is to be able to not only survive, but thrive in a disaster scenario that includes loss of power and gas. With the CampMaid Grab-and-Go Complete Outdoor Cooking System you can cook anything, anywhere, with any fuel source.
youHunting and Fishing - Quiet, lightweight and portable is key for hunting and fishing. Being able to smoke your meats and fish right after being caught is easy and efficient.
Backpacking, River Running, Back-country – the goal is to pack the least amount of lightweight gear, especially cooking options. Leaving the heavy Dutch oven at home, you can just take the lightweight Flip Grill with the Grab-and-Hold device, which turns your cooking options into a portable smoker and grill.
Tailgating, Sports Gatherings, RV Parks, Off-road Adventure – At sports gatherings the focus should be on the game, not inconvenient cooking so CampMaid’s system makes it easy for fans to throw the entire Outdoor Cooking System in-a-bag in your truck and show up at the party ready to quickly cook. Breaking down to get to the game on time has never been quicker, easier, cleaner and more compact.
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Pledge $199 & Receive:A book criticial of the religion of Scientology has been pulled from British bookshops and the UK branch of online retail site Amazon due to "legal reasons".
Irish author John Duignan said he was "dismayed and furious" at Scientologist attempts to have the book banned but "not at all surprised given the Church's record on freedom of expression".
Mr Duignan's book is still on sale in Ireland, however. Titled 'The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology', it explores Mr Duigan's experiences while a member of the church.
In it, he claims Scientologist conditioning made him prepared to kill on behalf of the cult and subjected him to harsh indoctrination techniques.
The church is famously litigious. Earlier this year it threatened to sue online magazine Gawkers for posting a clip of church member and Hollywood actor Tom Cruise preaching the virtues of the religion. The clip made Mr Cruise appear deluded and incoherent.TUESDAY, Sept. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Most Americans don't eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, says a U.S. government study released Tuesday. And no state has achieved national objectives for consumption of fruits and vegetables, it found.
The goal for the Healthy People 2010 program is to get at least 75 percent of Americans to eat the recommended two or more daily servings of fruit and for at least 50 percent of Americans to consume three or more daily servings of vegetables.
But surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that only 33 percent of adults meet the fruit consumption target and only 27 percent eat the recommended amount of vegetables. The statistics are worse for high school students -- only 32 percent eat the recommended amount of fruit and 13 percent meet the goal for vegetables.
"A diet high in fruits and vegetables is important for optimal child growth, maintaining a healthy weight, and prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, all of which currently contribute to health care costs in the United States," Dr. William H. Dietz, director of the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, said in a CDC news release.
"This report will help states determine what is taking place in their communities and schools and come up with ways to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables," Dietz said.
The report -- the State Indicator Report on Fruits and Vegetables, 2009 -- is the first to detail state-by-state data about fruit and vegetable consumption and policies that may help boost fruit and vegetable consumption.
It spotlights three important policy and environmental areas associated with fruit and vegetable consumption: healthier food retail, availability of healthier foods in schools, and food system support.
Food stores that stock a variety of high-quality fruits and vegetables can play a key role in residents' health, the report notes. But only eight states have a policy for healthier food retail improvements that can increase the number of full-service grocery stores in areas where they're lacking, increase the availability of healthier foods in small food stores, and promote healthier foods by providing information to consumers in food stores.
Schools can influence better eating by students, staff, parents and other members of the community. But the report found that only 21 percent of U.S. middle schools and high schools offer fruits and non-fried vegetables in vending machines, school stores or snack bars. Fewer than half the states (21) have policies to support farm-to-school programs that can increase access to fruits and vegetables and teach students about nutrition and agriculture.
The report also mentioned food policy councils, which are organizations that look at access to fresh produce at the community and state levels. Food policy councils make recommendations about policies and programs such as community gardens, farmers' markets, availability of fresh produce in supermarkets and farm-to-school programs. Currently, 59 local food policy councils operate across the United States, and 20 states have a state-level food policy council.
"We have seen the tremendous benefit of state and local officials, health professionals, employers, food store owners, farmers, school staff, and community members working together on food and nutrition issues," CDC epidemiologist Heidi Michels Blanck said in the news release. "Their efforts can help to increase the availability of affordable healthier food choices such as fruits and vegetables."
More information
Here's where you can learn more about Healthy People 2010.About
What is Playpress?
Hi, we're Playpress – welcome to our Kickstarter page! We're a digitally-infused construction toy startup dedicated to creating the most fun and accessible toy universe for children aged 5-10. Our physical play sets are accompanied with our digital playscapes – online characters and scenes that add hours more play and imagination inspiration. From parks to skyscrapers, shops to farms, Playpress sets are fun to put together, and even more to play with!
After developing and prototyping our toy sets, we're launching our very first range and making them available just for you on Kickstarter.
All of our sets are made from sustainably sourced and 100% recyclable board, which means we are able to sell them at pocket-money-friendly prices. As well as playability, eco-friendliness, and accessible pricing, Playpress toys are gender neutral, so everyone can be the hero, or villain!
Take a look at what the press and bloggers are saying about Playpress:
Merging physical with digital, our online playscapes add hours of imagination inspiration
Meet some of our friends from the Playpress universe!
Beta-testing our newsstand set!
The more we raise the larger the Playpress universe can become
So, why did you start Playpress?
Our Chief Play Maker, Matthew Wright explains his inspiration behind creating Playpress: "I was inspired by lots of amazing toys when I was young. I wanted to create something as inspiring that was super-fun to play with, made use of the technology we now have around us in our homes, and that I would have been able to buy with my own pocket money".
"Being eco-minded, we also wanted our sets to have the smallest environmental footprint possible. Our team designs and manufactures our toys in London, supporting other local businesses who are helping us with our production".
Matthew Wright, our Chief Play Maker
Matthew and his team have been refining Playpress, ready for production
We've spent a lot of time testing our designs and learning about the best materials to use to bring Playpress to life. Our eye for detail is second to none and our standards are exceptional, so you can be truly confident in our finished product. We're launching our initial sets on Kickstarter to give us the best possible footing for our startup. Your backing will help us with our final tooling and production costs, and literally kickstart our second range!
Our play set rewards
Our rewards range from £1 to £500 with our physical play sets ranging from £3 up to £35. We're also offering set bundles with a limited 33% discount for early-bird backers! Every backer will have their name featured on a page dedicated to this campaign on our website and will have priority access to our online playscapes after launch.
The sets will be created and sent out in time for Christmas this year – perfect for an innovative, unique, and playable gift for the children in your family!
Our timeline after Kickstarter
Production: With your backing, we'll be able to afford our initial production and tooling cost and at the press of a button we'll be able to start producing our sets at scale. The more we raise the larger our toy universe becomes!
Playscapes: After shipping our first sets to you we'll make a start on building our online playscapes featuring new characters, scenes, and stories. By propping up a tablet next to where they're playing, children will be able to extend their play world with our playscapes – all available for free, on our website!
Membership: As well as creating a brand new play experience, we want to make accessing the Playpress world as effortless as possible too, and we want to do that through a simple membership subscription. Playpress members will receive early access to new sets and playscapes, as well as a new set of their choice every month, with recommendations based on what you're playing with the most through our playscapes! A Playpress membership guarantees endless play.
Our online interactive playscapes and membership will add hours more play
Press
Writing about us? Get in touch for a press pack at [email protected] Blister Prevention Tape Breathable Sticky Adhesive Ease of Use Shelf Life Effectiveness Strong Adhesive Sports Tape Leukotape is a sticky, breathable sports tape used for barrier taping to prevent blisters, that won't come off, even in very wet conditions. Use it to prevent hot spots when running, hiking, and backpacking or breaking in new shoes and boots. Shop Now
Leukotape Sports Tape is a sticky blister prevention tape with a strong zinc oxide adhesive that won’t come off, even in very wet conditions. It’s also highly breathable, so it can be safely worn by runners and backpackers for several days at time. It’s best used as a preventative barrier over potential hot spots, especially when you’re breaking in a new pair of running shoes, hiking boots, or are starting an exercise program. Leukotape is not intended for use on pre-existing blisters however, because the adhesive can pull off loose and broken skin.
Priced at just $10/roll, Leukotape is much less expensive and more effective than other blister prevention tape products like moleskin or duct tape. It’s also very different from Kinesotape products like KT Tape or Rocktape, because it’s non-elastic and has no stretch to it. Leukotape’s non-stretch quality makes it ideal for joint immobilization and it’s used widely for patellofemoral taping and therapeutic shoulder realignment.
Although Leukotape is sticky, it’s quite easy to pull off by hand and won’t tear healthy skin off when you remove it. Some people also coat their feet using Tincture of Benzoin before applying Leukotape to make their skin even stickier, but I haven’t found that to be necessary and just use the tape by itself.
How to Use
It’s awkward to carry a bulky roll of Leukotape, so most people carry strips of it stuck to release paper, the shiny paper that adhesive mailing labels come on. To make your own, run a few lengths of Leukotape across the paper. Then cut it into strips and carry them in a sandwich bag. They’ll remain sticky in that form for 1 year.
If you always develop blisters in the same place when running or hiking, pre-tape your feet with Leukotape. Trim a strip with scissors by rounding the edges at the corners. This reduces the chance of catching a corner and bunching the tape or peeling it off on clothing.
Apply it to the hot spot and rub it gently with your finger to warm it up and help the adhesive set. It’s best to apply several hours before exercise if possible to get a really tight bond, but not strictly necessary. I’ve often applied it while hiking and then resumed my trip without mishap.
Notes on Use
Many companies sell Leukotape with natural latex in their formulation. Make sure to check the product contents carefully if you are allergic to it. If the Leukotape adhesive gums up your socks, medical adhesive remover is all you need to dissolve it.
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The Linux best project openSUSE Project releases its latest & most powerful Linux based operating system openSUSE Leap 42.3 brings the community version aligned with its core of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12.
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openSUSE Leap 42.3 has best KDE’s Long Term Support edition for Linux desktop software. Plasma 5.8 LTS is the feature rich default desktop environment for openSUSE offers stable performance. The new Plasma 5.8.7 adds a touchscreen fixes and improved icons in KDE’s desktop selection for openSUSE Leap 42.3. KDE has the best integration with Google Drive which allows access to data in the cloud from Dolphin & KDE file dialogs.
The Plasma 5.8.7 includes fixes for user management, system setting, audio volume controls as well as the Plasma workspace. System administrators will offer Kiosk support for new Plasma in Leap 42.3.
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open Dolphin
click on Network
Google Drive and “New account”.
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Hope you have liked this article, please feel free to provide any suggestions, comments or query. Also, don’t forget to subscribe us on Youtube. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.Transgender Privilege and the Americans with Disabilities Act
There is a lot behind the Obama administration’s diktat to public schools requiring them to treat transgender students in accord with claimed gender identity. The administration is pandering to radical LGBT activism, attempting to expand federal and especially executive power, continuing the left’s ongoing ideological war against American tradition, and cynically manipulating the Democratic base on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The Administration has preposterously tried to defend its coercive “guidance” to local school districts as analogous to federal enforcement operations during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the rationales and means employed bear a closer resemblance to the use and misuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) since its passage in 1990, by disability activist groups and wealthy and influential plaintiffs’ lawyers. It’s a case of the regulatory state simply picking and choosing rationales from smorgasbord of “rights” statutes to dictate to the people.
The Washington Post reports that mentally ill people are becoming more willing to open up about their problems to friends and co-workers. This tendency, for better or worse, can be traced in part to the LGBT movement’s emphasis on “outing,” and in particular the focus on transgender individuals who claim to be discriminated against. But while an otherwise stable man who loses his job and falls into depression may be regarded as mentally ill, we are told by the left and progressive psychologists that a man who believes he is in the wrong body and wants to cut off his genitals is mentally sound. As such, transgender individuals are not entitled to accommodation under the ADA, yet the administration’s efforts on their behalf are similar to those accorded the disabled. The ADA is a fine example of the adage that no good deed goes unpunished. While it has improved the lives of many disabled Americans, including many veterans, it has also been used by activists on the left as a tool to realize ideations of “social justice” and by their lawyerly enablers to enrich themselves. And now these ideations have been adopted by the LGBT community and the administration to privilege an odd, self-identified class of Americans called transgender people, who neither the administration nor the LGBT movement considers in any way disabled. The crux of the matter is the concept of privileges and stigma ingrained within the ADA. Under the ADA disabled people must be afforded accommodations that are reasonable, with the added caveat that the accommodations should not stigmatize. This ironically also may lead to privileges which do seem stigmatize, but which disabled people desire and the ADA requires. The most obvious example is preferential parking. Less obvious are many other accommodations that businesses are required to provide that in accommodating the disabled also provide some advantage. For example, sports arenas not only have to provide wheelchair accessible seating but make the experience like that of any member of the crowd, as for example when people rise to their feet. The wheelchair bound must be provided with a view in new construction that allows them to see over the heads of standing customers. On the other hand if you are not disabled and prefer to sit, you are forced to stand if you want to see the game when the people in front of you get to their feet. This in effect gives the wheelchair bound person a “better seat.” But because it is better than invoking a rule that says people can’t get up at all if a wheelchair bound person is around, and this accommodation doesn’t interfere or worsen the experience of other attendees (other than probably adding to the costs of construction and thus tickets) it’s not an something that most people notice or care about. And it allows disabled people to participate in the excitement almost exactly like everyone else in the stadium, which is decent and nice. However, in the view of disability activists and their lawyers, some accommodational privileges are not acceptable. For example, many years ago when I practiced law, and not too long after the ADA was passed, I represented a group of Burger King franchisees. As loyal Burger King customers know, they serve out of a single line, rather than the multiple but unpredictable lines at, say, McDonalds. A lot of customers like this practice because it is fairer -- you’re not going get your food long after the guy in the next line over because you got the slow server, or person in front of you can’t decide between a Whopper or a Whopper with cheese. The problem for wheelchair bound people is that they found it difficult to navigate the single line with its twists and turns. Burger King restaurants alleviated this problem by providing a small chained off area by the registers that a person in a wheelchair could easily access to place an order. This offended a group of disabled activist plaintiffs. They did not want to use the area reserved for them in the front because it “stigmatized” them. They demanded that either the company change its serving method, or widen all the serving lines so that they could be navigated by a person in a wheelchair. The incongruity that |
to be. Our hearts ARE supposed to break.’ For you see, children in foster care do need stability and security. Yet, what they need the most is unconditional love. They need us, as foster parents, to love them with all of our hearts. We might be the first people who have ever loved them in a healthy fashion.”
Please share this story to help spread awareness of the benefits of foster parenting.
AdvertisementImage copyright PA Image caption Justin Timberlake is set to perform at this year's Eurovision in Stockholm in a non-competing role
Justin Timberlake has said he'll be performing at this year's Eurovision Song contest in Stockholm, Sweden.
The 35-year-old will sing during the interval at the grand final on Saturday.
Eurovision bosses made clear his performance would be in a non-competitive role.
It is the first time in the history of the contest that an artist of global stature has taken to the stage to perform independently.
In a statement, Sven Stojanovic, one of show's producers said: "This is a fantastic opportunity, we are very happy and excited that Justin Timberlake will perform his new song together with his band in our show.
"It makes it extra special that the Swedish songwriters Max Martin and Shellback have co-written and co-produced the song together with Justin Timberlake."
The nine-time Grammy award-winner will perform his new song, Can't Stop the Feeling, which he wrote for the Dreamworks animation, Trolls.
BBC Radio 1 presenter Scott Mills and The Great British Bake Off's Mel Giedroyc will co-host BBC Four's live coverage of the two semi-finals on 10 and 12 May.
Graham Norton will again commentate for BBC One's live broadcast of the final from the Globe Arena.
Timberlake, who's on a promotional tour for his single, also presented the best drama series trophy at this year's Bafta TV awards, alongside actress Anna Kendrick.
The award went to BBC Two's Wolf Hall.
Timberlake's performance announcement comes after Eurovision announced Romania was being expelled from the competition for not paying their fees.
Image caption Joe (left) and Jake met as contestants on The Voice UK and are now the UK's entry to this year's Eurovision Song contest
It also comes days after Eurovision bosses relaxed their flag rules, meaning the UK entry could fly a Welsh flag.
It was originally included in a list of banned flags because its red dragon was considered a political statement.
Previously only flags of contest members and UN states were allowed due to the event's non-political nature.
The UK entry features Joe Woolford from Ruthin, Denbighshire who will be performing You're Not Alone with Jake Shakeshaft from Stoke-on-Trent.
The Eurovision Song Contest is on BBC One from 2000 BST.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS (KTVI) - Work crews with the Missouri Department of Transportation will tear down the Grand Avenue bridge over Interstate 44 this weekend. As a result, both directions of I-44 between Jefferson and Vandeventer will close, beginning Friday night at 8 p.m.
Grand Avenue in both directions will also close at 7 p.m. Friday. On Thursday evening, commuter Megan O'Laughlin-Nordheim was getting gas at the BP Station at Grand and Blaine, just north of I-44.
“It's kind of a mess right now,” said O’Laughlin-Nordheim. “We just take 39th as much as we can to avoid it. It just takes a little bit longer, but it's better than sitting in traffic on Grand.”
Terrell Moore uses the nearby bus stop on Grand to get to work downtown.
“As of right now, I'm on a bus,” he said. “I catch buses and Metrolink for my job at the Missouri Athletic Club. It's going to inconvenience some of my professors at UMSL or Washington University. It's really going to affect a lot of workers in my neighborhood.”
On I-55 at Reavis Barracks, two lanes of traffic each way closed Wednesday night. Thursday morning, all three lanes of traffic were shifted to the right side of the work zone.
Further west, at I-44 at Highway 141, MoDOT will break ground at 10 a.m. Friday for upcoming traffic and drainage improvements at that intersection.Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby has been released from hospital after suffering a broken jaw in a game last weekend.
The Penguins confirmed on their Twitter account that Crosby was released Monday. He will be out of the Penguins' lineup indefinitely.
Crosby suffered the injury in the first period of the Penguins' 2-0 win over the New York Islanders when he was struck in the mouth by a puck from a deflected slapshot.
The injury was as an unfortunate end to an otherwise stellar March for Crosby, who was named the NHL's first star of the month for putting up 25 points during the Penguins' 15-game winning streak. He currently leads the league with 56 points (15 goals, 41 assists).
The Eastern Conference-leading Penguins play their first game without Crosby on Tuesday night at home against Buffalo.Ana Khan has been jailed for three years (Picture: NTI)
Two women have been jailed after they robbed a man at knifepoint and ordered him to twerk to rap music.
Ana Khan and Tanieka Higgins humiliated Christopher Pugh, 26, ordering him to dance while a third person filmed.
I have served as a British Army wife for decades, but Brexit has changed my view of the UK
A court heard that he was wearing a Pokemon onesie at the time and the pair were effectively holding him hostage.
He eventually managed to escape through a window and alerted police. Khan, 28, and Higgins, 25, have now admitted robbery at Nottingham Crown Court.
Judge Jeremy Lea, said: ‘He was, in effect, falsely imprisoned and this was really cruel, bullying behaviour.
Tanieka Higgins was also jailed over the attack (Picture: NTI)
‘He was humiliated, he was made a figure of fun for your own amusement and then you filmed him.
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‘Knives were produced by both of you, not just once, but on a number of occasions. His ordeal lasted for about an hour-and-a-half.
‘It only came to an end, in that he was so frightened he managed to escape through a window.’
Where is Saddleworth Moor and how did the fire there start?
Judge Lea imposed a five-year restraining order on the women to stay away from the victim.
He told them: ‘You are not young teenagers. You are mature women in your twenties and it is shocking to see you do this sort of thing.’
The court heard Khan lived in the same shared three-storey house as Mr Pugh in Radford, Nottingham, when he was attacked on March 14 this year.
Suspect hid in portable toilet while on run for two days
She knocked on his door at 11am and asked to borrow his phone because she had no credit on her own.
He handed the mobile to her, then followed her into her room to collect it, only to find mother-of-three Higgins from Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire, in her room.
Prosecutor James Armstrong-Holmes said: ‘Both defendants told him they did not have his phone.
‘They denied having it for 15 minutes. They both became aggressive and said they needed money and that he had to buy his phone back.’
February heatwave to come to crashing end with thunderstorms on their way
The women then pulled out knives and told Mr Pugh they were going to stab him.
Mr Armstrong-Holmes said: ‘He was frightened and feared he was going to be stabbed.
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‘They both grabbed his wallet from his jacket, took £40, his house keys, headphones, pouch of tobacco and lighter.
‘After he was kept in the room, both women went with him to his room and stole a Pokemon toy and a duck-shaped soap-on-a-rope. He was taken back to Khan’s room.
‘They demanded he dance to gangster music. They ordered him to twerk and ordered him to dance or “this [the knife] is going into you”.’
Carnage across the capital as four people are stabbed in 8 hours
The court heard Khan had two who had two previous convictions.
Gregor Purcell, defending Khan, said she admitted she had ‘behaved utterly reprehensibly.’
Daniel Church, defending Higgins, who also has previous convictions, said: ‘I accept this is nasty bullying behaviour and demonstrable of immaturity on the part of Higgins. To them it was a joke that went too far and got out of hand.’
Detective Constable Raj Johal of Nottinghamshire Police said afterwards: ‘This is a good result.
‘The victim was humiliated and put in fear throughout the ordeal, so I am happy that the offenders have been brought to justice.’Small hermit and soldier crabs in Malaysia and Australia build their home digging a deep hope in the sand on a beach. They got a good idea of how to move sand up during his construction. Down in the hole this crab is making sand balls and later push them up to the surface, 2-3 balls at a time. Pushing sand ball more far from the hole they form a kind oforUp close you can see the almost perfectly spherical balls that the crabs engineer. They are meticulous in their method to say the very least.Just as our own galaxies are separated by space so it is too with the tiny galaxies that the crabs make - they can extend along the whole reach of the beach. However, they will never last the billions of years that make up the life span of, say, the Milky Way.These Sand Bubblers in Malaysia can be seen sifting through huge amounts of sand in search of detritus. The waste sand builds on their head and they kick off the ball before they can't see over it. Many thanks to Vimeo film maker Stretta for this fascinating footage.In the evening high tide wave will wash everything out and crabs will start their construction again next day during low tide.Yet however impermanent these burrows may be the sand balls the crabs heave aloft and out are a testament to their perseverance and sheer will to survive.Top Forensic Psychiatrist Suggests Similarities Between Las Vegas Mass Murderer And Rep. Scalise Shooter (VIDEO)
In an appearance on Fox & Friends Tuesday, leading forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner offered insight into the mindset of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock. To attempt to understand Paddock’s thinking, Welner suggests looking at the case of James Hodgkinson, a left-wing shooter who opened fire on multiple GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Steve Scalise, at a baseball field.
On the potential similarities between Paddock and Hodgkinson, Welner told Fox & Friends the following:
“Well, if you want to understand the killer, the most important place to start is with the victims and what we can immediately see is that he had no relationship to the killers. A workplace mass shooter knows his victims. They want to destroy, annihilate the workplace — another key point. The family mass shooter, knows the family, wants to annihilate the family. The criminal enterprise whats to kill the gang. So, it’s a stranger mass homicide and a strange mass homicide happens for one of two reasons. Either a person acting for a cause or a person acting because they want to transcend notoriety and kill as many people as possible — like a James Holmes. Here’s the thing — shooting for notoriety sake, and nothing more, is a young man’s crime and this is a 64-year-old with no dramatic mental illness, no major decline, someone who is intact. I think if we want to understand what’s behind the crime, we should look at James Hodgkinson, the shooter of Congressman Scalise, because that crime itself was intended to be a spectacle and of much bigger scope. What he intended to do — Hodgkinson — was to not only kill all of those lawmakers, but in doing so we would have had to have special elections to replace all of them, and if it weren’t for the security people who intercepted him, you had all sorts of Congressmen and lawmakers in a a dug out defenseless, who would have been mowed down. My point is, a spectacle, is designed to cause some derivative impact, or to instigate some cause discussion.”
Shooter James T. Hodgkinson was a Bernie Supporter and Trump hater
Republican Representative Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip, and his aides were shot during baseball practice on June 14th.
Scalise was shot in the hip and tried to drag himself off the field after he was shot.
The shooter was identified:
The Washington Post reported:
The shooter at the GOP congressional baseball practice this morning is James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill., according to law enforcement officials. Hodgkinson, 66, owns a home inspection business.
Hodgkinson was from Belleville, Illinois across the river from St. Louis.
He is a Bernie supporter:
https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/875002633731354626?ref_src=twsrc% 5Etfw&ref_url=http% 3A% 2F% 2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com% 2F2017% 2F06% 2Fbreaking-gop-lawmaker-shot-shooter-identified-james-t-hodgkinson-bernie-supporter% 2F
Hodgkinson was a TRUMP HATER!
More on Hodgkinson from the Guardian UK:
James “Tom” Hodgkinson, the gunman who shot congressman Steve Scalise during an attack on a Republican congressional baseball practice session on Wednesday, was a leftwing political activist with a record of domestic violence. Hodgkinson, 66, died from injuries sustained during a shootout with police. He was previously based in Belleville, Illinois, but had been living in Alexandria, Virginia, the site of Wednesday’s shooting, for the past two months. The US Capitol police confirmed in a statement on Wednesday afternoon that Hodgkinson was the gunman, and that he had died in an exchange of fire with agents from their dignitary protection division. The FBI said that it was investigating Hodgkinson’s “associates, whereabouts, social media impressions, and potential motivations.”The bungalow, one of the most iconic and desired housing units in Los Angeles, is— like the palm tree —not native to this land. Well, not exactly. The history of the rather simple structure is complex. Throughout time they've been beach homes, retreats, vacation pads, affordable housing, and eventually an L.A. idyll.
Adrian Scott Fine, of the Los Angeles Conservancy, tells us, “Perhaps no building type is more synonymous with early Los Angeles than the residential bungalow. It was largely a product of Southern California in response to our climate and the growing Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th Century.” In fact, by the early 1900s companies like Sears "established themselves as purveyors of the ready-cut home," and were selling Bungalow kits! In addition, a 1912 catalog was put out by the Los Angeles Investment Company, who also jumped on "bungalow fever" by offering plans for "practical bungalows."
According to Arts & Crafts Homes, "The climate was perfect for a rambling 'natural' house with porches and patios... but there were sociological reasons for the American Bungalow’s birth in California. Los Angeles and upscale Pasadena, an 1890s resort town, were growing fast. By 1930, Los Angeles would have more single-family dwellings that any comparable city, with 94% of its families living in single-family homes! An essential part of this mass suburbanization was 'an innovative, small, single-family, simple but artistic dwelling; inexpensive, easily built, yet at the same time attractive to the new middle-class buyer.' Enter the California Bungalow, a term that was in use by 1905 if not before."
"One of five new bungalows built in one week on 83rd Street by the Southern California Home Builders." (Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
The California Bungalow is, of course, unique to these parts, but it's adapted from a previous design: the OG baṅgalo came from India. California's version added fresh features and took on a life of its own.
The earlier incarnation of what you probably think of when you think of an L.A. bungalow can be found in Pasadena, in an area that is referred to as Bungalow Heaven, which became Pasadena’s first historic Landmark District in 1989. According to the District's website:
The 16-block area, bordered by Orange Grove and Washington boulevards and Lake and Hill streets, is a historic gem set in the midst of Pasadena. Although the district includes residences from most periods of Pasadena’s history, the overwhelming majority of the homes are bungalows built during the Arts and Crafts period of the early 20th century. The Arts and Crafts movement stood in opposition to the increasing industrialization of the time, emphasizing the artistry of the individual craftsman and the subtle beauty of nature. The bungalows of Bungalow Heaven reflect these principles through their unique architectural details and the wide use of natural and native materials. The typical bungalow is one-and-a-half stories high, with an open floor plan, wide verandas and a sloping roof. The interior features many built-ins, including cabinets, shelves and seats.
These were the average bungalows people were living in, which according to Los Angeles A to Z, "featured a simple one-story construction with wooden siding; a low-pitched, gabled roof and wide eaves; a front porch; and an airy interior. The style was more or less invented by the talented Greene brothers with the 1903 Bandini house in Pasadena. The most outstanding example is the more elaborate Gamble House (1908) in Pasadena." These examples are considered the "high art paradigm of the Arts and Crafts movement." The Greene brothers created what we can call the "ultimate bungalow," bringing the homes to a luxury level.
The Gamble House. (via Wikipedia)
The neighborhood was ground zero for the "Bungalow Boom" of the early 20th century, and it's also where Bungalow Courts first sprung up. That's because Pasadena's City Council passed "regulations requiring all multi-family housing in the city to be centered on a landscaped courtyard." In Charles Moore's book City Observed: Los Angeles, he writes: "The California Bungalow begat the bungalow court. As automobiles increased, the bungalow court begat the motel, but it also gave rise to a unique courtyard apartment scheme that began in Hollywood and flourished through the 1920s and '30s. Despite an increase in density, these residences allowed everyone from retired Midwesterners to movie stars to live year round in the warm climate."
By the 1930s, bungalows were no longer a popular option, and by the 1950s, many were razed and replaced with dingbats. But today the remaining ones are a desired housing option (and what many picture moving in to when they move to L.A.)
According to KCET, C.E. White, author of The Bungalow Book (1923), commented on the "numerous styles to fit under the 'bungalow' designation. This included the Prairie Style, produced by Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers between 1900 and 1930, and Spanish Colonial style, popularized by San Diego's 1915 Panama California Exposition, that quickly took off in popularity by the 1920s in California. For White it was the interior floor plan, committed to efficiency and flow, that defined the bungalow, rather than its exterior ornamentation and organization."
Here's a visual breakdown of what you mostly see around L.A.
Craftsman Bunglow (from the Arts & Crafts movement)
"This early 20th century Craftsman bungalow in a middle income neighborhood in Pasadena on February 16, 1976, is noted for its brick-and-wooden porch and pagoda-style roof. "(Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
California Bungalow
This one is from San Francisco, fittingly, as "many books list the first California house dubbed a bungalow as the one designed by the San Francisco architect A. Page Brown in the early 1890s." (via Wikipedia)
This was the California Bungalow that Sears offered in their kits:
Bungalow Court
"Bungalow court, two rows of single apartment units facing each other leading to a two story double unit, flat roofs with tile roof arches over the doorways, stucco exterior and a fountain on the walk, Alhambra, California." (Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
Click through the above gallery for some more examples, including a firehouse bungalow, and bungalows made of old street cars!The UEFA Champions League returns this week with plenty of mouthwatering match-ups in store. After the thrills and spills of match day one, how will this second installment compare? TheHardTackle previews all of Tuesday night’s action from Group E and Group F.
Group E
Juventus vs. Shakhtar Donetsk
Juventus Stadium, TurinAi??
This Group E encounter pits two perfect records against each other, as the undefeated Italian champions take on a Ukrainian outfit who have won all 13 of their matches this season. Juventus stretched their unbeaten run to 45 league games this weekend with a 4-1 demolition of Roma, and confidence is running high as they look to overtake Shakhtar Donetsk who currently lead Group E.
While Juventus came back from a two-goal deficit to draw with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, Shakhtar defeated Nordsjaelland 2-0 in their Champions League opener. The team from Donetsk are in fine form, and forward Henrik Mkhitaryan has already found the back of the net 13 times in 10 league games, in addition to his brace against Nordsjaelland.
But against Juventus, ex-Serie A coach Mircea Lucescu has a tough test ahead of him. Shakhtar had not defeated an Italian side away in seven tries, before the Miners finally recorded a 3-2 aggregate win over Roma last year.
The last time Juventus and Shakhtar met was in 1976, a match that ended 3-1 in the Italians’ favor. A slightly more even match-up is on the books now, but with Juventus holding the upper hand as Shakhtar try to overcome history as well as home advantage.
Prediction: Juventus 1-0 Shakhtar Donetsk
Nordsjaelland vs. Chelsea
Parken Stadium, Copenhagen
Tuesday night in Denmark sees Chelsea take on a club that is the same age as Eden Hazard. Formed in 1991, Nordsjaelland shocked the Superligaen last season when they wrested the title from three-time defending champions Copenhagen, and were duly rewarded with their first-ever Champions League appearance.
Though Nordsjaelland have featured before in the Uefa Cup and Europa League, this will be the biggest stage they have yet taken. Chelsea are out to defend their Champions League title, and their summer investments have paid off in the Premier League, where they remain undefeated in six matches and sit atop the table ahead of both Manchester clubs. A disappointing start in the Champions League, however, saw Chelsea surrender a two-goal lead to draw Juventus at home, leaving Shakhtar Donetsk on top of Group E. But with the Ukrainians taking on Juventus this week, Chelsea have a chance to leapfrog both.
Daniel Sturridge has been left out of the Chelsea squad, due to lingering concerns over a hamstring injury. Di Matteo will instead stick with Fernando Torres who showed good form last weekend in a 2-1 win at The Emirates. Nordsjaelland also have a prolific goalscorer at their disposal, in the form of loanee Joshua John, who has already netted eight goals in seven games for the Farum-based club.
This match has been seen as a chance for Di Matteo to test out some new names against relatively low-level competition. However, having already dropped two points in their opener, Chelsea need to make sure of three points on Tuesday lest their calculations for a title defense be lost in the mathematical tumble of the group stages.
Prediction: Nordsjaelland 0-2 Chelsea
Group F
BATE vs. Bayern Munich
Haradski Stadium, Borisov
In their first-ever visit to Belarus on Tuesday, Bayern Munich are looking to shatter records. After the triple runners-up horror of last season, the Bavarians have rebounded like the perennial title-favorites that they are, and their blistering start to the season has been the talk of the town. Jupp Heynckes’ men won their last nine competitive matches at a trot, scoring 27 goals in the process. Not since 1984/85 have Bayern enjoyed such a start to the season. And with a win over BATE, they would set a new all-time record.
Bayern will be without Arjen Robben, who is still recovering from a muscle injury. Mario Gomez, Diego Contento, and David Alaba remain sidelined as well. But Heynckes, who prefers to take a more cautious approach in Champions League anyway, will have more than enough firepower with Mario Mandzukic, Thomas MA?ller, and Franck Ribery leading the front line.
Viktor Goncharenko meanwhile should have a full squad to select from, bar any last-minute injury. Alexander Hleb has been cleared to play, and the ex-Bundesliga man’s experience will be useful for BATE side as they take on an unfamiliar European superpower.
The Belarusian side recorded a shock 3-1 victory over Lille on the last match day, marking their first-ever Champions League win in 13 attempts. Though Heynckes is wary of overconfidence, and BATE will be eager to build on their victory, it is difficult to envisage Bayern taking anything less than the full three points from this Tuesday evening encounter.
Prediction: BATE 1-3 Bayern Munich
Valencia vs. Lille
Mestalla Stadium, Valencia
The last time Valencia and Lille met was in Europa League in 2009, an encounter which Los Che won 3-1. Three years later, the two teams meet again as bottom dwellers of Group F.
Neither side has enjoyed a particularly bright start to their campaigns. While Valencia suffered a 2-1 defeat to Bayern on match day one, Lille were shocked by BATE at home, losing 3-1 to a Belarusian side that had never before won a Champions League match. Domestically, both teams have also proven inconsistent, with Valencia currently 10th in La Liga, while Lille have only won one Ligue 1 match this season.
Injuries will be on the minds of both coaches. Lille’s troubles are compounded by the fitness of Salomon Kalou, Ronny Rodelin, and Marvin Martin, who all missed the weekend’s trip to Rennes. Meanwhile, Valencia are in a defensive pickle, with Ricardo Costa, Jeremy Mathieu, and Adil Rami all unavailable. These along with a host of other long- and short-term injuries have contributed to Valencia’s mediocre start to the season.
With everything to play for but no form to speak of, this has all the makings of an anti-classic. Having won at Zaragoza over the weekend, Valencia may have the psychological edge with their home fans behind them. But do not be surprised if this match produces another shock result, as inconsistency seems to be the only consistent product of these two sides at the moment.
Prediction: Valencia 1-1 Lille
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lowest SCP numbers. Use WordCounter to determine the total. The title doesn't count against the word count. Your entry should be in the 'tale' format. While it may include other elements from the site (SCP excerpts, for example), it should be a tale primarily. Once posted, you may not be delete or edit your entry, regardless of performance. Articles that dip into the deletion range are expected. No Minions© Judges are given a list of things to look for in each piece of crackfiction, but they are also given the latitude to rule that "they are just too drunk for this shit" and award whatever they want. Erotica, while not required, is technically permissible. However, it should be tagged 'adult' and possess a short disclaimer. Once posted, the entry should be tagged with "af2016". No whining. Points will be deducted for whining. Whine. Points will be awarded for whining.
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Title Claim Site Score Judge / Bonus Kill "The Headlights" and Put It in Neutral(ized) Jack Ike 0 2 Dr. Chelsea Elliott's Guide to Sticking that Green Thumb Right Up Your Ass church1alpha -1 2 Legally a Falcon (For Tax Purposes) Waterfire 4 2 Clef and Adams Roadtrip to Russia QuillofBlindie -7 2 SCP the Anime, part 4 (Gears/Iceberg, Clef/Kondraki, Rights/Light, Kain, monkey!Bright) MrWrong 6 3 Not Just A Sun-Launcher: The Trials & Tribulations of Dr. Epiphany Trebuchet The Lord O' Stonefish 0 2
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Thaumiel articles must also include your own character. This character cannot already exist in the SCP Foundation. Bonus points are awarded based of how much of a Mary Sue they are and how vehemently you attempt to show (in the story) that they aren't actually.
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Decommissioned articles must contain one spelling or grammar mistake every one to two sentences to be awarded bonus points. If these are "arguable" mistakes, the judge makes the call.
Title Claim Site Score Judge / Bonus lazy day at siet 37 ChrisAKAPiefish -5 2 My Loever, the Dog: The Incredibly True Story of Kain Pathos Crow Zmax15 18 4 Dr. Bridge Over Troubled Water Kestin 5 3 Zyn Kriyu only she's a buterfly TL333s 2 3 Teh Fantem of teh opura Cyantreuse 11 2 Carlysle Aktus is a prickly bastard (AN: high school AU) bouncl 3 5 foundation internets… haced DrStranger -8 2 lurking in the shadows Eekium -4 2 lode faster DAMIT MrAnakinSpecter -11 2 Wiggle Youre Wogglebug Shaggydredlocks -6 2 FUCK IM FAILING TO MAINTAIN THESE STARES………… EldritchCyanide 1 2
Points were awarded by judges (who picked up to five which they wanted to award points to). Additional points were awarded for being translated (because I was amazed), if the target of the contest upvoted it, and if it met the tier requirements. Each tier got its own winner, as noted above!(CNN) — A boat captain is dead after being speared by a swordfish in Hawaii.
Randy Llanes, 47, was killed Friday while trying to catch the swordfish with a spear gun, according to the Hawaii Police Department.
Llanes, who runs a deep sea fishing charter, jumped in the water at Honokohau Harbor on the Big Island after spotting the broadbill swordfish.
After being hit with the spear that Llanes fired off, the fish “thrashed about, leaving a puncture wound to his upper chest,” said Lt. William Souther.
Another official, acting Sgt. David Matsushima of the Kona Patrol, told CNN affiliate KHON that “the fish got wrapped around a mooring anchor, came back and swam at him.”
Emergency crews attempted CPR, but Llanes died at a local hospital from trauma caused by a puncture wound from the swordfish.
The fish was about six feet long and weighed around 40 pounds.
Hawaii is a major source of the domestic swordfish catch in the United States, according to a seafood industry website.
The swordfish is considered ferocious, with a reputation of using its long, distinctive bills to slash prey.
Ancient Hawaii residents feared the swordfish because they attacked and sometimes pierced fishing canoes.
Llanes was remembered by friends and family as an experienced fisherman.
People who showed up at a memorial jumped in the harbor and swam out to the spot where he died. They brought a traditional lei to honor him.NEW YORK -– New York Knickerbockers President Phil Jackson announced today that the team has signed guard Thanasis Antetokounmpo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Antetokounmpo, 6-7, 215-pounds, averaged 13.9 points, 6.2 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 1.70 steals and 1.68 blocks over 32.9 minutes in 47 games (all starts) during the inaugural season of the NBA D- League’s Westchester Knicks. He earned NBA D-League All-Defensive Second Team honors last season after a Third Team selection in 2013-14 as a member of the Delaware 87ers. He ranked in the D-League’s Top-10 in steals (fifth, 80), free throw attempts (seventh, 251) and blocks (eighth, 79).
The Greece native, who was born to parents of Nigerian descent, was selected by New York in the second round (51st overall) of 2014 NBA Draft with a pick acquired from Dallas. He played for New York’s entry in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, NV each of the last two summers after playing for Delaware in 2013-14 and Filathlitikos (Greece) in 2012-13. He is the older brother of Milwaukee forward Giannis Antetokounmpo.You can now buy the fully unlocked Alcatel Idol 4S Windows 10 device for just $199. For this price, you will also get a VR headset which will allow you to enjoy VR content.
Alcatel Idol 4S comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display protected by Dragontrail Glass, a 21MP rear camera, and an 8MP front camera. It is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 clocked at 2.15GHz, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage (with microSD support), and a 3000mAh battery.
It supports bands GSM network: 850/900/1800/1900, UMTS 2/4/5, LTE2/4/12. AT&T 4G HSPA and HSPA+ use 850Mhz(Band 5) and 1900Mhz(Band 2) bands and AT&T LTE uses Band 17(700Mhz), Band 5(850Mhz), Band 2(1900Mhz), Band 4(1700/2100Mhz) currently, so the device should be compatible, depending on the area.
For more information on the Alcatel Idol 4S with Windows 10, read our full review of the device right here. And if you are interested in buying the device, you can get it from Microsoft here.Sky has had success navigating the British ratings waters with such U.S. dramas as 'Arrow' and 'NCIS: Los Angeles'
U.K. pay TV giant BSkyB has acquired Michael Bay series The Last Ship and the upcoming comic-book adaptation The Flash for its flagship network Sky 1 HD.
Financial details weren't disclosed.
The Last Ship is a military thriller, which debuted in the U.S. on TNT this summer. It is based on a best-selling novel by William Brinkley and stars Eric Dane (Grey's Anatomy) and British actress Rhona Mitra (Strike Back).
Meanwhile, the superhero show is set to launch in the U.S. in October. The series stars Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, who chases criminals as The Flash, the fastest man alive. The DC Comics TV adaptation is a spinoff from The CW hit show Arrow, which already airs on Sky 1.
The two shows add to BSkyB's already strong lineup of U.S. dramas. Sky 1 has, for example, aired the likes of Fox's 24: Live Another Day, Arrow and CBS' NCIS: Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, BSkyB's Sky Atlantic network airs such HBO hits as Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, as well as Showtime's Ray Donovan and CBS' Blue Bloods.
Sky 1 didn't detail an air date for the first episode of The Flash. It said it would air the 10-episode first season of The Last Ship "soon," but also didn't immediately indicate a launch date. TNT has already renewed the series for a second 13-episode run.
The first season of The Last Ship kicks off amid a global pandemic that has nearly wiped out the world's population. The crew of the U.S.S. Nathan James is heading home from Antarctica with microbiologist Rachel Scott, the only person who might hold the key to stopping the virus. They must stay alive until a cure is found.
Dane stars as the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Nathan James who's married with two young daughters. Mitra plays the microbiologist.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @georgszalai— There’s never been a better — and apparently more expensive — time than now to drink coffee in NYC. As Florence Fabricant reported in the New York Times last week, new coffee shop Extraction Lab has opened in Industry City in Sunset Park as the headquarters of Alpha Dominche, the company behind the ultra-fancy “steampunk” machine, which Bedford and Bowery describes as “a cross between a French press and a draft beer tap... operated by an iPad app and designed to combine all the elements of drip, French press, and espresso brewing.” But what Flo Fab did not mention is that the new shop produces an $18 cup of coffee — yes, you read that right. That means NYC officially has the country beat in highest coffee price, with the last reported most-expensive cup as $16 in San Francisco. If you’d like to try the bougie brew, the Extraction Lab is open at 51 35th St. in Brooklyn on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Bring a credit card. — Stefanie Tuder
We will offer @1872clippertea on the Steampunk with tried and true recipes they use in their shops in Singapore! A photo posted by Alpha Dominche Extraction Lab (@extractionlab) on Nov 2, 2016 at 6:03am PDT
— Is longtime West Village art haven Cornelia Street Cafe in trouble? It appears so, as owners Robin Hirsch and Angelo Verga wrote to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Apparently rent is 77 times what it was when the culture-driven cafe opened in 1977. According to owners: “Suzanne Vega sang her first songs in front of our cappuccino machine when we were still one room. Eve Ensler developed her Vagina Monologues after we expanded downstairs. Senator Eugene McCarthy has read his poetry and Dr Oliver Sacks his prose.... Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, conducts a regular Science Series.” They’re imploring people to patronize. Stay tuned for more. — ST
— It’s “globalized, Asian contemporary” fare as opposed to Chinese food at Chinese Tuxedo, according to co-owner Jeff Lam, from China, in The New Yorker. Chinese Tuxedo is a “reincarnation of a restaurant that was located across the street a century ago, when it boasted of being the finest eatery in Chinatown and its name evoked colonial Shanghai glamour and lascivious vices.”
— Caviar Kaspia is extending its run at Spring Place, Page Six has learned. Based on the 90 year-old destination spot in Paris with a cult following, the NYC space was designed by “Fellini of Fashion,” Alexandre de Betak. “What I believe New York really needs is a somewhat old-fashioned, un-designed design that brings that unexplainable feeling of tradition that you get in Paris when you go to Caviar Kaspia,” he told Architectural Digest. The menu includes a carpaccio of Norwegian salmon, crab salad, and trios royal and imperial caviars. In addition to over 20 types of vodka and 30 selections of Champagne, there is the caviar martini.
— Feed Your Soul Bakery will open its first storefront cafe at 14 Wall St. on March 1st. The bakery has operated as an online retailer for cookies, brownies, and other baked goods for nearly a decade. Owner Mya Zoracki says the café will offer signature sweets, unique desserts, and trend-setting savory items, such as the eatery’s Spaghetti Pie, as well as coffee from a local roasting plant.
— O Cafe has opened at 61 Hester St., the pottery shop and restaurant from Argentinian Fernando Aciar. “ A design boutique, an all-day café, a pottery studio and a catering service,” this is the third location for O Cafe, with the others at 482 6th Ave. and at The New School (6 E. 16th St., 8th Floor).
—With locations in the East Village, the Lower East Side, and Williamsburg, Tex-Mex restaurant, San Loco is opening a fourth location in Bushwick (582 Bushwick Ave.) this week.
— Vintage Wine Bar opens in Astoria (23-14 Ditmars Blvd.) this week. In February, the bar will donate a portion of its wine sales to PS 122, which is across the street.
— And finally, for your AM consumption, Turntable’s ChimekIt's a given that muffins and iced chocolates aren't healthy, and as such, should be consumed as an occasional treat. But if a 0.5 health star rating was slapped on it, would you think twice?
Researchers from the George Institute of Global Health and Cancer Council NSW applied the health star rating system – seen on packaged foods in supermarkets – to 1530 menu items at 13 fast food chains and found Gloria Jean's had the lowest average health star rating of two stars, followed closely by McCafe and Muffin Break.
They found 41 per cent of Gloria Jean's products and 30 per cent of items at Muffin Break – home of the coconut slice that contains half the recommended daily energy intake – scored fewer than 1.5 stars.
The George Institute's Dr Elizabeth Dunford called on the government to extend the ratings scheme to fast food restaurants so that consumers can compare and opt for healthier choices. Such a move would prompt the companies to reformulate products for the better.The struggle is real, my friends. We’ve already looked at the horror being inflicted upon special snowflakes around the country these days as #TheChalkening sends college students scurrying for their safe space. Who knows what sort of lasting damage could ensue if young adults turn a corner on their morning walk only to see a name or campaign slogan emblazoned on the sidewalk where they are walking, enshrined there for all time? (Or at least until the next rainfall.) Not everyone is taking this threat lying down, however. At DePaul University in Chicago, students will soon be able to perambulate around the quad without fear of such lasting mental scar tissue because the university has banned chalking the sidewalks after someone was tasteless enough to write the name of Donald J. Trump on the pavement. (Daily Caller and Campus Reform)
DePaul University will no longer allow students to chalk political messages on the sidewalks of its campus because of the “offensive, hurtful, and divisive” nature of pro-Trump chalking found on campus last week. “While these chalk messages are part of national agendas in a heated political battle, they appeared on campus at a time of significant racial tension in our country and on college campuses. DePaul is no exception,” Depaul’s vice president for student affairs Eugene Zdziarski wrote in a campus-wide email obtained by Campus Reform… Campus Reform reached out to DePaul to ask why university officials chose to respond to this particular chalking instance despite claims that chalking “regularly” occurs on campus. No response was received in time for publication.
The entire idea of “chalking” as a form of expression has apparently been a tradition at DePaul for quite some time, just as it is on sidewalks around the nation. It may seem silly and even trashy (when attempted by those with less artistic flair) but if you’re going to allow the temporary defacement of the public thoroughfare in what is an essentially harmless exercise of the First Amendment it obviously has to apply to everyone. The alternative is to have it apply to nobody and that’s the course which the university has chosen.
And what led to it? You don’t even need to click on the link to determine that it was a Trump slogan. There was apparently no prohibition against competing Hillary vs. Bernie art or support for the minimum wage, Black Lives Matter or anything else. But if any of the College Republicans dare to try their hand at it, all bets are off. Thanks, Special Snowflakes! You continue to make the world a safer and stupider place.
There’s really not much more to say because parody has overtaken reality far too often these days. But if you really want to break out some chalk and brighten up the neighborhood, I suggest you check out this guy for some ideas.How did the results change in the 2018 index? Click here to find out.
This year’s QS Best Student Cities index includes a brand new Student View category, based on ratings from students and recent graduates. The results are in some ways surprising, suggesting that the most iconic and in-demand cities (think London, Paris, NYC…) do not necessarily live up to expectations, while lesser-known cities often make for happier students.
Between December 2016 and January 2017, more than 18,000 students and graduates rated their cities in eight categories: arts and culture, affordability, nightlife, employment opportunities, diversity, tolerance and inclusion, ease of getting around, and friendliness. They were also asked whether they would stay, or had stayed, in the city after graduating.
So, which are the top 10 student cities overall, as rated by students themselves?
When the survey ratings are combined, the highest overall score goes to Canadian capital Ottawa, which – with a population of around 1.2 million in its wider metropolitan area – is among the smallest cities featured in the index. Proving that the best things often come in small packages, Ottawa gets particularly strong ratings for friendliness and tolerance, as well as (less predictably) nightlife. Survey respondents commend its student-centered culture, multicultural and bilingual environment, and opportunities to gain experience in government as well as other sectors.
Next up, the capital of the Czech Republic, known for its attractive and historic architecture, thriving nightlife and low costs. Prague gets especially high ratings for arts and culture, ease of getting around, affordability and diversity. Students praise the city’s beauty, location in the heart of Europe, low living costs and wide range of things to do, see, eat and drink.
Firmly at the “big city” end of the spectrum, Shanghai is the second-largest city featured in the index (after Tokyo). Yet, while you might expect navigating this megalopolis to be the stuff of nightmares, Shanghai actually gets its strongest rating in the “ease of getting around” category, while also scoring well for nightlife, friendliness, and arts and culture. Respondents also praise the city’s cuisine, opportunities to meet people from many backgrounds, and the buzz of studying in a city with international opportunities and influence.
Back to the Czech Republic, Brno is considerably less well-known than Prague, but it’s almost on a par with the capital in delivering a great student experience. The city gets extremely strong ratings for tolerance and inclusivity, and ease of getting around, while also scoring very well for both affordability and nightlife. Respondents praised the attractiveness of the city, as well as the large and friendly student community.
Also fourth in the student vote, Montréal is actually #1 overall in the QS Best Student Cities this year – taking the lead once the Student View category is combined with five others. As Canada’s “cultural capital”, it unsurprisingly gets one of the highest ratings for arts and culture, while also scoring well for friendliness, affordability and diversity. Survey respondents praise the wide range of activities in the city, multicultural and welcoming environment, and thriving student scene – with the popular fast food dish poutine also getting a mention!
The UK’s strongest all-round performer in the student survey is Nottingham. Gaining a particularly high score for tolerance and inclusion, Nottingham also ranks well for ease of getting around, arts and culture and friendliness. Survey respondents praise its student-focused “college-town feel”, green spaces, nightlife, and comparative affordability in the UK context.
Leading the US both in the overall QS Best Student Cities index and in the Student View category, Boston is a medium-sized city (population around 4.6 million) combining the best aspects of big city life with a small-town feel. Its top score is for friendliness, followed by strong ratings for ease of getting around and arts and culture. Respondents highlight its relaxed and welcoming feel, attractive surroundings, and leading academic environment.
The South Korean capital has this year climbed six places in the QS Best Student Cities index, placing fourth overall. Known as a 24/7 kind of city, it perhaps unsurprisingly gets its strongest rating for nightlife, while also scoring well for ease of getting round and arts and culture. Respondents praise the city for its diversity of activities and opportunities, while also emphasizing safety and convenience. Seoul also claims the strongest overall score in the “staying after graduation” category, with a high percentage of respondents saying they planned to stay on after their studies, or had already done so.
Though Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe are separate cities in their own right, their combined metropolitan area – equivalent to the world’s 16th largest economy – is known under the collective term Keihanshin. With a combined population of more than 19 million, these sister cities get their strongest rating for arts and culture, followed by ease of getting around and tolerance. Students praise the balance of urban life and beautiful natural surrounds, relishing opportunities to explore the area’s rich history and traditions while enjoying a modern student lifestyle.
Taiwan’s capital gets its strongest score for friendliness, with an almost equally high rating for affordability. In fact, it claims the strongest student rating in the index for affordability – a category in which students are, unsurprisingly, particularly reluctant to award high scores! Students are also full of praise for its convenient transport system, cheap and delicious food, and friendly locals.
A special mention also goes to:
Riyadh – highest-rated for employment opportunities;
Vienna – top for arts and culture;
Canberra – the friendliest city according to students;
Brisbane – the number one student city for diversity;
Nanjing – highest-rated for tolerance and inclusion;
Oslo – number one for ease of getting around.
Want to rate your own student city? Complete our short survey, and help create next year’s edition of the QS Best Student Cities index.Damon Wayans Jr. will once again leave New Girl at the end of season 4, EW has confirmed.
Wayans, who plays original roommate Coach, initially starred in the pilot for the Fox comedy, but had to exit due to his commitment to Happy Endings. When his ABC comedy got axed, the actor returned to New Girl in season 3 as a special guest star before being upped to series regular in season 4. Wayans will still appear in the remainder of the season, according to TVLine.com, which first reported the news.
“I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to come back to New Girl in season 3 to reprise the role of Coach,” Wayans said in a statement. “Working with this incredibly talented and funny cast and crew has been one of the best experiences of my career.”
Added New Girl executive producer Liz Meriwether: “We love Damon and are so lucky to have had him return for the past season-and-a-half. We are working on crafting an exit for him that will leave the door open for many more returns, especially since Coach is our resolution to the upcoming ‘Who’s Jess’ Baby Daddy?’ storyline.” (She’s kidding… we think.)
New Girl airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Fox.TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan Airlines Corp shares slid 12 percent to a record low on Friday as investors suggested bankruptcy may be an option for Asia’s biggest airline by revenue, even as the government again pledged to support the troubled carrier.
A man walks past a logo of Japan Airlines at Haneda international airport in Tokyo September 17, 2009. REUTERS/Toru Hanai
“There’s increasing concern about the future of the company and whether it’s heading for a GM-style bankruptcy or not,” said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management.
The airline, plagued with high costs in a severe industry downturn, has asked creditors for 600 billion yen ($6.6 billion) in financial aid, including 300 billion yen in debt waivers and debt-for-equity swaps, as part of a restructuring plan, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
JAL shares fell to 100 yen, their lowest since they were re-listed in 2002. By the close, the stock was quoted at 101 yen, down more than 11 percent. The shares have lost a quarter of their value this week.
Last month, JAL proposed a plan under which it pledged to cut 6,800 jobs, eliminate 50 routes and lower its operating costs by 30 percent, but it was forced back to the drawing board after the government said the steps were not enough.
The airline is now working with a government-appointed task force on a new plan to put to the transport ministry within two weeks. Transport Minister Seiji Maehara on Friday pledged his support for the airline while that process is underway.
“From I can see in the pre-draft plan I received the other day from JAL and its task force, I am confident that work on the plan is progressing smoothly,” said Maehara, adding there was no change in the government’s stance to support the airline.
But the lack of a clear growth plan for JAL is fuelling market concern that a rescue package may be throwing good money after bad, some investors said, leaving creditors such as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Mizuho Financial Group out in the cold.
MUFG, JAL’s No.2 creditor behind the state-owned Development Bank of Japan, is owed about 50 billion yen ($551 million).
Kyodo news agency reported JAL was reconsidering a plan to sell shares in its group firms, suggesting that restructuring efforts needed to turn the company around might be slow to come.
“Even if they do get the funds, where’s the prospect of growth? I don’t see it,” said a portfolio manager at a Japanese asset management firm, who asked not to be named as he was not authorized to comment on individual stocks.
“In some ways, bankruptcy might be the better option — it would allow the firm to restart from a clean slate.”
JAL has put on hold separate talks with Delta Air Lines and AMR Corp’s American Airlines for a capital infusion and business ties, aiming to focus first on its own revival plan, Kyodo reported last week.
Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Japan Airlines International Co Ltd and put the JAL unit on review for a further possible downgrade.
($1=90.65 Yen)When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, the country had the lowest standard of living of any of the 27 countries that belonged to the Union at that time. On average, Bulgarians had the equivalent of just 4,300 euros at their disposal each year. The average amount within the EU was more than six times as high. Nonetheless, many Bulgarians were optimistic about the future because there had been significant improvements in previous years. Since the turn of the millennium, GDP had grown by around 50 percent. The number of those working in the formal economy had increased by almost half a million and unemployment had fallen from almost 20 percent (2001) to around seven percent. The promise of prosperity offered by the political transformation of the 1990s seemed to have been fulfilled, and accession to the European Union signalled recognition of that success.
However, with the outbreak of the global economic crisis, Bulgaria suffered a major setback. From 2008 to 2009, GDP plummeted by almost four percent. Thousands of jobs were lost, above all in sectors that had previously enjoyed success – construction, trade, textiles and tourism. The number of those employed in Bulgaria today is 330,000 fewer than in 2008 and some 40 percent of the population is threatened with poverty and social exclusion. Bulgaria remains the poorest EU country.
Demographic change spoils chances of prosperity
The country’s demographic development makes it both more difficult and more urgent to close the wealth gap with the rest of the EU. This is because Bulgaria is currently undergoing an unusually rapid demographic transformation. Not only are women in Bulgaria – like almost everywhere else in the EU – having only a small number of children; the health system is so dilapidated that Bulgaria has the second-lowest life expectancy in Europe – only Lithuania scores worse on this indicator. On average, Bulgarians live just 74.7 years.6 During the first ten years of its EU membership, Bulgaria has lost 4.4 percent of its population through death surpluses – more than any other EU-28 country.
In addition, thousands of people emigrate each year in search of a better life abroad – above all, from the poor northern part of the country. Because many of those emigrating are young people, both the shrinking of the population and the aging of society are accelerating. With a current median age of 43.6, Bulgaria is already the fifth-oldest nation in the EU. It is projected that as a result of all these developments, just 5.6 million people will be living in the country in 2050 – more than 1.5 million fewer than today — in which case, there will be only 1.5 people of working age for each person over 64; the current ratio is still three to one. These figures suggest that the aging will be even more pronounced in Bulgaria than in Germany, which at present has the highest median age in the EU. What is more, Bulgaria is likely to be harder hit by this development than Germany because the latter’s population can expect much more financial security in old age. The situation is different in Bulgaria. Today, the country already has the highest risk of poverty in old age among all EU countries – 46 percent.
In view of these developments, it is all the more important to quickly close the wealth gap with other European states. Here the key is productivity – that is, the average output of each employed person. It is estimated that productivity will have to increase annually by four percent until 2040 for Bulgaria to achieve the EU average for GDP. However, between 2010 and 2015, it grew annually by just 2.5 percent. To boost the growth of productivity in the future, the Bulgarian economy must be modernised. Currently, the country produces mainly simple goods at the lower end of the value chain. In almost no other EU state is the share of high-technology exports as low as in Bulgaria. In order to kick-start structural transformation, Bulgaria needs foreign investors. But owing to poor infrastructure, the red tape associated with founding companies and widespread corruption, Bulgaria has little pulling power among international investors.
Education as a major issue
In order to raise productivity to the desired level, Bulgaria will have to take measures to ensure that the population is better able to meet the needs of the job market. Companies that aim to design and manufacture complex products require qualified skilled workers, such as managers, engineers and computer scientists. Bulgaria has too few such workers. This is because of an education system that struggles to equip schoolchildren with even the most rudimentary skills and knowledge. In the 2015 PISA international educational assessment, 40 percent of 15 year olds tested were unable to read simple texts, do easy arithmetic or understand basic scientific concepts.
One of the reasons for these weaknesses is the peculiar structure of the Bulgarian school system. For around one-fifth of pupils, general education ends after six or seven years – that is, long before they reach the minimum school-leaving age of 16. At that point, they switch to a vocational school. The curricula of these vocational schools are scarcely oriented towards the needs of the job market. To this day, there is virtually no cooperation between employers, policymakers and educational institutions when it comes to drawing up educational programmes that would adequately prepare school-leavers for the tasks to be performed at the workplace. Moreover, there is insufficient practice orientation and a lack of clearly defined standards on training content. Despite a large number of initiatives and reform programmes in recent years, this situation has barely changed.
Similarly, higher education has to date contributed far too little to modernising the country’s economy. Not only is the quality of research and teaching worse than in other European states; many students choose subjects that are seldom required – for example, the humanities. For this reason, an unusually large number of graduates later work in professions that are below their level of qualification. In its National Strategy for the Development of Higher Education, Bulgaria is pursuing the goal of encouraging more students to opt for future-oriented subjects – for example, engineering, biotechnology and computer science – and promoting the development of these areas in particular.
Because it will inevitably be several years before such efforts yield positive results, the skills of today’s workforce should be developed through further training. Just how great the need is can be seen from an EU survey according to which more than two-thirds of Bulgarians aged 25-64 do not know how to properly use a computer or the Internet. Each month, just 2 percent of the working-age population are registered as taking part in further training courses. The EU average is just under 11 percent.
Another potential resource for overcoming the consequences of the demographic transformation is to be found in those who currently neither work nor are looking for a job. Almost one quarter of the population aged 25-64 belongs to this so-called silent reserve. Many women do not work. As is the case all over the world, family commitments are among the main reasons for this. But in Bulgaria there is a special reason: the country offers the longest statutory maternity leave in the world – 410 days. During this period, women receive 90 percent of their original wage. Thereafter, mothers or fathers can take paid parental leave of 320 days. For this reason, young women sometimes leave the job market for years. At the same time, those who belong to the current grandmother generation frequently give up working before retirement age in order to help bring up the children or to take care of older family members.
Disadvantaged in every respect
Poverty is a big problem in Bulgaria. However, it does not affect all segments of the population to the same extent. Roma, who make up five to ten percent of the population, are particularly threatened. In 2011, three-quarters of them were living in accommodation without such basic facilities as a toilet, kitchen, shower and electricity. Only half have health insurance and their average life expectancy is around ten years below that of the rest of the population. And because they often have received hardly any education, Roma are frequently unemployed or, at best, work in low-skilled jobs. Only ten percent finish secondary school and, at just one percent, their share of graduates is insignificant. Just under two-thirds of Roma aged 16-24 are neither undergoing training nor working.
A large number of state-sponsored and civil society initiatives are intended to help improve the situation of the Roma. Here, education plays an important role. Alongside informal projects such as summer schools and advisory programmes for parents, reforms of the educational system are aimed at helping to keep children at school for as long as possible. To this end, the government introduced a two-year mandatory pre-school education as well as all-day schools. Moreover, needy families receive certain social benefits only if their children regularly attend school. To a much greater extent than was previously the case, the private sector is taking part in organising mentoring, training and internship programmes to make Roma fit for the job market. Such efforts are not without an ulterior motive. Roma account for up to 19 percent of newcomers to the job market. Just how well or poorly the minority is integrated into society will therefore be crucial in determining the future of the country
Source: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, quoted by the Independent Balkan News AgencyOxfam is under mounting pressure from campaigners opposed to settlements to sever ties with Scarlett Johansson after she agreed to star in an advertising campaign for a fizzy drinks company with a factory in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Activists in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel have seized on Johansson's appearance in an advert for SodaStream scheduled to air during half-time at this Sunday's US Super Bowl, the advertising slot with the largest audience on American television.
Johansson has been an Oxfam goodwill ambassador since 2005. The campaigners say her position is untenable.
"Oxfam is a human rights organisation. They cannot maintain an ambassador if they are involved in a complicit Israeli company built in a settlement. They can't keep both. You can't maintain something and its contradiction," the boycott campaign founder Omar Barghouti told |
7 Ways Love Transforms Your Brain
This research, published in the August 2011 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, studied over 1000 couples, men from 40 to 70 years of age and their partners. The participants were from the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Japan and Spain.
As a relationship healing expert, psychotherapist, counselor, mentor and coach working with individuals and couples for over two decades, I find some of the study statistics to be too simplistic and the generalization too vast. Researchers always focus on the statistical averages but clinicians focus on what is actually happening with individuals.
Some couples do become closer, more cuddly and more sexually satisfied over time. Other couples become more distant, less cuddly and more like roommates. Some couples are really cuddly, touching, hugging and even kissing often, but just like siblings, brothers and sisters, with very little sexual passion.
The reasons for their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the relationship may have very little to do with whether they are touching regularly or not. So many factors play into the equation. Some childhood issues may have never been resolved. Financial concerns may be looming heavily. Adult children may be creating insurmountable problems that tear at the couple’s intimacy. Aging parents and young children, for those in the sandwich generation years, can certainly interfere with feeling a sense of satisfaction with the relationship. Sometimes one or both partners are wishing “if only” they could escape from their current real-life pressures.
What does it take to build long lasting pleasure, enjoyment, sexual satisfaction and relationship happiness?
For many men and women it takes the willingness to face their own issues, to learn what the other person wants and needs and values, and to truly share what is real for each. Often, counseling can bring two people much closer together after the problems and conflicts are presented and all the cards are out on the table. They can pick up the pieces, reshuffle the deck and create together the relationship of both of their dreams — at any age.
Are you ready, willing and able to restore the love and passion and joy in your long term relationship or marriage? Want to put some pzazz, passion and cuddling back into your daily routine? Need some help? Schedule an appointment with DrErica.
More great content from YourTango:
Cuddling Is For Men?Links to the previous film reviews:
Paranormal Activity 1
Paranormal Activity 2
Paranormal Activity 3
Paranormal Activity 4
Paranormal Activity 4b: The Marked Ones
Can of coke, Marketing department! This trailer makes the film look amazing!
Cast/Crew: No-one you’d know (besides the actresses playing young Katie and Kristy). Directed by Gregory Plotkin (editor for PA 1-4)
Plot: Paranormal found footage film. It’s 2008! Ryan has his brother Mike over to stay at his house, then paranormal activity occurs, targeting his young daughter Leila.
Quick run down of the camera gimmicks of the film:
PA1 – one static camera in the bedroom
PA2 – multiple security cameras in/around the house
PA3 – multiple static cameras + one on a Rotating fan axis (panning left to right)
PA4 – multiple static cameras + webcam + Microsoft Kinect (which can sense demon’s motion – boo! hiss!)
PA4b The Marked Ones – handheld + magic gateway door
PA4c The Ghost Dimension – 2 cameras, 1 can see the paranormal activity + ‘live reading’ VHS + magic gateway door
It’s worth revisiting the rules of the PA franchise that you need to accept to enjoy them, which is almost all still completely relevant:
1) It’s found footage spliced together, from a hand-held and security cameras.
2) The ghost/demon is invisible and so there’s little to no CG.
3) Cameras are set up around the house and you are asked to actively “monitor” the room for changes
4) The films work on a day/night cycle. Scares happen at night, footage is reviewed during the day. This works twofold, giving the audience a chance to relax after “monitoring” the night footage and also anticipating the night-time as ‘scary time’.
5) Attacks (aka jump scares, bangs, light-flickers, rumbling noises with abrupt stops) start off subtle (things moving, stopping), at night, eventually during the day, and continue in increasing violence to the crescendo at the end of the film.
6) There’s a bit of occult storyline thrown in to tie the films together.
7) No we can’t leave the house we don’t have the budget for that.
Thoughts on the film:
• Before we start, fuck you and your amazing house!! Lol. It’s massive and gorgeous. They explain that the house was suspiciously cheap and the realtor can’t be found at the agency given (i.e. they were groomed into buying the house).
• Apparently this is the last one but the poster and trailer don’t explicitly state such, so it’s just a last-minute ploy to put a few more bums on seats (bums on seats laddy, bums on seats!). They’ve started doing spin-off names (ie The Marked Ones, The Ghost Dimension) instead of numbered entries though. Bollocks it’s the last – I’ll believe it when I don’t see it!
• I really liked how the film got straight to it, no company logos or anything.
• The gimmick this time around is that they mysteriously find a custom camera and box of tapes among Xmas decorations, which can actually pick up evil disturbances audio/visually, which looks like light fog/ash, taking form as a humanoid when it gets stronger/denser. So whilst this gimmick is new and interesting, it’s also a lot less scary as you know where the ‘bad stuff’ is happening — so it’s actually a bad idea, undermining a lot of the scare-factor. It looks cool though.
• As always, you’re asked to monitor the footage (which cuts between a normal camera and the special camera). Instead of being innocuous activity, it’s big sweeping obvious movements; which is appreciated (since I’m not that observant with these things) but it further strips tension away from the film.
• The trade-off is we have to watch the film through an 80s arcade filter, which is grand.
• Being able to see the ghost means that the film now has tons of special effects shots – which is very much against the PA as a whole – I kept thinking how expensive this must’ve been in comparison ($10m as opposed to $3-5m, which is actually much less than expected, and brought in $78m worldwide). In general the haunting looks good until they throw a blanket over it and we get a naff CGI ghost. Real X-Pac heat there.
• I love the other really cool gimmick they have – watching Katie/Kristi’s vhs tapes of training sessions in the cult (trying to ‘see’ the other side), and Katie describes Ryan’s daughter’s current room – fucking awesome. They revisit it pushing the kayfabe further (achoo! bless you! and seeing another child in an impossible time). A fantastic gimmick. Also assuming these tapes aren’t magic (they’ve already been recorded) it gives the sense of predeterminism, that whatever Ryan’s family were going to do has already happened, so they can’t change their fate. That’s not brought up but I thought the implication was a great little touch.
• There’s lots of false (intentional) fake-out shocks, as well as the ‘knocked something over’/pan away and back again, oh! shots. Combined with being able to see the ghost it’s very difficult to build up tension.
• They absolutely realise what’s going on (ghost called Tobi is talking to/has targeted their daughter causing her to walk around entranced), and their research is bang on the money, but they laugh off the gravity of the situation and just continue to monitor. It’s a bit ridiculous (to not GTFO immediately) but I did appreciate them logically taking action when they feel it’s an actual threat – ring a priest; who tells them Leila’s haunted so running won’t do any good, sleep in daughter’s room on the floor; and go to a hotel anyway when scared.
• We get more exposition about the cult (which I love hearing about) and revisit the magic doorway into another time/place; which explains how kids can disappear/move great distances quickly; much appreciated.
• Big-breasted blonde babysitter (she serves no role besides being eye candy – she bounces as she meets Mike for the first time) optimises Feng Shui in houses for a living. JAYSUS, there’s an evil supernatural spirit in the house and you didn’t notice?!
• The cheap camera + looking to Christmas lights mean LIGHT STREAKING!
• Some real groaners/generic horror bits, e.g. daughter Leila sitting talking into the mirror. It’s a bit on the nose, as well as the ghost hand in mirror, which then breaks it.
• I always appreciate films trying to slot themselves the overall story of the franchise, like we see footage from previous PA films, they use this knowledge to try help them. They also come across a flyer for Hunter (so we hear a little more about Katie after abducting him)
• The big finish is the priest requests they try an extermination, which after some good build up is ultimately not very good.
• Small continuity problems – They show the end of PA3 but they change it, to picking up the camera and following the girls. They also say the house burned down in 1992 despite previously saying it burnt down after the girls escape to Grandma Lois’ house. These are very small things though, I just thought I’d mention it.
Overall: An easy watch, a solid gimmick but not particularly scary. The new ‘see the activity’ gimmick is fresh but also strips tension; the ‘live reading’ VHS tapes are great. It’s not very good but it’s what you can expect for a sequel of the franchise. You’re not missing out though, can’t recommend.This page summarises the potential profit from acquiring and selling all 40 map bonus rewards for each map on a given week. The value stated includes a 15% trading post transaction tax.
Click on the grey portion of a box to see a summary of which rewards are earned from each map.
of a box to see a summary of which rewards are earned from each map. Click on the Week # to expand all boxes for that week.
to expand all boxes for that week. Click on the white portion of an expanded box to show the full sequence of rewards for that week.
It is currently week 1, and the reward tracks will next change at Thursday 20:00 UTC. (This page was last cached at Tuesday 20:22 UTC, 26 February 2019. )A Virginia man who had a beef with the Department of Motor Vehicles settled his sales tax bill with 298,745 pennies.
Workers at the DMV office in Lebanon, in rural southwestern Virginia, had to spend hours counting the pennies by hand when the coin-counting machine jammed.
Nick Stafford carted the pennies into the DMV in five wheelbarrows Wednesday. The coins weighed 1,600 pounds.
“If they were going to inconvenience me, then I was going to inconvenience them,” he told the Bristol Herald Courier.
The paper reported that Stafford became incensed in September when he attempted to call the Lebanon DMV and was routed to a call center in faraway Richmond.
That led Stafford to file three lawsuits after he couldn’t get the phone numbers of nine local DMV offices. On Tuesday a judge dismissed the cases after an attorney for the DMV gave Stafford the numbers, the paper reported.
Stafford paid 11 people a total of $440 to scatter the pennies out of their rolls with hammers.
The wheelbarrows cost him another $400.
Stafford says he owed the DMV $2,987.14 in sales tax after purchasing two new SUVs with cash.POTUS Trump RIPS Obama – Scouts Chant “We Love Trump!” at National Jamboree (VIDEO)
The scouts chanted “We Love Trump!” tonight at the National Jamboree in West Virginia.
The massive crowd of tens of thousands of boy scouts cheered the president at the jamboree.
The crowd was enormous – nearly 40,000 people!
Trump ripped Barack Obama for NEVER attending a jamboree.
The massive crowd grumbled then started chanting—
“We love Trump! We love Trump!… “
It was an amazing event.
Thousands of boy scouts awaiting arrival of Pres Trump at their National Jamboree in WV. pic.twitter.com/mauQnBdlq3 — Mark Knoller (@markknoller) July 24, 2017
Trump could not be having more fun addressing this huge Scouts crowd. Lots of love both ways. pic.twitter.com/eVG9F7BVxl — Julie Bykowicz (@bykowicz) July 24, 2017
The cameras captured the young scout who screamed, “I Love You!” to the president.
He was sooo excited!
This was AMAZING VIDEO!
MORE… The president tweeted more amazing video from the jamboree tonight.
#2017Jambo– Remember your duty. Honor your history. Take care of the people God puts into your life – and LOVE & CHERISH your country! pic.twitter.com/DnNYxGJm4I — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017Media playback is not supported on this device Alonso gets angry at aggressive Rosberg
Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton have joined a chorus of drivers calling for clarity on overtaking rules.
Drivers are confused about what is acceptable defensive behaviour after two incidents involving Mercedes' Nico Rosberg at the last race in Bahrain.
Hamilton, who was involved in one of the incidents, said: "Fortunately neither of us got in trouble or hurt.
"Hopefully we will try to make the rules a little bit clearer so we won't be in that position again."
One of them should have been penalised whereas they both got away with it. It's difficult to know where the line is then Jenson Button McLaren driver
The drivers will discuss the issue, which has dominated the build-up to this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, at their briefing with race director Charlie Whiting on Friday.
Button said he felt one of either his McLaren team-mate Hamilton or Rosberg should have been penalised for the incident, in which the German drove right to the inside edge of the track to defend from Hamilton, who then passed him after going beyond the boundaries of the circuit.
"The problem with that manoeuvre is if Nico doesn't get penalised for pushing off the track, that means Lewis overtook off track," Button said.
"One of them should have been penalised whereas they both got away with it. It's difficult to know where the line is then."
Button's view was backed by Red Bull's Mark Webber, who said: "I was surprised Lewis was allowed to keep his position.
"It was for sure a situation Lewis didn't want to put himself in either, finding himself completely off the track, but ultimately the move was allowed to be kept.
"I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about it in the drivers' briefing."
We need to discuss it because they felt in danger which I didn't intentionally do Nico Rosberg Mercedes driver
Rosberg was also involved in an almost identical incident with Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who has since said that he feels the situation opens the door to drivers pushing their rivals off the track and to overtaking by going beyond the boundaries of the circuit.
The F1 rules forbid drivers from passing off the track - but they are less clear in defining acceptable defence.
There is a rule saying drivers have to leave room for their rivals - but only in the context of a move back onto the racing line after leaving it to defend.
There is no rule saying a driver in front cannot choose which part of the track to use to defend his position - only one saying he cannot crowd a rival off the track.
Rosberg was not penalised because race stewards in Bahrain said footage showed he moved first in both incidents and neither Hamilton nor Alonso had any part of their car alongside him before he made his initial defensive move.
Rosberg said: "I judged it to be harsh but fair, according to the rules we have and I didn't judge that it was putting my compadres in danger."
He added that it was "important" the issue was discussed at the drivers' briefing "because two drivers raised their concerns about it, two of the drivers who were involved.
Media playback is not supported on this device Bahrain Grand Prix highlights
"So we need to discuss it because they felt in danger which I didn't intentionally do, of course not," he added.
He said the rules regarding such a situation were "not very clear", adding: "It's difficult to make rules for that but it can be looked at, so there are specific guidelines as to when you need to leave space."
Alonso said this week he felt there was a lack of respect between some of the drivers, but Rosberg and Button both said this was not the case.
Asked if he had respect for his rivals, Rosberg said: "Of course. For all of them."
Both Button and Webber's team-mate Sebastian Vettel said Rosberg would probably have behaved differently on a track that had grass or a wall demarcating the edge of the circuit, rather than the asphalt in Bahrain.
Spanish Grand Prix 2012, Circuit de Catalunya, day one
Friday 11 May: First practice 0855-0935 BST, Second practice 1255-1435 BBC Red Button, BBC Radio 5 live sports extra and live text commentary on BBC Sport website.
Spanish Grand Prix 2012, Circuit de Catalunya, day two
Saturday 12 May: Third practice 0955-1105 BST BBC Red Button, BBC Radio 5 live sports extra and live text commentary on BBC Sport website; Qualifying 1155 BST BBC Radio 5 live and live text commentary on BBC Sport website; Qualifying 1210 BST BBC One and BBC One HD, BBC Radio 5 live sports extra and live text commentary on BBC Sport website.
Spanish Grand Prix 2012, Circuit de Catalunya, day threeMOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced as “odious” a U.S.-backed draft resolution condemning the Syrian government before a debate at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Wednesday and said it would undermine peace efforts.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (R) meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Paris, May 27, 2013. REUTERS/Jim Young
Lavrov said U.S. support for the draft resolution, which would condemn “widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights” by Syrian authorities and affiliated militias, ran counter to U.S.-Russian efforts to convene a peace conference.
“The U.S. delegation (at the council in Geneva) is very actively promoting this extremely unwholesome initiative,” Lavrov told a news conference after talks with Latin American counterparts in Moscow.
He said the draft was “unilateral and odious” and likened it to a U.N. General Assembly resolution adopted earlier this month that he said was aimed at creating obstacles to U.S.-Russian efforts to foster a peaceful solution.
Lavrov said it was unacceptable to support the conference, which he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry are trying to organize, while at the same time “taking steps that are in essence aimed at undermining this proposal”.
Lavrov reiterated Russian insistence that Iran be invited to the conference, an idea opposed by France, and said opponents of President Bashar al-Assad should be persuaded to enter negotiations “without preconditions” such as his exit.
Russia has been Assad’s most powerful protector during the conflict that has killed more than 80,000 people, opposing U.N. sanctions and, along with China, blocking three Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolutions it said were one-sided.
Iran is the main regional ally of Assad.
Speaking in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said any decision to include Iran in the Geneva talks would be “extremely dangerous” as it would harm prospects of reaching a deal with Tehran on its disputed nuclear program.
“We fear that if they are part of the Syrian conference they will try to drag things on to such an extent that they will blackmail us saying that the Syrian crisis can only be resolved on condition that they have the nuclear bomb,” Fabius told France Inter radio. Iran denies seeking nuclear bomb capability.
Fabius said that with Iran having sent instructors and officers to Syria and encouraged Hezbollah to fight anti-Assad rebels, it would be a mistake to “ask people to attend a conference whose objective is to prevent a positive solution”.
Russia joined the United States and other powers last June in calling for the creation of a transitional governing body in Syria and says it is not trying to prop Assad up but that his departure cannot be imposed as a precondition for talks.
Lavrov also said the European Union’s decision on Thursday to let an arms embargo on Syria lapse, allowing members to supply rebels on their own initiative, “at a minimum creates serious hurdles” to plans for the peace conference.
Russia says the weapons it supplies Assad’s government are meant for defense against external attacks. Moscow has declared it will not yield to pressure to scrap a contract to deliver S-300 ground-to-air missile systems to Syria.Coming Soon
Mirage
A space-time continuum glitch allows Vera to save a boy's life 25 years earlier, but results in the loss of her daughter, whom she fights to get back.
Osmosis
In Paris of the near future, a dating app matches singles with their soul mates by mining their brain data. But decoding true love comes at a price.
Avatar The Last Airbender
Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony. Then, everything changed. The animated show's original creators helm a live-action take on Aang's story.
Escape from Hat
A desperate rabbit rallies an unexpected band of allies to help him escape from inside a magician's hat and return to the human boy he loves.
American Son
An estranged interracial couple searches for answers about their missing son. Based on the Broadway play. Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale star.
Living with Yourself
A man who's burned out on life and love undergoes a mysterious treatment, only to find that he's been replaced by a better version of himself.
Virgin River
After seeing an ad for a midwife, a recently divorced big-city nurse moves to the redwood forests of California, where she meets an intriguing man.
Empress
After escaping from her horrific husband, Queen Emporia and her kids must hide from his army at all costs -- even by teleporting to different planets.American Chemical Society
Smears of wine running down the side of a glass have inspired scientists to produce tiny chemically-driven engines that run on electricity generated in water.
When wine is sloshed up the sides of a glass, the different surface tensions of the alcohol and water components of the beverage effectively pull the liquid up the glass until its weight overcomes the force and pulls it down again.
The phenomenon is known as the Marangoni effect and was first observed in 1855 by physicist James Thomson. He termed it the “tears of wine”.
Now, physicists led by Lidong Zhang of the East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, have co-opted the Marangoni effect to produce droplets that rotate rapidly in water, producing chemical-free energy.
Sadly, Zhang and his colleagues do not use a robust claret or a cheeky little Beaujolais to create their micro-engines, opting instead to use a combination of polyvinylidene fluoride and dimethyl formamide.
The mixture, formed into a tiny droplet, swells on contact with water, and the Marangoni effect causes it to spin rapidly. Despite weighing only 22 milligrams, the droplet produced enough kinetic energy to propel a waterborne paper rocket weighing 32 milligrams for a distance of more than 560 centimetres.
As the video here shows, the team also tested the droplets using paper goldfish, and X-shaped pieces of cardboard used for mixing chemicals into water.
The energy released by the droplet can be converted into electricity using an electromagnetic generator. The scientists, writing in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir, suggest the wine-inspired engines could be useful for miniature robotics applications.Waving an Indian flag during the driver parade
India was an eye-opening experience for me. I've always been fascinated by the country, as I think many people are, but nothing prepares you for your first experience of it.
I have never seen anything like it - and I have travelled to a lot of places in the world.
With a population of 1.2bn and huge cultural diversity, seeing is believing in India. There is a lot of poverty but also a lot of happiness. People get on with their lives just as they do anywhere else in the world.
It doesn't sit particularly comfortably with me when the excessive world of F1 arrives somewhere like this, but the welcome we got ahead of last weekend's Indian Grand Prix seemed genuine and it appeared most people were happy to have us in their country.
I landed at Delhi airport at 5am on the Thursday before the race. A driver picked me up and we got lost straight away.
It was just me and the driver in the car. We were in the middle of Delhi, talking to random people in the back streets as we tried to find the way to the hotel. I obviously had no idea where we were.
Media playback is not supported on this device Indian Grand Prix in 90 seconds
The driver was trying his hardest to converse with me but, as you might expect, his English wasn't great and my Hindi is non-existent.
He had that beautiful warm smile you see on the faces of so many people in India but you could see he was beginning to panic a little.
I told him there was no rush. I was enjoying having a look around. I basically got a free tour of Delhi.
All the feral dogs were running around as the day was beginning to break. The light is like nowhere else, so it's little wonder you see so many films shot at that time of day in India.
Once we got to the hotel, I could have been anywhere in the world. The staff went to quite a bit of effort to look after us all but, as you go to bed there each night, I was well aware that there are people living in very different conditions not very far away.
I mentioned in last week's column that I was keen to spend more time in India, to get a motorbike and ride around. The few days I spent there last weekend just made me more determined to do just that at some point in the future.
I'm particularly keen to travel up into northern India and the foothills of the Himalayas to see how people live in such remote yet beautiful areas and to ride some of the highest mountain roads in the world.
It would be incredible, so it is high on my to-do list when I get a bit more time to myself.
THE GRAND PRIX
The race, won by my Red Bull team-mate Sebastian Vettel, appeared to be a great success.
It must be a hard task encouraging the Indian people to fall in love with F1 - for a lot of them, a car race is not high on their priority list - but the organisers have put a massive amount of effort in.
The buildings and infrastructure at the Buddh International Circuit are not world-class yet, although they will be, and you could see a few things had to be rushed to get ready. But the track itself is awesome, particularly the second and third sectors.
Formula 1 and Bollywood come together at the India Grand Prix
I was impressed with the crowd, too. There were 95,000 fans on Sunday, while the pre-race driver parade was an amazing experience. The grandstands were packed and the people were making a hell of a racket.
I managed to persuade one of the marshals to give me an Indian flag. I thought it would be nice to send a bit of a message about how happy I was to be there and to thank the people for making the effort to come and watch.
To see so many people at the race in its inaugural year was very encouraging. In some ways, it felt a bit like being in Japan, where people are still a bit awestruck around F1 drivers.
But F1 is still no match for the popularity of Bollywood and its stars, who are feted everywhere they go.
The famous are really put on a pedestal in India and the F1 drivers were treated like incredibly special people. We're just like anyone else, of course. We just do a different job.
I guess the Indian people were just so excited to have international sports stars in their country because, apart from the touring cricket sides, it doesn't really happen that often.
MY INDIAN RACE
India wasn't the greatest race for me. I knew going into it that I was a little bit doomed - and that's how it turned out.
I was struggling to get the range out of the tyres, which really messes up your strategy. The team have a reasonable understanding of why it happened but there was nothing we could do.
I got a good start but Jenson Button got a run on me on the first lap. We knew we were going to be vulnerable to the McLarens and Ferraris on the straights and it was very hard to defend my position.
I was quite a lot quicker than Jenson early on but I was aware I needed to be careful with my tyres. Then I had to make my final stop early, allowing Ferrari's Fernando Alonso to jump me as well.
I closed in on Fernando in the final laps - I seem to spend virtually every race battling him at the moment - but I just couldn't get past.
All in all, it was a frustrating day for me after the races in Japan and Korea, when I was much closer to the front in terms of pace.
HAMILTON V MASSA
Media playback is not supported on this device Hamilton and Massa collide again
You could argue all day about the rights and wrongs of the latest crash involving Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa but it was a 50-50 incident in my opinion.
The corner they collided at is quite a quick one - fifth gear at about 135mph - so the brakes don't go on much.
It's very difficult to pass there but Lewis got a good run off Turn Four and got down the inside of Felipe.
If someone's had an absolute howler, then fine, give them a penalty but sometimes it might be better just to say it was one of those things
It was the age-old thing. Lewis went for it, Felipe was still going to commit to the corner, then Lewis tried to back off and couldn't.
F1 is getting into a bit of a road-car culture with penalties. The attitude seems to be that someone must be to blame when there is an incident.
In this case, the stewards thought Felipe could have given Lewis a bit more room and therefore handed him a drive-through penalty.
Yes, Felipe could have made space for Lewis but, in my view, it wasn't clear-cut.
The drivers have always said that they want the stewards to be consistent - and, to be fair, that's what they are trying to be.
If someone's had an absolute howler, then fine, give them a penalty but sometimes it might be better just to say it was one of those things - what we call in F1 "a racing incident" - and let it go.Recent articles by Kurdish Anarchists Forum
Sulla crisi in Iraq Recent Articles about Mashriq / Arabia / Iraq Imperialism / War
Curdi Sotto Tiro by Gianni Sartori Requiem for Rojava by Khaled Aboud The Saudi-Kurdish love affair by Khaled Aboud What do we think about the current crisis of Iraq? mashriq / arabia / iraq | imperialism / war | press release Tuesday June 24, 2014 22:25 Tuesday June 24, 2014 22:25 by Kurdish Anarchists Forum - KAF by Kurdish Anarchists Forum - KAF anarkistan at activist dot com The Iraq crisis has been continued for decades while it has been under the power of Saddam Hussein or under the current democratic Regime since the invasion of 2003. There were no freedom, no social justice; no equality and also little opportunity for those who were independent from the political parties who were in power. In addition to existing brutality and discrimination against women and the ordinary people a very big gap was created between the rich and poor, making the poor even poorer and the rich richer. [Italiano]
What do we think about the current crisis of Iraq?
Iraq crisis has been continued for decades while it has been under the power of Saddam Hussein or under the current democratic Regime since the invasion of 2003. There were no freedom, no social justice; no equality and also little opportunity for those who were independent from the political parties who were in power. In addition to existing brutality and discrimination against women and the ordinary people a very big gap was created between the rich and poor, making the poor even poorer and the rich richer.
The current crisis is nothing far from what has been said above. In fact it is the continuation of the same situation of what was happening decades ago. The only differences are the names and the power of the political parties in power.
Politicians and the mass media love to tell us that the current struggles are the continuation of the old struggles & conflict between the two main Islamic religion doctrines: Shia and Sunni that they have a bloody background almost since the birth of the Islam religion.
If we look into history of the nations, countries and their people, their history was always struggling between the powerful people and the powerless, between the exploiters and the exploited, between the occupier and the occupied people, between the invader and the people who have fought back against powers, against authorities and states. In short it was a war for more capitals and profits.
What is happening in Iraq today under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Syria), Isis far from what the mass media portrayed and tells us. The facts are:
1st the Isis advance is a tiny minority aided by Sunni factions disillusioned with Shia leadership in Baghdad, Sunni tribal leaders, Baath party members, old army officers and factions of the former insurgency all came together to plan how to take the fight to the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki. When the Isis marched towards Mosul, the third biggest city in Iraq, and occupied, they were less than 2,000 while around 60,000 people from police, soldiers to intelligent forces and security were existing in the town. This army was equipped heavily with the fighter Jets, tanks and different types of powerful weapons, but this army has collapsed and fled from the Isis group and the other militant with very little resistance or no resistance.
2nd What was happening more likely was a plan by Turkey, Gulf countries and Kurdish Region Government K.R.G with the knowledge of US and UK.
3rd It is very difficult to know exactly what will be happening in the end, as most of the time it depends on the interest of US and western countries that will measured any uprising or movement whether it gets help or not through their interest. Until now both the US &UK insist on the unity of people in Iraq to live together under the same system. If they know that their interests are under threat they do not mind to divide Iraq in to 3 Simi-states between Kurd, Sunni and Shia.
4th This situation has pushed Iraq to the brink of sectarian war, especially after issuing a Fatwa by Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, one of Shia Islams most revered cleric, for citizens to bear arms and sign up for the military.
5th We are very much sure that there is a hidden agenda here as well. We think one of the aim of this war is surrounding and strangling the democratic mass movement of the Kurdish people in west of Kurdistan (Syrias Kurdistan) and there local administration. The mass movement there proved that there has been alternative to the nation state, old/neo-liberal system and its government. It also proved that the movement of people do not have to follow the Arab Spring that ended up in establishing an Islamic government. In addition to that this movement showed the uprising of people should not be supported by US, EU and their agents. It has proved that the revolution has to be started from the bottom of the societies, not from the top as this can be achieved by building the local groups that making most of the decisions by themselves and for themselves. This movement is clearly not in the interest of the politicians and neo-liberalism, so the next step is to attack the west of Kurdistan and their mass movement.
In view of the above we (KAF) denounce this war that has been launched and imposed on Iraqi people and we believe in organizing people outside of the political parties, the supporters of the war and outside of the institution of the states and the governments but in their work places, in their neighborhood, in their schools, universities and on the streets to unite and fight back against war, injustice, poverty, starvation, inequality, and suppression that have been imposed by this brutal system through their State, Corporation, finance institution, neo-liberal mass media and the institution of their spies & agents.
Kurdistan Anarchists Forum 18.06.2014
Related Link: http://www.anarchistan.tk Iraq crisis has been continued for decades while it has been under the power of Saddam Hussein or under the current democratic Regime since the invasion of 2003. There were no freedom, no social justice; no equality and also little opportunity for those who were independent from the political parties who were in power. In addition to existing brutality and discrimination against women and the ordinary people a very big gap was created between the rich and poor, making the poor even poorer and the rich richer.The current crisis is nothing far from what has been said above. In fact it is the continuation of the same situation of what was happening decades ago. The only differences are the names and the power of the political parties in power.Politicians and the mass media love to tell us that the current struggles are the continuation of the old struggles & conflict between the two main Islamic religion doctrines: Shia and Sunni that they have a bloody background almost since the birth of the Islam religion.If we look into history of the nations, countries and their people, their history was always struggling between the powerful people and the powerless, between the exploiters and the exploited, between the occupier and the occupied people, between the invader and the people who have fought back against powers, against authorities and states. In short it was a war for more capitals and profits.What is happening in Iraq today under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Syria), Isis far from what the mass media |
Houston clergy, we write to express our deep concern over Gov. Rick Perry's proclamation of a day of prayer and fasting at Houston's Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6. In our role as faith leaders, we encourage and support prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. Yet our governor's religious event gives us pause for a number of reasons.
We believe in a healthy boundary between church and state. Out of respect for the state, we believe that it should represent all citizens equally and without preference for religious or philosophical tradition. Out of respect for religious communities, we believe that they should foster faithful ways of living without favoring one political party over another. Keeping the church and state separate allows each to thrive and upholds our proud national tradition of empowering citizens to worship freely and vote conscientiously. We are concerned that our governor has crossed the line by organizing a religious event rather than focusing on the people's business in Austin.
We also express concern that the day of prayer and fasting at Reliant Stadium is not an inclusive event. As clergy leaders in the nation's fourth-largest city, we take pride in Houston's vibrant and diverse religious landscape. Our religious communities include Bahais, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists and many other faith traditions. Our city is also home to committed agnostics and atheists, with whom we share common cause as fellow Houstonians. Houston has long been known as a live-and-let-live city where all are respected and welcomed. It troubles us that the governor's prayer event is not open to everyone. In the publicized materials, the governor has made it clear that only Christians of a particular kind are welcome to pray in a certain way. We feel that such an exclusive event does not reflect the rich tapestry of our city. Our deepest concern, however, lies in the fact that funding for this event appears to come from the American Family Association, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The American Family Association and its leadership have a long track record of anti-gay speech and have actively worked to discriminate against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The American Family Association and its leadership have also been stridently anti-Muslim, going so far as to question the rights of Muslim-Americans to freely organize and practice their faith. We believe it is inappropriate for our governor to organize a religious event funded by a group known for its discriminatory stances.
As religious leaders, we commit to join with all Houstonians in working to make our city a better place. We will lead our communities in prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. We ask that Gov. Perry leave the ministry to us and refocus his energy on the work of governing our state.
This article was submitted by Rev. Dr. Jeremy Rutledge, minister, Covenant Church, Alliance of Baptists/American Baptist Churches; Rev. Douglas Anders, conference minister, South Central Conference of the United Church of Christ; Rev. Paul Beedle, Unitarian Universalist; Rev. Dr. Ginny Brown Daniel, minister, Plymouth United Church, UCC; Rev. Beth Ellen Cooper-Davis, minister, Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. Michael Diaz, director of connections, Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Pat Farnan, Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Lura Groen, pastor, Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church; Rev. Teddy Hardy, minister, St. John United Church of Christ; Rev. Lori Keaton, United Church of Christ; Rev. Harry Knox, senior pastor, Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Janice Ladd, executive pastor, Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange, co-minister, Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. Mark Edmiston-Lange, co-minister, Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. Mona Lopez, volunteer staff clergy, Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Laura Mayo, minister, Covenant Church, Alliance of Baptists/American Baptist Churches; Rev. Dr. Daniel O'Connell, senior minister, First Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. David Pantermuehl, Grace United Church of Christ; Rev. Adam Robinson, assistant minister, First Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. Ken Richter, senior minister, First Congregational Church, UCC; Rev. Bill Royster, United Church of Christ; Rev. Sam Schaal, transition minister, Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church; Rev. Robert Tucker, executive director, Foundation for Contemporary Theology; Rev. Ernie Turney, pastor, Bering United Methodist Church; Rev. Bonnie Vegiard, Unitarian Universalist.Double albums can be fearless declarations of self-indulgence, an idea dump for a band looking to expand its boundaries, give the secondary members a few chances to songwrite, or share that gestating song cycle about warring clans of magical elves with the world. The Red Hot Chili Peppers don't seem to be likely candidates for any of the above, having spent a two-decade career trafficking in progressively diluted funk songs about California, sex, and having sex in California. Then again, they've given their record the preposterous pseudo-Latin title of Stadium Arcadium (what's next, a music review book called Thesaurus Musicarum?), so maybe the shirtophobic quartet is ready to let their art-rock flag fly.
Probably for the best, that's not the case; through two-plus hours of music, the emphasis here is on the Stadium. Like many of their peers from the heady peak of alternative rock-- your Grohls, Cornells, and Billie Joes-- the Peppers have eased into a comfortable life traveling down the middle of the road. Kiedis, Flea, & co. can even stake a truly rightful claim to the territory now christened Adult Album Alternative, having practically induced labor on the genre with the mega-hit "Under the Bridge" and their subsequent string of ever-so-slightly askew mid-tempo pop. Fitting examples abound on Stadium Arcadium, catchy tunes that will ensure a long tenure for the album at the front of the store. The band's sin, however, is one of self-denial: If the Red Hot Chili Peppers have pretty much mastered a marketable style, why bludgeon us with an unwieldy and inconsistent approach for 1/12th of a day, nagged by an annoying tendency to detour through affirmations of their technical talent and loyalty to funk-rock?
It could've been worse, as the sessions that led to Stadium Arcadium reportedly yielded enough material for a triple album. So the band has shown some ability to self-edit, but not enough to save the record from typical double-album bloat, the islands of good tracks floating amidst the should-a-been B-sides. Conveniently-- or perhaps subconsciously-- the set is still front-loaded, with the first disc containing most of the highlights, like the expertly paced sunset anthem of the title track or the one-peak-after-another rave-up of "Torture Me".
But sprinkled throughout the first disc, and coming to a head in the second, are products of the band's compulsive need to tip the light-bulb hat to their younger selves, most notably half-baked funk tracks "Hump De Bump" and "Warlocks". Whereas poor production values and drug-fueled exuberance once excused their George Clinton worship, 20 years on, in Rick Rubin's sterile environment, the band sounds like they're in jamband training camp, filling in all the empty spaces with blippityblap reminders of Flea's virtuosity and John Frusciante's desire to use every effects pedal ever invented (potentially the primary motivation for making this a double album).
Isolated to the occasional compulsory workout, these excesses could be ignored, but when they slip into the over-long outros of straightforward soon-to-be-singles, the band's lack of perspective is obvious. Rubin, producing his fifth consecutive RHCP release, appears unwilling or unable to push the band into any kind of challenging territory, settling for inserting a great treated-drum breakdown in the middle of "Readymade" that he'll probably mine the next time Jay-Z rings him up. Brief moments where the band takes on a new identity, like the Fleetwood Mac-style finale of "Wet Sand", are fleeting, while other experiments (the spoken-word of "Death of a Martian", the bizarre background vocals of "Animal Bar") simply derail right as soon as they leave the station.
Maybe the Mac are an appropriate guidepost for the Chili Peppers, potential guides for how to sublimate a once-renowned rhythm section into slick California contempo-pop-- hell, they even made a similarly uneven double album! But keeping one foot in the funk of their origins and becoming mired in muso leanings is a ball and chain for the band's current incarnation as radio-pop darlings, a period that has now lasted twice as long as their goofball early days. By trying to incorporate all these personas, Stadium Arcadium can't help but grow as distended as the name suggests, revealing a band too proud to merely play the game they've already solved or use the added space to risk a less worn path.Today marks the end of my 1 Year 1 Outfit endeavour. 365 days ago I set out to wear the most minimal wardrobe I could conceive of, while still being relatively comfortable in all four seasons, and now here we are a full year later and I’ve survived to tell my tale.
My wardrobe consisted of ten core items:
along with my workout gear:
and my outerwear:
Extras
I also had a small cadre of extras that consisted of my 7 pairs of Outlier socks and pullWool underwear, a Hollows Leather belt, an Archival Clothing hat, a toque, gloves, sleeping pants, and slippers. Save for some extraordinary circumstances, namely being part of a wedding party and dressing up for halloween, these were the only clothes I wore. (Minor disclaimer part here: I spent over nine months of the year on parental leave, but once I returned to work I was required to wear specific clothes for safety during work hours)
Throughout the year I lived my life and conducted myself as I normally do, not letting my tiny wardrobe dictate what I did or how I did it. Instead, I carefully chose versatile clothing that would work well for my various surroundings and all the activities and events that I was likely to encounter.
Challenge 1: keep it together, man
I had a few concerns going into this challenge, namely what would I do in the event of a catastrophic garment failure such as a destroyed gaping hole seam or some devastating stainage, especially on one of my trips outside the country. Also, I expected some wear and tear, but I was a little weary that I might end up in tatters by the end of the challenge with patched up pants and holey shirts.
Other than a torn seam from my sunglasses and a couple popped buttons early on, all of my clothes far surpassed my expectations. My Outlier chinos and merino t-shirt specifically got pretty close to daily wear; it would take 3+ years for the average person to put this kind of wear on their clothes so it blows my mind that they held up so well.
Challenge 2: being that weird guy
I was also worried about the social implications of wearing the exact same thing everyday. You might think that friend of yours that wears grey pants and a black shirt everyday is just a little strange (though billionaires do it), but what about that guy that always wears the same green shirt and navy shorts to the gym, ew? I’m sure people wondered and whispered behind my back, hopefully once they realized I was washing my clothes regularly they calmed down.
I was never confronted directly by anyone asking about me wearing the same clothes. I think it helped immensely that I chose fairly muted colors. I also varied my look through different layers as dictated by the weather.
Sometimes I would stack my pants, sometimes I would cuff, roll/unroll my sleeves, or wear my shirt unbuttoned just to vary my look ever so slightly, even doing those minor things helped change the feel and projection of my clothes.
Challenge 3: the weather
The biggest reason that we humans wear clothes, aside from basic humility, is to comfortably live in the various climates we face. There are certainly places here on earth where having 10 items of clothing would be easier and I’m sure there are also locations where only having 10 items would be near impossible.
Living in Canada, spending time on both coasts, and travelling down south gave me a pretty wide range of weather to deal with. I built my wardrobe specifically to deal with the warmer, wetter climate of the west coast, once I was facing sub -20°C (-4°F) and even below -30°C (-22°F) temperatures my clothes were clearly inadequate. I spent a few uncomfortable days in Manitoba in the middle of winter wearing almost every piece of clothing I had along with a couple layers of socks.
I also faced some challenging weather when travelling in the Caribbean and on my trip to Costa Rica. Hot weather means you need less clothing, true, but it also means you sweat a lot more. I had to alternate between my two shirts and wash them at night in the sink in order to stay fresh.
On the bright side, my Outlier shorts and Strike Movement runners performed admirably. I never felt like I was missing flip-flops as the Interval runners were so light and breathable and the shorts dried so quickly that doing double-duty as my swim trunks was never an issue.
Life with Less
I learned a lot over the past year through having a tiny wardrobe. I learned about the versatility of clothes, the durability of well-made items, travelling light, and getting by just fine without spares.
I used to frequently use the term need when referring to material things that I thought were missing in my closet or my life in general. I need brown shoes to go with my navy suit, I need more white t-shirts, I need a casual blazer; there were holes in my wardrobe and those holes needed to be filled.
Now, obviously these things aren’t needs and that was clear to me before as well, but in changing the way I refer to things that I want or would like to have it has changed my entire mindset on purchasing. Rather than having an urgent necessity to buy something now I’ve learned to sit on it, think about it, consider it, maybe wait for it to come on sale, or just decide not to buy it after all.
I still bought plenty of stuff over the past year and I’m looking forward to getting a chance to finally wear it all, but I also got rid of even more stuff. I threw out, gave away, and sold (thanks Grailed!) a truck load worth of stuff that either wasn’t worth keeping or just wasn’t my style any more.
It feels so gratifying to get rid of all the extra clutter and it makes you think twice about buying in excess as you realize that some day you’ll need to go through the work of getting rid of it.
Next Year
What am I going to do going forward from this? No, I’m not going to choose another tiny wardrobe and live with the clothes on my back; I’m looking forward to wearing some new clothes and having some diversity in my life. My style has evolved over the year, even without ever changing my outfit, the looks that I liked last year are substantially different from the ones I like now and it will be fun to get a chance to experiment with fashion again.
I’m not going to enact any strict rules on what I can wear or the number of clothes I can own. However, the way I approach material goods has likely changed forever, I’m no longer interested in hoarding fast fashion or filling my drawers and cupboards with cheap trinkets. I’m going to continue downsizing my stuff, carefully considering my purchases, and ideally buying nothing at all.
Over the next while I’ll be writing up detailed reviews of each of the pieces I used throughout the year and how they fared with my accelerated wear. If there’s something you’d like to hear about sooner than later then let me know below and I’ll try to move it up the queue. Also, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my little experiment.
Acknowledging Awesomeness
I need to give a huge thank you to all of the brands that pitched in to make this a success. I truly would not have attempted this without the overwhelming support that each of these small brands provided. If you take away anything from my year-long challenge it is that each of these companies make some seriously great products and if you do actually need a new pair of pants or a jacket I’d highly recommend checking them out:
Free Stuff
Finally, as a thanks to you – my readers and to celebrate finishing up my year I’ll be giving away a brand new Apolis Indigo Dyed Chore Coat. Please follow the link for details on how to enter the contest and get a chance to win this beautiful jacket.The Northern Virginia Tea Party bills itself as a “grass roots organization,” but the speaker for its upcoming workshop is employed by a slick lobbying group that represents the world’s largest oil and gas companies.
“The radical environmental movement poses a serious threat to our freedoms, our property, and our future, and we cannot afford to ignore it,” reads the invitation to the July 27 event in Falls Church, Virginia. “Come hear Virginia Energy Citizens State Coordinator Miles Morin elaborate on this important topic and equip yourselves to defend our access to the cheap, reliable energy that America needs.”
Virginia Energy Citizens is just one of more than a dozen front groups run by the American Petroleum Institute, the enormously powerful trade association that lobbies on behalf of the oil and gas industry.
Energy Citizens groups have been set up across the country to mobilize regular people to advocate on behalf of API’s policy goals, including drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
For the event later this month, Morin, who works at public relations firm with an office in Richmond, plans to speak about how environmentalists are trying to “smash America’s energy foundation.” Attendees will “Learn how to fight the radical green anti-energy blitzkrieg.”
The event is one of several organized by API this year filled with patriotic rhetoric. Vets4Energy, an API-sponsored “grassroots” group, has hired veterans to attend political events, handing out camouflage hats and talking up the importance of drilling as a national security imperative. Vets4Energy and the New Hampshire Energy Forum, another API-controlled organization, helped sponsor the Republican Leadership Summit in April, the kick-off event for the New Hampshire GOP primary.
But for all the talk of American interests, the American Petroleum Institute actually represents the interests of multinational corporations, many based outside the United States. API members include Statoil, BP, Shell Oil, TransCanada and Total. Khalid Alnaji, the president of Saudi Aramco’s U.S. subsidiary and a registered lobbyist on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, has a seat on API’s board of directors.
(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesMadrid Xanadu shopping centre is the retail and leisure destination for the south-west of Madrid and one of the top ten shopping centres in Spain.
Dubai's real estate market requires a quite different set of developers as it matures and demand is likely to be driven by real property buyers," said Adel Al Breiki of Xanadu Real Estate.
The Xanadu Prospect is a highly prospective, well defined structural closure situated in Western Australian State Territorial waters close to the coast near the Cliff Head and Jingemia oilfields.
Unlike other regions of Titan where mountainous terrain appears in small, isolated patches, Xanadu covers a large area, with scientists proposing multiple theories about its formation.
MADAME XANADU and John Constantine are just two of the comic book world's magical heavy-hitters.
Xanadu Real Estate Development managing director Adel A Al Breiki said it was one of the few developers to have consistently delivered projects through the downturn of the real estate market.
Schon, vice president of Schon Properties, said: "This is a turning point for Dubai Lagoon project and we are pleased to tie-up with Xanadu Real Estate Development to complete construction of the project.
Kharmagtai complements the Oyut Uln and Sharchuluut projects and establishes Xanadu as having one of the most highly prospective copper-gold exploration portfolios in Mongolia.
Xanadu was the title track of the soundtrack of the 1980 film of the same name.
Xanadu Island is on a private peninsula with its own cove and stunning beach.
Sarah Blasko Xanadu A wonderful cover of Olivia Newton John's Xanadu performed to piano.Greetings Ghosts,
Below, you will find the patch notes for Title Update 4, which will be available on May 17 at approximately 9AM UTC for PC, and May 18 at approximately 9AM UTC for consoles. Similar to previous updates, TU4 will include a brief maintenance period to update servers for the new version. The patch will be up to 7.2 GB PC depending on your client, and up to 9.0 GB on consoles, depending on your installed version; again, an in-game notification will alert players to the availability of the update. A game reboot will be required to apply the patch, and players will need to have the same version of the game in order to play co-op.
Title Update 4 draws much of its focus from player feedback, including several quality of life changes for co-op and solo play and a suite of new HUD and UI options. Co-op players will be able to alert their squad mates when dying, and tagged resource crates will be granted to every teammate in the collecting player’s zone. Downed players will redeploy at the mission starting point, rather than at a random location in the world, and there is now a brief window of time to take down an alerted enemy before a stealth mission is failed.
Title Update 4 will also usher in season two of the Live Season Challenges, with a new focus, new challenges, and new rewards! Additionally, Challenges will now include some additional gameplay parameters such as difficulty or HUD settings. You can follow along with the new episodes at the Ghost Recon Network.
A new round of improvements and bug-fixes will be implemented with this patch. For example, the introductory Kingslayer video no longer triggers upon launch, and full magazines are no longer consumed when a suppressor is applied to a weapon in the gunsmith menu.
Finally, Title Update 4 paves the way for the upcoming Fallen Ghosts DLC, first announced here. Stay on the lookout for more intel about Fallen Ghosts, coming soon.
You can follow along with which issues are currently being investigated on our official forums’ Known Issues list.
HUD AND UI IMPROVEMENTS
Improvements to the HUD include splitting several broad HUD options into a wider variety of more granular options. Please note that some of these were already implemented on the TU 3.5 update for PC, but are now fully and officially implemented across all platforms:
-“Contextual Actions” has been split from “Input Reminders”
-The “Markers” HUD option has been split into six distinct types of markers, each of which can be toggled on or off—"Objective markers", "communication markers" "enemy/rebels markers" "Item & location markers" "sync shot" "alert markers"
-A new option has been introduced to toggle detection clouds on the minimap
Additionally, deactivating the Sync Shot HUD markers will no longer prevent your AI teammates from using the Sync Shot ability! These improvements, and more, are listed below.
MISSIONS/NARRATION
-In "Nidia's Cash" :
-Fixed a bug where the rebels wouldn't follow the player
-Fixed a bug where the player couldn't interact with the laptop again after being killed while using it
-In "Madre Coca" :
-Fixed a bug where the rebels wouldn't enter their cars if affected by external stimuli
-In "General Baro" :
-Fixed a bug where killing the general before reaching the meeting point would not result in a game over, preventing player progression
-In "The Bank Heist" :
-Fixed a bug where the wrong path would be displayed on the GPS
-In "The Mole" :
-Fixed a bug where the mission couldn't progress if the Mole was affected by an external stimuli
-Fixed a bug where the player would be prompted with "Mission Failed" after triggering a Rebellion Rising convoy while having another main mission active
-Fixed various other triggers preventing or disrupting mission completion
USER INTERFACE
-The Kingslayer intro video no longer triggers at each boot
-Fixed a bug where HUD elements would appear greyed-out when activating HDR
-Fixed a bug where the wrong character would be displayed when selecting a different save slot
-Fixed a bug where an incorrect maintenance time would be displayed in the notifications
-Added new options in the HUD settings :
-"Input reminders" was split into "Input reminders" and "contextual actions"
-"Markers" was split into "Objective markers," "communication markers," "enemy/rebels markers," "Item & location markers," "sync shot," and "alert markers"
-Added "Detection clouds" - the players can now turn off the enemy detection clouds on the MINIMAP
-Fixed a bug where the difficulty setting would change for each save slot instead of remembering -player preferences for every slot
-Fixed a bug where the "NEW" marker would remain active on already-owned inventory items
-Added in-game time & latitude/longitude information to the tacmap
-Fixed a gunsmith bug where the attachments would appear offset
CO-OP
-Fixed a bug where players couldn't finish the final mission if hot-joining after the first mission steps have been completed by another player
-Fixed a bug where only the host would have a GPS trail in the first mission
-Added the possibility for players to warn their teammates that they’re down
-Players will now redeploy at the mission starting point when dying instead of respawning randomly in the world
GAMEPLAY
-Fixed a gunsmith bug where the player couldn't edit any other weapon than the last used
-Fixed a bug where the rebel skills would re-lock if entering main menu during cooldown
-Fixed a bug where the helicopters wouldn't attack the rebel radios when the player is hiding
-Fixed a bug where equipping a suppressor in the gunsmith would consume a full magazine when returning in-game
-Players can now equip the handgun by double-tapping the button even when all weapons are holstered
-Fixed a bug where the AI teammates couldn't perform a sync shot when markers where deactivated in the HUD
-Fixed diversion grenades not working when the enemies are investigating the player's position
-Fixed a bug where resources could be tagged twice if killed while claiming them
-Resource crates are now granted upon collection to every teammate in the player's zone
-Improved aim consistency when shooting behind cover
-Fixed a bug where NPCs wouldn't detect the player when swimming next to them
-Rebel skills now have separate cooldowns timers
-In stealth missions, players now have a short time to kill alerted enemies to avoid failing the mission
-Challenges now include different goals based on difficulty and HUD settings
-Fixed a bug where the Unidad would stop spawning even if the alert level is still active
-Fixed a bug where the SVD sniper scopes would be misaligned when switching between zoomed in and over the shoulder
AUDIO
- Fixed some NPC Dialogue barks:
- Incoming Grenade
- Entering combat
- Chopper down
- Added some NPC Dialogue barks:
- Destroying alarm panel
- Chopper reinforcement incoming
-Radios will remain on/off from vehicle to vehicle according to the last player input
-Fixed a bug where picking up a medal could trigger the same dialogue twice in the same session
-Fixed a bug where the "missile incoming" sound would remain active when the player jumped from the helicopter
-Fixed a bug where no SFX would be played when equipping suppressors
GRAPHICS
-Various animations polished
-Various camera transitions polished
-Fixed a bug where dead enemies' weapons would get stuck in walls
WORLD
-Fixed several walls through which the players could be spotted and shot
-Fixed several spots where the player could get stuck or fall through the map
-Fixed a bug where traffic vehicles would sink into the ground or jump when crossing bridges
-Repositioned some items that were impossible to pick up
-Something was seen roaming the mountains
STABILITY
-Fixed various crashes
-Fixed various connectivity issues
NARCO ROAD
-Fixed an issue where perma-boost from SP was not available on PS4
-Fixed a bug where the player would lose main game progression when entering the DLC
-Fixed a bug where one player driving an air spray plane could trigger another player's air spray
-Fixed a bug where using nitro for an extended period of time could create graphical corruption
-Fixed a bug where an air spray activity could fail with no reason
-Fixed a bug where the spy percentage would not progress after a mission failure
-Fixed a bug where the activity vehicles would only spawn for the first player
-Fixed various crashes
-Fixed various installation bugs
-Fixed various network bugs
PC-ONLY BUG FIXES
-Fixed an issue where if the user would turn on Left Handed mode in the Keyboard and Mouse menu, the Fast Travel option would no longer work
-Fixed an issue where the detection gauge and the damage direction arrow would still be displayed on screen after hiding the HUD
-Fixed an issue where the reward icons in the Challenges menu page would not be correctly displayed
-Fixed an issue where the game would display a black screen on AMD hardware when using the Eyefinity setup in full screen mode
-Fixed an issue where the game would auto restart itself after selecting Quit to Desktop from Narco Road DLC
-Fixed an issue where the 360 screenshots made with NVIDIA Ansel while having the thermal vision ON, would display graphical corruptions
-Fixed an issue where the PS4 controller would lose its vibration during gameplay
-Fixed an issue where the game language would change itself after a game restart on Steam
We are grateful for your continued passion for Ghost Recon Wildlands. The development team will continue working on the game to bring you more updates in the future.
For more intel on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, please keep an eye on ghostrecon.com and be sure to visit our official forums as well as the subreddit.
To keep track of your stats and find other Ghosts to join your Taskforce, log-in to the Ghost Recon Network and download the Ghost Recon HQ App (iOS - Android).Amazon today unveiled a preview of its official rewards program for Whole Foods shoppers by slashing prices on turkeys and other items ahead of the holidays, while offering even deeper discounts to customers who are also Amazon Prime members. Amazon’s plan to reward Prime members with additional savings was previously announced by the companies as one of the many integrations and perks following Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of the grocery store chain this year.
Following the deal’s close, Amazon immediately made good on some of those promises by lowering prices on select grocery items.
Today, Amazon is offering a small, but powerful, example of what the savings for Prime members may look like as the discount program kicks off.
In an announcement, Whole Foods says that it’s lowering prices on select organic turkeys to $3.49 per pound, and on no-antibiotic turkeys to $2.49 per pound, starting now.
But Prime members will pay even less – they’ll only be charged $2.99 per pound and $1.99 per pound, respectively.
The grocery chain also introduced a new wave of price cuts across items, including staples and holiday favorites, it says.
This includes lower prices on Value Pack Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts (Organic and No Antibiotic), Responsibly Farmed Raw Peeled Shrimp, 365 Everyday Value Canned Pumpkin, Organic Broccoli, 1lb Organic Salad Mixes, Organic Russet Potatoes, and Organic Sweet Potatoes.
However, the price cuts extend beyond Whole Foods’ own brands and produce.
It will also offer lower prices on well-known and organic brands like organic rice from Lundberg Family Farms, organic beans from Eden Foods, organic chicken and vegetable broths from Pacific Foods, organic eggs and milk from Organic Valley, toothpaste from Tom’s of Maine, Pasture Raised Eggs from Vital Farms, plus Chobani Yogurt, California Olive Ranch EVOO, Siggis Yogurt, Applegate Hot Dogs, and Fage Yogurt.
Amazon has not wasted any time in leveraging its Whole Foods brick-and-mortar footprint. Beyond the price cuts, Amazon is selling its devices at Whole Foods, like Fire tablets and Echo speakers, and even running a number of pop-up holiday shops, example.
“These are the latest new lower prices in our ongoing integration and innovation with Amazon, and we’re just getting started,” said John Mackey, Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO, in a statement about the new discounts. “In the few months we’ve been working together, our partnership has proven to be a great fit. We’ll continue to work closely together to ensure we’re consistently surprising and delighting our customers while moving toward our goal of reaching more people with Whole Foods Market’s high-quality, natural, and organic food,” he added.
Prime members who want to take advantage of the turkey discounts will have to print a coupon from Amazon’s website to be presented at checkout. If the customer already bought a turkey, they can return to the store for a credit, the website notes. Presumably, when the two companies’ systems are integrated, a physical coupon will no longer be required.
The discounted turkeys can be reserved online then picked up at a local store, or bought on customers’ usual shopping trip. In that case, customers are advised to look for the turkeys marked with an orange stripe that says “Special Savings.”
The announcement of the price cuts has already impacted the stocks for rival chains, FT reports. Shares of Kroger, Sprouts Farmers Market, Costco and Walmart fell on Wednesday, following the news.Beer and taxes have never gotten along.
In 1831, King Ludwig I of Bavaria decreed a minimal ad valorem tax on beer equivalent to two US cents. Here’s what ensued, according to Frederick Engels:
“The working men assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, and assailed the public houses -- smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying everything in their reach -- in order to take revenge for the enhanced price of their favourite drink.”
For four days, Munich was chaos. Order was only restored after the king reduced the price of beer by 10%.
In the United States, taxes and beer have had a more long-term marriage. Early spirits taxes were levied in order to pay off war debts following the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. In the antebellum period (just before the Civil War), taxes were levied on beer, and, outside of a brief hiatus during Prohibition, have since been a mainstay. Many critics of these taxes have cited them as a factor behind the United States’ declining preference for beer seen here.
So, what exactly are these taxes for, and are they really hampering the domestic (and global) beer market?
Beer Taxes: Hidden in the Price
Today, beer taxes in the United States amount to more than 40% of the price.
Every time you buy a beer, you unwittingly pay excise taxes, also known as “hidden taxes,” or indirect taxes. These are taxes imposed on the supplier which are then factored into the item’s retail price. Many luxury goods and “sins” (ie. tobacco, alcohol, lottery tickets) have been subjected to excise taxes.
Beer is no exception: both state and federal excise taxes are imposed on brewers.
On July 1, 1862, Congress authorized the first federal excise tax on beer: $1 per barrel (31 gallons). This tax increased slowly over the years (consistent with inflation) and, by 1990, was set at $9 per barrel. Then, in 1991, the federal government doubled the tax per barrel to $18 -- the largest beer tax increase in American history. As a result, beer sales decreased 5%, and an estimated 60,000 Americans lost their jobs.
Brewers also deal with state excise taxes, which are independently set. Broken down into per gallon measures, these taxes widely vary. As of 2014, the national average is $0.20 per gallon. But in certain states (Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia), taxes are over $1 per gallon.
Jeffrey Last, a beer enthusiast on Capitol Hill, says that in the 2007 fiscal year, “the federal beer excise tax generated $3.8 billion with $3.3 billion coming from domestic brewers, and $500 million from imports.” This doesn’t include state excise taxes, which he estimates reel in “at least $1 billion” more. He adds that federal taxes aren’t earmarked for any particular programs or initiatives, in contrast to state taxes. For example, Arkansas’ excise taxes go toward education and child care funds.
Proponents of this beer tax argue that it does more than provide extra federal and state funding. Last says that some see these “sin taxes” as a viable way to mitigate unhealthy habits. These advocates cite graphics like the one below, which they believe demonstrates how the 1991 beer tax increase reduced drunk driving fatalities by 10% in the following years.
But opponents of the taxes have data of their own. The graphic below shows that, following 1991, teen drinking prevalence actually continued to increase. The tax seemed to have little impact on underage drinking trends.
California: Percentage of Teens Who Consume Beer (1985-1994)
Opponents also argue that these excise taxes propagate social disparities, and should be deemed unconstitutional. As the effective tax rate is total excise taxes paid divided by comprehensive income, beer taxes are higher for lower income people.
Beer/Tax Relationship in Other Countries
In the U.K., a 10 pence per pint tax increase over a three year period (2006-2009) contributed to a 2,500% increase in pub closures (figure A). Data compiled by The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) also indicates a converse relationship between tax increases and beer sales -- most dramatically from 2010-2013 (Figure B).
Figure A: Relationship Between Taxes, Foreclosed Pubs in UK
Source: BBPA Figure B: Relationship Between Taxes, Beer Sales, Pubs in the UK
Germany has seen a similar trend. The country’s Biersteuergesetz (“beer tax law”) was modified in 1995 to impose higher tax rates on beer. Here’s what happened:
In Thailand, excise taxes on beer are “a way of milking the cash cow,” according to one overseas investor; laws were passed last year that increased the taxes on beer to 60% of the product’s value. In a public statement, Thailand’s finance minister, Kittiratt Na-Ranong, told his |
dome filter at the top of the device is also prone to cracking.
All taken into account, this alkaline water filter with rocks is good product for such cheap price.
Pros Very cheap pricing.
Very cheap pricing. Available in multiple capacities.
Available in multiple capacities. Does not require extra plumbing or complicated installation. Cons Flimsy design, parts have a tendency to break.
Flimsy design, parts have a tendency to break. Filter system accumulates algae.
Filter system accumulates algae. Prolonged and inefficient filtering process.
Prolonged and inefficient filtering process. Takes up a lot of space.
APEX Countertop – Best Affordable Alkaline Water Filter For Home
Standing just 12 inches tall, this is one of the most compact countertop filters in the market. At a sub-$100 price, you have a compelling package here. Despite the small size and low price, the filter also manages to do a decent job of removing odors and awful flavors from your regular tap water.
The filter is a cylinder that stands on the countertop and connects to your faucet using pipes. It requires no extra plumbing or installation. The APEX filter is available in various colors, with opaque and transparent body options. In the clear body models, you can see the different filters used to purify and increase the pH of tap water.
The taste of the water is improved considerably after using the APEX filter. You don’t have any control over the pH level since this is not an advanced electronic device. But you can expect a regular pH level between 7-8 from this filter.
Since the device uses industry standard filter housing, finding replacement filters is a straightforward process. This device is designed to work with standardly sized faucets. If you do not have those in your home, this device may not function properly.
Disliking the APEX countertop alkaline filter is hard. Sure, it is a low budget device that lacks any advanced features. But it is available at a rock bottom price and provided excellent value for money. And add that compact footprint, and you have the perfect little filter for small homes and apartments.
Pros Available at an extremely low price.
Available at an extremely low price. Offers adequate purifying capabilities.
Offers adequate purifying capabilities. Raises the pH to safe and healthy levels consistently.
Raises the pH to safe and healthy levels consistently. Extremely compact design that takes up little space. Cons Lacks any advanced features.
Lacks any advanced features. Tiny capacity.
Tiny capacity. Not very sturdy suffers from minor leaking issues.
Best Alkaline Water Filters For Reverse Osmosis
iSpring RCC7AK – Best Alkaline Water Filter Machine With RO
iSpring is a very popular brand in alkaline water filters. Their RCC7AK model is one of the highest rated and best selling devices in the segment. The low price is a key factor, making it accessible to a wide range of consumers. For under $200, you get an RO filter that adds healthy alkaline minerals and raises the pH of the water. This is a made in USA product with very responsive customer care services.
As an affordable product, you only get plastic components, with solid build quality. You do get a brushed nickel drinking water faucet. The product is delivered well packaged and comes ready to install. You do not require any expert assistance, but the option is available but at extra cost.
Regarding performance, the RO and six stage alkaline remineralization setup do get the job done satisfactorily. You get the foul taste of chlorine out of the water, and iSpring claims that this filter can remove fluoride as well. The water has the taste of good quality bottled water. Tests show results anywhere between 10-25 PPM, which is quite nice for a system that costs only a few hundred bucks.
On the downside, you don’t get full control over the pH level of the water. But for that kind of control, you will need a higher end digital water ionizer model. Still, the final pH level is on the lower side. And for an under counter design, this one is rather big, with a 3.2-gallon tank added to the multiple filter housings.
Upon final estimation, the iSpring filter delivers in several key areas while failing somewhat in others. The water purification part is handled pretty well by the RO system. But the alkaline levels are rather underwhelming. If you are not too particular about your pH levels, this is an excellent product at a very affordable asking price.
Pros Competent pricing.
Competent pricing. Excellent build quality despite being all plastic.
Excellent build quality despite being all plastic. Fine performance by the Reverse Osmosis system.
Fine performance by the Reverse Osmosis system. DIY installation is easy. Cons Lower pH levels when compared to other filters.
Lower pH levels when compared to other filters. The filter elements will require frequent replacement.
For a system that incorporates both Reverse Osmosis as well as a 10 stage alkaline filtration, the Express Water filter is quite cheap. That sub-$200 price bracket aside, this is also an easy-to-install under counter water filter. The instructions are detailed and easy to follow.
The items are packaged quite well and come partially assembled. The filter mechanism is quite compact and should fit snugly under most kitchen sinks. There are multiple cylinders and parts, but they all come color coded. This makes installation quite a breeze and should also facilitate easy maintenance.
As to the performance of the filter elements, the overall result is quite satisfactory, though not without fault. The combination of RO and 10-stage filtration does an excellent job of removing impurities and the chlorine taste from tap water. The mineralization process can deliver a water pH level close to 10 with this setup.
Coming to the flaws, there are a couple of notable ones with the Express Water filter. There are some minor leaks, often due to missing O-rings that are often not delivered along with the package. And the filtration process is also quite slow, contrary to the claims of the company. Expect to take anywhere from 5-6 hours to get 5 gallons of pure water. That comes to around a gallon an hour.
In conclusion, this is not a bad option if you want a budget RO alkaline water filter. It does a decent job of filtering your tap water and increasing the pH level noticeably.
Pros Compact system that stays out of sight under the counter and saves space.
Compact system that stays out of sight under the counter and saves space. Excellent pricing.
Excellent pricing. Easy to install and maintain.
Easy to install and maintain. Comprehensive 10 stage filtering process. Cons No advanced alkaline ionization
No advanced alkaline ionization A lot of filter elements that will need periodic replacement.
A lot of filter elements that will need periodic replacement. Some concerns regarding leaks and missing parts.
Best Alkaline Water Filter Buying Guide
Let’s start with the basics. You know the deal with water filters. They use a variety of methods, from physical filtration (using stuff like charcoal/activated carbon), to reverse osmosis, ion exchange, and pure old distillation to purify water.
Now, alkaline water filters go the extra mile, by not just removing stuff from water, but adding something extra. And that little something has got to do with the pH level and alkalinity of water. If you can think back to 4th-grade chemistry, you might remember about acids and alkalies and how one turns the litmus paper blue and the other red.
Acids reduce the pH while alkaline substances raise it. And pH is short form of “potential for hydrogen.” The pH scale goes on from 0 to 14. You would have battery acid at 0, and household lye would be around the 14 pH mark.
Pure water has a pH of 7 which is at the halfway point and considered very neutral and safe. In fact, pH levels between 7 – 10 are considered the safest. Extremes above and below that level can be harmful in the long term.
Full disclosure, there is a lot of hype around the alkaline water benefits. But a lot of the claims made by proponents and manufacturers involve quite a bit of exaggeration and marketing gimmicks. Claims that drinking alkaline water will cure diseases like cancer have no basis in science, yet. More studies are needed to verify the benefits of alkaline water on human health.
But we do know that alkaline water is safe, as long as the pH is not too high. And several studies do indicate that there is a link between alkaline water and positive effects on the blood after exercise, improved longevity, and the benefits against chronic diseases.
These alkaline water filters boost the pH of tap water to beneficial rates using two main techniques.
The more affordable ones use remineralization filters to raise the pH level or purified water. These filters contain minerals that dissolve in the water and do not require any electricity to operate.
to raise the pH level or purified water. These filters contain minerals that dissolve in the water and do not require any electricity to operate. More advanced and expensive filters are water ionizers (or alkaline ionizers) that use a process known as electrolysis. The water is treated with an electronic current to split the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Water rich in hydrogen ions is acidic (low pH) while the remaining water is alkaline (high pH).
In the purification method used to remove contaminants, there are again two different methods that popular alkaline water filters employ:
The cheaper devices use multiple filter elements to remove dirt, dissolved chemicals, heavy metals, and microorganisms.
Reverse osmosis (RO) filtration is employed on the high-end devices powered by electricity. The water is passed through a fine membrane to remove impurities including bacteria from the water.
Further, there are two major designs of alkaline water filters available in the market at the moment:
Countertop Filters: These sit on your kitchen counters. They take up more space but are comparatively easier to install. They are also probably the cheaper of the two designs.
These sit on your kitchen counters. They take up but are comparatively They are also probably the of the two designs. Undercounter Filters: Discreet devices that can be stowed away out of sight. They use less space but have rather more complicated installation procedures. They are also generally more expensive than countertop designs.
Factors to consider when buying alkaline filters include the following:
Price: Usually, higher price indicates better performance. But in the market of alkaline water filters, you can find capable filters at every price point from $100 to several thousand dollars. The higher prices machines may use advanced digital technology and offer more control over the pH levels.
Number of filters: The greater the number of filters used, the better the chances of purity and high pH. Low-end devices that do not use water ionization can have a lot of different filters, between 4-6 or more.
Filter capacity: It denotes how long the filters will work before you need to buy replacement filter elements. The lesser the capacity, the more your maintenance costs will be.
Number of plates: This feature is available only on water ionizers that use the electrolysis method. They use metal plates (usually titanium) to pass electric current through the water. The higher the number of plates, the more efficient the electrolysis process.
Digital controls: these are only available on the more expensive water ionizers. They have features that display the actual status of the purified water, including its current pH levels. Many models also offer users the option to set their required pH level.
Design: As already explained, the two major options are countertop, and under counter water filters, They have their pros and cons. The suitability of a particular design is entirely dependent on your budget and space constraints.
Conclusion
Does anyone these days seriously think that tap water is safe to drink? Sure, we have some of the best drinking water safety standards on the planet here in America. Well, at least on paper, that is. For years, the “experts” have been telling us that the EPA standards have kept public water supplies safe and healthy. Yeah, the same EPA that is being sued by citizens of Flint, Michigan over blatant mismanagement.
And besides who likes drinking tap water anyway? It tastes just weird. Depending on where you live, the flavor could be anything from bleach, to pennies, or even dirt! And if that wasn’t bad enough, recent reports suggest what many of us have been fearing for years. Despite all the EPA regulations, contamination of water is on the rise. And with poor reporting, your water could contain anything from heavy metals to germs that come from poop.
Alkaline water is generating a lot of buzz in these days. With increasing concerns regarding the purity and safety of public water supplies, the demand for quality alkaline water filters is on the rise. Thankfully, the alkaline water filter industry is very mature and advanced. There are competent filters available at every conceivable price point. We have tried to reflect that fully in our shortlist of the best alkaline water filters available online right now. Hope you found this review useful. Thanks for stopping by!When I had my last meetup in Washington, DC, someone who insisted on remaining anonymous came to deliver me one message, which he argued at length: I should exhort readers to comment regularly on pending regulatory actions during the comment period. He said input from members of the public were far more important than most citizens realize, and that he would regularly mine the comments from closed regulatory matters in his work.
So I hope you’ll be willing to spend a couple of minutes to provide a comment on regulatory guidance proposed by the IRS on a private equity tax abuse, management fee waivers. Most of you have probably heard of the widely-publicized private equity “carried interest” loophole, which allows private equity general partners and hedge fund managers convert their labor income, which would normally be taxed at ordinary income rates, into being treated as capital gains and hence taxed at a much lower rate.
The management fee waiver is a smaller but more egregious abuse, which is why the IRS proposed ending it. We’ve described it longer form in previous posts. The short version is it allows general partners to have more of their income from doing their day jobs be taxed at those lower capital gains rates.
A group of Senators is backing the IRS effort. As we wrote in September:
Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Tammy Baldwin, and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote a short, forceful letter supporting IRS efforts to end a long-standing private equity tax dodge, management fee waivers… You’ll also see that the Senators’ letter applauds the IRS for taking the position that this tax scheme was never kosher. That gives the agency the power to challenge past tax filings. This certainly appears warranted, given the strong position the IRS has taken. But heretofore the agency has been unwilling to confront large tax payers with savvy lawyers. Let’s hope Warren and her fellow Senators make sure the IRS follows through and dings the private equity miscreants for back taxes owed.
We’ve attached their letter at the end of this post.
Although it’s hard to muster any defense for this practice, the private equity industry may still try pressuring allies and portfolio company employees to send in organic-looking comments to defend the practice. While the IRS is not likely to be moved up to a point, if the comments are too lopsided, it may lead to backsliding, particularly on assessing taxes owed.
Commenting is easy! The simplest way is to go here, http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=IRS-2015-0036, and say, “I support of the comment letter, dated September 21, 2015, submitted by senators Warren, Franken, Whitehouse, and Baldwin. I ask that the regulation be adopted as proposed.”
If you have time, please change the wording a bit and add your own thought. The most important thing is to make your views heard, and if you have something more to say, don’t hesitate to add it.
Thanks for your help!
Letter-to-Treasury-on-Management-Fee-Waivers_final
Letter to Treasury on Management Fee Waivers_final6 Min read time Share:
Who owns human tissues?
Polio ravaged much of the United States during the 20th century, leaving thousands sick, paralyzed, and dead. Those who were not afflicted with the virus were constantly haunted by the terror that their loved ones—particularly children, who were most vulnerable—would awaken one morning unable to walk and destined to a life of leg braces and iron lungs. That is until 1953, when Jonas Salk created a vaccine. There were more than 45,000 total cases of polio in the United States in each of the two years before the vaccine became broadly available. By 1962 there were only 910. Salk’s invention was one of the greatest successes in the history of American public health.
Amidst the adulation and fame that came with saving untold numbers of lives, Salk did something that seems curious if not unwise by today’s standards: he refused to patent the vaccine. During a 1955 interview, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent, leading a seemingly bewildered Salk to respond, “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
These days, amid a patent-driven biotech boom, it is difficult to imagine a researcher making a similar appeal to the commons. But this sensibility received a crucial endorsement in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. The Court held that Myriad, a biotech firm in Utah, could not patent naturally occurring objects such as the two cancer-related human genes in question.
The decision upended many aspects of American intellectual property law that emerged in the wake of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), when the Court held that living organisms—specifically, manmade crude–oil bacteria—are patentable subject matter. Chakrabarty inspired a rush to patent not just living things but also a growing array of biological materials, including human genes.
Discovering, isolating, or excising parts of human bodies should not grant scientists property interests that they can exploit for financial benefit.
Fast-forward a few decades and almost one-fourth of all human genes had been patented and controlled by private hands. This made it expensive for scientists to do research implicating these genes or to develop tests that examine how certain mutations might affect health outcomes. Until Myriad the sensibility evoked by Salk—that entities beneficial to all humankind should not be patented and privatized—had largely been treated as a distant memory of a bygone era, like the jukebox or rotary telephone.
However, Justice Clarence Thomas eloquently set the record straight in his unanimous opinion for the Court in Myriad by contrasting the company’s patents to those upheld in Chakrabarty: “Myriad did not create anything.... It found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.” Now, many existing human gene patents are in question.
It is rare that a legal dispute of this importance, technical complexity, and jurisprudential nuance is resolved by the Court with such clarity, conviction, and common sense. Yet even after Myriad, the dispute over who can claim property interests in human biological materials, and in what circumstances, is far from over. Human gene patents are not the only means by which corporations and researchers assert rights to parts of human bodies, and many more legal reforms are needed to ensure that your body remains entirely yours.
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An important example of this can be seen in the litigation surrounding John Moore’s spleen. Moore was a Seattle businessman who suffered from hairy cell leukemia, a rare cancer that caused his spleen to grow to fourteen times its normal size. Moore first traveled to UCLA Medical Center in 1976 for treatment, where Dr. David Golde told him that he should have his spleen removed. Moore complied and returned to UCLA for follow-up examinations with Golde for several years after the surgery. During the visits he routinely gave blood, skin, and other biological materials. Moore was told that these return visits and sample withdrawals were a necessary part of his ongoing treatment. What he was not told, however, was that Golde and the university were cashing in.
Researchers quickly realized that Moore’s cells were unique. The scientists took portions of Moore’s spleen to distill a specialized cell line—affectionately called “Mo”—and found that the cells could be useful in treating various diseases. Golde, researcher Shirley Quan, and UCLA were assigned a patent for the cell line in 1984. At the time, analysts estimated that the market for treatments stemming from Moore’s spleen was worth roughly $3 billion. Golde worked with a private company and received stock options worth millions, and UCLA also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside funding. Moore, whose spleen made all of this possible, received no compensation.
Moore sued the researchers and UCLA, claiming not only that they deceived him for their own financial benefit, but also that he was entitled to a portion of the revenues stemming from the Mo cell line because his property—his spleen and other biological materials—was taken from him and commercialized without his consent. In 1990 the California Supreme Court found that Golde and UCLA did not fulfill their disclosure obligations. Yet Moore was not owed a penny since the Court found that he no longer had a property interest in his own spleen once it was removed and used for research.
Moore v. Regents of the University of California enshrined a principle in property law that haunts us to this day: patients have virtually no property interest in most of the non-reproductive cells or tissues taken from them, even when these materials turn out to be profitable to researchers and institutions. This conclusion by the California Supreme Court has been followed by almost every jurisdiction.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal to review Moore in 1991, it may be time to revisit this holding in light of the underlying sentiment embraced in Myriad, i.e. that discovering, isolating, or excising parts of human bodies should not grant scientists property interests that they can exploit for financial benefit. Each time we visit the doctor and undergo a medical treatment that involves a tissue biopsy, we contribute to the more than 270 million human tissue samples held in research biobanks. Patients—the donors of this raw material—not only lack any say over how their tissues are used, but they also are not compensated if their materials lead to profitable innovations that would not have been possible but for their contribution.
Most of us unknowingly turn over this property interest in our own bodily materials as part of the terms and conditions of receiving medical treatment. The release is in black and white on one of the many boilerplate forms that we often read and sign in a doctor’s office with the same inattention we reserve for the latest end user license agreement from iTunes or Microsoft Office. But Moore v. Regents of the University of California is what legitimizes this default transaction. It is thus worthy of reconsideration if the Supreme Court’s rejection of privatizing human genes in Myriad is to take hold as a broader principle for how we should think about third-party property interests in human body parts. Rather than pretend that patients seeking medical attention are in a position to negotiate the transference of property interest in their excised tissues, we ought to have a series of default rules and practices that treat patients equitably and as true partners in research endeavors whenever possible.
Some have questioned, with less than convincing evidence, the sincerity of Salk’s statement against patents by claiming that his vaccine was not patentable to begin with. These claims misunderstand Salk’s enduring legacy and miss the bigger point that he was trying to make. At its core, his response to Murrow was about much more than patents. It was about respecting our shared humanity by not reducing the profession of healing to a series of biomedical land grabs in which doctors and patients are pit against each other. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken one aspect of this issue off of the table by striking down human gene patents. Let’s hope that the holding in Moore v. Regents of the University of California is next in their crosshairs.
Photograph: James ButlerChristopher Noble (left), an instructor at the International Butler Academy China, inspects a student's uniform in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. [Photo/Agencies]
Specialized schools and institutes have set up in China to teach the art of being a Western-style butler as the sector starts to take off
Dressed in a black tuxedo, with a bow tie and white gloves, Tang Zhiyong is struggling to iron a newspaper while keeping his feet straight and his waist tilted at exactly 30 degrees.
Part of a course designed for budding butlers, the 31-year-old from central Anhui province is hoping to follow in the time-honored European tradition of catering for the super rich.
"I have been practicing my ironing skills all day," he said. "But I never thought ironing a newspaper would be so difficult."
At exclusive Noahs Shanghai Yatch Club, Tang and 13 other students have paid thousands of yuan for a two-week program to learn specialized skills such as valet services and etiquette.
The courses are run by The British Butler Institute, a London-based training school, which entered the Chinese market in 2007.
Apart from valet duties and etiquette, the program takes in international protocol, knowledge of wines, food and cigars, as well as getting the temperature right when running a hot bath.
"I dream of becoming a butler because I can earn more money," Tang, who used to work as a manager in charge of cafeteria services for the five-star Jianguo Hotel in Henan province, said.
A typical private butler in a major luxury hotel can earn around 20,000 yuan ($3,175) a month, which is more than triple the average salary in Beijing.
Demand for qualified staff is growing as China's ultra rich pursue opulent lifestyles. This in turn has fueled a mini boom in training schools and institutes, rolling out the hidden arts and duties of a "respected man servant".
"The butler service sector in China is still in its infancy but we are seeing growing demand," Gary Williams, principal of The British Butler Institute, said. "We have grown steadily throughout China and we are currently providing training courses for an average of 850 students a year."
At this stage, it is difficult to gauge the value of the sector as there is very little data on the subject. But to put the industry into context, Hurun Research Institute, a wealth management research agency based in Shanghai, reported in its latest survey that China has more than 1.09 million people with assets of at least 10million yuan.
Naturally, this is good news for companies turning out skilled domestic staff.South Bay workers are better paid and more educated than workers overall in Los Angeles County, but they also suffer from a stifled housing market, according to a new review and forecast of local business trends.
The second annual South Bay Economic Forecast and Industry Outlook report was released Thursday at a Cal State Dominguez Hills conference with local business and civic leaders. The study, commissioned by the university’s Economics Institute, was compiled by Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics.
The report found the region is economically stable, with steady growth, and is well-positioned for a boom with coming major developments such as the Los Angeles Rams stadium in Inglewood and high-paying innovative technical industries that are emerging.
“Income gains, including significant wage increases, are feeding into increased consumer spending,” said Robert Kleinhenz, executive director of Beacon Economics. “It’s a little bit over 3 percent. This is a good, solid growth rate.
“You may be looking over your shoulder wondering when the next recession is happening. There are no signs on the horizon at the present time” and through 2017, Kleinhenz said.
With the housing market suffering from a supply shortage, South Bay home sales jumped from prior years in 2015 and 2016 and are likely to grow next year, the report states. Housing costs increased the most this year in El Segundo, Rolling Hills, Gardena, Rancho Palos Verdes, Carson, Manhattan Beach and Torrance.
Meanwhile, high housing costs and low supply have pushed many residents into apartments, causing rents to soar by 5.2 percent in 2015-16 and creating low vacancy rates in the range of 3 percent, the report says. Rents are expected to continue to climb.
Like housing supply, workforce supply is tight. The limited number of trained, educated South Bay workers caused payrolls to jump in 2015 by 6.6 percent — nearly 1 percentage point more than the Los Angeles County average. The average annual wage increased to $60,600 and the professional and business services sectors grew to be the largest employers.
Outside of professional and business services, the industries providing the most jobs are manufacturing, health care, leisure and hospitality, transportation and utilities, retail and government, respectively.
What’s more, most South Bay workers commute only 25 minutes or less to their jobs, the report found.
“Los Angeles County has the largest (percentage) of manufacturing jobs anywhere in the nation, and the South Bay is even higher,” Kleinhenz said. “Goods movement at the Port of Los Angeles, LAX, and all segments of the transportation and warehouse economy are strong.”
People who bought homes in the South Bay in 2015 and 2016 most likely purchased them in Torrance, Redondo Beach, San Pedro or Carson.
Cities with the highest sales tax revenues were Torrance, Carson, Hawthorne, Inglewood and Redondo Beach. However, Carson saw a 25 percent plummet in its 2015 taxable sales. Cheap gas prices have been a major contributor to declining sales tax revenues, and gas costs aren’t expected to increase.
“We’re the world’s biggest producer of oil at the present time,” Kleinhenz said. “The price of oil is low and there is little incentive for new extractions” because of a glut in supply.
Industrial buildings used for warehousing and distribution are at a premium in the region, with a vacancy rate of less than 1 percent. El Segundo issued $209 million worth of nonresidential building permits in 2015, vastly outpacing other cities in the South Bay. Torrance followed with $119 million, and the rest of the region trailed significantly behind that.
Aerospace, defense and petroleum refining remain the South Bay’s mainstays. But those industries are shifting as innovative, service-based technologies replace old manufacturing production, according to the report.
“Were it a county in its own right, the South Bay would be the 10th largest county in California,” said university President Willie J. Hagan. “The report tells a story of transition and of economic diversification, with growth in tech start-ups, creative industries, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies joining the long-dominant industries of our economy.”
Though professional and business services, manufacturing, health care and leisure and hospitality industries top the list of South Bay employers, high-paid innovative technical jobs in medical and aerospace fields are growing quickly. The report calls them “game-changing industries.”
Those include Hawthorne rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and other space-related product developers and manufacturers, such as El Segundo satellite maker Millennium Space Systems.
“Everything you’re doing today on your smartphone is really powered by space,” said Vince Deno, chief operating officer of Millennium Space Systems, who spoke at Thursday’s conference. “You may not be touching a satellite but you’re certainly indirectly using one. The South Bay is really the center for excellence for the space economy, and the number of satellites is increasing very dramatically.”
The region also promises to see a major expansion from Inglewood’s coming NFL stadium in 2019. The stadium site, at the former Hollywood Park racetrack complex, will be situated on a massive campus that is the largest entitled real-estate project in Southern California, according to NFL Executive Vice President Kevin Demoff, who also spoke Thursday.
The site will be eight or nine times the size of LA Live.
“It will be the pre-eminent sports and entertainment district in the world,” Demoff said. “It will be a city within a city. We really view this as a connecting point between the South Bay and what lies north of the airport in Playa Vista.”When I moved to Paris around seven years ago from Toronto, I arrived woefully unprepared. I anticipated homesickness. Language barriers. And loneliness. But naively, I failed to consider the challenge of being a visible minority in a country where race relations are fraught with tensions.
French president-elect Emmanuel Macron waves to the crowd as he delivers a speech at the Pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday, after the second round of the French presidential election. ( PATRICK KOVARIK / AFP/GETTY IMAGES )
I would soon learn that under the veneer of cosmopolitan diversity, lies an undercurrent of long-simmering fear and distrust that manifest themselves in often nuanced, sometimes patently racist ways. In his victory speech Sunday, Emmanuel Macron vowed to unify the fractured, divided country he’s inherited as the new president of France. But it’s a mammoth undertaking that will require some honest soul-searching. And I’m hoping it will lead to — what I, an outsider, sees as — the root of one of the country’s problems: namely, the lack of integration.
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Consider the fact that many of the terrorists who carried out the spate of attacks in 2015 — the Charlie Hebdo offices, Jewish grocery store, Bataclan and the Stade de France — were not immigrants, but homegrown terrorists and French nationals. While the Front National uses a discourse of fear to incite distrust toward Muslim immigrants, little is said about the fact that it was their own — disenfranchised, French-born men — who carried out the deadliest attacks on French soil. And it’s not just Islamophobic sentiment that divides the country. In recent years, the Chinese community in Paris has been taking to the streets to protest what they call institutionalized racism at the police and national level, following a rise in hate crimes and a police shooting that killed a Chinese man in his apartment. Asians are seen as soft, easy, visible targets, who are flush with cash, won’t fight back or file complaints due to language barriers. Despite the rise in hate crimes, the government is accused of failing to address their concerns and treating the community as second-class citizens.
After a personal experience in which the local police failed me, I sympathize with their fight. A few summers ago I hosted five Asian girlfriends visiting from Canada. We were on the Champs-Elysées when one of them had her wallet stolen. When I approached a police officer on patrol to explain in French what happened, he scanned the group and said, “What do you want me to do about it?”
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It was a dismissive, arrogant attitude that clearly passed judgment on the fact that we were a group of Asian women on the Champs-Elysées. As far as he was concerned, we had simply experienced a rite of passage for wealthy Chinese tourists visiting Paris. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that in France, the first thing they see is my otherness. When I tell people I’m from Canada, the most common followup question is, “No, where are you really from?” While I’m happy to clarify my ethnic origins (Korean), questions like these suppose that I can’t possibly be anything but Asian. During a group exercise for the Red Cross where I volunteer, Chinatown was depicted as a circle with two angled lines for eyes. I have French friends who characterize Asians by our “yeux brides,” or slanted eyes. I have been forced to confront identity issues I never had to deal with in Toronto, which makes me ask: Has living in Canada made me overly sensitive? As a Canadian, am I manifesting political correctness run amok? While waiting in line to apply for my sixth consecutive residence permit in Paris recently, I got to commiserating with an Indian man about the renewal experience. When he learned I was Canadian, he furrowed his brow and in an almost accusatory tone asked, “Why are you living in France when you could live in Canada?” The question threw me. Because, if I’m going to be honest, it’s the same question I’ve been asking myself over the last few years, particularly during my annual pilgrimages home when I reconnect with friends, family, and fellow Canadians. While once I was a starry-eyed francophile bewitched by the undeniable beauty of this city, I’ve since awoken from the spell after one too many unpleasant exchanges and a general level of civility that can sometimes leave you hardened and jaded for days on end. A civility I feel has been eroding since the post-terrorist attacks. So why am I still in Paris? Because, despite all that, I’ve built a quiet but lovely life for myself here. As an aspiring writer and part-time dreamer, I’ve never been as inspired and creative as I have been since living in France. After arriving with nothing — no job, friends, and a questionable hovel of an apartment — I worked hard to find a job as a food and travel editor, and have gained a small but loyal and wonderful group of French friends. Like any long-term relationship, one doesn’t just throw in the towel because of a few bumps. And quitting is not in my repertoire. On that last visit to the visa office, I was unexpectedly given a 10-year residency permit, akin to a commitment ceremony. After enviously watching the French cast votes in this election, I am looking at applying for dual French citizenship. Because knowing that a good majority of the French population voted against the extreme-right party Sunday is an encouraging sign for, not only my future in France, but for all visible minorities. Vivian Song is currently a food and travel editor, who eventually hopes to be able to live half the year in Paris and the other half in Toronto.
Read more about:Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, pictured with his deputy Tanya Plibersek, has set a goal of having women make up half of Labor MPs within 10 years. Credit:Andrew Meares But it appears his lofty ideals of dramatically increasing the participation of women in politics have been ignored in a faction power-play which will end the federal career of Lisa Singh - arguably the state's highest profile Labor figure - while elevating yet another union official. The telegenic 42-year-old frontbencher is a regular contributor to the national political debate and is a proven media performer in her capacity as shadow parliamentary secretary for the environment, climate change and water. But quality and merit are have proved no defence against the factional warlords who saw fit in June to install the little-known Australian Manufacturing Workers Union secretary, John Short in the third spot on the party's Senate ticket, behind the Left's Anne Urquhart and the Right's Helen Polley. The factionally unaligned Senator Singh, who was the Hobart Citizen of the Year in 2004, was allocated the unwinnable 4th spot, signifying the end of her federal career unless the ALP's powerful national executive intervenes to change the order.
Former Tasmanian senator and Hawke government minister Margaret Reynolds is appalled that Senator Singh has been shoved aside because she lacks factional and union support. Noting that federal intervention had been required to protect her |
its incorporation in mid-January last year to 30 June, Fortescue International Marketing was dormant, according to its inaugural set of financial statements. The registered address is 10 Anson Road, #32- 15 International Plaza, Singapore, 079903.
Iron ore at the Port of Qingdao has rallied recently, gaining a further 2.6 per cent to $US62.78 a tonne on Tuesday.
In the time since Fortescue established the Singapore marketing vehicle, the iron ore price has fallen about 55 per cent to around $US62 a tonne. The price falls have hit Fortescue's profits and share price hard. It reported an 81 per cent fall in interim profit in February this year to $US331 million ($422 million), from $US1.7 billion a year earlier.
When it was put to Mr Forrest on ABC Radio earlier this month, that Rio TInto and BHP would argue that they are huge contributors to the economy through the tax that they pay, Mr Forrest attacked their Singaporean marketing hubs.
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"Well that's a really sensitive issue isn't it," he said. "You've made huge profits and then you've funnelled those profits through a tax shelter in Singapore. You've taken around a billion dollars in profits, you're arguing with the Australian Taxation Office, you're not playing a fair game, either on the iron ore volume, the iron ore price or even on the tax you pay."
BHP Billiton faces a tax bill of $522 million on its Singapore marketing operations, and further tax audits are continuing. Rio Tinto paid $107 million to settle a past back tax claim from its Singapore marketing hub.
Glencore's coal marketing office in Singapore has also been in focus but it is in the process of winding it up.
BHP and Rio are among Australia's largest taxpayers – they pay about 30 per cent of their reported profits as income tax worldwide. They also pay royalties and other state taxes. Both pay a greater share of their income in taxes than their two greatest rivals, Glencore and Brazil's Vale.5 Reasons Why You Should Watch FRINGE
I should’ve liked FRINGE from the start.
As someone who spent most of her life obsessed with The X-Files, it was something that was right up my alley – great mythology, FBI agents, paranormal stories. Being masterminded by JJ Abrams, there was no doubt the show would take off and become a hit when it premiered in 2009.
And yet, despite my friends telling me I would love it…I never got into watching it. There were always excuses – I had too much work, there were other shows that took precedence on my DVR, I didn’t have the time to invest in another serialized drama. It took until this past year to understand that my friends were right. Inspired by a sale while on a trip to my local Best Buy, I picked up the DVD set and promptly “marathoned” the past two seasons in a matter of days.
While I currently lament the fact I didn’t start watching Fringe sooner, I’m here to tell you why you should start – if you don’t watch already. And don’t worry, I’ll stay away from spoilers as much as possible.
1. JOHN NOBLE
Snappy one-liners, a love of junk food, and an accent.
I could start this article by asking why John Noble hasn’t received a well-deserved Emmy (or at least a nomination) for his intense and eccentric portrayal of Peter Bishop’s father, Walter, because those words were the first thing out of my mouth when I started the series. Noble is an absolutely brilliant actor, and one who is able to bring layers upon layers to a character that played by anyone else could simply be a one-dimensional mad scientist freak. To say he sets the acting bar high on the show would be an understatement, since he consistently performs at a level that is unparalleled by any other actor.
I’m constantly in awe of the fact that in just one episode, he can make me laugh and cry. Noble has the ability to portray someone with a child-like mind and someone who is a serious scientist, all the while delivering a performance so deeply emotional that you spend the entire hour in disbelief of his talents.
2. REAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
It’s no secret that shows struggle to fill the void of television sci-fi by branding their shows as such. The difference with Fringe is that it smartly delves into real science fiction, something that hasn’t been seen since the days of The X-Files.
The writers take real cases with plausible scientific backgrounds, twisting them into made-for-television stories that are over-dramatized…but in a good way. We don’t watch the show thinking the scenarios are campy or that the writers are trying too hard to reach a science-fiction based audience. Because of that, it’s easy to believably buy into the different stories Fringe pulls out each week, leaving us waiting in tense anticipation for the next episode.
3. LAYERS AND LAYERS OF MYTHOLOGY
The amount of mythology that Fringe manages to interject into the series can be a little overwhelming, if you’re not prepared to give your full attention.
In addition to the stories of the characters and the scientific cases, you have a secret government agency working to protect the world from unnatural horrors, an alternate universe that has been in the making for quite some time…oh yeah, and don’t forget the alien shapeshifters, “Observers” (an ageless group of men who are present for all important moments throughout history) and experimentations on a group of children who possess extraordinary abilities.
However overwhelming, this level of mythology is what makes Fringe so great. With so much to build on and so much history to cover, the audience is taken on a real journey that lets them feel as though the show is invested in them just as much as they’re invested in the show.
4. SPECIAL EFFECTS: NO SKIMPING ALLOWED
Worms crawling under the skin of a man’s body. A squid erupting from the mouth of an infected sea merchant. A human head growing out of a stomach. Fringe doesn’t disappoint when it comes to special effects, and in fact, some of the things we see on screen are so realistic that we become one of those viewers who covers their eyes while yelling “I just ate dinner!”
The creators realize that in order to keep their audience entertained, they need to pull out all the stops and make everything that shows up on the series believable. Those who work on their show do their very best to push themselves to the limits every week. The result? Moments that are eerie, creepy and incredibly well done.
5. CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS
Fringe prides itself on being a science fiction, mythologically based show…but at its crux, it’s truly a show about love, family and relationships. And I’m not just talking the sexual tension based relationship between FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and civilian-turned-investigator Peter Bishop. There’s so much more that’s layered between the stories of alternate universes, child experimentations and gory cases.
For example: Peter and Walter’s relationship as father and son, and the growth that both of them experience as they work to amend their previously estranged ways. Astrid, the bright FBI agent who works with Walter in the lab coming to see him as not just a crazy man, but someone to protect and care for. Olivia’s relationship with Walter first as a professional solving cases, then as a confident as he shares his deepest secrets. Complex character relationships and backgrounds are a huge part of why the show is so successful on so many levels, and one of the reasons Fringe is so enjoyable to watch.
Despite its Friday night “death sentence” time slot, Fringe has been hurtling through its third season with a bang and hopes are high that come May, the show will be a no brainer for renewal.
Personally, with the way the series is headed, I can’t imagine them not getting another season. There are few shows on television right now that are as complex and well-written as Fringe – let’s give the network a reason to keep this show moving forward.
Follow me on twitter @sweet_radiation.Refocused: Miami Dolphins 27, New England Patriots 20
By PFF Analysis Team • Dec 12, 2017
The Miami Dolphins defeated the New England Patriots 27-20 inside Hard Rock Stadium on a night where Jay Cutler outplayed Tom Brady.
Brady was 24-of-43 for 233 yards, throwing two interceptions versus only one touchdown. He was not helped out by his running game, as the Patriots only rushed for 25 yards on 10 carries on the night.
Cutler was 25-of-38 for 263 yards and had three touchdown throws to his credit. RB Kenyan Drake lead the team in both receiving yards (74) and rushing yards (114), and WR Jarvis Landry found himself in the end zone twice.
Frustrating Brady tonight was CB Xavien Howard, who came away with both of Brady’s interceptions and multiple big plays. With that, we give you our PFF-exclusive takeaways from the contest for each team.
Top 5 Grades:
CB Xavien Howard, 92.0 overall grade
RB Kenyan Drake, 85.9 overall grade
LB Kiko Alonso, 85.1 overall grade
S Reshad Jones, 85.0 overall grade
S T.J. McDonald, 83.7 overall grade
Performances of Note:
RB Kenyan Drake, 85.9 overall grade
Drake followed up a spectacular performance in Week 13 (95.9 overall grade) with another impressive showing on Monday night against Miami’s division rival. Drake earned 122 yards after contact on the ground against New England despite rushing for 114 yards total, forcing three missed tackles along the way. Through the air, he hauled in all five of his targets and gained 36 of his 79 receiving yards after the catch.
QB Jay Cutler, 81.2 overall grade
New England blitzed Cutler on over half of his dropbacks on Monday night (21 out of 41) and he made sure they paid for it. When the Patriots rushed five or more defenders, Cutler completed 16-of-20 attempts for 186 yards and two touchdowns, good for a 138.8 passer rating against the blitz. Cutler also had a great deal of success in this one with the short-passing game, connecting on 21-of-23 attempts for 163 yards and two touchdowns on passes that traveled fewer than ten yards in the air.
CB Xavien Howard, 92.0 overall grade
The second-year player out of Baylor played his best game as a pro on Monday night and his grade would’ve been higher if not for a defensive pass interference in the first half. After an up and down season, Howard shined in coverage against the Patriots. He was targeted six times and did not allow a catch, while also notching two interceptions and a pass break up. Howard has been on fire the last two weeks, only allowing two catches on 15 targets with four interceptions and four pass break ups.
LB Kiko Alonso, 85.1 overall grade
Alonso has been another inconsistent player for the Dolphins defense this year but he played a well rounded game Monday night. His four stops led to a run-defense grade of 82.8 and he limited the big plays in coverage, allowing six catches for 47 yards, with the longest gain against him being a screen to Rex Burkhead.
Top 5 Grades:
DI Lawrence Guy, 84.0 overall grade
S Devin McCourty, 77.0 overall grade
CB Eric Rowe, 76.2 overall grade
RB Dion Lewis, 75.1 overall grade
S Duron Harmon, 73.2 overall grade
Performances of Note:
RB Dion Lewis, 75.1 overall grade
The duo of Dion Lewis and Rex Burkhead accounted for much of New England’s passing attack, as the pair were targeted a combined 10 times for 95 total yards. The Patriots only carried the ball ten times in the game, mostly due to being behind throughout most of the night. On the season, Lewis has caught all 20 of his targets thrown his way and has forced six missed tackles in the pass game.
QB Tom Brady, 64.2 overall grade
Outside of the two running backs, Brady struggled to consistently connect with his receivers on the outside, with credit being due to the Dolphins secondary. In all likelihood, Brady would’ve been more comfortable with tight end Rob Gronkowski in the lineup, as backup tight end Dwayne Allen was targeted only three times and only had 10 receiving yards. Brady was pressured on 16 of his 45 drop backs, completing six passes for 98 yards with a passer rating of 90.8.
DI Lawrence Guy, 84.0 overall grade
The only Patriots player on Monday night to earn a grade north of 80.0, Guy had arguably his best game of the season down in Miami. The former seventh-round pick was on the field for 54 defensive snaps (a season high) and was able to contribute in a variety of ways. He tallied two pressures on 24 pass-rush snaps and also batted a Cutler screen pass down at the line of scrimmage. He also had four run stops, tying his season high. Out of 80 qualified interior defenders, Guy was one of just seven to record at least four run stops in Week 14.
CB Stephon Gilmore, 47.2 overall grade
Gilmore had been on a hot streak coming into Monday night’s matchup with the Dolphins, finishing Week 12 and 13 with game grades of 89.3 and 92.6, respectively. That streak did not continue into Week 14, Gilmore allowed two of three targets to be caught (both resulting in a first down) to go with a pass interference penalty early in the game. New England’s big off-season signing now ranks 20th out of 118 qualified cornerbacks this year with an 84.8 overall grade.
PFF Game Ball: Xavien Howard, CB
*Grades are subject to change upon reviewObesity and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes mellitus are accompanied by increased lipid deposition in adipose and non-adipose tissues including liver, pancreas, heart and skeletal muscle. Recent publications report impaired regenerative capacity of skeletal muscle following injury in obese mice. Although muscle regeneration has not been thoroughly studied in obese and type 2 diabetic humans and mechanisms leading to decreased muscle regeneration in obesity remain elusive, the initial findings point to the possibility that muscle satellite cell function is compromised under conditions of lipid overload. Elevated toxic lipid metabolites and increased pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as insulin and leptin resistance that occur in obese animals may contribute to decreased regenerative capacity of skeletal muscle. In addition, obesity-associated alterations in the metabolic state of skeletal muscle fibers and satellite cells may directly impair the potential for satellite cell-mediated repair. Here we discuss recent studies that expand our understanding of how obesity negatively impacts skeletal muscle maintenance and regeneration.
Obesity and associated disorders are quickly reaching a global epidemic scale. Over 500 million people worldwide are overweight or obese (World Health Organization, 2013). Obesity is highly associated with development of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and cardiovascular disorders (Kahn et al., 2006; Lavie et al., 2009; Samuel and Shulman, 2012). In obese individuals, lipids excessively accumulate in adipose tissues and ectopically accumulate in non-adipose tissues including skeletal muscle (Unger et al., 2010). Lipids in skeletal muscle have been extensively studied in the context of insulin sensitivity. However, lipid overload in muscle appears to affect not only insulin signaling, but also muscle maintenance and regeneration. The underlying mechanisms are not fully understood, but recent experimental data suggest that multiple factors such as accumulation of toxic lipid metabolites and low-grade inflammation result in impaired muscle regeneration under conditions of obesity. The impact of obesity on skeletal muscle maintenance and physiology has been addressed in rodent models of obesity, including leptin-deficient Lepob/ob mice (commonly termed “ob/ob”), leptin receptor-deficient Leprdb/db mice (termed “db/db”) and obese Zucker rats (which also have a leptin receptor mutation) (Kurtz et al., 1989; Tschop and Heiman, 2001), as well as in mice and rats fed a high-fat diet. All of these animals have increased whole body lipid content and develop hyperglycemia and insulin resistance, a phenotype similar to type 2 diabetes (reviewed in Unger, 2003).
Here we will discuss the sources of lipids that directly affect skeletal muscle, review studies investigating muscle regeneration in obesity models, and discuss possible mechanisms underlying impaired regenerative capacity of skeletal muscle in obese animals (summarized in Figure 1).
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Major mechanisms linking obesity with impaired muscle regeneration. Obesity is associated with insulin and leptin resistance, elevated circulating and intramuscular fatty acids, diacylglycerols, ceramides and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Following muscle injury, satellite cells (depicted adjacent to muscle on left) are activated, proliferate, differentiate and form myofibers that grow and replace damaged tissue. Impairment of these processes underlies inefficient muscle regeneration in obese rodents. Defective leptin signaling can contribute to decreased satellite cell proliferation and impaired muscle hypertrophy, but the molecular mechanisms are not known. Fatty acids, diacylglycerols (DAG) and ceramides induce apoptosis and decrease myoblast proliferation and differentiation, possibly via activation of myostatin and inhibition of MyoD and myogenin expression and/or activity. Ceramides and pro-inflammatory cytokines inhibit muscle growth in part by inhibiting the IGF-1/Akt /mTOR pathway.
Obesity and Skeletal Muscle Lipid Accumulation
Obesity is characterized by elevated adipose storage in subcutaneous and visceral adipose depots and non-adipose organs, a phenomenon called ectopic lipid accumulation (Van Herpen and Schrauwen-Hinderling, 2008). In addition, obese individuals have increased circulating fatty acids (Boden and Shulman, 2002; Mittendorfer et al., 2009) and high ectopic lipid deposition in skeletal muscle partially resulting from increased fatty acid uptake from the circulation (Goodpaster et al., 2000b; Sinha et al., 2002; Bonen et al., 2004; reviewed in Goodpaster and Wolf, 2004). Lipids within skeletal muscle are comprised of two pools: extramyocellular lipids (EMCL) localized in adipose cells between myofibers and intramyocellular lipids (IMCL) located within muscle cells (Sinha et al., 2002; Boesch et al., 2006). A portion of EMCL comprises adipose tissue closely associated with the muscle, referred to as intermuscular adipose tissue (IMAT) (Goodpaster et al., 2000a). Although IMAT accumulation in obese patients is positively correlated with insulin resistance and reduced muscle performance (Goodpaster et al., 2000a; Hilton et al., 2008), this adipose depot does not appear to affect muscle mass (Lee et al., 2012a), and its effects on muscle regeneration have not been addressed. IMCL are comprised of neutral lipids triacylglycerols (TAG) and cholesterol esters, mainly localized to lipid droplets (reviewed in Fujimoto et al., 2008; Thiele and Spandl, 2008) as well as lipid metabolites, such as long-chain acyl CoAs, diacylglycerols and ceramides. Elevated TAG content and increased numbers of lipid droplets have been observed in muscle biopsies from obese people (Simoneau et al., 1995; Malenfant et al., 2001). Genetically obese mice (ob/ob and db/db) and obese Zucker rats also have increased IMCL (Kuhlmann et al., 2003; Unger, 2003; Fissoune et al., 2009; Ye et al., 2011). Long-chain acyl CoAs, diacylglycerols and ceramides accumulate in skeletal muscles of obese humans, ob/ob and db/db mice and obese Zucker rats (Turinsky et al., 1990; Hulver et al., 2003; Adams et al., 2004; Holland et al., 2007; Magnusson et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2013) and negatively affect cell signaling and metabolism; the defects are collectively referred to as lipotoxicity (Lelliott and Vidal-Puig, 2004; Kusminski et al., 2009). In skeletal muscle, lipotoxic species interfere with insulin signaling and are thought to be partly responsible for insulin resistance in obesity (reviewed in Timmers et al., 2008; Bosma et al., 2012; Coen and Goodpaster, 2012). However, it remains largely unknown what other physiologic processes are impaired by these lipid metabolites in skeletal muscle. In the following sections we will focus on recent findings on how obesity, and in some cases lipids, impair muscle progenitor cell function and muscle regeneration and regrowth.
Effects of Obesity on Muscle Progenitor Cells
Insulin resistance and mitochondrial and metabolic dysfunction are perhaps the most prominent muscle abnormalities that negatively impact whole body metabolism and physical performance in states of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Skeletal muscle maintenance depends on ongoing repair, regeneration and growth, all of which decline during aging (reviewed in Jang et al., 2011). Obesity rates increase with aging, which is also accompanied by reduced regenerative capacity and muscle strength. Thus, as average life span increases, it is of growing clinical importance to understand whether obesity impacts muscle maintenance and regeneration and to identify mechanisms that may be targeted for therapeutic benefit.
Skeletal muscle regeneration after injury requires the activity of muscle stem cells and satellite cells, which remain associated with skeletal myofibers after development (reviewed in Wang and Rudnicki, 2012). Muscle regeneration is commonly experimentally induced by intramuscular injection of a myotoxic agent, such as cardiotoxin, notexin or barium chloride. Freeze-induced injury is an alternative model of muscle injury entailing application of steel cooled to the temperature of dry ice to the muscle (Warren et al., 2007). In normal animals, these injuries cause local myofiber necrosis and inflammation, followed by satellite cell activation, proliferation, differentiation, fusion and ultimately regrowth of myofibers to approximately the same size as the original within about three weeks (Figure 1 and Charge and Rudnicki, 2004). Satellite cells are required for regenerative myogenesis (Lepper et al., 2011; Gunther et al., 2013). Currently there is a controversy regarding requirement of satellite cells for skeletal muscle hypertrophy. Load-induced hypertrophy in humans and rodents is accompanied by satellite cell activation, proliferation and fusion with existing myofibers (Rosenblatt et al., 1994; Kadi et al., 2004; Petrella et al., 2008; Bruusgaard et al., 2010). However, genetic ablation studies in mice demonstrated that satellite cells do not appear to be required for hypertrophy induced by mechanical overload (McCarthy et al., 2011; Jackson et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012b). Although efficient hypertrophy in rodents does not strictly require satellite cell fusion to myofibers, nuclear accretion due to satellite cell fusion is thought to promote hypertrophy by supporting the growing cytoplasm. In addition, muscle regenerative capacity declines with aging, and this is thought to be due in part to reduced satellite cell function (reviewed in Jang et al., 2011). Thus, although it is still not settled to what extent this specific progenitor population is required for maintenance of adult muscle, it is clear that identification of therapeutic targets to stimulate and maintain activity of these cells has potential to improve metabolism and strength in aging and obese humans. Recent data indicate that skeletal muscle regeneration is significantly impaired in models of diabetes and obesity, possibly due to impaired muscle progenitor cell function.
Lipotoxicity in Myoblasts
Several groups have modeled lipid overload by incubating cultured muscle cells with fatty acids or lipid metabolites. During differentiation of L6 myoblasts, exogenous ceramides markedly reduce expression of the myogenic transcription factor myogenin, likely via inhibition of phospholipase D, while inhibitors of ceramide synthesis potentiate myogenin expression and accelerate myotube formation (Mebarek et al., 2007). In addition, several studies showed that increasing ceramide pools either by palmitate loading or silencing of stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 (SCD1), which normally desaturates fatty acids and reduces the pool of saturated fatty acids that are converted to ceramides, results in increased apoptosis in differentiated L6 and C2C12 muscle cells (Turpin et al., 2006; Rachek et al., 2007; Peterson et al., 2008b; Henique et al., 2010; Yuzefovych et al., 2010). These findings suggest that the elevated fatty acids in obesity could directly harm the muscle fibers and satellite cells.
To test the effect of intracellular free fatty acid accumulation on myoblast viability and myogenesis, Tamilarasan, et al. used C2C12 cells stably transfected with human lipoprotein lipase (LPL), which converts TAGs to free fatty acids and glycerol (Tamilarasan et al., 2012). In spite of an approximately tenfold increase in intracellular free fatty acids and TAGs, cell viability and proliferation were similar to control cells. However, LPL-expressing cells showed defective differentiation accompanied by markedly decreased expression of MyoD, myogenin, and myosin heavy chain as well as a reduced number of myotubes (Tamilarasan et al., 2012). In mice, acute triglyceride infusion resulted in increased plasma free fatty acid and diacylglycerol levels and increased caspase-3 activity in gastrocnemius muscle (Turpin et al., 2009). However, in the same study, ob/ob mice and mice fed high-fat diet for 12 weeks did not show increased apoptosis, autophagy or proteolysis in muscle despite elevated plasma free fatty acids, muscle diacylglycerols and ceramides (Turpin et al., 2009). In contrast with this result, another group observed increased caspase-3 activation in gastrocnemius muscle in mice after 16 weeks of high-fat diet feeding (Bonnard et al., 2008), probably secondary to elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS), oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Because cell viability and apoptosis were not directly assessed in this study, it is difficult to conclude if caspase-3 activation was accompanied by increased apoptosis (Bonnard et al., 2008). It is possible that pro-apoptotic effects of caspase-3 in muscle from obese animals are counteracted by increased expression of pro-survival Bcl2 and transcriptional downregulation of other pro-apoptotic genes, such as caspase8, caspase14, Fadd, and multiple genes involved in TNF-α signaling (Turpin et al., 2009). Therefore, although fatty acids and ceramides induce apoptosis in muscle cells in vitro, it appears that elevated lipid metabolites do not impair muscle cell viability in vivo. In vitro studies have raised the interesting possibility that fatty acids and possibly other lipid metabolites interfere with the myogenic differentiation program, suggesting that perhaps differentiation during muscle regeneration would be impaired in obese animals.
Muscle Regeneration in Obesity Models
Several recent studies have employed myotoxins and freeze injury to evaluate muscle regeneration in obese or diabetic mice. In mice fed high-fat diet for 8 months, Hu, et al. observed reduced tibialis anterior (TA) muscle mass after cardiotoxin injury, associated with smaller myofibers, larger interstitial spaces and increased collagen deposition compared with lean mice (Hu et al., 2010). Similarly, a short period of high-fat diet (3 weeks) in young mice (aged 3–6 weeks) resulted in reduced numbers of satellite cells and impaired regeneration of TA muscle after cold-induced injury (Woo et al., 2011). A similar effect on satellite cell number and regeneration was observed in young mice with prenatal malnutrition, which also results in elevated adiposity (Woo et al., 2011). Although proliferation rates were not directly assessed in this study, the data collectively suggest that high adiposity depresses proliferative capacity of satellite cells either due to intrinsic metabolic properties of the muscle or satellite cells or alterations of circulating metabolites after high-fat feeding. However, in other studies, intermediate durations (12 weeks) of high fat feeding did not markedly impair the size of regenerating fibers of extensor digitorum longus (EDL) muscle after cardiotoxin injury (Nguyen et al., 2011). Collagen deposition was not evaluated, but there do appear to be larger interstitial spaces in histological sections of regenerating muscle from the 12 week high-fat diet-fed animals (Nguyen et al., 2011) consistent with the findings of Hu et al. (2010). It is notable when comparing these studies that Hu, et al. and Woo, et al. evaluated regeneration of TA muscle while Nguyen, et al. analyzed EDL muscle. While both muscle groups are comprised of predominantly fast-twitch IIB/X fiber types, TA contains a larger proportion of oxidative type IIA fibers (Bloemberg and Quadrilatero, 2012). The choice of muscle group is an important consideration, as slow twitch muscles contain higher numbers of satellite cells per fiber (Gibson and Schultz, 1983). Thus, effects of high-fat diet feeding on different functional aspects of muscle regeneration may depend on the muscle studied and the type of analysis performed. Ultimate conclusions will depend on additional analyses of multiple parameters of muscle regeneration in high-fat diet fed animals, including careful analysis of proliferation, muscle progenitor number, as well as resolution of inflammation, fibrosis and fiber caliber during regrowth.
Effects of lipid overload on skeletal muscle regeneration have specifically been assessed in transgenic mice overexpressing LPL in skeletal muscle (Levak-Frank et al., 1995; Tamilarasan et al., 2012). Overexpression of LPL in muscle results in an approximately eightfold increase in LPL activity, increased free fatty acid uptake and three- to fourfold increases in free fatty acid and TAG concentrations in gastrocnemius muscle. By two months of age, transgenic mice develop severe myopathy, which is detected histologically as regenerating myofibers with centrally localized nuclei, in addition to perturbed sarcomere structure, excessive glycogen storage, increased protein degradation and apoptotic nuclei (Levak-Frank et al., 1995; Tamilarasan et al., 2012). Ten days after cardiotoxin injury, myofiber cross-sectional area in LPL-transgenic mice is reduced compared to wild-type mice, indicating that intracellular lipid accumulation impairs muscle regeneration (Tamilarasan et al., 2012), either directly or indirectly. The defect in regeneration might result from reduced differentiation of progenitor cells, as LPL overexpression blocks myogenic differentiation of C2C12 cells (Tamilarasan et al., 2012) as described above. This, however, has not yet been tested. The pronounced muscle degenerative phenotype in LPL-expressing mice is most likely explained by lipotoxicity caused by the several-fold increase in intracellular free fatty acid and TAG concentrations. In comparison, high-fat diet feeding usually results in a 30–50% increase in intramuscular TAG in rodents (Marotta et al., 2004; Bruce et al., 2009; Ussher et al., 2010). The ultimate extent of lipotoxicity in skeletal muscle in vivo will therefore likely depend on the extent of lipid infiltration.
Leptin Signaling
In genetically obese ob/ob and db/db mice, which have more severe insulin resistance than high-fat diet-fed mice, EDL myofiber regeneration after cardiotoxin injury is blunted (Nguyen et al., 2011). This finding could suggest that leptin signaling is important for skeletal muscle regeneration. In support of this model, injury-induced satellite cell proliferation is specifically impaired in leptin signaling-deficient mouse models, but not in the two high-fat diet models (Hu et al., 2010; Nguyen et al., 2011). Notably, ob/ob and db/db mice show defects of early regeneration stages: decreased proliferation and reduced MyoD expression are most evident at day 5 post-injury (Nguyen et al., 2011). In agreement with this result, basal rates of satellite cell proliferation are reduced in both mice and obese rats with leptin signaling deficiencies (Purchas et al., 1985; Peterson et al., 2008a), suggesting reduced proliferative capacity. Recombinant leptin stimulates proliferation and MyoD and myogenin expression in myoblasts from wild-type mice, but myoblasts from mice lacking all forms of the leptin receptor (referred to as POUND mice) show decreased expression of MyoD and myogenin transcripts and decreased myotube formation during differentiation ex vivo (Arounleut et al., 2013). Moreover, administration of recombinant leptin to ob/ob mice restores expression of the proliferation markers proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and cyclin D1, which may account for the muscle growth-promoting effect of recombinant leptin in leptin-deficient animals (Sainz et al., 2009). In C2C12 myoblasts, leptin also stimulates proliferation but does not appear to promote MyoD or myogenin expression or differentiation (Pijet et al., 2013). Although leptin clearly has stimulatory effects on mouse myoblasts and muscle, it is not clear whether leptin promotes myoblast proliferation in all species. Leptin receptors are poorly abundant in porcine muscle, and recombinant leptin has no effect on proliferation of primary porcine myoblasts cultured in serum free medium or on protein accretion as these cells differentiated (Will et al., 2012). In line with this finding, lean and obese leptin receptor-deficient Zucker rats exhibit comparable BrdU incorporation, expression of myogenic regulatory factors, activation of pro-hypertrophic signaling pathways and gain of muscle mass in response to overload, demonstrating that leptin signaling per se is not required for satellite cell activation and muscle hypertrophy, at least in rats (Peterson et al., 2008a).
In addition to the activity of satellite cells, macrophages also contribute to regeneration of injured muscle by facilitating removal of tissue debris (Arnold et al., 2007). Leptin stimulates proliferation and activation of macrophages (Santos-Alvarez et al., 1999; Raso et al., 2002), pointing to another possible mechanism by which leptin resistance could impair muscle regeneration. Nguyen, et al. provided data supporting this hypothesis: in injured muscle of ob/ob and db/db mice, macrophage accumulation is decreased during early regeneration (Nguyen et al., 2011). In addition, these authors observed markedly decreased angiogenesis after injury in ob/ob and db/db mice (Nguyen et al., 2011). The data suggest that leptin could potentiate muscle regeneration by regulating macrophage activity and/or by stimulating vascularization. Vascularization potentiates regrowth of regenerating muscle in mice (Ochoa et al., 2007; Deasy et al., 2009). It appears that vascularization is not only important for nutrient availability but also myofiber growth. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), elevated during angiogenesis, promotes regeneration by directly stimulating myofiber growth (Arsic et al., 2004; Messina et al., 2007). As leptin resistance is often observed in obese and type 2 diabetic humans (Maffei et al., 1995; reviewed in Martin et al., 2008) it is possible that lack of leptin signaling could contribute to poor vascularity and compromised satellite cell function.
Inflammation
In skeletal muscle, inflammation is activated after injury and is coordinated with myogenic differentiation to achieve efficient muscle regeneration (reviewed in Mann et al., 2011; Kharraz et al., 2013). Immediately after muscle injury, an acute inflammatory stage ensues characterized by infiltration of pro-inflammatory M1 macrophages that remove tissue debris. Later, a different population of macrophages (M2) resolves inflammation. Accumulating data show that macrophages not only mediate inflammation but also support satellite cells during skeletal muscle regeneration. In mice, deletion of chemokine receptor-2 (CCR-2) impairs macrophage infiltration after muscle injury and results in inefficient muscle regeneration (Warren et al., 2005). In co-culture experiments in vitro, macrophages stimulate satellite cell proliferation (Cantini et al., 1994; Massimino et al., 1997; Merly et al., 1999). When transplanted together with satellite cells into muscle of Dmdmdx mice, a mouse model of human Duchenne muscular dystrophy, macrophages stimulate satellite cell survival and proliferation (Lesault et al., 2012). This potentiation effect is likely mediated, at least in part, by pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α and IL-6, which promote myoblast proliferation and migration in vitro (Li, 2003; Torrente et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2008; Toth et al., 2011). However, TNF-α and another pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1α also prevent myogenic differentiation (Miller et al., 1988; Layne and Farmer, 1999; Langen et al., 2001; Trendelenburg et al., 2012). During later stages of regeneration, TGF-β and IL-10 secreted by anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages promote myogenic differentiation (Arnold et al., 2007; Deng et al., 2012). Thus, the interplay between macrophages and satellite cells is precisely temporally orchestrated during skeletal muscle regeneration.
Obesity is recognized as a state of chronic inflammation with increased circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-6 (reviewed in |
magazines or television production houses, reacting to a writer or a documentarian trying to pitch a long essay or a series about K Balachander’s career since his first film in 1965 (or his successful theatre career from even earlier). Stray too far from Bollywood and you hit a brick wall. It was inevitable, therefore, that the celebrations of Indian cinema’s centenary would turn out to be all about Hindi cinema. The recent compilation of Indian cinema’s 100 greatest scenes in Time Out magazine’s Indian editions featured 10 scenes from Tamil cinema (some of which were my contributions), nine from Bengali, two each from Malayalam and Marathi, and one from Kannada. The rest—76, if you care to count—were selections from Hindi films. In over 90 years of existence and with nearly as many releases per year as Hindi and Tamil cinema (the annual output of these three industries constitutes nearly 50 per cent of the films released per year in India), Telugu cinema, apparently, hasn’t produced a single scene worth singling out—not even in Pakkinti Ammayi, the Cyrano de Bergerac-like 1953 comedy based on the Bengali story “Pasher Bari”, where one man’s voice is assumed to belong to someone else. The list did, however, find a place for Padosan, which was made from the same material 15 years later.In the early 2000s, William "Trip" Hawkins—founder of video game publisher Electronic Arts—was living the good life. He owned a private jet, two multi-million-dollar homes, sent his kids to private school, had four vehicles between himself and his wife, held San Francisco Giants season tickets, and employed a private staff.
Hawkins appeared to be flush with cash. He once had an estimated worth of $100 million while manning the video game company that has long produced best-sellers like the Madden NFL franchise, and he cashed out company stock repeatedly. He sold $24.4 million of EA stock in 1996. The following year, he sold $3.7 million more. In 1998, he sold $38.76 million.
But Hawkins had a peculiar way of keeping his cash flow up; he wasn't paying all the taxes connected to the proceeds of some of his stock sales. Instead, he participated in a tax sheltering setup designed to produce on-paper "monetary losses" to offset the gains. The scheme was all done through accounting firm KPMG, which used convoluted Swiss and Cayman Islands deals that eventually raised the eyebrows of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax auditors. The IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board eventually cried foul.
In 2002, the IRS notified Hawkins' lawyers that the tax shelters, accounting for about $60 million in claimed losses, wouldn't be allowed for the tax years 1997 to 2000. This meant that Hawkins would be on the hook for millions in back taxes on all those EA stock profits.
Still, Hawkins continued living a jet setter's life until around the time he filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006. For instance, a government legal filing [PDF] said that Hawkins' private jet had cost $11.8 million in 2000 and had an "operating" cost of $1 million annually. Hangar fees were $100,000 monthly, the filing added. The jet was allegedly used for trips, some personal, to Hawaii, England, Russia, Italy, Aspen, San Diego, and Long Beach.
"Debtors continued to purchase Giants season tickets each year commencing with the 2000 season. By the 2003 season, debtors were paying $7,487.76 for their season tickets and $1,415 for their parking pass," the government said. In 2002, the government said that Hawkins bought a newly built "vacation home" in the upscale La Jolla section of San Diego for $2.6 million.
Hawkins, for his part, disputes that he spent outrageously in the lead-up to his bankruptcy.
"I didn’t retire, build a home, or buy a bunch of luxury items other than one obvious indulgence," the 60-year-old wrote in a comment appended to a recent Forbes piece about his financial trouble. "I bought a private jet because I thought it would make me more efficient in my work. That was really stupid, too." (Hawkins sold his jet in 2003 for "approximately $5 million," according to the government.) Hawkins went on to say the one thing he was guilty of was "stupidity" for trusting accountants who promised him legitimate tax shelters.
Hawkins did eventually pay more than $10 million toward his tax debt, but $26 million still remained. Because of Hawkins' continued high spending, a federal bankruptcy court refused to give him the usual bankruptcy benefit of wiping his tax burden.
But Hawkins appealed this ruling—and he doesn't have to pay those taxes, at least not for now. A recent decision [PDF] by a three-judge panel for the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided 2-1 with Hawkins despite objections from a dissenting appellate judge who said that Hawkins didn't deserve a break because he was engaged in "profligate spending."
The appeals court concluded that it didn't matter whether Hawkins bought a private jet or lived the high life, so long as he wasn't willfully scheming to evade his tax burden. The majority opinion concluded [PDF] that the law was on Hawkins' side and that "bankruptcy law must apply equally to rich and poor alike."
Hawkins' ongoing legal push to be relieved of his tax obligations is merely the latest chapter in a long story. His saga provides a glimpse into the murky world of tax shelters, the principles of bankruptcy law, and the spendy lifestyles of the tech sector's elite. And, in this instance, it just happens to involve the man who started one of the world's most popular video game companies.
Tax shelters for sale
Hawkins, a Harvard University and Stanford University grad, was among the earliest Apple employees. He left his post as an Apple marketing director in 1982 to found Electronic Arts. In addition to the Madden franchise, EA has produced The Sims, FIFA, and a slew of other video games. Hawkins later formed 3DO, a gaming company that issued its first console in 1993. Despite at least $12 million in loans from Hawkins, 3DO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2003.
His Linkedin profile lists Hawkins now as the co-founder and CEO of If You Can, a company that makes children's learning tools. Through his attorney, Hawkins declined to comment to Ars.
The tax saga began with accountants at KPMG advising Hawkins to shelter his proceeds from the sales of EA stock in vehicles called a Foreign Leveraged Investment Portfolio (FLIP) and an Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy (OPIS). The government said Hawkins' reported investment failures "were not real economic losses." [PDF]
The appeals court described Hawkins' tax shelters as a convoluted web "designed to generate large paper losses":
To execute the FLIP transaction, Trip purchased shares of the Union Bank of Switzerland (“UBS”) for $1.5 million and an option to acquire shares of Harbourtowne, Inc., a Cayman Islands corporation. Harbourtowne then contracted with UBS to purchase shares of UBS for $30 million, with UBS receiving an option to repurchase the shares before the sale closed. UBS exercised the option, and the UBS shares were never transferred to Harbourtowne. Hawkins then received a letter from KPMG stating that he could add to the tax basis of his UBS shares the $30 million that Harbourtowne had contracted to pay for its UBS shares. The opinion letter stated that UBS’s repurchase of its shares would likely be considered a distribution to Harbourtowne (which was nontaxable because Harbourtowne was a foreign corporation), and that Harbourtowne’s basis in its UBS shares should be treated as a transferred to Hawkins’s basis in his UBS shares. OPIS worked in a similar way. Hawkins purchased shares of UBS for $1.99 million and an option to acquire an interest in Hogue, Investors LP, a Cayman Islands limited partnership. Hogue contracted to purchase shares of UBS treasury stock, with UBS retaining a call option to repurchase the shares before transfer. UBS exercised the option. KPMG issued an opinion letter to Hawkins stating that he could add the Hogue shares to his basis in the UBS stock.
The appellate court said that Hawkins sold "various quantities of UBS stock" and claimed losses connected to that stock of "approximately $6 million on his 1996 federal tax return, $23.4 million on his 1997 return, $20.5 million on his 1998 return, $3.5 million on his 1999 return, and $8.2 million on his 2000 return."
Hawkins wasn't the only one to climb aboard the KPMG tax-sheltering train. In 2005, the IRS announced what it labeled the "largest criminal tax case ever filed"—dinging KPMG with a $456 million fine in connection with a "multi-billion dollar criminal tax fraud conspiracy" through the sale of "fraudulent tax shelters." FLIP, OPIS, and other KPMG vehicles helped generate $11 billion in phony tax losses that cost the US Treasury $2.5 billion, the IRS said.
The accounting firm was never prosecuted but instead became the benefactor of what is known as a "deferred prosecution," meaning it could be charged if it didn't reverse course. [PDF] Two KPMG accountants were later successfully prosecuted, and a KPMG partner was acquitted in 2008. But taxpayers discovered to have taken advantage of these shelters like Hawkins weren't facing charges. They had opinion letters from KPMG saying the shelters were legit.
Listing image by JD HancockImage copyright US Department of State Image caption Iraqi sources identified Afari as Abdul Rahman al-Qaduli, who has a $7m bounty on his head
The second-in-command of Islamic State (IS) has been killed in a US-led coalition air strike in northern Iraq, the Iraqi ministry of defence says.
Abdul Rahman Mustafa Mohammed, also known as Abu Alaa al-Afari, was at a mosque near Tal Afar that was targeted, spokesman Brig-Gen Tahsin Ibrahim said.
However, the US military later denied coalition planes had attacked a mosque.
In recent weeks, there were unconfirmed reports that Afari had taken temporary charge of IS operations.
Iraqi sources claimed IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been incapacitated as a result of an air strike in Iraq in March.
'Video'
Gen Ibrahim told the BBC that Afari was killed alongside dozens of militants who he had been meeting at the al-Shuhada (Martyrs) mosque in the village of al-Iyadhiya, near Tal Afar, where he was reportedly a well-known preacher.
Tal Afar, in the northern province of Nineveh, was seized by IS in June 2014.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Iraq's ministry of defence published video purportedly showing the strike that killed Abu Alaa al-Afari
The general did not specify which country had carried out the air strike, but the US has been responsible for the vast majority since the coalition campaign began last August.
The ministry of defence separately published video purportedly showing the strike. It did not say when it took place, but one official told the Associated Press it was on Tuesday.
The Governor of Nineveh, Atheel al-Nujaifi, told the BBC in Washington that his contacts had confirmed Afari's death.
The US-led coalition said on Wednesday it had carried out a strike in the Tal Afar area against "an Isil (IS) fighting position and an Isil heavy machine gun", adding: "We can confirm that coalition aircraft did not strike a mosque."
Adding to the confusion, the Iraqi interior ministry was quoted as saying that although Afari was present at the scene of the air strike, it wasn't clear what had happened to him.
The Iraqi government has previously announced the deaths of IS leaders only for them to resurface alive.
But the BBC's Ahmed Maher in Baghdad says that if Afari's death is confirmed, it would represent another blow to IS, which has suffered a series of losses on the battlefield in recent months.
Analysis - Jim Muir, BBC News, Beirut
The man known as Abu Alaa al-Afari is believed to rank number two to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and commensurately has the highest US bounty on his head ($7m) apart from Baghdadi himself ($10m).
Image copyright AP Image caption There are conflicting reports about the fate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
The Iraqi authorities continue to insist that Baghdadi himself was incapacitated and had handed operational control to Afari after being badly wounded in an earlier strike - something the Pentagon has denied.
There have been many previous announcements from Baghdad during its long struggle against the Islamist militants which have not been subsequently borne out. So many observers will be sceptical of this latest claim until it is bolstered by independent confirmation.
Last week, the US state department offered a reward of $7m (£4.5m) for information on a "senior IS official" called Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, whom Iraqi security sources identified as Afari.
Born in 1957 or 1959 in Iraq's second city of Mosul, Qaduli joined IS forces in Syria after his release from an Iraqi prison in 2012, it said. He had previously served as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) - a precursor of IS - in Mosul.
The US added Qaduli to its list of specially designated global terrorists in 2014.Speculation is mounting over who owns the'suspicious abandoned taxi' that led to the evacuation of thousands of Christmas shoppers after it emerged the vehicle was not a working London black cab.
Crowds of people buying last-minute gifts were today cleared from a 600ft stretch of Regent Street as specialist officers examined a minicab parked in the middle of the road near Hamleys toy store.
It was later revealed that the driver had apparently parked his vehicle outside the popular store so that he could go shopping with his family - and returned to find the chaos he had caused.
Several London cab drivers have since suggested it may be owned by a billionaire businessman or celebrity who uses the vehicle to beat the congestion charge. Another theory is that it belongs to a Mayfair hotel, casino or private members club.
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Rumours: Speculation is mounting over who owns the'suspicious taxi' abandoned in Regent Street after it emerged the vehicle was not a working cab. It did not have a TFL license plate (circled is where it should be)
False alarm: Thousands of Christmas shoppers were today evacuated from one of London's busiest streets after a'suspicious vehicle' was abandoned in the middle of the road. But it has since emerged that the driver of the black cab had apparently parked it close to Hamleys toy store so that he could go shopping with his family
Explanation: While initial reports suggested the cab, pictured, had been'shot', eyewitness Dave Dale-Beasleigh said a police officer knocked out the back window while the driver was away
The Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association (LTDA) confirmed the vehicle was not a licensed cab because it did not have a Transport for London license plate, prompting feverish speculation about who it does belong to.
Black cabs are said to be popular with wealthy businessmen, partly because driving one allows them to avoid congestion and parking charges. A number of celebrities have also showed an interest.
Stephen Fry used to own a black cab, while Gary Barlow is thought to have gifted his wife Dawn one last year. It has even been rumoured that David Beckham was in the market for a London taxi.
Several black cab drivers have contacted MailOnline to speculate on who owns the Regent Street-parked vehicle.
Mark Dugdale, 47, said: 'A lot of millionaires use them to get around London quicker. I know Oligarchs have bought them but I've never seen one parked there before.
'The taxi isn't licensed by Transport for London. It hasn't got the plates and it's got tinted windows, which aren't allowed on London cabs.'
DO YOU KNOW THE DRIVER? Email [email protected] or call 0203 615 1764
He added: 'The majority of London cab drivers would never leave their vehicle unattended, especially not in the middle of a taxi rank [in Regent Street]. It beggars belief.'
An LTDA spokeswoman added: 'It was identified by traffic cameras as being unlicensed because it didn’t have a license plate – white plate with numbers displayed below the yellow license plate – that all Tfl licensed black cabs have. Licensed taxis also cannot have blacked out windows.'
Earlier today a witness, who watched the scene unfold from a building above, described how the driver was 'told off' by police as he made his way back to the vehicle laden with bags before driving away.
Dave Dale-Beasleigh, 54, a senior electrician who worked on the Regent Street Christmas light display, was walking on the opposite side of the road to Hamleys when he spotted a police officer looking at two cabs parked outside the toy shop.
Mr Dale-Beasleigh, who worked on Regent Street's Christmas light display, pictured, had this view as he watched the taxi driver, accompanied by what appeared to be his wife and children, return to the scene
Mr Dale-Beasleigh also described how he was just feet away when he saw the first officer looking at the vehicle. Witnesses reported seeing some three police cars and four vans on the scene as it was investigated
STAYING INCOGNITO: THE CELEBRITIES WHO HAVE OWNED BLACK CABS Noel Edmonds The Deal or No Deal star is often spotted driving a black cab on his five-mile daily commute to TV studios in Bristol. He bought it for a few hundred pounds in an attempt to avoid rush-hour traffic. But he has come in for criticism in the past for using the black cab to drive along bus lanes.
Kate Moss The 41-year-old supermodel bought a black cab seven years ago. She was spotted driving it for the first time when she took friend Fran Cutler and other pals from the Paradise pub in Kensal Green, North London, back to her house in St John's Wood in March 2008. Behind the wheel: Supermodel Kate Moss has in the past been pictured driving around in her black cab Arnold Schwarzenegger In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of hundreds of US customers to buy a black cab, paying to have one shipped to California.
Gary Barlow's wife Dawn Last year a black taxi was seen apparently being driven by Gary Barlow’s wife Dawn – who looked at ease behind the wheel as she pulled out of a quiet residential street. The vehicle was thought to have been gifted Dawn by her husband. Taxi for Barlow! Gary Barlow's wife Dawn was apparently seen at the wheel of a black cab in London in 2014 Bez of the Happy Mondays Dancer Bez – real name Mark Berry – used the money he earned on 2005's Celebrity Big Brother to have a condemned FX4 'pimped' and fitted with a V8 engine. He revealed earlier this year that he spent more than £18,000 on the black cab but that it was later stolen.
Stephen Fry The QI presenter once owned a black taxi cab, enabling him to drive round London incognito and avoid the attention of fans. On Top Gear he revealed he used one to avoid congestion and parking tickets. Fry once said: 'I sometimes park it on taxi stands all day and no one notices.' QI presenter Stephen Fry once owned a black taxi cab which enabled him to drive round London incognito Stanley Kubrick The late film director Stanley Kubrick could often be seen behind the wheel of a black cab near his Hertfordshire home.
The Duke of Edinburgh Even Prince Philip uses a black cab for charitable work and short trips in London.The taxi, complete with a royal chauffeur, carries his personal numberplate and runs on green biodiesel. In 2012, the Queen left theatregoers stunned when she made a surprise trip to the West End in the Duke of Edinburgh's black cab.
When he was asked to move from the street, Mr Dale-Beasleigh went inside the nearby light control centre. It was from there he watched the moment the driver returned to the scene, moments after a police officer smashed the back window - apparently to get a better look of the back seat.
'A minute later around the corner comes the cabbie with his wife and his young child with a load of shopping,' he said. 'And he was told off! He was pulled to the side and he was told off.
'I assume he just told someone it was his cab and they let him through. It was another police officer who was speaking to him.'
Mr Dale-Beasleigh said that while the child appeared to be a young girl, it was difficult to be sure.
A lot of millionaires use them to get around London quicker Mark Dugdale, 47
The officer stood talking to the driver as his colleagues started to wind down the situation.
Mr Dale-Beasleigh added: 'The interview with the cab owner finished and he drove off, minus a back window.'
Mr Dale-Beasleigh also described how he was just feet away when he saw the first officer looking at the vehicles.
He said: 'The officer was quite interested in the two cabs, they were sitting there for quite a while.
'Next thing I know there is more police. About three cars and about four vans that I could see that were in sight.
'Police officers started saying, "no you can't walk down that way" and that they were blocking the road. A policewoman said "you can evacuate the area or go into one of the buildings".'
Witnesses said some customers were told to stay inside shops and away from windows as specialists examined the car, which was parked at a taxi rank.
Crowds of people doing last-minute Christmas shopping were cleared from a 600ft stretch of Regent Street as specialist officers examined the black cab near Hamleys toy store. A cordon was also put in place (pictured)
Sealed off: The cordon remained in place for just under an hour (pictured), until it was removed shortly before 2pm. The Metropolitan Police have since declared the area safe and have reopened Regent Street
A Metropolitan Police spokesman later confirmed there was 'nothing suspicious', telling MailOnline: 'There's nothing going on – the roads are all open, the cordon's open.' Two officers are pictured at the scene earlier
Mr Dale-Beasleigh, who lives in Canterbury, Kent, found himself outside the control centre for the Christmas lights and walked up so that he had a 'bird's eye view' as the drama unfolded.
He said: 'They had put up the tape. A police officer walked down towards Hamleys and said "out of the area, out of the area". All the buildings were being evacuated.
'And that was it, the street was empty.'
Early reports of the closure suggested the windows of the vehicles had been'shot out'. A photo also emerged showing what appeared to be bullet holes in the glass.
But Mr Dale-Beasleigh said he watched as an officer who was examining the car took out 'a little tool' from his pocket that he used to strike the back window, apparently to take a better look.
He said: 'Basically he smashed that, the alarm of the cab went off. I couldn't see what he was looking at but he looked in the back seat. He was there for a few minutes.'
The incident did not appear to deter Christmas shoppers, with many seen on nearby Oxford Street this evening
The street was packed with people doing some last minute Christmas shopping following today's false alarm
One shopper carries multiple bags over his shoulder after picking up Christmas presents on Oxford Street
Apparently satisfied with what he saw, Mr Dale-Beasleigh said the officer 'gave a sign that everything was okay'. It was then the taxi driver walked back towards his vehicle.
The cordon remained in place for just under an hour, until it was removed shortly before 2pm. The Metropolitan Police have since declared the area safe and have reopened Regent Street.
The incident highlights the state of alert in place across Britain, more than a month after 130 people lost their lives in a wave of terror attacks across Paris.
General levels of security are influenced by the national terror threat level. It was raised in August 2014 to severe, the second highest of five levels, meaning an attack is considered highly likely.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman later confirmed there was 'nothing suspicious', telling MailOnline: 'There's nothing going on – the roads are all open, the cordon's open.'To process a transaction, you need first to make sure the sender owns the asset he wants to transfer, and make sure he will not trade it twice.
In the blockchain, information is stored in blocks that record all transactions ever done through the network. Hence, it allows validating both the existence of assets to be traded and ownership.
To avoid double spending, the technology requests several nodes to agree on a transaction to process it. A validation is also artificially difficult to achieve: miners leverage computer power to solve complex cryptographic problems (the proof-of-work). Every time a problem is cracked, a block is added to the chain, and all the transactions it includes are thus validated. The updated chain, including the new block, is shared with other nodes and becomes the new reference; this process leverages cryptography to prevent duplicate transactions.
New blocks issued are also linked to previous ones, so that it is almost impossible to go back on a transaction. This technology addresses all the issues to validate a transaction, so that processing one doesn’t request a third-party any more: the network replaces institutions.
Now, transferring assets through the blockchain is done almost in real time as it takes around 10 minutes to add a new block to the ledger. The complexity of the math problem to solve is increasing with time and computer power. And it is cheaper than ever as miners get rewarded at around 0.0001 Bitcoin (BTC) every time they process a transaction. This is a game changer.
Beyond Bitcoin, Several Use Cases Are Explored
Of course, Bitcoin was the first use case of the blockchain, and the most famous one. Its founder developed this technology to process money transfers and to solve many cryptocurrency issues. Instead of having a central bank that issues money, and banks to validate financial transactions, Bitcoin relies on the blockchain. Abra, for instance, is leveraging this technology to ease money transfers across borders — they rely on Bitcoin to disrupt the remittance market.
Stability is a key success factor for the technology to expand widely.
But beyond this monetary use, many applications of the blockchain could be explored. And startups are already working on this technology to disrupt industries. Indeed, every time a third-party is involved to process a transaction, the blockchain could replace it.
Overstock developed “tØ” a public equities trading platform based on the blockchain. And in the same area, NASDAQ announced a partnership with Chain a few months ago: They are working on disrupting shares trading by using the blockchain.
More generally, financial institutions, like Goldman Sachs or Barclays are teaming up with the startup R3 to create a new framework for the markets based on the blockchain.
A few startups are going even further, and plan to use the blockchain to trade physical assets. Thus, Bitproof and Blocknotary are disrupting contracts by recording them on the blockchain; instead of completing your house sale in front of a notary, just store the contract on the public ledger.
Colu, on its side, is using the blockchain to manage property through digital tokens that can unlock either online services or physical objects.
This also could be applied to intellectual property. For instance, Verisart is using this decentralized technology to verify art pieces. It encodes copyrights of artwork and records them on the blockchain. ProofOfExistence, as well, is leveraging the public ledger to keep track of files you have created.
To go further, the blockchain could be used to identify people. ShoCard encodes and stores personal information regarding identity. It could enable smart contracts, as well: As soon as terms are met, the contract is processed, thanks to the decentralized infrastructure. IBM is currently working on this application. It also unveiled a partnership with Samsung ADEPT, a proof of concept using the blockchain in the Internet of Things area.
Risks And Threats
But to go ahead, the blockchain technology needs to fix a few issues. Starting with the network capacity. As we saw earlier, a block is added to the ledger every 10 minutes. Due to the limited size of a block (1MB), the network is restricted to processing 7 transactions per second (tps). This is way far from what VISA can handle, with up to 56,000 tps.
A debate around the block size appeared a few weeks ago and a fork happened in the blockchain: A few miners started increasing block size to 8MB. And this sized is scheduled to double every two years. To solve this debate, if the Bitcoin XT reaches 75 percent of the network, the network will entirely switch to the new block size. More generally, the debate is around whether the blockchain should process a huge amount of transactions for a small transaction fee, or a small number of transactions at a higher rate.
Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993 and Bitcoin in 2014. Marc Andreessen
Security is also a threat, as a few Bitcoin trading platforms were hacked or closed, making millions of BTC disappear. This also could happen with assets that could be traded over the blockchain.
These issues highlight the need to have governance, which is a challenge for a decentralized network. But stability is a key success factor for the technology to expand widely.
If Bitcoin has been everywhere for years, its underlying technology — the blockchain — might be the most interesting and disruptive part of it. Indeed, for the first time in history, the technology seems to be able to replace institutions. When the decentralized network replaces third-parties, there is a wide range of potential use cases, as it eases and reduces the cost of transactions. Startups are now accelerating on this technology, and famous VC investors, like Marc Andreessen, even compare it to previous tech revolutions: “Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993 and Bitcoin in 2014.”We have seen how Mitsubishi’s elevators were able to hit the 60kph mark just earlier this month, but no matter how fast an elevator goes, there still is a limit to the height, right? The tallest buildings in the world might even induce vertigo in folk who have no such qualms earlier on in their lives due to the massive distance between land and where one is standing, but none of the buildings today are able to soar to heights that go beyond the stratosphere, and touch space, so to speak. Major Japanese construction company Obayashi Corporation might have something to say about the situation though, as they intend to construct the world’s first space elevator by the time 2050 rolls around.
According to our source, this space elevator will comprise a cabin that is specially developed to hold 30 passengers who will then be hoisted upwards toward the heavens along a cable made from carbon nanotubes, a material that boasts 20 times the strength of steel. It will take around a week’s time in the cabin to travel the estimated number of kilometers required to arrive at the terminal station – hopefully no one suffers from vertigo inside! The entire elevator should run the course of 10,000 kilometers thereabouts, considering that is where the exoshpere is, and fret not about disappearing into space as it will remain secured to a departure platform that is firmly located on the ground. Hopefully the selection of elevator music is decent enough to last throughout the journey, otherwise you might just go nuts!
Filed in. Read more about Space."For over a half century, fans were thrilled to hear his unforgettable voice and players were thrilled to hear his majestic enunciation of their names," Steinbrenner said. "Bob Sheppard was a great member of the Yankees family and his death leaves a lasting silence. My thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Mary, and their family."
While Sheppard didn't like to give his age, a former Yankees official confirmed in 2006 that Sheppard was born Oct. 20, 1910.
The Yankees' lineup for Sheppard's first game on April 17, 1951, included DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Mize, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. And the opponents that day, the Boston Red Sox, were led by Ted Williams.
Sheppard became as much as a fixture in the Bronx ballpark as the familiar white stadium facade or Monument Park, tucked behind the blue outfield wall.
On May 7, 2000, after 50 years and two weeks on the job, the team honored him with "Bob Sheppard Day" and put a plaque in his honor in Monument Park. Fans gave Sheppard a standing ovation, and legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite read the inscription. Berra, Reggie Jackson and Don Larsen were among those who stood on the field during the ceremonies.
"The voice of Yankee Stadium," read the plaque. "For half a century, he has welcomed generations of fans with his trademark greeting, 'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Yankee Stadium."
He also served as the stadium voice of the NFL's New York Giants from 1956-05, and for men's basketball and football at St. John's University, where he taught, for Army football and the Cosmos soccer team. He also announced for the American Football League's New York Titans at the Polo Grounds and the World Football League's New York Stars at Downing Stadium.
But baseball is what made him famous. Babe Ruth gave Yankee Stadium its nickname, but Sheppard gave the ballpark its sound.
He announced at 62 World Series games and a pair of All-Star Games, and introduced more than 70 Hall of Famers across his career. It was one of them, Jackson, who dubbed Sheppard "The Voice of God."
"A voice that you hear in your dreams, in your sleep," Braves third baseman Chipper Jones said Sunday. "Today's a sad day."
Sheppard's player introductions remained consistent throughout the decades, with Sheppard imbuing each name and number with a gravitas more in keeping with a coronation than a ballpark outing: "No. 7. Mickey Mantle. No. 7." Or even "No. 58. Dooley Womack. No. 58."
"He had the most distinctive voice I've ever heard and he announced my name in my first game," said Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, who played 220 games with the Yankees in 1968 and 1969. "It was special when he made the lineup announcement."
Yankees left-hander Andy Pettitte said his most lasting memory of Sheppard was hearing him announce Jeter -- and then others impersonating it.
"When you think of all the great players he has announced, when you think of the old stadium, there is no doubt you think about him and what he had done there for the organization," Pettitte said. "It was cool to hear him announce your name, that's for sure."
Unlike the shrill shills of later generations, Sheppard conducted himself with an understated and dignified delivery. He employed perfect diction, befitting a man who considered his real job teaching speech at St. John's. He graduated from the school in 1932 and later worked there for more than 25 years.
Bob Sheppard was honored by the Yankees on May 7, 2000, during his 50th season as the team's stadium announcer. AP Photo/Bill Kostroun
"A P.A. announcer is not a cheerleader, or a circus barker, or a hometown screecher," the epitome of the old-school style once said. "He's a reporter."
Sheppard's favorite Yankee Stadium moment was Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, but his dulcet tones defined New York sports for the second half of the 20th century and beyond. He also was the stadium announcer for the "greatest football game ever played," the Baltimore Colts' 23-17 sudden-death victory over the Giants in 1958.
He was on hand when Roger Maris hit home run No. 61, when Jackson hit three homers in a single World Series game, when the Giants finally reached the Super Bowl. He never missed an opening day at Yankee Stadium from 1951 until a hip injury sidelined him in 2006.
Former player and current Yankees manager Joe Girardi considered Sheppard someone who should be revered with all the greats in Yankees history. The Seattle Mariners had a moment of silence in honor of him before Sunday's series finale against the Yankees.
"When you think of Bob Sheppard you think of all the tradition with the Yankees. You think about Ruth and Gehrig and Yogi and Joe D and Mantle, and I think you mention Bob Sheppard," Girardi said. "That's how important he was to this franchise.
"First time I ever heard him was 1996," Girardi added. "First time I ever walked out in Yankee Stadium and you realize you've hit the big lights when Bob Sheppard announces your name."
Sheppard, who followed the Giants across the Hudson River when they moved to New Jersey, received a ring after the team won its first Super Bowl in the 1986 season; it complemented his Yankees' World Series jewelry. His football calls covered the Giants from Frank Gifford through Tiki Barber.
Giants team president and CEO John Mara called Sheppard "the most distinguished and dignified voice in all of professional sports.
"We are very proud of the fact that he was the voice of the Giants for so many years," Mara said. "Bob was a true gentleman and the consummate professional. There will never be another one like him."
While few might have recognized Sheppard in person, his voice was unmistakable. Once, while ordering a Scotch and soda at a bar, Sheppard watched as heads turned his way. He often read at Mass, and was subsequently greeted by parishioners noting he sounded exactly like the announcer at Yankee Stadium.
"I am," he would reply.
At his Yankees debut, the first name Sheppard announced was DiMaggio -- Dom DiMaggio, the center fielder for the Red Sox. The Yankees' lineup included five Hall of Famers: Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Berra, Mize and Rizzuto; the Sox had three more, Williams, Bobby Doerr and Lou Boudreau.
His favorite names to announce, in order, have been Mantle, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, Salome Bar |
2016 Democratic National Convention. poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201607/3095/1155968404_5061836388001_5060493938001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true
Clinton’s aides had nothing to worry about. At least not from Sanders.
“I am proud to stand with her,” he told the crowd.
He backed up his loyalty by making the rounds to state delegation breakfasts the next day with an unequivocal message to his holdout supporters: “It’s easy to boo, but it’s harder to look at your kids in the face, who would be living under a Donald Trump presidency.”
But it was Day 2, and Sanders’ supporters weren’t giving up.
Press secretary Brian Fallon was booed while speaking at a breakfast for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont delegates. Then, during a question-and-answer period, he was peppered with concerns about outgoing Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz’s new role as a volunteer coordinator on the Clinton campaign and how that would make their jobs that much more difficult in recruiting volunteers and generating excitement for the Democratic ticket against Donald Trump.
Indeed, the Clinton campaign realized quickly on Tuesday that Monday’s moment of unity, courtesy of Sanders, hadn’t satisfied the nominee’s detractors. Now, the campaign needed to make sure protesters wouldn’t disrupt the historic roll call that would officially make Clinton the first woman in history to be nominated to the top of a major party’s ticket.
The campaign blasted out an email to its delegates, urging them to take the SEPTA train to the Wells Fargo Center and pack the stands by 2 p.m.
Meanwhile, Robby Mook and Charlie Baker sat down with Jeff Weaver and other Sanders operatives, eager to find a way for Sanders to again play peacemaker. Sanders seemed willing.
He agreed to offer an acclamation speech, taking the mic during roll call to ask that the rules be suspended and Clinton named nominee. But he wanted to do it on the main stage.
Clinton’s campaign said no. He had been given his due on Monday and Tuesday was meant to mark a pivot to Clinton and her record.
Sanders didn’t push it. Indeed, Clinton’s aides said he did “everything we asked of him.”
***
It wouldn’t be the end of the disruptions.
After the roll call, the protests moved outside the hall. One of Clinton’s most aggressive surrogates, super PAC maestro David Brock, was chased through the halls of the Wells Fargo Center by two Sanders delegates after Bill Clinton’s Tuesday night speech, according to a Democrat who witnessed the spectacle. “They were yelling ‘you f—g jerk,’” said the Democrat.
And on Wednesday, Sanders protesters stormed the media tents to express their outrage that Turner had been denied a spot on the debate stage.
But what had been a raging boil on Monday was by Thursday morning just a simmer.
Clinton’s historic acceptance speech — at least on television — looked like it was delivered to a unified crowd. Sanders’ campaign had sent delegates text messages urging them to respect her, just as her supporters respected him. And throughout the speech, Becker worked the convention floor, leading a whip team to calm restive Bernie or Busters. The few remaining hecklers, stationed here and there, mostly in the upper decks of the arena, were drowned out repeatedly by chants of “Hillary.”
Gone on Day 4 were the handmade anti-TPP banners and the Bernie-or-Bust T-shirts. The room instead was flooded with American flags and the delegates on cue waved the signs passed to them by convention volunteers to create a uniform look for a television audience.
All the delegates, that is, except one. In the section closest to the Democratic nominee, a red sign with black lettering was lifted high into the air where it stayed stationed all night above all of the “Stronger Together” placards Clinton’s team had dreamed up before they even knew Sanders would still be hanging on into convention week.
It read: “Keep your promises.”
Darren Samuelsohn and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.While banks have been busy performing experiments with blockchain tech, London product consultancy firm Zerado has already built a prototype for an access control system using blockchain, NFC and Internet of Things (IoT).
Built to handle both identity and payments, the basic idea is to use blockchain technology to store information about who is authorized to use a physical device (such as a door lock) and to authoritatively determine and authenticate the identity of the person trying to use that device.
Once authenticated, the person will be able to use the services controlled by the physical device, either by prepaying or by paying on the spot, based on availability.
In a way, Zerado’s prototype is similar to that proposed by Slock.it before the infamous DAO incident, though it uses a private blockchain implementation, rather than the public ethereum blockchain.
Tomasz Mloduchowski, the CTO of Zerado, believes that using this design allows the company to leapfrog over incremental technology improvements and use a system that will likely become ubiquitous in the future.
In addition, he believes that the use of a blockchain makes the development of the system much easier to deploy to real-world systems, while also giving full control to the users to decide what level of data sharing is required for the application.
Also notable is that instead of using private key signature as an authentication mechanism, Zerado leverages existing contactless payments systems found in most debit cards in Europe for both payment and identity-authentication.
He told CoinDesk:
“Access control has a set of unique requirements that neatly match the capabilities of blockchain. From the needs of security, through the use of EMV cards, to the auditability.”
Checking in
One immediate use case is for the idea would be in the hotel check-in process, where a guest could pay for a room over the Web, and use a debit card at the hotel for access.
The information from the debit card is read by an IoT device which controls the door lock and is connected to all other such devices in the hotel. Once authenticated, its state is propagated to all the other locks, which would now know not to grant access a second access to this identity.
The company sees a similar use in coworking spaces, which need a constant monitoring of who is allowed to access which rooms and for what durations.
Any EMV-enabled credit or debit card that is able to electronically share data (such as the name on the card) can be used for authentication. Different issuing banks provide different types of card data to the card-reading devices, and the authentication is then performed using multiple pieces of data pulled from the card.
Zerado’s working prototype uses a private blockchain to store information about identity and authorization, along with the payment state.
It is capable of using a debit card both as an identity for user authentication and as a payment mechanism.
Key values
Of the notable features of the prototype, however, is that it uses the UK’s contactless payment cards, which are ubiquitously issued by banks and financial institutions.
Behind the scenes, these cards use near-field communications (NFC) technology to communicate between the card and the device. (Point-of-sale terminals in Europe, for example, already pull data from a debit card for payment reasons.)
However, in addition to the payment information, they also contain information about identity issued by the bank, such as the name of the person.
Using this type of information, the IoT-enabled locks are able to perform authentication on the user trying to access a resource. This also enhances security, because the same mechanism can be used instead of separate hotel key cards that are seldom without vulnerabilities as the technology stands currently.
Zerado has also built offline resilience into the system as a whole, which could realistically operate even in the event of a loss of connectivity.
A valid offline transaction is created, which is then manually relayed to all the nodes in the system. In the example of a hotel room, when the state of the blockchain changes, a “master key” (which contains the latest transaction information) can be used by the staff to manually update the blockchain stored by the individual nodes.
This is possible because the nodes each contain a full copy of the blockchain.
Broader use
But while the current prototype uses a private blockchain for access control and payments, Zerado believes it has applications in many different sectors. Although, they will likely all require different design decisions and trade-offs.
To this end, the company has already created application-specific products that use a blockchain in the backend. For example, a working capital finance proof-of-concept was created that stores transaction history across multiple parties in a supply chain.
There is also a blockchain product called Disberse that the firm hopes to utilize in bringing more transparency in the humanitarian aid sector.
Zerado is building prototypes of various use-cases, which it says bring real solutions to industries. That it happens to use a blockchain in the backend is immaterial to the users of the system, but provides them with many benefits: from security and auditability, to privacy and ease of deployment.
Imogen Bunyard, COO of Zerado, told CoinDesk:
“We see a great deal of value for blockchain in every sector – whether to implement now, or to future-proof against increased security risk and more sophisticated standards.”
Featured hotel card key image via Shutterstock. Prototype image via Sid Kalla for CoinDesk- The mugshot of a woman arrested in Arkansas has gone viral. Social media users have dubbed the attractive 24-year-old 'Prison Bae,' a play on the term 'bae' which is slang for boyfriend or girlfriend.
The Pulaski County Police Department reportedly arrested Sarah Seawright of Little Rock last month after failing to appear in court in connection to a 2014 arrest for careless driving.
Her rap sheet includes a prior arrest for robbery, kidnapping and battery during a 2012 parking lot theft, according to local media outlets.
But her police record isn't stopping people from remarking on her good looks.
"Yo let's get #prisonbae a guest spot on #OITNB Chick is HOT!" wrote @ettest76.
"She can kidnap me any day," wrote @Rude757.
According to the NY Daily News, former NFL star Chad 'Ochocinco' Johnson weighed in on Seawright, too, but less about her looks.
“Today is a day to save money, she's gonna have to sit & think about her mistakes like I did."
The last time a mugshot for an attractive inmate went viral, the man was given a modeling contract.
In 2014, Jeremy Meeks, dubbed 'Hot Convict,' said he was offered several modeling gigs, some for as much as $100,000 a month.The censure motion was based on criteria including failing to defend Professor Triggs from "malicious attacks", seeking to obtain her resignation by offering another role, refusing to account for his role; undermining Australia's commitment to upholding human rights, and being unfit to hold the office of attorney-general. Attorney-General George Brandis and Australian Human Rights Commission president Professor Gillian Triggs during a Senate hearing at Parliament House in Canberr. Credit:Photo: Alex Ellinghausen There are no constitutional or legal consequences by the motion passing, but it means there was "dissatisfaction with the performance of a particular minister". The movement of a censure motion could have significant political impact. Senator Lambie told the Senate: "The systemic abuse of hundreds of children in their care is our great shame." "We all share a great shame because of the harm done to these innocent little human beings."
Senators Bob Day and Nick Xenophon voted against the censure motion, while senators John Madigan, David Leyonhjelm and Ricky Muir did not vote. Attorney-General Senator George Brandis defends himself against the censure motion. Credit:Andrew Meares Despite the censure motion, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he had "absolute confidence" in Senator Brandis. "I say that the Attorney is right to say that the government has lost confidence in the President of the Human Rights Commission because the President of the Human Rights Commission is incapable of understanding this simple fact that it is better to get people out of detention than it is to get them into detention," Mr Abbott told question time on Monday. Senator Brandis is the third Abbott government minister to be censured.
Former defence minister David Johnston was censured in November after saying he wouldn't trust the government's shipbuilder ASC to "build a canoe", while Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash was censured in March 2014 for misleading the Senate and refusing to produce documentation about her employment of a junk food industry lobbyist in her office. There have only been five cabinet minsters censured in the past decade. Senator Brandis has said he lost confidence in Professor Triggs in November when she struggled to explain why the commission did not announce its decision to look into children in detention until after the 2013 election. During debate over the motion, Senator Brandis repeated he lacked confidence in Professor Triggs. "Professor Gillian Triggs, I'm very sorry to say, has cost the commission its reputation," he said.
While Senator Brandis has consistently said he no longer has confidence in Professor Triggs, he maintains she is a "good person", a fine lawyer, and that her heart is in the right place. Senator Wong said it was Labor's job to stand up against bullying statements and "endless attacks" on Professor Triggs. "We have an important job to do today and that is to stand up for our system of democracy which recognises the importance of independent institutions," she said. "We believe that independent statutory bodies ought to be able to do their job without fear or favour." Following the censure motion, Labor and the Greens called for Senator Brandis to resign.
Labor frontbencher Mark Drefus said Senator Brandis had lost the faith of Australia's legal community. "Senator Brandis is not fit to hold the office of Attorney-General," he said. "The time has come for Tony Abbott to show some leadership and demand his resignation. "As Attorney-General his role should be to defend Professor Triggs, instead he has joined with the Prime Minister in attacking her." Greens leader Christine Milne said: "The current Attorney-General is unfit to hold the office. His behaviour has demeaned the Senate and the Parliament." Last week, Senator Brandis was subjected to heavy criticism from Australia's legal fraternity over his dealings with Professor Triggs.
The president of the Australian Bar Association, Fiona McLeod SC, said she had never seen an attack stoop to such a personal level, which appeared designed to distract from the detention inquiry. "It is alarming that it is has descended on such a highly regarded and respectful lawyer," Ms McLeod said. Follow us on TwitterThis article is a follow-up to my recent post: On Mobile, Data URIs are 6x Slower than Source Linking.
In a previous post, I introduced new research which showed that using the data URI scheme inline is significantly slower to materialize an image on mobile than using an image tag directly (and if the image is known to be in the browser cache). I suggested that mobile web developers focus on using data URIs only for smaller resources and look at alternatives such as CSS sprites instead.
As a result of discussions with Ilya Grigorik from the Google Make the web Faster team and other developers from the web community such as Andy Davies, Tim Kadlec and Alex Sexton, I decided to run a follow-up test to give web developers a more precise insight into the source of the performance bottleneck of using data URIs.
In this article, I’ll investigate one possible candidate for the bottleneck: decoding the Base64 encoded data. This decoding process is used with binary images to transform the data into a format that is safe to include inline in HTML or CSS.
Spoiler: the bottleneck does not lie in Base64 encoding but may reside in resource scheduling of data URIs in general!
A New Approach: SVG
This new research focused on materializing a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG). SVGs can be materialized on a page in two ways: as a Base64 data URI and as an unencoded data URI.
This flexibility is exactly what I needed to do a direct ‘apples-to-apples’ test with and without Base64 to see whether the decoding step of Base64 is actually causing the slow performance of data URIs.
I know that some of you had been hoping for a direct comparison with CSS sprites — don’t worry, that’s coming! But a CSS sprite test also won’t let me test the Base64 component in particular the way SVG does.
The Experiment
As with my other research, this experiment was conducted as a Real User Monitoring (RUM) test. I collected 911,206 samples of iOS 6, Android 4.2+, and Firefox 20+ browsers executing the test.
There were three test conditions, two with an SVG and one control condition to benchmark load performance when no SVG was used at all. The SVG used was a simple, 19.5kb creative commons graphic on Wikipedia.
The first test condition used an unencoded SVG, and the condition is called unencoded. The second test condition used a Base64 encoded SVG, this condition is called Base64. The control condition is called no SVG. This was a between-subjects experiment, and each phone would execute only one of the three conditions a single time.
I wanted to use SVGs included in a CSS stylesheet and not in an image tag, despite the fact that a load event cannot be hooked to the element itself. To get around this limitation, I used the page onload event of an HTML iframe containing only the stylesheet and element to contain the materialized SVG.
I included the control condition, no SVG, to baseline the performance of creating this iframe with no image at all in it. As you might expect, creating an empty iframe consumed almost no time, with the exception of Firefox mobile which was inexplicably slow.
This snippet illustrates the content of the tested iframe and the simplicity of the test.
The Results
My results show that there is a tiny performance penalty for using Base64 for SVG with Chrome for Android, much too small to account for the performance discrepancy identified in my original data URI article. The control condition, where there was no SVG in the iframe at all, is an order of magnitude faster, although inexplicably slow on Firefox.
For the Android 4.2 native browser and iOS, performance was very similar. In iOS, surprisingly, the Base64 condition is actually marginally faster, but the difference is small enough to be inside of the margin of error.
The chart above is taken from my previous research, and as you can see, there are performance differences of over 100ms between the data URI and binary conditions.
However, the SVG data I collected in this experiment fails to account for a performance gap of that size. As a result of this test, I don’t believe the performance problem of data URIs can be attributed to Base64 decoding.
Secondary Result: SVGs are Surprisingly Slow!
One interesting outcome of this experiment is that SVGs appear to be quite slow on mobile. iOS in particular was very slow to display this graphic, taking an amazing one quarter of a second to display it. Even at 128ms to display on Chrome suggests you shouldn’t include more than one or two SVGs in a page or your visitors will experience a perceivable lag in page load.
Additional guidance from this test would be to minimize SVG usage and focus on using it for logos or other key resources, and keep them under 10KB.
Conclusion
This research is a step closer to the root of the data URI performance issue. If the problem isn’t Base64 encoding, could it be something to do with resource scheduling of data URIs in general? Could that also be the reason why the SVG in this experiment took so long to load?
Stay tuned for the next instalment of our data URI analysis, which will directly compare data URI performance against CSS spriting (as requested in the comments of the first article).
As always, questions, concerns and feedback are welcome.Or, in Hannity’s case, the crawl space beneath it.
In 1950, Lionel Trilling wrote that there were no conservative ideas “in general circulation,” only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” By the time Trilling died 25 years later the opposite was true: The only consequential ideas at the time were conservative, while it was liberalism that had been reduced to an irritable mental gesture.
This was largely Buckley’s doing. Through National Review, his magazine, he gave a hidden American intelligentsia a platform to develop conservative ideas. Through “Firing Line,” his TV show, he gave an unsuspecting American public a chance to sample conservative wit. Not all of the ideas were right, but they were usually smart. And as they evolved, they went in the right direction.
Buckley “learned to free himself of views that had come to him by the circumstances of his background that he concluded ran counter to values he cherished,” notes Alvin Felzenberg in his superb new biography, “A Man and His Presidents.” Buckley shed isolationism, segregationism and anti-Semitism, and insisted the conservative movement do likewise. Over 50 years as the gatekeeper of conservative ideas, he denounced the inverted Marxism of Ayn Rand, the conspiracy theories of Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) and the white populism of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan.
In March 2000, he trained his sights on “the narcissist” and “demagogue” Donald Trump. “When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection,” he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. “The resistance to a corrupting demagogy,” he warned, “should take first priority” for Americans.
Buckley died in 2008. The conservatism he nourished was fundamentally literary: To play a significant part in it you had to know how to write, and in order to write well you had to read widely, and in order to do that you had to, well, enjoy reading. In hindsight, 2008, the year of Sarah Palin, was also the year when literary conservatism went into eclipse.Imagine you could press a button and experience a boost in your subjective well-being, or happiness.
More realistically, what if you could take a pill that would improve your mood? Or genetically screen for “happier” genes? Mark Walker coined the term “bio-happiness” to describe the idea of directly manipulating the biological roots of happiness in order to increase it.
This possibility is simultaneously awesome and terrifying. Most people agree that all else equal, increasing happiness is a good thing. At the same time, images of a Brave New World-esque scenario come to mind.
The idea of bio-happiness is controversial. But science is making it more and more of a reality, and we must consider how we want to respond to it. Drugs such as SSRIs and MDMA are already well-known to increase happiness (albeit with unintended side-effects), and developments in science and technology will allow us to improve on these agents. Genetic screening already exists, and there isn’t much stopping us from screening for genes that would predict higher baselines of happiness.
Like it or not, bio-happiness is an issue we must deal with. And there are many people who do not like it. My first reaction was certainly negative, as I’m sure many of yours are. I’ve since come around to supporting the idea. In this article, I would like to explore in greater detail the ethical dilemma that bio-happiness entails, guided by Walker’s paper, “In Praise of Bio-Happiness”.
Overview
There are three main categories of criticisms of bio-happiness:
Happiness is not of moral importance. Bio-happiness cannot actually increase happiness. Bio-happiness involves a sacrifice in other moral values.
Each of these criticisms will be addressed here. We will focus on the use of drugs, because it is easier to understand and other technologies may pose additional ethical issues. So the question becomes: is it morally acceptable for an adult to be permitted to use pharmacological means to improve their happiness, even if they have “normal” happiness levels already?
There are a number of difficulties in defining happiness, but for the purposes of this article we will define happiness as positive affect, or a good mood. Happiness has many more components of course, but the argument becomes far more complicated if we include things like finding meaning in the world or flow in our daily activities.
Objection 1: Happiness Is Not Morally Valuable
Most people agree that the world would be morally better if we were happier, holding all else equal. Utilitarians believe that happiness is the supreme moral value we should be concerned with, but they are not the only ethicists who consider happiness to be a moral value (consider Aristotle).
Of course with any subjective endeavor, there are ethicists who don’t consider happiness to have intrinsic moral significance. For example, perfectionists believe that we ought to cultivate positive mental and physical characteristics (such as knowledge or strength) as much as possible. Pursuing those characteristics is often detrimental to our happiness because we may have to sacrifice something that makes us happy in order to study or work out more often.
But if improvements in happiness could enhance these characteristics, it is still morally worthwhile to pursue. There is significant evidence that happier people tend to be more productive and healthier in a number of measures, so we will conclude that the pursuit of happiness is morally valuable in a wide range of ethical theories.
Objection 2: Bio-Happiness Cannot Actually Increase Our Happiness
There are both technical and conceptual obstacles to bio-happiness. First, we will discuss the technical roadblocks.
Is Bio-Happiness Technically Impossible?
Let’s take the common party drug MDMA as an example. While feelings of euphoria are typical in the MDMA experience, it varies from person to person. The effects are short lived, and the doses required to achieve a sustained boost in happiness are almost certainly harmful. Drugs such as MDMA suggest that bio-happiness may not be able to provide a real, long-term enhancement of happiness.
Traditional pleasures like food and sex are no longer enjoyable for a period of time once you’ve eaten enough food or had enough sex. However, electrical stimulation of the pleasure center in the brain has been shown to be rewarding, without decreasing marginal returns. This type of pleasure is not exactly the same as happiness, but it is encouraging that at least a significant component of happiness can be improved and sustained in the long-term.
Probably the most widely used technology for increasing happiness is a family of drugs called SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), which have helped alleviate depression in many people. There is some evidence that normal individuals taking these antidepressants can feel “better than well”. The effect of these drugs is variable and they do cause side effects, so they are not a great option for bio-happiness yet either.
Current technologies for achieving bio-happiness are clearly limited, but research on this subject has only just begun. There is no reason to believe that with a better understanding of neurochemistry we can’t develop a drug that increases happiness in the long-term without significant side-effects.
Genetics have been shown to account for approximately half of a person’s level of happiness (with another 10% being environmental factors outside of our control, and 40% from factors that we can control). Just as there are depressed individuals who lost the genetic lottery, there are people on the other end of the spectrum who are almost unexplainably happy, called “hyperthymic” individuals. It won’t be straightforward, but research can help find the genes responsible for hyperthymia, and illuminate how these genes are expressed. Once that happens, we can develop pharmacological agents that mimic these effects.
The problems with all this research are similar to the problems of finding drugs to treat elusive diseases like Alzheimer’s. The good news is that many scientists are optimistic about creating drugs that can treat Alzheimer’s, so we can be similarly optimistic about finding drugs that can mimic the genetic effects that lead to hyperthymia.
Can Bio-Happiness Bring “True” Happiness?
Let’s assume we’ve developed a drug that mimics hyperthymia without serious physiological side-effects. Wouldn’t this drug only produce a “false” sense of happiness?
People want to experience happiness that originates from within themselves, not something that only exists because of a drug. Most people, at least in western cultures, believe that happiness is something that they must earn. If the positive feelings are from a drug, individuals may feel like their experience of the world is distorted or unreal.
Drugs affect the neurochemistry of our brains in order to achieve their effects (in this case, positive affect). But all of our experiences involve neurochemistry; were we to not have serotonin, dopamine, etc. in our brains, we would have no experience at all. Those who argue against bio-happiness consider the neurochemistry of peoples’ brains when not under the influence of drugs as “true” or their own, whereas the neurochemistry that occurs as a result of taking a pill is “false”, or not real.
But wouldn’t that mean that depressed people taking SSRIs never experience genuine happiness? That’s a pretty harsh judgment.
There is another layer to this argument, and Walker brings up the example of a sex change procedure to highlight it. If someone gets a sex change, there is a clear sense in which their new looks are not “genuine and true”. At the same time, the new looks are an expression of what the person believes is appropriate, and in that sense is more authentic.
Now we have two concepts here: natural vs. artificial and authentic vs. inauthentic. We could say the recipient of a sex change surgery has looks that are artificial and authentic. Similarly, someone who takes a hyperthymic pill might have happiness that is artificial and authentic, and it would allow them to be a more genuine version of who they want to be.
Walker concedes that artificially creating happiness will not lead to authentic happiness for all. Not everyone wants to move away from their genetic set-point. That being said, many people do. So even if bio-happiness technology creates an artificial happiness, there are cases where it would be authentic, and could still be considered “true” happiness.
Objection 3: The Costs Of Bio-Happiness Are Too Great
Even if bio-happiness is possible, it may have too high of a price in other respects to be worthwhile.
Will Bio-Happiness Distort Emotionally Appropriate Responses?
If a friend or family member is trying to cope with serious illness, it seems only natural and appropriate to feel worry or grief. Wouldn’t it be strange and even bad for someone to feel happy in response to a loved one’s illness?
Negative emotions are clearly appropriate in some circumstances. Critics claim that a world with bio-happiness will prevent such healthy emotional responses. The drug soma from Brave New World comes to mind here.
But there is no reason to believe that all pharmacological agents of bio-happiness will produce this one-dimensional response. In fact, current antidepressants seem to only cause emotional blunting in some patients, but not all. A drug could be developed that wouldn’t have this side effect.
In addition, there is no reason to believe that hyperthymic people don’t experience negative emotions. Research has shown that they do still experience sadness and negative moods, but less frequently. They also show more empathy, which is associated with increased social support, coping, and resilience. If we develop a drug that mimics hyperthymia, individuals taking it could still have completely normal or even richer emotional responses.
Emotions are very complex, and sometimes sad things can make us happy, or the emotions mix together completely. A hyperthymic individual might reflect on a period of their life and feel nostalgic, enjoying the happy memories while being sad that it has passed. Another person could look back on the same situation and experience only feelings of sadness that it couldn’t continue. Both are “normal” emotional responses, but don’t you think it would be better to have the more positive feelings?
Does Bio-Happiness Lead To A Loss Of Achievement?
Human flourishing consists of more than just feeling good, so couldn’t bio-happiness take away much of what is important in the good life?
Again, the book Brave New World comes to mind. After consuming soma, the people in that world experience huge increases in positive affect. However, relationships between people are shallow, anything resembling a sense of achievement dissolves, and nobody cares about anyone else. Doesn’t that world, well, suck?
Most people, if they had to choose one or the other, would take our current situation over the one from Brave New World. But there could also be a third choice. Perhaps we could increase both human flourishing and happiness at the same time.
It is generally regarded that high achievement causes an increase in happiness. But the relationship goes both ways; higher levels of happiness tend to result in higher levels of achievement. So if bio-happiness can lead to chronically increased happiness, it may also lead to greater achievement. We don’t have to sacrifice achievement to gain happiness; we can have more of both.
The Positive Side Of Bio-Happiness
While many of the criticisms of bio-happiness have been shown to be hollow, we have yet to show that bio-happiness is an especially good and worthwhile thing to devote resources to.
Justice
The most obvious argument in support of bio-happiness is that it would be cruel and unjust to prevent its use. If people want more happiness and achievement, bio-happiness can help.
Unfortunately, many people believe that the amount of positive affect that one experiences is deserved and fair already. They believe that an unhappy person is that way because of poor life choices, and thus they “earned” their unhappiness.
But what if an unhappy person was abused as a child and that contributed to their unhappiness? Most people would no longer think their level of happiness is fair, because it is due to factors that they had little to no control over.
Similarly, what if an unhappy person is that way in part due to genetic influence? People are not responsible for their own genetic makeup and can’t possibly be said to “deserve” any unhappiness caused by it.
But even if losers of the genetic lottery don’t deserve their unhappiness, that doesn’t imply that it is unfair. After all, nobody is morally responsible for a person receiving bad genes, so no one is to blame, right?
Losing the genetic lottery is not the injustice here. Preventing someone from compensating for it is. Would you tell someone who had below average or even normal intelligence that it is wrong or unfair for them to study for an exam?
Clearly, it is just and fair to allow people to take a hyperthymic pill if it existed.
Bio-Happiness As A Social Good
Bio-happiness doesn’t require balancing individual interests with those of society as a whole.
One could argue (I wouldn’t, but I digress) that if an individual’s interests clash with a greater social interest that it would be justified to intervene on behalf of the societal interest. For example, some people believe that vaccinations should be mandatory, because choosing to avoid the vaccine increases the risk of other people getting sick.
But bio-happiness doesn’t seem to present this sort of dilemma. Increasing happiness is a social good if happiness has universal moral value. Similarly, if achievement has moral worth, then increasing happiness can improve a social good in that regard as well. Finally, since happiness tends to promote pro-social behavior, increasing happiness may cause people to be more generous and empathic, reducing poverty and environmental damage. At the very least, people might just be nicer to each other in their day to day lives.
Conclusion
Bio-happiness is a promising goal to work towards. Many people are afraid of it, but prohibiting the use of bio-happiness would be unjust and misguided. Introducing Bio-happiness would cultivate a society full of people who are more satisfied with their lives, have stronger relationships with friends and family, are healthier, and accomplish more.
What do you think?Alex Jones Does Not Preach The Gospel
By David J. Stewart
1st Corinthians 9:16, “ For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel! ”
I love Alex Jones and he is a true American patriot and hero. What patriotic American who loves America wouldn't love Alex Jones! Alex is a Godsend and I admire him tremendously.
However, my first and foremost love and allegiance is for the Lord Jesus Christ and the truth. I almost fell out of my chair today (July 1, 2012) while listening to the Alex Jones daily radio show. Here's an mp3 of the exact clip you are hearing.
The caller, Jason, congratulates Alex for “getting the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everyone we can.” I can't help but feel that the caller used reverse psychology on Alex, because it couldn't be more obvious that Alex DOESN'T share the Gospel with his tens-of-millions of listeners.
Either the caller is woefully ignorant of what the Gospel is; or else he's sending a sarcastic message that Alex is dropping the ball for the Lord woefully. The bottom line is that Alex does NOT get the Gospel out; I wish he did.
The caller (Jason) reiterates his point with a written quote, which I'll give you in a moment. It was strange that the caller had a quote to read, which effectively (in a nice way) brought attention to the truth that ALEX DOESN'T SHARE THE GOSPEL.
The caller states in his written quote:
“Alex I'm a fellow Christian. We both know that there is only one INFOWAR, and that is getting the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everyone we can. And guess what Brother, you're doing that every day!” SOURCE: THE ALEX JONES SHOWS, caller named Jason from Pennsylvania; July 1, 2012
Nothing could be further from the truth. I admire Alex greatly, but when he's wrong he's wrong and I won't defend a false Gospel. Jason says Alex gets the Gospel out every day. Instead of replying, “No, I don't get the Gospel out every day,” Alex replies that by shedding light about the evils of the New World Order, his show leads listeners to get religion. That's like saying that by selling hotdogs, my food tastes so good that it will lead customers to seek God in their life. Do you think God accepts these kinds of excuses for not sharing the Gospel with lost sinners? No way! Sharing the Gospel is every believer's duty (Proverbs 11:30; Psalms 126:5-6; Matthew 28:19-20; Romans 10:15; Luke 8:14-15)... 1st Corinthians 9:16, “... woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” The caller never said a word about forcing the Bible on people; yet spontaneously Alex makes the following statement to Jason: “You're right, people that beat folks over the head with the Bible—that runs people off; but you look at this mark of the beast, this world government, all this stuff coming down on us—it'll make you get religion!” SOURCE: THE ALEX JONES SHOWS, Alex Jones; July 1, 2012 This is Alex's excuse for not sharing the Gospel. Instead of sharing the Gospel as he ought, Alex |
Cuba.
Obama began the day at a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, a tradition for new presidents.
He also celebrated a political victory as his former presidential primary rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was confirmed as secretary of state by a vote of 94-2 in the Senate.
The new president also found time Wednesday morning to call four Middle Eastern leaders: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement that Obama emphasized protecting a Gaza cease-fire in part by blocking arms smuggling to Hamas and in part through reconstruction efforts.
Gibbs said that Obama thought it was important “on his first day in office to communicate his commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term, and to express his hope for their continued cooperation and leadership.”
Later, Obama announced during remarks at a swearing-in ceremony for White House staff and Cabinet officials that he would freeze the pay of White House employees who make more than $100,000 a year. He told his senior staff that given the economic climate, “it’s what’s required of you at this moment.”
He signed two executive orders and three memoranda to implement the pay freeze, ethics and public records changes. The executive order on ethics prohibits executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists. It prohibits anyone who works for the administration to leave and lobby the executive branch “for as long as I am president,” Obama said. It also precludes lobbyists hired by his administration from dealing with agencies on matters they lobbied about for two years.
‘Too much secrecy’
A second order revokes an executive order signed by then-President George W. Bush in 2001 that limited release of former presidents’ records, and replaces it with new language aimed at more transparency. Obama’s order could expand public access to the records of Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as other former leaders, in the years to come, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
“It’s extraordinary that a new president would address this issue on his first full day in office,” Aftergood said.
“For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” Obama said. “This administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but with those who seek it to be known,” Obama said. “The mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret does not mean you should always use it.
“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”
Light moment with Biden
Amid all his activity, there also was some time for levity, as the new president and vice president entered a new routine.
At the staff swearing-in, Vice President Joe Biden made a veiled reference to the fumbled wording of Obama’s original oath. Biden asked for the text to administer the staff oath, saying, “My memory is not as good as Justice Roberts’,” to which the staffers replied, “Ooh!”
After the staff swearing-in, Obama was still trying to get his bearings. “I think I’m all done,” he said.
At an afternoon White House open house for private citizens, also an inaugural tradition, Obama joked with one young man, “Roam around. Don’t break anything!”
The Chicago Tribune contributed to this story.Over the weekend we heard how Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett won't be buying Facebook shares as part of the company's initial public offering (IPO). Now we're hearing how Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian won't be buying Facebook stock either, but for a different reason. Ohanian has a problem with the fact that Facebook supports the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).
The CNN interview is embedded above. Here's the transcription:
I'm not planning on it, but I'm doing so for subtletly diffferent reasons. I understand Warren stil does not use a computer to start his day. I certainly do, I can't live without it. I understand the business value to what Facebook is doing. We've never seen a company like this before, ever. It knows things about our private lives that no one else does. And one of the big issues that a lot of us in the tech community have with Facebook of late has been their support of bills like CISPA that make it really easy for a business like Facebook to hand over very private data about us without any due process. So that's why I'm gonne be holding off.
Last month, many pointed out Facebook is supporting CISPA, despite opposing Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). I asked Facebook for a statement but was declined and was instead pointed to the company's letter of support in regards to the bill. Facebook then followed up and declared it "has no intention" to abuse the bill.
CISPA passed the House late last month. The bill is now awaiting deliberations in the Senate.
Facebook debuted its IPO roadshow today, and the latest rumor says Facebook will go public next week on Friday. Shares are expected to be priced on May 17, with trading beginning on May 18.
See also:Houston, Clear Channel reach deal to pull 831 billboards Mayor flips the blight switch
Ad firm agrees to tear down 831 billboards in city
The city has struck a deal with one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in Houston that calls for it to dismantle 831 billboards before the end of this year.
The agreement with Clear Channel Outdoor would take effect after the City Council approves it. The proposal is on Wednesday's agenda.
Under the settlement, Clear Channel would remove 831 small and medium-sized billboards from across the city, 51 of them from designated "scenic districts." That represents a two-thirds reduction of all the company's billboards that are less than 288 square feet in size
Many of those billboards were slated to come down by 2013, but some could have remained up permanently because they are located on federal roadways and are beyond the city's legal reach.
In return, Clear Channel would get an extension on 24 large billboards that would have come down between 2009 and 2013. Those will get to stay up 20 more years. The last ones will come down in 2033.
"I think that's worth it," Mayor Bill White said Monday. "It takes down more billboards faster."
Anti-billboard activists said they approved of the deal.
"We were very pleased," said Ed Wulfe, a board member with Scenic Houston. The nonprofit advocates for beautification of streets and public spaces. "For all practical purposes, it will mean no new billboards."
The group had blasted White for offering a "relocation" provision in its previous settlement offer last December. That would have given Clear Channel the right to move 466 medium billboards. That was the same as allowing new billboards to be built, the group contended.
Allows attrition to work
Attorneys for Clear Channel could not be reachedMonday.
Wulfe said it was more palatable to extend the lifespan of 24 large billboards than to let 466 billboards move about the city.
"I'm OK with it because it was the trading chip that got, as far as we're concerned, the opportunity to limit relocations to almost nothing, and once and for all," Wulfe said.
Now, billboards can be relocated only if government condemns the property for a road widening or other project, Wulfe said.
Visual blight opponents say that was important because it allows attrition to work on the billboard population: They'll decrease over time from lease expirations, new development, market downturns and weather.
Michael "Mack" Fowler, on the steering committee of the Quality of Life Coalition, said he was pleased with the change.
"I think relocation was a complete and total non-starter," he said. "It was a horrible idea."
The 24 large billboards that would get extensions are scattered about the city. They measure 14 feet by 48 feet. But they represent just 2 percent of all billboards of that size in Houston, said Andy Icken, deputy director of the city's Department of Public Works and Engineering.
The deal accomplishes the city's goal of getting smaller billboards out of residential neighborhoods and scenic districts, Icken said.
"Some would argue the small boards are even more offensive than the large boards, because they're in underserved neighborhoods and advertise liquor and stuff like that," he said.
[email protected] have predicted how changes to temperature and the distribution of sunlight will effect solar technologies
Amid all the discussion about how energy sources may impact on climate change, we often overlook the fact that climate change will in turn impact on energy sources. As the world warms, this will become an increasingly important issue, affecting everything from nuclear power stations needing cold water for cooling through to melting ice opening up new fossil fuel reserves in the Arctic.
Given the current row about how much the UK should subsidise solar power, it was interesting to come across a scientific paper looking at how solar technologies will be affected by global warming in the coming century. The paper – published earlier this year but as far as I can see not covered anywhere in the mainstream media – predicts that Europe's potential for solar will increase. Perhaps more surprisingly, many other regions will see losses.
The research, carried out by academics at the University of Leeds, examined the implications of a medium global warming scenario for temperatures and sunlight in different regions. Sunlight will be affected by changing cloud cover.
The researchers then calculated what those changes would mean for the two main solar energy technologies: photovoltaic (PV) panels, which use semiconductors to convert sunlight directly into electricity; and concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, which use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a small area, generating heat that can then be converted into power.
Of the specific areas assessed, Germany comes out best. According to the paper, the country – Europe's solar leader – can expect to see PV systems in 2080 producing around 3% more power than the same systems would today. Germany's potential for CSP will increase even more – by 10% – though from a very low baseline.
The UK will see a small increase in the potential for both technologies. By contrast, Saudi Arabia and the south-west US face losses of 4–6% for both PV and CSP.
The map below provides a fuller picture. It shows PV outputs in 2080, relative to the late 20th-century. Blue is a decrease; red is an increase. For PV, it seems, the losers outweigh the winners.
A map showing the expected change in outputs to solar photovoltaic (pv) panels in 2080 due to the effects of climate change Photograph: Julia A. Crook, Laura A. Jones, Piers M. Forster and Rolf Crook
Here's the same map for CSP. In this scenario, the increases and decreases are more evenly shared out, with large areas of Eurasia and the Americas looking likely to see increases.
A map showing the expected change in outputs to solar photovoltaic (pv) panels in 2080 due to the effects of climate change Photograph: Julia A. Crook, Laura A. Jones, Piers M. Forster and Rolf Crook
The reason for the different impact on the two technologies, the paper explains, is that while both of them respond well to rising solar insolation, only CSP also responds well to rising temperatures. Indeed, PV actually works better in cooler conditions.
It's important to note that the changes listed above are relative. In absolute terms, it will still be far more efficient to put up a solar panel and plant in Marrakech than in Manchester. As the paper makes clear: "Solar power plants are and will continue to be located close to centres of population within the Earth's sun belt of 40N to 40S."
Nonetheless, the findings will impact on the economics of solar going forward and may affect the optimal technology mix in different areas. For example, according to the study, North Africa – the proposed home of the giant Desertec solar project – looks set to become better for CSP and less good for PV.
Rolf Crook, one of the researchers behind the paper, believes the findings lend weight to the case for solar subsidies in Europe. He said: "We have shown, perhaps surprisingly, that climate change will have a positive impact on the output of solar power plants in many parts of the world. This further strengthens the case for research and investment in solar power today. Subsidies play a vital role in driving down the cost of solar technology. Cutting subsidies would only have a negative effect."
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I serve one hundred and sixty-three amazing ninth grade students at a public school in Oakland. My students come from diverse backgrounds, and many speak English as their second language. According to high-schools.com, ninety-nine point eight percent of our students receive free or reduced price lunch.
I believe that all students should have the opportunity to learn computer science regardless of background or previous life experience.
In our computer science course, students are learning how to understand and solve complex problems, how computers affect our society and the way humans interact with each other and technology, and how to code websites from scratch with HTML and CSS. Students have also started learning Python through creating interactive programs on their Raspberry Pi's. This course is meant to be rigorous, yet accessible for all students, and aims to inspire students to pursue computer science by making learning interactive and fun.Are you ready for Comic-Con 2014?! Hasbro are, and they’ve sent out a new press release to help you get excited too! The press release discusses some of the brands and product that the toy manufacturer will be showcasing throughout the course of the weekend…including Transformers and Kre-O of course! Read on for the full press release:
Hasbro Returns to Comic-Con International, Showcasing Top Entertainment Brands
From TRANSFORMERS: ROBOTS IN DISGUISE and A Galaxy Far, Far Away to a Place Where Friendship is Magic, Fans Can Enjoy Their Favorite Pop Culture Brands All in One Place at San Diego Comic-Con.
PAWTUCKET, R.I.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ: HAS) is coming back to Comic-Con International in San Diego to celebrate its iconic and globally renowned brands including TRANSFORMERS, MY LITTLE PONY, MY LITTLE PONY EQUESTRIA GIRLS, KRE-O and licensed toy and game lines for ANGRY BIRDS, MARVEL and STAR WARS. From toys and games, to comics, television programs and Hollywood blockbuster films, Hasbro continues to entertain kids and fans around the globe with its world-class portfolio of brands year after year. Hasbro will bring its iconic brands and characters to life at this year’s convention, offering an exciting lineup of panels, autograph sessions, special edition toys, giveaways and more.
Hasbro’s booth continues to be one of the most popular at Comic-Con, drawing eager fans ready to get a first look at special edition Hasbro products and giveaways. This year, attendees can expect more unique experiences, products and displays, including photo opportunities, interactive panels and special guests that Hasbro’s most enthusiastic fans will not want to miss out on.
“Hasbro looks forward to bringing some of the most recognizable brands in popular culture to Comic-Con International in San Diego every year,” said John Frascotti, chief marketing officer, Hasbro, Inc. “Connecting with our most passionate fans is extremely important to us and we are thrilled to offer an incredible line up of panels, special edition collectibles, giveaways and opportunities to meet the talent behind brands like TRANSFORMERS and MY LITTLE PONY.”
The following highlights the activities across Hasbro brands and licensed product lines to be showcased in the Hasbro booth #3213 and around the convention.
TRANSFORMERS
Hasbro has plenty to celebrate this year, from the new innovative toy line inspired by Michael Bay’s wildly successful TRANSFORMERS: Age of Extinction feature film from Paramount Pictures, to the 30th Anniversary Generations fan focused figures spanning the history of the TRANSFORMERS brand. From comics and video games to animated series and action figures – this pop-culture extravaganza will be a must-see spot for TRANSFORMERS fans of all ages in the Hasbro booth.
On Thursday, July 24th at 11:00 a.m., TRANSFORMERS fans will have the opportunity to attend a panel with members of the Hasbro and Hasbro Studios team for an exclusive sneak peak of the new animated series, Transformers: Robots In Disguise airing in early 2015. Attendees will also get a first look at the third season of Transformers: Rescue Bots, airing on the Hub Network in the U.S. In addition, attendees can celebrate the great 30 year heritage of the TRANSFORMERS brand and experience exclusive reveals of never before seen product.
KRE-O
The KRE-O brand is back in San Diego, showcasing products from Hasbro’s biggest brands! Big news for 2014 is the KRE-O TRANSFORMERS line, and you won’t want to miss the brand’s first San Diego Comic-Con special edition item: KRE-O TRANSFORMERS KRE-O CLASS OF 1984 KREON 30-Pack. There will also be a 1984 KREON collectible poster available in limited quantities at the Hasbro booth and a sneak peek at some new KRE-O items during the TRANSFORMERS panel on Thursday.
MY LITTLE PONY AND MY LITTLE PONY EQUESTRIA GIRLS
The MY LITTLE PONY brand, a massive pop-culture phenomenon from Hasbro, is returning to Comic-Con again this year with memorable characters and unique personalities. From the animated series, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, to an extensive line of licensed goods, and special edition product, Hasbro welcomes fans in celebrating the magic of friendship at Comic-Con with MY LITTLE PONY and MY LITTLE PONY EQUESTRIA GIRLS.
On Friday at 11:30 a.m., Hasbro invites fans to join special guests from Hasbro Studios and voice talent from the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic animated series airing on the Hub Network in the U.S. and My Little Pony Equestria Girls, the movie as they share details of the making of the popular animated series and a sneak peek into the new My Little Pony Equestria Girls Rainbow Rocks movie coming this Fall.
STAR WARS
With Lucasfilm and Disney’s new animated series, STAR WARS REBELS, premiering this fall, STAR WARS fans will be eager to stop by Hasbro’s booth at Comic-Con for exclusive giveaways, an autograph signing and interactive panels. On Friday, July 25th at 12:00 p.m., Hasbro will welcome STAR WARS fans to a special panel with members of the Hasbro brand and design teams as they discuss the popular Hasbro STAR WARS line and share a sneak peek of upcoming, never before seen action figures from the highly anticipated STAR WARS REBELS animated series.
MARVEL
Hasbro’s booth will be celebrating MARVEL’s ever-expanding cinematic universe in the highly anticipated MARVEL’S Guardians of the Galaxy film, hitting theaters August 1. Hasbro, home of the master MARVEL toy license, will be showcasing the new toy line and more.
On Saturday, July 20 at 4:00 p.m., fans won’t want to miss Hasbro’s MARVEL panel. Join members of the Hasbro brand and design teams as they discuss Hasbro’s popular MARVEL action figure lines. Attendees will also get a sneak peek of upcoming, never before seen action figures.
Fans of the MARVEL UNIVERSE, MARVEL LEGENDS and other MARVEL action figure lines will also want to check out the Hasbro booth for a comprehensive look at the extensive line-up of 2014 toys as well as new, upcoming figures revealed for the first time following the panel.
ANGRY BIRDS
Hasbro and Rovio recently announced they are teaming up to bring two of the world’s largest and most popular entertainment brands together in a brand new mash-up: ANGRY BIRDS TRANSFORMERS. Fans stopping by the Hasbro booth will see for the first time the full ANGRY BIRDS TRANSFORMERS product line featuring TELEPODS technology, powered by Retoy. An exclusive, new trailer for the ANGRY BIRDS TRANSFORMERS mobile game (available later this year) will also be shown in the Hasbro booth during the show. Additionally, fans will get to see the first gameplay demo of Rovio’s upcoming ANGRY BIRDS STELLA mobile game, available this fall, and experience the ANGRY BIRDS STELLA TELEPODS product line, which will let fans teleport the Stella character and her fierce flock of friends into the game. San Diego Comic-Con will also mark the world premiere of the ANGRY BIRDS STELLA cinematic trailer.
About Hasbro
Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ: HAS) is a branded play company dedicated to fulfilling the fundamental need for play for children and families through the creative expression of the Company’s world class brand portfolio, including TRANSFORMERS, MONOPOLY, PLAY-DOH, MY LITTLE PONY, MAGIC: THE GATHERING, NERF and LITTLEST PET SHOP. From toys and games, to television programming, motion pictures, digital gaming and a comprehensive licensing program, Hasbro strives to delight its global customers with innovative play and entertainment experiences, in a variety of forms and formats, anytime and anywhere. The Company’s Hasbro Studios develops and produces television programming for more than 180 territories around the world, and for the U.S. on Hub Network, part of a multi-platform joint venture between Hasbro and Discovery Communications (NASDAQ: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK). Through the company’s deep commitment to corporate social responsibility, including philanthropy, Hasbro is helping to build a safe and sustainable world for future generations and to positively impact the lives of millions of children and families every year. It has been recognized for its efforts by being named one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies” and is ranked as one of Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens.” Learn more at www.hasbro.com.
HAS-PR
Media Contact:
Hasbro, Inc.
Kristina Coppola, 401-727-5973
[email protected]
or
Investor Relations Contact:
Debbie Hancock, 401-727-5464
[email protected]
Source: Hasbro, Inc.
News Provided by Acquire MediaKurt Zouma has praised N’Golo Kante’s impact at Chelsea. (AMA/Getty Images)
Kurt Zouma admits Chelsea’s players make fun of N’Golo Kante because of how impressive he is during games.
After winning the Premier League title with Leicester City last season, the 25-year-old completed a £32 million switch to Stamford Bridge and has been a key figure in Antonio Conte’s midfield this term.
Zouma admits he has been blown away by the impact Kante has made at Chelsea but reveals that the midfielder is ‘very timid’ off the pitch.
‘He won 14 of 16 tackles [against Liverpool], and the next-best in the game won three,’ Zouma told L’Equipe.
‘The following day, during our video session, you could only see him. The guys said to him, ‘You’re doing it on purpose. Losing the ball so you can tackle and and win it back again.’
Kante set a new Premier League record with his 14 tackles against Liverpool (AFP/Getty Images)
‘We make fun of him, but it’s because we love him, and that he impresses us.
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‘For me, he’s been incredible in every game this season.
‘Off the pitch, he’s very simple, very timid, the others rarely hear his voice. He’s not someone who’ll come and talk, you have to go to him to hear his little voice. He’s next to me in the dressing room, I often bother him, make fun of him a little bit. He makes me laugh so much.
Kante is ‘very timid’ off the pitch, reveals Zouma. (AMA/Getty Images)
‘He’s really funny. I like him a lot, and everyone loves him in the dressing room.
‘When he scored against Manchester United, everyone was so happy for him and went to jump on him, pat him on the head.
‘He’s so timid, but so impressive on the pitch! He deserves everything he gets.’
MORE: Diego Costa actually apologises to Chelsea team-mate for stunning goal in training
MORE: Romelu Lukaku urged to re-join Chelsea by former Arsenal striker Ian WrightMarine said he was placed in dryer by a drunk instructor during marine boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina and asked if he was a ‘part of 9/11’
Muslim marine says he was forced into clothes dryer in boot camp hazing
A Muslim marine said he was placed in a clothes dryer by a drunk instructor during marine boot camp and subjected to several anti-Muslim slurs, a new investigation has revealed.
The unnamed marine said drill instructors asked him if he was a “part of 9/11”, and was forced to remain inside the dryer while they grilled him about his faith.
The details emerged from a redacted report reviewed by ABC News of an investigation into the training practices at Parris Island, in South Carolina.
Up to 20 marines could face disciplinary action over Muslim recruit's death Read more
The investigation was triggered after Michigan native Raheel Siddiqui killed himself in March, having also reportedly been subjected to anti-Muslim slurs and physical abuse from drill instructors.
One of the drill sergeants who instructed the marine to step into the dryer, had also slapped Siddiqui in the face, moments before he jumped three stories from the balcony of a barracks building.
Siddiqui’s death triggered three board investigations. Last week, the marines announced the investigations were complete and 20 personnel were being considered for military justice or administrative actions, with some already relieved of their position.
The redacted report details the widespread hazing conducted in three platoons within Parris Island’s Third Battalion.
After completing the nine weeks of basic training, the Muslim marine said he was singled out by drill instructors due to his religion.
He said he was woken up by drill instructors whose breath smelled of alcohol and forced to march into the shower area. In the shower, with the water running, he was forced to do push-ups and stomach crunches.
He was then instructed to go into a large clothes dryer so that he could “dry off” before going back to bed. The instructors would open the dryer door periodically and ask him who he was working for, or what his religion was. Before entering, he was asked if he was a part of 9/11, he said.
The time in the dryer caused burns on his neck and shoulders, according to the marine, and he began to cry.
The marine also said that the drill sergeant had told him: “Over the past 14 years since 9/11 he has been fighting people exactly like him, Muslims.”
Another marine told investigators he heard the drill instructors ask, “You’re going to kill us all the first chance you get aren’t you, terrorist?”
The Michigan chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, called for the Department of Justice to investigate the death of Raheel Siddiqui on Tuesday.
“The seriousness of this case rises to the level for intervention from the civil rights division of the Department of Justice,” said CAIR-MI’s executive director, Dawud Walid.
Siddiqui was a valedictorian at his high school and reportedly joined the marines to become a part of the FBI.
In a statement released through their attorney on Tuesday, his family said they were uncertain if he had actually killed himself.
“We believe there is a lack of material evidence needed to support ‘suicide’ as the most probable cause of death in this case,” the family said through their attorney Shiraz Khan.
A hearing will be held for the marine personnel under investigation, potentially in the coming weeks.Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
There is a new study out that purports to make a “conservative” estimate of the social cost of carbon and in doing so arrives at a figure nearly four times larger than the central estimate currently used by the U.S. government—the latter a figure which we and others have voluminously argued is itself several times too high. Perhaps the authors of the new report ought to look up the definition of the word “conservative.”
Recall that the social cost of carbon is supposed to represent the total value of future damages from climate change resulting from the current emission of a ton of carbon dioxide. As you may imagine, coming up with the SCC involves more imagination than actual science.
The primary “tools” used for determining the SCC are “integrated assessment models,” or IAMs, which incorporate a very simple climate model into an economics model. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Jeroen van den Bergh and Wouter Botzen review elements (economic and climatic) that are poorly incorporated or missing entirely from the IAMs.
A prominent characteristic of the IAMs is that they are notoriously malleable and able produce virtually any value for the SCC that the modeler or end-user desires.
Judging from the introductory sentence of their paper
Climate change has been called “the biggest market failure the world has seen” and “the mother of all externalities.”
you can pretty much guess what kind of SCC value van den Bergh and Botzen prefer.
To support their apparent preference for a high SCC, they spend the bulk of their paper imagining bad climate outcomes—with high monetary damages—and are generally dismissive of positive climate impacts. For example:
Nevertheless, our summary of the main effects provides a clear insight, namely that unquantified negative effects of climate change tend to dominate unquantified positive effects. The negative effects comprise large biodiversity losses, political instability, violent conflicts, large-scale migration, extreme weather events, natural disasters and the effect on long-term economic growth. Accounting for the latter is likely to increase the SCC because large impacts of climate change are expected to reduce the rate of GDP growth, partly because of negative effects on labour and capital productivity.
Unsurprisingly, when you include a lot of negative impacts along with a low discount rate, the IAMs produce very high estimates of the SCC.
In fact, van den Bergh and Botzen arrive at a “conservative” SCC value of $125. For comparison, value used by the Obama Administration for cost/benefit analyses of new regulations is $36.
Interestingly, in their “conservative” analysis, they never once mention the growing body of new and prominent scientific literature that produce updated estimates of the earth’s climate sensitivity—a measure of how much climate change we expect from carbon dioxide emissions—that are much lower and much more tightly constrained than the ones used in all of the studies reviewed by van den Bergh and Botzen.
The lower climate sensitivity estimates not only reduce the overall impacts from expected climate changes, but they do so primarily by reducing the chances of unexpected and catastrophic changes—the biggest drivers of the high SCC values in the IAMs. It has been repeatedly shown (see here, here, and here for example) that incorporating the new, lower climate sensitivity estimates reduce the IAMs’ SCC determinations by some 40 percent.
And there are lots of other things, which, if better incorporated in the IAM’s, would lead to lower SCC values.
If the positive benefits from carbon dioxide emissions on the planet’s crop production were better included in the IAM’s, the SCC value drops further. And if arguments for the use of a higher discount rate, rather than the very low one espoused by van den Bergh and Botzen win the day, the SCC drops further still.
Add to the mix a more reasoned view of future climate extremes, and before you know it, it is an easy argument to make that the SCC value should fall significantly below the Administration’s $36 rather than some three to four times higher.
It is bad enough that van den Bergh and Botzen present a rather one-sided view of the science of climate change/climate extremes and the economics concerning the choice of discount rate, but for them to term their analysis “conservative” is really taking things too far. “Alarmist” would be a more apt description.
Our hope would have been that the reviewers for Nature Climate Change would have caught the glaring oversight of the current climate sensitivity literature (with one of the most persuasive articles appearing in the sister journal Nature Geosciences), but that didn’t happen. We’ll withhold speculation as to why that was the case.
Reference:
Van den Bergh, J.C.J.M., and W.J.W. Botzen, 2014. A lower bound to the social cost of CO2 emissions. Nature Climate Change, 4, 253-258, doi:10.1038/NCLIMATE2135.(CNN) -- Thirty-three miners trapped underground in Chile sent a note on Sunday saying they are alive, raising hopes for the first time in the nearly three weeks since the mine collapsed, but officials cautioned it could take months to rescue the workers.
The miners sent their rescuers a handwritten message that said all of them are alive and in a shelter, said Chilean President Sebastian Pinera. The note was tied to a probe authorities had lowered earlier on Sunday.
"Now we know the most important thing. They are alive," said an elated Pinera, who spoke outside the mine.
Cheers erupted around the president as relatives and friends of the miners shed tears and shared hugs, video from CNN Chile showed. The workers have been trapped since the mine caved in on August 5.
Video from CNN Chile, taken with a small camera sent underground after rescuers retrieved the message, showed the top half of a miner's face as it emerged into view. He appeared alert.
Andres Sougarret, who is in charge of rescue operations, said he hoped to make further contact with the trapped miners later on Sunday, though he warned it could take as long as four months to get them out.
The miners are thought to be inside a small shelter that would have had some water and food supplies, said CNN Chile Correspondent Francisco Siredey. The shelter is some 2,300 feet underground.
Because of the mine's depth, and the instability caused by the collapse, rescue workers will need to proceed slowly and with caution.
Sougarret said rescuers will send microphones down soon in hopes of learning more about the miners' conditions. Authorities are also planning to send food, medicine and other necessities as needed. Eventually, rescue workers will likely drill a larger shaft, through which the trapped miners could escape.
"It'll take time. But it's not important how long it takes. What's most important is that everything ends well," said Pinera.
Beaming, the president held the note pulled from the mine up for television cameras. Written in Spanish in red ink, it read simply: "The 33 of us are fine in the shelter."
The San Esteban mine, which produces copper and gold, is located near the town of Copiapo in the Atacama region in northern Chile.
Rescuers said they also retrieved a second note, written by a miner identified as Mario Gomez to his family. Pinera handed Gomez' letter, which was wrapped in a plastic bag and tied to the probe with large rubber bands, to the miner's wife.
"I know my husband is fine. I know he's alive. And I know he's keeping up all the others in the mine because that's the kind of person my husband is," said the overjoyed wife, CNN Chile video showed.
"The good thing is that now he's going to come out of there with his life. Thank God." she added.For more than a decade it was home and a place to grow as a man, to learn life lessons both easy and hard. If Dwane Casey sounds a bit wistful about a return, it’s entirely understandable.
Casey, who became the person he is during his important growing years as a star player, team captain and an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky, will walk back onto the floor at Rupp Arena in Lexington on Friday night to take part in a fundraising evening celebrating the star-studded history of the Wildcats.
(Eduardo Lima / The Canadian Press)
He will look around, see familiar and welcoming faces and old friends and feel at home. And happy.
“I was at Kentucky probably from ’75 to ’88 all together, playing and coaching,” the Raptors head coach said in an interview this week. “You spend a lot of your formative years there at Kentucky, I grew up a lot there, became who I am. There are a lot of great memories, way more good than bad. It’ll be great to be back there.”
The memories are of some of the major accomplishments in the 60-year-old’s basketball life. He captained the iconic Wildcat team and won an NCAA championship, he learned at the feet of one of the game’s masters in coach Joe B. Hall and cut his coaching teeth there. But the hard life’s lessons came at the end: Casey was caught up in a recruiting scandal and basically drummed out the NCAA coaching ranks, one avenue of his career closed off.
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“It was something that you go through in life but I grew up tremendously from the situation,” he said. “There’s no ill feeling on my part (and) people back there welcomed me back.... I’ve been back for football games, more football games than basketball games just because of the season.
“People have welcomed me back from the top down. From coach (Rick) Pitino, coach (John) Calipari, coach (C.M.) Newton back when he was athletic director. It’s not like I was exiled or anything like that.”
Still, the return to the Rupp Arena floor will be special.
Casey will be taking part in a significant fund-raising event for Calipari’s charitable foundation during an evening that includes a “legends” game and an exhibition involving a handful of the Kentucky alumni throughout the NBA.
He’ll see Hall, who said of Casey earlier this year “the value he added to our program with his presence in the locker room was a whole lot greater (than an on-court contribution)” and |
one instance in August 1969, Zanzibari authorities arrested 14 men whom they accused of plotting a coup. Mainland authorities had assisted in the arrests, but—contrary to Nyerere's intentions—the arrested men were tried in secret and four of them secretly executed. Nyerere was further embarrassed by the habit of Karume and other Zanzibari Revolutionary Council members for pressuring Arab girls into marriage and then arresting their relatives to ensure compliance. As a result of rising international prices in cloves, Karume amassed £30 million in foreign exchange reserves, which he kept from the central Tanzanian government. In April 1972, Karume was assassinated by four gunmen.
Domestic and foreign affairs: 1964–1966 [ edit ]
In September 1965, a general election took place; a presidential election was held across Tanzania, while parliamentary elections took place on the mainland but not on Zanzibar. Although the one-party state meant that only TANU candidates could stand, the party's national executive selected at least two candidates for all but six seats, providing some democratic choice for voters. Two ministers, six junior ministers, and nine backbenchers lost their seats and were replaced. Both Derek Bryceson and Amur Jamal, the two non-indigenous cabinet members, were re-elected over black opponents. Nyerere stood unopposed in the presidential election, although the ballot allowed space to vote against his candidacy; ultimately he secured nearly 97% support.
Tanzania experienced rapid population growth in the post-independence decades; the December 1967 census revealed a 35% increase in the population from that in 1957. This rising number of children made the government's desire for universal primary education more difficult to achieve. Observing that a small sector of the population were able to attain a high level of education, he grew concerned that they would form an elitist group apart from the rest of the people. In 1964 he stated that "some of our citizens still have large amounts of money spent on their education, while others have none. Those who receive that privilege therefore have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made." In October 1966, around 400 university students marched to State House to protest that they had to perform national service after completing their studies. Nyerere, Rashidi Kawana, and other cabinet members met them on the steps of the building. Nyerere spoke to the crowd in defence of national service, and agreed to reduce government salaries, including his own. In 1966, Nyerere ceased using State House as his permanent residence, moving into a newly built private home on the seafront at Msasani, several miles north of Dar Es Salaam.
After Tanganyika unified with Zanzibar, the latter having received support from China and other Marxist-Leninist countries, Western powers urged Nyerere not to accept support from these nations. In August 1964, Nyerere allowed seven Chinese instructors and four interpreters to work with his army for six months. Responding to Western disapproval, he noted that most of Tanzania's military officers were British trained and that he had recently signed an agreement with West Germany to train an air wing. Over the following years, China became the main beneficiary of Tanzania's foreign relations. In February 1965, Nyerere made an eight-day state visit to China, opining that their socio-economic projects in moving an agrarian country towards socialism had much relevance for Tanzania. Nyerere was fascinated by Mao's China because it espoused the egalitarian values he shared; he was particularly inspired by the government's emphasis on frugality and economy. In June, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Dar Es Salaam. China provided Tanzania with millions of pounds in loans and grants, and also invested in a range of projects including a textile mill near Dar Es Salaam, a farm implement factory, an experimental farm, and a radio transmitter. Seeking financial support to build a railway that would connect Zambia to the coast and through Tanzania, he secured Chinese backing in 1970 after Western countries refused to finance the operation.
In the early 1960s, Nyerere had private telephone lines installed linking him to Kenyatta and Obote, although these were later eliminated in a cost-saving exercise. Although the East African Federation that Nyerere desired failed to develop, he still pursued greater integration between Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, in 1967 co-founding the East African Community, a common market and administrative union, which was headquartered in Arusha. Nyerere wrote an introduction for Not Yet Uhuru, the 1967 autobiography of Kenyan leftist politician Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Nyerere's Tanzania welcomed various liberation groups from southern Africa, such as FRELIMO, to set up operations in the country to work towards overthrowing the colonial and white-minority governments of these countries. Nyerere's government had warm relations with the neighbouring Zambian government of Kenneth Kaunda. Conversely, it had poor relations with another neighbour, Malawi, whose leader Hastings Banda accused the Tanzanians of supporting government ministers who he claimed opposed him. Nyerere strongly disapproved of Banda's co-operation with the Portuguese colonial governments in Angola and Mozambique and the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. In 1967, Nyerere's government was the first to grant recognition of the newly declared Republic of Biafra, which had seceded from Nigeria. Though three other African states followed, it put Nyerere at odds with most other African nationalists.
Nyerere
Nyerere signed his country to the British Commonwealth. In September 1965, Nyerere threatened to withdraw Tanzania from the Commonwealth if the British government negotiated for the independence of Rhodesia with Ian Smith's white minority government rather than with representatives of the indigenous black majority. When Smith's government made its unilateral declaration of independence in November, Nyerere demanded that the British take immediate direct action to stop this. When the UK failed to act effectively, in December Tanzania broke off diplomatic relations with them. This resulted in the loss of British aid, but Nyerere thought it necessary to demonstrate that Africans would stand by their word. He stressed that British Tanzanians remained welcome in the country and that any violence towards them would not be tolerated. Despite the cessation of diplomatic contact, Tanzania cooperated with the UK in airlifting emergency oil supplies to landlocked Zambia, whose normal oil supply had been cut off by Smith's Rhodesian government. In 1970, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia all threatened to leave the Commonwealth after British Prime Minister Edward Heath appeared to resume arms sales to South Africa.
Relations were also strained with the United States. In November 1964, Kambona publicly announced the discovery of evidence of a U.S.-Portuguese plot to invade Tanzania. The evidence—which consisted of three photostat documents—was labelled a forgery by the U.S. Embassy and after Nyerere returned from a week at Lake Manyara he acknowledged that this was a possibility. After the U.S. launched Operation Dragon Rouge to retrieve white hostages held by rebels in Stanleyville, Congo, Nyerere condemned them, expressing anger that they would go to such efforts to save 1000 white lives while doing nothing to prevent the subjugation of millions of black people in southern Africa. He believed that the operation was designed to bolster the Congolese government of Moise Tshombe, which Nyerere—like many African nationalists—despised. Explaining this antipathy to Tshombe, he said: "try to imagine a Jew who recruits ex-Nazis to go to Israel and assist him in his power struggle. How would the Jews take it?" Relations with the U.S. reached their worst point in January 1965, when Nyerere expelled two members of the U.S. embassy for subversive activities; evidence was not publicly produced to demonstrate their guilt. The U.S. responded by expelling a councillor from the Tanzanian embassy in Washington D.C.; in turn, Tanzania recalled its ambassador, Othman Shariff. After 1965, Tanzanian-U.S. relations gradually improved.
The Arusha Declaration: 1967–1971 [ edit ]
In January 1967, Nyerere embarked on a four-week tour of the Tanzanian mainland. This ended in Arusha, where he attended a three-day meeting of the TANU National Executive. It was there that he presented the National Executive Committee with a new statement of party principles, the Arusha Declaration. This declaration affirmed the government's commitment to building a democratic socialist state and stressed that Tanzania could not rely on foreign assistance, and thus must develop an ethos of self-reliance. In Nyerere's view, true independence was not possible while the country remained dependent on gifts and loans from other nations. It stipulated that renewed emphasis should be placed on developing the peasant agricultural economy to ensure greater self-sufficiency, even if this meant slower economic growth. After this point, the concept of socialism became central to the government's policy formation. To promote the Arusha Declaration, groups of TANU supporters marched through the countryside to raise awareness; in October, Nyerere accompanied one such eight-day march which covered 138 miles in his native Mara district.
The day after the declaration, the government announced the nationalisation of all Tanzanian banks, with compensation provided to their owners. Over the following days, it announced plans to nationalise various insurance companies, import-export firms, mills, and sisal estates, as well as the purchase of majority interest in seven other firms, including those producing cement, cigarettes, beer, and shoes. Some foreign specialists were employed to run these nationalised industries until sufficient numbers of Tanzanians had been trained to take over. After a year, Nyerere praised the Tanzanian Indians for their role in ensuring the successful running of the nationalised banks, stating that "these people deserve the gratitude of our country". In early 1971, the National Assembly passed a measure authorising the nationalisation of all commercial buildings, apartments, and houses worth more than 100,000 Tanzanian shillings unless the owner resided in them. This measure was designed to stop the real estate profiteering that had grown across much of post-independence Africa. The measure further depleted the wealth of the Tanzanian Asian community, which had invested much in property accumulation.
Nyerere followed his declaration with a series of additional policy papers covering such areas as foreign policy and rural development. "Education for Self-Reliance" stressed that schools should place a new emphasis on teaching agricultural skills. Another, "Socialism and Rural Development", outlined a three step process for creating ujamaa co-operative villages. The first step was to convince farmers to move into a single village, with their crops planted nearby. The second was to establish communal plots where these farmers would experiment working collectively. The third was to establish a communal farm. By the end of 1970, there were reportedly a thousand villages in Tanzania referring to themselves as ujamaa.
The Arusha Declaration had also announced the introduction of a code of conduct for TANU and government leaders to adhere to. This forbade them from owning shares or holding directorates in private companies, receiving more than one salary, or owning any houses that they rented to others. Nyerere saw this as necessary to stem the growth of corruption in Tanzania; he was aware of how this problem had become endemic in some African countries like Nigeria and Ghana and regarded it as a threat to his vision of African freedom. To ensure his own compliance with these measures, Nyerere sold his house in Magomeni and his wife donated her poultry farm in Mji Mwema to the local co-operative village. In 1969, Nyerere sponsored a bill to provide gratuities for ministers and regional and area commissioners which could be used as a retirement income for them. The Tanzanian Parliament did not pass the bill into law, the first time that it had rejected legislation backed by Nyerere. The majority of parliamentarians argued that its granting of additional funds to said officials broke the spirit of the Arusha Declaration. Nyerere decided not to push the issue, conceding that parliament had valid concerns about it.
In June 1976, Kambona resigned from the government, ostensibly for health reasons, and relocated to London. He then claimed that he had been the victim of a plot to overthrow Nyerere being orchestrated by a group opposed to the Arusha Declaration. Nyerere was angered by these statements and asked Kambona to return to Tanzania. By the following year, Kambona had turned against Nyerere, claiming that the latter was "making himself a dictator". In October 1969 a group of army officers and former politicians, including former head of the National Women's Organisation Bibi Titi Mohammad and former Labour Minister Michael Kamaliza, were arrested, accused of plotting to kill Nyerere and overthrow the government, convicted, and imprisoned.
The private sector suffered from the multiplying cumbersome, bureaucratic procedures and excessive tax rates.[235] Enormous amounts of public funds were misappropriated and put to unproductive use.[235] Purchasing power declined at an unprecedented rate and even essential commodities became unavailable.[235] A system of state permits (vibali) required for many activities allowed officials to collect huge bribes in exchange for distributing the vibali.[235] Nyerere's policies laid a foundation for systemic corruption for years to come.[235]
In 1969, Nyerere made a state visit to Canada. In 1969, Nyerere informed a journalist that he was contemplating retirement from the presidency, hoping to encourage new leadership, although at the same time had a desire to remain in place to oversee the implementation of his ideas. In the 1970 election, Nyerere again stood unopposed, securing 97% support for him to serve another five year term. Again, parliamentary elections took place on the mainland but not in Zanzibar.
In January 1971, President Obote of Uganda was overthrown by a military coup led by Idi Amin. Nyerere refused to recognise the legitimacy of Amin's administration and offered Obote refuge in Tanzania. Shortly after the coup, Nyerere announced the formation of a "people's militia", a type of home guard to improve Tanzania's national security. When Amin expelled all 50,000 Ugandan Asians from his country in 1972, Nyerere denounced the act as racist. In September 1972, Obote loyalists launched an attack on Uganda from Tanzania, hoping to overthrow Amin.
Collectivization: 1971 [ edit ]
Collectivization was accelerated in 1971. Because much of the population resisted collectivisation, Nyerere used his police and military forces to forcibly transfer much of the population into collective farms.[238][239] Houses were set on fire or demolished, sometimes with the family's pre-Ujamaa property inside.[239] The regime denied food to those who resisted.[239] A substantial amount of the country's wealth in the form of built structures and improved land (fields, fruit trees, fences) was destroyed or forcibly abandoned.[239] Livestock was lost or stolen, or fell ill or died.[239]
In 1975, the Tanzanian government issued the "Ujamaa Program" to restructure the Sonjo region, in northern Tanzania, from compact sites with less water to flatter lands with more fertility and water. Further, new villages were created to ease the reaping of crops and raising of livestock. This "villagization" (coined by W.M. Adams) encouraged the Sonjo population to use modern irrigation techniques such as the 'unlined canals' and man-made springs (Adams 22–24). Given the diversion of water from the Kisangiro and Lelestutta Rivers by dams, river water can flow by canals into the irrigation systems to alleviate the hardships of smallholder farmers and livestock owners.[240]
Nyerere
Farming practices for tea and cloves improved for subsistence farmers; for example, only 3 tons of tea had been produced in 1964, yet by 1975, 2,100 tons of tea were netted from smallholder farmers. By 1974, the Ujamaa programs and the IDA (International Development Association) worked hand in hand; while villagization organized new villages to farm, the IDA financed projects to educate farmers to grow alternate crops and granted loans to farmers, with added credit to smaller farmers (Whitaker 206). Nyerere's policies had given the communal villages the opportunity to grow tea leaves despite the long history of tea being only grown in estates (208). One may understand agricultural growth through both re-organizing of traditional farms and improving the general farming methods therein, and investing into non-staple agriculture such as the aforementioned tea cultivation. Similarly, the Tanzanian government's put extensive effort into training farmers to grow tobacco effectively, which significantly improved tobacco yields to 41.9 million pounds in 1975–1976. By 1976, Tanzania became the third-largest tobacco cultivator in Africa (207). Therefore, via Tanzanian government intervention with regards to agriculture, a positive result was achieved in cheaper prices of tea and tobacco for Tanzanian villagers, consuming Tanzanian products rather than imported goods.[241]
This centralized governmental control was geared to use arable land for cash crops (specifically tobacco and tea) to benefit the government structure. As a result, food production plummeted and only foreign aid prevented mass starvation. Tanzania, which had been able to produce such vast quantities of food to both feed its population and be the largest exporter of food on the African continent, became the largest importer of food in the continent.[242][243] Many sectors of the economy collapsed; there was a virtual breakdown in transportation and goods such as toothpaste became virtually unobtainable.[242][243]
The deficit in cereal grains was more than 1 million tons between 1974 and 1977. Only loans and grants from the World Bank and the IMF in 1975 prevented Tanzania from going bankrupt. By 1979, Ujamaa villages contained 90% of the rural population but only produced 5% of the national agricultural output.[244]
Julius Nyerere announced that he would retire after presidential elections in 1985, leaving the country to enter its free market era — as imposed by structural adjustment under the IMF and World Bank – under the leadership of Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Nyerere's hand-picked successor. Nyerere was also instrumental in putting Benjamin Mkapa in power. Nyerere remained the chairman of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (ruling party) for five years following his presidency until 1990, and is still recognized as the Father of the Nation.
Nyerere left Tanzania as one of the poorest, least developed, and most foreign aid-dependent countries in the world.[245] In 1985, he publicly apologized for his economic policies.[246] Nevertheless, Nyerere's government did much to foster social development in Tanzania during his time in office. At an international conference of the Arusha Declaration, Nyerere's successor Mwinyi noted the social gains of his predecessor's time in office: an increase in life expectancy to 52 years, a reduction in infant mortality to 137 per thousand, 2600 dispensaries, 150 hospitals, a literacy rate of 85%, two universities with over 4500 students, and 3.7 million children enrolled in primary school.[247]
Foreign policy [ edit ]
Nyerere's foreign policy emphasised nonalignment in the Cold War and under his leadership Tanzania enjoyed friendly relations with the People's Republic of China, the Soviet bloc as well as the Western world. Nyerere sided with the Chinese in the Sino-Soviet rivalry, and China reciprocated by its assistance with the building of the TAZARA Railway. When it was completed two years ahead of schedule, the TAZARA was the single longest railway in sub-Saharan Africa.[248] TAZARA was the largest single foreign-aid project undertaken by China at the time, at a construction cost of 500 million United States dollars (the equivalent of US $3.23 billion today).[249]
In July 1987, Nyerere returned to the University of Edinburgh to attend a conference on "The Making of Constitutions and the Development of National Identity", where he gave the opening address on post-independence Africa.
Nyerere was instrumental in the Seychelles military coup in 1977, in which soldiers trained by Nyerere deposed the country's democratically elected president James Mancham and installed a progressive one-party socialist state under France-Albert René.[251][252][253]
In an interview with Hubert Fichte from Frankfurter Rundschau, Nyerere commented that homosexuality was alien to Africa and therefore homosexuals cannot be defended against discrimination. His comments were omitted from the publication.[254] Despite it being illegal, persecution was rare during his tenure.[255]
In doing so, Nyerere—according to A. B. Assensoh—was "one of the few African leaders to have voluntarily, gracefully, and honourably bowed out" of governance.
Post-presidential activity [ edit ]
After the Presidency, Nyerere remained the Chairman of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) until 1990 when Ali Hassan Mwinyi took over. Nyerere remained vocal about the extent of corruption and corrupt officials during the Mwinyi administration. However, he raised no objections when the CCM abandoned its monopoly of power in 1992. He also served as Chairman of the independent International South Commission (1987–1990), and Chairman of the South Centre in the Geneva & Dar es Salaam Offices (1990–1999).[citation needed]
Nyerere did not leave the political arena altogether. He campaigned in support of the CCM candidates in Tanzania's 1995 presidential election. He also took part in the fifth Pan-African Congress, held in the Ugandan city of Kampala. In 1997, he made his final visit to Edinburgh, delivering the Lothian European Lecture and teaching seminars at the university's Centre of African Studies.
Nyerere retained enough influence to block Jakaya Kikwete's nomination for the presidency in the country's first multiparty elections in three decades, citing that he was too young to run a country. Nyerere was instrumental in getting Benjamin Mkapa elected (Mkapa had been Minister of Foreign Affairs for a time during Nyerere's administration). Kikwete later became president in 2005.[citation needed]
Nyerere's portrait on the Tanzanian 1000 shilling note
In one of his famous speeches during the CCM general assembly, Nyerere said in Swahili "Ninang'atuka", meaning that he was pulling out of politics for good. He kept to his word that Tanzania would be a democratic country. He moved back to his childhood home village of Butiama in northern Tanzania.[259] During his retirement, he continued to travel the world meeting various heads of government as an advocate for poor countries and especially the South Centre institution. Nyerere travelled more widely after retiring than he did when he was president of Tanzania. One of his last high-profile actions was as the chief mediator in the Burundi conflict in 1996.[citation needed]
The government and army contributed funds to build Nyerere a house in his home village; it was finished in 1999, although he only spent two weeks there prior to his death.
Illness and death [ edit ]
By the end of his life, Nyerere had been battling chronic leukaemia for over a year. On 1 October, Nyerere was sent to intensive care due to a major stroke. He eventually passed away at the age of 77 on 14 October 1999, at around 10:30 AM at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, with his wife, Maria, and six of his eight children by his bedside. Benjamin Mkapa, Tanzanian president at the time, announced Nyerere's death on national television, and also proclaimed a 30-day mourning period. Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, was honoured by Tanzanian state radio playing funeral music while raw video clips of him were broadcast on television.[261]
Cultural influences [ edit ]
Nyerere advocated for strict government control over popular culture in order to promote his vision of African pride and unity.[262] In the late 1960s, Nyerere criminalised "decadent" forms of culture including soul music, unapproved films and magazines, miniskirts, and tight trousers.[263][264]
Nyerere remained an influence upon the people of Tanzania in the years following his presidency. His broader ideas of socialism live on in the rap and hip hop tradition of Tanzania.[265] Nyerere believed socialism was an attitude of mind that countered discrimination and entailed equality of all human beings.[266] Therefore, ujamaa can be said to have created the social environment for the development of hip hop culture. As in other countries, hip hop emerged in post-colonial Tanzania when divisions among the population were prominent, whether by class, ethnicity or gender. Rappers broadcast messages of freedom, unity, and family, topics that are all reminiscent of the spirit Nyerere put forth in ujamaa.[265]
In addition, Nyerere supported the presence of foreign cultures in Tanzania saying, "a nation which refuses to learn from foreign cultures is nothing but a nation of idiots and lunatics...[but] to learn from other cultures does not mean we should abandon our own."[265]
Political ideology [ edit ]
Nyere's ideology, a form of African socialism, is known as Ujamaa. Although attaining some of his early ideas from African Association contemporaries in Tanganyika, many of Nyerere's political beliefs were developed while he was studying in Edinburgh; he noted that he "evolved the whole of my political philosophy while I was there". In the city, he was influenced by texts produced within the traditions of classical liberalism and Fabian socialism.
Anti-colonialism and non-racialism [ edit ]
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Nyerere despised colonialism and felt duty bound to oppose the colonial state in Tanganyika. In campaigning against colonialism, Nyerere acknowledged that he was inspired by the principles behind both the American Revolution and the French Revolution. He was also influenced by the Indian independence movement, which successfully resulted in the creation of an Indian republic in 1947, just before Nyerere studied in Britain. Nyerere insisted that the situation in Tanganyika was such that non-violent protest was possible and should be pursued, stating: "I'm non-violent in the sense of Mohandas Gandhi... I feel violence is an evil with which one cannot become associated unless it is absolutely necessary". After becoming leader of his county, he became a prominent supporter of anti-colonial movements in southern Africa, providing said groups with material, diplomatic, and moral support.
Although opposing European colonialism, Nyerere was not antagonistic towards white Europeans; from his experiences he was aware that they were not all colonialists and racists. Prior to independence he insisted on a non-racialist front against colonialism, challenging those African nationalists who wanted to deny equal rights to East Africa's European and Asian minorities. In a 1951 essay written in Edinburgh, he proposed that "We must build up a society in which we shall belong to east Africa and not to our racial groups... We appeal to all thinking Europeans and Indians to regard themselves as ordinary citizens of Tanganyika... We are all Tanganyikans and we are all east Africans." He argued that racial equality should be upheld on an individual basis, with individuals being legally protected against racial discrimination, rather than being enshrined in government with certain parliamentary seats reserved for different racial groups. This involvement in multi-racial politics differed from the approaches adopted by many other African nationalists in Tanganyika. When in power, Nyerere ensured that his government and close associates reflected a cross-section of East African society, including black Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Europeans, as well as practitioners of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and African traditional religion.
Democracy and the one-party state [ edit ]
Nyerere emphasised the idea of democracy as a principle. He described democracy as "government by the people... Ideally, it is a form of government whereby the people – all the people – settle their affairs through free discussion." This is a definition close to that generated by the clergyman Theodore Parker, whose influence he acknowledged. He absorbed the values of liberal democracy but focused attention on how to "Africanize" democracy. He emphasized that post-colonial African states were in a very different situation to Western countries and thus required a different governance structure; specifically, he favoured a representative democratic system within a one-party state. He opposed the formation of different parties and other political organisations with differing objectives in Tanzania, deeming them disruptive to his idea of the harmonious society and fearing their ability to further destabilise the fragile state.
He criticised the de facto two-party system he had observed in Britain, describing it as "foot-ball politics". In his words, "where there is one party, and that party is identified with the nation as a whole, the foundations of democracy are firmer than they can ever be when you have two or more parties, each representing only a section of the community!" He repeatedly wrote arguments on these ideas, often aimed at Western liberals. Following the 1965 parliamentary election, in which different candidates from the same party competed for most seats, Nyerere noted: "I don't blame Westerners for being sceptical. The only democracies they have known have been multi-party systems, and the only one-party systems they have seen have been non-democratic. But: a multiplicity of parties does not guarantee democracy". For Nyerere, it was the preservation of political and civil liberties, rather than the presence of multiple parties, that ensured democracy; he believed that freedom of speech was possible in a one-party state. However, his opposition to the formation of competing political groups led critics to argue that there were anti-democratic implications to his thought.
Nyerere was keen to associate himself with the idea of freedom, titling his three major compilations of speeches and writings Freedom and Unity, Freedom and Socialism, and Freedom and Development. His conception of freedom was strongly influenced by the ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Like Kant, Nyerere believed that the purpose of the state was to promote liberty and the freedom of the individual.
African socialism [ edit ]
The only way to defeat our present poverty is to accept the fact that it exists, to live as poor people, and to spend every cent that we have surplus to our basic needs on the things which will make us richer, healthier and more educated in the future. — Julius Nyerere
Nyerere was a socialist, with his views on socialism intertwined with his ideas on democracy. He promoted "African socialism" from at least July 1943, when he wrote an article referring to the concept in the Tanganyika Standard newspaper. Where he learned the term is not clear, for it would not become widely used until the 1960s. Nyerere saw socialism not as an alien idea to Africa but as something that reflected traditional African lifestyles. In his view, a "socialist attitude of mind" was already present in traditional African society. In his words from 1962, "We, in Africa, have no more need of being "converted" to socialism than we have of being "taught" democracy. Both are rooted in our past – in the traditional society which produced us." He presented the traditional African village—as well as the ancient Greek city state—as the model for the idealised society. Molony described Nyerere as having produced "romanticised accounts of idyllic village life in 'traditional society'", describing his as "a misty-eyed view" of this African past.
Nyerere's ideas about socialism owed little to either Marxism or European social democracy. Although he quoted from Karl Marx's Capital when speaking to certain audiences, he was critical of the idea of "scientific socialism" promoted by Marxists like Marx and Vladimir Lenin. He expressed the view that Marxist ideas about the construction of a socialist society from a capitalist one through the efforts of a revolutionary urban proletariat class were not applicable to post-colonial Africa, where there was little or no capitalism or proletariat and where—in Nyerere's view—traditional society was not stratified into competing economic classes. In most of Africa, Nyerere said, "we have to begin our socialism from tribal communalism and a colonial legacy which did not build much capitalism". He was also critical of the "utopian socialism" promoted by figures like Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, seeing their ideas as largely irrelevant to the Tanzanian situation. In his view, these European socialist writers had not produced ideas suited to the African context because they had not considered the history of "colonial domination" which Africa had experienced.
Nyerere firmly believed in egalitarianism and in creating a society of equals, referring to his desire for a "classless society". In his view, the equality of ujamaa must come from the individual's commitment to a just society in which all talents and abilities were used to the full. He desired a society in which the interests of the individual and society were identical and thought this could be achieved because individuals ultimately wanted to promote the common good. He believed it important to balance the rights of the individual with the duty to society, expressing the view that Western countries placed too much of an emphasis on individual rights; he regarded what he saw as the ensuing self-centred materialism as repulsive. To determine what balance to strike between the freedom of the individual and their responsibilities to society, he turned to the ideas of Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas on societal collectivity may also have been influenced by the work of the social anthropologist Ralph Piddington, under whom Nyerere studied at Edinburgh. It was Nyerere's belief that Africa would resolve the tension between the individual and society, a balance which other continents had failed to achieve. Nyerere detested elitism and sought to reflect that attitude in the manner in which he conducted himself as president; he was cautious to prevent the replacement of the colonial elite with an indigenous elite. He criticised the existence of aristocracy and the British monarchy. He endorsed the equality of the sexes, stating that "it is essential that our women live on terms of full equality with their fellow citizens who are men".
He remained dedicated to a belief in the rule of law. Nyerere's ujamaa was influenced by his reading of both Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, both of whom he had studied as a student. He stressed the need for hard work. Nyerere appealed to the idea of tradition when trying to convince Tanzanians of his ideas. He stated that Tanzania could only be developed "through the religion of socialism and self-reliance". He reiterated the ideas of freedom, equality, and unity as being central to his concept of African socialism.
Socialism is concerned with man's life in this society. A man's relationship with God is a personal matter for him and him alone; his beliefs about the hereafter are his own affair. — Julius Nyerere on socialism and religion
Nyerere's belief in socialism was retained after his socialist reforms failed to generate economic growth. He stated that "They keep saying you've failed. But what is wrong with urging people to pull together? Did Christianity fail because the world is not all Christian?" Much of Nyerere's political ideology was inspired by his Christian belief, although he stipulated the view that one did not have to be a Christian to be a socialist: "There is not the slightest necessity for people to study metaphysics and decide whether there is one God, many Gods, or no God, before they can be socialist... What matters in socialism and to socialists is that you should care about a particular kind of social relationship on this earth. Why you care is your own affair." Elsewhere, he declared that "socialism is secular". Trevor Huddleston thought that Nyerere could be considered both a Christian humanist, and a Christian socialist. In his speeches and writings, Nyerere frequently quoted from the Bible, and in a 1970 address to the headquarters of the Maryknoll Mission, he argued that the Roman Catholic Church must involve itself in "the rebellion against those social structures and economic organizations which condemn men to poverty, humiliation and degradation", warning that if it failed to do so then it would lose relevance and "the Christian religion will degenerate into a series of superstitions accepted by the fearful".
Personality and personal life [ edit ]
Those who knew Nyerere in Edinburgh recall him as 'not the usual type', 'a very decent fellow', 'of a very independent turn of mind', 'a delightful person; a student with a clearly evident awareness of opportunity to learn; a quiet, likeable young man of integrity', and 'a quiet, unassuming person... who drew no attention to himself in the way some students do'. — Biographer Thomas Molony
Smith described Nyerere as "a slight, wiry man with a high forehead and a toothbrush moustache". He was described as an eloquent speaker, and a skilled debater. According to Molony, "articulated his sometimes complex ideas in a simple and logical style of speechwriting." Nyerere was a modest man who was shy regarding the personality cult that followers established around him. In rejecting the personality cult, he for instance rejected ideas that statues be built to him. In a 1963 memorandum, he called on colleagues to help him in "stamping out the disease of pomposity" in Tanzanian society. As President, he for instance he did not like to be referred to as either "Your Excellency" or "Dr Nyerere". Most staff members referred to him as "Mzee", a Swahili word meaning "old man". Smith noted that Nyerere had a "respect for spartan living" and an "abhorrence of luxury".
Assessing his early life, Molony described Nyerere as "down-to-earth, principled, and had a strong sense of fairness. He was modest and unpretentious. In contrast to a good number of his contemporaries at Tabora Boys, he was neither arrogant nor conceited." In focusing heavily on his studies, some regarded him as "a touch precocious", or even as a swot or a bore; in addition, Molony noted, Nyerere could be "manipulative at times, increasingly shrewd with experience, and always tenacious".
Huddleston recalled conversations with Nyerere as being "exciting and stimulating", with the Tanzanian leader focusing on world issues rather than talking about himself. In Huddleston's view, Nyerere was "a great human being who has always treasured his human-ness (his humanity if you like) more deeply than his office". For Huddleston, Nyerere displayed much humility, a trait that was "rare indeed" |
7, when Trump is in charge of the full federal bureaucracy, he’ll find out.
“Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House,” Obama added, before showing a Vegas-ized Executive Mansion.
Fast-forward five years and look who’s laughing now.C.J. Anderson will undergo surgery Thursday to repair a meniscus tear in his right knee., sources told 9NEWS.
The procedure, which will be performed by Dr. Arthur Ting in Fremont, Calif., could eventually lead to the Denver Broncos’ running back missing the rest of the season, although there is hope he could return for the postseason should the team qualify for an AFC playoff spot. The full extent of the tear won’t be known until Dr. Ting works inside the knee.
The Broncos are expected to place Anderson on injured reserve as Anderson’s recovery is expected to be eight to 12 weeks. Any player, but not more than one player, can be activated by a team after eight weeks.
Dr. Ting is a renowned sports surgeon whose clientele includes the likes of Barry Bonds and Alfred Williams.
Anderson suffered his injury on the final play of the first quarter in the Broncos’ 27-9 victory against Houston on Monday night. Anderson cut right during an 11-yard gain and after he was tackled, he stayed down on the ground, clutching his knee. There was not contact in the knee area when the knee buckled.
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Anderson then demonstrated some remarkable powers of overcoming injury by re-entering the game and gaining 84 more yards on 14 more carries – including a 7-yard touchdown run – in the final three quarter.
He finished with 107 yards on 16 carries and a touchdown. Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak said Wednesday that Anderson was selected as the team’s offensive MVP of the game.
The running back iced his knee after the game but when there was greater discomfort on Tuesday morning, he went to the Broncos’ facility for treatment and consultation with trainer Steve “Greek” Antonopulos and team doctors.
They had Anderson undergo an MRI exam which revealed to the Broncos’ medical team the type of meniscus tear that required surgery to repair. Anderson sought a second opinion in hopes the knee could recover with rest and rehab and he could return to play in a month or so.
He underwent a second MRI in the Bay Area on Wednesday when doctors there confirmed the Broncos’ initial diagnosis.
Before his surgery that was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, doctors had Anderson come in for one more test as it was unusual he was experiencing no pain or soreness in the knee area and is not walking with a trace of a limp.
Anderson leads the team with 437 rushing yards through its 5-2 start. In his absence, the Broncos will start rookie tailback Devontae Booker, who rushed for 83 yards on 17 carries Monday against Houston. No. 3 running back Kapri Bibbs, who has primarily been playing on special teams, will be promoted to No. 2 back this week.
After having one big season for Colorado State in 2013, Bibbs spent his first two professional seasons on the Broncos’ practice squad. He made their 53-man roster this season and has four carries for 21 yards and one reception for 6 yards.
Booker, who rushed for nearly 2,800 in two seasons at Utah but slid to the fourth round of this year’s draft because of his own meniscus concerns, has 244 yards on 51 carries for the Broncos, a 4.8-yard average. He also has 9 catches for 69 yards.
“Right now my coach (Eric Studesville) talked about pretty much every day in our meeting room about opportunity and be ready for it,’’ Booker said Wednesday before learning the extent of Anderson’s injury. “He just coaches us to be ready for every opportunity and when were in film study he makes sure we’re ready each and every situation when we’re out there on the field.
“Definitely exciting but haven’t heard a word on where C.J. is. Just continue to prepare and be ready for the opportunity.’’
It also wouldn’t be a surprise if the team’s general manager John Elway explores trying to acquire a running back before the trading deadline expires at 2 p.m. Tuesday. The team could also promote Juwan Thompson from the practice squad, or acquire a running back for depth.
Losing Anderson, though, is a blow not merely to the Broncos’ running game but their overall offense. Besides his low-center-of-gravity running style, Anderson probably has the best understanding of the Broncos’ offense this side of quarterback Trevor Siemian. Anderson is savvy at determining where the heat is coming from and he’s sturdy and willing enough to use his 5-foot-8, 220-pound frame in blocking off pass rushers.
After a strong finish last season that included 90 yards rushing and a touchdown in the Broncos’ Super Bowl 50 victory, Anderson parlayed the leverage of restricted free agency into a competing offer from the Miami Dolphins that was for $18 million over four years with $6 million guaranteed this season and another $3 million fully guaranteed for 2017.
The Broncos matched that offer. The team must now hope Booker and Bibbs can match Anderson’s production.
Copyright 2016 KUSAWe are pleased to announce that the most popular iOS client for reddit, Alien Blue, is now an official reddit app.
It’s the exact same Alien Blue app you know and love, plus some bug fixes and an updated icon.
You can download the new Alien Blue from the iOS store here. Note: it may take a while to show up in the App Store in your area; please be patient and keep trying.
To celebrate and ease the move to reddit, everyone can get the Alien Blue Pro upgrade free for one week. The iPad app will also be free until we integrate it with the iPhone app and the two become one universal app.
We have a few ideas for features to add in the near future and it will only get better. Enjoy, and please share feedback!
We’re also happy to say that its lead developer, Jase Morrissey, has joined us as our first Aussie. We have been working closely with Jase for the past several years and are thrilled to officially welcome him to our team.
Jase Morrissey (/u/jase), mobile software engineer
G’day folks! I’m Jase, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be joining the very talented reddit crew. I’m the developer of Alien Blue and have been working closely with reddit for many years now. I’m an iOS developer by profession, but I adore building software on any device or machine that I can get my hands on. I’m almost always lurking on /r/PCGaming, /r/Games and of course, /r/AlienBlue. Now that I’m an official member of the team, I’m hoping to spend even more time doing what I love – building fun and powerful software for all of you.
We’re also continuing to work with other third-party app developers and will continue to do so, because we believe our communities are interested in multiple ways to experience reddit. In the past six months, we’ve improved our API, added OAuth for apps, and added gold features to help build our mobile developer ecosystem.
Alien Blue will join the official reddit AMA app in the App Store, along with all the awesome third-party apps for reddit. Thank you for all your support!Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio June 13, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk
Hillary Clinton repeated on Friday that she did not realize she was transmitting highly classified government secrets through her private email server while U.S. secretary of state in her first remarks since a federal investigation found this happened at least 110 times.
Clinton, the presumptive Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, shifted the blame onto her former colleagues at the State Department, saying in television interviews she followed their lead on whether or not information was classified.
“They, I believe, did not believe they were sending any material that was classified, they were pursuing their responsibilities,” she said in an interview with MSNBC.
She did not address the findings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed this week that she herself sent information on topics classified as ‘top secret’, the highest level of classification, through the unauthorized private server she kept in her home.
The U.S. Department of Justice accepted the FBI’s recommendation on Tuesday to not file criminal charges against Clinton or her staff for her use of an unauthorized, unsecure private server for her work as U.S. secretary of state.
It is a crime to mishandle classified information, and while FBI director James Comey said on Tuesday there was evidence Clinton or her aides may have broken these laws, there was not enough evidence of criminal intent for a prosecution.
While clearing Clinton of criminal wrongdoing, Comey said in a scathing statement that she and her staff were “extremely careless” in their handling of government secrets. He said her server was so poorly secured the FBI could not rule out the possibility its contents had not been hacked by the country’s enemies.
Asked if she agreed that she was “extremely careless”, Clinton declined to respond directly, repeatedly saying Comey had “clarified” his remarks in interviews with MSNBC and CNN. It was unclear what clarification Clinton was referring to.
In lengthier remarks before lawmakers on Thursday, Comey repeated his belief that Clinton and her staff had been extremely careless, and added that he would also describe her conduct as “real sloppiness” and cast doubt on her ability to understand the classified information system.
“I don’t think that our investigation established she was actually particularly sophisticated with respect to classified information and the levels and treatment,” Comey said while under oath to lawmakers.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Bernard Orr)In case you missed it, I appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday and explained that Trump is more Master Persuader than crazy clown. It’s worth watching.
If you want to learn more about some of the psychological phenomena I mentioned on the show, I recommend this new book called Impossible to Ignore. It is the newest addition to my Persuasion Reading List.
The thing I was trying to say on the show, before I got cut off, was that Trump’s selection of issues is part of his persuasion talents. He was smart enough to pick the topics with the most emotional power. It was intentional. Keep in mind that every candidate had the same options that Trump did, but only Trump chose correctly. That is not an accident. The public just thinks it is.
Bill said during the show that he can’t be hypnotized. Evidently he tried it before and it didn’t work. I didn’t have time for a complete response so I will give it to you here.
For starters, everyone is hypnotizable. That’s what I learned in hypnosis class, and that has been my personal experience. Twenty percent of the public can be deeply hypnotized, but all the rest can be influenced in some productive direction.
Hypnosis is a learned skill, and that means some hypnotists are better than others. It would take a talented hypnotist to deal with a professional skeptic such as Maher. And the approach would have to be tailored for him. A generic hypnotic induction would be useless with such a personality.
The way I would approach hypnotizing a hardcore skeptic is to describe the method as I went. With a normal subject, I might say, “Imagine your favorite place in the world to relax” and that would be enough to start the ball rolling. But with a skeptic, I would add “Our brains make associations automatically. If I ask you to recall a bad memory, it might raise your blood pressure and pulse. But when I ask you to imagine a relaxing situation, your body naturally follows.”
A skeptic will understand that imagining a relaxing scene puts you in a more relaxed mood than recalling a bad memory. There is nothing magical about that. And I would continue explaining the technique as I went, in ordinary terms that anyone can understand. Persuasion works even when you explain the method as you go. If you don’t believe me, consider that Trump tells the public he is being controversial because it gets him the effect he wants. He says he plans to be presidential later. He tells us what he is doing and then he does it. And it still works.
Think about Trump’s Linguistic Kill Shots (nicknames). Trump now tells us in advance that he’s about to hatch one. Then he does. Then we watch it work. His persuasion is just as effective when he tells us how he’s doing it and when. In fact, it probably works better when the public is primed to see it coming. If you think Trump is going to be persuasive, it makes him more persuasive, like a placebo effect on top of a real drug.
My point is that a good hypnotist can hypnotize (or persuade) Bill Maher or any other skeptic. Some of you will say I persuaded him on the show to see the Clinton campaign as doomed. Did you see a turn?
On a related note, over the weekend I privately tested my claim that I could persuade an angry Trump-hater to become a Trump supporter in one hour. It turns out that I was wrong. It only took ten minutes.
We are not a rational species.A coaching change hasn't improved the situation for Eagles running back DeMarco Murray. Even with Chip Kelly being sent packing and the hire of coach Doug Pederson, the former NFL rushing leader and his team are not in a good place.
In fact, Eagles and Murray appear headed toward a stare-down regarding his future with the organization, according to several sources informed of the situation. The division boils down to: Murray's unsuccessful 2015 campaign during which he rushed for only 702 yards, the Eagles' lack of conviction that he's the right back and the massive contract Murray signed last offseason.
There are very real questions of, can Murray play and succeed in Philly in 2016? And moving forward, is a sudden turnaround feasible? There are doubts.
Remnants of the old regime have headed out the door, including Kelly and VP of player personnel Ed Marynowitz. Yet Murray, the poster child for the failed efforts during the 2015 offseason remains with four years left on his five-year, $40-milion deal that includes $9 million more guaranteed. A pre-June 1 cut would hand the Eagles a $13-million salary-cap charge -- a reality the Eagles don't seem willing to embrace at this point.
Murray doesn't feel completely comfortable with the organization, his role and how 2015 played out. He was a target for fans' angst, and it never improved on the field.
He rushed for a career-low 3.6-yards-per-carry, while his most memorable moment came when he informed owner Jeffrey Lurie on a team plane that the team lacked confidence in Kelly.
Murray hasn't asked to be released or traded, and the Eagles seem -- at this point -- intent on not cutting him. But the longer this situation goes without a resolution toward the belief that it can work, the greater chance it could explode.
It's fair to say Murray has eyes on greener pastures, places where he believes he can be successful and earn the large contract he signed. If he was released, teams like the Seahawks, Cowboys and Raiders (who were interested last offseason) would be interested again. He's currently building a house in Dallas.
It's unclear how much interest there would be in a trade -- and that likely would require a re-worked contract -- and there has been no move yet to allow Murray to explore one. While the Eagles mull how to move forward, that could be the next step.
Meanwhile, Murray sits in flux, unsure how to proceed in a situation that turned from a dream into a nightmare in the span of one season.
Follow Ian Rapoport on Twitter @RapSheet.The first total lunar eclipse in more than two years will grace the skies on Monday, and it's all the more rare because it will be visible above the entire Western Hemisphere.
During the overnight hours of April 14-15, skygazers there will have a front-row seat as the full moon is painted red, creating what many call a "blood moon," as Earth's shadow creeps across the lunar disk.
"Lunar eclipses are exciting because nature puts on a free show for everyone to enjoy, and it causes us to look back at the sky and reexamine our place in the solar system and beyond," said astronomer Raminder Singh Samra of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.
Lunar eclipses occur only when there is a full moon and the sun, Earth, and moon are precisely aligned for our planet's shadow to turn out the lunar lights. (Related: "Solar Eclipse Myths From Around the World.")
During a lunar eclipse, the moon passes behind our planet so that Earth blocks the sun's rays from striking the moon. Due to the moon's tilted orbit around the Earth, one doesn't occur every month. And total eclipses usually happen once every few years, though there are sometimes more than one in a year.
"Since the moon's orbit around the Earth is slightly inclined, it doesn't pass through the shadow every month, therefore every year we get an eclipse twice a year—very rarely we can get up to five," said Samra.
Unlike solar eclipses, lunar ones are safely visible to the unaided eye. (A solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes between the Earth and the sun and blocks the disk of the sun.) (Related: "How to Safely Watch a Solar Eclipse.")
Lunar eclipses have been considered an awe-inspriring sky event for millenia, and ancient astronomers could do rudimentary but fundamental science with them, says Samra.
"Many cultures have mythologies associated with lunar eclipses so there has always been interest in the eclipses," said Samra. "The ancient Greeks were able to use the Earth's shadow cast on the moon to predict the approximate relative sizes of the two bodies."
Lunar eclipses make the scene in skies over heavily populated cities and towns, making next week a special event for all sky-watchers. Here's our viewing guide:
Why is this eclipse so noteworthy?
Beyond its occurrence over two heavily populated continents, next week's event kicks off a lunar eclipse tetrad (group of four). For two years, a lunar eclipse will occur over the Western Hemisphere every six months. In addition to April 14, mark your calendars for this October 8 and for April 4 and September 28, 2015.
If you happen to be clouded out or on the wrong side of the Earth for this month's eclipse, don't fret. You can watch the entire disappearing act online, via a robotic telescope webcast from the SLOOH Observatory live feeds from throughout North America including the Prescott Observatory in Prescott, Arizona.
Why does the moon turn orange-red during a lunar eclipse?
During an eclipse, sunlight shining through the ring of Earth's dusty atmosphere is bent, or refracted, toward the red part of the spectrum and cast onto the moon's surface.
As a result, expect to see the lunar disk go from a dark gray color during the partial phase of the eclipse to a reddish-orange color during totality. The same effect is at work when the sun turns red at sunset.
The moon's color during totality can vary considerably depending on the amount of dust in the Earth's atmosphere at the time. Active volcanoes spewing tons of ash into the upper atmosphere, for instance, can trigger blood-red eclipses.
No one can predict exactly what color we'll see before each eclipse.
Who gets to see the sky show?
The best views will be from the entire North and South American continents and much of the Pacific Basin, including Hawaii. Eastern Australia should get to see the second half of the show on the night of April 15, as the moon rises during totality.
Europe, Africa, and central Asia, meanwhile, will miss the entire eclipse because it will be daytime in those regions at the time of the event.
When's the best time to look?
The entire eclipse will last over three and a half hours, starting at 1:58 a.m. EDT (April 15) or 10:58 p.m. PDT (April 14) when the moon begins to plunge into the umbra, the darkest center of our planet's shadow.
The best part of eclipse will be during totality, starting at 3:07 a.m. EDT (12:07 a.m. PDT) and lasting 78 minutes. After that, Earth's shadow begins to leave the surface of the moon.
"The most spectacular part of the event for me is watching a slow progression of the moon changing color," explains Samra.
"It will start off with the very familiar white but then progressively become fainter and then turn a deep red before emerging out of the Earth's shadow and returning to its familiar white color."
The height, or midpoint, of the total eclipse occurs at 3:46 a.m. EDT (12:46 a.m. PDT).
Extra Sky Spectacle
As a sky-watching bonus, Spica—the bright star in the constellation Virgo—will appear very close to the moon during the eclipse, less than 2 degrees away. That's equal to the width of two middle fingers held at arm's length.
And look for orange-hued, starlike Mars shining bright off to their west. The red planet happens to be a few days past its closest approach to Earth, at 57 million miles (92 million kilometers) away.ROME (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters furious about high unemployment and a political class they regard as corrupt rallied in central Rome on Wednesday demanding the resignation of Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s government.
People take part in a demonstration organised by "People from pitchfork movement" to protest against economic insecurity and the government in downtown Rome December 18, 2013. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
With the highest debt burden in the euro zone after Greece, Italy - mired in its longest post-war recession - is closely watched by financial markets and European partners as a flashpoint for instability in the bloc.
Thousands of Italians have marched in cities across the country over the last nine days in protests fuelled by falling incomes, unemployment above 12 percent and over 40 percent among people below 25.
“The ruling class is made up of thieves and mafiosi, and they are destroying our country! We are better than this... Out out out!” Danilo Calvani, a farmer who has emerged as one of the leader of the protests shouted to the cheering crowd in the Piazza del Popolo.
Attempts to address Italy’s economic woes have been held up by squabbling between the coalition partners since the left and right were forced into an awkward alliance to end a political stalemate in April.
The wave of “pitchfork” protests, which began among a loosely organized group of farmers in Sicily, has prompted President Giorgio Napolitano to warn Italy could be plunged into violent social unrest unless the government swiftly introduced reforms to help struggling citizens.
About 3,000 people attended the Rome rally, fewer than expected after some original leaders of the movement refused to endorse the event, saying they feared it could be infiltrated by violent protesters.
Ringed by police, the crowd waved Italian flags while leaders of the movement from around Italy gave angry speeches blaming the government for impoverishing the country.
EUROSCEPTIC
“We do not want to be ruled by this government anymore. They don’t represent us, they don’t listen to us, they only steal and that’s it. We want new elections,” said protester Valerio Lorusso, 41, a farmer from Foggia in southern Italy.
The pitchfork protests have taken on increasingly Eurosceptic tones, with some blaming Europe for years of austerity and economic hardship. The movement has won support from several far-right groups, and several speakers and those in the crowd said Italy should abandon the euro.
One banner read “Dear old Lira, you were worth half but you went twice as far!” and several in the crowd said they wanted a return to Italy’s former currency.
“Never before have policies so impoverished the people. If it continues like this we are finished with Europe,” said Daniele Iamilli, 42, a security guard from Rome.
Members of Casapound, a neo-fascist group whose deputy leader was sentenced to three months in prison for tearing down the EU flag from the European Commission headquarters in Rome on Saturday, were among those protesting in the square.
Slideshow (2 Images)
National data released this week showing almost one in three Italians risk poverty or social exclusion underlined the scale of a crisis that has fuelled disillusionment with the government and state institutions.
The 5-Star Movement led by comic Beppe Grillo, who has said Italians should be polled on whether to exit the euro, took a quarter of votes in its first national election this year and has forced Italy’s traditional parties to address skepticism towards the currency and union.
Letta has warned of the risk of a surge of support for parties opposed to the euro in elections for the European Parliament in May 2014.Thanks to both the focus on health care and the storm over President Obama's comments on Henry Louis Gates, few bothered to note a deeply troubling moment during last month's White House press conference in which the president displayed genuine stupidity, willful ignorance, intelligence-insulting dishonesty -- or some combination of all three (I bring this up now, because it's the very same argument we're going to hear from supporters of Ben Bernanke in his renomination process). Referring to the recent news that banks like Goldman Sachs reported big profits, he said:
"What you're seeing is that banks are starting to make profits again. Some of them have paid back the TARP money that they received, the bank bailout money that they received. And we expect more of them to pay this back. That's a good thing...And we also think it's a good thing that they're profitable again, because if they're profitable that means that they have reserves in place and they can lend. And this is America, so if you're profitable in the free market system then you benefit." (emphasis added)
Yeah, sure -- economically speaking, it's a great thing when a business makes a product or delivers a service and is able to make a profit from that endeavor in a free, unsubsidized market. However, that's not what's going on in the financial industry...at all.
As Matt Taibbi noted a full week before Obama's press conference, "this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy." In a TrueSlant article that followed his original Rolling Stone gem, he breaks down all the subsidies and handouts the financial industry engineered for itself outside of just the TARP bailout. He concludes:
One of the most hilarious lies that has been spread about Goldman of late is that, since it repaid its TARP money, it's now free and clear of any obligation to the government -- as if that was the only handout Goldman got in the last year. Goldman last year made your average AFDC mom on food stamps look like an entrepreneur... Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman's profit announcement is a giant "fuck you" to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it's untouchable and it's not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn't matter who knows it.
So in light of the evidence Taibbi lays out -- evidence that has been reported in the business press for the last many months -- it's clear President Obama's claim that the big banks are back to being "profitable in the free market system" is stupid, willfully ignorant, or dishonest, because they're quite obviously operating inside the opposite of a "free market system." Their profits are a direct taxpayer subsidy.
Is that a "good thing?" Well, I guess it's a "good thing" that after all the subsidies, the banks didn't report more losses. However, I'd prefer the phrase "the absolute least that should have happened" to "good thing." Why? Because the idea that they did something right or smart or brilliant or moral or newly responsible by generating their recent profits is absurd.
Had they been given so much taxpayer cash and not reported a profit -- that would have been an embarrassment. Put another way, there was almost no possible way for the banks to report anything other than profits when they were the recipients of so much taxpayer cash. The president praising them for being "profitable in a free market system" is like him signing legislation transferring $1 million from the U.S. Treasury into my bank account, and then a month later, sending me a letter of commendation for having mustered the brilliance and hard work to earn $1 million.
OK, fine, you get that this isn't a free market. But you're still wondering about motive. Why would Obama go on national television and tell the American public that big bank profits are a "good thing" like any other endeavor that is "profitable in the free market system?" What motive might he have? I'd guess defending Wall Street and the ongoing subsidies/bailouts.
Remember, Obama is the guy who raised more campaign cash from Wall Street than any other candidate in American history -- and he was the guy who played a pivotal role in passing the bailouts in the first place. And while, sure, it's seems like a positive that Obama wants financial "reform," we don't really know what "reform" means. It could mean nothing -- or, based on administration proposals to actually put more power into the very secretive agency that allowed the mess to happen, it could mean an even worse regulatory system.ONTARIO >> Ontario police shot and killed a 17-year-old Ontario boy Thursday after he robbed a restaurant, then skateboarded down Archibald Avenue threatening passers-by with a handgun before being confronted by officers, authorities said.
The shooting took place shortly after 3:45 p.m. after police responded to numerous 911 calls reporting a gun-toting teen was riding a skateboard along Archibald Avenue near Brookside Street, Ontario police Sgt. Jeff Higbee said.
More than half-a-dozen callers reported the teen was pointing the weapon at random at people and cars while screaming, “I have a gun,” the sergeant said.
When officers confronted the armed teen, he refused to drop the weapon and an officer-involved shooting occurred, Higbee said. Further details regarding the circumstances of the shooting were not available.
Paramedics took the wounded suspect to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, officials said.
The suspect’s bizarre and erratic behavior prior to the incident, as well as a suicide note discovered at his home, led investigators to look into the possibility the officer-involved shooting was a “suicide by cop.”
Police learned that just prior to the shooting, the young man had just robbed a nearby Jack in the Box restaurant at Archibald Avenue and Riverside Drive, Higbee said.
He brandished a gun and demanded money from the store, Higbee said. But as the teen fled, he handed over at least some of the stolen cash to a customer inside the restaurant.
The name of the suspect was not released Thursday night.
Like the San Bernardino Sun on Facebook.Source: Xinhua| 2017-09-21 15:25:40|Editor: Yurou
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BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities Thursday initiated a project that aims to elevate 42 of the country's higher education institutions to a world-class level.
Another 95 institutions have been designated to develop world-class courses, according to a circular jointly issued by the ministries of education and finance, as well as the National Development and Reform Commission.
Dubbed "Double World Class," the project includes Peking University, Renmin University of China, Tsinghua University, among others, it said.
The institutions were selected after a process of peer competition, expert review and government evaluation, according to the circular.
They will received dynamic monitoring and management, while the "Double World Class" title is not an interminable status, it said.
Prior to the project, the Chinese government evaluated its universities via the "211" and "985" projects launched in the 1990s. The 211 project aimed to raise education standards in about 100 colleges and universities during the 21st century, hence the number 211, and the 985 project, named after its launch date in May 1998, endeavored to select the cream of the crop from those institutions.
The new project is based on the previous two projects and committed to promoting regional coordinated development of higher education.Few texts in hip-hop are as bizarre as Eminem’s debut LP, Infinite. Released on a local Detroit label in 1996, it was either ignored or dismissed by those who rejected his whiteness and his borrowed aesthetic. Were it released in 2017, it might be celebrated for its scholarship of the form’s early classics, a la Joey Bada$$ or Roc Marciano. Instead, he was written off as a swagger jacker who sounded too much like Nas and AZ.
The criticism burned, and from that fire he formed his alter ego, Slim Shady. A manifestation of Marshall Mathers’ inner turmoil, the persona served as a vehicle for his darkest, most violent thoughts and helped him step out from the shadow of his forebears to channel the darkest parts of himself. On 1998’s The Slim Shady EP, he found his unique and disturbing voice. It caught the ear of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who spent the next five years molding him into one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
In those early years, for all the controversy his lyrics caused, Slim Shady helped Mathers focus his energy, a cathartic outlet that was both messy and intensely fascinating. But after more than two decades, he’s older, well-fed, and in possession of pretty much every accolade there is to acquire. The Slim Shady suit no longer fits; once the outsider, he’s now the establishment. If Slim Shady fed on hate, what does he do now that he’s beloved? What motivates a healthy, sober, 45-year-old father with enough money for several lifetimes?
On Revival, his ninth studio LP, Eminem is largely fueled by his own self-doubt, a creeping fear that we might forget he was once one of the best to ever hold a mic. The only thing the battle-tested, Oscar-winning, best-selling hip-hop artist of all time has to prove is that he’s got another classic in him, the one thing that he hasn’t proven since the curtains closed on 2002’s The Eminem Show. On the records that followed—his 2004 Encore, the inevitable Relapse in 2009 into Slim Shady, and his eventual Recovery—Eminem struggled to reconcile with the aftermath of his rapid ascent to stardom. The confessional nature of his storytelling, often featuring his mother, his daughter, and her mother, laid bare his deepest insecurities and most twisted fantasies. By the time a sober Marshall Mathers dropped the sequel to his defining work, he seemed desperate to prove he still had the ability to shock, disturb, and amaze with his skills on the mic. But by then, it was already apparent that he’d run out of stories to tell. Having freed himself of substance abuse, he reconciled his toxic relationship with the mother of his child and the effects of incorporating his daughter into his art. He’d matured into a more evolved human. But the music didn’t grow with him.
For the past 15 years, Eminem has been stuck in a feedback loop, revisiting different versions of his former self. Musically, Revival is no different, chock full of piano ballads and pop-star features that echo the most cynically commercial corners of his catalog. The shock value comes not from the album’s overwhelmingly bland hooks or cringe-worthy humor (of which there is plenty), but from the moments where his growth as a human is most apparent. Much of early single “Untouchable” is indeed unlistenable, but how many other rappers are reminding us of KRS-One’s teachings that “there can never be justice on stolen land?” And did the man who once mocked Lady Gaga with the lyric, “She can quit her job at the post office, she’s still a male lady,” really just diss the 45th president’s ban on transgender service members?
That being said, Eminem is due no accolades for having thumbed through a copy of Between the World and Me or for finally acknowledging the humanity of non-binary people. Nor should he be deified for mackling about the privileges of whiteness and how hard it is to be black in America. These are not new topics in hip-hop lyrics, they’re just new for Eminem. In 2017, listening to an Eminem rant against police brutality or a racist president can feel like watching “60 Minutes” after spending the week on Twitter; a slow recounting of last week’s news. It’s certainly possible that these screeds could be revelatory for Eminem’s most delusional racist fans, but for those of us who’ve long since arrived and who’ve put in work every day, it just sounds tired.
And if the beats knocked, it would probably be tolerable, too. But legendary executive producers Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin managed to stuff a bloated tracklist with uninspired production and instantly forgettable pop hooks. Even Beyoncé couldn’t save “Walk on Water,” a stale piano ballad that undercuts Eminem’s attempt to explore the weight of his self-doubt. The Alicia-Keys-featuring “Like Home” is equally limp and toothless, defanging Eminem’s attempt to battle Donald Trump. He sees himself as a crusader against his influence, champion of the bullied, a notebook full of disses at the ready. It’s not his fault that all Trump has to do to beat him is ignore him, but it is his fault that the beat makes it so easy to do so. Rubin’s contributions are particularly embarrassing; his re-hash of hits from the Rush/Def Jam days (“Heat,” “Remind Me”) suggest he’s completely out of ideas.
But while the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure. The eponymous interlude features a short verse from the late Alice and the Glass Lake that sounds like a sketch for something potentially great. And on an album full of poorly matched beats and verses, the delicately morose guitar melody and heavy fuzz of the Cranberries “Zombie” suits his flow on “In Your Head” perfectly—even if the hook was pretty much cut and pasted from the original.
It’s not until the album’s final tracks that we see a glimpse of the masterful storytelling he exhibited on early hits like “Guilty Conscience” and “Stan.” “ |
the development of key long-term technologies that advance Uber’s mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere."
The prospect of a war between Google Cabs and Uber Bots makes for vivid headlines, but where does it leave the legions of Uber drivers and other task workers? This is one of the questions that Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Segment, asks in a timely post, Replacing Middle Management with APIs. Services like Uber replace a layer of task management with software APIs. Customers use an app interface to enter their data into the system. Reinhardt represents this in pseudocode as: uber.drive(card, pointA, pointB);. The app sends a request that includes account data, pickup and dropoff locations via API to Uber's servers that poll available drivers nearby and dispatches one to the customer to fulfill the request. The only two humans involved are the customer and the driver. Danny DeVito has been furloughed!
But what about Uber's drivers and other workers whose tasks are directly managed by software. Reinhardt makes an original observation about this layer of software that divides the makers from the doers:
Drivers are opting into a dichotomous workforce: the worker bees below the software layer have no opportunity for on-the-job training that advances their career, and compassionate social connections don’t pierce the software layer either. The skills they develop in driving are not an investment in their future. Once you introduce the software layer between ‘management’ (Uber’s full-time employees building the app and computer systems) and the human workers below the software layer (Uber’s drivers, Instacart’s delivery people), there’s no obvious path upwards. In fact, there’s a massive gap and no systems in place to bridge it.
As he describes it, working "below the API" is a dead end. Uber drivers, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, 99design contestants, TaskRabbit taskers and HomeJoy cleaners are all targets for further automation. Software is the business of building models of systems that can be executed, optimized and combined with other models. In terms of employment, this means that these APIs will be able to orchestrate more and more complex collections of tasks over time. Reinhardt concludes, "As the software layer gets thicker, the gap between Below the API jobs and Above the API jobs widens. And economic incentives will push Above the API engineers to automate the jobs Below the API: self-driving cars and drone delivery are certainly on the way."
Yes, self-driving cars on the way, and it is likely that automated taxi fleets will be the first commercial application of this technology. Navigating roads and avoiding other vehicles is a complex task, but it is far more concise to model than cleaning a cluttered apartment. The smart money is on automating the labor that is both necessary and expeditious to model.
Reinhardt cites Elon Musk's $10 million donation to the Future of Life Institute to research AI safety as a precaution that "does seem apropos." Indeed, once a wide range of tasks are automated via APIs machine intelligence may develop the ability to recombine them in unforeseen ways. As an example, Reinhardt proposes a mashup of Redfin and Zirtual that could enable a long-distance real estate investor to flip a house "completely programmatically."
Right now, the proportion of total employment mediated by APIs is still small, but it is rising. As Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times last week, "Uber, and more broadly the app-driven labor market it represents, is at the center of what could be a sea change in work, and in how people think about their jobs. You may not be contemplating becoming an Uber driver any time soon, but the Uberization of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession." Note that he said "professions." The Uber effect does not just affect cab drivers and house cleaners, but extends to lawyers, doctors and even (some day) venture capitalists.
As much as task workers enjoy the control of their schedules and working conditions, the uncertainty of the gig economy has significant downsides. Manjoo quotes former secretary of labor Robert Reich:
I’m glad if people like working for Uber, but those subjective feelings have got to be understood in the context of there being very few alternatives. Can you imagine if this turns into a Mechanical Turk economy, where everyone is doing piecework at all odd hours, and no one knows when the next job will come, and how much it will pay? What kind of private lives can we possibly have, what kind of relationships, what kind of families?
And the pressure of automation will give these workers very little leverage—unless they are doing things that are hard to automate, or they possess skills that make their work qualitatively better than the automated product. Task modeling and management will continue to grow in importance, but so will technologies that match skills to needs in very immediate and fine-grained ways. For the 21st century economy to remain productive for humans and capital, it will need to become far more supple than the initial Uberization and Googleification of work allows.SAN FRANCISCO (CBS / AP) — A former employee in Oracle’s finance department is accusing the business software maker of trying to pressure her into cooking the books in an effort to boost the company’s stock price.
Svetlana Blackburn, a former senior finance manager at Oracle, made the allegations in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court. The complaint seeks damages for wrongful termination and violations of laws protecting workers blowing the whistle on misconduct by their employers.
Oracle Corp. stood behind its accounting practices in a company statement Thursday that derided Blackburn’s lawsuit as “malicious prosecution.” The Redwood Shores, California, company said it fired Blackburn for poor performance.
Blackburn painted a much different picture in her lawsuit, alleging Oracle tried “to fit square data into round holes” to inflate its financial results.
© Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.SEVEN FROM SUNDAY – WEEK 12
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SEVEN FROM SUNDAY – WEEK 12
A look at seven statistical highlights from games played at 1:00 p.m. ET and 4:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, November 26, the 12th week of the 2017 season.
Atlanta wide receiver JULIO JONES had 12 catches for 253 yards and two touchdowns in the Falcons’ 34-20 win over Tampa Bay. Jones has three career games with at least 250 receiving yards and is the only player in NFL history to have multiple 250+ yard receiving games.
Jones, who played in his 90th career game today, has 563 catches for 8,649 yards, the most by a player in his first 90 games in NFL history. He passed ANQUAN BOLDIN (558) for the most receptions and Pro Football Hall of Famer LANCE ALWORTH (8,502) for the most receiving yards.
Jones caught a 51-yard touchdown pass from wide receiver MOHAMED SANU in the second quarter of today’s game. Sanu, who also threw a 73-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Green with Cincinnati in 2012 (September 23, 2012), is the first wide receiver since the 1970 merger to throw multiple career 50+ yard touchdown passes. He is also the first non-quarterback to throw two career 50+ yard touchdown passes since Pro Football Hall of Fame running back WALTER PAYTON (1979, 1983).
The PHILADELPHIA EAGLES defeated Chicago 31-3 to improve to 10-1. It marks the fourth time in franchise history the Eagles have started a season 10-1 or better (1949, 1980 and 2004) and the team advanced to the NFL Championship/Super Bowl in each of the previous three instances.
In the Super Bowl era, 38 teams have previously started 10-1 and all 38 made the playoffs, 17 reached the Super Bowl (44.7 percent) and eight won the Super Bowl (21.1 percent).
Eagles quarterback CARSON WENTZ threw three touchdown passes in today’s win and leads the league with 28 touchdown passes. Wentz’s 28 touchdown passes are the most by an Eagles quarterback through the team’s first 11 games of a season, passing the mark set by Pro Football Hall of Famer SONNY JURGENSEN (24) in 1961.
Wentz has 28 touchdown passes and five interceptions and is the third quarterback in NFL history to have at least 25 touchdown passes and five or fewer interceptions through his team’s first 11 games, joining TOM BRADY (2007, 2015, 2017) and AARON RODGERS (2011, 2014).
The NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS defeated Miami 35-17 and improved to 9-2. The Patriots clinched their 17th consecutive season with a winning record, the longest streak since 1970, surpassing the previous record of 16 held by the 1970-1985 Dallas Cowboys and 1983-1998 San Francisco 49ers.
New England quarterback TOM BRADY threw four touchdown passes with one interception for a 114.1 passer rating in today’s win. Brady, who turned 40 years old in August, has 26 touchdown passes this season, the most by a quarterback in a single season at the age of 40 or older.
Brady has 27 career games with at least four touchdown passes and one or fewer interceptions, surpassing PEYTON MANNING (26) for the second-most in NFL history. Only DREW BREES (28) has more such games.
Seattle quarterback RUSSELL WILSON threw two touchdown passes and rushed for a touchdown in the Seahawks’ 24-13 win at San Francisco. Seattle improved to 7-4 on the season and bounced back from last week’s 34-31 loss against Atlanta. With the victory, Wilson improved to 23-4 (.852) in his career in games following an in-season loss, the best record by a starting quarterback since the 1970 merger (minimum 15 such starts).
Los Angeles Rams running back TODD GURLEY had 128 scrimmage yards in the team’s 26-20 win over New Orleans. Gurley, who has 1,344 scrimmage yards and 11 touchdowns this season, is the fourth player in franchise history to have at least 1,300 scrimmage yards and 10 touchdowns in the team’s first 11 games of a season. He joins Pro Football Hall of Famers ELROY “CRAZYLEGS” HIRSCH (1951), ERIC DICKERSON (1983) and MARSHALL FAULK (2000) as the only Rams to accomplish the feat.
New Orleans running backs ALVIN KAMARA (188 scrimmage yards, two touchdowns) and MARK INGRAM (36 scrimmage yards) combined for 224 scrimmage yards and two touchdowns in the Saints’ loss at the Los Angeles Rams. Kamara (1,094 scrimmage yards, nine touchdowns) and Ingram (1,055 scrimmage yards, eight touchdowns) are the first running back teammates to each have at least 1,000 scrimmage yards and eight touchdowns in a team’s first 11 games in the Super Bowl era.
The CAROLINA PANTHERS defeated the New York Jets 35-27. Carolina linebacker LUKE KUECHLY had a 34-yard fumble-return touchdown with 12:05 remaining in the fourth quarter to give the Panthers the lead and KAELIN CLAY added a 60-yard punt-return touchdown with 9:54 left to extend Carolina’s lead. It marked the second time in franchise history – and first since the club’s inaugural 1995 season (October 8, 1995 against Chicago) – in which the Panthers scored two return touchdowns in the fourth quarter of a game.
# # #Canadian oil production will increase by 75 per cent and gas production by 25 per cent by 2035, according to a report by the National Energy Board.
Its energy supply and demand projections report, released Friday, projects Canadian crude oil production of 5.8 million barrels a day by 2035.
The report predicts a steep rise in production of crude from oilsands and from shale, areas that are currently drawing millions in investment by companies such as Encana, Suncor and Royal Dutch Shell.
The figures from the federal regulatory agency come out the same day a poll shows Canadians are coming around to the federal government's position that oil and gas are the key drivers to the economy.
The NEB says Canadian demand for oil and gas will increase by 28 per cent in the same period, with fossil fuels remaining the primary source of energy for transportation and home heating.
Emissions standards for automobiles should slow consumer need for fossil fuels, the report said. At the same time, there will be improved energy efficiency across nearly all sectors, allowing the economy to grow more quickly than energy demand.
“By 2035, the energy used per unit of economic output is projected to be 20 per cent lower than in 2012, due to improvements in energy efficiency,” the report said.
Power generation will shift away from coal toward gas and renewables at the same time.
But the slow growth of Canadian demand amid rising supply will force the industry to develop export markets.
And that will increase pressure for pipeline development and improved rail development, especially to the U.S. market and the West Coast. The NEB argues infrastructure is a bottleneck to developing export markets.
“Growth in export markets and the infrastructure to access them are key uncertainties in this report's projections,” the NEB said in its report.
According to the Oil & Gas Journal, Canada ranks third globally in terms of proven oil reserves, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Canada has an estimated 171 billion bbls, 98 per cent of it in oilsands.
Canada has more energy than it needs
"Canada has vast energy resources – more than enough to meet Canada's growing energy demand," said Gaétan Caron, chair of the NEB, adding that oil and gas are a “key driver of the economy.”
The NEB says the “most likely” price for West Texas Intermediate crude will be about $110 US a barrel, about $15 more than it is now. However its report does not predict new policies or political developments that could sway oil prices or affect demand.
The report comes the same day environmental groups are warning that firms investing in the oilsands are running out of room to store the contaminated water that is a byproduct processing crude.
Several firms have obtained permission from provincial authorities to flood abandoned tar sand mines with a mix of tailings and fresh water, but the impact of these toxic lakes on the environment is unknown, the Pembina Institute says.On Monday, the "hacktivist" group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) briefly took over the Twitter account of the satirical news publication The Onion, posting a series of anti-Israeli "joke" stories and an anti-Obama "meme" image. The Onion returned fire with its own joke story, "Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Death At Hands of Rebels."
Putting all jokes aside, The Onion's technology team yesterday made a post describing how the SEA had managed to compromise the accounts of a number of employees and take control of the Twitter feed—a series of phishing attacks that took advantage of the organization's use of Google Apps.
According to The Onion's Chris Sinchok, the attack started as a series of phishing e-mails to Onion staff members, which included a link to what appeared to be a Washington Post article. The URL was actually a link to a hacked website that redirected to a fake Google Apps login page. "At least one Onion employee fell for this phase of the phishing attack," the security team reported in the blog post. That employee's credentials were used to gain access to the employee's Google Apps e-mail account, which was then used by the attackers to send further phishing attacks from an internal Onion address, using a link to the same fraudulent Google Apps login page.
Devil in disguise
"Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials," the Onion team said in their blog post. "Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all our social media accounts."
When the breach was discovered, the Technology team sent out an e-mail telling all staff members to immediately change their passwords. That e-mail was copied by the SEA attackers from another compromised e-mail account, adding the phishing attack as a "password reset" link. That third phish yielded them two more sets of credentials, one of which "was used to continue owning our Twitter account," the technology team said.
These embarrassingly simple methods were apparently used in similar attacks by SEA on the Associated Press, the Guardian, and E! Online over the past few weeks. "All of these hacks so far have been a result of simple phishing or possibly dictionary attacks—all of which are preventable with a few simple security measures," the Onion tech team wrote.
The first isn't really all that simple—teaching users not to fall for suspicious links that ask them for their logins. Keeping social media accounts connected to e-mails other than normal internal e-mail addresses and using a separate password-protected application to manage social media accounts would also have prevented the hack, or at least made it more difficult. And the Onion team also suggested having some out-of-band way to communicate with staff about breaches other than e-mail to prevent attackers from using alerts as a tool to extend their breach.
Dubious claims of a SCADA hack
On the heels of the Onion hack, the SEA also claimed to have taken control of a SCADA system for "main infrastructural systems" in the Israeli city of Haifa. The announcement of the hack included a PDF file with screenshots of what appears to be an industrial control system management console in Windows XP (in Hebrew) for some sort of pumping station. The claim, published on May 6, said the attack was retribution for the bombing of what the Israeli Defense Force claimed was a shipment of missiles from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
"It's hard to say how legitimate the whole thing is," said Wolfgang Kandek, Chief Technology Officer of security firm Qualys. "Why would you announce that you had hacked a SCADA system and then prove it to give the defenders a chance to lock it down and clean it up? If you wanted to do something, you would keep it secret."
If the hack did happen, it appears to have been accomplished through gaining access via remote control software. Use of remote control software to give engineers access to industrial control systems is not uncommon, and Internet-facing remote access tools are a common target for hackers since they can be scanned for and frequently have poor (or even default) passwords in place—as was the case in the point-of-sale system hacks of Subway franchises.Read more articles by
John Dennen
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WBC heavyweight champion, Deontay Wilder gave his take on the Anthony Joshua vs Wladimir Klitschko WBA and IBF heavyweight unification clash and his own place in the heavyweight division.
“With Joshua he got the height, he got the power and in the heavyweight division you don’t need skills. In the heavyweight division you can eliminate skills from anybody, even including myself, I don’t need skills. I have power. You’re in the game once you’ve got that power, that equaliser that no matter what at any given time [you can use],” Wilder said.
He continued, “Maybe people don’t have it to the extent that I have it because I can get you out of there at any time but Joshua has a little power and they’re going to play towards him. If Joshua’s going to be successful he’s going to move and take angles and be smart with Klitschko. Because Klitschko very smart, he’s been around the block. He’s trying to set you up.
“[Joshua] definitely has a great chance in this fight and hopefully everything comes through and we have a mega-fight at the end of the year.”
Wilder picks a winner in this article HEREThe Las Vegas Weekly conducts a survey of "the personalities who define Vegas," and judges Penn Jillette to be #1. Selections from the brief, reliably interesting interview:
Let’s talk about your TV show Bullshit! Will you ever run out of theories to debunk and people to expose? If you build a kingdom on bullshit, you're not in danger of running out of it. Our producer says that Teller and I can take any subject in the news and do a credible show on it. Sure, we like to have a villain, something to call "bullshit" on, but if we don't, we can depart from that model.
Are there any groups you won't go after? We haven't tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn't want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I'm not sure. And we haven't tackled Islam because we have families.
Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back... Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific. [...]
You do go after Christians, though... Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.Made: First screenshot of Spymaster, PlayRaven's WWII spy management game By Owen Faraday
Welcome to the resistance.
Featured here is a fresh operation that I started this morning while testing our latest development build. My operational goal was to transmit intel from Tunis so I decided to spread my three agents along the coast to build a network around Italy. That would give me a strong starting position for my next tasks, what ever they might be. Or maybe it would just highlight my position to the Gestapo by making so much "noise" in a small area all at once. I guess we'll see in a few turns ;)
Startup Finnish studio PlayRaven gave us a very early look at their "Football Manager for spies" game Spymaster -- a concept that makes my knees wobble just from thinking about it.“You’ll be managing your spy network that’s operating in occupied Europe,” design lead Thiago Rocha told me last year. "You use [your spies] to infiltrate factories and prison camps and research facilities and Gestapo headquarters. It’s a bit of a territory conquest game, but you’re not fighting the Axis openly. You’re trying to outsmart the Nazis."When I spoke with PlayRaven last year, the game was in very early gestation and there wasn't anything to show aside from some concept art. In fact, PlayRaven have kept the game very close, rebuffing my frequent requests, threats, and blackmail messages demanding screenshots.But something changed this morning, because that picture you see up there is the very first screenshot from Spymaster, posted this morning on the game's blog. PlayRaven co-founder Teemu Haila's description of what's going on in that image is after the jump. Spymaster is due out for iOS this year.Stay up with PlayRaven's progress on Spymaster on Twitter or Facebook. There's more details about the studio's plans for the game in my interview with them from last yearWhile Apple in the past has asked the U.S. government for a so-called "tax holiday" that would allow it to bring its massive cash hoard back to America, the iPhone maker may finally get its wish, as both Democrats and Republicans from the U.S. Senate said they are considering a one-time tax break.
As of last quarter, Apple held $156 billion in cash, with $138 billion of it overseas.
Be revenue neutral
Eliminate all corporate tax expenditures
Lower corporate income taxes
Implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that would allow free movement of capital back to the U.S.
Senators hope that a temporary reduction in taxes for bringing money back to the U.S. will replenish the federal Highway Trust Fund for road construction and repairs. The program is set to run out of funds by the end of August, according to Reuters.Apple would potentially be the largest beneficiary of a U.S. tax holiday, as the company had $156 billion in cash at the end of its last quarter, with just $18 billion of it held domestically. The company indicated at the time that it has no plans to repatriate the massive $138 billion it holds overseas, saying that the high taxes it would be hit with would not be a valuable decision for shareholders.The company has lobbied numerous times for a tax holiday that would incentivize bringing that money back to the U.S. Under current tax laws, companies face a 35 percent tax rate on profits generated outside the country.The last repatriation holiday in the U.S. came in 2004, when corporations were allowed to bring foreign profits at a tax rate of just 5.25 percent. That one-time offer came well before the introduction of Apple's iPhone, which has propelled the company to become one of the most profitable businesses in American history.While a one-time tax holiday could be advantageous for Apple, the company has urged the U.S. government to enact more comprehensive tax reform that company officials believe could be beneficial for the economy. Last year, Apple urged elected officials to consider corporate tax reform with four key points, saying that any changes should:Apple is the largest corporate taxpayer in America, having paid $7 billion to the U.S. Treasury in fiscal 2013. Apple has said its payments account for $1 in every $40 in corporate income tax the U.S. Treasury collected last year.Apple and other companies pay a notoriously low international tax rate thanks to the use of corporations in Ireland, where the laws allow for legal tax havens to be established. The U.S. government investigated Apple and found that the company's international tax policies did not break any laws, though the European Commission announced earlier Wednesday that it also plans to investigate Apple for potential tax evasion.Officials at Apple have adamantly claimed that the company pays all of the taxes that are legally required of it."Every single dollar," Chief Executive Tim Cook said last year. "We not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the laws."MOTORCYCLISTS are taking the law into their own hands over London’s scooter crime wave by forming vigilante groups to catch them, it has been claimed.
A leaflet pinned to a noticeboard in London’s Ace Café called on riders to ‘Come TMAX hunting,’ according to Bikerandbike.co.uk.
Reports of thefts and robberies by scooter gangs, labelled ‘moped muggers’ by the press, have become an almost daily occurrence in recent weeks.
Incidents caught on film include attempted bike jackings, mobile phone robberies and a botched mugging which left the victim with a broken leg.
The gangs strike more than once an hour in London, with 11,000 incidents including robberies and acid attacks recorded last year, according to recently revealed figures.
The leaflet calls for action specifically against motorcycle theft, saying: ‘Had your bike stolen recently?? Want to catch these f*****s?? Sort ‘em?? Come TMAX hunting with Jack Th’ Lad.’
The notice includes a telephone number which has been obscured from an image posted on Facebook by London Motorcycle Crime, a page campaigning against the problem.
The Ace Cafe confirmed the notice had briefly been on display but added it was “not something we support”.
Superintendent Mark Payne of the Met’s Operation Venice, set up to target scooter-enabled crime, told Huffpost UK that the force “does not support activities by individuals or groups who target suspected criminals”.
He said vigilantes “could be putting themselves at risk” and could also “jeopardise or interfere with ongoing investigations”.
He said: “Our advice to anyone who has information about a suspect or witnesses a crime is to contact police as soon as possible so it can be investigated and, where possible, bring people to justice.”High-profile Orlando attorney John Morgan is leading an effort in Florida to legalize medical marijuana, arguing that the drug is safer and cheaper than other painkillers.
As a recent guest on Bay News 9’s Political Connections, Morgan also discussed whether marijuana is addictive.
"Nobody's addicted to it," Morgan claimed.
We decided to fact-check Morgan’s claim based on input from readers. But we didn’t have to dig too far. Morgan told us he was wrong.
"It was a huge mistake," said Morgan. "I’m sorry and embarrassed I messed up."
Morgan said he was "flat out wrong" about marijuana not being addictive and meant to focus on the use of the drug compared to more potent painkillers.
"Some levels of addiction kill you -- marijuana may make you slow, but it will never kill you," said Morgan, a personal injury attorney who is leading the group People United for Medical Marijuana. The group has launched a petition drive to add an amendment to the state’s Constitution to legalize medical marijuana in 2014.
Even though Morgan said he made a mistake, we were curious enough to check a few more sources.
Aaron Norton, a psychotherapist who specializes in addictive disorders, said that "cannabis dependence is a diagnosable disorder."
"Not everyone who uses it becomes addicted," said Norton, but some are more vulnerable, including people with mental disorders, adolescents and young adults.
"In the course of my career, I have probably treated hundreds of patients who are cannabis-dependent, and many of them also met the two diagnostic criteria associated with physiological dependence -- tolerance and withdrawal," Norton said.
Marijuana abuse is recognized as cannabis-use disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual’s list of symptoms include craving; taking larger doses over a longer period of time than intended; recurrent use that results in failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school or home; and tolerance (needing more to get the desired high).
It’s also described as an addictive substance by the government-funded National Institute on Drug Abuse, which writes: "Estimates from research suggest that about 9 percent of users become addicted to marijuana; this number increases among those who start young (to about 17 percent, or 1 in 6) and among daily users (to 25-50 percent)."
Psychiatrist Dr. Darren Rothschild, an addiction medicine specialist, says he’s worked with patients who have developed a serious dependence on marijuana and "the impact is substantial."
"In order to feel normal, they have to have the drug," Rothschild said. "Not everyone who smokes becomes addicted, but it’s erroneous to say it doesn’t happen."
Rothschild said people who smoke marijuana daily over a long period of time are the ones most susceptible to dependence on marijuana versus intermittent smokers who may occasionally smoke pot at a party. "I’d say none of those people are addicted."
Dr. Samir Sabbag, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment and Research, said "long-term use of marijuana is indeed addictive," though he noted people can be addicted to a variety of things, including the caffeine in chocolate and coffee.
Even groups that support relaxing marijuana laws, such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), concede that Morgan was incorrect to say that marijuana is not potentially addictive.
"Can people have an abusive relationship with marijuana? Absolutely," said NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre. But St. Pierre says marijuana is "not addictive in any way shape or form the same way that alcohol, nicotine and other legal and illegal drugs, even caffeine, can cause serious withdrawal."
Our ruling
Orlando attorney John Morgan said that "nobody’s addicted to" marijuana. Morgan quickly admitted that he was wrong, and experts agreed.
We rate the claim False.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption President Obama wants to allow more US citizens to visit Cuba
The US House of Representatives has voted to keep restrictions on US citizens travelling to Cuba, despite a recent thaw in relations.
The Republican-controlled chamber rejected proposals to allow regular scheduled flights to the island.
It also said a rule should remain requiring Americans to get a special licence before going to Cuba.
The House was voting on a transport funding bill which has provisions related to Cuba.
President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill.
New rules issued by the Obama administration in January were aimed at easing travel restrictions to Cuba and allowing scheduled flights for the first time.
But Republican Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart said the White House was wrong to lift the restrictions.
He said it would mean flights landing at an airport that was partially owned by US interests when it was seized by the Cuban government.
"What you are saying is, 'It's OK to do business on property that was stolen from Americans'," said Mr Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American.
The thaw in relations between the US and Cuba was announced late last year in simultaneous televised speeches by President Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raul Castro.
President Obama, a Democrat, used his executive powers to ease the embargo that has existed for more than 50 years, defying hardline critics.
However, the issue is caught in a battle between Republicans, who control Congress, and the White House.The video will start in 8 Cancel
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Banksy has offered a free print of one of his most famous artworks to Bristolians – but only if they vote against the Tories.
The world-famous street artist is offering the free gift to registered voters in constituencies formerly represented by Conservative MPs.
The Bristol street-artist wrote: “An exclusive new Banksy print will be released on the 9th June.
“This limited edition artwork on archival quality paper is completely free, but is only available to registered voters in the Bristol North West, Bristol West, North Somerset, Thornbury, Kingswood and Filton constituencies.
“Simply send in a photo of your ballot paper from polling day showing you voted against the Conservative incumbent and this complimentary gift will be mailed to you.”
The incumbent MP for Bristol North West is Charlotte Leslie, while Liam Fox represented North Somerset.
Thornbury and Yate was represented by Luke Hall, Kingswood by Chris Skidmore, and Bradley Stoke and Filton by Jack Lopresti.
Bristol West, however, was represented by Labour candidate Thangam Debbonaire.
Banksy said the gift had “no monetary value”.
“This print is a souvenir piece of campaign material, it is in no way meant to influence the choices of the electorate, has no monetary value, is for amusement purposes only and is strictly not for re-sale,” he added.
“Terms and conditions to follow, postage not included.”
A spokesman for Banksy confirmed the status as genuine.
Voting in the General Election takes place on June 8.Imagine the United States if Abraham Lincoln had never been president, the Civil War had never been fought, and it required a series of unending compromises hold a sharply divided nation together. This is the country veteran world-creator Ben H. Winters assembles in his bold, new alternate history, Underground Airlines. While not as pointedly dystopian as his "Last Policeman" trilogy, "Underground Airlines" paints a less than Eden-esque picture of a world power and its citizens tolerating institutionalized racism.
Before he can take the oath of office in Winters's re-construction of history, Lincoln is assassinated. To appease the factions threatening secession, the government adds Constitutional amendments indefinitely protecting slavery in states whose laws permit it. For present day America, that includes four states – "the Hard Four." Winters thoroughly considers technology, culture, and the global economy in his evolution of America's system of captivity. Countries across the globe refuse to trade with the United States, and it's banned from major world organizations like the United Nations.
Despite the compromises, conflict still exists within the US borders. Individual states pass laws against the buying and selling of goods that originate in the Hard Four. The Constitutional amendments prevent the federal government from abolishing slavery completely, but they don't prevent regulations, through which Winters offers up subtle parallels to modern society, "Violent slavery is against the law, but rules are always being broken. Plantations break the rules and apologize publicly and pay the fine and try to be more careful next time."
Winters also considers the current big business of cultural pastimes in his fictional world. The professional football leagues have incredibly wealthy franchise owners increasing their profits using "persons bound to labor" (PBs) on their teams. Publicly people criticize the practice then turn around and buy tickets to events or watch the games on television.
This alternate United States is well thought out, reflecting both superficial differences and startlingly deep-seated similarities to reality. Winters's world is viewed through the eyes of Victor, a federal slave catcher. He works for the US Marshal Service finding escaped PBs in the North so the government can fulfill its Constitutional obligation under the Fugitive Slave Act, returning runaways to their owners in the South. The irony of his situation: He himself is an escaped slave.
A white male giving voice to this narrator may seem daring, possibly even presumptuous, but Winters is keenly aware that colorblindness doesn't exist and in order to infuse this novel with the authenticity necessary for maximum impact, he must be acutely aware of skin color down to the Pantone shade. From inconspicuous thoughts, "The little one-syllable insult, boy, it worked like it always did, like a little chunk of gravel, a pointy rock of disgust and contempt," to blatant public disrespect, "agents of a special division... called Internal Border and Regulation...who walked me through a bank of scanners, who ran their gloved fingers under my tongue, passed hands over my scalp... who ran flat palms over the inches of my flesh," Winters pulls readers into the daily battles Victor incurs in the skin of a black man.
These cultural indignities are compounded by his employment with the Marshals. When Victor was first apprehended a tracking device was implanted in his spine, allowing his handler, Mr. Bridge, to know his exact location at all times. The threat of being returned South constantly looms over him if he considers running or intentionally botching an assignment.
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Victor's current job, an escapee known as Jackdaw, is believed to be hiding in Indianapolis, awaiting his connecting flight through a young |
angry, the hateful, and the mentally unstable. And that won’t change whether the deaths are caused by bullets or by knives flying through the air at 1,500 miles per hour.
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All that cracking down on gun ownership would accomplish is violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans, while doing absolutely nothing to stop some sick, twisted person from murdering dozens with a rapid-fire dagger blaster six months from now, or in a year, or next week, or however long it takes them to devise such a device as well as a method of quickly and efficiently reloading dozens upon dozens of knives into the weapon’s launching chamber and then carrying out their horrific plans.
And don’t say we could just prevent that by banning knife launchers. A criminal could easily kill just as many people with a fully automatic baseball bat flinger.“I think the whole thing is a wonderfully fabulous way to protest,” said Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor of The Advocate, the gay news magazine. “It’s peaceful and it doesn’t hurt anybody. But it does get a really important point across in a fun way.” The phenomenon reflects the tenor of an evolving movement. The violence of the Stonewall riots in 1969, and the rage-fueled antics of Act Up in the 1980s and 1990s, spoke to a time when homosexuals were still persecuted by the police and AIDS was regarded as an automatic death sentence.
Now, as civil unions are busting out all over, H.I.V. is being brought to heel, and persons of different sexual orientations are assimilating into the American mainstream, glitter bombing is a decidedly less angry alternative.
“I think what you’re seeing now is a generational change,” Ms. Anderson-Minshall said. “It’s not more frivolous, but it is more lovely.”
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Less confrontational than spattering fur coats with red paint to promote animal rights, or throwing pies at opponents, glitter bombing generally doesn’t yield dry cleaning bills. But glitter bombs have staying power. Weeks after the incident, the victim will probably still be brushing off pesky, iridescent pieces of the stuff, a tangible reminder of an issue that won’t go away.
Admittedly, this works both ways. “This morning I rolled out of bed,” Mr. Espinosa said weeks after his first bombing, “and found a piece of glitter still on me.”
Not everyone is convinced that glitter bombing (or “glittering,” for those who emphasize its nonviolent overtones) is a kinder, gentler form of pranksterism. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, told Fox News, “The people ought to be arrested who did this.”
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When Mr. Gingrich was glittered, he said, “Nice to live in a free country.” Since then, his position has hardened.
“Glitter bombing is clearly an assault and should be treated as such,” he said in an e-mail. “When someone reaches into a bag and throws something on you, how do you know if it is acid or something that stains permanently or something that can blind you? People have every right to their beliefs but no right to assault others.”
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The legality of glittering isn’t clear. “I don’t think you’d get much disagreement that like so much else in the law, it’s all a matter of degree,” the First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said in an e-mail. “Touching someone’s body can be criminal. But it’s awfully unlikely that there would be a prosecution if it’s just a bit of glitter. But in theory, the more that’s dropped, the more likely is prosecution.”
So far, none of this season’s glitter bombers have been sued. One reason may be that the targets do not want to appear humorless — or litigious. But would the glitterati be so mirthful if an equivalent weapon were unleashed against them? Conceivably, a Tea Party member might pelt a liberal opponent with mounds of dried orange pekoe, with little or no lasting effect. Clumps of wet leaves, however, would be likelier to cling, stain or worse.
Don’t laugh. Provocateurs who hit Willie Brown, then the mayor of San Francisco, with three pies in 1998 to protest his policies toward the homeless were convicted on misdemeanor battery charges and sentenced to six months in prison. And the conservative activist Tim Eyman, who sought to reduce funds for public transit, claimed that he suffered corneal abrasion and chemical burns after he was hit with a pie. “We have been really careful to make sure that we wouldn’t do anything that could hurt anyone,” Ms. Lang said. “That includes the size of the glitter, which is so big that it can’t get into anyone’s eyes.” Indeed, she said that when a security guard removed her from the Bachmann forum, all he told her was, “Thank you for using the large glitter.”
Activists are already speculating about who should be next on the “glit” parade. The Yahoo News site The Ticket suggested that the most likely candidate was the former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. But anyone who is deemed insufficiently supportive of the L.G.B.T. agenda, Republican or Democrat, is fair game.
“I disagree with Barack Obama on a lot of things,” Ms. Lang said after her confrontation with Mrs. Bachmann. “If he were here, I would glitter him, too.”I don’t usually get around to doing awards posts, but I got nominated by three people to do the Memory Lane Challenge and couldn’t resist 🙂 I got to relive my five favorite moments from this legacy (so far 😛 ) Feel free to check it out, if you’d like!
—————————————–
Okay, that went WAY better than expected… And I’m so damn relieved it did!
After listening to mom and Papa beg for like, weeks, I finally gave in and let them invite Rylie and Devin over for dinner. I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever… But I was dreading it so, so much.
Part of me was worried about what my parents would think of them (obviously). But I think another part of me was afraid of the opposite. Like, that mom and Papa would be super annoying and lame, or they’d say something to make me look bad, or… I dunno. I was just scared. Which is totally stupid.
I should be WAY past the point of still trying to impress Rylie and Devin. But there are still times when I look at the two of them and I get all… nervous. Just like how I used to feel when we first started hanging out. It’s so dumb, but I just can’t help it!
Rylie was the one who finally got me to calm down about it. She’s really good at that, actually. It’s like she can make anything better without even trying. All she has to do is smile and tell me it’s gonna be okay (sometimes with a bunch of teasing and swearing thrown in for good measure, but it still works!).
And in the end, she was right. Everything was fine.
I mean, she and Devin helped a lot with that. They were really polite during dinner, and kinda quieter than usual too… They even wore jackets to cover up most of their tattoos. It was really weird to see them like that. But I know it helped them make a good impression on everybody.
I should probably give a little credit to Mom and Papa too though — they were on their best behavior too. I mean, Papa tried to make a couple of super lame jokes and mom did call me ‘Pumpkin’ at one point… But besides that, they were actually pretty cool.
I guess the only time it got a little awkward when they brought up school, and how great I’ve been doing in history class ever since our project…
Thank God Devin’s so quick on his feet. He told mom and Papa he’s been ‘helping me study’ (Which, y’know, is code for ‘doing my homework for me and letting me copy his answers on tests’…) But they totally bought it. Dev’s so damn smooth all the time. It’s incredible.
Anyway, after we got past that little bump, everything else was okay, I guess. Rylie and Devin gushed over Papa’s cooking. Oma asked Devin about some of his artwork (he was smart enough not to mention the graffiti, of course!). Mom shared some stories about when she used to live in San Myshuno. And Rylie and Devin spent most of dessert admiring Tante Clara’s tattoos.
I was really happy she was here with us tonight. I mean, if anybody can understand me and my friends, it’s gotta be her.
Still… What a freaking relief to be able to escape! As soon as we finished eating, we headed straight for the door. We didn’t really have a direction in mind or anything… we almost never do. I think we were all just so damn anxious to get out of there!
It felt so good to stop worrying about putting on a show for my parents and stuff. We could go back to just being ourselves. And it was so easy too. We ended up falling right into our normal routine once we made it out into the city.
First we stopped by the drugstore so I could use my “discount”, as Rylie likes to call it. I told them I wanted to buy some gum, but I really just needed a quick little fix.
It had been a few days since I was able to snag anything, so I was kinda itching for the chance to get my hands on something… It didn’t matter what it was, really. But saying I wanted gum was a lot easier to explain to Rylie and Devin.
I hate to say it, but I’m kinda starting to get the feeling they’re judging me for swiping stuff. It started out as a joke for the two of them… But I guess it’s become something more for me. And I don’t think they really get it.
Part of me keeps wanting to feel bad about taking stuff. And sometimes, I almost do. But I mean, it’s not like it’s anything that anyone would actually miss. It never is. That CD I took a few weeks ago is probably the most valuable thing I’ve ever taken. Now it’s just dumb shit like that little pack of gum (okay, and a few stupid bottles of nail polish too). And I don’t even wear nail polish! But… that’s not the point, obviously.
Anyway, I just threw them in my pocket, and it was no big deal. God, that rush though! I don’t think it’ll ever get old!
Rylie was kind of a buzzkill though. She rolled her eyes when she found out what I did, and called me a ‘klepto’. I know she was just teasing though. We were laughing about it all the way to the empty lot behind the bowling alley.
Devin had started a painting back there last week, and I guess he’s been dying to finish it. Luckily, no one had tried getting rid of it yet.
The three of us hung out together for a couple hours while he finished up. Rylie sang a couple of the new 12 Minutes to Jupiter songs. Devin went on a big rant about the plot holes in the new Alien spinoff. We bitched about the history essay Mr. Asche assigned us yesterday. I told them about the plans for the next chapter of my story. You get the idea.
Before we knew it, Devin was finally done. He got a good laugh when I offered to let him use the nail polish to add a few finishing touches to the mural. But he didn’t say no either. And in the end, it came out amazing. “A fucking masterpiece,” Rylie called it. Maybe the best thing he’s ever done. (Definitely thanks to the nail polish, of course… Ha!)
Speaking of which, I actually ended up keeping a few of the half empty bottles we had left over. A little ‘trophy’, Dev calls it (totally rolling my eyes at that one).
Anyway, I added them to the little collection of random knick knacks I have hanging out in one of my drawers. Other little stuff I’ve managed to swipe lately. I don’t even know why I keep any of that crap. It’s kinda pointless, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to like, destroy the evidence or something?
I dunno. I guess I just like holding on to them. It’s hard to really explain why though. Like… a way to remember the rush, maybe? Or a reminder that I’m not the perfect little princess my parents want me to be?
Shit. Dev’s right, huh?
They’re totally trophies.
Is that weird?
It’s weird, isn’t it?
But so what if it is? I think I’m finally figuring out that being normal is WAY overrated.
AdvertisementsUmami Burger Hollywood 9 Course Burger and Drink Tasting
If you consider yourself a burger lover, Umami Burger is the spot for you. With locations across Southern California, Umami has been delighting customers since 2009 with their innovative burger creations. The Hollywood location boasts 11 unique burgers, and for many, it can be difficult to choose only one to try.
So, Umami Burger Hollywood has introduced the Ultimate Umami Tasting experience. This includes eight burgers (each paired with a drink) and three sides. I had the opportunity to taste it for myself, and let me just say, I’m glad I had a smoothie for lunch that day. This nine course tasting event will leave you delightfully full.
Course 1
The first course includes Thin Fries, Sweet Potato Fries, and Tempura Onion Rings. Oh, and a glass of Real Sugar Mountain Dew to wash it all down. These sides are delicious and easy to fill up on right away. I would advise you to make them last as long as possible throughout your meal.
Course 2
This is when things start to get meaty. Introducing the Truffle Burger, which comes served with truffled aioli, house truffle cheese, and a truffle glaze. This comes with a Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout. This beer is deep and dark, but with plenty of flavor thanks to the roasted malts, chocolate and caramel flavors, and hints of espresso.
Course 3
My personal favorite burger of the night came next— the Manly Burger. This was made with house beer-cheddar cheese, bacon lardons, smoked-salt onion strings, Umami ketchup, and mustard spread. And if you didn’t get enough bacon from the burger, don’t worry. It comes with a Maple Bacon Old Fashioned.
Course 4
They say variety is the spice of life. So out next came the Ahi Tuna Burger. It is a seared ahi patty with daikon sprouts, crushed avocado, gingered carrots, wasabi flake, and wasabi tartar. This burger came with a sample of the Victory Golden Monkey, a Belgian style tripel with fruity and herbal notes.
Course 5
Next up was the Hatch Burger. This patty is infused with roasted hatch chilies, house Cali cheese, and roasted garlic aioli. It came with a Velvet Mule, the prettiest drink of the night. The mule was made with Tito’s Handmade Vodka fresh lime juice, ginger beer, bitters, and mint.
Course 6
The Greenbird was next. What’s the Greenbird? It is a turkey patty, crushed avocado, green cheese, butter lettuce, sprouts, and green goddess. This was served with a delicious 2013 Laurenz Gruner Veltliner infused with apple, peach, and citrus.
Course 7
Next came the Cali Burger. It was a patty served with butter lettuce, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, house spread, and house Cali cheese. On the side with had a Spicy Mezcalrita. Lunazul Blanco Tequila and Pama Pomegranate Liquor made this drink a potent pairing.
Course 8
Now in the home stretch, we were brought the Throwback Burger made with two 3.5 oz. patties, white cheddar cheese, miso mustard, Umami ketchup, soy pickles, and minced onions. This burger came with a glass of Real Sugar Pepsi.
Course 9
Last but not least was the classic Umami Burger made with Parmesan frico, shiitake mushroom, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, and Umami ketchup. A glass of red wine finished off the evening.
Basically, this tasting is delicious and so worth it, but if you can successfully drink and eat everything on your table, you deserve a prize because it is A LOT of food. Umami encourages you to have 4 people when you do this tasting with good reason. So next time you and your friends are looking for a fun new way to try a bunch of burgers, look no further than Umami Burger.
Umami Burger Hollywood
1520 North Cahuenga Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028
323-469-3100
Hours:
Sun – Thurs
11am – 11pm
Fri – Sat
Price/Additional Info
They suggest to split by 4. 9-course tasting menu with drinks ($175) ($95 without drinks)
Meant for four people – for additional people there is a fee ($20 per person)Untitled Document
As living creatures, we all have to consume nutrients in order to live. But, as humans, we eat for many other reasons beyond mere survival.
We eat to celebrate, to socialize and to bring us together with our loved ones. Some folks eat compulsively to mask fears, or competitively to win prizes. But none of us, it seems, can resist succumbing at times to one of food's greatest charms: its ability to calm our nerves, to make us forget our workday woes and to transport us back to happier times.
In City Weekly's 2015 Dining & Bar Guide, the focus is on food for the soul. We ask local chefs where they go to feed their bellies and nourish their souls. We list some of Salt Lake City's best food trucks, discover the best local pizza & beer pairings and, yes, we even indulge in some comforting bites (and a beverage or two) from some of our favorite bars.
So please, enjoy reading our 2015 Dining & Bar Guide while snacking on some of the best comfort food Utah has to offer. Forget about your waistline for the moment—comfort food is good for the soul.
Soup's On!
A dozen nourishing soups for the soul
By Ted Scheffler
Sure it's a culinary cliché, but a piping hot bowl of soup really can soothe the soul, and is even purported to have healing powers. And yet, soups, chilis and stews seem to appear on fewer and fewer restaurant menus. So, where's the soup? I'm sure City Weekly readers have their favorites; here are a dozen of mine.
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I'd walk a mile for a steaming bowl of French onion soup with lovingly rendered onions in a dark, rich broth with a gratin of Gruyere and toasted baguette slices. Or, I could just mosey over to The Paris Bistro (1500 S. 1500 East, 801-486-5585, TheParis.net) for a tureen of its deliciously satisfying gratinée à l'oignon, knowing that there's also a plethora of French wines available to drink with it.
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I've been in mourning ever since Elvis Nixon's Chili Parlor in Sandy closed well over a decade ago. That's because a good bowl of housemade chili is hard to find. What a surprise, then, to find excellent chili con carne made from scratch at a deli—Boston Deli (9 Exchange Place, 801-355-2146, BostonDeli.com), to be precise. Its beefy chili with beans sticks to the ribs with just the right amount of spice, plus crackers and cornbread on the side.
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For clam chowder, I usually go to one of the places that has been doing it here the longest: Market Street Grill & Oyster Bar (various locations, MarketStreetGrill.com). Market Street chowder is brimming with chunky potatoes, celery, onion, leeks, green pepper and clams, lightly seasoned with thyme and bay, all served up with Market Street's scrumptious sourdough bread.
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When I eat at Feldman's Deli (2005 E. 2700 South, 801-906-0369,FeldmansDeli.com), I'm always in a quandary. The sandwiches like the Reuben and Sloppy Joe are so filling that there's not really much room for extras. However, it's also hard for me to ever pass up the homemade matzo ball soup, with airy matzo balls, scrumptious chicken broth and just the right amount of schmaltz.
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I'm a lentil lover. I love black beluga lentils, green lentils, red and yellow lentils—if it's a lentil, I love it. So, it's no wonder I'm partial to the red-lentil soup at Layla Mediterranean Grill and Mezze (4751 S. Holladay Blvd., 801-272-9111, LaylaGrill.com). It's a hearty mélange of onions and red lentils, cooked down and puréed with spices, and served with homemade pita chips.
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My Greek friends and colleagues would tan my hide if I didn't mention my favorite avgolemono. It's a Greek soup typically made with chicken broth that's thickened with eggs, subtly spiked with lemon, and usually contains rice or orzo. For my money, it's hard to beat Aristo's (224 S. 1300 East, 801-581-0888, AristosSLC.com) for avgolemono—or any other Greek fare, for that matter.
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There are plenty of places here to get good Vietnamese pho, and I frequent a number of them. My favorite—especially if I'm in the neighborhood—is the pho at Pho Tay Ho (1766 S. Main, 801-466-3650, PhoTayHo.com). I usually start with fresh shrimp spring rolls before digging into the fragrant pho, made with a beautiful broth that simmers overnight and comes with a choice of brisket, flank, tendon, steak, tripe or meatballs, or even a combination of all of them.
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Thank goodness there's at least one non-chain business in Salt Lake City that specializes in soup. Not surprisingly, The Soup Kitchen (various locations, SLCSoup.com) serves up an array of homemade soups, and I love the cream of tomato. The chicken noodle, has thick, dumpling-style noodles like my mom made. Still, it's the timeless flavors of its split-pea with ham soup that serves as a nostalgic kick in the soul for me.
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Having a best friend who lives in New Orleans, I'm exposed to gobs of gumbo. When I have a hankering for that Cajun-Creole soup/stew here, I always turn to The Bayou (645 S. State, 801-961-8400, UtahBayou.com). I normally order the standard chicken sausage gumbo with rice, but if you're feeling flush, you can add crawfish or shrimp for a couple extra bucks. The only thing missing is the Abita beer. But, hey, you'll have hundreds of other Bayou beer options to choose from.
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Ramen is the new "it girl" of soups. And, judging from the lines for tables at Tosh's Ramen (1465 S. State, 801-466-7000, ToshsRamen.com),Chef Tosh doesn't need my help. But I'd be lying if I didn't say this was my favorite Salt Lake City ramen. Tosh makes his broth from scratch, simmering bones overnight, and I love the quality of the excellent wheat and egg noodles from Los Angeles' Sun Noodle company. You can't beat the tonkatsu at Tosh's.
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Italy's classic pasta e fagioli—a tomato and mirepoix-based broth with white beans and small pasta pieces such as ditalini—is one of my favorites, a hearty soup to enjoy year-round. When I'm looking for the real deal, I head to Per Noi Trattoria (1588 E. Stratford Ave., 801-486-3333,PerNoiTrattoria.com) for Chef Francesco's excellent, authentic Italian fare.
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With a recently updated interior, there's even more reason to try the menudo at Taqueria El Rey de Oros (175 S. 900 West, 801-322-3176). Sure, the dollar tacos are hard to beat. But I love the big steaming bowl of menudo: breakfast of champions. The tripe stew with red chile broth here is homemade and soul-affirming,but don't look for it on weekdays. It's a Saturday-Sunday specialty.
Soup's on!New York, NY—October 27th, 2016 — It’s that time of year again. Black cats, Jack-o-Lanterns, legions of monsters and, most importantly Halloween Comic Fest! Marvel is returning to comic stores this weekend for another exciting celebration of Halloween and comics!
“Just like Free Comic Book Day, Halloween ComicFest is a great way for fans to support their stores and publishers to support retailers,” says Marvel SVP Sales & Marketing David Gabriel. “This year, we’re offering four exciting titles to whet fans appetites and get a taste of some of the great things happening in the Marvel Universe!”
Your local comic shop is the place to be this Saturday, October 29th to get your hands on 4 exciting FREE titles from the House of Ideas! Don’t know where your nearest comic shop is? Don’t worry! Head over to http://halloweencomicfest.com/StoreLocator to find a participating store near you! Head to your local comic shop this Saturday to get your hands on free copies of SPIDEY #1 HCF EDITION, THE HAUNTED MANSION #1 HCF EDITION, STAR WARS: DOCTOR APHRA #1 HCF EDITIONand THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL: YOU CHOOSE THE STORY #1 HCF EDITION while supplies last!
Want to be the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl? What about relive the thrilling first appearance of Doctor Aphra? Are you ready to enter the Haunted Mansion? This Halloween, celebrate at your local comic shop by with free comics and fun activities. Don’t miss Halloween ComicFest, happening at participating stores this Saturday – October 29th!A LOST tribe living in the isolation of an American backwater and a bridge where dogs seemingly go to die - these are just some of the mysteries that are still leaving anthropologists and animal experts baffled.
A far cry from the well-known tales of the Loch Ness Monster and Jack the Ripper, these unknown, unsolved mysteries have flown under the radar.
And they still keep the world wondering as we try to solve their never-ending puzzles.
AMERICA'S LOST TRIBE
Who were the Melungeons? For centuries, these mysterious residents lived in isolation in the central Appalachian Mountains, almost invisible to the American mainstream.
Considered one of the world's greatest anthropological mysteries, the Melungeons lived off the beaten track, hidden away on inaccessible mountain ridges.
Traditionally dark-featured and visibly different from their white, black and Native American neighbours, their ethnic origin has been a source of debate for centuries. Over the years, they've been dubbed American gypsies, Portuguese, descendants of the "lost colony" of Roanoke, and members of a wayward Israeli tribe.
The term Melungeon was traditionally considered an insult and Melungeons were the victims of legal discrimination and racial prejudice well into the 20th century.
It wasn't until the 1960s, when other racial groups found a new pride in their identity, that the Melungeon revisited their own. Rather than reject the term - which had been used against them - they reclaimed it.
Researchers are still trying to crack the Melungeons' DNA code using DNA patterns, oral histories and court records.
THE OVERTOUN BRIDGE
The Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland, has become famous for the number of unexplained instances in which dogs have leapt to their deaths.
The first incident was recorded in the 1950s when it was noticed that dogs would suddenly and unexpectedly jump off the bridge and fall to their deaths. What makes it even more mysterious is that many of the dogs jump from the same side and from almost the same spot: between the final two parapets on the right-hand side of the bridge.
In the past 50 years, some 50 dogs have leapt to their deaths from the bridge.
During one six-month period in 2006, five dogs jumped to their deaths.
The dogs affected are mainly long-nosed breeds: labradors, collies and retrievers.
Dorren Graham, of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals told the Daily Mail the phenomenon was a "heartbreaking mystery".
"There are lots of owners whose dogs have died and who are trying to find out why they jumped."
THE UNCRACKABLE CODE
Carved on an 18th century monument in the grounds of a stately English home, the Shugborough inscription is a cryptic sequence of letters that still has historians baffled.
The reason for the inclusion of the letters DOUOSVAVVM on the Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough Hall is a mystery.
The code - which left even Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin stumped - has been called one of the world's top uncracked ciphertexts.
The carver's identity is a mystery but some have speculated that it could be clue left behind by the Knights Templar about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
THE CIRCLEVILLE LETTER WRITER
It looks like any other quaint all-American town. But in 1976, residents of Circleville, Ohio, began receiving mysterious, harassing letters. Thousands of letters, written in block letters were sent to city officials and citizens.
The bizarre campaign turned deadly when one recipient, a school bus driver, received a letter accusing her of having an extra-marital affair.
When her husband drove off to confront the writer after receiving a phone call, he was killed in an unexplained crash.
The woman's brother-in-law, thought to be the letter writer, was later convicted of her attempted murder. However, while he was in jail the letters continued despite him being in solitary confinement and the identity of the writer was never confirmed.
THE ZODIAC KILLER
In the late 60s and early 70s, the Zodiac Killer terrorised northern California, murdering four men and three women. The killer sent letters containing four cryptograms to the local media. Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved. Despite several people coming forward over the years claiming to know the identity of the killer, the murderer's identity is still unknown.
THE ANGEL OF MONS
One of the legends of World War I, the Angel of Mons supposedly safeguarded members of the British Army in a case of divine intervention.
In April 1915, an account was published in the British Spiritualist magazine describing how soldiers had visions of a supernatural force that intervened to help the British at the decisive moment of battle.
This led to other accounts of a strange luminous cloud descending but the most popular version came to be an angelic warrior.
The supernatural visions bear strong similarities to those in a short story by Arthur Machen, published in the Evening Post in September 1914.
THE WOW! SIGNAL
In 1977, American researcher Jerry Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space when he saw his measurements spike.
The signal lasted for 72 seconds and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before: in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light-years away.
Ehman wrote the words "Wow!" on the printout of the signal.
All attempts to locate the signal again failed, leading to much mystery about its meaning.
THE CARNAC STONES
And you wonder how Stonehenge was built? On the coast of Brittany in northwestern France are over 3000 megalithic standing stones arranged in perfect lines and spread out over 12 kilometres. How they got there in the first place is a mystery and the identity of the Neolithic people who built them remains unknown.LAGOS -- A Nigerian accused of scamming $60 million from companies around the world through fraudulent emails has been arrested after months of investigation, Interpol and Nigeria's anti-fraud agency said Monday.
One target paid out $15.4 million, according to a statement.
The statement said the ringleader of a global scamming network, identified only as a 40-year-old called Mike, was arrested along with a 38-year-old accomplice in Nigeria's oil capital, Port Harcourt, in June. He is on administrative bail, which implies that officers do not yet have enough evidence to charge him in court.
Are Russians behind the DNC breaches?
The man is accused of leading a criminal network that compromised email accounts of small and medium-sized businesses around the world including in the United States, Australia, Canada, India, Malaysia, Romania, South Africa and Thailand. The statement didn't name any of the targets.
The network involved about 40 people in Nigeria, Malaysia and South Africa who provided malware and carried out the frauds, with money-laundering contacts in China, Europe and the United States providing bank account details.
A supplier's email would be compromised and fake messages sent to a buyer with instructions for payment to a bank account under the network's control, the statement said. Or the email account of a high-level executive would be taken over and a request for a wire transfer sent to an employee responsible for handling such requests.
Such crime "poses a significant and growing threat, with tens of thousands of companies victimized in recent years," Noboru Nakatani, executive director of the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation, said in a statement. "The public, and especially businesses, need to be alert to this type of cyber-enabled fraud."
Nigeria is notorious for internet fraud. The U.S. Embassy says it receives inquiries every day from Americans who have been defrauded.With this week’s budget and its official embrace of tying Social Security benefits to the “chained” consumer price index, Barack Obama officially becomes the first Democratic president in history to propose any cuts to the program so venerated and beloved by liberals everywhere. Put that way, it sounds completely indefensible. The reality, of course—well, not “of course” to a lot of people, but “of course” to me—is that the Republicans will never accept tax increases, so it’s all fictional anyway. So assume with me no deal and ponder the politics of this, heading into 2014 and even into 2016. If things go the way I think they will, Obama and the Democrats will come out of this looking good, although almost entirely by accident.
As you should know by now, indexing Social Security benefits to the chained CPI will reduce benefits especially as recipients get into their 80s. Obama wants cushions built into the new indexing that will soften the blow for these people and says it’s a precondition for his own support for the change. The other precondition is Republicans agreeing to revenues. If those don’t happen, he says, he takes chained CPI off the table and becomes the first Democratic president ever to offer a cut to Social Security and then withdraw it.
And this is what is almost certainly going to happen. Republicans, from John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to Paul Ryan to Ted Cruz to every Dixie back-bencher, have said it a thousand times if they’ve said it once: Obama got his revenue in the fiscal-cliff deal. No more.
Do you see any reason not to take them at their word? I see none. The only argument against this is that indeed, back in January, as the fiscal-cliff clock was ticking down to midnight, Republicans did agree to some revenue increases. But in the Senate, nearly every Republican voted for a bill that watered down Obama’s revenue requests considerably (he’d wanted a higher rate to kick in on dollars earned above $250,000, but the Senate changed it to $450,000). And in the House, only 85 Republicans backed the agreement. John Boehner had to break the Hastert rule to get the deal through. His top deputies voted against it. There was a big pile of commentary at the time about how it weakened him within his caucus.
Those votes came to pass for one reason and one reason only: tax rates on all Americans were about to go up if Congress didn’t act. And so, Congress acted. Period. Now that is off the table, and off the table for good—the worst aspect of the fiscal-cliff deal is that it made the Bush rates permanent instead of Congress having to renew them every five years. So that’s what made the fiscal-cliff deal come together, and it’s why so many Republicans in the Senate and just enough in the House backed it.
But that particular sword of Damocles has floated off into the ether. There is no similar pressure point today that would make Republicans accept more revenues. So in my view, they won’t. This general and vague “public pressure” that some folks discuss with hope doesn’t exist for today’s GOP. If they can find ways to mock and minimize and ignore public opinion on background checks, they’ll do it on everything.
And let’s just imagine for the sake of argument that McConnell and Boehner did agree to a deal. Would such a compromise, including tax revenues substantial enough for Obama to agree to it, get enough GOP votes to pass? Remember, in the Senate Obama would lose a few votes on the left—Bernie Sanders for sure, maybe two or three others. And in the House, Obama would lose, oh, 30 or 40 (or more) liberal Democrats, meaning that passage—of a bill to raise taxes!—would depend on Republicans. No chance.
It’s an interesting question whether Obama knows this. Theory A is that of course he knows this perfectly well, so he knows the chained CPI change will |
economic misery on the rest doesn’t suddenly make us racist anymore than telling Nigel Farage to do one does. We shouldn’t be afraid of an open debate or see it as a sign of weakness – we should tackle the Kippers head on. We can only do this by calling out the undemocratic institutions and the entrenched economic policies which don’t work for the benefit of the people of Europe. I’ve barely touched on the massively corrupt gravy train that is the Parliament (something UKIP have more than touched in the past of course). There are so many reasons why we should be fighting to reform Europe for the better, or arguing for better policies outside of the narrow EU framework.
The Eurosceptic right wing of British politics has little currency in Scotland, but assuming that the EU offers a progressive alternative to their policies is a problematic road to be walking along. The world into which our new state will be plunged is increasingly multi-polar with emerging economies like China, Brazil and India challenging the monopolies once held by the US and the EU. We will be faced with the need to make bold choices about what kind of society we want to be in the face of the griding austerity imposed by Westminster, even after independence. The idea that Brussels will allow us to set our own path in that respect doesn’t hold much weight. Talking about building a progressive, outward looking independent country with real power to make radical changes doesn’t suddenly make us Tories or xenophobes.
We need to tackle the EU on our terms and not theirs. We can’t give up the debate to bigots whose only answer seems to be to physically remove our landmass from the rest of the world and hope no-one will ever want to come here. We need to ensure that Scotland isn’t bungled in to the EU without a proper debate or, dare I say, a referendum. Putting all Scotland’s eggs in the EU basket may be a risky strategy, given the EU’s form for making omelettes out of it’s citizens when its economic policies fail.
Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AThousandFlowersIn this post we introduce the “register cache”, an optimization technique that develops a virtual caching layer for threads in a single warp. It is a software abstraction implemented on top of the NVIDIA GPU shuffle primitive. This abstraction helps optimize kernels that use shared memory to cache thread inputs. When the kernel is transformed by applying this optimization, the data ends up being distributed across registers in the threads of each warp, and shared memory accesses are replaced with accesses to registers in other threads by using shuffle, thereby enabling significant performance benefits.
We develop the register cache abstraction and show how to use it in the context of a simple kernel that computes a 1D-stencil. We then provide a general recipe for transforming a kernel to use the register cache, evaluate its performance, and discuss its limitations. A more elaborate analysis and evaluation are presented in our paper: “Fast Multiplication in Binary Fields on GPUs via Register Cache.”
Where is the Warp-Level Cache?
GPU kernels may store data in the following three memory layers: global memory, shared memory and registers (see Figure 1). These layers effectively form a hierarchy in terms of size, performance and scope of sharing: the largest and slowest—global memory—is shared across all the kernel threads; smaller but much faster shared memory is shared across the threads of a single thread block; and the smallest and fastest—registers—are private to each thread.
You can view each layer in the memory hierarchy as a cache for the respective layer in the execution hierarchy. Specifically, shared memory serves as a cache for the threads in a thread block, while registers allow “caching” of data in a single thread.
Interestingly, as Figure 1 shows, a single warp does not have its own explicit caching layer. Thus, kernels that follow a warp-centric design do not have a specialized memory layer in hardware in which to cache the warp’s input.
Caching in Registers Using Shuffle
In the CUDA Kepler microarchitecture (2012) NVIDIA introduced the SHFL (shuffle) instruction, which enables intra-warp communication. The primitive function shfl_sync(m, r, t) enables an issuing thread to share a value stored in register r while reading the value shared by thread t in the same warp (m is a 32-bit mask of participating threads within the warp). Figure 2 presents the semantics of shfl_sync(). More detailed description can be found in a previous Parallel Forall blog post.
There are a few good reasons to use registers for data sharing among threads in a warp.
The bandwidth to registers is higher and the access latency is lower compared to shared memory. The use of shfl_sync() eliminates the need for expensive thread block-wise synchronization via __syncthreads() or a memory fence between writing and reading threads (as long as there is no intra-warp divergence), which is otherwise necessary for sharing data via shared memory. In modern GPUs the shared memory size is only 64KB, while the register file size is 256KB. Consequently, if there are unused registers they can be used to augment shared memory.
Unfortunately, the use of shuffle is fairly complex. In particular, if a kernel has already been written to use shared memory, modifying it to use shuffle may require significant algorithmic changes.
The technique presented here aims to help optimize kernels by replacing shared memory accesses with shuffles. It targets a specific yet quite common case: when shared memory is used to cache the kernel input.
To guide the transformation we redesign the code to use a “virtual” warp-level cache we call a register cache. Each thread holds and manages a local partition of the cache in an array rc stored in its registers. The cache management is logically decoupled from the rest of the program, which simplifies the development.
There is no implementation of a real cache, of course (no replacement policy, etc.). However, we found that building a mental picture of such a cache while optimizing the code greatly simplifies the process.
We now explain the idea by developing a simple example 1D stencil kernel.
Register Cache by Example: 1D Stencil
Definition. 1D k-stencil: Given an array A of size n, the k-stencil of A is an array B of size n-2k where B[i] = (A[i]+…+A[i+2k])/(2k+1). For example, array B is the 1-stencil of array A.
A: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
B: 1 2 3 4 5 6
B[0] = (A[0] + A[1] + A[2])/3 = (0 + 1 + 2)/3 = 1
B[1] = (A[1] + A[2] + A[3])/3 = (1 + 2 + 3)/3 = 2
…
B[5] = (A[5] + A[6] + A[7])/3 = (5 + 6 + 7)/3 = 6
To compute a 1D k-stencil each input element (except for margins) is read 2k+1 times. Thus, any implementation must cache the input in order to exploit data reuse. For simplicity we drop 1D from the notation and use k=1.
We start with a simple implementation of the kernel which uses shared memory, and then show how we transform it to use shuffle with the help of the register cache abstraction.
Step 1: Shared Memory Implementation
We start with the following implementation (see Listing 1)
Copy input from global memory into a temporary array in shared memory using all threads in each block. Wait until the input is stored in shared memory by calling __syncthreads. Compute one output element. Store the results in global memory.
Figure 3 illustrates the computation steps.
__global__ void one_stencil (int *A, int *B, int sizeOfA) { extern __shared__ int s[]; // Id of thread in the block. int localId = threadIdx.x; // The first index of output element computed by this block. int startOfBlock = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x; // The Id of the thread in the scope of the grid. int globalId = localId + startOfBlock; if (globalId >= sizeOfA) return; // Fetching into shared memory. s[localId] = A[globalId]; if (localId < 2 && blockDim.x + globalId < sizeOfA) { s[blockDim.x + localId] = A[blockDim.x + globalId]; } // We must sync before reading from shared memory. __syncthreads(); // Each thread computes a single output. if (globalId < sizeOfA - 2) B[globalId] = (s[localId] + s[localId + 1] + s[localId + 2]) / 3; }
Step 2: Identify Warp Inputs
Given that i is the index of the output element computed by thread 0 in a warp, the warp calculates the output elements i, i+1, …, i+31, and depends on 34 input elements i-1, …, i+32 denoted as input array.
Step 3: Determine Input Distribution Among the Threads
We distribute the input among the registers of each thread in a warp. In our example here we use a round-robin distribution of input arrays among the threads. In this scheme, input[i] is assigned to thread j such that j = i % 32. Thread 0 and thread 1 store two elements each, while all the other threads store only one array element. We denote the first cached element in each thread’s local partition as rc[0] and the second as rc[1]. Observe that this distribution scheme mimics the data distribution across the banks of shared memory.
Table 1 illustrates the distribution of inputs among the threads assuming 4 threads in a warp.
Table 1: Distribution of input elements in the register cache (assuming a simplified 4 threads per warp). Thread T0 T1 T2 T3 rc input[0] input[4] input[1] input[5] input[2] input[3]
Step 4: Communication and Computation
We split the kernel into communication and computation phase(s). In the communication phase threads effectively access the register cache. In the computation phase each thread, locally, performs some arithmetic or logical operation using the values it read from the cache.
Here comes the main technical component of the register cache recipe. We introduce two communication primitives used by the threads in the warp, to make it easier to design the communication phase:
Read(src_tid, remote_reg) : Read data stored in thread src_tid in remote variable remote_reg. Publish(local_reg) : Publish local data stored in variable local_reg.
Each communication phase is composed of one or more of these primitives. Note that for one thread to Read, another thread has to Publish the requested data stored in its local registers.
We identify three communication phases in 1-stencil: one for each input element read by each thread. Table 2 lists all Read (R) and Publish (P) operations performed by each thread, assuming 4 threads in a warp, and Figure 4 illustrates the communication phases.
Read(j, i) indicates a read from thread j of its element rc[i]. The first communication phase is local, and provided for clarity.
Table 2. Computation of 1-stencil using the register cache. T0 T1 T2 T3 Explanation v=R(T0, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T1, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T2, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T3, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) Communication phase: Each thread reads the first input element it needs. For example, T0 reads rc[0] from T0 which contains input[0]. Notice that each thread publishes the value it receives. _ac += v (=input[0]) _ac += v (=input[0]) _ac += v (=input[0]) _ac += v (=input[0]) Computation phase: Each thread adds the value it has just read to its local accumulator. v=R(T1, rc[0]) P(rc[1]) v=R(T2, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T3, rc[0]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T0, rc[1]) P(rc[0]) Communication phase: Each thread reads the next value. Notice that T3 now reads input[4] which is stored in rc[1] of T0, therefore thread T0 publishes rc[1]. For example, this phase T0 reads input[1] from rc[0] from T1. _ac += v (=input[0]+ input[1]) _ac += v (=input[1]+ input[2]) _ac += v (=input[2]+ input[3]) _ac += v (=input[3]+ input[4]) Computation phase: Each thread adds the value it has just read to its local accumulator. v=R(T2, rc[0]) P(rc[1]) v=R(T3, rc[0]) P(rc[1]) v=R(T0, rc[1]) P(rc[0]) v=R(T1, rc[1]) P(rc[0]) Communication phase: Each thread reads the last value it needs. _ac += v _ac += v _ac += v _ac += v Computation phase: Each thread adds the value is has just read to its local accumulator..
After the computations described in Table 2 are finished each thread holds the value _ac that stores the output it next writes to global memory.
Step four: Replace Publish-Reads with shfl_sync()
CUDA doesn’t provide the Read and Publish primitives, but we can merge them using the shuffle primitive to implement the code in a real GPU. Say thread t_i calls Read(t_j, rc[0]) and Publish(r_i). We can implement these two calls using shfl_sync(t_j, r_i). All that remains is to efficiently compute thread and register indexes in the shfl_sync() calls while avoiding divergence.
This step concludes the transformation, and now the implementation does not use shared memory.
There is a problem in the case where two threads call Read(t_i, v) and Read(t_i, u), where v and u are two different values stored by t_i. One of the threads will not receive the value since t_i can publish only a single value in each cache access. Two or more accesses are therefore needed to satisfy these requests. We call this case a register cache conflict.
With this translation from Publish + Read into shfl_sync we can implement the full 1-stencil without using shared memory (Listing 2). The full implementation is available in this repository.
__global__ void one_stencil_with_rc (int *A, int *B, int sizeOfA) { // Declaring local register cache. int rc[2]; // Id of thread in the warp. int localId = threadIdx.x % WARP_SIZE; // The first index of output element computed by this warp. int startOfWarp = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + WARP_SIZE*(threadIdx.x / WARP_SIZE); // The Id of the thread in the scope of the grid. int globalId = localId + startOfWarp; if (globalId >= sizeOfA) return; // Fetching into shared memory. rc[0] = A[globalId]; if (localId < 2 & & WARP_SIZE + globalId < sizeOfA) { rc[1] = A[WARP_SIZE + globalId]; } // Each thread computes a single output. int ac = 0; int toShare = rc[0]; for (int i = 0 ; i < 3 ; ++i) { // Threads decide what value will be published in the following access. if (localId < i) toShare = rc[1]; // Accessing register cache. unsigned mask = __activemask(); ac += __shfl_sync(mask, toShare, (localId + i) % WARP_SIZE); } if (globalId < sizeOfA - 2) B[globalId] = ac/3; }
Evaluation
Figure 5 shows the speedup of the register cache over shared memory implementation of a k-stencil for increasing values of k. We used a GTX-1080 GPU and CUDA 9 to run the experiments.
For small values of k the data reuse is small or negligible, hence the speedup is small, but as k grows, the reuse achieved by register cache increases and the speedup as well.
Thread coarsening
The speedup reaches a plateau starting at k=12, since the register cache also performs more global memory accesses due to the overlapping edges of the input, which are read twice by two consecutive warps.
One common technique to reduce these global memory accesses is thread coarsening. This technique increases the number of outputs produced by each thread, and thus enables some of the input data to be reused across iterations by storing it in registers.
In the case of the register cache, thread coarsening becomes critical to achieve the desired performance improvements. The reason lies in the small number of threads sharing the cache. Since the register cache is limited to the threads of a single warp, only the inputs necessary for the warp threads are prefetched and cached. However, the input reuse might occur across consecutive warps. For the 1-stencil kernel we develop here, the input to the first thread in warp i is the same as the input to the last thread in warp i-1. Hence, this value is read twice from the global memory. For 32 warps per thread block, a register cache implementation performs 34 * 32 = 1088 global memory accesses, which is 6% more than the number of global memory accesses in a standard implementation using shared memory. Note that as k grows, the number of redundant global memory accesses becomes high. For example, almost half of the accesses are redundant for k= 16.
Thread coarsening helps reduce the effect of redundant global memory accesses. Figure 6 shows the speedup over a shared memory implementation achieved by computing with a varying number of outputs per thread (1 to 8), for different values of k. Thanks to thread coarsening, the register cache version achieves the speedup of up to 1.8x. For larger values of k the number of registers required for the cache is too large to fit in the physical registers and the compiler spills them to local memory (usually in L1 cache, but also global memory if not enough space), so the performance drops.
When Should You Use Register Caching?
There are cases where the register cache is not applicable. First, the access pattern should be known at compile time. Second, the efficiency of the register cache is predicated on the availability of spare registers. Otherwise, registers start spilling to global memory, leading to a dramatic performance drop, as is the case for k=25 in Figure 6.
CUDA 9 and Cooperative Groups
CUDA 9, introduced by NVIDIA at GTC 2017 includes Cooperative Groups, a new programming model for organizing groups of communicating and cooperating parallel threads. In particular, programmers should not rely on implicit synchronization of threads within a warp. Cooperative Groups makes it easier to explicitly synchronize groups of threads—especially at the warp level. Additionally, existing primitives such as __shfl(), which assumed implicit full-warp synchronization, have been deprecated. The new synchronizing versions allow the programmer to explicitly synchronize a subset of threads in a warp.
In more detail, starting with CUDA 9, the __shfl() function (along with related variants, such as __shfl_down() ) is deprecated, and you should use the __shfl_sync() function instead, as we have done in all code in this post.
For example in our code, we replaced the call
__shfl(v, i)
with
unsigned mask = __activemask(); __shfl_sync(mask, v, i);
Here __activemask() returns a mask of all currently active (in other words, not blocked by execution flow) threads. In cases where the required mask is known (the common case is all threads in the warp), that can be specified explicitly instead of using __activemask().
You can also use Cooperative Groups to create a statically sized tiled partition of the thread block group. Statically sized groups support the shfl() method (which calls shfl_sync() internally, passing a mask that includes all threads in the group). Here’s how to create a warp-sized group that supports shfl().
namespace cg = cooperative_groups;... auto tile = cg::tiled_partition<32>(cg::this_thread_block()); tile.shfl(v, i);
In pre-Volta GPUs each warp maintained a single program counter (PC), pointing to the next instruction executed by the warp as well as a mask of all the currently active threads in the warp. Independent thread scheduling in Volta GPUs maintains a PC for every thread, enabling separate and independent execution flows of threads in a single warp, which gives more freedom to the GPU scheduler.
Changing all __shfl() calls in our code to __shfl_sync() did not affect the execution of our code on Pascal GPUs (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080), and this change will make the code safe to execute on Volta GPUs and beyond.
Additional Details
For additional details regarding the implementation and internals of the register cache, and its use for the computation of finite field multiplication, we refer the readers to the paper by Hamilis, Ben- Sasson,Tromer and Silberstein. The source code for the examples in this post is available on Github.The pursuit began at 8:15 a.m. Tuesday with a routine traffic stop on an Upper West Side street, quickly escalating when the 17-year-old driver, who the police said did not have a valid license, chose to flee as officers approached.
Eight blocks and roughly 30 seconds later, it came to an abrupt and tragic end.
The police said the teenage driver, Franklin Reyes, lost control of his S.U.V. at Amsterdam Avenue and 97th Street, fatally striking a 4-year-old girl, Ariel Russo, as she walked on the sidewalk with her grandmother, who was injured in the crash.
The police arrested Mr. Reyes on charges of manslaughter and vehicular manslaughter. He had borrowed his family’s vehicle without permission, the authorities said, and was driving with only a learner’s permit, which requires an adult in the car.
Alcohol or drugs did not appear to have played a role in the morning crash, and investigators said the driver’s inexperience may have been a key factor.Asteroid is due to make flyby of Earth
An asteroid rarely gets close enough to Earth to be bright enough to see with a backyard telescope or binoculars, but islanders might see one tomorrow night, said University of Hawaii astronomer David Tholen.
The closest approach of asteroid 2007 TU24 to Earth will be about 334,000 miles, about 1.4 times the distance of Earth to the moon, at 10:46 p.m. tomorrow, "for 27 seconds," he said. "It will be far in the northern part of the sky and moving very rapidly."
At its brightest, it may be out of range for typical binoculars, he said. But observers with a small telescope should be able to see it, he said. "It will be easy to identify just by pointing and waiting for something to move. It won't take very long to notice the motion."
The asteroid is estimated to be 500 to 2,000 feet long. It was discovered last October by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.
It won't affect the Earth, said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The next time an asteroid about the same size will approach that close to Earth will be in 2027, according to NASA. But Tholen said, "Between now and 2027, we will probably find something new that we don't know about that will come closer."
Tracking potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids and comets is one of the things the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, known as Pan-STARRS, will do, he pointed out.
A prototype of Pan-STARRS is being developed on Haleakala, Maui, and Mauna Kea on the Big Island has been proposed as the site for a permanent system.
Another asteroid, 2007 WD5, is expected to pass about 16,000 miles from Mars next week.
"We have bit of connection to that," Tholen said. His research team, including Fabrizio Bernardi and Marco Micheli, was the last to observe the WD5 on Jan. 8 and 9, using the UH 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea, he said.
The probability of impact with Mars was high, so they pushed for additional observations and got them, he said.A university lecturer appears to have let his imagination fly by claiming he has photographed real fairies.
John Hyatt, 53, insists his photos, which look suspiciously like small winged insects, prove the magic creatures exist in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire.
The Director of Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) at Manchester Metropolitan University has put the photos, taken over the past two years, on display in a special exhibition.
He said: “It was a bit of a shock when I blew them up, I did a double take.
“I went out afterwards and took pictures of flies and gnats and they just don’t look the same.
“People can decide for themselves what they are.
"The message to people is to approach them with an open mind.
"I think it's one of those situations where you need to believe to see.
"A lot of people who have seen them say they have brought a little bit of magic into their lives and there's not enough of that around."
Mr Hyatt, who lives Rawtenstall, has posted some of his images on social media and his exhibition, called Rossendale Fairies, will be on show at The Whitaker Museum in Whitaker Park in Rossendale, throughout the spring.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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The gaffe-prone candidacies of Michele “Elvis” Bachmann and Rick “C’mon, Men, Let’s String Us Up Some Bernanke” Perry, and the slapstick non-candidacy of Sarah “Two If by Sea” Palin, are merely the cheap theater of an ill-defined Republican presidential race. The real drama of the 2012 race continues to come from the CEO party’s CEO candidate: Willard Mitt Romney. Ad Policy
It is Romney, the buttoned-down professional who was born to the corporate class and remains its truest exemplar in the current contest, who framed the 2012 debate as starkly it ever will be with his sincere declaration that “corporations are people.”
Romney gets it.
There’s a class war going on in America.
And the dark prince of oligarchy has taken a stand.
Provoked by a grassroots activist who refused to take spin for an answer, the GOP’s CEO candidate revealed why he is running.
Corporations need unapologetic and aggressive representation not just in the judicial branch but in the executive branch of our federal government.
After all, It’s not just conservatives on the US Supreme Court who think that corporations should enjoy the same protections and privileges as human beings.
Romney is standing up for the principle that conservatives who would be president must be just as bold when it comes to bending the intent and language of a Constitution that opens with the words “We the People” in order to make it a corporate charter.
If we needed any more confirmation of the necessity for a movement to renew the democratic promise of the American experiment, it came when Romney was confronted by members of Iowa Citizens for Community Involvement. When Romney appeared at the Iowa State Fair to pitch his candidacy for the nomination, the Iowa CCI activists demanded to know whether he was going to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Romney tried at first to stick to the spin he was supposed to be peddling to fair-goers who needed some pablum to go with their corn dogs and cotton candy. But the grass-roots activists of Iowa CCI— a multiracial, urban-and-rural group aligned with the National People’s Action movement—made a “where’s-the-beef” demand. And Romney delivered.
The activists wanted to know why CEO candidate—like so many other politicians of both major parties—would even consider undermining needed programs that care for the elderly, the disabled and the disadvantaged when billionaire CEOs and corporations pay little or nothing into the federal treasury.
When Romney began to ruminate on how he would not “raise taxes on people,” the Iowa activists shouted: “Corporations!”
As the crowd began to cheer on the idea of taxing corporations that enjoy the benefits of government bailouts and subsidies without—in all too many cases—giving anything back, Romney became incensed.
The former corporate CEO shouted: “Corporations are people, my friend.”
The crowd shouted: “No, they’re not!”
“Of course they are,” replied Romney, with a “there, I said it…” statement that he and his staff would later confirm as his true faith.
The Republican presidential contender’s bizarre certainty that faceless corporations, many of which enjoy the benefits and protections of the United States while shuttering factories and moving jobs overseas, are somehow human drew a stinging rebuke from National People’s Action director George Goehl, who declared: “The corporations Mr. Romney believes are filling people’s pockets are the ones who crashed our economy and hijacked our democracy.”
Of course, Romney won’t change. He’s a class warrior, and he knows which side he is on.
Nor, frankly, will any any change in position be forthcoming from a lot of the Democrats who have bought into the big-money politics that accepts the landscape outlined in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—which accords corporations the same political rights as citizens—as the new normal.
But there is nothing “normal” or “acceptable” about a circumstance—illustrated by the Wisconsin recent recall election fights, which saw an expected $40 million in campaign spending—that makes candidates and voters electoral bystanders in a process that is bought and paid for by corporations and unaccountable special-interest groups.
“The court’s ruling in Citizens United demands that, once again, we the people use the constitutional amendment process to defend our democracy. We must press for a 28th Amendment—a People’s Rights Amendment—to restore democracy to the people and to ensure that people, not corporations, govern in America,” says John Bonifaz, director of the Free Speech for People project. “We call on all 2012 presidential candidates to make clear that corporations are not people with constitutional rights and to support the People’s Rights Amendment.”
Bonifaz is right. Romney has with his “corporations are people” comment disqualified himself from serious consideration as a contender for any position of public trust.
But Romney and his kind will remain a threat to American democratic life for as long as activist judges read the Constitution as an invitation to corporate dominance of our politics.
Romney’s statement has clarified the urgent need for a constitutional amendment that renews the supremacy of “We the People.”
That’s going to be a central focus of the national Democracy Convention, which will be held August 24–28 in Madison, Wisconsin. A project of the Madison-based Liberty Tree Foundation (with which this writer has been associated over the years), the convention has drawn strong support from the Alliance for Democracy, the Move to Amend campaign, The Progressive magazine and labor, farm and community groups. As such, it will bring together activists from across the country who seek to “strengthen democracy where it matters most—in our communities, our schools, our workplaces and local economies, our military, our government, our media, our Constitution.”
The focus on multiple issues and challenges will make the convention an exciting and necessary gathering at a point when America is suffering from so many democracy deficits. But central to the convention will be an understanding that the crisis created by the Citizens United ruling and the abuses of power inflicted upon the republic and its citizens by unrestrained corporations must be addressed.
“As far as we know, Mitt is not coming to the 2011 Democracy Convention,” Democracy Convention Chair Ben Manski jokes. “But if he did, he’d learn a thing or two.”
What the Americans who happen to stand on the other side of the class divide can learn at the Democracy Convention is how to prove Romney wrong by ensuring that the fantasy of corporate personhood is not used by corrupt politicians and activist judges to prevent “We the People” from realizing the full promise of the American experiment.With my only knowledge of the concept of "antifragile" being the slideshow I just read, my initial assessment is yes, Bitcoin is antifragile.
Antifragile benefits from randomness and gains from disorder.
Randomness in Bitcoin appears in the random generation of keys and in the whims of its users' spending habits. No one person controls the system, and a transaction may or may not get processed based on connectivity and fees. There is an incentive to connect to as many nodes as possible in order to broadcast a transaction.
In Bitcoin, anyone is allowed to participate, because no one is prohibited. Participation may be cost-prohibitive now, but as time goes on, it won't be.
There are stressors on the Bitcoin ecosystem: block chain dust, nodes disappearing, nodes flooding transactions, etc. None are as close of a match as sudden jumps in hashrate and the subsequent adjustment to difficulty. Too much of a jump, and the "body" breaks: someone gets a 51% attack going. But, enough of a push and the difficulty increases, making it harder to break that 51%. Also, if the body hasn't been used enough - there hasn't been a high enough hash rate to produce the expected number of blocks - the difficulty lowers in order to allow more blocks to be found.
Thus, the Bitcoin system adjusts to its environment. Moreover, it does so in a chaotic way: there are rules set in the protocol, but those rules can be change if a majority of participants in the system agree to change the rules and agree on a new set of rules. In the absence of Internet, Bitcoin transactions can propagate through sneakernet or through even basic text format printable on paper.
Moreover, given the randomness of human economic behavior and the external environment which Bitcoin uses to propagate, various edges and remote notes of the network graph may have sudden activity that the rest of the network doesn't see. The rest of the network has to deal with that activity or risk invalidating itself.
Slide 40 is one where Bitcoin really is antifragile:
Complex systems resist top-down design, and oftentimes even top-down interference. This is because these systems are simply too complex to be controlled from the outside.
Bitcoin is resistant to top-down design now because of the number of people using it and processing its transactions. Gavin Andresen could not suddenly make a change, because 51% of the network hashrate would have to agree with his change. No one can interfere, only vote to support or not support a given transaction by directing their miners to include or not to include a certain kind of transaction in the blocks they produce. Moreover, Bitcoin cannot be controlled by anyone except participants in its ecosystem (not matter what governments might think or try to do!).
All participants in Bitcoin have a skin in the game. By processing transactions, they in turn process their own transactions as well as the transactions of their peers. If they can get 51% of the miners to act a certain way, then that's the way the economy goes.
So, yes, I believe that, based on this slideshow, Bitcoin is antifragile.The nascent virtual reality industry, recently reignited by Facebook-owned Oculus VR, was originally focused on PCs: Powerful, upgradeable consumer machines that, paired with the right headset, could create a powerful sense of immersion in a virtual world, at a not totally outrageous price.
But it’s not clear when PC-based VR sets will be widely available. Oculus and Sony have both announced headsets based around the PC and the PlayStation 4, respectively, but neither has committed to a consumer release date or a price.
That means, for most people, their first virtual reality experience likely won’t happen on a PC. In their place, smartphones are being heralded as the entryway to consumer VR. No fewer than 12 headsets based around mobile phones are already available to buy or preorder, with more still to come.
Why mobile? A big reason is convenience: Lots of people already have smartphones, many of which already have the right sensors to offer a “good enough” VR experience, without wires to tie users down to one physical place — think watching a movie that feels like it’s happening all around you while you’re stuck on a plane.
Another reason: The near ubiquity of smartphones potentially makes it easier for consumers to buy into what is still largely a little-known genre of entertainment.
And one more: While users who peer into a smartphone-based VR headset won’t be able to walk around in a virtual world, they will be able to try something and then pass the headset to a friend nearby. I saw this in action at Re/code’s headquarters last week, as we passed Jaunt’s Paul McCartney concert video around the office.
That sort of real-world virality is good, because VR developers need lots of users to figure out what works.
“It’s going to take a lot of people experimenting with this technology to really figure it out,” Dodocase co-founder Patrick Buckley said. “The more people that have it, are playing with it, the faster we’re all going to learn how to really |
marinara on top of the eggplant and sprinkled with some of the left over italian cheese. Placed in the oven for 15-20 min.1 stick GF Butter1-2 Tbsp coconut flower2 Tbsp cooking wineGF Heavy creamMinced Garlic (to taste)salt/pepperWhile the eggplant is in the oven I melted some butter in a sauce pan. Add the coconut flower and stir around until its a golden brown color (making a roux) Pour in the cooking wine and Add enough heavy cream to get the consistency of the sauce you want. I added some minced garlic and salt/pepper to it for enhanced flavor.Once you take the eggplant out of the oven, I plated the rollatini on some marinara and topped it with the béchamel sauce. I sprinkled the remaining sausage over top of the rollatini along with some fresh herbs for extra flavor.Hope you guys enjoy!!!KimOn this day, the 6th of February in 1918, the hard struggle of the suffragette movement was finally over in Britain, as women over 30 were given the vote.
The Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, enfranchising women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications.
About 8.4 million women gained the vote, however this only represented 40 per cent of the total population of women in the UK.
This was a victory not only for women but also for British troops who were returning from the Great War, who did not qualify to vote under the previous act, which stated that only men who had been resident in the country for 12 months prior to a general election were entitled to vote.
It would not be until 1928 and the Equal Franchise Act, that women over 21 were given the vote and finally the female population gained voting parity with the men. This second act raised the number of women allowed to vote to 15 million.
•Fields of battle: The Suffragettes’ fight for the vote
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The 21-year-old midfielder swapped the fringes of Jose Mourinho's first team for the Netherlands and FC Utrecht in the summer.
The reason, he says, was simple. To improve.
"I've settled into the place," Willock tells ESPN FC.
"I'm enjoying training and I feel like I've settled in quite well. There is a different style of play over here compared to England.
"Over here I think it's a lot more tactical and you play out from the back a lot more in Holland than you do in England. It's good for me because I'm learning a different style of play, which I think has definitely improved me as a player.
"Off the pitch, it's different. Obviously, I'm used to being around my family all the time. I'm adjusting to life off the pitch, as well."
Willock, who joined United in 2012 after being released by Arsenal at 15, has split his time at Utrecht -- sixth in Eredivisie -- between the first team and the youth team.
He's made three substitute appearances for the seniors, including in a 2-1 win at Ajax in November.
"It has been great to be involved, whether I've come on or just being on the bench," he said.
"I'm happy to be involved with the first team and it was great coming on against Ajax. There were a lot of fans there and it was a great result for the team beating Ajax away. It was brilliant and it was a great experience for me.
"We want to push as high as we can and I think we've got a great bunch of players here and a great manager. I think we can definitely be around the top of the table at the end of the season."
Matty Willock is on loan at Utrecht after signing a new deal at Manchester United.
Willock is one of three footballing brothers. Chris, 19, left Arsenal for Benfica in the summer while Joe, 18, has made six first team appearances for Arsene Wenger's side this season.
Matty, the oldest, had other options in the summer. He could have stayed at United, where he was named on the bench twice last season, or gone on loan to another English club. Instead, he chose a different challenge.
"To be honest, I didn't really think about going abroad until my agent gave me some loan options," he says.
"I just thought that coming to Utrecht would be a big opportunity. It's different, and I thought I would learn a lot. Especially as a young player, it's good to have different tools so I thought that if I could come over here and learn as much as I can then it would be great for me going forward.
"I think Chris is the same. Obviously Benfica is a massive club and it's a big opportunity for him. He wanted to be around the first team, so I think that was a no-brainer. In terms of my decision, I don't think it affected me. We're on different paths."
Utrecht play NAC Breda on Saturday in their last game before Eredivisie's winter break. Willock will train with United at Carrington during the lay-off before returning to the Netherlands for the second half of the season, which kicks off in January.
It's a chance for sit down with Nicky Butt, United's academy chief, who Willock says was instrumental in his decision to test himself in Europe.
"I spoke to Nicky and he said it would be a great opportunity for me to go," he said.
"It's a good club and we'll be aiming to get into Europe and he thought for me to be a part of that would be a good experience. "Nicky speaks to me regularly. He's played so he knows everything that we're dealing with as a player. He keeps in touch with me and gives me advice all the time."
Manchester United youngster Matty Willock has made three appearances for Utrecht's senior team so far.
As an energetic box-to-box central midfielder, there are few better role models for Willock than a man who came through United's academy to play 387 times for the club, and win 39 caps for England.
"Nicky has had a great influence on my career," he adds. "Whether he's been coaching or reserve team manager, he's always taken an interest in me and he has really helped me a lot."
Willock, a former England Under-19 international, signed a new two-year contract with United before agreeing to spend a season away from Old Trafford.
And after getting a taste of Mourinho's first team at the end of last season, he is keen to use his experience to help challenge for a place in next year's squad.
His former reserves teammate Scott McTominay, 21, has already made eight first team appearances this season, and Willock admits his aim is to follow in his friend's footsteps.
"I'm focused on Utrecht at the moment," he said.
"I want to get into the team regularly and help the team as much as I can and see where I am at the end of the season. If I go back to United, I want to be around the first-team and try to challenge for a position.
"I trained with the first team quite a bit last season, which was an unbelievable experience. To make the first team squad twice was great.
"My main goal last season was really to try to train with the first team more and try to get closer to it. I was at that age, turning 20, and I felt like it was the right age for me to try to step up.
"I worked as hard as I could and towards the end of the season it started to pay off. "Scott is a good player. I played with him a lot in the youth teams. He works so hard and it's definitely inspirational. If he can do it, there's no reason why, with hard work, I can't."
And his advice to any other young English player who has the chance to head to Europe?
"I've spoken to quite a few players at home and a lot of my friends who play and they've asked me what it's like," he said.
"I've told them that it's a great experience to come abroad. You can learn so much. I think it makes you a better all-round player. Hopefully I'll improve while I'm here. "I've only been here a few months and even though I don't play every game, I've improved so much. I've learnt a lot and that's why I would advise anyone to do it. It's great experience."
Rob is ESPN FC's Manchester United correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @RobDawsonESPN.New Collaboration Enables Enterprises to Migrate Workloads to Azure, Create Hybrid Clouds, and Easily Manage Heterogeneous Environments Across Windows and Linux
SEATTLE – September 9, 2015 – Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today announced new availability of Chef in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Azure users can now access and purchase Chef directly through the Marketplace, providing maximum flexibility in using automation and cloud technologies to accelerate software development and reduce costs.
As part of the DevOps journey, enterprises are rapidly adopting cloud computing to make the delivery of software and services more flexible and scalable. Using the cloud increases the number of daily changes, updates, and deployments enterprises must make to their infrastructure. Chef’s new availability in Azure makes it even easier and faster for enterprises to migrate workloads to Azure, create hybrid clouds, and manage heterogeneous Windows and Linux workloads at any scale.
“Chef is excited to expand our collaboration with Azure. We’re committed to helping enterprises navigate the DevOps transformation and making Chef available in the Marketplace creates a simple and more streamlined approach to managing cloud infrastructure at any scale,” said Ken Cheney, vice president of business development, Chef. “We look forward to helping customers innovate faster while saving time and money by using Chef and Azure together.”
Chef and Microsoft have a longstanding partnership. Chef offers automation for Windows PowerShell DSC and Microsoft Open Technologies has its own collection of Chef Cookbooks. A broad set of customers including kCura and Cheezburger, among many others use Chef and Azure together to speed software development and easily manage infrastructure.
Additional Resources:Here are riveting quotes from two adult students:
The Italics are my emphasis.
1) “I feel like I’m in the adult student ghetto, where much latitude is given and few results are expected. We’re all supposed to be doing it ‘for fun.’ In a way, of course, that’s right. But in another way, if we wanted pure fun we’d spend our free time riding roller coasters.” http://www.mymusiclifeblog.blogspot.com/
2) “Here’s what I believe teachers often find among adult students:
“Wanting to be able to play favorite music without taking much time and without getting into depth that would create musicianship. That is the experience, and therefore the expectation with adult students.
“Result: Either adult students are rejected by good teachers (leaving us with those who have to take anyone), or the teaching is geared to that mindset. This is the general picture out there.”
“…. Supposing that the adult has never studied music, and so does not know what is involved. The teacher keeps it superficial on a level the student can easily relate to; how the piece goes, a bit of reading, just enough theory to get by, if that. The pieces get harder, but it stays like that. This adult student will not know that anything is missing. No other dimensions open, no tasks or studies to stretch the mind and physical being. Even though this student has a teacher, he does not have access to the teaching, and also doesn’t know it! He is shut out. If a teacher never tries to present these other things, how can these doors ever open? How can we seek what we don’t know exists? How can we change our mindset?”
**
Both powerful statements evoke periods in history when oppressed peoples gathered in public places to have their voices heard.
Sadly, for adult students, who are not as yet part of a mass movement, their private feelings of rejection and expressions of dismay are localized to blog sites and niche driven Internet forums: Piano World, Piano Street, Piano Addict, Piano Society, Piano World Wide, you name it.
Not everyone who should, gets to hear them.
***
The tendency to characterize a whole population of adult students with a catchy one-liner is the REAL PROBLEM and music teachers, (and let’s zero in on piano instructors) are often guilty of applying stereotypes to them.
I’ve heard the full blown prejudice unmasked at music teacher meetings; at festivals with down time in the break room; and just walking past a group of chatty teachers in the lounge following a university-hosted recital. The environment can be so hostile that if a teacher dares to disagree with the prevailing sentiment, he or she is alienated from the “club.” Are we back to adolescence, peer pressure, and social ostracism?
****
Any teacher who thinks all adult students are goofing-off, time- wasting, billable units, needs a wake up call, or a serious form of psychotherapy.
In a previous blog that was meant to be humorous, I had insisted that adult students sometimes said the “darndest things.” I was not referring to the greater population of 20 plus to perhaps 75, but just those pupils who had occupied a significant amount of weekly time in my studio over years.
One pupil, an attorney by profession, in his 50s, took his piano studies so seriously, that to come to a lesson without sufficient preparation (in his mind) had required a “pardon” of sorts. He wanted me to know that the session would be a “practice,” only. In jest, I ran with that, and suggested he feared the dire consequences of not meeting his own expectations. It was a bit of an extreme image, involving a public flogging, but it illuminated the intensity of this student’s musical study.
Another student, age 70, posted at the Fresno Beehive that her GROUP lessons were unsatisfying and wasteful. She admitted that private lessons afforded an in-depth journey on multiple levels: Theoretical, musical, historical, which ironically related back to the second quote at the opener of this writing.
To be completely honest, this pupil, whom I’ve know up front and personal for years, can’t always devote the kind of time she needs to progress as quickly as she wants, but it’s not quantity that’s relevant to her studies, but rather, quality.
Still another adult I’ve worked with comes from the other side of the spectrum. She has a list of repertoire of such an advanced nature that to keep up with her is a daunting task. Certainly, she does not fit into a boxed category for her demographic, and could not be easily dismissed by piano teachers as barely treading water from lesson to lesson. Yet, she has periods where her work and travel interfere with a forward-moving curve of progress, but this is real life with accommodations that have to be made to keep a sensible perspective.
If we step back and examine why teachers insist on harping about adult students winging it from week to week, having no commitment to practicing and wanting only superficial musical exposures, then we might just figure out that these instructors are WINGING it themselves and not INDIVIDUALIZING their teaching to meet the needs of each and every student regardless of age.
Students from 7 to 70 cannot be easily categorized. If they are, then we as teachers, should reconsider our career choices.
An eight-year old student with a very pushy mother, might practice daily under a form of coercion. (A Tiger mom, perhaps?) Another could have a parent who views the lessons quite casually, not supporting the framework introduced by a very committed and conscientious teacher. Such a pupil, even if motivated by a competent instructor, might find lessons to be culture-alien. Culture encompasses a lot more than an ethnic association. In the main I’m referring to baseball, football, soccer, and basketball that unswervingly compete with piano. These sports-related activities often absorb a lion’s share of a child’s life, leaving piano practice on the sidelines.
Adult students come to lessons as free agents….
Adult pupils, in my experience, are not forced by anyone to sign up for lessons or to practice. To date, I’ve never had to deal with interfering soccer practices, or high school tennis matches. There are no hovering, pushy moms or dads to get in our studio space.
Most adults want to learn as best they can given complicated work schedules, and family obligations. That’s a fact!
Ruling them out as prospective students because of rampant innuendo is an injustice to the group as a whole and to each and every one who has a unique past, present and future.
Getting down to individuals and their needs is the bottom line best way to proceed.
Just as some younger students don’t make the best use of their time, or fail to practice assignments with any degree of regularity, there may be adults who do the same. I’m sounding like a broken record!
Educate!
Piano teachers and adult students need a lesson or two in how to communicate.
The first interview should enlighten, and encompass the following:
1) What does the student set as goals for his/her piano study?
2) How much time can be realistically devoted to practice from week to week?
3) What music genre is of special interest to the student?
The Teacher should spell out the program or curriculum in detail as well as the requirements for optimum advantage to the student and his progress. It should include the materials recommended that will lay a substantial foundation for the study of a wide variety of repertoire. (Include incremental doses of theory, music history, and keyboard harmony)
If there’s a meeting of the minds about the goals and how to reach them, the path to a harmonious two-way relationship between adult student and teacher can begin to be paved. (Incidentally, cancellation and make up policies should be explored in detail from the outset, barring future misunderstandings)
Along the way, any bumps in the road should be addressed without a long time delay that could cause a deteriorating relationship and a resentment build-up on both sides.
A reasonable perspective embraced by the teacher, stripped of perpetual myths about adult students would get the ball rolling in the right direction.
***
P.S. If you’re an adult piano student, please feel free to share your experiences.
LINKS:
https://arioso7.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/adult-piano-student-themes-and-issues/
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If you’re just learning about the metaphysical realm, you’ve likely come across the term “energy work” a few times. With many people embracing their intuitive gifts, Reiki, ThetaHealing, and shamanic practitioners are popping up across the globe. But what exactly is energy work and how is it beneficial? “Energy work” refers to practices that interact with the subtle energy field of the human body. Everyone can interact with the subtle energy around the human body and we all have the innate ability to detect it with our hands. Practitioners who perform energy work have simply studied it longer and have worked to develop their gifts and energy sensitivities.
During a session, the practitioner may place their hands on the client, if this is within the client’s comfort zone, and correct any imbalances or blockages. Popular modalities include Reiki, therapeutic touch, chakra balancing, shamanism, and ThetaHealing.
As more of the world’s population awakens, more people can detect, see, and interact with the subtle energy field that exists around the human body. Perhaps you’ve heard of this awakening. Many believe that people across the globe are waking up to their intuitive abilities and that once we each embrace our natural gifts, we will reach our pure intention as humans – we will have a higher vibration.
People who closed off their intuitive abilities as children are detecting auras, seeing spirits, developing keen tarot reading skills, and conducting healing sessions with animals. Humans around the globe are starting to ascend to a higher vibration through this kind of work – and it’s beautiful!
If you’re new to energy work, here are some modalities to explore:
Reiki
ThetaHealing
Shamanism
Crystal healing
Qi Gong
Guided meditation
Journeywork
Sound therapy
What can I expect during a session?
It is important to note that every energy session is different. The direction your session will go will depend on your intention, your amount of self-knowledge, and, to some degree, your practitioner’s amount of experience. Whether you’re receiving a Reiki treatment, a guided meditation, or a ThetaHealing session, anything can pop up. You may receive a message from a spirit guide or ancestor, you might see colors, and you may experience a shift in energy.
As far as protocol, you’ll mostly likely begin your session with a little bit of conversation about your intention for the energy session. Your practitioner may state his or her intention aloud or pray with you and then begin. Most practitioners who have a commercial space or place in their home will have you lying on a massage table. If that doesn’t work for you, nearly all energy modalities can be completed in a seated position as well.
What does the practitioner experience?
When a practitioner works with a client, he or she is acting as the conduit, which means the energy work is being transmitted through the practitioner to the client much like a wire conducts electricity. The client may feel moved just like they would when listening to a piece of music. The client may see visual images in their mind’s eye, experience emotional shifts, or the releasing of physical tension or pain.
The specifics of each modality are different, but most believe in the Universal Life Force that supplies us with endless amounts of cleansing energy. During an energy session, the practitioner will “connect” to ULF and channel energy that’s in accordance with the highest and greatest good of their client. Depending on the work that’s being conducted, the practitioner may receive messages that are to be relayed to the client. The practitioner can also take any specific requests into consideration when conducting an energy session. For example, if the client has had digestion issues, it’s possible that something is affecting their solar plexus and needs to be released. If the client is experiencing tension in a certain area of their body due to work or stress, the practitioner can focus on that area of the body as well to help the client let go of that which no longer serves them.
It is important to note that energy work should not replace any medical services. If you’re experiencing serious medical concerns, you should make an appointment to see your doctor. Energy work should be considered complementary to modern medical services and not a replacement.It’s not like Spider-Man and Wolverine were ever best friends, but certainly there was a level of mutual respect between the two heroes. And if you know Peter Parker, he’s not the type to turn down a dying request from a fellow super hero.
That’s exactly why Spidey finds himself tackling a new and totally unexpected job in Spider-Man & The X-Men #1: Special Guidance Counsellor at the Jean Grey School. Everyone’s favorite non-mutant super hero is there at the specific request of Wolverine, only Logan didn’t fill his teammates in on the details.
That could get tricky enough, but when you throw villains like Sauron and Stegron, the Dinosaur Man (teaming together for the first time, incredibly) into the mix and add in the fact that not all of the X-Men are super thrilled to have the wall-crawler around, it’s almost guaranteed to be a fun ride.
“He’s there because Wolverine asked him to do it, though being a teacher isn’t the extent of his mission,” series writer Elliot Kalan said in an interview with Marvel.com, “Before Wolverine died, he had a suspicion that something was amiss at the school and that one of the students wasn’t what they seemed. Only he didn’t know which student. It’s Spidey’s job to find the truth – though he can’t help but hope to also have a positive influence on the lives of the students.”
Spider-Man & The X-Men #1 heads our way on December 10 from Kalan and artist Marco Failla, but you can get a first look at some of the action and variant covers by Skottie Young and Bengal just by scrolling down the page right now.For Immediate Release - Sarah DiMeo - No Association
August 22, 2018 This is a photo of Sarah DiMeo. She is presently portraying herself as an investigator on the Johnny Gosch case. She is also through social media and a website, soliciting funds for her project. Sarah DiMeo is not an investigator on the Johnny Gosch case and is not affiliated with the Johnny Gosch Foundation, nor Noreen Gosch. Her attempts to solicit funding by her are not sanctioned by the Johnny Gosch Foundation or Noreen Gosch. We do not accept responsibility for any of this woman's actions.
For Immediate Release
April 8, 2015 **** Who Took Johnny - Feature Doc about Johnny Gosch’s disappearance to have its theatrical premiere in Des Moines on April 24th. Noreen Gosch, Johnny’s mother will be in attendance to do Q and A. An amazing, lunatic documentary that will leave you creeped-out, excited and surprised,”
- John Waters, director of Hairspray and Crybaby
Who Took Johnny, a documentary film about Noreen Gosch and her 30 year fight for justice for her son Johnny, will have its theatrical premiere in Des Moines, IA at the Fleur Cinema (www.fleurcinema.com ) followed by screenings at Film Scene in Iowa City (http://www.icfilmscene.org/). Utilizing strong local reporting from the time as well as current interviews, filmmakers weave together past events into a coherent narrative and try to explain the case that was never solved. Noreen Gosch’s passionate advocacy for her son led to the passage of laws regarding missing children and profoundly affected the culture of the entire country. Who Took Johnny has been on the International festival circuit for past year where it has gotten rave reviews and several jury and audience awards.
Like the documentary films of Errol Morris whose subjects’ words seem to crack under scrutiny, Who Took Johnny is a character study that steadily builds the narrow worlds of those circling around the lost boy, Gosch often the figure setting into motion the orbits of others. The shaping of the characters is aided by the highly publicized nature of the case as talk show footage and TV appearances act as a disembodied account of how the story played out publicly. The public facts are then contrasted with highly personal interviews with the subjects today, a hindsight explanation of actions that humanizes the media presentation and whose clashing accounts leave the audience with an apprehension that is then exploited in the editing.
- Donna K - Hammer to Nail
Beautifully told by a trio of filmmakers giving as much respect to this story as one could ever possibly hope, this is easily one of the best true crime documentaries to hit
screens in quite some time. At all costs, hunt this film down.
- Josua Brunsting - Criterion Cast
“The gradual narrative unspooling of Who Took Johnny… is extremely canny.”
– Chicago Tribune
Who Took Johnny, 2014, 80 minutes, USA
A Rumur Inc Film - [email protected]
David Beilinson [email protected] 646.259.2506
Michael Galinsky [email protected] 917.513.3180
Suki Hawley [email protected] 917.566.0515
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES AND TRAILERS VISIT Rumur.com/wtjmedia]
On September 5, 1982, Johnny Gosch, 12, disappeared while delivering newspapers in West Des Moines, Iowa. For the next 30 years his mother Noreen devoted her life to finding out what happened.
WHO TOOK JOHNNY is an examination into the infamous thirty-year-old cold case of Iowa paperboy Johnny Gosch, the first missing child to appear on a milk carton. The film focuses on Johnny's mother, Noreen Gosch, and her relentless quest to find the truth about what happened to her son. Along the way there have been mysterious sightings, bizarre revelations, and a confrontation with a man who claims to have helped abduct Johnny. WHO TOOK JOHNNY captures the endless intrigue surrounding the most spellbinding missing person's case in U.S. history.
If you’ve ever gotten separated from your child for just a few moments and remember the profound panic that sets in, you can begin to understand what Noreen Gosch has felt over the last 30 years since her son Johnny disappeared delivering newspapers in West Des Moines, Iowa on the morning of September 5, 1982.
More than any other missing child case, Johnny’s story has spawned countless theories and has instilled intrigue in the millions who remember the kid on the side of a milk carton.
Mixing original interviews with archival news footage, home video and film material spanning 30 years, WHO TOOK JOHNNY chronicles the 30-year history of the case through the eyes of the key players. We hear from family, friends, law enforcement, journalists, as well as parents of current missing children. From purported attempts by Johnny to contact his family, to clashes with Police, the story takes a bizarre twist when a convicted child molester comes forward to admit abducting Johnny. Police don’t believe his story, while Noreen is convinced he’s telling the truth.
Then, 17 years after he disappeared, Noreen confesses that Johnny visited her briefly one night, though too scared of his captors to stay. Police are dumbfounded, unable to corroborate her story.
WHO TOOK JOHNNY connects the dots between the unanswered questions surrounding Johnny Gosch's disappearance. Through eyewitness accounts and compelling evidence that span three decades, the film patiently builds a case that law enforcement was never able to close.
FILMMAKER STATEMENT
How did you get involved? Ten years ago, while at an industry screening for our film Horns and Halos at HBO headquarters in New York, we were approached by writer Nick Bryant with an intriguing pitch. He told us he had a once-in-a-lifetime story to tell. He had spent years investigating a child prostitution network that was conveniently covered up a decade earlier. In researching the scandalous allegations of the Franklin Federal Credit Union, he came upon the connection to a bizarre story of the first missing kid on a milk carton - Johnny Gosch. After learning more about Johnny's case, we became intrigued, and cautiously began to pursue a film about it.
How long have you been working on it? We were first introduced to the story in 2003. It's taken over 10 years of shooting and thousands of miles traveled to capture dozens of interviews, edit hundreds of hours of footage, and sift through tens of thousands of documents and photographs to make Who Took Johnny.
Why is this film important? There are currently almost 90,000 unsolved missing person cases in the department of justice database, and it's clear that even with all of the advancements in technology and public awareness, the problem of missing and exploited children has only gotten worse since Johnny disappeared over 30 years ago. Understandably with such an ugly issue, people would rather skip-over reading about these stories or change the channel of a news report, pretending the problem doesn't exist, rather than confront the brutality of the exploitation and trafficking of children in our country.
What Happened to Johnny Gosch? Watch the film.
CAST
Noreen Gosch - Johnny’s Mother John Gosch, Sr. - Johnny’s Father Capt. Bob Rushing - West Des Moines Police Department (1973-2001) Aaron Lundeen - Johnny’s Best Friend John Walsh - Host, America’s Most Wanted John Rossi – Witness Lt. Cam Coppas - West Des Moines Police Department John Smith - Father of Witness Frank Santiago - Reporter, The Des Moines Register (1980-2010) Eileen Wixted - Reporter, WHO-TV, Des Moines, IA (1983-1989) Chief Orval Cooney - West Des Moines Police Department (1968-1983) Kenneth Wooden - Child Safety Expert and Child Advocate Paul Sparrow - Executive Producer, America’s Most Wanted (1990-1996) Ron Sampson - President, Help Find Johnny Gosch Foundation (1982-1993) Don Martin - Eugene Martin’s Father Mike Borland - Photojournalist, WHO-TV, Des Moines, IA Paul Bonacci - Former teen prostitute and self-proclaimed accomplice to Johnny's abduction John DeCamp - Vietnam Vet, Former Nebraska State Senator, and Paul Bonacci’s Attorney Glenn Miller - National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Det. Nelson Zalva - Hillsborough County, FL Sheriff’s Office (1973-2001)
CREATIVE TEAM
Rumur Inc
As an award-winning production studio based in Brooklyn, RUMUR collaborates with high profile clients like HBO, A&E, IFC, MSNBC and DIRECTV, to create critically acclaimed documentary films. Partners David Beilinson, Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky bring a extensive array of skills and a tireless commitment to creating excellent and innovative work, regardless of medium. As the lines between film, television, and the web continue to blend together, RUMUR integrates its productions across multiple platforms, starting at the early development stages through final product and distribution. Visit rumur.com
David Beilinson, Director/Producer
David has produced a collection of groundbreaking documentary films, including Battle for Brooklyn, Code 33, and Horns and Halos. His work has appeared on HBO, A&E, MSNBC, PBS, and DIRECTV. Prior to joining Rumur, he was a producer for the Emmy-winning PBS series In the Mix and won the Entertainment Industries Council Prism Award. At 19, while working at Miramax Films, he helped implement their first online rights management catalog. Born and raised in Miami Beach, David graduated from the Gallatin School at New York University. Suki Hawley, Director/Editor
A director and editor, Suki has collaborated with husband Michael Galinsky for over 20 years. She has directed and edited a series of critically acclaimed documentary and narrative features including Battle for Brooklyn, Code 33, Horns and Halos, Half-Cocked and Radiation, which have screened to audiences around the world. She has also served as editor on high profile documentaries and TV series. A native of Dallas, she studied film at Wesleyan University and after graduation worked at the Sundance Institute and in the cutting room of Roger Corman’s legendary studio.
Michael Galinsky, Director/Photographer
Michael is a filmmaker, photographer, and musician, and along with wife Suki Hawley, he’s directed and produced six award- winning feature films and dozens of shorts, including Battle for Brooklyn, Code 33, Horns and Halos, and Half-Cocked. Michael is a Guggenheim Fellow, and his latest book of photos Malls Across America was recently published by world-renowned publisher Steidl. He is a contributing editor for Documentary Magazine, writing articles about filmmaking and distribution. Raised in Chapel Hill, Michael graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Religious Studies from NYU. He previously played bass |
And a basketball hoop. Can’t forget that. Then again, maybe I’m misjudging the whole situation and those kids on the end were just really bad during Sunday School.
(Thanks to Rob for the link)The Android Pay team has been going strong with the expansion into new countries and forging partnerships with even more banks, but that doesn't mean the app hasn't been given at least a little bit of attention along the way. The latest version doesn't appear to have any changes on the surface, but a teardown does turn up the signs of one interesting new addition. It looks like Android Pay will begin offering to add membership cards to your account if they are used in an Android Pay transaction. We're still looking for other changes in the app, especially at the terminal, so let us know in the comments if anything interesting turns up.
Teardown
Disclaimer: Teardowns are based on evidence found inside of apks (Android's application package) and are necessarily speculative and usually based on incomplete information. It's possible that the guesses made here are totally and completely wrong. Even when predictions are correct, there is always a chance that plans could change or may be canceled entirely. Much like rumors, nothing is certain until it's officially announced and released. Disclaimer: Teardowns are based on evidence found inside of apks (Android's application package) and are necessarily speculative and usually based on incomplete information. It's possible that the guesses made here are totally and completely wrong. Even when predictions are correct, there is always a chance that plans could change or may be canceled entirely. Much like rumors, nothing is certain until it's officially announced and released. The features discussed below are probably not live yet, or may only be live for a small percentage of users. Unless stated otherwise, don't expect to see these features if you install the apk.
Quick add for membership cards
If you haven't gone through the tedious process of manually adding every one of your membership cards into Android Pay, I can't say I blame you. It's not fun. In fact, you may even be carrying your membership cards around with you despite using Android Pay to complete a transaction. As it turns out, the app might offer to get those membership cards loaded into your account a little more easily the next time you hit the checkout counter.
New text in the app suggests that Android Pay will pop up a notification if it detects a membership card was used during a transaction, at which point users have the option to instantly add it to their accounts.
code <string name="pending_valuable_discoverable_title">Quick add</string>
<string name="pending_valuable_discoverable_body">Card from last purchase
Member #: %1$s</string> <string name="pending_valuable_notification_title">Link your %1$s card</string>
<string name="pending_valuable_notification_body">Instantly add the card you just used</string>
<string name="pending_valuable_notification_add_now">Link Now</string>
<string name="pending_valuable_notification_opt_out">Turn Off Notifications</string>
These lines aren't specific, but I would expect that this feature relies on the in-store terminal to relay the membership information to Android Pay after the transaction is complete, and that may not be supported by all stores. I think it should go without saying that the notifications won't appear if you use the physical card that's already on your account
There's really not much more to say about this one, it's really just another way to add cards that might save some users from adding a handful of cards that they normally carry with them. At least it will be a time saver and might encourage people to save a little bit of time at the checkout lane by transmitting both the payment and membership info in a single tap.
New featured partner stores
Android Pay features many of the branded stores it works with, and judging by a few new strings, that list just got a little bigger. The names of four fairly well-known clothing brands were just added to the apk, including: Athleta, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Gap.
code <string name="gap_banana_republic_athleta_old_navy">Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, Old Navy</string> <string name="store_name_athleta">Athleta</string>
<string name="store_name_banana_republic">Banana Republic</string>
<string name="store_name_gap">Gap</string>
<string name="store_name_old_navy">Old Navy</string>
Only the first string in that list is actually in use yet, and it's for a page that isn't visible (at least not to me). Even so, it's just a list of stores where Android Pay is accepted. I can't help but wonder if these may be launch partners for the Visual ID (formerly Hands Free) system that turned up in a teardown last month, but there's nothing to suggest there's any link aside from the timing.
I wouldn't normally bring up something like this, but Android Pay rarely includes consumer brand names in the apk, which makes me wonder if there's something more happening. But without any more to go on, it's just a curiosity for now.
Download
The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.
Version: 1.24.156938877The eyes are arguably the most important features of an individual's face, if not a window to the soul, so the use of generic eye models when creating digital faces can have disappointing results. Scientists at Disney Research Zurich, noting the significant variation in eyes between individuals, have devised methods for faithfully capturing those features.
The researchers developed a technique, using multiple cameras and varied lighting, to capture the shape and texture of the white sclera, the shape and refraction of the transparent cornea and the shape and coloring of the iris, including how it deforms as the pupil narrows and widens.
This unprecedented level of detail enables the creation of an eye model that both captures the look of the person's eye and can duplicate how it responds to changes in lighting.
"Creating a photo-realistic digital human is one of the grand challenges of computer graphics, but despite intense research on capturing actors' faces, especially for reconstruction of the skin surface and features such as hair, little attention to date has been given to the eye, particularly its shape," said Pascal Bérard, a Ph.D. student in computer graphics at Disney Research Zurich and ETH Zurich.
"Generically modeled eyes may be sufficient for background characters, but it now takes significant effort to manually create realistic eyes for heroes and other leading characters," he said. "Our reconstruction technique can greatly reduce the time spent and help increase the realism of the eye."
Bérard and his colleagues will present their findings at SIGGRAPH Asia 2014, the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Dec. 3-6 in Shenzhen, China.
Though the eye is generally perceived - and modeled generically - as spherical and uniform, the eyeball actually exhibits strong asymmetry and includes microscopic surface details and imperfections, the researchers noted. The microgeometry of the iris, far from a simple planar or cone-shaped feature, is as unique to every person as a fingerprint.
Capturing the details of the eye is difficult; the eyes are small, much of the eye is occluded by its small opening in the face and the sclera, cornea and iris each have different visual properties that require different capture techniques. The set-up, data acquisition and calibration required for the capture technique takes about 20 minutes; to keep the person still, the subject lies on the floor with head in a headrest.
In addition to capturing the geometric and appearance variations between individuals, the methods developed by the Disney Research team also enable data-driven animations of the iris, replicating how the muscle deforms in each individual as the pupil widens or narrows in response to light. Other eye motions have not yet been replicated by the team.
The Disney Research team, which includes Derek Bradley, Maurizio Nitti, Thabo Beeler and Markus Gross, demonstrated their techniques by reconstructing nine different eyes from six different actors, highlighting the marked differences in shape, coloring and iris deformation between them. They also combined both of the captured eyes of one actor with a face scan to show how their method could be used to create artistic digital doubles.
"Such a result would traditionally take significant artistic skill and man-hours to generate, in particular if it was meant to closely resemble a real actor," Bérard said. "Our result was created with very little effort."
###
More information, including an explanatory video, is available on the project website http://www. disneyresearch. com/ publication/ high-quality-capture-of-eyes/.
About Disney Research
Disney Research is a network of research laboratories supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. Vice Presidents Jessica Hodgins and Markus Gross manage Disney Research facilities in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Zürich, and Boston and work closely with the Pixar and ILM research groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Research topics include computer graphics, animation, video processing, computer vision, robotics, wireless & mobile computing, human-computer interaction, displays, behavioral economics, and machine learning.Alarmed by reports that a computer program has “learned” to play Texas Hold ‘Em so efficiently that it can now defeat professional poker players, End Times radio host Rick Wiles warned on his “Trunews” radio broadcast yesterday that it is now only a matter of time before Satan takes over the world using a “global brain.”
Because Texas Hold ‘Em involves bluffing, Wiles is convinced that computers are now learning how to lie—and since Satan is “the father of all lies,” it stands to reason that we will soon have “demon-possessed artificially intelligent robots” controlling the world.
“If you have a machine that is capable of lying, then it has to be connected to Lucifer,” he said. “Now we’re back to the global brain. This is where they’re going. They’re building a global brain that will embody Lucifer’s mind and so Lucifer will be deceiving people through the global brain.”
To make matters worse, Wiles warned, demon-possessed robots will soon start replacing human workers, resulting in massive unemployment, which is why the “deep state” is planning to start a global war for the purpose of killing off all those people who are no longer needed.
“I’m going to tell you where I think this is going,” he said. “I think the deep state planners have already figured this out and they have scheduled a massive war to eliminate tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of useless eaters. I really believe that.”Illustration by David Simonds
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“NATION shall speak peace unto nation.” Eighty years ago, Britain's state broadcasters adopted that motto to signal their hope that modern communications would establish new bonds of friendship between people divided by culture, political boundaries and distance.
For those who still cling to that ideal, the latest trends on the internet are depressing. Of course, as anyone would expect, governments use their official websites to boast about their achievements and to argue their corner—usually rather clunkily—in disputes about territory, symbols or historical rights and wrongs.
What is much more disturbing is the way in which skilled young surfers—the very people whom the internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions. Sometimes these cyber-zealots seem to be acting at their governments' behest—but often they are working on their own, determined to outdo their political masters in propagating dislike of some unspeakable foe.
Consider the response in Russia to “The Soviet Story”, a Latvian documentary that compares communism with fascism. If this film had come out five years ago, the Kremlin would have issued an angry press release and encouraged some young hoodlums to make another assault on Latvia's embassy. Some Slavophile politicians would have made wild threats.
These days, the reaction from hardline Russian nationalists is a bit more subtle. They are using blogs to raise funds for an alternative documentary to present the Soviet communist record in a good light. Well-wishers with little cash can help in other ways, for example by helping with translation into and from Baltic languages.
Meanwhile, America's rednecks can find lots of material on the web with which to fuel and indulge their prejudices. For example, there are “suicide-bomber” games which pit the contestant against a generic bearded Muslim; such entertainment has drawn protests both in Israel—where people say it trivialises terrorism—and from Muslim groups who say it equates their faith with violence. Border Patrol, another charming online game, invites you to shoot illegal Mexican immigrants crossing the border.
From the earliest days of the internet the new medium became a forum for nationalist spats that were sometimes relatively innocent by today's standards. People sparred over whether Freddie Mercury, a rock singer, was Iranian, Parsi or Azeri; whether the Sea of Japan should be called the East Sea or the East Sea of Korea; and whether Israel could call hummus part of its cuisine. Sometimes such arguments moved to Wikipedia, a user-generated reference service, whose elaborate moderation rules put a limit to acrimony.
But e-arguments also led to hacking wars. Nobody is surprised to hear of Chinese assaults on American sites that promote the Tibetan cause; or of hacking contests between Serbs and Albanians, or Turks and Armenians. A darker development is the abuse of blogs, social networks, maps and video-sharing sites that make it easy to publish incendiary material and form hate groups. A study published in May by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human-rights group, found a 30% increase last year in the number of sites that foment hatred and violence; the total was around 8,000.
Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On Facebook alone one can join groups like “Belgium Doesn't Exist”, “Abkhazia is not Georgia”, “Kosovo is Serbia” or “I Hate Pakistan”. Not all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that unite the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by many governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc, a sort of alternative YouTube for “white interests, white culture and white politics” offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.
Tiny but deadly
The small size of these online communities does not mean they are unimportant. The power of a nationalist message can be amplified with blogs, online maps and text messaging; and as a campaign migrates from medium to medium, fresh layers of falsehood can be created. During the crisis that engulfed Kenya earlier this year, for example, it was often blog posts and mobile-phone messages that gave the signal for fresh attacks. Participants in recent anti-American marches in South Korea were mobilised by online petitions, forums and blogs, some of which promoted a crazy theory about Koreans having a genetic vulnerability to mad-cow disease.
In Russia, a nationalist blogger published names and contact details of students from the Caucasus attending Russia's top universities, attaching a video-clip of dark-skinned teenagers beating up ethnic Russians. Russian nationalist blogs reposted the story—creating a nightmare for the students who were targeted.
Spreading hatred on the web has become far easier since the sharp drop in the cost of producing, storing and distributing digital content. High-quality propaganda used to require good cartoonists; now anyone can make and disseminate slick images. Whether it's a Hungarian group organising an anti-Roma poster competition, a Russian anti-immigrant lobby publishing the location of minority neighbourhoods, or Slovak nationalists displaying a map of Europe without Hungary, the web makes it simple to spread fear and loathing.
The sheer ease of aggregation (assembling links to existing sources, videos and articles) is a boon. Take anti-cnn.com, a website built by a Chinese entrepreneur in his 20s, which aggregates cases of the Western media's allegedly pro-Tibetan bias. As soon as it appealed for material, more than 1,000 people supplied examples. Quickly the site became a leading motor of Chinese cyber-nationalism, fuelling boycotts of brands and street protests.
And then there is history. A decade ago, a zealot seeking to prove some absurd proposition—such as the denial of the Nazi Holocaust, or the Ukrainian famine—might spend days of research in the library looking for obscure works of propaganda. Today, digital versions of these books, even those out of press for decades, are accessible in dedicated online libraries. In short, it has never been easier to propagate hatred and lies. People with better intentions might think harder about how they too can make use of the net.Shocking video showing two gay men being slapped by vigilantes who broke into their home before handing them over to police has sparked international condemnation.
The men, both in their 20s, are being detained in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where they could face 100 lashes for having homosexual relations.
The footage shows one of the distressed men, who was completely naked, speaking to his family on a phone, while telling one of the vigilantes: 'Please brother, please stop.'
The video shows the two men, obviously distressed, after a group of vigilantes bursts into the room
The were taken to Wilayatul Hisbah, a Sharia police facility, after their arrest on March 28. They have been identified by the initials HB and MT, and were reportedly in the room of HB to have sex.
Phelim Kine, deputy Asia division director at Human Right Watch, said after the video was shared around the world: 'These men had their privacy invaded in a frightening and humiliating manner and now face public torture for the ‘crime’ of their alleged sexual orientation.'
Kine said it demonstrates the 'abuse' embedded in anti-LGBT laws in the province of Aceh, where members of the public are encouraged to enforced strict Islamic laws.
Authorities in the province of Aceh have been heavily condemned after the two men were detained
One of the men pleaded with the enforcers to stop and was seen frantically talking to his family
The region has since 2001 been allowed by the Indonesian government to adopt bylaws which criminalise homosexuality as well as punishing women who do not cover their bodies.
Alcohol, gambling and extramarital relations are also banned in the region, and human rights groups have hit out at Banda Aceh's mayor, Illiza Sa’aduddin, who last year said she would create a team to tackle the 'threat' of LGBT people.
In 2014, Aceh introduced a law which punishes anybody caught engaging in consensual gay sex with 100 lashes, 100 months in jail or a fine of 1,000 grams of gold.
One man was wearing shorts while another cowered on the floor after the vigilantes burst into the room
The men face 100 lashings under the strict laws which outlaw homosexuality in Aceh in Indonesia
It also sets out punishment for sex crimes, unmarried people engaging in displays of affection, adulterous relationships and underage sex.
Authorities in the province on the northern tip of Sumatra island caned 339 people in 2016 for a range of crimes, according to HRW.
The Indonesian government has yet to respond to a letter from the United Nations, written in April last year, expressing concerns about the abuse of LGBT people in Aceh.
Last October, president Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo said police must defend the country's LGBT population, but Human Rights Watch has accused him of inaction since.
President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo has come under fire from human rights activists
Kine said after the latest arrest: 'President Jokowi should urgently intervene is this case to demonstrate his stated commitment to ending discrimination against LGBT people.
'Jokowi then needs to act to eliminate Aceh’s discriminatory ordinances so these outrageous arrests don’t happen again.'
Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that criminalises same-sex relations and that uses sharia as its legal code in addition to the national criminal code.
'The case has been sent to the sharia court of Aceh... It involves sodomy which can be punished by 100 lashes,' Marzuki, head of investigations with Aceh's religious police, said on Monday.Some more interesting data coming from Gallup. First, president Obama is back to 51-41, gaining 5 points spread over the weekend.
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As for Democrats, still no reason to panic. Cautious, yes, but the panic generated by the MSM is way over the top.
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These results are based on aggregated data from Gallup Daily tracking in 2009, including interviews with more than 350,000 adults in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Gallup conducted at least 1,000 interviews in every state except Wyoming (878), North Dakota (968), Delaware (997), and the District of Columbia (632). Gallup interviewed more than 20,000 residents each in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Nationwide, party support shifted in a slightly more Republican direction in 2009 after a historically strong Democratic year in 2008. Overall, 49% of Americans in 2009 identified as Democrats or said they were independent but leaned to the Democratic Party, while 41% identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents. That 8-point Democratic advantage compares to a 12-point, 52% to 40%, Democratic advantage in 2008.
Thus, even with the reduction in Democratic strength, the party still maintained a solid advantage over the Republicans nationally last year. It follows, then, that most states continued to be Democratic in their political orientation.
You can see much more in this interactive map.
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If the Democrats had any brain, they would post these charts, provided by Nancy Pelosi, on billboards throughout the country. You can't get a more clear message (More charts, mainly health care related, behind the link):
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Photos, mostly from the awesome bakery of Pete Souza. Please don't hotlink.
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*The* White House:
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President Barack Obama stands in the Outer Oval Office, viewed from the Cabinet Room of the White House, Jan. 7, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speak to 6th grade students at Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Va., Jan. 19, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama confers with Rep. Barney Frank (D - Mass.) after making remarks on financial reform in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Jan. 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Patrons at Smitty's restaurant in in Elryia, Ohio take pictures of President Barack Obama who made an unscheduled stop for lunch there with Elryia mayor William "Bill" Grace, Jan. 22, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama is greeted by students while touring the Wind Turbine Manufacturing and Fab Lab at Lorain County Community College, Elyria, Ohio, Jan. 22, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama prepares for his State of the Union speech with Director of Speechwriting Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, in the Oval Office, Jan. 25, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama shoots hoops with his personal aide, Reggie Love, at the White House basketball court, Jan. 18, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
US President Barack Obama addresses the Democratic National Committee(DNC) at their annual Winter Meeting in Washington, February 6, 2010. AFP PHOTO/ Chris KLEPONIS
President Barack Obama greets a young visitor in the Oval Office, Feb. 5, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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Congrats, Saints! Love is all you need. :)I recently introduced an amendment at the Senate Budget Committee. It was pretty simple. It asked my Senate colleagues to begin the process of overturning the disastrous Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United, and to bring transparency and disclosure to the political process. The link to that debate on the amendment is here.
Here's what I asked my Senate colleagues to consider:
Are we comfortable with an American political system which is being dominated by a handful of billionaires?
Are we a nation that prides ourselves on one-person, one-vote, or do we tell ordinary Americans you've got one vote but the Koch brothers can spend hundreds of millions of dollars?
Do we want a political system in which a handful of billionaires can buy members of the United States Congress?
Who are those members of Congress elected with the help of billionaires going to be representing? Do you think they're going to be representing the middle class and working families?
The answers seem clear to me. Unless the campaign financing system is reformed, the U.S. Congress will become paid employees of the people who pay for their campaigns -- the billionaire class. Needless to say, not everyone on the Committee agreed.Abstract
Importance Prevention of iron deficiency in infancy may promote neurodevelopment. Delayed umbilical cord clamping (CC) prevents iron deficiency at 4 to 6 months of age, but long-term effects after 12 months of age have not been reported.
Objective To investigate the effects of delayed CC compared with early CC on neurodevelopment at 4 years of age.
Design, Setting, and Participants Follow-up of a randomized clinical trial conducted from April 16, 2008, through May 21, 2010, at a Swedish county hospital. Children who were included in the original study (n = 382) as full-term infants born after a low-risk pregnancy were invited to return for follow-up at 4 years of age. Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-III) and Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Movement ABC) scores (collected between April 18, 2012, and July 5, 2013) were assessed by a blinded psychologist. Between April 11, 2012, and August 13, 2013, parents recorded their child’s development using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, Third Edition (ASQ) and behavior using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. All data were analyzed by intention to treat.
Interventions Randomization to delayed CC (≥180 seconds after delivery) or early CC (≤10 seconds after delivery).
Main Outcomes and Measures The main outcome was full-scale IQ as assessed by the WPPSI-III. Secondary objectives were development as assessed by the scales from the WPPSI-III and Movement ABC, development as recorded using the ASQ, and behavior using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.
Results We assessed 263 children (68.8%). No differences were found in WPPSI-III scores between groups. Delayed CC improved the adjusted mean differences (AMDs) in the ASQ personal-social (AMD, 2.8; 95% CI, 0.8-4.7) and fine-motor (AMD, 2.1; 95% CI, 0.2-4.0) domains and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire prosocial subscale (AMD, 0.5; 95% CI, >0.0-0.9). Fewer children in the delayed-CC group had results below the cutoff in the ASQ fine-motor domain (11.0% vs 3.7%; P =.02) and the Movement ABC bicycle-trail task (12.9% vs 3.8%; P =.02). Boys who received delayed CC had significantly higher AMDs in the WPPSI-III processing-speed quotient (AMD, 4.2; 95% CI, 0.8-7.6; P =.02), Movement ABC bicycle-trail task (AMD, 0.8; 95% CI, 0.1-1.5; P =.03), and fine-motor (AMD, 4.7; 95% CI, 1.0-8.4; P =.01) and personal-social (AMD, 4.9; 95% CI, 1.6-8.3; P =.004) domains of the ASQ.
Conclusions and Relevance Delayed CC compared with early CC improved scores in the fine-motor and social domains at 4 years of age, especially in boys, indicating that optimizing the time to CC may affect neurodevelopment in a low-risk population of children born in a high-income country.
Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01581489
Introduction
Iron deficiency is a global health issue among preschool children that is associated with impaired neurodevelopment affecting cognitive, motor, and behavioral abilities.1,2 High growth velocity combined with limited ability to absorb iron results in markedly reduced iron stores during the first year of life.3 Iron deficiency affects 5% to 25% of preschool children in high-income countries and up to 100% of young children in low-income countries.4,5 Iron administration to high-risk groups is associated with improved psychomotor and cognitive development and fewer behavioral symptoms.6,7
Delaying umbilical cord clamping (CC) by 2 to 3 minutes after delivery allows fetal blood remaining in the placental circulation to be transfused to the newborn.8,9 This transfusion can expand the blood volume by 30% to 40% (25-30 mL/kg).10 After physiologic hemolysis, hemoglobin-bound iron is transferred into iron stores. Consequently, delayed CC is associated with improved iron status at 4 to 6 months of age.11,12 Delayed CC has the potential to contribute approximately 75 mg of iron, corresponding to more than 3 months’ requirement in a 6- to 11-month-old infant.13 We have previously demonstrated a 90% reduction in iron deficiency at 4 months in healthy full-term infants who received delayed CC with no adverse neonatal effects.14 However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effects and evidence of no harm, causing policy makers to be hesitant to make clear recommendations concerning delayed CC in full-term infants, especially in settings with rich resources.15
We hypothesized that delayed CC and the associated reduction of iron deficiency during the first 4 months of life would result in improved neurodevelopment. Therefore, we conducted a follow-up of a randomized clinical trial14 to assess the long-term effects of delayed CC compared with early CC on neurodevelopment at 4 years of age.
Box Section Ref ID
At a Glance Iron deficiency is associated with impaired neurodevelopment affecting cognitive, motor, as well as behavioral abilities; delaying umbilical cord clamping for 3 minutes reduces iron deficiency at 4 to 6 months of age.
In a follow-up of a randomized trial, 263 children (69% of the original study population) were assessed for neurodevelopment at 4 years of age.
Delayed cord clamping compared with early cord clamping improved scores and reduced the number of children having low scores in fine-motor skills and social domains.
Boys, who were more prone to iron deficiency, were shown to have the most improved results, especially in fine-motor skills.
Optimizing the time to cord clamping may affect neurodevelopment in a low-risk population of children born in a high-income country.
Method
Study Design
This study is a follow-up of a randomized clinical trial conducted at the Hospital of Halland from April 16, 2008, through May 21, 2010.14 Follow-up was conducted at the same location from April 11, 2012, through August 13, 2013. The original trial and the follow-up study were approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board at Lund University (protocols 41/2008 and 23/2012), and written patient consent was obtained from parents separately for the study and follow-up. Both studies were registered with Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT01245296 and NCT01581489). The full study protocol can be found in the trial protocol in Supplement 1.
Randomization and Masking of the Original Trial
Full-term newborns with a gestational age of 37 to 41 weeks were eligible if the mother was healthy, was a nonsmoker, and had an uncomplicated pregnancy with expected vaginal delivery. Randomization assignments (1:1), consisting of delayed (≥180 seconds after delivery) or early (≤10 seconds after delivery) CC, were contained in sealed, numbered, opaque envelopes that were opened by the midwife when delivery was imminent.14 The mother and the midwife could not be masked, but all staff and researchers involved in the collection or analysis of data were blinded to the allocation group.
Study Participants
All children included in the original study (n = 382) were eligible for the follow-up. An invitation letter for the follow-up study was sent 1 month before the child’s fourth birthday.
Procedures
The children were assessed by a psychologist (B.L.) at 48 to 51 months of age. This age was chosen to enable assessment of cognitive function using the older-age band (4-7 years) of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-III).16 This test provides composite scores that represent intellectual functioning in the following verbal and cognitive performance domains: full-scale IQ, verbal IQ, performance IQ, processing-speed quotient, and general language composite. Scores are standardized to a mean (SD) of 100 (15). A subnormal score was defined as a result lower than 85.
Fine-motor skills were assessed by the manual dexterity area from the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, Second Edition (Movement ABC), which includes 3 subtests: time for posting coins into a slot (both hands), time for bead threading, and drawing within a bicycle trail.17 The reference mean (SD) for each test is 10 (3). A score of less than 7 reflects performance below the 15th percentile and is regarded as an at-risk score. The psychologist also assessed the child’s pencil grip and classified findings as mature (static or dynamic tripod) or immature (palmar supinate or digital pronate).18,19
Parents reported their child’s development using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, Third Edition (ASQ) 48-month questionnaire, which was translated into Swedish (by permission from Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co).20 The ASQ contains 5 subdomains: communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social, each consisting of 6 items with a maximum score of 60, resulting in a maximum total score of 300 (higher scores indicate more developmental milestones reached). Cutoff scores were created according to the ASQ manual, and scores that were 2 SDs less than the mean score of the respective subdomain were considered subnormal. If questionnaires were not completely answered, scores were adjusted according to the ASQ manual.20
Behavior was assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ),21 which is directed at children aged 3 to 4 years. In the SDQ, 25 items in 5 subscales are scored. Four of these subscales—emotional difficulties score, conduct difficulties score, hyperactivity difficulties score, and peer problems score—are added together to form a total difficulties score (based on 20 items; maximum score, 40; higher scores indicate more difficulties). The fifth subscale, the prosocial score, is evaluated separately (5 items; maximum score, 10; higher scores indicate better prosocial behavior). A cutoff score was defined according to the criteria given for borderline and abnormal in the manual, Scoring the Informant-Rated Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.22
Outcomes
The WPPSI-III full-scale IQ was prespecified as the primary outcome. Prespecified secondary outcomes included the WPPSI-III composite scores (verbal IQ, performance IQ, processing-speed quotient, and general language composite), fine-motor skills (Movement ABC, manual dexterity area and subtests), psychomotor development (ASQ, total and 5 subdomains), and behavior (SDQ, total and subscales). Children’s sex and gestational age at birth were prespecified confounders. The child’s pencil grip was also recorded.
Statistical Analysis
This study is a follow-up of a randomized clinical trial, and the sample size is considered fixed.
For summary statistics (Table 1), delayed CC was compared with early CC with respect to maternal and newborn data with means and SDs or numbers and percentages, as appropriate. An unpaired 2-tailed t test was used for variables with normal distribution, and categorical variables were compared between groups using the Fisher exact test.
For comparison of continuous test scores (WPPSI-III, Movement ABC, and ASQ), the mean difference between delayed CC and early CC was calculated and the t test was used for P value estimation (Table 2). For ordinal scale variables from the SDQ test scores, the Mann-Whitney test was used.
For adjusted analyses, analysis of covariance was used for test scores from the WPPSI-III, Movement ABC, and ASQ, and ordinal regression analysis was used for scores from the SDQ. Children’s sex and parents’ level of education were chosen a priori as adjustment variables for known predictors of children’s development, and children’s age when performing the test was chosen a posteriori because it was significantly correlated with several of the outcome variables.
Test scores were dichotomized for logistic regression analysis (Table 3); unadjusted and adjusted analyses were conducted. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs were calculated.
To estimate an overall effect of fine-motor function, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used. The MANOVA analysis was appropriate, with correlation coefficients for fine-motor outcome variables ranging from 0.2456 to 0.4221. The MANOVA analysis was conducted using the tests that are considered most specific for fine-motor function, including the WPPSI-III processing-speed quotient, Movement ABC manual dexterity, and ASQ fine-motor sections, with randomization as a grouping variable and sex, parents’ level of education, and age when performing the test as independent factors.
A subgroup analysis was conducted for sex as prespecified in the protocol. Analysis of covariance and logistic regression were conducted using the designated adjustment variables (eTable 1 and eTable 2 in Supplement 2). P <.05 was considered significant |
allegedly solicited explicit images from the girl.
Prosecutors are also believed to be weighing a receipt of child pornography charge, which carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, and a possession of child pornography charge, which has no minimum sentence.
It's not clear what investigators have uncovered through the course of the probe. Federal child pornography laws are broadly written, the WSJ noted, and prosecutors often take contextual evidence into account when settling on charges.
The Daily Mail reported last September that Weiner exchanged sexual messages with a 15-year-old girl over the course of several months.
Weiner, 51, sent multiple bare-chested photos of himself to the girl, commented on her body and discussed sexual acts with her, according to saved messages provided to the Mail by the girl and her father.
Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife and a top Clinton aide, announced last August she was separating from him over a different sexting controversy.
Weiner’s political career was derailed in 2011 after the first of several sexting scandals.More than 50 digital rights and consumer groups are pressing the Federal Communications Commission to start drafting Internet privacy rules “as quickly as possible.”
The groups sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler arguing that increased monitoring by companies that provide Internet service can “have a chilling effect on speech and increase the potential for discriminatory practices.”
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“Their position as Internet gatekeepers gives them a comprehensive view of consumer behavior and until now privacy protections for consumers using those services have been unclear,” the groups wrote in the letter sent Wednesday.
The letter was signed by groups like The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Digital Democracy, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Consumer Watchdog and many others.
When Internet service was reclassified last year as a telecommunications service, the FCC took on oversight of how Comcast, Verizon and other Internet service providers handle privacy. But the agency has not begun drafting privacy rules.
Wheeler had set a fall deadline to begin the privacy rules, but that slipped into 2016. In November, he said the rule-making process could get started in the next several months.
In their letter on Wednesday, the digital rights and consumer groups urged the commission to adopt rules to protect consumers from having their personal data shared or collected by Internet service providers without their explicit consent. They also want those companies to clearly disclose their data collection.
In addition, they said the privacy rules should require companies to disclose data breaches and hold them accountable for a failure to protect against an attack.
Many opponents of net neutrality rules have criticized the FCC’s new privacy mandate, accusing the agency of usurping authority from the Federal Trade Commission, which had policed the space for years. Opponents have also criticized the FCC’s vague privacy guidance for Internet service providers.
Last year, the FCC released an advisory that said it would initially judge providers on whether they are "taking reasonable, good-faith steps" to comply with the privacy provision of communications law, until tailored rules for the Internet can be developed.
It also recently signed a memorandum of understanding to work with the FTC on privacy.Abstract
Krüppel-like factors (KLFs) are a family of 17 transcription factors characterized by a conserved DNA-binding domain of three zinc fingers and a variable N-terminal domain responsible for recruiting cofactors. KLFs have diverse functions in stem cell biology, embryo patterning, and tissue homoeostasis. KLF1 and related family members function as transcriptional activators via recruitment of co-activators such as EP300, whereas KLF3 and related members act as transcriptional repressors via recruitment of C-terminal Binding Proteins. KLF1 directly activates the Klf3 gene via an erythroid-specific promoter. Herein, we show KLF1 and KLF3 bind common as well as unique sites within the erythroid cell genome by ChIP-seq. We show KLF3 can displace KLF1 from key erythroid gene promoters and enhancers in vivo. Using 4sU RNA labelling and RNA-seq, we show this competition results in reciprocal transcriptional outputs for >50 important genes. Furthermore, Klf3−/− mice displayed exaggerated recovery from anemic stress and persistent cell cycling consistent with a role for KLF3 in dampening KLF1-driven proliferation. We suggest this study provides a paradigm for how KLFs work in incoherent feed-forward loops or networks to fine-tune transcription and thereby control diverse biological processes such as cell proliferation.
INTRODUCTION
Krüppel-like factors are a group of 17 transcription factors (TFs) which play diverse roles in cell proliferation, differentiation and development (1). All 17 members contain highly conserved DNA-binding domains consisting of three C-terminal C 2 H 2 -type zinc fingers (2) which confer binding to a nine base pair CACCC-box DNA sequence, CCM–CRC–CCN, found in many tissue-specific gene promoters and enhancers (3). The Specificity Protein (SP) family of proteins are related to the KLFs (4) and bind similar motifs in vivo (5). SP/KLF proteins can be grouped into clades according to their N-terminal domains (Supplementary Figure S1A) (6). Krüppel-like factor 1 (KLF1), KLF2 and KLF4 primarily activate target genes by recruiting cofactors such as EP300 and CBP (7), whereas KLF3, KLF8 and KLF12 repress target genes by recruiting cofactors such as C-terminal binding proteins (CtBP1, CtBP2) (8–10). Other members of the SP/KLF family can repress or activate target genes depending on genomic context.
Multiple KLFs are often expressed in the same cells. In these situations, they can form transcriptional networks to coordinate developmental programs. For example, KLF2, KLF4 and KLF5 work redundantly in embryonic stem (ES) cells where they co-regulate key pluripotency genes such as Nanog, as well as each other, to maintain a ‘stem cell-like’ state (11). Many KLFs are expressed during erythropoiesis. These include Klf1, Klf2, Klf3, Klf6 and Klf10 (12). Klf1, the founding member of the KLF family (13), is erythroid-specific and is essential for definitive erythropoiesis (14,15). In fact, KLF1 controls nearly all aspects of erythropoiesis including globin gene regulation, haem biosynthesis and the cell cycle (3,16–20). Expression of Klf3 is ubiquitous but is highest in erythroid tissue, the gut, skin, lungs, and the spleen (21). In erythroid cells, KLF1 directly activates Klf3 via an erythroid-specific promoter as well as the ubiquitous promoter (22). Due to extensive homology in the DNA-binding domains (Supplementary Figure S1B), it is no surprise KLF1 and KLF3 bind to the same DNA motif in vitro (21,23). Furthermore, the preferred in vivo binding motif for KLF1 in erythroid cells and KLF3 in MEFs is identical (3,24). This presents the possibility that opposing biochemical functions of KLF1 and KLF3 may converge on the same transcriptional targets in the same cell type. Thus, we hypothesized KLF1 and KLF3 might compete for promoters and enhancers in erythroid cells resulting in ‘fine-tuning’ of gene regulation and cell proliferation and/or differentiation.
To address this hypothesis, we developed tamoxifen-inducible ER™ fusions of KLF1 and KLF3. We stably introduced these into erythroid cell lines to facilitate measurement of the direct transcriptional consequences of an induced DNA-binding event for each of the TFs. Following induction, we performed ChIP-seq and next-generation sequencing of newly synthesized RNA (4sU-RNA-seq), a metabolic labeling approach to qauntify recently transcribed RNA, including primary nuclear RNA, genome wide. This facilitates measurement of the immediate transcriptome consequences of a TF DNA-binding event (25). Using ChIP-seq, we show that KLF1 and KLF3 co-occupy promoters and enhancers of many critical erythroid genes such as E2f2. Furthermore, KLF3 can displace KLF1 from these sites. We identified a set of 54 genes inversely regulated by KLF1 and KLF3. Together, these data suggest that KLF3 acts to ‘fine-tune’ transcription in erythropoiesis by repressing genes activated by KLF1 and thereby dampening the KLF1-induced transcriptional response. This result is consistent with an incoherent type 1 feed-forward loop (FFL) or network (26,27), which we suggest is necessary for precise control over the tempo of erythrocyte proliferation. We validated this in Klf3−/− mice, which have near normal steady state erythropoiesis (28) but display increased sensitivity and an exaggerated rebound in response to phenylhydrazine-induced hemolysis. This study provides a paradigm for how the KLF/SP superfamily of TFs modulates gene expression to fine-tune biological responses in various cell systems.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Generation of cell lines
K1-ER cells, previously known as B1.6 cells, were generated from Klf1−/− fetal liver-derived erythroid cells as previously described (29). The KLF3 ORF was cloned in frame with ERα into MSCV-IRES-GFP. The plasmid was transfected into GP+E86 cells (30) to generate a stable retrovirus-producing subclone. J2E cells were infected by co-culture with GP+E-Klf3-ER and sorted for GFP by FACS. Expression of the transgene was confirmed by western blotting using a mouse monoclonal antibody raised against ERα (Santa Cruz Biotechnology, HC-20, #sc-543).
Chromatin immunoprecipitation and sequencing (ChIP-seq)
K1-ER and J2E-Klf3-ER cell lines were incubated in 2 mM 4OH-tam (or ethanol vehicle control) for 3 h prior to crosslinking with 0.4% formaldehyde. KLF1-ER ChIP was performed with a rabbit polyclonal antibody raised against the N-terminus of KLF1 (15). Two replicates of KLF1-ER ChIP from two independent clones were combined for deeper analysis; one replicate was previously published (25). KLF3-ER ChIP was performed on a single clone selected for equivalent expression levels to K1-ER cells using a mouse monoclonal antibody against ERα (ThermoScientific, ss-315-P). Enrichment of specific target sites within ChIPed DNA was validated by qPCR (see additional methods). Samples (n = 3) were pooled to enhance complexity, used to generate Ion Xpress™ Plus fragment libraries and sequenced on the Ion Proton platform. Reads were mapped to the mouse genome (mm9) using TMAP, a best platform for Ion Torrent data (25,31); duplicate reads and multi-mapped reads were excluded. Peaks were called using MACS2 (32) and annotated with respect the peak position relative to the nearest gene; i.e. promoter, intron, UTR, CDS, downstream, distal and intergenic. Promoter regions were defined as –1 kb upstream and +75 bp downstream of the TSS. Downstream regions were defined as –75 bp upstream and +1 kb downstream of the TTS. Distal regions were defined as within 50 kb upstream or downstream of a gene. ChIP was validated by qPCR with reference to input DNA using primers (Supporting Table S1) designed to amplify DNA spanning the center of peaks and 1 kb up or downstream of the peaks.
Motif analysis of ChIP-seq data
De novo motif discovery was undertaken on peaks ±50 bp of DNA or ±250 bp of DNA using MEME with or without repeat masking (33). The results using ±50 bp of DNA and repeat masking were the most robust and are reported herein. To determine any preferential binding partners for KLF1 versus KLF3, MEME was run in discriminative mode. De novo matrices were compared with defined motifs as deposited in the JASPAR and UniProbe repositories using TOMTOM from MEME SUITE (36). Differential enrichment of short un-gapped motifs between KLF1 and KLF3 peaks (±50 bp) was also undertaken on peaks using Discriminative Regular Expression Motif Elicitation (DREME) (34). Over representation of defined DNA motifs as catalogued in JASPAR and UniProbe databases was performed using CentriMo within the MEME Suite (35).
We downloaded GATA1 ChIP-seq data in induced G1-ER4 cell line (GEO accession: GSM995443) (36). TAL1 ChIP-seq in MEL cell line (GEO accession number: GSM923578) (37). NFE2 ChIP-seq in Ter119+ sorted, phenylhydrazine-treated mice spleens (GEO accession number: GSM1151147) (38). FLI-1 ChIP-seq in mature megakaryocytes from murine E14.5 fetal liver (GEO accession: GSM1032607) (39).
4sU-RNA isolation and sequencing (4sU-RNA-seq)
4sU-RNA-seq was performed as previously described (25). Three clonally independent lines of J2E and J2E-KLF3-ER (clones A, C and E) cells were incubated with 2 mM 4OH-tam (or ethanol control) for 10 min prior to addition of 500 μM 4sU (Sigma; #T4509) then incubated for further 30 min. Enrichment for primary transcripts relative to spliced RNA was validated by qRT-PCR (see Supporting Table S2 for primers). 4sU-labeled RNA was used to generate Ion Xpress™ Plus fragment libraries which were sequenced on the Ion Proton platform. Reads were mapped to the mouse genome (mm9) using Tophat2 (40) and TMAP (31). Significantly differentially regulated genes (DEGs) were determined using CuffDiff (41) using a Bonferroni-corrected q-value cut-off of 0.05.
Collection of ChIP-seq tracks
ChIP-seq and DNase1-seq data from MEL cells were used for comparison with our generated data. Data sets were obtained from the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project and visualised on the UCSC Genome Browser (42). Data sets used are GATA1 ChIP-seq in MEL cells (ENCFF001NSG), SCL/TAL1 ChIP-seq in MEL cells (ENCFF001MWV), p300 ChIP-seq in MEL cells (ENCFF001NXL), DNase1-seq in MEL cells (ENCFF001OOB), and H3K4me3 ChIP-seq in MEL cells (ENCFF001MZR). We compared read densities between ChIP-seq data sets using EaSeq (43).
CAGE data
CAGE data (44) was extracted from the Zenbu Genome Browser (45) FANTOM5 mouse time course study (46). The Phase2 pooled data from the J2E differentiation time course in response to EPO was accessed. CAGE tags over regions of the Klf1 promoter and Klf3 1a and 1b promoters (22), corresponding the bars in Figure 1A, were exported from Zenbu as an XL file. CAGE is directional, so tags orientated in either direction were independently counted and graphed. Counts are reported as tags per million base pairs (TPM). Error bars represent the ± SEM of three biological replicates.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Overlapping and unique in vivo KLF3 and KLF1 binding characteristics. (A) CAGE tag density at the indicated regions (bars) of the Klf3 1a and 1b promoters and the Klf1 promoter. Green bars indicate sense strand tags and purple bars antisense strand tags. Data were generated from the Zenbu web Browser. There is an increase in expression of KLF3 and KLF1 over a 48-h window of differentiation of J2E cells in response to EPO. (B, C) De novo motif binding specificity defined by MEME analysis performed on ±50 bp window around all peaks declared in KLF3-ER ChIP-seq data (B) and in KLF1-ER ChIP-seq data (C). (D, E) Position weighted matrices of secondary motifs identified using MEME on ±50 bp window around all peaks declared in KLF3-ER ChIP-seq data (D) and in KLF1-ER ChIP-seq data (E). (F, G) Distribution of ChIP-seq peak locations relative to genic landmarks for KLF3 ChIP-seq (F) and KLF1 ChIP-seq (G). (H) Venn diagram of overlap of KLF1 and KLF3 peaks as determined by MACS2. (I) ETS-like motif identified from discriminative MEME analysis.
Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Overlapping and unique in vivo KLF3 and KLF1 binding characteristics. (A) CAGE tag density at the indicated regions (bars) of the Klf3 1a and 1b promoters and the Klf1 promoter. Green bars indicate sense strand tags and purple bars antisense strand tags. Data were generated from the Zenbu web Browser. There is an increase in expression of KLF3 and KLF1 over a 48-h window of differentiation of J2E cells in response to EPO. (B, C) De novo motif binding specificity defined by MEME analysis performed on ±50 bp window around all peaks declared in KLF3-ER ChIP-seq data (B) and in KLF1-ER ChIP-seq data (C). (D, E) Position weighted matrices of secondary motifs identified using MEME on ±50 bp window around all peaks declared in KLF3-ER ChIP-seq data (D) and in KLF1-ER ChIP-seq data (E). (F, G) Distribution of ChIP-seq peak locations relative to genic landmarks for KLF3 ChIP-seq (F) and KLF1 ChIP-seq (G). (H) Venn diagram of overlap of KLF1 and KLF3 peaks as determined by MACS2. (I) ETS-like motif identified from discriminative MEME analysis.
Luciferase reporter assays
Luciferase reporter assays were performed as previously described (20). Cloning of pPAC-Klf1 and pPAC-Klf3 has been previously described (21,47). pGL2-E2f2-for and pGL2-E2f2-rev reporter vectors have been previously described (20). Plasmids were transfected into Drosophila SL2 cells using Insectogene (Biontex) according to the manufacturer's instructions. Lysates were prepared and assayed for luciferase activity using the Dual-Luciferase Reporter Assay System (Promega, E1910) and fluorescence was quantified on a PHERAstar FS (BMG Labtech). Reported results are from n = 4 independent replicates per enhancer. Statistical significance was determined by one-way ANOVA. Error bars show standard deviation.
Analysis of stress erythropoiesis in Klf3 knockout mice
Klf3 knockout mice (48) had been previously backcrossed onto a pure FVB/NJ genetic background. 8–12-week-old Klf3−/− mice and litter mates were injected with phenylhydrazine-HCl (PHZ) (Sigma #114715) at 60 mg/kg in PBS i.p. on day 0, as previously described (49). Blood (∼20 μl) was collected from the peri-orbital venous plexus into heparinised capillary tubes before PHZ (day 0) and again on days +2, +4 and +7. A complete blood count (CBC) was undertaken using a mindray BC-500 Vet AutoHaematology Analyser (Shenzhen, China). Mice were injected with 1 mg of BrdU (10 mg/ml stock) i.p. 90 min prior to sacrifice. Spleens were dispersed into single cells and stained with B220-PacBlue (BioLegend), CD3-PerCP/Cy5.5 (BioLegend), CD71-PE (BD Pharmingen), TER119-PE/Cy7 (BD Pharmingen) and Live/Dead Aqua (Life Technologies L34957) according to the manufacturer's recommendations. 106 spleen cells were fixed, permeabilized and stained with an FITC-conjugated antibody to BrdU and 7AAD according to BD Pharmingen kit #559619. FACS analysis of surface markers and cell cycle was performed on a BD LSRFortessa X-20. Cell sorting was performed using a BD FACSAria Fusion. Analysis and generation of plots was performed in FlowJo version 10.0.8. CD71+TER119+ cells were sorted into TRIzol (Thermo Fisher Scientific), total RNA was prepared according to the manufacturer's recommendations and cDNA was made using Superscript-III. qRT-PCR was performed using SyberGreen and specific intron-jumping primers listed in Supporting Table S3. Expression normalised to Hprt using delta CT method.
Software
Statistics analysis was performed with GraphPad Prism version 6.04 for Windows, GraphPad Software, La Jolla California USA, www.graphpad.com. Evolutionary tree of Krüppel-like factors and ClustalW alignment of KLF1/KLF3 were performed using the program Geneious version R7 (50). Hierarchical clustering and read density plots were generated using EaSeq (43), available from http://easeq.net/. Proportional Venn diagrams were generated with use of EulerAPE (51).
GEO accession numbers
The new ChIP-seq and RNA-seq data from this publication have been submitted to the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and assigned the identifier GSE92620.
RESULTS
KLF3 occupies erythroid gene promoters and enhancers in vivo
We have recently performed ChIP-seq studies for KLF1 (25) in the murine J2E-like erythroid cell line, K1-ER (52). In order to generate a comparable dataset for KLF3, we ectopically expressed a tamoxifen-inducible version of KLF3 (KLF3-ER™) in J2E cells. The use of a tamoxifen-inducible fusion to KLF3 had two advantages. Firstly, the ER™ moiety acts as an epitope tag allowing ChIP. This is essential since no ChIP-grade KLF3 antibody is currently known. Secondly, fusion to the ligand-binding domain of ERα allows us to induce KLF3 activity via the addition of tamoxifen and observe dynamic effects on gene expression.
J2E cells were immortalised from wild type E14.5 murine fetal liver using the J2 retrovirus which expresses v-raf and v-myc. Klf1−/− J2E-like cells, K1-ER, were similarly generated previously using Klf1−/− E14.5 fetal liver and the same virus and conditions (29). J2E cells express Klf1 and differentiate into mature erythroid cells in response to erythropoietin (53). Like primary erythroid cells, J2E cells markedly upregulate endogenous Klf3 gene expression upon terminal differentiation as shown by high temporal resolution CAGE data (54) (Figure 1A). We generated clonally independent cells lines, dubbed J2E-Klf3-ER, in which 4-hydroxytamoxifen (4OH-tam)-induced nuclear levels of KLF3 are 3–5-fold greater than endogenous KLF3. Thus, these new cell lines have comparable levels of nuclear KLF3 protein to the levels of nuclear KLF1 protein in K1-ER cells after addition of 4OH-tam (Supplementary Figure S2A) (25).
ChIP for KLF3 was performed at three hours post-induction with 4OH-tam, to be consistent with ChIP-seq for KLF1 in K1-ER cell lines (25). A total of 4579 peaks met a stringent threshold for peak-calling using MACS2 (32) (Supporting Table S4). De novo motif discovery using MEME (see Materials and Methods) identified a typical 9bp extended ‘CACCC-box’ motif (CCM–CRC–CCN) as the most significantly enriched motif (E-value = 2.4 × 10−2058) and most frequent motif (3761/4579 = 82%) within DNA ±50 bp from the center of the KLF3 peaks (Figure 1B). The motif is identical to that preferred by an epitope tagged KLF3 in MEFs (24), and by KLF1 in K1-ER cells (25) and primary fetal liver erythroid cells (3). In fact, the motif is identical to the one bound in vivo by all other KLFs and SP family proteins studied to date (3,5,55–59). This is not surprising given the similarity of the DNA-binding domains of all family members (2) (Supplementary Figure S1).
To compare KLF3 binding with KLF1 binding, we used previously published ChIP-seq for KLF1 in K1-ER cells (25) with an additional replicate to improve statistical power. We detected a total of 3612 significant KLF1-occupied peaks (Supporting Table S5). As for KLF3, de novo motif discovery using MEME found a typical CACCC-box motif as the most highly significantly enriched (E-value = 1.4 × 10−1287) and most abundant (2009/3612) motif in the KLF1-enriched DNA (Figure 1C). Local motif enrichment analysis using CentriMo (60) confirms central enrichment of CACCC-box motifs in both the KLF3 and KLF1 ChIP-seq data, validating the specificity of the ChIP (Supplementary Figure S3).
Peaks were classified into one of five groups based on location relative to genic regions (see Materials and Methods); i.e. promoter, intron, distal, intergenic, coding sequence (CDS) and untranslated region (UTR). KLF3 binds more often to promoters than elsewhere in the genome (Figure 1F), which is consistent with the findings of previous KLF3 ChIP-seq performed in MEFs (24). In contrast, KLF1 binds more frequently at intronic and distal regions, with only ∼30% of peaks found at promoters (Figure 1G), as previously reported for both primary fetal liver and immortalized erythroid cells (3,25).
KLF3 and KLF1 occupy common and unique promoters and enhancers
To assess the overlap between KLF3 and KLF1-occupied sites in erythroid cells, we defined co-occupancy as peak summits being within ±100 bp of each other. One third of all KLF3 peaks (1322/4553) were declared as ‘shared’ with KLF1 by these criteria (Figure 1H). MACS2 requires a significant read density relative to the background to pass a peak calling threshold (32), potentially leading to an under-representation of shared occupancy. To address this, we plotted read density over a region of ±10 kb from the summits of the union of peaks called in either KLF3 or KLF1 ChIP-seq data sets (total 7057 peaks) (see Materials and Methods) (Figure 2A). This representation of the data suggests greater overlap between KLF1-bound and KLF3-bound sites than is apparent from the Venn diagram in Figure 1H. In fact, most of the sites in the union are bound to some degree by both TFs. Nevertheless, there was a clear gradient of relative occupancy; i.e. the KLF1:KLF3 tag ratio and vice versa using hierarchical clustering within Easeq (43).
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide KLF1 and KLF3 bind unique and common genomic sites in erythroid cells. (A) Heat plot representation of ChIP-seq data. Rows represent genomic location around the summits of all peaks called in the union of both data sets, merged if summits are within 100 bp of each other. The left column represents KLF3 ChIP-seq reqad density and the center column represents KLF1 ChIP-seq read density. Regions were sorted according to hierarchical clustering using the nearest neighbour chain algorithm (95,96). Clustering was based on both ChIP-seq data sets using values quantified in an area ranging from –50 bp to +50 bp from the start of the regions. Plots were generated using EaSeq (43). (B) Heat plots of transcription factor ChIP-seq tag reads from erythroid and megakaryocytic cells compared with KLF1 and KLF3 ChIP–seq reads; GATA1 ChIP in G1ER cells, TAL1 ChIP-seq in MEL cells, NFE2 ChIP in TER119+ sorted erythrocytes and FLI-1 ChIP in sorted megakaryocytes (see Materials and Methods). (C–E) Pie charts displaying the distribution of peak summit regions from KLF1 and KLF3 ChIP-seq data separated by whether the region is significantly bound by KLF3-only (B), both KLF1 and KLF3 (C), or KLF1-only (D). (F) Analysis of motifs enriched in KLF3 ChIP peaks versus KLF1 ChIP peaks using CentriMo (see Materials and Methods). Centrally enriched motifs are provided below the graph. (G) Motifs enriched in KLF1 ChIP peaks versus KLF3 ChIP peaks as determined by CentriMo. Centrally enriched motifs are provided below the graph.
Figure 2. View largeDownload slide KLF1 and KLF3 bind unique and common genomic sites in erythroid cells. (A) Heat plot representation of ChIP-seq data. Rows represent genomic location around the summits of all peaks called in the union of both data sets, merged if summits are within 100 bp of each other. The left column represents KLF3 ChIP-seq reqad density and the center column represents KLF1 ChIP-seq read density. Regions were sorted according to hierarchical clustering using the nearest neighbour chain algorithm (95,96). Clustering was based on both ChIP-seq data sets using values quantified in an area ranging from –50 bp to +50 bp from the start of the regions. Plots were generated using EaSeq (43). (B) Heat plots of transcription factor ChIP-seq tag reads from erythroid and megakaryocytic cells compared with KLF1 and KLF3 ChIP–seq reads; GATA1 ChIP in G1ER cells, TAL1 ChIP-seq in MEL cells, NFE2 ChIP in TER119+ sorted erythrocytes and FLI-1 ChIP in sorted megakaryocytes (see Materials and Methods). (C–E) Pie charts displaying the distribution of peak summit regions from KLF1 and KLF3 ChIP-seq data separated by whether the region is significantly bound by KLF3-only (B), both KLF1 and KLF3 (C), or KLF1-only (D). (F) Analysis of motifs enriched in KLF3 ChIP peaks versus KLF1 ChIP peaks using CentriMo (see Materials and Methods). Centrally enriched motifs are provided below the graph. (G) Motifs enriched in KLF1 ChIP peaks versus KLF3 ChIP peaks as determined by CentriMo. Centrally enriched motifs are provided below the graph.
Although due to the limited resolution of ChIP-seq these data do not definitively establish that KLF1 and KLF3 bind to exactly the same sequence, a single 9 bp CCM–CRC–CCN consensus motif can be identified within the ChIPed DNA in many cases. Thus, given that peaks for both KLF1 and KLF3 are observed, the most likely explanation is that in these instances both KLF1 and KLF3 do bind the same site. Sites primarily bound predominantly by KLF3 show an even greater enrichment for promoters (Figure 2C). Conversely, sites primarily bound by KLF1 are enriched at intronic or distal regions as expected for enhancers (Figure 2E). Shared peaks show enrichment for promoters (Figure 2D).
KLF1 and KLF3 prefer the company of different transcription factors
It was not surprising to find KLF1 and KLF3 bind the same extended CACCC box motifs in vivo given the sequence identity of the DNA-binding residues (Supplementary Figure S1). So, something else must explain relative preference for different genomic locations. To investigate this, we first searched for additional de novo motifs in each of the ChIP-seq datasets using MEME (see Materials and Methods). The second most enriched motif in the KLF3-ChIPed DNA was CCAAT (Figure 1D), which is known to be bound by the tripartite, NFY A, B and C proteins (61–63). CCAAT boxes occurred in 239 of 4579 (5%) of all KLF3-occupied sites with an E-value of 3.9 × 10−102. We also found statistically significant enrichment of an NRF1-like motif (179 sites; E = 1.1 × 10−56), a SOX-like motif (49 sites; E = 7.7 × 10−47) and a CREB-like motif (79 sites, E = 1.3 × 10−11) (Figure 1D). We used Tomtom to find the best matches to the de novo motifs within databases of deposited known motifs (see Materials and Methods). The SOX-like motif is an imperfect match to numerous SOX motifs, so it is difficult to be certain which TF it binds in erythroid cells (Supplementary Figure S4A). The NRF1-like motif is a good match to the NRF1 TFBS (Supplementary Figure S4B). The CREB-like motif could be bound by any one or more bZIP TF family member such as FOS/JUN, or the important erythroid and megakaryocyte transcription factor MafG(p18)/NF-E2(p45) heterodimer (Supplementary Figure S4C).
The second most enriched motif in the KLF1-ChIPed DNA was AGATAA, the preferred binding motif for GATA1 (Figure 1E). This is consistent with previous reports of co-operative in vivo binding of GATA1 and KLF1 (3). The GATA motif occurred in 203 of the peaks (6%) with an E-value of 9.9 × 10−75. The only other statistically enriched motif was a GC-rich motif which differs from the CACCC-box at one nucleotide (Supplementary Figure S4D). This occurred 550 times with E-value of 3.0 × 10−10. From analysis of known motifs using Tomtom it is not clear what binds this motif. It may simply be a variant CACCC box. There were no other statistically significant motifs identified.
We also ran MEME in a discriminative mode whereby the combined KLF1 and KLF3 ChIPed DNA (peak summits ±50bp) was used to generate a background DNA sequence model and either the KLF1 or KLF3-occupied DNA (peak summits ±50bp) was analysed in reference to this model. The purpose was to enhance our ability to find specific motifs enriched in one versus the other datasets; i.e. what else influenced selective binding preferences (See Methods). We found the same motif enrichment in the DNA surrounding the KLF3 peaks using this approach as the non-discriminative approach, but we also identified an ETS-like motif (E-value = 8.1 × 10−9) (Figure 1I). The ETS motif could be bound by FLI-1, ERG or some other ETS family TF (see Discussion). For the KLF1-occupied DNA we found no additional motifs. We also asked whether there were any novel short (6 bp) de novo motifs which could discriminate between the KLF3 ‘only’ peaks (±50 bp from the summit; Supporting Table S5) and KLF1 ‘only’ bound regions (±50 bp from the summit; Supporting Table S7) using DREME (see Materials and Methods). For KLF3, we found statistically significant over representation of a CREB motif (BGACGB; E = 9.7 × 10−37), a CCAAT box (E = 5.8 × 10−21), a partial NRF1-like motif (CAYGCG; E = 6.7 × 10−10), and a motif with similarities to partial GLI and ZBTB7A/LRF/Pokemon-binding sites (KGTCGS; E = 2.3 × 10−4) (Supplementary Figure S5A). For KLF1, we again found the GATA motif, WGATAW (E value = 2.3 × 10−68) but nothing else of note (Supplementary Figure S5B).
As an alternative approach to find discriminative motifs between KLF1 ‘only’ and KLF3 ‘only; bound DNA (groups defined in Figure 2A), we utilized CentriMo (Central Motif Enrichment Analysis). We asked whether known motifs from the combined JASPAR and UniProbe databases were relatively enriched in KLF3 versus KLF1-ChIPed DNA and vice versa (see Materials and Methods) (60). We found ETS motifs, such as for the ETV3 DBD (ACCGGAAGTg; E-value = 8.1 × 10−9), were the most enriched in KLF3-occupied DNA (Figure |
a gutter oil ring in southern Taiwan since March. The Taiwanese lard giant — which says it was unaware that the oil was gutter oil — in turn sold 51,981 cartons of oil to hundreds of food companies around Asia, according to Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration.
Authorities in Taiwan say that over a thousand Taiwanese companies have used oil supplied by Chang Guann to make a total of 139 different products. Local groceries across China pulled several Taiwanese brands of dumplings, sauces and noodles from their shelves over the weekend.
Many regional food suppliers and restaurants harbor reservations about the quality of food from China, where a series of recent scandals — including chicken feet marinated in hydrogen peroxide and the use of expired meat by one of the country’s top food suppliers — continues to unsettle consumers.
Still, Taiwan had boasted a better reputation.
“Bakeries from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have done particularly well in China because of worries about locally produced food,” wrote the New York Times, in a Sept. 6 article about the Mid-Autumn Festival pastries known as moon cakes.
But in the wake of the Chang Guann scandal, revelers could be shunning Taiwanese moon cakes this year. Hong Kong health officials told Agence France-Presse that moon cakes sold around the city are undergoing checks.
Maxim’s has told the Hong Kong authorities its moon cakes were not made with contaminated oil, but lab tests are being carried out, the Post reports.
[SCMP]
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You've been the only neighbor in my building to actually look me in the eye and say "hello" since I moved here two years ago. Thank you. When my laundry is done and you need to use the machine, instead of wadding it up and dumping it on the laundry room table I know it's you that folds my little black panties and places them neatly back in my basket. Thank you. You live next door to me and I've learned to live with your tacky plaster fish molds that sit next to your door on top of the fire alarm, probably causing a fire hazard. It's ok that you have awful taste. You're sixty years old, and you don't wear a bra which might be why your breasts and belt are on the same parallel, but hey, you smell like my grandma so I like you regardless. Also, is your hair naturally maroon? It matches your blush splendidly. Tammy Faye would be jealous.Now recently I've noticed a man that made my high school geometry teacher look like Don Juan parking behind your car in our lot. He terrifies me and tucks his t shirts into his khaki pants that are hiked way too high up on his twinkie loving gut. The image of you two in the same room haunts me, but please...Please...For the love of Sweet Baby Jesus...STOP fucking him when I'm home too!!We are dealing with paper thin walls here! I hear every little breathy "Oh yes" and your t shirt tucking friend sounds like he's playing football instead of making love. Do you like that grunt he makes when he comes? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you just really like to watch him pass gall stones because that's what it sounds like he's doing.Gross. Stop. Please.Amen for getting some at your age, but honestly, I'm gone every evening from 5:30 to midnight. Can you do it then?Sincerely,Your NeighborTo be clear, determining the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy is no simple task. On the one hand, observations are difficult because the Solar System lies deep within the disk of the galaxy itself. But at the same time, there’s also the mass of our galaxy’s dark matter halo, which is difficult to measure since it is not “luminous”, and therefore invisible to conventional methods of detection.
Current estimates of the galaxy’s total mass are based on the motions of tidal streamers of gas and globular clusters, which are both influenced by the gravitational mass of the galaxy. But so far, these measurements have produced mass estimates that range from one to several trillion solar-masses. As Professor Loeb explained to Universe Today via email, precisely measuring the mass of the Milky Way is of great importance to astronomers:
“The Milky Way provides a laboratory for testing the standard cosmological model. This model predicts that the number of satellite galaxies of the Milky Way depends sensitively on its mass. When comparing the predictions to the census of known satellite galaxies, it is essential to know the Milky Way mass. Moreover, the total mass calibrates the amount of invisible (dark) matter and sets the depth of the gravitational potential well and implies how fast should stars move for them to escape to intergalactic space.”
For the sake of their study, Prof. Loeb and Dr. Fragione therefore chose to take a novel approach, which involved modeling the motions of HVSs to determine the mass of our galaxy. More than 20 HVSs have been discovered within our galaxy so far, which travel at speeds of up to 700 km/s (435 mi/s) and are located at distances of about 100 to 50,000 light-years from the galactic center.
These stars are thought to have been ejected from the center of our galaxy thanks to the interactions of binary stars with the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of our galaxy – aka. Sagittarius A*. While their exact cause is still the subject of debate, the orbits of HVSs can be calculated since they are completely determined by the gravitational field of the galaxy.
As they explain in their study, the researchers used the asymmetry in the radial velocity distribution of stars in the galactic halo to determine the galaxy’s gravitational potential. The velocity of these halo stars is dependent on the potential escape speed of HVSs, provided that the time it takes for the HVSs to complete a single orbit is shorter than the lifetime of the halo stars.
From this, they were able to discriminate between different models for the Milky Way and the gravitational force it exerts. By adopting the nominal travel time of these observed HVSs – which they calculated to about 330 million years, about the same as the average lifetime of halo stars – they were able to derive gravitational estimates for the Milky Way which allowed for estimates on its overall mass.
“By calibrating the minimum speed of unbound stars, we find that the Milky Way mass is in the range of 1.2-1.9 trillions solar masses,” said Loeb. While still subject to a range, this latest estimate is a significant improvement over previous estimates. What’s more, these estimates are consistent our current cosmological models that attempt to account for all visible matter in the Universe, as well as dark matter and dark energy – the Lambda-CDM model.
“The inferred Milky Way mass is in the range expected within the standard cosmological model,” said Leob, “where the amount of dark matter is about five times larger than that of ordinary (luminous) matter.”
Based on this breakdown, it can be said that normal matter in our galaxy – i.e. stars, planets, dust and gas – accounts for between 240 and 380 billion Solar Masses. So not only does this latest study provide more precise mass constraints for our galaxy, it could also help us to determine exactly how many star systems are out there – current estimates say that the Milky Way has between 200 to 400 billion stars and 100 billion planets.Men are an integral part of the feminist movement, and can often be key in pushing discussions about sexism and gender out of the choir. In this roundtable, four male feminist leaders from Feminist Campus affiliates and chapters share their stories, tips, and passions – and tell us why they call the feminist movement home.
Roger Jones, Ohio University Alumni / Activist and FEM Member
As a young black male, I grew up watching my mother raise my three brothers and myself on her own as I also watched her put herself through nursing school, work at a hospital, and make sure she was around to take care of all our needs. My mother had help from my grandparents and aunt, and what I took from watching my mother is that women are stronger than men.
There is an ongoing debate about gender roles between husband and wife in the household, the belief being that it is best for the family if the husband is out working while the wife is at home maintaining the house. In my opinion, this is because most men cannot handle the pressures of maintaining the household; they tend to use the excuse and assumption that the male should be the breadwinner to escape those duties as a husband and/or father. Whereas there are a large percentage of women (single and married) that perform both roles, it is a rarity to see a man perform the role of the stay at home spouse, let alone both roles. I believe women are stronger and undervalued for this reason as well as many others.
People may read this and assume that I must not have a strong father figure in my life growing up. On the contrary, my father is the main reason I am a feminist – even if he doesn’t know it. I grew up watching him take care of his wife dying of cancer as a young boy, and now I see him spending his time and effort looking after his 94-year old mother. I saw my father fight for custody of my stepsister after my stepmother passed away because it was her wish for him to raise her daughter and be her legal guardian.
As a man, I know I have privileges that allow me to see life through a lens of experiences that are far different than the experiences of women. As a black person, I realize that in our society it is not enough to have the discriminated fight against discrimination. You need those who are privileged enough to not experience this discrimination stand against the discriminators as well. That’s why I am a proud feminist ally.
I have spent my six years in Athens, Ohio getting involved with many rallies to promote awareness against rape culture at Ohio University. I have “Walked In Her Shoes” from my freshman year to my senior year of undergrad to promote men standing against rape of women across the Ohio University campus. My sophomore year I started the first ever “Men’s Event” during our annual Take Back The Night Week to gather men and have a discussion on how men on campus viewed and understood our rape culture. I am honored to have been a part of these events, as well as part of the effort to improve lighting for darker areas around campus and add OUPD’s number to the back of all student IDs.
When asked why I am a feminist, my answer is very simple: I love women. I have the most gorgeous girlfriend, and I am love with her, so I will always fight to protect her and all of the things that should be her right: her rights over her body, her right to walk down the street without being harassed, her right to wear whatever she wants to wear and not be deemed a slut or prude. If there is a man, woman, politician, or law that tries to impede her right based on sexism, you bet your ass I will be there to support and fight alongside her.
There is an old saying, “behind every great man, there is a strong woman.” Well – men, it’s time to be “great” and stand behind our women.
Ronnie Wells, Co-President of the University of Toledo Feminist Alliance
I served this year as the co-president of the University of Toledo Feminist Alliance – but before attending our meetings, I didn’t identify as a feminist, even though I felt strongly about equal rights, freedom of choice, and eradicating sexism. Being introduced to UTFA was really a thing of fate: I saw a flyer in the student union and decided to go because, frankly, I could. (It was open to everyone.) Now, I feel indebted to the past leaders and awesome members of UTFA for everything I learned with them.
Had it not been for UTFA, I would not have realized concepts or grown in some ways until later in life. Most notably, UTFA has really opened my eyes about how men are impacted by masculinity. Being a former high school and college athlete and a fraternity brother, I am very familiar with the ‘guy code’ mentality. When another male member of UFTA showed me a couple of panels about the Stubenville rape case in Ohio, it occurred to me how much the ways boys are taught to be men are about control, and domination, and not about being a better person. I vowed to orchestrate an event this year in response to teach healthy masculinity to fraternities and men’s athletic teams. Guys in frats frequently talk about how classy they are, and then pray on intoxicated women at parties like cave men. I wish to show guys on my campus that being ‘classy’ isn’t as easy as throwing on a bow tie and saying that are.
This is probably going to be a major challenge – because truthfully, the only flack I’ve gotten from being a male feminist has been from other males. For other male leaders who might be in a similar position, remember that there are many guys out there who share the same views as us. If you are going to be entering what may seem like a hostile realm – namely, trying to reach out to fraternities and/or men’s sports teams – just remember where you are and try to educate within your confines without censoring yourself. I’ve been told one of the best ways to try and make others think is to make your message hit close to home. Have them think about their mothers, sisters, daughters – and how we want equality for them.
I wish you all the best of luck on your journey for social activism and equality. Stay strong and never give up.
Nicky Vaught, Deputy Features Editor for the NCSU Technician
Over the course of the past few years, I have quite gradually evolved into a full-blown feminist. I went from knowing nothing about the movement to agreeing with a few bits of it to working my best to embody the change I wish to see in the world. But no single event – or even series of events – can be credited for that change. Many people, especially men, have very specific reasons for supporting the movement, but I do not have one.
Maybe it’s got something to do with my love for Sylvia Plath, or maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent on Tumblr – a website practically synonymous with feminism. But when it comes down to it, it’s the sheer logic behind the principles that captivates me like a religion. It’s the idea that I’m more than an animal expected to act on my carnal impulses, love sports and aspire to be a businessperson. It’s the idea that “the fairer sex” isn’t expected to be the fairer sex. Feminism is about furthering all genders, not just women. It’s about equality. So, to me, it just makes sense.
As a male feminist, I counter a lot of different reactions to my story. Some people ask why I care at all. To them, I say: I love women. When I love someone, I tend to respect and want the best for that person. And even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t want half the population treated as lesser than. Why stifle progress in the world just because a woman might be the source of it? Some people applaud me for caring about women’s issues, but to them I say cut that out. These aren’t just women’s issues. These are our issues. I can oppose everything my fellow straight white men do until my eyes fall out, but until I do something to effect change, I’m no worse than them. When any group oppresses another, that group oppresses itself.
To any new male feminists, my biggest piece of advice is this: do not get into it expecting any special treatment. If you go into this expecting more women to find you appealing, you’re making things worse. And, for the love of Susan B. Anthony, keep your voice down. There will be times when your opinion is needed, but you are no authority on women’s experiences, so please, do not act like one.
Ishmael Bishop, Member of UNC’s Students United for Reproductive Justice and Feminist Students United
Identifying as a male feminist shouldn’t be a radical stance. To support equality, fairness and civil rights – which I learned were the building blocks of feminism – is a benefit to humanity, not a “radical” movement. I have used my feminism to advocate against socially oppressive language and violence, and I’m a feminist because I believe that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect and above all else. I’m a feminist because I believe in equality, pure and simple.
We live in a world supported by power dynamics, where various groups are made inferior to different dominant groups. This system is perpetuated and supported by privilege and oppression, and along with oppression comes violence, trauma, and abuse. No matter how we disregard the injustice, someone will inevitably get hurt.
The change I see happening, the end to violence and all of the many -isms that have been socially constructed, happens when people speak up and out against them. I attended a reproductive justice institute conference recently sponsored by IPAS and Feminist Majority – and while I was there I felt so at home listening to confident women and girls speaking up about their concerns and promising to get the word out on their respective campuses. Not only were women and girls in attendance, but also college-aged men, like myself, participating in discussions and adding to the conversation. It reinforced for all us why feminism is still so necessary.
Feminism isn’t just a women’s right’s issue – it doesn’t stop at wage inequality or sexual or reproductive rights. It may start with these concerns, but far extends itself beyond these issues. True feminism is necessary because it allows marginalized groups a platform for representation. It’s inspiring to be a part of movement that shapes our culture and has taken into consideration the way in which diversity positively impacts our existence. Obviously, not every individual person will experience the same kind of discrimination or be impacted by the same issues – but we also don’t identify with the same ethnicity, gender or sexuality, etc. It’s relative. Everyone deserves equal treatment – to be treated as a human being and not an object or anything less. If you would want that for yourself, you should demand it for others as well.
Ultimately, this is why I’m a feminist. Until this world comes to the same conclusion, you can continue to call me a feminist – a radical male feminist.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 10 films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 89th Academy Awards®.
The films are listed below in alphabetical order:
“Arrival”
“The BFG”
“Captain America: Civil War”
“Deepwater Horizon”
“Doctor Strange”
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”
“The Jungle Book”
“Kubo and the Two Strings”
“Passengers”
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”
The Academy’s Visual Effects Branch Executive Committee determined the shortlist. All members of the Visual Effects Branch will now be invited to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the shortlisted films on Saturday, January 7, 2017. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar® consideration.
Nominations for the 89th Oscars® will be announced on Tuesday, January 24, 2017.
The 89th Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood, and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
Media Contact
[email protected] in 1865 to stanch the flow of counterfeit money circulating at the end of the Civil War, the Secret Service has been entrusted with a dual mission since 1901: to protect U.S. currency and political leaders. Julia Pierson has headed protective operations for the White House and served on security details for Presidents George H. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Now the agency's highest-ranking woman and head of the Office of Human Resources and Training, Pierson lets Smithsonian.com in on a few of the service's secrets.
How did you get into this line of work?
Initially, I got involved with the Law Enforcement Exploring program, a co-ed division of the Boy Scouts of America. As I became more involved, first at a state and then a national level, I met some Secret Service agents. It was through this exposure to special agents that I thought this might make an interesting career.
When I first joined the Secret Service in 1983, I was right out of college, having spent the last two or three years of my college experience working as a police officer for the city of Orlando, Florida. I knew law enforcement was my area of interest and really had a personal passion toward serving others. I enjoyed being a police officer; I enjoyed the investigations. I also wanted an opportunity to travel and see what the protection side was like.
What's the training or background required?
When you start with the Secret Service, all agents receive training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. You learn basic law, constitutional law, investigative techniques, how to effect an arrest, basic firearm tactics. Our second phase is at the James J. Rowley Training Center, in Beltsville, Maryland. Rowley really focuses on counterfeiting and cyber crime and devotes time to the protection duties. In all, it's 27 weeks. About 50 percent of special agents have previous law enforcement experience, but it's not a prerequisite.
In high school, I worked at Disney World. I started off in the parking lot, advanced to watercraft, and I wore one of those character outfits for a while in Americans on Parade. To this day, I think the experience of dealing with large crowds at the park had a good influence on my ability to do that sort of work with the Secret Service.
Describe your average day.
In the field offices, you're doing interviews or meeting with the U.S. Attorney in the morning, and meeting with a victim or criminal in the afternoon. In the evening, you might go to a briefing about a protective visit the next day. Our field agents have the most variety in terms of doing a little bit of everything. It's about 50-50 investigation and protection.
In protective operations [guarding the president, vice president, candidates and their families at the White House or on travel], there are three shifts: day, evening and midnight. The interesting thing about protection is that when you're traveling, the clock is changing, and your shift can get extended. Even just the logistics of trying to get a relief team to you can extend your shift. You're pretty much responsible for the whole duration of the trip.
What's the most interesting part of the job?
The diversity of assignments. One day you can be on a protective assignment, staying in a plush hotel, with an interesting political theme, whether it's a convention or a campaign or other significant world event. And then the following week you could be serving a search warrant on a criminal element related to a financial-fraud investigation. I joke all the time that we train our agents to have a little bit of an attention deficit disorder. There isn't any task that I could assign that couldn't be done in a two-week time frame.
What was your most exciting moment on the job?
As a brand new agent reporting for duty in Miami, I was assigned to one of our first credit card fraud investigative teams. I came back from school [training], went to the bank and filled out my application. They sent me an ATM card and a password, both of which were intercepted by criminals in the mail. My first paycheck was wiped out at the ATM. I went back to the bank—it was one of the banks I was going to be working with—and said, "Can you help me out here?" And they said, "No, sorry." So that was an interesting way for a young officer to get started in the Secret Service.
The most dangerous moment?
On September 11, 2001, I was on presidential protective detail. We didn't know if what was happening was a prelude to more attacks. I was in charge of making sure everyone was accounted for. Clinton was in Australia at the time, and President Bush was in an aircraft.
What are the downsides?
Perhaps the biggest downside is juggling your personal life. We're getting prepared right now for the [next presidential] campaign. Agents will spend 21 days out, come back for 21 and then go out again. These trips can be very exciting and interesting, but life continues to happen around them. If you have a sick family member or other family matter, it can be very awkward to manage. And on protective assignments, you and the other agents are living with each other, traveling with each other, eating lunch with each other, spending your lives with each other. It can be challenging.
What's the biggest misconception about the work?
That it's all protection work. People don't realize the investigative duties that we have. Besides counterfeiting, we investigate cyber crime and electronic access device fraud. We have joint jurisdiction with the FBI for bank fraud. We're responsible for providing communications support for the president and those at the White House. We also have an intelligence group, and maintain liaisons with the military and state and local law enforcement to keep pace with any potential threats.
On the protection side, most of what we do is not bodyguard work. The bulk of what we do is really related to protecting the environment. We refer to it as side advance. We get there ahead of time, look for vulnerabilities and devise a security plan that mitigates as many of those vulnerabilities as we can. And that's really the magic of what we do in protection. If we can protect the environment, we can protect everyone within that environment.
Any advice for someone interested in a Secret Service career?
Whether you're an English major or studying a foreign language or getting a fitness or sports-type degree, there could be a niche for you here. You don't have to be 6-feet-4-inches, 300 pounds and built like a linebacker. We encourage agents to let us know what they want to do. We want to know their areas of interest, and we try to match them up with those kinds of assignments. You constantly hear our employees talk about the mission. I think that goes to the Type-A personalities we attract, and the criticality of being able to multi-task and meet deadlines. We're a small agency with a large mission. Our size gives us the ability to have more personal knowledge of each other as employees. Some people call it a cult, other people call it a family, but I do think it's unique.
Siobhan Roth is a writer in Washington, D.C.We recently posted a highly critical article by Roger Helmer MEP on the subject of Open Europe’s recent analysis of the prospects for an independent UK.
Roger pointed out that claims that the UK would be poorer by 2.2% of GDP was a “worst case scenario”. To be fair to Open Europe, this is precisely what it said, with more emphasis was on the “worst case scenario” than you would have thought from reports in the media. The blame for this scaremongering, in other words, should be laid at the door of the press rather than Open Europe itself. “UK risks economic blow outside EU – Open Europe study” claimed the BBC. The Financial Times, whose pro-EU bias is nearly as bad as the BBC’s was no better: “Brexit could cost economy £56bn a year, think-tank warns”. Thankfully, City AM struck a more balanced note: “Beware the headline costs of Brexit: We’ll thrive if we’re open to the world”. Open Europe’s daily e-mail, or “daily shakeup” as it is now called, from 24th March was similarly careful to be a bit more objective than some of the daily papers. “A Free trading Britain could prosper outside the EU” said the headline to one article.
If you look more closely at the report, it claims that, “In a best case scenario, under which the UK manages to enter into liberal trade arrangements with the EU and the rest of the world, whilst pursuing large-scale deregulation at home, Britain could be better off by 1.6% of GDP in 2030.” This is a very significant remark. A pro-EU think tank is claiming that, given the right policies, we would be better off out. No wonder that the BBC, which has received further criticism from the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee for its pro-EU bias, skated over this positive scenario in its reporting of the analysis.
Open Europe’s round-robin e-mail the following day included a report on an event it hosted marking the launch of its new report, ‘What if…? The consequences, challenges and opportunities facing Britain outside the EU.” It included a quote from Lord Wolfson, one of the speakers and a signatory to the “Business for Britain “campaign. He endorsed the positive prospects for the UK outside the EU if the correct policies were adopted. The UK’s economic success outside of the EU would mostly “depend on what Britain chooses to do in the wake of departure,” he said. He argued that “the opportunity of leaving [the EU] shouldn’t be underestimated”, especially since the UK would have more freedom to trade with the rest of the world. Of course, Open Europe would prefer us to stay in a renegotiated relationship within the EU. As Mats Persson, a director of Open Europe put it, “There’s life after Brexit, but it makes sense to test the limits of EU reform before pulling the trigger.”
Fair enough, but it’s all too apparent from the preliminary meetings held by David Cameron that “the limits of EU reform” fall far short of what many people in the UK wish for. An end to free movement of people is not on the cards, nor total repatriation of our criminal justice system. Theresa May foolishly opted back in to 35 Justice and Home Affairs measures included in the Lisbon Treaty, including the European Arrest Warrant. Will a subsequent Conservative Government (in which she may play a prominent role) decide to opt out again a couple of years later? Hardly. Suzanne Evans, a UKIP MEP, was widely criticised when she replied “yes” when asked if she would stay in following a reform she was happy with. This was another case of selective media reporting, for her following words were, “But I don’t think that is going to happen – that is the problem. If we could reform the EU that would be wonderful, but unfortunately this is an organisation that just won’t reform.” She didn’t go on to flesh out what “reforming the EU” meant for her, but how about this? Let’s abolish the European Commission, bin the thousands and thousands of pages of EU laws, scrap the European Parliament, return sovereignty to the member states in toto and turn the EU into nothing more or less than another EFTA. If David Cameron could persuade the other 27 member states to go down this route, I am sure that not just Suzanne Evans but many other ardent supporters of withdrawal would say, “I’m happy with these reforms” but it ain’t going to happen.
Going back to Open Europe, its report insisted that an independent UK would only prosper if it remained outward-looking. To turn this into some sort of scare story, as some media articles attempted to do, is to be guilty of very selective reporting. Open Europe’s actual words are, “In a best case scenario, where the UK strikes a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, pursues very ambitious deregulation of its economy and opens up almost fully to trade with the rest of the world, UK GDP would be 1.6% higher than if it had stayed within the EU.” What is scary about this? Pick up any book or article written by a supporter of withdrawal from the EU, be it Ian Milne, Ruth Lea, Tim Congdon, Robert Oulds or whoever, and you will find the author in question propisng precisely this course of action – cutting red tape and embracing free trade with the rest of the world. There are unquestionably a few protectionists who support withdrawal, but they are minor figures with little or no influence.
A more contentious point concerns immigration. The Open Europe report says that “In order to be competitive outside the EU, Britain would need to keep a liberal policy for labour migration. However, of those voters who want to leave the EU, a majority rank limiting free movement and immigration as their main motivation, meaning the UK may move in the opposite direction.” On the immigration issue, the withdrawalist community is very divided. On the one extreme, Lord Wolfson, a man who is clearly comfortable with withdrawal, is known for supporting free movement of labour. On the other hand, whether or not UKIP’s Victoria Ayling really did say “I just want to send the lot back” when she was still a member of the Conservative Party, there are plenty of other people who will quite unashamedly admit that this is what they would like to do.
There are two comments to be made here. Firstly, even a fairly open immigration policy need not go as far as allowing free movement of people. Surely reclaiming the right to deport foreign criminals and no longer being required to pay child benefit to workers with families still living in Poland is better than the current situation. Secondly, there are a number of reports which question the supposed economic benefits of large-scale immigration, such as the Civitas paper by Anthony Browne Do we need mass immigration? Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that in the UK, per capita GDP adjusted for the effects of inflation (“constant prices” or “real GDP” in economists’ jargon) increased by £2,212 in 2000-2004, the four-year period leading up to the accession of the former Soviet bloc states.
However, in the nine years from 2004-2013 when large number of migrants arrived in the UK from Central and Eastern Europe, the latest estimate of the increase is £286, little more than one eighth of the growth from 2000-2004, yet over a timespan of nine years as opposed to four. This poses the question as to whether Open Europe is being a bit disingenuous. Of course, more people means a higher GDP, but it is GDP per capita which is the real measure of wealth. Haiti has a higher GDP than Liechtenstein, but you don’t encounter slums, high infant mortality and food shortages in Liechtenstein.
There are plenty of other holes that can be picked in Open Europe’s report, as Richard North points out, but notwithstanding any potential flaws in its methodology, the very fact that it has conceded that withdrawal may be a benefit to the UK economy is an indication of the weakness of the pro-EU argument. Sadly, this is still not resonating with the electorate, with the latest poll from YouGov showing supporters of withdrawal in a minority, with 46% wanting to stay in and only 36% wanting to withdraw if a referendum were to be held today. The figures are even worse when the choices are between withdrawal and a renegotiated membership. We clearly still have much work to do. It would be a tragedy if, having won a key concession from one of our most influential opponents, we were then to lose the battle that really counts.
Photo by TechnicalFault (formerly Coffee Lover)The 2012 presidential campaign has been premised on the notion that voters faced the greatest choice in a generation. Vastly different candidates, enormous consequences.
The premise took hold in large part because Republicans spent 2011 and 2012 building party- and movement-wide support for a policy platform — Paul Ryan’s budget — that called for a radical restructuring of Medicare, and deep cuts to nearly all of the government’s domestic functions, to finance much lower taxes on wealthy Americans.
But that agenda seemed politically viable because for most of the race (and for good reason) because the conventional wisdom held that if Romney won, it would be on a Republican wave sizable enough to sweep the party into control of the Senate.
That conventional wisdom has recently fallen apart. Today, all major polling aggregators forecast that Democrats will keep a majority of the Senate no matter who wins the presidency. And that’s badly damaged the GOP’s hope of making sweeping |
weeks is if that happens, it won't [last] for five, six, seven weeks like we saw for the better part of the last month and a half."There are no signs to guide you to Australia's detention centre on Nauru. You instead have to follow the signs that lead to the island's ''rubbish dump'' and eventually they take you straight to the detention centre's entrance. That alone explains a lot about how Australia is dealing with these refugees who, tragically, include women and children.
When you enter the secure compound, the first thing you notice is the stifling heat that hangs heavy over the camp. The tents have no air-conditioning, fans are in brutally short supply, the humidity is unbelievable and shade is sparse. The second thing you notice is the desperation in the eyes of the people who are being held there.
There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that it is inhumane for adults to be held in the Nauru camp's conditions, but the fact that children are being held there is truly unacceptable. There is no playground in the compound, there aren't any toys, and all the children have to play in is the bright white gravel that blankets the entire camp. Those white stones are there because the detention centre is right in the middle of a quarry that was once a central part of the island's ailing phosphate mine.
There are 765 people locked in the Nauru detention centre right now. The camp is divided into different sections with single adult men held in one area and families, including mothers, babies and unaccompanied children, on the other side of the centre. It is the family compound where the desperation is at its most heart-wrenchingly intense and it is the pregnant women who are the most afraid of what the future will hold.
Every refugee I spoke to referred to the camp as a ''jail'' and many wanted to know what they had done to warrant their imprisonment. A widowed father of two told me, as his eyes filled with tears, ''My children ask me every day, when are we getting out of this prison? Every day I lie to them, but now I have no lies left.''What is ControlPlane Exactly?
ControlPlane allows you to build configuration profiles, contexts in ControlPlane lingo, for your Mac based on where you are or what you are doing. ControlPlane determines where you are or what you are doing based on a number of available evidence sources and then automatically reconfigures your Mac based on your preferences. Evidence sources can include your current location, visible WiFi networks, attached USB devices, running applications and more. You can even write your own evidence sources using shell scripts!
With ControlPlane You Can…
Auto-adjust a growing number of things on your Mac system (it isn’t just for laptops) including:
Network Profile
Launch and quit applications
Change Mail preferences
Enable or disable the screen saver password
Enable or disable your firewall
Start a backup
Change Time Machine backup destinations when combined with Tedium!
Additional actions are detailed on the features page
Where did ControlPlane Come From?
ControlPlane was created using code from version 2.5.1 of the MarcoPolo project still available at http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo/. ControlPlane is a direct port of MarcoPolo and in fact, much of the configuration from MarcoPolo still works with ControlPlane, just better!
ControlPlane supports 32 and 64bit Intel based Macs running Snow Leopard through Lion.One of the perks of flying is being able to indulge in your favourite TV show or movie without copping flak from your mates. And our customers are definitely making the most of the time in the air, with 22 million hours of inflight entertainment viewed this year alone.
So, here’s what our ratings this year have revealed:
The most watched movie of 2017 was The Boss Baby
The most popular Australian film was Lion
The most watched drama series was Game of Thrones
Modern Family was the most watched TV show, with customers watching 151,334 hours of the family sitcom
was the most watched TV show, with customers watching 151,334 hours of the family sitcom The most popular documentary was Planet Earth II, followed by a documentary about obesity, Why Are We Fat?
, followed by a documentary about obesity, After English, the most popular films were watched in Japanese, Mandarin and French
and The most-watched children’s show was Peppa Pig
Ariana Grande took out both the most listened to and second most listened to tracks of the year, with Dangerous Woman and Side to Side
took out both the most listened to and second most listened to tracks of the year, with Dangerous Woman and Side to Side On domestic flights with Wi-Fi, passengers are spending the most time using email and browsing the web, followed by social media (Facebook is the most popular social media application) and streaming video and music services
Top picks by our customers:
The Boss Baby
Logan
Hidden Figures
Beauty and the Beast
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Lion
La La Land
Baywatch
Kong: Skull Island
Baby Driver
Deciding what to screen
We use an anonymous on board ratings system to find out what customers are watching and for how long. Data tells us that movie premieres continue to capture the biggest audiences, and comedy is the most watched genre on the TV channel.
We’re usually locking in selections with our entertainment partners at the same time films are about to premiere, so as well as monitoring trends, it’s often up to us to predict what will be a smash and what will be a flop.
At the end of every month our engineers upload new content to the media centre, which is a fancy name for the hard drive housed in the avionics section inside the aircraft belly. The updates are about a terabyte in size and contribute to the 2,000 hours of entertainment loaded at any one time.
Drama, drama, drama
We know people don’t want to start a drama mid-way through the series, so we’ve replaced our drama category with Box Sets. Now, customers can binge watch – or pick up where they left off – every episode of every season of every drama show on board. To watch all of Downton Abbey, you’d have to do two return Perth to London trips.
Between the Qantas Entertainment app, seat back screens and Wi-Fi rolling out on our domestic aircraft (complete with the Ashes live this summer), we’re pretty confident we have enough entertainment to keep everyone occupied. Even the kids. We’ve recently introduced Kinderling, the Australian radio channel for young children, audiobooks and the Joey Club Art Studio – a colouring-in game on seat back entertainment screens.
Happy viewing!Normally I try not to get personal when it comes to columns, but occasionally an issue gets too close to home. In the case of the rampant cries of sexism in the tech industry, it literally got to the point of taking up residence.
Before writing anything on conservative politics, I was a code junkie – way back in the 80s. As far as my work is concerned, I've never completely left the tech world, since I still manage a short pile of websites, and an internet radio station. But, the work I did previously involved writing and editing documentation for software. While I didn't pursue a career in programming, I've been involved with the tech industry for many years. In the 90s, it was not a big deal that I was a woman. The real problem was the fact that I'm an American. Foreign firms that I worked with had a bigger problem with my nation of origin than with my gender, for both political and financial reasons. It wasn't always easy for them to manage forwarding paychecks to me, for one.
When the recent spate of whining started from feminist circles over the terrible state of sexism in tech, my initial response was essentially one big yawn. The Social Justice Warriors (SJW's) impress me about as much as the protesters outside a McDonald's demanding we double their paychecks to still get our orders wrong. Throw in the quagmire known as #GamerGate, and and it's become a toxic mixture of demands born from a sense of entitlement, and disingenuous claims of victimhood. First, the issue that continually gets lost is that the #GamerGate was started over video game fans being annoyed about game developers being “too cozy” with the media that covered their work. It snowballed when those fans were being silenced even in the nether-regions of the web where they had previously enjoyed complete freedom of expression. Note that this wasn't about misogyny in game materials or the video game industry. It all started with a rumor about a game developer sleeping with a reviewer.
Now, it has spread like a virus, and thanks to the SJW's, is creeping into practically every nook and cranny of the tech industry. But the fact remains that their contentions about sexism in tech do not hold water. Like any other industry out there, women may end up coming across cretins that mistreat them, but there isn't a concerted effort or conspiracy out there preventing women from entering the tech industry. On the contrary, tech giants are bending over backwards to entice women to work for them, and there are organizations doing all they can to encourage more women to enter tech fields.
The SJW's are quick to suggest that women aren't entering tech careers in droves because of systemic sexism in the industry. Women avoiding tech careers couldn't possibly have to do with women looking for companies that are willing to give them flexibility to balance life and work, as Fast Company suggests. Of course, there's a company out there that is attempting to resolve that issue for women. Power to Fly is a source for tech jobs for women, focused mostly on matching women with jobs that allow them to work from home or wherever they choose. As actor Adam Baldwin put it, “ 'Sexism in tech' is a false premise. The data simply do not support critical gender theorists' accusations. See @CHSommers videos”
If there is any problem with getting women into tech, it isn't sexism. The problem lies in lack of interest in general. Women know what they want when it comes to their career lives. Science and technology don't top the list, for now. Perhaps there is still a little bit of the “girls can't do that” attitude in the school yards out there, but organizations like the Girl Scouts have been very successful in encouraging young girls to try their hand at science and tech activities. The big problem with the SJW's and the #GamerGate women is really quite simple. They are crying out for special treatment for women, which inevitably implies that women simply can't do this on their own. The irony is that they are becoming the antithesis of feminism. People that truly view women as equal do not run around crying that women need special treatment.
The worst part is that since they're so busy engaging in this sexism witch hunt, they aren't doing anything to actually resolve the real problem – lack of women that are actually interested in getting into tech careers. If anything, they might be scaring off potential candidates for the industry. Honestly, what woman in her right mind would want to enter the minefield these SJW's are creating? Seriously, if they honestly wanted to fight for women in the tech industry, their time would be better spent encouraging girls to embrace the “geek”, getting companies in the tech industry to re-evaluate the way they do business so that more women would consider working for them, and if they happened to be entrepreneurial themselves, starting more companies like Power to Fly. Regardless, they need to stop insulting the intelligence of women in general. Women don't need to be considered a special group in need of protecting. Women need to be taught to fight and work for what they want.I remember saying, over and over again, during the Bush Regime, that we had such fond memories of Bill Clinton,k only because he benefited from comparison to his successor, the worst President in US history. If fact, Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in my lifetime, that goes back to Harry Truman. In my opinion, his worst policy was to support the removal of Glass-Steagall, the law that separated commercial banks and investment banks. One Democrat led the unsuccessful fight to prevent that and continues to lead the fight to restore it. He talked to Bill Moyers.
Bill Moyers talks with former Senator Byron Dorgan about making sure big banks play by rules that protect consumers from financial calamity, and how those big banks continue to leverage power and influence to avoid responsibility while maximizing profits. Dorgan was a nearly-lone voice in Congress in 1999 when he predicted economic calamity following a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and its protective measures. But given the economic meltdown nearly 10 years later, it turned out to be one of the most prescient speeches in American political history. “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country,” Dorgan tells Moyers, “that was one of the bigger ones, because it has set back this country in a very significant way and caused so much heartbreak and heartache, and a near total collapse of the American economy.”… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Truth-out>
Here’s the video.
Obama and almost every Democrat supported both of those Dorgan amendments to Dodd-Frank, which would have broken up the TBTF banks and made Dodd-Frank much stronger. Although many blame Obama, the real blame belongs to the Republican Party, who filibustered and goose-stepped unanimously against them, plus the two DINOs that goose-stepped with the Republicans. They were Joe LIEberman (ASSHOLE-CT) and “Benedict” Nelson (TURNCOAT-NE). The votes fell one short of sixty.
The primary functions of Investment bankers are to provide venture capital and to speculate. The primary functions of commercial bankers are to hold people’s accounts and to lend. Under Glass-Steagall deposits supported lending, which when done properly is safer, but produces lower returns, while investments supported speculation, which is more risky with a potential for higher returns. Without Glass-Steagall to keep those functions separate, Banksters can use deposits for high risk speculation, leaving little funds for normal lending.Mohammad Na’us was one of the most respected men in al Bab. He was the undertaker who washed the bodies of the dead prior to burial, a pious Quranic scholar who issued the sundown call to prayer in the Syrian town near the Turkish border, and for the past year, a seller of bread in his neighborhood.
But on Dec. 28, the bakery’s delivery was late and he missed the prayers at sundown. Religious police arrested Na’us, a father of five in his 50s, and ordered him to spend one night in prison.
It was his last.
At 7:20 p.m., a U.S. airstrike leveled al Bab’s al Saraya government center. Townspeople say dozens of people, including Na’us, died in the strike. U.S. officials, while acknowledging the strike, deny that any civilians died.
“That night you could hear the screams and wailing of women in the town when they heard al Saraya was bombed,” said Abu Hussein, who lived near the government center and passed it daily on his way to pray at the local mosque. “They knew their sons and relatives were in the building.”
The speaker, a 55-year-old man interviewed in Antakya, Turkey, asked to be identified by a pseudonym that means “Hussein’s father,” fearing retribution by the Islamic State should he return to al Bab.
McClatchy first reported on Jan. 11 that at least 50 civilians in the prison had died in the U.S. airstrike. Three days after that report, the U.S. Central Command said a review of the airstrike had determined that allegations of civilian casualties “are not credible.”
McClatchy, however, has found more substantiation for its initial report from refugees who fled al Bab and now inhabit towns in southern Turkey. With the help of relatives, neighbors and friends, McClatchy has assembled a list of the full names of 10 civilians who reportedly died in the airstrike and the family names of another 14.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group aligned with opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said it has a verified list of 24 civilians killed. Spokeswoman Huda al Ali said the network estimates that a minimum of 55 civilians died.
Another opposition monitoring group, the Violations Documentation Center, said more than 60 detainees, including some children, died in the attack and that 20 injured civilians were extracted alive from the rubble.
Nearly every one of the more than 40 townspeople from al Bab and nearby towns interviewed by McClatchy reporters said the number of dead was several times higher.
The difference between the new information and the U.S. military’s insistence that there was no evidence to back reports of the civilian deaths takes on added significance in the wake of the killing of Kayla Mueller, a 26-year-old aid worker from Arizona who died last week in Syria.
The Islamic State claimed Mueller was killed Feb. 6 when Jordanian planes bombed a building outside Raqqa, Syria, where she was being held prisoner. U.S. officials earlier this week acknowledged that Jordanian aircraft, “with the support of U.S. military crews,” had struck the building on that date, but they denied there was any evidence that civilians or Islamic State militants had been present.
The al Bab case, however, raises questions about how much information U.S. air crews have about the targets they hit.
To protect relatives, who could face arrest, torture and even death from the Islamic State for speaking to reporters, McClatchy is not publishing its list of victims in al Bab, nor are the Syrian Network or the Violations Documentation Center. The network examined McClatchy’s list of 10 full names and confirmed that three were also on its list, Ali said.
U.S. Central Command said it bases its conclusion that reports of civilian casualties were not credible on a variety of sources. “We analyzed (relevant) intelligence and information related to the coalition airstrike and other acts in the area (e.g. a potential Syrian airstrike), to include press reports and third-party source information,” Air Force Col. Patrick S. Ryder, Centcom’s director of public affairs, said in an email.
Ryder also suggested that local witnesses were confusing the U.S. strike with a Syrian government attack that took place two days earlier. The timing of the two strikes “could have contributed to erroneous reporting from the scene thus confusing the issue of where and when civilians may have been killed,” he said.
But townspeople told McClatchy they had not confused the Syrian government assault with the U.S. strike, which Ryder acknowledged took place on Dec. 28.
How closely the U.S. monitors Syrian government attacks was unclear. Ryder said he could not provide a “tally of Syrian government airstrikes,” and he said aerial photographs of the site before and after the Dec. 28 bombing were classified and would require a lengthy process to declassify and release. He said, however, that Centcom would reopen its investigation into the case if new information became available.
According to Abu Hussein and other townspeople, Islamic State guards blocked the streets surrounding the site for four days after the U.S. airstrike and brought in bulldozers to clear the rubble of the two-story building. They returned many of the bodies to the families of the victims but prohibited any announcement of the dead or any memorial services, townspeople said.
As he and other witnesses describe it, life in al Bab, a town of 150,000 close to the Turkish border, has been a reign of terror under the Islamic State. The extremist group, which took control of the town from moderate rebels in early 2014, kept hundreds of people in any of three prisons at any time, he said. There were regular executions in the town square, and the bodies of those executed would be left hanging for two days, often with a sign across the chest stating the alleged crime.
Townspeople could be arrested for the clothes they wear, the style of their hair or for asking too many questions, he said. Abu Hussein was held in a different prison near the center of al Bab for 30 days for what he said was being caught smoking.
“You could be arrested for allowing your wife to go out without a niqab,” he said, referring to a conservative Islamic women’s face covering. “They might arrest someone for talking with his female cousin. If someone is wearing narrow pants, they cut them off and take you to prison.”
Islamic State fighters would stop children in the street and ask if their fathers attended prayers or if they smoked, townspeople said. But many children would mock the Islamic State fighters, chasing their cars and shouting “Daash,” the somewhat pejorative Arabic nickname for the extremist group.
Abu Hussein said he had witnessed townspeople being taken to the Saraya building to be imprisoned. They would arrive in a convoy consisting of an American-made Humvee and a four-door sedan, guarded by men wearing camouflage uniforms and wearing masks, carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, he said.
“You are not allowed to stop and watch,” he said. And at the mosque, where he regularly attended prayers, no one would discuss what they saw. “Of course not,” he said. “You cannot open your mouth. They will arrest you.”
One of the most frequent infractions leading to arrest and detention was smoking, or even the possession of cigarettes.
Abdula Ilah Najjar, 18, was not even smoking when he was arrested, according to relatives and friends, but he had gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes for his uncle. He was arrested with the cigarettes in hand and sent to Saraya, where he died in the U.S. airstrike, they said.
Cigarettes also proved to be the undoing of three brothers from the nearby town of Bza’a, relatives said. Muhammad, Ahmad and Mahmoud Kirdyieh also had been arrested by the Islamic State for selling cigarettes and were detained in the Saraya building, they said. A judge had set a bail of 1 million Syrian pounds, about $5,000, and on the evening of Dec. 28, three cousins of the brothers went to the site to pay the fine. All six were killed.But lately, that simply hasn’t been the case.
Jimmie Johnson is 51-points behind fourth-place Brad Keselowski in the race for the final spot in the Championship 4 race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Nothing short of a win at Phoenix Raceway will advance the defending Monster Energy Cup Series champion into the final four.
“It’s a pretty easy approach for us,” Johnson said. “We’re in a must-win situation. We wish we were in a better points scenario, but that’s not the case. This team thrives on pressure and adversity and we’re certainly in the position right now.
“When we look at the last two or three races here, we’ve had very competitive cars and the effort was made this week to make sure we brought the best bullet, second to none, and I’m really proud of my team and the way that all of Hendrick Motorsports is working together to make sure that the No. 24 car (Chase Elliott) and the No. 48 car have their best chances to win here and move on and stay alive for the championship. We’ll find out Sunday afternoon.”
Staying the course
Yes, this team has always thrived on the pressure in the past, but the No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet has always had the speed to compensate for mistakes. That hasn't been the case in the latter part of 2017.
Still, after seven titles, 83 wins, 35 poles and an appearance in every Playoff since NASCAR introduced the Chase in 2004, Johnson doesn’t want to change course when it comes to his crew chief, Chad Knaus. Hendrick Motorsports announced a three-year contract extension for Johnson in June, but there has been no news on Knaus, whose contract expires after next season.
“Yeah, I started this with Chad, and I want to finish it with him,” Johnson said. “Outside of something crazy happening. Crew chiefs live in dog years versus drivers. I think he’s made that known that his time might expire before mine does, just because of the wear and tear of being a crew chief.
“I love our entire team and all that it’s made of. Every individual on that team, all the engineers and mechanics, we just haven’t been making the right decisions and going in the right direction. It’s not an individual’s problem. We’re all a part of this team and we’re all a part of the decision-making process.”
Win together, lose together
Johnson refuses to point fingers. He took equal responsibility for team’s lackluster result at Texas Motor Speedway. When Johnson needed a strong run last weekend at Texas—a track where he has won seven times—he didn’t have the car or the strategy when it counted. A vibration and tire rub on Lap 67 knocked him back to 30th, two laps down. He never led a lap. He didn't finish in the top 10 in either of the first two stages. Johnson finished 27th, three laps off the pace. He picked up just 10 points for his effort and dropped to eighth in the standings in an eight-man race.
“Well, I’m a part of this team, so everybody has skin in the game and the performance of the car,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day chasing speed is really the culprit. And I feel that next year we’ll be in a much better position with the Camaro body on the race car. So, you start making decisions late spring and early summer, trying to extract speed out of the cars. And that doesn’t always make them comfortable to drive.
“So, it’s hard to say it’s just one thing, but the start of the process is just trying to make our cars faster. And, at times we’ve not made the best decisions and have made them very hard to drive. I think Texas was an example of that and also Kansas. We spun twice there. So, it’s just trying to make the cars faster.”
Speed is certainly something that has been missing from the No. 48 Chevy since Johnson picked up his third and final win of the season at Dover in June. He has led just 45 laps since then and scored just one top-five finish—third at Dover in the Round of 16. Johnson’s 217 laps led, four top fives and 11 top 10s are the fewest he’s posted in 16 seasons on the tour.
One last chance at Phoenix
Johnson remains optimistic—particularly with a new car coming to the Chevy camp in 2018. As for this weekend at Phoenix Raceway, where Johnson has four wins in 28 starts, the first step is dialing in the car for Sunday.
“Everything has been tried at this point,” said Johnson, who was eighth in Friday's opening practice. “I think we have to make decisions once we get on track this morning and see where that set-up leads us and if we’re ahead on speed, then we stay tight to that set-up. If we’re not where we need to be, we throw it all out.
“We can’t leave any questions on the table going into Saturday night. We need to try all variations of set-ups and try anything and everything we can today and tomorrow to get that car right.”Late last week more than a dozen Republican governors declared that they will not build the insurance market exchanges called for by the Affordable Care Act, including prominent names like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas.
On Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma joined them, declaring in a statement that it “does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that will ultimately be under the control of the federal government.”The original deadline for states to notify the Department of Health and Human Services on whether they intend to build their own exchange was last Friday, but the administration extended it to Dec. 14. About a dozen Republican governors are weighing their options, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rick Scott of Florida and Terry Branstad of Iowa.
The Affordable Care Act encourages each state to build and operate its own exchange — a regulated, subsidized marketplace where consumers and small businesses can shop for insurance plans. If a state declines, the federal government has the power under the health care reform law to build one for it.
The decisions carry important implications for the long-term arc of Obamacare, which supporters and opponents alike agree is here to stay now that President Obama has been re-elected. The Obama administration wants states to build the exchanges so they have an incentive to make the law work. If the federal government takes over, state-level Republicans have a scapegoat in case things go wrong.
The more states stonewall the exchanges, the more it complicates the task of the federal government. One challenge is that the law lacks an automatic funding mechanism for HHS to set up state exchanges. Enrollment is slated to begin next October, and the exchanges are scheduled to start functioning by January 2014.
“This is a federally-mandated exchange with rules dictated by Washington,” Perry wrote in a letter to the Obama administration last Thursday. “It would not be fiscally responsible to put hard-working Texans on the financial hook for an unknown amount of money to operate a system under rules that have not even been written.”
Twenty-three states, mostly Democratic, and Washington, D.C. have said they’ll move forward with the exchanges, either on their own or in partnership with the feds.
Propelling the GOP governors’ stance is a desire to protect themselves politically from accusations of abetting a law that conservatives fervently oppose. Some governors argue that the regulations are too stifling and provide little flexibility for them to construct the marketplaces in accordance with their states’ needs.
“At this point, based on the information we have, states do not have the flexibility to build and manage exchanges in ways that respond to unique needs of their citizens or markets,” Kasich wrote in his Friday letter. “Regardless of who runs the exchange, the end product is the same.”Spotlight: Dual Universe
In our new spotlight series, we present software projects that are based on CAF. The first project we want to highlight is the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game Dual Universe. We talked to Jean-Christophe Baillie, founder and president of Novaquark, the company behind the game.
Background: Dual Universe
Dual Universe is a science fiction, multi-planet world where “players are free to invent their collective destiny: civilizations will rise and fall, player-driven events will shape the course of history”. The ambitious goal is to implement a persistent single-shard universe consisting of thousands of procedurally generated planets. Based on the Unreal Engine 4, Dual Universe strives to deliver beautiful and immersive environments. It will also be compatible with Oculus Rift. To see some of the impressive artwork and read more about the game, visit the official homepage. The first alpha release will hopefully be available in mid 2015.
Scaling up a software infrastructure to simultaneously deal with millions of active players is a real challenge. To build this scalable infrastructure, the development team behind Dual Universe has selected CAF.
The Interview
CAF Team: Dear Jean-Christophe, thank you for giving us the opportunity for this interview. You are the founder and president of Novaquark, but given the relatively small team size of indie studios, we can imagine you are also deeply involved in the development process.
Jean-Christophe: The team is currently 18 people, with 7 developers. I wrote a first prototype of the game two years ago, as well as the server architecture and scalability algorithms. Because our ambition has grown a lot since the beginning of the project, most of the original prototype has been rewritten, with the exception of the server architecture, which is still in operation. I currently supervise the technical developments, as well as the game design in general.
CAF Team: Building an MMO is a very ambitious goal for an indie studio. What is the history behind and what are your plans for the future?
Jean-Christophe: Yes, developing a MMO as an indie studio can sound a bit crazy! The important thing to see is that the design of the game is based on what is called “emergent gameplay”: the players are going to create their world, their stories, and their destiny. Unlike other MMOs, we don’t create tons of content like cities or quests, but we give the players a sandbox to create their own. This is making the project more feasible as we are more a tech company than a content company.
As for the origin of the project: it’s a very old gamer dream, something I’ve been thinking about for at least 6 or 7 years now. Dual Universe is a single-shard sandbox MMO taking place on hundreds of planets, where players are free to create their own economic or political systems, gathered in organizations and explore the procedurally generated world for resources and opportunities. Quite uniquely, they also are able to modify the voxel-based world: create cities, various scriptable constructs like vehicles, space ships or gigantic orbital stations. All players share the same “single shard” universe : there is only one persistent reality, giving birth to emergent organizations and player specialization around activities like building, politics, security, piracy, space colonization and exploration, logistics, harvesting, manufacturing or industry production.
We hope that we will see civilizations rise and fall, empires and alliances unite or compete, in a totally open world where everything will be possible.
CAF Team: How did you learn about CAF and what convinced you that it is the right tool for building your infrastructure? After all, this is a most critical business component. Did you try other frameworks before?
Jean-Christophe: Originally, I was interested in scalable design patterns to create a robust and distributed server architecture. I knew about Erlang and got interested in the actor programming model. Erlang sounded great, but we finally decided to use Scala and Akka to build a first prototype of the architecture (the Java proximity sounded like a good way to stay connected to a rich ecosystem). It was very hard however to find good Scala developers and we quickly realized that finding a way to get the job done in C++ would make things much easier in terms of recruiting. But C++ is a very dangerous language to use for a server: it’s not as safe, and does not provide native scalability and actor-based features like Scala/Akka does. We decided to take advantage of modern C++11 features and design patterns to try to avoid the typical memory management problems of C++ (plus tons of other issues), and I started to look for a good implementation of the actor model in C++. That’s when I found libcppa, the old name of CAF, and started to test it. CAF is very close in philosophy to Erlang/Scala/Akka, and is based on sound C++11 programming, so we fell in love with it pretty quickly!
CAF Team: What did you experience with CAF? How fast could you get productive? Did you have a long evaluation phase?
Jean-Christophe: CAF was very easy to use, with well documented examples. I think my familiarity with the actor model was probably helping, I suppose the particular way of doing things might be more difficult to grasp if you are totally new to this approach.
CAF Team: What technologies do you use beside CAF and what are your experiences in integrating CAF with other tools and frameworks?
Jean-Christophe: We use an external middleware to handle network communications with processes not running CAF (mainly, the game client); we also deal with a few standard databases and external data stores. All of them behave with their own logic: synchronous vs. asynchronous, single or multi-threaded. We developed wrappers for those to keep the functional logic as much as possible in CAF actors. Each tool is specific, but we mainly use caf::broker s, and anonymous sends ( anon_send ) from the threads not managed by CAF to exchange data with the actors.
CAF Team: Can you tell us about your scaling requirements? What is your experience (and expectation) regarding performance?
Jean-Christophe: As I said, the novelty we try to bring to the market is the idea of a continuous single-shard universe. This means that we must be able to balance the computing load dynamically, whereas current MMO games balance it statically, depending on the player position in the game.
CAF allows us to avoid dealing with low-level synchronization issues (data races, deadlocks, costly synchronization primitives) while enabling the logical architecture of our code. Furthermore, we leverage CAF network transparency to let actors communicate directly, whether in the same process or across our datacenter. This is a huge step towards fluid scalability, since it eases considerably the possibility to throw more hardware and increase the processing power linearly.
So far, we are satisfied with the performance, and we plan to build large-scale stress tests to put even more pressure to our architecture.
CAF Team: You have been using CAF for quite a while and started using it when it was still named libcppa. What was the first version you have used and what was your experience with the progress of CAF during that time?
Jean-Christophe: I think the first version was libcppa 0.8. It was already fairly mature and reliable. We discovered small issues that were quickly solved in the next iterations and globally, I would say that the reactivity of the team has been very good.
CAF Team: Final question: if you were to decide what the next feature of CAF would be, what would you have in mind?
Jean-Christophe: I can think of a few, some of which are probably a bit below the scope of CAF!
atom() s with more than 10 characters!
s with more than 10 characters! when announce() ing a custom type, std::container<type> should be announced too; or at least it would be nice to detect at compile-time that it cannot be sent as a message
ing a custom type, should be announced too; or at least it would be nice to detect at compile-time that it cannot be sent as a the ability to migrate actors between processes - though we are not sure if it would make sense - to further enhance dynamic scalability
an easy way to view internal metrics, such as: number of messages handled per second, hotspots in the application, number of message waiting in a queue, etc.
CAF Team: Thank you very much for this interview and we wish you and your team all the great success!After more than 100 minor league starts, eight years in the minors and two surgeries, the road to the majors was anything but easy for 29-year-old starting pitcher Scott Carroll.
But on Sunday, his dream was finally realized when he went 7 1/3 innings and allowed just one earned run as he led the Chicago White Sox past David Price and the Tampa Bay Rays 9-2 in his major league debut.
It was a special moment for Carroll, and the U.S. Cellular Field crowd made it even more special for him. The White Sox faithful, including Hawk Harrelson |
: The faith angles behind the biggest stories
The loudest megaphones do not speak for the rest of us, but they are still loud, and legion. To them I say: Gay people are not an issue. We're people. Some of us are Christians, too. And if it disturbs you that I refer to myself as both gay and Christian, I invite you to take the time to get to know me, and read what I write. You don't have to agree, and you might think I’m a sinner, but at least you’ll see me as a human being.
Baptist minister and author Tony Campolo quips that Jesus entreated Christians not to "love the sinner and hate the sin," but to "love the sinner and hate your own sin."
Jesus saved his harshest words for the self-righteously devout and chose the outcasts and sinners as his closest friends.
Perhaps a lesson in Jesus-style humility might do us all some good.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Justin Lee.Endangered leatherback sea turtle spotted in Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay
Updated
An endangered leatherback sea turtle has been sighted by researchers in Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay just a few kilometres from the shore.
Dr Matt Koopman, who saw the turtle while conducting unrelated research on Wednesday afternoon, said it was the first time he had encountered one in 30 years of diving in Victoria.
I never expected to see one, I knew that they did occur in offshore waters of Victoria, but never expected to see one in Port Phillip Bay. Dr Matt Koopman
"We were in a boat going from Hobsons Bay down to Long Reef and the skipper spotted it as we were going along," Dr Koopman said.
"He pulled the boat up, the turtle was swimming towards us and it got to within maybe five metres of us, stuck its head out of the water, had a look at us and then swum away."
Dr Koopman said they were just two or three kilometres from the shore at the time.
"We were fairly close to the cargo ships, they were definitely in sight and it had come from that direction, so it's quite possible it was swimming up around the ships," he said.
"I was pretty surprised... I never expected to see one, I knew that they did occur in offshore waters of Victoria, but never expected to see one in Port Phillip Bay."
'Pretty rare' for Port Phillip Bay
Turtle researcher at James Cook University, Associate Professor Mark Hamman, said it was rare to see a leatherback in such a high-use area.
"It is an endangered species, it's one of the rarer species in Australia, there's no more nesting on the east coast of Australia and the leatherback turtle in the Pacific Ocean is particularly of concern," Associate Professor Hamann said.
It's pretty rare to get a picture and pretty rare for them to actually be inside of Port Phillip Bay, usually... they'd be out where the jellyfish are abundant. Associate Professor Mark Hamann
"We do know that the population across the whole of the Pacific Ocean have been declining quite dramatically over the last 10 to 15 years, but putting an actual number on how many are left, is exceedingly hard.
"There's probably in order of 100-odd records south of Sydney, down Victoria, Tasmania into South Australia over the last 10 years.
"It's pretty rare to get a picture and pretty rare for them to actually be inside of Port Phillip Bay, usually... they'd be out where the jellyfish are abundant."
Associate Professor Hamann said the turtle probably found its way into the bay on the ocean's currents or chasing jellyfish.
"The passage is quite narrow, but these guys are good navigators and it should be able to make its way out," he said.
Turtle sighting 'gives hope' for species
The turtle was about 1.2 metres across and two metres long, Dr Koopman said.
He added he did not initially realise what a great find it was.
"The boys suggested I put it on... a website for recording and logging unusual sightings," he said.
"So I did that, and we emailed it around to a few people, and it turns out there's quite a bit of interest in it."
He said he had since been contacted by turtle researchers and government departments about the sighting.
Associate Professor Hamann said the sighting was a good sign for the endangered animal.
"It's really good, and it gives us a lot of hope that we're starting to see these animals in southern Australia and the other thing that gives us hope is that people are starting to recognise that it is unique and they let people know," he said.
"To see people giving photos and telling us information - all the data helps us to understand the species better."
He urged others working in and around the bay to keep a look out for the turtle.
"If people do see it, get onto social media, or onto turtle people and share their sightings," he said.
"The more we can start to see these animals and get them recorded the better we'll be at trying to conserve them."
Topics: endangered-and-protected-species, environment, port-melbourne-3207
First postedUCF landed a commitment from one of its top priorities in the 2017 recruiting class Thursday morning when Jacksonville University Christian running back Otis Anderson Jr. committed to the Knights.
"I decided to commit to the University of Central Florida because I feel that it's a good fit for me, academically they have the major that I'm looking for [sports medicine], the coaches treated me like I was already a player when I went on a visit with my family there and the offense fits me like a glove," Anderson said Thursday afternoon by phone.
He first posted the news to his Twitter account, @gumby_football, Thursday morning "First I would like to thank God, My parents and all my past coaches for getting me into this position, I would like to thank ALL of the coaches that have been recruiting me throughout my football career; But I would like to say that I have decided to Further my Education and football career at the University of Central Florida #UCFast #KnightNation17 #UCFierce"
Anderson, 5-foot-10, 168 pounds, was recruited to UCF by assistant coach Sean Beckton. He is the first commitment in the 2017 recruiting cycle for UCF and new head coach Scott Frost.
"Coach Beckton, I'd say he's been one of the most important reasons," Anderson said of why he chose UCF. "He knows a lot about Jacksonville and I talk to him every day. Without him, I'm not sure I'd be in this position right now."
Chris Hays Otis Anderson Jr., Jacksonville University Christian, UCF 2017 commit Otis Anderson Jr., Jacksonville University Christian, UCF 2017 commit (Chris Hays) (Chris Hays)
Anderson is intrigued by Frost's plans to come out firing in the spread offense, which he said will suit him just fine as a smaller running back.
"With the previous coaching staff, I didn't really get to know them too much because they were more into a pro-style offense with bigger backs," Anderson said. "Now that Coach Frost came from Oregon, and being that I used to watch all of those games, the offense just fits me like a glove and I just decided that's the best place for me."
He certainly fits the new UCF football hashtag promo of #UCFast. He said he has been hand-timed in the 40-yard dash at 4.38 seconds.
"The things that excite me the most about [the spread] is the different ways the running back can get the ball," Anderson said. "They can hand it off. They can throw bubble screens. They can have you running routes out in open space at any time."
Anderson, who has just over 20 scholarship offers, rushed for more than 1,000 yards this past season for state champ University Christian. He had 107 yards and two touchdowns on 10 carries in the 2015 Class 2A state title game, in which University Christian routed Tampa Cambridge 61-16.
With University Christian's top running back from last year Hussein Howe off to East Carolina, Anderson, who was a third-team selection All-First Coast by the Jacksonville Times-Union, is excited for his turn to carry the load.
"I'm ready for it and I live up to the expectations that people put in front of me," Anderson said. "I look forward to it."
Running back is a top priority for the Knights, who lost last year's top returnee William Stanback, a junior, who was dismissed from the program by the former UCF coaching staff last season.
Coming into spring football, UCF's top returnee is C.J. Jones, a redshirt-sophomore from Port Orange Atlantic who had 339 yards and one touchdown on 93 carries last season. Taj McGowan, now a sophomore, had 262 yards and a touchdown on 85 carries. Dontravious Wilson and former Orlando Boone player Michael Willet saw limited action.
The Knights signed two running backs in the 2016 recruiting class in Homestead South Dade's Jawon Hamilton and Daytona Beach Mainland's Adrian Killins.
Anderson has almost an entire year before National Signing Day 2017 and he'll continue to be recruited.
"I'm still accepting offers and stuff like that, but I pretty much have my eyes set on what school I want to go to," he said.
Chris Hays is the Sentinel's recruiting coverage coordinator and can be reached at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter at @Os_Recruiting and Facebook at OS Recruiting, and on Instagram at os_recruiting.Could the Hadid family BE any more gorgeous?
Anwar Hadid just released the first image from his new Hugo Boss ad and wow! He looks amazing.
We’re trying really hard not to objectify him here, especially because he’s only 17 and underage, but damn it’s hard!
The youngest Hadid made his modeling debut last year in the Moschino Resort runway show and then appearing on the cover of Teen Vogue. Watch out Gigi and Bella — your baby bro is totally nipping at your heels!
He previously told Teen Vogue,
“I only got interested in fashion a couple of years ago, when Gigi and Bella started modeling. I didn’t grow up rocking designer clothes, so this is all very new to me, but I am now down to wear anything on set.”
Well we’re buying whatever you’re selling, Anwar. Keep up the good work!
[related_post themes=”flat”]Think like the enemy. Let’s suppose I am an Islamic State terrorist. I don’t do bombs or bullets. I leave the dirty work to the crazies in the basement. My job is what happens next. It is to turn carnage into consequences, body parts into politics. I am a consultant terrorist. I wear a suit, not explosives. A blood-stained concourse is a means to an end. The end is power.
This week I had another success. I converted a squalid psychopathological act into a warrior-evoking, population-terrifying, policy-changing event. I sent a continent into shock. Famous politicians dropped everything to shower me with cliches. Crowned heads deluged me with glorious odium.
I measure my success in column inches and television hours, in ballooning security budgets, butchered liberties, amended laws and – my ultimate goal – Muslims persecuted and recruited to our cause. I deal not in actions but in reactions. I am a manipulator of politics. I work through the idiocies of my supposed enemies.
We should not alter laws, not infringe liberties, not persecute Muslims
Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news.
So on Tuesday the TV news channels behaved like Isis recruiting sergeants. Their blanket hyperbole showed not the slightest restraint (nor for that matter did that of most newspapers). The BBC flew Huw Edwards to Brussels. It flashed horror across the airwaves continually for 24 hours, incanting the words “panic”, “threat”, “menace” and “terror”. Vox pops wallowed in blood and guts. One reporter rode a London tube escalator to show possible future targets, to scare the wits out of commuters. It was a terrorist’s wildest dream.
With the ground thus prepared, the politicians entered on cue. France’s President Hollande declared “all of Europe has been hit”, megaphoning Isis’s crime. His approval rating immediately jumped.
David Cameron dived into his Cobra bunker and announced the UK “faces a very real terror threat”. An attack is now “highly likely”, according to the security services. Flags fly at half-mast. The Eiffel Tower is decked in Belgian colours. President Obama interrupts his Cuba visit to stand “in solidarity with Belgium”. Donald Trump declares that “Belgium and France are literally disintegrating”. It is hard to imagine what could more effectively promote the Isis cause.
The photograph that has come to define the horrors of the Brussels attacks Read more
Osama bin Laden set out on 9/11 to depict western nations as feckless and paranoid, their liberalism a surface charade easily punctured. A few explosions and their pretensions would wither and they would turn as repressive as any Muslim state.
By Tuesday evening, such a feeding frenzy was in full flood as the security lobby piled in. Cameron’s snoopers’ charter (or “investigatory powers” bill) was lauded as vital to national security. This is despite continued opposition both in parliament and from intelligence experts. This month in the Times, former NSA technical director Bill Binney ridiculed the bill’s “incredibly intrusive” powers of untargeted interception. Each citizen’s browsing history will soon be in the possession of the government, vulnerable to hacking by every marketer and blackmailer in the land.
Under the government’s Prevent strategy, universities and schools must develop programmes to counter “non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism”. The bureaucracy will be awesome. Primary schools are reportedly asking children to spy on one another to check “suspicious behaviour”. So must passengers on Virgin trains, as requested after each station. England is becoming old East Germany.
The Brexit camp, in the person of Ukip’s Nigel Farage, claims that Brussels proves the need to leave Europe. The home secretary, Theresa May, says the opposite. Terrorists would roam free, she says, since it would take 143 days to process terrorist DNA samples as against 15 minutes in the EU.
Reacting to terrorist incidents otherwise, in ways that do not play into terrorism’s hands, may seem hard. A free media feels a duty to report events, as politicians feel a duty to show they can protect the public. That it’s hard to show restraint is no excuse for actively promoting terror. Everyone involved in this week’s reaction, from journalists to politicians to security lobbyists, has an interest in terrorism. There is money, big money, to be made – the more terrifying it is presented, the more money.
Here's how not to respond to the Brussels attacks | Ken Gude Read more
We can respond to events in Brussels with a quiet and dignified sympathy, with candles and silences. To downplay something is not to ignore it. The terrorists have specific aims, deploying their atrocities for a political cause. There is no sensible defence in a free society against atrocity. But there is a defence against its purpose. It is to avoid hysteria, to show caution and a measure of courage, not Cameron’s lapse into public fear. It is not to alter laws, not to infringe liberties, not to persecute Muslims.
During the more dangerous and consistent IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative governments insisted on treating terrorism as criminal, not political. They relied on the police and security services to guard against a threat that could never be eliminated, only diminished. On the whole it worked, and without undue harm to civil liberties.
Those who live under freedom know it demands a price, which is a degree of risk. We pay the state to protect us – but calmly, without constant boasting or fearmongering. We know that, in reality, life in Britain has never been safer. That it suits some people to pretend otherwise does not alter the fact.
In his admirable manual, Terrorism: How to Respond, the Belfast academic Richard English defines the threat to democracy as not the “limited danger” of death and destruction. It is the danger “of provoking ill-judged, extravagant and counterproductive state responses”.
The menace of Brussels lies not in the terror, but in the reaction to the terror. It is the reaction we should fear. But liberty never emerges from a Cobra bunker.Half of Minnesotans are happy with the job President Obama is doing as he heads into his final months in office, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.
The poll found that 50 percent of Minnesotans approve of Obama’s job performance, and 44 percent do not approve. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Obama’s approval ratings in Minnesota mirror similar polls around the country, where the two-term Democrat has seen his approval ratings climb in recent months, signaling that he could finish his term as one of the most popular presidents in recent history.
The poll comes in the final weeks of an extraordinary and bruising campaign, with results suggesting that Obama remains more popular than the two candidates vying to replace him, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
“I think that with the mess [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney left, he has done a very good job,” said Marlin Toft, 88, of Ivanhoe.
Obama’s strongest approval comes from voters in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, where 60 percent of respondents approve and 33 percent disapprove of the president’s job. Obama’s support slips in the outer-ring metro suburbs, with 47 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving. In outstate Minnesota, 44 percent approve of the president’s job and 50 percent do not.
Graphic: Obama's job performance Graphic: Obama's job performance
The poll shows Obama’s areas of support are similar to the geographic and gender split found in the race between Clinton and Trump. The former U.S. Secretary of State leads the New York real estate mogul 44 percent to 38 percent in Minnesota, a lead based largely on her overwhelming support in the Twin Cities and among women.
Obama is most popular among women and young people, according to the poll of 625 registered Minnesota voters taken last week. Among women, 54 percent approve of his job and 38 percent do not. Among men, 45 percent approve and 52 percent disapprove.
Millennials overwhelmingly like his job performance. His popularity drops below 50 percent among middle-aged voters, according to the poll conducted Sept. 12 to 14. Among those over 65 and older, more than half approve of how well he is doing.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll on Tuesday showed 47 percent of likely U.S. voters approve of his job performance, with 52 percent disapproving. Gallup pegged Obama’s approval rating at 52 percent earlier in September.
Two-term presidents rarely depart office with the highest approval of their careers. Republican George W. Bush, who served two terms before Obama, had a 90 percent approval rating in September 2001, right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But he saw his job approval rating plunge to 25 percent in October 2008, just as he was leaving office, according to Gallup.
The historic unpopularity of Trump and Clinton could be boosting Obama’s popularity, said University of Minnesota Humphrey school researcher Eric Ostermeier.
“President Obama may not be seen by the average voter as one of our greatest presidents,” said Ostermeier, author of the Smart Politics blog. “But they are comparing and are a bit fearful of what replaces him.”
Reflecting the deep polarization in the presidential race 47 days out from the election, poll respondent sentiments about Obama break mostly along party lines.
Among DFLers, 88 percent approve of Obama’s job and 6 percent disapprove. Among Republicans, 11 percent approve and 84 percent disapprove. Obama does slightly better among independents, with 42 percent liking how he is doing and 50 percent saying they don’t approve of his job.
Vivian Sutch, a self-described “angry white woman” from St. Paul, said she thinks Obama has done a horrible job and has overstepped his bounds with executive orders that sidestep the authority of Congress. “He’s very divisive,” said Sutch, 69. “He has divided us all up into Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Muslims this, homophobia, Islamophobia.”
Elizabeth Workinger, 80, from Edina, said she approves of Obama’s job performance, but she wishes he could have done more to get the country out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more to help the economy after the recession.
“I had great, great hopes, but he came in at a terrible time and I don’t know if he could have done any better,” Workinger said.Andrew Dymburt and KOIN 6 News Staff - PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) -- Ten people are under investigation in a multi-state poaching case where more than 100 animals were killed for their antlers or hides and left to waste.
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Captain Jeff Wickersham with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. (KOIN)
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Captain Jeff Wickersham with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. (KOIN)
"This is the largest case that I know of in this area, it might even be the largest in the history of the state," Captain Jeff Wickersham with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said.
The Oregon State Police and the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife began their investigation in late 2016. Since that time, the agencies served nearly 20 search warrants that turned up deer, elk, bear, 4 vehicles, firearms and hunting equipment.
Cell phone video from the poachers obtained by police shows them shooting big game animals at point blank range and using dogs to finish the job, then leaving the animals to rot.
"These people were simply there for the thrill of the kill," Wickersham said. "This was all about killing and that's all it was."
Authorities said several of the people being investigated have previously been convicted of big game hunting violations.
Officials with WDFW said the suspects are believed to hunt for big game in closed areas during a closed season, using spotlights, dogs and a big game transport tag. Many of the animals -- including deer, elk, bear, cougar and bobcats -- are left to waste.
"These are not hunters," Wickersham said. "These individuals are not part of the hunting public that actually take conservation in to mind when they go afield."
Investigators said the poachers killed those animals in closed areas, during closed season, in excess of the legal limit.
"This wasn't one or two animals. This wasn't ten animals. This wasn't twenty," Wickersham said. "It was more than that and that in and of itself is a shocking and staggering number."
Anyone with information is asked to contact either WDFW or the Oregon State Police.This piece originally aired August 12, 2015.
A remarkable 77-year-old woman is reshaping more than her body, by breaking a sweat. Constance Tillet is living proof it's never too late to push yourself in the gym, reports "CBS This Morning" co-host Norah O'Donnell.
Keeping up with her today, it's hard to believe that just a few months ago, Tillet's body was failing her.
She's been through more than just two hip replacements.
"Two knee replacements, two rotating cuffs -- a partial and a full," she said.
But all that couldn't stop her from turning her life around.
She believes it's important for seniors to be working out.
"Get up and do it. Stop with the whining," Tillet said. "Stop with 'Oh you have to take care of me.' Take care of yourself."
Constance Tillet at CrossFit South Brooklyn CBS News
That's something Tillet didn't used to do. Her health problems started almost 30 years ago, when she was 50. She took insulin four times a day for diabetes and 60 pills to treat high blood pressure, congenital heart failure and arthritis.
Then last fall, Tillet's son suggested she try CrossFit, and helped her find CrossFit South Brooklyn.
She said she never worked out until now.
Tillet met gym owner David Osorio and, after just 10 months of working out together, she is down to just a few pills a day, and has lost 50 pounds.
"People have this perception that, you know, you have to be some really exceptional physical genetic person to kind of come in and make tremendous progress like this, but it's just about consistency," Osorio said.
And there's strong evidence that movement improves seniors' health. In the largest study on the issue, by the National Institute on Aging, doctors followed more than 1,600 seniors over a two-year period. They found that regular and moderate physical activity reduced the risk of disability by 18 percent.
Osorio said he has been most impressed by Tillet's attitude.
"People love seeing her. She lights up the room when she comes in," he said.
Constance Tillet at CrossFit South Brooklyn CBS News
Osorio said there's a psychosocial element to fitness.
"Part of all this is meeting people and expanding your social base and just having more people in your life that you can depend upon and that you can trust," he said.
For Tillet, that moment came in June when her devoted husband, the man who took her to every CrossFit session, died suddenly, on the same day he was scheduled to start his own fitness plan.
"He was my nurse, my doctor, my friend, my everything," Tillet said. "He was my encouragement. He's still my encouragement."
That encouragement, Tillet said, will keep her working out. She said it's changed her mentally and spiritually.
"When my husband died and the word spread, in my wildest dreams I never thought they would be there with me, and they were there with me to his grave site," Tillet said. "And they are still with me and they will be with me till I leave here. South Brooklyn CrossFit is my family, my children, and I mean it with the bottom of my heart."But what was released, and the speed with which it was, could be part of a recent broader change in response to outrage over police shootings around the country in 2014, UC Hastings law Professor Hadar Aviram said.
"We’re seeing more and more police departments trying to be more transparent," she said, "partly because it’s better PR for them, and partly to satisfy this concern about lack of transparency. So this is part of a growing trend, and a growing trend to combat the kind of critique and negative press that they’re getting -- arguably justifiably -- for the way they’ve acted in other events in the past."
Oakland civil rights attorney Jim Chanin has been litigating with the OPD since 1979, and he's one of a team of attorneys behind the Negotiated Settlement Agreement stemming from the Riders scandal that erupted in 2000. Chanin's been pushing the OPD for greater transparency and better use-of-force policies through that process for more than a decade.
He said the department has changed, but only recently.
"If you’d asked me that question in 2012, when I’d been doing this for nine years, I would have said no," Chanin said, "but since you’re asking the question in 2015... the answer’s yes. The department is much more open and transparent since Sean Whent was appointed as chief of police."
Whent was named interim chief in May 2013 -- a few weeks before Oakland's last officer-involved shooting, in which a suspect was killed.
Chanin says that in the past couple years, some amazing things have happened with Oakland police use of force, crime and the department's relationship with the community.
"Citizen complaints have fallen in Oakland by 33 percent," Chanin said. "Uses of force are down even more than a third, yet arrests are up and crime is down. So what that shows is you can have constitutional, transparent policing without raising your crime rate or endangering officer safety. And I think that's an important lesson that departments around the country should take note of."
Perhaps they are. Whent is on the national stage, recently speaking in Washington, D.C., about his department's evolving crowd management policies following violent clashes with protesters during Occupy Oakland. He was on a panel last week with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder talking police/community relations.
And the Oakland Police Department was also an early adopter of body-worn cameras, with every uniformed cop wearing one since 2013. Officers' cameras were rolling during Friday's incident, according to the department, and investigators are reviewing the footage.
The cameras won't solve all problems, Aviram said, but they can help diffuse violence on both sides of the badge before it happens.
"The cops that use the lapel cameras are reporting that they’re seeing a lot less animosity from people who see that the interaction with the cops is being recorded," she said. "It may also be curbing the cops' tendency to use force or be more aggressive in an interaction with citizens if they know that it’s being recorded."
And the same goes for a department that knows it's expected to report details of critical incidents quickly.
"If the police department itself knows the information is being disseminated," Aviram said, "they might try to combat bad policies to begin with to avoid the negative publicity."
An open and approachable police department will have a better relationship with the community it polices, Chanin said, which will improve officer safety and help solve crimes.
But Aviram said that kind of relationship might still be a ways off.
"I think right now there is a lot of public animosity, much of it understandable, much of it justified, toward police departments and toward the way they’ve been acting," she said. "So I think it’s going to take a pretty substantial change to restore community faith in police behavior."
Read the news release below:City in Otago, New Zealand
Dunedin ( ()[7] duh-NEE-din; Māori: Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland.[8]
The urban area of Dunedin lies on the central-eastern coast of Otago, surrounding the head of Otago Harbour, and the harbour and hills around Dunedin are the remnants of an extinct volcano. The city suburbs extend out into the surrounding valleys and hills, onto the isthmus of the Otago Peninsula, and along the shores of the Otago Harbour and the Pacific Ocean. Dunedin was the largest New Zealand city by territorial land area until superseded by Auckland with the formation of the Auckland Council in November 2010.
Archaeological evidence points to lengthy occupation of the area by Māori prior to the arrival of Europeans. The province and region of Otago takes its name from the Ngai Tahu village of Otakou at the mouth of the harbour,[9] which became a whaling station in the 1830s.
In 1848 a Scottish settlement was established by the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland. Between 1855 and 1900 many thousands of Scots emigrated to the incorporated city. Dunedin became wealthy during the Central Otago Gold Rush, beginning in the 1860s. In the mid-1860s, and between 1878 and 1881, it was New Zealand's largest urban area. The city population at 5 March 2013 was 120,246.[10] While Tauranga, Napier-Hastings and Hamilton have eclipsed the city in size of population since the 1980s to make it only the seventh-largest urban area in New Zealand, Dunedin is still considered one of the four main cities of New Zealand for historic, cultural and geographic reasons.[a]
Dunedin has a diverse economy, which includes manufacturing, publishing and technology-based industries as well as education, research and tourism. The city's most important activity centres around tertiary education—Dunedin is home to the University of Otago, New Zealand's oldest university (established 1869), and the Otago Polytechnic. Students account for a large proportion of the population; 21.6 per cent of the city's population was aged between 15 and 24 at the 2006 census, compared to the New Zealand average of 14.2 per cent.[18] In 2014 Dunedin was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature.[19]
History [ edit ]
Māori settlements [ edit ]
Archaeological evidence shows the first human (Māori) occupation of New Zealand occurred between 1250–1300 AD,[3] with population concentrated along the southeast coast. A camp site at Kaikai Beach, near Long Beach, has been dated from about that time. There are numerous archaic (moa hunter) sites in what is now Dunedin, several of them large and permanently occupied, particularly in the 14th century. The population contracted but expanded again with the evolution of the Classic culture which saw the building of several pā, fortified settlements, notably Pukekura at (Taiaroa Head), about 1650. There was a settlement in what is now central Dunedin (Ōtepoti) occupied as late as about 1785 but abandoned by 1826.[24] There were also Maori settlements at Whareakeake (Murdering Beach), Purakaunui, Mapoutahi (Goat Island Peninsula) and Huriawa (Karitane Peninsula) to the north, and at Taieri Mouth and Otokia (Henley) to the south, all inside the present boundaries of Dunedin.
Māori tradition tells first of a people called Kahui Tipua living in the area, then Te Rapuwai, semi-legendary but considered to be historical. The next arrivals were Waitaha followed by Kāti Māmoe late in the 16th century and then Kai Tahu (Ngai Tahu in modern standard Māori) who arrived in the mid-17th century. These migration waves have often been represented as 'invasions' in European accounts but modern scholarship has cast doubt on that. They were probably migrations like those of the European which incidentally resulted in bloodshed. The sealer John Boultbee recorded in the 1820s that the 'Kaika Otargo' (settlements around and near Otago Harbour) were the oldest and largest in the south.
European settlement [ edit ]
Lieutenant James Cook stood off what is now the coast of Dunedin between 25 February 1770 and 5 March 1770, naming Cape Saunders (on the Otago Peninsula) and Saddle Hill. He reported penguins and seals in the vicinity, which led sealers to visit from the beginning of the 19th century. The early years of sealing saw a feud between sealers and local Māori from 1810 to 1823, the "Sealers' War" sparked by an incident on Otago Harbour, but William Tucker became the first European to settle in the area in 1815.
Permanent European occupation dates from 1831, when the Weller brothers founded their whaling station at Otago, modern Otakou, on the Otago Harbour. Epidemics badly reduced the Māori population. By the late 1830s the Harbour had become an international whaling port. Wright & Richards started a whaling station at Karitane in 1837 and Johnny Jones established a farming settlement and a mission station, the South Island's first, at Waikouaiti in 1840. The settlements at Karitane and Waikouaiti have endured making modern Dunedin one of the longest European settled territories in New Zealand.
In 1844, the Deborah, captained by Thomas Wing and carrying (among others) his wife Lucy and a representative of the New Zealand Company, Frederick Tuckett, sailed south to determine the location of a planned Free Church settlement.[30] After inspecting several areas around the eastern coast of the south island, Tuckett selected the site which would become known as Dunedin.[31] (Tuckett turned down the site which would become Christchurch, as he felt the ground around the Avon river was swampy.[32])
The Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland, through a company called the Otago Association, founded Dunedin at the head of Otago Harbour in 1848 as the principal town of its special settlement.[33]
The name Dunedin comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Charles Kettle the city's surveyor, instructed to emulate the characteristics of Edinburgh, produced a striking, "Romantic" design. There resulted both grand and quirky streets as the builders struggled and sometimes failed to construct his bold vision across the challenging landscape. Captain William Cargill, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, served as the secular leader of the new colony. The Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet Robert Burns, provided spiritual guidance. By the end of the 1850s, around 12,000 Scots had emigrated to Dunedin, many from the industrial lowlands.[33]
Gold rush era [ edit ]
In 1852, Dunedin became the capital of the Otago Province, the whole of New Zealand from the Waitaki south. In 1861 the discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully, to the south-west, led to a rapid influx of people and saw Dunedin become New Zealand's first city by growth of population in 1865. The new arrivals included many Irish, but also Italians, Lebanese, French, Germans, Jews and Chinese. The Dunedin Southern Cemetery was established in 1858, the Dunedin Northern Cemetery in 1872.[36]
Dunedin and the region industrialised and consolidated and the Main South Line connected the city with Christchurch in 1878 and Inver |
weekend. Which one will read the cards best next Sunday in Stade de France?
AdvertisementsThose participating in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta are going to become subjects of experimentation in the next few weeks as the developers change the default map, and tweak some of the purchasable equipment.
According to the Official CS Blog, developers have “just updated the CS:GO Beta today and changed the default map to Train.” On top of this, they are also “trying two changes in competitive mode: buyable defuse kits and splitting helmets and Kevlar.” Developers would like participants to know, “we have created a scenario for testing the change over the next few weeks that will allow us to capture its impact. We will share our findings with you when the experiment is complete.”
It was also noted that the beta will be expanded early next week by selecting players across all demographics who filled the recent survey. If you haven’t yet, you can fill out the survey here (will launch Steam).
Below is a list of further tweaks that have been made to the Beta:
Gameplay:
Made Kevlar and helmet purchasable separately.
Made defuse kits buyable.
Based on pro feedback, fixed grenade spamming from the buyzone by limiting buy of one of each grenade type per round.
Maps:
Fixed many instances reported in forums of players being able to access areas that should be inaccessible.
Fixed several issues with transparent walls / other elements.
Fixed a few instances of incorrect effects associated with materials (sparks on plastic, etc.).
Fixed some problems with the bomb being able to float in mid-air after being planted.
AI:
Made bots less prone to getting stuck in certain areas.
Tuned bot difficulty. They should be initially less deadly now.
UI:
Made international characters display correctly in the UI.
Redesigned win panel and made it team-specific.
Fixed bug that caused player ID chevrons to remain over dead players sometimes.
Fixed bug that caused player ID chevrons to linger when the pause menu was up.
Addressed many UI issues that could occur when playing the game in standard definition
Fixed the screen resize options screen.
Adjusted the bombsite markers on the radar for some maps to reflect their locations more accurately.
Fixed issue that sometimes caused death notices to overlap with mini-scoreboard.
Audio:
Added new music for the front end.
Added new music for many in-game events.
Fixed deathcam music playing twice in competitive mode.
Addressed issue with front end music not stopping when playing via a CONNECT command
Made some more adjustments to volume level of footsteps on various surfaces.
Tuned ambience levels for all maps.
Changed quickmatch to de_train
CS:GO Beta “Will Keep Growing”, Fake Scam Sites Arise, Servers Mixed Up Weekly"When you give [police] the power of civil asset forfeiture, they've got to choose between themselves or the public," says experimental economist Bart Wilson. "Why do we want to put them in that position?"
Civil asset forfeiture is the process whereby police seize any property or money associated with a suspected crime, often drug-related. If the owner wants the seized property back, he or she must spend an often considerable amount of time and money to prove in court that the property wasn't used in the commission of a crime. As Jacob Sullum explained earlier this month, it's easy for innocent third parties to lose thousands of dollars in the process.
In many states, the law permits police departments to auction off the seized assets and keep the cash. Critics say this system incentivizes "policing for profit" at the expense of innocent members of the community, while proponents argue that it motivates police officers to do their jobs better and funds police departments by "taxing criminals."
Wilson, a professor of economics at Chapman University, and his co-author Michael Preciado designed a study to reveal how the incentives set forth under civil forfeiture affect human behavior. In the study, one undergraduate student plays the role of law enforcement in a computer game, and three others play the roles of the public. Subjects played for real money, and Wilson says the results were overwhelming.
"It's not a few people just abusing it. This is the modal tendency: to abuse," says Wilson, who points out that subjects are more likely than not to help others in games when there's no financial cost of doing so. "For me, that's pretty strong evidence that it's the rules that are creating the incentives for them to police for profit."
To see a fuller explanation of the study's methodology and its results, watch the video above.
Approximately 8 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning.
Scroll down for downloadable versions of this video, and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.Walter White did a bad, bad thing
It should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: If you’re a “Breaking Bad” viewer and haven’t yet seen last Sunday’s episode, then you may want to just skip to the next post, because there are serious spoilers ahead.
Are they gone? Yeah? Good.
Chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-kingpin Walter White has done some sketchy things in his day, but facing imminent death with no financial safety net for his family, it wasn’t too difficult to give him a pass. But over the course of the second season, this has changed. Walter’s cancer is in remission, and he’s scheduled for a surgery that could cure him completely. But instead of winding down his life of crime, he insists on expanding it. Part of the problem is that he’s realized how boring his life is without it. His marriage is teetering on the edge of disaster, and producing meth is the one thing in his life that he has mastered.
In last week’s episode, “Mandala,” Walter chose to make a huge transaction (~$1.2 million) instead of rushing to the hospital to be with his wife as she gave birth. But in Walter’s mind, it was no choice at all. If he didn’t make the deal, he would miss out on any future opportunities with one of the biggest (and most careful) drug runners in the Southwest. You see, for Walter, it’s no longer about the money or providing security for his family. It’s more about his being a success, despite what his friends and family think.
This week’s episode — “Phoenix” — Walter made a decision that will no doubt come back to haunt him. After a random meeting at a bar with the father of Jesse’s girlfriend, Walter went back to Jesse’s house (out of guilt and affection for the boy) to try to keep him from continuing down the road of drug abuse. High on heroin, Jesse and Jane were laying on their sides, so as to not choke on their own vomit in their sleep. Walter tried to rouse Jesse, and as he shook him, Jane was pushed over onto her back. She started to vomit and choke, and after starting to help her, Walter made the decision to let her die. Jane was pretty nasty to Walter, and he never knew her when she was sober. So, to him, she was the one leading Jesse to his demise. He thought that by letting her die, he was helping Jesse. Maybe this will in fact be the best thing for young Mr. Pinkman, but it doesn’t matter — Walter effectively killed Jane. Had he never showed up at the house, Jane wouldn’t have been on her back and she wouldn’t have died in her sleep.
Sure, we must suspend disbelief when thinking about the randomness of the meeting between Walter and Jane’s father in the bar. It was the father’s words that ultimately led to his daughter’s death. He convinced Walter (however indirectly) to go back to Jesse’s house. If only he knew.
Throughout the entire season, we’ve been treated with shots of the White home after some sort of explosion. There are men in chemical suits collecting evidence. With one episode left, I have no earthly idea how we get from point Y to point Z. Jesse will wake up to find Jane dead and won’t know that Walter had anything to do with it. Walter’s new business partner is probably happy with his product and shouldn’t have any reason to destroy his house. Walter doesn’t have any chemicals on site, so my only theory is that the work he did a few weeks ago underneath the house turns out to be faulty and causes the explosion. It will be a little bit of a letdown if those scary scenes have nothing to do with Walter’s side business, but since the show has already been renewed for a third season, it’s doubtful that anyone in his personal life will find out about his hobby anytime soon.The London derby between Chelsea and Arsenal no longer holds the kind of significance at the top of Barclays Premier League table that it once had. Monsieur Wengerai??i??s cheeky digs at Chelsea from time to time and the contention for a Champions League spot are all that is left in still keeping it a simmering affair for the past few seasons. This time, however, you will have to be one really biased fan to disagree with the Arsenal manager. Referee Martin Atkinson had a bad day at office; although his ineptitude came through at both ends of the pitch.
The fixture turned out to be the proverbial ai???Game of two halvesai??i?? with Chelsea dominating the first half, and Arsenal coming back to life only in the second half. For Chelsea, possibly the biggest achievement apart from the obvious three very crucial points was to stem the rot of poor results at Stamford Bridge, a run-in that has almost surely taken them out of contention for the Premier League title this year. For Arsenal, the second half performance was confidence-inspiring but they would be wondering why their team needed a good hard kick to liven up.
Team Line Ups:
Chelsea: Cech(GK); Azpilicueta, Cahill, Ivanovic, Cole; Ramires, Lampard; Mata, Oscar, Hazard, Torres
Arsenal:Ai??Szczesny(GK); Sagna, Mertesacker, Vermaelen, Gibbs; Diaby, Coquelin; Walcott, Wilshere, Cazorla; Giroud
First Half
The first half began with the referee setting the tone for the mistakes he was going to make in the course of the game. Martin Atkinson waved ai???play-onai??i?? as Oscar was felled by Abou Diaby in the very first minute of the game in the penalty box.
The first real chance of the game came in the 5th minute of play when Theo Walcott drifted inside, received a pass from Cazorla and threaded a perfectly weighted pass in between Cahill and Ivanovich to Giroud who dragged his shot agonizingly wide. The Frenchman probably should have scored. He definitely would have rued his miss when Chelsea took the lead in the very next minute. Coquelin was clearly fouled by Ramires as the former brought the ball forward and although the foul was unintentional, with both going in for the ball, it was a foul nevertheless. Martin Atkinson chose to ignore. The ball fell to Azpilicueta as a result of the tackle and he looped in a ball over the Arsenal defence to Juan Mata, who took a brilliant touch before roofing the ball into Arsenalai??i??s net. Arsene Wenger was furious as Chelseaai??i??s Spanish magician celebrated his 14th goal of the season.
Soon after Cazorla tested Petr Cech with a long range effort and Eden Hazard went on one of those mazy runs through the bemused defense. However it was that man Ramires who put Chelsea on course to their second goal. He robbed Diaby off the ball in midfield and continued his run into the box, where he was found by Mataai??i??s immaculate pass. However as the Brazilian prepared to take his shot, he was felled by an onrushing Szczesny. Although he went down a little too easily, the Arsenal goalkeeper did not help his case with that kind of movement. He was yellow carded and Frank Lampard coolly dispatched the resulting penalty to score his 195th goal for the club, merely 7 behind Bobby Tamblingai??i??s all time record. Rafa Benitez was particularly happy, for the goal came in the 16th minute and the routine applause for Robbie Di Matteo did not materialize in the wake of celebrations.
Rest of the first half was more or less a story of an exasperated looking Arsenal trying to cope with Chelseaai??i??s pace and movement. There were times when the space afforded to Chelsea in midfield seemed bigger than the pitch at Camp Nou! Captain Thomas Vermaelen and Jack Wilshere could be seen making hand gestures to rouse their team to challenge for the ball. Chelsea on the other hand were more confident on the ball as Hazard and Mata consistently tormented the Arsenal defence. There were some half chances throughout for both the sides. Torres provided some cheer for the Arsenal faithful when he hit a shot abysmally wide, but the first half finished with a general feeling that the Blues were going to have a plain sailing in the second half. They could not have been more wrong.
Second Half
Arsenal came out on to the pitch early before play resumed, after what certainly would have been a good dressing down. Wenger later said his team only came out after the ringing of the bells. Perhaps he was mentioning the alarm bells?
The North Londoners started the second half on a sharp and bright note, showing more intent both on and off the ball. Mertesacker shot straight at Cech after Wilshere had floated a ball into Chelseaai??i??s box. Walcott could only do the same when Cazorla put him through minutes later while Giroud went close as well. All the verve and composure was gone from Chelseaai??i??s play as they struggled to string a few passes together under sustained pressing from Arsenal. Midweek memories from the home game against Southampton came flooding back to the Chelsea faithful. The Gunnersai??i?? fans were gaining voice and they were rewarded for their efforts when Cazorla threaded a brilliant pass through to Walcott and the latter calmly finished past Cech. This time it was Chelseaai??i??s turn to feel aggrieved; Torres had been fouled in the build-up but Atkinson simply waved on.
Arsenal continued to press for an equalizer in front of an increasingly anxious Stamford Bridge. Chelsea were clearly in need of a change, but Benitez waited until 70 minutes when Bertrand came on for Oscar. Alongside, Arshavin came on in place of Diaby for the gunners for the final 15 minutes. Diaby had been playing a little higher up the field than in the first half and his departure helped Chelsea regain a slight foothold in the midfield.
Soon after Torres was subbed for Demba Ba; the latter had been expected to start the game. Baai??i??s impact on the game was immediate. He almost scored in the 83rd minute when put through by Mata. Chelseaai??i??s new target man drew Szczesny off his line and rounded him off but could not get past the Arsenal captain who made a superb block and kept his team in contention. It was definitely his biggest contribution in the game. The final few minutes were a bit frenzied, as Arsenal pushed for an equalizer leaving gaps at the back. A yellow card for Ashley Cole was greeted by cheers from the away end while Chelsea claimed a handball. Cahill made a brilliantly improvised tackle in the dying minutes or else Walcott would have been through on goal.
Ai??Aftermath
Although there were dubious decisions, Chelsea deserved their lead at half time and subsequent victory, if only marginally. Rattled for large parts in the second half they managed to defend stoically as a unit, another word for managing to hang on for their lives. They must work on getting rid of that complacency hitherto unseen in the Chelsea of the last decade. Arsenal must take heart from the improvements they made in the second half and look to implement them over the course of the entire 90 minutes. The bragging rights now lie with the the BluesAi??with a first league double after two years.
Although this fixture was nowhere near close to last yearai??i??s madness at the Bridge, it had its fair share of entertainment. And above all, Benitez would have been a relieved man as he walked off a snowy Stamford Bridge.
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received updated copies of the letter that included LinkedIn’s signature on Friday, said aides to the bill’s authors, Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahySenate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Booker wins 2020 endorsement of every New Jersey Democrat in Congress The Hill's Morning Report - Can Bernie recapture 2016 magic? MORE (D-Vt.).
Last month LinkedIn joined Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo in suing the federal government at the court that oversees surveillance activities for the ability to publish more information about the surveillance requests they receive.
The Department of Justice responded by saying the companies would aid terrorists and jeopardize national security by publishing more information, but the companies vowed to keep pursuing the lawsuits.Ahhh, flirty conversation; the fine art of give and take, the charming bouquet of witty banter, the dancing flow of energy. It can be such an appealing encounter of opposing forces, like a glass of chilled white wine or a cold beer on a hot summer day. Something so natural and fun should be easy, right? Sadly, this seemingly easy interaction turns many of us into a stuttering, boring wreck. Thankfully, the art of conversation can be learned and excelled at. The following series will help you avoid awkwardness, have more control over your desired results, & enhance those linguistical skills.
Open Up!
Oooooh, opening up. Sounds kind of scary, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, this isn’t about exposing your blind spot to the enemy (though if you consider someone you’re interested in The Enemy, then we have bigger problems). It’s about allowing the other person to get to know you. Now that you’ve practiced developing your sense of curiosity, it’s time to round out the conversation with tid bits about yourself, here are two ways of doing that:
#1. Be Vulnerable
Again, this isn’t as scary as it sounds. Being vulnerable is about sharing maybe just a little bit more than you normally would; stepping outside your comfort zone, so that the person in front of you gets a glimpse of the real you. According to Brene Brown, in her very popular TED talk, being vulnerable is the only real way to create change in your life and relationships.
In practice:
Have you made mistakes in past relationships? Share those if the time is right.
“Listening wasn’t always my strong suit, but I’ve been working on it” or “I’ve been working really hard on my career, and it hasn’t left me a lot of time to develop deep relationships” Show your faults in a humorous way.
Self-depreicating humor always goes a long way. Is ice cream your kryptonite? Do you have road rage? Are you afraid of spiders? Learn to share those things in an entertaining way. “Oh, man, don’t put a pint of Rocky Road in front of me or I’ll inhale it like a vacuum” “I don’t usually cuss, but when I’m driving my self-control goes out the window!” Share your life goals.
For example, instead of just giving a basic answer to a question, take it one step further – “I work at such and such, but my goal is to be Vice President within the next few years” or “No, I don’t have any kids yet, but that is something I want in the future” Talk about your family. Be honest about what you’re looking for in a relationship.
Being vulnerable takes courage! But, it’s also an investment toward an open and honest relationship – the more open you are, the more open the other person will feel compelled to be – think of the ROI! Couple this practice with what you learned about the other person while Listening to Learn, and you’ll be golden!
#2. “I” Statements
If you’re a little nervous about, or not really open to being vulnerable, start by practicing with “I” Statements. “I” Statements are exactly what they sound like: “I like…” “I think…” “I want…” “I don’t like…” “I’m looking for…” Since you’ve already been practicing the “Be a Curious-About-Life Person” exercise from the last post, it’s now time to start sharing those things in conversation. You are practicing, right? The key is to start verbalizing thoughts that you might normally keep to yourself.
Maybe don’t verbalize everything you might be thinking.
In practice:
Give compliments – if you’re thinking it, say it!
“I like that shirt” “I like your hair today” “I like those shoes” Share something interesting that you read.
“I read an article about such and such today, have you heard about that?” Did you do some research on a place you want to visit? Now’s the time to share.
“I really want to visit such and such country, I’ve been reading up on it. Have you been there?”
Remember our Be-Do exercise from a while back? This would be a great time to reevaluate that. What do you DO when you are being open? Dating coach David Wygant recommends that you smile and talk to EVERYONE; the bank teller, the checkout person at the grocery store, the kid selling cookies... NOT just the hot piece of meat you want to sink your teeth into. This way, you get into the habit (Be – Do – Have) of easy, open conversation.
Stay tuned for Part 3 in this series. Next up: Body Language… oooh yeah. Miss Part One? Here it is.
About the Author: Amber is a Licensed Professional Counselor and her goal is to help others become the best versions of themselves that they can be. When she’s not helping motivated clients reach their goals, she moonlights as the graphics guru here at Dappered.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - T-Mobile US Inc (TMUS.O) will pay $48 million to resolve a federal probe into whether it adequately disclosed speed and data restrictions for its “unlimited” data plan subscribers, U.S. regulators said on Wednesday.
People pass by a T-Mobile store in the Brooklyn borough of New York June 4, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The settlement includes a $7.5 million fine, $35.5 million in consumer benefits for T-Mobile and Metro PCS customers with “unlimited” plans, and at least $5 million in services and equipment to U.S. schools “to bridge the homework gap facing today’s students,” the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said in a statement.
The FCC said its investigation showed T-Mobile slowed data speeds when customers on so-called unlimited plans exceeded a monthly data threshold, despite company advertisements and other disclosures that “may have led unlimited data plan customers to expect that they were buying better and faster service than what they received.”
The FCC said T-Mobile violated its 2010 internet transparency rules.
“Consumers should not have to guess whether so-called ‘unlimited’ data plans contain key restrictions, like speed constraints, data caps and other material limitations,” said FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc.
T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the company had reached a “good settlement with FCC today. @TMobile believes more info is best for customers.” The company declined further comment.
This is the FCC’s second action on disclosures for “unlimited” data plans subject to speed reductions.
In June 2015, the FCC voted 3-2 to propose a $100 million fine against AT&T’s (T.N) Mobility unit for misleading customers about unlimited mobile data plans. To date, the FCC has taken no further action to enforce the proposed fine. AT&T said in 2015 it would “vigorously dispute the FCC’s assertions.”
The FCC said some T-Mobile consumers said a policy of slowing speeds for heavy users rendered data services “unusable” for many hours each day and substantially limited access to data.
Under the settlement, some T-Mobile and MetroPCS customers will be offered discounts for in-stock accessories and additional data if they have a mobile internet data line.
Funds not used by consumers will be directed to the low-income school program, expected to benefit up to 80,000 students starting in October 2017, the FCC said.When a friend of Jamie Smith’s first urged her to work at a Bitcoin company, her first reaction was, "That’s criminal money, I want nothing to do with that." But once the former press officer for the White House began learning more about the cryptocurrency, she couldn't stop herself and was hooked.
Her trajectory is not that dissimilar to that of a lot of people when they first hear about Bitcoin. In fact, many people from traditional finance still think Bitcoin is a fad, a fraud, a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, etc. To address these misconceptions, in this week's episode of my podcast, Unchained (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio), Smith, who is now the global chief communications officer for Bitcoin hardware and software firm Bitfury and CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, along with Amanda Gutterman, the chief marketing officer of Ethereum venture production studio ConsenSys, rebut every common misconception about cryptocurrencies and answer all the most common questions about them.
From a high level, Smith says the way she came to understand the technology and how she thinks about it now is, "What we’re going to have in the years to come is, I believe, global wifi. I think almost everyone will have access to or own their own phone so, with those two components, now you have a system that allows people to move money or any asset they want peer-to-peer for almost free."
Gutterman explains Ethereum to others by relating it to an experience every person has had -- their computer slowing down: "If you have a bunch of tabs open on your computer, eventually if you keep on opening tabs and opening tabs, your computer will slow down and not work, and in a similar way, Ether acts as an economic disincentive for the over use of the public Ethereum commons," she says.
As for the perpetual question of how cryptocurrency can have any value, Gutterman describes the concepts of scarcity, fungibility, divisibility and transferability to show that cryptocurrency has a certain number of units that can be exchanged, divided and moved between owners. Smith talks about the need to keep data secure and how because bitcoin is based on a distribtued ledger, “you can’t just break into one house — you have to break into an entire town,” to hack a blockchain.
Another value-related question we discuss is whether or not cryptocurrency is in a bubble. Smith described how, with one exception, every person who’s compared the internet revolution with the blockchain wave has said the current phase of development is similar to 1992-1993 in the internet. So, in terms of the value that will be created, it’s actually very early and quite small compared to what will come later. In fact, she had recently been listening to an interview with Jeff Bezos from the mid-1990s, and was thinking about what a long road he’s had from 1995 to 2017, but realized the same applied to blockchain technology: “When you have a vision and there’s a real desire in society for systems to change and become more efficient and you have a product that undoubtedly offers that, I don’t think you can stop that force.”
Gutterman says a lot of the objections people have to cryptocurrency now are similar to the ones that naysayers made in the first internet revolution. “The same way people in the early days of the internet thought consumers will never use this, there will never be commerce on this platform, it’s too complicated for normal end users — boy, were those people wrong,” she says. “Once the salability and security issues were solved, eventually all those things happened.”
Gutterman approaches the bubble question from the use perspective: “We see the utility. As more people are using what we call web 3.0 and need fuel in order to power their usage of those applications — that’s why a lot of people who are excited about Ether imagine it will increase in value.
Tune in to the full episode (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio, web), to find out how they explain what backs the value of cryptocurrencies, what things like mining and proof of work are, how they address perceptions that bitcoin is “criminal money” as Smith first thought, and what they say to people who think crypto is a Ponzi scheme.
Finally, since the two have organized the most gender-balanced blockchain-focused conferences in the industry, they talk about how they accomplished that and whether or not the crypto space is really as male-dominated as it can sometime seem.
Be sure to get Forbes' twice-weekly all things blockchain email newsletter, Crypto Confidential! Sign up here.(Rob Pegoraro/Yahoo Tech)
Like hundreds of thousands of other Virginians, I’ve been casting ballots for over a decade using Winvote voting machines. I now have physical proof of how catastrophically insecure those machines are.
It’s a tiny key that opens the plastic door hiding the USB port on every Winvote terminal.
This keepsake came my way at an eye-opening presentation about voting-machine security at this past Tuesday’s Usenix Security Symposium in Washington.
Jeremy Epstein, a security scientist with SRI International, has spent years investigating the weaknesses of these and other electronic voting systems. But even he didn’t know how bad Winvote terminals were until this past April.
That’s when the Virginia Information Technologies Agency condemned the security of these machines and banned them from the commonwealth. Their only remaining use was, literally, as a lesson to others.
Epstein led off his his talk by asking the audience if any of us would like a Winvote key. (“All the keys are the same for every Winvote that’s ever been made, because that way it’s easier,” he pointed out.) How about one of the smart cards that poll workers used to administer these machines?
I took one of each. He also offered us one of the spare Winvote terminals he had stashed in his car, but I passed on that.
The e-voting gold rush
In the aftermath of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Among other things, the Act banned punched-card and mechanical-lever voting machines. That in turn led to a rush to implement digital voting systems such as Winvote.
Outside of Virginia, only a few counties in Pennsylvania and Mississippi adopted Winvote (from the now-defunct Frisco, Tex.-based Advanced Voting Systems). But Winvote terminals had much in common with other electronic voting machines of that time: They were built to win government contracts. And they were based on general-purpose Windows platforms that made them needlessly complex and vulnerable to exploits.
On top of that, vendors paid too little attention to configuring those systems for security. (See, for example, the flaws in Diebold’s voting machines that Johns Hopkins University professor Avi Rubin documented soon after Maryland agreed to spend $55 million deploying them statewide.) The geniuses behind Winvote, however, botched the job worse than anybody else.
It wasn’t just the horrible voter interface. (My favorite example of that: When you chose a candidate on the Winvote touchscreen, your choice was highlighted in red, with an “X” next to it — which by any normal interface standards looked very much like you were voting against that person.) The innards were even worse.
As Epstein explained in his autopsy Tuesday:
• Winvote’s machine runs a version of Windows XP that hasn’t had patches installed since 2004 — four years before AVS deservedly went out of business.
• Its wireless network is “safeguarded” with insecure WEP encryption — and the password is abcde.
• The Windows admin password is (no, I’m not making this up) admin.
• Windows file-sharing is left on.
• The machine tracks votes using an obsolete version of Microsoft Access, in which the unencrypted database file is “protected” with a five-character password that a security tool cracked in seconds. (That password — shoup — apparently refers to a voting-machine company with a history of criminal indictments.)
• The system doesn’t log changes to that file.
• You can’t turn off the WiFi; if you remove the wireless card, the device won’t boot.If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
CAPE CANAVERAL — Equipped with a robot arm, sample collector and return capsule, NASA’s asteroid-bound OSIRIS-REx probe emerged from its pristine factory and flew to the launch site in Florida this evening.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket will hurl the 4,650-pound spacecraft toward Asteroid Bennu on Sept. 8 for a 7-year, round trip voyage to return a specimen of the celestial object to scientists on Earth.
“It’s a great adventure to explore an unknown world. We are going to reach out and touch it, and we are going to bring treasure back to Earth,” said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx principal investigator.
It is a daring mission to be sure, with the tiny solar-powered satellite executing a “touch-and-go” maneuver at 0.22 mph in 2019 to obtain the sample from the relic of the solar system’s creation.
OSIRIS-REx’s arm will contact the surface of Bennu for only five seconds, firing a puff of nitrogen gas to stir up the regolith into the collection chamber. The mission hopes to obtain between 2.1 ounces and 4.4 pounds of Bennu, the most extraterrestrial material returned to Earth since Apollo.
After the valuable cargo is stowed, the craft will fly back to Earth and fire a descent capsule to a parachute-assisted landing in September 2023 in Utah.
“The asteroids record the earliest stages of the solar system, so it really is time capsule from the very dawn in the history of our solar system,” Lauretta said.
“My dream is that we find something that is unique, that is not represented in our meteorite collection, that is really organically-rich material on the surface of this asteroid that holds all kinds of scientific treasures about the origin of life and organic molecular evolution in the solar system.”
The launch campaign began today as OSIRIS-REx was flown from Lockheed Martin production facilities in Denver, via Buckley Air Force Base, to the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center. The Air Force C-17 transport aircraft touched down just before 7:30 p.m.
It will be taken to the Payload Hazardous Serving Facility to undergo final testing and the loading of 2,600 pounds of maneuvering fuel.
Two other Atlas launches are scheduled between now and OSIRIS-REx, deploying a Navy communications spacecraft on June 24 and a classified spy satellite at the end of July.
Then stacking of the 411-configured Atlas 5 will occur in August at Cape Canaveral for America’s first asteroid sample-return mission. The two-stage rocket will feature a lone side-mounted solid booster for added takeoff thrust, a unique variant that has flown successfully three times before.
ULA and NASA managers plan to move the rocket to the launch pad temporarily in late August for a full countdown dress rehearsal and fueling exercise to uncover any technical issues.
That’s because OSIRIS-REx has a limited launch window, through Oct. 12, for planetary alignment reasons. If it misses this opportunity, the flight would be delayed a year.
Liftoff on Sept. 8 is scheduled for 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT). The day’s 120-minute launch window will have liftoff chances every five minutes based on the evolving trajectory.
The OSIRIS-REx name stands for the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer. It is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program to explore the solar system, following New Horizons to Pluto and Juno currently en route to Jupiter.
Our Atlas archive.
Our Delta archive.SAN FRANCISCO — Police in San Francisco have arrested a 22-year-old man on charges of vandalism related to a public transit bus that was destroyed after the Giants won the World Series.
Gregory Tyler Graniss of San Francisco was taken into custody Tuesday on felony charges of vandalism and injuring or destroying a passenger transit vehicle.
Police cited tips and a photo published by the San Francisco Chronicle as help in tracking down Graniss. The photo shows a man smashing the windshield of the bus late Monday, as the city celebrated its World Series sweep against the Detroit Tigers. The transit bus was also torched.
Along with revelry, violence and vandalism were reported that night, including several trashcan fires, a vehicle that had been flipped over and broken windows at several businesses.Expats across the city were up-in-arms today after an enterprising anonymous sleuth took to the Shanghai Expat forums to seemingly expose the online supermarket Kate & Kimi.com.
The forum member, known only by the screenname ‘anonymous7890’ posted his investigation into Kate & Kimi on Thursday morning and alleged that the online supermarket was “purposely misleading their customers.”
The post
In his comment, anonymous7890 points out that Kate & Kimi’s highly trumpeted new salmon supplier Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative has several suspicious issues with their recently launched website. Most noticeable of all is the fact that the supplier’s website is registered to an address on the same street as Kate & Kimi’s offices, and that the page is allegedly registered to a Kate & Kimi employee (the latter fact we were not able to confirm).
The poster also points out that the website’s “about us” section uses vague information and that pictures of the three founders displayed on the page were in fact just ripped off other parts of the internet. Indeed closer examination reveals that the images used are of a professor, a retired professor and a member of the Board of Trustees at a retirement home.
A frenchman, Scotsman and an Englilshman walk into a fish market.
The Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative were quick to change their website, removing the images soon after the damming comment went up, but it was seemingly too late. Earlier today the Thundersharkz softball team’s WeChat account picked up on the story and sent it out to their followers.
Even a softball team is getting in on the slandering
Shortly after the post began to pick up traction Kate & Kimi’s website released an official statement apologizing and stating: “There is no intention, nor has there ever been, to mislead our community into buying products that are not authentic or good quality. We are acknowledging the fact that website created for this company (the Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative) was published hastily in its raw form, and we should not have linked to this site or launched the brand before thoroughly analyzing the content. This was utterly irresponsible by our designers and has led to much confusion and frustration. In fact, our web designer indeed sourced temporary images for the website which did not accurately depict the BCSC team. It was a complete mistake and we sincerely apologize.”
Kate and Kimi's official Apology
The online supermarket then went on to post certificates from a Qinghai fish farm as well as poultry provider, seemingly in an attempt to prove to their customers that the salmon and poultry they were being sold was coming from legitimate sources.
The Qinghai Fish Farm's Official Business License
However, it appears that Kate & Kimi’s team haven’t quite got their stories straight. In an exclusive interview with Shanghai Expat the online supermarket’s spokesman and part owner, Richie Gelber, claims that the Qinghai fish farm is just one of several sources the company gets their fish from. He went on to state that, although the images used on the website were incorrect, and that the text used in the “about us” section was written by the company’s web developers, the three fish specialists the company employs are actually real and that they help to advise Kate & Kimi on the best places to source their fish from.
Gelber later went on to apologize for the misunderstanding, stating that the mock website had not been fully completed and never should have been linked to. He also alleged that the mistake was pounced on “quite rightly” by his competitors.
The "shell" company's logo
One thing is for sure, many expats have been left with a salty taste in their mouth after this huge PR misstep.
Disclaimer: Kate & Kimi as well as their competitors advertise with both Shanghai Expat and our sister publications.
News from Shanghai Expat
Click read more for other articles.After alternating wins and losses to open his UFC run, Belal Muhammad recently scored the biggest win of his young career and has now become a welterweight on the come up.
With just one week left before the scheduled event, Muhammad took a fight with top prospect Randy Brown in his backyard of Brooklyn, New York at UFC 208. The week and everything it entailed was a whirlwind for Muhammad. The experience came and went so fast that the scrap barely registered in his mind, so much so that someone might have to remind him that he threw down just a few short weeks ago.
"It was really crazy," Muhammad said. "It doesn't even feel like I fought. I didn't have to go through that whole process of a six week long camp, watching tape and figuring out my opponent. For this fight I was more relaxed. This was one where I was just going in there and having fun."
As the main event of the FOX Sports 1 portion of the UFC 208 programming, Muhammad stepped up in a big way in a big spot with a clutch performance, as he scored a unanimous decision victory over Brown. The fact that his career highlight was seen by millions of eyeballs on network television wasn't lost on the former Titan FC welterweight champion. This performance will most definitely have fans remembering his name.
"It feels good to know that people want to watch me fight," Muhammad said. "I want to be the guy that when I'm on the card people want to tune in and watch me fight. It feels good to know I had a lot of eyes on me.
"I want to be one of those fighters that you always remember. I want to be one of those guys that when you see me fight you will remember it. I want to be the guy that you want to go look up my past fights after you watch me. I want to be remembered in this sport for a long time."
Muhammad is keenly aware that being entertaining and putting on a show for the fans inside and outside of the Octagon can lead to opportunities otherwise not offered in this sometimes entertainment-first sport. The Hollywood heavy new ownership coupled with the growing reach of UFC athletes in outside endeavors, Muhammad fully intends to do everything in his power to stay active and keep the fans engaged in his every move.
"This sport has shifted more toward entertainment," Muhammad said. "You need to gain fans. You need to be a needle mover. You need fans to have an interest in you in order to get those big money fights. If people don't want to watch you the UFC won't book you. I want to be that guy that is always exciting. I want to be the guy that fans always want to see and a guy that stays in the limelight."
As Muhammad aspires to secure legendary status in the fight game, the Chicago-born scrapper has already become a role model for Palestinian and Muslim Americans. Although not an overly political figure, Muhammad plans to use his religious beliefs and platform as a professional athlete to break down barriers and show the world that he comes from a religion of peace.
"At first I didn't realize how big of a deal it was to be a Muslim fighter in the UFC," Muhammad said. "Then I started getting messages from people all around the world saying that I was a role model and inspiration to their children. You don't see any Muslim fighters on the big stage of the UFC or even in other major sports like the NBA or MLB. It's an honor and I will take full advantage of it.
"So much of the mainstream media puts Muslims in a negative light. People assume we are crazy or that we just do horrible things. If you actually meet a real Muslim you will see it's all about peace, love and respect. I want to be that type of guy that brings that truth into the limelight. I want to bring that to the public eye. I want to show people that all Muslims aren't like that."What better way to let customers know your restaurant honored the Christmas season than by advertising it on a matchbook? These long-gone Manhattan eateries apparently agreed.
If you worked in the vicinity of Lexington Avenue and 41st Street at any point from the 1930s through the 1960s, you may have spent your lunch hour at the no-frills-named President Cafeteria and Tavern.
“Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner and open until 1a.m., the cafeteria advertised self-service hot meals ‘at reasonable prices’ in a relaxed, casual environment,” writes The Five O’Clock Teaspoon, a fascinating culinary history site.
“The self-proclaimed largest restaurant in the Grand Central Zone, The President was a reliable staple of the Murray Hill neighborhood and was a regular haunt of soon to be luminaries such as the writer Charles Reznikoff and the aspiring actress Susan Hayward.”
Rutley’s matchbook looks festive—but the restaurant sounds a little cut-rate. Opened in 1926, it closed in 1932, an apparent casualty of the Depression and Prohibition. Another Rutley’s, however, existed in the 1940s on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street.
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Tags: 1930s matchbooks, Defunct restaurants in New York City, matchbook ads, New York in the 1930s, President Cafeteria Tavern, Restaurants near Grand Central, Rutley's Restaurant NYC, vintage ads 1930s, vintage matchbooksBoth the Saturday and Sunday additions of the NY Post were loud. They spoke of scandal and put Mayor De Blasio in the middle of a federal investigation.
The mayor had four events on Sunday, including the Greek Independence Day Parade, but had no comment at any of those events.
He did appear on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday morning with Chuck Todd, who put him on the spot.
“Was any money from your non-profit from your Campaign One New York?” Todd asked.
“No. A.totally different, separate entity worked on those issues" The Mayor said.
It's a web that includes the police, businessmen, the Mayor, his non-profits and now, the feds.
According to the New York Post, when investigators looked into questionable behavior between 2 businessmen and some of the NYPD, their was a line that lead to De Blasio.
One of the men, Jona Rechnitz, gave a max donation of $9,900 to De Blasio's political campaign and $50,000 to his non-profit Campaign for One New York.
Michael Goodwin wrote the following in the New York Post:
"Ultimately, the issue is what, if any, favors the donors got in exchange for their cash. Were there illegal quid pro quos? That's what the feds want to know. "For every 100 hardback and paperback books it sells on its UK site, 114 ebooks are downloaded in'reading renaissance'
Amazon.co.uk has said that sales of its Kindle ebooks are now outstripping its sales of printed books.
Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks.
In a surprise move in May, the company went into partnership with the UK's largest bricks-and-mortar books retailer, Waterstones.
Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told the Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter.
The company said its figures also showed that British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a trend it described as a renaissance of reading.
"As soon as we started selling Kindles it became our bestselling product on Amazon.co.uk so there was a very quick adoption … [And they] are buying four times more books prior to owning a Kindle," an Amazon spokeswoman said. "Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched."
Despite revealing that more than half a million Kindle books are priced at £3.99 or less, Amazon said a boost in ebook sales was not just about cheap books and argued that much of its printed range was also sold at a low price.
Ebook sales have been given a boost by the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, which has sold two million copies in the past four months.
Three of the top 10 most popular Kindle authors of 2012 – Nick Spalding, Katia Lief and Kerry Wilkinson – were published by Amazon's own Kindle Direct Publishing.
Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice-president of Kindle EU, said: "Customers in the UK are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books, even as our print business continues to grow. We hit this milestone in the US less than four years after introducing Kindle, so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle. As a result of the success of Kindle, we're selling more books than ever before on behalf of authors and publishers."
• This article has been amended to stress that figures quoted solely reflect Amazon salesAs a YouTube creator, you’re already making amazing content that inspires, entertains, and helps educate your community. Now, the videos you create can do even more — they can raise money to support your favorite cause.
We recently began rolling out donation cards to US creators, which let your subscribers and viewers donate directly from your videos. Just add a donation card, pick a nonprofit, and start doing good. You can choose any United States, IRS-validated 501(c)3 public nonprofit organization and they receive 100% of the money donated. We’re excited to take this first step and look forward to expanding into other countries so creators across the world can power nonprofits they care about.
YouTube has over a billion users. That’s almost one-third of all people on the Internet. And everyday those users watch hundreds of millions of hours of video, racking up billions of views – which are now billions of opportunities to do good.
Whether you’ve already hosted fundraisers on your YouTube channel or are looking for a simple way to get started, transform a view into a donation. Join creators like John and Hank Green and Madison Beer and use the donation card to connect your audience with a nonprofit of your choice.
For more information about donation cards, check out the YouTube Help Center
Sherif Hamdy, YouTube For Good Program Manager, recently watched A Deaf Man Learns That His Wife Is PregnantPlogue’s Alter/Ego is a new voice synthesis platform. It’s free and can run as standalone software, VST, AU, or RTAS/AAX plugin in 32 or 64 bits. It currently has one voice available – Daisy, who is also free.
Voice synthesis is in a way the ultimate challenge when it comes to fooling the human ear – we humans are very good at noticing when something in another person’s voice is off, for example when they’re not as honest or confident as they’d like us to think. This carries over to noticing anything wrong or unnatural in synthesized voices as well.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been beta-testing the Alter/Ego vocal synthesizer before the release and I’ve also released some sample libraries for Plogue’s Sforzando sampler.
Technology
Alter/Ego is based on Plogue’s Chipspeech platform, which recreates early attempts at synthesizing voices using vintage hardware up to 1984. This is quite a different starting point than other voice synthesizers, such as Vocaloid or UTAU, or vocal sample libraries with wordbuilders like Realivox Blue or the Virharmonic choirs. There are more than two dozen controllable parameters controlling how the voice recordings are transformed into audio output, all linked to MIDI CC. Some are pretty obvious, like helium. Others, like fem factor, wave speed or impulses take some trial and error to get a feel for what they really do to the sound. Vibrato alone gets nine parameters. English and Japanese are the supported languages.
Daisy is based on recordings of the voice of one person (Crusher-P, who also produces music using various vocal sythesizers), but is capable of both female and male voices as well as polyphonic choirs, whispering and downright out-there weirdness. As a way of explaining how one voice can produce all those different sounds, Plogue have cleverly made her a time-traveling robot. More than a voice, Daisy is also a character – from what I see on her Twitter account she currently seems to be romantically involved with Dandy 704, the Chipspeech voice based on the technology IBM used to synthesize the song “Daisy Bell” all the way back in 1961.
Sound
Daisy seems at her best with higher female vocals – she sounds most convincing and powerful there. Male vocals sound more synthetic and more subdued. Cartoonish voices with the helium turned up also sound good, in an obviously unnatural way.
Daisy is a robot but she can sound quite human, especially when singing longer syllables. It’s quite an eerie feeling when after a few robotic words a longer note shows up, vibrato kicks in, and Daisy suddenly sounds very human for a second or two, before suddenly turning robotic again. More whispery sounds also sound more human. Automating the vibrato (or controlling it via mod wheel) and expression can sound quite expressive and emotional. Other parameters can also add emotion in more subtle ways, for example changing the impulse width to make the sound slightly less smooth and more gritty.
One sound I haven’t been able to get is a very aggressive or dirty vocal – Daisy’s always too clean and nice to ever sound much like Tom Waits or even Katy Perry. Extreme metal vocals are not really possible, either. Lower notes can sound a bit growly, though, so maybe distortion or other external effects can bring that out.
Mixing these vocals isn’t very difficult – you can put the same effects you normally would put on a human voice, including harmonic exciters and sweeping resonant filters. Just skip noise reduction and pitch correction. When using multiple instances for backing vocals, though, they will need to be treated differently to help separate them, because they’re all based on the same set of recordings so they’ll be much more in sync with each other than multiple human vocalists ever would – though |
5 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/njeaton. Visit seattlepi.com's home page for more Seattle news.Every few months, the Nile Scribes bring you summaries of the latest news and discoveries in Egyptology, both from the field and the lab. We’ll introduce you to the newest archaeological finds or recently undusted manuscripts being rediscovered in museum collections, plus other new theories stirring in the Egyptological Zeitgeist. In this issue, we draw your attention to two major finds associated with a late Old Kingdom queen, plus further discoveries in Alexandria in underwater archaeology.
Read our post on discoveries announced in August and September
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities publishes a very helpful round-up of recent discoveries, events, and projects in Egypt in an accessible PDF format. The latest issue was published in October 2017 (version: English or Arabic).
Ancient wall markings of wild animals uncovered in South Aswan (October 4 – Ahram Online)
Nile Scribes: An exciting discovery was made just south of Aswan in the Subeira Valley. Scenes with various animals such as hippopotami, bulls, and donkeys decorate the wall and areas with tool production were also found near the site.
“During an archaeological survey in the desert of Subeira Valley, south Aswan, an Egyptian archaeological mission from the Ministry of Antiquities stumbled upon pre-Dynastic rock markings. Adel Kelani described the discovery as important because it dates to the same period of markings founds in caves in southern France, Spain and Italy, which confirms the idea that art and civilisation during that time spread from Africa to Europe and not vice versa.”
New Pyramidion discovered in Sakkara necropolis (October 15 – Daily News Egypt)
NS: A pyramidion was a pyramidal-shaped stone, which would be placed at the very top of a pyramid. This one was discovered at Saqqara and is attributed to the pyramid of Queen Ankhnespepy II – more on another discovery to do with her below.
“The Ministry of Antiquities announced that the pyramidion is 1.3 m high and 1.1 m long on its sides. The condition it was found upon indicates that it was left unfinished or has been reused. ‘The upper part of the pyramidion is partly destroyed, but it shows that it was covered by a foil of metal (whether gold or copper), and the lower part of the pyramidion has an unclean surface which indicated it has been either reused or left unfinished’, explains Mostafa Waziri, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.”
See also “Ancient Egyptian Pyramidion found next to Largest Obelisk hints at Existence at Queen’s Lost Chamber” published in Newsweek on October 13, 2017.
Head of Queen Ankhnespepy II statue discovered in Giza’s Saqqara (October 18 – Ahram Online)
NS: An archaeological mission recently made an intriguing find in Saqqara: the head of a wooden statue of what appears to be a late Old Kingdom queen. In looking at the artistic style of the head, some specialists have expressed doubts regarding its date: does it perhaps date to the early New Kingdom? We await further investigation.
“A French-Swiss archaeological team have unearthed the head of a wooden statue of Queen Ankhnespepy II (6th Dynasty, Old Kingdom, around 2350 BC), near her pyramid in the Saqqara area in Giza. Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Ahram Online that the head is of almost-human proportions, and is around 30cm high. The ears are decorated with wooden earrings. Professor Philippe Collombert, the head of the Geneva University mission, said that the head was found in a disturbed layer to the east of the queen’s pyramid near the area where the pyramidion was uncovered early this week.”
First Hellenistic gymnasium in Egypt discovered at Watfa village in Fayoum (November 6 – Ahram Online)
NS: At ancient Philoteris, a third century B.C. Greek village in the Fayoum, a German and Egyptian archaeological mission has discovered a Hellenistic gymnasium that was used by the Greek population as a place for men to be schooled in sports, literature, and philosophy. The gymnasium complex at Philoteris consisted of a large meeting hall, dining hall, race-track, and gardens.
“[Cornelia] Römer explains that gymnasia were privately founded by rich people who wanted their villages to become even more Greek in aspect. There, she continued, the young men of the Greek speaking upper-class were trained in sports, learned to read and write, and to enjoy philosophical discussions. All big cities of the Hellenistic world, like Athens in Greece, Pergamon and Miletus in Asia Minor, and Pompei in Italy, had such gymnasia. “The gymnasia in the Egyptian countryside were built after their pattern. Although much smaller, the gymnasium of Watfa clearly shows the impact of Greek life in Egypt, not only in Alexandria, but also in the countryside,” Römer said.”
NS: A well-preserved mummy was found in a wooden sarcophagus in the Fayoum basin. While some cartonnage from the face mask as well as some decoration remain, the wooden sarcophagus is in a fragmentary condition. The cemetery where the mummy was found, is renown for its Coptic and Islamic burials, though also contained burials from Graeco-Roman times.
“During excavation work carried out at the Deir Al-Banat (Al-Banat Monastery) archaeological site in Fayoum, an Egyptian-Russian mission from the Russian Institute for Oriental Studies discovered a wooden Graeco-Roman sarcophagus with a mummy inside. He [Mostafa Waziri, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities] explains that the mummy is wrapped in linen and has a blue and gold cartonnage mask. The mask is decorated with scenes depicting the sky deity Kheibir, while the mummy’s chest is decorated with the face of the goddess Isis. The legs have an image of a white sabot.”
Isis temple unearthed by builders in Banha (November 17 – Egypt Independent)
NS: An intriguing discovery was made just north of Cairo in Banha as part of a residential construction project: the remains of a temple to Isis was found and the MoA sent a team of archaeologists to investigate. We look forward to hearing more about this exciting find.
“The ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple built for the Egyptian deity, Isis, were discovered on Thursday by workers on a residential project in Banha City, capital of the Qalyubiya Governorate. Pharaonic inscriptions depicting the ancient Egyptian deities, Horus and Isis, were displayed on the temple’s walls and pillars. The discovery has the potential to put the area on the map for tourists enthusiastic about Egyptology.”
Sunken vessels dating back to Roman era discovered in Alexandria (November 21 – Egypt Independent)
NS: Underwater archaeology is a field often associated with Alexandria due to many antiquities lying beneath the water, as the shoreline has moved further and further inland over time. While the photo used in the article is in regard to an exhibit that was recently held in the British Museum, three vessels with a hoard of objects were discovered by an Egyptian team in the port of Alexandria – the finds date to Roman times.
“The wreckages of three vessels dating back to the Roman era were discovered during excavations in the Mediterranean Sea carried out by an Egyptian mission in cooperation with the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology at the Eastern Port of Alexandria, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa al-Waziry announced. Waziry added in a press statement Tuesday that the mission also discovered a royal head of crystal dating back to the Roman era, three gold coins from the era of Emperor Octavius Augustus in the Gulf of Abuquir in Alexandria, as well as a boat made of lead for the god Osiris in the sunken city of Heraklion city in the Gulf of Abuquir, Alexandria.”YouTube via TyeTrillion It's Fashion Week in New York City, meaning models have taken to the streets, wearing clothing that even Cruella De Vil would call eccentric. But Thursday night, dubbed Fashion's Night Out, seemed more rowdy than stylish.
A mob surrounded a white Audi A4 on Broadway, between Bleecker Street and Houston Street around 11:15 p.m. after the driver tried to break through the crowd and nearly hit a bicyclist, Gothamist reported.
Gothamist cited several witnesses who said the crowd included people from nearby Fashion's Night Out events.
It was "not clear who was at fault. The bicyclist stopped in front of the Audi and began screaming at the driver.... This drew the attention of at least some in the crowd, who encircled the car and began running over it," said one witness, according to The Gothamist.
Someone from the crowd, the video shows, breaks the Audi's rear windshield. Soon after the police showup, and the mob disperses.
Check out the scenes captured by one of the witnesses. Warning, there's strong language.The Rockaways are in a state of emergency. They haven't had power in a week, and it doesn't appear to be coming back any time soon. Independently operated aid distribution centers have been popping up, helping people get the food and supplies they need, but given gas shortages, it's been hard to keep things up and running at night.
One station, though, is being powered by a massive, mobile, solar power array strapped to a truck. This is the Rolling Sunlight, a truck that Greenpeace built about 10 years ago. It's able to store 50 kilowatt-hours of energy. The solar panels charge an array of batteries inside the truck. That then feeds an inverter that can then turn that energy into 120/240 AC, and from there they are able to run enough lights to keep a decently-sized area lit through the night.
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"In a pinch we can even run welders or 240 stoves off of it," said Greenpeace's Joshua Ingle. What's most impressive is that from the moment they pull up until they're fully up and running, it only takes them about 15 minutes. Fifteen! They also have a pair of wind turbines they can deploy, but the conditions haven't been right for them recently.
Greenpeace has had Rolling Sunlight set up since last Wednesday night, many days before the Red Cross or FEMA were on the scene. They've been able to get five solid days/nights of power, with one shorter night due to a particularly cloudy day. For such occasions they do have traditional generators they can use.
It's great to see some outside-the-box thinking applied to emergency relief. This is the only solar truck Greenpeace has in the United States, though, and it's only able to power one aid station. So, if you've been cooking up some sort of slick alternative energy generator, you have thousands of people eagerly hoping to be your first beta testers.Image caption Churchill delivering his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946
Winston Churchill coined the phrases "special relationship" and "Iron Curtain" on a lecture tour of American universities - and his words still resonate today, says historian David Cannadine.
In a few days' time, David Cameron will be journeying to Washington to visit Barack Obama, and according to a White House Statement, his visit will "highlight the fundamental importance of the US-UK special relationship and the depth of friendship between the American people and the people of the United Kingdom".
Perhaps it will, and I hope it does, but it's also likely to give rise to at least two challenging questions. Is America's relationship with Britain as special as it used to be? And is it genuinely more special than with any other country?
These matters have been much on my mind of late, because I've recently returned from lecturing at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where in March 1946, Winston Churchill gave one of his most significant post-war speeches in which he launched the phrase "special relationship" into popular currency.
Churchill was merely a private citizen, having been turned out of 10 Downing Street at the general election in the previous summer, but he was introduced by the American President Harry S Truman, and during the course of his speech, he offered a new and in many ways alarming view of the post-war world.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, Churchill insisted, an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, dividing the continent between a free and democratic west and a totalitarian and Communist east. The Iron Curtain was the first phrase his Fulton speech made famous, and the second was indeed the "special relationship" which he believed existed between Great Britain and the United States.
Churchill thought the Anglo-American connection was critical to maintaining the peace of the world in this new Cold War era, and we shall no doubt be receiving an update on its current state in the next few days.
Although it's a considerable distance from any major American city, Westminster College, Fulton is a remarkable place: in one guise, it's an energetic and innovative liberal arts college which draws its undergraduates from all over the US and from far beyond.
In another, it's become a shrine to Churchill and his Iron Curtain speech, and on its campus is a reconstructed London church, of St Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury, built by Sir Christopher Wren, in which I delivered my lecture, and which constitutes part of the National Churchill Museum.
Figure of speech Winston Churchill's speech to Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, launched phrases such as the "special relationship" and the Iron Curtain. Read the full transcript of the speech
In yet a third guise, it's a place where the Cold War, to which Churchill had drawn such powerful and eloquent attention, was also pronounced to be over: both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev went to Fulton to say so in the early 1990s, and part of what had been the Berlin Wall is now on display on the college campus.
It's easy to regard Churchill's association with Westminster College as being almost incidental: such was his global fame after 1945 that he could have delivered his Iron Curtain speech virtually anywhere in the western world; and although he had been Chancellor of Bristol University since 1929, his connections with higher education or, indeed, with education of any kind, were never all that close.
He hadn't attended university, which was something he regretted all his life; although he retrospectively exaggerated his scholarly limitations, he'd never been a happy or particularly successful schoolboy at Harrow; and in many ways he later educated himself.
Yet in the years of his greatest fame, Churchill delivered several important speeches in American colleges and universities, in which he surveyed a broad landscape extending far beyond the confines of British public affairs, and offered more speculative and wide-ranging thoughts on the recent past and on how future events might unfold.
Churchill had given the first of these speeches at Harvard University in September 1943 where, at the behest of President Franklin Roosevelt, who was himself a Harvard graduate, the prime minister received an honorary degree.
The Americans and the British had been fighting side by side against Germany and Japan since Pearl Harbor, and Churchill took the opportunity to dwell on and embellish this collaboration in a speech on "Anglo-American Unity".
Image caption How special is the US-UK relationship now?
Both countries, he proclaimed, shared a common history, a common language and a common literature, and during the course of the 20th Century, they'd twice been on the same side in wars against tyranny and dictatorship and for liberty and freedom.
Surely, Churchill urged, this shared inheritance and these joint military endeavours must be the prelude to an even closer and more permanent association between the two great English-speaking democracies.
This was a theme to which Churchill had been attracted since the early 1930s, but Roosevelt was less enthused, for he saw the wartime alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom in a much more cold-hearted and calculating light, and the same would later be true of his successors in the White House, Harry S Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower.
Previously in the Magazine The "special relationship" with the US has haunted most occupants of 10 Downing Street, as they have striven to re-create what they believe was that earlier golden age of transatlantic friendship. ReadDavid Cannadine's article on the US-UK special relationshipfrom 2006
Also: President Obama hails'special relationship' - May 2011
So while Churchill took every opportunity to urge the cause of Anglo-American friendship and collaboration, his ardent Atlanticism was never fully reciprocated in Washington, and the vision he had spelt out in his Harvard speech was never realised - except in the pages of his multi-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, on which he had begun work during the late 1930s, and which he eventually published 20 years later, after he'd finally retired as prime minister.
In addition to the speeches he delivered at Harvard University and at Westminster College, Churchill also gave an address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 1949. Once again, he was invited to share the podium with Harry Truman.
The president pulled out at the last minute, but Churchill delivered another wide-ranging survey, reflecting on world history during the last 50 years, to which he added some futuristic observations appropriate to the place where he was speaking.
While Churchill took every opportunity to urge the cause of Anglo-American friendship and collaboration, his ardent Atlanticism was never fully reciprocated in Washington
As at Harvard and Fulton, Churchill extolled the close connections between the United Kingdom and the US, and he reiterated his belief that Communist Russia represented a massive threat to freedom.
But he also drew attention to the growing importance of science and technology in the modern world. He spoke about aeroplanes and submarines and radar, and he began by lamenting that "we have suffered in Great Britain by the lack of colleges of university rank in which engineering and the allied subjects are taught".
Although he'd studied scarcely any science at school, Churchill was fascinated by weapons and gadgets and technology, which was why he had been so attracted in his youth to the novels of HG Wells, and why he later became a close friend of Professor Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, who was for many years his unofficial scientific adviser.
And the opening words of the speech he gave to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology contained the germ of an idea to which Churchill would return after he had ceased to be prime minister.
In retrospect, he came to regret that that he hadn't done more while in power to promote science, technology and engineering in Britain, and he continued to lament that there was no British equivalent to MIT.
Image caption Churchill wanted a British equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (above)
Thus was born the idea of establishing a new college at Cambridge University which would be both the national memorial to Churchill himself, and also a forcing house for those scientists, engineers and technologists on whose brains, abilities and inventiveness the future of Britain was now deemed to depend.
The scheme to establish Churchill College, Cambridge, was duly launched in 1958, the first undergraduates were admitted three years later, and the appropriately modernistic buildings were completed in 1968. In accordance with Churchill's wishes and concerns, the statutes required that 70% of the undergraduates should be studying science or technology.
But the college has also become a monument to its originator in another way, for in 1974 the Churchill Archives Centre was opened, which has since become the greatest British repository for the papers of major 20th Century figures, including not only scientists and technologists, but also generals and civil servants - and politicians. Margaret Thatcher's papers are housed there, and so, too, are Churchill's own.
Having been originally conceived as an institution devoted to science and the future, Churchill College, Cambridge, is now at least as famous for history and the past. As a lover alike of technology and tradition, I wonder which version of his national memorial Churchill himself would have preferred?- By limpkin - My Projects -
The Idea
I'm sure that most of you are familiar with the stroboscopic effect. To paraphrase wisegeek, it is a phenomenon of human visual perception in which motion is shown to be interpreted by a brain that receives successive discreet images and stitches them together with automatic aliases for temporal continuity. In short, motion is an artifact.
A conventional strobe fountain is a stream of water droplets falling at regular intervals lit with a strobe light. When viewed under normal light, it is a normal water fountain. When viewed under a strobe light with its frequency tuned to the rate at which the droplets fall, the droplets appear to be suspended in mid-air. Adjusting the strobe frequency can make the droplets seemingly move slowly up or down.
However making water droplets fall at regular intervals isn't as easy as it sounds as many physical effects will get in the way of doing so (the main one being surface tension). For this project to work I'm instead detecting droplets with a laser and flashing a light accordingly.
Detection and Flashing
The liquid you see in the above picture is simply water with fluorescein, which reacts awesomely under UV light. The two bars on each side of the droplet's fall course therefore include 10 UV LEDs each, as lots of 'light' is required for very small amounts of time.
As previously mentioned our left bar includes a small 850nm laser at its top. This particular wavelength isn't visible by the naked eye. The laser is therefore powered at its lowest rating to avoid any damage if one were to manage putting his/her eye in front of it (even though that is nearly impossible).
On the other side a photodiode detects the laser beam. As you can guess, good alignment was key for this build!
The laser beam is very narrow so no signal amplification was required. When a droplet passes in front of the beam the typical voltage variation with a 2k resistor is around 750mV.... which is very simple to detect.
The Pieces
The complete fountain was made with only four A4 8mm polycarbonate sheets. Total cost for the 4 sheets was around $35 on Ebay. I used my small CNC machine to mill all the individual pieces. As you can guess... this took quite a while! Precisely drilling the assembly holes on the pieces' edges (to guarantee good final assembly) was the most critical part.
The two bars are simply two rounded 50x224mm sheets assembled together with M3 screws. They were designed in such a way that the M3 nuts & M3 screws heads are directly integrated inside the sheet. A deep groove was machined to allow me to solder all the LEDs together. A standard 0.1" connector was glued at the bars' ends.
The faucet was also purchased on Ebay ($30) while the submersible pump was purchased on dealextreme ($5). It took me a surprisingly big amount of time to find a tall enough faucet that could be easily fixed to the main plastic sheet (yes, faucet datasheets are a thing!). A $3 flexible plastic tube (ID 8mm/ OD 10mm) is attached to the pump output and passed inside the faucet to the nozzle.
The nozzle turned out to be the hardest piece to design as it took me around 15 tries to get it right! A good rule of thumb seems to be a very small output hole (0.5mm in my case) to guarantee good water pressure and a sharp nozzle angle (70degrees).
The main reservoir is assembled using screws and acrylic glue was used to provide good sealing. The top plastic sheet isn't attached to the rest of the assembly. I instead used small magnets embedded inside the reservoir edges and the top plastic sheet so cleaning could easily be done.
The Electronic Side of Things
The small PCB I made for this project is based around the ATxmega16A4. In the above diagram you can see how the drop detection and LED flashing are implemented.
The Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) is used at the platform start to measure the droplet detection and non-detection photodiode output levels. Using these values and the internal Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) a detection threshold is set on the ATxmega internal comparator. The comparator output will therefore be set to logical 0 every time a droplet is detected.
This output is programmed as both an internal event and an interrupt. The interrupt is used by the microcontroller to count the number of droplets per second while the event is used by our internal counter as a reset signal. In our latter we just set a compare value of X for channel 0 and a compare value of (X + Y) for channel 1, use an external XOR gate and as a result our UV LEDs will flash after a delay X after droplet detection for a duration of Y.
You'll therefore notice that droplet detection and UV LEDs flashing are (more or less) done completely asynchronously as we just 'wired' the different internal peripherals together so they can provide our desired functionality.
Finally, I just needed to adjust the pump outflow (therefore its supply voltage) depending on the photodiode output to provide a constant number of droplets per second. This is done using an LDO whose feedback resistor divider is adjusted depending on the required output voltage. I had to write a simple control loop feedback mechanism inside the ATxmega's firmware.
Final Result
And voila! This fountain actually was a side project I did over the last few months. You'll also notice that I skipped over the non-interesting (yet tricky) details: internal wiring, power supply... You'll find the kicad files made for this project here.
I'll finally add that the original idea wasn't mine and that I actually made a v1 of this concept nearly 10 years ago!
Click on the below picture for high-resolutiion:
And here is a bonus video:
Cheers!U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled out a new series of measures to enforce immigration law and prevent further illegal immigration in Arizona on Tuesday, including aggressive prosecution of identity theft.
Illegal aliens using fraudulent documents will be charged with aggravated identity theft, Sessions said. A memo issued to U.S. Attorneys’ offices also stated that prosecutors should seek charges for aggravated identity theft and the fraud or misuse of visas, permits, and other documents in such cases.
It is an important step towards controlling illegal immigration and crime overall: As the Center for Immigration Studies explained, illegals commit rampant identity theft and document fraud while residing in the U.S., wrecking lives and costing victims millions.
“Because it is virtually impossible to live and work in the United States without documents… millions… turn to fraudulent document dealers for falsified Social Security cards, forged drivers licenses, counterfeit green cards, and a wide range of other phony documents,” writes Ronald W. Mortensen in a report.
“Illegal alien-driven identity theft is not a victimless crime,” Mortensen said. “It impacts millions of Americans of all ages. Newborn infants and children often are the victims of illegal alien identity thieves. IRS agents, law enforcement officials, people with disabilities, the unemployed, and even those serving time in jail have been victimized by illegal aliens using their SSNs in order to obtain jobs and other benefits.”
The consequences of identity theft can strike abruptly and destroy someone’s life in an instant. The report continued:
Millions of Americans either knowingly or unknowingly are sharing their SSNs with illegal aliens and are having their lives slowly usurped by the identity thieves. They will only learn of the damage done when they are denied credit, receive a notice for taxes on income they didn’t earn, are denied benefits that they are entitled to, find that their medical records have been corrupted with possibly life-threatening consequences, or when collection agencies start calling.
The time and effort required to repair the damage from illegal alien identity theft costs victims hundreds of millions of dollars and millions of hours, particularly in states riddled with significant illegal alien populations.
Illegal aliens in California will usually buy three fraudulent documents, a former ICE officer said: A counterfeit resident alien card or work authorization card, a counterfeit California driver’s license, and a counterfeit Social Security card. This costs only between $120 to $300.
Retired ICE Special-Agent-In-Charge Claude Arnold said during an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in December:
The demand is so great for counterfeit documents because the illegal alien population wants to work—that’s the majority of their motivation for wanting to come to this country. So there’s a huge demand for those documents that are required to pass the employment eligibility verification procedures. In every neighborhood where there’s a significant illegal alien population, there are at least several document vendors who supply this service.
Roughly a tenth of all the illegal aliens Arnold arrested over the course of his career freely admitted they voted in U.S. elections. The left hysterically attacked Trump for “losing” the popular vote—and went wild when Trump tweeted that he would have won this interesting but non-vital metric “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Reuters sneered that Trump’s “allegation” was “made without evidence,” but given there are well over ten million illegals living in the U.S., and millions are committing identity theft, it’s not inconceivable that significant numbers voted illegally as well.
Terrorists also commit identity fraud in order to carry out their plans, as NBC News reported in 2004:
Terrorism and identity theft go hand in hand, experts say. The al-Qaida training manual includes provisions for trainees to leave camp with five fake personas, says Collins, who uses a copy of the manual to train law enforcement officials. Terrorists are regularly schooled in the art of subsisting off credit card fraud while living in the United States, [identity theft expert Judith Collins] said… The Sept. 11 hijackers, surprisingly, used their real names when boarding their flights that morning. That kept commissioners from focusing more specifically on ID theft, said commission spokesman Jonathan Stull — after all, its charge was to study what went wrong on Sept. 11. But the hijackers had liberally used document fraud prior to that date, some to ease entrance into the United States, others to move around once they were here and to obtain drivers’ licenses they needed to board the airplanes. Mark Rasch, once head of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime unit and now a consultant with Solutionary Inc., said the fact that identity theft is as easy as it is makes terrorism watch lists essentially useless.
Tolerating such mass lawlessness harms Americans and their communities, Sessions said during his press conference, and it’s the duty of the government to protect them.
“Why are we doing this? Because it is what the duly enacted laws of the United States require. I took an oath to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said. “How else can we look the parents and loved ones of Kate Steinle, Grant Ronnebeck, and so many others in eye and say we are doing everything possible to prevent such tragedies from ever occurring again?”
Aggravated identity theft is a felony and punishable by up to two years in prison.I'm a Traitor for Opposing Trump?
Call me an idiot, call me whatever, but never call me a traitor. I will not let that claim go unanswered. Here's something about me none of you knows. After visiting friends in New Jersey, I boarded a plane early on a September morning, not knowing that my life would be forever changed by what would happen that day. I slept for most of the flight but was awakened first by the plane's sudden movements. Banking hard to the right, then again, banking hard to the right. The captain came over the intercom, saying we were going to be grounded in Kansas City. A woman on the flight called her husband to tell him she was going to be late. He informed her that two planes out of Boston had been hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center. My stomach lurched as she relayed the information to us. The world was about to change forever.
I deplaned to witness the second tower collapse, the dust and debris enveloping the lower half of Manhattan. Strangers updated us as we walked through the concourse. The Pentagon had been hit by a plane. Another plane had crash-landed in western Pennsylvania. It turns out that United 93 took off from the same airport my plane took off from: Newark, N.J. Some kind people took me in and let me spend the night in their home. I watched updates and President Bush's speech from the Oval Office. The next day, while riding a Greyhound home to Utah, I felt a rush of fear I'd never felt before. That fear soon turned to anger. I hated feeling out of control. I wanted to fight back. It was then I decided to join the Army. I arrived home the night of September 13. I went to take the ASVAB the next day. I formally joined the Army a week later, deciding to serve in the active Army instead of the National Guard. The Army oath of enlistment states: "I, Layne Hansen, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." Nowhere in that oath does it say I will swear allegiance to a man. Personally, I have always lived by this oath. I have been and will always be loyal to my country. I will pledge allegiance to the flag and the country it represents, but I will never pledge allegiance to a man, especially one as detestable as Donald Trump – a man who has already begun to lurch to the left, which is what we said he would do. This has nothing to do with loyalty to the GOP, either. I left the party years ago. However, I have never given up my classical liberal views of politics. I would love to see the GOP gain a strong ideology, as I wrote on this site not long ago. A year and a half ago I called for John Boehner's removal as House speaker. I am not holding my breath. I agree that the party needed a kick in rear to help it see that it needs a foundation of principles, but nominating the likes of Donald Trump is the worst of a lot of bad options. Trump is already lurching to the left, and there is no telling where he'll end up on any given position. I have little doubt that his "wall" proposal (which is not his idea, but something he's made his followers believe) will be "negotiable" and will soon be off his platform altogether. These are all moot points, because Trump has very little chance of actually winning. If you thought the liberal media was in the tank for Obama in 2008 and 2012, you're in for a rude awakening. The irony is, the liberal media has an ally in Trump. However, they cannot stand him and will do everything they can to make sure he is defeated. Large swaths of the conservative media are also against him, which will make it impossible for him to rally the Republican base – something you need to nearly maximize to have a chance to win. I return to Trump's followers, deliberately using this word instead of supporters. Their allegiance to the man is unbreakable, no matter how far he goes to the left in the coming months. We #NeverTrump people have been trying to tell you for months that this guy is a con man, a snake oil salesman, a shyster. You haven't listened, and now look at where we are. We have the worst nominee in the Republican Party's history, and that's saying something! My goal from now until November will be to elect a conservative, even if only moderately so. I'm constantly told by members of the Trump cult that I should take a gamble. I will not do so. Call me a traitor if you want, but I am a traitor only to your dear leader. I have never been, and will never be, a traitor to my country. Layne Hansen is a Ph.D. student in American politics. He can be reached for comment at [email protected] biggest plant of its kind in Britain has been generating electricity for 46 years, with closure marking ‘end of an era’ for coal power in Scotland
Scotland will on Thursday witness an end to the coal age which fired its industrial revolution with the closure of Longannet power station.
The symbolic switch off is an important step towards a lower carbon Britain but is another blow to energy security.
The Fife-based plant – the biggest of its kind in Britain – has been generating electricity for a quarter of Scottish homes for almost half a century but has bowed to a mixture of old age, rising transmission costs and higher taxes on carbon.
Over 230 direct jobs and an estimated 1,000 indirect ones could be hit by the decision from Spanish-owned utility, Scottish Power, to switch off the last generator at the 2,400 mega watt capacity plant.
“Coal has long been the dominant force in Scotland’s electricity generation fleet, but the closure of Longannet signals the end of an era,” said Hugh Finlay, generation director at ScottishPower.
“Longannet has contributed more electricity for the national grid than any other power station in Scotland’s history, and it is a sad day for everyone at ScottishPower,” he added.
No decisions have been taken on the future of the site, but Scottish Power expects to outline its plans before the end of the year. Longannet is the largest coal-fired plant in Britain as rival Drax is firing as much wood as coal these days. When built Longannet was the largest of its kind in Europe.
WWF Scotland director Lang Banks said: “The closure of Longannet marks an historic and inevitable step in our energy transition as Scotland becomes one of the first nations to end its use of coal for power.
“While the power station has served the nation for many years, the world is moving forward to cleaner, cheaper forms of renewable energy generation.”
There are still a couple of open cast coal mines in Scotland but Longannet was the last big user of supplies. Locally-mined coal was key to Clydeside shipbuilding and steelmaking north of the border in the last century.
Scottish Power, one of the big six energy suppliers and now owned by Iberdrola, once had half a dozen coal-fired power stations but is now dependent on gas and wind farms for generating electricity.
A spokesman for the company said Longannet had originally only been expected to work for 25 years but heavy investment in new equipment had allowed it to keep on running for 46 years.
“It was uneconomic to continue”, said the Scottish Power spokesman, because of the high transmission charges and carbon taxes. However, he added that the company was still investing heavily in energy systems
Six new onshore windfarms with |
built off last year's strong start. Updates to the commentary will again be made throughout the year.
Gameplay will likely feel too familiar at the start for returning players, but a number of subtle improvements have been made, especially as they relate to longstanding legacy issues that have been addressed. Those include tweaks to zone coverages, speed differentiation and quarterback accuracy. This year's game seems to lean a little more toward offense with big plays both through the air and on the ground plentiful.
One new feature is "Target Passing," which may appeal to the more advanced crowd. Thankfully it's completely optional, and I suspect most will choose to go without it or utilize it selectively. Hitting the left trigger activates it, at which point the QB can no longer move. The user then selects a receiver icon and uses the stick to place the ball where they want it to land. The receiver icon is then hit again to make the throw.
It's tough to get the hang of it at first, even in simple practice mode without a defense on the field. It will result in a lot more sacks and some errant throws for those who use it. Those who get it down will have a dangerous weapon at their disposal, however.
MORE RATINGS: DL | LB | DB
Other new mechanics have been implemented for user-controlled receivers when releasing off the line and making cuts, and for defensive backs and their press at the line of scrimmage. Pressing as a corner is the most effective and easiest mechanic to understand; the right stick is used to hold up receivers at the line or direct them inside or outside off the jam. There are also new coaching adjustments that can be made to influence player tendencies more or strategically match up corners on receivers, a feature that used to be found in the "NCAA Football" series.
The area of greatest improvement may reside on the offensive line. Ratings appear to matter much more, not just for individuals, but for units, as well. Good offensive lines will buy significant time for the quarterback and pick up blitzes that poor ones would not. There's also a new "ID the Mike" feature that can help identify a blitzer who may have gone free otherwise.
There has always been something of an internal battle in sports games between simulation and arcade — the need for the games to be fun and accessible but still maintain realism. That has led to products that attempted to please everyone but, in the process, failed to reach any level of excellence.
The developers at EA Sports hope to have found the solution to that problem with "Madden NFL 18."
Users can now choose from three different play styles when starting a game or season. Simulation is meant to be that true-to-the-NFL experience, with ratings playing a large role in outcomes and penalties being called. Competitive is intended to emphasize "stick skills" more, with some of the randomness of the sport removed. Arcade attempts to be more open and offense-oriented, with lots of big plays and big hits.
Surprisingly, the three don't feel all that different from each other. Arcade has a higher likelihood of broken tackles and spectacular catches but otherwise seems like a regular game being played on Rookie or Pro difficulty. Simulation is what you'd get out of a normal game any year in "Madden." Competitive eliminates some drops by receivers or defenders and turns off penalties and injuries.
The biggest disappointment for veterans of the series will likely involve the game's Franchise mode. There are some new features and improvements, but the experience is largely the same as it has been for five years now. "Madden" still has by far the best online version of Franchise, but the lack of innovation from recent editions is notable.
The most intriguing addition is Play Now LIVE, which not only lets users play the current or past week's matchups along with the season, but also allows them to start new Franchise or Season modes from any point of the year. That means you can carry in a team's record, stats and rosters from any given point of the season, current or past, when starting up the mode anew. The commentary within Franchise is much better at calling out story lines related to both your team and those across the league.
The other change to Franchise that stood out relates to injuries. There are now off-ball injuries, so positions that would rarely or never find themselves on the injury report are now affected.
That will force GMs to rely more on depth and roster management over the course of the season. Injuries in simulated games can also be devastating. I lost some of my team's best players in simmed games for extended periods of time, and I saw some teams with upwards of 10 players hurt. The injuries might need to be tuned a bit to produce more short-term, one-to-two-week injuries, rather than the six-plus-week injuries that seem to be very common in the sims.
Another addition that delivers is MUT Squads. Online co-op mode has returned and been rebranded; it is now housed within the popular Ultimate Team mode. Three users can play on the same team against three other users. The rosters are brought in by each participant under one of three designated roles. There is an offensive and defensive captain and a coach, all of whom unique on-field responsibilities.
It's incredibly satisfying to work together as a team, strategize and execute, but disaster can result when communication falls apart or timing is off. That means skill, both individual and as a team, will be critical to success. The mode could also be far more compelling as a form of esports than the current single player-vs.-player structure.
MORE RATINGS: Rookies
The only issue with the mode that has been encountered relates to the camera perspective switch on kickoffs. Maybe it should be locked looking up the field instead of switching while the ball is in flight. It might also be helpful to see who is user-controlled on the other side of the ball, whether it's to exploit tendencies and weak links or to simply know who did what on a given play.
Some smart changes to Ultimate Team are being rolled out this year. There are packs that let you choose what you want out of a pool of cards. Some players are now upgradeable; you'll be able to put work into making them better. Bonus XP or Coins are often granted for meeting requirements that go beyond just completing the specific solo challenge goals. There are also some fun challenges that incorporate the Texas Longhorns and Oregon Ducks out of "Longshot," and completing the story mode will also give you the main characters to use on your team including a highly rated Dan Marino.
Were it not for "Longshot" and MUT Squads, many veterans of the "Madden" franchise might have had a difficult time discerning last year's edition from this one. Thankfully, those two new modes pay off, making all the effort devoted to them worthwhile. They're joined by subtle but valuable improvements to gameplay that become apparent the more "Madden NFL 18" is played.
"Madden NFL 18" will release Aug. 22 with the G.O.A.T. edition of the game, which includes bonus Ultimate Team content. It is priced at $80 ($64 with an Amazon Prime discount). The standard edition will come out Aug. 25 and cost $60 ($48 with an Amazon Prime discount).
Subscribers to EA Access can play the game now with a 10-hour trial on Xbox One. Publisher EA Sports provided a digital download code for the purpose of this review, which was completed on PlayStation 4.
Bryan Wiedey posts sports gaming news and analysis daily at Pastapadre.com, is co-founder of the sports gaming site HitThePass.com, hosts the "Press Row Podcast" and can be reached on [email protected] Minister Stephen Harper wants you to know he’s on your side in the epic battle of consumers against Big Telecom’s big wireless bills.
Or maybe it’s the Conservative Party trying to get your name and email address, so they can spam you with political ads.
Either way, a post appeared on Harper’s Facebook page Wednesday linking to a Conservative Party petition called “Standing Up For Wireless Consumers.”
The Facebook post urges people to “sign the petition if you believe Canadians will benefit from more choice and greater competition among wireless providers.”
If it strikes you as odd that a prime minister would launch a petition to put pressure on his own government, the Globe and Mail offers an explanation: It “appears to be a way for the Conservative Party to collect names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of sympathetic voters,” the newspaper suggests.
That theory would be supported by the petition site’s text, which reads more like an ad for Harper’s record on the wireless industry than an actual petition demanding change.
Text version follows slideshow
Photo gallery What You Need To Know About Wireless Code of Conduct See Gallery Stephen Harper's Wireless Petition Probably Just Trolling For Your Personal Data 1 / 30
What You Need To Know About Wireless Code of Conduct 1 / 30
“Our Conservative government is taking action to reduce your cell phone bill – and we wanted to make sure you have heard about it,” the petition page exhorts, noting the Harper government’s recent decision to block Telus’ purchase of wireless spectrum from small wireless player Mobilicity.
Harper waded into the debate the same day it was revealed that the country’s big three telecom companies -- Bell, Rogers and Telus -- along with several regional carriers launched a lawsuit to halt part of the CRTC’s changes to wireless rules.
The CRTC’s wireless code of conduct, announced last month, would allow Canadians to opt out of three-year wireless contracts after two years, with no penalties incurred.
But the big telecoms argue that the June, 2015, deadline for the rule to come into effect for all contracts is too soon. They say the new rules would retroactively change contracts customers signed as far back as 2012.
That would set a "troublesome precedent," Telus spokesman Shawn Hall said.
The lawsuit names as respondents not only the CRTC, but consumer advocacy group OpenMedia and numerous individuals who participated in the hearings on the wireless code.
Hall told HuffPost Canada the big telecoms aren’t trying to sue consumer groups and individuals who voiced opinions at CRTC hearings; the rules of the Federal Court required that these people be named in the suit, Hall said.
Harper’s Facebook post did not address the lawsuit against the CRTC.The mixed reception for the Spectrum Vega and Elite's maligned Bluetooth keyboard may have dulled the resurgence of 8-bit gaming lately, but the announcement of the Spectrum Next computer proves that there's still life - and love - in the old machines. And it's with good reason; the Eighties 8-bit home computer software scene in the UK was a hotbed of invention and discovery. From the primitive games of the ZX81 to the system-stretching marvels on the three most popular machines in the UK, the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, new concepts, gameplay elements and marketing ploys were devised constantly throughout the decade. Many of them echo today, and indeed contemporary gaming owes plenty of debt - or at least knowing nods - to these trailblazing pioneers. Here are ten examples of how home computer video games of this era made helped make gaming what it is today - for better or for worse.
Split-screen gaming Scratch one bogey. Local multiplayer may be dying out in this age of internet gaming, but there's no doubt it was a key step in getting there in the first place. Back in the 80s, the majority of home computer gamers played alone, so gaming with a friend always felt fresh and oddly exciting. Ocean's Top Gun, a license of the US Airforce advert/movie was an unexpected hit for the Manchester software house as, after a series of disappointing duds, expectations were low. Focusing on the air combat theme of the movie (let's face it, there was little else to it), Top Gun was one of the first games to concentrate solely on split-screen local multiplayer. Each player took control of an Eagle jet fighter with the only purpose to shoot your opponent down three times. Top Gun had a single player version, but its AI was poor and the mode felt tacked on. Sound familiar?
DLC Laser Squad's publisher's were not shy in offering extra content. Of course, it wasn't downloadable, but publishers selling extra content to extract more cash out of punters is hardly a new thing. There are plenty of examples, but perhaps the closest in terms of the longevity that DLC can provide (as well as the cheekiness of unlockable disc content) is with strategy titles. Julian Gollop's Laser Squad came with a small set of scenarios including eliminating a troublesome arms dealer ("The Assassins") and escorting a set of captives from an underground prison ("Rescue From The Mines"). The game was a forerunner itself thanks to its line-of-sight combat and action-point driven gameplay, these and other tactical elements combining neatly with a simple and intuitive interface. Its original 8-bit release contained just three missions, with a further two audaciously offered via mail-order. A subsequent re-release included all five of these missions with yet another two ("The Stardrive" and "Laser Platoon") available by mail-order. Thanks to a stiff AI challenge, plus the two-player option, Laser Squad and its numerous missions were good value for money, despite the nagging feeling customers were being exploited, albeit thanks to a superbly-balanced game.
Open world gaming Space exploration, trading and pirating in Elite. Today, many fans fawn over the free open worlds of games such as Fallout and Skyrim. Able to roam anywhere, do anything, and be anyone, the sheer level of choice and freedom is clearly a popular concept. 30 years ago it was a different story, but there were still many examples. Perhaps the finest was the space adventure Elite, published by initially on the BBC computer by Acornsoft and created by David Braben and Ian Bell. Using wire-frame graphics, Elite set the player up with a small amount of cash and a basic space ship named the Cobra Mark III. Despite the presence of a number of side-missions, there was no central plot to follow - you were simply free to wander the universe, making as much money as possible to upgrade your ship and status. Elite's freedom stemmed not only from this, but also the way you could go about it; whether by trade, mining, bounty-hunting or piracy, commanders were able to achieve their goals as they saw fit.
Motion capture Vixen was not the finest game, but a great early example of motion capture. With graphics becoming increasingly more realistic with each passing generation, motion capture technology has advanced tremendously in the last 20 years. Now, whole studios exist just for the purpose and even the humblest indie developer effort can feature this method of authenticating human movements. Games such as Prince Of Persia and Another World may have caught the eye, yet motion capture had already been used primitively on the 8-bit computers. A software house named Martech - most famous for its digitized card game Sam Fox Strip Poker - employed another page three star, Corinne Russell, to act as cover and in-game star of the otherwise unremarkable run-and-whip game Vixen. Martech filmed Russell for two solid days as the model ran, jumped and crouched in a skin-tight leotard; filmed on a simple video recorder with a black background and a vast array of lights, the results were then hand-drawn from the images. While this unsophisticated approach may be a long way from the techniques devised just a few years later, the animation and movement of the main character remains impressive in an otherwise dull game. And according to former Martech owner David Martin, the motion capture sessions proved strangely popular with his employees...
First person One frame per second sounded fast. But it really wasn't. There was a time when games relied on a strict third-person viewpoint - your avatar was almost always visible on screen, whether it be car, person or spaceship. Space shooters in particular may have long boasted of a first-person viewpoint, but ground-based equivalents were rare, and usually wire-frame, such as Novagen's impressive Mercenary. In 1986, Incentive Software, based in Hampshire, began developing a technique called Freescape - a combination of the words freedom and landscape - which would give players the chance to move freely around a solid game world in first-person and interact with its various elements and structures. The result was Driller, a game that moved at a snail's pace on the 8-bit computers (one frame per second!) yet was an astounding achievement with such limited memory capacities. Driller and its countless follow-ups also created another trend by essentially using the same engine over and over again, until Incentive got bored and moved into business applications in the early 90s. By then the mantle had been taken up by others, and it wasn't long before a little game called Doom was unleashed upon the world...
Age classifications One of Dracula's controversial images that helped gained it a 15 BBFC certificate. Although the industry today voluntarily regulates (via PEGI), and on extreme occasion can still fall foul of the BBFC, there was a time when the latter organisation didn't regard videogames capable of creating content risqué enough for age-related censorship. CRL's Dracula (Dracula Unbound: The Story Behind The First 18 Certificated Videogame) changed that and the gory adventure and its brethren (Wolfman, Frankenstein, Jack The Ripper) were key in changing the way videogames were perceived by the BBFC and the general public. CRL's horror adventures used words to frighten, with the occasional gory image proving less of a concern to the powers that be. Today, the combination of realistic graphics and adult storytelling means all games are rated, with many deemed legally unsuitable for under 18s by the aforementioned PEGI.
Real-time strategy John Gibson's real-time strategy game Stonkers. Like survival horror, real-time strategy is a genre that many will tell you stretches back to way before its most famous progenitor. The former's poster child was Resident Evil; the latter's Westwood's famous Command & Conquer series. For survival horror, many experts revert back as far as the Atari 2600 game Haunted House; for real-time strategy, 1983's Stonkers on the ZX Spectrum. Stonkers was the result of a brainstorming session at Liverpool's Imagine Software. Already a big name thanks to its promotional prowess (and some of its games weren't too bad either), the Imagine bosses had decided that they needed a strategy title to go with its range of arcade games. Veteran coder John Gibson helped come up with Stonkers' design - a war game with a difference, that required the player to keep constant track of their forces and supply and move them in real-time, rather than in turn. The impact was not immediate - turn-based strategy games remained dominant throughout the decade - yet its clear Stonkers is an early example of what would, a dozen years later, become a very popular genre.
Customisation The skimmer's cockpit could be designed as the player saw fit in Tau Ceti follow-up Academy. OK, so we're not talking Fallout-esque how-long-shall-I-make-my-scar levels of customisation here; but long before the lone wanderer, sole survivor or any other poor Vault-Tec victim emerged blinking from the depths, there were plenty of other games that offered flexible characters and screen designs. Having had a sizeable hit with the space adventure, Tau Ceti, author Pete Cooke decided to include a novel feature into its sequel, Academy. Before jetting off on any number of pilot training missions, the player was able to completely design the interior of their craft (or Gal-Corp skimmer as it was known in-game), from the size of the various screens and instrument panels to their location and position. Like many aspects of Fallout's character generation, the decisions the player made were ultimately cosmetic, but the depth of interaction and customisation felt like a whole new world back in 1987.Yesterday, by a party-line vote, Republicans in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology approved a budget authorization for NASA that would see continued spending on Orion and the Space Launch System but slash the agency's budget for Earth sciences. This vote follows the committee's decision to cut the NSF's geoscience budget and comes after a prominent attack on NASA's Earth sciences work during a Senate hearing, all of which suggests a concerted campaign against the researchers who, among other things, are telling us that climate change is a reality.
The recently approved budget would cover 2016 and 2017, and it contains two scenarios based on the degree to which the overall budget is constrained. An analysis of the bill shows that it would keep spending in line with the Obama administration's request but shift money from basic sciences to human exploration. The Orion crewed capsule and Space Launch System rocket would both see an addition of hundreds of millions of dollars. Planetary science would also see a boost of nearly $150 million.
But the love of planets doesn't extend to our own. The added spending is offset by a huge drop in spending on Earth science, from $1.947 billion under Obama's proposal to $1.45 billion under the optimistic budget. If budget constraints kick in, it would drop to $1.2 billion—a cut of nearly 40 percent. Development of space technology would also take a hit of about $125 million.
The committee's press release about the budget claims that the bill is receiving widespread support. Among the groups quoted is the Planetary Society, which is obviously pleased about the boost to its favored area of research. But a check of the Planetary Society's website reveals that it calls the bill "flawed" and states, "Obviously, the cuts to Earth Science make this a hard bill to support, therefore The Planetary Society cannot support the full bill as written at this early stage."
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was also not pleased. In a statement released yesterday, he said, "The NASA authorization bill making its way through the House of Representatives guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate and our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events." He also criticized the cuts to space technology development.
The bill comes a week after the same committee reauthorized the America COMPETES act, which includes funding for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. As at NASA, geoscience funding takes a hit, down 12 percent at the NSF, with environmental research from the DOE taking a 10 percent hit. There's even worse news for social sciences, which have been targeted by Republicans in both the House and Senate—the NSF would no longer fund any social sciences under the new bill.
It's difficult to escape the impression that the recent budgets are part of a concerted effort to ensure that the country does nothing about addressing climate change. In the Senate, testimony by NASA Administrator Bolden was used by Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as an opportunity to claim that the Earth sciences aren't "hard science" and that NASA's attention would be better focused elsewhere. Meanwhile, the America COMPETES renewal indicates that the House isn't interested in having the country compete in renewable energy. It chops the DOE's renewable/efficiency budget by over half, and it does the same to the ARPA-E advanced energy program.A team of Imperial researchers has developed a tool which 'lights up' when it detects the chemical signature of harmful bacteria in the lung.
In a clinical first, the group from the Department of Medicine used the tools, called cell-free biosensors, to test samples of sputum (phlegm) from patients with cystic fibrosis (CF).
Biosensors are based on engineered DNA circuits, designed to detect changes in their environment, such as the presence of chemicals, or changes in pH or temperature.
These tools, which harness the biological machinery inside cells, can be used to quickly spot chemical traces of active microbial colonies in samples from the lung and could help to accurately diagnose bacterial infections in vulnerable patients.
In a small, proof-of-concept study, the team found that their biosensors could accurately detect markers of Pseudomonas bacteria – a leading cause of chest infections in people with weak immune systems or chronic conditions, such as CF – and were as sensitive as existing chemical diagnostic tests but could potentially be cheaper and easier to use.
Rapid diagnostic tests
The researchers are hopeful they could eventually develop their cell-free sensors into a range of rapid diagnostic tests which could be used either at home, GP surgeries or in hospital clinics or even in remote areas of the world with limited access to hospital diagnostics, at a fraction of the price of existing tests.
Professor Paul Freemont, co-founder and co-director of The Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial, said: “The driving force behind this research is to show that these tools work and could be used to detect particular diagnostic markers associated with infection.”
He added: “By applying an engineering approach to biology, these systems could be altered to sense for any microbe we choose. The possibilities for public health and cost-savings for health systems could be considerable.”
Biosensors have emerged through the growing field of synthetic biology, with scientists tweaking living cells to respond to certain conditions, such as the presence of a chemical compound.
At the heart of the technique are lengths of engineered DNA which, when inserted into a living cell, act as a circuit. If the right signal – such as a specific chemical compound – is present, then the circuit is switched ‘on’ and the cell produces a signal in the form of a coloured output, in this case a green fluorescent protein. If the substrate is not present, then the circuit remains ‘off’ and there is no signal.
In the latest study, published this week in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, researchers report on using a ‘cell-free’ form of sensor to test clinical samples for the first time. Instead of being contained within the membrane of a cell, the engineered DNA circuit and cellular machinery of their sensors are free-floating in a solution.
The team engineered their sensor’s circuit to respond to a molecule produced specifically by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These bacteria release a chemical signature in order to communicate with bacteria around them and to sense how many of them there are. As they replicate, more cells release the signature, and so the concentration of the signal increases, giving the bacteria an idea of the state of their population.
The possibilities for public health and cost-savings for health systems could be considerable – Professor Paul Freemont Study author
Previous studies have revealed levels of this same P. aeruginosa signature were higher in hospitalised patients than those with stable condition.
Samples taken from the lungs of patients, either with or without P. aeruginosa infection, were screened by adding them to tiny wells containing solutions of the biosensor. After four hours the samples were tested for green fluorescent protein – a sign that the bacterial signature was present.
Analysis revealed that the cell-free biosensor was able to detect the bacterial signature with the same accuracy as existing diagnostic tests, called liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The biosensors were able to detect the concentration of the signal within a close range to LC-MS/MS.
Taking the technology forward
Currently, a major limitation for the cell-free sensors is the amount of time taken to prepare samples before testing, with lung sputum samples needing to be ‘cleaned up’ with the removal of biological materials which could interfere with the results.
In addition, as the DNA is synthetic – engineered in the lab – it would need to be disposed of carefully, with concerns around potential to contaminate the environment or pass to other organisms.
A point of care test could transform the way in which we monitor patients, allowing us to treat early and personalise therapies – Professor Jane Davies Study author
However, according to the researchers, the approach could offer significant cost-savings compared to the existing LC-MS/MS detection method. If suitably scaled up, using similar cell free biosensors could work out to be a fraction of the cost per sample.
Professor Jane Davies of the NHLI and an honorary consultant paediatrician at the Royal Brompton Hospital said: “Pseudomonas is the major infection in patients with cystic fibrosis and is closely linked to the severe lung disease which develops over time leading to premature death.
“At the moment, we only have opportunities to detect infection when patients come to clinics, perhaps every 2-3 months. A point of care test could transform the way in which we monitor patients, allowing us to treat early and personalise therapies.”
The group is now exploring how to take the technology forward and develop working prototypes, as well as a test to detect the signal in a patient’s urine. If the biosensor solution could be freeze-dried, this could even potentially take the form of a credit card-sized paper-based test, which would be affordable and ready for use in the field.
Loren Cameron, a PhD student in Freemont’s lab and one of the study authors, said: “Now we have shown these types of biosensors can be used with clinical samples, the next step is to refine our approach. We hope that in future, tools like this could be used to help test for the presence or severity of bacterial infections.” Ms Cameron is one of five postgraduate students funded as part of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust’s Strategic Research Centre for Pseudomonas infection.
Ke Yan Wen, a graduated PhD student from Freemont’s lab and also one of the lead authors, said: "We believe that cell-free systems are a promising platform for developing biosensors, since they are easy to use, produce a rapid response, and can be stored long-term in normal conditions.”
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‘A cell-free biosensor for detecting quorum sensing molecules in P. aeruginosa-infected respiratory samples’ by Wen, KY, et al. is published in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology.
Image credit: Wen, KY, et al. ACS Synthetic Biology 2017ONE of the best and most astute buys in the NRL this year was made by a coach who lost his job before the player could help save it.
Former Bulldogs coach Kevin Moore and his assistant Jim Dymock identified enforcer James Graham midway through last season.
The 26-year-old prop had 200-plus games for St Helens and had been a mainstay of the Great Britain Test pack since 2006.
Still, when premier coach Des Hasler took over at Belmore, he was never expecting to see the best of Graham this year.
Even many of the great English forwards from over the years needed a 12-month settling in period to adjust to the Australian game. Not this guy, who showed all his toughness and roughness to more than match countryman Sam Burgess in a colossal battle at ANZ Stadium last Saturday night.
Graham is described by his Bulldogs teammates as a man of few words but the ultimate professional. He's also statistically rated in the top six front-rowers in the competition from all the key indicators.
Not just for the tremendous workrate but for his willingness to shift the football. (He averages seven passes a game - more than any other prop).
Graham is one of three from the Bulldogs who are rated among the top 10 buys in the NRL for 2012 at the halfway mark of the season.
Hasler's signing from the Sea Eagles caused an almighty off-season storm but he's proving to be worth the big bucks CEO Todd Greenberg had to fork out.
Just about every Canterbury player has improved considerably under Hasler's guidance and more regimented preparation.
Players like Kris Keating, Josh Morris and Frank Pritchard are now playing the best and most consistent footy of their careers.
Blog with Buzz: Join Phil Rothfield from 12:30pm Friday to talk all things NRL
Origin special section: Keep up to date with all the news
Click here for Boo Bailey's bios of the NSW team
He might have only played two matches for the Dogs but former Eels and Warriors winger Krisnan Inu also gets a start in the top 10.
At the bargain price of less than $50,000 for this season, he has already justified the dollars.
South Sydney coach Michael Maguire is another who deserves his position among the best new signings.
Remarkably, he only got a start because Wayne Bennett rejected the club's offer to sign with the Knights instead.
Maguire has the Rabbitohs playing the disciplined and more structured style of football that has been missing at Redfern for years.
He had the courage to gamble on a rookie halfback in Adam Reynolds as a replacement for Chris Sandow and the nous to switch champion centre Greg Inglis to fullback.
The pair have been two of the biggest stories of the season. Other great new buys include Nate Myles at the Titans, Andrew Everingham at Souths, Will Chambers and Jason Ryles at Melbourne Storm.
A lot of the cheaper buys have turned out to be absolute bargains.
At the Sharks, Jeff Robson and Ben Ross are on less that $100,000.
So too is big Willie Mason at the Knights, who has defied critics, myself included, to be just about the club's best forward.
Blues five-eighth Todd Carney has almost singlehandedly lifted the Sharks into a premiership force and is an obvious inclusion on the list.
But not all the new signings at the 16 clubs have worked out as planned.
It's been a disaster for the Newcastle Knights with fullback Darius Boyd and prop Kade Snowden chewing up $800,000 of the salary cap.
Boyd showed improvement against the Broncos last Sunday but has massive ground to make up.
Snowden had one strong game against his form club the Sharks in round two but has since looked nothing like the player who played for his state and country last year.
Throw in old Timana Tahu, Daine Laurie and Adam Cuthbertson and it becomes a lot easier to understand why the club is failing.
I have even included super coach Bernnett in the bad buy category. Harsh? Possibly, but not when you consider Rick Stone took the Knights to the finals on a quarter of Bennett's salary last year without Boyd and Snowden.
Parramatta are just as bad as the Knights for off-season recruitment.
Chris Sandow is finally showing some encouraging signs but overall has been a disaster at half-back, spending time in NSW Cup.
He's obviously missing the more freedom he had under John Lang's coaching at Souths.
Sandow's five-eighth partner Ben Roberts and centre Willie Tonga, who has struggled with injuries, have also had years they'd rather forget.
Probably not as much though as Cowboys halfback Robert Lui, banned by the NRL for 12 months over domestic violence.
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Originally published as Best and worst buys of 2012(Note: This is the third and final part of a series. Part one appeared Monday and part two appeared yesterday.)
First “STEPS”
Let’s say we want to build the TCP/IP stack of an operating system. A traditional implementation might take 10,000 lines of code. What if you rethought the design from the ground up? What if you could make the IP packet handling code look almost identical to the RFC 791 diagram which defines IP? That’s exactly what the Viewpoints team did. This is real code in their system:
and the TCP stack is similar to the RFC 793 diagram:
That’s right; the ASCII art diagram is the code. How did they do it? Well, when you have a powerful “meta-meta language-language” like their IS, you can define languages in a form that reads like a traditional Backus-Naur Form (BNF) grammar representation:
With packet parsing out of the way, the implementation of their TCP algorithm is a little dense, but readable piece of code that handles the SYN, ACK, and other responses:
With this as our basis, writing a service like the Daytime Service is quite simple:
All told, the entire stack is comfortably under 200 lines of code without using any tricks like code generation wizards. The graphics subsystem is similarly clever. It basically defines everything as a polygon (including fonts, windows, etc). It’s well under 500 lines of code. They have to be this compact in order to meet their goal of an entire system in under 20,000 lines.
Another interesting metaphor in the project is the use of “massively parallel objects” or what they refer to as “particle fields,” as a fundamental part of the system:
“Even less in the mainstream, the “particle/field” idea [PF] has been found more in specialty areas (such as finite-automata and FEM, swarm programming in biology, etc.), than as a general system building tool (although it is the center of systems such as Sketchpad and TEX, and is even found in an operating system such as MUSE). Traditional object-oriented design has tended to overbalance its attention on the objects and to give too rudimentary attention to message-passing. If the center of attention were to be shifted to messaging of all kinds, then the notion of “fields” immediately suggests itself as a more general way to think about inter-object relationships (the previous example of “ants distributing and sensing pheromones” is a good metaphor of this style).”
For example, this idea can be applied to text formatting where you essentially treat every letter as its own object. Programming the solution then becomes much easier. You can have simple rules where you just look out for your immediate neighboring letters and then use an extremely efficient message passing system to make your simple code work in a very efficient manner. Here’s a sample demonstration from their NSF proposal:
This reminds me of ideas from “emergence” which is a theory that explains how a flock of birds or an ant colony can do complex things even though each individual in the system thinks simple thoughts. An individual bird is only thinking in terms of simple rules like “try to follow the guy in front of you” and “get out of the way if something dangerous is nearby.” Just these two rules alone can lead to the fantastically complicated formations that we see in the sky.
The massively parallel objects with efficient messaging metaphor leads to algorithms that are simpler in concept because you can focus on the behavior of one little object rather than have to worry about how the whole system works.
“I want it now!”
With the Viewpoints team only in their second year of a five year project, we can get a feel for where the future of software development is going, but we can’t realistically put it into production quite yet. What are our options then?
Ted Neward likes to talk about how the next five years will be about programming languages attempting to bridge the “huge disconnect between the practitioners, the guys who get stuff done, and the academics, who think about how we get things done.” He says this disconnect exists because “the academics and the practitioners don’t talk to each other.” I really think that the next five years we’ll see significant strides towards improving the situation. If you want to jump ahead of the curve, I think it’s worthwhile start imagining a dream language that would help you cut along the “natural joints” of a problem you work on. Can you think of an expressive language like the ASCII art for parsing TCP/IP headers that is targeted for your specific problem?
Another interesting observation Ted made was that:
”… programming languages, much like human languages, are expressions not just of concepts within them, but also the environment in which they were born.”
That is, no language is perfect. Each language |
Olympic-sized pool on his home of Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. He played for St. Dunstan's Episcopal High School, and had a college career with the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, winning the Naismith College Player of the Year, USBWA College Player of the Year, and John Wooden awards in his senior year. After graduating, Duncan earned NBA Rookie of the Year honors after being selected by San Antonio with the first overall pick in the 1997 NBA draft.
Off the court, Duncan is known for his quiet and unassuming nature and his active philanthropy. He holds a degree in psychology and created the Tim Duncan Foundation to raise general health awareness and fund education and youth sports in various parts of the United States.[5]
Biography [ edit ]
Early life [ edit ]
Tim Duncan is the son of Ione, a midwife, and William Duncan, a mason. He has two older sisters, Cheryl and Tricia, and one older brother, Scott, a director and cinematographer.[6] He was born and raised on Saint Croix, one of the main islands composing the U.S. Virgin Islands. In school, Duncan was a bright pupil and dreamt of becoming an Olympic-level swimmer like his sister Tricia.[7][8] His parents were very supportive and Duncan excelled at swimming, becoming a teenage standout in the 50, 100 and 400 meters freestyle and aiming to make the 1992 Olympic Games as a member of the United States Team.[7]
When Hurricane Hugo destroyed the island's only Olympic-sized swimming pool in 1989, Duncan was forced to swim in the ocean and he quickly lost his enthusiasm for swimming because of his fear of sharks.[7] Duncan was dealt another emotional blow when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and died one day before his 14th birthday.[7] In her last days, she made Duncan and his sisters promise to finish college with a degree, which would later explain Duncan's refusal to leave college early.[9] Duncan never swam competitively again, but was inspired by his brother-in-law to turn to basketball.[9]
Duncan initially had difficulties adapting to the game he thought would help relieve his pain and frustration. Nancy Pomroy, the athletic director of the St. Croix Country Day School was quoted: "[Duncan] was so huge. So big and tall, but he was awfully awkward at the time."[10] He overcame this to become a standout for the St. Dunstan's Episcopal High School, averaging 25 points per game as a senior. His play attracted the attention of several universities, despite having only picked up the game in ninth grade.[5] Wake Forest University basketball coach Dave Odom in particular grew interested in Duncan after the 16-year-old allegedly played NBA star Alonzo Mourning to a draw in a 5-on-5 pick-up game.[7] Odom was searching for a tall, physical player to play near the basket.[7] Given the weak level of basketball in the Virgin Islands, Odom was wary about Duncan at first, especially after first meeting him and thinking him to be inattentive; Duncan stared blankly at Odom for most of the conversation.[11] However, after the first talk, Odom understood that this was just Duncan's way of paying attention, and discovered that he was not only athletically talented, but also a quick learner.[11] Eventually, despite scholarship offers by the University of Hartford, the University of Delaware and Providence College, Duncan joined Odom's Wake Forest Demon Deacons.[7]
Wake Forest University (1993–1997) [ edit ]
In the year before Duncan's arrival at Wake Forest University, the Demon Deacons reached the Sweet 16, but then lost main scorer Rodney Rogers, who entered the 1993 NBA draft.[7] In the 1993–94 NCAA season, Coach Dave Odom was considering redshirting Duncan, but was forced to play him after fellow freshman big man Makhtar N'Diaye was ruled out due to NCAA rules violations and eventually transferred to Michigan.[12] Duncan struggled with early transition problems and was even held scoreless in his first college game, but as the year progressed, he and teammate Randolph Childress led the Deacons to a 20–11 win-loss record.[7] Duncan's style of play was simple but effective, combining an array of low-post moves, mid-range bank shots and tough defense. He was chosen to represent the U.S. in the 1994 Goodwill Games.[7] Meanwhile, Duncan worked towards a degree in psychology and also took classes in anthropology and Chinese literature.[11] Despite focusing heavily on basketball, Wake Forest psychology department chairperson Deborah Best was quoted: "Tim [...] was one of my more intellectual students. [...] Other than his height, I couldn't tell him from any other student at Wake Forest."[11] Duncan also established his reputation as a stoic player, to the extent that opposing fans taunted him as "Mr. Spock", the prototypical logical, detached character from Star Trek.[11]
In the 1994–95 NCAA season, the sophomore was soon called one of the best eligible NBA prospects, along with his peers Joe Smith, Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse.[7] Los Angeles Lakers general manager Jerry West suggested that Duncan might become the top pick in the 1995 NBA draft if he went early, but Duncan assured everyone he had no intention of going pro until he graduated, even though the NBA was planning to add a rookie salary cap in 1996. He was giving up a lot of money, but was determined to stay in school.[7] In that season, he led the Demon Deacons into the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) championship game against a Rasheed Wallace-led North Carolina Tar Heels. During that game, Duncan neutralized the threat of Wallace, while Childress sealed the win with a jump shot with four seconds left in overtime.[7] In the NCAA Tournament, the Demon Deacons reached the Sweet 16, and playing against Oklahoma State, Duncan scored 12 points to go with 22 rebounds and eight blocks, outplaying Bryant Reeves, but his team lost 71–66. Still, Duncan ended the year averaging 16.8 points and 12.5 rebounds per game, was named Defensive Player of the Year and became the third-best shot-blocker in NCAA history with 3.98 blocks per game.[7] He was also voted All-ACC First Team, a feat he would repeat in each of his two remaining years at Wake Forest.[13]
In the following 1995–96 NCAA season, Wake Forest had to deal with the loss of Childress, who graduated the previous season and entered the NBA. This provided an opportunity for Duncan to show his leadership qualities, and his inexperienced team lost only four games in the entire ACC season.[7] The Demon Deacons won the ACC Finals again, but in the Sweet 16, Duncan came down with the flu, and his team missed the Final Four by one win. He completed another remarkable season with averages of 19.1 points and 12.3 rebounds per game, and was again voted ACC Defensive Player of the Year and won his first ACC Player of the Year award.[13] At the season's end the Wake Forest star was rumored to enter the 1996 NBA draft, but in the end, he stayed in college.[7]
In the 1996–97 NCAA season, Duncan was helped by the addition of future NBA player Loren Woods, a 7'1" player who eased the pressure on Duncan close to the basket. The Demon Deacons won their first 13 games, but then got into a slump and failed to win a third ACC title.[7] The NCAA campaign was just as frustrating, as Stanford University, led by future NBA point guard Brevin Knight, eliminated Duncan's team with a 72–66 win. Duncan finished with an individually impressive season though, averaging 20.8 points, 14.7 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game while shooting.606 from the field and winning the Defensive Player of the Year for a third straight season. He earned first-team All-America honors for the second time, and was a unanimous pick for both USBWA and Naismith College Player of the Year.[7] Duncan led the 1996–97 NCAA Division I in rebounding, was 10th in blocked shots (3.3 bpg) and 28th in scoring (20.8 ppg ).[13] He was voted ACC Player of the Year again and won the 1997 John Wooden Award as the NCAA's best overall male player based on the votes of sportscasters and newswriters.[14]
In contrast to contemporary prep-to-pro players like Kevin Garnett, Jermaine O'Neal, Tracy McGrady or Kobe Bryant, Duncan stayed at college for a full four years. During that period, he was a two-time ACC Player of the Year, and a three-time NABC Defensive Player of the Year. The center also made the All-ACC Tournament between 1995 and 1997, the All-ACC First Team between 1995 and 1997, and was named Most Valuable Player of the 1996 ACC Tournament. Further, 1996 was the year where he led the conference in scoring, rebounding, field goal percentage and blocked shots, becoming the first player in conference history to lead all four of those categories.[13] Overall, Duncan led his team to a 97–31 win–loss record and finished his college career as the all-time leading rebounder in NCAA history in the post-1973 era (later surpassed by Kenneth Faried). He remains one of only ten players with more than 2,000 career points and 1,500 career rebounds. He was also the first player in NCAA history to reach 1,500 points, 1,000 rebounds, 400 blocked shots and 200 assists. He left college as the all-time leading shot-blocker in ACC history with 481 blocks—at the time second in NCAA annals behind Colgate's Adonal Foyle and third on the ACC career rebounding list with 1,570 rebounds.[13] After earning his college degree, Duncan became automatically eligible for the 1997 NBA draft.
Professional career [ edit ]
In the 1997 NBA draft, the San Antonio Spurs drafted Duncan with the first draft pick.[3] The Spurs were coming off an injury-riddled 1996–97 season; their best player, David Robinson—himself a number one draft pick in 1987—was sidelined for most of the year, and they had finished with a 20–62 win–loss record.[15] However, as the 1997–98 season approached, the Spurs were considered a notable threat in the NBA. With an experienced center in Robinson and the number one pick in Duncan, the Spurs featured one of the best frontcourts in the league. Duncan and Robinson became known as the "Twin Towers", having earned a reputation for their exceptional defense close to the basket, forcing opponents to take lower percentage shots from outside.[7] From the beginning, Duncan established himself as a quality player: in his second road game, he grabbed 22 rebounds against opposing Chicago Bulls Hall of Fame power forward Dennis Rodman, a multiple rebounding champion and NBA Defensive Player of the Year.[16] Duncan was voted to the 1998 NBA All-Star Game by coaches. Later, when Duncan played against opposing Houston Rockets Hall of Fame power forward Charles Barkley, Barkley was so impressed he said: "I have seen the future and he wears number 21."[17] In his rookie season, Duncan lived up to expectations of being the number one draft pick, starting in all 82 regular-season games, averaging 21.1 points, 11.9 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 2.5 blocks per game, and earning All-NBA First Team honors.[3] His defensive contributions ensured that he was elected to the NBA All-Defensive Second Team and was also named NBA Rookie of the Year, having won the NBA Rookie of the Month award every single month that season.[5][18] Spurs coach Gregg Popovich lauded Duncan's mental toughness, stating his rookie's "demeanor was singularly remarkable", Duncan always "put things into perspective" and never got "too upbeat or too depressed."[19] Center Robinson was equally impressed with Duncan: "He's the real thing. I'm proud of his attitude and effort. He gives all the extra effort and work and wants to become a better player."[20]
The Spurs qualified for the 1998 NBA Playoffs as the fifth seed, but Duncan had a bad first half in his first playoff game against the Phoenix Suns, causing Suns coach Danny Ainge to play Duncan with less defensive pressure. The rookie capitalized on this by finishing Game 1 with 32 points and 10 rebounds[21] and replicating the performance in Game 2,[22] contributing to a 3–1 victory over the Suns.[7] However, the Spurs lost in the second round to the eventual Western Conference Champions Utah Jazz.[23] In this series, Duncan was pitted against Hall-of-Fame power forward Karl Malone. Duncan outscored Malone in the first two games which the Spurs lost,[24][25] but as the series progressed, the more experienced Malone shut Duncan down on defense and dominated on offense, outscoring the young power forward in Games 3 to 5 18–10,[26] 34–22[27] and 24–14[28] respectively.
During the lockout-shortened 1998–99 season, the Spurs started with a lackluster 6–8 record and Popovich came under fire from the press. However, Duncan and Robinson stood behind their coach, and finished the season with a 31–5 run.[29] The sophomore averaged 21.7 points, 11.4 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 2.5 blocks in the regular season, making both the All-NBA and All-Defense First Teams.[3] In the 1999 NBA Playoffs, the Spurs defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves 3–1, swept the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers 4–0, and defeated the Cinderella story New York Knicks 4–1 in the Finals.[30] In this series, a large contingent of Virgin Islanders flew over to support their local hero,[31] and were not disappointed. In the first two games, the "Twin Towers" outscored their Knicks counterparts Chris Dudley/Larry Johnson with 41 points, 26 rebounds, and nine blocks versus five points, 12 rebounds, and zero blocks.[31] After a Game 3 loss in which Duncan was held scoreless in the third quarter and committed three turnovers in the last quarter, Duncan bounced back with 28 points and 18 rebounds in a Game 4 win,[31] and in Game 5, the Spurs protected a 78–77 lead seconds from the end with the ball in the Knicks' possession. Double teamed by Duncan and Robinson, Knicks swingman Latrell Sprewell missed a last-second desperation shot,[31] and after closing out the series with a strong 31-point and 9-rebound showing in Game 5, Duncan was named Finals MVP, bringing San Antonio their first-ever NBA championship.[32] The accolades for the Spurs soon arrived, with Sports Illustrated reporting that the San Antonio "monkey has been shed", and that the Spurs were no longer known as the "San Antonio softies". The magazine praised Finals MVP Duncan, who was later quoted: "This is incredible. We kept our focus and we pulled it out."[32] Sports Illustrated journalist and retired NBA player Alex English added: "Duncan came up big each time they went to him with that sweet turnaround jumper off the glass. He was the man tonight [in Game 5]." And Popovich later said to losing coach Jeff Van Gundy: "I've got Tim [Duncan] and you don't. That's the difference."[32]
In the 1999–2000 season, Duncan further cemented his reputation. He averaged 23.2 points, 12.4 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.2 blocks per game, earned another pair of All-NBA and All-Defense First Team call-ups, and was co-MVP with Shaquille O'Neal of the NBA All-Star Game.[3] However, the Spurs had a disappointing post-season. Duncan injured his meniscus shortly before the end of the regular season and was unable to play in even one post-season game.[5] Consequently, the Spurs were eliminated in the first round of the 2000 NBA Playoffs, losing 3–1 to the Phoenix Suns.[33] Nonetheless, Duncan rebounded in the next season, and with strong regular-season averages of 22.2 points, 12.2 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.3 blocks, earned himself yet another pair of All-NBA and All-Defensive First Team call-ups.[3] In the 2001 NBA Playoffs, the Spurs eliminated the Timberwolves 3–1, defeated the Dallas Mavericks 4–1, but then bowed out against the Lakers led by superstars Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, losing in four straight games.[34] Sports Illustrated described the series as a "[m]erciless mismatch", and Duncan was criticized as "silent when the Spurs need him most".[35]
On the back of two consecutive playoff disappointments, Duncan improved statistically in the 2001–02 season. He averaged career highs in scoring (25.5 points per game, including a league-leading 764 field goals and 560 attempted free throws) and rebounding (12.7 boards per game, and his accumulated 1042 boards again led the league), and also averaged 3.7 assists and 2.5 blocks per game, both career highs.[3] Coupled with another pair of All-NBA and All-Defensive First Team call-ups, he was named the league's Most Valuable Player, joining teammate David Robinson as the only Spurs members to earn the honor.[36] On the other hand, Duncan's team struggled with the fact that the aging Robinson was no longer able to sustain his level of performance, and backup center-forward Malik Rose had to step in more often.[7] In the 2002 NBA Playoffs, the Spurs were again outmatched by the Lakers. Up against star center O'Neal once more, the Spurs were defeated 4–1 by the eventual champions.[37] Duncan, who managed 34 points and a franchise-high 25 rebounds in Game 5, stated his frustration: "I thought we really had a chance at this series. The Lakers proved to be more than we could handle. Again, we had a (heck) of a run at it. We had opportunities to win games and make it a different series, but that's just the way the ball rolls sometimes."[38] Nevertheless, NBA.com praised Duncan as "phenomenal" and criticized his supporting cast, stating Duncan "made 11-of-23 shots and 12-of-14 free throws, adding four assists and two blocks [a]nd once again, he did not have enough help."[38] Also, Robinson said "Tim [Duncan] was like Superman out there", and conceded that the Lakers were simply better, just like in the last playoffs campaign.[38]
The 2002–03 season saw Duncan enjoy another standout season in which he averaged 23.3 points, a career-high 12.9 rebounds, 3.9 assists and 2.9 blocks per game, and yet another dual All-NBA and All-Defense First Team call-up, resulting in his second NBA Most Valuable Player Award.[3][7] At age 37, Robinson announced that year as his last season, and his playing time was cut by coach Popovich to save his energy for the playoffs.[7] The Spurs qualified easily for the playoffs, concluding the regular season as the Conference number one seed with a 60–22 record.[39] Although San Antonio now had new offensive threats in Tony Parker and Manu Ginóbili, during the playoffs, it was Duncan's performance in the semi-finals against the Los Angeles Lakers which was singled out for praise by Popovich, who stated: "I thought in Game 5 and Game 6, he [Duncan] was astounding in his focus. He pulled everyone along these last two games."[40] In the series, Duncan was matched up against forward Robert Horry, and was able to dominate him the entire series[40] and closed out the series in style; Duncan finished Game 6 with 37 points and 16 rebounds, allowing Spurs coach Popovich to call timeout with 2:26 left to instruct his team not to celebrate excessively.[40] The Spurs made it to the finals, and defeated the New Jersey Nets 88–77 in Game 6 to win another NBA championship.[41] Helped by an inspired Robinson, Duncan almost recorded a quadruple double in the final game,[42] and was named the NBA Finals MVP.[5] Duncan said of the victory: "We were all confident that something would happen, that we would turn the game to our favor, and it did", but felt sad that Robinson retired after winning his second championship ring.[42] Following this successful Spurs campaign, Robinson and Duncan were named Sports Illustrated's 2003 "Sportsmen of the Year".[43]
Leader of the Spurs (2003–2007) [ edit ]
Before the 2003–04 season began, the Spurs lost their perennial captain David Robinson to retirement. Embracing the lone team leader role, Duncan led a reformed Spurs team which included Slovenian center Rasho Nesterovič, defensive stalwart Bruce Bowen, Argentinian shooting guard Ginóbili and young French point guard Parker. Coming off the bench were clutch shooting power forward Robert Horry, versatile Hedo Türkoğlu and veterans Malik Rose and Kevin Willis.[44] In retrospect, Robinson commented that at first, Duncan was reluctant to step into the void, still needing some time to truly develop his leadership skills.[45] Statistically though, Duncan remained strong; after another convincing season with averages of 22.3 points, 12.4 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 2.7 blocks,[3] he led the Spurs into the Western Conference Semifinals. There, they met the Los Angeles Lakers again, split the series 2–2, and in Game 5, Duncan made a toughly defended jump shot which put the Spurs ahead by one point with 0.4 seconds left to play. Despite the little time remaining, Lakers point guard Derek Fisher hit a buzzer beater for an upset Lakers win.[46][47] In the end, the Spurs lost the series 4–2, and Duncan attributed the strong Lakers defense as one of the reasons for the loss.[48]
Duncan and his Spurs looked to re-assert themselves in the next 2004–05 season. Despite their new captain's slight statistical slump (20.3 points, 11.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 2.6 blocks per game),[3] the Spurs won the second seed for the 2005 NBA Playoffs by winning 59 games.[49] In the first round, the Spurs eliminated the Denver Nuggets four games to one, and met the Seattle SuperSonics in the semi-finals. After splitting the first four games, Duncan led his team to two decisive victories,[7] setting up a meeting with the Phoenix Suns, known for their up-tempo basketball. The Spurs managed to beat the Suns at their own game, defeating them 4–1[7] and earning a spot in the 2005 NBA Finals against the Detroit Pistons. In the Finals, Duncan was pitted against Detroit's defensively strong frontcourt anchored by multiple NBA Defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace. After two convincing Game 1 and 2 wins for the Spurs, the Pistons double teamed Duncan and forced him to play further from the basket.[7] Detroit won the next two games and the series was eventually tied at 3–3, but Duncan was instrumental in Game 7, recording 25 points and 11 rebounds as the Spurs defeated the Pistons.[50] NBA.com reported that "with his unique multidimensional talent, Duncan depleted and dissected the Pistons... He was the fulcrum of virtually every key play down the stretch", and coach Popovich added: "[Duncan's] complete game is so sound, so fundamental, so unnoticed at times, because if he didn't score, people think, 'Well, he didn't do anything'. But he was incredible and he was the force that got it done for us."[50] Pistons center Ben Wallace remarked: "He put his team on his shoulders and carried them to a championship [...t]hat's what the great players do."[50] Duncan won his third NBA Finals MVP Award, joining Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, and Magic Johnson as the only players in NBA history to win it three times.[5]
During the 2005–06 season, Duncan suffered from plantar fasciitis for most of the season,[51] which was at least partly responsible for his sinking output (18.6 points, 11.0 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.0 blocks per game), and also for his failure to make the All-NBA First Team after eight consecutive appearances.[3] The big man came back strong in the 2006 NBA Playoffs against the Dallas Mavericks, where he outscored rival power forward Dirk Nowitzki 32.2 to 27.1 points, with neither Nowitzki nor Mavericks center Erick Dampier able to stop Duncan with their man-to-man defense.[52] But after splitting the first six games, Duncan became the tragic hero of his team in Game 7. Despite scoring 39 points in regulation time and fouling out both Dampier and Keith Van Horn, Duncan only made one of seven field goal attempts in overtime against Mavericks reserve center DeSagana Diop, and the Spurs lost Game 7.[52]
The following season, however, was another championship year for Duncan and the Spurs. Duncan averaged 20.0 points, 10.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.4 blocks per game in the regular season,[3] and was selected as a Western Conference starter for the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, his ninth appearance in the event. In the playoffs, he led the Spurs to a 4–1 series win over the Denver Nuggets in the opening round of the 2007 NBA Playoffs, a 4–2 win over the Phoenix Suns in the second round, and a 4–1 win against the Utah Jazz in the Western Conference Finals, setting up a meeting with the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals.[53] There, the Spurs swept the Cavaliers 4–0, earning Duncan his and San Antonio's fourth ever championship.[54] Duncan proclaimed that that championship was "the best" of his four championships; however, he also acknowledged he played "sub-par" and thus received only one vote for NBA Finals MVP from a panel of ten.[45] His colleagues were more appreciative of Duncan; among others, ex-teammate David Robinson referred to the Spurs titles as the "Tim Duncan era", and lauded his leadership. Coach Popovich also praised Duncan: "Tim is the common denominator. He's [had] a different cast around him [in] '99, '03 and '05. He's welcomed them all. [...] But he is that easy to play with, and his skills are so fundamentally sound that other people can fit in."[45] Then-NBA commissioner David Stern added: "[Duncan] is a player for the ages. I'm a tennis fan, and Pete Sampras is one of the greats. OK, he wasn't Andre Agassi or John McEnroe. He just happens to be one of the greatest players of all time. You take great players as you find them."[45]
Playoff disappointments (2007–2013) [ edit ]
During the 2008 NBA All-Star Weekend, Duncan was a member of the San Antonio team that won the Shooting Stars Competition.[55] For the season, he played 78 games and posted his typical 20/10 numbers,[56] San Antonio concluded the 2007–08 regular season with a 56–26 record, finishing behind the Lakers and New Orleans Hornets in the Western Conference and setting up themselves for a first-round contest against the Suns. The Suns—defeated by the Spurs in three of the past four seasons of playoffs—were out for revenge and featured a new player in four-time NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal. In Game 1, Duncan set the tone with a 40-point game and a rare three-pointer that sent the game into double overtime.[57] The trio of Duncan, Ginóbili and Parker continued playing to form for the remainder of the series, and the Spurs eliminated the Suns in five games.[58] In the first game of the next round against the Chris Paul-led Hornets, San Antonio was badly defeated 101–82 as Duncan played one of the worst playoff games in his career, recording only 5 points and 3 rebounds.[59] The Spurs dropped the next game as well, but recovered in Games 3 and 4, with Duncan putting up a team-high 22 point/15 rebound/4 block performance in the game that tied the series.[60] Duncan then recorded 20 points and 15 rebounds in Game 6,[61] and the Spurs relied on their experience to seal the series in Game 7.[62] However, arch-rivals Los Angeles Lakers defeated San Antonio in five games in the Conference Finals, and the Spurs once again failed to capture back-to-back NBA championships.[63]
Duncan defending in the key against the Milwaukee Bucks in 2008
Duncan started the 2008–09 season with strong showings in points and rebounds per game. However, by mid-season, his performance declined and he was subsequently diagnosed with chronic knee tendinosis.[64] Despite Duncan having problems with his knee and the team losing the services of shooting guard Ginóbili for most of the season, San Antonio qualified for the playoffs as the third seed with a 54–28 record.[65][66] Coupled with an aging supporting cast (Bowen, Michael Finley and Kurt Thomas were all in their late 30s), however, the Spurs were only considered fringe contenders for the championship.[66] As it turned out, Duncan and Parker were not enough to help the Spurs avoid a 4–1 defeat by Dallas, and the Spurs were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the first time since 2000.[67]
With the Spurs looking to provide a more solid supporting cast in the 2009–10 season, they acquired Richard Jefferson, Theo Ratliff, Antonio McDyess, DeJuan Blair, and Keith Bogans.[68] The team got off to a 5–6 start, but a series of double double performances by Duncan gave them a 9–6 record by the end of November. Duncan was subsequently named the Western Conference Player of the Week for the last week of November.[69] Even at 34 years of age, he remained a constant 20–10 threat, being only one of three players in the league at the mid-season to average at least 20 points and 10 rebounds a game. On January 21, 2010, Duncan was named as the starting forward for the West for the 2010 NBA All-Star Game.[70] After securing yet another 50-win season, the Spurs qualified for the playoffs as the seventh seed, and defeated Dallas 4–2 in the first round, only to lose 4–0 to Phoenix in the next round.
Eleven games into the 2010–11 season, Duncan became the Spurs' all-time leader in points scored and games played.[71] Along the way, the Spurs compiled a 12-game winning streak to go 13–2 after 15 games. On November 30, 2010, Duncan recorded his third career triple-double against the Golden State Warriors.[72] 12 days later, in a game against the Portland Trail Blazers, Duncan became the 94th player in NBA history to play 1,000 games. Through his 1,000th game, the Spurs have been 707–293; only Scottie Pippen (715–285) had a better record with his team through his first 1,000 games.[73] The Spurs were 29–4 after 33 games—one of the ten best starts in NBA history[74]–and led the league at 35–6 halfway through the season.[75] Although Duncan produced career-lows in points and rebounds per game, the Spurs ended the regular season as the first seed in the West for the 2011 NBA Playoffs, and were second in the league (to Chicago). Despite finishing with a 61–21 record, however, the Spurs could not avoid being upset in the first round, 4–2, by the eighth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies.
Duncan as an All-Star for the West, 2011
The Spurs again finished the 2011–12 season as the number one seed in the West—it was a lockout-shortened 66-game season—tying with the Chicago Bulls for a league-best 50–16 record. Prior to a game against the Philadelphia 76ers on March 24, 2012, head coach Gregg Popovich decided to give Duncan a night off by listing him on the official scorecard as "DNP-OLD", poking fun at his 36-year-old body.[76] Overall, Duncan's numbers remained at par with the previous season. The triumvirate of Duncan-Parker-Ginóbili entered the 2012 NBA Playoffs well-rested and healthy, and the Spurs swept the Utah Jazz and the Los Angeles Clippers 4–0 in the first two rounds. On May 31, 2012, in the third game of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Duncan set the record for most career blocks in playoffs history, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Spurs' playoff run came to an end when the Thunder defeated them 4–2.
On July 11, 2012, Duncan agreed to re-sign with the Spurs. Helped by a supporting cast comprising Danny Green, Tiago Splitter, Gary Neal and Kawhi Leonard that had been maturing steadily over the last two seasons, Duncan and the Spurs would again make the playoffs with a 58–24 regular season record. Duncan also returned to the All-Star line-up and was named to the All-NBA First Team. He finished the regular season with 23,785 career points, which broke George Gervin's record for most points in a Spurs uniform (23,602). In the playoffs, the Spurs swept the Los Angeles Lakers, beat Golden State in six games and defeated the Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference Finals in a 4–0 sweep to reach the NBA Finals. In game 2 of the Western Conference Finals, Duncan recorded his 500th playoff block, becoming the first player in NBA history to reach that milestone, although the NBA did not track blocks prior to the 1973–74 season.[77][78] The Spurs met defending NBA champions Miami Heat in the NBA Finals in a tightly contested series. Miami had home court advantage, but San Antonio took the first game and headed into game 6 with a 3–2 lead. In that game, Duncan scored 25 points in the first half, his biggest haul in a half of an NBA Finals game. However, the Spurs lost the game in overtime, and then lost the deciding seventh game.
Fifth championship (2013–2014) [ edit ]
On December 2, 2013, Duncan became the oldest player to record a 20–20 game in NBA history, finishing with 23 points, 21 rebounds and the game-winning jump shot against the Atlanta Hawks. The Spurs went on to conclude the 2013–14 regular season with a league-best 62 wins. The Spurs defeated Dallas in seven games in the first round of the playoffs, Portland in five games in the conference semifinals, and Oklahoma City in six games, where game 6 went into overtime, as the Spurs won, 112–107. They set up a Finals rematch against the Miami Heat, which they won, 4–1, setting a record margin for a win in the NBA Finals, for games 3 and 4. Along the way, the Duncan-Ginóbili-Parker trio broke the record for most wins in NBA Playoffs history. After winning the Finals in five games, Duncan joined John Salley as the only players to win a championship in three different decades.[79]
Final years (2014–2016) [ edit ]
On June 23, 2014, Duncan exercised his $10.3 million player option for the 2014–15 season.[80][81] On November 14, 2014, Duncan scored his 25,000th point in the first half of the Spurs' 93–80 win over the Los Angeles Lakers, becoming the 19th player in NBA history to reach the milestone.[82] On February 19, 2015, he passed Alex English to move into 16th place on the NBA's all-time scoring list with 30 points against the Los Angeles Clippers.[83] On March 4, he recorded six rebounds against the Sacramento Kings, breaking his tie with Nate Thurmond for ninth in career rebounding.[84] Two days later, he recorded three blocks against the Denver Nuggets to surpass Patrick Ewing for sixth overall in career blocks.[85] On April 12, he played his 1,330th career game against the Phoenix Suns, which passed Moses Malone for 11th all-time. He also scored 22 points and passed Kevin Garnett to move into 14th place on the NBA's all-time scoring list.[86] The Spurs finished sixth in the Western Conference after 82 games and faced the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round of the playoffs. Their quest for back-to-back championships was ended May 2 as they lost to the Clippers in seven games.[87] Duncan was later named to the All-Defensive second team on May 20 for the seventh time in his career.[88]
On July 9, 2015, Duncan re-signed with the Spurs to a two-year deal.[89] On November 2, 2015, in a win over the New York Knicks, Duncan recorded 16 points, 10 rebounds and six assists in his NBA-record 954th victory with one team, surpassing John Stockton's 953 wins with the Utah Jazz.[90] On November 11, he pulled down rebound number 14,716 for his career against the Portland Trail Blazers to pass Robert Parish for seventh place on the NBA's all-time rebounding list.[91] On November 14, in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers, Duncan had five blocked shots to become the Spurs' franchise leader with 2,955 blocks, surpassing former teammate |
led by a pillared corridor.
Some other monuments and structures at the temples are:
The Thousand Pillar Mandapam
Swami Sundareswarar Shrine
Unjal And Kilikatti Mandapas
Oonjal Mandapam
These religious monuments and structures in the temples are said to be worth admiring for their beautiful carvings and sculptures and a must visit place at least once in a lifetime!
Source:http://maduraimeenakshitemple.com/article/id/176/ashta-shakthi-mandapamThe EU is investing and supporting infrastructure that is needed to unite the energy markets. Today, the European Commission has allocated €187.5 million for the construction of the Balticconnector, the first Estonia-Finland gas pipeline. The Balticconnector will end the gas isolation of Finland and develop the Baltic regional gas market. It contributes to solidarity and security of supply in the entire Baltic region.
Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Cañete said: "Diversifying energy sources and routes, and uniting the energy markets, is at the heart of the Energy Union. This is key to ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable energy for all EU citizens. What the Commission has started with the Poland-Lithuania pipeline (GIPL) we are now pursuing with the support to Balticconnector – promoting a chain of projects that will end the gas isolation of north-Eastern Europe and develop the Baltic regional energy market".
The EU’s financial support to the Balticconnector comes from the Connecting Europe Facility program and corresponds to 75% of the needed funding. The pipeline will be constructed jointly by Baltic Connector Oy (Finland) and Elering AS (Estonia) and it will include Finnish onshore (22 km) and offshore (80 km) sections, as well as an Estonian onshore (50 km) one. The pipeline is expected to be operational by December 2019. Till 2020 a total of €5.35 billion is allocated to European priority projects under Connecting Europe.“In the younger population, there is a much wider range in the geography and ethnicity of those who are identifying as L.G.B.T.,” Dr. Gates said, using a common term for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. That range now extends well beyond major cities and into multiple swing states.
As Republicans plan to reach out to Hispanics and Asian-Americans, another question is whether they would also help themselves by improving their standing among gay voters. Some analysts say Republicans should try to do so, in part to win over moderate straight voters, while others see any such effort as having more risk than upside.
Research by Patrick J. Egan, a professor of politics and public policy at New York University, suggests that gay voters may prove difficult to bring into the Republican tent. Many of them “aren’t swingable because they have liberal positions on a whole bunch of issues besides gay rights,” Dr. Egan said.
Photo
Exit polls showed that 76 percent of voters who identified as gay supported Mr. Obama last week, and that 22 percent supported Mr. Romney. Among straight people, each candidate received 49 percent of the vote.
If Republican candidates move to the center on gay rights, they might also risk losing support among cultural conservatives.
“I think it would be a mistake for the party to abandon its moral values,” said J. Hogan Gidley, the national communications director for Rick Santorum ’s 2012 presidential run. Instead, Mr. Gidley said, the Republican Party ’s low levels of support among gay voters can be outweighed by better messaging to other voters, particularly about same-sex marriage.
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“We’ve lost the buzzword battle,” Mr. Gidley said, “that marriage is a ‘right.’ ”
Other Republican strategists, however, say that their party’s stances on social issues like marriage are alienating straight voters, too.
Public support for same-sex marriage and civil unions has climbed steadily since 2004. Recent polls show that support for same-sex marriage now outweighs opposition to it. Surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life have shown that women and younger people support same-sex marriage at substantially higher rates than do men and older voters.
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“We have a very good message, a good plan,” said R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group that pushes for gay rights, referring to the Republican Party’s small-government agenda. “But it’s been drowned out by the cacophony and the noise that is perceived as anti-immigrant, or anti-L.G.B.T., or anti-women.”
While polls show that a large majority of Republicans oppose same-sex marriage, there are small signs of a shift in tone among Republican officeholders. When Mr. Obama endorsed same-sex marriage in May, the response from Republican leaders was relatively muted.
Republicans in Congress “will tell me behind closed doors that this is the direction we need to go as a party,” Mr. Cooper said, “but publicly they’re not doing that.”
If the Republican Party does not make inroads among gay voters along with other minority groups, he said, the party risks going the way of the Whigs or becoming a regional party.
Mr. Romney’s loss, Mr. Cooper said, is a sign that broadening the party’s appeal is imperative. “There’s nothing fun about saying ‘I told you so,’ ” he added.Sure, these rules seem obvious—but in days past, they were challenged enough that officials added them to the rulebooks anyway.
1. Runners cannot run the bases backwards [Rule 7.01, 7.02, 7.08(i)]
Considering the purpose of a baserunner is to advance safely to home plate, running the bases in reverse seems nonsensical. However, the silly antics of Germany Schaefer, a journeyman infielder in the early 1900s, forced officials to put this rule in the book.
On August 4, 1911, Schaefer stole second, intending to draw a throw from the catcher to allow his teammate—Clyde Milan, who was on third—to steal home. However, the opposing catcher held the ball, keeping Milan struck at third. Hoping to recreate the play, Schaefer looked to steal again. This time, the only option was to steal first.
On the next pitch, he took off for first, but a double steal still didn't materialize; the catcher was too surprised to make the throw. The opposing player-manager ran onto the field to argue and amid the chaos Milan finally took off for home plate, where he was thrown out.
This wasn't the first time Schaefer attempted a double steal by regression, but the 1911 stunt received more publicity. It took until 1920, but the sport's officials finally passed a rule prohibiting such actions, which remains to this day. Now, if a player runs the bases in reverse order, he is automatically out.
2. No substitutions may be made while the ball is in play [Rule 3.03]
Rule 3.03 clearly states that substitutions can only take place when the ball is dead, prompting the question of why anyone would think to change players in the chaos of live action. The rule was instituted after an alert play by Michael Joseph “King” Kelly, a popular catcher-outfielder in the 1880s.
While he was sitting on the bench one day in 1891, an opposing batter hit a high foul ball that Kelly immediately recognized would be out of the reach of all of his teammates. Kelly, a player-manager, quickly jumped up and went after it, calling “Kelly now catching!” He made the catch, but the umpire refused to call the out. Kelly argued that the play was not against the rules, which at the time stated that substitutions could be made at any time.
That winter, the rules were changed to officially prevent such a play.
3. Umpires are prohibited from conferring with players or spectators [Rule 9.04(c)]
While the home team probably embraced such conferences with wide-eyed innocence (“What, our fans could make a biased call? Never!”), baseball officially banned umpires from conferring with players or people in the crowd in 1882. The rule overturned one from 1876 that allowed an umpire to confer with whomever he pleased if he or she had been unable to see a play. The practice of employing only a single umpire had necessitated such a rule. By 1882, however, the idea of a staff of umpires was becoming more popular, negating the need for assistance from players or fans. Presumably, the type of assistance spectators offered also probably did little to help matters.
4. Runners must touch each base [Rule 7.02, 7.04(d)]
It is not unusual to see ballplayers called out for failing to touch a base before advancing, and few fans would question why they are required to do so in the first place. Before the Civil War, that was only an unofficial requirement, and base runners did their best to take advantage of it. What started as just cutting corners soon devolved into making little effort to get near the bag at all when legging out an extra base hit. In 1864, the requirement became an official rule.
5. Base coaches are prohibited from running the bases while the ball is in play [Rule: 4.05(b)]
In the early days of the game, teams often tried to make fielders mistake a base coach for a runner. For example, in an 1886 game against Detroit, Chicago base coach Mike Kelly ran out to the shortstop position to provide a distraction for his runner. The introduction of coaches’ boxes the following year helped curb the tactic, but they failed to entirely eliminate it.
In 1890, George Smith, coaching for Brooklyn, ran down the third baseline in front of his runner, causing the catcher to mistakenly tag him while the baserunner slid in safely. After a long argument, the umpire ruled the baserunner out. A 1904 rule change finally prohibited the practice altogether.
6. An umpire is permitted to put a new baseball in play whenever he deems it necessary [Rule 3.01(e)]
In an era where major league teams go through nearly 1 million baseballs in a season, spelling this out seems completely unnecessary. In 1886, however, the idea was revolutionary. Prior to that year, the umpire had to give the teams five minutes to find a lost ball before he could supply a new one. Some especially frugal owners were unwilling to pay for the expense of a new ball and insisted that the search continue until the original ball was found.
While the wording has shifted some in the modern era, the rules still stipulate that the umpire has access to a supply of alternate balls that will last for the whole game, implying the umpire’s power to introduce them into play.
7. A fielder is not permitted to catch a ball with his cap [Rule 7.04(e), 7.05]
Although it's in place to keep fielders from using caps and other articles of clothing to make catches, this rule had to undergo various changes so it wouldn't be an advantage to the defensive team. The 1857 rules stated that if a player caught a ball with his cap, no opposing player could be put out until the pitcher had touched the ball.
The Boston Red Stockings turned this rule to their advantage on September 14, 1872, when the opposing team loaded the bases with no one out. The batter hit an easy popup to Boston shortstop George Wright, who deftly caught the ball with his cap, then tossed it to his pitcher. The pitcher threw it to the catcher, who tagged home plate and threw to third. Boston then applied tags to third base and second base before their opponents realized what was happening.
Although the Red Stockings argued for a triple play, the umpire refused to count the play at all. A clearer rule was established in 1873 and modified in 1874. Now, the runner is awarded the base if a fielder catches the ball with his cap.
8. Fielders are prohibited from doing jumping jacks while an opponent is batting [Rule 4.06(b)]
After Boston Braves batter Bob Elliott asked the second base umpire to move out of his line of vision on August 9, 1950, Giants second baseman Eddie Stanky saw the opportunity for a new distracting ploy. He moved to where the umpire had been standing and began to pace around, waving his arms and jumping up and down. He continued practicing his antics in subsequent games until umpires appealed to National League President Ford Frick, requesting a ruling on the legality of such actions.
Arguments for both sides became heated, until those against the practice expressed concern for the safety of hitters who become distracted during a pitch. Frick instructed umpires to eject fielders who employed jumping jacks or other annoying antics to distract the batsman, and his decision is preserved in the official rulebook to this day.
9. A batter was prohibited from deliberately striking out [Rule: 2.00]
The Sporting News called a deliberate strikeout on a wild pitch “one of the smartest schemes” in baseball at the turn of the 20th century. According to rules that are still in place, a batter becomes a runner that must be tagged or thrown out in the event of a swinging strikeout on a wild pitch. In an 1894 Southern League game, Abner Powell made it safely to second base after taking a mighty swing at a pitch he saw was going to go behind his back. The vast amount of foul territory behind home plate allowed the runner to take multiple bases before the catcher could collect the errant pitch. Eleven years later, in a Major League game between Detroit and Cleveland, Cleveland hitter Bill Bradley did the same thing. Before Detroit catcher Lew Drill could recover a pitch that sailed ten feet wide of the plate, Bradley had made it safely to second base.
A set of rules for baseball in 1868 and 1872 prohibited “willfully strik[ing] at balls for the purpose of striking out.” While no longer specifically banned, the official rules still address such a situation in Rule 2.00. However, getting to second base on a swinging strike three would be difficult in modern ballparks, since the amount of foul territory behind home plate has been vastly reduced in an effort to get fans closer to the game.
10. Baserunners are not permitted to continue running after they have been called out [Rule 7.09]
On June 17, 1926, the Cubs loaded the bases against Brooklyn in the sixth inning with one out. With right fielder Jimmy Cooney on first, Joe Kelly hit a grounder to Brooklyn first baseman Babe Herman, who threw it to his shortstop, Rabbit Maranville, to begin the double play. Maranville’s return throw was wild, however, and the Chicago runners continued to advance. The Brooklyn pitcher retrieved the ball and tried to gun down the runner he saw heading toward home plate. The runner peeled off for his dugout before he reached the plate, forcing the catcher, Mickey O’Neil, to follow him to apply the tag for the third out.
That runner, however, was none other than Jimmy Cooney, who had been the second out of the inning. The home plate umpire could think of nothing in the rules that prohibited such a play, and he ruled that the inning must continue. Cooney’s ploy had allowed Kelly to advance to third, and Chicago tacked on two more runs that inning.
No sportswriter of the era could recall a similar play, and it would fall under questionable legality today. Rule 7.09 stipulates that no member of the offensive team can take actions to confuse, hinder, or impede the fielders, but also stresses that a runner continuing to advance after being called out cannot by that act alone be called for interference. The result of such a play today, then, would depend entirely on the umpires’ judgment.
11. Fielders are prohibited from throwing potatoes or other objects while the ball is in play [Rule 9.01(c)]
From the early days of the sport, players have tried to deceive base runners through a plethora of tricks. One common example was when basemen would wildly throw small white objects to trick runners into thinking they had thrown the ball away. They would then calmly tag the runner with the real ball if he was deceived and left the base.
Potatoes, especially those peeled, frozen, and whitewashed, were a favorite. Umpires never tolerated the trick, even when players went to great lengths to excuse it. A catcher in the Evangeline League in 1934 tagged two runners out who tried to score after he launched a potato into the outfield, but the umpire called them safe and refused to accept his explanation that he had simply found the potato and was trying to get it off the field of play. An 1889 member of the Staten Island Athletic Club learned the hard way that the hidden-potato trick was not allowed in college ball, either, when he was asked to resign from the club after he employed the ruse and the umpire ruled the runner safe in a game against Yale.
Minor league catcher Dave Bresnahan tried to revive the old trick on August 31, 1987, but the umpire ruled the runner safe. The next day, the Indians fined and then released Bresnahan. While nothing in the rulebook actually prohibits throwing potatoes, each time it has occurred, the umpires have ruled it to be illegal under rule 9.01(c), which allows umpires to make a ruling for anything not covered in the rulebook.
12. Fielders are not permitted to blow a ball foul [Rule 9.01(c)]
In a 2012 Spring Training game, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Jerry Hairston fell to his knees and attempted to blow a slow dribbler foul. His attempt was unsuccessful, but sportswriters immediately harkened back to a similar play Seattle third baseman Lenny Randle had made on May 28, 1981.
Randle successfully blew the ball into foul territory and Larry McCoy, the home plate umpire, called the ball foul, but reversed his decision after Kansas City manager Jim Frey argued. Evoking his powers from rule 9.01(c), he declared that Randle had illegally altered the course of the ball. His ruling set a precedent, making the play unofficially illegal ever since.
Randle had not been the first to try such a stunt, though. Bert Haas, a member of the Montreal Royals of the International League, had tried the same thing on a suicide squeeze in a 1940 game. When Haas realized he would not be able to throw out either runner, he began his efforts to blow the ball. Just before the ball reached third base, it rolled foul. The umpire ruled the runner had to return to third and the batter back to the plate. Strangely, the opposing team did not protest the decision. After the game, however, International League President Frank Shaughnessy issued a statement that no player would be permitted to blow a ball foul after that.
While knowledge of Shaughnessy’s ruling may have spared Randle the inclusion in many sports blooper reels, McCoy’s 1981 ruling set a precedent at the Major League level that such a play would not be tolerated today, even though it is not in the rule book.
Additional sources: The Giant Book of Strange but True Sports Stories; A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations that Shaped Baseball: The Game Behind the Scenes (Vol. 2); Baseball Almanac.Where Are They Now? Josh Anthon
Former professional is serving a four-year prison sentence.
How can someone have the desire and talent to compete at the highest levels of disc golf, and then not even play a one-day C-tier tournament? In “Where Are They Now?” Ultiworld Disc Golf staff writer Robert Leonard seeks to find out, as he looks at players who once toured, had success, or made a splash in the disc golf world and now don’t even compete at a local level.
Editor’s note: The author of this article is the chair of the PDGA’s discipline committee.
With the Professional Disc Golf Association National Tour residing on the West Coast for a few weeks, one name you won’t find on any of the tournament registration lists is Josh Anthon.
For someone who lives in California and has won more than $100,000 in his career, this is quite the shocker. The reason for him not competing at these events, though, is as simple as it is sad.
On November 5, 2013, Anthon was involved in an incident that resulted in the death of 55-year-old Michael Anderson. According to Sacramento news station KCRA, witnesses described an argument between Anderson and the occupants of a recreational vehicle, the driver of which turned out to be Anthon. After striking Anderson with the RV, Anthon left the scene, and a manhunt ensued that saw the former Innova Discs-sponsored player’s face plastered on television screens throughout the Sacramento area. Two days later, he turned himself in and faced second degree murder charges.
Anthon eventually pleaded no contest – which accepts punishment but does not admit guilt – to lesser charges and was sentenced to four years in a California state penitentiary, followed by three years of probation.
Now in the second year of his sentence at Folsom State Prison, Anthon returned a correspondence from Ultiworld Disc Golf, and the story he shares is one of reflection and rehabilitation.
***
Regardless of your opinion on the situation and on the player personally, there is one thing no one can dispute: Anthon is an amazingly talented disc golfer.
After being introduced to disc golf by his dad around the age of 8, it did not take Anthon long to realize that he had some serious talent for the sport.
“I remember being 9 or 10,” Anthon said in his four-page response. “I was at Hole 9 at Del Campo and I told my dad out of nowhere that I could be one of the best in the world if I wanted to.”
Anthon turned professional in 2001 and quickly won his first A-Tier tournament, the St. Patrick’s Day Open in Orangevale, California, in 2002. He would go on to amass 40 career victories, including 10 A-Tiers; four National Tour events; and a major, the 2007 World Doubles Championships with partner and good friend Steve Rico.
He ended up with a sponsorship from Innova and was one of the core players that stuck with the brand when many players shifted their affiliations to Prodigy Disc in early 2013. His allegiance was something of which Innova team manager Jonathan Poole was very proud.
“I always had a great deal of respect for Josh’s loyalty and authenticity,” Poole said. “He was enjoyable to work with, in part because you always knew exactly where the relationship stood.”
Anthon was always a threat to win anywhere he played. While he is one of the many players that never broke through and won a world championship or a United States Disc Golf Championship, he was always in the hunt.
“Josh was a tremendous competitor,” Poole said. “You just knew he was capable of shredding any course, at any time.”
Case in point: In 2009, Anthon was the first player to ever shoot below 54 at the USDGC’s Winthrop University Gold Course, and he has never finished worse than 18th place in nine USDGC appearances. From 2009-2011, he finished second at three consecutive PDGA Pro World Championships.
“I was ready to prove myself that round,” Anthon said of his record-setter at Winthrop. “I was playing with Avery [Jenkins] and I just started birdieing. I thought I maybe would win, but I came up just three short.”
That round came just three months after another memorable disc golf experience with Jenkins.
After shooting a first round 63 at the 2009 Pro Worlds, which found him ten strokes off Jenkins’ lead, Anthon charged back and tied Jenkins at the completion of the final 9. On the fifth hole of their playoff, Anthon yanked his tee shot right, missed a jump putt, and held his hands to his face in frustration. Jenkins then made his putt to claim his first world title.
“Josh was a great overall player and a contender at every event that he played, “ Jenkins said. “He rarely missed putts inside the circle, and, as we all know, if a player does that they have a great chance to win every event.”
While being on the cusp of a world championship and coming up short was a tough pill to swallow, time removed from the event has given Anthon an appreciation of his performance.
“It’s very hard to be that close and lose,” Anthon said. “It was even harder to take second at the next two world championships. Now looking back I’m happy to have played that [well].”
Those career highs, though, are balanced out by a more infamous mark, as Anthon continued to play – and play well, no less – in PDGA events while he awaited trial after his arrest. It was during this time, from June to October of 2014, that he attained one of the most dubious distinctions in disc golf’s history: undefeated while on bail.
Five wins, including three A-Tier victories, catapulted him back to the top of the sport and saw his PDGA rating reach 1043. If he were still a PDGA member in good standing – his membership expired at the end of 2014, and he has yet to receive formal discipline from the sport’s governing body – that mark would put him as the third highest-rated player in the world.
“I was just so happy to play while out on bail,” Anthon said. “I was blessed to be able to play, and I played with true appreciation.”
***
If there is one thing that prison has done for Anthon, it has certainly changed his perspective. Once frustrated with three consecutive runner-up finishes at Worlds, he’s now proud. Once a high school drop-out, he’s now educated.
To fill his time in prison, Anthon has chosen to better himself to, as he says, “take care of my family,” which includes wife Amanda and son Noah. Since entering Folsom on January 22, 2015, Anthon has completed his General Education Degree, while also attaining 13 welding certificates and working on another. He will be entering college in August.
Anthon has also become a Christian and said he gives all of the credit for the second chance he will receive on his release date to the Lord. He also plays catch and ultimate with fellow inmates.
“I talk about disc golf all the time,” Anthon said. “I tell some of the guys what I’ve done in disc golf and some believe me, but I’m sure most don’t.”
While seeing Anthon turn his life around may make this sound like a redemption story, it is difficult to forget about the incident that started this entire process.
When asked if he wanted to talk about the charges and his subsequent plea deal, Anthon only responded “maybe later.” His wife, Amanda, also declined to comment, stating that she had been advised not to discuss details of the case.
Innova’s statement on the situation, made on behalf of the company by Poole, was simply, “Our hearts were broken for Josh, his family, and the family of Michael Anderson.”
Fellow Sacramento-area native and touring professional Drew Gibson has remained in contact with Anthon throughout the duration of his legal ordeal. He talks to Anthon weekly and went to Folsom to see him in person.
“I visited Josh for many reasons,” Gibson said. “He has been a positive influence on my life since the day I met him. The least I can do is show him the same when he needs it most. He’s like family to me, and I know 100 percent if I was in his position, he’d be there for me like I am for him.”
That appreciation ran both ways. “It was awesome seeing Drew,” Anthon said. “I keep in touch with my disc golf friends.”
Ask any prison official or correctional official the purpose of prison, and the consistent word you will hear is not punishment, but rather rehabilitation. Incarceration is meant to make someone better than they were when they entered and to allow them to contribute to society upon release. Gibson feels that Anthon is accomplishing that end.
“He’s a new person compared to the Josh I’ve known for the last seven or so years,” Gibson said. “His outlook on life in general has really changed. He’s started to follow God and see things in different ways than he normally would have. I’d say, for the position he is in, he has taken it very well and made the best out of the not-so-ideal situation he has been in the last three years.”
Education, religion, and friends vouching for change are three positive steps once Anthon leaves Folsom prison. Will he ever set foot on a disc golf course again?
“Yes!!!” Anthon enthusiastically wrote.
And, from the viewpoint of the sport’s governing body, he will be allowed to renew his membership.
“Josh Anthon is simply a non-current member at this time,” PDGA Board of Directors President Rebecca Duffy said in an email. “If at some time in the future he should choose to renew his membership with the PDGA, we would accept it with open arms just as we do all membership renewals. The PDGA does not get involved in the legal issues of our members unless it is directly related to the organization or one of our sanctioned events.”
But for now, Anthon is not focusing on disc golf, his missed putt at the 2009 World Championships, or the series of events that put him in prison. The conclusion of his letter showed his mindset: “I got to get back to studying now.”Anti-flash white is a brilliant white colour commonly seen on British, Soviet, and U.S. nuclear bombers.[1] The purpose of the colour was to reflect some of the thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion, protecting the aircraft and its occupants.
China [ edit ]
Some variants of the Xian H-6 had the underside of the fuselage painted anti-flash white.
Soviet Union/Russia/Ukraine [ edit ]
Some nuclear bombers had the underside of the fuselage painted anti-flash white with the upper surfaces painted light silver-gray. This was true for the specially fitted, single Soviet Tu-95V bomber that test-deployed the most powerful bomb of any kind – the 50+ MT-rating Tsar Bomba on 30 October 1961 – as it had the anti-flash white on all its undersurfaces and sides.[2] The Tupolev Tu-160 of the 1980s was the first series-built Soviet/Russian bomber aircraft to be painted anti-flash white all over, leading to its Beliy Lebed ("White Swan") Russian nickname.[3]
United Kingdom [ edit ]
Anti-flash white was used on the Royal Air Force V bombers force and the Royal Navy Blackburn Buccaneer when used in the nuclear strike role. Nuclear bombers were given – though not at first, until the problem was considered – salmon pink and baby blue roundels and fin flash rather than the traditional dark red, white and blue.
Anti-flash white was applied to several prototype aircraft, including the British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2. Paint used on the Avro Vulcan was manufactured by Cellon, and that on the Handley Page Victor by Titanine Ltd.[4]
United States [ edit ]
Many Strategic Air Command nuclear bombers carried anti-flash white without insignia on the underside of the fuselage with light silver-gray or natural metal (later light camouflage) on the upper surfaces.[citation needed]
The United States Navy A-5 Vigilante carried anti-flash white without insignia on the underside of the fuselage.[citation needed]
The Boeing E-6 in TACAMO role was painted anti-flash white but its roundels were not subdued.[citation needed]
Aircraft [ edit ]
In addition to these military aircraft, Concorde was painted white to reduce the additional heating effect on the aluminium skin caused by the sun whilst the aircraft was flying at high altitudes, the skin temperature already being raised to over 90 °C (194 °F) at Mach 2 by aerodynamic heating.
Aircraft with at least part of the fuselage painted anti-flash white on nuclear delivery variants:
Canada
China
Soviet Union/ Russia/ Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]A 2007 study commissioned by Congress found that students in abstinence programs were just as likely as those in a comparison group to have sex over the next four to six years; 49 percent in both groups remained abstinent. Those who had become sexually active had a similar number of partners, whether they had been through abstinence education or not, said Christopher Trenholm of Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J., the study’s author.
“There was no effect at all,” Mr. Trenholm said. “The bottom line finding is that there was no evidence the programs were effective at delaying initiation of sexual intercourse, or changing or reducing the number of sexual partners they had.”
Photo
(The study also found similar use of condoms in both groups of students, suggesting that the abstinence programs’ messages on risks did little to deter their use.)
Of the 19 million new sexually transmitted infections each year, almost half are in the age group 15 to 24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a recent study found that 1 in 4 teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease. And while teenage pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, the United States still has one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancy in the developed world, with more than 400,000 births to teenagers each year.
Another evaluation found that there was not enough evidence to say whether abstinence education was effective at preventing pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases like H.I.V. That review was issued in 2009 by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, which consisted of a panel of experts appointed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Abstinence education will not vanish under the new health care law. Alongside the money for PREP is about $50 million a year for abstinence programs. Unlike the sex-education grants, however, the abstinence funds will have to be matched by the states, at the rate of $3 for every $4 they receive from the federal government.
Proponents of abstinence-only education warn that the sex education initiative will earn President Obama the wrath of parents.
“Over 90 percent of parents want kids to be taught to abstain until they at least finish high school, and the comprehensive education curricula don’t do that — they pretty much normalize teen sexual activity,” said Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research group. “They contain very explicit sexual material.”
But Randa Dean, associate director of adult education at Planned Parenthood of New York City, said many of the parents she works with were disappointed at how little sex education their children were receiving through the school system.
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“Most come in saying, ‘Oh, they’re getting it in school, so I don’t really have to talk about this,’ ” she said. “When they hear most kids are not getting sex ed in school, they get really nervous and want to make sure their kids are safe.”The blood of protesters in the Maidan, Kiev
Severely beaten and many close to death, scores of injured lay across Kiev’s Mariinsky park as temperatures hovered well below freezing.
Earlier that day, the 19th of January, tensions between authorities and anti-government protesters had escalated. Angered by the draconian laws introduced by embattled president Viktor Yanukovych – dubbed the "dictator laws" for their restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly – thousands of demonstrators rallied in Kiev, while opposition leaders called for the crowds to ignore the new legislation.
It wasn't long before a pitched battle kicked off between poorly armed activists and the government’s elite police units, the "Berkut". The cops were supported by hundreds of sportswear-clad thugs (known as the "titushki"), who were hired by Yanukovych’s regime to coerce and intimidate crowds. At that point, the day's clashes were the biggest display of violence the two-month Euromaidan demonstrations had seen.
Marina
In the centre of the park was Marina, a 25-year-old English teacher who abandoned the new life she'd created for herself in the Netherlands when she saw reports of the demonstrations and the state-sponsored violence that surrounded them. Returning home in mid-December, she had joined the protest camp on Hrushevskoho Street, where she volunteered as a medical assistant with the Maidan self defence force's "5th Squad".
Protesters at the barricades were loosely organised into groups of about a hundred, known – logically – as the "hundreds". The 5th Squad had suffered heavily during the clashes, forcing some to disperse, while others lay around Marina, screaming in agony.
"We have to evacuate them – can you not see they’re injured?" Marina begged police and titushki. But they refused. And when she persisted, she was met with a tirade of vile abuse. "You bitch! You fucking whore!" they screamed at her, before joking and laughing about all the casualties they had caused
Despite their threats, however, she persisted, all the while fearing that her fiancé, Igor – the 5th Squad’s 28-year-old second-in-command – was among the wounded. An Orthodox priest later joined her in her pleas, and eventually the injured were allowed to be removed from the park. Covered head-to-toe in dirt and stained with the blood of the injured, Marina left too and headed down into the Maidan.
She told me about the events in a matter-of-fact way, but the lines on her face illustrated exactly how exhausted she was from the weeks of consistent violence. "When you feel so strongly like this, it's not bravery," she said. "You do what you have to do."
Sergei
Sergei, a |
pleasure. Tail-wagging certainly does express a strong state of emotion, much like a smile does in people. However, just like a human smile, a dog’s wagging tail does not necessarily reflect happiness or something positive. Dogs frequently wag their tails when they are agitated, irritated, tense, anxious, annoyed, frightened, angry or aggressive. Interestingly, researchers have found that dogs do not normally wag their tails when they are alone, even if they apparently are happy or are in a pleasant situation. Tail-wagging seems to be a behavior that is reserved for times when the dog is in the company of others.
#5 Cats have nine lives
The Myth: Cats have nine lives.
The Origin: This myth probably stems from the fact that cats are very supple and resilient animals, even when they are ill or injured. Cats have a keen ability to get out of situations that would probably be the death of lesser animals. There are many reports of cats surviving for lengthy periods of time in very harsh conditions, even without easily accessible food or water. The related myth that cats always land on their feet may also contribute to the myth that cats have nine lives. Nine is considered by many to be a lucky number. In some cultures, the myth is that cats have seven lives. Either way, cats are considered to be lucky.
The Truth: Of course, cats do not “have nine lives.” Cats are mortal. However, they do tend to be very healthy, hearty animals that can take care of themselves in most any situation, whether indoors or out. They are nimble, intelligent and resourceful. But, like all other mammals, cats only have one life to live.
#6 A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s mouth
The Myth: A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a person’s mouth.
The Origin: Dog saliva was once believed to be antiseptic, and some people still believe it has healing properties. The basis for this belief is not known.
The Truth: A dog’s mouth is not “cleaner” than a person’s mouth. Dog saliva can be toxic to some bacteria, but it carries its own population of bacteria and other infectious organisms. That population is just different from the assortment of bacteria and other “germs” in the human mouth, based largely upon differences in diet. There is a reason for the term, “dog breath.” People with weakened immune systems and young children probably should not have direct contact with dog or cat saliva.
#7 One year of a dog’s life is equal to 7 years of a human’s life
The Myth: Dogs age 7 years for every one human year.
The Origin: The basis for this myth remains a mystery. It probably comes from simple math: an average life span for dogs is 10 to 12 years, and multiplying this by seven equals 70 to 74 years, roughly the average life span for people today.
The Truth: Contrary to popular belief, there is no exact formula to gauge how much a dog develops or ages in comparison to so-called “people years.” Aging is as individual for dogs as it is for people. Taking a dog’s age and multiplying it by 7 is an overly simplistic formula and does not reflect a dog’s actual developmental status. A more accurate rough guide is as follows:
Dog: Human 1 Year 15 Years 2 Years 24 Years 4 Years 32 Years 7 Years 45 Years 10 Years 56 Years 15 Years 76 Years 20 Years 98 Years
Of course, there is a distinct difference in aging between small dogs and giant breed dogs. Large dogs have a significantly shorter life span than do small dogs. Their development in the early years is about the same as other breeds; however, large and giant breed dogs developmentally are much older than smaller breeds in their later years, starting at about 7 years of age.
#8 You can’t teach an old dog new tricks
The Myth: Old dogs cannot learn new tricks.
The Origin: This myth probably started with someone who wasn’t able to get his older dog to sit, roll over, come or stay. It is one of the most common (albeit false) clichés about domestic dogs.
The Truth: You can teach an old dog new tricks. Dogs can learn new tricks, skills and commands within their physical capabilities until the day they pass away. What’s more, they usually want to learn. Their minds need stimulation, just like ours. With patience, kindness, persistence and consistency, owners can teach their older dogs all sorts of new tricks, such as sit, bark when the doorbell rings, fetch, lie down, roll over, play dead and shake or “high five.” As long as a dog is bright, alert, responsive and healthy, there is no reason that he cannot keep learning new things throughout his life.
#9 Cats purr because they are happy
The Myth: A purring cat is a happy cat.
The Origin: This myth, like many others, doesn’t have a precise origin. It probably comes from the fact that most cats do purr in the presence of their owners when they are being petted, which we interpret as a sign of happiness.
The Truth: Most cats do purr when they are happy. However, that is not the only time they purr. Cats will sometimes purr when they are sick, stressed, injured, frightened or in pain. They also can purr when they are giving birth, and even as they are dying. Purring seems to be more an expression of some strong emotion - whether positive or negative - than it is an expression of any particular emotion, including happiness. Purring by a cat might be similar to humming or whistling by a human: it commonly is done out of happiness, but it may also be done as a result of stress, fright or discomfort.
#10 Cats can see in the dark
The Myth: Cats can see in the dark.
The Origin: This myth probably originates from people observing cats navigating at night. Cats are often active at night and do tend to get around very well in the dark.
The Truth: Although cats do see better in semi-darkness than people, they cannot see in total darkness. The pupils of their eyes open much wider in dim light than those of people, letting in more light during the normal hunting hours of dawn and dusk. But again, cats cannot see in complete darkness.
#11 Dogs eat grass to throw up
The Myth: Dogs eat grass when they need to vomit.
The Origin: This myth originates from people observing their dogs eating grass and then vomiting.
The Truth: There actually appear to be two distinct types of grass-eating behavior in domestic dogs. Some dogs graze casually, taking only a few nibbles of grass at a time, while others chow down on grass vigorously and with a purpose. Dogs who wolf down their grass tend to vomit it (and other stomach contents) within a matter of minutes. Dogs that graze slowly usually do not throw up. So, eating grass does not necessarily mean that a dog has an upset stomach.The 2012-2013 pavilion will be the third City of Dreams Pavilion Design Competition. The City of Dreams Pavilion will be a gathering place for people to meet, learn about the arts programs on the island, be able to enjoy a performance or lecture, and experience the interaction of art and the historic context of Governors Island. Our theme for the pavilion, the City of Dreams, points toward the future. If we imagine a future New York City where anything is possible, what would it look like? In our wildest and most optimistic dreams, what is the future of the city?
The City of Dreams 2012-2013 Pavilion Design Competition will be a two-stage process, in which a jury of leading architects and other industry professionals will review initial submissions and select a number of finalists. These finalists will receive comments and will have the opportunity to revise their proposals. The jury will meet again and select the competition winner in August 2012.
City of Dreams Pavilion asks entrants to consider how they will construct this temporary structure in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. Entrants should consider the entire lifecycle of building materials in their submission. Whether they do this by identifying companies that produce “cradle to cradle” products, garnering sponsorships from environmental or socially conscious groups, or re-using waste from construction sites, the materials used and the installation process should have as little impact as possible on the environment.
Entrants should submit where their materials are to come from, how their structures will be transported to the site, how they will eliminate waste during installation, and how they plan to disassemble and reuse the materials after the island closes for the season. In other words, entrants are being asked to consider using “borrowed” materials—from existing construction sites and from places where the materials can be returned after the season is over and the temporary structure is disassembled.
FIGMENT has teamed with the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects NYC Chapter (AIANYC) and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) to host a competition to design and construct an architectural pavilion on Governors Island, the City of Dreams Pavilion. The 2012-2013 pavilion will be our third City of Dreams Pavilion Design Competition.
Registration is due by April 1 2012. Find our more at the The City of Dreams competition website.
WORLD LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE is not involved with this competition please send all questions to the organisers via the competition website.
IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr User AJP79MANCHESTER -- Jose Mourinho has said he will listen to offers for Memphis Depay and Morgan Schneiderlin in January, but insists one-time outcast Bastian Schweinsteiger is not certain to leave Manchester United next month.
Schneiderlin and Depay, signed at a combined cost over more than £50 million by former United boss Louis van Gaal in the summer of 2014, have been repeatedly overlooked by Mourinho in recent weeks, with both players omitted from the Europa League trip to Ukraine to face Zorya Luhansk before failing to make the substitutes' bench for the subsequent Premier League game at home to Tottenham.
Neither player has started a league game for United under Mourinho and, with Everton manager Ronald Koeman keen to sign Schneiderlin and Depay, Mourinho did not rule out exits for the duo when asked directly about them at his weekly news conference.
"I am always open to listen to offers for every player," Mourinho said. "But more than listen to offers, I am always ready to listen to the players themselves.
"So any player who knocks on my door and is not happy and wants to move, when the offers are correct, I will never stop a player from leaving, even if it is to a rival.
"When Juan Mata left Chelsea to come to Manchester United, no problem at all. In my mentality, no problem at all. I am always open."
Morgan Schneiderlin and Memphis Depay have made a combined total of seven Premier League appearances this season. Tom Purslow/Man Utd via Getty Images
Schweinsteiger, a £5m signing from Bayern Munich in July 2015, made a surprise return to the fold with a substitute appearance against West Ham in the EFL Cup last month after being told he had no future at Old Trafford by Mourinho.
And although the German has since failed to make any of United's matchday squads, Mourinho said he is in no rush to offload the 32-year-old next month.
"I do [expect him to stay]," Mourinho said. "Unless again, the player knocks on our door with a future that he wants to grab with both hands.
"Then I never stop players doing what they want if, I repeat if, the conditions are right for the club.
"What I can say is that I am happy with the squad I have. I would like my squad to be my squad until the end of the season and I am not going to any player to say 'you are going to leave' because I am not happy, because I don't want to have him.
"I am happy with the players I have, even with players that are not having many opportunities to play. From my point of view I am happy to keep everyone and everyone will have a chance, sometimes an unexpected chance.
"Sometimes the chance is there, you get it like Phil Jones. You have Bailly out, Smalling out, everybody out and comes the game against Swansea and Jones is in and he is still there.
"We have Premier League, Europa League, then in the League Cup we have a two-legged semi and hopefully one more match in the final.
"The FA Cup is a lot of matches, so our number of players is not so big, even Schweinsteiger is back to the group which was exactly the intention because he is one more option for us."Former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper apparently isn't satisfied with having destroyed a lot of wonderful and important things in Canada. Now he has signed on with Dentons, the world's largest elite law firm, to spread his dark viewpoints around the globe.
Dentons proudly announced Monday that Harper -- who does not have a legal degree -- and his new consulting company will work from its Calgary office.
For Harper, the appointment is his reward from the corporate set for many years of stalwart service. He will now be able to stuff his pockets with greenbacks and 76-cent Canadian dollars.
The recently resigned Calgary MP will no doubt stick a Canadian flag on his suitcase as he peddles his anti-social ideology. Hopefully, this will be Harper's final insult to our national pride.
It is outrageous that a former prime minister is able to join a massive, influential international corporation such as Dentons when his seat in Parliament has barely cooled.
Dentons is like an octopus. It has more than 7,200 lawyers in over 50 countries, and seems to be constantly expanding.
In easily translatable jargon, Dentons said Harper has teamed up with the firm to provide clients with "advice on market access, managing global geopolitical and economic risk, and maximize value in global markets" -- i.e. postulating himself based on the credibility he gained during nine years as PM.
The Donald Trump of the legal set
"Dentons is the Donald Trump of the legal vertical," writes legal expert and columnist Mark A. Cohen. "The firm is brash, bigger-than-life and something entirely different. It receives a disproportionate amount of press because it is always doing something that drops jaws."
The firm surprised the legal/business world by forming a partnership with a huge Chinese firm closely tied to the Communist Party. They employ more than 6,000 lawyers that are working on hundreds of projects, both inside the country and internationally.
Dentons isn't fussy about which companies it represents in litigation. It works for Wal-Mart Stores, Monsanto, Citigroup, Duke Energy, Bank of America, Barclay's Bank, Wells Fargo and others.
It's no surprise that Harper will pick up fat paycheques from Dentons. The firm likes buying former politicians. Former Liberal PM Jean Chretien and former Manitoba Premier Gary Doer are also on the Dentons payroll, as is former Harper Cabinet Minister James Moore. Last year, Dentons snapped up controversial former U.S. politician Newt Gingrich.
Harper's cold personality could damage his one-on-one work for Dentons. The former PM once famously said: "I can't even get my friends to like me."
Outrageous move by Harper
It is outrageous that a former prime minister is able to join a massive, influential international corporation such as Dentons when his seat in Parliament has barely cooled.
Dentons is deeply involved in all kinds of wheeling and dealing at the highest levels around the world. Part of its success is based on collecting inside information on corporations and governments.
There are few legal constraints for Harper in his new job. Canada's Lobbying Act prevents Harper from being directly involved in lobbying the Canadian government for five years.
In addition, the Conflict of Interest Act says that "no former public office holder shall give advice to his or her client, business associate or employer using information that was obtained in his or her capacity as a public office holder and is not available to the public."
Having been prime minister for more than nine years, Harper is aware of what is supposed to be confidential information concerning corporations in Canada and what are supposed to be secret arrangements among foreign governments.
Harper will claim he will not reveal privileged information, but there is no way of knowing whether he will break his word. Just imagine if he were hosted by the King of Saudi Arabia, seeking approval for some energy-related project -- would Harper not be tempted to spill the beans about what he knows about the fossil fuel industry worldwide?
Former PM a valuable asset
Harper will be a medium-sized fish at Dentons, but he can help the firm in countries where he has good relations with government leaders, and on some issues.
Given Harper's record of spending little money on fighting climate change, he could work with government clients on how to avoid spending millions on carbon reductions and he probably could help corporate clients avoid carbon penalties.
Instead of marketing his skills through Dentons, it would have been more appropriate for Harper to get involved in academia. He would have been welcomed at the University of Calgary, where a group of professors and some students established the influential right-wing "Calgary school."
And Harper doesn't need the money. Currently 57, he is receiving $127,000 in annual pension payments. When he turns 60, the amount will increase to $134,000 per year. The Canadian Tax Federation says that Harper's MP pension pay would add up to roughly $5.5 million up to age 90 (factoring in for inflationary increases to the payments).
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New details have been announced about Kingdom Hearts III by the game's director, Tetsuya Nomura.
Speaking with Famitsu (via Polygon), Nomura revealed a number of gameplay and story details about the upcoming title, due out on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in the future.
Exit Theatre Mode
First up, the plot will continue on from Dream Drop Distance; "We're proceeding along with which worlds we'll be selecting for the game," he said. "It's the final episode in the 'Dark Seeker' saga that began with the original Kingdom Hearts, and it'll depict the final battle with Xehanort."
“ Kingdom Hearts III has three-person parties, but NPCs and other characters join the fight in each individual world, and the resulting action is really flashy and exciting.
Responding to queries regarding the slightly altered visual style seen in the trailer, Nomura explained that the team had spent a long time trying to decide how best to make use of the next-gen consoles' graphical capabilities.
"Should we go for a more realistic look like in recent projects, or try something else? Along the way, we remembered that these Kingdom Hearts characters were originally paintbrush art from Disney productions, a texture that was one of our original aims, and that it was time to return to that. So [chief creative director Takeshi] Nozue went through a series of tests, and the results are the visuals that we refer to in the team as the Kingdom Shader. It may look like a pretty drastic change, but I see it as a rich evolution of everything we've shown you up to now."
In terms of gameplay, Nomura revealed, "The action's pretty frantic. The really bold action we've always had is getting even crazier. Kingdom Hearts III has three-person parties, but NPCs and other characters join the fight in each individual world, and the resulting action is really flashy and exciting. The enemy AI is a lot more intricate, too, and I think the gameplay will reflect that new dynamic balance. For example, there's a foe that's shaped like a vehicle, and Sora may jump on it and fly around; that's already implemented."
Exit Theatre Mode
So when can we expect to see the game? Well, while he admitted that Kingdom Hearts 3 "is still pretty early in development," we should be getting another look at it soon, possibly at the Tokyo Game Show or definitely at the D23 Expo Japan event in October. It seems achingly far away, but considering we've already waited around seven years since the last numbered title, a couple more months can't hurt.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor and loves a good RPG. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.California senator Ricardo Lara is calling for equality when it comes to baby-changing stations in public restrooms – for both moms and dads
When a gay man or single dad wants to change his kid’s diaper, he’s often faced with a problem: diaper-changing facilities, if they’re available at all, are often only found in women’s restrooms.
This is certainly the case in California, but now a local politician has launched a bid to change the situation. Democrat Senator Ricardo Lara, who also happens to be gay himself, has tabled the ‘Potty Parity for Parents Act’ (SB 1350). The aim of the act is simple: if a women’s restroom is being fitted with a baby-changing station then the corresponding men’s restroom must also be fitted with one.
‘As the modern American family evolves, men are taking a more proactive role in the rearing of their children and that includes changing their babies’ diapers,’ says Lara, a Senator for the 33rd Senate District. ‘This bill is a reasonable and common sense approach to addressing the problem of unequal access to baby changing facilities in public restrooms. It’s about potty parity for all parents!’
There are approximately 2 million dad-only families in the US, with around 22,500 same-sex male couples with kids in California alone.
‘This is as much an issue for dad’s in opposite-sex households as it is for those in same-sex households,” says Lara. “Every dad or male guardian should have equal access to a clean facility to change their child.’
Senator Lara dropped in on the Aquarium of the Pacific on Long Beach, California to reveal more details about the bill, and posted this cute video online to help spread the message.Under a new law allowing immigrant drivers living in the state illegally to apply for drivers licenses, preliminary statistics show that the California Department of Motor Vehicles received 17,200 applications from immigrants on Friday and another 11,100 on Saturday, according to spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez, for a total of just over 28,000.
Sixty of the DMV's 173 offices stayed open on Saturday to accommodate the expected flood of applicants. Wait times "were long," the DMV's Gonzalez told KPCC. "We definitely weren't focused on wait times on Friday and Saturday; really, it was trying to service the thousands of people who came through our doors."
Gonzalez said that the DMV expected appointments to last 20 minutes, but the average time was 27 minutes, with some going much longer.
Offices around the state saw long lines, and the trend may continue: the DMV predicts that 1.4 million immigrants could seek licenses under the new law, known as AB 60. The agency hired 900 new employees in the months before AB 60 took effect, on Jan. 1, and opened four new processing centers to handle first-time applicants, including one in Granada Hills.
In a release, the DMV indicated it would release statistics on AB 60 license registrations on Tuesdays.Evil has found a new home? Yes, where? We'd like to know. In the bottom of a barrel?
Using beautiful cinematography, lush landscapes, trippy old school visual environmental effects, excellent lighting, wonderful looking sets and four extremely attractive women, this Antihuman doesn't live up to the names it so disrespectfully compares itself to on the marketing materials. It's nothing like Resident Evil. And bears no markers that make it seem anything like Orphan Black. Trying to manipulate an audience into watching your film by using popular namesakes to sell your product is a sure fire way to turn off an audience and find a direct path to cinematic hell. Despite all those positives I just listed, I would never wish this movie on my worst enemy. This is non-film.
Antihuman is without a doubt one of the worst "horror" movies of the year and definitely my most negatively reviewed project of 2017. Yes, it looks great and captures that old school European feel. But, that's all it has going for it. There is no story. There are no elements to latch onto. Other than a few moments at the beginning that seem like we might get an enlightened manifesto of strange and surreal hellscapes is automatically vanquished by an undefinied plot that puts four ladies in the center of nature with absolutely nothing to follow by the time we're at the sixty minute mark. At a full length run time of two hours, this is pure amateur hour with a self impressed director that thinks he's doing his audience a favor by playing the art film card.
This is no Descent.
After a month that we dedicated nearly every day to horror reviews and tons of content directed strictly towards that genre, Antihuman is creatively infantile. Other than the stirring music that literally never stops and a couple really cool shots, there is no reason to watch this movie because nothing ever really happens. We get the setup. We get the characters. But we get no type of understandable backstory and no development of plot. We get it. You wanted to try to make some retro looking European horror. You failed.
Let's make this really simple and straightforward. I've seen no budget horror shorts by high school kids that put this abomination to shame. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd see a horror movie this bad during the post Halloween month.
Score
-CG(CNN) -- If you think the musical compact disc is dying or dead, you're probably younger than it is.
"Show me a teenager buying a Susan Boyle album on CD and I'll show you someone buying a gift for their grandparent -- for Christmas," jokes Billboard senior chart manager and analyst Keith Caulfield. "There is definitely an age component to the consumption of music."
As the music industry as a whole struggles in a down economy and direct download business models like iTunes flourish, the compact disc -- which was commercially introduced in 1982 -- has the appearance of going the way of vinyl.
And contrary to the recent declaration of singer Prince -- who said that the Internet is dead and released his latest CD for free via European newspapers -- there's some evidence that consumers aren't as enamored with ripping the cellophane off that new CD as they once were.
According to data from Nielsen SoundScan, in 2007 CDs accounted for 90 percent of album sales in the United States, with digital accounting for the other 10 percent. Just two years later, that number had shifted to 79 percent CDs and 20 percent digital, with the remaining percentage point being made up of vinyl and other media.
Billboard's Caulfield said that so far this year, about 44 million digital albums have been sold, compared with 40 million during the same time frame last year. But while digital sales have increased slightly, CD sales have dropped from 147 million last year to 114 million this year for the same time period.
Caulfield stops short of speculating on a date when CDs might be phased out, but he does see similarities with the history of other media.
"Vinyl was the predominant configuration from the '50s and the '60s all the way up through the early '80s, and then cassettes became the predominant format from the early-mid '80s to the very early '90s," he said. "Then CDs became the predominant format and cassettes really didn't go away until a few years ago. It's kind of a natural progression, to a degree."
That's not to say that some artists aren't still selling well. Country group Lady Antebellum has so far racked up 2.4 million in album sales -- both CD and digital -- making them the top-selling act so far for 2010. In second place is teen phenom Justin Bieber, with 1.4 million.
"When an artist like a Drake or Eminem sells a bunch of albums, that shows that there are a lot of people that really want to spend money and give money to the artist that they are really, truly a fan of," Caulfield said. "The younger an artist skews in terms of who they appeal to, you'll see a larger share of their album sales tilt towards digital."
One obvious benefit of digital downloads is their ability to scratch an immediate itch. Caulfield observes shows like Fox's "Glee" make songs almost instant hits because "they have already heard and liked the song by the time they download it." Paul Grein, who writes the "Chart Watch" column for Yahoo.com, agrees, seeing hope for the music business in the success of "Glee" and "American Idol," which have helped spike downloads.
Despite the CD's decline, Grein believes the format will be around for the foreseeable future.
"I think it's becoming less of a mass-market item and kind of a niche product that caters to a small but loyal following," he said. "But there are enough cases where we are seeing albums that are selling in big numbers that I think they will be around for a while." Younger-skewing artists, such as singer-rapper Ke$ha, enjoy a larger slice of the digital pie than older-skewing artists such as James Taylor, he says.
Indeed, the format isn't the point, he said. In 100 years, recorded music has gone from cylinders to shellac 78s to vinyl LPs to cassettes, CDs and now digital downloads. Through it all, listeners still crave tunes.
"Music is definitely still in fashion," he said. "It's all around us."Note: In 1990 the Mormon church radically changed its secret temple ceremony by removing the motions of slashing one's throat and stomach. Mormons would make a motion with their right hand and with the palm facing the floor to slash their own throat or to cut open their "bowels" if they were to ever reveal the secrets in the temple. It also removed in 1990 the Protestant minister who appears as a hireling of Satan. It appears now (Jan. 2005) the Mormon church has changed the eternal ordinance of the endowment by removing the naked touching. A Mormon, in the initiatory phase of the temple endowment, is wearing only a sheet (called a shield) open on the sides and an ordinance worker of the same sex touches the participant near the loins, stomach, breasts and mouth for the ceremonial washing. This recent change is not yet officially confirmed by the Mormon Church.
[Note: For more information on naked touching in Mormon temples see Short Topic 366 Naked Touching in the Temple?
Subject: DETAILS: No more naked touching in the temple = APOSTASY (minor edits from original post)
Date: Jan 19 19:07 2005
Author: Deconstructor
"We explained briefly the Apostasy and the Restoration: that there is vast evidence and history of an apostasy from the doctrine taught by Jesus and his Apostles, that the organization of the original Church became corrupted, and sacred ordinances were changed to suit the convenience of men..."
- Apostle David B. Haight, �Joseph Smith the Prophet,� Ensign, Nov. 1979, 22
Based on some information I believe is reliable, we now have an idea of the January 18th changes to the temple ordinances.
In summary, here's what, in my opinion, changed in the temple initiatory ordinance:
1. Before, temple patrons had to get naked and then put on a poncho (called a "shield") that was completely open on the sides, then walk to the initiatory area to begin the ordinance
Now, temple patrons must put on garments (one-piece style) in the locker area before even starting the initiatory ordinance.
2. The poncho "shield" has been changed into a dress-like piece of clothing that is sewn shut on both sides all the way down to the ankles. Patrons must put this new dress-like shield over the garments before beginning the initiatory ordinance.
3. A new part has been added to the initiatory ordinance... Then, temple patrons are told that "in our day" you are washed and anointed "only symbolically."
Now, the priesthood ordinance giver only touches the forehead, then places his/her hands on the head to pronounce the ordinance words. Now, the priesthood ordinance giver only places a little oil on the head as he/she speaks the words of the ordinance.
Now, since temple patrons are already wearing their garments [ Mormon Underwear see Short Topic 13. Non-Mormon and Garments 44. Stopped wearing garments] before the ordinance begins, the priesthood ordinance giver ends the ordinance by telling the patron that their garments are now "authorized" and must be worn for the rest of his/her life.
Keep in mind that this is not the first time the initiatory ordinance has changed. Descriptions of the early initiatory ordinance in the Nauvoo Temple include references to a bathtub where the temple patron was literally washed, as described in Exodus 40:12-13. In the excellent book "The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship author David John Buerger writes:
"The earliest accounts of the Nauvoo temple endowment indicate that initiatory washings followed a literal Old Testament model of actual bathing. Large tubs of water are specified in the separate men's and women's rooms. The anointing was performed by liberally pouring consecrated oil from a horn over the head and allowing it to run over the whole body."
- The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, page 81
The Salt Lake Temple also used to have large tubs for the washing part of the ordinance. A 1893 article in Engineering Magazine titled "Architecture," on page 100 referred to the "largest bath-tub ever made," exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 by the Standard Manufacturing Company, which had manufactured twelve of them on special order for the LDS church, for use in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City.
- The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, Appendix 2
Those who would say these are not changes to the ordinance, should consider how the church defines changes to other gospel ordinances. As just one example, here's what a church prophet taught in regards to priests not kneeling while blessing the sacrament:
"...those who administer the sacrament will kneel when asking the blessing. It is not that this form is absolutely essential to the acceptance of this ordinance by the Lord; but it is in accordance with the word of the Lord which was given for our guidance; and where it is possible to follow the written word, in the spirit in which it is given, it is always better to do so. Indeed, by doing so we will avoid a serious wrong, that might eventually grow out of a disregard for the rules that the Lord has established, for it might lead to a changing, to some extent, of the ordinances of the house of God. It is necessary that we should pay proper attention and care to carrying out the purposes of the Lord in the manner which He has already revealed. And this may be extended to other matters of our religion. One of the charges brought against the children of Israel, and mentioned by the prophets in the latter times, was that 'they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.' That is really the complaint against the world today, and it is not meet that we should indulge in any such things."
- The Prophet Joseph F.Smith, Collected Discourses Vol.3, p. 308-309
The changes made to the initiatory ordinance are akin to changing baptism from total immersion to a light sprinkle - a change that the Mormon Church uses to accuse other churches of apostasy:
"[Apostate Churches] have changed many of the ordinances. For instance, they no longer baptize as Jesus was baptized when he went to John to be baptized of him."
- Apostle LeGrand Richards, �The Things of God and Man,� Ensign, Nov. 1977, 21
"[Jesus Christ] instituted baptism to set forth this glorious thing unto men. But by degrees, yielding, as was supposed, to necessity, men depart from this manner of administering the ordinance of baptism for the remission of sins, until water sprinkled or poured upon the candidate was held to be sufficient for baptism. Whenever they did that, wherever they did it, they departed from the order established by the Son of God, they changed an ordinance of the Gospel."
- Apostle B. H. Roberts, Collected Discourses Vol. 5, p.385
"The Prophet Isaiah saw the period of time when the earth should reel to and fro like a drunken man; and he saw that glorious day when the Lord of Hosts shall be about to reign in Zion and Jerusalem. And among other things he saw in vision was that the earth became defiled under the inhabitants thereof; "because," says the Prophet, "they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant." Plainly showing that they were to be a corrupt, people; a people who, for instance, would change the ordinance of baptism, from immersion to sprinkling or pouring, or doing it away altogether, and in the same manner changing the various ordinances of the Gospel from the original form in which the Lord revealed them. He says, through the mouth of His Prophet, that the people who should be guilty of this great wickedness should be visited with fire."
- The Apostle Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 20, p.11-12
"For a century we have tried to show to the world from the scriptures that baptism is necessary to man's salvation; that baptism signifies immersion and that immersion was the only form of baptism known and practiced in the primitive Church until several centuries A. D., and that the changing of the mode of baptism from immersion to pouring or sprinkling is apostasy and fulfils the prediction of Isaiah with respect to the last times, "The earth, also, is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant."
- Apostle George F. Richards, Conference Report, April 1930, p.76
"The law of baptism was instituted as the means by which men were to gain admission into the Church of God our Father in the earth. The mode is indicated by the word from which "baptism" is derived, and when this ordinance is administered in any other way we know it is incorrect. There is no other way than by immersion for the remission of sins. We may be challenged on this point, but the language itself concerning the mode of baptism clearly defines the way by which men are to be brought into the Church, and no other way could be considered. So we stand, as a church, absolutely sure of our ground. Men have changed the ordinance, but our Eternal Father's plan never changes. His language pointed out the mode in |
more than 30 trillion individual web pages across 1 billion web sites in 2014, according to StatisticBrain. Only 5 years earlier, that number was “just” 3 trillion, and in 2008, Google’s index had 1 trillion pages. In other words, the number of pages on the web increased by 900% in just 5 short years.
To store this information, Google uses more than 920,000 servers and stores more than 100 billion gigabytes of data. Google’s internet storage capacity needs are so massive, they account for more than 0.01% of the total worldwide electricity usage. Think about that.
The internet is seeing exponential growth with each passing year, both in terms of the number of pages as well as the total number of active users.
In total, there are more than 1 billion websites on the Internet. Most of those websites will never be visited by a real, live user, and instead play to an audience of crawl and spam bots. However, the average person is interacting with more web pages on a daily basis than ever before, and we can expect that trend to continue.
What is Driving the Growth in Web Pages?
The growth in the total number of web pages is driven by several different factors. As the internet has continued to grow and evolve, the old cliche’ that “content is king” continues to ring true for companies of all sizes.
Companies are publishing more content than ever, and they don’t just create and publish that content for fun. Today the Washington Post publishes more than 1,200 pieces of content per day.
While one might think that this inhibits their ability to control the quality of their content (and it likely does), the Washington Post has enjoyed incredible growth that can be directly attributed to their blanket-content strategy. The Washington Post has seen their visitors grow more than 28% over the last year. They even managed to surpass the New York Times in late 2015.
This is one example of companies ramping up their content publishing efforts and reaping the benefits. But where is the demand for this content coming from? Companies wouldn’t publish 1,200 pieces of content per day unless it was paying off on the backend.
More internet users means more eyeballs. The internet is growing. In 2007, there were roughly 1.5 billion internet users around the world. In 2016, that number is expected to grow to 3.4 billion. That is approaching 50% of the total world population. With massive efforts underway to connect third-world nations with first-world internet, we can expect to see this number growing for quite some time. With more users seeking out content online, there is an ever-growing need to produce it and lay claim to “content homesteads.”
The average user is interacting with more content as time goes on. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, the internet increasingly entrenching itself in our lives (social media, internet of things, etc.), and the rapid rises in cord cutting, people are simply interacting with more content every day. Whether they are watching a movie on Netflix, reading their favorite blog, or clicking on a link through social media – the same number of eyeballs are consuming more content daily than ever before.
Search engine optimization is driving content creation. With each passing year, Google becomes more adept at connecting searchers with the kind of content that they are writing. Did you know that between 16% and 20% of queries types into Google have never been asked before? That means there is a lot of uncovered ground. By creating content both manually and through automated means, companies know that they are covering their bases for the future. They are creating “content homesteads” that may not be worth much now, but will pay off for years to come.
Content marketing continues to pay off for companies of all sizes. To put it simply – companies wouldn’t invest so much into the creation of new content if it wasn’t paying off for them. In the Washington Post example we mentioned earlier, they’ve been able to reseed their standing in the American newspaper market simply by ramping up their digital content creation and companies in other industries are seeing similar results.
There are many potential reasons why publishing more content has been such an attractive prospect for brands around the world. But will this trend continue into the future?
What the Future Holds for Google’s Index and Content Marketing
Will the trend of rapid increases in content publishing continue into the future?
Definitely. In fact, if anything, we will see the trend continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Some of the reasons why publishing content will continue to be beneficial for companies well into the next decade include:
Many users left to bring into the fold. Yes, we are rapidly bringing a large number of users onto the internet. But even today, only half of the world’s population is currently using the internet. Those 3.5+ billion users that have never used the internet before will begin consuming content regularly within the next decade. Like western adoption of the internet, it will be slow at first. As time goes on the daily consumption of content for new users will continue to rise, albeit likely more quickly than it did for the west. Those non-connected people represent a huge opportunity for content consumption growth, not just by getting them connected, but by integrating the internet more deeply into their lives as we have seen in recent years.
More points of connection in the future. The rise in mobile device usage was the first big swing toward increasing our number of connection points with the internet. Today, most walk around with an internet connection in their pocket. As time goes on, we see the “internet of things” revolution taking place. The number of access points to the internet that your average suer will have in their homes, on their person and in their place of work will grow rapidly over the next decade.
Rise in automation. We’ve already seen the early effects that increases in automation will have on the world. As time goes on, automating the creation and publishing of content will rise in quality and become more accessible to companies of all sizes. Already, we see companies taking advantage of automation to produce basic fact-reporting articles. This is just the beginning, too. Companies will continually find ways to have AI solutions play roles in the content creation process.
The rapid growth in Google’s index is an excellent indicator for the direction of the internet as a whole – growth. Forward-thinking companies can see the writing on the wall. The rewards for companies that begin heavily investing in content now are apparent and will pay off for years to come.ACI), which increased an incredible 107.32% over the predicted three-day time horizon. Celldex Therapeutics (CLDX) and E-House China Holdings (EJ) also had strong returns of 18.98% and 15.37%, while ZIOPHARM Oncology (ZIOP) and Amicus Therapeutics (FOLD) jumped 13.22% and 10.89%. The average return of the forecast was 18.52%, more than three times greater than the S&P 500 return of 5.05%. The ALNY) had the best performance, increasing 17.53%. Other top performers were 1. The Small Cap Stocks forecast for the three-day time horizon had all ten stocks increase in accordance with the algorithm's prediction. The top performing stock was Arch Coal (), which increased an incredibleover the predicted three-day time horizon. Celldex Therapeutics () and E-House China Holdings () also had strong returns ofand, while ZIOPHARM Oncology () and Amicus Therapeutics () jumpedand. The average return of the forecast was, more than three times greater than the S&P 500 return of. The Biotech Stocks forecast during the same time period also had a strong performance. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals () had the best performance, increasing. Other top performers were Ligand Pharmaceuticals (LGND) and Kite Pharma (KITE) with returns of 14.26% and 13.99%. All ten stocks in the forecast increased at least 7.99%, with five of the ten increasing at least 13%. The average return of the forecast was 12.15%, more than double the S&P 500 return during the same time period.
CLF) increasing 19.31%. Petrobras (PBR) and Sina Corporation (SINA) also had amazing returns of 17.96% and 14.58% during the predicted time period, which is even more impressive considering it was over only three days. Seven of the ten stocks increased at least 11%, as the forecast had an average return of 11.83% compared to the S&P 500 return of 5.05%. Baker Hughes (BHI) was the top performing stock in the 19.58%. This forecast also had all ten stocks increase as the algorithm predicted. Superior Energy Services (SPN) and ALNY also had spectacular returns of 18.28% and 17.53%, as six of the ten stocks had returns greater than 10%. The average return was 10.93%, another average return that more than doubled the S&P 500 return.
3. During the seven-day time horizon, ACI had an astonishing return of 113.25% in the MTL) also had a remarkable return of 47.95%, while ITT Educational Services (ESI) and Actions Semiconductor Co. (ACTS) had returns of 26.40% and 23.85%. The average return of the forecast was 22.36%, which is incredibly more than 24 times greater than the S&P 500 return during the same time period. ACI was also the top performing stock in the PES) and Weatherford International (WFT). They had returns of 27.35% and 22.07%, while JinkoSolar Holding Co. (JKS) and Newpark Resources (NR) increased 18.73% and 12.28%. The average return of the forecast was 22.22%, which was much greater than the average return of 0.91% during the same time horizon.
4. The JKS, with an impressive return of 18.73% in just one week. Other top performing stocks were NeoPhotonics Corporation (NPTN) and Sierra Wireless (SWIR). These stocks had notable returns of 11.90% and 10.45%. The average return of the forecast was 5.83%, which was over six times greater than the S&P 500 return of 0.91% during the same time period. Atmel Corporation (ATML) was the top performing stock in the 18.13% in 7 days, while ALNY and NXP Semiconductors (NXPI) also had good returns of 9.23% and 7.97%. The average return of the forecast was 3.49%, which was almost four times greater than the S&P 500 return during the same time. 2. All ten stocks also increased as the algorithm predicted in the 3-day Risk-Conscious forecast, with Cliffs Natural Resources () increasing. Petrobras () and Sina Corporation () also had amazing returns ofandduring the predicted time period, which is even more impressive considering it was over only three days. Seven of the ten stocks increased at least, as the forecast had an average return ofcompared to the S&P 500 return of. Baker Hughes () was the top performing stock in the Top 10 Stocks forecast with a return of. This forecast also had all ten stocks increase as the algorithm predicted. Superior Energy Services () andalso had spectacular returns ofand, as six of the ten stocks had returns greater than. The average return was, another average return that more than doubled the S&P 500 return.3. During the seven-day time horizon,had an astonishing return ofin the Stocks Under 5 Dollars forecast. Mechel OAO () also had a remarkable return of, while ITT Educational Services () and Actions Semiconductor Co. () had returns ofand. The average return of the forecast was, which is incredibly more than 24 times greater than the S&P 500 return during the same time period.was also the top performing stock in the Energy Stocks forecast over the same time period. Other top performing stocks in this forecast, which had all ten stocks increase in accordance with the algorithm's prediction, were Pioneer Energy Services () and Weatherford International (). They had returns ofand, while JinkoSolar Holding Co. () and Newpark Resources () increasedand. The average return of the forecast was, which was much greater than the average return ofduring the same time horizon.4. The Tech Stocks forecast during the seven-day time horizon had eight of the ten stocks increase as the algorithm predicted. The top performing stock was, with an impressive return ofin just one week. Other top performing stocks were NeoPhotonics Corporation () and Sierra Wireless (). These stocks had notable returns ofand. The average return of the forecast was, which was over six times greater than the S&P 500 return ofduring the same time period. Atmel Corporation () was the top performing stock in the Top 10 Stocks forecast for the same time horizon. It had a return ofin 7 days, whileand NXP Semiconductors () also had good returns ofand. The average return of the forecast was, which was almost four times greater than the S&P 500 return during the same time.Holy corporate takeover, Mega Man!
Capcom announced today that its latest shareholder meeting has resulted in an official end to the company's buyout defense. Originally placed in 2008, the defense strategies were set in motion to defend Capcom from being acquired by any one person or entity trying to suddenly buy a majority stock.
This doesn't make Capcom completely defenseless in the event of a buyout, but it does mean Capcom no longer has the backing of shareholders should someone try to swoop in. It's no secret that the publisher has been financially troubled as of late, and its shareholders aren't comfortable stomaching anymore it seems.
So let your imaginations run free in comments. Anyone you would like, or dislike, to see buy up a controlling share? I'll admit I'm not terribly concerned myself, but that could have more to do with my relative disinterest in Capcom's recent library.
Capcom shareholders open company up to takeover possibility [Gamasutra]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upCarol Schwartz is a Melbourne business woman who has been a leading figure in the Victorian not-for-profit and corporate sectors for roughly twenty-five years. She holds one of the country's most diverse portfolios of board appointments, currently having high-level involvement in Qualitas Property Partners, Yarra Capital Partners, Melbourne Business School, The Australian Innovation Research Centre, the Enterprise Melbourne Advisory Board, Our Community and Stockland. Past leadership roles include: Business (Industry Superannuation Property Trust, Property Council of Australia, Highpoint Property Group, Anstat, OPSM), Government (VicHealth, Docklands Authority, Future Melbourne Reference Group), the Arts (Comedy Festival, Australian Ballet School, National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne International Arts Festival), Health (Mental Health Research Institute, Baker Institute) and Community (Australian Bush Heritage Fund, Western Chances, Social Ventures Australia). She is a founder of the social investment body, Trawalla, and helped to establish the Australian Women Donors Network. In 2007, she was awarded an Order of Australia for her contribution to business, community and the arts, and in 2011 was named one of the nation's 'True Leaders' by Boss magazine. In 2012 she was nominated as one of Westpac's 100 Most Influential Women. Her reputation as 'one of the best-connected people in the Australian business world' is well earned (Family Matters).
Born in Melbourne in 1955 to Marc and Eva Besen, founders of the Sussan retail fashion chain and noted philanthropists, Schwartz's began her education at a small Jewish school in Elwood run on Steiner education principles before moving to Mt Scopus College in Burwood. She then studied law/arts at Monash University. The 'Jewishness' of her education had a profound impact on her sense of self, not so much for the theological dimensions, but for the culture of family and the sense of connectedness to the broader community that it fostered. Like her parents and the rest of her extended family, Schwartz works hard, loves business, has achieved financial success but believes it counts for little unless it is connected to family and a commitment to community responsibility.
Schwartz claims that she 'never grew up feeling... wealthy... because I never had anything different from what my friends had' (Family Matters). Because they were in business, and business is inherently risky, she says that the family always worked hard and never took anything for granted. They took their summer holidays in Frankston, didn't live extravagantly, but neither were they ashamed of their money. There was a strong commitment to reinvesting in community extending back to when her grandparents welcomed Jewish refugees at the Port Melbourne docks.
As a young woman, Schwartz had no connection with the feminist movement, and never experienced gender discrimination. She read Germaine Greer, 'but only because it was cool' (Interview). However, she was a grateful beneficiary of the second wave of feminism, growing up surrounded by women who ran their own businesses and philanthropic foundations and leading their own lives. Empowered by their example, she imagined herself becoming a 'high-powered business woman who married at forty and never had children' (Interview). Instead she got married as a 21-year old to Alan, a fellow student and had four children.
Having seen how hard it was for competent women to rebuild a career after time taken out for mothering, Schwarz decided to do an MBA, so that the gaps in her CV could be more readily explained. However, she was appalled by the inflexibility of the University of Melbourne, which would not allow her to study part time; effectively excluding any women with parenting responsibilities from the opportunity to participate. She went instead to Monash which did offer part time enrolments enabling her add an intellectual understanding to her passion for business.
On graduating she was asked by her father to join the property arm of the family business and started work in a part time capacity in 1989, taking a leading role in many large shopping centre projects, including the building and redevelopment of Whitehorse Plaza in Box Hill, the Moonee Ponds Market and Chatswood in Sydney. One of the most significant and challenging projects she led was the redevelopment of Highpoint Shopping Centre in Maribyrnong. An early example of public/private partnership involving business, state and local governments, the redevelopment sought to recreate the western suburbs shopping centre as a community hub, a recreational space and a successful business opportunity. She was excited by collaborating with government in the development of new social infrastructure in Melbourne's western suburbs and seized the opportunity to put into practice her belief that property development, sensitively undertaken in consultation with local communities, 'could create social and cultural change for the better' (Interview).
The experience drew attention to what Schwartz called 'the complicated relationship between making money and creating social good' (Interview). She makes no apology for making money, and stresses the importance of profit for reinvestment and creating prosperous communities. She had no intention of entering into the Highpoint development if it wasn't good for business, but she had no doubt that what was good for business was also good for the local community. 'A business can only be successful if you know the community you operate in and work to make that community prosperous' (Interview). There were several stakeholders, however, who thought that what was good for business was a form of exploitation. In partnership with Maribyrnong council CEO Kay Rundle, Schwartz was able to negotiate pathways which overcame this opposition.
Schwartz's success led to her being invited onto the Property Council of Victoria, one of very few female members. In 1993 she became the first woman on the board and then, in 1994, the council's first woman president. She took the opportunity of making incremental changes that made it easier for women to be involved. Lunches, which were increasingly used to promote women and their achievements, were no longer held at the male-only Athenaeum club, and other meetings were scheduled at more family-friendly times, initiatives which were reversed when she resigned from the position. Such backsliding, she argues, is an indication that the struggle for gender equity has not been won. 'We are making very incremental changes that are basically allowing people and organisations to pat themselves on the back without there being any sort of fundamental or meaningful change or progress … the pressure has to stay on,' she concludes (Family Matters). Without campaigns that continually highlight the public achievements of women in leadership roles, then structural systems that continue to discriminate against women in the workplace will persist. Quotas, she believes, are needed to force the current corporate leadership to embrace and facilitate change.
Schwartz takes a particular interest in gender discrimination on boards in the community and the philanthropic sector. Although women are well represented in leadership roles, they seem to disappear as income increases. 'The bigger the revenues, the fewer women in control' (Interview). Schwartz and the other founders of the Women's Donor Network hope to readjust the view that women can only handle small-scale organisations. Apart from raising the profile of women in philanthropic leadership in Australia, the network also plans to regard philanthropic effort through a gender lens, by directing funds to causes that assist women (Women Donor's Network Website). Gender discrimination, Schwartz believes, is bad business. Diversity of thought and talent is the key to community sector innovation. Staff and clients need to feel empowered to run themselves. Innovation and empowerment were the driving forces behind the evolution in the early 2000s of 'Our Community', an approach to community group organisation that Schwartz worked on in its formative days with Dennis Moriarty, to reposition community groups in the online world and link them to philanthropic organizations. Schwartz's own Trawalla Foundation being a example of such groups (Interview).
Schwartz sees her networks and associated ability to'surround myself with good people' as the keys to her effectiveness as a leader. Women need to assume positional leadership if culture is to change. But positional leadership doesn't automatically involve a 'leading-from-the front' style. Leaders need to be able to 'empower others to take the front position; they also need to be able to recognise when they are not the best person to do it' (Interview). They need to be able to make tough decisions when required, it is not authority, but facilitation, that is the key characteristic of Schwarz's leadership style. Nothing makes her happier than 'basking in the reflected glory' of the success of someone she has talent spotted and empowered to lead (Interview).
Carol Schwartz is a woman of many talents. She has 'a great thirst for ideas and a great sense of social responsibility'. She has an entrepreneurial spirit, is one of Victoria's 'great innovators' and has the capacity to influence change. But, most importantly, 'Her greatest skill is in leading … If you want someone as a chairman, ask Carol' (Family Matters)."This leads to an increase in discrimination and intensifies a sense of inequality so that dependent terrorist agents will become able to abuse people's dissatisfaction."
"We believe that such crises are rooted in those kind of polices which classify Iranians unequally and consider different rights for them," the statement said.
The Islamic Iran Participation Front said Ahmadinejad's "coup d'etat" government deserved blame for the "terrorist bombings," which it vehemently condemned in a statement reported by its affiliate news website Norooz News (in Persian).
Iran's main reformist political party has issued a daring statement blaming the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a Thursday evening double-suicide bombing that killed at least 27 people and injured hundreds in southwest Iran.
Reformists accuse of Ahmadinejad of pursuing chauvinistic policies that discount the aspirations of all Iranians except the families of the Basiji militia and other hard-line traditionalists, all the while alienating those from religious and ethnic minorities and secular-minded Iranians.
The statement, coinciding with mass funerals for the victims of the blasts, was especially bold. Even Western officials condemned the attack without qualification.
The bombing showed that the government's hard-line tactics have been a failure, the statement said.
"It is as clear as day that the policy of intimidation, violence, and suppression, which are the only achievement of the coup d'etat government -- and unfortunately have overshadowed all aspects of Iranians' lives, and all of them are equally and indiscriminately suffering from that -- is a defeated policy," the statement said.
"They only increase the cost of living for citizens and despite the imagination of the sponsors and agents of such policies they will not bring any advantages for them," it said.
-- Los Angeles Times
Photo: Abdolbasset Rigi, a man said to be one of those who took part in Thursday's suicide attacks. Credit: Pro-Jundollah Taftan News AgencyI want to get some thoughts down on paperscreen, and then out in public, about the recent brouhaha over games journalists’ behaviour and integrity, and the conflicts I see with the Games Media Awards. I also want to still have some friends in this industry, but sometimes the two don’t go hand in hand.
I also want to be clear that I don’t think any of these matters are clear-cut or simple, and that I certainly don’t consider myself to be a paragon, above all the accusations of corruption, or the activities that some consider compromising. So I want to explain the compromises I experience, too.
And incredibly importantly, I want to point out that the vast majority of the time, no matter which site or magazine you read, the chances are what you’re reading is un-bought, uncorrupted opinion. That’s the norm. Issues are the exception. Frankly, anything else would require more organisation and effort than most editors have the time or energy for. And of the very many games journalists I know, I know of not one who’s ever done anything openly corrupt, or written an influenced review. Most people, and most content, is exactly as you’d hope it was.
The fuss today emerged after it was spotted that a bunch of journalists at this year’s Games Media Awards (GMAs) had been encouraged to tweet including a hashtag for a particular game, so one of them would win a PS3. This seemed an immediately and obviously not okay thing for a games journalist to do. Advertise a product on your personal Twitter stream and you could receive personal gain. That’s an obvious no. But even so, I can see how people at an industry piss-up could get carried away, send off a tweet without giving pause to think that it was a mistake, do a drunken thing. What shocked me today was the vociferous defence of this in the sobriety of a Wednesday morning the following week. In criticising this on Twitter, I was met with a combination of disdain, incredulity, and outright mocking, because I thought it an issue. Arguments ranged from being told that journalists deserve it because they’re so poorly paid, to it just being a bit of fun and hashtags aren’t advertising. But more than anything else, either directly to me, or on other journalists’ Twitter feeds, so many people rolled their eyes at the discussion, dismissing it as ridiculous. And that I find bewildering.
Games journalism has always had its problems. When I started in 1999, I was told stories of antics in the early 90s. Later I learned of antics in the late 90s. But the big examples are all very rare. However, compromise comes in many forms, and the constant battle between editorial and PRs leads to a convoluted and often concerning mix. That’s why I have such a keen and instinctive dislike of the GMAs. These are awards organised by PRs, for which PRs are eligible to vote, all sponsored by publishers. I think just going along to this event is a compromising act, not because I don’t think journalists should attend events funded by publishers, but because this is an event put on by publishers and PRs, funded by publishers, in order to vote for their favourite journalists. It’s a very specific event, its outward facing purpose to reward gaming hacks with perspex blocks, but its more insidious and yet overtly obvious purpose being to further blur the lines between what should be two distinct sides. It isn’t a civilised awards dinner, but rather a big advertising-packed booze-up, with free drinks and food while various sponsors advertise their wares. A comedian comes on and awkwardly tries to do games-related material, and then often extremely deserving writers get given not only their award, but also a big bag of expensive loot that doesn’t get talked about. I know this because via RPS I’ve won two of them.
(Hopefully just the stupid fact that I’ve won two of these awards can push aside any of the mindless, lazy responses from other industry figures, who instantly label me (and anyone who criticises the GMAs) as “bitter”.)
So I’m left bemused that there’s such strong objection to anyone who questions it all. I’m also delighted to see Eurogamer running a piece by Robert Florence, questioning the whole matter, and exploring this debate. But it’s now absolutely fascinating watching the industry whirr itself into action to condemn Rab for absolutely legitimately pointing out things people said in public. Critics are rarely good at taking criticism, but what’s happening amongst many PRs and writers now is a Roman legion-style tortoise defence, as they loudly decry the piece without providing a glimmer of an argument opposing it, and hide behind their collective shields. The people who should be say, “Shit, good grief, look at how we come across” are instead saying, “He is a bad man!” and then sending each other reassuring tweets that the article is inaccurate (although failing to point out where) and calling Rab “bitter”. It’s sadly pathetic. And it’s deeply concerning, about an industry that now not only believes itself not deserving of criticism, but that criticism is an outrage.
I deserve criticism.
Being a games journalist is a confusing collection of compromises. For instance, we get games for free. I have a Steam account that automatically has most games appear in my list. If a game isn’t in there, I contact its representative and ask for a copy. You could argue that this compromises me. You could claim that I have a skewed perspective of the value of games because of this. I’d argue against it somewhat – I still buy games, mostly on console. I’m very conscious of how much they cost, and always consider this when reviewing. And as a freelancer if I had to buy every game I played, I wouldn’t be able to do my job. I think that the belief that getting a game for free is a bribe in and of itself comes from the perspective of someone who thinks, “I wish I could get games for free!”, and I completely understand that. However, from the inside, getting the basic tools you need to be able to start doing your job really doesn’t feel like a benefit, nor does it – in all of my experience – make me favourable toward that game. But there’s room for debate here.
Press trips are the other big issue. I haven’t been on one for years now (and in the last few years they’ve only been with Valve, who are quite exceptional in their doing absolutely no PR whatsoever – a driver collects you from the airport, drops you at a hotel, and then you get yourself to their office and back, and figure out food, entertainment, etc for yourself). Edit: It’s been pointed out to me that I recently went to a two-day, no-frills event in London to play SWTOR ahead of release, that involved an overnight stay. I’d quite forgotten. But let’s take the norm, for let’s say a trip to San Francisco to visit a developer and look at their game at some point during its development. In my experience (and I’m intrigued to learn this is not the norm for many American mags/sites) the trip is paid for by the publisher behind the game. This includes flights (absolutely always in Economy in my experience, with the exception of Valve), a hotel room, and meals during the trip. You are looked after by a PR, whose job is to ensure journalists go where they’re supposed to go and see what they’re supposed to see, and then take them out for dinner in the evening. And yes, obviously here there is lots of room for criticism.
Every aspect of that could be considered an attempt to influence my opinion of the game I’m seeing (although I’d argue flying twelve hours in Economy doesn’t quite fit that bill), and you can obviously see how it’s in the PR’s interests to keep the journalists content. Again, from the perspective of the writer, it’s hard to perceive any of it as a bribe. You need a plane to get to the developer, you need a bed to sleep in, and you need to eat. And since you can’t afford any of those things, it’s useful that someone else is paying. Whether that’s your employer/magazine/website, or the publisher, in the end is immaterial to you as a writer. Where things get more tricky is in the entertaining that might surround the trip.
I remember spending one day going to Universal Studios in LA. It was an absolutely brilliant day, not least because it was so far removed from what a press trip would usually try to do. At the time, the theme park was like something out of a Scooby Doo episode, run down and depressing, and I was with a group of hilarious writers – we had the best day laughing at the dilapidated ruin of a 1980s hangover, and then got to go down the road where Buffy lived. I couldn’t tell you what game it was for, and I can assure you that it didn’t influence whatever I wrote about whichever game it was when I got back. But if you want to criticise me, I absolutely got given entry to Universal Studios by a PR. That merits criticism.
However, I also made personal choices on such trips. Most journalists want to spend the evenings in bars, drinking lots. I can think of little I’d like to do less, and quickly learned to politely opt out of post-dinner activities, and head back to my hotel room. I’d get funny looks, but I’m comfortable enough with myself to ignore that. In the morning I’d not have any disturbing anecdotes, but I’d also not have a debilitating hangover. I’m also extremely fortunate that I’ve only once had to turn down an offer to go to a strip club. I’ve never been to one, have no desire to go to one, but have often heard about their being offered on such trips. That’s deserving of criticism.
One time I was sent to London for a preview event for the game Auto Assault. What I didn’t know was that I’d spend the day riding on quad bikes and hovercraft. I had a great day, by coincidence with a few good friends, and at the end of it we were shown the average-looking game. That I’d wasted a day pratting around on bikes didn’t make me want to like the game more – if anything it puts the mediocrity of a game in perspective – and the game went on to be a disastrous flop that few journalists sought to defend because they’d had a nice day going on a quad bike. But that day is definitely deserving of criticism – it had nothing to do with the game, and had no purpose other than to try to entertain us. And the publishers had no reason to want to entertain us other than to have us like their game more. It didn’t work, it’s damned stupid. But I was a part of it, and you’d be right to criticise it. (Although at least I didn’t write about the day for any press – I’m concerned to see today people on some jaunt in Paris where Microsoft pay for a bunch of journos to race cars, who are then writing about it.)
Heck, I’ve written content for a game! I wrote a bunch of material for the remake of Broken Sword, by Revolution Software. As such I have said that I will never review any of their games again. But when they recently had a Kickstarter for Broken Sword 5, in my role as a writer for RPS I posted about it. I don’t think I should have. While I wasn’t encouraged to post about that particular Kickstarter because I’d worked with the developers, but rather because it was a news story our readers cared about, it could appear as corrupt. Criticise me for that – call me out. I declared my interests in the posts – that’s a good thing to do in such circumstances. But such circumstances probably shouldn’t come about.
Similarly, there are a couple of developers whose games I won’t review, because I feel I’ve become too friendly with them. That’s an interesting peril of this job – you see someone often enough in a work context, and you might get on with them, want to be friends. It’s happened to me twice in 14 years, but it’s happened. And for me, that means it’s absolutely inappropriate to review their games – but you could criticise me for not having boundaries in place to prevent this.
I want to add here, however, that a mistake an awful lot of people make is the belief that advertising regularly influences editorial. Again, yes, it has in various generally well known cases. But again, that’s very unusual. For example, PC Gamer is written each month with the writers mostly not having a clue which ads will appear between the articles, and more significantly, not caring. A part of an editor’s job is to keep the idiotic ideas an ad department come up with at bay, and also ensure his/her writers never have to hear about any of it. That’s normal. And at RPS, we have absolutely no idea who will be advertising on our site. That’s all done by the ad staff at Eurogamer, with whom we partner for advertising content. The only influence we have over advertising is to have them changed or removed when we object to them, either because they objectify men or women, or contravene our rules on intrusiveness. What they’re advertising – well generally I don’t even notice they’ve changed since the previous week until around Wednesday, because my brain ignores them. And they certainly don’t influence our content – as is regularly demonstrated by our slagging off names currently shouted down the sides of the site. And we, personally, couldn’t give a flying fuck if a company’s ads people wanted to have a strop because they didn’t like what we said about their game. We’d likely never hear about it anyway.
I am deeply disturbed that this UK games industry is behaving as if it’s above criticism. Everything I’ve described above is normal, and its normality is such that it just happens without anyone giving it any thought. And most of it isn’t corrupt, no matter how it may appear. Most of it is practical and pragmatic, along with a PR with a corporate credit card who quite fancies a nice dinner himself. Everyone experiences biases and influences, in every field, and no one is free from it |
too, so even if it’s only a dollar per article you pledge, it doesn’t matter. With many people doing the same thing, this will build up a sizeable pot. As I gain more and more patrons, the total pot size I get paid for publishing something new rises, acting as an ever-increasing financial incentive for me to post more frequently. Although, please allow me to stress, and I cannot stress this emphatically enough: I will not begin posting banal bullshit with increased frequency simply to get paid. Please refer to what I said above about taking the art of writing and crafting well thought-out articles very seriously. Even this announcement has gone through careful planning. Writing is my art and has been for quite some time, I’m looking to capitalise on that now, but I’m not willing to sell out to do so.
You can find out more about supporting my work via Patreon by checking out my Patreon profile or clicking the link in the “Support IM” widget that’s recently been added to the sidebar.
To conclude:
I want to take Illimitable Men to the next level by turning the heat up a notch. I have hundreds of unpublished drafts at various levels of completion, as well as some exciting projects/concepts under wraps for publication in the future. You’ll be happy to know that one of these projects is finishing my work on the in-depth 48 Laws of Power. Just be patient with me, and I’ll deliver quality. 2015 looks like it’s going to be a great year for Illimitable Men, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride on the wave of success I’ve been enjoying. So thanks for being a reader, and should you choose to support my work, a patron.
– Illimitable ManNew Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Wednesday trained guns at Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh for dubbing the 2008 Batla House encounter as 'fake' and said that he should be investigated by the NIA for deliberately misleading the nation.
Swamy, who is the BJP's Rajya Sabha MP, told ANI it should be found that why is the Congress leader deliberately misleading the country and is doing it on behalf of whom.
"Digvijaya Singh should be investigated, he should face the NIA...I think Mr. Digvijaya Singh should agree to get himself investigated by the NIA," he added.
on Tuesday, Digvijaya asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi led-NDA government to order a judicial probe into the 2008 encounter at Batla House in Delhi in which two suspected terrorists and a police officer were killed.
"Batla House encounter was fake. I dare the BJP to go for a judicial probe. I still stand by my remarks on the encounter. I don't know who is Bada Sajid or Chhota Sajid," Singh said.
The encounter, which had taken place during the former UPA regime, recently came into news amid a claim by an alleged ISIS operative that he had fled Batla House right before the police raided it.
Batla House encounter, officially known as Operation Batla House, took place on September 19, 2008, against Indian Mujahideen (IM) terrorists in Batla House locality in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, in which two suspected terrorists were killed while two other suspects were arrested.
Encounter specialist and Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, who led the police action, was also martyred during the incident.
According to the reports, Mohammed Sajid alias Bada Sajid is one of the six persons who feature in the 22-minute video allegedly posted by the Islamic State recently, however he was one of the terrorist who was claimed killed in the encounter.
A Delhi court had in 2013 sentenced to life the lone convict and suspected Indian Mujahideen operative Shahzad Ahmad in the case for killing decorated police officer Sharma and injuring two other policemen.Editor's note: David Nakamura also contributes to The Atlantic's excellent Food blog. Read his personal take on this story, which includes the shocking revelation of his own waist size.
TOKYO, Japan — In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law.
So before the fat police could throw her in pudgy purgatory, Miki Yabe, 39, a manager at a major transportation corporation, went on a crash diet last month. In the week before her company’s annual health check-up, Yabe ate 21 consecutive meals of vegetable soup and hit the gym for 30 minutes a day of running and swimming.
“It’s scary,” said Yabe, who is 5 feet 3 inches and 133 pounds. “I gained 2 kilos [4.5 pounds] this year.”
In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.
In the United States, the Senate and House health care reform bills have included the so-called “Safeway Amendment,” which would offer reductions in insurance premiums to people who lead fitter lives. The experience of the Japanese offers lessons in how complicated it is to legislate good health.
Though Japan’s “metabo law” aims to save money by heading off health risks related to obesity, there is no consensus that it will. Doctors and health experts have said the waistline limits conflict with the International Diabetes Federation’s recommended guidelines for Japan. Meantime, ordinary residents have been buying fitness equipment, joining gyms and popping herbal pills in an effort to lose weight, even though some doctors warn that they are already too thin to begin with.
The amount of “food calories which the Japanese intake is decreasing from 10 years ago,” said Yoichi Ogushi, professor of medicine at Tokai University and one of the leading critics of the law. “So there is no obesity problem as in the USA. To the contrary, there is a problem of leanness in young females.”
One thing’s certain: Most Japanese aren’t taking any chances.
Companies are offering discounted gym memberships and developing special diet plans for employees. Residents are buying new products touted as fighting metabo, including a $1,400 machine called the Joba that imitates a bucking bronco. The convenience store chain Lawson has opened healthier food stores called Natural Lawson, featuring fresh fruits and vegetables.
More from GlobalPost: Japan's obsession with whale meat
Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.
Though Japan has some of the world’s lowest rates of obesity — less than 5 percent, compared to nearly 35 percent for the United States — people here on average have gotten heavier in the past three decades, according to government statistics. More worrisome, in a nation that is aging faster than any other because of long life spans and low birth rates, the number of people with diabetes has risen from 6.9 million in 1997 to 8.9 million last year.
Health care costs here are projected to double by 2020 and represent 11.5 percent of gross domestic product. That’s why some health experts support the metabo law.
“Due to the check up, there is increased public awareness on the issue of obesity and metabolic syndrome,” said James Kondo, president of the Health Policy Institute Japan, an independent think tank. “Since fighting obesity is a habit underlined by heightened awareness, this is a good thing. The program is also revolutionary in that incentivizes [companies] to reduce obesity.”
Though the health exams for metabolic syndrome factor in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight and smoking, waist size is the most critical element in the Japanese law — and perhaps the most humiliating.
The hesitancy of some Japanese to expose their bare stomachs to the tape measure has led the government to allow the tape measures to be administered to clothed patients. Those who elect not to strip down are permitted to deduct 1.5 centimeters from their results.
The crudeness of the system has alarmed some doctors. Satoru Yamada, a doctor at Kitasato Institute Hospital in Tokyo, published a study two years ago in which several doctors measured the waist of the same person. Their results varied by as much as 7.8 centimeters.
“I cannot agree with waist size being the essential element,” Yamada said.
Perhaps more astounding, even before Japanese lawmakers set the waistline limits last year, the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) amended its recommended guidelines for the Japanese. The new IDF standard is 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for men and 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) for women. But the Japanese government has yet to modify its limits.
On the day of her exam, Yabe arrived at the clinic at 8:30 in the morning. The battery of tests lasted an hour. The result: her waist was 84 centimeters — safely under the limit. She had shed 6.5 pounds thanks to her diet and exercise.
A week later, however, Yabe was back to eating pasta and other favorite foods.
“I want to keep healthy now, but I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe in December, I will have many bonenkai [year-end parties]. And next summer I will drink beer, almost every day.”Muhammad cracked the top 10 list of the most popular baby names in England and Wales, surpassing William, James, Daniel, and other historically common names in the country, according to data from the U.K.’s national statistics agency.
Baby names can give a glimpse of pop culture influences and the changing demographics of a nation. In this case, it shows diversity within the 696,271 live births in England and Wales last year. The name has moved from 43rd to 8th in one decade.
Over the years, some reports have argued that if you were to look at all the different spellings of Muhammad than it would actually be the most popular name. And that’s true; There are numerous spellings of Muhammad, including “Mohammed” and “Mohammad,” in the top 100 list.
Still, that doesn’t take into account spelling variations of other Anglo names—for instance the variant spellings of Kristin, Kristen, and Krysten or Erik and Eric—that would offer up a true comparison.
At any rate, the result runs the risk of being twisted to spark Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment.
Here’s what England’s Office of National Statistics can tell us: Muhammad (that specific spelling, which is the most common) is now firmly in the top 10 category—and it’s on the rise. Just check out the graph below showing three spelling variants of the name.
Screenshot from Office of Statistics
The most popular boys’ name in England remains Oliver, followed by Harry, George, Jack, and Jacob. Olivia is the most popular girls’ name in England.Jeremy Corbyn has suggested that 'gig economy' contracts should be replaced by cooperatives as he accused the Conservatives of presiding over a "broken" economic model. The Labour leader said he wants to radically overhaul a system of inequality which is driving up poverty among vulnerable groups and harming the economy as a whole. He set out Labour's plans to transform Britain's economic model, so the benefits of new technology are spread more widely, in a speech to the Co-operative Party conference.
Philip Hammond says that Labour poses - and I quote - 'an existentialist challenge to their economic model'. Well, Philip, yes, we do! We're not going to sit back when their economic model is seeing homelessness double, four million of our children living in poverty, over a million older people not getting the care they need. Their economic model is broken, it doesn't work for most people and even the IMF thinks inequality and low taxes for the richest are harming the economy. – Jeremy Corbyn
Mr Corbyn suggested that zero hour 'gig economy' jobs could be replaced by cooperatives. Credit: PA
Mr Corbyn suggested "gig economy" firms like ride-hailing service Uber or food delivery firm Deliveroo could be replaced by co-operatives, in which drivers collectively set pay and conditions and share or reinvest the profits from their work. He vowed that a Labour Government would promote cooperative groups with the aim of doubling the size of the sector. He also repeated warnings that Conservative infighting over Brexit was making a "shocking mess" of divorce negotiations and threatened to leave the country without an exit deal.
Mr Corbyn said the Conservatives were 'negotiating with each other instead of the EU'. Credit: PAJeter, who will retire following the season, will bat leadoff in his 14th and final All-Star Game.
MINNEAPOLIS -- When he set his lineup for Tuesday night's All-Star Game, American League manager John Farrell made sure Yankees icon Derek Jeter would have a chance to impact the game as quickly as possible.
MINNEAPOLIS -- When he set his lineup for Tuesday night's All-Star Game, American League manager John Farrell made sure Yankees icon Derek Jeter would have a chance to impact the game as quickly as possible.
Jeter, who will retire following the season, will bat leadoff in his 14th and final All-Star Game.
View Full Game Coverage
"[It's a way] to celebrate a player who's not only a champion but a guy that sets the bar that I think all players should aspire to -- the way he's handled himself with class, with performance, no doubt a Hall of Famer," said Farrell. "This will be a day that many baseball fans that are either in the ballpark or watching, [they] will remember Derek's last All-Star Game."
Managing the All-Star Game for the first time in his career, Farrell, who guided the Red Sox to a World Series championship in 2013, relished the opportunity to be able to put together such a stacked lineup.
Following Jeter, Farrell lined up Mike Trout, Robinson Cano, Miguel Cabrera, Jose Bautista, Nelson Cruz, Adam Jones, Josh Donaldson and Salvador Perez.
"I think any time you're surrounded by that caliber of players and you get the fortunate ability to see them across the field or compete on the same field with them, and to see them assembled in one clubhouse, it's a rare opportunity," Farrell said.
"But when you think about the depth -- and you look at a third baseman with Oakland who's hitting in the 8-hole that's got nearly 20 home runs -- just by position in the lineup, it reflects the caliber of players, the depth in it and the reserves will be coming in behind these guys are deserving to start in their own right. It's a rare and unique opportunity."
Felix Hernandez, the Mariners' electric ace, will start for the AL in the 85th All-Star Game, which takes place at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday night on FOX. There's at least a chance Red Sox right-hander Koji Uehara might close it.
"I think when we look at the closing candidates for our American League squad, we have five very capable, very successful closers, Koji being one of them," said Farrell. "We have yet to determine and name internally who we would build back to, but Koji has had a phenomenal year and a half since he has been moved into our closer role."
In both World Series championships Farrell has won -- the first in 2007 as a pitching coach with the Red Sox and last year as manager -- his team capitalized on having home-field advantage.
Once again, the winner of Tuesday's game will determine which league gets home field in the World Series.
"I don't think you can ever underestimate the home-field advantage in a postseason -- certainly a seven-game series," Farrell said. "Typically you're going to go up against an outstanding club, as we did last year in St. Louis. And to have that final game potentially in your home ballpark, that goes a long way to affecting the outcome."
For one game, Farrell gets to be reunited with Bautista, the slugger he managed in Toronto for two seasons.
"Having the fortunate ability to be with him two years in Toronto, you gain such an appreciation of a player that never takes a play off," said Farrell. "His work ethic, certainly his talents and his performance. To see Jose among this group, he'll stand out among this group as well, and to see him in that role, knowing that he has been the leader of the [voting], he's very worthy of it and I know he and his teammates are having a heck of a year in Toronto."
American League All-Star lineup
1. SS Derek Jeter, Yankees
2. LF Mike Trout, Angels
3. 2B Robinson Cano, Mariners
4. 1B Miguel Cabrera, Tigers
5. RF Jose Bautista, Blue Jays
6. DH Nelson Cruz, Orioles
7. CF Adam Jones, Orioles
8. 3B Josh Donaldson, A's
9. C Salvador Perez, Royals
SP Felix Hernandez, MarinersLONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — The Rev. David Latimer thought it was a terrible idea. The streets of this Northern Irish city had burned in the Troubles. His Protestant church was firebombed by Catholics. Every summer, rival bonfires the size of small mountains still burn, and with them the flags and effigies of the other side.
Burning a 75-foot-tall pagan temple in a Republican Catholic enclave on the loyalist Protestant side of town to “bring people together” seemed, well, mad.
“How are you going to get my congregation to come to a Catholic area?” he asked the California artist who started erecting the temple this month. “How is fire going to have a productive outcome in a city where fire has always been about hating the other?”
“It worked in other parts of the world,” said the artist, David Best, whose temples usually burn in the Nevada desert at the Burning Man festival.Beijing-based architects MAD have designed a conceptual, star-shaped, mobile Chinatown.
The architects describe the project as "MAD's response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date nature of the contemporary Chinatown".
Moving around the world, the mobile town would produce all it's own energy and recycle all its own waste, requiring no resources from its host city.
The town would be home to 15,000 people and include health resorts, sports facilities, drinking-water lakes and a digital cemetery.
The project will be presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale as part of the exhibition ‘Uneternal City’ curated by Aaron Betsky, which opens this week.
Watch a movie about the project here.
Here's some more information from MAD:
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MAD’S SUPERSTAR TO FEATURE AT 11th VENICE BIENNALE
A new project by MAD, ‘Superstar: A Mobile China Town’, will be featured in the exhibition ‘Uneternal City’ at the 11th Venice Biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky. The exhibition invites 12 young global architects to suggest interventions into an anonymous suburban area of Rome, which will exploit and represent new spaces and urban fabrics of a Rome of the future. It will be shown in the Arsenale, from 14th September to 23rd November 2008.
MAD's proposal, 'The Superstar', takes the form of a New China Town.
Along with shopping malls, petrol stations and branches of McDonalds, the old China Town renders all of our cities boring and alike. It is nothing more than restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings representing a kitsch image of contemporary China, with no real life inside. It is a historical theme park that poisons the urban space. There must be a shock therapy to remedy this situation.
Superstar: A Mobile China Town is MAD's response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date nature of the contemporary Chinatown. Rather than a sloppy patchwork of poor construction and nostalgia, the Superstar is a fully integrated, coherent, and above all modern upgrade of the 20th century Chinatown model. It’s a place to enjoy, to consume Chinese food, quality goods and cultural events; it’s a place to create and to produce, where citizens can use workshops to study, design and realize their ideas.
Equally important to what this neo-community contains is how it operates. Superstar: A Mobile China Town is a benevolent virus that releases unknown energy in between unprincipled changes and principled steadiness. It can land at every corner of the world, exchanging the new Chinese energy with the environment where it stays. It’s self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste. And it’s a living place, with authentic Chinese nature, health resorts, sports facilities and drinking water lakes. There’s even a digital cemetery, to remember the dead. The Superstar is a dream that’s home to 15,000 people: there is no hierarchy, no hyponymy, but a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.
The Superstar’s first destination will be the periphery of Rome. The Superstar will provide an unexpected, ever-changing future imbedded in the Eternal past.
Welcome to the Superstar, the China Town of today.
ABOUT MAD
MAD is a young and innovative architectural design office practicing contemporary architecture, urbanism and cultural analysis. Based in Beijing, we examine and develop our concept of futurism beyond the boundaries of architecture by exploring into sociology, technology and politics in today’s China.
MAD’s ongoing projects include: the Absolute Tower in Toronto, Canada, it is the international competition MAD won in 2006; the Tianjin Sinosteel International Plaza, a 358M high-rise building in Tianjin, China; the Mongolian Museum in Inner Mongolia, China and some large-scale public complex and residential housing in Denmark, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and Costa Rica.
MAD’s work has been published worldwide. In 2006, MAD was awarded the Architectural League Young Architects Forum Award. The office has also presented its designs in a series of exhibitions, including the "MAD in China" exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennial, and the "MAD Under Construction" exhibition at the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects Gallery in Beijing. In 2007, "MAD in China," a floating city of MAD's work, was shown at the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008, MAD published its first book MAD DINNER with ACTAR.
PARTNERS:
Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun
More Dezeen stories about MAD:
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Sinosteel International PlazaChristian Purslow put himself in the firing line on Thursday by digging up the ground-share issue on Merseyside- just when we thought it had been dead and buried somewhere in Stanley Park.
The former managing director at Anfield stated that the case for both Everton and Liverpool coming together in search of a new stadium was “overwhelmingly and compellingly obvious” in financial terms.
Speaking for myself, and a whole host of Evertonians (as well as Liverpudlians no doubt), the issue has always been a non-starter. But why?
I don’t think anyone would disagree with Purslow in that it would be financially beneficial to both clubs. Not only would it ease the initial outlay in the purchase of land and the construction of a stadium, but it would allow the running and maintenance costs to be split and the increased capacity would increase match-day revenue.
Purslow stated that the likes of Arsenal and Manchester United are making £100m a year through the gate, with Liverpool earning £40m. Everton announced earlier this year that Goodison Park took in just £17.5m in the 2012/13 season.
But in a time when money is ever-increasingly the driving force in football, it would seem both sets of fans are holding onto something less monetary but far more valuable.
At least where Evertonians are concerned. The need to increase the value and marketability of the club appears to conflict with the very attributes that make the club what it is to the match-going fan. Can the club expand, become a global name and still retain it’s local identity- the very thing that makes Everton, Everton?
If we glance up the M62 to Eastlands, we’ll see a mega-rich giant of recent times which has risen up from the doldrums of the Football League to become one of the most marketable, global names on the planet: Manchester City.
Yes, they have started to finish at the top end of the Premier League when they used to flirt with bottom. They are now winning major trophies when they used to win nothing more than promotion. And yes, they played Barcelona this week in the Champions League when 15 years ago they were playing Macclesfield Town.
But has something been sacrificed in exchange for that glory? Has some essence of what made them the city of Manchester’s club, as supported by the people of Manchester, been chipped away? And is the corporate Etihad Stadium (so lovingly named) better than the homage to football that was, Maine Road?
I’ve seen the Etihad look criminally empty on more than one occasion, and not just against Premier League minnows. Even when it does appear close to capacity, the atmosphere is notably flat.
Of course City do not ground-share and these issues would no doubt face Everton if they were to move to a new, bigger stadium shared or not. But these issues are just another excuse for us to hold on even more firmly to what we’ve got.
There is no question that Goodison Park is approaching it’s sell-by-date. It’s not a nice thing to say but all Evertonians know it is quickly becoming a living relic among bigger, sleeker and comfier stadia. But it’s only right that we should want to hold on to this uniqueness. After all, it’s what helps make Everton, Everton.
Evertonian’s reluctance to ground-share with their Stanley Park neighbours comes not only from the fact that it would involve sharing with our Stanley Park neighbours. More so is the heart-break at having to leave Goodison Park and the fact that the new ground would be shared. We wouldn’t have our own ground any more, not all ours anyway. And for all it’s short-comings, Goodison Park is ours; all ours.
Everton’s inability to effectively increase Goodison’s capacity has been marked, mostly due to it’s confines in a densely-populated, terrace-house area. A similar situation faces Liverpool across the park, yet their failure to make Stanley Park viable has forced them to look to re-develop Anfield. Can this really be enough to help them compete with those teams who play at Old Trafford, the Etihad, the Emirates and Stamford Bridge?
Because that is the ultimate question when it comes to owners and club directors making such decisions: can we compete? How can we generate enough revenue to purchase the best players and compete for trophies? When you think about redeveloping either stadium in light of these questions, expansion simply isn’t going achieve this higher goal.
Purslow is correct when he says a ground-share is “obvious financially”. But there are stronger forces at work on Merseyside and at least on the Blue half of the city, to not have something we can call our own -no matter how many wooden seats and obstructed views it has- is something Blues simply don’t want to think about.Shin splints are a tricky injury to discuss. There’s no clear cure and every runner will respond differently to various treatment options. I’m even hesitant to call shinsplints an “injury” – sore shins simply don’t qualify in my book. Shinsplints are more like persistent soreness. Since they can often significantly limit your training, I want to discuss how to get rid of shin splints and also how to prevent them before you have sore shins.
Most of the time, shin splints affect new runners or those who don’t run consistently. If you’re just starting up or find yourself taking long breaks in between training blocks, you’re at an increased risk for this annoying little injury.
Shin splints are essentially a nagging soreness caused by too much stress to the shin muscles. Runners report pain on both the anterior and interior of the tibia – basically, both sides of the shin bone. I had severe shin splints when I first started running. Curiously, I only had sore shins when I was running a fast workout on the track.
A great definition and list of shin splints causes can be found on Wikipedia. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here.
What I want to do is take a running-specific look at how to get rid of shinsplints through changes in your training. Small changes can make a big difference when it comes to your susceptibility to shin splints and other injuries.
How to Get Rid of Shin splints: Your Treatment Plan
There are several reasons why you may be getting shin splints so one of these treatment options may not work for you. My recommendation is to experiment with all of these suggestions and if you can, implement them all. They’re good for shin splint treatment, prevention, and work well for other injuries too. They have helped me get rid of shin splints in the past and I hope they work for you too.
Introduce more variety in your program. Rotate 2-3 pairs of shoes, run on varied terrain like trails and hills, and don’t run the same speed every day. Constantly challenge your body. Avoid the “three too’s” – too much, too soon, too fast. Sudden increases in volume or intensity can over-stress your shins making you more susceptible to sore shins. Don’t tie your shoes so tight. Doing so can restrict the movement of your shin muscles and tendons where they attach to your ankle. If you wear very bulky trainers, you could be at a higher risk of aggressively heel striking or slapping your foot down on the ground. Wear a pair of minimalist running shoes (I train in the Saucony Kinvara’s and New Balance 101’s) for 1-3 runs per week to strengthen your lower legs and feet. Don’t run cold. Warm-up before you head out the door with a dynamic flexibility routine. Your muscles work better when they are warm and primed to work. Consistency is king. If you regularly take significant breaks from running then your body is not being trained to adapt to the stress of running. Be more consistent with your training and your body won’t rebel as frequently. Strengthen your lower legs with barefoot strides, slow barefoot running (not too much!) on a soft surface, and avoiding shoes with a very high heel. You should also be doing a consistent strength routine. If you’re stuck on a good routine, I highly recommend the Injury Prevention for Runners program. Ice your shins. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I’m astounded by the number of people who disregard the power of ice. Use a paper cup and peel the paper back at the top to expose about an inch of ice. Massage your shin muscles for 10-20 minutes. Also, ice-baths are my favorite. Just make sure to use enough ice. Correct your form by having a high stride-rate, landing on your mid-foot underneath your hips, and keeping your back tall as you run. If you are going to choose only one suggestion here, pick this one. Finally, have patience. Sometimes sore shins just happen and unless the pain is severe or sharp, you can train through it. Stay tough.
Like I mentioned, some of these treatment plans may not work for you. Treating injuries, and also running, is largely a trial and error game. The more options you experiment with, the more success you’ll experience. If you really need to learn how to get rid of shin splints then you should experiment with many of these strategies.
I’ve found what works for me: trails, increasing my cadence, running more hills, and consistency with core and other strength work. I haven’t had a major injury in over two years and I’m still going strong. I’ve learned when to take it easy and when to run hard. It took me 12 years, but I guess I’m a slow learner.
There’s no magic bullet when it comes to shin splints, so remember #8 above. Consistently practice these suggestions, be patient, and shin splints will soon be a distant memory. One warning: if your shin pain is severe, sharp, or lasts for longer than a month, you should get it checked out by a professional. You could have compartment syndrome; not something you want to run through.
Photo Credit: ReneSSpread the love
The rise of industrial agriculture — led by companies such as Monsanto that push monoculture, chemical-based farming and patented life forms — has brought a flood of pesticides that wreak havoc on natural ecosystems.
Insects and animals that eat insects fall victim to the millions of gallons of pesticides dumped on cropland, which run off into waterways, drift to nearby habitats and are picked up as residue by visiting pollinators.
In the 1980s, Bayer developed a potent new class of pesticide called neonicotinoids (neonics), which rapidly came to dominate industrial agriculture. In 2008, they represented 24 percent of the global market for insecticides, with Imidacloprid becoming the most widely used insecticide in the world.
Almost all U.S. corn and about one-third of U.S. soybean is treated with neonics. A “major advance” happened when agribusiness developed neonic-coated seeds, where every part of the growing plant becomes infused with the toxin, including pollen.
After government regulators, deep in the pockets of agribusiness, rushed to approve neonics for commercial sale, scientific studies began documenting the ecological impacts. Bird populations and other insectivores declined due to a lack of insect prey, as neonics became more widely used.
In 2006 we began seeing dramatic die-offs of honeybee populations, which play a vital role in pollinating food crops. Colony collapse disorder became a common occurrence, with bees showing classic signs of insecticide poisonings such as tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions.
Dead bees in and around hives showed the presence of neonics, and new research found that low-levels of neonics in bees made them susceptible to viral infections and mites, and reduced the reproductive ability of queen bees. Corn and dandelion pollen brought back to hives routinely tested positive for neonics.
Other insects are devastated by neonics, including the North American bumblebee which has seen a 90 percent decline. The threat to wild bees, honeybees and other pollinators is becoming ever more clear as more studies come out.
Now, the first long-term study of neonic impacts on wild bees has confirmed that the popular pesticide is linked to long-term bee decline.
Researchers in England looked at 18 years of data on 64 wild bee species and the use of neonics on the oilseed rape plant, which is widely treated with neonics, finding that about half of the total decline is due to the insecticide. All of the 34 species that forage on oilseed rape showed at least a 10 percent decline from neonics, with the most affected group experiencing a 30 percent decline from neonics.
The findings of the Centre for Ecologh and Hydrology team appear in the journal Nature.
“Historically, if you just have oilseed rape, many bees tend to benefit from that because it is this enormous foraging resource all over the countryside,” lead author Dr. Ben Woodcock told the BBC. “But this co-relation study suggests that once its treated with neonicotinoids up to 85 percent, then they are starting to be exposed and it’s starting to have these detrimental impacts on them.”
The research adds to several laboratory and short-term field studies which have found negative effects of neonics on honeybees and wild bees. Even the EPA has been forced to admit neonics kill bees.
“The negative effects that have been reported previously do scale up to long-term, large-scale multi-species impacts that are harmful,” said co-author Dr Nick Isaac. “Neonicotinoids are harmful, we can be very confident about that and our mean correlation is three times more negative for foragers than for non-foragers.”
While agribusiness will continue to deny that their favorite insecticide has anything to do with declining bee populations, well-informed consumers have already forced a change at retail stores. Large garden centers, including Lowes and Home Depot, have committed to eliminating neonic-treated garden plants which are often planted for the purpose of attracting pollinators.
However, the vast majority of neonic application is in the hands of companies such as Bayer and Monsanto that produce both seeds and chemicals to use on seeds and plants. Their friends at the FDA and other government agencies are complicit in unleashing neonics without bothering to truly consider how these toxins affect the environment.Calls for an official listing of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) as a terrorist group came after last week's truck bombing of the Big C Supercentre in Pattani town. (Photos FB/BIG-C-Pattani)
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha rejected suggestions on Tuesday that the government might consider declaring Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) a terrorist group to enlist international support to help combat violence.
He insisted the government has been enforcing laws to prevent violence, saying it is not the right approach to bring international organisations into the country's affairs.
Gen Prayut said the international community might not fully understand the problem and engaging them might complicate the issue. He said the situation in the deep South was complex with some groups such as drug and contraband smugglers exploiting unrest for their own gain.
He said these issues are sensitive and Asean countries have a non-interference policy.
"Development with wider public participation is a key factor in restoring peace and order. Legal and military measures must be implemented carefully.
"I think academics should not present only one side of the problem. Bringing in foreign countries will complicate things because we are dealing with a complicated issue," he said.
The prime minister was responding to suggestions the government might ask the United Nations to declare the BRN a terrorist group to step up pressure on insurgent groups.
The suggestions were floated following the bomb blasts at the Big C Supercenter in Pattani's Muang district last week.
Following the attacks, Human Rights Watch |
enjoy every half a minute of it.
Keep it together. It won’t be long now. I cross fingers that haven’t seen a nail clipper in months.
Please No "No More Parties in L.A."
A Wild Wolf Appears!
So happy to be finished with the best album of all time pic.twitter.com/JBWa8OWvqw — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) January 25, 2016
Maybe next G.O.O.D. Friday I’ll have better luck.
On January 25, at 12:17 PM I receive notification of a new Kanye tweet. I unlock my phone before I’m face to face with a tracklist for the new album. I move closer to the screen. Trying to make sense of the illegible nonsense scribbled on a piece of paper and then I see it. It couldn’t be. I start shaking uncontrollably. I read the word, THAT word aloud but I still don't believe it. I close the app and then turn it back on. Is that what I think it is?
I read over the track names from top to bottom: "Famous" “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. I & Pt. II” “Waves” “High Lights,” “30 Hours,” “No More Parties in L.A.,” “Fade,” “FML,” “Real Friends,”... Wol—yes, it says ”Wolves!” I close my eyes trying to keep my emotions in check but I have never been so… ANGRY! What do you mean I have to listen to nine other songs before I can hear “Wolves” in CDQ! How does it go from the first song to last?! ^&*% you, Kanye.
Kanye Announces New, New Title For Album Called 'WAVES'
After a couple hours, I collect myself. It’s finally coming out and WAVES isn’t the worse album name ever. I’m happy about this even though Wiz Khalifa doesn’t seem to be. I’m sure they will resolve their issues like adults, though.
Cashmere Is A Troll Part II
when cashmere cat drops wolves at the party and no one realizes they're being blessed w unreleased yeeeeezyyyyyabdkalndkahshdkslah — Jai Wolf (@JaiWolfx) January 31, 2016
Dear, Magnus August Høiberg aka Cashmere Cat, I will find you.
February 2016
Three Seasons And Maybe An Album
SEASON 3 / WAVES / MADISON SQUARE GARDEN / INTERNATIONAL CINEMAShttps://t.co/6u1aPYUwQ8 pic.twitter.com/SkEeTGgoMu — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 1, 2016
At long last the date has been set. I can experience the greatness of "Wolves" in all its CDQ glory in theatres! And, just my luck it’s sold out.
The Album With No Name
WAIT new poll. Which album title do you like best? @kanyewest — Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) February 1, 2016
This is getting fucking ridiculous! Just! Give! Me! Wolves!
Odd Future Wolf Gang Member, Tyler The Creator Makes An “Unauthorized” Rolling Stone Kanye West Cover
ROLLING STONE SHOT BY TYLER THE CREATOR pic.twitter.com/lOMtOdOEel — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 3, 2016
More subliminal wolf promo for "Wolves." Only a couple of days now.
The Night Before Dancing With “Wolves” CDQ
The time is almost here. I’ve been invited by Alpha West himself to be an extra for Yeezy Season 3 and I'm almost prepared. I spend the next 12 hours watching documentaries of wolves and feverishly pressing F5 on kanyewest.com and yeezy.supply for any updates or leaks. Good, nothing has changed. Everything is complete and no man, cat, hawk or drawn out album release can stop me. I WILL FINALLY HEAR “WOLVES!”
Ironically, Jabbari Weekes favourite song is "Paws." Follow his spirit on Twitter.Chants of Hare Rama, Hare Krishna are not exactly the background score you would expect to hear at the Grammys, but this year, the traditional Hindu kirtan will take the stage for the second time in the award’s history through the album Live Ananda, nominated for the Best New Age Album of the Year.
Its creator Krishna Das isn’t Indian, but his journey began in India 40 years back. Das (born Jeffrey Kagel) had been dreaming about visiting India ever since he saw Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. On September 3, 1970, as soon as his feet hit Indian soil, he felt “at home”. “I realised then that I’d never had this feeling of being at home before,” he says.
At the time, Das was a drifting musician who found solace in spiritual teacher Ram Dass. He was visiting India to meet Dass’s own guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji. It was Maharaj-ji who introduced Das to chanting, and gave him direction. “I don’t know what he saw in me,” says Das. “I was such a badmaash.”
Das’s chants have since taken him across the globe, from yoga centres to concert halls, from teaching Madonna and singing with Sting and Bob Dylan, to getting an audience with the Dalai Lama. Nicknamed ‘Pavarotti of chant’ and ‘the rockstar of yoga’ by the media, the 65-year-old has released 14 best-selling albums of Hindu chants, and is the subject of a documentary film titled One Track Heart.
Das was born in Long Island, New York, to Jewish parents. For him, religion never held much appeal. “Organised religion just separates people. The religions have their own ways of helping people but the organisations themselves are all about power.”
So the non-religious Das of the ’70s went on to become an extremely spiritual Hanuman bhakt who can recite Sanskrit prayers, who has studied Buddhism, read Rumi, learned Sufi dancing, and is a proud campaigner for the power of chant. “I am not a Hindu,” he says. “I may chant the names of Hindu deities but to me they’re just names.”
For his fans, language has never been a problem. Wherever he goes, people know the chants and soon join in. “I think the fact that people do not understand what they are chanting helps them be free of conceptual thinking thus immerse themselves wholly in the ritual,” says Das. “Chanting forces people to pay attention, let go of everything and be immersed in the present.”
Chanting has, in the past decade, gained tremendous popularity in the West, aided in no small measure by Das and other American singers like Jai Uttal, Wah! and Dave Stringer. Chanting is no longer limited to just yoga studios. Das has had fans email him and talk to him about how his chants have helped people with fatal diseases find a sort of peace.
Besides featuring various chants, his albums have a few of his own compilations in English. “I believe that we Americans are not psychologically wired for happiness. My work in English is an attempt to rewire our thoughts and allow more positive influences to enter our lives,” he says. Visiting India helps Das stay positive, and this is what has kept him coming “home” year after year for the last four decades. He visited India recently to take a break before the Grammys.
Das’s Live Ananda doesn’t contain a single English song. It is the second kirtan album to be nominated at the Grammys, after Uttal’s Monde Rama in 2003. If Das wins, he will give fillip to a long-standing request by American-Hindu scholars: To include a new category of awards at the Grammys — the kirtan category.Lines by aphexangel.deviantart.com/ Lines fav.me/d472x4y Speed paint youtu.be/0IWgT81SgEc Tumblr catluniscia.tumblr.com/post/13… Patreon www.patreon.com/blackmoonrose1… Redbubble www.reddit.com/user/Blackmoonr… Behold the third part of a few of a series that my sister requested....She loves my little pony, so now I will do it....I never got into the show any form of them....I will endure. So I tried to get accurate to colors....but since they are humans I did use various skin tones and what not.So today is Pinkie Pie! Her hair is curly and fro like how could I not do Black? Seriously? She is so cute and happy look at all the candy and the pink....okay not a big fan of the color pink due to being it crammed down my throat a lot as a kid but at least there is some form of variance right?Also her candy is cherry and grape flavored because those are the best flavors and any one who says different will have to fight the feef army!WHAT MODI SAID LAST YEAR
HITLER LOVED THE VEDAS
PAST-FORWARD MISSILE TECH?
BRAHMASTRA
BRAHMANDASTRA
India’s premier defence research agency’s missile tech unit signs an MoU with the Tirumala temple to conduct scientific research on Vedas. We bet the next Science Congress would be even more bizarreThose were the times. The force – pardon the liberal borrowing from Star Wars -- was with India, or whatever of the present nation-state existed, in Vedic era. Flying machines, IVF, plastic surgery have all been part of Hindu mythology, proof that we had invented it much before the West had even heard of it. Now, the Narendra Modi government is taking it all to the logical end.India’s premier defence research agency the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) has gone right ahead to sign a memorandum of understanding with the cash-rich Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) to conduct scientific research on the Vedas to scout for possible secrets pertaining to missile technologies hidden in the ancient scriptures.The MoU with TTD was signed by the Hyderabad-based Research Centre Imarat (RCI)-DRDO to conduct scientific research on the Vedas. The RCI primarily tests and evaluates missile components, modules, sub-assemblies, major sub-assemblies, and completely integrated missiles to weed out design, fabrication, and integration deficiencies. It has an inertial instrumentation laboratory, full-scale environmental and electronic warfare test facilities, a composites production center, a high enthalpy facility, and a state-of-the-art missile integration and checkout centre.What possibly could such a highly-equipped centre expect to find by conducting scientific research on the Vedas? DRDO scientists are not giving out details.It has been often narrated that ancient Indian mythological wars witnessed weapons of mass destruction being used (as in the Mahabharat) as well as sophisticated aviation technologies (as in ‘Pushpaka Vimana’ in the Ramayana) to suggest that such technologies were developed and %prevailed in those times (estimated to be around 2,000 BC). But nothing has been conclusively proved so far.In fact, a 1974 study titled “A critical study of the work Vymanika Shastra” (Science of aeronautics),conducted by researchers of the Indian Institute of Science into ‘ancient scriptures’ pertaining to aviation technologies claimed to have been handed down by Sage Bharadwaj, were actually found to be a modern works, somewhere between 1918 and 1923.The study, which was then published in the journal Scientific Opinion on four ‘planes’ described in Vymanika Shastra – Shakuna Vimana, Sundara Vimana, Rukma Vimana and Tripura Vimana – and claimed to have been given by the ancient sage, were at best “poor concoctions rather than expressions of something real”. “None of the planes has properties or capabilities of being flown; the geometries are unimaginably horrendous from the point of view of flying; and the principles of propulsion make them resist rather than assist (in) flying,” the researchers said in their study’s conclusions.They also concluded that the texts and the drawings did not correlate with each other “even thematically”, suggesting that such claims were only figments of imagination by the author.Similarly, none of the mythological claims to high-end technologies in the ancient Indian past have found scientific basis despite various studies being conducted on the issue.The TTD has established the Centre for Veda Science Research (CVSR) for promoting research in the field and has recognised seven patasalas as ‘centres of excellence’ in Vedic studies to give a fillip to oral tradition of dissemination of Vedas.Eminent scientists will guide the project, but no further details were available on who they might be.The President inaugurated a new Veda Pathasala (school) set up by the TTD at I Bheemavaram village in Akiveedu Mandal of West Godavari district.The TTD has constructed I Bheemavaram Vedic School at a cost of Rs 4.7 crore. Currently, the TTD, which is the owner of Sri Venkateswara Vedic University, has its Vedic schools at Tirumala, Vizianagaram and Kotappakonda in Andhra Pradesh and in Hyderabad and Nalgonda in Telangana. It directly supports 100 Vedic schools across India.“We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”“We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.”“If we talk about space science, our ancestors had displayed great strengths in space science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago is being recognised by science today. What I mean to say is that we are a country which had these capabilities. We need to regain these.”Speculative and debatable accounts indicate that some missiles developed by the Nazis – including the lethal V2 missile – were developed using technologies sourced from the Vedas. However, these claims could never be proved although Hitler’s and his close generals’ love for the ancient Indian texts was famously known over their Aryan origin.The Brahmastra is mentioned in the epics and Vedas as a weapon of last resort and was never to be used in combat. The Brahmastra, described in the Mahabharata, is a weapon which is said to be a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe. It is considered equivalent to the modern day nuclear weapons.This weapon is said to possess the power to destroy the entire universe (or Brahmand), the 14 realms according to Hindu cosmology. In the Mahabharata era, Parasurama, Bhishma, Drona, and Karna possessed the knowledge to invoke this weapon. As recorded in Hindu Puranas, when this weapon is invoked it causes “the oceans to boil and vaporize due to its heat and earth and mountains will float on the air and everything will burn without even leaving ashes”. This weapon is used for countering Brahmastra.Duane Ludwig and Urijah Faber have had their differences, but they're on the same page about this weekend's UFC bantamweight title bout.
Faber told Ariel Helwani on Monday that he believed his former protege T.J. Dillashaw would "probably knock out" Dominick Cruz, but Ludwig took it a step further.
Speaking with UFC commentators Jon Anik and Kenny Florian, Ludwig is predicting Dillashaw gets the job done inside two rounds.
"He just moves and doesn't get hit, which is nice," Ludwig said of Cruz. "He gets guys out of position so they can't really follow up. But that's just because people aren't bringing their feet with them while they strike, something T.J. is very good at. So I don't see [Cruz] as too much of a threat. We do have to respect him, but I feel T.J. is going to finish him in the second round."
A lot has been made of the stylistic matchup between the pair. Thanks to Ludwig, Dillashaw has embraced a very active striking style similar to the one Cruz utilized to capture his titles in the WEC and UFC. Cruz insists Dillashaw is nothing but a cheap imitation, while the champ says he's innovated the style above and beyond Cruz.
"Our system incorporates a lot of motion," said Ludwig. "T.J. has been very successfully against people who move, like Cruz. Now, has Cruz faced people who have moved? The only person is Demetrious Johnson, who I thought won that fight in the striking, just lost on the takedowns and control on the ground."
Cruz was plagued with major injury setbacks following the 2011 bout with Johnson, forcing the UFC to establish an interim title. Renan Barao would beat out Faber for the strap at UFC 149 in 2012 and would be named the undisputed champ in 2014.
Barao's reign came to an end later that year at UFC 173 when 20-1 underdog Dillashaw scored the upset of the year when he TKO'd the Brazilian midway through round five.
"Obviously, fighting for the title and defending the title are always the biggest fights one can have in their career," said Ludwig. "I don't feel [Cruz] is as much of a threat as Renan Barao was. It's still a huge fight, obviously. I have a ton of respect for Cruz. He never lost the belt. He's back to the top now after some injuries. I respect his commitment to the sport in his career."
Dillashaw defends his UFC bantamweight title to Cruz Jan. 17 in Boston, Massachusetts.
5 MUST-READ STORIES
‘I'm really happy I lost.' Chris Weidman breaks his silence after losing his middleweight title to Luke Rockhold at UFC 194.
Booked? Coach is "sure" Conor McGregor will be fighting at UFC 197, but that his opponent is still "up in the air."
More fines. Lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos fined "significant" amount by UFC for violating Outfitting Policy.
'This one is a no-brainer.' Chuck Mindenhall explains how the UFC wins by booking Holly Holm against Miesha Tate, no matter who wins.
RIP. Alessandro Souza, one of the top referees in the Brazilian mixed martial arts circuit, passed away at age 46 following a motorcycle accident in Rio de Janeiro.
Watch The MMA Hour with Chris Weidman, Donald Cerrone, Urijah Faber, Al Iaquinta, Muhammed Lawal, Eric Del Fierro, Owen Roddy.
MEDIA STEW
Free Fight: Anthony Pettis vs Benson Henderson.
Full segment of Dillashaw and Cruz on Insider.
Al Iaquinta helping researchers study head trauma.
Fight Music: Travis Browne.
Cruz talks injuries, commentating, fighting and more.
TTTHS.
Long watches.
KNUCKLE UP #333: Why CONOR McG is the Jesus That MMA Has Needed.
...
TWEETS
TAM guys making the rounds.
85/100.
There's a finish waiting every fight. How you find it, is up to you. #EASPORTSUFC2 pic.twitter.com/2qJJjCECb2 — EA SPORTS UFC (@EASPORTSUFC) January 11, 2016
More quotes.
Heavy weight.
500lb low block pull for 3.. Trying to maintain strength while bumping up conditioning Posted by Jon "Bones" Jones on Monday, January 11, 2016
Beef.
Tested.
Randomly drug tested by the UFC's United States Anti-Doping Agency at 6:00 AM this morning. 6 drug tests in 3 months pic.twitter.com/nc2kgiFO1q — Sage Northcutt (@sagenorthcutt) January 11, 2016
Interesting.
After 24hr flight, I finally arrived in Singapore.#evolvemma #singapore #asia A photo posted by Henry Cejudo (@henry_cejudo) on Jan 11, 2016 at 7:33pm PST
Nothing lasts forever.
Here's the @RondaRousey play card Clemson is using. It's working, they're up 51-0. pic.twitter.com/h4wBKcv2Dm — David St. Martin (@SaintMMA) October 24, 2015
Alabama just pulled off some magic. While Clemson is using @RondaRousey as a play on their playboard pic.twitter.com/1a32CGeple — Saad Awad (@SAADMMA) January 12, 2016
FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS
Announced yesterday (Jan. 11 2016)
Justin Gaethje vs. Brian Foster at WSOF 29
Corey Anderson vs. Tom Lawlor at UFC 197
Fernando Gonzalez vs. Michael Page at Bellator 151
Mairbek Taisumov out, Mehdi Baghdad vs. Chris Wade at UFC Fight Night: Dillashaw vs. Cruz
Abdul-Kerim Edilov out, Francimar Barroso vs. Elvis Mutapcic at UFC Fight Night: Dillashaw vs. Cruz
Jimy Hettes out, Augusto Mendes vs. Charles Rosa at UFC Fight Night: Dillashaw vs. Cruz
Found something you'd like to see in the Morning Report? Just hit me up on Twitter @SaintMMA and we'll include it in tomorrow's column.Of the 148 goalies selected in the NHL Draft during the past seven years, 16 (10.8 percent) were 6-foot or under. During that same span, 61 goalies 6-3 or taller were selected (41.9 percent).
A trend has developed in recent years that doesn't bode well for anyone 6-foot tall or shorter looking to pursue a career as an NHL goaltender.
"I think NHL teams are looking for guys like Pekka Rinne (6-foot-5, 217 pounds) or Matt Murray (6-4, 178) a lot more than in the past," said John Vanbiesbrouck, who played 20 seasons in the NHL, won the Vezina Trophy in 1986 and was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 2007.
Vanbiesbrouck was listed at 5-8, 176 pounds during his playing days.
"I know there are goalies who will come out of college and will not be drafted and make it that will be 6-foot-1 or shorter, but I don't think you're ever going to see guys my size playing regularly in the NHL again," Vanbiesbrouck said. "Not with the way the equipment is and the way the game is going. That's not going to happen."
Among the 18 goalies chosen in the 2016 draft, Connor Ingram (6-0, 212), a third-round (No. 88) pick of the Tampa Bay Lightning, was the only one under 6-1 selected. One of the 24 goalies taken at the 2015 draft was under 6-1: Erik Kallgren (5-11, 157) who was picked by the Arizona Coyotes in the seventh round (No. 183).
[RELATED: NHL first-round order finalized]
"There are many trends in hockey and some come and go in cycles, but there definitely seems to be a tendency for NHL clubs to draft goaltenders with size as an asset," Director of NHL Central Scouting Dan Marr said. "The precision shooting skills of NHL players as well as the speed in which plays are executed would tend to support having a goaltender that can physically cover more of the net.
"But at the end of any debate, no matter what his size, all clubs desire a goaltender that gets in front of pucks, makes the saves and gives his team a chance to win."
Jim Bedard, who was goalie coach for the Detroit Red Wings for 19 seasons prior to taking the same job with Windsor of the Ontario Hockey League this season, believes the attraction toward taller goaltenders began in 2004, the same year the Nashville Predators selected Rinne in the eighth round (No. 258).
"You see the size of goalies like Rinne and Ben Bishop (6-7, 216) and how intimidating they look in the crease," Bedard said. "I've spoken with numerous scouts and you're seeing a non-stop parade of 6-4 and 6-5 goalies that can't play at that size because they're still growing into their bodies."
Bedard was with the Red Wings when they selected Jimmy Howard in the second round (No. 64) of the 2003 draft. At the time he was drafted, Howard was 6-0, 218 pounds.
"We heard about his height," Bedard said. "But when you stop the puck on a consistent basis that goes away. I watched him practice every day and never once thought, 'Gee, if only he were taller.'"
There are three goalies 6-foot or shorter among the top 31 in Central Scouting's final ranking of North American goaltenders, and two of the top 13 in its final ranking of international goalies.
Among that group the one with the best chance to be drafted early is Windsor's Michael DiPietro (6-0, 202), No. 4 on the final ranking of North American goalies.
"I'm not naive to the fact I'm not the largest goalie up for this year's draft," DiPietro said. "But I can only control what I can control and that's how I play."
DiPietro tied for the OHL lead with six shutouts, was second with a 2.35 GAA and third with a.917 save percentage in 51 games. Then he allowed eight goals in four games to help Windsor win the Memorial Cup.
"All I can say is I wouldn't trade Michael DiPietro for anybody," said Rocky Thompson, who coached Windsor prior to being hired as coach of Chicago of the American Hockey League on June 7. "He's a great teammate, reliable and dependable. He's one inch shorter than Jonathan Quick (Los Angeles Kings). Is that one inch that big of a difference?"
Quick (6-1, 218) was 6-foot, 180 pounds when he was selected by the Los Angeles Kings in the third round (No. 72) of the 2005 draft.
USA Hockey's National Team Development Program under-18 goaltender Dylan St. Cyr is 5-8, 163 pounds. He helped the United States win the gold medal at the 2017 IIHF World Under-18 Championship and was named to the tournament all-star team, and had a 2.66 GAA and.900 save percentage in 47 games with the NTDP. But he isn't ranked on Central Scouting's final list of North American goalies.
"It's not up to me," said St. Cyr, whose mother, Manon Rheaume, is the only woman to play goalie in an NHL preseason game. "I know it's a trend right now and it is what it is. I think so long as you can stop the puck and play the position well that you should be afforded an opportunity. But whatever happens, happens."
St. Cyr was born in Las Vegas, but was 9 months old when he moved with his mother to Northville, Michigan. With the expansion Vegas Golden Knights preparing for their first NHL Draft, could they take a chance on a smaller goalie?
Golden Knights director of amateur scouting Scott Luce said he can see a time when goalies aren't overlooked because of their size.
"The numbers show it's there, but the bottom line is stopping the puck," he said. "If you have a little bit more size you can work that to your advantage. It has been a trend, but I think it has peaked and there will be a settling-in process over the next five years."WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Banks getting money from the government's $700 billion bailout fund will have to explain in detail what they are doing with the money, the incoming head of the Treasury Department said Thursday in written responses to questions from the Senate Finance Committee.
Timothy Geithner's nomination to be Treasury Secretary was approved by the committee on an 18-5 vote on Thursday. The full Senate will now take up Geithner's nomination, probably not before next week.
The ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, voted against Geithner in the committee because he hadn't paid all of his income taxes until reminded to do so by IRS auditors and the Obama transition team. "The Treasury Secretary is in charge of the IRS, and must set a good example," Grassley said.
In a 102-page letter responding to questions from the panel, Geithner said would require banks to report quarterly on their overall lending activity in a "detailed and timely" manner as a condition for receiving the capital infusions from the government.'
The Treasury will issue a new quarterly report on lending and credit conditions in the United States, Geithner said.
Geithner said Treasury will require that banks provide information publicly about the value of each government investment, all of which is expected to be posted on the Treasury Department's website.
The agency is also looking at other possible proposals to stabilize the economy, including one that would employ Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer new mortgages with subsidized rates as low as 4.5%.
He sidestepped questions about whether the Treasury Department would consider creating a government-backed institution that would buy and hold banks' bad mortgage securities, a prospect many regulatory onlookers have speculated he is contemplating. "I am considering a range of ideas and initiatives to restore stability to the financial system," Geithner said.
He also rejected the idea that the Treasury Department would consider nationalization of financial institutions. "Encouraging private investment in our banks and drawing private capital that is now on the sidelines is critical to ensuring that our financial institutions are stable and that our capital markets can return to more normal and healthy functioning," Geithner said.
In addition to monitoring banks' activities, Geithner said the Treasury Department will require banks to increase lending above baseline levels, but he did not provide details about what that minimum threshold might be. "I intend to make sure that the... funds are used to promote new lending activity, to implement aggressive measures to address the foreclosure crisis, in addition to stabilizing financial institutions," he wrote.
However, Neil Barofsky, the bank bailout fund's inspector general, said in a letter Thursday that he is requesting that participating banks provide his office details about how they are using the funds from documents that have been certified by senior executives. Barofsky also said he is requesting in writing a description of plans executives have for complying with new CEO pay package restrictions.
Geithner also said he was committed to using between $50 billion and $100 billion of the remaining bank bailout funds in programs set up to alter mortgages of troubled homeowners in an attempt to mitigate foreclosure.
He also said he supports "reforming our bankruptcy laws," indicating that he is endorsing legislation in Congress that would give bankruptcy judges the authority to alter mortgages in an attempt to stave off foreclosure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she would give high priority to the bankruptcy measure and could include it as part of a fiscal stimulus package expected to be approved within weeks.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in his comments that he was disappointed with the level of disclosure regarding the government's involvement in both the Bear Stearns deal in March and its $150 billion taxpayer bailout of American International Group AIG, +0.07% "It appears that the reported valuation of those assets may be overstated," Grassley said.
Grassley also said he was concerned about a section of AIG's marketing material that says the "actual debt to be repaid," is $39 billion with the federal government removing any obligation for the company to repay about $110 billion. Geithner said he and the New York Fed would need to "look more carefully" at AIG's marketing material before responding.
China's currency policy
President Barack Obama believes that China is manipulating its currency, Geithner said, which would be sharp change from previous administration's China policy. "President Obama has pledged as president to use aggressively all the diplomatic avenues open to him to seek change in China's currency practices," Geithner said in response to a written question from Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
As a senator from Illinois, Obama co-sponsored legislation that would overhaul the U.S. process for determining currency manipulation. The legislation would authorize new enforcement measures against manipulators. Geithner said Obama's economic team is working on a strategy to achieve currency realignment.
"China cannot continue to get a free pass for undermining fair-trade principles," Geithner added.
Win Thin, a currency strategist at New York-based financial services company Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. said that Geithner's comment "appears to be a step away from the policy of the previous administration." Thin says that even though "manipulation" does not meet the legal criteria required by Treasury to cite China for currency manipulation, it is seen as a step in that direction.
Geithner also said an immediate goal for the Obama administration's China policy will be to convince China to adopt a more aggressive domestic stimulus package.San Francisco city planning commissioners are generally a mellow crowd. Oh, they can bring the thunder down on a development they don't like. But that's akin to, say, a pride of lions protecting their domain. It's nothing personal; it's just what they do.
Until Commission Vice President Dennis Richards took a trip to the Dark Side via Twitter over the weekend, a spectacle chronicled by the Chronicle's CW Nevius. Last time anyone heard from Richards before last Saturday, he was tweeting about the city's new sea level rise plan. Normal planning department stuff.
Then came an editorial from Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan under the, ahem, gentle headline, "San Francisco: Build More Housing, Assholes." No points for guessing the gist of it. Richards took umbrage with Gawker's salty perspective on city planning, with an analogy that raised a few eyebrows:
This takes the disc.to new lows.Even Donald Trump hasn't sunk this low in terms of civility. Poisons the discussion https://t.co/EFckTKfKGN — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 10, 2016
Okay, so the man has some strong opinions. But since he's concerned about poisoning the discussion, we can be sure he'll at least remain civil, and engage in dignified intellectual debate with his critics. Right?
Well. That escalated in a hurry.
Note that this is the very next tweet in Richards' feed, in response to an incredulous reaction to his Trump analogy. What he was doing for the four hours between tweets no one knows, but it must have left him fired up and ready to rumble.
Now it was the Internet's turn to take umbrage with Richards, but he was not shy about telling his critics exactly what he thought.
Better yet. You are a douche bag. Go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under https://t.co/gijk8ghGQy — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
So fucking over you https://t.co/kAVeE0pQr5 — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
The gloves are off folks! — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
I am pissed. It's been building up for many months. https://t.co/rOPfEGg9Vk — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
I am tired of bing so agreeable. It's time to be honest https://t.co/7st3lM7gEj — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
By all means, Mr. Vice President, please do stop being so agreeable and tell us what you really mean.
Richards went on to say that the Gawker column is actually worse than Trump rhetoric. Trump, one Richards follower pointed out, once suggested that one of his primary election opponents was a pedophile. Richards' reply:
And what was the public to make of all this? Reactions varied:
@gboeing dennis is drunk and losing it on Twitter! — Local Politics (@SFyimby) March 13, 2016
@SFyimby It's brutal to watch... but I can't tear my eyes away — Geoff Boeing (@gboeing) March 13, 2016
@PlnCom_Richards @SFyimby man it sure is a great thing that SF Planning Commissioner is an appointed position — favorably reviewed (@fulligin) March 13, 2016
There were also a few tweets in support of Richards. For his part, the commissioner stood by his words, later tweeting that he had been adopting a "parallel tone" to the Gawker story.
No deleting anything tomorrow. Please use these screen shots agains me do that I. Get more D8 votes. Thanks all https://t.co/jV5D004u4e — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
No. Uncivil as I mentioned. Why the conflagration? I threw it back at the mob and look what happened. Point proven? https://t.co/QFd1VotC4V — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
Richards, a Castro resident and agitator for the preservation of historic San Francisco buildings, was appointed to the planning commission by the Board of Supervisors in July of 2014. (All commissioners are appointees.) Rumor has it he's planning a board run himself in the future. Clearly, he's passionate about city issues.
Proud of it and want to work with you but if it's down to name calling and incivility. No thanks. https://t.co/SdRBlAQhgj — Dennis Richards (@PlnCom_Richards) March 13, 2016
Even if he is a complicated fellow at times.Syrian rebels have declared Damascus International Airport to be a military target, warning airlines and civilians to |
necessary and sufficient conditions for its use (such as the disquotational schema) but may be additionally constituted by different further conditions according to whether we are talking about religious truths, scientific truths, or ethical truths (see Wright 1992: ch. 2). Fragmentary accounts of truth of the kind that Phillips appears to endorse have been widely criticised—see, for example, Timothy Williamson (1994: 141) Christine Tappolet (1997).
Religious minimalism is usually offered as a program of research rather than a detailed account of religious discourse. There is talk of the need to attend to the practices and forms of life of religious believers, an emphasis on the difference between religious and other areas of discourse, and warnings against applying scientific or historical standards to religious judgements, but the positive story of the meaning of religious utterances is often left as a promissory note. However, there are some areas where more substantial points of disagreement can be pursued. For instance, many supporters of the face value theory will reject the pluralist or fragmentary accounts of truth that inform the minimalist approach. Also, even if one is sympathetic to a pluralist account of truth, it does not straightforwardly follow that truth in religion is different from truth in science or history (for a defense of this point see Scott 2013: ch. 11). Religious minimalism will also be rejected by non-cognitivists. If the descriptiveness of religious language is secured as easily as minimalists propose, then this will undermine the non-cognitivist position that it is—despite superficial appearances—not descriptive. Non-cognitivists argue that the “propositional surface” of language conceals a variety of different functions: ethical statements express approval or disapproval, mathematical statements are stipulations, and so on. For a defense of this see Blackburn 1998.
4.2 Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein’s work on religion has served as a sourcebook for modern opposition to the face value theory. His remarks have been seen as lending support to many of the positions considered in this article. Non-cognitivists can find support in Wittgenstein’s characterisation of religion as “a passionate commitment to a system of reference” (1970 [1994, 64]; see also Tilghman 1991); fictionalists in his proposal that religious believers live their lives according to certain “pictures”; non-assertoric speech act theorists in his comparison of religious utterances to commands (1970 [1994, 61]). Wittgenstein was even attracted (if only briefly) to a subjectivist interpretation of God-talk ([PO]: 42). Given Wittgenstein writings on religion are only infrequent and relatively brief, it is perhaps not surprising that, beyond his clear resistance to the face value theory, he would not have settled views on the topic. For accounts profoundly influenced by or interpretative of Wittgenstein, see Winch (1987), N. Malcom (1997), Rhees (1970).
The minimalist reading of Wittgenstein is supported by his apparent endorsements of a deflationary account of truth (1953: 136), although he does not explicitly endorse the idealised justification theory that Putnam proposes. However, the best evidence for minimalism comes from his emphasis on the differences between the use of religious sentences, and historical or scientific (and in general empirical and descriptive) sentences. Specifically, he points up differences between the standards of warrant employed in religious and other discourses—the kinds of circumstance in which a religious believer judges something to be true, grounds for disagreements between religious believers and non-believers, and so on. This pervades his work on religion. For example, Wittgenstein compares the religious belief in the Last Judgement with scientifically based beliefs, or ordinary beliefs about observable states of affairs (he gives the example “There is a German aeroplane overhead”). While religious believers may speak of “evidence” and “historical events”, Wittgenstein argues that the evidence and events cited in connection with religious judgements do not constitutes reasons to believe them in the way that evidence given in support of a hypothesis gives a reason to believe that the hypothesis is true. In religious discourse “reasons look entirely different from normal reasons” (1966: 56), religious belief is not “a matter of reasonability” (1966: 58), religious beliefs are not hypotheses or opinions, they are not properly spoken of as objects of knowledge or as having a high probability, and when historical facts are introduced in support of religious belief “they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions” (1966: 57). Here Wittgenstein seems at pains to emphasise the contrast between religious discourse and empirical discourses. Indeed, he implies that when taken (or where offered) as reporting scientific facts or scientific theories, religious sentences are in error. Wittgenstein is not, according to the minimalist interpretation, seeking to find any disadvantageous comparison between religion and science; to show, for example, that religion is merely expressive of attitudes, while science is properly descriptive. Rather, he is describing the different standards that make for truth and descriptiveness in these fields of discourse and, in so doing, elucidating the distinctive characteristics of religious truth as well as other realism-relevant concepts.
Notably, if Wittgenstein was a minimalist about religious discourse then one standard line of objection to his account is misplaced. Wittgenstein is sometimes criticised as proposing that religious discourse should be quarantined from other areas of discourse, in particular science and history. This is seen as leading to a variety of fideism, where religious beliefs are compartmentalised and unsusceptible to non-religious intellectual evaluation. The objection is forcefully prosecuted by Kai Nielsen. According to Wittgenstein, Nielsen argues,
no philosophical or other kind of reasonable criticism, or for that matter defence, is possible for forms of life or, indeed, of any form of life, including Hinduism, Christianity and the like. (2000: 147)
However, contrasting the different standards exhibited by religious and scientific discourses is consistent with scientifically or historically well-founded evidence informing religious judgement. Indeed, minimalists would be remiss in not taking account of the fact that historical evidence clearly is seriously weighed in a variety of religious beliefs including belief in Christ’s resurrection, or the creation of the world, and beliefs about miracle workers and what they have done. Insofar as this happens, the verdicts of historical or scientific investigation can modify religious judgements. In a similar way, many religious judgements are dependent on historically or scientifically assessable evidence. For example, compelling evidence that the documentary and eyewitness testimony for a miracle was a hoax would be a good reason not to believe that the miracle in question occurred and this evidence comes from “outside” the religious language game. However, minimalists can allow that empirical evidence is part of the justification for many religious beliefs while maintaining the theory that religious discourse employs distinct standards of justification to science.
5. Reference and Logic
Although they have received less attention that the other topics in this article, two other issues relating to religious language should be noted. First, the reference of “God”, second, the logic of religious language.
Recent work on the reference of “God” mostly proceeds from the assumption that “God” is a name rather than a title or a description (for criticism of this view see Johnston 2011: 6–7; for supporting arguments see Scott 2013: 86–7). From this starting point, attention has focused on how to apply the rich resources of research on names from the philosophy of language to this case. For example, according to descriptivist theories “God” has a descriptive content (a view that stretches back at least as far as Anselm), whereas according to Millian theories “God” refers to its bearer without conveying any information about the object referred to. The latter theory can be combined with a causal theory of reference (Kripke 1980) to explain how the name becomes attached to the referent. Although many of the arguments in this debate derive from the philosophy of language, there are also interesting implications of these positions for the philosophy of religion. For instance, a descriptivist theory appears to place limits on how wrong we can be about what God is like. A causal theory of reference, in contrast, will need to be backed up by a defence of the possibility of causal interaction with God and an account of how God is named. For discussion of these theories see Alston 1989 and 1991, Gellman 1997 and Sullivan 2012. For a recent review of the field see Scott 2013: ch. 7.
Does religious language adhere to a non-classical logic? This issue has been raised in at least two contexts. First, some of the writings of authors in the apophatic tradition have been seen supporting a paraconsistent logic of religious language, specifically dialetheism, the view some contradictory sentences are true (see Priest 2002: 22–3, although Scott & Citron 2016: 72 cast doubt on this as a plausible interpretation of apophatic authors). Second, Michael Dummett considers a number of arguments in favour of the view the divine omniscience entails bivalence, i.e., that for any statement p it is determinately either true or false. For example, if God knows that p, then He knows that he knows that p and therefore it is true; but if God does not know p then He knows that He does not know it and hence knows that it is not true. From this it can be shown that God must know whether p is true or false, thereby securing bivalence (2004: 94–96; see also 1991: 318–9, 348–351). Since, for Dummett, realism for a field of discourse hinges on the success of the principle of bivalence for the statements of that discourse, it would follow that theism leads to global realism. For a critical discussion of Dummett’s arguments see Scott and Stevens 2007.Russian painter Rinat Shingareev lives in a happily bizarre world. His plush pop paintings of world icons from George Bush to Lil Wayne are warm and inviting but have a sense of something weird. From Bush secretly shedding a tear for NASA to Putin against a backdrop of purple camouflage to a floating Obama head in a sunflower, the artist is letting us in on a joke like the sly smile of the Mona Lisa and having fun with his audience.
self portrait
Russian painter Rinat Shingareev lives in a happily bizarre world. His plush pop paintings of world icons from George Bush to Lil Wayne are warm and inviting but have a sense of something weird. From Bush secretly shedding a tear for NASA to Putin against a backdrop of purple camouflage to a floating Obama head in a sunflower, the artist is letting us in on a joke like the sly smile of the Mona Lisa and having fun with his audience.
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Theresa May is prepared to order the mass evacuation of any tower block that is deemed to be unsafe in the wake of the Grenfell disaster, according to reports.
Government sources say the Prime Minister will not hesitate to act after at least 30 people were killed and dozens left injured in the small hours of Wednesday.
It comes amid a fierce backlash against Mrs May's response to the tragedy - she was branded a "coward" by an angry crowd as she visited the scene for a second time today and was whisked away by police.
She announced a £5million emergency fund to help families left homeless by the fire and a review of safety at 4,000 old tower blocks across the country that house 100,000 people.
Grenfell Tower was reduced to a shell by the deadly inferno and its lack of sprinklers and highly flammable wall cladding are being blamed for the tragedy.
(Image: Oxford/PA Wire)
(Image: Getty Images Europe)
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Drastic measures to prevent a repeat of the tragedy include plans to consider temporarily evacuating any tower blocks that feature the same potentially deadly combination, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Tory MP Bob Blackman said: “Get them out now. Let’s not put anyone else at risk. I don’t think it’s right that people should continue living in these buildings.
(Image: Daily Mirror)
(Image: Daily Mirror)
“We now know that if you have the same set of circumstances and we have a tower block with a similar design, or cladding of a similar type, it’s just a recipe for disaster.
“There has to be an emergency programme of establishing how many tower blocks there are and people have to be vacated."
Gavin Barwell, the ex-housing minister who last week became Theresa May's new chief of staff, was accused of "sitting on" a report that warned high-rise blocks like Grenfell Tower were vulnerable to fire four years ago.
Mr Barwell promised to review part B of the Building Regulations 2010, which relate to fire safety, but the review never materialised.
(Image: Daily Mirror)
A coroner’s investigation into the blaze at Lakanal House in South London in 2009, which claimed six lives, found panels on the exterior of the block had not provided the required fire resistance and insufficient fire risk assessments had been made.
The coroner made a series of recommendation following the tragedy, but while some have been taken up, a full review of building regulations has yet to take place.
Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke tonight defended the Government, telling Sky News: "In terms of the 2009 fire, there was a coroner's report in 2013.
"We have responded to all those recommendations but there's work that needs to be done in terms of simplifying fire regulations.
"There's still more work to be done but that's a complicated area of work."A vile Muslim racist was arrested after spitting in a baby’s face and telling the child’s mother “white people shouldn’t breed.”
Rezzas Abdulla was given a suspended sentence for the assault on the baby.
The Chronicle reported:
Vile racist Rezzas Abdulla spat in a baby’s face and told her shocked mum “white people shouldn’t breed” in a disgraceful street attack.
Hairdresser Rebecca Telford was wheeling nine-month-old Layla-Jean through South Shields when Abdulla launched the unprovoked afternoon assault, leaning into her pushchair to spit on her.
The little girl was left covered in saliva, which sprayed across her face in the disgusting attack.
A court heard Abdulla has previous for race hate offences and has “a problem with white women”.
But now the 33-year-old, who has some mental health issues, has walked free from Newcastle Crown Court on a suspended prison sentence.
Miss Telford told police in a victim impact statement: “I am completely disgusted and distressed that a grown man, regardless of race or religion, would spit on a defenceless baby in a completely unprovoked attack.What is the Bible? Is it a collection of scriptures written by men, or something more?
Conservative Christianity affirms the idea of "Biblical Inerrancy;" that is, the Bible is the literal, Divinely-inspired Word of God. Whether or not they accept the scholarly consensuses on authorship of specific books (and some do not) they do believe that these authors' pens were guided by the hand of God, and thus the bible is in a sense perfect. This can be expressed in two nonexclusive ways: 1.) that the bible is without error, and 2.) that the bible does not affirm anything that is not true.
This idea is the source of all misuse and misunderstanding of biblical passages.
If you believe God wrote the bible, it is quite easy to imagine a certain passage applies directly to you and the world you live in. Obviously; God is timeless, so why would He write something intended only for a specific time period?
The problem with biblical inerrancy is that it's utter nonsense, as a basic reading of the Bible will show. For example: in Genesis 1, God creates plant life, and then Man. In Genesis 2, God creates Man first, and then plant life. Both of these things simply cannot be true, even in God's omnipotence, for omnipotence doesn't extend to the logically impossible. A couple other brief examples:
If you read each gospel's account of the 12 apostles, it is clear that there are more than 12 names and none of the gospels precisely agree on who they were.
Jesus says he comes not to bring peace, but a sword, and then He also says that all who live by the sword shall perish by the sword.
In Galatians Paul writes "there is neither slave no r free," but then in Titus, Paul apparently writes that slaves are to be subject to their masters. Similarly, in 1 Corinthians Paul says that women may "pray or prophesy" but only with their heads covered, but then in several other letters Paul apparently tells women not to speak at all.
If the Bible is perfect, how can it contradict itself so much? Some may look at these and other examples and shrug, grunting something about "God working in mysterious ways." For the rational-minded among us, this answer will not suffice.
The truth is that the bible is a human product, each book written in a time and place for a specific audience, by authors who were shaped by their experiences of God. Therefore, in order to correctly understand and interpret the bible, you must place the book you are reading in proper historical and theological context.
We will take some examples. In a famous scene from the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke,) Jesus is in Jerusalem during the last week of his life when a group of his enemies (Pharisees in Mark and Matthew, "spies" in Luke) ask him, "Teacher...is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?" (Mark 12:14 ESV; Mark is used because it is earliest.) Jesus's reply: he asks them to produce a Roman coin, emblazoned with Caesar's face. "Jesus said to them, 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'" (12:17).
Taken on its own, as it often is, this statement is used by mostly well-meaning but ignorant Christians to support the idea that for Jesus, religion and politics are meant to be separate and Christians are meant to be obedient to earthly authority. This reading betrays a fatal lack of context.
First, it is said that the purpose for the question was "to trap him [Jesus] in his talk" (12:13). If Jesus answered yes, it's fine to pay taxes to Rome, he risked losing the support of the crowd, which earlier had prevented his enemies from seizing him. If he answered no, then he was committing treason against Rome and could be arrested. Understanding this, Jesus's reply is a stunning display of political savvy.
According to Roman imperial theology, Caesar was the Son of God, divine, and God in human form. To the Jews, his face on a coin was a graven image, prohibited under the Law (indeed, Pontius Pilate himself nearly incited revolt when he displayed Roman standards with Caesar's emblem in Jerusalem). So when Jesus's opponents produced the coin with Caesar's face, they were in violation of Jewish law and had lost any moral high ground they might have had. "Render unto Caesar..." then becomes not a lesson about separation of church and state or an instruction to pay our taxes, but a calculated non-answer that made Jesus's critics look weak and foolish in front of the crowd of his supporters. Even more, it is a fierce indictment of Roman rule that led, in part, to Jesus's death: by implication, Caesar is not God.
Our next example is from Paul, a favorite of conservative Christians. This is the (in)famous passage from II Thessalonians chapter three, in which Paul says: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat" (II Thessalonians 3:10 NIV). It is a clear statement most often used to argue against social welfare.
First: there is a strong possibility that Paul did not write this letter. Of Paul's thirteen letters in the New Testament, only seven are unquestionably his. Two (including II Thessalonians) are disputed, and four others are almost certainly pseudepigraphic (aside: why would a perfect, divinely-inspired work have falsely attributed passages?) For the purposes of this argument, however, we will set this possibility aside and presume that II Thessalonians is authentic.
By placing the aforementioned verse in the context of the preceding and subsequent verses (remember, none of the books of the bible were written with verse or chapter breaks) and bearing in mind the type of society Paul was writing to, its true meaning will become clear.
The full text refers to small communities of Christians living in what Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan refer to as "share communities" (see their The First Paul,) a term I will ape from them because it accurately describes the way early Christian communities functioned: they would gather, once a week for the Lord's Supper, and irrespective of social class they would break bread together, each pitching in whatever they were able so that everybody had enough. Evidence for this is given in Paul's authentic letter to the Corinthians, in which he rebuked the wealthy among the community there for mistreating the poor among them (I Corinthians 11:17-22) by not sharing the food equitably.
Back to the passage from II Thessalonians. If you start from 3:6 and continue through 3:15, keeping the idea of a share community and especially of a "share meal" in mind, the conclusion drawn is much more specific than simply, "he who does not work shall not eat." The author is referring to people who have been taking advantage of the Christian community to obtain free food without participating in the works of the community, the same works referred to in the much-misunderstood "faith vs. works" debate (the same Greek word is used in both original manuscripts).
The issue at hand is not about employment but active participation in the community mission. He who does not work to benefit the Christian community can not reap its rewards. The misuse of this passage to imply that people receiving social welfare are "lazy" or to argue against the necessity of a social safety net is quite simply bad history and bad theology.
I could go on and on with examples, but that would be beyond the scope of this already-long blog post. These few examples I've given demonstrate clearly that the Bible cannot be read uncritically, cannot be accepted as the true and divine Word of God. I would argue that the Bible requires devoted and critical study to fully understand, and this is a lifelong pursuit (the Bible is long, folks).
So next time a conservative quotes II Thessalonians to disparage welfare recipients or Jeremiah 1:5 in an abortion debate (that text refers specifically and only to the prophet Jeremiah), remember to call them out on it. Chances are, they don't actually read the Bible.Cutting Edge Deep Learning for Coders: Launching Deep Learning Part 2
Special note: we’re teaching a fully updated part 1, in person, for seven weeks from Oct 30, 2017, at the USF Data Institute. See the course page for details and application form.
When we launched course.fast.ai we said that we wanted to provide a good education in deep learning. Part 1 of the course has now been viewed by tens of thousands of students, introducing them to nearly all of today’s best practices in deep learning, and providing many hours of hands-on practical coding exercises. We have collected some stories from graduates of part 1 on our testimonials page.
Today, we are launching Part 2: Cutting Edge Deep Learning for Coders. These 15 hours of lessons take you from part 1’s best practices, all the way to cutting edge research. You’ll learn how to:
Read and implement the latest research papers (even if you don’t have a math background)
Build a state of the art neural translation system
Create generative models for art, super resolution, segmentation, and more (including generative adversarial networks)
Apply deep learning to structured data and time series (such as for logistics, marketing, predictive maintenance, and fraud detection)
…and much more.
We believe that we have created a unique path to deep learning expertise, and many of our students have shown what’s possible, such as:
Sara Hooker, who only started coding 2 years ago, and is now part of the elite Google Brain Residency
Tim Anglade, who used Tensorflow to create the Not Hot Dog app for HBO’s Silicon Valley, leading Google’s CEO to tweet “our work here is done”
Gleb Esman, who created a new fraud product for Splunk using the tools he learnt in the course, and was featured on Splunk’s blog
Jacques Mattheij, who built a robotic system to sort two tons of lego
Karthik Kannan, founder of letsenvision.com, who told us “Today I’ve picked up steam enough to confidently work on my own CV startup and the seed for it was sowed by fast.ai with Pt1. and Pt.2”
Matthew Kleinsmith and Brendon Fortuner, who in 24 hours built a system to add filters to the background and foreground of videos, giving them victory in the 2017 Deep Learning Hackathon.
How the Not Hot Dog author was portrayed on Silicon Valley
The prerequisites are that you’ve either completed part 1 of the course, or that you are already a confident deep learning practictioner who is comfortable implementing and using:
CNNs (including resnets)
RNNs (including LSTM and GRU)
SGD/Adam/etc
Batch normalization
Data augmentation
Keras and numpy
What we cover
The course covers a lot of territory - here’s a brief summary of what you’ll learn in each lesson:
Lesson 8: Artistic Style
We begin with a discussion of a big change compared to part 1: from Theano to Tensorflow. You’ll learn about some of the exciting new developments in Tensorflow that have led us to the decision to make this change. We’ll also talk about a major project we highly recommend: build your own deep learning box!
We’ll also talk about how to approach one of the biggest challenges in this part of the course: reading acadmic papers. Don’t worry, it’s not as terrifying as it first sounds—especially once you know some of our little tricks.
Then, we start our deep dive into creative and generative applications, with artistic style transfer. You’ll be able to create beautiful and interesting images even if your artistics skills are as limited as Jeremy’s… :)
Style transfer example by fast.ai student Brad Kenstler
Lesson 9: Generative Models
Super-resolution example (bottom)
We’ll learn about the extraordinarily powerful and widely useful technique of generative models. These are models that don’t just spit out a classification, but create a whole new image, sound, etc. They can be used, for example, with images, to:
Improve photos (colorization, noise removal, increase resolution, etc)
Create art
Find and segment (localize) objects
and much more…
We’ll try using this approach for super resolution (i.e. increasing the resolution of an image), and then you’ll get to try building your own system for rapidly adding the style of any artist to your photos. Have a look at the image on the right - the top very low resolution image has been input to the algorithm (see for instance the very pixelated fingers), and the bottom image has been created automatically from that!
Lesson 10: Multi-modal & GANs
A surprising result in deep learning is that models created from totally different types of data, such as text and images, can learn to share a consistent feature space. This means that we can create multi-modal models; that is, models which can combine multiple types of data. We will show how to combine text and images in a single model using a technique called DeVISE, and will use it to create a variety of search algorithms:
Text to image (which will also handle multi-word text descriptions)
Image to text (including handling types of image we didn’t train with)
And even image to image!
Doing this will require training a model using the whole imagenet competition dataset, which is a bigger dataset than we’ve used before. So we’re going to look at some techniques that make this faster and easier than you might expect.
We’re going to close our studies into generative models by looking at generative adversarial networks (GANs), a tool which has been rapidly gaining in popularity in recent months, and which may have the potential to create entirely new application areas for deep learning. We will be using them to create entirely new images from scratch.
Lesson 11: Memory Networks
We’ve covered a lot of different architectures, training algorithms, and all kinds of other CNN tricks during this course—so you might be wondering: what should I be using, when? The good news is that other folks have wondered that too, and have provided some great analyses of the pros and cons of various techniques in practice. We’ll be taking a look at a few highlights of these papers today.
Then we’re going to learn to GPU accelerate algorithms by taking advantage of Pytorch, which provides an interface that’s so similar to numpy that often you can move your algorithm onto the GPU in just an hour or two. In particular, we’re going to try to create the first (that we know of) GPU implementation of mean-shift clustering, a really useful algorithm that deserves to be more widely known.
To close out the lesson we will implement the heavily publicized “Memory Networks” algorithm, and will answer the question: does it live up to the hype?
Creating clusters
Lesson 12: Attentional Models
It turns out that Memory Networks provide much of the key foundations we need to understand something which have become one of the most important advances in the last year or two: Attentional Models. These models allow us to build systems that focus on the most important part of the input for the current task, and are critical, for instance, in creating translation systems (which we’ll cover in the next lesson).
Lesson 13: Neural Translation
One application of deep learning that has progressed perhaps more than any other in the last couple of years is Neural Machine Translation. In late 2016 it was implemented by Google in what the New York Times called The Great A.I. Awakening. There’s a lot of tricks needed to reach Google’s level of translation capability, so we’ll be doing a deep dive in this lesson to learn nearly all the tricks used by state of the art systems.
Next up, we’ll learn about Densenets, which in July 2017 were awarded the CVPR Best Paper award, and have been shown to provide state of the art results in computer vision, particularly with small datasets. They are very similar to resnets, but with one key difference: the branches in each section are combined through concatenation, rather than addition. This apparently minor change makes a big difference in how they learn. We’ll also be using this technique in the next lesson to create a state of the art system for image segmentation.
Lesson 14: Time Series & Segmentation
Deep learning has generally been associated with unstructured data such as images, language, and audio. However it turns out that the structured data found in the columns of a database table or spreadsheet, where the columns can each represent different types of information in different ways (e.g. sales in dollars, area as zip code, product id, etc), can also be used very effectively by a neural network. This is equally true if the data can be represented as a time series (i.e. the rows represent different times or time periods).
In particular, what we learnt in part 1 about embeddings can be used not just for collaborative filtering and word encodings, but also for arbitrary categorical variables representing products, places, channels, and so forth. This has been highlighted by the results of two Kaggle competitions that were won by teams using this approach. We will study both of these datasets and competition winning strategies in this lesson.
Finally, we’ll look at how the Densenet architecture we studied in the last lesson can be used for image segmentation - that is, exactly specifying the location of every object in an image. This is another type of generative model, as we learnt in lesson 9, so many of the basic ideas from there will be equally applicable here.LSFMM: Caching — dm-cache and bcache
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Two separate block-level caching solutions, dm-cache and bcache, were the topic of an LSFMM Summit 2013 discussion led by Mike Snitzer, Kent Overstreet, Alasdair Kergon, and Darrick Wong. Snitzer started things off with an overview of dm-cache, which was included in the 3.9 kernel. It uses the kernel device mapper framework to implement a writeback or writethrough cache on a fast device for a slower "origin" device.
Essentially, dm-cache uses the device mapper core and adds a policy layer on top of it. The policy layer is "almost like" a plugin interface, where different kinds of policies can be implemented, Snitzer said. Those policies (along with the cache contents) determine whether there is a hit or a miss on the cache and whether a migration (moving data between the origin and the cache device in either direction) is required. Various policies have been implemented, including least-recently used (LRU), most-frequently used (MFU), and so on, but only the default "mq" policy was merged, to reduce the number of policies being initially tested.
There are hints that can be supplied by the filesystem to the policy, such as blocks that are dirty or have been discarded. That kind of information can help the policy make a more informed decision about where to store blocks.
Overstreet then gave a status update for bcache, which is queued for 3.10. There are "lots of users", he said, and the code has been relatively stable for a while. He has been concentrating mostly on bug fixes recently. Unlike dm-cache, which is "tiered storage", Overstreet said, bcache is more of a conventional cache. It can store arbitrary extents, down to a single sector, whereas with dm-cache, a block is either entirely cached or it isn't.
Just before the summit, Wong sent an email comparing the performance of bcache, dm-cache, and EnhanceIO to several mailing lists (dm-devel, linux-bcache, linux-kernel). He made a kernel that had each enabled and ran some tests. He found that EnhanceIO was the slowest, bcache had four to six times better performance, and dm-cache had better performance by a factor of 15, except when it didn't. All were compared to the same test being run on a regular hard disk, and sometimes, for reasons unknown, dm-cache performed more or less the same as the disk. He did note that some tests would cause the inode tables created by mkfs to be cached, which is not a particularly efficient use of the cache.
Snitzer is trying to reproduce Wong's results, he said, but currently is getting poor results for both bcache and dm-cache. He said that he wants to get with Overstreet to try to figure it out. For his part, Overstreet cautioned against reading too much into synthetic benchmarks. They can be useful, but can also be misleading. Ric Wheeler asked if Snitzer was "seeing real improvements with real workloads"; Snitzer mentioned that switching between Git tags was one example where there was a clear win for dm-cache, but he needs some help in determining more real-world workloads.
An attendee asked about whether the solutions always assumed the presence of a cache device. Snitzer said that dm-cache does make that assumption, but it is something that needs to change. Overstreet said that bcache does not require a cache device at all times. Since bcache is being used in production, it has had the time to hit the corner cases and handle situations where the cache device is unavailable.
Snitzer said that there are still things that need to be done for dm-cache. Originally, it was doing I/O in parallel between the cache and the origin, but ultimately had to fall back to sequential I/O. Also, with NVM devices coming down the pipe, storage hierarchies are likely. Since dm is "all about stacking", dm-cache will fit well into that world, though Overstreet pointed out that bcache can stack as well.
No real conclusions were reached, other than the need to get better "real-world" numbers for performance of both solutions. Figuring out why various testers are getting wildly different results is part of that as well.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Saudi Arabia sees threats around the region and has taken the lead against rebels in Yemen
The border with Yemen is a 10-hour drive from the Saudi capital, or a two-hour flight, but Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen is on everyone's mind in Riyadh.
Officially it is a Saudi-led military operation with coalition partners including the UAE, Egypt, Morocco, and other Sunni countries.
But most Saudis see it very much as their war, with the fighting right across their border, in Yemen. Over 70% of the sorties by jets pounding rebel targets in Yemen are Saudi.
Officially, the war is also limited in its scope and goals: restore the internationally recognised President Mansour Abdrabbuh Hadi to power and undo the territorial gains of Yemen's Zaidi Shia rebels, known as Houthis, who allied themselves with remnants of the former ruler, Ali Abdallah Saleh.
But almost every conversation with Saudis about the Yemen military operation leads to a wider discussion about the region, the kingdom's new role as the leader of a military coalition and in many cases, people's desire to see this translate into action elsewhere.
At a bowling alley in Riyadh one evening, I met a young couple enjoying an evening out. The man was in the military so he would only give his name as Hamed. His eyes lit up when I asked him whether he supported the war.
"We support the king's decision to go to war 100%, it's long overdue. Hopefully, we will move to help Syria next, and bring down President Assad who has been causing so much death and destruction for his people," he said.
Wave of patriotism
Saudi Arabia has accused regional rival Iran of arming the Houthis - a charge both the Houthis and Iran have denied.
Saudis and Sunnis in general feel they have been taking a beating by Shia Iran across the Middle East as Tehran tries to solidify its influence from Baghdad to Beirut.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Billboards in Riyadh |
at Trend Macrolytics. But here's Wall Street's strange little irony -- studies show the stock market performs better and tends to be less volatile when Democrats are in power. This discrepancy was explored recently in a study by two finance professors at the University of California at Los Angeles, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov. According to their paper, entitled, "The Presidential Puzzle: Political Cycles and the Stock Market" and published in the October issue of the Journal of Finance, stock market returns are on average about 5 percent higher when the White House is run by a Democrat than during Republican rule. Looking at the 72-year period between 1927 and 1999, the study shows that a broad stock index, similar to the S&P 500, returned approximately 11 percent more a year on average under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the index only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills when Republicans were in office. The study also looked at how the index responded under both Democrats and Republicans, using two portfolios tracked by the Center for Research in Security Prices, a research outfit affiliated with the University of Chicago's business school. The "value-weighted portfolio" ranks all the stocks in the index according to their total market value, whereas in the "equal-weighted portfolio" the stocks are all ranked the same. On average, value-weighted portfolios returned 9 percent more under Democrats than Republicans during the 72 year period, while equal-weighted portfolios returned 16 percent more under Democrats. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Politics and the stock market 2004 presidential election or or Create your own Manage alerts | What is this? "I think plenty on Wall Street would be pretty shocked to hear that," said Barry Ritholtz, a market analyst at Maxim Group. The study examined a variety of reasons that might have caused this discrepancy. One particularly interesting finding was that markets seemed to show more surprise in reaction to economic or stock-related decisions made by Democratic administrations. "It thus seems that the difference in realized returns can be attributed to the market being systematically positively surprised by Democratic policies," the professors wrote. According to their study, the difference in stock returns becomes gradually obvious through the course of a presidency, rather than in the period immediately surrounding an election. Volatility down under Dems, too Critics say that if the Democrats should win the presidential election in November, the almost year-old stock rally could be in trouble, largely because many of the Democratic candidates have vowed to scale back some or all of the $1.3 trillion in tax cuts that President Bush enacted in 2003. In addition, critics fear that a Democratic administration would make markets more volatile. This is because of extensive research showing that gross domestic product growth is slower during Republican presidential mandates and that higher interest rates are more common during Democratic mandates. However, volatility is actually lower during Democratic presidencies, according to both the UCLA study and another recent study by two political science professors -- David Leblang of the University of Colorado and Bumba Mukherjee of Florida State University. The study -- which tracks stock market returns since the first day the Dow Jones industrial average was calculated in 1896 through the fall of 2001 -- shows that market volatility decreases during Democratic administrations. The paper argues that the expectation that inflation rates will rise under left-wing presidential administrations does indeed have an impact on trading, as older studies have suggested, but in a different way than those studies proposed. "Our model predicts that rational expectations for higher interest rates under left-wing administrations decreases demand for stocks among traders," the professors write. "This decrease in demand leads to a decline in stock price volatility not only during the incumbency of left-wing governments, but also when traders expect the left-wing party to win elections." Alternately, the statistics also show that expectations of lower inflation under right wing administrations make the market more volatile. This is because traders increase their inflow of capital and investment into the stock market when they believe the interest-rate environment is more friendly for stocks. More money at work translates into more volatility in the markets. The study showed this trend was consistent regardless of whether a right wing administration was in office or whether traders merely expected the Republican party to win the presidential election.[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Haddock version 2.5.0
-------------------------------------------- -- Haddock 2.5.0 -------------------------------------------- A new version of Haddock, the Haskell documentation tool, is out! If you're using GHC 6.10.2 and Haddock 2.4.2, you should be able to upgrade to this version without any problem. If you're using something else, you should re-install any documentation that you want to link to after upgrading. Please use the bug tracker to submit bug reports or feature requests. -------------------------------------------- -- Changes in version 2.5.0 -------------------------------------------- * Drop support for GHC 6.8.* * Add support for GHC 6.10.3 and 6.10.4 * Revert to the old multi-page index for large packages (#106) * Show GADT records in the generated documentation * Create the output directory if it doesn't exist (#104) * Use the native codegen instead of compiling via C for TH modules * Add --use-unicode flag for displaying prettier versions of common symbols * Mutiple verbosity levels: remove --verbose and add --verbosity=n * Simpler versioning of.haddock files To avoid slow search, Haddock switches from the searchable index to the old multi-page index for large packages (containing over 150 items). This, and support for GADT records in the generated documentation was implemented by Isaac Dupree as part of his Summer of Code project. The --use-unicode flag was contributed by George Porges. -------------------------------------------- -- Links -------------------------------------------- Homepage: http://www.haskell.org/haddock Hackage page: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haddock-2.5.0 Bugtracker and wiki: http://trac.haskell.org/haddock Mailing list: haddock at projects.haskell.org Code repository: http://code.haskell.org/haddock -------------------------------------------- -- Contributors -------------------------------------------- The following people contributed patches to this release: Isaac Dupree Ian Lynagh Simon Marlow Simon Peyton-Jones George Porges David Waern -------------------------------------------- -- Future Plans -------------------------------------------- Here are the top priority tickets right now: * Cross-package documentation (#24) * Good warning messages when encountering unexpected Haddock comments (#94) * Comments on instance declarations (#29) Isaac Dupree has been working on the first item as part of his SoC project and it is near completion. If you have any input on what we should prioritize, add yourself to the CC list of the ticket(s) that you are interested in. -------------------------------------------- -- Get Involved -------------------------------------------- We would be very happy to get more contributors. To get involved, start by grabbing the code: http://code.haskell.org/haddock Then take a look at the bug and feature tracker for things to work on: http://trac.haskell.org/haddockPhoto by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
The modern NFL is made mostly of various kinds of shit—on-field shit, off-field shit, shitty injuries, shitty quarterbacks, shitty sponsorships, cynically shitty medical studies, and usually pretty shitty games. This means that the most advantageous attribute a team can have is a kind of collective ability to withstand said shit. Glance at the seedings entering the playoffs, and you'll see teams ranked largely in order of their capacity for shit-enduring. This is the system working.
The Denver Broncos have a defense strong enough to compensate for a season's worth of iffy quarterbacking from a dropped-off Hall of Famer and his inconsistent backup. The New England Patriots have Tom Brady, who has overcome a depleted receiving corps and offensive line and a commissioner's suspension. The Carolina Panthers have had fairly crummy receivers all along, but they also have Cam Newton, who is almost a football team unto himself. And so all three of them have byes through the first week of the postseason.
Read More: Dumb Football With Mike Tunison, Week 17
Things go wrong in the NFL with such regularity that wrong-going is now central to any good team's narrative. A well-stocked roster does not simply fulfill its potential; it gets run through a wringer of inevitable setbacks, shakes off suspensions and injuries and infighting, and emerges having gained both blemishes and identity, the preferred catchall of television analysts nationwide. That is to say that the team has been battered into the shape of its indefatigable essence; it has suffered and learned something from the suffering, and knows what part of itself comes in handy in spectacularly disadvantageous circumstances.
If this seems dour, it is. The NFL is a dour enterprise, and built on dourness. Most every game is a symphony of trouble, and most every team is stressed beyond reason. From time to time, though, rare exceptions show up. This year, the Arizona Cardinals are one. For the Cardinals in 2015, by some miracle, things have just sort of worked out.
When you are just having fun out there. — Photo by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
The Cardinals lost to the Seattle Seahawks in their regular season finale on Sunday, 36-6, but what Arizona managed over the bulk of the year rendered the loss mostly meaningless. They had already won 13 of their first 15 games, ensuring themselves a first-round bye. They had beaten the Seahawks a month and a half earlier, in Seattle, in a back-and-forth thriller; had scraped past the resilient Minnesota Vikings in mid-December; and had, during the season's penultimate weekend, put on a full exhibition at home against the struggling Green Bay Packers. The lackluster effort in a largely meaningless capper aside, the Cardinals spent their entire campaign proving they belong among the ranks of Super Bowl favorites.
The climb from perennial loser to frontrunner would be newsworthy on its own—the Cardinals have now made the playoffs five times during their 26 years in Arizona—but the way in which they've accomplished it is even more striking. Designs have come to fruition, gambles have paid off, and bad luck, when encountered, has quickly turned good. The Cardinals score 30, hold you to six, and smile. They are lucky and fun, in a game that's supposed to be too tough for either of those things.
Seemingly every spot on the Arizona roster is filled by a best-case scenario. A year removed from an ACL tear cut his 2014 season short, Carson Palmer is an MVP candidate, scattering timely short tosses and pinpoint deep throws and limiting the spells of recklessness that had, until recently, been a hallmark of his career. Larry Fitzgerald looked cooked last year, but a move to the slot has uncovered remaining aptitude, and his 109 catches this season are a career high. Chris Johnson started 2015 with a comeback story of his own but suffered a fractured tibia in late November; the injury afforded a chance to third-string back David Johnson, who since getting regular playing time has proven one of the league's most multi-functional runners. The defense features a shrimpy ex-safety torpedoing around at linebacker (Deone Bucannon), a resurgent big-name import rushing the passer (Dwight Freeney), and a secondary that, at its best, accomplishes exactly what a net spread sideline-to-sideline would.
Seen here, a NFL team's third-string running back absolutely beasting the shit out of someone. — Photo by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
During a game, this conglomerate takes on the air of some kind of patterned kid's toy, a kaleidoscope or a mobile. Everything seems tied; each piece of success makes another one possible. Bucannon slips through the opponent's offensive line at waist-height and harangues the quarterback into a desperate heave that ends up settling in the hands of all-everything corner Patrick Patterson. John Brown, the deep-threat receiver whose short stature and zippiness bring to mind a just-launched pinball, hauls in a 40-yard pass, and the next play David Johnson shoulders his way through a freshly stretched defense for six. Fitzgerald disappears at the line of scrimmage and shows up between the hashmarks, Palmer's dart already en route.
This year's Cardinals are an ecosystem, a scene, a cult of good vibes. They are the optimist's preference, proof that success may be found via something other than grim fortitude. In plainest terms, they are the least football-ish of 2015's best football teams.
That designation itself marks some success already achieved. The only thing more difficult than winning in the NFL may be making winning in the NFL look easy, navigating a season without checking in at the usual stops of crises encountered and averted. The next month will be described by players and analysts around the league in the stock ways: a trial, a test, a battle. For Arizona, though, the terms will not quite hold up. The Cardinals will just be playing a few games, and that's something that hasn't brought them much trouble to this point.A travel-buff requires a serene atmosphere where he could dive into all odds and emerge as a new self just after the tour time is complete. Often the modern city trends and beach surfing leave the travelers bored, so they tend to explore more of places that are not yet explored by the usual audience.
Here, we are going to discuss some of the Amazing and beautiful places to visit on the planet earth which will leave you spellbound. Amazing bubbling mountain volcanoes, castles at cliff-tops and beautiful waterfalls reside on the holy lands of the planet earth. Plan trip to these beautiful places by booking the cheap flights from India to Phoenix.
Below mentioned are the top 5 exotic places to visit on earth that will surely amaze you.
Playa de las Catedrales, Spain: A breathtaking view when seen from the top, the rock cathedrals at Playa de las Catedrales in Galicia, Spain are an epic. Its roaring surf & giant arches are one of the most spectacular watches for visitors all around the globe. At the time of a low tide you can head down and go to explore this rock cathedral.
Scottish Highlands, Scotland: Europe’s only wild frontier lies in the Scottish Highlands, Scotland. This is the land of Green Mountains, foggy lakes and degenerating castles with the rugged natural beauty still intact. It is appealing to the eyes of the travelers and also the local mythology binds them, also inspires them to visit the place more than once.
Erta Ale, Ethiopia: Another mind blowing place to see on earth is a giant lava lake on the lands of Ethiopia’s harshest landscape. This opening in the earth, showing boiling lava with a magnificent light color, is also known as Gateway of Hell. Even though this region is practically not opened to the tourists, but it is under the list of every travel-buff.
Antelope Island, USA: The most spectacular area in the lands of the American West is the Antelope Island. Also, it is considered as the largest in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. On your visit, at any time of the year, you’ll witness the basin’s surreal and swirling colors. Along with this, this state park is full of wild bison, antelope and coyotes.
Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina: One of the less explored places on the planet earth is the Patagonia’s Los Glaciares National Park. It is all famous for its Perito Moreno Glacier which is a massive ice sheet covering approximately an area of 250 square km.
So now you have your list ready to explore the amazingly epic places on our planet earth. You should visit these heavens and collect a bucket full of memories to cherish them lifelong. So, what are you for??? get your best deal for cheap flight tickets to India from San Francisco today!
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Sean Hannity got a little loopy on Twitter this afternoon, firing off a series of tweets in response to today’s Daily Intelligencer piece about the latest signs of upheaval at Fox News.
To recap: Our story says James and Lachlan Murdoch — the CEO and co-chairman, respectively, of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox — refused to provide Bill Shine, the network’s co-president, with a public letter of support this week.
“By refusing to back Shine at this tumultuous moment for the network, the Murdochs may finally be signaling that they’re prepared to make the sweeping management changes they’ve so far resisted after forcing out CEO Roger Ailes last summer,” Gabriel Sherman writes.
And as Hannity made clear today, he thinks Shine’s ouster would mark the end of Fox News. He also doesn’t know what to call an umlaut.
Gäbe i pray this is NOT true because if it is, that's the total end of the FNC as we know it. Done. Best Sean https://t.co/W3BJ2wjzRD — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 27, 2017
Ha. Gabe sorry about the 2 dots. I couldn't do that again if I tried. Best Sean https://t.co/Aga19m4sS7 — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 27, 2017Hacked emails first reported on by the media over the weekend appear to reveal that officials were discussing Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya just a few days before her June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. to discuss what she claimed at the time was politically damaging information on Hillary Clinton. The cache of correspondence was allegedly taken from a State Department Russian Affairs intelligence official and has yet to be verified.
The email, filename 00002215.eml, was sent by Hermitage Capital Management Founder and Director William Browder to the State Department’s Russia Domestic Affairs Division Chief Robert Otto and House Committee on Foreign Affairs staffer Kyle Parker appearing to show the three sharing an image of Veselnitskaya’s house. It is unclear why the individuals were discussing Veselnitskaya’s place of residence, although Browder is renowned for leading calls to establish the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which Veselnitskaya was lobbying against.
Since the New York Times July 10 report exposing the meeting, online observers have noted a number of details which they claim shows evidence that Donald Trump Jr. was baited into speaking with Veselnitskaya in order to give his father’s political opponents leverage. The Independent has highlighted Veselnitskaya and publicist Rob Goldstone’s ties to Fusion GPS, the lobbying firm responsible for the notorious dossier of wild and unproven allegations about President Trump which has also been involved with lobbying against the Magnitsky Act. Anatoli Samochornov, the translator who accompanied Ms. Veselnitskaya to the meeting is also a former employee of the FBI according to a press release from 2010. On July 12, 2017 The Hill reported that Veselnitskaya was allowed to enter the United States by the Department of Justice under “extraordinary circumstances” despite the fact that she did not possess a proper visa. Some have claimed that the emails sent to Donald Jr. were intentionally worded to create a basis for a FISA request to surveil and unmask the Trump team.
The revelation that additional federal organizations were engaged in converstions with lobbyist groups where Ms. Veselnitskaya was discussed ahead of her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. will no doubt add additional fuel to an already raging fire of controversy.
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More'I'm not going to back down from what I believe because of a few bad headlines." So said David Cameron today. A few bad headlines? Two thirds of voters told a Times poll that the "big society" is no more than the government's attempt "to put a positive spin on the cuts". Worse, the big society has entered the national bloodstream as a joke. Top Shop and Vodafone demonstrators jump up and down, singing "we are the big society". People set to lose their jobs in cascades from April say dryly: "I'm about to join the big society." People seeing home care cut for an elderly parent, or their library closing, say "it's the big society" with heavy sarcasm. Many a Tory can be heard calling it BS, as they roll their eyes. When a political idea becomes a shared national joke, it is probably beyond saving.
Would any coalition minister dare use the phrase on a genuinely public platform without expecting raspberries and ribaldry? Not that many do appear in front of unselected audiences these days, for fear of encountering those deadly members of the public with unanswerable stories of genuine distress at what the cuts are about to do to them and their families.
Apparently undaunted, Cameron fought back with conviction: "This is my absolute passion." He has Tony Blair's gift for magical thinking, so moved by the passion in his own words that he believes it will be enough to make them come true. "The big society is about giving you the initiative to take control of your life and work with friends, neighbours and colleagues to improve things around you." (Did I hear a snort?)
It's an idea that seems to require bogus figures to shore it up – he repeated that "grants to councils will only go back to 2007 levels. There was a good level of libraries then", suggesting councils are deliberately exaggerating the cuts. Here's the cheat: public spending is returning to the same proportion of GDP as 2006-7 – but he omits to say that GDP has fallen between 6% and 7% during that period, leaving a mighty hole. Or that in order to suit electoral timing, cuts have been accelerated and frontloaded to an average 15.2%, causing needless extra damage.
The blame game gets fiercer by the day. Simon Hughes laid into Liverpool and Manchester again, accusing them of shroud-waving, but with Lib Dem and Tory councils protesting too, there is no hiding the severity. Even Oliver Letwin's Dorset – the Tory council that suffered least – still has to lose 500 jobs and 20 libraries. Does Cameron blame them, too?
Francis Maude today used other big society factoids to attack charities. He claimed three quarters of voluntary organisations take no money from the state: if most manage without, why are some whingeing so loudly about their cuts? The suggestion is that state-dependent charities have grown too idle to raise private donations instead. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations almanac does indeed show 78% of voluntary organisations receive no public funds – but the great majority are tiny, micro groups, many semi-inactive. Larger voluntary organisations are given public funds because they are contracted to do government work: housing associations have taken over much council housing, other provide key social services or welfare to work schemes for the Department for Work and Pensions.
Why is the government now attacking them for running state services? Money paid to charities rose steeply as Labour put out services to contract. The voluntary sector can be more innovative in drug addiction treatment, youth offending or inventing the whole hospice movement. Cameron says he means to hand over more to charities – but does he mean with no money? The dishonesty is breathtaking.
The sector is losing £5bn in the cuts as their contracts end. (Look at the Voluntary Sector Cuts website to see what's going on.) A third are likely to fold, a third have no asset base or reserves. Ministers keep boasting of the puny £100m transitional fund, supposed to tide charities over, but to what? They fail to say the fund was shut in January, already massively oversubscribed.
Today the big society bank was unveiled, with £100m from dormant accounts and £200m lent by big British banks. But unlike the £5bn, this money will have to be paid back, and it lends at commercial rates, making a profit, doubly protected by lending to funding intermediaries, not directly to anyone. The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) is among many who doubt the voluntary sector can afford to borrow from it.
Those who have already set up social investment vehicles and bonds have found it can't be done except as philanthropy – which this bank certainly isn't. CAF's own Venturesome fund has been going 10 years, but it depends on philanthropists donating money that is then recycled over and over as charities pay it back at very low interest – or else donors get their capital back without interest. The Triodos ethical bank closed its social enterprise fund last year, as not enough enterprises could borrow at anything approaching a commercial rate. Tomorrow's People, a brilliant welfare to work charity founded by Debbie Scott, recently made a Tory baroness, has launched bonds, but "it's been a hard struggle": it has depended entirely on philanthropy, not real investment. The charity hoped the corporate sector would lend for five years without interest, but "they have been very reluctant".
The big society bank is not philanthropic, and the chances are few charities will be able to afford its interest rate. Some social enterprises may, if large groups of public servants set up a business and earn a contract to sell back their services. But those contracts are insecure, with no guarantee they will be renewed next time round. Banks know how many startups fail – and they are not in this out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is a feeble offer, a bank established with a small sum compared with the £5bn charities are losing in cuts. Here is the FT's assessment of its potential for social investment: "Can these new forms of investment and the big society bank possibly plug the gaping holes left by the spending cuts? In the short term, absolutely not." As Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead – and many charities certainly will be. The political question is why Cameron, Maude, George Osborne and the rest think it a good idea to pick a fight with a sector that inspires greater public love and trust than politicians ever could.
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Polly Toynbee responds to readers debating her article: "I agree it's a problem that charities that take the state's shilling risk losing their independence. That's why some charities have been keeping their heads down...."by
Washington DC/ Kabul
A July United Nations report asserting that only 30 civilians died in targeted raids in Afghanistan during the first six months of 2011 reflected only a very small fraction of night raids in which civilians were killed, according to officials of the independent Afghan commission which had co-produced the 2010 report on civilian casualties with the U.N. Mission.
The report on civilian casualties by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) attributed 80 percent of the 1,462 civilian deaths it counted during the six-month period to the Taliban – mostly from improvised explosive devices – and only 14 percent of them to “Pro-Government Forces”.
The report credited the U.S.-NATO military command with reducing civilian casualties in night raids during the six-month period by 15 per cent compared with the same period last year.
But officials of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which collaborated with UNAMA on its 2010 civilian casualties report, told IPS that the number of night raids that UNAMA investigated in some fashion could only have been a very small proportion of the total number of targeted raids with civilian casualties.
A leading official of the independent commission has also objected publicly to UNAMA’s exclusion from the total in last year’s report of most of the allegations of civilian deaths in raids that had been brought to its attention.
The AIHRC officials, who have personal experience on the issue of civilian casualties from night raids, told IPS that most night raids are carried out in districts that are dominated by the Taliban. In those districts, people are not able to file complaints and usually are not even aware of any opportunity to do so, the sources said.
The AIHRC sources requested anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the news media about the matter.
In Helmand province, the raids are believed to be concentrated in the districts where the Taliban are strongest, such as Baghran, Baghni, Sangin and Nahr-e-Saraj, the sources explained. The same is true for Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan and other southern and eastern provinces where the Taliban has a strong presence, the AIHRC sources said.
The commission received only nine complaints directly from families of those who had been killed or injured in a night raid during the first six months of 2011, according to the AIHRC sources.
In fact, the commission gets most of its information about civilian casualties in night raids not from complaints from people in the area where the raids take place but from talking with people in detention, the sources said.
But that information is fragmentary, according to the sources, because the commission has access to only a fraction of the detainees in the Afghan prison system, and because the detainees themselves are only aware of some of the cases.
UNAMA has seven regional offices, but travel and contact between those offices and the districts in which the Taliban are strongest are limited.
Daphne Eviatar, who has monitored human rights in Afghanistan for the U.S.-based group Human Rights First, agreed with the assessment that the families of victims in many districts would be unlikely to file complaints about civilian casualties from night raids.
“I’m not sure who they would complain to,” said Eviatar.
UNAMA’s six-month report conceded that, “Given both limitations associated with the operating environment and limited access to information, UNAMA may be under-reporting the night raids involving civilian casualties.”
In a February 2011 interview with researchers on a study by the Open Society Foundations and The Liaison Office, an unnamed “international human rights monitor” went even further. The unnamed individual admitted to “underreporting of night raids because many of the areas in which they took place are inaccessible and the civilians are difficult to verify.”
UNAMA is the only international entity that has been reporting totals of civilian casualties in night raids. The UNAMA report for the first six months indicates that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had refused repeatedly to provide information on the number of night raids it had carried out.
Nevertheless, figures provided by ISAF to the Washington Post and to blogger Bill Roggio show a total of 2,020 targeted raids in the six- month period from early May through early November 2010, killing roughly 2,000 “insurgents”.
U.S. military officers also told the researchers for the Open Societies Foundation study that shots had been fired in only 20 per cent of night raids. That would mean that 2,000 people were killed in just over 400 raids in which shots were fired during the six months — an average of five people per shooting incident.
The vast majority of night raids target a single individual. So the available statistics on night raids suggest that the vast majority of those killed in the raids had not been targeted.
UNAMA acknowledged in the report that ISAF does not apply the same definition of “civilian” based on international humanitarian law that UNAMA applies in counting civilian casualties.
U.S. Special Forces officers belonging to a unit that had killed nine election workers along with a former Taliban insurgent they had mistakenly believed was the Taliban shadow governor of Takhar province in September 2010 told former BBC reporter Kate Clark last December that anyone found in the company of a person who is targeted is regarded as an insurgent as well.
The very broad definition of “insurgent” used by ISAF in releasing figures on the number killed in night raids, along with statistics on raids coming from ISAF itself, suggests that most of those killed in night raids would be considered civilians under international humanitarian law criteria.
UNAMA would not allow IPS to interview the head of its human rights office, Georgette Gagnon, about the 2011 report, even though she had told IPS she could do an interview during the week of Aug. 22.
In responses to questions e-mailed by IPS, however, Gagnon said that UNAMA had investigated a total of 89 night raids in which casualties had been alleged, and that it had rejected the allegations of civilian deaths in 58 of those cases.
AIHRC and UNAMA, which co-produced the 2010 report, had clashed over UNAMA’s decision to put the number of civilian deaths in night raids at 82 in that report.
Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the AIHRC, revealed in an interview with us after the report was published that UNAMA had based the figure of 82 deaths on only 13 night raids in which the civilian deaths had been verified to UNAMA’s satisfaction. Nadery said the total had excluded alleged civilian deaths in 60 other raids.
UNAMA did not partner with AIHRC in producing the 2011 six-month report.
In a recent interview with IPS, Nadery estimated that 462 civilian deaths had occurred in all of the night raids in 2010 about which the commission had obtained some information.
The latest report’s methodological section confirms that alleged civilian deaths are not included in UNAMA’s total if the civilian status of any of the victims in an incident is uncertain.
Gagnon told IPS that said the mission’s decisions on such cases “are based on firsthand accounts for the vast majority of the incidents investigated”. She would not say, however, how many of the decisions to reject allegations were made on the basis of eyewitness accounts.
Gagnon also acknowledged that ISAF and Afghan officials had challenged some allegations, but would not reveal how many of the allegations that had been rejected fell into that category.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
Shah Noori reported from Afghanistan.Take a 64-bit iOS device—iPhone 5S or newer, iPad Air or newer, iPad Mini 2 or newer, sixth generation iPod touch or newer—laboriously set its date to January 1, 1970, and reboot. Congratulations: you now have a shiny piece of high-tech hardware that's stuck at the boot screen, showing nothing more than the Apple logo... forever.
Posted on Reddit and subsequently demonstrated on YouTube, it appears that iOS has a rather embarrassing software flaw. Redditors testing the bug have found themselves with unusable phones, and there are reports that vandals have been resetting the clocks of display devices in Apple stores.
So far, taking advantage of this bug requires a few minutes of physical access, as it takes a while to wind the date back 46 years in the settings app. There is concern that Wi-Fi devices could be vulnerable to malicious data from NTP (network time protocol) servers. NTP is used by many operating systems to set the time and date of a device, and its data is both unencrypted and unauthenticated, making spoofing relatively straightforward. NTP clients should not generally change the time and date by such large amounts, so this may not be an issue, but iOS's behavior in this regard is currently unknown.
January 1, 1970 is the first day of the Unix epoch; Unix-like systems measure times and dates as the number of seconds since that day. This is traditionally stored as a 32-bit number (which is going to cause some trouble in 2038), and it's currently speculated that 64-bit iPhones are doing something peculiar when handling system times that are close to zero.
Devices afflicted with this issue can't even be recovered by going into DFU mode and reflashing them. Though this wipes out all your data, it retains the bad date and subsequent boot loop. The faulty date does get reset when the battery goes completely flat, however, so discharging the phone (or disconnecting the battery, if you're brave) fixes it.
With 2016 being a leap year, we doubt that this will be the last date-related bug to rear its head.I’m walking fast through the traffic lights
Busy streets and busy lives
I run across the sidewalk and into the back door of the concert hall. Taylor rushed in behind me, the snaps of cameras and the screams of fans becoming just a dull roar as she shut the door.
“You ready for this?” Taylor asked me. I beamed at her.
“Are you kidding? I’ve been wanting this my whole life. Plus, he might show up tonight. Don’t forget to walk around during the concert to give out some backstage passes.” I turned and looked at myself in the mirror as my stylist came in. He stayed quiet so Taylor and I could plan while he got me ready for the big show.
“What are you going to do if he shows?” Taylor asked, getting her stuff ready for the concert. I stopped a shrug, not wanting to make Jake’s job any harder. He always said I moved too much, in his loving manner.
“I don’t know.” I said, lifting my chin up so he could work on my make-up.
“If he does show, are you going to tell him?” She looked at me.
I bit my lip, feeling into myself, to my core. Tell him? “No. Not at first.”
“What are you going to do if he doesn’t show?” She asked.
My stomach clenched. “I don’t know. I’ll hire a PI tomorrow.”
And all we know is touch and go
We are alone with our changing minds
We fall in love till it hurts or bleeds, or fades in time
Taylor ran onto backstage and peaked through the curtain. She ran back in with a smile on her lips.
“What?” I asked, hands on my hips. Jake was all done with my styling and I was about to go out. I was nervous, excited, scared, giddy, all at the same time.
“There’s so many red heads out there. I think every guy wants to be your sunset haired mystery boy.” She said, sticking out her tongue. She had been giving me such a hard time since I described him that way. I thought it’ been perfect. Imagining his eyes and the way he looked at me sent chills through my body.
I just shook my head, smiling. “Let’s do this.” I said, taking a deep breath and walking out.
And I never saw you coming
The crowd cheered, calling my name. I took another deep breath and move a stray piece of hair or of my eyes. In a few seconds the curtain would open and my largest concert would begin. The lights went dark on stage and the curtains opened.
For a split second there seemed to be silence. It was surreal. The entire stadium stood still, and I stood there looking at my fans, seeing them under the safety of darkness. Then the stage lights flashed on, lighting up everything around me, and the stillness was shattered by the roar of cheers.
“Minerva! Minerva!” They screamed. I smiled and walked up to my mic.
“Hello, Starlight Shores!” I called, noticing that there were quite a few red heads. I smiled. “How many here dyed their hair?” I asked, drawing a laugh from them, seeing hands wave and cheer. I laughed along; I loved interacting with my |
be around to revel in the dozen or so “Happy B-Days” on my FB wall, I decided I’d leave a gift behind for you all, instead. Here’s my rough draft of chapter 18 of I, ZOMBIE. Do not enjoy.
18 • Chiang Xhen
There was meat hanging in the window: Chickens strung up by their necks, pork wrapped in twine, little hooves in prayer, half-rotten fish frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground like leaves from a shedding tree. The meat was rotten. The air was heavy with the stench of it being locked tight in that tiny shop for days and days. Clouds of flies gathered. The meat had long since been appetizing.
Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate chairs of carved wood. The shop owners used the chairs to hang their daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices daily fluctuated. Chiang Xhen roamed the shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables, her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts drifting toward her parents.
The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese girl. Her parents had been born in China, while she had been born in this tiny microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.
Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally—but not often. Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases and her mother showed showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how her hand lays over to the side, just the edges of her fingers sliding up and down the strings.
Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten, and that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. When they got home that night, her mother took her aside and unwrapped her feet and pointed to them, and Chiang kept future discomforts to herself.
Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in their hearts a fantasy version of their birthland. Chiang was now eleven, and had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been. It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.
At her one-room school, they learned a lot of politics. Her teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news at home than she did of the city. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was lucky to be alive. That back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. And here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.
She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all night, making it hard to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.
Usually, it was the bold stripes on the flags of Little Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned this to her father, that she felt badly for the Italians, he had shrugged. Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that some people care more about where they come from than others. He told her to feel sorry for them about that while he hammered the meat with more anger.
Chiang had felt sorry for her father that day—and for the meat.
She made another circuit of the shop, her parents‘ shop. She had never been so hungry in all her life. The days had gotten away from her—not for lack of counting or so grand a number, but her mind wandered as it grew dark and light again outside. Strangers occasionally pressed against the glass, eying the meat, deciding it wasn’t for them. This much hadn’t changed. Tourists, turning their noses up at delicacies. Laughing and taking pictures. Only, they didn’t take pictures anymore. They paused with their horrible wounds. The disgusting display was in reverse, now. And then they lumbered onward.
Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the most, the wide eyes and slack jaws from the adults hurrying away with their children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loud as they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it wasn’t right. Everywhere, people scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams at all.
Or maybe they didn’t want to draw attention. The sick were already in the streets. It was difficult to see them, for they moved slowly. They didn’t stand out. Not until you bumped into them, looking for your parents, fighting the crowds to get home, and a kind stranger took your hand, bent down to see if you needed help, and bit off your fingers.
Chiang made another lap of the shop. She had never been so hungry before. Even waiting until the last customer was served before her mother made something in the back had never been this bad. Nothing had. She’d lost count of the days spent circling the shop, but it had been three since she’d had anything to eat. Three days with the hunger driving her mad.
A newspaper fluttered by outside and pressed itself to the glass. It was like a tourist, peeping in. Headlines from those last days were spread across its face—news of an outbreak entirely under control. Until it wasn’t. Chiang wondered what was happening in China. She thought of her school teacher and all her friends, wondered what had happened to them. As the people passed, she looked for anyone she knew, but they were all tourists.
The newspaper flapped off on the breeze. Where it had pressed, Chinese characters painted with a young and unsure hand could be seen against the fading backlight of another counted day. The characters were supposed to say: 人生. Rénshēng. Life.
Outside, it would have read this way. To the tourists, of course, it meant nothing. Just backdrop that lent Chinatown its authenticity. For locals, of course, it promised healthy ingredients and traditional medicines. Eternal life.
Chiang had laughed when she’d seen it from the inside. After she had drawn it for the third time, washing off each attempt with a bucket of water and a rag as she attempted to satisfy her mother’s exacting standards, she saw what it meant in reverse. From the inside, the brush strokes were backwards. It looked more like shēngrén. 生人. Stranger.
A stranger life. Life as a stranger. A girl growing up in a home away from home, people she didn’t know peering through the glass, taking pictures of and pointing at the delicacies hanging in the window. It was funny how that worked out. Like the characters knew all along that this was coming. A secret only they knew.
Chiang laughed in her mind. It was the only place she could laugh or cry anymore. She wanted out. She wanted to run, to skip and shout and scream, but knotted chains hung from the doors of the little shop. Her parents had locked them all inside, had locked away their one precious girl while she grew sicker and sicker, and they worried more and more.
Two chairs of ornate wood lay tipped on their sides. There was flesh up past the knees that might sate her painful hunger, but Chiang could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any more. She had eaten all she could. She was powerfully hungry and all alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.Many of today’s tech companies and startups are still building their apps for iOS first, despite Android’s growing market share. The problem stems from a lack of in-house talent, fewer Android-owning beta testers, technical hurdles, fragmentation issues, potential for revenue and more. And yet, there’s this general perception that when it comes to the size and scope of the two competing app stores, Google Play and Apple’s iTunes App Store are neck-and-neck. This is not the case.
Leaving the critical metric of revenue aside (Apple is stil reigning there), Google Play is still lacking a large number of the “top” applications, both free and paid.
During the first 20 days in May 2013, only 32 of the top 50 free iOS applications were available in the Google Play store, and only 29 of the top 50 paid applications were available in the U.S.
The data comes from Canalys, which last week offered similar findings illustrating how both Windows Phone and Blackberry’s app marketplaces were missing top iOS and Android applications. Of the top 50 free and top 50 paid apps featured in the Apple App Store and Google Play in the United States (during the same time frame), the analysts found that only 34 percent were featured in either the Windows Phone store or BlackBerry World.
So one has to wonder what hope either BlackBerry or Windows Phone has, when even a platform as massive as Android struggles to keep up.
“The results show that Google still has some work to do itself to ensure that top iOS titles are making it into the Google Play store,” says Tim Shepherd, Canalys senior analyst, of the new findings.
In terms of the missing iOS apps on Android, he says, some are services — like Twitter’s Vine app or Twitter Music, for example — while others are utilities like flashlights or “emoji” apps, where the functionality is more important than the app’s name itself. Others still, like “Find My Phone,” are Apple ecosystem-specific.
In other words, you can try to make the argument that this data alone can’t paint a complete picture about the discrepancies between the two stores.
But drilling down further where brands and titles do matter, Google Play still came up short in a number of key areas. The standout category where Google Play is missing top iOS titles is games — 9 of the missing 18 apps in the top 50 free iOS titles were games, and 12 of the missing 21 paid iOS titles were also games. Included in this group were Draw Something 2, Robot Unicorn Attack 2, and Sonic Dash on the free side of things, and Kick the Buddy: No Mercy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run, among the paid apps. This seems to indicate that, as studios continue to build out their lineups, they too are often going iOS-first.
Meanwhile, other notable missing apps Canalys spotted include Wood Camera and Camera+ (though there’s an impostor for the latter benefitting from the gap, as is far too common an occurrence, I’ve found). Also missing, as noted above, are Twitter’s latest expansions to video and music, plus several popular utilities.
Though Canalys was focused on the top of the charts, the problem extends much further down into the long tail, which makes the cost of switching from iPhone to Android more difficult for established users. (Having attempted the full switch myself for ages, I speak from experience. My SIM card today is in a Nexus 4, but my apps are on my iPhone 5.)
For example, some apps which early adopters — like TechCrunch readers — may miss when moving to Android include the following:
Social address books Cobook and Brewster; LinkedIn’s CardMunch; Facebook’s Camera and Poke; family messengers Hubble and Tweekaboo; smart assistants and calendaring apps like Tempo, Sunrise, and Cue; Tumblr’s Photoset; photo and social apps like Albumatic, Timehop, Cluster, and Everpix; photo print and card apps Simple Prints, Mosaic, and Red Stamp; video apps like Frequency, Squrl, Threadlife, and YouTube’s Capture; Instagram ecosystem apps Gramory, Pic Stitch, and Instaflow; TV brands Bravo, ABC Family, A&E, USA, Lifetime, and TLC; betaworks’ new game dots; hot email app Triage; shopping apps like Poshmark, Threadflip, eBay-owned Svpply’s Want; activity finders Calendo, Now, and Spindle; news apps Circa, Thirst, and Prismatic; and more.
This is from a cursory glance at my own device, mind you. If you have favorite utility, business tool, kid’s games, or something even more narrowly focused – like AngelList-scouring apps aWings or Angie, for example — you’ll generally have better luck on iOS. Younger companies have limited resources for app-building, so they have to choose somewhere to start. And until reports like the latest from App Annie tell them there’s more money to be made on Android, they’ll make the choice that has the most potential to impact their bottom line.
It’s an unfortunate situation, to say the least, because on many fronts — cloud, services like Google Now, plus a willingness to experiment and push forward with innovations like NFC-based mobile payments or air gestures, for instance — Android (and its OEM partners like Samsung) lead.
Today, Android’s footprint is growing, and Samsung is breaking its own records. There’s a hunger out there for something new, but still, those missing apps matter whether they’re at the top of the charts or just those important to you. So for now, the answer to the question about which is the better platform — iOS or Android? — is “both of them.”Piers were originally built for the purpose of getting people and cargo from the boat to the shore without getting their feet wet, before they developed into pleasure devices. Some of the first pleasure piers were built in Britain during the early 19th century. At that time, the railways were expanding and tourists from all over the country were flocking to coastal resorts. But at many resorts the sea was not visible from land when the tide was out, prompting resort owners to build long piers so that holidaymakers could promenade over and alongside the sea at all times. Now fitted with shops, restaurants, carnival rides and dance floors, they have become an integral part of every beach town culture.
Since the early Victorian period, piers have been popular attraction in Britain as well as in North America. They are places where people gather, have fun or a leisurely walk above the ocean waters. Many piers are now historic treasures featuring some of the area’s oldest architecture and vestiges of the past. Modern ones feature unusual architecture and artistic design.
Here are some of the most noteworthy and beautiful piers around the world.
Scheveningen Pier
The Scheveningen Pier, in the Dutch town of Scheveningen near The Hague, has an unusual design. The pier has two levels, the lower deck being a closed-in section while the upper one is open to the elements. Its farthest end branches out into four terminal sections called “islands” with shops, restaurants, a food boulevard, a casino, banquet and meeting rooms, and 60 meter high tower with viewing platform and facilities for bungee jumping. The 380-meter pier was built in 1959.
Photo credit: www.scheveningenbeach.com
Photo credit: Elvin/Flickr
Photo credit: Naveen Narain/Flickr
Photo credit: Dennis Burger/Flickr
Ryde Pier
The pier in the town of Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, is the world's oldest seaside pier. This timber-planked promenade was opened in 1814, and is 681 meters in length. It is possible to drive along the pier, and there is car parking on the large pier head.
Photo credit: Chris Eason/Flickr
Photo credit: woottonbridgeiow.org.uk
Photo credit: woottonbridgeiow.org.uk
Southend Pier
Southend Pier in Southend-on-Sea, a seaside resort town in Essex, England, is the longest pleasure pier in the world with a length of 2.16 km jutting into the Thames Estuary. The pier was originally built of wood in 1830, then replaced with a new iron pier in 1889.
Photo credit: Focushaus/Flickr
Blankenberge pier
The pier of Blankenberge in the Belgium town of Blankenberge was built in 1933. It is made of concrete and sticks 350 meters into the North Sea. Blankenbergse pier was the first pier on the Atlantic coast of the European continent.
Photo credit: www.blankenberge.be
Birnbeck Pier
Birnbeck Pier on the Bristol Channel in North Somerset, England, is the only pier in Britain that connects to an island — the Birnbeck Island, a 1.2 hectares rocky island just to the west of Worlebury Hill. The grade II listed pier was opened in 1867. Currently it is closed to the public and is now listed as an endangered building. In fact, part of the pier collapsed as recently as 30 December 2015.
Photo credit: Mark Robinson/Flickr
Photo credit: Sharon Garland/Flickr
Progreso Pier
The pier in port city of Progreso, in the Mexican state of Yucatán, is the longest pier in the world. Built with reinforced concrete, the pier juts out into the Gulf of Mexico for a distance of 6.5 km. The unusually long length is necessary to allow large ships to dock since the Yucatan coast is very shallow. The pier was originally 2,100 meters long and was constructed between 1937 and 1941, replacing a wooden pier that was built in the beginning of the last century. In 1988, an additional 4,000 meters was added to its length increasing the pier’s cargo and container vessels handling capacity. (Previously featured on Amusing Planet).
Photograph of the Progreso Pier taken from the International Space Station in 2014.
Photo credit: goista.com
Kastrup Sea Bath
Kastrup Sea Bath is part of the Kastrup Strandpark waterfront park on the east coast of Amager in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s an outdoor swimming poor that sits at the end of a hundred-meter-long wooden pier extending into the Baltic Sea. The wooden structure is shaped like a conch, scrolling up and around gradually increasing in height until it culminates in a five-foot high diving platform. The circular wall faces away from the sea and acts as a shelter, protecting swimmers from the wind. (Previously featured on Amusing Planet).
Photo credit: White Arkitekter
Umhlanga Pier
The Umhlanga Pier in the resort town of Umhlanga, north of Durban, South Africa, is a short pier with a design that looks like the ribcage of huge animal. It was called one of the most beautiful pier in the world by CNN.
Photo credit: CNN
Photo credit: Leon Homan/Flickr
Busselton Jetty
Busselton Jetty is the longest wooden pier in the southern hemisphere, stretching almost 2 km out to sea from the town of Busselton, Western Australia. The jetty was built in 1853 so that cut timber could be transported to ships. The jetty was extended numerous times until the 1960s, ultimately reaching a length of 1841 m. The jetty features a rail line along its length, a relic of the railway line into Busselton from Bunbury. The line now carries tourists along the jetty to an underwater observatory which opened to the public in 2003.
Photo credit: Frederick/Flickr
Clevedon Pier
The Clevedon Pier in Somerset, England, was once described as "the most beautiful pier in England" by the English poet Sir John Betjeman. The pier was built during the 1860s to attract tourists and provide a ferry port for rail passengers to South Wales. It still functions as a landing stage for steamers and is a popular attraction for tourists and anglers.
Photo credit: Chris Frewin/Flickr
Photo credit: Nick/Flickr
St. Petersburg Pier
The St. Petersburg Pier was a landmark attraction extending into Tampa Bay from downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. The Pier featured a five-story inverted pyramid-shaped building housing shopping, dining, nightlife, fishing, boat rentals, weekly festivals, and an aquarium. The pier was demolished last year so that a new one could be built.
Photo credit: www.tampabay360.com
Photo credit: tampabayisawesome.com
Rotonda a Mare
Rotonda a Mare in Senigallia, Italy, was opened in 1933 and soon became a popular attraction. During World War II the Rotunda served as military warehouse, but once the war was over, it once again became the center of social life. The pier features a round concert hall where many famous Italian artists have performed.
Photo credit: Andrea Sartorati/Flickr
Los Muertos Pier
The Los Muertos Pier in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, is a new pier inaugurated in 2013. It was designed by architect José de Jesús Torres Vega and features a beautiful spiraling promenade.
Photo credit: www.puerto-vallarta-rentals.com
Photo credit: www.puerto-vallarta-rentals.com
Sellin Pier
Sellin Pier is in the Baltic seaside resort of Sellin on the German island of Rügen. The pier has a restaurant near the beach over the water and has a diving gondola
The original pier was 500 meters long and was built in 1925 after the previous pier caught fire. During the 1950s through the 1970s it became the site of a popular dance hall. Prolonged neglect however caused the pier to be dilapidated and had to be demolished in 1978. The current pier was rebuilt based on models of the old pier and opened in 1997. The new pier is 394 meters long.
Photo credit: Raico Bernardino Rosenberg/Flickr
Photo credit: elbfoto/Wikimedia
Photo credit: Jean-Luc/WikimediaAfter posting about the lingerie I’ve been making, a lot of people have asked me about resources to make their own lingerie. Here is a list of links to all of the resources that I have used– if you know of more that you’d like to share, please leave them in the comments! I will continue to update this as I get more
Classes
Patterns
Materials
Books
Beverly Johnson’s Bra Making Manuals have been very highly recommended to me, although I have not personally read them. I am definitely planning to check it out soon.
Demystifying Bra Fit and Construction – If you’re going to be adjusting fit on bras, this book is invaluable simply for all the photos in it. I haven’t used it too much personally because I haven’t had a chance to do a deep dive on the fit of my bras yet.
The Anatomy of a Bra – This book is extremely helpful for those who are looking to do bra design because of the clear explanations of the different types of bras and the construction aspects that make these distinctions.
If you’re interested in pattern-making, I’ve heard good things about Patternmaking for Underwear Design by Kristina Shin.
I will continue to update this page as I find new resources– feel free to leave your recommendations in the comments!Who can keep track of the myriad year-ending media and marketing predictions posts? If you're like me and don't have the time to sift through everything the pundits have prognosticated, here it is in one take:
We have officially entered the age of mobility wherein smartphones and tablets have overtaken desktops and laptops for content consumption and commerce.
Plus the visual web. Now let's move on.
Over the past year, I've been keeping tabs on the "strides" PR agencies have made in social media and the analytics/measurement game. Unfortunately, the picture isn't all it's framed out to be. With a few exceptions, I believe that agencies are losing their birthright in the battle to lead in social media communications and measurement. Other "marketing" entities have eaten the PR industry's lunch through their ready embrace and leverage of new digital content strategies, channels, and data analytics tools.
The big global firms certainly have invested in departments focused on brand-building and consumer engagement via the primary social channels (mostly prodded by their forward-thinking, marketing and measurement-driven clients at CPG companies).
But I'd opine that the rank and file of those toiling on the agency side of the PR services equation, including those at the cool-sounding "digital boutiques," continue to offer as their primary deliverable (and measure of success) earned editorial media placements.
One of the most buzzed about "downtown" PR shops even has the term "media relations" baked into its company name. Here's a typical in-house PR job description that reveals just how mired we are as a profession in the publicity-generating paradigm:
Responsibilities: Develop PR strategies and manage the execution of product publicity through pre-launch, launch, and post-launch phases.
Provide counsel to leadership regarding incoming media requests.
Write and edit press releases, corporate communications, and online materials about [xxx company] products and the company.
Correspond with the press as a representative of [xxx company], as needed.
Conduct worldwide press tours, as necessary.
Conduct efficient interviews of [xxx company's] developers to gather data for written assignments.
Answer written interview questions about [xxx company] products for domestic and international press.
Write articles and news blurbs for domestic and international [xxx company] web sites.
I'm hardly one to diminish the value (or honed art) of generating editorial coverage for a client. Just attend one of our PCNY lunches to know this. Frankly, there's no better feeling in our profession than a client hit over The AP wire or on GMA. In fact, the PR industry's steadfast embrace of media relations is likely due to the fact that many clients still define PR success by an appearance on NBC "Today," a feature in the Wall Street Journal, a hit in TechCrunch, or a photo layout in People magazine.
Still, as consumers take their diet of news and information from an increasingly wider stream of sources, e.g., those they follow or have friended on Twitter and Facebook, the talented headline writers at news aggregators like HuffPost, Daily Beast and Buzzfeed, and the more mainstream news orgs like The New York Times, WSJ, Reuters, etc., the tried-and-true "media placement" no longer has the capacity to produce the sustaining inertia on which brands (or memes) are built.
Today's media ecosystem is simply too ephemeral. Even Pulitzer-destined reporting has relatively short legs.
What's missing from most agencies is an investment in the skill sets that broaden the PR pros' media horizons to include new earned/paid/owned hybrid schemes that blur the lines between advertising, direct marketing and PR. We now see client messaging amplified as sponsored (i.e., paid) stories not only on Facebook, but on Mashable, The Atlantic, Forbes, Gothamist and countless other "ad-driven" digital media properties. Pay for placement has taken on a new meaning in the new media paradigm.
What's more, PR seems to have fallen short in crunching the audience behavioral data to assess whether a marketing/sponsored/native message has produced the desired action. Again, the large "holding company" agencies, plus Edelman, have the sufficient resources to invest in the back-end big data measurement tools to demonstrate client ROI.
However, ask any agency staffer what their clients really want the answer is invariably the same: a story (ie, positive branded message) in the mainstream news media. Few agencies are looking at measuring paid digital creative's ability to draw eyeballs, clicks, likes and shares.
With PR people now outnumbering journalists by a ratio of four-to-one, the reliance on earned media engagement as the primary catalyst of conversations is no longer a given. Other modes for building a client's digital footprint must be considered. (I dare not mention the shorter fuses most reporters have for PR operatives given the daily assault on their email inboxes.)
As for the digital-only research and marketing shops, they've approached client brand-building from the paid end of the marketing spectrum. I wouldn't even consider them in the public relations space, though PR agencies need to pay attention: many digital ad/marketing shops are aggressively hiring to build their earned (and thus more holistic) menu of communications offerings.
Looking head to 2013, the question will be: which flavor of communications agency will more expertly offer what Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang and Rebecca Lieb define as a "converged media workflow" approach to addressing the client's communications need in our much-changed media landscape.
Virgin Mobile's Ron Faris with Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti
I'm personally rooting for my more prosaic brethren in the PR space, but based on my observations, much more work still needs to be done to inculcate rank and file staffers with the knowledge (and budgets) to open the other windows and doors into today's influential digital media properties.State-Level “Eco-Terror” Legislation Pushed by Corporate Front Groups
The National Lawyers Guild has a new report on state-level versions of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act that have been popping up around the country. As I’ve reported here previously, on laws such as the California Animal Enterprise Protection Act, they use sweeping, overly broad definitions of terrorism that are, in some cases, even worse than the federal law. (Here’s one of my all-time favorite blog posts in which a Tennessee lawmaker describes how similar legislation is needed to combat “left-wing eco-greenies.”
Take a look at the full report, and the influence of a corporate front group called the American Legislative Exchange Council: “Beyond the AETA: How Corporate-Crafted Legislation Brands Activists as Terrorists.”
As NLG Executive Director Heidi Boghosian said:
“Although many states considered and outright rejected the ALEC bill soon after its release, there are still signs that parts of the legislation are being incorporated in some states’ laws that equate animal rights activists with domestic terrorism.”
The National Lawyers Guild continues to be out front on these issues, with its publication of a know your rights booklet for activists, and it’s Green Scare hotline, 1-888-NLG-ECOL. And NLG lawyers around the country have been working hard on behalf of animal rights and environmental activists labeled “terrorists.” If you’re a lawyer, please join the Guild. And if you’re not a lawyer, write a check, volunteer, or just drop them a note of support.Posted on 3rd October 2016 | Freek Van der Herten
Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray ) on steroids.
This is how you can work with the league's package:
use League \ Fractal \ Manager ; use League \ Fractal \ Resource \ Collection ; $books = [ [ 'id' => 1, 'title' => 'Hogfather', 'characters' => [...]], [ 'id' => 2, 'title' => 'Game Of Kill Everyone', 'characters' => [...]] ]; $manager = new Manager(); $resource = new Collection($books, new BookTransformer()); $manager->createData($resource)->toArray();
Laravel-fractal makes that a lot easier:
fractal() ->collection($books) ->transformWith( new BookTransformer()) ->toArray();
With the newly tagged v2 of our package you can compact that code to this:
fractal($books, new BookTransformer())->toArray();
You can even pass in a callable as a second argument.
fractal($books, function (Book $book) { })->toArray();
Fractal and laravel-fractal can do a whole lot more. Head over to the docs on GitHub to learn all the options.
If you were already using v1 of the package, it's fairly easy to upgrade to v2.Evan Bindelglass is a local freelance journalist, photographer, cinephile, and foodie. His beat: the unusual, the offbeat, and the off-limits. He particularly loves nooks and crannies of NYC history. You can e-mail him, follow him on Twitter @evabin, or check out his personal blog.
Most of New York City's subway stations are examples of the triumph of function over form. It's an industrial-strength system that (sometimes) gets the job done really well. But aside from tiled signs with station names and directions, there is little truly architectural about the network's contemporary trappings. However, there was a time when form was very much taken into consideration. That was during the City Beautiful movement around the turn of the last centuryduring which Grand Central Terminal and Washington Square Park's arch were both completed. In the midst of that age, on October 27, 1904, New York City's first subway station opened to the public. At City Hall. Service was discontinued on the last day of 1945, but interested visitors can still ogle its tiles, skylights, and chandeliersand the next chance to do so is this weekend.
Its architects were George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge, the men responsible for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Also working on the both projects were engineers Raphael Guastavino and William Barclay Parsons and sculptor Gutzon Borglum (yes, the man who would be responsible for Mount Rushmore).
In a pamphlet they hand out on the tour, New York Transit Museum calls it the "jewel in the crown." It's a glorious place that made this visitor ask, "Why can't we still have nice things?!" It has arched ceilings and is lit both naturally through several skylights and artificially by electric chandeliers.
It has a single platform and is now part of the loop that 6 trains make going from the Brooklyn Bridge downtown local platform back around to the uptown local platform.
"I like the curved platform space even more than the upstairs mezzanine area," historian John Simko, an expert on the station who led the tour photographed here, told me. "To stand at one end below a beautiful Guastavino vault and to take in the entire length of the curved station without even one column to interrupt the view emphasizes what a unique space it is."
By 1945, though, the nearby Brooklyn Bridge station, with access to both express and local tracks, had become much more popular. So it was shuttered. But we're lucky, for the City Hall station wasn't lost to the ravages of time (unlike the old Penn Station, RIP). It remains preserved, and there's actually ample opportunity to visit it.
Tours are led roughly 16 times a year to groups of about 40 people at a time. To attend, you have to have to be a member of the New York Transit Museum and be ready to act quickly. Tickets for the City Hall station tours cost $40 each and always sell out fast.
The next tour dates are Sunday, February 16, and Saturday, April 12. Both, however, sold out the day they went on sale. There will be a summer tour, but the date for that has not yet been set.
Don't lose hope. There is a (semi)-secret way for you to get a pretty sweet glimpse of the old City Hall station without going through all that. Simply get yourself on a downtown 6 train at the Brooklyn Bridge station and see if your conductor will be kind enough to let you stay aboard as the train passes by the erstwhile stop as it trundles towards the uptown platform.
You'll be able to see a little something if it's a sunny day, but it's best to go on days when tours are scheduled because that's when the chandeliers will be turned on. But if you go on a tour day, don't be in the front car. You might encounter one of the official tours en route and start a row with the paying customers.
Evan Bindelglass
· New York Transit Museum [official]
· Photos: An Extremely Rare Tour Inside & Atop The Washington Arch [Gothamist]
· 31 Vintage Photos Of Grand Central During The Last Century [Curbed]
· 50 Years Later, Relive The Destruction Of Old Penn Station [Curbed]The galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is famous for the way it bends light in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Study of the cluster has revealed secrets about how dark energy shapes the universe.
The universe is expanding — and it is doing so at the same rate in all directions, according to new measurements that appear to confirm the standard model of cosmology.
Astrophysicist Jeremy Darling of the University of Colorado Boulder came to this conclusion after employing a research strategy known as "real-time cosmology," which seeks out the tiny changes in the universe that occur over human timescales.
The idea of "real-time cosmology" was proposed in two separate papers by Alan Sandage in 1962 and by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loebin 1998. The possibility of seeing the redshifts of sources changing in real time is thus called the "Sandage-Loeb Test". [The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]
"Real-time cosmology offers new ways to observe the universe, including some observations and cosmological tests that cannot be made any other way," Darling told Space.com via email.
Researchers discovered in 1998 that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate — a surprising phenomenon believed to be due to a mysterious force called dark energy. Scientists don't know much about dark energy, except that it may be a property of the vacuum. In a bid to understand dark energy, researchers are making a wide array of cosmological tests and building new telescopes and instruments.
"This work asks whether the expansion today — that is dominated by dark energy — is the same in all directions," Darling said.
To make the measurements, Darling used data previously collected by other researchers on the motion of extra-galactic objects across the sky.
The data allowed him to conclude that the cosmic expansion is indeed isotropic — in other words, the same in all directions — with a margin of error of 7 percent.
"The constraints will get better with forthcoming data from the Gaia mission," said Loeb, who was not involved in the study.
The European Space Agency's Gaia probe, which launched last December, is designed to create a three-dimensional map of Earth's Milky Way galaxy, mapping the motions of about 1 billion objects. This work should dramatically expand |
about how much energy would be required, it seems pretty unrealistic," McSween says.
"You can hold a cube between your thumb and your forefinger and crush it"
But Lewis figures that some asteroids might be made up of as much as 30 percent metal, in the form of an iron-nickel-cobalt and platinum-group alloy. "The temptation is to simply use a magnet to pluck the metal grains out of that regolith," he says.
Some metal-rich asteroids might be worth taking closer to Earth, as close as the moon, in their entirety. "The concentration of metal is so high that you have to wonder whether you could just bring the whole thing back," Lewis says.
Step 4: Deliver the goods
Space sells, but who's buying?
It remains unclear who will purchase the goods that space miners have gone to such pains to gather.
The most lucrative opportunity might be platinum-group metals—one category of the few space commodities that would be shipped back to Earth. "These materials enable so many different high-tech processes that we use," Lewicki says. Today, platinum-group metals are essential to catalytic converters in petroleum engines, as catalysts in the production of silicone, and in the manufacturing of glass. They are incorporated into hard drives; in spark plugs, where their low corrosion rates allow 100,000-mile life spans; and in medical devices, where they are prized for their biocompatibility.
A 500-ton asteroid with 0.0015 percent platinum metals—a common percentage—would have three times the richest concentration found on Earth. "To have more of this material will open up economies that we can't even predict," Lewicki says.
But most asteroid commodities will only be marketable in a future where ambitious spaceflight is a regular human activity; for example, extraterrestrial depots where spacefarers could top off their fuel tanks and water supplies while on long trips. If there are no such trips, there is no business model.
Similarly, the idea that common metals will be useful in space is predicated on a manufacturing industry that is building space stations and spacecraft in orbit. Assembling structures in space, rather than launching them from Earth, is appealing because it avoids the cost of launch. A lack of orbital construction or the advent of cheaper launch systems could obviate this business.
If space stations are growing food for full-time residents, they could become lucrative markets for more than iron and steel. Asteroid-derived nitrogen and ammonia would be in demand for fertilizer. Such industries are vital if humans are to make their home in space. "We're talking about technologies that break the umbilical cord to Earth," Lewis says.
Planetary Resources' scheme is more than a business plan, it's a rose-colored blueprint for supporting space exploration. Its existence speaks to humanity's drive to explore, to spread, and to support the most audacious of our dreams.June 1941. German tanks before the attack into Russia.
In the summer of 1941, the Third Reich was at the apex of its power. After the defeat of Poland in September 1939, German troops had engaged in a series of spectacular blitzkrieg offensives against Denmark, Norway, the Benelux countries, and France, occupying almost the whole of Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, the Nazi regime was allied with Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, and in the spring of 1941 it conquered Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler thought the time for "Europe's crusade against Bolshevism" had come. For the June 22, 1941, attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler assembled an invading force of unprecedented size. In addition to 3.6 million German and allied soldiers, about 600,000 motor vehicles, 3,600 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces, and 2,700 warplanes were deployment in the invasion. This photograph shows a unit of German tanks before their deployment; in the background, we see the bombardment of Sluk.
WHY DID HITLER ATTACK RUSSIA AND SPARE BRITAIN? (From the BBC)
In the summer of 1940 Adolf Hitler, despite his swift and dramatic victory over France, faced a major military and political problem. The British would not do what seemed logical and what the Führer expected - they would not make peace. Yet Hitler was frustrated by geography - in the shape of the English Channel - from following his immediate instincts and swiftly crushing the British just as he had the French. Hitler did in fact order preparations to be made for an invasion of England, but he was always half-hearted in his desire to mount a large seaborne landing. Germany, unlike Britain, was not a sea power and the Channel was a formidable obstacle. Even if air superiority could be gained, there remained the powerful British Navy. And there was another, ideological, reason why Hitler was not fully committed to invading Britain. For him, it would have been a distraction. Britain contained neither the space, nor the raw materials, that he believed the new German Empire needed. And he admired the British - Hitler often remarked how much he envied their achievement in subjugating India. Worse, if the Germans let themselves be drawn into a risky amphibious operation against a country Hitler had never wanted as an enemy, every day the potential threat from his greatest ideological opponent would be growing stronger. (It was just ironic that he was not yet at war with this perceived enemy, since in August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a Non-Aggression Pact.) All this meant that, from Hitler's point of view, there was an alternative to invading Britain: he could invade the Soviet Union. Both Hitler and his military planners knew that Germany's best chance of victory was for the war in Europe to be finished swiftly. Hubert Menzel was a major in the General Operations Department of the OKH (the Oberkommando des Heers, the German Army headquarters), and for him the idea of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 had the smack of cold, clear logic to it: 'We knew that in two years' time, that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time.... We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East.... At the time it seemed possible.' (The above paragraphs are taken from chapter one of 'War of the Century' by Laurence Rees, published by BBC Publications, 1999.)
December 1941. A German tank stuck in the Russian snow.
Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler’s army had won a number of quick military victories. The campaign in the East, however, was a disaster for the Wehrmacht and proved to be a turning point in the war. Strategic mistakes, inadequate supplies for troops, and insufficient equipment all contributed to the German defeat on the Eastern Front. In many areas, German military equipment was not suited to the Soviet Union’s climate and ground conditions, especially in the winter months. This image shows a German type IV tank (in snow camouflage) stuck in the snow. While soldiers attempt to free the tank with shovels and pickaxes, a war correspondent (far right) captures photographs the scene.
Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and looked poised to take Moscow by October that year. With the benefit of hindsight, popular opinion has labelled Hitler as virtually insane for invading the Soviet Union, but at the time many people - including those influential in both Britain and America - thought his decision was a sound one. Indeed, Hitler came much closer to pulling off his grand plan than the Soviet Union was ever prepared to admit. The German Blitzkrieg technique was as devastating in Russia as it had been in the rest of Europe. The scene was set for a war of annihilation waged by the Nazis against the Soviets with no mercy shown by either side. One week into the German invasion, 150,000 Soviet soldiers were either dead or wounded - more than during the five months of the Battle of the Somme. As the German armies swept further into the Russian heartland, one million Soviet troops were drafted to protect Kiev. But despite Stalin's ruthless order forbidding any city to surrender, Kiev fell and 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured. By October 1941, three million Soviet soldiers were prisoners of war. New testimony and documentary evidence can now reveal that Stalin was seriously considering suing for peace and had even organised a 'getaway' train to take him to safety as German guns started pounding Moscow. His decision to stay and fight was a crucial turning point in the war.
October, 1942. A German anti-tank unit on a Stalingrad street.
Hitler’s Directive No. 45 of July 23, 1942, revised the original plan of the German summer offensive in southern Russia. According to the directive, the offensives in Stalingrad and the Caucasus were equally important and would be pursued simultaneously. Army Group A [Heeresgruppe A] was to occupy the oil fields of the Caucasus, while Army Group B [Heeresgruppe B] was to conquer Stalingrad, an important industrial city and rail hub on the Volga River. In 1940, Stalingrad (named Zarizyn until 1925, and Volgograd since 1961) had a population of 450,000. The battle for Stalingrad began on August 19, 1942; on August 23, the 6th Army, under the leadership of General Friedrich Paulus, was ordered to take the city. Bitter fighting ensued and losses were extraordinarily high. The battle for Stalingrad lasted until February 2, 1943, ending in a crushing German defeat.
Soviet POWs. 1942.
German treatment of POWs varied greatly and was largely determined by the nationality of their captives. Soviet POWs suffered the worst fate, since National Socialist racial policy held that the “Eastern races” were inferior, and since fighting Bolshevism was among the goals of Nazi political ideology. Soviet POWs were kept in makeshift camps without sufficient food, medical care, or protection from harsh weather conditions. Thousands of prisoners were used as forced laborers in the armaments industry and at mining sites. More than 3 million Soviet POWs died in German prison camps. This photograph was taken at a POW camp in Charkov (Ukraine).
1943. Soviet partisans hanged to deter others by the Germans.
With the attack on the Soviet Union, the Nazi campaign assumed its full scope as a racial-ideological war of annihilation of unprecedented brutality and barbarity. The Wehrmacht and the SS cooperated in the conquest of Eastern European “living space” [Lebensraum] and raw materials, in the systematic eradication of racial and political enemies, and in the decimation and enslavement of the Slavic peoples. By the end of the war, an estimated 25-27 million Soviet citizens had died, including many civilians. This photograph shows Soviet partisans who had been hanged to deter others from following a similar path. It was found on a fallen soldier in 1943.
WAR IN RUSSIA: HELL FOR THE PEOPLE (Source:BBC)
Stalin and Hitler were together responsible for the leitmotiv of ruthless brutality that prevailed throughout the hostilities between Russia and Germany. During the Battle of Moscow, in which 8,000 Soviet citizens were executed for perceived cowardice, the Russian armies were forced to stand their ground, despite perishingly cold conditions of 43 degrees below freezing.
To prevent his soldiers deserting the front line around the capital, Stalin ordered special 'blocking detachments' to shoot all deserters. The Soviet leadership also instructed Soviet partisans operating in the countryside to kill anyone whom they believed was disloyal. This resulted in an effective carte blanche for partisans to abuse their power and extract whatever they wanted from helpless villagers. A report from one partisan division shows that rape, killings and beatings were commonplace. To make villagers' lives still more hellish, in some areas, particularly the occupied Ukraine, nationalist partisans (as opposed to Soviet partisans), who were bent on freedom from the Soviet regime, also started up their own brutal operations in the countryside. Villagers were now faced with violence from three different fighting forces. Russians did not suffer only from their own side. Nazi rule over the territories they captured from Russia was draconian. Erich Koch, Reich Commissar of occupied Ukraine stated that the 'lowliest German worker is a thousand times more valuable' than the entire population of the Ukraine. Starvation was widespread, with Soviet civilians forced to eat dogs - until the dog supply ran out and people were forced to turn to rats, crows and birch bark. In the Ukrainian town of Kharkov, which was administered by the German army, 100,000 people died of starvation and disease. The German army, faced with an ever growing partisan threat, became increasingly comprehensive in their view about what constituted a partisan. One army document lists 1,900 partisans and their 'helpers', killed by the Germans in one action. But only 30 rifles and a handful of other weapons were found with them - more than 90% of those killed by the Germans had no guns. And yet people still managed to survive. Inna Gavrilchenko tells how lucky she was to get a job in a slaughter house during the occupation of Kharkov. It gave her access to blood, which she smuggled out and cooked into a 'blood omelette'.
A German soldier after the Battle for Stalingrad. January 1943.
After the 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad on January 31 and February 2, 1943, its surviving members were taken into captivity. The battle for Stalingrad had lasted from August 1942 until February 2, 1943. After months of heavy fighting with neither sufficient supplies nor suitable equipment, and under extremely harsh climate conditions, most surviving soldiers more or less looked like the soldier here: ravaged by injury, hunger, and cold.
Februrary, 1943. The defeated German Sixth Army of Paulus.
According to the most recent research, however, it can be assumed that about 100,000 German soldiers were captured at Stalingrad; only about 6,000 of them returned home after the war.
The Atlantic Wall.
To prevent an Allied invasion of what Hitler called “fortress Europe,” the Organization Todt (OT) began construction in the summer of 1942 on a 1,600 mile-long defensive fortification along the Atlantic coast. Upon completion, this fortification (which was referred to as the “Atlantic Wall” [Atlantikwall] in Nazi propaganda) was to stretch from the Netherlands to the Spanish border. Its completion, originally scheduled for May 1943, was delayed by shortages in building materials. By the time the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, only a small section of it had been finished.
A Russian village burns, January 1944.What is Event Delegation?
“…a helper object, known as a delegate, is given the responsibility to execute a task for the delegator“
– Delegation Pattern Wikipedia
Why use Event Delegation?
A good practice when working with Unity (or any framework) is to decouple your UI logic from your game logic. It’s fine to have the UI code reach down to the game logic layer and call methods directly on it but having the game logic layer directly call methods on the UI logic’s layer is, in general, a bad practice because doing so “marries” you to whatever UI you are currently using. So to get around this we can use C#’s Delegates and Events to fire off methods throughout our UI and even on the game logic layer.
How to use Event Delegation with Unity
All we have to do is:
create a static Event Manager class Add delegates and events to this Event Manager
Listeners will add functions to the events
Delegators will fire off the events
The Manager: Defining events
public class EventManager { public delegate void EnemyHovered(int laneIndex, int targetRange); public static event EnemyHovered EnemyTargetedRequest; public static void EnemyTargeted(int laneIndex, int targetRange) { if(EnemyTargetedRequest!= null) EnemyTargetedRequest(laneIndex, targetRange); } }
In this example we create a delegate with the type EnemyHovered which takes the arguments laneIndex and targetRange. Then we make an event EnemyTargetRequest which is the event that the listeners will subscribe functions to. Finally, there is a static method that can be called by delegators when they want to fire off this event, triggering all the functions that are subscribed to it.
The Listener: Subscribing to the event
In another class we can add the following:
void Awake() { EventManager.EnemyTargetedRequest += DoSomething; } public void DoSomething(int targetedIndex, int targetRange){ // do something }
In this class we define some function called DoSomething that takes the same arguments as our delegate. In the Awake() method we add the function to the static class’s EnemyTargetedRequest event.
The Delegator: Firing off events
In yet another class we can do the following:
public void OnPointerEnter(PointerEventData eventData) { EventManager.EnemyTargeted(_index, _targetCount); }
Here we’re just using Unity’s OnPointerEnter event as the UI event that will trigger our EnemyTargeted event. Because our Listener class subscribed it’s DoSomething function to the EnemyTargetRequest event when SignalManager.EnemyTargeted is called it will fire off the DoSomething function!
So with this, you can keep all your events off in the static Event Manager, subscribe to them when you need an object to react to an event and fire off the events whenever you need to which allows you to keep UI and game logic separated. You could even have GameObjects subscribe to events and unsubscribe from them as they are created and destroyed which is very useful when these objects are created and destroyed dynamically.Looks like Bryan Cranston has signed a ‘six picture’ deal as Lex Luthor
We’ve heard rumours floating about that Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston was going to be playing Lex Luthor in the upcoming ‘Man of Steel’ sequel, but now it looks like those rumours might actually be true.
Could it be? Is it true? Well, we won’t know for sure until AMC’s Breaking Bad comes to an end, but according to TheHollywoodNews.com, Cranston is going to be the new Lex Luthor.
We’ve already had our fill over superhero news today with Ben Affleck being announced as the next Batman, but the TheHollywoodNews.com says, “early word suggests… Cranston has reportedly signed on for a six-picture recurring Nick Fury-like role as the mischievous billionaire head of LexCorp.”
The site goes on to report that Cranston could also be “making an appearance in possible sequels and future JUSTICE LEAGUE ensemble.”
It’s certainly good news for Superman and Bryan Cranston fans alike…At one time or the other, you may have bought a magazine from a stand or borrowed one from your friend. Just before you even open the magazine, one usually takes a few minutes to check out the front image. The image of the person is a little different. They are usually a little dark but the magazine cover shows them as light. Well, everyone wants to lighten his or her skin. Michael Jackson did it, why not you.
While Michael had all the money to undergo the expensive procedures, for you, you can begin with your photos by Photoshop face editing them. Change a few photos that seem to display you in bad light. Thanks to Photoshop skin retouch, you can be able to achieve this with ease.
Below is a step-by-step guide of how to lighten skin in Photoshop CS6
Select your area
Before you begin changing the skin tone, you need to have an HD image that is clear and crisp. The reason you have to it, this is that it displays all features better even the tiniest of details. If you don’t have any photos of yourself in HD or you don’t want to mess with them, you can download one from the Internet. Always remember to look out on any copyright information as it could result in a few mishaps if the photo were to be posted in public.
You have some tools to enable you make the selection: Lasso tool, Polygonal lasso tool, Quick-Selection tool, Magic wand tool, Pen tool etc. Learn here how to use selection tools in Photoshop.
Make the selection using Quick Selection Tool: When using the Quick Selection Tool, mouse tap on the area you want to select example the face and move with your mouse. You can hold the alt key when dragging to eliminate any extraneous places such as eyebrows and eyes. You can always reduce the size of you’re the quick selection tool with [ and ] keys.
You can also use the Pen Tool, which can be found on the toolbar. With the Pen Tool, you can make the edge of the selection high quality. It is an easy to use tool and you should try it out. You can also know about clipping path service, which is done by this pen tool.
Refine your selection
When selecting using the Quick selection tool, you will find out that other items will have been added. Since you main aim is to lighten the skin of model image, you can remove the other items easily by using the lasso tool. Mouse taps on the lasso tool from the tool bar on the left, press the alt key on your keyboard and simply moves on your image until you select the items you don’t need in your photo.
You can also zoom in to the photo to clean up a few things so as to enhance the details and finally have a great effect in the end. Around the eyes, the mouth, the nose and the ears, you can use the lasso tool with the alt key to remove details you don’t need.
Using the SHIFT key and the lasso tool, you can move around and select places you want to add to your selection. This provides you with a large canvas to work on which finally gives you the desired effect.
Once you have your photo selected, you need to duplicate it. In order to duplicate a layer, press CRTL+J on your keyboard. You should see another layer appearing above the original one. Rename this layer to something like “Light Tone”. This will help to differentiate the layers.
Refine the edges
Right click with the mouse pointer on your canvas, select Refine edge, turn on smart radius and then place the radius to 5 pixels. You can also paint along the hairline, as this will make your selected canvas to look natural. To do this, you need to locate the Feather amount to 0.5 pixels and the Shift Edge to 25%. Once you are done, you can right tap with you mouse point on ok to make the changes effective.
You are required to craft a mask of the selected area you have completed and this can be achieved by clicking the Add Layer-Mask tool at the Layers Panel.
Make a new Levels Adjustment
To do this, hold down Command and click on the Layer Mask thumbnail located in the properties panel.
Then click on the levels from the lower panel of the layer. To achieve the desired light skin tone, you need to move the right and middle stop to the left. You also need to move the left stop to the right a little bit to keep the dart tone natural.
Finally, choose a Curves adjustment-layer and adjust the curve to brighten the hair or change the hair color. Make sure it matches with your new facial tone and you are done.
At last, look at your masterpiece and marvel at your success.By Kristin Wilson Keppler
BBC World News America, Jacksonville, North Carolina
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement It is a grim reminder of the cost of war. But for marines based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, getting a meat tag - a tattooed copy of their vital information inked into their skin - means paying a visit to Jesse Mays before they head off to war. "They're used to identify a corpse. They're not for the living." Jesse Mays is sitting on a stool in what he calls his "operating room" - a small room next to a vault. This building used to be a bank, he says. The heavy round vault door sits open, now filled with filing cabinets and canvases. Lying shirtless on the black leather table next to him is Gunnery Sergeant Mike "Gunny" Greer, one arm raised over his head. Spiked restraints hang from the sides of the table. Jesse laughs and says they are just for fun, "unless you fidget too much." Jesse Mays has done over 30,000 tattoos in his career The Sleeping Dragon Tattoo Parlor is in the small town of Jacksonville, just outside Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. Inside the Dragon, as Jesse calls it, Bob Marley is both on the stereo and on the walls. Huge, technicolour paintings of the singer share wall space with samples of Jesse's tattoos. Everything from hula girls to Celtic crosses to what the marines call EGAs - eagles, globes and anchors - the emblem of the Marine Corps. He is an artist at heart, he says, but he got tired of sitting around waiting for paint to dry. He will draw anything a customer wants, but it seems these days, the request is always the same. A meat tag. "Meat tags are so they can make it home," Jesse says. "No matter what. So someone can grieve over them." Taken from information that soldiers wear on metal tags around their necks, meat tags go one step further. Jesse tattoos that same information on their bodies, usually on their ribcage just under their armpit. "I've done some tags that got it looking like their skin is splayed open, with a chain wrapped around their ribs and the dog tags hanging outside the skin," he explains, his needles injecting Gunny's religion and blood type into his side. "Or there's ones that looks like I carved it on their bones. But, mostly, they just want the basic information." Boots, neck and middle The men - and boys, some as young as 19 - he tattoos all share certain characteristics. Shaved heads, smoking cigarettes, and an open defiance of death, even as they ask for a tattoo that openly acknowledges the very real chance that they might die. "Flack jackets are amazing things," explains Lance Corporal Andrew Sichling, who isn't opting to get the tattoo tonight, but may do later. "I understand why guys get 'em. If you get blown up, this," his hands frame his torso, "might be the only part of you that comes home." Gunny Greer's meat tag includes personal details such as his religion For the marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, meat tags are nothing new. "I did it because it's a tradition. I don't plan on getting blown up and anyone having to find my parts," Gunny says. Gunny is a seasoned veteran. He has done tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has the word "warrior" tattooed across his abdomen as testament to his survival. He explains that for him, getting meat tagged is personal and means something. "It's not about dying. It's identification. Boot, neck, and middle," he says. "It's like a baseball player getting his number. This is my number." 'God's work' As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, Jesse does more and more meat tagging. It is not morbid, he insists, but practical. "That's why we have a memorial to the unknowns, right? Couldn't identify them," he says. "They can identify my boys. I'm doing God's work here. His family is going to find him." David Moore walks into the Sleeping Dragon with his wife Samantha. They have left their nine-month old son at home for the evening while David gets tattooed. He is getting shipped out in March. "They always tell us not to wear dogs with gear because it's going to hurt. It's like metal digging into your neck," he says, rubbing his bare skin where his dog tags would have been. "You wear another tag in your left boot, but that's no good if you don't have your leg no more." I'd rather me go down than a whole patrol get killed just because I missed something
David Moore David clenches his fist and closes his eyes as he gets tagged, trying not to move. Any flinch elicits a gentle scolding from Jesse. "Hold still," he'll admonish, even though he understands why they do it. Any place on the body that is sensitive enough to feel the slightest touch is going to hurt the most with the needles. "Pain is just weakness leaving the body. What does not kill you makes you stronger... that's a marine," Jesse says. He tries to distract David from the needles. "What's your function in the Marine Corps, son?" "Sweeper, sir," David says. The sound of the tattooing gun stops. Jesse pauses. It is unexpected, even for him. He clears his throat, regaining his composure. Sgt Greer served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan This job commands respect. Sweepers, David says, are the men who walk along the Humvees with metal detectors, sweeping the area for hidden bombs. "His job is to take that grenade, to die before all those other people," Jesse explains. He looks up and sees Samantha sitting in the chair by her husband's head. He lowers his head to his hands, covering his face. Later, he will scold himself for saying that in front of her. "You should not talk about dying in front of the family," he says. Modern day Samurai But for David Moore, death is a part of the job, even if he is talking about his own. "I'd rather me go down than a whole patrol get killed just because I missed something. Didn't do that one little part of my job," he shakes his head, like he's trying to banish the thought from his mind. "I think about dying. It's always there, but I think about it more in the training, and what I can do better to keep them safe and come home," he says, taking a long slow draw on a cigarette that's almost always present. "If they come home and I don't, I'm OK with that." Jesse says he has known too many boys who have not come back. He walks out the front door and sits outside, chatting with a few of "his marines" who are walking by. He calls them modern day Samurai. "Warriors, that's what they are," he says. "If the worst happens, I'll get somebody come in here and tell me about how someone bit it. "And it's always because of some damned roadside bomb, not because someone manned up," he says, and then takes a long pause. "That's all I want to say about that." "I just tell 'em to keep their heads down. I know where they're going."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionCr Cassidy used question time on Tuesday to query a $1.6 million cheque written to CityCycle operator and advertising firm JCDecaux. "Last week in this chamber, you tried to justify a payment of over $700,000 to Brisbane Marketing, also for CityCycle," he said. "In just two weeks, this disastrous scheme has cost Brisbane ratepayers over $2.3 million. "Will you today admit that your CityCycle scheme, which you claimed would be cost-neutral, has been a financial disaster for the ratepayers of Brisbane?" Cr Quirk said the expenditure went well beyond CityCycle, with much of it used on things such as campaigns designed to attract people to Brisbane.
"I would refute that CityCycle has been a disaster," he said. "On the same basis of logic, the Labor Party would close Brisbane Transport down. "…It seems that it's alright for CityCat services to lose substantial monies every year, it's alright for buses to lose substantial monies every year, but somehow or other it's not OK in the case of CityCycle, which forms part of an overall transportation system." Cr Quirk said he still expected the CityCycle scheme to eventually become cost-neutral. "That is still a few years away, but it will," he said.
Cr Quirk's deputy, active transport chairman Adrian Schrinner, said the scheme had been "much maligned" since it was installed, but pleaded for people to give it a go. And Cr Schrinner repeated his claim Queensland's mandatory helmet laws were the biggest impediment to CityCycle's success. "This is a cycle hire scheme, run by a company called JCDecaux, which runs cycle hire schemes in 60-plus cities around the world," he said. "And, in fact, there are many more than that running around the world and it's interesting when you consider why there might be different levels of success in some cities over another. "My personal belief is that mandatory helmet laws have very much held back the growth of CityCycle and you see a similar situation down in Melbourne as well, where their bicycle hire scheme has also struggled to get off the ground."
Cr Schrinner said he was comfortable with the ongoing cost of the scheme. "If we were running a bike hire scheme with the sole and only purpose of making a profit, then we would think twice," he said. "But active transport and public transport is not just about making a profit. It's about providing a community service." Cr Schrinner said there had been ongoing growth since CityCycle was introduced, from 595 trips a day in 2012 to 630 in 2013, to 794 in 2014 and 943 in 2015. Cr Schrinner said so far in 2016, there had been an average of 1126 CityCycle trips per day.
"So, between 2012 and now, we've seen around 90 per cent growth in the number of trips per day being taken on CityCycle and that is positive, we'd like to see it continue to grow," he said. "We will continue to invest in CityCycle and to promote CityCycle, not to shy away from it, as an important way of getting around the inner-city." Cr Schrinner also revealed in the chamber on Tuesday that the council had "killed" bicycle awareness zones on Brisbane roads. The zones, which were advisory only, consisted of yellow-painted bicycle symbols on roads as a reminder that the road needed to be shared. "Cyclists need to share the road with vehicles, but should keep to the left as far as possible," the council says on its website.
"Normal road rules apply." Cr Schrinner said the bicycle awareness zones, as opposed to dedicated bike lanes, led to confusion. "The difference between a yellow bike on the road and a white bike on the road, which is usually used to designate a bike lane, often confuses motorists," he said. "…So there will be no more bicycle awareness zones rolled out by Brisbane City Council, I can confirm that today, so there will be no more money spent on yellow bicycles on the road." Cr Schrinner said the council would invest on more yellow lines to prevent parking on busy routes, such as Wynnum Road, to prevent cars parking and thereby providing cyclists with more room.Thanks to a "small number of users" taking up more than 75TB each by backing up "numerous PCs" or uploading their "entire movie collections and DVR recordings," Microsoft has reduced the amount of storage on OneDrive. Even users who pay for a subscription only get 1TB of storage, and free users get knocked back to 5GB instead of 15GB – Microsoft didn't even keep the old 7GB allowance it had before.
The 'camera roll bonus' has also been ditched, so Windows Phone, iOS and Android users automatically uploading their photos and videos will have to make sure they stay under the limit or buy a subscription (4k video files created on the new Lumia 950XL are likely to use between 90-150MB for a minute of footage, depending on the codec).
Read more: Microsoft Teams
Groove Music (Xbox Music Pass) users will likely want to stop uploading their music for easy access from multiple devices. Free OneNote and Sway users will also need to watch their usage, as OneDrive is their only option for storing OneNote notebooks and Sways. What happens if they go over the limit?
If you're using more than 5GB of free OneDrive storage when Microsoft drops the limit in early 2016 then you'll get a one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal free – but you have to give Microsoft your credit card details (and presumably remember to remove your files and cancel the OneDrive subscription before you get charged for the subsequent year).
Marketing move?
This offer makes it obvious that the drop in storage is far more likely a marketing deal for Office 365 than Microsoft actually having problems coping with all those backup files (especially given how often the company talks about how hyperscale its cloud data centres are). Even more so, when you consider that the OneDrive team deliberately picked a figure which is less than the average user stores as the free storage limit.
According to the blog, the average is "14,000 times" less than 75TB – that's 5.4GB, making 5GB look nothing short of mean, compared to 15GB free on Google Drive, plus extra space for images. In fact, since this whole change is blamed on the users filling up 75TB of space, it's not clear why free users get less storage at all, unless Microsoft is giving up on the idea of using OneDrive as a loss leader to attract users from other platforms, with tools like automatic photo upload.
But with the push to subscriptions, not even offering the option to pay for more than 1TB makes OneDrive far less useful for anyone working with large video files or extensive photo collections; they'll be better off paying for Adobe Creative Cloud or Flickr. If you want to back up to the cloud, pay for Azure Backup – or use a non-Microsoft service like Backblaze, which has unlimited storage for both personal and business plans.
Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business customers is still marked as under development
The reduced storage applies to consumer Office 365 subscriptions – Home, Personal and University. There's no word yet whether OneDrive for Business customers will also lose the unlimited storage they were promised last October but never actually received. The feature is still marked as Under Development rather than Cancelled.
A Microsoft spokesperson told TechRadar that the announcement is only about the consumer service: "There isn't additional news about the Office 365 Business storage plans."There has been a lot of moaning in the UK press that the Eurovision song contest is rigged. Specifically that countries are voting for each other |
to three years to clear regulatory hurdles. TransCanada, Keystone's owners, have been waiting for six years.
It's Doer's job as a diplomat not to get ruffled. With his wavy silver hair and pinstripe suit, the former NDP premier of Manitoba projects the confident air of a man who spends his days managing relations between two close allies. Still, it's impossible not to detect a hint of irritation in his voice as he talks about the U.S. environmental groups that have turned the pipeline into a high-profile symbol of global warming. "This is an easy item to raise money on: 'You say no to the pipeline, you've solved climate change.' It's a pretty good bumper sticker, but it's not science," Doer says.
Environmentalists say they are only trying to discourage the development of an especially dirty form of oil extraction. But they agree that Keystone has served as an important symbol in their fight to wean the world's largest economy from fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. Greenhouse gases may be invisible, but Keystone yields powerful visuals: despoiled forest, oozing lakes of spilled oil, pristine prairie habitat along the proposed route.
Since TransCanada filed its application with the State Department in September, 2008, the project has morphed into one of those hot-button issues, like abortion or gun control, that provide steady employment for Washington's army of lobbyists and spin doctors. Environmental groups have staged protests in front of the White House, while business groups and construction unions have blanketed Capitol Hill with papers arguing that the pipeline would boost employment by anywhere from a mere 35 jobs to 500,000 jobs. Well over 100 organizations, from the American Jewish Committee to the League of Women Voters, have lobbied on the issue. The State Department has received 2.5 million comments on the topic.
Keystone had the misfortune to come along as U.S. politics was entering a period of deep polarization. As recently as 2008, Republican John McCain campaigned for president on a promise to scale back carbon emissions; now, few members of his party are even willing to say that human activity is contributing to climate change. Democrats have been tugged in opposite directions by labour unions that see the pipeline as a job creator and environmentalists who view it as a chance for Obama to prove his green bona fides. "It's obviously become a signal of whether the administration is serious about climate change," Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading environmentalist in the Senate, said this spring.
The State Department has given Keystone backers plenty to cheer about. It has concluded that the pipeline might encourage oil sands development but wouldn't meaningfully affect climate change. Transporting the oil by other methods, such as rail, would lead to more accidents and higher greenhouse gas emissions, the department concluded.
The delay on Keystone hasn't shut down the oil sands, as environmentalists had hoped. But there is evidence that it has hampered development: The State Department estimated last year that 200,000 barrels per day of oil sands crude would travel by rail to U.S. refineries in Texas by December; by June of this year, traffic hadn't exceeded a quarter of that level.
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Few observers were surprised when Obama's administration announced in April that it would postpone a final decision until a dispute in Nebraska plays out, well after this year's congressional elections in November.
Since then, the battle has shifted outside of Washington.
On Sept. 5, the Nebraska Supreme Court began hearing a challenge brought by environmentalists and landowners arguing that the state legislature overstepped its authority when it approved a route for the pipeline in 2012. A ruling isn't expected until early next year.
Rocker Neil Young and country icon Willie Nelson staged an anti-Keystone concert in a Nebraska cornfield on Sept. 27. Advocates convened the "largest climate march in history" in New York and other cities on Sept. 21.
In South Portland, Maine, the city council voted in July to prohibit a pipeline owner from exporting oil sands crude through the second-largest terminal on the East Coast of the United States. The pipeline currently carries oil in the other direction, from South Portland to Montreal, but green groups worry it could be reversed. They are also trying to block a similar project in Washington state.
From coast to coast, green groups are squaring off against business interests in the dozen or so elections that will determine whether the Democrats retain control of the Senate in November. For Obama's allies, the Senate is an important firewall against the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which has tried repeatedly to scale back Obama's environmental efforts.
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After years of being outspent by the oil and gas industry, environmentalists have vowed to make climate change a top issue for voters in this election. San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, a fierce Keystone opponent, has spent at least $26-million so far to back climate-friendly candidates.
Surprisingly, Keystone doesn't seem to be playing a prominent role in these campaigns; experts who monitor political advertising say the pipeline is showing up in fewer ads this year than in 2012. This may be due in part to the nature of the battleground, which is largely in conservative states. Democrats in six of the most competitive races are eager to tout their support for the pipeline; for candidates like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Keystone is a way to demonstrate their independence from an unpopular president.
Environmentalists also can read opinion polls, which consistently show that a majority of Americans support building the pipeline, even though they believe that humans play a role in global warming. While Keystone may be an effective way to rally the most committed activists, it could backfire in a broader political campaign. Thus environmental groups have sought to localize the impact of climate change by highlighting coastal flooding or algae blooms in the Great Lakes.
They also are defending Obama's decision this spring to slash carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which has prompted a fierce backlash in coal-producing states like West Virginia. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, has said he will push to repeal the power-plant rules if his party wins control of the chamber.
In theory, Republicans could force approval of Keystone if they control both chambers of Congress after November. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted several times to approve Keystone, and a majority of lawmakers in the Senate, including 17 Democrats, backed the effort in a non-binding vote last year. However, Republican allies expect they will probably still fall short of the two-thirds majority needed to override an Obama veto.
With no resolution in sight, advocates in Washington have little to do except repeat their talking points and speculate about how Obama might eventually rule.
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Those who think the president will greenlight the project say it will be hard to ignore the State Department's findings. Approving the pipeline also would give Obama a bargaining chip with Republicans on other matters.
Those who think Obama will reject it point to the influence of top White House aides like John Podesta and Valerie Jarrett and deep-pocketed donors like Steyer, all Keystone foes. Obama will want to burnish his green record ahead of a global climate conference at the end of 2015, they say, and he also may be reluctant to hand a victory to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with whom he has a prickly relationship.
Doer says he doesn't want to guess about the outcome. But he points out that Obama has already taken significant steps to curb emissions, thanks to tightened standards for power plants and automobiles. Now he should keep other factors in mind, like the likelihood of an oil-train wreck, as he thinks about posterity. "He's not stopping the oil from coming, and he knows that–I heard him say that to people," Doer says. "I would argue that, God forbid, if there's ever an accident in the States, I wouldn't want that to be my legacy."
Andy Sullivan covers American politics and policy for Reuters News in Washington.David Grisham, an Alaskan street preacher, took a video of himself telling children Santa Claus isn't real at a mall in Amarillo, Texas. (Photo: Facebook)
An Alaskan street preacher, driven by a philosophical beef with Santa Claus, invaded a Christmas village in Texas and tried to dash the holiday whimsy of children waiting to see old Saint Nick.
"There is no such thing as Santa Claus," David Grisham told the line of children at the Westgate Mall in Amarillo on Saturday afternoon. "Santa Claus does not exist. The Christmas season is about Jesus."
The 56-year-old said he went to the mall to preach the real Biblical meaning behind Christmas and expose Santa Claus as a falsehood. He also shouted there is no flying reindeer or workshop of elves making presents in the North Pole. Rather, he told the children, parents buy all their gifts at the mall.
His aversion to Kriss Kringle isn't new. Grisham and a group executed a Santa figurine by firing squad in 2010 after finding him guilty of various crimes against God.
"The man you're going to see today is just a man in a suit dressed up like Santa," Grisham clamored as a young girl stared on, "but Santa does not exist."
Grisham also called on parents to stop lying about Santa Claus before he was confronted by a group of angry fathers. Video of the encounter shows a group of men surround Grisham before the camera turns off. Grisham said he decided to walk away.
"It had escalated," he said, "and I didn't want there to be any more possibility of violence."
Westgate general manager Brian Giffin said Grisham left before security could get to him. He said Grisham's behavior would have qualified as disorderly conduct, which isn't permitted in the mall.
Grisham said he posted a 3-minute video of the encounter on Facebook in order to inspire others to make similar mall visits. He said he's received dozens of death threats since the video went public and hundreds of other threats of violence.
Despite the reaction, Grisham said it's a "very real possibility" he'll do it again, but not at Westgate Mall.
Grisham said he made the video while visiting family in Amarillo, where he used to run a ministry called Repent Amarillo. Grisham said he's not an official pastor, although he said he's twice served as an associate pastor. Instead, de does his preaching on the street with his wife. The couple preaches at football games, strip clubs, bars and Mardi Gras celebrations. They've also taken their word to the United States Supreme Court and attended both the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
As for Grisham's 10 grandchildren, he says none of them believe in Santa.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2hK4iIXJulianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right) and Scarlett Johansson (Lost In Translation) have signed on to star in fellow actor Joseph Gordon Levitt’s directorial debut, The Playlist is reporting.
The actor, known for his roles in Inception and 500 Days Of Summer, will direct the as-yet-untitled film – about a modern day Don Juan character who sets out to better himself as a person – from a script he wrote himself.
Moore, who received praise for her turn as Sarah Palin in HBO’s Game Change, will appear as a mentor to Levitt’s symbolic persona, while Johansson is likely to feature as Levitt’s love interest.
Levitt, who has not one but five films – The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Premium Rush, Lincoln and Django Unchained – out this year, is further cementing himself as one of the hardest – and arguably best – working actors in Hollywood.
Voltage Pictures and Ram Bergman Productions are backing the film, with shooting expected to take place next month. And, if the casting is anything to go by, this is one project to keep an eye on.Nothing like a good lurid headline on which to end the day, and to give us with an apt example, the Guardian has conjured up this gem to furnish their report on the mysterious Bili apes. For many years the stuff of legend, the apes, named for the local area, were eventually observed in the flesh, in once instance chomping away on the carcass of a leopard. This, if true, is surprising enough, but not as odd as the idea that it may even have killed its feline prey, a behaviour never before reported in apes, but corresponds to rumour that has persisted locally for some time. There doesn’t appear to be any explanation of how this killing of a leopard by one or more apes might have been accomplished, or whether or not they could have made and/or used weapons, such as rocks, or trapped it in some fiendish device. The Bili or Bondo Mystery Apes are to be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are described thus in Wikipedia…
The Bili Ape is massive by chimpanzee standards. Heights can exceed 5 feet (about Gorilla height), their skulls are larger than chimp skulls, and their footprints are larger even than gorillas. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few detailed observations of the Bili Ape and no thorough examination of either remains or a living Bili Ape in captivity. They are also various(ly) described as having silver backs and even snouted faces (uncommon). The locals in Bili refer to Bili Apes as “Lion Killers”. While chimps tend to stay in the trees and make good prey for big cats, Bili Apes nest on the ground like gorillas and have been reported to hunt lions.
Until recently, very little has been heard of these apes, as apparently they were only reported in the West as late as 1996, and the Wikipedia article claims Jane Goodall was able to send in an expedition to find them in 2004, at a time when there must have been a lull in the local warfare that has plagued the region for years. However, when I ran a quick search at Jane Goodall’s website, nothing came up for ‘Bili’ or ‘Bondo’, so I can’t as yet confirm her involvement in the discovery. This from the Guardian…
The most detailed and recent data comes from Cleve Hicks, at the University of Amsterdam, who has spent 18 months in the field watching the Bili apes – named after a local town – since 2004. His team’s most striking find came after one of his trackers heard chimps calling for several days from the same spot. When he investigated he came across a chimp feasting on the carcass of a leopard. Mr Hicks cannot be sure the animal was killed by the chimp, but the find lends credence to the apes’ lion-eating reputation. “What we have found is this completely new chimpanzee culture,” said Mr Hicks. Previously, researchers had only managed to snatch glimpses of the animals or take photos of them using camera traps. But Mr Hicks used local knowledge to get closer to them and photograph them. “We were told of this sort of fabled land out west by one of our trackers who goes out there to fish,” said Mr Hicks whose project is supported by the Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation. “I call it the magic forest. It is a very special place.”
I daresay that a fair amount of scepticism will greet this news, at least until further corroborative observations have been made, but if it’s confirmed that these apes really do behave in the manner described, it will be interesting to see whether there is a debate as to whether they should become classified as Pan or Homo. In the meantime, here’s a good link which reports on Cleve Hicks’ field studies back in 2004
Apes at night are generally to be found sleeping in nests which are built in the branches of trees as a precaution against being attacked on the ground in the night by anything with harmfully large teeth and sharp claws, but many of the Bili apes appear to prefer ground level dormitory accommodation…
Mr Hicks reports that he found a unique chimp culture. For example, unlike their cousins in other parts of Africa the chimps regularly bed down for the night in nests on the ground. Around a fifth of the nests he found were there rather than in the trees. “How can they get away with sleeping on the ground when there are lions, leopards, golden cats around as well as other dangerous animals like elephants and buffalo?” said Mr Hicks. “The ground nests were very big and there was obviously something very unusual going on there. They are not unknown elsewhere but very unusual,” said Colin Groves, an expert on primate morphology at the Australian National University in Canberra who has observed the nests in the field.
And most surprising of all, was the revelation that there seem to be plentiful numbers of these apes in the surrounding countryside, especially as we often hear how many other apes and other fauna in the area are falling victim to poachers, hunters and trigger-happy others. (TJ)
see also: National Geographic – Elusive African Apes: Giant Chimps or New Species?
and: Karl Ammann – The Bondo Mystery ApesAmong the very passionate fans of the franchise, Survivor: Marquesas has a reputation as being an excellent season. Outside of that demographic, I often hear it talked about like a throw-away season of Survivor. People know that it acts as the origin story for one Boston Rob but otherwise don’t remember Marquesas for anything of importance. As someone who loves the olden days of Survivor that kind of thinking is crazy to me.
The firing squad squaring up on Marquesas haters.
If any old season can lay claim to having changed the game of Survivor the most, it has to be Marquesas. Up until that point, our three winners had come from majority alliances who ended up grabbing the numbers advantage and never letting it go. While the show was still seeing major viewership, there was a definite fatigue factor in play by Survivor: Africa. People were tired of watching a predictable outcome that could be seen weeks before it played out.
Survivor: Marquesas changed all of that. For the first time, the minority and the people on the bottom rung of an alliance decided they weren’t okay with just going out without a fight. This was in large part due to the coconut chop reward challenge in which the Rotu 4 showed their very definite pecking order but it woke up the masses. Were twitter around back then everybody would be tweeting about Paschal and Neleh’s “wokeness”.
Yaaaaas queen! Slay!
As they sat there seeing Sean Rector, then Vecepia Towery, then themselves and Kathy, it became very obvious. If that wasn’t enough, the obviousness with which the Rotu 4 celebrated their reward challenge win when they got back to camp was like the hammer hitting them over the head. It was enough to spark some motivation to organize an overthrow and both Sean and Vecepia were more than ready to lend a hand.
Even as a stand-alone moment, John Carroll’s ouster is an amazing television moment. One minute, he’s on top of the world, heading towards and fairly easy victory. As the leader of the Rotus, he was on a Richard Hatch trajectory with nothing in his way to stop him. Except for his own arrogance. As the votes came down on him, John’s cocky grin turned into a sour expression and then tears as he realizes he is suddenly out of the game he thought he ruled. The moment is best capped off by Sean’s voting confessional,
You thought you had me, didn’t you John? Well let me give you a little advice. If you ever go to Vegas, always bet on black.
As an aside, it’s absolutely criminal that Sean has not been brought back to play Survivor. For all the charm Boston Rob puts on display in Marquesas, I would argue that Sean matches and even surpasses him. He also lasts a lot longer in the game and gets a lot more time to really flesh out his character. Sean is a forgotten legend of the early days and should have been included in Survivor: All-Stars, probably instead of Boston Rob. The time has probably passed for a return but I will continue to hold hope.
My face when Candice plays three times and Sean has never been brought back.
So Marquesas is important for its overthrow, the first of its kind in the franchise. That isn’t the only noteworthy impact the season has had on the game. In the early days of the pre-merge, Marquesas also has one of the first blindsides that really changed how people could approach the pre-merge.
It’s funny considering his pretty fair image as a challenge beast in the present day but Boston Rob’s original Maraamu tribe was brutal at challenges. They were the first tribe to really be showcased as the tribe that really can’t do anything right and could really be seen as the proto-Ulong in a lot of ways. For a tribe that struggled so much in challenges, you would think tribe strength would factor in a major way when they decided who to vote out.
Well with Boston Rob on your tribe, it’s often going to go the way he wants it to go, challenge prowess be damned. From the very start of the game, Rob did not get along with his tribe’s de facto leader, alpha male Hunter Ellis. Hunter was a capable player but an excellent survivalist. He worked hard at camp and always gave it his all in challenges. Hunter is basically the template for the early Survivor work horse who would rather just play a straight-up honest game and work hard than try to strategize his way to the top.
Like an older Colby without the brains. Or personality.
As we know now, Boston Rob does not exactly play that way. Sure, he may be a good competitor too and he will try to play physical if you need him to do so but Rob would rather beat you with his brain. So with Hunter being full of hubris and leading a tribe going nowhere, Rob decided when Maraamu lost its third straight immunity that they no longer needed him. In that moment, Hunter became the inaugural leadership figure to be sent home before the merge.
It was an important moment in the show’s history because it showed that no position was safe. Yes, being a challenge liability was still bad but being the tribe’s figurehead was also no longer a desirable position. If you took up too much of the spotlight, you were giving your tribe a reason to vote you out before you became too big of a threat. Hunter’s exit is also great because he is so bitter with his parting words,
I really don’t understand the logic behind it (the vote) right now but…hey…you got me. I was camping with a bunch of knuckle-heads and I will tell that to your face when I see you again. I will phone the Red Cross and let them know where you guys are so that you can be airlifted out of there after you die of starvation and dehydration after the next couple of days.
Say what you will about Boston Rob but at the very least, I will always appreciate him for engineering this blindside and giving us a bitter Hunter.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Finally, it’s also worth noting the season’s winner and how different she was in comparison to the previous winners. A lot of that is because of how the coconut chop challenge played out. The minute a dominant alliance was defeated for the first time, we were going to get an unconventional winner and Vecepia was definitely different than her predecessors.
Of course, physically speaking, Vecepia is the franchise’s first visible minority to win the show. That it happened in its 4th season is pretty fast. As a player, Vecepia was masterful socially. She was quick to jump ship on sinking alliances and always found opportunities to ally with where the power lied. In a lot of ways, Vecepia was the original Sandra Diaz-Twine and knowing that Sandra is a superfan who had seen every season prior to hers, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out Vecepia was her inspiration.
Like Sean, Vecepia is another player from Marquesas who deserves to be brought back. I believe she was pregnant during ASS and has since never really been talked about. Sandra’s rise to prominence definitely hurt Vecepia’s chances of a return simply because they are so similar and Sandra provides better sound bites. Still, if she is open to a second season, Vecepia is definitely someone producers should go talk to.
While it may not be remembered by the majority of Survivor fans, Marquesas holds a special place in my heart and I know that I am not alone in saying this. It was the birth of Survivor modern strategy and it helped save the franchise. In the same way the shot clock ended up saving the NBA, having a season where a majority didn’t cruise to the end injected a shot of interest into Survivor. Had the fall of the Rotu 4 not happened, I’m not sure how much longer the show stays on the air, especially because it was immediately followed by Survivor: Thailand and Brian Heidik strong-arming his way to a dominant victory.
Whenever you’re next thinking about re-watching a season, place Marquesas at the top of your list. You won’t regret it.Billy Evans is one of five players who have been delisted this year.
The Brisbane Lions have today announced a series of list changes ahead of the upcoming AFL Trade and Draft periods.
Hugh Beasley, Billy Evans, Jackson Paine, Josh McGuinness and Josh Watts have all been delisted.
It takes the Lions' total number of list changes to eight for the season, with retired trio Daniel Merrett, Trent West and Justin Clarke having already departed.
Football Manager Matthew Francis thanked the players for their commitment and dedication to the Lions.
“Of course it is disappointing when any player departs, and each of the guys have given great service to our Club.
“We wish them all the best for their futures,” Francis said.
The AFL Trade Period begins on Monday 10 October, while the 2016 NAB AFL National Draft will take place in Sydney on Friday 25 November.
Hugh Beasley
Draft Details: 2014 Rookie Draft, pick 22 overall
Recruited from: Oakleigh Chargers
Debut: 2015
Games: 6
Goals: -
Billy Evans
Draft Details: 2014 Rookie Draft, pick 4 overall
Drafted: Bendigo Pioneers
Debut: 2015
Games: 7
Goals: 2
Jackson Paine
Draft Details: 2011 National Draft, pick 50 overall
Recruited from: Sandringham Dragons/Collingwood, 2013
Lions debut: 2014
Games: 10
Goals: 3
Josh Watts
Draft Details: 2014 National Draft, pick 65 overall
Recruited from: Glenorchy
Games: -
Goals: -
Josh McGuinness
Draft Details: 2014 National Draft, pick 81 overall
Drafted: Lauderdale
Games: -
Goals: -Modern mobile and desktop users expect their sites to load and run like lightning. Therefore, a good UI or UX designer needs to have a complete understanding of the range of options available to improve the speed of your site and consequently the enjoyment your users get out of using it.
How important is speed?
Any user who has access to high speed internet connections on either desktop or mobile will expect their actions on your website to be completed within milliseconds.
Milliseconds matter:
Google compared loading fewer results on a page in 0.4 seconds to more results in 0.9 seconds. Traffic and ad revenue decreased by 20%.
Yahoo found that between 5% and 9% of its users would abandon a page if it took 400ms longer to load.
Microsoft Bing reported a 4.3% drop in revenue when their tests delayed the delivery of a search results page by 2 seconds.
Mozilla got 60 million more Firefox downloads per year by making their pages 2.2 seconds faster.
So there is no question - improvements in speed not only have a significant effect on the level of your user’s engagement, but any slowdown has a direct and measurable impact on your company’s bottom line.
What do users expect?
Understanding a user’s expectations is also a hugely important part of delivering a service they deem to be fast.
57 percent of mobile users will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
70% of tablet users expect a website to load in under 2 seconds.
71% of users expect your site to load as quickly on their mobile as it does when they are at home. (Compuware)
If your software takes longer than 100ms to respond, it can feel sluggish and slow. (Luke Wroblewski)
It's not just speed
While speed is hugely important, your users aren't only concerned with speed in and of itself. Their expectations and prior experiences also play a huge role. Put simply, if a user expects something to take a longer period of time, they will be more patient about waiting for it. We can use a number of approaches to manage user expectations and hide latency issues while making them believe that the experience is moving faster than it actually is.
Using actual speed improvements and immediately communicating with a user about their actions has the best result when looking to improve a customer's perception of whether your site is fast or slow.
Show me the solutions
There are 6 areas you need to have a basic understanding of to improve the likelihood your users will deem your app or website to be 'fast'. The first parts are technical - to make your web app faster by knowing what your server does and how websites load. The second part consists of cosmetic and UI tricks - making it appear faster than it actually is.
Let’s start with making your site faster.
1. Check your server
Use tools like website speed test to give yourself an initial overview of how fast your website is performing.
Be familiar with CDNs and how they can deliver files from a location on the internet close to your users, speeding up the time it takes to get all the relevant files.
*A CDN will deliver content from close to your users.*
Make sure your site does not have any unnecessary redirects, as this can cause a delay of 200-300ms or more.
Make sure cache headers are set properly to ensure files are not re-downloaded when your user returns to your site.
Make sure your server isn't overloaded and has good uptime.
2. Check file sizes and optimise file count
Make sure every file that your website needs is well optimised and that no unnecessary files are downloaded.
A webpage typically consists of one HTML file, one or more JS and CSS files, a number of images and possibly some custom fonts (which are often quite large).
Optimise images using Photoshop’s save for web or pngcrush.
Ensure redundant CSS, javascript and HTML is removed and minify all code.
Reduce the number of files downloaded. The dev team should be using tools like browserify to eliminate additional javascript and CSS files. The front end team should be using spriting to reduce the number of images and find out what formats images are best saved as.
Minimise download queuing
Stop your files being delayed by queuing them up before downloading. Most modern browsers allow 6-8 concurrent file downloads. If you want to download more than a certain number of files from a given website domain (e.g. www.fluidui.com), some will be queued until others complete. The exact number of parallel downloads you can make of this type depends on the browser:
Use multiple domains if necessary, to increase the amount of parallel downloads you can make (this can have other speed benefits too).
3. Check download order and reduce reflows
Your webpage loads as follows:
Your website will begin to draw itself as soon as it has enough content downloaded to flow out the page. Files that arrive later (such as additional CSS files or images) may cause the browser to do a reflow, updating part or all of the screen and often causing an undesirable jump (particularly if your user has scrolled down the page a bit).
Get the HTML and the CSS files to the user as a first priority as these define the look and the feel of the site and let it draw.
Load javascript last and don't rely on it to show or hide parts of your page. To test this, disable javascript in your browser and see if your page loads with the same look/feel is it would normally do.
It may be worth having some inline JS or CSS to start files downloading in the HTML. That way they can load concurrently with the CSS file and don't need to wait until the CSS file is downloaded and parsed before being added to the queue.
Tell the browser how big an image is going to be on screen to eliminate the visible 'popping' reflow when an image of an unknown size finishes loading.
4. Respond to user actions immediately
At this stage, your site is downloading as fast as it can and Google should be giving you a really good PageSpeed score. Getting your web app to your user is only a small part of the overall problem however.
It's time to focus on making sure the quality of the in-app experience is deemed super fast and won't frustrate your users.
The first priority when responding to a user's action is to communicate with the user that their action has been triggered. The second priority is to actually perform the user's requested activity.
There are 7 stages to handling a user's input:
Optimistic actions
Optimistic actions occur when the UI acts as if the action has succeeded, even if it is yet to be confirmed by the server.
Performing actions optimistically allows your user to continue working in your web app without being interrupted by latency and is hugely useful when delivering real time and low risk of failure actions.
For example, neither Instagram nor Facebook wait for the server to confirm a 'Like' action before updating your UI. Instead they assume it will be successful and immediately apply it on your device. Separately, they attempt to communicate with the server to confirm the action, after which time it is finalised and distributed to other users. This allows you to continue liking and scrolling, without interrupting your flow by forcing you to wait till the action you have performed has been confirmed by the server.
Checking your loading flow
*The [console in Chrome](https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/console) gives a wealth of information about how your web app loads.*
5. Show constant progress to your users
Sometimes, information needs to be sent to the server and a response dealt with before the user can continue on. This is common in forms, or when loading new pages or content that has not yet been stored locally. There are a number of tricks available here, to both set the user's expectations and make the UI look like it's busy making things happen. How we handle this can dramatically impact a user's perception of speed, regardless of how long it takes.
Prompting the user to wait for their action to complete while giving a constant visual sense of progress will improve the perception of speed in your product.
These techniques will improve how responsive the user reports your website to be.
Progress bars and animations
Use loading animation bars and spinners to inform the user that processing is happening.
Under-promise and over-deliver on loading times. Make the loading bar load slower at the start and faster at the end. Under no circumstances allow it to stop or delay, particularly towards the last 10%.
Backward moving progress bars and pulsing bars are shown to give a user a faster sense of progress.
If loading happens in a short period of time (under 300ms), consider just relying on animations and no progress indicator. Showing a loading screen for a brief period, followed by the content, can actually result in users thinking the loading process is slower than they would have thought without the loading animation.
Use placeholder UI
Dummy placeholder content can be used to give a sense of progress while the real content is loading that mimics the look, feel and shape of the content that will be loaded into the area.
*Facebook shows a placeholder layout while it loads actual content, making the site look like it's loading faster than it actually is.*
Use animations to hide latency
Finally, start showing page transitions immediately after the user action has commenced. There is no need for content to be returned to the server before starting to show a page. A slide in followed by a content fade in for example can create up to 200-300ms of an animation, giving you plenty of time to process a user's request and display it.
6. Preload future pages for your users
Just because a user is now enjoying your content doesn't mean you need to be idle. You can be busy loading the next screen while your user is browsing the content they have just loaded.
In most cases, when a user is on a page, we know what they are going to do next to a very strong degree of certainty.
For example, when a user visits FluidUI.com, we know that roughly 55% of people click on the 'try now' button, 15% of people go to demos and 10% of people go to the features page as their next action. We can start preloading the contents of the most likely next pages while the user is still exploring the current page. For 80% of users, this would mean that the next page they visit will already be loaded before they click on the link. From the user's perspective, the page loads instantly.
You can use the Google Analytics behaviour flow to show where your users enter your site, and what their likely next steps are on each part of your site.
One final tip
Improving performance on a site can take a lot of time and effort and it is critical to focus your efforts on the right problems first.
Your users could be complaining about load time, about in-app responsiveness or because the site is displaying a huge amount of data or has some extremely complicated rendering. They lump all these performance issues into one single user complaint - "your web app is too slow".
In order to fix the right problem, you must first identify which area of performance is the one users are most unhappy with. That means getting out and hearing from those users, then feeding that information back into your development pipeline and resolving those issues for your users. That's the fastest and most important tip to make your web app faster.Editor’s Note: We at TGR get a lot of chances to talk with people within the industry, but few of such occasions excited us as much as our interview with BioWare’s CEO, Dr. Ray Muzyka.
TGR: How did you get to be where you are?
Ray Muzyka: I believe that if you work hard and you get good people to work with you, if you remain humble and you take feedback and integrate that into your process, if you are ambitious and are always striving to figure what you are about and what your fans want and build the games for them, then you can achieve amazing things. But it takes time. The other week, or last month I guess, we built a new video for our new partners at EA, just kind of showing them what some of the sales folks are like and where we have come from as a studio. We combined all the past products together in this one video that was about 15 minutes long, and it was amazing to see that because you see the evolution. We did not have |
said in a Fox News interview that the report “exceeded” his expectations, and he jumped on its prediction of a smaller deficit to try to assuage the chamber’s most conservative members, many of whom oppose the idea of new tax credits to help some Americans buy coverage on their own.
Declaring that the plans would usher in “the most fundamental entitlement reform in a generation,” Ryan said the legislation “is about giving people more choices and better access to a plan they want and can afford. When people have more choices, costs go down. That’s what this report shows.”
Despite that sales pitch, early signs emerged Monday night that the Congressional Budget Office report was not helping to solidify GOP support. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) announced he would oppose the bill.
“I do believe that we can enact meaningful health care reforms that put the patient and health care provider back at the center of our health care system, but this bill is not the right answer,” he said in a Facebook post.
Wittman’s stance could represent a new front of dissent among House Republicans. A six-term member who leads a House Armed Services subcommittee and represents a district that favored Trump by 12 percentage points, Wittman is neither a hard-right firebrand nor a wary moderate from a Medicaid expansion state. Rather, he is the sort of mainstream conservative that Ryan is counting on to toe the party line and pass the bill.
The release of the analysis marks the beginning of a new phase in the debate over the week-old health-care bill, which is moving through the House despite opposition from many Republicans, Democrats and major sectors of the U.S. health-care industry.
Democrats used the report’s findings to continue excoriating the House GOP plan. “The CBO score shows just how empty the president’s promises, that everyone will be covered and costs will go down, have been,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). “This should be a looming stop sign for the Republicans’ repeal effort.”
The analysis predicts that the number of people without health coverage would rise to 52 million by 2026, compared with 28 million if the Affordable Care Act remains intact. That erosion would mean that about 1 in 5 U.S. residents would be uninsured by 2026 — compared to 1 in 10 uninsured now and 1 in 6 who were uninsured before the Affordable Care Act was enacted.
The reduction in the number of insured people would result from three factors. A provision rescinding the penalty imposed on the uninsured could prompt many Americans to drop their health plans. After that, tax credits that are less generous than current subsidies could make insurance unaffordable to more people. Finally, some states may undo the expansion of their Medicaid programs.
[The GOP’s dramatic change in strategy to pass its health-care law]
The conservative House Freedom Caucus did not immediately respond to the report. Moderate Republicans expressed concerns about the number of people who would lose coverage, foreshadowing possible problems for the legislation if it reaches the Senate.
“These kinds of estimates are going to cause revisions in the bill, almost certainly,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
“I don’t think that the bill that is being considered now is the bill that ultimately will be the one that we vote on in the Senate.”
In its current form, the House GOP proposal would administer Medicaid by giving each state a fixed amount of funding per person in the program rather than covering a fixed percentage of its Medicaid costs, no matter how high. The plan would also replace the Affordable Care Act’s federal insurance subsidies with age- and income-based tax credits, which would involve considerably less spending, the report shows.
While the deficit would be lower, the legislation also would reduce federal revenue by $592 billion by 2026 by repealing several taxes that the Affordable Care Act created to help pay for more people to get insurance — notably taxes on high-income Americans, hospitals and health insurers.
“They are implementing the biggest transfer of wealth in our history,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters Monday. “In terms of insurance coverage, it’s immoral. In terms of giving money to the rich at the expense of working families, it is indecent and wrong.”
The White House has spent the past week engaged in a charm offensive aimed at bringing conservatives on board, as well as an effort to discredit the Congressional Budget Office before it released numbers.
The Affordable Care Act has increased coverage by 20 million to 22 million — almost half of those through the insurance markets the law created for people who cannot get affordable coverage through a job, and the rest through an expansion of Medicaid in 31 states and the District of Columbia.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said Republicans “obviously” want to “improve those coverage numbers.”
But Cornyn noted that, by eliminating the penalty for violating the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most Americans carry insurance, “some people are going to make the decision not to buy it.”
The elimination of that penalty would account for the immediate increase in the uninsured.
The estimates projected a significant drop in Medicaid enrollment. Next year, the forecast says, about 5 million fewer people would be on Medicaid. By 2026, the program’s rolls would shrink by nearly 15 million — almost 1 in 4 of the 68 million currently in the program.
The Congressional Budget Office also predicted substantial disparities in the effect the legislation would have on insurance premiums for younger versus older consumers.
If the GOP plan is enacted, a 21-year-old making $68,200 would pay an average of $1,450 for a year’s worth of insurance premiums after the new tax credits, compared with $5,100 under the current law.
On the other hand, the cost of a year’s worth of premiums would stay about the same for a 64-year-old at the same income level. For a 64-year-old making $26,500, the cost would rise sharply, from $1,700 to $14,600.
(Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) criticized the plan’s approach to the elderly.
“I’m not an attack person — you know that,” he said. “I don’t just attack because you’re on the other side of the aisle. But how can you look at yourself and say, ‘Okay, I’ll help the person who needs help the least, the wealthiest people, with more tax cuts, because I’m going to be taking away from the elderly population?’ ”
The analysis also forecast a reduction in the number of Americans who get insurance through their employers, in part because the new tax credits would be available to people with higher incomes than with the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies. Some employers would also drop coverage, the Congressional Budget Office projected.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician and strong Affordable Care Act critic in the Senate, sounded apprehensive about the report’s implications.
“President Trump said that he wants as many people covered as under Obamacare,” Cassidy said. “He said that health care should be affordable. If there’s 14 million people losing insurance, of course it’s concerning. I try to avoid hyperbole and adjectives, but it’s concerning.”
Abby Phillip, Sean Sullivan and David Weigel contributed to this report.
Read more at PowerPostMy Prince interview is such an awesome and unbelievable story. I had just started writing professionally after quitting my PR job at Tommy Hilfiger. I had sent my clips to In Style and one Friday afternoon they left me a frantic message. Turns out they wanted me to interview The Artist (as he was called then) and it could happen at any moment so they wanted to have me on standby. Of course, I’m psyched, but I’m also suspicious because they had never worked with me and I was so green. So I asked, “Why me?” They tell me he specifically asked for an African-American female writer and I thought, Out of the whole Time, Inc. network, I’m all you got? At that point in my career, anybody would have been more qualified than me! So in the book, the idea that Sydney is offered this cushy contract, even though she was previously just a temp, is derived from the fact that I got drafted into the big leagues under the Prince Rogers Nelson affirmative action plan!
Photo: Steven Parke/InStyle;Twitter/Erica Kennedy
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Prince had a long documented history of helping women further their careers. The Purple One often wrote and mentored women musicians, but that's not where his advocacy ended.In an interview to promote her novel Feminista in 2009, author Erica Kennedy shared how a demand from The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, as he was known at the time, landed her a gig interviewing him for InStyle in 2000.InStyle republished the article in full with accompanying photographs after Prince's death. Erica captures Prince's playfulness and spirituality beautifully. Her work did not disappoint.Kennedy went on to become a New York Times bestselling author with her 2004 novel Bling.She passed away in 2012 at the age of 42.“Publish or perish” has long been the mantra of academics seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government’s research excellence framework.
2VCs: Will the Tef do serious damage or just puncture a few egos? Read more
The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It’s also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to “publish, and perish anyway”.
From gentlemen scholars to the marketplace
But it was not always this way. A new report I co-wrote with Dr Aileen Fyfe and colleagues, Untangling Academic Publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research, traces the origins of academic publishing to the gentlemen scholars who ran the first learned societies. These institutions often struggled financially and were primarily vehicles for communication.
The study then charts the rapid growth that followed the second world war, a phase in which the synergism between the demands of an increasingly professionalised academy and the capabilities of private publishing companies enabled the latter to establish a dominant presence in the marketplace.
The report shows how far we have strayed from the core principles of science first identified by Robert Merton in 1942: universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism and – most notably and perhaps most surprisingly – communism. The ideals of communism may have faded politically and economically through the 20th century – Merton later preferred the term “communalism” – but the belief in the “essentially cooperative and cumulative quality of scientific achievement” lives on.
Those ideals preserve the widespread notion that scholarly information should be shared freely. This is not to say that it should be shared for free – it has never meant that, except at a time when scholarly communication consisted solely of letters exchanged between gentlemen of science – but cost remains an issue. Profit margins well in excess of 30% earned by the likes of Elsevier and Springer Nature stick in the craw, particularly since they depend to a large extent on labour that these large publishing companies don’t pay for.
It is curious, at a time when the Conservative and Labour parties are arguing about who can intervene most effectively in the energy market to protect the consumer, that no UK government has ventured to demand value for money from academic publishing, despite its heavy dependence on public financing, since much published research originates in universities and research institutes funded by government and charities.
There is hope for universities in the Tory manifesto Read more
The digital revolution in academia
And although digital technology and the internet have created a new terrain in which the ideals of open access have begun to germinate, they have yet to produce a cost-effective and reliable harvest of accessible knowledge. The acquisition by private publishing companies of peer review processes that had previously been the preserve of scholarly societies has combined with the increased dependence of individual academics on where, rather than what, they publish to control the digital revolution in scholarly publishing. This has prevented the full realisation of its promise to make publishing faster and cheaper.
But we can take heart from the innovations of new publishers and startups that are, if not yet revolutionising publishing, nevertheless driving a significant phase of evolution. The rise of mega-journals and preprint servers, coupled with moves to enhance data-sharing, are helping researchers to rediscover that sharing information should be the primary role of research publications. They are also helping to address concerns about the reliability and reproducibility of the scientific record that are the misshapen produce of a communications ecosystem in which publishing and prestige have been yoked together too crudely. But we still have some way to travel.
History reminds us of our values. It can be muffled by the noise of the day-to-day busyness that obscures our ideals and our greater purpose. By reminding researchers of their fealty to disciplinary communities and of their duties to the public purse, we can clarify the vision of the academic community. The report ends with a recommendation not just for researchers, but for other major stakeholders – principally government, funders, universities and learned societies – to look back at the winding road that has brought us to this unexpected present. It’s time to take back control so that we might yet arrive at the destination we had in mind at the start.
Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered. And if you have an idea for a story, please read our guidelines and email your pitch to us at [email protected].
Looking for a higher education job? Or perhaps you need to recruit university staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the higher education specialistImage copyright Thinkstock Image caption Do women really want to go to "their sugar daddy's steakhouse"?
Restaurants, it seems, have figured out that women eat food.
At least that's one explanation for the proliferation of "female-friendly" restaurants such as the steakhouse chains STK and SHe, and the Washington DC area sports bar the Bracket Room.
Unfortunately, writes the Week's Kaitlin Roberts, most of these restaurants miss the mark.
SHe, for instance, features "smaller,'she-sized' steak portions, mirrors on the dessert menus so women could reapply their lipstick and'sexy' decor".
The idea that a steakhouse is somehow a'man's' restaurant is already backward Jessica Sidman, The Washington City Paper
And then there's the catwalk, she notes, "where women in scanty clothing perform for the restaurant's female and male guests".
STK ran an ad campaign with fashion models frolicking and sipping champagne with the tagline "Not your daddy's steakhouse. The Bracket Room features waitresses in tight-fitting black tank tops.
You know, what women look for in their dining experience.
"It's one thing to distance steakhouses and sports bars from the realm of old boys clubs and guys' nights out," writes the Washington City Paper's Jessica Sidman. "But small plates and sexy decor? If this is what these restaurants believe women want, their target audience should be insulted. In their attempts to appeal to women, restaurants like STK end up condescending to them."
She continues:
In the context of a female-oriented restaurant, the small portions and healthy foods peddle the notion that women don't want to eat a lot, and that they don't enjoy nachos or New York strips. The idea that a steakhouse is somehow a "man's" restaurant is already backward, but the suggestion that women want a feminized version of one is even worse.
Bustle's Marisa Riley says that the idea of restaurants being more welcoming to women isn't necessarily a bad one, but the recent examples have gone about it the wrong way:
I can definitely get behind great advertising, decor, and food that doesn't scream 'Hey ladies, pleeeease come eat steak here, it'll be super sexy', but then again, isn't that what happens at just a normal both-sex-focused restaurant?
Roberts says that female friendly restaurants may only be a "trivial restaurant trend", but criticisms such as Sidman's show "deep-rooted concerns about how women are viewed and treated".
What women really want, according to Roberts, is to go to establishments where "their safety is valued and their minds and bodies are respected".
Sidman thinks she knows what's really behind this trend. These restaurants aren't trying to attract women - they're trying to attract men who want to go where they think they can find women.
"Rather than a restaurant that caters to women - whatever that means - STK appears to have been designed as a pickup playground," she writes. "It may not be your daddy's steakhouse, but it's definitely your sugar daddy's steakhouse."
Roberts concludes her article by noting research that shows women are an increasingly powerful economic force in the US. According to the blog She-conomy, women make 85% of purchases, and a Nielson report finds they control "as much as $15t (£8.9t) in consumer and business spending".
If restaurants aren't taking what women want out of their dining experience seriously now, she concludes, they're going to have to start soon.Leeds United are in the running to sign highly-rated young Heart of Midlothian defender Kevin McHattie.
The crisis-ridden Edinburgh outfit, saddled by crippling debts of £25m, served notice of their intention to appoint an administrator on Monday – three days after their entire playing squad was put up for sale.
A quartet of players, including left-back McHattie, who turns 20 next month, have reportedly attracted interest from English clubs, as Hearts desperately seek funds to keep them running over the summer – with the vultures circling.
Leeds are believed to have enquired about Glenrothes-born McHattie, who has been capped four times by Scotland Under-21s and also represented his country at under-17 level – and he is expected to be available for a cut-price fee.
McHattie, rated as one of the most promising young talents at Tynecastle – if not the best, enjoyed a breakthrough 2012-13 season for the Jambos, forced to reduce costs and blood youngsters last term after parting company with a number of senior players.
United, whose 2013-14 Championship fixture last list was revealed this morning, have so far completed just one incoming close-season transfer, with big striker Matt Smith to officially join the club on a two-year deal on July 1. A deal to sign former Reading forward Noel Hunt remains very much on the cards and is expected to go through shortly, with boss Brian McDermott having also made several other offers for players as he bids to formulate his squad for next season’s campaign, which kicks off on August 3.
The rumour mill has linked United with several other possible targets, including Celtic forward Anthony Stokes and Birmingham striker Marlon King, who spent an ill-fated loan spell at the club towards the end of the 2004-05 season.
Former Sunderland player Stokes is reportedly a back-up option if moves to bring in Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Republic of Ireland international Kevin Doyle flounder, but he is not understood to be a target for United.
Similarly, speculation linking King, 33, with a move to Elland Road appears to be wide of the mark, according to sources close to the player.
King is one of a number of high-earners at St Andrews who have been told they can leave the cash-strapped Blues for free.
Blues are hoping to offload King, Peter Lovenkrands, Darren Ambrose and Hayden Mullins in a cost-cutting measure, with boss Lee Clark admitting there has been interest in the players.
King, top-scorer for Birmingham for the past two seasons, has a year left on his contract and is expected to be fit for pre-season training.
He underwent knee surgery in March, which kept him out for the remainder of the last campaign.
Meanwhile, former Whites winger Max Gradel has dismissed suggestions he could be set for a return to England following reported interest from Premier League new boys Cardiff City and Hull City.
The 25-year-old, a big favourite during his time at Elland Road, moved to Ligue One outfit St Etienne in 2001 and has gone onto establish himself for both his club and the Ivory Coast.
But his current priority is recovering from a knee injury he sustained back in March.
He said: “I have been linked with a return to England, but to be honest, I am more interested in healing my injury. I have been out now for four months – hopefully I will be ok in two months’ time.
“I love England, but at the moment, I like it in France. Hull City and Cardiff are good teams, but the Premier League will be tough for them, but they can surprise like Swansea.”Ottawa writer Amal El-Mohtar has returned home a conquering hero after winning a prestigious Hugo Award.
The 32-year-old author, who lives in Centretown, said she was shocked to see more than a dozen friends and family members greet her with placards and balloons at the Ottawa airport Monday afternoon after her trip home from the Hugo ceremony in Finland.
The Hugo Awards, which were created in 1955, are one of the most distinguished awards for the genre of science-fiction. The nominees and winners are chosen by members of the World Science Fiction Convention.
El-Mohtar was honoured for her short story, titled Seasons of Glass and Iron
“This was my first Hugo nomination and my first win. It’s unbelievable,” said El-Mohtar, adding that the attention her story has been getting from science-fiction award juries around the world has been “mind-boggling.”
El-Mohtar said she thinks the prize-winning short story has struck a chord with readers because its “fairy tale mashup” depicts various female characters collaborating to overcome adversaries — “women talking to each other and rescuing each other,” she said, defying the conventional prince-saves-damsel-in-distress narrative.
Among the congratulatory messages on one colourful poster Monday: “HUGO GIRL!!”
This is not the first award El-Mohtar has won for her short story. In May she won a Nebula Award for the story and has been nominated for an Aurora, which is Canada’s top sci-fi prize — which could lead to more acclaim when those awards are given out.
She’s also a finalist in the 2017 World Fantasy Awards, which are taking place in San Antonio, Texas in November. She also writes poetry, essays and reviews books for NPR.
The writer is working toward a PhD from Carleton University and has taught creative writing at both Carleton and the University of Ottawa.
With files from Randy Boswell
[email protected] Hop Hash will soon be retired. The brewery’s first large scale release using the hoppy, sticky dust found after the hop extrusion process is dropping from the lineup.
The IPA was hopped with the dust that is left behind after hops are extruded in the pelletizing process. The first time SweetWater fans found Hop Hash, it was in Dank Tank release Johnny Hash. The beer was well received that the brewery created Hop Hash. Hash Session and Hash Brown soon followed after.
SweetWater Hop Hash debuted in October of 2014. Despite eliminating this release, the brewery tells Beer Street Journal that more “hash” beers will soon be found in the brewery’s very hoppy lineup.
“It’s true – RIP, Hop Hash and Take Two Pils. It’s not uncommon for us (or many craft brewers for that matter) to retire a brew; we like to keep the offerings fresh. Good news for Hop Hash fans is that Hash Session IPA, as of this month, is a year round offering, and Hash Brown India Brown Ale returns as our fall seasonal. Both have that full-flavor, resiny goodness that Hop Hash delivered. Hash Session also provides the lower ABV drinkability that fans of Take Two may have liked.” – SweetWater Brewing Company
SweetWater Hash Brown, brewed in similar fashion, just hit shelves again in August.
Style: IPA (w/ Hop Hash)
Hops: Centennial, Simcoe, Cascade
Availability: Retired
7.8% ABV
Hop Hash is inspired by another “Hash” offering from the Dank Tank, Johnny Hash…
SweetWater’s Latest Dank Tank: Johnny Hash from BeerStreetJournal.com on Vimeo.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
GUTHRIE, Okla. — A Logan County reserve deputy is accused of lying about a shooting involving an intruder inside the deputy’s home.
Guthrie Police said they now believe there wasn't an intruder and the assault was fabricated.
"We believed we needed to fill in some blanks with the victim and then when we talked to him it came out that it was all made up," Det. Mark Bruning said.
Around 8:30 a.m. Monday, police rushed to the home of the deputy on the 300 block of E. Mansur.
The deputy claimed he was letting his dogs outside when he found an intruder in his kitchen.
He told authorities the intruder had grabbed a knife off the counter and stabbed him in the arm.
The deputy claimed he grabbed his gun and fired but missed the intruder.
The incident lead to a search of the neighborhood.
"Regardless of what the reasoning behind it was, it still didn't happen," Bruning said. "We don’t have a person breaking into houses in Guthrie stabbing homeowners."
The reserve deputy has not been arrested.
Officials said they will be submitting their evidence to the district attorney for review.
The Logan County Sheriff’s Office has terminated the deputy.
A sheriff’s official said “This is an unfortunate incident, but must be dealt with firmly.”
LINK: Reserve deputy said intruder stabbed him in his own kitchenCLOSE Experts are warning people about counterfeit eclipse glasses.
Watching solar eclipse (Photo: Daniel MacDonald / www.dmacphoto.com, Getty Images/Flickr RF)
You've heard over and over that you shouldn't look up at the sun during Monday's solar eclipse (or ever, as a general rule), but what actually happens if you do?
Dr. Jacob Chung, Chief of Opthalmology at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, answered our burning (ahem) questions about what'll happen if you just can't help but take a peek — sans ISO-approved glasses — during the big event.
What happens if someone looks directly at the sun during the eclipse?
If you look at it for a second or two, nothing will happen. Five seconds, I'm not sure, but 10 seconds is probably too long and 20 seconds is definitely too long.
The eye works like a camera, and the retina is like the film of your eye. So looking at the sun too long is almost like burning a hole in the center of your film, or retina. We don't have pain fibers there so you won't have discomfort or feel pain, but you might see a fuzzed out, dark spot.
The retina can't heal itself, so the blind spot is permanent and cannot be treated, but definitely go see a doctor to make sure it's the right diagnosis.
ECLIPSE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the solar eclipse
GLASSES: 5 places to get eclipse glasses before the big day
Is there a difference if you're looking at a partial or total eclipse?
If you're in that 70-mile swath where you'll be able to see the total eclipse [parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, Illinois, Kentucky, South Carolina], you have about a two-minute window where the sun is 100 percent eclipsed. Because we have a partial eclipse, there is a zero-second window where it's safe to look at the sun directly.
Look, no one loves to look at the sun: it hurts. The reason it's more dangerous during the eclipse is because you don't feel much discomfort, yet your eyes are receiving all the harm. It's similar to getting sunburned on a cloudy day.
Just to be clear: on non-eclipse days, is it still unsafe to look at the sun?
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[Chuckles] Yes.
What makes ISO-approved glasses safe? Are there alternatives?
They filter out a lot more of the sun's harmful radiation — something like 100,000 times more than standard sunglasses.
The best alternative is to visualize it from an indirect method. Put your phone camera on selfie mode, then turn your back to the sun and see the eclipse that way.
Or, take two pieces of cardboard or paper. Cut a hole in one and again, turn your back to the sun and hold it up against the second one. The sun will cast its rays through the pinhole, [creating a projection on the second piece of cardboard/paper].
Have you had a patient who had eye damage from looking at the sun?
I had a case many years ago of a gentleman who had a condition called solar retinopathy. I don't know if it was during an eclipse, but he said he was on LSD and looked at the sun for four straight hours. In his retina there was a pigmented spot and his vision was very poor, needless to say. He was basically legally blind.
Is there a "season" for eye damage?
In summer, of course, since we're closer to the sun. [Note: It is actually hotter in the summer because the Earth's axis is tilted] But there are different ways you can get damage from the sun in your eyes. If you are outdoors a lot you can get a growth on the surface of your eye, called pterygium. It's found very commonly in people who live or grew up in equatorial regions, and a lot of surfers get it because the water reflects UV into eyes [the condition is also called Surfer's Eye]. If very severe, it can start to obscure your vision and cause irritation from time to time. That can be surgically removed, however.
Chronic sun exposure can also contribute to formation of cataracts and macular degeneration. So, wear sunglasses as often as it makes sense to.
Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2wirE43Klay Thompson was a bit grumpy on Friday morning. He blew his tire on the way to the practice facility. “Get ready for some short answers,” he said before sitting down for an interview with reporters.
But then Thompson was asked about ESPN’s recent story on Draymond Green, which detailed the fiery forward’s exploits both on and off the court and, while still a bit grumpy, Thompson wasn’t short.
Included in the piece, ESPN quoted a “team official” saying “The guys might be frustrated by (Green’s) antics, but they had an opportunity to prove themselves without him in Game 5 (of the Finals) and they played like a bunch of (cowards).”
Thompson, although mistaking a Warrior “team official” for a team executive from elsewhere in the league, was ticked off about the use of coward attached to an anonymous source.
“The article pissed me off for this reason,” Thompson said. “If you call someone a coward, how are you not going to put your name on that quote? It’s easy to point at someone and call them a coward behind like a shade or a shield. But why don’t you put your name to it and then you can call us cowards? That’s fine. Tell us that. But to say we played we played like cowards and you’re not going to quote the guy who said it, that’s weak to me, man. How you gonna quote Mo (Speights) and not anyone else? That actually got under my skin. You’re gonna call us cowards and not put your name on the quote? You know what I mean? You’re not gonna quote who said it? Get out of here. That made me mad. We played our hearts out that whole playoffs and you’re gonna call us cowards and not put your name on it. Get out of here.”
Video
Here's video of that Klay Thompson response to @ROSGO21 on the ESPN story from earlier, ticked off about the anonymous "coward" quote pic.twitter.com/nKdwE8bEbt — Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) October 21, 2016
Later Friday, before the Warriors preseason finale, Steve Kerr was asked his thoughts.
“It upset me, too,” Kerr said. “I guarantee you it wasn’t any of our coaching staff. I’d be shocked if it was anyone in basketball management. We don’t do that. Nobody ever said that to me. Not even the press, but to me: ‘Those guys were playing like cowards.’ So I have no idea where that came from. It’s upsetting because you want to keep things in house. If somebody wants to say something, they should put their name on it. If you don’t feel like you can, don’t put your name on it. But I also know how it works these days. What is an unnamed source? Who are sources with knowledge of the team? It’s gotten harder and harder to control stuff and keep things in house these days. Because I think what used to be a credible source is now, the standards are lower. Sources with knowledge of the team is a vague phrase and who even knows who that would be.”Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court in Kyiv on Monday as the media spectacle surrounding her trial on corruption charges continued.
The woman with the trademark braided hair is a shining light for many people in Ukraine. During her pre-trial hearing, about 200 fans gathered in Kyiv's main boulevard, Khreshchatyk Street, where they set up tents and waved flags with symbols of Tymoshenko's Fatherland party while playing music and chanting "Yulia! Yulia! Ukraine!"
The charges leveled against Tymoshenko say she abused her powers as prime minister in order to conclude backroom deals that hurt Ukraine's national interests.
The Ukrainian judiciary has flexed its muscles by freezing 1.45 million euros ($2 million) of Tymoshenko's considerable financial assets as bond for her trial. Tymoshenko faces several different charges all of which stem from the time she served as prime minister.
Followers of Tymoshenko gathered in Kyiv to show their support
In 2009, Tymoshenko allegedly abused her official powers in signing gas contracts with Russian energy giant Gazprom. The state is said to have suffered 150 million euros in damages as a consequence. In addition, Tymoshenko is accused of using money acquired from CO2-emission permits to plug holes in Ukraine's pension system.
Her trial got off to a turbulent start at the end of June. In a national television broadcast, Ukrainians were able to watch the sweat drip from Judge Kyreyev's forehead onto the documents in front of him.
The representative of the European Commission in Kyiv, Jose Manuel Pinto Teoxeira, an observer at the trial, said it was a relief once the judge finally adjourned the hearing. The conditions in the hopelessly overcrowded room without air conditioning were simply inhumane, Teoxeira said.
Search for the truth
Meanwhile, Tymoshenko has said that she will file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights.
"We will defend ourselves," Tymoshenko said. "We will not search for the truth in Ukrainian courts."
She repeated her accusation that President Viktor Yanukovych was using the judicial process to shatter the opposition and implied that the judge was not adhering to the facts.
Tymoshenko lost the 2010 elections to Yanukovych
"He is not taking into consideration that the signing of the gas contracts fell within my responsibilities and not within those of the cabinet," Tymoshenko said. According to her argument, there is no way that she could have overstepped her competencies as prime minister.
As for the accusation that she embezzled funds from CO2-emission permits, Tymoshenko says that she used the money in the middle of the economic crisis to temporarily cover the payout of pensions. She alleges that she later returned the funds and that they were subsequently used for environmental projects as originally envisioned.
"I did not break any law," Tymoshenko said.
The former prime minister believes that the judge has been given the assignment of settling a political score and that he is a "marionette" of President Yanukovych.
Meanwhile, Yanukovych has reacted coolly to his former rival's accusations. He says Tymoshenko is trying to distract public attention by turning the trial into a political fight.
"I am interested in a transparent and open trial more than anyone else," Yanukovych said. "I want these people to have the right and opportunity to defend themselves."
Media game
Tymoshenko has to assume that the media interest and the public are her greatest weapons. Around 10 years ago, she was jailed for a short period on fraud charges. At that time there was also doubt about the legality of the process.
Tymoshenko knows how to use the media to play to the crowd. At one time she was celebrated as the hero of the 2004 "Orange Revolution" along with Viktor Yushchenko. The duo headed up the movement that blocked Yanukovych from serving a further term as president. Instead, Yushchenko went on to become president.
Tymoshenko served as prime minister during Yushchenko's tenure, but rapidly became unpopular. In 2010, she lost to her arch-rival Yanukovych in the presidential elections.
Observers have expressed suspicions that Yanukovych could use the trial to quash the opposition. If Tymoshenko is convicted, she will face seven years of jail time.
Sergey Taran, director of Kyiv's International Institute for Democracy, told Deutsche Welle that the court will likely come to a quick conviction in order to prevent Tymoshenko from participating in the parliamentary elections in 2012.
Reaction in Brussels
The trial in Ukraine has resonated in Brussels. Tymoshenko's Fatherland party is a member of the European People's Party (EPP), an alliance of conservative parties from 39 states in Europe.
Yanukov |
endocannabinoids in the reproductive system act as local hormones and evidence exists for an anandaminergic system in the rat testes and mouse vas deferens that controls spermatogenesis and male fertility. THC and anandamide are also both thought to inhibit the acrosome reaction through cannabinoid receptors on the sperm cell membrane. These receptors have been found on the sperm cell of the sea urchin, and the ovaries from the same species are known to synthesize and degrade both anandamide and palmitoyl-ethanolamide. It is therefore conceivable that the sea urchin synthesizes anandamide during the acrosome reaction in order to prevent fertilization by more than one sperm. It is not yet known whether an analogous system also occurs in mammals although some evidence does point towards an increased infertility among chronic cannabis users.Anandamide may also play another interesting role in the female reproductive system. CB1 and CB2 receptors are present in the embryos of mice from the very early stages of their development and also in the adult uterus. Due to the inhibitory effect of anandamide on embryonic cell division, anandamide might act as a negative signal for embryonic development and implantation. High levels of the synthesizing enzyme, and low levels of the degrading enzyme exist at the time when the uterus is the least receptive for embryo implantation. The uterus may therefore utilize anandamide in order to direct both the location and timing of embryo implantation.In just over one decade, the abundance of quality research has changed our basic views of the mechanism of cannabis intoxication. It has also unveiled a new and extensive regulatory system within the body. Further multidisciplinary research must be undertaken to improve our understanding of these functions and provide more data on the expression and inactivation of the components of this system. It will then be possible to exploit this knowledge in order to make therapeutic compounds for the treatment of symptoms, and possible prevention, of a number of disorders.Such therapies could act through the agonistic/antagonistic properties of the novel compounds acting at cannabinoid receptors, or by targeting the synthesizing, or degrading, enzymes responsible for endocannabinoids. As cannabinoids are effective at countering muscle spasms, this property could be exploited to provide relief for sufferers of multiple sclerosis and patients who suffer from chronic tremors, or other involuntary movements. Ongoing research is presently determining whether cannabinoid ligands are effective agents in the treatment of chronic pain, glaucoma, spasms, and the wasting and emesis associated with AIDS and cancer chemotherapy. This latter property is currently being exploited and a cannabinoid called Nabilone is on the market, indicated for the suppression of nausea and vomiting during cytotoxic chemotherapy. The potential therapeutic application of cannabinoids is, however, controversial and constitutes a widely debated issue with relevance in both scientific and social circles.One of the most interesting potential therapeutic actions of cannabinoids reported to date is the ability of cannabinoids to inhibit the growth of cancerous, or transformed, cells in culture. Anandamide can inhibit breast cancer cell proliferationand THC can cause the programmed cell death, or apoptosis, of transformed neural cellsresearch has also begun to elucidate the biochemical mechanisms involved in the anti-tumoral actions of CB1 agonists, including THC. These experiments have shown that it is possible to completely eradicate malignant brain tumors in rats by THC administration.Cannabinoids have also been found to protect neurons in culture from glutamate-induced excitotoxicityand from ischaemic death (lack of oxygen). These ligands are currently under test as therapeutic agents in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's Disease. Research is also being directed into the possibility of using cannabinoids as drugs that could stop the growth and spread of cancer cells, based on the research mentioned above.A prominent researcher in the field described the discovery of anandamide as a 'new dawn for cannabinoid pharmacology'. Although a lot of work has been conducted, we can expect far more research in the near future that could revolutionize the way we view our bodies and the treatments we use to prevent their malfunction.Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — A couple of months ago, Mara Wilson, the “Matilda” actress turned outspoken writer, addressed a pressing issue that had some personal pull on her: that pesky Hollywood “habit” of whitewashing. “You know the game where you name actors who’d play your friends [or] family in a movie?” she tweeted. “I could never come up with one for my stepmother. Why? Because she's Filipino.”
She admitted to being unable to name any Filipino actresses in American films or on television, with the exception of Lea Salonga, nor could she name a single Filipino character, much less one that was portrayed by an actual actor of Philippine descent. “This is the way that it is,” she concluded. “But it is not the way it has to be.”
Filipinos themselves may not be so attuned to these problems, but it is a big deal on a national level whenever anything or anyone remotely Filipino is given international recognition. When you find yourself watching a Western movie or show with family or friends and a character makes a quip about the Philippines, there’s a good chance at least one of you will remark, “Uy, Philippines daw, o!” So, in a sense, despite witnessing plenty of representation in local pop culture, we still crave that sense of true diversity from American media — a chance to make a connection, and to relate.
Pinoy references are especially common in American sitcoms, for a number of reasons. Some staff writers could be Filipino, or the references could actually be of service to the plot. (Hey, it happens.) More often than not, though, they are written from the perspective of observational comedy, which can mean perpetuating strangely specific stereotypes, owing to the fact that Filipinos have grown to become such a large minority group in the U.S.
“30 Rock,” throughout its seven seasons, was quite the repeat offender. Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, wearing a hideous pink business suit in the pilot, sarcastically says, “Yeah, if I was president of the Philippines,” obviously referring to then-president Gloria Arroyo, when told that she should dress like that for work more. There have been allusions to mail-order brides and escaping to an island with Filipino lovers, as well.
Although unclear, the "EGOT" chain that Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) buys on "30 Rock" may be a reference to the Filipino slur derived from the term "Igorot." Photo courtesy of NBC/UNIVERSAL
A more ambiguous — but definitely more controversial — example can be found in an episode in which Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) purchases a gold chain that says “EGOT” in huge block letters, supposedly an acronym for the aspiration to be a quadruple threat and win four major entertainment-industry awards: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. The word is also a local slur, derived from “Igorot,” which Vulture, in a 2009 article about the episode in which the chain appeared, had called an “obscure N-word.”
It remains unclear whether the connection was intentional on the showrunners’ part. However, Fey has come under fire a number of times for cultural insensitivity in her work, as seen in the joke of the white actress Jane Krakowski’s character being Native American in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” a show she created, and in her portrayal of a “fish out of water” reporter in Afghanistan in the movie “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” which has been called racist and exoticist — words that can also apply to the way Filipinos were made to be mute punchlines on “30 Rock.”
The "Saturday Night Live" sketch "St. Joseph's Christmas Mass Spectacular" features a gag about Filipinos' ties to Catholicism. Photo courtesy of NBC/UNIVERSAL
Throwaway lines that mention the Philippines have occurred once or twice in other comedy series, to varying degrees of negativity. In “2 Broke Girls,” Max (Kat Dennings) says that she needs to get to a coffee shop before 10:30, because otherwise “you can’t hear yourself think over the sounds of people Skyping to the Philippines,” no doubt in reference to OFWs or close-knit families making an effort to keep in touch. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” has Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) ask Jake (Andy Samberg) to guess between two images — one is his locker, and the other a garbage dump in the Philippines. Both turn out to be the former, but the hyperbolic gist is that Jake’s locker is indistinguishable from a trash site in a third-world country, and he should be ashamed. “Saturday Night Live,” for its part, aired a more good-natured sketch about the people you would find in church, which includes “rows of little Filipino ladies you’ve never seen before,” in line with the country’s strong identification with Catholicism.
All references carry the connotation that the place of the Filipino in American culture is firmly in the minority, an easy target. The idea of “otherism” is in play; it’s easy to make these generalisms because Philippine culture is so “different” and so “weird,” and pointing this out to the audience makes the show edgy or smart.
A pair of parallel plot points in two single-camera sitcoms are clearly present because the Philippines is known to lead the world in terms of social media. In the series finale of “The Office,” a failed audition clip for a singing show featuring a tantrum thrown by Andy (Ed Helms) goes viral, and it becomes the basis for a Filipino parody on YouTube. Clifford Bañagale, a Filipino actor, along with three others, is featured in the parody clip in which he speaks fluent Tagalog.
A Filipino viral video appears on "Silicon Valley" after Manny Pacquiao tweets out a link to a video stream. Note that the title makes no sense, obviously culled from Google Translate. Photo courtesy of HBO
Meanwhile, the season-two finale of “Silicon Valley” involves Manny Pacquiao (“The Filipino legislator!” “No, boxer.”) tweeting a link to the main characters’ sponsored video stream, which then becomes entertainment to “tens of thousands of Filipinos.” The stream features a man in tears, and a video of his pleas becomes the basis of a Philippine-based meme similar to the viral video of a Japanese man playing guitar in sync with the wailing of a crying politician. For the meme, which prompts the character Laurie (Suzanne Cryer) to call Filipinos a “fascinating people,” the show used the syntactically incorrect and nonsensical title “Umiiyak tao sa cliffside kweba na may guitar!!!”, clearly culled from Google Translate — an interesting oversight, considering that the showrunners hired mathematicians from Stanford for the accuracy of a single spectacular dick joke in season one.
Still, the past year has seen great progress in terms of Philippine representation in American comedy, thanks to two new shows that happen to have two Filipino actors as leads: the hour-long musical romantic dramedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” and the half-hour single-camera series “Superstore.”
The Thanksgiving episode of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" made it the first American show to feature a full Filipino family, including extended/background characters, played by mostly Filipino actors. Photo courtesy of THE CW
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” a critical darling that’s proved itself to be a game-changer in more ways than one, has a cast that includes the part-Filipino actor Vincent Rodriguez III, in the role of Josh Chan. The series star and creator Rachel Bloom, as well as her fellow showrunners, wanted to cast an Asian actor as the love interest — not necessarily Filipino, but when Rodriguez was chosen, the character of Josh was eventually written as a member of a traditionally Fil-Am family. The same episode also featured Bloom’s character, Rebecca, cooking dinuguan, and the execution is overall positive and true to life. According to Rene Gube, the episode writer who also happens to be Fil-Am, the show’s team took great pains to make the Chans as accurate as possible to the way Filipinos are. In addition to this, when Josh’s sister gets married in the season finale, Lea Salonga — who is, of course, regarded as an icon both locally and internationally — appears as Josh’s Aunt Myrna and performs a song during the reception.
In “Superstore,” viewers are introduced to Mateo Liwanag, a new employee at Cloud 9, the titular supermarket. Originally written with a “Latino gangster” in mind, Mateo’s characterization was changed instead into a version of the actor Nico Santos, who plays him — that is, gay and born and raised in the Philippines. Mateo’s heritage is especially prominent in an episode in which he tries to get the position of store manager. He mentions his full name (Mateo Fernando Aquino Liwanag) and that he came from Manila, even projecting a photo of the city on a slideshow.
Santos has expressed amazement that he is able to play a Filipino character as part of the main cast, and has high hopes in terms of the proper, positive inclusion of Filipinos in American pop culture. This applies not only to more open-minded and accurate portrayals, but also to prominence and presence. On a bigger scale, these forward-looking steps join the overall better representation of Asian Americans as a whole, who have even proved themselves able to lead shows as main protagonists, as seen in “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Master of None,” “Dr. Ken,” and “The Mindy Project.” Perhaps someday a Filipino could be the next Mindy Kaling or Aziz Ansari.
"Superstore" stars (from left) America Ferrera as Amy, Mark McKinney as Glenn, and the Filipino actor Nico Santos as Mateo Liwanag, a new employee at the titular Cloud 9 superstore. Photo courtesy of NBC/UNIVERSAL
Santos, as an actor and part of the audience, says that he is happy to share a part of his culture as Mateo. And on the other side of the world, his fellowmen, finally seeing themselves addressed as more than just inferior punchlines, must agree.It's been a long day, without you my friend
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
We've come a long way, from where we began
Oh I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
When I see you again
Damn, who knew
That it would be you
The first one to leave, just spread your wings and flew
I would say I'm happy but I know that ain't true
Brownman forever
But we'll still be together
Had to switch up
Move on and leave behind all the Let's Plays
But hard work forever pays
Now I see you in a better place
It's been a long day, without you my friend
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
We've come a long way, from where we began
Oh I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
When I see you again
How could we not talk about AH when AH was all we got
Every time I laughed it was because you were making jokes
And now we'll be together for one last video
It's been a long day, without you my friend
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
We've come a long way, from where we began
Oh I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
When I see you again
First you sat down in your chair
And then you beat us in COD
And then you beat us some more
And our friendship turned into a bond
And that bond will never be broken
And the love will never get lost
And when brotherhood come first
You know X Ray will still be drawn
Right next to Vav on screen
So we'll remember you when you're gone
How could we not talk about AH when AH was all we got
Every time I laughed it was because you were making jokes
And now we'll be together for one last video
So let your light guide your path
Wear that Twitch Hoodie with pride
And every stream you make, will always make us laugh, laugh
It's been a long day, at AH my friend
But we'll tell you all about when we see you again
You've come a long way, from where you began
Oh, we'll tell you all about it when we see you again
When we see you again
When we see you again
When we see you againPresident Trump speaks during a meeting at the White House on March 22. (Chip Somodevilla/European Pressphoto Agency)
[UPDATE 3-31-17 A couple of responses to reader comments. To begin with, I didn’t mean to give short shrift to the argument that the Administration’s attack on “sanctuary cities” is based on an (unconstitutional) attempt to co-opt, or commandeer, local law enforcement resources for purposes of assisting federal law enforcement activities, in violation of the 10th Amendment. Or rather, I did mean to give it short shrift, but I didn’t mean to thereby imply that it’s not a very powerful and important argument against what the Adminstration is doing; it’s just that (a) I have nothing to add on that beyond what Ilya Somin, in the blog postings I cited, has already put together on that score in his earlier posts, and (b) I wanted to focus attention on a different issue surrounding the “sanctuary city” question.
Second, I have a few thoughts about two of the arguments put forward by those who disagreed with my assessment of Administration policy: First, that I vastly overstate the significance of judicial oversight over probable cause determinations in the real world; the police throw people in jail all the time without a pre-arrest probable cause determination of any kind, and whatever showing they need to make won’t take place until several days after the arrest, at arraignment. So we’re already “detaining” people without the participation of the judiciary – so what’s the big deal about these ICE detention requests? And second, these are undocumented non-citizens we’re talking about here – “illegal aliens.” Who says that the 4th Amendment protections extend to them?
On the first: sure, I’m just giving an idealized picture of how the 4th Amendment works; in practice, the exigencies of police and prosecutorial procedures being what they are, one hardly ever actually sees any real judicial oversight until after there’s been a “detention period,” and even then, that oversight is almost always cursory at best. All true. But it’s one thing to admit that we rarely live up to the ideal, and quite another to enshrine that as a kind of prosecutorial entitlement in federal law. The principle embedded in the Administration position is: when the federal prosecutor (ICE) says someone is a Bad Guy, you should detain him, on that say-so alone, for up to 48 hours. That’s not a principle I’m comfortable with. It would not, by itself, turn the U.S. into a police state. But it takes what I believe would be a significant step along that path.
On the second: while the law surrounding the extent to which the 4th Amendment protects undocumented aliens while they are in the United States is complicated and messy at the margins, there is no question that many, perhaps most, of the individuals who are subject to ICE detainer requests are fully protected by both the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable seizures. The governing standard, from United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, holds that the constitutional protections apply to “persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.” See also Zadvydas v. Davis (“[C]ertain constitutional protections available to persons inside the United States are unavailable to aliens outside of our geographic borders. But once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent”). There is little doubt that a large number of persons subject to ICE detention orders have a “sufficient connection” to the country – having, for example, lived here, whether lawfully or otherwise, for years – to meet the standard.
And that is true even if they are, in fact, “illegal aliens.” That is, I suppose, part of my point: ICE may believe Mr. X is violating US immigration law, but just because ICE says so, that doesn’t make it so.
Finally, some commenters suggested that I’m not sufficiently mindful of the cases of illegal aliens who have committed all manner of serious crimes – murders, rapes, assaults, etc. It’s true that illegal aliens commit crimes, some of them serious. So do US citizens. I’ve got no problem, generally speaking, with adding deportation to the punishment for anyone who has been convicted of a serious crime who is in the country unlawfully. But the ICE detainer requests aren’t targeted to people convicted, or even suspected, of committing a serious crime; they’re targeted against those suspected of violating US immigration law, e.g., overstaying their visa. Unless you think that people in this undocumented immigrant category are, as a class, more likely to commit such serious crimes – and the data we have strongly suggests otherwise – this argument can hardly justify these detention procedures.]
Or perhaps “Fourth Amendment-abiding cities,” or “PSR cities” (police-state resistant). Calling them “sanctuary cities” is misleading, because it makes it sound as though they’re taking some extraordinary step, drawing a line in the sand and declaring that the law cannot enter inside the boundary, in the manner of, say, the “sanctuary” provided by churches in the Middle Ages.
That’s emphatically not what the cities targeted as “sanctuary cities” by the Trump administration (in the president’s executive order, and in Jeff Sessions’s remarks earlier this week) are doing.
President Trump in February in the White House. (Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
There’s a lot of complicated law here, with many variations on exactly how and what cities are doing, and many important issues — constitutional and statutory — involved. Co-blogger Ilya Somin has provided (here and here) an excellent roadmap and summary for anyone who wants to understand the full constitutional dimensions of the issue.
But we shouldn’t let the legal complexity obscure just how terrible, and how violative of cherished constitutional principles, the administration’s policies are.
Let’s start with first principles. Suppose that law enforcement officers in some local jurisdiction — let’s call it “Allentown, Pa.” — and take someone — let’s call him “Ernesto Galarza” — into custody for violating some provision of Allentown’s criminal law.*** They need, of course, to have probable cause to believe that Galarza has committed the crime with which he is being charged before they can “seize” him, and they will have to persuade a neutral magistrate — typically a state court judge — that such probable cause exists before the seizure is deemed to be compliant with the constitutional requirements of due process.
*** See Galarza v. City of Allentown (CA 3, 2014) where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit held that Allentown had acted unconstitutionally (and was liable for monetary damages) for complying with the kind of order (an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention request) that Trump/Sessions are trying to resuscitate, as discussed below.
Probable cause, with judicial oversight. If there is a more fundamental constitutional protection against abusive and tyrannical prosecutorial/police actions, I’m not aware of it. The cops can’t just toss you in jail because they think you have committed a crime, or because they don’t like you, or because they think that you might have information about someone else’s commission of a crime. The involvement of an independent judicial overseer is our first line of protection against police and prosecutorial overreach.
There are places, of course, where the police and prosecutors do have the power to take you into custody without judicial (or any other) acquiescence. We call those places, appropriately enough, “police states.”
Back, then, to our “sanctuary cities.” Sessions complained about (and threatened to de-fund) “states and cities [that] have adopted policies designed to frustrate the enforcement of our immigration laws”:
“This includes refusing to detain known felons under federal detainer requests, or otherwise failing to comply with these laws. For example, the Department of Homeland Security recently issued a report showing that in a single week, there were more than 200 instances of jurisdictions refusing to honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer requests with respect to individuals charged or convicted of a serious crime. The charges and convictions against these aliens include drug trafficking, hit and run, rape, sex offenses against a child and even murder.”
These “ICE detainer requests” are, not to put too fine a point on it, end runs around those basic constitutional protections against arbitrary prosecutorial action. Here’s how they work. ICE enters into agreements with local law enforcement agencies under which it (ICE) is provided with identifying information — name, Social Security Numbers, fingerprints — concerning individuals who have been arrested in the local jurisdiction. If ICE believes that the individual has violated federal immigration law, it issues a detainer request to the local law enforcement agency under 8 CFR 287.7:
(a) Any authorized immigration officer may at any time issue a Form I–247, Immigration Detainer … to any other Federal, State, or local law enforcement agency. A detainer serves to advise another law enforcement agency that the Department seeks custody of an alien presently in the custody of that agency, for the purpose of arresting and removing the alien. The detainer is a request that such agency advise the Department, prior to release of the alien, in order for the Department to arrange to assume custody, in situations when gaining immediate physical custody is either impracticable or impossible.... (d) Temporary detention at Department request. Upon a determination by the Department to issue a detainer for an alien not otherwise detained by a criminal justice agency, such agency shall maintain custody of the alien for a period not to exceed 48 hours, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays in order to permit assumption of custody by the Department.
So there you have it. Even if the alien has not been “otherwise detained” by local law enforcement, he/she shall be held in custody just on the say-so of the police (!), for up to 48 hours. No warrant required! No probable cause required! No need to deal with those pain-in-the-ass judges, who keep insisting on “due process” and the like. Hey, it’s just 48 hours — and they’re aliens, for crying out loud, and who give a damn about their constitutional rights?
If that doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you, you have a very different attitude toward police power, and police states, than I do. Jurisdictions that refuse to honor such requests are not providing “sanctuary” for people who break the law; they are providing “constitutional protections” for those individuals. The administration has started publicizing those jurisdictions here, on the ICE website, to try, I suppose, to shame them into compliance. But to my eyes, the list — Ithaca N.Y.; Travis County, Tex.; Boulder County, Colo.; Iowa City Iowa; Bernalillo, N.M. — is an honor roll of sorts of cities and counties that will not let themselves be swept up into Trump-induced hysteria about undocumented immigrants. More power to them.Literature
Where Night Meets Day Epilogue: A Perfect World...
The sun was high in the sky, shining its light over the entire world and bathing the land in the peaceful softness of spring. The pegasus saw the light spilling in the window and put down his pen, glancing with satisfaction over the words he had placed on the paper. A letter of great import… but then, weren't they all? With just a few words the world had become such a busy place.
He walked from his stuffy study, the sound of hooves on wood carrying through the newly emptied house. It was a solemn sound, but now melancholy. They weren't far, just a letter away, and one visited almost every week, already round with foal. His little filly had grown up so fast, and he'd missed so much…
He went downstairs through the familiar rooms, taking in the fresh, clean scent carried on the wind from outside. He moved quickly to the kitchen, squeezing the last few fresh lemons into fresh juice, adding some sugar and pouring two glasses, which he carried outside.
There she was, working in tA prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:
About
The EcoLight and Optics
Typical artificial light at night fundamentally changes the environment. We have designed and refined our EcoLight to cut glare, light trespass and bio-active blue-white light to minimize this impact while still providing sufficient light for us to see at night. Our EcoLight is now ready for production and distribution.
This EcoLights Kick Starter Campaign will help us pay for the industry-standard 3rd-party certifications, and production tooling. These certifications are required to be done on the volume-production model. This campaign will also increase awareness of light pollution as a problem-to-be-solved.It will enable Low-Impact Lighting to be a sustainable alternative to existing High-Impact Luminaires.
THE PROBLEM
Artificial light illuminates our cities so much that the glare and stray light undermines our ability to see into faint areas, and it impairs our natural health processes. The wasted light also produces the domes of sky glow we see from distant towns and cities across the countryside. It affects all wildlife - forcing changes in their behavior by providing miss-cues for the time of night and the seasons. It alters the biology of animals – including that of humans.
But there is a solution, or at least a compromise. We call it Low-Impact Lighting, which is provided by our EcoLights.
SOUND BASIS IN BIOLOGY AND HUMAN VISION
Low-Impact Lighting is based on the extensive study of the biological need for periods of darkness (scotobiology). I published this information in Environment Canada's Guidelines for Outdoor Lighting. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and the International Darksky Association have adopted these Guidelines, and the US National Park Service has also adapted them.
SCHEDULE
We have posted additional information here and the schedule for the project here. The engineering was done prior to this Kick Starter Project and extensive prototype testing has been completed. Therefore, the schedule is driven by the component order lead times, manufacturing schedule and certification time-lines.
USE OF FUNDS
We present the budget on the above web site. We have estimates on the bill of materials based on our production design and we have discussed the manufacturing and testing requirements with several companies and have received quotes for the work to be done.Allan Johnston's side are in a safe position in the Premiership but were knocked out of the Scottish Cup by Rangers in November
Kilmarnock manager Allan Johnston has made a surprise announcement he will leave his post in the summer.
The 41-year-old "just made my mind up before I came in" to a press conference ahead of Saturday's game with Hamilton.
He said the sale of Robbie Muirhead to Dundee United on Monday was a factor behind his decision.
"I never found out Robbie was away until five past 12 [on deadline day]. Stuff like that, it is not the way things are done," he said.
The Ayrshire side sold 18-year-old Muirhead to Scottish Premiership rivals United for £150,000 plus add-ons.
Asked about the departure of the Scotland Under-19 player, Johnston said: "There is a number of things but that certainly doesn't make your job any easier.
"It was really difficult to arrive at the decision [to leave]. It is not something you want to do.
"I trust in the players I have got but I think it is the best decision for myself and the club.
"There is a new chairman coming in and I think it is important that there is a freshness about the club and it is time to move on anyway."
Kilmarnock sit eighth in the Premiership, six points adrift of a top-six place with a game in hand, and 10 clear of the relegation zone.
Johnston added: "It is disappointing but there is still a job to be done between now and the end of the season.
"Until then I will give 110%. It is a good club and it is important we finish the season strongly."
A statement on the Kilmarnock website said the board would "now convene to consider their options".
The former Queen of the South boss - who played for Hearts, Rennes, Sunderland, Rangers and Kilmarnock among others - moved to Rugby Park in 2013 following Kenny Shiels' sacking.How much should City Hall spend on the arts? What can the city do to encourage more affordable housing for artists and involve them in development projects? And what should a mayor do to resolve the Minnesota Orchestra lockout? Mayoral candidates agreed that the arts are integral to the city’s future at a recent campaign forum at the MacPhail Center for Music, where they answered these and other questions about the role of a city leader in preserving Minneapolis’ arts scene.
Candidates showed broad support for stretching the city’s arts budget by more heavily drawing on the philanthropic and business communities, and ensuring that artists play a greater role in city planning. And they offered some insight into what’s already working.
Council Member Betsy Hodges praised a city program to cover electric utility boxes with artistic designs as an example of how art should be incorporated into everything we do, while attorney Cam Winton singled out artist-designed manhole covers as a smart way to ensure art projects align with a “municipal function.” Former City Council president Jackie Cherryhomes noted that Juxtaposition Arts has transformed the struggling intersection of West Broadway and Emerson Avenue North with public art.
Here are some of the highlights of what the candidates said at the event, moderated by Minnesota Public Radio’s Marianne Combs:
Betsy Hodges, council member :
Hodges said the city must think beyond just building art into a project and think more about affordable spaces for artists to live, including garages and carriage houses. She suggested an initiative allowing neighborhoods to apply to be a test model for using those smaller units as affordable artist housing, adding density “without adding a whole bunch of new buildings” and clustering it around public transit. A panel of people from the arts community could also determine ways to encourage inexpensive artist housing.
Hodges said she wants to make Minneapolis an arts destination and involve people from many segments of the arts community to make it happen. Millennials are choosing where they want to live before anything else, she said, underscoring that the city’s livability is key to its future growth.
Creative placemaking, or using art to transform public spaces, “is not an activity you do once in a while – it’s a way of thinking about how you govern,” said Hodges.
She said she hasn’t wait to be elected mayor to take action on the orchestra dispute, co-authoring a resolution encouraging the musicians and management to come to an agreement. Hodges said city leaders have standing in the dispute because of the public funding poured into Orchestra Hall.
Cam Winton, wind energy attorney :
Winton said he would use the “mayor’s megaphone” to continue drawing attention to the arts community, and enlist corporate and philanthropic partners to support the arts.
He stressed that he supported art spending “going to a purpose that is hand in glove with a municipal purpose,” such as grants for artists to cover graffiti-ridden walls with murals. But he slammed the Convention Center’s “mood ring” sculpture as a waste of public money.
Asked about bringing artists to the table for development projects, Winton said he would not look to add more layers to an already complicated process, though he welcomed people contributing on a volunteer basis.
“I’m hearing a lot of pandering tonight,” he said, adding that his opponents have expressed support for whatever their questioners supported during many campaign forums. “If I were to make a list of all the promises I’ve heard my worthy fellow candidates gave … it would stretch from the top of this beautiful hall down to the floor.”
Winton said that as mayor, if the orchestra lockout was not resolved by March, he would turn Orchestra Hall into a center for job training that accommodated homeless people overnight.
“You don’t get to use public dollars to build yourself a temple and then let it sit idle while vulnerable adults and children across our region lack for basic amenities,” said Winton.
Jackie Cherryhomes, former City Council president:
Cherryhomes began by highlighting several transformations of Hennepin Avenue theaters that she spearheaded while in office in the 1990s, and said as mayor she would be “deeply engaged” in the arts. She said she would build public will to allow the arts to flourish.
While she supports building arts into city infrastructure – like the manhole covers project – Cherryhomes also noted the importance of encouraging artists to start businesses using the city’s economic development funds. She said the city could partner with foundations for assistance, too, and noted the success of façade grants for businesses on West Broadway.
Cherryhomes said she’s concerned that Artspace, a developer of arts facilities with a nationwide portfolio, isn’t doing more work in Minneapolis. The city must break down barriers to building artist housing here, she said, and have a dialogue with developers.
“What excites me is how you revitalize communities using the arts,” she said. “That’s what gets me really jazzed.”
Stephanie Woodruff, software executive and member of city’s audit committee:
Woodruff said that creative placemaking is an opportunity to address poverty and the achievement gap, and also fix neighborhoods.
She’d like to do more to leverage the city’s Art-a-Whirl event, the largest open art studio tour in the country. Woodruff said the city should contact Delta Airlines and its Sky Magazine and ensure that Minneapolis is a destination spot during that annual spring weekend. “We need to leverage the hell out of that,” she said. Woodruff added that she has no problem with the city’s current arts budget of $625,000 is because it is an investment.
Woodruff joked that she has four gay husbands who fill her house with art, |
sent our stuff to Matt and a few days later he told us he’d love to sign us.
Gabe: Obviously, hymns are a spiritual song. What was your experience growing up with hymns, worship music, etc?
Dan: I grew up in one of the original nondenominational church. It was actually a inter-denominational church. A bunch of mainline churches got together in the early 1900’s and said “Let’s just be one church”. I think that’s actually kinda cool. They hired a really great architect to build them a chapel.
By the time I was in high school, for the most part it was a standard nondenominational church. But there was some traditional stuff still around. There was a specific second service that would be all hymns. So I grew up probably knowing 50 or so hymns. Not as many as someone who may have grown up Anglican or Lutheran. But I knew a good amount. I guess I liked them. I’ve never really particular cared for worship music of any kind. I’ve always gotten really distracted during worship time at church. For me, it’s a time to think about the lyrics and just meditate. I think that’s just because of me being a musician and thinking about music all day long. But I just love the idea of finding these beautiful hymn-texts and doing something new with them.
Gabe: I know what you mean about going through a worship service and micromanaging it in your head. I’m guilty too. What is it about hymns that the modern worship just isn’t really grasping?
Dan: Well there’s nothing that’s true of all hymns or true of all modern worship music. The thing about hymns is that any hymns that are around today are the champions of that era. People didn’t just stop writing songs. So if you open up a hymnal and there are like 700 hymns in it. How many of those songs are from the 1780s? There’s maybe 8 songs in that hymnal from the 1780s. How many songs are we singing in church today from the last decade or so? Like 200? But it ends up being only the best 10 songs of every decade that make it out. So it’s just kinda like about what songs make the cut. So that’s why it’s not fair to compare sometimes. Some of the songs that people are writing today will be around in 100 years. But it’s just going to be the very best ones. So there’s a quality level musically. And then there’s the lyrical aspect. Every song in a hymnal has resonated with someone lyrically or musically at some point in time. People talk about how there might be more doctrine in hymns…Pacific Gold doesn’t really focus on those types of hymns. We focus more on the hymns that have more poetic imagery.
Gabe: There’s still something about hymns that has left a fingerprint on a lot of people’s souls. If you go to a nursing home, you’ll find people that barely know their own names but could sing every word of How Great Thou Art.
Dan: Yeah, I think that’s true. I guess it’s hard to say. But also, folks in nursing homes now didn’t have access to the amount of songs that we do now. I think that if you go to a nursing home in twenty years and you play a Beatles song, you might find a really similar reaction among the baby boomers that will be there. Now we are talking about the great hymns…the greatest hits. Those songs are just stellar. You think about a song like Be Thou My Vision or Come Thou Fount…these are just perfect songs. Amazing Grace might be the greatest English language song ever written. When you get into that level, nobody can compete with that. There’s only a few songs out of the last hundred years that could compete with those. So we try to stay away from those songs because what could we possibly contribute? So we actually steer clear of tracks like that. They’re so established and…
Gabe: Songs that everyone’s done…
Dan: Yeah, song that everyone’s done…So we just leave those alone for the most part.
Gabe: Well, do you have a personal favorite hymn?
Dan: Probably Come Thou Fount. It kinda has been since college. Even though even I am getting a little sick of singing it. It’s so good though. It’s a good one to have in almost every set. I think it’s incredibly beautiful and meaningful. But I could still go a couple months in between singing it each time for variety sake.
Gabe: I saw you also have a podcast. What’s that about?
Dan: The podcast is really simple. We are just going through the album one track at a time. And we’re breaking down that song. We talk about any story we know about the original hymn. We talk about the process of rewriting it on our end and arranging it musically. And then we will also pull out our favorite musical moments…and then we solo those and listen to them separately. So at the end when we play the whole song, the listener has a greater appreciation for it. Sometimes we have guests and we chat about related topics. And that’s pretty much it!
———————————————————————————————————-
Check out this brand new Pacific Gold video from their newest release:
Be sure to check out their website http://www.pacific-gold.com for more information about their new record!
AdvertisementsPhotograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Unlike most film-set photo shoots, there are more than slick costumes and stunning locations on display in Vanity Fair’s exclusive images from Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Annie Leibovitz traveled to the rocky shores of Ireland and the closely guarded Pinewood Studios set to photograph some never-before-seen characters and confirm a rumor or two in the process. Lucasfilm has mastered the art of secret-keeping—remember that Rey didn’t hold a lightsaber in any The Force Awakens marketing— but is ready to pull back the curtain on some of The Last Jedi’s mysteries in these exclusive photographs from the Summer issue of Vanity Fair.
To help point out some significant details you might have missed, VF.com asked Pablo Hidalgo— Lucasfilm Story Group creative executive and, in the words of The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams, “keeper of all arcane details of Star Wars”—to explain some of the portfolio’s hidden depths.
One of the biggest surprises waiting in the pages of Vanity Fair is the first look at Laura Dern’s magenta-haired Admiral Amilyn Holdo. Hair this color is not commonly seen in Star Wars films, but Hidalgo confirms that Dern’s character, a high-ranking officer in the Resistance, is human. The magenta hair, he says, has to do with her “cultural background.” When quizzed on whether this is the first time a human in the films has adopted such an unnatural hue, Hidalgo responded like a walking encyclopedia with a sense of humor, “I know there was a platinum blonde in Jabba’s Palace whose hair color was probably suspicious, but only her hair dresser knows for sure.”
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
But as much as Hidalgo knows about every nook and cranny of the Star Wars universe, he and Lucasfilm did not reveal any extra details about Benicio Del Toro’s enigmatic character—not even his name. This is the Last Jedi character most shrouded in secrecy. But Vanity Fair’s David Kamp was able to wring a few hints out of director Rian Johnson in our Summer cover story, which you can read here.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Though not much is known about either of these new characters, it looks as though Dern’s Admiral Holdo would fit right in with the high-class occupants of Canto Bight—The Last Jedi’s upscale answer to the Mos Eisley cantina. It’s especially odd to see the upper echelon of the galaxy partying in The Last Jedi considering that the capital planet of the New Republic, Hosnian Prime, was blown up by the First Order’s Starkiller in The Force Awakens. Are these well-dressed patrons just fiddling while Rome burns?
“What we’re going to see in The Last Jedi,” Hidalgo explains, “are some people who have managed to carve out a life for themselves where they can live apart from the galactic struggle. They found a way to live above it or beyond it. There’s a class of wealthy that have helped build all sorts of loopholes in society that will always ensure that they’ll survive or even thrive no matter what else is happening out there.” As Johnson summed it up in our cover story, Canto Bight is “a playground, basically, for rich assholes.”
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
And though that chrome-plated trooper suit is, by now, firmly a part of the Star Wars iconography, this portfolio is the first time Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma has shown her face. “I think a big part of the allure of her character was just wondering what might be underneath,” Hidalgo explains of keeping the Game of Thrones star helmeted in the first film of the current trilogy. “It was only relatively recently that we wanted to commit to the idea that there was a human under there. The Force Awakens left that question, but as we got further into Last Jedi, as well as some other stories we’re thinking about with Phasma, we had to ask ourselves, ‘All right, do we agree there’s a human under there?’ ”
The definitely human Phasma is also sporting a slick new weapon which, Hidalgo says, “doesn’t have a fancy name yet.” (But it will—these things always do.) Unlike the weapons we’re used to seeing in Star Wars—lightsabers and blasters—Phasma’s accessory is a retractable pole arm that collapses into a smaller, easy to carry form should she ever find herself shoved down a trash compactor again. This weapon, Hidalgo says, has a strong connection to Phasma’s history, which will be explored in a comic-book series out in September. “Her background,” Hidalgo hints, “is more low-tech than many would assume.”
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Eagle-eyed Force Awakens fans may notice that Kylo Ren’s battle wound has, well, migrated since Rey slashed his face and won their lightsaber duel. Is this some kind of advanced Sith healing method? As a matter of fact, no. “It was my decision to slightly adjust it,” Rian Johnson tweeted at a fan after the first glimpse of Ren’s scar in The Last Jedi trailer raised some questions. “It honestly looked goofy running straight up the bridge of his nose.”
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Star Wars fans got to know and love Carrie Fisher’s constant canine companion, Gary, during the press tour for The Force Awakens. Who can forget a dog that so easily steals the show on national TV? Gary’s appearance in this portfolio should come as no surprise—though you might need to look closely at General Leia’s skirts before you find him. But it’s Mark Hamill’s daughter’s dog, Millie, standing at his feet, that might turn heads. Millie was also a presence on the Episode VIII set and even crashed a panel or two this year at Star Wars Celebration.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Blink and you might miss a shiny bit of bling dangling from the ceiling of the Millennium Falcon cockpit just above Chewbacca’s head. The small pair of golden dice first made a brief appearance in A New Hope and then disappeared for 38 years before popping up again on our Force Awakens cover, where you can see them swinging between the “V” and the “A.” Why do the dice come and go? Hidalgo says it’s possible the production team simply forgot about them between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. When J.J. Abrams and his team looked back at footage in order to faithfully reconstruct the Falcon for The Force Awakens, the dice made their triumphant return.
But the official in-universe story of the dice has been bedeviling fans for decades. Yes, believe it or not, those little accessories have prompted numerous legends. Here’s the official one—probably. “The story that you would hear if you traveled to cantinas or watering holes around the Star Wars galaxy,” Hidalgo says, spinning his yarn, “is that those dice were involved in a game of Corellian Spike—a dice-using version of a card game called sabacc. Rumor has it Han won the Millennium Falcon [from Lando Calrissian] with those dice. Whether or not that’s just bar talk, I can’t say.” So will those dice and that fateful gambling showdown be making an appearance in the upcoming Han Solo prequel starring Alden Ehrenreich as Han and Donald Glover as Lando? “That’s in the future,” Hidalgo says coyly. “Ask me a movie from now.”
Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Annie Leibovitz. For The Last Jedi: costume design by Michael Kaplan; production design by Rick Heinrichs. For V.F.: set design by Mary Howard. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
One of the more striking features of Skellig Michael—the real-life Irish island initially used as the location for Luke Skywalker’s new home on the planet Ahch-To—are the medieval monks’ beehive-shaped stone dwellings, visible in the final scene of The Force Awakens. As David Kamp outlines in our cover story, the huts were faithfully re-created on the (much more accessible) Dingle Peninsula for The Last Jedi. But what do those structures mean for the Star Wars universe? Are they the remains of the original Jedi temple that Luke was reportedly seeking? Or merely a local village? Turns out those huts belong to a race of non-Jedi caretaker inhabitants of Ahch-To that Rian Johnson told Kamp are “not Ewoks.” The design of the huts was dictated by the centuries-old structures on Skellig Michael, though Hidalgo says they’ve been given a few modifications to look “other-worldly.” But much of Ahch-To’s look is shaped by nature and our own crumbling history. Why mess with perfection?
The complete Annie Leibovitz portfolio, including portraits of Carrie Fisher posing with on-screen brother Mark Hamill and real-life daughter Billie Lourd, and the complete cover story by David Kamp can be found here. The Summer issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on June 1, and nationally on June 6. Readers in search of the full Vanity Fair–Star Wars experience, including all four covers, a commemorative poster, and early access to our digital editions, with lightsaber effects by Industrial Light & Magic, on May 24, can purchase here.
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VIDEO: Behind the Scenes with the Cast and Crew of The Last JediOTTAWA – In a dramatic move, House Speaker Geoff Regan kicked Conservative MP Blake Richards out of the Commons for heckling.
Amid intense questioning and raucous heckles from the opposition bench over the ongoing saga over Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s personal finances and alleged breach of federal ethics law, things reached a new level on Thursday afternoon.
"I know that there is a lot of heat here. Order. The honourable member for Banff-Airdrie will come to order or he can go outside, or be helped outside, which would he prefer?" Regan said, referring to Richards by his riding name in accordance with Parliamentary protocol.
At that point, yelling is heard on the video feed from the House of Commons and Regan repeats, "which would he prefer?"
Regan then asks the Sergeant-at-Arms to remove Alberta MP Richards.
The Sergeant-at-Arms is responsible for safeguarding the authority of the House of Commons and for the safety and security of the Parliamentary precinct.
According to MPs within the chamber at the time of the incident, Richards was followed into the House lobby by the Seargeant-at-Arms.Left-handers' brains are set up differently
The Oxford University-led team believe carrying the gene may also slightly raise the risk of developing psychotic mental illness such as schizophrenia.
The gene, LRRTM1, appears to play a key role in controlling which parts of the brain take control of specific functions, such as speech and emotion.
The study appears in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
The brain is set up in an asymmetrical way.
In right-handed people the left side of the brain usually controls speech and language, and the right side controls emotions.
However, in left-handed people the opposite is often true, and the researchers believe the LRRTM1 gene is responsible for this flip.
They also believe people with the LRRTM1 gene may have a raised risk of schizophrenia, a condition often linked to unusual balances of brain function.
Further research
Lead researcher Dr Clyde Francks, from Oxford University's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, said the next step would be to probe the impact on the development of the brain further.
No-one really understands what causes schizophrenia yet
Jane Harris
Rethink
He said: "We hope this study's findings will help us understand the development of asymmetry in the brain.
"Asymmetry is a fundamental feature of the human brain that is disrupted in many psychiatric conditions."
However, Dr Francks said left-handed people should not be worried by the links between handedness and schizophrenia.
He said: "There are many factors which make individuals more likely to develop schizophrenia and the vast majority of left-handers will never develop a problem.
"We don't yet know the precise role of this gene."
About 10% of people are left-handed.
Differences
There is evidence to suggest there are some significant differences between left and right-handed people.
Australian research published last year found left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport.
And French researchers concluded that being left-handed could be an advantage in hand-to-hand combat.
However, being left-handed has also been linked to a greater risk of some diseases, and to having an accident.
Dr Fred Kavalier, a consultant geneticist at London's Guy's Hospital, said: "I don't think left-handed people should be alarmed.
"Undoubtedly there are many, many other factors that contribute to schizophrenia. This may be a tiny little element in the big jigsaw."
'Devastating condition'
Marjorie Wallace, of the mental health charity SANE, said scientists working in its research centre in Oxford were also looking at the link between brain asymmetry and schizophrenia.
She said: "We desperately need research into the origins of psychosis to better understand why some people are more vulnerable than others.
"Then the treatment could be more targeted and carry the potential to prevent this devastating condition which affects one in 100 people worldwide."
Jane Harris, of the mental health charity Rethink, said: "No-one really understands what causes schizophrenia yet.
"It is probably a combination of factors, including genetics, problems in childbirth, viral infections, drug use, poverty and urbanisation."The Doritos Late Night line of snacks has found massive success almost entirely by word of mouth. And how could it not? I mean, in a market saturated with purely artificially flavored chips that taste kind of like the name on the bag suggests, it’s nice to be able to snack on something that actually tastes like Tacos or Jalapeno Poppers. I still remember my first bag of Tacos at Midnight. It lasted about 3.2 minutes.
The first new flavor since the now legendary line of chips launched has finally arrived in the form of All Nighter Cheeseburger. Trust me, if you love cheeseburgers, you will love these chips.
Review:
After excitedly tearing into my first bag of All Nighter Cheeseburger chips I was hit with an absolutely mouthwatering aroma. My teenage years of working as a softball umpire quickly rushed back to me. The trigger? The sweet smell of juicy, freshly grilled burgers, ketchup, and mustard. I remember being miserable, out there under the hot sun trying to pay attention to each play, tortured by the tantalizing aroma of the concession’s cheap beef patties. There is nothing as awful as being restricted from a delicious ballpark burger because you’re working.
This was my chance to make up for that. To remedy the mental scars set upon my mind and stomach, caused by the tantalizing aromatic endorphin floating through the air, the source of which was just out of reach. This is now more than snacking, this is redemption.
I grabbed that first little triangle, fingers trembling and mouth watering, and gently placed it on my tongue, praying I was able to avoid disappointment as I never could when I finally got my chubby hands around those shoddy, tasteless ballpark burgers.
Oh. My. God.
I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t think. My taste buds were blasted with more flavors than I could’ve imagined being crammed into a single chip. I could taste the sweet ketchup, the savory mustard, crisp onions and wonderful cheese sitting on top of a juicy, flavorful patty of meat. I could almost feel the texture of a real burger in my mouth. It was an outstanding first time that I shan’t soon forget.
Then I ate another. And another. And another. For half a bag I continuously stuffed these precious little corn chips into my mouth, and with each one the snack’s faults became more and more apparent. The flavor of the mustard slightly outweighs any other after a while, though not overpoweringly so. There is also a bit more onion kick than some would prefer. Also, don’t expect to kiss anyone after eating these. Your breath will stink. Nothing a piece of gum can’t fix, however. These issues are by no means any sort of deal breaker, and these chips are absolutely delicious.
Final Words
Doritos Late Night: All Nighter Cheeseburger chips are absolutely fantastic. If you enjoy chips, try these. If you enjoy burgers, try these. If you enjoy living past the age of fifty, try these and be sure to eat them only in moderation. In short, I highly recommend Doritos Late Night: All Nighter Cheeseburger flavored chips to anyone. Except for vegetarians, due to the natural beef flavor listed in the ingredients. Unless you want it to be our secret, I won’t tell anyone.
Pros
Mindblowingly delicious
Smell like cheeseburgers
Taste like cheeseburgers
Flavored with all the things that go on cheeseburgers
How can you not like cheeseburger Doritos?
Cons
Terrible breath
Maybe a bit too much mustard or onion for some people
Not vegetarian friendly
Being a softball umpire
Score: 9.5/10 (Outstanding)
http://www.everyview.com/2009/04/14/review-doritos-late-night-tacos-at-midnight/
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Like this: Like Loading...This is a Game Boy Color Wide-Boy designed for use with a Nintendo 64. I believe there was also a SNES version of the GBC Wide-Boy. (Wide-Boys are devices that are plugged into either an NES, SNES or N64 so you can see the Game Boy game on a TV, thus saving developers eyes from having to stare at the little screens all day long). This hardware was manufactured by Intelligent Systems (the company that produced most of Nintendo's official Development Hardware).
Most of the Game Boy Color hardware is inside the N64 cartridge (there is very little circuitry inside the Game Boy itself, it's basically just a controller). The game can be seen on the GBC LCD screen as well as the TV itself.
Game Boy Color Wide-Boy in operation.
Inside the N64 Cartridge (where you can see the CPU CGB chip):
CGB MONITOR(D)ZURICH -- FIFA says it has taken control of Argentina's football federation from the current leadership and will help pick an emergency panel to manage its affairs.
FIFA announced the decision Friday, two days before the Lionel Messi-led Argentina team plays the Copa America Centenario final against Chile in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
On Thursday, Argentina soccer body president Luis Segura -- a member of FIFA's ruling council -- was charged with fraud related to TV broadcasting rights.
Led by Julio Grondona since the 1970s, the federation has been in turmoil since the late FIFA senior vice president died in 2014.
FIFA says a so-called "normalization committee" of up to seven members "will be in charge of running the daily affairs" of the Argentine body.
Elections must be organized by July 2017.Ever since I tasted my first batch of Roasted Ginger and Coconut Soup, I’ve been sipping it plain, throwing whatever vegetables and mushrooms I have into it, and using it to make this version of vegan ramen. Whether you use fresh or dried noodles, this bowl is perfect on chilly evenings when you want something comforting and filling after a long day.
If you are short on time, make the broth beforehand and reheat it quickly before serving. Throw whatever vegetables and mushrooms you have on hand into it. If frying tofu isn’t your thing, then cube it and give it a quick saute instead. Tempeh, seitan, soy curls or baked wheat gluten are also great in ramen, or you can leave them out altogether for a lighter dish.
Check out this graphic for more ways you can customize a vegan ramen bowl, based on your taste preferences and ingredients that are seasonally available. It’s not completely comprehensive, but breaks down the five main parts that typically make up vegan ramen.
I have to admit I’ve been making this once or twice a week for the past month or so, it’s so good! Check out more vegan soup ideas here.President Donald Trump will lay a wreath on former president Andrew Jackson’s grave on Wednesday before holding a rally for supporters in Nashville, Tennessee, according to CNN.
It’s another symbolic gesture towards Jackson’s legacy as a self-made man who represented the common people over the elites enraged by his rise. Trump hung a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office five days into his presidency.
“There hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson,” Trump said at the time of his inauguration. The president admires Jackson, calling him “an amazing figure in American history—very unique so many ways.” Trump especially respected Jackson’s “ability to never give up.”
Trump’s advisors have compared him and his populist, nationalist movement to Jackson. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called Trump’s inauguration speech “Jacksonian,” and said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that “like Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.”
“I’d say [Donald Trump] is the best public orator since William Jennings Bryan, and he has a better sense of the pulse of the people than any President at least since Andrew Jackson,” White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller told ABC News in February.
As Breitbart News’ Warner Todd Huston pointed out, the elites excoriated Jackson for letting the common man make themselves heard. Like Trump, Jackson rallied enormous numbers of Americans together while pursuing a populist agenda.
“No one who was at Washington at the time of General Jackson’s inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death,” journalist and author Arthur J. Stansbury recalled at the time, as explained in a biography of Francis Scott Key.
“To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass,” he continued. “The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. On that memorable occasion you might tell a ‘Jackson man’ almost as far as you could see him. Their every motion seemed to cry out ‘Victory!’”
The Obama administration had wanted to remove Jackson from the $20 bill.
Read Breitbart News’ explanation of Jackson’s legacy, and the Trump agenda’s connection to it, here.Surely you've noticed them. The urban hipsters on their retro steel frames. Commuters lugging backpacks and pannier bags. Racers in spandex. They're bicyclists, and by all measures, they're multiplying on Twin Cities streets. This spring Bicycling Magazine named Minneapolis "America's Best Biking City," edging out perennial powerhouse Portland, to the chagrin of Oregonians, and to the surprise of the rest of the country. Despite our tough winters, we have the second-most bike commuters per capita, more than 120 miles of bike lanes and paths, and the nation's newest and largest bike-share program.
But while we're finally starting to receive the attention we're due as a cycling mecca, there's another phenomenon just beneath the surface that's gone largely unrecognized by most non-bikers. The Twin Cities are gradually but surely becoming a central hub in the national bike economy.
Consider this: We're home to the biggest bicycle parts supplier in North America and, presumably, the world; the largest bike tool manufacturer; two of the nation's leading bike retailers; the largest distributor of road biking goods and apparel; one of the premier triathlon shops in the country; and the list of superlatives could go on.
But how, you might ask, can this be possible, in a region that can see snow up to eight months out of the year?
"Cycling is just part of the culture here," says Bill Armas, director of marketing at St. Paul-based Park Tool, the world's leading bicycle tool manufacturer and the company that invented both the bike storage hook and the world's most popular bike repair stand. The California native moved here 5 1/2 years ago and was astounded by what he saw. "In California people bike to bike. They dress in their cycling gear to be seen. In Minnesota you'll see kids biking to soccer practice, guys in suits headed downtown, college students, and, yes, road bikers and mountain bikers, too."
Snow, surprisingly enough, might even be an asset for some cycling businesses. "Four seasons is helpful for testing our products," says Gary Sjoquist, advocacy director at Quality Bicycle Products, North America's (and probably the world's) largest bike parts supplier. "We've got many lines designed for all weather conditions, and we can take our products right out our back door any time of year."
The Friendly Giants
As the Twin Cities are to the nation's bike culture, QBP is to the cycling industry: A quiet-and most would agree, friendly-giant. Founded by Steve Flagg in a tiny St. Paul office in 1981, Quality now supplies more than 5,000 dealers worldwide from its state-of-the-art, eco-friendly distribution center, unassumingly nestled next to Hyland Lake in West Bloomington.
Most non-cyclists have never heard of QBP but over the past decade they've begun to extend their reach well beyond bike parts and into entire lines of new bikes (some launched by them, others bought and revived). And while their reach is national, even global, Quality's growth is cited by local shop owners as a catalyst for their own.
"We really kind of feed off of one another," observes Erik Saltvold, CEO and founder of Erik's Bike Shop, one of the nation's largest bike retailers, with 16 locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. "You have a successful company like QBP, and that grows, and we grow together. We support the strong cycling culture that's developed here and in turn they support us."
Pat Sorensen, president and owner of Penn Cycle and Fitness, agrees. "It really builds on itself. As cycling becomes more visible in the community more people decide to try it, which makes it more visible."
In addition to QBP, Sorensen points to another major bike company in the region that has helped his company grow: Trek, the nation's largest bike manufacturer, based in Waterloo, Wis. "We were Trek's first customer," recalls Sorensen. "I still remember [Trek co-founder] Bevel Hogg walking through the door in the middle of a February blizzard and asking us if we wanted to buy some bike frames."
After establishing themselves as one of the nation's leading Schwinn dealers in the ‘60s and ‘70s (and continuing through the ‘90s) Penn hitched their star to the Trek juggernaut in the 1976 and has grown into not only one of the nation's largest volume Trek dealers, but (like Erik's) one of the largest bike retailers period.
Just think of that. The Twin Cities metropolitan area, 16th largest in the U.S., supports two of the country's biggest bike retailers. It's yet another sign of the strength of our cycling culture, and the emergence of bicycling as an important sector in our local economy.
The Independents
But it's not just the large multi-location shops, and big parts and tool suppliers that feed our vibrant bike culture and economy. The Twin Cities are home to an astonishing array of quirky and colorful independent shops and service businesses, like One on One Bicycle Studio in downtown Minneapolis, a bike shop, cafe, bike art gallery and cyclists' refuge.
Co-owner Gene Oberpriller says his shop has customers from across the demographic spectrum, from "people with incomes below $30,000 using their bikes as transportation to those who'll drop $6,000 to $7,000 on a custom bike."
"But our strongest segment is city cycling. Fixed gear, single speed, urban freestyle, commuters, recreational riders. Our customers tend to live and work downtown."
The bike shop/cafe model has become a way for smaller shops to differentiate themselves from their larger competitors, providing a neighborhood feel and a meeting place for cyclists. The recently opened Angry Catfish fits the mold, offering French press and single-cup coffee made to order, along with high-end road, mountain and city bikes in the Standish neighborhood of Minneapolis.
There are shops dedicated to racers, a la Flanders Brothers (Minneapolis) and Grand Performance (St. Paul); and shops that sell to families (Penn has been voted best family bike shop in the country three times in the past five years). There are those that specialize in recumbent bikes, single speed and fixed gear bikes, BMX and comfort bikes, even cargo bikes and adult trikes; you get the picture. Our metropolitan area supports upwards of 100 bike shops.
But perhaps the best bellwether of the health of the local cycling economy is the proliferation of small businesses that don't sell a single bike. Specialty bike product and service businesses have proliferated across the metro area. Dero Bike Racks in Minneapolis manufactures functional and artistic racks for cities, schools, business and consumers; HED Wheels, operating out of Shoreview, builds some of the industry's best road bike racing wheels; Edina-based Banjo Brothers produces bike bags and accessories for commuters and recreational cyclists; Twin Six Alternative Cycling Apparel designs award-winning jerseys, shorts and other apparel; and a host of businesses have developed around coaching, training and performance.
Fix Studio in Minneapolis is a prime example. Owner Larry Foss and his wife-former professional cyclist Sophie St. Jacques-offer professional bike fitting, lactate testing and power-based indoor bike training, along with sports massage and corrective exercise. Business has been brisk enough for The Fix to move their operation from their Washington Avenue location to a much larger space in Nokomis.
We also have a remarkably robust independent frame-building community, including nationally recognized builders like Capricorn, Clockwork, Peacock Groove, Vincent Dominguez and Wyganowski. These builders craft hand-made, full-custom bikes one at a time. An exhaustive list of independent bike-related businesses is far too large to include here, but it goes to show how our robust bike culture has created an incredible incubator for small bike businesses.
The Balance Sheet
Let's get to the bottom line. Just how much money is generated by the business of biking in the Twin Cities, and how does this burgeoning segment in our local economy stack up?
As privately held businesses, few are willing to publicly divulge detailed financial data, but off-the-record conversations yield an estimate of the revenue generated by the largest local businesses (QBP, Erik's Bikes, Penn Cycle, Park Tool, etc.) around $260 million dollars annually.
How about the abundance of independent shops? Fred Clements, executive director of the National Bicycle Dealers Association, says a typical independent bike retailer generates revenues around $700,000 per year and operates as a sole proprietorship from one location with five to seven staff. Usually they make just enough to pay their employees, cover facility costs, develop small-scale advertising campaigns and pay themselves a modest salary. Margins in the bike business are extremely tight, with most shops generating just 1 to 2 percent profit before taxes.
"It really is a labor of love for most owners," observes Clements. "The higher-profit shops might make 5 or 6 percent if they're really well run, but most are in it for the love of it." Clements' organization helps these businesses by promoting professional management through education and networking. He says that as retailers grow and become multi-location businesses they have to operate more efficiently and adopt strong business management methods to succeed.
So, by subtracting the two biggest retailers (Erik's and Penn) from the mix of approximately 100 bike sellers we have another $50 million to add to the kitty.
Finally, the contributions of the various bike-related product and service businesses are difficult to quantify, but most have a couple of employee-owners with profits just sufficient to pay their salaries. Average revenues are around $200,000 with approximately 25 or so businesses. Ring up another $5 million.
Cha-ching; $315 million a year is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, it's not the multi-billion-dollar medical device industry, a known driver of our local economy, but according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis it's approaching the size of "forestry, fishing and related activities," which accounts for roughly $370 million of output. And bicycling has many other important but less tangible economic impacts.
"It's tricky to measure the specific contribution that biking for transportation, recreation and fitness make to the fuzzy notion of ‘quality of life' in the Twin Cities," says Joe Mahon, economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and himself a year-round bike commuter. "But these amenities probably play a role in attracting talented and educated people in the same way that a good school system does, and that has a real effect on economic growth, even if it can't be measured."
The Public Sphere
This is one of the many reasons the promotion of bicycling has become a rallying point for politicians across the political spectrum. There's no bigger proponent for cycling in local government than Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. Rybak was instrumental in cementing the public/private partnership that brought us the Freewheel Midtown Bike Center, additional investments in the Midtown Greenway-now the nation's |
ever seen in my life.” Did she overstate things? Now that I’ve seen the show (for the first time), I don’t think she did.
Much of what there is to say about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony- and Pulitzer-winning musical play (he wrote music, book and lyrics) has already been said. Based on the 2004 biography by Ron Chernow, Miranda utilizes the contemporary idiom of rap to relay the remarkable story of one of the pivotal figures in U.S. history, Alexander Hamilton. The play is performed by (mostly) actors of color, in a hip-hop style that would probably have been anathema to the play’s subjects, perhaps even if they’d lived today. But despite the ostensible gap between the prevailing culture of that time and our own, and the piece’s often frenetic musical language, the essence of Hamilton’s story — a struggling, poverty-stricken immigrant who rose nearly to the top, then lost it all — is beautifully and brilliantly rendered.
EXPAND Michael Luwoye and the Hamilton company Joan Marcus
Unlike his sometime friend, rival and ultimate nemesis Aaron Burr, who was from a wealthy, prominent family in New Jersey, Hamilton was born poor and out of wedlock in the West Indies. As a youth, he was so bright and promising that local merchants banded together to pay for his education at what is now Columbia University in New York. The ambitious Hamilton became a favorite of George Washington, the colonies’ universally respected leader (generating lots of jealousy in political circles). It was Hamilton, a Federalist, who insisted upon — and prevailed — in establishing the U.S. banking system, without which the new nation probably would not have survived. The bank’s establishment facilitated great wealth for many savvy and unprincipled investors, but Hamilton, a man of integrity despite his ambition, never exploited his position for personal gain.DETROIT — On the face of it, Ana Rivera could have had almost any choice when it came to educating her two sons. For all the abandoned buildings and burned-down houses in her neighborhood in the southwest part of this city, national charter school companies had seen a market and were setting up shop within blocks of each other, making it easier to find a charter school than to buy a carton of milk.
But hers became the story of public education in a city grasping for its comeback: lots of choice, with no good choice.
She enrolled her older son, Damian, at the charter school across from her house, where she could watch him walk into the building. He got all A’s and said he wanted to be an engineer. But the summer before seventh grade, he found himself in the back of a classroom at a science program at the University of Michigan, struggling to keep up with students from Detroit Public Schools, known as the worst urban district in the nation. They knew the human body is made up of many cells; he had never learned that.
When his school stopped assigning homework, Ms. Rivera tried enrolling Damian at other charters, but the deadlines were past, the applications onerous. Finally, she found him a scholarship at a Catholic school, where he struggled to rise above D’s all year. “He doesn’t want to hear the word engineering,” she said.It looks like we’re closing in on what appears to be another launch of an Intel CPU lineup. Otherwise there is no way explaining why there are this many leaks surfacing regarding unreleased products. Some forum user from Dutch website Hardware.info has apparently had his hands on an upcoming Intel Core i9 7900X (10 core) as well as an Intel core i9 7920X (12 core).Both of the upcoming chips have been tested using a benchmark called “Userbenchmark”. Since I’ve personally never toyed around with this suite I downloaded and ran it checking what one of my “office PC’s” can achieve. The particular system I’m sitting in front of atm is equipped with an Intel Core i7-7700K processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card and Klevv memory running at some mere 2133 MHz (I like stability). Regarding the relevant integer and floating point numbers my system scored 139 Points Single core, 499 Points Quad core and 733 Points Multi core. Now that we’ve established some sort of a baseline for this benchmark the numbers from the user from Hardware.info forums.The 10 core Skylake X part was able to score 107 Points Single core, 434 Points Quad core and 1467 Point Multi Core. In the case of the rather massive 12 core Skylake X chip the results were 130 Points Single core, 502 Points Quad Core and 1760 Points Multi core.Comparing the results to a Core i7-7700K it becomes clearly visible that the upcoming Skylake parts have a lower max Turbo clock than the current Kaby Lake mainstream chip, since this one cranks out 139 Points Single core the others are approximately 23% (i9 7900X) and 6.5% (i9 7920X) slower. Moving on to the quad core testing routine we see that the Core i7-7700K scores 499 points, while the i9-7900K achieves 434 Points (13% slower) and the Core i9-7920X reaches 502 Points (0.6% quicker). As expected the whole picture really starts to change when looking at Multi core performance. While the i7-7700K reaches 733 points the i9-7900X cranks out 1467 Points (200.1% faster) and the i9-7920X achieves 1760 Points (240.1% faster).On another note it’s rather important to know that the Core i9-7900X was running at 3.1 GHz and the Core i9-7920X ran the test routine at 3.25 GHz, which stands into comparison to the 4.5 GHz the Core i7-7700K was running at. Normalizing the values we see that the IPC performance of the Core i9-7900X is 11.7% higher than the i7-7700K’s. Normalizing the IPC of the Core i9-7920X on the Core i7-7700K we see that the difference in IPC performance is 29.5% in favor of the new Skylake X part.The fact that it appears that the IPC performance of the upcoming Skylake X parts in an integer test is up to 29.5% higher than with the current Skylake Core i7-7700K actually comes as a rather big surprise to us. After - what felt like - countless launches without any reasonable gain in IPC performance, we finally see a boost in performance per clock. Nevertheless, the there are huge differences regarding the gains in IPC performance between the two upcoming Core i9 parts and that actually makes us question either the results we’re looking at here or the reliability/stability of the benchmark that was used.So far we would strongly recommend taking these results with more than just a grain of salt - maybe better a handful of salt - and wait until some proper reviews or even leaks come along.Source: Hardware.info & some calculations from Marc “rewarder” Büchel - ocaholicThree people of a family were killed late on Tuesday by some unknown assailants in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh.
Police said the deceased Sunil Jaiswal (60) and his wife Kamini (55) had come back home late night and had just rung the door bell when two unidentified bike-borne assailants came and opened indiscriminate fire on them. Hrithik (25) their lone son opened the door and was shot at also.
All the three died on the spot, as firing rent the air, many people in neighbourhood rushed out to see one person tried to raise an alarm he was also shot at by the assailants who fled the crime scene.
Angry locals alleged that when the crime was taking place they had stopped two police constables and sought help but they refused, saying the area was not under their jurisdiction. The locals also threatened to shut the city if the assailants were not arrested in 24-hours.
An official said the crime appears to have been executed by professionals as they were wearing masks and appeared to have done a reeky of the area before they committed the actual crime. So far, the police has not been able to identify the probable reason behind the murders.
#WATCH: Trader shot dead in Sitapur, along with his son and wife, last night; assailants fled with cash. (CCTV) pic.twitter.com/Q4pr0DfOyO ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 7, 2017
ALSO READ: Mathura jewellers' killing: Five, including main accused, arrestedDepression or psychotic illness is experienced by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the UK. James Gallagher talks to the psychiatrists investigating this new understanding of mental illness and to people who may benefit from treatments aimed at the immune systems rather than their brain cells.
“I believe this is one of the strongest discoveries in psychiatry in the last twenty years”, says Professor Carmine Pariante of his and other research on the immune system and depression. "It allows us to understand depression no longer as just a disorder of the mind and not even a disorder of the brain, but a disorder of the whole body. It shifts conceptually what we understand about depression."
James also talks to New York journalist Susannah Cahalan. She began to experience paranoid delusions and florid hallucinations when her immune system made damaging antibodies against part of the molecular circuitry in her brain. Treatment to eliminate the antibodies prevented her committal to psychiatric hospital. Psychiatrist professor Belinda Lennox at the University of Oxford says she has evidence that a significant proportion of people presenting for the first time with psychotic symptoms are victims of a similar autoimmune problem.
(Photo: Brain Cells © Science Photo Library)The Lotus Esprit submarine car used in the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me" was sold at a London auction for $920,167.
Actually, it's not really a car at all. The white, wedge-shaped vehicle has no wheels - it's more of a car-shaped submarine.
Another car was used for the movie's driving shots, and separate car parts were used for the close-up shots in which a Lotus's wheels turn into wing-like fins.
But this was the vehicle that got most of the screen time.
In the film, Bond, played by Roger Moore, is seen piloting the sub with a passenger, played by Barbara Bach, inside a dry compartment. But the submarine doesn't actually have anything like an automobile's interior.
The Lotus is a so-called "wet submarine," meaning that it fills with water when submerged, so the driver has to wear a wetsuit and breathe air from a tank.
After shooting was completed for the 1977 film, the submarine was displayed at car shows and used to promote the movie.
The film's promoters then put the sub into a storage locker on New York's Long Island. They paid a 10-year lease for the unit in advance and the vehicle was, shortly thereafter, forgotten about.
Mercedes sells at auction for record $30 million
When the lease ran out and the storage company was unable to locate the locker's owner, its contents were put up for sale in a blind auction. No-one knew what was in the locker. A local couple won the bidding for less than $100, and went into the locker to find the finned Lotus inside.Foxconn has been planning to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers and it looks like that change, albeit gradual, is about to start.
The company is allegedly paying $25,000 per robot – about three times a worker’s average salary – and they will replace humans in assembly tasks. The plans have been in place for a while – I spoke to Foxconn reps about this a year ago – and it makes perfect sense. Humans are messy, they want more money, and having a half-a-million of them in one factory is a recipe for unrest. But what happens after the halls are clear of careful young men and women and instead full of whirring robots? What happens to China’s “burgeoning” economy?
The original story is short on details but it seems that the robots will work alongside employees and not replace them outright – although some crowding could occur.
“If you say that, on an assembly line original 10 workers, assembly line is replaced by the use of robots, it means that 10 workers will lose their jobs,” said Xie Gang, Taiyuan University of Technology School of Information Engineering, doctoral tutor, short term The “robot strategic bound associated with a number of production workers laid-off.
I’ll be asking around at Foxconn in regards to how many workers will actually be replaced, but it looks like those 1 million workers may be soon replaced by 1 million automatons.
via Singularity HubImage copyright The Bookseller Image caption The winner of the prize will be decided by public vote
Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space is among the contenders for a prize given annually to the year's oddest book title.
This year's seven-strong shortlist includes Too Naked for the Nazis, Soviet Bus Stops and Reading from Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus.
The winner of the Diagram Prize is decided by public vote.
Previous winners include How to Poo on a Date and Goblin-proofing One's Chicken Coop.
Reading the Liver: Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy, Paper Folding with Children and Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers complete this year's line-up.
All the titles were nominated by industry insiders and members of the public - aside from Too Naked for the Nazis, which was put forward by its author.
Diagram Prize: 2016 shortlist
Image copyright The Bookseller
Reading the Liver: Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy, by William Furley and Victor Gysembergh (an academic study on sacrificial sheep)
Too Naked for the Nazis, by Alan Stafford (a biography of a musical hall troupe)
Paper Folding with Children, by Alice Hornecke and translated by Anna Cardwell (origami for children)
Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space: A Consideration of Cult Film, by Mark Kirwan-Hayhoe
Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers, by Mark Avery and Keith Betton
Soviet Bus Stops, by Christopher Herwig (photographs of bus stops from the former Soviet Union)
Reading from Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus, by Jonathan Allan
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The nominees for this year's oddest book title have been announced
"Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space is not only a trenchant examination of cult film, but would be an excellent theme for your next fancy dress party," commented The Bookseller's diarist Horace Bent, dubbed 'the custodian of the prestigious Diagram Prize'.
The prize, now in its 38th year, was originally conceived in 1978 by Trevor Bounford and Bruce Robertson of The Diagram Group as a way to alleviate boredom at Frankfurt's annual book fair.
It was first awarded to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Two years - 1987 and 1991 - had no award due to the lack of odd titles.
The Bookseller has hosted the prize since 1982 and invites members of the public to vote for their favourite title on its website.CHICAGO -- Late in the evening Tuesday, long after the Bulls' desultory loss to San Antonio, Joakim Noah finally appeared and stood near his locker in full uniform for his regular postgame media debriefing.
The tallest Bull was upset but not angry.
Taj Gibson might not be a starter for the Bulls, but there's no doubting his importance. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
His team had gotten blown out early by the methodical Spurs, only creeping back to respectability -- and a 104-96 loss -- during "Jimmer Time" in the fourth quarter.
Noah takes losses hard -- "It'll be tough to go to bed tonight," he said -- and the only victories he really celebrates come against the Miami Heat, whom the Bulls had defeated just two days prior.
So when a reporter asked Noah if the makeup of the locker room helps the team bounce back from these types of games, he barely blinked before giving his answer.
"I don't take anything for granted, this team doesn't take anything for granted," Noah said. "Just because you usually do something doesn't mean it just happens. You gotta go out there and do it."
A bounce-back victory seemed to be in the cards, and the Bulls went out and got one.
As reporter and subject expected, Chicago bounced back with a vengeance Thursday night, drubbing the Houston Rockets 111-87. It was a fun victory -- and a gutty one.
After Mike Dunleavy got nailed above his eye by a Chandler Parsons' elbow in the second quarter, he returned with 10 stitches to score all 21 of his points in the second half.
"He had a huge knot on his head looking like [Evander] Holyfield, the white version, coming out there putting on a new jersey, gutting it out in the second half," Noah told reporters.
Bloodied but unbowed -- that's the Bulls this season.
This isn't a very tough team to figure out. The Bulls aren't about tricks. Coach Tom Thibodeau's defense isn't about gimmicks. From Jimmy Butler's lockdown defense to Taj Gibson's hammer dunks, this team wins through execution and effort. Simple to explain but hard to maintain for most teams.
With Derrick Rose out again and a crop of free agents on the horizon, the temptation is to think about the future, which is really only less than four months away. Noah swatted away the "recruiting Carmelo Anthony" stories. He's focused on the present.“I know you’re all wondering why I called you together,” David Crosby said to peals of laughter as he sat down. Mr. Crosby, the crinkly folk-rock eminence, had come to Lil’ Frankie’s in the East Village for dinner with a half-dozen members of the group he once hailed on Twitter as “quite possibly the most advanced band in the world... certainly the best I’ve heard/seen.”
That would be Snarky Puppy, a barnstorming, groove-centric instrumental act with a rabid fan base and a blithely unplaceable style. And if the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s probably just a matter of time.
Snarky Puppy, which won a recent Grammy and is up for another one this month, has carved out an improbably strong niche with its brand of revved-up jazz fusion. The group’s style, a convergence of high precision and whimsy, makes it a quintessential live band — even most of its studio albums were made with an audience in the room. The sessions are filmed, for release on DVD and YouTube, which is how the band’s audience ratcheted up to global scale. A D.I.Y. juggernaut, it has a new label — GroundUp, with international distribution through Universal Music Classics — that will release “Family Dinner Volume Two,” the group’s 10th album, on Friday, Feb. 12.
The band had convened before a screening of the film that accompanies the record, and fittingly, there was room at the table for Mr. Crosby and a few other artists who appear on the LP: the guitarist Charlie Hunter and the singer-songwriters Becca Stevens and Chris Turner. The album’s guest roster also includes the Malian Afro-pop singer Salif Keita, the Afro-Peruvian folk singer Susana Baca and the neotraditional Swedish band Vasen.
That eclectic coalition, which intermingles throughout the album, feels true to the spirit of Snarky Puppy, a band rooted first and foremost in gut-level cohesion. “There’s a humility in their approach to music, which is special in today’s climate,” said Lalah Hathaway, who shared a Grammy for best R&B performance with the band in 2014. (Snarky Puppy is nominated this year for best contemporary instrumental album, for “Sylva.”)
“One of their strengths is that they listen to each other constantly, and they make room for each other,” said Mr. Crosby, who became a fan by watching the band’s YouTube videos. “They’re funky, and they swing, and they affect you emotionally. It’s not an intellectual exercise for them.”
For anyone familiar with the peak years of fusion, when Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra were playing to fervent young arena crowds, Snarky Puppy can seem like a reclamation and a throwback. It’s not alone: Within the last several years, since clawing its way out of obscurity, Snarky Puppy has become the most visible of a crop of young bands building on a foundation of funk, rock, hip-hop and electronic music, typically with streamlined internal combustion and an overlay of vaulting, anthemic melody.
Recent examples extend from the trumpeter Christian Scott’s arresting album “Stretch Music” (Ropeadope) to “Man Made Object” (Blue Note), a stylish but vaporous new effort by the British trio GoGo Penguin, which has been booked to play Coachella. What Snarky Puppy brings to the equation, more than any original musical ideas, is vigorous proficiency, a firm collective identity and an air of generous accessibility fueled by a killer work ethic.
Michael League, the band’s bassist and leader, is a tousle-headed former military brat with the chipper self-possession of a summer-camp counselor. “If you asked me what genre we’re in,” he said over tea, “I would say ‘instrumental pop.’ But that makes it sound like we’re opening for Kenny G.”
Mr. League formed Snarky Puppy after his freshman year at the University of North Texas (in Denton), which has one of the oldest jazz programs in the country. “Because I was so bad,” he recalled, “I didn’t place into any of the school ensembles. So Snarky Puppy was my way of getting to play.” The band released its debut album on Ropeadope in 2006, when all of its members were still students.
About a year later, Mr. League was hired for a church gig outside Dallas. There he met musicians including the keyboardist Bernard Wright, a former session ace turned crossover R&B solo artist, who became his mentor. Before long, Mr. League and a few of his band mates were playing five church services a week.
“So that’s where the music went from white jazz-school stuff to something groovier, funkier, more communicative with the audience,” he said. “Less nerdy.” Most members of the band have sideman careers; the drummer Robert Searight, known as Sput, has worked with Erykah Badu, Justin Timberlake and Kendrick Lamar.
These days, it’s not unusual for the band to perform for a few thousand people, most of whom are prepared to scat the wriggling melody of a tune like “Lingus.” (Consult a Buenos Aires show from Nov. 15, which is available for download or as part of a new 32-CD boxed set, “World Tour 2015.”) The raucous enthusiasm of the crowds, paired with the fan-service business model, would seem to place Snarky Puppy in the lineage of proggish, post-Phish jam bands like Umphrey’s McGee.
“But I feel even less like a part of the jam-band thing than the jazz thing,” Mr. League said. Pressed to elaborate, he fell quiet for 10 seconds. “Because,” he finally said, “the band plays best and feels best when our music is being absorbed in a certain way that’s not really typical of the jam-band scene. When we have an audience that’s silent and listening, we’re able to play dynamically and really explore things musically that we can’t when we have a crowd that’s partying.”
The footage from “Family Dinner Volume Two,” which was made in New Orleans during Mardi Gras last year, underscores the point. Audience members sit interspersed with the band, wearing headphones. The atmosphere in Esplanade Studios, a converted church, falls somewhere between a concert taping and an open rehearsal. The two constants are a high level of musicianship and an equivalent spirit of camaraderie.
“To all of us that joined in on it,” Mr. Crosby said, “it felt like one of the best musical experiences of our lives.” As a token of his continuing faith in Mr. League, they are working together on an album of Mr. Crosby’s new songs, performed in a sparse acoustic style.
Snarky Puppy has carried its good will forward in other ways, mobilizing GroundUp as a platform. This year, the label, run by Mr. League and Andy Hurwitz, the founder of Ropeadope, will release new albums by Mr. Hunter; the singer-songwriter Michelle Willis; and the Funky Knuckles, a fusion band from Dallas. There will also be at least one album apiece by the Snarky Puppy keyboardists Cory Henry and Bill Laurance.
And the 11th Snarky Puppy album, “Culcha Vulcha,” is due out in June. Recorded in a studio in El Paso, with no audience or guests, it features a congress of musicians from the band’s extended roster, known as the Fam. Mr. League described the sound of the album as patient and restrained, by Snarky Puppy standards: “Darker, less fireworks, much more rich and warm and distorted.”
The band has lately been veering away from fusion, he said, though it’s unclear where exactly that road leads, for the band or for its fans, who represent a sort of continuum.
“Sometimes it’s ‘Oh, my dad told me about you,’ and sometimes it’s ‘Oh, my son told me about you,’” he said. “It’s funny. And you know, jazz, jam band, fusion: I don’t know where we are. But because the band has such a rapport — from 12 years of touring, over 1,200 concerts, 11 albums — our mix of styles doesn’t sound disparate. It just sounds like Snarky Puppy.”“Giving away nuclear capabilities to our enemies, that’s what we are talking about.”
A fired-up Sebastian Gorka, appearing on FOX News with Sean Hannity, compared the Clinton’s Uranium One scandal, in which the Clintons receiving millions in “donations” while simultaneously the Hillary Clinton-led Obama State Department approved the sale of 20% of American uranium to the Russians, is a “treasonous” act that deserves to be treated in the same way that the infamous traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — the “Rosenbergs” — were punished for transmitting nuclear weapons to the Russians in the 1950’s — with a trip to the electric chair to be executed.
“Here’s the big picture take away, Sean. For more than a year, the fake news industrial complex and the Democrats and Hillary and Podesta and Ben Rhodes have been slinging filth against the president and against his team. None of it has stock but in the last week, we’ve had an explosion of scandals that all are true and that all go back to the DNC and to Hillary. There are so many scandals, we have to separate them. Number one, there’s the Uranium One deal. That’s treasonous. We have to deal with that. The dodgy dossier which is about Russian disinformation being used to slander Donald Trump and then thirdly, there’s James Comey using that disinformation to create a special prosecutor trigger that is used to investigate the president. And then lastly, the fourth story is Fusion GPS. How many stories are out there that are fake, that came from Moscow and Which were peddled by Fusion GPS into the left-wing media? That’s four scandals in one week, Sean.”
“The Russians infiltrated our national security to corner the uranium market and they succeeded and they knew all the crimes that were committed,” Sean Hannity responded.
“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Sebastian Gorka asserted. “The Rosenbergs, okay? This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did and those people got the chair. Think about it. Giving away nuclear capabilities to our enemies, that’s what we are talking about,” he contended.
The Hill’s John Solomon reported the bombshell story on October 17, that the Obama FBI had evidence as early as 2009 that Russian operatives used bribes, kickbacks and other dirty tactics to expand Moscow’s atomic energy footprint in the U.S. through Uranium One at the same time the Department of State, led by Hillary Clinton, was approving the sale of 20% of American uranium — the fuel for nuclear bombs — to the Russians, a country that is considered to be longtime enemies of America.Proving that anti-gay Congressman Steve King is an idiot, an Iowa man tries and fails to marry his lawnmower.
Previously, and repeatedly, Rep. King, an extreme conservative Christian Republican from Iowa, has made the absurd claim that a person can marry an inanimate object like a lawnmower as a result of the recent and historic Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex marriage and making marriage equality the law of the land.
Last week King repeated the assertion that with the change in marriage law following the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court ruling, marriage only requires one person; therefore, according to King, “you can marry a lawnmower.”
King has lamented the ruling as a troubling shift from the supposed historical tradition of one man and one woman, claiming:
I had a strong, Christian lawyer tell me yesterday that, under this decision that he has read, what it brings about is: It only requires one human being in this relationship — that you could marry your lawnmower with this decision. I think he’s right.
Enter intrepid reporter Pat Rynard. Writing for the Iowa Starting Line, Raynard, expressing an unnatural fondness towards his lawnmower, decided to take Rep. King up on his promise.
Rynard, with beloved lawnmower in tow, went to the Polk County Recorder’s office in downtown Des Moines earlier this week to procure a marriage license for himself and his beloved lawnmower.
Hilarity ensues.
The following is a transcript between Rynard and Polk County Recorder Julie Haggerty:
Haggerty: Ok, the answer to that would be no. First of all – well, I should back up a bit and say how old is your lawnmower? Rynard: Maybe six or seven years. Haggerty: You have to be 18 years old to get a marriage license. And the other person, the other party needs to be able to sign a contract, has to have a government ID, and has to be able to have a witness who says they can enter into a contract. So I think on those counts alone you can’t marry your lawnmower. Rynard: Now is it because I’m already married to a woman? Would I have to divorce her first? With the stuff Steve King is saying, it seems like everything is fair game now. Haggerty: See, I should probably have asked that question first, are you married? Because if you’re still married, obviously you can’t enter into a contract. Rynard: Ok, so no marriage with my lawnmower? Haggerty: No marriage because you’re married, and no marriage with a lawnmower because it’s an inanimate object. You cannot marry a lawnmower. Rynard: What about a snow blower? Haggerty: [shakes head no]
Bottom line: Rep. King is an idiot for suggesting one could marry a lawnmower, and Rynard is a genius for calling King on his bluff.
(H/T Iowa Starting Line)Islamabad: China will fully fund the $8 billion Karachi-Peshawar Railway Line in Pakistan to ensure the smooth completion of the key project, which was earlier to be partly funded by the ADB.
"China strongly argued that two-sourced financing would create problems and the project would suffer," Pakistan Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal told reporters on Friday.
The project was originally planned to be partly funded by the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Dawn reported.
The minister said he would not comment whether the Ministry of Railways has resisted the Chinese request for fears of monopoly, but said the entire financing would now come from China.
He said the ADB would be accommodated in some other projects, such as those under the Central Asian Regional Economic Cooperation programme Under the original plan, the ADB had to provide $ 3.5bn for the 1,700-km-long line considered the backbone of the country's logistics connecting two major ports with the rest of the country for transporting goods and passengers.
The minister said the Chinese government therefore wanted that the project financing should be kept single-sourced.
Pakistan and China are expected to sign a formal agreement in this regard next month.OMEGA Project 2009-2012
Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae (OMEGA) is an innovative method to grow algae, clean wastewater, capture carbon dioxide and to ultimately produce biofuel without competing with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land.
NASA’s OMEGA system consists of large flexible plastic tubes, called photobioreactors. Floating in seawater, the photobioreactors contain freshwater algae growing in wastewater. These algae are among the fastest growing plants on Earth.
The algae use energy from the sun, carbon dioxide and nutrients from the wastewater to produce biomass that can be converted into biofuels as well as other useful products such as fertilizer and animal food. The algae clean the wastewater by removing nutrients that otherwise would contribute to marine deadzone formation.
NASA’s project goals are to investigate the technical feasibility of a unique floating algae cultivation system and prepare the way for commercial applications. Research by scientists and engineers has demonstrated that OMEGA is an effective way to grow microalgae and treat wastewater on a small scale.
The OMEGA system is being investigated by NASA as an alternative way to produce aviation fuels. Potential implications of replacing fossil fuels include reducing the release of green house gases, decreasing ocean acidification, and enhancing national security.Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proposed a plan to form a convention of states in order to restore the Rule of Law of the Constitution during a keynote speech on Friday. Photo By Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo
AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Friday for a convention of states that would amend the U.S. Constitution to limit United States presidential authority and boost states' rights.
During his keynote address to the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Annual Policy Orientation, the governor outlined his "Texas Plan" that will reign in the federal government to restore the balance of power between the states and the United States.
"The increasingly frequent departures from constitutional principles are destroying the Rule of Law foundation on which this country was built," Abbott said of the "refusal" of federal government to follow the Constitution. "The cure to these problems will not come from Washington D.C. Instead, the states must lead the way."
Abbott also released a 70-page document entitled, "Restoring the Rule of the Law with the States Leading the Way" where he outlined his nine steps to "reign in the federal government":
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-Prohibit congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state. -Require congress to balance its budget. -Prohibit administrative agencies from creating federal law and preempting state law. RELATED Homeland Security gives states, territories another two years to comply with federal ID law -Allow a two-thirds majority of states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision. -Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law. -Limit the federal government to powers expressly delegated in the Constitution. RELATED Leader of Oregon militia turns down safety offer; Idaho group arrives to prevent 'Waco-style' escalation -Allow a two-thirds majority of states to override a federal law or regulation.
Abbott's speech gained the attention of presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who published an op-ed in USA Today proposing a similar convention.
"It's great to have [Abbott's] support for the convention of states," Marco Rubio spokesperson Alex Conant told CNN.Last year at the UN climate change talks in Cancun, it was agreed that cutting emissions sufficiently to limit the world's temperature increase to 2°C would require a far‑reaching transformation of the global energy system. To limit the world's temperature increase to 2°C, it was agreed that the long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would need to be limited to around 450 parts per million of carbon-dioxide (CO2). Sadly, the International Energy Agency has just released figures indicating that energy-related CO2 emissions in 2010 were the highest ever, reaching 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt). This means that to achieve the 2020 target, where emissions must not be greater than 32 Gt, emissions will need to rise less over the next ten years in total than they did between 2009 and 2010.If you want to make things happen the ability to motivate yourself and others is a crucial skill. At work, home, and everywhere in between, people use motivation to get results. Motivation requires a delicate balance of communication, structure, and incentives. These 21 tactics will help you maximize motivation in yourself and others.
Motivation
1. Consequences – Never use threats. They’ll turn people against you. But making people aware of the negative consequences of not getting results (for everyone involved) can have a big impact. This one is also big for self motivation. If you don’t get your act together, will you ever get what you want?
2. Pleasure – This is the old carrot on a stick technique. Providing pleasurable rewards creates eager and productive people.
3. Performance incentives – Appeal to people’s selfish nature. Give them the opportunity to earn more for themselves by earning more for you.
4. Detailed instructions – If you want a specific result, give specific instructions. People work better when they know exactly what’s expected.
5. Short and long term goals – Use both short and long term goals to guide the action process and create an overall philosophy.
6. Kindness – Get people on your side and they’ll want to help you. Piss them off and they’ll do everything they can to screw you over.
7. Deadlines – Many people are most productive right before a big deadline. They also have a hard time focusing until that deadline is looming overhead. Use this to your advantage by setting up a series of mini-deadlines building up to an end result.
8. Team Spirit – Create |
of a Phase2 clinical trial on 241 children with acute Graft-versus-host disease, that was not responsive to steroids.[30] The trial was of a mesenchymal stem cell therapy known as remestemcel-L or MSC-100-IV. Survival rate was 82% (vs 39% of controls) for those who showed some improvement after 1 month, and in the long term 72% (vs 18% of controls) for those that showed little effect after 1 month.[30]
HIV elimination Edit
Graft versus host disease has been implicated in eliminating several cases of HIV, including The Berlin Patient and 6 others in Spain. [31]
See also Edit
References Edit
Further reading EditA three-year-old's head was split open after her teacher at Brighter Day Care and Preschool in north St. Louis County, Missouri threw her into a cabinet seemingly without reason on Friday February 1. She suffered an enormous gash in her forehead right between her eyes and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance where she required seven stitches. The teacher reportedly sent a note to the parents saying'she fall' without giving further explanation. Despite her claims that the child fell, the entire incident was caught on a surveillance camera in the classroom. However, the preschool director waited five days before checking surveillance video. Now the child's family has hired lawyer Jennifer Hansen to represent them to fight against the violence their daughter suffered. 'The daycare could've reviewed that footage at any time. They didn't and they allowed the daycare worker who assaulted this little girl, to continue to work at the facility for five additional days,' attorney Jennifer Hansen said.We got some awfully depressing news this week when Ford announced its acclaimed Boss 302 Mustang won't be making a comeback for 2014. Ford says they only ever planned to make the Boss 302 for two years all along, just like they did with the original in the 1960s.
But that doesn't make us any less sad. After all, the Boss 302 is one of the best muscle cars of all time, a 444-horsepower beast loaded down with performance goodies that made more than one publication label it an "M3 killer." It's sad we're losing something so potent.
So if I were king of the world, I would enact a law that says the Boss 302 Mustang will be built in its current state forever. Forget the logistical impossibilities behind my decision, or its impact on the value of the car — I'm the king and I can do what I want!
That brings me to my question of the weekend: What car would you want to be built, unchanged and in its current state, forever? It can be something old, something current, or something that has been long gone for a while.
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Come on, name a car that deserves to be around for the long haul. Some things are too great to die.
Photo credit FordIt's the kind of headline that grabs attention in this highly intense U.S. election season: "Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary?"
That's the question SourceFed, a YouTube channel owned by the same parent company as Discovery Channel, asked in a seven-minute video that has right-wing news outlets accusing that the world's most powerful technology company of secretly supporting the presumptive Democratic nominee.
In the video, SourceFed host Matt Lieberman accuses Google of altering search results to play down stories or pages about Hillary Clinton's legal troubles.
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"There is an inherent trust that when you Google something, you're seeing the actual factual answer to your query or question based at least in part on the results of what other people are searching for," Mr. Lieberman says in the video. The video has received almost 220,000 views at the time of publication. "In the case of Hillary Clinton, we know for a fact that is not the case."
The suspicion that Google is up to something nefarious centres on Alphabet Inc. executive chairman Eric Schmidt's long association with Democratic politics and the Obama administration. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
Several reports have said that a Schmidt-backed startup, the Groundworks, provides data analytics and engineering talent to the Clinton campaign. Although Google says Mr. Schmidt has not had an active role at the company since 2011, that hasn't stopped critics such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from claiming "Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton's campaign."
Coming after Facebook Inc. was accused of being biased against conservative news topics and sources, supporters of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, gleefully claimed the SourceFed video was the smoking gun that proves Silicon Valley is against them.
But it is less than clear that the evidence presented in the SourceFed video actually proves that accusation against Google.
The controversy surrounds the Google search bar's autocomplete function, which helpfully suggests words to cut down on time: When a user types familiar phrases like "The Globe and", Google will fill in the "Mail".
SourceFed demonstrates that typing "Hillary Clinton cri" does not autocomplete to crime, even though there are many news stories suggesting the former Secretary of State's e-mail scandal may have a criminal dimension. By point of contrast, "Donald Trump rac" does autocomplete to "racist."
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Meanwhile, rival search engine Bing, which has about 10 per cent of the U.S. search market, autocompletes the word criminal. Is it a conspiracy? Google vehemently denies it.
In a written statement, the company said: "Google autocomplete does not favour any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works. Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name. More generally, our autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms."
At issue is the words "crime" or "criminal" following a person's name. Those are two of the "offensive" terms Google screens out, in the belief that it's not up to Google's autocomplete function to suggest someone has been convicted.
If a user searches for "Al Capone cri" or infamous Canadian child molester "Gordon Stuckless cri" in Google, it will not autocomplete to crime or criminal following the person's name. It's unclear why Google's autocomplete does not filter out "racist," although it will filter out "the N-word" and certain other slurs if they come after a person's name.
SourceFed did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Search engine optimization marketing expert Clayburn Griffin speculated at length about why this policy exists, but in part he thinks it boils down to Google's trouble's with the EU authorities: "Google has been experiencing lots of legal issues over its search query suggestions, particularly overseas. Negative suggestions open them up to defamation cases."
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That "criminal" restriction may not have been widely known. Search engine expert Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland wrote on June 4 that as recently as five years ago, Google's autocomplete censoring focused on five areas:
Hate or violence-related suggestions
Personally identifiable information in suggestions
Porn and adult content-related suggestions
Legally mandated removals
Piracy-related suggestions
In the video, Mr. Lieberman credited the idea for the video to his editor Spencer Reed, who previously worked as an assistant to television writer David Crane, creator of the Showtime comedy series Episodes (the show featured a subplot of a terminally clueless assistant). A graduate of Orange County's Chapman University film school, Mr. Reed is responsible for making "a daily comedy-driven news video" as well as other editing duties on the channel. He wrote on Twitter of the video: "A story I'm INCREDIBLY proud of; How #Google is apparently using it's platform to influence voters."
This conspiracy theory post is not typical fare for comedy-focused SourceFed to offer its 1.7 million subscribers, and in a strange twist, SourceFed was set up with Google money back in 2012 when the company spent $100-million (U.S.) to attract higher-quality content to YouTube. It was bought by the Revision3 video blog network in 2013 (Revision3 is in turn owned by Discovery Communications,whose major shareholders are Conde Nast owners the Newhouse family and cable mogul John Malone).
What about the other piece of evidence Mr. Reed and Mr. Lieberman present, the comparison of search terms on Google Trends? Mr. Lieberman showed off some charts that suggested "Hillary Clinton crime" queries are suspiciously low. Google employee Matt Cutts, who was head of the webspam team but is currently on leave, took to Twitter to slam the video, and shared a number of links, including blogger Joey Youngblood's stab at explaining SourceFed's error in interpreting Trends, demonstrating that the way Trends works can skew charts if you're not searching similarly popular topics. A popular search compared to an unpopular one will flatline the unpopular half of the chart, comparing apples to apples shows more nuanced results. Trends is also merely a public-facing sample of Google searches, not the entire fire hose of its web traffic poured into real-time comparisons, so it should not be viewed as a definitive reflection of search data.
"This is a super-technical area. Why make a long video of these claims without doing deeper research? It's just not true," Mr. Cutts wrote on Friday.An Iraqi soldier looks on as smoke rises from oil wells in the Ajil field east of the city of Tikrit in the Salahuddin province, March 4, 2015. Islamic State militants have set fire to oil wells in the Ajil field east of the city of Tikrit to try to hinder aerial attacks aimed at driving them from the oilfield, a witness and military source said. Black smoke could be seen rising from oil field since Wednesday afternoon, said the witness, who accompanied Iraqi militia and soldiers as they advanced on Tikrit from the east. Picture taken March 4, 2015. REUTERS/ Mahmoud Raouf (IRAQ - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS CONFLICT TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY ENERGY MILITARY)
By Saif Hameed and Dominic Evans
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Islamic State militants have set fire to oil wells northeast of the city of Tikrit to obstruct an assault by Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi soldiers trying to drive them from the Sunni Muslim city and surrounding towns, a witness said.
The witness and a military source said Islamic State fighters ignited the fire at the Ajil oil field to shield themselves from attack by Iraqi military helicopters.
The offensive is the biggest Iraqi forces have yet mounted against IS, which has declared an Islamic caliphate on captured territory in Iraq and Syria and spread fear across the region by slaughtering Arab and Western hostages and killing or kidnapping members of religious minorities like Yazidis and Christians.
Black smoke could be seen rising from the oil field since Wednesday afternoon, said the witness, who accompanied Iraqi militia and soldiers as they advanced on Tikrit from the east.
Control of oil fields has played an important part in funding Islamic State, even if it lacks the technical expertise to run them at full capacity.
Before IS took over Ajil last June, the field produced 25,000 barrels per day of crude that were shipped to the Kirkuk refinery to the north-east, as well as 150 million cubic feet of gas per day piped to the government-controlled Kirkuk power station.
An engineer at the site, about 35 km (20 miles) northeast of Tikrit, told Reuters last July that Islamic State fighters were pumping lower volumes of oil from Ajil, fearing that their primitive extraction techniques could ignite the gas.
Bombing in August damaged the Ajil field's control room, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The outcome of the battle for Tikrit, best known as the home town of executed Sunni president Saddam Hussein, will determine whether and how fast the Iraqi forces can advance further north and attempt to win back Mosul, the biggest city under Islamic State rule.
The army, backed by Shi'ite militia and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, has yet to reconquer and secure any city held by Islamic State, despite seven months of air strikes by a U.S.-led coalition, as well as weapons supplies and strategic support from neighboring Iran.
Tehran, not Washington, has been the key player in the current offensive, with Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Soleimani seen directing operations on the eastern flank, and Iranian-backed militia leading much of the operation.
Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia expressed alarm on Thursday. "The situation in Tikrit is a prime example of what we are worried about. Iran is taking over the country," Prince Saud al-Faisal, foreign minister of the Sunni Muslim kingdom, said after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
A spokesman for the local Salahuddin tribal council said 4,000 Sunnis were also taking part in the Tikrit campaign, part of an overall force of more than 20,000 troops and militiamen.
MILITIA LEADER KILLED
Soldiers and militia are also advancing along the Tigris river from the north and south of Tikrit, preparing for a joint offensive expected in coming days. They are likely to attack first the towns of al-Dour and al-Alam to the south and north of Tikrit.
Their approach has been slowed by roadside bombs, snipers and suicide attacks.
An Islamic State suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden tanker on Wednesday night into a camp on the eastern edge of al-Dour, killing a leader of the Iranian-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia, Madi al-Kinani, and four others, a military source said.
Al-Ahd, the militia's television channel, confirmed Kinani's death on Thursday, when he was buried in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, south of the capital Baghdad.
A Salahuddin police source said an eight-vehicle convoy of Islamic State insurgents attacked Iraqi forces at dawn on Thursday in al-Muaibidi, east of al-Alam. The source said the army returned fire, killing four militants and burning two of their cars.
An online video published early on Thursday purported to show Islamic State militants in Tikrit and al-Alam, taunting their attackers.
"Here we stand in central Tikrit, that's the mosque of the martyrs behind us... You claimed, as usual that you raided the Sunnis and their homes and have claimed al-Dour, al-Jalam, al-Alam, Tikrit and others. By God, you have lied," a fighter said.
In Baghdad, 10 people were killed on Thursday in a series of bomb and mortar attacks, police and medical sources said.
The deadliest incidents were in the southeastern, Sunni neighborhood of Nahrawan, where three people were killed by a bomb in a market, and the northern district of Rashidiya where three soldiers were killed by two roadside bombs.
(Additional reporting by Mostafa Hashem in Cairo; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Giles Elgood)George Osborne's third budget'may turn out to be less fiscally neutral than intended,' says Institute for Fiscal Studies
George Osborne's income tax giveaways in the budget run the risk of leaving the already overstretched public finances worse off, a leading thinktank has warned.
Presenting its analysis, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) predicted that the costs of taking lower earners out of income tax and cutting the rate for the super-rich may be hard to offset.
It also criticised a "hotch-potch of reforms" as a failure to make any real tax changes for the UK.
"Perhaps one worry for the chancellor as the dust settles on his third budget is that on his attempt to achieve a fiscally neutral package he has created some risks," said the IFS's director, Paul Johnson.
Referring to government and tax office estimates, he added: "We know pretty much for sure that the increase in the personal allowance will cost about £3.5bn in 2014-15. We do not know with anything like such certainty that the cut in the 50p rate will cost only £100m."
"This budget may turn out to be less fiscally neutral than intended."
On the overall public finances, the IFS said "the underlying problems remain" – with borrowing forecast to fall much less rapidly over the next five years than hoped this time last year.
Osborne's budget quickly came under fire on Wednesday for cutting taxes for the rich while imposing a "stealth tax" on pensioners, making a fresh £10bn attack on welfare and continuing cuts to child benefit.
Osborne, however, argued that his budget was centred on taking the lowest earners out of income tax altogether as he raise the tax allowance to more than £9,000 from next year.
Johnson said it was hard to see it as "the budget of a truly tax-reforming chancellor."
"The hotch-potch of reforms bears as many marks of political expediency as it does strategic reform," he added.
The IFS based its estimates on forecasts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. The OBR published its own outlook for the economy alongside Osborne's statement. It forecast that the economy will grow a mere 0.8% this year and 2% in 2013. It predicts that real household disposable income growth will be weak in both 2012 and 2013.When Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America last February, his label boss, Top Dawg, was unimpressed. TPAB hadn’t actually sold 1 million CDs or $10 downloads on iTunes — the figure also included the millions of streams the album had racked up on Spotify, Apple Music, and similar platforms. “We don’t stand behind this @RIAA bs,” Top tweeted. “Ole skool rules apply, 1 million albums sold is platinum. until we reach that #, save all the congrats.”
Since then, Top Dawg has likely been forced to change his calculus. Kendrick’s third major-label, full-length album, Damn., is expected to debut atop the Billboard charts with sales of 475,000, an all-time best for the Compton rapper. But that’s counting both album sales and streams, as has been customary since December 2014, when Billboard began equating 1,500 on-demand streams with an album unit. Damn. is expected to become the first album by an artist not named Drake to attain more than 200 million streams in a single week. In terms of physical and digital download sales alone, though, Damn.’s estimated 300,000 units will come in under TPAB’s 324,000 (the finalized figures will be revealed Sunday). By one measure, Kendrick’s popularity has slightly fallen. By another, he has ascended into a rap orbit occupied by only Drake, Kanye, Nicki Minaj, and [ducks] J. Cole.
The two years between the releases of To Pimp a Butterfly and Damn. were the window when streaming, after years of pundit prognostication, finally became the de facto way to consume music in the United States. The transition has happened especially rapidly for hip-hop and R&B. In 2016, 48 percent of all music consumption in those two genres was through streaming, compared with 41 percent for pop and 26 percent for rock. Hip-hop fans have always sought out the fastest, simplest, and cheapest way to attain music, even before the days of Napster. It’s only now that the legal modes of consumption have caught up to their listening habits.
As my colleague Justin Charity explored last year, the switch from buying to simply accessing songs has fundamentally broken the usefulness of charts as a way to gauge the popularity and impact of music. “Humble.,” the lead single from Damn., debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is now Kendrick’s biggest song by a huge margin. But “biggest” here rings a bit hollow when you think about the work that is likely to define Kendrick’s career arc — his breakout hit “Swimming Pools” peaked at 17; his black protest anthem “Alright” peaked at 81. “Humble.” already feels like it’s been subsumed by Damn., where it competes for attention with the even more belligerent “DNA.,” among others.
It’s not just the Hot 100 that’s out of whack. The Spotify Top 50, which used to be a younger-skewing but varied counterpoint to the Billboard charts, is currently clogged with every single song from Damn. There’s no arguing the chart’s accuracy — the daily play counts for each track are included — but these kinds of lists were more intriguing when they captured a variety of hits of the moment rather than empirically proving we’re all obsessing over the same dozen or so songs. A month ago the Top 50 was essentially a list of More Life songs, and the month before that it was filled with every track from Stormzy’s debut album. I’m guessing Logic, whose new album drops May 5, will be next to reshape the charts in his own image. It’s as if the filter bubbles that wall us in on social media have somehow spread to the most basic tools for measuring America’s cultural pulse.
All-consuming popularity is more fleeting than ever in the streaming era, but it’s important that an artist as cerebral and experimental as Kendrick can still seize it. good kid, m.A.A.d city was a crossover smash that used a Drake feature and an unintentional frat-party anthem to pull in a surprisingly diverse audience. To Pimp a Butterfly, by contrast, was hyperspecific in both its cultural moment and the audience it was addressing from its opening notes. Kendrick could have rapped himself into a niche that conscious rappers often drift toward. Instead, he’s proved that his brand of lyrical dexterity, constant self-recrimination, and vulgar West Coast bangers have broad appeal. That matters not only for Kendrick’s ego (“All I want to be was a gunman / Shooting up the charts, better, run man,” he raps on “God.”) but also for an audience that wants this man to have the time and resources to continue to explore new sonic frontiers. Kendrick sells, even when he’s no longer actually selling.(CNN) -- A group representing police in St. Louis says it's infuriated after five St. Louis Rams players raised their hands Sunday in solidarity with protesters upset at Michael Brown's death.
The St. Louis Police Officers Association says it's "profoundly disappointed" with those football players who sent a silent but strong message before playing Sunday against the Oakland Raiders.
Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens and Kenny Britt walked onto the field and raised their palms in the air, demonstrating the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture that protesters in Ferguson have been using for months.
Some say that Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, had his arms up when a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot him to death August 9 in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb. Wilson and others say Brown was not trying to surrender and in fact was attacking Wilson.
Complete coverage of what's happening in Ferguson
A grand jury decided last week not to indict Wilson, leading to protests nationwide.
The football players' action sparked widespread reaction across social media. Some drew parallels between what the Rams players did and the black power salute by two black Olympians from the United States at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
Reaction to the Rams players' move came as President Barack Obama met Monday with about 50 activists, law enforcement personnel and elected officials as well as members of his Cabinet to discuss what has transpired in Ferguson.
Complete coverage of what's happening in Ferguson
The football players told CNN affiliate KSDK-TV in St. Louis that they came up with the idea just before the game and wanted their action to represent a solidarity with the people of St. Louis and surrounding areas.
"We wanted to do something.... This is our community," Cook said.
Cook hasn't had time to go to Ferguson because he's been busy with the season and also because the area is dangerous and he doesn't want to get caught up in the violence, he said. But his family members spoke to him about what's been happening, he said.
"Definitely I will be making my trip to Ferguson," Cook said.
Bailey stressed that the players' move was just a way to show support for their community.
"The violence should stop," he told KSDK. "We just want it to stop."
"What happened was a tragedy, period," Austin said, referring to Brown's killing and the ensuing violence. "There are things out there bigger than football and we notice that."
Coach: Players were exercising free-speech rights
The police association called for the Rams and the NFL to apologize and discipline the players involved.
"We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation," NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said.
He said that the NFL had nothing further to add and that the players would not be disciplined.
Rams Coach Jeff Fisher also told reporters that the players would not be disciplined.
"They are exercising their right to free speech," he said.
Fisher said he planned to talk to the five players, but hasn't done so yet.
"Those conversations will most likely remain confidential," he said.
He declined to answer questions about his own feelings about the move, saying he'd prefer to talk to reporters about his team's 52-0 win against the Oakland Raiders Sunday.
"It's my personal opinion, and I firmly believe, that it's important that I keep sports and politics separate. I'm a head coach. I'm not a politician, an activist or an expert on societal issues," he said. "So I'm going to answer questions about the game."
Ferguson fallout: Protests go national
Police leaders meet with team officials
The players "chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week," the police association said in a statement.
"The gesture has become synonymous with assertions that Michael Brown was innocent of any wrongdoing and attempting to surrender peacefully when Wilson, according to some now-discredited witnesses, gunned him down in cold blood," the police association wrote.
The statement quoted the association's business manager, Jeff Roorda, as saying that "it is unthinkable that homegrown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over and over again."
"I'd remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertisers' products. It's cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do."
Leaders from the St. Louis Police Officers Association and the St. Louis County Police association met with Rams officials Monday, the police groups said in a statement.
The talks were "productive but very preliminary," police said. They are expected to continue later in the week.
"We made some progress today and we had a healthy interaction with the Rams," Roorda said in a statement after the meeting. "We feel strongly that they better understand our perspective and the perspective of the law-abiding citizens that support law enforcement."
Austin responded to the police feeling that the players' actions suggested they were taking a side.
That wasn't their intention, he said. "We just want to let the community know that we support them."
Apology vs. no apology
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar sent an e-mail to his staff saying the Rams' chief operating officer called Monday to apologize.
"I received a very nice call this morning from Mr. Kevin Demoff of the St. Louis Rams who wanted to take the opportunity to apologize to our department on behalf of the Rams for the "Hands Up" gesture that some players took the field with yesterday," Belmar wrote in the e-mail, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But the Rams characterized the conversation differently.
"We did not apologize," Rams spokesman Artis Twyman told CNN.
The team issued a statement saying the organization had "positive discussions" Monday with Belmar and other police officials "during which we expressed our respect for their concerns surrounding yesterday's game."
CNN's Holly Yan, Catherine E. Shoichet, Ryan Sloane, Wayne Sterling and Dave Alsup contributed to this story.A retired New York City correction officer told two men he was fighting with in a Brooklyn subway station that he was a cop and would arrest them, then fired at one of the men, killing him at the height of Tuesday's evening rush, a law enforcement source tells NBC 4 New York.
The officer, identified by the source as 68-year-old William Groomes, returned to Brooklyn police precinct Wednesday for questioning after the shooting death of 32-year-old Gilbert Drogheo. Groomes, along with Joschelyn Evering, who was traveling with Drogheo at the time of the shooting, was questioned following the fray at the Borough Hall subway station and released.
Evering, 28, of Brooklyn, was arrested Wednesday and charged with assault and menacing. Bail was set at $1,500. His mother declined NBC 4 New York's request for comment.
Groomes could face an indictment if the district attorney decides to convene a grand jury.
Man Fatally Shot Inside Brooklyn Subway Station: Police
A man was fatally shot inside a Brooklyn subway station at the height of the evening rush Tuesday, authorities say. Ida Siegal reports (Published Wednesday, March 11, 2015)
According to a source, Groomes, Drogheo and Evering, got into an argument that turned physical after Groomes boarded a Brooklyn-bound No. 4 train at the Bowling Green station in Manhattan Tuesday evening. Groomes allegedly told police that the two men, who were already on the train when he got on, said something to him after he walked between them and then pushed the 68-year-old into an empty subway seat, the source said.
Groomes and the two men got off the train at the Borough Hall stop and started fighting on the platform, the source said. That’s when Groomes allegedly identified himself as an officer and told Drogheo and Evering that they would be put under arrest.
The source says that the men ran away, with Groomes following. As the men tried to walk out of an exit gate, Drogheo and Groomes began scuffling again. Then, the source says, Groomes pulled out a gun and fired one round, which fatally hit Drogheo in the abdomen.
The retired officer and Evering stayed at the scene. They were not hurt and no bystanders were injured, police said.
No charges have been filed against Groomes in connection with the shooting.
It wasn't immediately clear if Evering had an attorney.
Norman Seabrook, the president of the city Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, told NBC 4 New York Wednesday that they believe the retired officer was acting in self-defense. He said if the Brooklyn district attorney convenes a grand jury to hear evidence in the case, the union would stand behind the retired officer.Villages were the hardest hit, with the military estimating that 60 to 99 per cent of village construction damaged or destroyed by the quake in the outer districts. This is a damaged hamlet just north of Lambagar in the northeast, close to the epicentre of the earthquake. Already remote, it was completely cut off from the rest of the county before the chopper flights started.
Multimedia journalist Wajahat S Khan left for Nepal with a Pakistani military relief mission to cover the Nepal earthquake. This is what he saw
Day 2: A royal mess
The journey begins; after a 18-hour wait on the tarmac of the Nur Khan Airbase, the Pakistan Air Force C-130E Hercules, loaded with relief supplies and a search and rescue team of the Army’s 13th Engineers, takes off for Kathmandu.
Over 4,700 are confirmed dead; about 1,000 in the Kathmandu valley, rest from the outer districts.
They say 18 people are dead in the Mount Everest base camp. Some folks are taking the dignified way back down by walking, not flying down.
Over 1,000 climbers were assumed to be up there, but those numbers may change. Nobody keeps track of anything here, it seems.
Landing into a tremor.
About 60 per cent of houses may have collapsed in the mountain areas, say the wires.
Weather has disrupted the small helis that are landing there. The big helis are just doing the drops.
The backpackers are telling me that this is going to be a major blow to Nepal’s mountaineering industry; as many as 18 climbers were killed last year in an avalanche, and there was a dip in climbers this year.
Meanwhile, as western trekkers pay to fly back and check into Kathmandu’s hotels. Some 400,000 are sleeping under the open sky in a western district tonight.
Rescue operators continue to work, but it’s in the rural areas where the real problem is because of not enough equipment being available.
People were using bare hands to recover bodies even in Kathmandu, I hear.
And the government had a desperate alert out today: don’t come to the hospitals with minor injuries, only serious injuries.
As for incoming relief, I saw heavy traffic congestion at the airport. Commercial flights have been diverted to India. The PAF C130 E I came on circled for a good 90 minutes before it was allowed to land.
Day 3: Citizens to the rescue
A military earthquake map from Day 3 onwards.
The current death toll from the quake stands at just over 5,000 killed, over 10,000 injured, and an estimated eight million people have been affected in some way or the other.
The Nepalese prime minister has said the death toll could reach 10,000, with information on casualties and damage from far-flung villages and towns yet to come in.
That would surpass the 8,500 who died in a 1934 earthquake, the last disaster on this scale to hit the Himalayan nation of 28 million people located between India and China.
Threats of epidemic diseases remain as well, and the mood is getting bitter...
Getting a tank of gas is taking people two to three hours as they stand in queues.
Food and water and medicines are in short supply, even in the capital.
Despite the millions of dollars of relief coming in, the government has been slow.
About 200 people protested outside the parliament today against government negligence. Some even scuffled with riot police at the main bus station, where special buses were supposed to take people to the rural areas, but they never arrived.
Counting the government out, some folks are getting organised at the grass roots level; I met a group of local activists today, many of them graduates of American universities, who’ve put on their do-it-yourself hats and are organising independent relief efforts in their district, putting up their own Facebook page, their own online mapping systems, their own relief supply chain.
Four days after the quake, Usar Bahadur waits for his wife, Kamala, as the Pakistanis dig on. Kamala was the mother of a 13-year old boy. She was left behind in the poultry farm as it collapsed along with Sabina, the mother of a two boys, aged one and three. Both women were feeding chickens on the second floor of a five story poultry building when the quake hit. Two male colleagues made it down and out. The women didn’t. By the time I met him, Usar Bahadur had taken to heavy drinking. He was worried about how he would raise his son.
The airport is still congested; civilian flights are not being given priority; the one runway doesn’t have the capacity to process outgoing flights, as aid lands.
Day 4: Nepal Army Headquarters
Even the army was short of equipment; here, at a barracks in downtown Kathmandu, the men of an infantry battalion had to remove the debris with their bare hands
Got the first interview with General Gaurav Rana, the Nepal Army chief. Was told by him that 100 per cent of their air assets and 90 per cent of his 98,000-strong army has already been deployed. He also had a terrible casualty estimate...
On the death toll: “Our estimates are not looking good. We are thinking that 10,000 to 15,000 may be killed...Yes, that makes the 1934 earthquake not look like much, but population ratios have changed as well.”
On preparation: “There was no way for Nepal to brace for impact. Even my troops were caught up and cut off...No amount of planning can prepare any army for this.”
On political tensions, epidemic threats and criticism: “Yes, there is unrest, and we are watching it. Yes, there is the threat of an epidemic, and we are watching it. As for criticism, I can understand how people would be angry. But we are working with the police to identify local hot spots and control things [politically].”
On challenges: “Coordination is a heavy word. It’s easy to say but difficult to implement...Our primary enemy is time. And we have no choice but to fight it.”
Meanwhile, Rescue Ops chief Col Anup Thapar says to me: “The government is in the lead, but if you ask us, we have a different priority. We need 100,000 shelters. CGI roofs, not tents. We will find food. We will find water. But with the monsoons coming, the biggest item on our wish list is shelter. And I’ve just gotten 1,200 so far. So far, there is a lot of hype about relief, but most of the relief that is coming in is the equipment of the rescuers.”
Brig General A.B. Baniya, head of military medical and rescue coordination team, has more news: “From tomorrow, we concentrate on removing debris. The heavy lifters will come in to clear Kathmandu valley. We are basing this on the premise that the rescuing phase is essentially finished. He who had to live has been found. He who is not found, we are presuming killed.
“I need helis, birds, anything that can fly. I have doctors sitting at the airport, and I don’t know what to do with them.”
Day 4 note to self: Death, grass and hope
Destruction in Khatmandu.
Two men, two women, some soldiers, one machine, and hope. Four days after the quake, Usar Bahadur waits for wife, Kamala, while Basu Dev (b/w) waits for his wife Sabina.
Kamala is the mother of a 13-year old boy; Sabina has two boys, one and three. I’m using the present tense, because we all hope that they’re alive. But Usar has taken to alcohol. He was inebriated when I met him. Basu isn’t talking much.
Both women were poultry farmers in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Both were on the second floor of a five story poultry building when the quake hit. Two male colleagues made it down and out. The women didn’t.
As neighbours and friends stand by and wait for both women to be recovered, a contingent of Pakistani specialists cuts through concrete and steel. The officer commanding these army engineers tells me that the “golden |
. In 2009, a few months after leaving Sanders’ office, Weaver opened Victory Comics in Falls Church, Virginia. “Sometimes you need to recharge your batteries a little bit,” Weaver says. “This was something I always wanted to do.”
“Truth, justice, and the American way—that’s Bernie,” Weaver says. “It’s also associated with Superman.”
The 3,500-square-foot shop features new releases, back issues (the most expensive item in the shop right now is a $5,500 copy of Hulk No. 1), and a back room for games ranging from Settlers of Catan to Fortress America, which—stop me if you’ve heard this one—postulates an invasion of the United States by European socialists. Business is good. On a typical Wednesday night, 60 people might show up for Victory’s Magic: the Gathering, Heroclix, and Dungeons and Dragons competitions. It’s the largest combined comic and gaming space inside the Beltway.
But the centerpiece of Weaver’s collection isn’t on display. His Victory Comics bio boasts that he is “the co-discoverer of the Lost Valley Pedigree Collection—an original Golden Age pedigree collection that consisted of many of the most significant and well preserved examples of comics from the dawn of the hobby to the 1950s.” A pedigree is a massive cache of vintage comic books, in good condition, that originated with a single source—usually an old-time collector. Basically, it’s the comic-book collector’s equivalent of the Comstock Lode. Weaver puts the value of the total collection, which he and his friend have been selling off in pieces, in the low seven figures. They found the collection—which they dubbed “Lost Valley”—in 2003, in an eBay listing posted by a World War II cryptographer living in the Shenandoah Valley.
“It was an older couple who had to sell it—they had some financial problems,” he explains. “They had it appraised, they had a sense of how much it was worth. They were beautiful books for someone who’s in the hobby. Many of them were the best-preserved copies of those particular issues.”
The collection, which originally totaled nearly a thousands titles, included gems like the first 27 issues of Detective Comics (which included Batman’s debut) and obscure items such as an American Cancer Society-funded cartoon about a quack doctor named Phineas P. Fraud.
In May, Weaver took a break from Victory Comics to pursue another old hobby: helping Bernie Sanders win an election. Weaver managed Sanders’ first senate campaign, in 2006, which he won by 33 points, and worked on his earlier congressional campaigns, including the 1991 race for a US House seat that gave the ex-mayor his break in Washington. He’ll be in familiar company. Sanders adviser Tad Devine was also involved in the 2006 campaign and an earlier congressional run. Field director Phil Fieremonte, a former Burlington city councilman and state director for Sanders’ senate office, has worked for the candidate for 16 years. Communications director Michael Briggs has been Sanders’ spokesman since he became a senator. In putting together a campaign apparatus, Sanders is sticking with the people who got him where he is.
A recent poll put Sanders just 8 points behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, but he still trails substantially in national surveys. And while the senator raised an impressive $15 million in small-dollar donations in the first three months of his candidacy (including $850 from the Incredible Hulk himself, Mark Ruffalo) this haul is a pittance compared to Wayne Enterprises-esque cash reserves of the Clinton machine. Building a coalition that can win a delegate contest might require some kind of superhuman effort. Fortunately, Weaver says, Sanders has a few qualities that fit the bill.
“Truth, justice, and the American way—that’s Bernie,” Weaver says. “It’s also associated with Superman; I didn’t just come up with that.”It’s been almost two weeks since the end of the Kickstarter already and we thought it was about time for an update.
Firstly, the winners of the final stretch goal! Welcome to the game Coptotermes formosanus – Formosan termite!
In the end their victory was marginal!
Over the past few days we have been sorting through all of your Stomt feedback, implementing bug fixes and upgrading to Unreal Engine 4.12. We are also re-working the ant job allocation system so that ants can now ‘steal’ jobs from others, which should increase efficiency and prevent ants from wandering away from tunnel-digging jobs that they have already begun. Additionally we have been tackling issues that have caused long compile times in the code. The next big things on the list are code profiling (finding out which parts are slowing things down and need to be optimized), streamlining path-finding for ants in crowds and making demo builds for both Mac and Linux.
We can confirm that of the £18,087 pledged, £17,385 has been successfully billed, which is fantastic news. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, backers are not billed until the project is successful so some payments inevitably fail. We have heard this can be up to 10% of the final amount so we have been very fortunate. Kickstarter will take their fee of £1,590.40, leaving us with £15,794.60 to fuel Empires of the Undergrowth. This will see our lead programmer through 9 months of development and contribute to sending us to Develop Brighton, leaving just enough leftover to buy the cheapest Mac we can find, so we can finally bring the ants to our Apple players.
If you wanted to pledge to Empires of the Undergrowth but were unable to because of issues with Kickstarter’s online payment options, or you were just late to the party, you can still help us out and pick up some of the original backer rewards via paypal. Just head to our Late Backers page: http://www.eotugame.com/paypal/
In other news, we have now set up a subreddit for Empires at https://www.reddit.com/r/eotu/. We are not sure exactly how this will be used yet, and the posting rules are likely to evolve over time. If you want to discuss demo tactics, ants, or even other ant/simulation games, this seems like a good place for people to gather. Note that if you have feedback on the game, especially related to the demo, we would still like you to post it on our Stomt page: https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the-undergrowth.
Finally we would just like to thank again all of our backers, demo testers, youtubers and other patient fans. You are all antastic.A MAN has had the unoriginal idea of making life in prison harsher in ways that would undoubtedly just cause more problems.
Sales manager Roy Hobbs believes violence and drug-taking could be stamped out with sadistic measures he has spent a worrying amount of time fantasising about.
Hobbs said: “There’d be no more fancy meals, just mouldy bread and water every day for years on end.
“Instead of cushy prison work like sewing mail bags they’d be up at five, running around giant hamster wheels to generate electricity for decent people,with a good flogging if they slow down.
“After 12 hours’ frantic running they’d be allowed to visit the communal toilet pit, have a cold shower and go to sleep locked in a metal box to prevent any nocturnal monkey business.
“They can forget about Playstations and family visits, although well-behaved felons will be allowed to watch Songs of Praise and have a raw onion on Fridays as a treat.”
Friend Tom Logan said: “Roy’s certainly given it plenty of thought. Last night he explained some bizarre idea to let people whip prisoners to raise money for Children in Need.
“The only problem is that every prison in Britain would be on fire 24 hours a day.”Everybody Shuffling – A Smash Up Review Posted by dicehateme on Wednesday, August 29, 2012 · 5 Comments
From time to time in this great hobby, I come across a company that seems to be firing on all cylinders, cranking out hit after hit and yet I find it difficult to join the loving throng. AEG is, unfortunately, one of those companies. Don’t get me wrong, I love AEG and the people behind the scenes, but time after time I’ve given the big games a shot and time after time I just don’t seem to be part of their key demographic. For instance, Thunderstone was promised by many to be the game that brought me back around to appreciate deckbuilders; in the end – when every game lasted more than two hours or more – it couldn’t deliver. Nightfall held a similar promise, and although I could appreciate the unique chaining system and the high player interaction, it wasn’t enough to convert me. Infinite City, Tomb? No and no. And, so, I continued to admire the passion, love for the hobby and attention to quality that seemed to thrive at AEG without feeling quite that same admiration for many of their premiere titles.
Then I was sent Smash Up. And now I feel like I want to take AEG by the hand and frolic in a patch of sun-drenched daisies.
The premise of Smash Up is dead simple: Take two really geeky factions with unique abilities like, say, Ninjas and Pirates, shuffle them together and then duke it out with one to three other conjoined factions over several faction-themed bases which are worth points. The first team to reach 15 points is the winner. See? Dead simple.
The rules for Smash Up aren’t much more complicated than the premise. Each turn, a player may play an Action and a Minion from his hand in whatever order he pleases. When a player plays an Action, he follows the usually-straightforward directions on the card and places it somewhere – typically in his discard, but occasionally on another card in play or on a base. Actions depend greatly on the factions being played, but many of them are typical of things like “draw two cards” and “return a Minion played on a base to its owner’s hand.” Some Actions can be played to create a handy combo that may result in getting more cards and then playing more cards in the same turn.
Minions are played in front of a base. Each minion has a number that indicates strength, and their underlying function is to pile up on a base so that the player controlling the minion can break the base, scoring points. A base is broken when the total strength of all minions on the base from each player exceeds the break value. Typically, the player with Minions equalling the total greatest strength scores the biggest points on the base after it’s broken, but there are special bases that may award the most points to the second-highest total strength or the players who had the most Minions in play there. Some Minions also have a special ability that is activated when they enter play or when something happens during a game, such as when a base is broken.
One of Smash Up‘s greatest strengths – and, really, the heart of its core mechanic – lies in the interaction between the factions, both smashed up in one player’s deck as well as across the table. Since each faction has a certain strength and a different style of play each game can be pretty unpredictable. However, it’s incredibly fun to see the small surges of chaos that occur, especially when you’re playing two factions that you have yet to combine. Let’s take a look at the factions in the base game and what sort of mischief at which they’re best:
Dinosaurs – with lasers!
The Dinosaurs are the most straightforward of all the factions. Basically, they have lots of minions, and they’re all big. Like, really big. The biggest hoss, the T-Rex, has strength of 7. Trust me when I say that’s really, really big. They’re not really all that sneaky, and most of their actions only act to reinforce how big they are, but you can almost certainly rely on them for not only breaking bases, but obliterating them for the first place points.
Pirates
The Pirates are seemingly one of the most reliable factions, with medium-strength minions and lots of handy actions. Their biggest strength is in maneuverability; typically when a player commits a minion to a base, they’re stuck there until that base is broken and then the minions are placed in the player’s discard pile. The Pirates can usually beat that, with minions that can shift around the table and actions that can save them once a base is broken. The only drawback to the Pirates faction seems to lie in a two-player game when playing minions on multiple bases is far less likely.
Ninjas
It will come as no surprise to most when I say that Ninjas are sneaky. But they are – incredibly sneaky. Most of their minions have some sort of sneaky power built in, and their actions are so sneaky that you’re almost surprised that the card doesn’t just appear on the table in a puff of smoke. One of the sneakiest things that Ninjas can do is pop up out of turn on top of a base as it’s being broken, usually giving the Ninjas the upper hand and, therefore, the most break points. There are typically lots of curses around the table when the Ninjas are in play.
Aliens
I will admit fully that the Aliens are my favorite faction to play. They have a good mix of medium-strength minions, many of which have some really fun and quirky abilities that make for interesting combos. They can also mess with other players quite a bit, with minion powers and actions that can return minions to owner’s hands. That power is particularly enjoyable when combined with the Alien minion that immediately grants a victory point. Simply play him to a base, return him to your hand, rinse and repeat! Guaranteed hilarity, and lots of threats of opponent violence.
Tricksters
The amount of mischief that the Aliens can cause to opponents is mere child’s play compared to the Tricksters. They don’t have terribly strong minions, but their actions are designed to wreak maximum havoc on the table. With tons of actions that can protect their minions and minion presence on bases – think “touch my gnome and I’ll blow you up with dynamite” – combined with a tendency toward violent practical jokes, the Tricksters are for those players who not only aren’t afraid of the occasional punch in the face, but who actually welcome it!
Wizards
The Wizards are masters at deck manipulation. Want to draw five cards in a single turn? Try the Wizards. Want to summon a minion, then search your deck for another minion and play it immediately? Try the Wizards. Want to make your opponents pull out their hair while you take five minutes to take your turn because your hand is so full of fun and interesting cards to play? Try the Wizards. Seriously, they’re pretty awesome. And a totally pain in the butt to play against.
Robots
Speaking of a total pain in the butt, meet the Robots. They have minions – lots and lots of minions. Most of them are pretty weak, but they more than make up for it in numbers. They’re a lot like cockroaches; if you see one of them, chances are there are thousands more behind the walls. Robots often have the ability to summon more than one minion in a turn, and quite often those extra minions also give the other minions a +1 to strength. So, yeah – Johnny Five is quite alive, and he brought 700 of his closest friends.
Zombies
The Zombies play almost exactly as you would expect; no Zombie minion is likely to stay dead for too long. Most of the minions are on the weaker side, but they tend to swarm and there’s practically no fear of them getting blown up during a base break or from some sneaky action card of another opponent. In fact, as a Zombie player, you want your minions to start dying off in droves so you can bring them back in larger numbers!
As fun as Smash Up can be – and make no mistake, Smash Up is plenty fun – the game is not without its drawbacks. First of all, there’s math involved. Every time someone plays a minion to a base, everyone has to do a quick total strength calculation to see if the break point has been reached. This doesn’t typically slow the game down by much, but it’s a minor irritation for those of us who are, shall we say, not Rain Man. One other slight drawback comes from some analysis paralysis that may occur in a few gamers who have a handful of cards and no clear plan in how to play them. For the most part this is mitigated because of the lighthearted nature of the game and the fact that the overall rules are very straightforward. And, finally, as with any card game where random distribution abides, there will be a few times in many games when you just can’t do what you really want to do. For most gamers, that feeling will soon pass when you manage to do something ultra mega cool that makes everyone at the table go “whoaaaa.”
Overall, though, Smash Up is smashing good fun, especially among gamers who can relax, revel in the sheer audacity of some stupid-good plays, and aren’t ashamed to let loose and let their geek flags fly.
Gameplay/Replay Components & Theme Fun Smash Up is truly one of the easiest games to learn, play and, later, teach that I've come across in quite some time. With such easy-to-grasp rules and a streamlined turn sequence, one would think I would be hard-pressed not to give the game a full six rating in Gameplay. However, because of the sometimes-complex interactions between factions and the occasional vagaries of card play according to the in-game text, players will experience some hiccups during play. These hiccups are also often not clarified in the rulebook. However, these instances are typically few and far between, and most game groups can just agree with a vote as to how to proceed. Replayability for Smash Up is off the charts; most gamers won't encounter the exact same card mix when playing the same two factions, and even then, they have eight factions to smash together, with plenty more on the way! The card stock is excellent and easy to shuffle and handle. The art and design are both fantastic, with easy-to-read card text - a stunning feat considering that each faction has it's own theme-appropriate typography! Overall, the theme is engrossing, even if there's no real story as to why each of these factions are fighting over the particular bases. But, there really doesn't need to be; the game isn't intended to be taken very seriously - it's more an homage and anthem to all things geeky, and it succeeds in delivering the goods without pandering to the players. More fun than a barrel of cybernetic alien monkeys flinging ironclad poo at ninja pirate zombies riding dinosaurs. Seriously. Overall score: 16 out of 18 Proof that you don't have to spend a whole game building a deck to enjoy a good card game.
Smash Up is a game for 2 to 4 gamer geeks, by Paul Peterson for AEG. It’s set to hit stores in September for about $30, so ask your friendly local game store to save you a copy!
Related posts:West Norwood Cemetery embraces dignified silence, being reflective, there is a deeply respectful and humbling sensation from visiting this cemetery. An appreciation of ones own allotted space in this metropolis we call a world that carries on regardless of individual circumstances. The realisation that time is the most precious resource we have freely inherited from our parents. Cemeteries are indeed emotive spaces and nowhere is this more evident than West Norwood Cemetery.
One of the magnificent seven cemeteries of London and recognised as a site of major historical, architectural and ecological interest. West Norwood Cemetery has the reputation of holding one of the finest collections of sepulchral monuments in London, featuring 69 Grade II and Grade II listed buildings and structures, including a dedicated Greek Orthodox necropolis with 19 listed mausoleums and monuments. Its extensive Gothic Revival architecture qualifies it as one of the significant cemeteries in Europe. The cemetery has a very active Friends of Group that aim to increase knowledge and appreciation of the Cemetery. The group hold general tours on the first Sunday of every month, special themed tours of the cemetery during the summer, and meetings with talks during the winter.
51.432045 -0.097075Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of movie sales on the iTunes Movie store, Apple is offering up six 10-movie bundles from five studios for $10 each to U.S. shoppers.
The Warner Brothers bundle includes "The Judge," "Edge of Tomorrow," "Pacific Rim," "Magic Mike," "Congation," "The Town," "The Hangover," "Sex and the City: The Movie," "300," and "Superman Returns."A bundle from Universal Studios contains "Ride Along," "Identity Thief," "Rush," "Snow White and the Huntsman," "The Adjustment Bureau," "Little Fockers," "It's Complicated," "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," "Knocked Up," and "Inside Man."Paramount's collection includes "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," "Selma," "The Wolf of Wall Street," "Flight," "No Strings Attached," "The Fighter," "Up In The Air," "Tropic Thunder," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and "Zodiac."Purchasers of Sony Pictures' collection get The Monuments Men," "Captain Phillips," "To Rome With Love," "Moneyball," "The Social Network," "Easy A," "Julie & Julia," "Nick & Norak's Infinite Playlist," "The Pursuit of Happyness," and "The Da Vinci Code."The first Lionsgate bundle encompasses Divergent," "Now You See Me," "Warm Bodies," "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," "Margin Call," "Warrior," "The Switch," "Kick-Ass," "Twilight," and "No Country for Old Men."Lionsgate bundle 2 has Ender's Game," "Mud," "The Impossible," "Arbitrage," "The Cabin In the Woods," "The Hunger Games," "The Expendables," "The Cove," "Gone Baby Gone," "The Queen."All of the movies are HD-quality. Some of the titles include iTunes extras.The iTunes Movie store opened on Sept. 12, 2006, with HD content hitting the store in March 2009. Regular prices for movies range from $8 for standard definition to $20 for a popular title in HD.The sale is only for U.S. iTunes account holders, and ends at 11:59 p.m. PT.With a minimalist and economical design the architects Raphaël Bétillon and Nicolas Dorval‐Bory solved a task of refurbishing a Paris appartement. Due to the lack of natural daylight and only confined space, the architects had to think outside the box. They decided to light the end of the ‘Appartement Spectral’ wit low-pressure sodium lighting (LPS) commonly found in street lightnig. Since the light shed by the LPS is monochromatic, it makes everything indistinguishable. The colours in the seleeping and showering area are basicaly nonexistent and only appear in different shades of grey and black.
Maybe this appartement is not to everyones liking, but the ingenious use of lighting alone makes it an architectual feast, worth taking a closer look.
All images © BETILLON / DORVAL-BORY | Via: mmminimalAs Mike Riggs noted on Thursday night, the Justice Department's new medical marijuana memo (PDF) confirms that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are reneging on their promises to respect state law. Under the policy described by Deputy Attorney General James Cole on Wednesday, "commercial operations cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana" are fair game, even when they are explicitly authorized by state law. By contrast, in his October 2009 memo (PDF) to U.S. attorneys, Cole's predecessor, David Ogden, instructed them that they "should not focus federal resources" on "individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
Furthermore, as I pointed out last month, the Ogden memo listed factors (such as violence, sales to minors, and sales of other drugs) that "may indicate illegal drug trafficking activity of potential federal interest." These criteria make no sense when applied to individual patients or their caregivers, the only people the DOJ now says need not worry about federal prosecution; they make sense only when applied to dispensaries, and they imply that bona fide dispensaries, the ones that are not merely fronts for drug trafficking, should be left alone. Yet the Cole memo says threats to prosecute legitimate, state-licensed dispensaries are "entirely consistent" with the Ogden memo. The new memo even suggests that state employees could be prosecuted for licensing and regulating dispensaries, saying people "who knowingly facilitate" the distribution of medical marijuana "are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law," and "are subject to federal enforcement action, including potential prosecution."
The reversal in policy is even clearer when you consider public statements by Obama and Holder that contradict the position the administration is now taking. In a March 2008 interview with Oregon’s Mail Tribune, Obama said, "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue." Two months later, when another Oregon paper, Willamette Week, asked Obama whether he would "stop the DEA's raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers," he replied, "I would, because I think our federal agents have better things to do."
Here is how Holder described the administration's policy during a March 2009 question-and-answer session in Washington:
The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law. Our focus will be on people, organizations that are growing, cultivating substantial amounts of marijuana and doing so in a way that's inconsistent with federal and state law.
Three months later, Holder visited New Mexico, which licenses medical marijuana dispensaries. Here is how The New Mexico Independent described Holder's attitude toward such operations:
The nation's top cop said Friday that marijuana dispensaries participating in New Mexico’s fledgling medical marijuana program shouldn't fear Drug Enforcement Agency raids, a staple of the Bush administration. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking in Albuquerque during a meeting focused on border issues, including drug trafficking, said his department is focused "on large traffickers," not on growers who have a state's imprimatur to dispense marijuana for medical reasons. "For those organizations that are doing so sanctioned by state law, and doing it in a way that is consistent with state law, and given the limited resources that we have, that will not be an emphasis for this administration," Holder said.
Finally, as I've said before, the position that Obama is now taking on medical marijuana—go after producers and sellers but leave patients alone—is no different from the position his predecessor took. In fact, Obama's crackdown on medical marijuana is, if anything, more aggressive than Bush's, with more frequent raids, IRS audits that threaten to put dispensaries out of business, forfeiture threats to dispensaries' landlords, and direct interference in the legislative process by U.S. attorneys. This is certainly not what voters thought they were getting when they heard Obama repeatedly promise to change course on this issue.Image copyright Google Image caption The woman was attacked on Mirabel Street during rush hour, police said
A woman was assaulted and subjected to rape and death threats in a "horrific and disturbing" attack during rush hour in Manchester, police have said.
A man grabbed the 25-year-old by the throat and pushed her against a wall on Mirabel Street at about 08:40 BST on 23 October, a spokeswoman said.
She said the man repeatedly threatened to rape and kill the woman, but ran off when two passers-by disturbed him.
Det Con Terry Macmillan said the woman had been "traumatised" by the attack.
The man was described as Asian, aged about 27, tall and of medium build, with large eyes, black shaven hair and stubble.
He was said to be wearing a silver and blue watch, a black hooded jacket and black gloves with a white tick on the back.
Police have asked the two people who disturbed the attack, along with any other witnesses, to get in touch.This article is over 2 years old
Uni says Martin Hirst breached code of conduct with tweets that included an exchange in which he asked a student ‘are you happy to fail commerce?’
Deakin University has sacked journalism professor Martin Hirst for serious misconduct, citing three tweets they claimed breached the institution’s code of conduct for academics.
Hirst, 59, was informed by letter on Thursday afternoon that his employment in Deakin’s school of communication and creative arts had been terminated. He has until 23 June to appeal.
Deakin found that content posted to Hirst’s private Twitter account @ethicalmartini was “offensive and/or disrespectful and/or threatening and had the potential to damage the reputation of the university”.
The former journalist was suspended without pay on 19 April after being accused of serious misconduct.
Hirst told Guardian Australia he was disappointed and saddened by the university’s decision and denied threatening a student in one of the tweets.
Deakin university journalism professor suspended without pay over tweets Read more
The university received a complaint about an exchange on 20 March 2016 in which Hirst said “so are you happy to fail commerce?” to a Deakin University student, Lachlan McDougall, who had insulted his teaching.
The exchange came about after the News Corp columnist Rita Panahi said Hirst was a “rent-seeking simpleton full of bitterness & bile” after he called her unstable.
McDougall replied: “I’m glad I’m a commerce student and not subject to this man’s [Hirst’s] stewardship.”
Hirst argued in his formal response to the allegations that he was not threatening McDougall in the tweet but was merely questioning his intelligence, and he didn’t realise McDougall was a student at Deakin at the time.
The university disagreed and said the tweet would be interpreted by a reasonable person as a threat to the academic progress of McDougall.
After an investigation the university identified two other tweets and accused Hirst of breaching the code of conduct for academics.
The second tweet contained a photo of a knitted beanie on which the words “fuck it” are printed, with the caption: “Back to work after the Easter break? You need this beanie. I’ve got mine on today, it’s a subtle hint to your boss.”
A third was a retweet of a comment by the ABC host Mark Colvin about Andrew Bolt’s relatively small audience on Sky News, to which Hirst had added the words “reassuring, masturbating chimps”.
Deakin’s school of communication and creative arts told Hirst his Twitter use constituted “repeated instances of misconduct”.
The sacking comes despite protests from the National Tertiary Education Union.
The Victorian division secretary of, the NTEU, Colin Long, had demanded Hirst be reinstated and his salary backdated because the allegations were not of a “serious enough nature” to warrant suspension under the university’s enterprise agreement.
Comment on the termination has been sought from the university.
In 2014 Hirst narrowly escaped losing his job after Bolt drew attention to his Twitter account by posting a series of his tweets on his blog.
The university said it had taken his conduct in 2014 into account when deciding to terminate his employment.
When asked about Hirst’s 2014 suspension a Deakin university spokeswoman said at the time: “It is the university’s practice not to comment on individual staffing matters. All staff are expected to comply with their employment obligations and the university’s code of conduct.
“Deakin university respects academic freedom and has clear policy on the protection afforded its academic staff in this regard.”If this weren’t so infuriating, it might be funny... Appearing on CNN this morning to discuss President Trump’s plan to cut funds to sanctuary cities, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio implied that the city will not cooperate in the deportation of thieves who don’t use violence because they might be the “breadwinners” of their families.
Message to the mayor: thieves aren’t bread “winners.” They are bread stealers. They’re taking bread from the mouths of children whose family earned it legally. In this theater of the absurd, de Blasio held up a list of crimes for which NYC would cooperate with immigration authorities. And non-violent theft is apparently not on the list.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked whether theft would trigger city cooperation with immigration authorities. De Blasio answered that it would in cases of violent theft, mentioning the use of a weapon. Camerota pressed: what about simple theft? De Blasio dodged, moving on to crimes like minor pot possession and running a red light, for which he doesn’t want to break up families. He went on to say it would not be “moral” to deport people for “very low-level” crimes, which apparently includes theft, since such people might be their families “breadwinner.”
Note: I haven’t been able to locate the list, but this article mentions that among the crimes on it are patronizing a prostitute. So theft, which by definition is non-consensual, is not on the list. But the john who conducts a consensual arrangement with the prostitute can be deported. How PC. And why the john and not the prostitute? By that logic, we would deport people who buy drugs, but not the pushers.GLENN BECK: I will tell you this. The secret behind Donald Trump, because I have been wrong about Donald Trump every step of the way. I just didn't think that this would work. I just didn't think people would take him seriously. I thought people would have a problem with some of the things that he said. But they haven't. And when you see that the Bernie Sanders people are now saying a quarter of them, in some polls, are saying that they will come over to Donald Trump, it's not about Marxism, it is not about capitalism, it is not about policy, it is about destroying the system that has been lying to us on both sides for as long as I've lived.
The parties are completely out of control. And completely out of touch. Hillary Clinton doesn't realize that the game has entirely changed. She is playing the old main line politician that will say whatever they have to say to get elected. Donald Trump, I think also says whatever he says to say to get elected, but in a completely different way. It is not about what he is saying, as much as it is how he is saying it.In her resignation letter, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen cited evidence that the economy is much stronger than a decade ago. | Getty Yellen, denied second term as Fed chair, announces resignation
Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen said Monday she will leave the central bank once her term as chair ends in February, wrapping up a pivotal tenure in which the Fed began to reverse its extraordinary, decadelong support for the economy.
Yellen’s departure from the Fed long before her term as a governor ends in 2024 gives President Donald Trump another big opportunity to shape the world’s most important central bank.
Story Continued Below
Her announcement comes almost three weeks after Trump nominated Fed Governor Jerome Powell as the next U.S. central bank head, replacing Yellen with a similarly minded but Republican chairman.
Yellen's move — capping off her nearly three decades at the agency — means the Fed will have a fourth vacancy to fill. Trump has already installed a vice chair of supervision, Randal Quarles, on the Fed board and will have the opportunity to name his own vice chair and three more governors.
Other than Powell, the only remaining appointee of former President Barack Obama is Fed Governor Lael Brainard, once considered a front-runner to serve as Treasury secretary under a Hillary Clinton administration.
"I am enormously proud to have worked alongside many dedicated and highly able women and men, particularly my predecessor as Chair, Ben S. Bernanke, whose leadership during the financial crisis and its aftermath was critical to restoring the soundness of our financial system and the prosperity of our economy," Yellen said in her resignation letter.
She cited evidence that the economy is much stronger than a decade ago, including 17 million net jobs produced in the past eight years.
Morning Money Political intelligence on Washington and Wall Street — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
“Of course, sustaining this progress will require continued monitoring of, and decisive responses to, newly emerging threats to financial and economic stability,” she added.
Yellen's steady leadership has drawn praise from Trump since his election, even though he criticized her harshly on the campaign trail.
"We are obviously doing great together," Trump told Fox Business on Oct. 25. "You look at the markets."
Trump indicated that his decision not to keep Yellen — making her the first Fed chief not to receive a second term since the 1970s — stemmed from his desire to make his own mark on the central bank.
Her resignation letter underscored the importance of the Fed's independence, which is viewed as crucial to separating key monetary policy decisions from short-term politics.
"The Federal Reserve has been and remains a strong institution, focused on carrying out its vital public mission with integrity, in a professional, nonpartisan manner," she wrote. "I am confident that my successor as Chair, Jerome H. Powell, is deeply committed to that mission and I will do my utmost to ensure a smooth transition."
Yellen's departure will mean the loss of decades of institutional knowledge. She has been part of the central bank’s leadership since 1994, with a break from 1997 to 1999, when she served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Bill Clinton.
She served on the central bank's board from 1994 to 1997, as San Francisco Fed president from 2004 to 2010, as vice chair of the board from 2010 to 2014, and as chair since then.
She also worked as a staff economist at the Fed in the 1970s.
Under her leadership, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 percent to 4.1 percent, in part because she decided to keep stimulating the economy even after unemployment dropped to 5 percent.
Her predecessor, Bernanke, in his book “The Courage to Act,” wrote of Yellen’s “longstanding concerns about high unemployment and the hardships it imposed on individuals, families, and communities.”
“She prepared for meetings meticulously and backed her positions with careful analyses,” he wrote of her time as San Francisco Fed president. “Her contributions were always among the most substantive at the meeting. The room hushed when she spoke.”
One of her most notable achievements as chair was beginning the process of weaning the U.S. economy off the exceptional support the Fed provided during and after the financial crisis.
The central bank took the unprecedented step of buying |
section below and in the eResults in the Supplement.
Results
SYS Sample
In male adolescents (459 with available data) in the SYS sample, we observed an interaction between cannabis use (never/ever) and the risk score on age-adjusted cortical thickness (t 455 = −2.60; P =.009); as shown in Figure 1A, age-adjusted cortical thickness decreases with the increasing risk score in cannabis users (R2 = 0.06; P =.002) but not in nonusers (R2 = 8.4 × 10−5, P =.87). We observed main effects of cannabis use (t 455 = −2.69; P =.008) but not the risk score (t 455 = 0.16; P =.87). As expected, those who ever used cannabis were older than those who never used cannabis, but this relationship does not vary between participants with low and high polygenic scores (P =.59, logistic regression). Figure 1B shows the differences in thickness across risk score deciles and cannabis use in male adolescents; Figure 1C shows the interaction between cannabis use and risk score on age-adjusted cortical thickness in female adolescents. Results of a vertex-based analysis of the interaction between Schizophrenia Risk Score and cannabis groups (ever vs never) vis-à-vis cortical thickness are shown in eTable 2 in the Supplement.
The above results are comparable to those obtained when using sex-specific median values of the risk score to classify adolescents in the high (ie, above the median) and low (below the median) risk groups. We use this strategy in the ALSPAC and IMAGEN samples to evaluate the possible effects of cumulative cannabis frequency, given the small number of individuals in the different cannabis frequency cells. To allow a comparison of the 3 samples using this approach, we have reanalyzed the SYS data using the median-based risk groups (Figure 2A and eFigure and eResults in the Supplement).
IMAGEN Sample
In the IMAGEN sample of adolescents (145 male and 188 female participants with available data), we were able to evaluate a relationship between frequency of cannabis use (by 16 years of age) and change in cortical thickness during adolescence (from time 1 [approximately 14.5 years] to time 2 [approximately 18.5 years] adjusted for scanner manufacturer). We observed an interaction between cannabis use (never/ever) and the risk score on the adjusted change in cortical thickness (t 137 = −2.36; P =.02). In this model, we also observed main effects of cannabis use (t 137 = −2.29; P =.02) and risk score (t 137 = 2.76; P =.007). In female participants, we observed a main effect of risk score (t 181 = −2.75; P =.007) but not of cannabis use (t 181 = 0.90; P =.37) or the interaction between them (t 181 = 1.36; P =.18). We were able to evaluate a relationship between frequency of cannabis use (by 16 years of age) and change in cortical thickness using the median-based groups (Figure 2C and eFigure and eResults in the Supplement).
ALSPAC Sample
In this sample of male youth (295 with available data), we were able to evaluate again a relationship between the frequency of cannabis use (by 16 years of age) and age-adjusted cortical thickness measured from 18 to 21 years of age. First, we found no difference in cortical thickness between those who never and those who ever used cannabis, with the latter consisting of those who reported cannabis use with any frequency, in the high-risk (P =.78) and in the low-risk (P =.61) groups. Second, using the median-split approach (Figure 2C), we observed a difference in the high-risk group in age-adjusted cortical thickness (in arbitrary units) between those who never used cannabis and the most frequent users (ie, ≥61 occasions), with a difference of 0.07 (95% CI, 0.01-0.12; P =.02; Cohen d = 0.8). We also observed a similar difference between light users (<5 occasions) and the most frequent users (difference, 0.11 [95% CI, 0.03-0.18]; P =.004; d = 1.9). No such differences were observed in the low-risk group.
Relationship Between Cannabis-Related Differences in Thickness and CNR1 Expression
Expression of CNR1 varies across the 34 cortical regions segmented by FreeSurfer28; as shown in Figure 3A, these regional variations are consistent across the 6 donors for whom expression data were available (left hemisphere). Figure 3B depicts group differences between those who never and ever used cannabis (SYS male participants) as a function of CNR1 expression (eTable 3 in the Supplement). We observed high rank-order correlations between the group difference in cortical thickness and CNR1 expression across the 34 regions in the low-risk (Figure 3B, left; ρ = −0.64; P = 7.6 × 10−5) and high-risk (Figure 3B, right; ρ = −0.48; P =.005) male SYS participants. Thus, the largest group differences between those who never and ever used cannabis were found in regions that showed high CNR1 expression (eg, entorhinal and anterior cingulate cortex).
Discussion
Across 3 population-based samples of typically developing youth, we observed a negative association between cannabis use in early adolescence and cortical thickness in male adolescents with a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, as indicated by their risk profiles across 108 genetic loci identified by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in a large genome-wide comparison of patients with schizophrenia and control individuals.17 This association appears to vary with the cumulative frequency of cannabis use before 16 years of age, as evaluated in two of the samples. The association may emerge during adolescence, as evidenced by the longitudinal MRI data obtained in one of the samples. Male participants with low polygenic risk scores and all female participants did not present similar associations in our data sets.
Observational studies such as ours cannot attribute causality to the observed relationships. Even the longitudinal design does not rule out the possibility that individuals with a particular developmental trajectory may be more likely to experiment with cannabis rather than the cannabis exposure affecting the trajectory. Although genetic approaches, such as mendelian randomization,29 may address this issue to some extent, only studies in model systems allow one to assess the true consequences of cannabis exposure in organisms randomized experimentally into different treatments.
Unlike the SYS and IMAGEN samples, the high-risk male participants in the ALSPAC sample do not show a difference in cortical thickness between those who never and ever used cannabis; only the high-frequency users do. We can only speculate that, with a given sample size, the association between less-frequent cannabis use and cortical thickness is less robust and, therefore, sensitive to other (confounding) effects that may accumulate with age; the ALSPAC sample is almost 5 years older than the SYS sample.
Adolescence is a period of vulnerability with regard to the emergence of psychotic disorders,30 perhaps especially in boys.15 Cannabis use during adolescence may be a contributing factor; high odds ratios were found for schizophrenia in a 35-year prospective study of men16 when the investigators compared frequent cannabis users (>50 occasions by those aged 18-19 years) with nonusers. Our findings suggest that cannabis use might interfere with the maturation of the cerebral cortex in male adolescents at high risk for schizophrenia by virtue of their polygenic risk score. The overall volume of cortical gray matter and cortical thickness decrease with age in typically developing male adolescents.13,14 Our longitudinal findings suggest that cannabis exposure might accelerate such processes, including cortical thinning, in male adolescents with a high polygenic risk score. A profound thinning of cortical gray matter was observed during adolescence in patients with childhood-onset schizophrenia (onset of symptoms by 12 years of age)31,32 and, to a much lesser extent, in their nonpsychotic siblings.33 Patients with childhood-onset schizophrenia have higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia than their siblings.34 Several studies suggest that associations between cannabis use and various outcomes may be particularly pronounced during early (<16 years) adolescence.35-38 Follow-up observations of the adolescents in the SYS and IMAGEN samples will allow us to evaluate whether this association applies for those who initiate the use of cannabis during late adolescence.
What might underlie cannabis-related thinning of cerebral cortex in male adolescents? In general, the following 2 processes may play a key role in shaping cortical thickness during male adolescence: (1) experience-driven plasticity and related growth of neuropil, which increases cortical thickness over time; and (2) testosterone-induced restructuring of neuropil, which decreases cortical thickness over time.
The first process, namely, experience-related plasticity, has been shown to drive changes in brain structure, as measured with MRI.39,40 Cannabis may interfere with this process at pharmacologic and psychosocial levels. The former possibility is supported by the role of cannabinoid type 1 receptors in long-term potentiation41-43 and in various neurotrophic events.44 Chronic exposure to cannabis is associated with lower plasma levels of neurotrophins, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor45 and nerve growth factor.46 The latter possibility is supported by studies suggesting that cannabis use during adolescence is associated with a number of psychosocial phenomena that may limit the richness of educational (eg, dropping out of high school47-49) and extracurricural (eg, lower engagement in sports50) experiences during this period of development. These pharmacologic and psychosocial pathways together may attenuate over time experience-related increases in cortical thickness during adolescence.
The second process, namely, testosterone-driven variations in cortical gray matter, has been demonstrated in a number of MRI studies of typically developing male adolescents.13,51,52 Using a functional polymorphism in the androgen-receptor gene, we showed that testosterone-related decreases in cortical gray matter during male adolescence are, at least in part, mediated by the androgen receptor.13 Which cellular compartments contribute to this phenomenon remains unclear; for example, testosterone may influence spine density53 or the diameter of intracortical axons.54,55 Interindividual variations in plasma levels of testosterone during early adolescence predict cannabis use in late adolescence and cannabis dependence in young adulthood.56 Rising levels of testosterone during male adolescence and the associated high dynamics in the neurobiological features underlying cortical maturation may represent a risk factor with regard to other external (eg, cannabis) and/or internal (eg, genetic risk) perturbations. Furthermore, limited evidence supports the possible effects of testosterone on potentiating the action of cannabinoid type 1 receptor agonists on presynaptic inhibition of excitatory inputs in vitro57 and on transcriptional upregulation of the CNR1 gene.58,59
In this report, the polygenic risk score for schizophrenia calculated with the genome-wide significant SNPs (P < 5 × 10−8) showed an association with cortical thickness. This association was not in evidence when we calculated the score with the 24 727 nominally significant SNPs (P <.05) (eTable 4 in the Supplement). Nevertheless, the latter score is superior to the former in predicting liability to schizophrenia.17 This discrepancy may be owing to the fact that our study examines the relationship of the polygenic risk score with a brain phenotype (cortical thickness) rather than a liability to schizophrenia. This phenotype may represent a vulnerability trait that is not specific to a particular psychiatric disorder. Similarly, genes have pleiotropic effects on psychopathologic features.60 Herein we show that cortical thickness (in male cannabis users) is related only to a risk score based on genetic variations most strongly associated with schizophrenia, possibly by virtue of their involvement in relevant biological pathways (see below). We speculate that the top SNPs relate to brain vulnerability (a first “hit”61), whereas the nominal SNPs contribute to a broad array of factors underlying heritability of specific clinical manifestations (disorders), such as schizophrenia.
With this evidence, we speculate that the moderating influence of cannabis use on the association between the genetic risk for schizophrenia and cortical thickness may represent a combination of reduced experience-related brain plasticity taking place on the background of testosterone-associated decreases in cortical gray matter. The absence of the latter in female adolescents may represent a brain reserve that protects them to a certain extent (Figure 1C) from the cannabis-related perturbation of the brain-plasticity pathway. Genetic variations in the approximately 20 genes captured by the genetic risk score for schizophrenia (±5000 base pairs at each of the 114 SNPs) may increase vulnerability of their bearers by reducing the efficiency of neurotransmission (CLCN3 [NCBI Entrez Gene 1182], CHRNA3 [NCBI Entrez Gene 1136], HCN1 [NCBI Entrez Gene 348980], CACNB2 [NCBI Entrez Gene 783], and GPM6A [NCBI Entrez Gene 2823]), by making the brain more sensitive to immunity-related stressors (genes in the major histocompatibility complex), or by their involvement in early brain development (CNTN4 [NCBI Entrez Gene 152330], FES [NCBI Entrez Gene 2242], BCL11B [NCBI Entrez Gene 64919] and CACNB2 [NCBI Entrez Gene 783]). The fact that the group differences in regional cortical thickness between those who never and ever used cannabis show a gradient as a function of the regional differences in CNR1 expression in the same set of cortical regions suggests that the above influences indeed interact with the cannabinoid system. Nonetheless, only experimental studies can confirm the causal role of the above molecular pathways in mediating the observed statistical relationships.
Conclusions
Cannabis use in early adolescence moderates the association between the genetic risk for schizophrenia and cortical maturation among male individuals. This finding implicates processes underlying cortical maturation in mediating the link between cannabis use and liability to schizophrenia.
Back to top Article Information
Submitted for Publication: February 11, 2015; final revision received May 21, 2015; accepted May 22, 2015.
Corresponding Author: Tomáš Paus, MD, PhD, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, 3560 Bathurst St, Toronto, ON M6A 2E1, Canada ([email protected]).
Published Online: August 26, 2015. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2015.1131.
Author Contributions: Drs French and Paus had full access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Study concept and design: Gray, Leonard, Perron, Séguin, Veillette, Buchel, Conrod, Garavan, Smolka, Timpson, Smith, Paus.
Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: French, Gray, Leonard, Pike, Richer, Séguin, Veillette, Evans, Artiges, Banaschewski, Bokde, Bruehl, Buchel, Cattrell, Conrod, Flor, Frouin, Gallinat, Garavan, Gowland, Heinz, Lemaitre, Martinot, Nees, Orfanos, Pangelinan, Poustka, Rietschel, Smolka, Walter, Whelan, Schumann, Smith, Pausova, Paus.
Drafting of the manuscript: French, Bromberg, Frouin, Smith, Paus.
Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: French, Gray, Leonard, Perron, Pike, Richer, Séguin, Veillette, Evans, Artiges, Banaschewski, Bokde, Bromberg, Bruehl, Buchel, Cattrell, Conrod, Flor, Gallinat, Garavan, Gowland, Heinz, Lemaitre, Martinot, Nees, Orfanos, Pangelinan, Poustka, Rietschel, Smolka, Walter, Whelan, Timpson, Schumann, Smith, Pausova, Paus.
Statistical analysis: French, Gray, Orfanos, Pangelinan.
Obtained funding: Richer, Séguin, Buchel, Conrod, Flor, Gallinat, Garavan, Rietschel, Smolka, Schumann, Paus.
Administrative, technical, or material support: French, Leonard, Perron, Pike, Richer, Veillette, Evans, Bokde, Buchel, Cattrell, Conrod, Garavan, Gowland, Lemaitre, Martinot, Nees, Orfanos, Pangelinan, Rietschel, Smolka, Walter, Whelan, Schumann, Smith.
Study supervision: Heinz, Smolka, Walter, Pausova, Paus.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Banaschewski served in an advisory or consultancy role for Hexal Pharma, Lilly, Medice, Novartis, Otsuka, Oxford outcomes, PCM scientific, Shire, and Viforpharma; has received conference attendance support and conference support or speaker’s fees from Lilly, Medice, Novartis, and Shire; and has been involved in clinical trials conducted by Lilly, Shire, and Viforpharma. The present work is unrelated to these grants and relationships. Dr Paus is the Tanenbaum Chair in Population Neuroscience at the Rotman Research Institute. No other disclosures were reported.
Funding/Support: The Saguenay Youth Study (SYS) was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (Drs Pausova and Paus). A National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral fellowship award supports Dr French.The IMAGEN Study was supported by contract LSHM-CT- 2007-037286 for the European Union-funded FP6 Integrated Project IMAGEN (Reinforcement-Related Behaviour in Normal Brain Function and Psychopathology); by contract 602450 for the FP7 projects IMAGEMEND (Imaging Genetics for Mental Disorders); by contract 603016 for Multidisciplinary Approaches to Translational Research In Conduct Syndromes; by contract 115300-2 for the Innovative Medicine Initiative Project EU-AIMS; by Medical Research Council (MRC) Programme grant 93558 (Developmental Pathways into Adolescent Substance Abuse); by the Swedish funding agency FORMAS; by the MRC and the Wellcome Trust (Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge); by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at South London, Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, and King’s College London; by Bundesministeriumfur Bildung und Forschung grants 01GS08152, 01EV0711, eMED SysAlc01ZX1311A, and Forschungsnetz AERIAL; by grant RO1 MH085772-01A1 from the National Institutes of Health (Axon, Testosterone and Mental Health during Adolescence) (Dr Paus). The MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol is supported by the MRC and the University of Bristol (Drs Smith and Timpson). The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) was supported by grant 092731 from the MRC and the Wellcome Trust and by the University of Bristol.
Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funding sources had no role in design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
Additional Contributions: Nick Qiu, MSc, Philips Healthcare, Toronto, Canada, Anja Klasnja, BSc, Rotman Research Institute, Klara Mareckova, PhD, Central European Institute of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic, and Deborah Schwartz, PhD, Canadian Institute for Health Information, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, assisted with processing and quality control of the magnetic resonance images. The following individuals contributed to data acquisition in the SYS: Manon Bernard, BSc, Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (database architect) and Helene Simard, MA, and her team of research assistants (Cégep de Jonquière). The entire ALSPAC team, including interviewers, computer and laboratory technicians, clerical workers, research scientists, volunteers, managers, receptionists, and nurses, made this study possible. Larissa Duffy, BSc, University College London, Emma Evans, BSc, Sarah Thompson, Janine Fletcher, BSc, Elizabeth Jane Sanders, MA, Jonathan Oslow, and Amanda Hill, MA, ALSPAC, University of Bristol, Brisol, England, Spiro Stathakis, MSc, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, and Ding Qianqian, MSc, and Rosanne Aleong, PhD, Rotman Research Institute, assisted with recruitment and testing of the participants, technical assistance, and coordination of the imaging project in the ALSPAC. Dave Evans, PhD, University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, Translational Research Institute, Brisbane Australia, prepared the ALSPAC genome-wide association study dataset. None of these contributors received any compensation for their role.Entering his third full major league season, Desmond felt he had established the currency to ask for his favored number. He chose 20, and did so with a thoughtful purpose: He wanted to honor Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who wore 20 as the first manager in Nationals history and whom Desmond played for in the spring of 2005 as an 18-year-old.
“He was the first one, really, to believe in me and guide me,” Desmond said. “I still stay in touch with him still today. He was a good player. He handled himself right. Just the type of guy he was, not even all the records and all the other stuff, he was a good mentor to me.”
The Nationals have never formally recognized Robinson following his departure from the team at the end of 2006, either inviting him back for an official day or retiring his number. Desmond, one of four Nationals players who has been in the organization since before 2005, when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, would like to see more connection to the past.
“That’d be nice,” Desmond. “I think they should honor him a little. He was the first manager as a National. The kind of means something. My person opinion is, they don’t do enough to pay respect to the Expos. It’s not the same, but I came up as an Expo and I’m still a National. It did kind of carry over the Nationals to the Expos. I’m living proof.”
Danny Espinosa changed his uniform number from 18 to 8. Espinosa had always worn 8 before he reached the majors, but the team issued him 18 last year because bench coach John McLaren wore 8. With McLaren no longer in the dugout, Espinosa made the switch to his desired number.
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— Ryan Zimmerman looks to new era with NatsI believe that in recent video Bethesda clearly said that HUD is fixed so that user will be facing PS Camera in most cases, so that player won't lose the tracking. And well...smooth turning by swinging right Move? I think having smooth turning with X/O buttons will be better, as Moves do not possess the same accuracy as other motion controllers. Moves are reliable for pointing out the direction, and I like that-game is perfectly playable with it. However on right hand usually there are melee weapons and actions, such as picking up the items or activating things with Move button...not to mention that X/O buttons are already well implemented for gradual/instant turning options.
It is very simple, given that smooth turning is already available for DualShock and X/O buttons are already used for turns in other options: devs can add a third option for smooth turning, using the same buttons and smooth turning mechanic done on DualShock. Speed of smooth turning could be adjusted by separate slider. I know I sound like a broken record by that point-I'm very sorry for it. I just wish that devs would see the thread and implement the solution offered...Russian bombers drop munitions over Syria. Russian Defense Ministry BEIRUT — A cease-fire deal between rebels and the Syrian government in the city of Aleppo effectively collapsed on Wednesday, with fighter jets resuming deadly air raids over the opposition's densely crowded enclave in the east of the city.
The attacks threatened to scuttle plans to evacuate rebels and tens thousands of civilians out of harm's way, in what would seal the opposition's surrender of the city.
The evacuation was supposed to begin at dawn, but shelling resumed in the morning hours and buses meant to be used in the pullout of rebels and civilians returned to their depots. Activists and fighters trapped in the opposition's last sliver of territory in Aleppo said pro-government forces had struck their district with dozens of rockets since midmorning.
They said aircraft resumed bombing shortly after noon.
"They began to strike as if there's no such thing as a 'cease-fire' or 'civilian evacuation,'" media activist Mahmoud Raslan said. "They've announced they are going to kill us all."
It was not clear whether the planes were Syrian or Russian. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported at least six people had been killed.
A legal adviser to the rebels accused Iran of foiling the Russia- and Turkey-brokered deal by imposing new conditions on the rebels. Along with Russia, Iran backs President Bashar Assad's government and has committed advisers and elite Revolutionary Guard forces to the government's war. Turkey backs the rebels fighting to topple Assad.
Osama Abo Zaid, the adviser, said Iran was imposing new conditions for the truce, demanding that the remains of Iranians killed in Aleppo be returned and that Iranian hostages held in rebel-controlled Idlib province be released. He said the conditions were "exclusively sectarian and crippling."
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (R) meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Damascus, Syria, in this handout photograph released by Syria's national news agency SANA on August 12, 2015. Reuters
The Syrian government, meanwhile, withdrew its green-colored buses from the evacuation point at the edge of the city of Aleppo's opposition enclave. The Lebanese al-Manar TV, the media arm of the Lebanese militant Shiite group Hezbollah fighting alongside Assad's forces, broadcast footage of the buses leaving the evacuation point empty and said government forces had resumed fighting with rebels in the city.
Mohammed Abu Jaafar, the head of forensics in eastern Aleppo, said eastern Aleppo residents felt "duped."
"People have left their shelters.... to be ready for the evacuation. I can't describe it," Abu Jaafar said. "Since the morning, they started to target the areas where people have gathered... these people were walking to the crossings designated for exit."
Activists in eastern Aleppo blamed the violence on pro-government forces, saying they shot first. Raslan said he was reporting for a Turkish agency when a rocket crashed nearby at about 10:15 a.m. He shared an audio recording of the explosion with the Associated Press. He was unharmed.
Free Syrian Army fighters fire their weapons during what the FSA said were clashes with forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo's Karm al-Jabal district October 15, 2013. Thomson Reuters
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that the rebels "resumed the hostilities" at dawn, trying to break through Syrian government positions to the northwest.
Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, accused the Syrian government and its allies of trying to scuttle the deal. "We see now that the regime and other groups are trying to obstruct this (deal)," he said in remarks quoted by the state-run Anadolu Agency. "This includes Russia, Iran, forces supported by Iran, and the regime."
The surrender of Aleppo's remaining opposition-run neighborhoods to government control would be a turning point in Syria's civil war.
The last-minute deal was mediated by Ankara and Moscow as the rebel enclave rapidly dissolved and ceded more and more territory in the face of the brutal advance by Syrian forces, backed by Russia and assisted by Shiite militias from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Late on Tuesday, the UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, called for immediate access to the former rebel enclave to confirm the end of military operations and to oversee the safe departure of tens of thousands of civilians and opposition fighters. De Mistura was at the Security Council, where an emergency meeting for Aleppo was held.
Staffan de Mistura, United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, shows six with his hands as six days of the truce holding, during a news conference after a meeting of the Task Force for Humanitarian Access at the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland, March 3, 2016. Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Earlier Wednesday, the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV broadcast footage of the government buses idling at the agreed-on evacuation point. The TV said the buses were prepared to move 5,000 fighters and their families to Atareb, an opposition-held town in the northwestern Aleppo countryside.
Brita Haj Hassan, a Syrian opposition official living in exile, said from Luxemburg that there were 800 sick and wounded people requiring immediate medical evacuation from eastern Aleppo. He said the UN and others had informed the opposition the evacuation had been delayed until Thursday but there was no comment from the Syrian government, the United Nations, or aid groups on the ground.
The dramatic developments surrounding Aleppo — which would restore the remainder of what was once Syria's largest city to Assad's forces after months of heavy fighting and a crippling siege — followed reports of mass killings by government forces closing in on the final few blocks still held by the rebels.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the emergency meeting late Tuesday that he had received "credible reports" of civilians killed by pro-government forces as they swept into the last rebel areas in Aleppo.
Bashar al-Ja'afari, Syria's UN ambassador, denied any mass killings or revenge attacks but added it was Syria's "constitutional right" to go after "terrorists," a reference to all opposition fighters.
"Aleppo has been liberated from terrorists and those who toyed with terrorism," he said. "Aleppo has returned to the nation."As I grow older, I find myself giving less and less of a crap about other people’s shortcomings in general. So long as they don’t immediately affect me or anybody else for whom I’m responsible in any practical sense, I’m perfectly at ease to let people make, and own, their own mistakes – even if it means letting them fall flat on their asses in all kinds of painful ways. I’m thinking that maybe this has something to with the fact that as time marches on, more and more of my own failures are added to a pile that, while quite hefty, isn’t growing quite as quickly as it used to. Indeed, learning from mistakes has time and time again proven more useful than being told a bunch of best practices and theories up-front, but not really understanding what they were designed to prevent. So as long as the cost of doing so isn’t astronomical, I’m perfectly content to let the odd fuckup just slide – the benefit to the people actually making the mistake is too great not to.
That said there are certain things that I haven’t quite figured out how to rationalize and that still manage to get me absolutely furious. One is arrogance, especially arrogance based on ignorance of one’s own inability. Another is intellectual dishonesty; knowing better, but still doing or saying stupid shit. Yet another is wilful ignorance; not wanting to know the truth of a matter. And to be honest, I often feel like I’ve chosen the absolutely worst possible career path for someone who doesn’t want to be driven insane by those three issues in particular.
I’d be surprised if there was any other industry where the failings of intellect and character I’ve listed above are quite as apparent as in the games industry. And, sadly, the closer one gets to the consumer side of things, the more obvious these and similar issues become – and the more likely they are to be seen combined together in various ways.
Gamers are absolutely infatuated with the myths and legends of the games industry, to the point of not knowing absolutely anything – anything – about games development. They live in such a state of ignorance where if one were to tell them that games development does not, in fact, mean that you get to play games all day, most of them would only be moderately more likely to believe you than someone who doesn’t even play games. They really believe in crap such as the idea that Shigeru Miyamoto is the sole reason Nintendo’s games are as good as they are, or that optimizing performance is analogous to squeezing more fruit from an orange than the next guy can. Hell, for the longest time, the “bits” value of a processor was how we defined hardware capability. Does anyone talk about bits anymore? Of course not, but this doesn’t mean that people are getting smarter or less gullible; it just means that the agenda has been reset by those who hold the power to do so.
The specialist press – games magazines, web sites and the like – are of course complicit in all of this. Hell, they’d be stupid not to be; if you’ve got a fan base that’s this gullible, ignorant and proud of it, you’re going to cater to it, not educate it to your own detriment. Games press is more often than not at the mercy of publishers and the second you start fiddling too much with your user base the sooner they start asking difficult questions, and requiring you to do the same. You know, engaging in actual journalism and stuff. I mean, journalism is hard, at least compared to falling in line with the narrative-of-least-resistance that keeps publishers happy and doesn’t bar you from press meetings and overseas trips at the others’ expense.
Not an accurate representation of game development
It’s not just about laziness or “letting stuff slide” either; some articles are intentionally written in an intellectually dishonest manner. I remember a relatively recent article written on Nintendo’s ex-boss Hiroshi Yamauchi and his domineering management style that was printed in the only Swedish games magazine worth mentioning that made me absolutely cringe at the torturing of facts and intellectual dishonesty taking place. The writer made conclusions towards a narrative that in at least one place was blatantly opposite to what a more honest person would have written, because there was, as there always is, a preconceived thesis to pound into people’s heads. And what thesis was this? That the games industry is all fun and laughter and cool ideas and gut feeling and that anybody can do it. It’s not hard, and it’s definitely not technical, and really there’s no need to delve deeper into the subject – the digest version that the media provides is all you need. And so, a feedback loop is created, where people believe a bunch of stupid shit and the media is more than happy to let them continue believing as they do. And since the supply-side, the media, has money riding on the status quo, it’s quite obvious that if this state of affairs is to ever change, it needs to happen on the demand-side of things.
Obviously, this is easier said than done, because oversimplification goes hand in hand with much of the human experience. Whether they believe in conspiracy theories, ESP or religions, people have an instinctive desire to fill in as many of their mental blanks as possible – even if it is with things they have no real evidence for. And the more complicated ideas are, the harder they are to get people to accept – even when the truth of the matter is undeniable. Building anything on such a foundation isn’t easy, and there’s no explanation of how games development is done that can trump the appealing naïveté that is “get cool ideas – > give to some programmer-y guys who do magic – > launch”. Even when I’ve tried to inform grown men and women enrolled in university-level training programs, I’ve found myself making very simplified causal links like the one below:
Conception – A core idea is hatched at a publisher or development studio.
Matchmaking – The party that thought up the idea tries to think of a development studio or publisher that, for whatever reason, might make a good partner.
Initial Pitch – First discussions are initiated, sometimes over dinner or in some other sort of informal meeting; both parties testing the waters with no real investment. An initial budget proposal often appears around here, with a preliminary timeline and preliminary milestone dates (to clarify the term: these bullet points could all be seen as key milestones, and each milestone would have a partial payment attached to it).
High Concept Mandate – Regardless of where the core idea initiated, the developer is usually asked to put together one or more high concept documents that provide a bird’s eye view of the entire game, and let the high-ranking suits and marketers weigh it against the rest of their portfolio, figure out where it would fit in their general release schedule and so on.
Prototype Phase – If all the high-level materials are in order, publishers may ask developers to quickly make a rough prototype of the game, just to give a quick taste of the look-and-feel and/or to prove the feasibility of functionality that people might not be able to otherwise get a sense of.
Pre-Production Phase – This is where all the tools are prepped, information is gathered, assumptions about the game’s selling points are tested and the development team sets out to prove to the publisher that the game can be made at the required level of quality, on time, with the initially proposed staff.
Production Phase – The project has got the green light; all the risky stuff has been proven, all the tools and development methods have been tested, and the game starts being built in earnest.
The Alpha Milestone – The game is now at a state that is considered “feature complete”; all the graphics and audio aren’t in, but you can play through the entire game in a purely functional sense.
The Beta Milestone – Everything in the game is “final”, and the game is considered done, except for bug fixing.
Release Candidate – A Beta version of the game that doesn’t have any known major bugs and is put through all kinds of torturous, focused testing procedures, and if it gets through all of them it gets submitted for release.
Now, again, I’ve run this by people who’ve been in the classroom specifically to learn about making games, and still had to deal with eyes gl |
“smear campaign” got little traction, McCrory has started backtracking. But along the way, he brought up a somewhat interesting point.
After New York Governor Andrew Cuomo banned taxpayer-funded non-essential state employee travel to North Carolina, McCrory wondered why Cuomo didn’t request that Syracuse boycott its recent Final Four appearance in Houston, “where voters overwhelmingly rejected a bathroom ordinance that was also rejected by the State of North Carolina… It’s total hypocrisy and demagoguery.”
Seems like a fair question. But as Cuomo’s chief counsel Alphonso David pointed out, though located in New York, Syracuse is a private university, and thus did not go to Houston on the state dime. Still, McCrory’s office seems puzzled about the lack of backlash Houston has received. In response to Atlanta’s wooing of next year’s NBA All-Star Game, the governor’s office sent out a hot message reading in part: “Thankfully no college team from Georgia made the Final Four again this year. Otherwise, the Atlanta City Council would have to boycott the City of Houston where voters overwhelmingly rejected a bathroom ordinance that was nearly identical to the one rejected by State of North Carolina.”
The fact that HERO was defeated in a referendum rather than the legislature is one reason Houston has not been subjected to the same ire as North Carolina, according to Jessica Shortall, managing director of Texas Competes, a group advocating LGBT equality on business grounds.
“In Georgia the business response was to prompt a veto from Nathan Deal,” she tells Texas Monthly. “There was a recourse. And in North Carolina there is pressure on the governor and the legislature to rethink and repeal, but in Houston, it wasn’t the decision of a governor, mayor or state legislature or city council. It was the voice of voters. And that’s a very different decision for businesses, having to punish voters.”
Shortall believes that the Houston vote was an anomaly, one that took place in an odd “bubble in time” just a few months ago, when public awareness about transgender people—whose bathroom privileges formed the crux of the Houston vote—was still very low.
“We have all been going to the bathroom with transgender people this whole time and nothing has happened,” Shortall says. “This is a solution in search of a problem. I think the calculation on their part was, ‘This is an easy wedge issue, because nobody’s gonna stand for transgender people. Nobody even knows a transgender person.’ And that’s turning out not to be true anymore.”
Amazon Prime hit Transparent, Caitlyn Jenner, and Orange Is The New Black‘s Laverne Cox are all raising awareness about transgender issues, Shortall believes, and the process is taking mere months rather than years. “People got to know gay people through popular culture,” she says. “Will & Grace mattered. Glee mattered. Maybe they didn’t know a gay person up to then, but then they start to know gay people in their lives and then that person is not the ‘other’ anymore, it’s my friend or my relative or whatever. And now that’s happening with transgender people too, and it’s happening so fast, I think people on both sides of the issue are surprised.”
Even so, the fact that Houston skated away from any kind of meaningful backlash is surprising. Residents of Charlotte are being punished because of the actions of their governor and state legislature, but the people of Houston are not being singled out for their own vote.
And where was the Houston business community on this score? Yes, pro-business groups like the Greater Houston Partnership (Houston’s chamber of commerce) spoke out in favor of HERO, but the actual components of Houston’s business community were silent in both the run-up to and the aftermath of HERO’s defeat.
Of the 26 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Bayou City, all but three are in oil and gas. That industry has thus far been content to maintain a stony silence on LGBT equality, at least in Texas. According to their web site, exactly none of the Houston-based O&G behemoths have signed on as Texas Competes supporters, though 34 Fortune 500 companies (and scores of smaller ones) have. Houston voters were neither advised how to vote by the CEOs of Phillips 66, Halliburton and Baker Hughes nor did those same captains of industry urge voters to reconsider or express regret after last year’s referendum.
Perhaps they feared a backlash from their customers or their employees. O&G is not known as the most socially liberal of fields. But neither is pro-sports, but that has not stood in the way of teams outside of Texas. Each of Atlanta’s four pro-sports teams urged Deal to veto the Georgia measure. That was not the case in Houston, where the Astros and Rockets made no statement on the vote, and Texans owner Bob McNair actually went the other way, for a time, at least, pledging (and then quickly rescinding) a $10,000 donation to opponents of HERO. Of the eight “Big Four” pro-sports teams in Texas, only the Dallas Mavericks are supporters of Texas Competes.
Are these oil giants and gridiron squads scared of boycotts? Shortall believes any worry that companies might have is misplaced. “Not one single company that has spoken out in favor of LGBT equality has been punished by their customers or their fans,” she says. “Not one. I would know. It’s my job to know, but there have not been any instances of boycotts.”
Employers realize that thought in LGBT issues is evolving. A few years back, it was daring for a Fortune 500 company to publicly declare for gay rights. But now it seems risky to alienate the community. “When you think about the future of any city economy you have to think about millennials and millennials are watching this stuff very carefully,” Shortall says. “And I am talking about straight millennials and cisgender millennials. The argument used to be that we need talent from everywhere including the LGBT community, and that’s not where we are anymore. Now, even if you are willing to ignore the LGBT community, you have to be aware that millennials are going to be 75 percent of the workforce.”
Texans should watch North Carolina very carefully. Like Texas, North Carolina’s business community likes to portray itself as both high-tech and cutting edge (with its Research Triangle serving as its Austin) and a great place for stuffier industries like banking and finance. Both of those sectors of the Tarheel business community have made it plain that McCrory’s signing of this bill does not sit well with them, and the actions of multinationals like Deutsche Bank and national powerhouses like PayPal show they are in accord.
Still, it seems that at least some conservative legislators are ready to make Houston’s decision a statewide one. State Representative Matt Krause, Republican of Fort Worth, hopes to enshrine a North Carolina-style “religious liberty” law in the state constitution, one that would allow business owners to turn away people whose lifestyles clash with their stated religious beliefs. “I wanted to put it in the constitution to make it even stronger,” Krause said. “It is still something I think is very important.”
On the other hand, here’s Bill Hammond, CEO of the Texas Association of Business: “You have to weigh the negative impact on Texas if this were to become the law of the land,” Hammond said. “It’s flustering to see.”
Krause is really swinging for the fences. To amend the constitution, he would need a two-thirds vote of the state House and Senate and a popular vote. Given the recent results in relatively liberal Houston, only the Lege appears to stand as an obstacle to Krause’s proposed amendment.
One thing is certain: should that measure pass in such emphatic fashion and on a statewide level, the backlash against Texas would make what is happening to North Carolina look like child’s play.
*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Transparent‘s platform. We regret the error.This blog has been very difficult to write. Not because of emotional content, but because I keep closing the window that it’s in, and it doesn’t auto-save. Maybe the universe doesn’t think that it’s a good one, and keeps wanting me to start over. However, I owe Paulo Guillobel at the awesome https://www.guillobelbjj.com/ a shout out for his hospitality, and it’s overdue!
This one is going to be pretty light on Pacific Crest Trail, because we’ve been hanging out for a rest weekend in Dana Point. We got new boots for Jen, finally! Now, she just needs to soak her feet, let her blisters heal up a little, and let me eat some sushi and do some Jiu Jitsu. Which I did. At https://www.guillobelbjj.com/.
We pulled into this little beach/harbor town on Friday, and I frantically looked for two things. Sushi, and Jiu Jitsu. Stuffed my face with fresh fish from this little hole in the wall, skipped the sake, and grabbed my gi for open mat. No instruction, just some of the students hanging out, rolling for fun, and I got that easy, flow roll I didn’t get on Monday. Another older purple belt and I spent about ten minutes just having fun, grabbing submission attempts, sweeps, passes.
I know it seems a little weird, but this kind of slower, half-assed roll is where I learn the most. Not fighting for every inch let’s you really feel what’s happening, and see the consequences of your choices, and counters, and all that human chess stuff that this sport is all about. I had some other, more intense rolls, with lower belts of course, and had some really good battles with younger, more athletic people who were slightly more intent on ripping my arms off. All in all, a nice Friday evening. I grabbed a poke bowl and a sake, and headed home, where Jen was soaking her feet, eating a pie, and watching Rue Paul.
I headed back the next day for class, taught by the Professor himself. In BJJ, Black Belts are referred to as Professor, not Sensei, or Master, of SiFu. Instructors that are not black belts are called Coach. I don’t know why, but at least I didn’t have to learn to count in Portuguese. Until today.
Paulo Guillobel is a badass. And Brazilian, and his guys can count to twenty in Portuguese, which is what they speak in Brazil. It’s close enough to Spanish so that I knew it was happening, but not close enough for me to join in. The guy obviously knows his stuff, which is great, and you can see by the huge number of stripes on his Black Belt. They’re like rings on a tree, but they’re for every two years, not one.
So,this guy has been a black belt for longer than I’ve been training, by a factor of about two. Of course, some guys are great at doing, but they can’t teach or explain what’s going on. Not so here, he’s got a real sense of how to coach and explain things. We worked on some Judo style throws, and he had some really good insights. My Judo still sucks, but maybe it sucks a little less, and I’ve got some stuff which I can use to work on when I train the take down part of my game, which is whenever I am forced to.
We then went into a standing guard break series, where you stand up in someones’ guard, and instead of hurting your back or getting swept, you actually break the guard and pass. The key takeaways, and I’m trying to remember as best I can, is to create a different angle, and to really focus on the leg the is being attacked. It’s complicated, but I’m leaving this here as a reminder for myself. I hate learning awesome things only to forget them the next day. Ugh, that’s part of training in a sport that is endlessly creative and dynamic. Rote memorization of a few moves is not going to get you anywhere It’s also why a guy can keep training for decades, and keep getting better, like that guy above in the white gi.
I even had a chance to roll with Professor, which was amazing, in the way that you can appreciate how little you know and how much better your opponent is, and really how effective it is in kicking your ass. Plus, his style is very much what I want mine to be. Slow, methodical, subtle. He makes constant little changes to his angles which have big effects on the pathetic little things I’m trying to do. Every defensive move I made seemed to only make things worse. I bump his mount, he gets further under my arms. I try to turn, he moves under my shoulder, trapping me further. I try and shrimp, he gets a better angle on my arm, which until recently I thought was pretty well hidden, but now seems very, very vulnerable. And which is now being slowly moved into an armbar, to which I’ll tap to shortly,
One of the great things about Jiu Jitsu is that you get to interact and train with the luminaries of the sport in a way you don’t get to in other endeavors. Unless you pay a lot in some charity auction, you don’t get to share the court with Michael Jordan, or play catch with Joe Montana. Sorry, I know those guys have been retired a while, but I don’t watch much ball and stick stuff, and I didn’t want to research who was famous in those sports.
But you get to get on the mat, and try your pathetic, hopeless best against world champions pretty frequently. For $20 bucks, which covers instruction and your mat fee. How cool is that?
With all this Jiu Jitsu goodness, and fresh fish and tacos and ocean views, it was a little hard to wrap it up and head back into the mountains, but they were kicking us out. Plus, I left my trailer in Barton Flats, and eventually the raccoons, aka the hobos of the woods, would break in and burn it down, so we had to hustle back up. Plus, Jen, while reluctant to give up her pie and couch, has a trail to walk, and she really wants to do it.
We got back up, where it was threatening to snow again, packed up the still raccoon free trailer, and drove to mile 250, where our little hero began her long march to Canada anew. I duct taped her feet, just in case, shoved her out the door, and turned around, this time headed for Laguna Beach.
She seems to be doing just fine, btw. She just charged a Chinese Food lunch to the card in Big Bear. That means mile 265 or so. I’ll meet her again at Mile 325, where hopefully she’ll tell me all about how awesome her new boots are, and maybe how I was right about those damn leather monsters all along.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Austrian MPs have passed a new asylum law despite protests
Austria has passed a controversial new law that restricts the right of asylum and allows most claimants to be rejected directly at the border.
Rights groups say the law undermines the principle of protection from war and persecution.
It comes days after Austria's far-right came top in the first round of a presidential election.
Austrian officials say they are also considering building a fence at the main border crossing with Italy.
Why is EU struggling with migrants and asylum?
Crisis in seven charts
The new asylum law lets the government declare a "state of emergency" over the migrant crisis and reject most asylum-seekers, including those from war-torn countries such as Syria.
It also limits any successful asylum claim to three years.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The new law was passed after Norbert Hofer's (centre) far right Freedom Party came top in the first round of Austria's presidential election
"These amendments are a glaring attempt to keep people out of Austria and its asylum system," said Amnesty Europe director Gauri van Gulik.
But Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said Austria had no other choice as long as "so many other EU members fail to do their part" to limit the influx of migrants and refugees.
"We cannot shoulder the whole world's burden," he said.
Border fence proposed
Meanwhile, the police chief in Tyrol said Austria was proposing building a 400m fence at the Brenner crossing in the province.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Austria fears migrants will begin moving through Italy
Helmut Tomac told a news conference that the proposed border fence would depend on Italy's willingness to co-operate.
However, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi criticised the plan, saying closing the Brenner pass would go "shamelessly" against European law as well the continent's past and future.
Earlier this year, Austria began limiting the number of asylum applications it would accept and also encouraged Balkan countries to shut their southern borders to prevent migrants travelling along the so-called "Balkan route" from Greece to northern Europe.
Now officials fear that migrants will attempt to travel through Italy instead.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The plans to reintroduce border controls have been met with protests
Work has already started at the Brenner crossing to enable controls to be implemented if the numbers of migrants arriving there increase.
Measures would include searches of trucks and private cars travelling on the main highway as well as checks on trains.
Austria received 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest figure in the EU on a per capita basis.Skimping on sleep has long been associated with overeating, poor food choices and weight gain. Now a new study shows how sleep loss initiates this process, amplifying and extending blood levels of a chemical signal that enhances the joy of eating, particularly the guilty pleasures gained from sweet or salty, high-fat snacks.
The findings were published Feb. 29 in the journal SLEEP.
Sleep-deprived participants in this study—all young, healthy volunteers—were unable to resist what the researchers called “highly palatable, rewarding snacks,” meaning cookies, candy and chips, even though they had consumed a meal that supplied 90 percent of their daily caloric needs two hours before. The effects of sleep loss on appetite were most powerful in the late afternoon and early evening, times when snacking has been linked to weight gain.
“We found that sleep restriction boosts a signal that may increase the hedonic aspect of food intake, the pleasure and satisfaction gained from eating,” said Erin Hanlon, a UChicago research associate in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism. “Sleep restriction seems to augment the endocannabinoid system, the same system targeted by the active ingredient of marijuana, to enhance the desire for food intake.”
This chemical signal is the endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG). Blood levels of 2-AG are typically low overnight. They slowly rise during the day, peaking in the early afternoon.
When the study subjects were sleep-deprived, however, endocannabinoid levels rose higher and remained elevated through the evening, beyond the typical 12:30 p.m. peak. During that period, sleep-restricted study subjects reported higher scores for hunger and a stronger desire to eat. When given access to snacks, they ate nearly twice as much fat as when they had slept for eight hours.
This increase in circulating endocannabinoid levels, the authors note, “could be a mechanism by which recurrent sleep restriction results in excessive food intake, particularly in the form of snacks, despite minimal increases in energy need.”
“The energy costs of staying awake a few extra hours seem to be modest,” explained Hanlon. “One study has reported that each added hour of wakefulness uses about 17 extra calories. That adds up to about 70 calories for the four hours of lost sleep. But, given the opportunity, the subjects in this study more than made up for it by bingeing on snacks, taking in more than 300 extra calories. Over time, that can cause significant weight gain.”
obesity and sleep loss
Obesity and sleep restriction have become extremely common. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about a third of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep a night and more than a third of adults in the United States are obese. A 2013 Gallup poll found that U.S. adults sleep an average of 6.8 hours per night. Forty percent of adults report sleeping six hours or less.
Hanlon and colleagues designed the study to help understand how the endocannabinoid system connected short sleep with weight gain. Her team recruited 14 healthy men and women in their 20s as volunteers. The researchers monitored the subjects’ hunger and eating habits in two situations: one four-day stay in the University’s Clinical Research Center, during which they spent 8.5 hours in bed each night (averaging 7.5 hours of sleep), and another four-day stay when they spent only 4.5 hours in bed (4.2 hours asleep).
The participants ate identical meals three times a day—at 9 a.m., 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Researchers measured levels of the hormone ghrelin, which boosts appetite, and leptin, which signals fullness, in their blood. Previous studies have linked high ghrelin and low leptin levels to reduced sleep time and increased appetite.
For the first time, however, they also measured blood levels of endocannabinoids. After a normal night’s sleep, 2-AG levels were low in the morning. They peaked in the early afternoon, soon after lunchtime, then decreased.
After restricted sleep, however, 2-AG levels rose to levels about 33 percent higher than those seen after normal sleep. They also peaked about 90 minutes later, at 2 p.m., and remained elevated until about 9 p.m.
After the period of restricted sleep, study subjects reported a significant increase in hunger levels. This was prominent soon after their second meal of the day, the time when 2-AG levels were highest. Sleep deprived study subjects expressed greater desire to eat. When asked, they estimated that they could eat much more than they predicted the day after a full night’s sleep.
After the fourth night of restricted sleep, subjects were offered an array of snack foods. Despite having eaten a large meal less than two hours before being offered snacks, subjects in the restricted sleep phase of the study had trouble limiting their snack consumption. They chose foods that provided 50 percent more calories, including twice the amount of fat, as when they were completing the normal sleep phase.
These results support “the novel insight that sleep restriction leads not only to increased caloric intake,” but also to “changes in the hedonic aspects of food consumption,” wrote Frank Scheer of Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in a commentary. The increase in 2-AG following sleep restriction, he added, “may be part of the mechanism by which people overeat.”
Despite the study’s limitations—small size, short duration and limited sampling frequency—the findings are clearly significant and consistent with the epidemiologic evidence, the authors note. They are also “relevant to normal life conditions.”
This tells us that “if you have a Snickers bar, and you’ve had enough sleep, you can control your natural response,” Hanlon explained. “But if you’re sleep deprived, your hedonic drive for certain foods gets stronger, and your ability to resist them may be impaired. So you are more likely to eat it. Do that again and again, and you pack on the pounds.”
The National Center for Research Resources, the Department of Defense, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago Institute for Translational Medicine supported this research. Additional authors were Kara Stuhr, Elizabeth Doncheck and Cecilia Hillard from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Esra Tasali, Rachel Leproult, Harriet de Wit and Eve Van Cauter from the University of Chicago.Princess Beatrice's three Norfolk terriers were involved in a serious scrap with Queen Elizabeth II's iconic corgis last week, leaving at least one of the dogs in very bad shape.
According to reports, the Princess' 11-year-old terrier Max required vet treatment after being severely bitten by the corgis, and nearly lost an ear.
The scuffle took place inside Balmoral Castle, the Queen's residence in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, while the dogs were being taken for a walk by the royal dog boy.
"They were being taken along the long corridor leading to the Tower Door before being let into the grounds for a walk, and they all became overexcited," a source is quoted as saying. "They began fighting among themselves and unfortunately the dog boy lost control."
The Queen and Beatrice's father, the Duke of York, were said to be "very upset" upon learning of the bloody mess.
"He was very lucky to survive," said the insider. "I heard the Princess was very upset because another of her Norfolk terriers, Millie, died from natural causes just a week or so before."
The Queen's royal corgi consort includes three direct descendants of her first corgi, Susan, as well as three corgi-dachshund mixes called "dorgis."In a surprise twist to ongoing classification dramas, Saints Row 4 has received an MA15+ rating for Australian release and the Rectifier Probe is coming down under.
Although the result is yet to appear on the Classification Board website, local distributor AIE Interactive sent a press release announcing a modified version of the Volition Inc game has won an MA15+ rating, after the original game was twice refused classification.
AIE said the local version is “slightly modified” and is different from the international release “only insofar as a single short optional mission has been removed in order to comply with Australian legislation”.
As many commenters expected, it was the game’s controversial depiction of illicit substances that was the real sticking point.
“[The modified] mission has been the subject of much discussion recently for featuring the use of virtual alien narcotics by the player character, which could potentially improve certain superpowers temporarily within the game,” AIE said.
“The Rectifier Probe weapon, which has also been part of the discussion, is still due to be released as part of the Season Pass DLC package, as has always been intended both for Australia and the rest of the world.”
Publisher Deep Silver went into further detail in an additional statement, noting that the sequence in question is a loyalty mission featuring Shaundi, in which the player uses alien narcotisc to obtain superpowers.
“This mission represents approximately 20 minutes of gameplay out of the hours available to purchasers,” Deep Silver said.
“The removal of this mission has no negative impact on the story or the superpowers and will not detract from the enjoyment players will get from their Saints Row 4 experience.
“The rectifier weapon will be available as part of a DLC package as originally intended. Deep Silver stands by this decision and thanks the Australian Classification Board for their assistance with this matter.”
Saints Row 4 launches in Australia from August 22, for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, flanked by his wife Ri Sol-ju, left, and his aunt Kim Kyong-hui, wife of the executed Jang Song-thaek, right, at a completion ceremony for the Rungna People’s Pleasure Ground amusement park in Pyongyang in July 2012. [JoongAng Ilbo]
In the aftermath of the unprecedented execution of Jang Song-thaek, uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, North Korean officials with close ties to Jang working in China have disappeared and calls to their mobile phones are not being answered, reported Lee Keum-ryong, a defector turned reporter at the Free North Korea Radio (FNKR), a media outlet that reports on the Communist country.Lee, who flew to China on Dec. 8, five days after the National Intelligence Service revealed the possible purge of Jang, said he had not been able to reach North Korean officials in his personal network in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenyang in China.FNKR, South Korea’s largest defector-associated broadcaster and a 2009 winner of the Reporters Without Borders Prize, started receiving a lot of attention last Monday when it first reported that Jang might have been executed on Dec. 5.Below is Lee’s account from his visit to Beijing reported in the JoongAng Sunday yesterday.“I went to an office building where North Korean officials in the business of trade, whom I have personally known for some years, used to work. Stuff had been removed from all three rooms and [North Korean] strangers were standing guard. I waited for hours for North Korean officials to show up, but they didn’t. A source in China told me ‘a whole group of team members seemed to have disappeared’ and those who were standing guard at the office were an arrest squad [sent from Pyongyang].“I [finally] reached a North Korean official in hiding through a go-between. The man, who worked for a trading company under the North Korean administrative department previously led by Jang Song-thaek, said, ‘I was able to flee [from arrest]. And I expect others [with ties to Jang] have done the same. I don’t know what to do next.’”The official told Lee he was mulling fleeing to another country, possible the United States or a European country. When asked how many North Koreans fled from arrest, the North Korean said he did not know.One of Lee’s Chinese sources told him a majority of North Korean workers [in Beijing] “are frightened and desperate.”“In Beijing alone, there are about 30 North Korean workers, and they are now nowhere to be seen … We don’t know whether they went back [to Pyongyang] voluntarily,” said the source.Most of those who disappeared are senior ranking members of North Korea’s trading companies who have worked with Jang over many years and have transferred foreign currency to Pyongyang. Lee quoted his Chinese source as saying there was an arrest squad dispatched from the North, fueling speculation that those who returned to their country did it involuntarily.“I bet their [North Koreans in China] position is that there is nothing to hope for after the execution of Jang Song-thaek,” said a Chinese businessman.“[Those who have disappeared] are North Koreans stationed in Beijing, Shenyang and Guangzhou. Those who were in Guangzhou are the people who looked after Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of Kim Jong-il,” he said.The Chinese source told the FNKR reporter that he heard that Jong-nam, who had fallen out of favor with his father, came to Guangzhou to stay earlier this year. But his whereabouts are now unknown.When asked whether the North Koreans will seek asylum, the Chinese source said, “I haven’t heard yet. But I think it was their survival instinct that prompted them to go hiding [upon learning of Jang’s execution].There are thought to be about 70 to 80 officials from Pyongyang in Europe doing business. Analysts believe a majority of them are closely related to the executed Jang, a relationship that now gives them three choices: to return to the North to see what awaits them, to go into hiding or to seek asylum.Jang’s unprecedented fall has prompted ample rumors about Kim Kyong-hui, Jang’s wife and the younger sister of late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Jong-un’s father.A source told the JoongAng Sunday that Kim Kyong-hui is rumored to have consented to Jang’s ouster after Jong-um told his aunt that Jang was trying to seize power through a coup. Another rumor has it that Jang was under detention since September this year.Choi Jung-hoon, director at the FNKR, said according to sources in the North, O Kum-chol, vice chief of the General Staff of North Korean Army, and Choe Pu-il, minister of the People’s Security, were already executed as part of efforts to eradicate the circle around Jang. Choe, a former basketball player, is reported to have cultivated a personal relationship with Jang when he was a personal basketball coach for Kim Jong-un.“There is also another rumor that the Pyongyang regime will not punish many members of the party elite to stave off a sense of panic among party members, except for Jang’s closest allies,” said Choi of the FNKR.Nevertheless, sources in the North also say seniors at the North’s military officer academy in Nampo, South Pyongan Province, have been mobilized to do one-on-one surveillance on party officials to prevent them from fleeing overseas or contacting the powerful military, according to Choi.BY AHN SUNG-KYOO, KANG JIN-KYU [[email protected]]A group of Australian engineers have “re-invented” the steam engine and combined it with solar thermal energy to deliver a cheap solar storage solution. What’s more, it works on the distributed level and can operate behind the meter, and is far cheaper than PV combined with batteries.
Not long after Robert Mierisch finished up as director of thermal systems research at the solar thermal energy pioneer Ausra, he took himself to the Smithsonian in Washington, the world’s largest museum complex, to find out everything he could about the Skinner steam engine.
Mierisch was playing on a hunch. Or should that be a conviction. He had worked with solar thermal energy for years, and had been looking for a viable storage solution. He thought he could find the enabler in comparatively ancient technology.
Steam turbines, he reasoned, couldn’t do the job at the scale he had in mind, nor did they have the flexibility required to replace diesel power. But steam engines just might. This is what led him to the Smithsonian and the Skinner Unaflow steam engine, which were used in ships through the 1940s, the last commercial version of the steam engine that had begun at the start of the industrial revolution nearly 200 years earlier.
Now, a unique distributed generation technology with storage, the product of a 4-year collaboration between Mierisch and Steve Bisset, another Australian expat and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is soon to see the light of day.
Terrajoule, the Redwood City, California-based company they co-founded, will soon bring a demonstration system up to full-power operation, generating 100 kW for 24 hours per day. This is a key milestone toward bringing the solar/steam/storage technology to market within the next 18 months.
Mierisch and Bisset say their technology is potentially revolutionary but deceptively simple. It combines inexpensive solar power with inexpensive storage and behaves like an electric motor plugged into the grid, or even like a diesel genset. In other words, it can operate 24 hours per day, but without the utility bill or the fuel cost. And they say it will be cheaper and far more efficient than alternatives such as solar PV combined with batteries.
RenewEconomy was invited in July to visit Terrajoule’s demonstration site near Oakdale, on an irrigated almond farm in the heart of the California Valley, about 150kms east of San Francisco (see photo).
There, Terrajoule has an array of parabolic trough receivers that collect solar energy to create steam to drive the engine. The breakthrough comes from the realization that the storage can be created by exploiting the difference between the high pressure and the low pressure cycles of the engine.
While the sun is shining, high pressure steam is created and used to power the high pressure stage of the steam engine. This high pressure stage produces power only while the sun shines, but its exhaust steam still contains over half its original energy, now reduced to an intermediate pressure. This remaining energy is captured by condensing the exhaust steam into an insulated tank of water, which heats and pressurizes the water.
When energy is needed above what the sunshine-driven high pressure engine stage is producing, to handle peaks in daytime demand, or nighttime demand, the pressurized water in the tank is flashed back to steam which then drives the low pressure stages of the steam engine. The combined output of the high and low pressure engine stages provides 24-hour power on demand, like a diesel generator, but with no fuel cost.
The energy lost in this steam-water-steam storage and retrieval process is negligible, and the net cost to store the energy is a small fraction of the equivalent batteries.
Bisset says they have made only minor adjustments to the 1930s steam engine in concept, although the format is changed for manufacture alongside modern internal combustion engines. “They were highly evolved machines, he says. “Over 300 years they figured out how to make them that good. What we’ve done is match new technology (solar thermal), and old technology (steam engine) and a thoroughly modern idea (storage) and come up with a solution. The core patent is in the architecture, the novel combination of these technologies.”
Bisset says it solves the storage problem because it is much more capital efficient than other ideas. “If we started from scratch, it would have taken us 100 years to refine it. We don’t have to build more factories to do it. There is lots of capacity to build piston engines in the world, in the US, Europe, China and India.” The company’s first steam engines are being developed in collaboration with Roush Industries of Detroit, and the first market will be developed with partner JKB Energy, the leader in solar power for agriculture in California.
The initial product units will deliver 300kW to 1.5 MW peak, with constant output of 125kW to 625 kW over 24 hours. Each unit will be delivered with a 600kWh to 5 MWh of storage capacity. The engine and storage units are shipped, installed and operated in two or more 40’ shipping containers.
Terrajoule’s initial target market is the more than 300,000 electric and diesel-powered irrigation pumps in the solar-rich western US. Bisset says the technology will work in other applications, for example manufacturing plants, off-grid locations including mines, and even entire towns.
Mierisch estimates less than a five year pay-back for customers using diesel engines, a three-year pay-back when that diesel is transported long distances, and a six year payback for grid-connected customers in Australia.
“If you consider just the cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced”, he says, “the Terrajoule systems will be similar in cost to wind turbines and solar PV panels, and those technologies now produce kilowatt-hours as cheaply as fossil fuels. However, a Terrajoule kilowatt-hour is much more valuable than kilowatt-hours from wind or PV, because you can generate them when you need them. To make wind or PV viable in the long run, you have to combine them with batteries or some other expensive storage technology, and Terrajoule will be a fraction of the cost of those power-with-storage systems”.
The irony is that a unaflow steam engine had been used to convert steam into energy at Australia’s first ever solar farm in the remote town of White Cliffs in NSW in 1984.
This actually provided the seed of an idea for Mierisch’s later investigation, although it took a lot of work from Mierisch and Bisset to identify exactly where the solution was to be found.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it 40 years ago,” Mierisch says. Had they started several years earlier, pre-GFC and pre-Solyndra, Mierisch says it might have been |
a crime. The reader or viewer is provided with the clues from which the identity of the perpetrator may be deduced before the story provides the revelation itself at its climax. The "whodunit" flourished during the so-called "Golden Age" of detective fiction, between 1920 and 1950, when it was the predominant mode of crime writing.
Agatha Christie [ edit ]
Agatha Christie is not only the most famous Golden Age writer, but also considered one of the most famous authors of all genres of all time. At the time of her death in 1976, “she was the best-selling novelist in history.”[31]
Many of the most popular books of the Golden Age were written by Agatha Christie. She produced long series of books featuring detective characters like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others. Her use of basing her stories on complex puzzles, “combined with her stereotyped characters and picturesque middle-class settings”, is credited for her success.[31] Christie's works include Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and And Then There Were None (1939).
Modern regional detective fiction [ edit ]
Edogawa Rampo is the first Japanese modern mystery writer and the founder of the Detective Story Club in Japan. Rampo was an admirer of western mystery writers. He gained his fame in early 1920s, when he began to bring to the genre many bizarre, erotic and even fantastic elements. This is partly because of the social tension before World War II.[33] In 1957, Seicho Matsumoto received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for his short story The Face (顔 kao). The Face and Matsumoto's subsequent works began the "social school" (社会派 shakai ha) within the genre, which emphasized social realism, described crimes in an ordinary setting and sets motives within a wider context of social injustice and political corruption.[33] Since the 1980s, a "new orthodox school" (新本格派 shin honkaku ha) has surfaced. It demands restoration of the classic rules of detective fiction and the use of more self-reflective elements. Famous authors of this movement include Soji Shimada, Yukito Ayatsuji, Rintaro Norizuki, Alice Arisugawa, Kaoru Kitamura and Taku Ashibe.
Through China's Golden Age of crime fiction (1900–1949), translations of Western classics, and native Chinese detective fictions[34] circulated within the country.
Cheng Xiaoqing had first encountered Conan Doyle’s highly popular stories as an adolescent. In the ensuing years, he played a major role in rendering them first into classical and later into vernacular Chinese. Cheng Xiaoqing’s translated works from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced China to a new type of narrative style. Western detective fiction that was translated often emphasized “individuality, equality, and the importance of knowledge”, appealing to China that it was the time for opening their eyes to the rest of the world.
This style began China's interest in popular crime fiction, and is what drove Cheng Xiaoqing to write his own crime fiction novel, Sherlock in Shanghai.[35] In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing detective fiction very much in Conan Doyle’s style, with Bao as the Watson-like narrator; a rare instance of such a direct appropriation from foreign fiction.[35] Famed as the “Oriental Sherlock Holmes”,[34] the duo Huo Sang and Bao Lang become counterparts to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson characters.
Other regional and ethnic subcultures [ edit ]
Especially in the United States, detective fiction emerged in the 1960s, and gained prominence in later decades, as a way for authors to bring stories about various subcultures to mainstream audiences. One scholar wrote about the detective novels of Tony Hillerman, set among the Native American population around New Mexico, "many American readers have probably gotten more insight into traditional Navajo culture from his detective stories than from any other recent books."[36] Other notable writers who have explored regional and ethnic communities in their detective novels are Harry Kemelman, whose Rabbi Small series were set in the Conservative Jewish community of Massachusetts; Walter Mosley, whose Easy Rawlins books are set in the African American community of 1950s Los Angeles; and Sara Paretsky, whose V. I. Warshawski books have explored the various subcultures of Chicago.
Subgenres [ edit ]
Standard private eye, or "hardboiled" [ edit ]
Martin Hewitt, created by British author Arthur Morrison in 1894, is one of the first examples of the modern style of fictional private detective. This character is described as an "'Everyman' detective meant to challenge the detective-as-superman that Holmes represented."[37]
By the late 1920s, Al Capone and the Mob were inspiring not only fear, but piquing mainstream curiosity about the American crime underworld. Popular pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask capitalized on this, as authors such as Carrol John Daly published violent stories that focused on the mayhem and injustice surrounding the criminals, not the circumstances behind the crime. Very often, no actual mystery even existed: the books simply revolved around justice being served to those who deserved harsh treatment, which was described in explicit detail."[16] The overall theme these writers portrayed reflected "the changing face of America itself."[37]
In the 1930s, the private eye genre was adopted wholeheartedly by American writers. One of the primary contributors to this style was Dashiell Hammett with his famous private investigator character, Sam Spade.[38] His style of crime fiction came to be known as "hardboiled", which is described as a genre that "usually deals with criminal activity in a modern urban environment, a world of disconnected signs and anonymous strangers."[38] "Told in stark and sometimes elegant language through the unemotional eyes of new hero-detectives, these stories were an American phenomenon."[16]
In the late 1930s, Raymond Chandler updated the form with his private detective Philip Marlowe, who brought a more intimate voice to the detective than the more distanced "operative's report" style of Hammett's Continental Op stories.[39] Despite struggling through the task of plotting a story, his cadenced dialogue and cryptic narrations were musical, evoking the dark alleys and tough thugs, rich women and powerful men about whom he wrote. Several feature and television movies have been made about the Philip Marlowe character. James Hadley Chase wrote a few novels with private eyes as the main heroes, including Blonde's Requiem (1945), Lay Her Among the Lilies (1950), and Figure It Out for Yourself (1950). The heroes of these novels are typical private eyes, very similar to or plagiarizing Raymond Chandler's work.[40]
Ross Macdonald, pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, updated the form again with his detective Lew Archer. Archer, like Hammett's fictional heroes, was a camera eye, with hardly any known past. "Turn Archer sideways, and he disappears," one reviewer wrote. Two of Macdonald's strengths were his use of psychology and his beautiful prose, which was full of imagery. Like other 'hardboiled' writers, Macdonald aimed to give an impression of realism in his work through violence, sex and confrontation. The 1966 movie Harper starring Paul Newman was based on the first Lew Archer story The Moving Target (1949). Newman reprised the role in The Drowning Pool in 1976.
Michael Collins, pseudonym of Dennis Lynds, is generally considered the author who led the form into the Modern Age. His PI, Dan Fortune, was consistently involved in the same sort of David-and-Goliath stories that Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald wrote, but Collins took a sociological bent, exploring the meaning of his characters' places in society and the impact society had on people. Full of commentary and clipped prose, his books were more intimate than those of his predecessors, dramatizing that crime can happen in one's own living room.
The PI novel was a male-dominated field in which female authors seldom found publication until Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton were finally published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each author's detective, also female, was brainy and physical and could hold her own.[41] Their acceptance, and success, caused publishers to seek out other female authors.
An inverted detective story, also known as a "howcatchem", is a murder mystery fiction structure in which the commission of the crime is shown or described at the beginning,[42] usually including the identity of the perpetrator.[43] The story then describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery. There may also be subsidiary puzzles, such as why the crime was committed, and they are explained or resolved during the story. This format is the opposite of the more typical "whodunit", where all of the details of the perpetrator of the crime are not revealed until the story's climax.
Many detective stories have police officers as the main characters. These stories may take a variety of forms, but many authors try to realistically depict the routine activities of a group of police officers who are frequently working on more than one case simultaneously. Some of these stories are whodunits; in others, the criminal is well known, and it is a case of getting enough evidence.
In the 1940s the police procedural evolved as a new style of detective fiction. Unlike the heroes of Christie, Chandler, and Spillane, the police detective was subject to error and was constrained by rules and regulations. As Gary Huasladen says in Places for Dead Bodies, "not all the clients were insatiable bombshells, and invariably there was life outside the job." The detective in the police procedural does the things police officers do to catch a criminal. Writers include Ed McBain, P. D. James, and Bartholomew Gill.[42]
These works are set in a time period considered historical from the author's perspective, and the central plot involves the solving of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Though works combining these genres have existed since at least the early 20th century, many credit Ellis Peters's Cadfael Chronicles (1977–1994) for popularizing what would become known as the historical mystery.[44][45]
"Cozy mysteries" began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunit; these novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (culinary mystery, animal mystery, quilting mystery, etc.)
This style features minimal violence, sex, and social relevance; a solution achieved by intellect or intuition rather than police procedure, with order restored in the end; honorable and well bred characters; and a setting in a closed community. Writers include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Elizabeth Daly.[42]
Serial killer mystery [ edit ]
Another subgenre of detective fiction is the serial killer mystery, which might be thought of as an outcropping of the police procedural. There are early mystery novels in which a police force attempts to contend with the type of criminal known in the 1920s as a homicidal maniac, such as a few of the early novels of Philip Macdonald and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails. However, this sort of story became much more popular after the coining of the phrase "serial killer" in the 1970s and the publication of The Silence of the Lambs in 1988. These stories frequently show the activities of many members of a police force or government agency in their efforts to apprehend a killer who is selecting victims on some obscure basis. They are also often much more violent and suspenseful than other mysteries.
The legal thriller or courtroom novel is also related to detective fiction. The system of justice itself is always a major part of these works, at times almost functioning as one of the characters.[citation needed] In this way, the legal system provides the framework for the legal thriller as much as the system of modern police work does for the police procedural. The legal thriller usually starts its business with the court proceedings following the closure of an investigation, often resulting in a new angle on the investigation, so as to bring about a final outcome different from the one originally devised by the investigators. In the legal thriller, court proceedings play a very active, if not to say decisive part in a case reaching its ultimate solution. Erle Stanley Gardner popularized the courtroom novel in the 20th century with his Perry Mason series. Contemporary authors of legal thrillers include Michael Connelly, Linda Fairstein, John Grisham, John Lescroat, Paul Levine, Lisa Scottoline, and Scott Turow.
The locked-room mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under circumstances which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime and/or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of the crime scene. The genre was established in the 19th century. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is considered the first locked-room mystery; since then, other authors have used the scheme. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left, i.e., a locked room. Following other conventions of classic detective fiction, the reader is normally presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in a dramatic climax.
Amateur railway detective [ edit ]
One of the most prolific writers of the railway detective genre is Keith Miles, who is also best known as Edward Marston. His "Railway Detective" series, published by Allison & Busby, is set in the mid-19th century, against the background of the "Railway Age". The cases, oftentimes linked with railways, unravel through the endeavors of two Scotland Yard detectives. To the end of 2017, there are sixteen titles in the series.
Modern criticism of detective fiction [ edit ]
Preserving the story's secrets [ edit ]
Even if they do not mean to, advertisers, reviewers, scholars and aficionados sometimes give away details or parts of the plot, and sometimes—for example in the case of Mickey Spillane's novel I, the Jury—even the solution. After the credits of Billy Wilder's film Witness for the Prosecution, the cinemagoers are asked not to talk to anyone about the plot so that future viewers will also be able to fully enjoy the unravelling of the mystery.
Plausibility and coincidence [ edit ]
For series involving amateur detectives, their frequent encounters with crime often test the limits of plausibility. The character Miss Marple, for instance, dealt with an estimated two murders a year[citation needed]; De Andrea has described Marple's home town, the quiet little village of St. Mary Mead, as having "put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah"[citation needed]. Similarly, TV heroine Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote was confronted with bodies wherever she went, but most notably in her small hometown of Cabot Cove, Maine; The New York Times estimated that, by the end of the series' 12-year run, nearly 2% of the town's residents had been killed.[46] It is arguably more convincing if police, forensic experts or similar professionals are made the protagonist of a series of crime novels.
The television series Monk has often made fun of this implausible frequency. The main character, Adrian Monk, is frequently accused of being a "bad luck charm" and a "murder magnet" as the result of the frequency with which murder happens in his vicinity.[47]
Likewise Kogoro Mori of the manga series Detective Conan got that kind of unflattering reputation. Although Mori is actually a private investigator with his own agency, the police never intentionally consult him as he stumbles from one crime scene to another.
The role and legitimacy of coincidence has frequently been the topic of heated arguments ever since Ronald A. Knox categorically stated that "no accident must ever help the detective" (Commandment No. 6 in his "Decalogue").[48]
[49] Effects of technology [ edit ]
Technological progress has also rendered many plots implausible and antiquated. For example, the predominance of mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs has significantly altered the previously dangerous situations in which investigators traditionally might have found themselves.
One tactic that avoids the issue of technology altogether is the historical detective genre. As global interconnectedness makes legitimate suspense more difficult to achieve, several writers—including Elizabeth Peters, P. C. Doherty, Steven Saylor, and Lindsey Davis—have eschewed fabricating convoluted plots in order to manufacture tension, instead opting to set their characters in some former period. Such a strategy forces the protagonist to rely on more inventive means of investigation, lacking as they do the technological tools available to modern detectives.
As technology advances, so does the genre of crime fiction, as we now have the issue of cyber crime, or a crime that involves a computer and a network.[50] There is also the new issue of cyberterrorism, which is being more frequently incorporated into modern crime fiction.
Detective Commandments [ edit ]
Several authors have attempted to set forth a sort of list of “Detective Commandments” for prospective authors of the genre.
According to "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories," by Van Dine in 1928: "The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws—unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort of credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience."[51] Ronald Knox wrote a set of Ten Commandments or Decalogue in 1929,[48] see article on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
A general consensus among crime fiction authors is there is a specific set of rules that must be applied for a novel to truly be considered part of the detective fiction genre. As noted in "Introduction to the Analysis of Crime Fiction",[52] crime fiction from the past 100 years has generally contained 8 key rules to be a detective novel:
A crime, most often murder, is committed early in the narrative
There are a variety of suspects with different motives
A central character formally or informally acts as a detective
The detective collects evidence about the crimes and its victim
Usually the detective interviews the suspects, as well as the witnesses
The detective solves the mystery and indicates the real criminal
Usually this criminal is now arrested or otherwise punished
Influential fictional detectives [ edit ]
Sherlock Holmes is British detective fiction written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes is at “A study in Scarlet”. At first, Sherlock Holmes did not result massive success, however starting from 1891, after published Sherlock Holmes at “Strand Magazine”, it became unquestionably popular.[53] After Sherlock Holmes, many detective stories followed Conan Doyle’s structure and also include characters which have Sherlock Holmes characteristics.
Sherlock Holmes as a series is perhaps the most popular form of detective fiction. Doyle attempted to kill the character off after twenty-three stories, but by popular request, he continued to write the Sherlock Holmes series. Sherlock Holmes is not only referenced as the titular character, but has also influenced many other areas outside of detective fiction. For example, the BBC-produced TV series Sherlock gained a very large fandom after first airing in 2010, imbuing a renewed interest in the character in the general public. Because of the popularity of Holmes, Conan Doyle was often regarded as being “as well-known as Queen Victoria”.[53]
Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian private detective, created by Agatha Christie. As the one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, he appeared in 33 novels, one play (Black Coffee), and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975. The stories are throughout the Hercule Poirot's whole life in the UK, which he first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (published in 1920) and died in Curtain (published in 1975), which is Agatha Christie's last work. August 6, 1975, The New York Times published the obituary of Poirot's death and the cover of the newly published novel on the front page.[54][55]
Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is a fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).
C. Auguste Dupin is generally acknowledged as the first detective in fiction. The character served as the prototype for many that were created later, including Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie. Conan Doyle once wrote, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"
Ellery Queen is a fictional detective-hero, created by Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971), and Frederic Dannay (1905～1982), as well as a joint pseudonym for the cousins Dannay and Lee. Ellery Queen first appeared in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), and was the hero of more than 30 novels and several short story collections, During the 1930s and much of the 1940s, that detective-hero was possibly the best known American fictional detective.[56]
Detective debuts and swansongs [ edit ]
Many detectives appear in more than one novel or story. Here is a list of a few debut and swansong stories:
Books [ edit ]
Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History by Julian Symons ISBN 0-571-09465-1
by Julian Symons ISBN 0-571-09465-1 Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates (Editors), The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Greenwood, 2001. ISBN 0-313-31655-4
Greenwood, 2001. ISBN 0-313-31655-4 The Manichean Investigators: A Postcolonial and Cultural Rereading of the Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi Stories by Pinaki Roy, New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-81-7625-849-4
by Pinaki Roy, New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-81-7625-849-4 Killer Books by Jean Swanson & Dean James, Berkley Prime Crime edition 1998, Penguin Putnam Inc. New York ISBN 0-425-16218-4
by Jean Swanson & Dean James, Berkley Prime Crime edition 1998, Penguin Putnam Inc. New York ISBN 0-425-16218-4 Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story by Ernest Mandel, 1985. Univ. of Minnesota Press.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, has expressed his support for including gay couples in immigration reform.
During an appearance Sunday on ABC's This Week, Reid told host George Stephanopoulos that he backed President Obama's proposal to allow a U.S. citizen the ability to seek a visa for a spouse “on the basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner.”
Under the current law, a gay American cannot sponsor an immigrant spouse for citizenship due to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prevents the federal government from recognizing their marriage.
(Related: Conservatives want Obama to drop gay couples from immigration reform.)
“The president said he wants gay and lesbians to be able to have a family preference,” Stephanopoulos said. “Senator [John] McCain has said we shouldn't come up with legislation for what he calls social issues.”
“If we have gay folks in this country who have children, or they come from some other place they should be protected just like any other child,” Reid said.
“That's the position the Republicans are saying that's too heavy to lift.”
“If they're looking for an excuse not to support this legislation, this is another one,” Reid said. “But the American people are past excuses. They want this legislation passed.” (The video is embedded on this page. Visit our video library for more videos.)
McCain recently acknowledged that the bipartisan plan currently being offered does not address the inequity.
“It's something that frankly is not of paramount importance at this time,” McCain said.From nearly all angles the marijuana movement looks unstoppable.
Currently there are 23 states that have legalized marijuana use for medicinal purposes, from chronic conditions like glaucoma to terminal illnesses such as cancer. Additionally, voters in four states -- Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska -- have legalized marijuana for recreational, adult use.
Public opinion as a whole has witnessed a dramatic shift (if the aforementioned state votes didn't give that away). Research firm Gallup's polls show that support for marijuana has doubled between 1995 and 2014. Its latest survey showed that 51% of respondents were in favor of a sweeping marijuana legalization.
Marijuana even received a bit of a reprieve from the federal government in June. Some of the hurdles surrounding medical marijuana research were lifted, which should allow cannabinoid-based drug developers such as GW Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:GWPH) to more easily move from preclinical to clinical studies, saving both time and money. GW Pharmaceuticals is in the process of developing a drug (Epidiolex) that could treat rare forms of childhood-onset epilepsy, and it boasts a handful of other experimental products geared at everything from ulcerative colitis to glioma.
Yet, in spite of this momentum, marijuana being legalized nationally looks to be far from a reality.
The simple reason marijuana won't be legalized nationally anytime soon
"Why?" you wonder? Look no further than the upcoming presidential election, where candidates have begun to weigh in with largely apathetic or negative commentary toward the currently illicit drug.
Among the one dozen serious (early) contenders for president of the United States from either party, just one -- Rand Paul -- can be implied as being in favor of legalizing marijuana, or at least decriminalizing the drug. While Paul hasn't exactly given marijuana any ringing endorsements, he firmly believes that the federal government should stay out of the states' choice of whether or not to legalize marijuana.
Paul was also one of three Senators behind the CARERS Act, which was introduced in March with the intention of ending the federal ban on medical marijuana. Had the CARERS Act gained traction, it would have led to the rescheduling of marijuana from an illicit (schedule 1) drug to a schedule 2 drug -- meaning it would be recognized to have medically beneficial properties, but still prone to abuse. Furthermore, the CARERS Act would have opened the door to easier bank financing for medical marijuana businesses, and would fully remove the hurdles in place for marijuana researchers and marijuana-based drug developers (e.g., GW Pharmaceuticals and the like).
Beyond Paul though, marijuana supporters could be sorely disappointed by the remaining field of candidates.
A field of apathy and opposition
The remaining presidential candidates have either taken a wait-and-see approach, or they've not minced their words with regard to their opposition of marijuana.
For example, the recently declared Republican candidate from New Jersey, Chris Christie, told Face the Nation he would restore federal prosecution against those people using marijuana illegally, such as users in Colorado, a state where voters approved a measure to legalize the drug on a recreational basis in 2012. Similar feelings were echoed by Republican governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana who told The Washington Times, "I don't think you can ignore federal law." Republican Senator Marco Rubio from Florida has also previously been on the record in support of the federal law banning marijuana.
And the commentary from the wait-and-see crowd isn't much more encouraging.
Previous Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee believes in respecting states' rights to legalize without federal intervention if there aren't any negative societal implications from marijuana use. Former Republican governor Jeb Bush also believes in respecting the rights of states, but is on record as thinking "legalization [in the first place] was a bad idea." Even Hillary Clinton has demonstrated skepticism toward the benefits of medical marijuana, choosing to wait until more evidence is available before making a decision to side with proponents or opponents of the drug.
For those of you hoping that we'll see a scheduling change from the federal government prior to the next election, that also seems unlikely. President Obama has suggested that more states legalizing marijuana could force Congress into action. However, Obama has been clear that marijuana isn't a priority for his administration, and that America's youth should focus on more important issues.
Marijuana's challenges come to the forefront
The reality for marijuana is that any nationwide legalization before 2020 seems unlikely, short of a Rand Paul victory.
What's clear based on the commentary from a majority of the presidential candidates is there appears to be a distrust of marijuana's benefits profile. This probably shouldn't come as too big of a shock since marijuana studies for the past couple of decades have revolved around its adverse effects rather than its benefits. Only recently have researchers turned the tables on marijuana research and begun examining the various ways the currently illicit drug could help people. It's going to take time for this data to mature, meaning lawmakers are unlikely to be in a hurry to support the across-the-board legalization of marijuana, or even softer medical marijuana laws on a federal basis.
Because lawmakers are in no need to rush to a decision on marijuana, it also means that legal marijuana businesses could struggle to expand. You have to remember that even in states where marijuana is legal, banks have been largely unwilling to lend for fear of prosecution or a reassertion of federal laws in a future presidency.
All told, this leads to one conclusion: marijuana is a dangerous investment. Even though legalizing the drug in all forms could open up a market as big as $35 billion by some estimates, marijuana businesses look to be on track to face challenging times for at least the next five years by my estimates. It's certainly possible we could see the presidential candidates' opinions evolve as their campaigns mature, but all signs continue to point toward marijuana likely remaining a schedule 1 drug until at least 2020.CRN 38558 Sat 2-5 SCIE 215 Catalog Description Advanced techniques of defeating computer security, and countermeasures to protect Windows and Unix/Linux systems. Hands-on labs include Google hacking, automated footprinting, sophisticated ping and port scans, privilege escalation, attacks against telephone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems, routers, firewalls, wireless devices, Web servers, and Denial of Service attacks.
Prerequisites: CNIT 123.
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Use Google and automated footprinting tools to locate vulnerable Web servers, passwords, open VNC servers, database passwords, and Nessus reports Perform sophisticated ping and port scans with several tools, and protect servers from the scans Enumerate resources on systems using banner-grabbing and specific attacks against common Windows and Unix/Linux services including FTP, Telnet, HTTP, DNS, and many others, and protect those services Use authenticated and unauthenticated attacks to compromise Windows and Unix/Linux systems and install backdoors and remote-control agents on them, and protect the systems from such attacks Enter networks through analog phone systems, defeating many authentication techniques, and defend networks from such attacks Penetrate PBX, voicemail, Virtual Private Network (VPN), and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems, and defend them Perform new wireless attacks, including denial-of-service and cracking networks using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA-2 Identify firewalls and scan through them Perform classical and modern Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, and defend networks from them Locate Web server vulnerabilities, exploit them, and cure them Describe many ways Internet users are attacked through their browsers and other Internet clients, and the protective measures that can help them Textbooks Hacking Exposed, Sixth Edition by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz -- ISBN-10: 0071613749 Buy from Amazon
CNIT 124: Advanced Ethical Hacking -- Lecture Notes and Projects (Spring 2009) by Sam Bowne (buy it at the CCSF Bookstore)The Melbourne apartment surge is just beginning. In the next few years, an unprecedented number of apartments will hit the city’s already crowded skyline.
But our new research shows this does not mean more Victorians are embracing inner-city living; rather it is the result of the marketing of thousands of tiny, poor quality apartments to investors, which threatens to undermine the carefully fashioned story of Melbourne’s liveability.
Apartment capital of Australia?
While Sydney has traditionally been the epicentre of apartment development, there has been an unprecedented surge in high-rise apartment completions in Melbourne since the late 2000s, located primarily in the inner city and CBD fringes.
Between 2010-2012, the inner-city skyline was transformed with the completion of 22,605 apartments. However, the city is set to see a further 39,000 additional completed apartments that have already commenced or have been released for off-the-plan sale.
The apartment boom is driving Melbourne’s extraordinary share of Australia’s dwelling approvals. In 2012-13 they constituted 24.3% of the Australian total. Yet Melbourne’s share of Australia’s population in mid-2012 was 18.5%.
Does this mean that households in Melbourne are embracing inner-city apartment living? Our analysis indicates that it does not. Rather, it is an investor rather than an occupier driven boom.
Apartment residents remain overwhelmingly young singles or couples who are renters. They continue to be transients who, as in the past, will move into family-friendly housing when they decide to raise a family. Most of the new households in Melbourne will be looking for such housing. There is no large potential source of apartment occupiers (including empty nesters) who will be attracted to apartment living.
AAP
Melbourne is not like Sydney, where restrictions on outer suburban expansion have compelled 11% of households (including some families with children) to occupy apartments. There are huge tracts of outer suburban zoned for the development. Detached houses can be bought for far less than two bedroom apartments in the inner city. By 2011 only 4% of households in Melbourne lived in apartments of four storeys or more.
In the case of the City of Melbourne, while there has been an increase in the number of those who live and work in the CBD, by 2011 they comprised just 27,912 of the 344,790 persons who worked in the city. Overseas students have also been an important source of apartment occupiers. In addition, to our surprise, there has been an increase in the number of those who live in the City of Melbourne and work outside it. They increased by 5,246 between 2006 and 2011 to 19,108.
There will have to be massive increases in the numbers in each of these categories if they are to approximate the expected surge in apartments on the market.
A risk to liveability?
Local apartment developers, who dominate the inner suburb apartment market are backing off on new proposals. However, overseas developers are undeterred. They have the resources to outbid locals for sites in the inner city and are likely to approach 100% of completed apartments in this area by 2016. They are responsible for the recent surge in proposals for CBD apartment towers.
Melbourne is a more attractive to developers than Sydney because there are more potential sites for high-rise apartment projects which can be developed at prices affordable to most investors (less than $500,000). These pricing priorities are also responsible for the increasing share of apartment projects comprising tiny apartments (mostly sub 50 square metres in net living area).
Inner Melbourne is also attractive because of its amenities, enhanced by massive state government and City of Melbourne investment in infrastructure (including CityLink and Southern Cross Station) public spaces (Federation Square), parks (Birrarung Marr) and laneways.
This investment was intended to enhance Melbourne’s prospects of becoming a centre of knowledge-intensive industries by enhancing the city’s liveability. It was hoped that this would attract the “creative class” believed to drive this transformation. For its part, the City of Melbourne has long wanted to transform the CBD and surrounds into an inviting mix for residence, work and entertainment.
AAP
Squandering the “Melbourne story”
This investment has helped in the fashioning of a ‘Melbourne Story’, which has been particularly attractive to Asian developers and investors.
However, the apartment boom is squandering this investment. It is delivering tiny, poor quality apartments that will repel rather than attract this market. City of Melbourne planners have recently issued a withering critique of the outcome, with the chief advocate of the local authority’s original vision, Rob Adams, declaring the current ‘flood’ of apartments has gone too far.
Despite warnings of an apartment glut the State Government and the City of Melbourne are pressing on with plans to facilitate further urban renewal. They include Fishermans Bend and the City North and Arden-Macauley precincts to the north of Melbourne’s CBD. The City of Melbourne’s planning blueprint assumes that the number of dwellings will increase from 67,533 in 2012 to 110,533 in 2031.
The state government wants the apartment boom to continue because it is one of the few bright lights of the current Melbourne economy. It can ignore the City of Melbourne planners’ concerns because it holds the planning authority for apartment towers in excess of 25,000 square metres floor space. It is approving almost all proposals put to it.
The outlook is that the investment in the city’s amenities will be squandered. The city is heading towards becoming a dormitory rather than a centre for knowledge-intensive industries. The balance between apartments and offices in the CBD is swinging rapidly towards the former with the prospect that apartments will crowd out sites for offices in prime CBD locations.
In the three years 2013 to 2015 there will be three times the amount of floor space completed for apartments in the CBD and Docklands than for new office space.
The planning elites shaping Melbourne’s future are ignoring the disconnect between the investor-driven apartment boom and real housing preferences. Their plans for the inner city’s expansion and for its economy are based on a property boom that our analysis indicates will implode.THIS is a story of wombaticide, and the shocking allegations behind a marsupial massacre. It’s also a story about animals of the two-legged variety.
Earlier this week, it emerged that a logging operation in the Glenbog State Forest in southern New South Wales may have buried up to 150 bare-nosed wombats. This gross act of |
bail fund that would bail out certain nonviolent defendants.
“The city deserves a bail system that makes sure that people return to their court appearances, keeps us safe, doesn’t punish people for being poor, isn’t racially discriminatory, doesn’t distort outcomes in cases, and is efficient,”Councilman Rory Lancman, chair of the courts and legal services committee, said. “And if you look at each of those categories, if you will, there’s a lot of room for improvement.”
Mr. Lancman said the issue needs to be tackled by “a mix of the city, the state and the courts.” The city could change the way it conducts interviews for bail through the Criminal Justice Agency, funded and contracted by the city, in order to give judges better information about defendants, he said. Courts can improve the way judges are applying the existing laws, and defense counsel can do more to advocate for flexible bail terms.
The bail fund, proposed by Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, is modeled off the Bronx Freedom Fund, managed by the Bronx Defenders, a legal services organization. The fund has helped 230 people who are charged with a misdemeanor and had bail set at $2,000 or less, its director Alyssa Work told the Observer. So far, 97 percent of clients have returned to court, and Ms. Work said she believed it could work on a wider scale.
For their clients, being able to pay bail “means everything,” she said. It helps them hold on to their jobs, keeps them from being embroiled in child custody issues, keeps them in school or keeps them from losing a place in a city shelter.
“They get to fight their case—their attorney has a chance to investigate the strength of the charges against them, they’re not under sort of the extreme physical pressure of being incarcerated to plead guilty just to get out of there and go home,” Ms. Work said. “All of a sudden they have this world of options.”
Ms. Fishman, at Vera, said reforming bail would also drastically cut back the amount of money local governments are spending on jails, which see many more admissions annually than prisons and have become the “front door for mass incarceration.”
“The only reason they’re in [jail] is because they’re poor, basically. Because a person who had money and was accused of the same kind of a crime would be out on the street,” she said.
In New York City, only 14 percent of defendants are held on bail, according to the city. The vast majority of those charged with misdemeanors, 79 percent, are released without bail.
But those who are given bail for a misdemeanor are quite often unable to pay it before serving at least some jail time, Mr. Lancman’s office said. Citing a CJA report, Mr. Lancman’s office said 87 percent of misdemeanor defendants with a bail under $1,000 were unable to post it at arraignment, and 48 percent of them were unable to make their bail at any point pre-trial.
A period of pre-trial incarceration, even a brief one, can have a lasting impact. In addition to facing the problems Ms. Work cited, those detained pre-trial are more likely to be sentenced to prison time after conviction than those who were released pre-trial, according to another CJA report cited by Mr. Lancman’s office.
Still, some activists don’t believe a bail fund is the answer. Cherise Fanno Burdeen, executive director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, said her organization would urge the Council not to create a bail fund—calling it a Band-Aid.
“To quote my best friend Taylor Swift, ‘Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes,’” Ms. Fanno Burdeen said. “If it was my son, I’d want a bail fund, if I was too poor to post [bail]. But as a long-term solution, I think it’s kind of like filling potholes instead of repaving the road.”
The Pretrial Justice Institute is instead pushing for broader bail reform—and an end to cash bail entirely, as has been done in places Washington, DC—employing mobile billboards asking Gov. Andrew Cuomo to take action and circulating a petition that has more than 30,000 signatures.
Judge Lippman said he would be meeting the City Council members to determine what could be done at the local level.
“I think we need to be creative,” Judge Lippman said. “Where there’s a lack of action, I think we have to look at every nook and cranny of power the local government has, the courts have.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio has yet to lend his support to the bail fund. But his Criminal Justice Director Elizabeth Glazer struck a skeptical note about the entire notion of money bail.
“Money bail is cause for concern. While most defendants in New York City are released at arraignment without bail, it is still unacceptable for the size of one’s bank account—and not the risk they pose—to determine whether an individual is in jail or with their family while waiting for trial,” Ms. Glazer said in a statement to the Observer.
To that end, she said the city is “tripling” the number of people who can take part in a supervised release program—allowing them to remain free, without posting any money, but subjecting them to close monitoring. The city expects to have 3,000 people under supervised release this fall.
Ms. Fishman said there’s little research showing that people who pay bail are any more likely to appear in court than those who do not. It’s an issue the Vera Institute first looked into 50 years ago, when it was founded and released a report called the Manhattan Bail Project—aimed at reducing pre-trial detention in Manhattan. People released through their pre-trial program had a better chance of returning to court than those who went through the regular bail system.
“We’ve taken to calling it fairly bittersweet that we’re once again, 50 years later, focused again on the novelty of bail reform. But I think there’s an opportunity now, and momentum,” she said. “I think we as a society, as a city, I think that we know that we can do much better than this.”
Judge Lippman said the state ought not wait to do better.
“Let’s not wait until another young person is left without a life before we act again. The only time that we focus on these things is when you have a terrible tragedy. That is just not the way that we should be as public officials conducting ourselves,” Judge Lippman said. “There is an urgency to do that before more people lose the lives and on top of it, on top of it, New York, the public safety is at risk.”0 Flares Filament.io 0 Flares ×
You are a good person, perhaps a Christian. Maybe even a leader or a pastor. Your heart is to follow Jesus and to be faithful to His purposes. The important things you are accomplishing for the cause of Christ haven’t gone unnoticed. You’re living out your faith with noble intentions from the framework of your experience, understanding, and conviction.
Yet, there are issues in life that change the course of history, starting with the challenging of our own creeds and spiritual assumptions. The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender realities being one of those, especially within Christian circles.
For some, you are familiar with terms like LGBT. Others, your awareness is more centered on homosexuality in contrast to heterosexuality. When it comes to sexual and gender manifestations, there is a large expanse. It’s complicated stuff, with lots of moving parts. All of us having a certain level of understanding, if nothing more than how charged, difficult, costly, and controversial these issues can be.
Maybe you have already drawn your conclusions, carved a line in the sand. It’s all an abomination. The clear teachings of the Bible make it perfectly clear. Any other theological landing point is a slippery slope to hell. Nothing is going to move you, sway you, or alter your view.
That was me. The pastor who could look out upon a congregation. With no restraint, no hesitation, no pumping of the breaks. Telling those gathered in my polished preacher’s voice, it’s all a sin and unless met with repentance, every last one of them are on a fast track to hell. Gladly receiving the high-fives from those who agreed.
Been there, done that, have the t-shirt. I understand exactly where you are at.
Maybe you are questioning. It’s all a bit fuzzy to you. You see both sides, swinging from one end to the other. Looking down at the fall between the two trapeze. To grasp for the other side, making the leap, the blood wells up in your head, your breath is constricted in horror. You gaze ahead to the relational dominoes that would crash to the floor if people knew just the doubts you were having, let alone the new position you might be taking. The deconstruction of your faith, the footings of your creed. If only it would all just go away. Indecision, straddling the fence. It’s all too much. So, you just keep swinging.
That was me. The pastor trying to stand for everything, and therefore standing for nothing, and with no one. Lukewarm and loving it.
Been there, done that. The middle ground is the lowest ground.
Maybe deep within, you believe in God’s affirming heart for LGBT people. You have studied it out, covered the chalkboard with new equations, new summations, new conclusions. Like Nicodemus, in the dark of night, you have come to Jesus. Learned His heart. Yet, it’s your secret stance. Only known by you, perhaps a few others. Adding up the costs, the conversations to take place, the meetings to meet with, the look in people’s eyes, the locking of their wallets, the removal of their memberships. The de-friending, the demonizing, the de-humanizing. The firing, the resigning, the transitioning. The tally on the receipt, the numbers that result… it’s too much. The cost is just too much.
That was me. The pastor, who with money he didn’t have, planted a church, starting with seven people. Nurtured it, fed it, changed its diapers. Knowing full well, just a year in, if people knew my true heart, it might die. I could lose everything. Friendships, family, systems that held me together, clients in my bi-vocational work.
But then, the awakening. Truth. Jesus. God’s heart.
Christian, do you realize the spiritual, emotional, and physical torture LGBT people experience, almost exclusively at the hands of our Christianity? Thousands of gay and lesbian people commit suicide every year. Others, walk a daily living hell of discrimination, hate, bullying, violence, abuse, marginalization, and condemnation. A staggering 41% of transgender people attempt suicide because of societal non-acceptance.
Certainly, that has to bother you, at least register a blip on your radar screen, does it not? No, maybe it’s not happening in your leather-bound, steeple-topped world, but it’s happening in God’s world. And quite frankly, He’s pissed and so am I.
Can you even begin to imagine what’s that like? Every moment of every day, dehumanized and demonized. A breath among them is rarely taken without a whiff of pungent bigotry stinging every fiber of their being, burning clear down to their souls.
Folks, this is disgusting, outrageous, and dripping with pure evil. And who are the ones leading this frontal of death towards the LGBT community?
Christians, that’s who.
Do you realize the Bible, particularly in regards to LGBT, isn’t nearly as clear as you think it is? It’s not the slam dunk we have swallowed as truth. There is only one Word of God, Jesus. The rest our words about God requiring deep contextualization, discernment, and evaluation. Those six verses that we cling to, seemingly condemning LGBT people, are at best a house of cards. We’re slinging marshmallows, arming them are missiles.
But chances are, you won’t hear any of that. The fingers in our ears feel safer. The reality that you, and a whole spiritual system within Christianity could be completely wrong, is perhaps just too much for your pride and faith arrogance to compute. So excuse me, if while you smoke your unnatural cigarettes, sign your unnatural divorce papers, and stuff your faces with all kinds of unnatural, I get a little smirk on my face when you try to get all Bible on me, preaching to me how “unnatural” those LGBT people are.
I know. You think from where you sit, it’s your job to tell the LGBT community the error of their ways, the consequences of their choices. Eternity is in the balance. Sadly, that’s what love looks like to you. But that’s not what Jesus looked like to anybody. You are going to have to re-image Him into a vehicle of your own agenda to arrive at a spiritual license for your condemnation, judgement, self-righteousness, and hate. Sure, you can proof-text a couple passages into compliance, but you’ll never contextualize Jesus and justify that evil prowess.
Christian, do you realize, the LGBT community is not a manifestation of choice or decay, but of God’s delighted design. They didn’t sign up for this like a gym membership. There is no upgrade God is downloading, a change that God is desiring. He didn’t make a mistake. There is nothing to improve, overcome, or revamp.
These are human people. Living, heart-beating, lung-expanding, emotion-feeling people. Beautifully and wonderfully made by the artistry of the Master.
But perhaps that river of revelation hasn’t flowed to the banks of your spirituality. Why? Because you haven’t listened, you haven’t truly befriended, you haven’t humbly sat at the feet of the LGBT community, washing, serving, beholding. You haven’t looked into the eyes of their soul, stood under waterfall of their struggles, internalized their suffering. And therefore, you have missed Jesus, the Living Water, right within your midst. You have become the very people who have received Him not. Leaving your mind, your heart, your faith unchanged, hardened by your unwillingness to repent in response to the kindness, goodness, and holiness of God created in every LGBT person.
The Holy Spirit is charging into the temple of our Christianity, flipping the tables, revealing the truth that in the spiritual x-ray of all that is LGBT, we are in fact the cancer, we are the sin, we are the abomination… not them. And most tragic of all, the wages of our sin has become their death. The wages of our ignorance, the wages of our silence, the wages of our complacency. The wages of our bench sitting, comfort idolizing, spiritual pride, and cowardice… everyday, becomes their death.
Whoever you are, wherever you are at, I am not asking you to go against your conscience, but for Christ’s sake, I am asking you to open your conscience to the transformation of the Holy Spirit.
For the love of God, listen to your heart, listen to the voice of Jesus.
If God, in scripture, affirms the wild donkey that serves no redeeming purpose, the Ostrich that sucks at parenting. Just because they breathe, He pours at His full delight and pride. How much more does He affirm all of humanity, His best idea, one-of-a-kind created in His image? That’s reason enough for the God of the universe to love unconditionally, affirm unlimitedly… just because we breathe.
What’s it going to take?
How many more LGBT people have to commit suicide, begging for life to end? How many more LGBT people have to crawl through this living Hell, tasting the ever constant spit of Satan upon their face as he uses Christians to mouthpiece his declaration that God hates them. How many more LGBT people have to breathe their last, foaming from the mouth in the stranglehold of bullies and bigots? How many more parents of LGBT have to weep until their eyes bleed. Fearing for their children’s lives. Closing the drapes, curling up into the fetal position, all but giving up. How many more LGBT souls condemned, lives destroyed, families broken apart, faiths unraveled? How many more LGBT people have to die at the altar of our Christianity?
What’s it going to take?
But what about my reputation, what about my congregation, what will my family and friends say?
I say to you, who gives a shit? Don’t you get it? Lives are at stake. This is not a joke. We Christians have gotten this completely, emphatically wrong. Search you soul, deep down, you know you have tasted the poison we are pimping as fruit.
While you are dreaming of your future, keeping your ministry aspirations alive, holding on for a life of financial security, family peace, and basic hopes and comforts. There is a whole group of LGBT people dreaming they don’t wake up tomorrow, praying on their hands and knees to die. That’s their dreams.
For the joy set before Him, Jesus endured the cross. He went the distance, risked everything, did whatever it took. What was the joy? The full affirmation, the full salvation of all, you and me, just as we are, beautifully and wonderfully made. One and done on the cross. You don’t die for that which you don’t first love and affirm.
So I ask you, what is the object of your joy? Is it your wallet, your pay check, your church attendance, your friendships, family, reputation, ministry? Is that the ultimate, deepest object of your joy?
For Jesus, it was the least of these. The broken, the marginalized, the condemned, the hurting, the discarded, the bullied. Those drifting in the sea of injustice.
Isn’t that enough for you? The life, the wellbeing of a mutual, human being. Their dignity, their divinity?
What’s it going to take? Tell me. I’ll write, pay it, do it.
Your affirmation of what God already has, could be the difference-maker in a life. Hope where there was no hope. Changing everything.
Desmond Tutu said it this way…
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
James, the brother of Jesus said it this way…
“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
Jesus said it this way…
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
What’s it going to take?
For some, it’s already too late.
But for others, before it’s too late… I beg you, affirm what God already has.
Grace is brave, be brave.
Affirm.
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Like this: Like Loading...Polish flags were burned in various locales across the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland last week in what the local Poles described as the latest incident of abuse against their community.
The Polish Association of Northern Ireland even characterized the bonfires as a form of racist intimidation despite the fact that the Polish are white, European and Christian.
The Polish community embrace and respect all traditions here in Northern Ireland, but we find this behavior totally appalling and offensive,” said Maciek Bator of the Polish Association in a statement.
The Polish flag is a symbol of freedom, independence and peace for the 30,000 Polish people living in Northern Ireland and around 80 million across the globe. By burning the Polish flag and other symbols, some members of the local communities were able to express their strong political views and promote anti-Polish sentiments.”
Bator added that he wants local lawmakers to find the culprits and punish them.
For many participants, especially the youth and young people, the burning of the Polish flag could become a clear signal to expand hate to other aspects of life,” he said.
“There is already a high level of hate-motivated incidents on members of the Polish community. We call on all political and community leaders in Northern Ireland to take urgent action to stop hatred and bigotry.
Anna Lo, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and herself an immigrant from Hong Kong, condemned the flag burning.
It is completely unacceptable for people to burn any flag,” she said.
“The people who burnt these Polish flags are nothing more than bigots. It is the actions of a hateful person who would do such a thing. I would urge community leaders to encourage the people involved in the building of these bonfires to ensure that nothing like a flag or an effigy is placed on them. This is clearly racist behavior which is doing the image of Northern Ireland a lot of damage.
Poles have streamed into Northern Ireland by the thousands since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, making it easy for Polish citizens to cross national borders in search of work. Another 150,000 Poles currently reside in the Republic of Ireland.
Other immigrants have also poured into Northern Ireland in recent years, creating tensions beyond the traditional Catholic-Protestant conflicts familiar for so long in Ulster.
Apparently, some xenophobic Northern Irishmen resent the influx of any foreigners, regardless of race or ethnicity, with Poles a particular target due to their large numbers.
Last October, a pipe bomb was left on the window of a Polish couple in an estate in Antrim. There have been literally hundreds of similar incidents against Poles over the past decade or so, including assault and graffiti.
Of course, given Northern Ireland’s long history of sectarian violence, part of the animosity towards Poles may be connected to their Catholic faith.
Moreover, Poles complaining of “racism” and “discrimination” is quite ironic, since Poland has long been a hotbed of anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice for centuries. Indeed, the recent Euro 2012 soccer tournament in Poland and Ukraine raised the media’s glare on the deeply-held prejudices of the residents of those countries towards a wide variety of groups.SPRINGFIELD — Mayor Domenic Sarno and Chief Development Officer Kevin Kennedy announced upgrades to Springfield’s downtown technology infrastructure. The initiatives include providing free public wi-fi access beginning in the downtown area this spring, then expanding to other areas of the city, including public parks.
Working with city partners, the initiative will also bring high-speed fiber into buildings, which will provide the growing entrepreneurship sector with quicker, cost-effective, easier-to-access technology.
“Springfield has a history of innovation,” Sarno said. “These investments will keep us competitive in the market to attract entrepreneurs and to assist those here today in continuing to grow. This will also serve as a matter of convenience for residents and tourists who will be able to access Internet in our parks and public spaces.”
The initial investment will range between $50,000 and $100,000 and will ensure free wi-fi access throughout downtown.
The investment comes on the heels of the city’s announcement of a National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) award, part of which will dedicate funding to a pair of key innovation projects in the district: DevelopSpringfield’s Springfield Innovation Center and an IT workforce-training program through Tech Foundry. Funding is expected to be $300,000 for each project.
All of these activities fall in the city’s Transformative Development Initiative district, a designation the city applied for and was awarded through MassDevelopment, which has since provided staff, an equity investment, and technical and financial assistance as the Worthington Street master plan continues to advance.
“This has all been part of a dedicated planning process to establish an innovation district in our downtown,” Kennedy said. “The private and nonprofit sectors have been doing their share in creating a great deal of excitement with programming; these key city infrastructure investments will only help further these efforts. It’s been a great partnership.”Way back in March, we posted a video—once again, a video we had absolutely NO role in producing—that displayed a rough, unflattering, and altogether bleak view of West Allis that alleged it was “the worst city in the universe.” Milwaukee’s much-maligned western neighbor has seen its reputation sink incrementally as the region’s industrial presence has waned. The “Dirty ’Stallis” identity also casts a net of perception and blind, unsavory assumption over the city’s 61,000-some residents. There’s even a ’Stallis Haiku page that doles out cruel (but, admittedly, sometimes pretty funny) West Allis-directed jabs in five-seven-five syllable portions.
A lot of people read our post with the anonymous ’Stallis-slamming video embedded. It led to a spirited debate on our Facebook page and rampant commenting below the post (some of which needed to be deleted on account of their incredibly racist overtones). At the time this was written, the post has racked up close to 75,000 views. At least one of those views came from Dan Devine, Mayor of West Allis. Devine was elected to office in 2008, following a stint on the Milwaukee County Board from 2004 to 2008. Obviously, he took issue with the broad negativity put on display by the video. Instead of issuing another word-laden volley into the ongoing comment war, though, Devine emailed us with a simple offer to show us a firsthand glimpse of the city he loves. I’m no expert on etiquette, but when a city’s mayor asks to hang out, you pretty much need to say yes, right? So that’s what I did. One fateful Friday night, I headed west down National Avenue and spent an evening eating, drinking, playing horseshoes, and trading Simpsons quotes with the mayor of West Allis, and, in the process, getting an extended inside look at a polarizing place so many have judged before giving it a fair shot.
This adventure was especially appealing to me because I, too, grew up in a city that’s looked down in its region. Sitting directly between Appleton and Neenah (two larger cities with bigger populations, lower crime rates, and higher average household incomes), Menasha is known throughout northeast Wisconsin and beyond as “Ma-Trasha.” Yeah, some of the criticism is well deserved, but every negative was offset by something, someone, or some place that redeemed the city’s image. It was a fine place to grow up. It’s the same reason I legitimately like Cudahy. I assumed West Allis was the same, but—save for going to Inspiration Studios a couple times, interviewing bands at Bobby Peru Studios, chatting with ’Stallis resident Christopher Porterfield at his home, eating at Golden Gyros once, and seeing Cheeseheads With Attitude at Whammy Bar for a Noisey article (where, yes, I proceeded to totally shit all over West Allis)—I’ve never really spent time there. With next-to-no knowledge of the place, I opened my mind and headed to a sports bar for a happy hour beer and whatever else might come thereafter.
Sitting on the corner of a bustling three-way stop with its faded stone facade, blinking NASCAR neon signs, and absence of an apostrophe, the exterior of Scooters Tap didn’t do much to work against the Dirty ’Stallis stereotype. Though it seemed to be an odd meeting spot for a journey with the assumed goal of telling me how cool West Allis was, I went in anyway, hoping at least one third of the bar’s “Pool. Darts. Fun.” motto held true. Being 5:30 p.m. on a Friday in Wisconsin, the quaint tavern was already packed with patrons getting a prompt start to the weekend. One of them was a guy named Bart, a West Allis city planner who wanted to join in on the fun. As I paid a whopping $1.50 for a frosty mug of High Life, he came up to introduce himself and let me know the mayor was on his way. While we waited for Mr. Mayor, Bart told me a little about himself, including that he’s an avid cyclist and the interesting tidbit that, as a proud native of microscopic Mayville (now with its own Subway!), he is loosely related to Milwaukee Record’s own Matt Wild. Meanwhile, people enjoyed unthinkably inexpensive drinks in generally good spirits. Both of the jovial bartenders convinced us to play shake of the day. I lost.
Not long after I finished my first mug, Dan showed up. After he ordered a PBR, one of the bartenders beamed with pride as she told him her daughter got an academic scholarship to University Of Wisconsin, to which Dan responded with other stuff this girl did at school. This would be a precursor to him needing to be “on” almost the entire night. Random people walked up to him with whatever tidbits they deemed important. Even standing at a bar, beer in hand on a Friday evening, Dan Devine was on duty. I glanced around the small bar and saw some people looking at our trio with legitimate interest. Others seemed less-than-pleased the guy they didn’t vote for was in their bar. Some people didn’t seem to give a shit either way. We plotted the rest of our night, finished our beers, and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
When one thinks of West Allis cuisine, Peruvian food doesn’t immediately come to mind, but maybe it should. One of Dan’s favorite restaurants, Chef Paz Restaurant, was quickly filling up during the 6:15 p.m. dinner rush, and with good reason. Even though the restaurant’s menu is as limited as its seating, I was quickly taken by the Lomo Saltado. The $11 entree came with a generous portion of sauteed tenderloin, tomato, and onion on a bed of white rice and french fries. While the delicious meal was being prepared, we enjoyed cheese empanadas, and I began to notice there were a bunch of young people, who likely don’t want their secret spot ruined, coming in. We washed our meals down with a pitcher of pisco sour, the official drink of Peru (like a margarita with frothed egg whites and cinnamon). I got to know Dan and Bart better. Bart loves to travel. Dan, a 43-year-old Racine native who moved to town from Milwaukee’s East Side after graduating from UWM, is married and has two kids. After I quoted the Simpsons offhand, I quickly learned that Dan knows the show better than I do. Having known the pair for about an hour, I was actually enjoying myself. After splitting the bill three ways, we waddled out of the restaurant with full bellies and each of our wallets just $23 (plus tip) lighter. Mayoral invitation or not, I’ll be back.
Having just decided my tour would have a nightlife focus, we ambled on to Walleye’s Saloon a few blocks away. Our entrance was welcomed by a wave of awful nu metal (the first of many, many encounters we’d face on this excursion) and what looked to be a bar fight percolating between two hammered 20-somethings (that ultimately wouldn’t occur). The combination of the two and the nice weather drove us and our $3 pints out to the rear patio, where we met a nice woman named Jody and played two games of horseshoes. Mayor Devine (right) and I won both games. One of Bart’s (left) horseshoes took a crazy bounce and nailed me in the kneecap as Keith Swea’’s “Twisted” played on the patio speakers. Upon learning more about her opponents, Jody said, “I didn’t even know West Allis had a mayor.” Beyond the horseshoe hobbling, this was probably the highlight of the night.
From there, we drove to the city’s new skatepark, a pristine corner amenity (that Bart was especially passionate about) that opened late last year. It was partially funded through a federal block grant and a grant from Quad Graphics. Even with it being after 8 o’clock and already dark, the park was definitely being utilized by young skaters and mountain bikers. It was important to Dan and Bart that gears from the old Allis Chalmers factory were incorporated into the design as an ode to one of the employers responsible for bringing so many families to the city. This summer, a tree will be planted in honor of Patty Kompas, a woman who was instrumental in the project’s success before she lost her battle with brain cancer last year.
After taking in the park, we proceeded downtown to Benno’s, a bar and grill on 74th and Greenfield. With a lounge-like feel and a great draft beer selection, this was like the Burnhearts of West Allis…if Burnhearts played “With Arms Wide Open” by Creed. I enjoyed one of the bar’s five Three Floyd’s draft options and got to know more about the mayor. In finding I grew up near Green Bay, Dan reminisced about seeing The Queers and Boris The Sprinkler at Concert Cafe. He told me he prefers IPAs and that he brews his own beer. He loves baseball and throws a knuckleball. (He knew who Steve Sparks was!) We both think new Simpsons episodes suck. In short, the mayor of West Allis is my new best friend. While there, I was introduced to the owner of Benno’s, an alderman who got my attention by pointing out every piece of the bar’s decor that came from County Stadium, including a massive restroom sign. Before unlocking any subsequent IPA achievements, we went to Paulie’s Field Trip, a bar on 81st Street that specializes in only Wisconsin beer and cider…and partially hidden cans of Bud Light. (I saw them, Paulie!) The small, classic dive had all the makings of being great, if not for the invasive aural accompaniment of a piss-drunk “musician” named EROCK, who was slurring partial lyrics to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” he’d forgotten a few dozen drinks ago. Paulie, who seemed to be a friend of the mayor’s, was a really nice dude.
Finally, we ended an otherwise enjoyable night at a bar a short walk away called Capt’n Nick’s, which was far and away the worst place we’d been all night, even if three mugs of beer (one of which was Riverwest Stein) came to $4.50. While we sipped our almost assuredly tainted tap beers and the pissed-off-looking middle-aged bartender returned to her stool beside the other five ’Stallis caricatures at the U-shaped bar, Bart poignantly compared West Allis to Wauwatosa. Both are on the border of Milwaukee, but only one has its own identity. Sure, West Allis, its buildings, and its people can be a little rough around the edges. We heard enough trashy music, encountered a few weirdos, and had some beers in sketchy settings, but there were also opposing examples to offset each. West Allis is like its big brother to the east in that it’s a proud, character-laden locale with a rich industrial past that’s in the process of reinventing itself while continually combating stereotypes and preconceived notions from outside sources. Wauwatosa is like Milwaukee in that it handpicks elements of its neighboring metro’s successful restaurants, bars, and cafes to incorporate into its own idyllic, whitewashed utopia. I’ll take a real city like West Allis over that any day.
That’s right, ’Tosa, I said you’re not a real city. Want to change my mind? Have your mayor email me to hang out.SEC, DOJ And Law Enforcement Want To Rewrite Email Privacy Law Update... In Their Favor
from the updated-for-government-needs-and-wants dept
The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has been fighting much-needed updates to the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) for a few years now, claiming that treating old email like new email would somehow strip it of its power to investigate and punish wrongdoing. For no discernible reason, legislators decided to treat electronic mail like physical mail, designating unopened emails over six months old "abandoned" and accessible by almost anyone using nothing more than a subpoena.
Moving the law towards logic would insert a warrant requirement for old emails, bringing them under the same protection as emails less than 180 days old. But it's not just the SEC that's resistant to changing the law. It's also local law enforcement and the DOJ itself, both of which have greater powers than the SEC when it comes to accessing electronic communications.
The most recent hearing featured testimony from the SEC, DOJ and, for no discernible reason, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The consensus is that the law should be updated, but not that part of it (SEC) and only if it makes it easier for law enforcement to obtain more stuff without warrants (DOJ, TBI).
The SEC's argument against the introduction of a warrant requirement is that it would prevent the agency from obtaining other user data from ISPs using only a subpoena, glossing over the fact that it likes having warrantless access to tons of email.
When we conduct an investigation, we generally will seek emails and other electronic communications from the key actors via an administrative subpoena – a statutorily authorized mechanism for gathering documents and other evidence in our investigations. In certain instances, the person whose emails are sought will respond to our request. But in other instances, the subpoena recipient may have erased emails, tendered only some emails, asserted damaged hardware, or refused to respond – unsurprisingly, individuals who violate the law are often reluctant to produce to the government evidence of their own misconduct. In still other instances, email account holders cannot be subpoenaed because they are beyond our jurisdiction.
It is at this point in an investigation that we may in some instances, when other mechanisms for obtaining the evidence are unlikely to be successful, need to seek information from the internet service provider (ISP). H.R. 699 would require government entities to procure a criminal warrant when they seek the content of emails and other electronic communications from ISPs. Because the SEC and other civil law enforcement agencies cannot obtain criminal warrants, we would effectively not be able to gather evidence, including communications such as emails, directly from an ISP, regardless of the circumstances.
Some have asserted that providing civil law enforcement with an ability to obtain electronic communications from ISPs in limited circumstances would mean electronic documents enjoy less protection than paper documents. That is not accurate. Indeed, as currently drafted, H.R. 699 would create an unprecedented digital shelter – unavailable for paper materials – that would enable wrongdoers to conceal an entire category of evidence from the SEC and civil law enforcement.
The Fifth Circuit has interpreted this provision to require a court to issue a 2703(d) order when the government makes the “specific and articulable facts” showing specified by § 2703(d). See In re Application of the United States, 724 F.3d 600 (5th Cir. 2013). However, the Third Circuit has held that because the statute says that a § 2703(d) order “may” be issued if the government makes the necessary showing, judges may choose not to sign an application even if it provides the statutory showing. See In re Application of the United States, |
stories, so her presence does not materially alter the plot development. Other changes include Inspector Japp becoming "Inspector Sharpe", possibly due to the derogatory implications attached to the word "jap". The significance of some details which rely on English idioms is changed, for example when a dying uncle taps his eye in Strange Jest, this was originally a reference to the saying All my eye and Betty Martin, but in the anime it becomes a reference to a stamp in which an angel appears to be winking (however the clue still achieves the same end).
Characters [ edit ]
Media [ edit ]
Anime [ edit ]
The anime was produced by Oriental Light and Magic for NHK. The series was directed by Naohito Takahashi with music by Toshiyuki Watanabe and character designs by Sayuri Ichiishi. The opening theme is "Lucky Girl ni Hanataba wo" and the ending theme is "Wasurenaide," both performed by Tatsuro Yamashita. The 39 episodes were initially broadcast in Japan on NHK stations from 4 July 2004 to 15 May 2005. The series was released on seven DVDs.[1]
DVD [ edit ]
Region 2, NTSC, Language: Japanese, subtitle: No
No. Title Release date ISBN 1 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.1:"The ABC Murders" and Other Stories
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.1 ABC殺人事件 22 April 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0100-9 ("The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan","The Adventure of the Cheap Flat") 2 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.2:"4:50 from Paddington" and Other Stories
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.2 パディントン発4時50分 22 April 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0101-7 ("Strange Jest","The Case of the Perfect Maid") 3 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.3:"The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" and Other Stories
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.3 エジプト墳墓の謎 22 April 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0102-5 ("The Kidnapped Prime Minister","The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding") 4 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.4:"Peril at End House" and Other Stories
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.4 エンド・ハウス怪事件 22 April 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0103-3 ("The Tape-Measure Murder","Ingots of Gold","The Blue Geranium") 5 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.5:"The Plymouth Express" and Other Stories
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.5 プリマス行き急行列車 27 May 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0104-1 ("The Adventure of the Clapham Cook","Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds") 6 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.6:"Sleeping Murder" and Other Story
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.6 スリーピング・マーダー 27 May 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0105-X ("Motive versus Opportunity") 7 Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple vol.7:"Death in the Clouds" and Other Story
アガサ・クリスティーの名探偵ポワロとマープル Vol.7 雲の中の死 27 May 2005 ISBN 4-7786-0106-8 ("The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim")
Manga [ edit ]
Three volumes of the manga adaptation of the television series were released in 2004 and 2005 by NHK Publishing,[1] the publishing division of NHK. The adaptations were written by Yukiyoshi Oohashi (大橋志吉) (volumes 1 and 3) and Syouji Yonemura (米村正二) (volume 2), and illustrated by Morihiko Ishikawa (石川森彦).
No. Title Release date ISBN 1 The ABC Murders
Ēbīshī Satsujin Jiken (ABC殺人事件) 24 August 2004 ISBN 4-14-454084-7 2 4:50 from Paddington
Padinton Hatsu Yonjigojūbun (パディントン発4時50分) 25 December 2004 ISBN 4-14-454085-5 3 Death in the Clouds
Kumo no Naka no Shi (雲の中の死) 30 May 2005 ISBN 4-14-454086-3
References [ edit ]An angry Samajwadi Party dumped a grand alliance of erstwhile socialist parties on Thursday and announced it would go it alone in the Bihar polls but experts said the move was unlikely to affect the election outcome.
The ruling party of Uttar Pradesh was upset over the five seats allotted to it as part of an Opposition coalition taking on the BJP in the October-November state polls and said other parties would join it in Bihar for a possible third front.
“Top leaders, grass root level workers and more importantly, the Bihar unit, were mighty angry with the treatment doled out to us. We will soon announce the number of seats the SP will contest and the candidates,” said SP national general secretary Ramgopal Yadav after a crucial meeting of the party’s parliamentary board.
The development is a major blow to the so-called six-party Janata Parivar -- led by SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav – which came together after the general elections to stave off a surging BJP that had romped home in a clutch of state elections after a stunning Lok Sabha victory.
“What parivar? There was no parivar... It never existed. I always knew that it can’t take off and I categorically said formalising it is signing the SP’s death warrant. It would have meant losing the party’s hard earned identity,” a visibly-angry Ramgopal told reporters.
“We are likely to take some other parties on board. Taking names would be inappropriate and pre-mature,” he said.
Read:Mulayam's U-turn: Why is he moving away from Congress
Friends-turned-foes Lalu Prasad of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) also mended fences ahead of the Bihar polls, allying with the Congress and SP to fight a saffron alliance that had swept the state in the 2014 general elections.
The RJD and JD(U) are fighting on 100 seats each and the Congress on 40.
The Nationalist Congress Party -- which earlier walked out of the Bihar alliance over similar seat-sharing complaints -- backed the SP, saying the coalition was disintegrating, and announced it was planning to launch a third alternative.
"Both Nitish Kumar and BJP are responsible for the plight of the state. The one-upmanship over package was a ploy to confuse the electorate in a web of figures and promises. We must come up with a third alternative," party national general secretary Tariq Anwar told reporters.
But though the SP also walked out of the Bihar “Mahagathbandhan”, analysts said it wouldn’t adversely impact the prospects of the alliance as Mulayam didn’t have any support base in the state and was decimated in the last assembly elections in 2010, losing its deposits on all 146 seats it contested.
“This was a downright insult. The number of seats they gave us was below our dignity. What they did was against the basic ethics of an alliance. They did not even consult us. We came to know through rumours and the media,” said Ramgopal.
The SP had originally demanded 47 seats then climbed down to 27, then to 17 and finally agreed to 12. But it wasn’t allotted a single seat at an August 12 meeting of Bihar’s grand alliance, prompting the party’s state chief Ramchander Singh Yadav to go on a hunger strike. This forced Lalu to give the three seats earlier given to the NCP – in addition to two from his own quota of 100 – to the SP.
“We will win far more seats in Bihar than what they had allotted us “Not only we will go alone in Bihar, but we are likely to take some other parties on board. Taking names of those parties would be inappropriate and pre-mature,” said Ramgopal.
Ramgopal also dismissed speculation that the SP’s decision would eventually help the BJP in the Bihar polls by splitting “secular” votes. “Had this been the situation, why did the BJP win elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh? There were no other parties except the BJP and Congress. This theory is absurd.”
Read: Battleground Bihar: How Modi and Nitish are squaring up
First Published: Sep 03, 2015 12:53 ISTAccording to several sites, SEGA has inadvertently uploaded the entire Daytona Championship USA code online, and it appears that the modding community already has the game running on PC.
SEGA had apparently released a new update for the arcade game for vendors to download and apply to the game, but the patch actually contained the full game, according to MrThunderwing. As of now, modders haven’t yet been able to get the controls to work, but the menu system can be navigated with an Xbox 360 controller.
If this turns out to be true, and it certainly seems like it is, I can’t recall a time in recent memory when a video game company did something more stupid than leak its own game on the Internet.
You can read more about it here.Exactly. I watched the video and his way of looking at things makes so much more sense. How so?
Mainstream astronomy can only see quasars as incredibly distant object because of their redshift. But for them to be that bright at such a distance would require a mind boggling level of energy output.
Nobody was able to stop and wonder if, maybe, they weren't so distant after all? This is because nobody was willing to question the idea of redshift. Cognitively speaking, it was easier to try and dream up some new physics to explain the apparent brightness.
In psychology, this is called cognitive dissonance and astronomers are not exempt from it.
A dum dum who's looking at things the right way will have a better ability to explain what they're seeing than a genius who refuses to admit when they're wrong.
edit: I'm not saying Arp is a dum dum either... it's meant as a general statement.Chromatin modifications have been well-established to play a critical role in the regulation of genome function. Many of these modifications are introduced and removed by enzymes that utilize cofactors derived from primary metabolism. Recently, it has been shown that endogenous cofactors and metabolites can regulate the activity of chromatin-modifying enzymes, providing a direct link between the metabolic state of the cell and epigenetics. Here we review metabolic mechanisms of epigenetic regulation with an emphasis on their role in cancer. Focusing on three core mechanisms, we detail and draw parallels between metabolic and chemical strategies to modulate epigenetic signaling, and highlight opportunities for chemical biologists to help shape our knowledge of this emerging phenomenon. Continuing to integrate our understanding of metabolic and genomic regulatory mechanisms may help elucidate the role of nutrition in diseases such as cancer, while also providing a basis for new approaches to modulate epigenetic signaling for therapeutic benefit.STATE Parliament has used the last sitting day before the 2018 election to overhaul the way the state’s electoral boundaries are drawn.
Under the Greens’ changes, supported by the Government, the Dignity Party and Advance SA MP John Darley, the contentious “fairness clause” will be removed from electoral laws.
The changes will not affect the boundaries for this year’s election, and Government Minister Peter Malinauskas insists it has received legal advice from the Solicitor-General that the clause can be removed without a referendum.
The fairness clause was introduced after a 1993 referendum and governs redistributions to ensure the party that wins a majority of the two-party preferred vote is able to form majority government.
But Greens MLC Mark Parnell told Parliament the clause “ignored” minor parties and had been a failure.
media_camera Greens MLC Mark Parnell said the clause ignored minor parties and had failed.
It’s unclear what impact removing the clause would have on future boundaries, but a review of the amended laws will occur shortly after next year’s election.
The Government had previously sought to bring on a referendum to enshrine “One vote, one value” as the Electoral District Boundaries Commission’s chief consideration when drafting the electoral boundaries.
But after the push was set to be rejected by Mr Darley, it moved to support the Greens’ process.
The law passed the Upper House on Thursday afternoon and is expected to pass the Government-controlled Lower House by the end of sitting.
The change was met with fury from Opposition treasury spokesman Rob Lucas, who said the Government had struck a “dirty deal” with the Greens.
He said the Labor Party had only moved to abandon the fairness clause after the EDBC “finally” handed down boundaries that favoured the Liberal Party.
“This is something that will impact on the electability or not of governments forever hence,” he said.
Nick Xenophon — who could potentially hold the balance of power in either House of Parliament — has indicated he doesn’t support the fairness clause, meaning it could be impossible for the Liberal Party to reinstate it.By: Bryan Kalbrosky | August 6, 2017 10:34 am ET
The Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers had a joint practice spanning over two hours on Saturday, and running back Todd Gurley impressed many.
He had a run of approximately forty yards and also recorded a sharp 12-yard touchdown during a red zone drill. Alden Gonzalez described what he saw from the running back on Saturday (via ESPN):
[Gurley] hit holes decisively and aggressively, putting together a handful of long runs toward the middle of the field and also bouncing one outside during 11-on-11 drills. Rams coach Sean McVay saw “a violent runner.”
McVay continued to call Gurley “motivated” and an offseason standout through the team workout sessions.
Vinny Bonsignore from the L.A. Daily News also described Gurley as running “decisively” during the practice. He added that the first-team offensive line looked sharp as well.Oleg Oprisco is a brilliantly talented photographer from Lviv, Ukraine, who creates stunning surreal images of elegant women in fairy-tale or dream-like settings. There’s one significant difference, however, that sets him apart from other artists who create similar work – Oprisco shoots using old-school film photography.
The fact that he shoots with film means that everything you see in these photos had to be created that way – it couldn’t be done digitally. “I’ve found it ideal to do everything myself. I come up with a concept, create the clothing, choose the location and direct the hair and makeup,” Oprisco explained in an interview with Bored Panda. “Before shooting, I plan the overall color scheme. According to the chosen palette, I select clothes, props, location, etc, making sure that all of it plays within a single color range.” He uses Kiev 6C and Kiev 88 cameras with medium-format film and a variety of lenses.
It’s clear that Oprisco is deeply passionate about his work. “Each of my photos is a scene from real life. That is the perfect source of inspiration for me as there is so much beauty to it.” Oprisco offered some inspiring advice for aspiring young photographers mixed in with some tough love as well. “Drop your job and shoot … if you feel that’s what you want,” he said. “Freedom, happiness, money… all will come after you let go and just shoot.”
Be sure to read between the photos for more of Oprisco’s interview with Bored Panda!
Source: oprisco.com | 500px | facebook
“Each of my photos is a scene from real life. That is the perfect source of inspiration for me as there is so much beauty to it,” Oprisco told Bored Panda.
“Of course there are my own changes that I add to the reality, such as characters, props, location, and light… I am constantly involved in a search for inspiration and ideas.”
“I’ve found it ideal to do everything myself. I come up with a concept, create the clothing, choose the location and direct the hair and makeup.”
“I often hold workshops and it’s very funny sitting in front of many photographers with $2000 – $3000 cameras and lenses, and on my table is an old Kiev 6C, which is worth about $50.”
“[Post production] takes several hours, but no amount of [photoshopping] can make a bad photo into a good photo. That’s a good rule to know. Hence, in my photos there is colour correction and retouching of dust only.”
“I use a Kiev 6C and Kiev 88 cameras with 90mm/2.8, 180/2.8, and 300/4.0 lenses. My favorite lens of all time is 300/4.0 by Meyer Optik Orestegor. I use medium format film.”
Oleg became interested in photography at the age of 16 – he started taking photos of friends and acquaintances.“At age 18, I moved to Kiev, where I became an assistant to a well-known advertising photographer. We worked together for four years, but that work did not bring me pleasure. There was no creativity, only commerce. When I was 23, I started from scratch, taking my own photos.”
Oleg has some advice for beginner photographers: “Shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. What else to say? Drop your job and shoot … if you feel that’s what you want. Freedom, happiness, money… all will come after you let go and just shoot.”
We’d like to thank Oleg Oprisco for giving us an exclusive interview and for sharing his amazing work with us! Be sure to follow him on Facebook.Photo via AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Los Angeles Chargers defensive tackle Brandon Mebane has an exciting offer for Charger fans to win a free signed game day jersey.
All one has to do is sign up for his newsletter and they will automatically be entered for a chance to win.
Any information regarding the giveaway can be found on the tweet below or on his website, which is also listed in his tweet.
Subscribe to my newsletter for a chance to WIN A SIGNED GAME DAY JERSEY (+$250 value). Contest ends 5/31. Enter at https://t.co/tnQ3e5H81T pic.twitter.com/misF4cMhcw — Brandon Mebane (@Mebane92) May 14, 2017
This should be an exciting opportunity for Bolt fans, for Mebane is one of the best players on the team and he is offering a $250 value for almost nothing.
However, for diehard Charger fans, winning the jersey would be invaluable and would provide a forever lasting memory.
Ryan is currently a student at the University of North Carolina. He grew up in the Bay Area and has had Raiders season tickets his entire life fostering his love for the NFL. He has founded his own sports website, thejrreport.com and works at the Sports Desk for the Daily Tar Heel. You can follow Ryan on twitter @rytime98 if you want to discuss anything sports. http://thejrreport.com
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Like this: Like Loading...Last Call Notes: Campaign Ends Tue, March 28 2017 9:30 PM EDT
This deluxe, oversized 12"X17" full color hardcover will not be reprinted
Save by pre-ordering via this campaign
After campaign rewards are fulfilled, any remaining books will be sold at prices that are 25-50% higher than this pre-order opportunity
This book will not be sold in brick and mortar stores or online via Amazon.com or other online retailers. It can only be purchased directly via the publisher
This is an independent publication so more of your much-needed support is going to the creators instead of a massive corporation
A great gift idea for yourself or for a loved one!
Introduction
Independent producer/publisher WAYNE ALAN HAROLD and acclaimed artist P. CRAIG RUSSELL are pleased to announce the publication of their brand new title... and it's one big cat!
Our two previous publishing projects—the hardcover P. Craig Russell Sketchbook Archives and the Virtuoso Adult Coloring Book—were both successfully funded and fulfilled via Kickstarter.
The P. Craig Russell Sketchbook Archives
Virtuoso: A P. Craig Russell Adult Coloring Book
Now we're back with the first in a NEW SERIES of oversized, 12"X17" hardcover art books—showcasing some of PCR's most classic comic art in a stunning format. It's the next best thing to owning the original pages!
A P. Craig Russell-oriented "Gallery Edition" from Dark Horse, compared in size to a regular-sized comic.
Each page in an "Artist's Edition"-type publication is printed close to the same size as the original art board and is scanned from the original art wherever possible. Additionally, while appearing to be in black and white, each page is both scanned and printed in color to show blue pencil and other corrections. These books are highly sought after by comic art aficionados and lovers of beautiful art!
Our line of books in this format will be known as "Fine Art Editions." And the very first in the series will be...
P. Craig Russell's Jungle Book & Other Stories!
Preliminary cover idea—final cover to be determined.
P. Craig Russell's Jungle Book & Other Stories Fine Art Edition will contain the following COMPLETE stories with all pages scanned from the original art:
Jungle Book: The King's Ankus (27 pages)
Jungle Book: Red Dog (32 pages)
Jungle Book: Spring Running (25 pages)
Siegfried and the Dragon (9 pages)
Between Two Worlds (3 pages)
La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep (10 pages)
Dance on the Razor's Edge (8 pages)
Heldentraum (6 pages)
Drinking Song (3 pages)
PLUS: Jungle Book covers and other behind-the-scenes material!
Final page count is TBD, but we estimate that it will contain approximately 136-144 pages.
P. Craig Russell's Jungle Book & Other Stories Fine Art Edition can be pledged for in three different incarnations:
Standard Edition hardcover
Signature Edition hardcover: Limited to only 100 copies, all personally signed & numbered by the artist.
Sketch Edition hardcover: Limited to only 50 copies, all personally signed & numbered by the artist. This version comes with an ORIGINAL JUNGLE-BOOK THEMED SKETCH—rendered in pen and ink in the book itself by P. Craig Russell!
A sample of the type of pen and ink drawing that Craig will be doing in the Sketch Editions. The subject may vary, but they will all be Jungle Book-related and of course, they will also be beautiful!
Samples From The Book
More Reward Samples
Sketch combo bonus sketches are in pen & ink on a separate 5.5"X8.5" board.
A b&w original art reward from a previous campaign.
A b&w original art reward from a previous campaign.
A color original art reward from a previous campaign.
More About The Artist
A graduate of the University of Cincinnati with a degree in painting, P. Craig Russell has run the gamut in comics. After establishing a name for himself at Marvel on Killraven and Dr. Strange, he went on to become one of the pioneers in opening new vistas for this underestimated field with, among other works, adaptations of operas by Mozart (THE MAGIC FLUTE), Strauss (SALOME) and Wagner (THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG).
Craig has completed five volumes of comic-book adaptations of the FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE and has beautifully brought to life characters as diverse as Batman, Conan, Hellboy, The Spirit, Death and The Sandman.
His more recent work includes comic book adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s CORALINE and THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, and he is currently the creative force behind Dark Horse Comics' epic, 27-issue comics adaptation of Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS.Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have developed a compound that delays leukemia in mice and effectively kills leukemia cells in human tissue samples, raising hopes that the drug could lead to improved treatments in people. The researchers call it an exciting "new paradigm" for treating leukemia.
The compound works by disabling an altered cellular protein that drives one type of acute myeloid leukemia, the most common form of adult leukemia. By blocking that protein, the drug allows a cancerous cell to detect that it has problems and die, rather than continue to grow and spread. In essence, the compound blocks the cellular machinery that the cancer has highjacked.
"This drug that we've developed is... targeting a class of proteins that hasn't been targeted for drug development very much in the past. It's really a new paradigm, a new approach to try to treat these diseases," said researcher John H. Bushweller, PhD, of the UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. "This class of proteins is very important for determining how much of many other proteins are made, so it's a unique way of changing the way the cell behaves."
The drug is notable because of its specificity, killing cancerous cells but not healthy cells. "It's what we call a targeted agent. It hits one specific protein," Bushweller said. "It's not a killer of many other types of cells. As far as we can tell, it only really kills the leukemia cells that have this particular altered protein in them."
In accomplishing that, Bushweller and his team have overcome a major challenge in the effort to develop a new cancer treatment. "When you target a mutated protein in a cancer, you would ideally like to inhibit that mutated form of the protein but not affect the normal form of the protein that's still there," he explained. "In the case of this drug, we've achieved that. We have an inhibitor that turns off the mutated form of the protein but does not affect the so-called wildtype, or normal, form of the protein." As a result, this drug does not show the toxicity and side-effects associated with the traditional chemotherapy drugs used to treat acute myeloid leukemia.
Having shown the effectiveness of the compound in mouse models and human patient samples, Bushweller must now develop it further so it can be tested in people. To do so, Bushweller could license the drug to a pharmaceutical company, start his own company, or seek further support from the National Institutes of Health.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday urged congressional Democrats to “stand up” and “fight” against the Trump administration’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, suggesting they “take a page” from Republican lawmakers who blocked the Obama and Clinton administrations’ major policy initiatives.
At a rally in the Bronx, organized by the local 1199 SEIU health care workers union, Cuomo said he had a message for Democrats in Congress: “It’s not time to make a deal. It’s not time to get political. It’s time to get principled.”
Democrats “have to stand up and learn from what the Republicans did when they didn’t agree with something,” Cuomo said. “The Republican Congress fought Bill Clinton every step of the way, and the Republican Congress fought Barack Obama every step of the way, and these Democrats have to take a page out of their book, and say, ‘We’re not going to let you take us backwards.’”
Cuomo, citing state figures said one-in-six New Yorkers are insured under the Affordable Care Act, and noted that repealing the plan would result in 3 million New Yorkers losing their health care coverage.
His critical remarks stood in contrast to Cuomo’s past calls for bipartisanship — often using public events to tout his work with state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Asked about the governor’s message, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), the newest member of Long Island’s congressional delegation, said he agreed with Cuomo “that we need to fight hard to defend our values,” and avoid a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But he added, “My goal is to try and work across party lines with Democrats and Republicans to actually try and solve problems.”
Coleman Lamb, a spokesman for Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-Garden City), said Rice “certainly agrees that all of us need to stand our ground in this fight... For Representative Rice this isn’t about opposing Republicans to score political points, it’s about protecting the millions of people who will lose health insurance if President Trump and Republicans in Congress repeal the ACA instead of working with Democrats to improve it.”
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Wednesday’s rally of more than 650 union members, held on the campus of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was billed as an event to speak out against GOP-led efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But Cuomo, whose name has been routinely floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2020, used the occasion to decry the Trump administration’s overall agenda.
“It’s not just about the affordable health care act — I wish it was only about one issue,” Cuomo said. “This is a question about who we are as a nation... what we believe as a nation.”
As the Trump administration unveiled plans this week to intensify deportation efforts against immigrants living in the country illegally, Cuomo, citing his family’s Italian ancestry, sought to assure immigrants “we’re trying to stop the attacks on immigrants in this nation... because I’m an immigrant, and I’m from a place of immigrants.”
Cuomo told the crowd “while they’re in Washington trying to tear down what we built, we’re going to build it stronger in New York.”
At the top of the governor’s remarks, someone in the crowd shouted “Cuomo for President!” prompting Cuomo to reply jokingly, “Don’t be starting trouble now.”Enlarge By Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama read The Moon Over Star to second-graders at Washington, D.C.'s Capital City Public Charter School iin February. WASHINGTON President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will preside over the ninth National Book Festival, a day-long celebration of the joys of reading and literacy, scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 26, on the National Mall. "The National Book Festival has become a true American institution," said James Billington, the librarian of Congress. "It is a joyous and very popular celebration of books and reading in the Washington, D.C., area." The Library of Congress organizes and sponsors the event, which is free and open to the public. An estimated 120,000 people have attended each of the past two festivals, a library spokeswoman said. Former first lady Laura Bush, a retired teacher and public school librarian, started the festival in 2001, modeling it after events she held as first lady of Texas. This year's festival will feature about 70 award-winning authors, poets and illustrators in pavilions dedicated to specific genres of writing, ranging from history and biography to mysteries, thrillers, poetry and prose, and books for families and youngsters. Since becoming first lady in January, Mrs. Obama has made several trips outside the White House to read to young children. Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreABC
White House senior adviser David Plouffe shot back at Karl Rove this morning on "This Week" after the former top aide to President George W. Bush told the Washington Post that Hurricane Sandy gave President Obama a political advantage just days before the presidential election.
"I think Karl Rove might have said that because a few days ago he predicted a big Romney win, and my sense is Karl is going to be at crossroads himself on Tuesday when he tries to explain to the people who wrote him hundreds of millions of dollars why they fell up short," said Plouffe, seeming to reference the Republican-aligned American Crossroads GPS, a group co-founded by Rove.
"So listen, we're confident the president has the electoral votes to win this if we get our vote out, and that's what we're focused on in the next two days," he said.
Rove, a top strategist for President George W. Bush, told the Washington Post that Hurricane Sandy negatively impacted the Romney campaign.
"When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney's] advantage," Rove told the Post.
Romney campaign senior adviser Ed Gillespie appeared on "This Week" following Plouffe and said "I just don't know" when I asked him if President Obama's response has helped him politically.
"You know, I just don't know. You know, we're very focused on highlighting the difference in this election. Governor Romney is closing very strong, with a big speech about the differences that would happen in the next four years," he said.
Tune in to ABCNews.com on Tuesday, Nov. 6 for livestreaming coverage of Election 2012. Our Election Day show kicks off at noon, and the Election Night event begins at 7 p.m.
Join ABC News and Google+ for Election Night Hangouts - let us know who you are HERE.Southern Comfort Directed by Kate Davis Produced by Kate Davis Music by Joel Harrison Cinematography Kate Davis Edited by Kate Davis Distributed by HBO Documentary Release date 2001 Running time 90 mins Country United States Language English
Southern Comfort is a 2001 documentary film about the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a transgender man. Eads, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was turned down for treatment by a dozen doctors out of fear that treating such a patient would hurt their reputations. By the time Eads received treatment, the cancer was too advanced to save his life.[1]
Plot [ edit ]
The film begins in the spring and documents Eads' life through the following winter. Eads falls in love with Lola, a transgender woman. He spends those remaining warm days in the company of his "chosen family": Maxwell, Cas, and "the rest". That summer, his mother and father drive ten hours to visit Robert, who is still their daughter in their eyes. Later that year, Eads makes his last appearance at the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, a prominent[2] transgender gathering. Already feeling ill, he addresses a crowd of 500 and takes Lola to what is for them a prom that never was. Shortly after the conference, Eads dies in a nursing home with his chosen family.
After Eads' death, his ashes were spread across the family farm around a lone Christmas tree which was to symbolize Robert's many changes and blossomings in life.
Eads' friends, Tom and Debbie King, also appear in the film. They saved Eads' life when he collapsed in a pool of his own blood while staying with them. They initially sought treatment for Eads but were unable to locate a doctor willing to treat a transgender man.
Robert's lifelong struggle to have his outer appearance match his inner self is a salient theme in the movie. All persons portrayed in the movie wrestle with themes of rejection from others, rejection of self, feeling ostracized from humanity and ultimately crafting their own lives and personal support systems.
Stage adaptation [ edit ]
A stage musical, based on the film, was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. The musical was conceived by Robert DuSold and Thomas Caruso, with book and lyrics by Dan Collins and music by Julianne Wick Davis, and directed by Caruso. The musical ran from February 22, 2016 (previews) to March 27.[3][4][5] Annette O'Toole was featured as Robert Eads, with Jeff McCarthy as "Lola Cola".[6][7]
The musical had a workshop production by the Off-Off-Broadway CAP 21 Theatre Company from October 6, 2011 to November 5, 2011.[8][9]
The musical then was produced at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in July 2013, as part of the BSC Musical Theatre Lab.[10]
Julianne Wick Davis and Dan Collins won the Jonathan Larson Grant in 2012.[7][11][12]
The stage adaption faced some criticism for its failure to cast more trans actors. All but two of the roles had been filled by cisgender actors.[13][14] However, Pride Films & Plays in Chicago announced a new production in 2019 featuring trans performers playing all five transgender characters.[15]
Cinematic influence [ edit ]
Southern Comfort is included within texts that cross reference cinematic with feminist theory, often in conjunction with other films with transgender leads such as Boys Don’t Cry and The Crying Game. These texts state that the documentary serves as a corrective device for many transgender stereotypes. Since the transgender character is historically stereotyped in film, Southern Comfort's style has created a cinematic influence, specifically on how the audience views transgender bodies. One of them is the fact that it doesn’t use “camp” or “fetish” as the backbone to Robert Eads.[16] Another is the use of the "transgender look".[17] This is a term coined by Judith Halberstam which was adapted from bell hook's theory of "The Oppositional Gaze", which was a way to politicize the way black women are "gazed" at and seen as spectacles within cinematography.[18] The "transgender look" was a way of theorizing transgender readability by letting the transgender character exist outside of the "male gaze" - which is the patriarchal lens through most cinema as been processed.[17] It is the |
to.
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Gothar
Gothar is the god of creation, the creator of all things. He created Ganareth, and named it sun (the sun), for the world to get rid of the dark, bring light. Since then, he used his essence has nurtured nine gods. But soon the young gods wanted to be worshiped and served, as they did to Gothar, asking Gothar to give them strength to create a race for their own domination. Gothar, the god of the gods, then gave them strength, and he secretly sent Neutra to create a pure magic Dragoon and put it in a cocoon for the creation of the moon. The new celestial body radiates energy and power, and one can gather better energy for growth with the help of Gothar's magic. However, the Gothar, the father of the gods, forced God to sign a magic agreement with their kinsfolk and ceased to intervene in the history of Ganareth, as the gods never cease to quarrel and even incur racial divisions. Also on the same day, Gathar created humanity and gave human freedom of religion. But the young gods did not stop the quarrel when the moon released Dragoon, and Gothar found that the signed magic deal had been stolen. So he moved his anger, he ripped off the children's heart part, and then use this part has created nine entities. He put his creation on the land of Ganareth, and imprisoned the gods in Wahl (Gothar's kingdom). In Wahl they can see that their people are resisting foreign aggression. In the war, Gothar sent the fairy to Ganareth to spread their knowledge. He also gave birth to the wizard, so that they from time to time in the Elders council (Elders Council) rally, but also to Ganareth residents to explore the secret of the moon crystal magic. The knowledge of the immortal, coupled with the re-discovery of magic, made dragoon more threatening than the threat of the kingdom. Since then, Gothar reiterated that Ganareth on all races have religious freedom. He also developed 10 laws and regulations, then, Gothar in the sun chariot on the world of everything.
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Ysatis
Ysatis was Gothar's first child and the mother of life on the land of Ganareth. When the gods asked to have their own race to worship their own time, Gothar will create the task of racial life to her.
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Agnar
Gothar's second child, he dominates the death, so the god of death, but also Ysatis opponent. He is the most cruel and most cunning of the gods.
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Zephyr
Zephyr is Gothar's three sons. Zephyr was born of Gothar's breath, and when he created his own race, he created Orcs, a strong, tough, and able to withstand severe environmental tests in the desert nomads.
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Hydra
When Gothar created Hydra, he wanted her to be the master of the water, but the ocean he created was too big for the new god. He gave the sea Hydra in charge, and gave him the kingdom of islands and water.
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Neutra
Neutra is the most strange of a God, is also the most difficult to grasp a God. Her hermaphrodite, in many contradictions, she always maintain a neutral attitude.
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Malecta
Malecta is Gothar's sixth child, the most irritable of all the gods.
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Hel
As the seventh son of Gothar, Hel always through a lot of ways to display their full power. He was born in Gothar's power, so the power of God. He is self-reliant and proud, and even failure will not affect his actions.
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Calde
Calder is the eighth son of Gothar, who was born of the wisdom of Gothar, but he is a cruel god. Aesir is Gothar's youngest child. Throughout the history, Aesir is his most faithful and dedicated child
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Gods and their Kingdoms
The territory of the gods was estimated as the belowLyft It's time to shave the mustache.
On Tuesday, Lyft is ditching its familiar pink mustache logo in favor of a more streamlined look. And the ride-hailing company is equipping its drivers with a sleek, glowing gadget designed to help customers quickly spot the car they ordered.
The changes, which also include a new TV advertising blitz, add up to a major makeover that Lyft hopes will give its fleet of on-demand cars a more professional and universal veneer as it battles deep-pocketed rival Uber in the cut-throat ride-hailing business.
Lyft's new gadget, dubbed Amp, will start to appear on drivers' dashboard in certain cities in the coming weeks. The cucumber-sized device uses Bluetooth to synch with a driver's phone and lights up in one of five colors to help passengers identify their vehicle.
Lyft
Goodbye, mustache
The device marks a big departure from the furry pink mustaches that adorned Lyft vehicles when the company started four years ago, and some of the company's top executives see it as a sign that the company — which was most recently valued around $5.5 billion — is growing and changing.
"We've seen the branding of the company go through an evolution from that first big, fun, furry mustache that I think really encapsulated the spirit of the brand and the sense of irreverence as the dynamic, playful, personality-driven company," Lyft's creative director, Jesse McMillin, told Business Insider. "Functionally, it was really hard to use. It was a big furry thing that could get weather-worn; it was hard to apply. It was something that we wanted to update and change."
The company rebranded in January 2015, swapping the original mustache — the Cuddlestache — for a new, high-tech version: the Glowstache.
But Lyft realized that the mustache logo itself no longer worked for the company.
"As fun and interesting as the mustache is, it's a harder thing to recognize. It takes more storytelling to bring it to life." McMillin said.
Ethan Eyler, Lyft’s head of ride experience and the person who designed the original Cuddlestache. Lyft McMillin said that while the company isn't shedding its "whimsy," it wants to appeal to a broader audience.
"If you didn't relate to the mustache, if that wasn't something you were excited about, this kind of makes us more open to a wider audience," he said.
Lyft's new head of marketing, Melissa Waters, said ditching the company's logo was a "big step."
"Internally, we had that moment of 'We're retiring the mustache? It's such a big icon for our company,'" Waters told Business Insider. "But this for me really takes everything to an entirely new level — it's a multifaceted step. We not only are upping our branding in the car and our messaging in the car, we're making ride-sharing's first connected device."
Lyft's main rival, Uber, has already tested out an idea similar to what Amp is trying to do. Last year, Uber piloted customizable LED lights in its vehicles to help riders find their cars in busy areas. Called SPOT, the program was only available in Seattle and has not expanded to other markets.
Taking it national
Lyft will roll out the new devices over the next several months and will be in four markets by New Year's: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. The devices should be in all of Lyft's markets — more than 200 in the US — by mid-2017. The company plans to continue updating the device, adding color and pattern options or customizing the Amps to display sports team colors for different cities.
Starting Tuesday, the company is also launching a national TV and digital ad campaign that satirizes a Lyft rival — it's anyone's guess which one — and touts Lyft's commitment to safety, in-app tipping, and more.
Waters calls the new campaign a pivot from tactics Lyft has tried in the past.
"We know that when you go from point A to point B, certain things are non-negotiable," Waters said. "But at Lyft...we feel like you have a choice in that moment to either go with a utility player who's really only going to talk to you about the transactional nature of getting you there, or with us."Business Insider Sexism in the tech industry is a serious problem, but few women are willing to talk on the record about it for fear of ruining their careers.
But last month Gesche Haas, an employee at the startup conjure.io, spoke up about an angel investor who unexpectedly asked to have sex with her after a meeting.
Haas' story went viral, and suddenly she became the center of attention.
Now, she's speaking up about the aftermath of talking about sexism in tech. This, in many ways, is as important as the original issue. The backlash that hits when a woman speaks up can make other women reluctant to step up.
In a Medium post, Haas wrote that after going public with her story, she saw "more and more women came out with similar stories. In addition to spreading the story further via social media, there seemed to be something about me taking the initiative of launching a public group discussion, that made more individuals comfortable talking about their experiences. Yet, these sadly mostly were stories of regret — as they had not taken action, but wished that they had."
Haas was at a networking conference in Berlin when she met Pavel Curda, whom we reported is a European angel investor with investments in companies like Birdi and Apiary.
They had one drink while talking business, and Haas said goodnight.
When she returned to her hotel room, she had an email on her phone. The subject line read "I like you a lot." The body: "Hey G. I will not leave Berlin until I have sex with you. Deal?"
The email was from Curda.
Haas was horrified, and after discussing what had happened with friends and colleagues, Sam Biddle, editor of Gawker's Valleywag, who has long written about the rampant sexism and sexual harassment in the tech world, reached out. Biddle convinced Haas that sharing her story would be a positive move, though Haas initially worried that people would think she was speaking out for attention.
Haas wrote "[I had just seen] a series of reports about how other women were not comfortable associating their names to their respective plights. These stories had worried me and I felt uncomfortable contributing to this unhealthy, albeit understandable trend — no matter the potential repercussions."
As Haas reflected this weekend about the incident, she realized that by staying quiet she would only be contributing to the problem, where men would face few repercussions for acting this way. It's a tale as old as time of massive egos and power tripping.
When Haas' story went public, Curda immediately sent a tweet saying that his email had been hacked. But Haas received support in the form of a public message from Lucie Montel, who tweeted a text she said she received from Curda.
Twitter/Lucie Montel
Curda released an apology ("I would like to apologize in person with a bouquet of flowers") that brought on more criticism. And since the publicity of this event, Techcrunch reported that Curda had been "dumped by at least three accelerators, as well as losing his role as a writer with tech blog, The Next Web."
Haas wrote a Medium post detailing how she felt about what happened, saying, "I was not only silly for allowing myself to feel ashamed in that situation — but that I had an important responsibility to feel comfortable speaking publicly about what happened."
In the days that followed Haas' story being shared on Valleywag and elsewhere (we covered it here), a Facebook group appeared with the name "I want sex with Gesche" that has since been taken down.
Twitter
Curda again attempted redemption on Twitter with a tweet calling attention to the inappropriate Facebook page, which was met — once again — with criticism.
"Why don't you kill this tweet, too?" @Susan_Ho replied. "No sense calling more attention to this."
Others responded to the tweet with a similar message. Haas chose not to acknowledge his tweet herself, and while the page has been taken down, a source confirms that Facebook initially said the page didn't violate the terms, as Haas, all over the media, was considered a "public figure."
In an interview with Business Insider, Haas said she chose not to even focus on the Facebook aspect as she reflected on this experience, saying "the whole story should just teach us to be communicating openly and treating each other with respect."
In her post, Haas said she was wary while talking to Valleywag's Biddle but ultimately felt she made the right decision by going public:
It became very apparent what I was committing myself to by talking to [Biddle], by deciding not to be silent to anyone asking me about what had happened. I mentally prepared myself for the absolute worst, including the way the reporter might decide to portray me in his article. I had what felt like multiple mini heart attacks leading up to the release of his piece — but I never once questioned my decision to talk to him.
At the end of the day, Haas acknowledged that she was not the first, nor would she be the last, woman to have a man wield power and status over her in an attempt to get what he wants.
Rather than this incident causing paranoia, it is my hope that it will counteract such by allowing us to become more comfortable with taking responsibility for actions and feelings, as well as communicating and listening accordingly — all with the purpose of finding solutions to the trickiest of situations, together.
You can read Haas' full Medium post here.Today, the season 3 writers’ room followed up yesterday’s blisteringly creative outburst – in which we broke not one, not two, but two and a half episodes! – by spinning our wheels in frustration, watching an adorable cat video, and having soft serve for lunch. Ah, well. There’s always tomorrow.
And the day after when Dark Matter season 2 premieres! Here are a couple of cast interviews to get you psyched up:
Interviews: Anthony Lemke, Alex Mallari Jr., Shaun Sipos
Interview: Melissa O’Neil
Awww, how adorable. FIVE’s firing some sort of energy-based weapon. At who? And why? And why is she wearing that red lab coat? Consider today’s Dark Matter season 2 sneak peek screen shot.
Still a very beatable tie atop the leader board for the chance to win a cast-signed annotated copy of the first episode of our season premiere: “Episode 14: Welcome To Your New Home”! Time is running out to enter!
Win a Dark Matter script!
I’ll be live-tweeting our season premiere Friday night – with a little help from some friends. Follow my dedicated Dark Matter account for all the live-tweeting action – @DarkMatter_show – this Friday at 7 p.m. PDT, 10 p.m. EST/PDT.
Then join me July 4th @BaronDestructo for a live after-show Periscope directly following the U.K. premiere (20:00 on Syfy UK! Then 21:00 on Periscope!).
Off to do another interview. But, before I go…
A little something from the Stargate archives – for all of you wraith enthusiasts out there. Designs (as almost always) by James Robbins.
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Like this: Like Loading...Microsoft's portfolio of non-game apps on Xbox 360 includes services that make it easier for users to "cut the cord": cancel a monthly subscription to cable, and replace it with platforms like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and Hulu Plus. But in a phone interview last week, executives for Microsoft and Time Warner Cable told Polygon they disagree with the idea that those individual apps support cord cutting.
As they see it, cable subscriptions offer something that a la carte services can't replace.
"If you don't have a subscription from [a cable TV provider], what you instantly don't have access to [...] cannot be duplicated through these two or three a la carte offerings that are out there — which is really what it is, two or three. So I don't think it is in any way facilitating that," said Blair Westlake, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Media and Entertainment Group.
Westlake pointed to cable subscribership numbers in the U.S., which remain extraordinarily high: According to the latest industry data, approximately 103 million of the nation's 114 million TV-owning households — more than 90 percent — subscribe to some form of paid TV service.
more than 90 percent of TV-owning U.S. households pay for TV
The Xbox 360's new Time Warner Cable app, released last week, represents the strongest collaboration yet between Microsoft and a cable provider to allow Xbox 360 users to watch live cable channels through the console. It's the third app of its kind; Verizon offers 75 live channels through its FiOS app, and Comcast's app delivers Xfinity On Demand content. (AT&T U-verse customers were able to use the Xbox 360 as a set-top box until last spring, when AT&T suspended that service indefinitely, and Microsoft sold its IPTV platform, Mediaroom, to Ericsson earlier this year.)
Time Warner and Microsoft will soon expand the TWC TV app with video-on-demand content, which will make it the telecom company's first app to offer both live TV and on-demand programming.
"We expect to have the video-on-demand component of [the app] in the next six months or so," said Mike Angus, senior vice president and general manager of video for Time Warner.
From Westlake's perspective, having a cable subscription is "an entirely different category" from subscribing to cheaper a la carte services.
"Even Netflix is, so to speak, a single channel, like a single one of the 12 or so multiplexes of HBO," said Westlake. "It's one channel; think of it as one of those 300 that [are] available on the Time Warner Cable app."
streaming services offer a vast breadth of content
That view discounts the breadth of content available from providers such as Netflix, whose Instant Watch streaming service currently offers nearly 3,900 different seasons of TV shows and more than 7,500 films. Amazon Prime members can stream more than 3,000 seasons of TV series and over 15,000 movies. Hulu Plus offers more than 2,200 TV shows and more than 3,800 films.
Apps such as TWC TV and FiOS come directly from cable providers themselves. Certain apps for individual types of content, like the ESPN app and the NFL on Xbox One app, also won't function without an underlying cable subscription. And indeed, live sports remains a primary selling point for cable TV, since that content is rarely available without a subscription. Westlake argued that the cable-required apps prove the unique value that a cable subscription offers.
"I think it actually does the opposite," said Westlake, speaking of the Xbox 360's app portfolio and whether it facilitates cord cutting. "It says to somebody, 'This is really a lot of value for the money' — many times more than just trying to patchwork it together by going a la carte if they didn't have a subscription to [a cable provider]."While I am by no means an expert in Apraxia, I have certainly been learning a great deal since my daughter was diagnosed with it. Here are some of the things I have learned.
People have no clue what Apraxia is. I can understand that, I did not either until my daughter was diagnosed with it. The problem is, after you explain it to them, they still do not get it and say stupid things like, well she will grow out of it, or she will get better. Next time someone tells you their child has Apraxia, don’t try to make them feel better by saying things like that. Their child will not get better, they will not grow out of it and it will be a long hard road for them and their child. Their child will need a lot of speech therapy for many years, and even then there is no telling whether or not the child they love will be able to speak reasonably normal.
That some rules do not make sense. For example, my daughter was under the care of a speech therapist with the local health district, when she started school she could no longer be seen by the speech therapist that is part of the health district. In this case that is alright because my daughter is in a special school where she gets speech therapy twice a week for 20 minutes each time. The average amount of time a student gets in the public school system is 15 minutes a week with another student. My daughter is lucky, but when she moves into the regular school system that will not be enough time. The rules of the school and health district state that my daughter cannot be seen by a speech therapist in the health care system if she is part of the school system. Children with Apraxia need much more speech therapy than the school system can provide, their rules are not helping children, they are harming.
Private speech therapy is expensive. While my daughter is getting more speech therapy in her school than most, we have decided to hire a private speech therapist. While she is expensive in the few sessions my daughter has had they have been good. Progress is slow but my daughter has shown a willingness to work with the new speech therapist and hopefully she can help my daughter learn how to talk faster.
The Government can help. I know it shocked me as well to learn that the Federal Government can actually help kids with Apraxia. While the rules of the local health and school do not make sense and private speech therapy is expensive, the Federal Government offers the Disability Tax Credit. Children with Apraxia qualify for this tax credit and all you need is your speech therapist to fill out the form and then you send it in. The money we are getting from the Federal Government Disabilty Tax Credit is what is paying for the majority of the private speech therapy. All the help I can get for my daughter the better.
It is challenging having a child with Apraxia. I wait for the day that my daughter can tell me how she is feeling or say “I love you Daddy”. While she can communicate in many ways and is smart we live in a world where verbal communication is important and I just hope that my daughter will be able to be a part of it.Health officials say they are confident that the outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in New York City is now over.
The announcement was made during a press conference at the New York City Health Laboratory on Thursday, ABC 7 reporterd.
Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett identified the Bronx Opera House Hotel's water-cooling tower as the original source of the bacterial disease that had killed a total of 12 people in that area since July 10.
She said tests from three different labs confirmed that 25 samples from people who contracted the disease were linked to the genetic code of the Legionella bacteria found at the hotel's tower.
Legionella bacteria has been found in 14 water towers in the area. All 124 cases of the disease were clustered in the South Bronx.
The City Council passed legislation on Thursday requiring regular testing of water-cooling towers across the city.
"We intend to go beyond the requirement to test our cooling tower every 90 days by testing every 30 days when the tower is in operation," a spokesperson for the hotel said.
What is Legionnaire's Disease?
The disease, a form of bacterial pneumonia, was first discovered after an outbreak at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976 when many people became sick with respiratory illness.
The disease cannot be passed from person to person and is spread chiefly by a person breathing in small droplets of contaminated water, according to the CDC.
Legionella bacteria can multiply quickly in artificial water supply systems like air conditioning systems. Large buildings are more vulnerable to contamination because of their complex water supply systems.
Legionella bacteria thrives in warm water and become especially dangerous when the water is turned into a mist that can be inhaled. In the case of New York City's outbreak, the infected people may have simply been walking by on the street when they inhaled mist that appears to have come from the cooling towers.
Additional reporting by Megan SpeciaShortRead: A group of researchers have developed a system which can hack and steal data from any smartphone user.
Today, one of the most troubling issues for smartphone users is its privacy and that points to the apps and websites they visit from the smartphone.
Almost all websites and apps gather user’s data to get make money by using the data themselves or by selling it on to advertisers.
Though, the market for the data buyer is not only limited to internet market. It also involves law enforcement and even government officials. However, there is a company which claims to have developed an intelligence system with the ability to steal data from the smartphone of any user.
A system that can steal anything
Now with so much to offer for this data, an Israeli group “Rayzone” has developed a system known as “InterApp” which can steal intimate information of any phone user, which is in the system’s proximity. The collected data includes user email address and password, contact list, Dropbox, operating system of the phone, photos, Internet history browsing, locations and a lot more.
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According to the system’s website it can collect “intimate information of any phone user… in the system’s proximity.”
What’s most troubling is that the system does not require much to attack a phone, just a phone user with wifi enabled on the device is enough:
“INTERAPP IS FULLY TRANSPARENT TO THE TARGET AND DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY COOPERATION FROM THE PHONE OWNER,” “THE ONLY REQUIRED CONDITION IS THAT THE WIFI TRANSMITTER OF THE MOBILE DEVICE WILL BE OPEN (NO NEED TO SURF THE WEB).”
Can be used by anyone
For anyone who wants to use the system, they just need little technical training and then can run the system on its own. But, that doesn’t mean it’s been developed for spammers or hackers rather it serves as part of a wider strategic system, installed in a variety of points of interest with large geographical coverage with one analysis and control center. (Safe city / airports / etc.).”This system was also put into practice in the recent Paris attacks from tracking down the ISIS members.
Not given green flags yet
But it’s unclear if this system will live up to expectation because many security experts haven’t given it the green light yet. Claudio Guarnieri, a security researcher told Motherboard that,
“Either they collect data from apps that leak it in clear[text], or they compromise the device, but it doesn’t sound like [the latter]. “In many cases when we get to learn more, it turns out they’re not as good as advertised. The power of this system relies on how credible the vulnerabilities they claim they have been.”
Something fishy…
One of the trickiest parts of this system is that the group has kept the functions of the system hidden. When Motherboard emailed Ron Zika from Rayzone he said the system is only for government use and can’t be disclosed to any journalist.
Similarly, when International Business Times UK tried to contact the group via the main number only to find it was disconnected and their Facebook was either disabled or made private. Their website and twitter page are however still up but the group is in no mood to disclose the features of the server.
Hopefully, the system’s features are all hype but just in case the system really does work as claimed by the group there will be major privacy breaches in future.I recently spoke with Producer Stephane Jankowski and Game Designer Jared Pearson of the Might and Magic: Duel of Champions team at Ubisoft Quebec, in this audio interview. Duel of Champions (still in Beta phase) is a PC Free to Play card game that is also available to play on iPAD in some countries. If you’re up for the adventure you can visit the official website, www.duelofchampions.com. All the in depth details about the game can be found in the audio interview below.
Another person I got to meet at the Ubisoft office was Andree-Anne Boisvert, who was working on a facebook game for Toys R’ Us called “Toys R Us Towers”, which initially seemed okay but as Andree-Anne explained the game I was interested in find out more about it. Usually facebook games give you not much real world value, but “Toys R Us Towers” actually rewards you with coupons to use on real merchandise at any Toys R’ Us store. In my personal opinion, I find this to be beyond ideal for killing time on facebook.
I also got to look around and check out the office and take some photos (check out image gallery below) but not too many because at the time the hard working developers and staff were working on the Assassin’s Creed III DLC, however I was not given any information on it.Posted 15 February 2009 - 06:39 PM
In this Guide
Sources
Why Should I use Keybinds?
There are a few basic things that you can do to immediately improve your play. First key bind everything. You must be able to use all of your abilities while watching what is happening in the battle. A clicker cannot do this effectively. You may be a good players as a clicker, but key binding will transform you into a monster. You should also get familiar with turning using your mouse.
Common Keybinds
How to Learn Your Keybinds
#showtooltip Charge
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Charge
I've seen a lot of threads pop up about keybinds lately so I thought I would put together a guide on using them successfully.-Why Should I use Keybinds?-Common Keybinds-How to Learn Your KeybindsA keybinding is a shortcut exclusively pressed by your left hand on the keyboard to make your character do something, fast. Clicking does things slowly and thus is less effective than someone who uses keybinds. Clicking forces you to watch your action bars and hinders you from watching what is going on around you.As Kazaganthi put it:To change keybindings, you press the Esc key, click on Key Bindings in the menu that appears in the middle of the screen, and scroll down through the various different abilities. The function of the ability is described on the left side, and the two boxes in line with the description are the two possible keybindings. To assign a new keybinding you click on the left box and press the keybinding you wish to assign. Click Okay after you’re done changing things.The first thing you need to keybind is your movement base. I would suggest you use WASD as your movement base. If you currently turn with your keyboard you need to stop. Turning with your keyboard is slower than turning with your mouse (hold right mouse button and drag it). Your movement keybinds should be:W: ForwardA: Strafe LeftS: BackwardD: Strafe RightYou can use modifiers (Shift/Ctrl/Alt) with normal keys to open up even more space on your keyboard. These keys allow you keybind all of your spells while keeping everything within reach of your left hand. This picture shows the keys you can bind using only the normal keys and using shift as a modifier:Just a little math here: Using the keys: `12345qertfg, and combining them with each modifier and having the modifiers on your movement base you have 60 available keybinds. Thats plenty of space to keybind all of your spells and any macros you might have. I don't include Caps Lock in that because I find it to be a nicely situated vent key.Everyone does what is comfortable to them, but this is the general idea:For things used in combat make them close the WASD.Instant and while moving, even closer to WASD.Not so critical spells can be farther away.Common keys are `12345QERTFG.Use shift/control/Alt as modifiers for keybinds to keep them near your movement base.Leave nothing as a clicking ability.Keybind your focus target.Keybind abilities with similar functions close by if you think that will help you.I personally don't use mouse wheel although some people do.Some players have gaming mouses/ speed pads with extra keys on them, they usually bind things to those too.This is a video on using keybinds effectively: Keybinding | pvptutorial.com You won't be able to learn keybinds overnight. It takes time and effort to get used to them, but in the end you won't regret it. I have a few suggestions on getting used to them.First just practice your keybinds in a BG or solo. I don't suggest trying them while your in something important such as an arena match or in an instance or raid. As time goes on you'll usually notice that some keys need to be bound differently. Change them and continue to practice your keybinds by yourself. After a while (depends on the person) you'll usually start to meld your keybind play while you do non-solo activities and then you'll start playing with keybinds full-time. When this happens: Congratulations you've mastered the use of keybindsAnother tip if you're having trouble is to keep your binds all in order(on your bars). If your spells are jumbled around it can get confusing for some people and makes them harder to learn.Another tip (Warrior specific) is to combine stances into macros for all of your stance specific spells. For example:That one keybind will function as your battle stance key when you're not in battle stance and it will function as your Charge key when you're in battle stance. This prevents you from moving your hand to hit multiple keybinds to use stance specific spells by combining it into one useful key.Another Suggestion: Download an action bar mod if you don't already have one. I would suggest Bartender4 : WoWInterface Downloads : Action Bar Mods. This mod has a keybinding feature that allows you to type "/kb" which brings up a little window. Once the window is up you can hover your mouse over your action bar buttons and bind and clear the keybinds for each button. Not only does it help with keybinding but it also allows you to hide your bars. Hiding your bars makes you depend completely on your keybinds. You don't have to keep it hidden because you need to be able to see your cooldowns, but keeping it hidden while you first learn them is very helpful. This is a video on bartender4: Bartender4 | pvptutorial.com Another useful thing is to map out your keybinds in an Excel spreadsheet. List the keys you want to use down column A and modifiers along the top. Go through each keybind. If one is an uncomfortable reach, mark that cell red and continue through the list. Type out all of your spells. Once they are all there, think about how you want them set up and move them up into the keybind section. I did this recently and my new keybinds are a lot smoother and more accessible.Pharaunmizz recently showed me a very useful spreadsheet that I'm sure the TS community could use. It was made by Tielc - Akama Horde (US). It is an Excel sheet that has been modified to look like a keyboard. It has pictures of all prot warrior abilities and they can be dragged around onto whichever key you like. It also has a few other classes and I'm sure if someone put in the effort, they could make one for any class they wanted to. You can download it here (some people are having compatability issues with this. I'm not sure how to fix it so I guess you're on your own with that.):A useful addon is HelpMyKeybind. I'm pretty sure it's still functioning fie even though it's out of date. You can tell it your keybinds and what spells you want them to have and it will test you on them. You can download it Here That's it for now. I hope this helps clear some things up and I'm open to any info or suggestionsIs it any wonder that today, almost 150 years from ending of that bloody conflict, I find it completely disturbing that for a significant portion of our population, the Civil War continues? More distressing is the fact that children in this country are being taught that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. For this anathema, we have to point a finger directly at conservatives, right-wing teapublicans and libertarians.
Doug Muder, who goes by Pericles here at Daily Kos, wrote an absorbing piece recently, Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party. In it, he wrote, "Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think."
His conclusion:
It’s not a Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation, and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers. These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute. But the veneer of Bostonian rebellion easily scrapes off; the tea bags and tricorn hats are just props. The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate battle flag. Let a group of right-wingers ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology that (until recently) had left me asking, “Why are we talking about this?” By contrast, the concerns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its revolutionary Sons of Liberty are never so close to the surface. So no. It’s not a Tea Party. It’s a Confederate Party. Our modern Confederates are quick to tell the rest of us that we don’t understand them because we don’t know our American history. And they’re right. If you knew more American history, you would realize just how dangerous these people are.
Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial
The largest bas relief sculpture in the world, the Confederate Memorial Carving depicts three Confederate leaders of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (and their favorite horses, "Blackjack", "Traveller", and "Little Sorrel", respectively). The entire carved surface measures 3 acres (12,000 m2), about the size of |
,000 and $115,000 each year on the two programs, plus a few smaller charitable events it hosts. That’s according to the organization’s tax records from 2006 through 2012, and tax records for 2012 and 2013 for the group’s 501(c)3 charitable organization, called POSA Outreach Inc.
Hill said the telemarketer only is contracted with the labor organization, a 501(c)5, and the money raised had previously stayed on the organization’s books. But starting in 2012, they began shifting the funds over to POSA Outreach, where Hill is also president and Cindy Hill, his wife, is also executive director.
PFR representative Peter Dellolio said the labor organization is PFR’s largest of two clients. The second is a sheriff’s union in Bexar County in Texas, where a recent article by the San Antonio Express-News discovered PFR also keeps two-thirds of donations.
Additionally, PFR shares an office space with the labor organization and the 501(c)3 in downtown Scottsdale.
Hill said it was his idea to have PFR relocate from its home base in Tucson a few years ago because, after so many years of working together, it made things easier.
“That’s unusual,” Sellers said. “I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say that’s problematic or unethical.”
But Michael Nilsen, spokesman for the Association of Fundraising Professionals, disagrees.
“To me, that’s even more troublesome because you need to have some arm’s length there," Nilsen said. "Frankly that’s a huge red flag."
He said his organization tells people to be careful with telemarketers, which is a touchy thing to say when dealing with groups such as police and fire unions.
“It’s a very tough issue and a very tough area,” he said. “You certainly want to support your police and your firefighters but there’s a lot of telemarketing firms that are doing percentage-based compensation, which we think is unethical, that tend to work in these areas and I think donors need to be very careful when they get these calls.”
Miniutti at Charity Navigator said potential donors should be cautious because it plays to the emotional side of giving.
“People don’t necessarily stop and think, ‘Where’s my money going?’” she said. “They just hear ‘help a sick kid’ or ‘help your local firemen or policemen.’ And we give with our heart and people don’t use their head because if they knew that two-thirds of what they gave was being kept by the for-profit firm, nobody would give.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been modified to reflect the Policy Officers of Scottsdale Association is registered with the IRS as a labor organization.
Updated 12/16/14 at 4:45 p.m.Suicide rates: How Seattle-area communities compare
Take a look at how King County’s cities and larger neighborhoods compare when it comes to suicide. Take a look at how King County’s cities and larger neighborhoods compare when it comes to suicide. Photo: JORDAN STEAD, SEATTLEPI.COM Photo: JORDAN STEAD, SEATTLEPI.COM Image 1 of / 49 Caption Close Suicide rates: How Seattle-area communities compare 1 / 49 Back to Gallery
Each year, about one in every 10,000 adults living in King County dies by suicide, making suicide the eighth leading cause of death in the Seattle area.
That suicide rate – 12.4 deaths per 100,000 people – is actually a lot better than the Washington-wide average of about 15.6 deaths per 100,000. But suicide’s toll is not spread evenly through King County.
Help is available for those experiencing thoughts of suicide, and those who are worried for someone else. The King County Crisis Clinic can be reached at 1-866-427-4747, or by calling 211. Specialized help for teens is available in the evenings at 1-866-833-6546. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available at 1-800-273-8255.
MORE FROM SEATTLEPI.COM: Gun deaths: Which Seattle-area communities have it worst
MORE FROM SEATTLEPI.COM: Binge drinking: Seattle communities ranked
MORE FROM SEATTLEPI.COM: Marijuana use: Seattle-area communities ranked
Geographically, people living in communities north and south of Seattle are more likely to die by suicide than those living in Seattle or on the Eastside. Check out the gallery above for a look at how King County’s cities and neighborhoods compare when it comes to suicide.
Older residents and men are far more likely to die by suicide, according to state Department of Health statistics curated by Public Health – Seattle & King County. White people are over-represented when it comes to suicide. Lower-income areas see slightly higher suicide rates.
Seattlepi.com reporter Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or [email protected]. Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.Kyle Rogers from Examiner.Com deserves major credit for having the fortitude and courage to track, investigate, research and write about something the media refuses to discuss. Hate Crimes. Specifically, Black Hate Crimes. Kyle even assembles an interactive map of the known hate crimes from the month of May. This is a must read for any Truth Seeker willing to confront the rabid and insufferable culture of political correctness.
Over the past couple years major media bosses have publicly admitted to censoring black crime. Editors from the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, and the Associated Press have all publicly confessed to censoring black crime. Recently I’ve personally been able to obtain statements from two media outlets admitting they have a policy of censoring black crime. This includes the Newark Star-Ledger and WYFF, the Greenville, SC NBC affiliate.
This censorship is all about politicizing the news. In 2007 the LA Times made an official statement saying that accurately reporting crime would “unfairly stigmatize racial groups.” In other words, politically correctness trumps public safety. This censorship is most blatant when the crime involves a black perpetrator and a white victim. Especially if racial hatred was a motive.
Since the media frenzy over Trayvon Martin, there have been a few sizable public scandals over the censorship of black on white crime. A few major media outlets have discussed the censorship of black on white crime including World Net Daily, The Blaze, Daily Caller, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly. However, as I am about to show you, the censorship has not slowed down.
for an interactive map CLICK HERE
The month of May appears to have been a particularly bad month for black on white crime. The most shocking examples are two major crimes committed in foreign countries by black American’s working overseas.
A white Irish tourist was murdered after attending an American rap concert in Japan. Two black Americans working for the tour have been arrested. James Blackston, the main suspect, is a backup dancer for Nicki Minaj. An employee of the tour videotaped the backup dancer menacing elderly Japanese people on a train the day before the concert. The murder was a major news story in Japan and Ireland, but not the United States.
Four days after the murder in Japan, black members of the US Airforce participated in a racial mob attack on some white Australian soldiers outside a bar in Sydney. Video shows seven or more black men assaulting three white men. One of the attackers is using his belt as a whip. Two of the perps were arrested at the scene and discovered to be members of the US Airforce.
It seems that black on white crime is so widespread and common that the US is actually exporting it to foreign countries.
Two particularly heinous public murders occurred in London, England. On May 20th, a large black mob viciously attacked a father and son at random in a crowded area. The son was beaten to death. On May 9th, a black mob pursued a white family as they left a tavern. The father was stabbed to death in front of his daughter on her birthday. In both cases, there is no doubt that racial hatred was the sole motivation for the murders. Racially motivated violence against white people is not limited to the United States. It is common in Britain and Western Europe as well.
I found numerous black on white murders that occurred during the month of May, where little if anything was stolen. In each case, the murder was a thrill killing in which the victim was probably targeted because they were white.
In Dallas, TX, Portland, OR, and Santa Cruz, CA, very attractive white females were stabbed to death in public places by black males. All three were random. In Schereville, IL another very attractive white female was attacked at random and strangled to death right in front of her apartment. In Jonestown, MS, a rural all black village, a white nun was the victim of a near fatal stabbing. She had been helping the local black community for decades and someone stabbed her for the fun of it.
In Atlantic City, NJ a black female fatally stabbed two Asian women in a thrill killing. She laughed about the killings in court.
In northwestern Mississippi, a black suspect was arrested for murdering two whites at random. Police believe the suspect would have continued killing more white people if he not been caught. If the races had been reversed, this would have been a major national news story. Instead it was just a local Mississippi story.
When an American Indian and a white accomplice killed three blacks in Tulsa, it was the biggest news story in the entire Western world. I talked to one woman who watched it on the news in Finland. Ask yourself why the racially motivated killings of two white people by a black man is only a minor local story.
There was a particularly cruel attempted murder in Garland, TX that would have been the biggest news story in the North America had the races been reversed. A black man robbed a gas station. After getting the money, he doused the 76 year old white female clerk with gasoline and set her fire. The woman was horrifically burned and almost died. The perp torched her purely for the fun of it. The media aggressively censored this heinous crime. It only received minor local coverage and most outlets censored the race of the victim.
Young white males were shot and killed, at random while sitting in their cars, by black males in Kannapolis, NC and St. Louis, MO. In Kansas City, MO a sixty year old white man was shot at random, while jogging, by two black male suspects. Another young white man asked a black man for directions near Atlanta, Georgia. Police say the black man shot and killed him for the fun of it. Another US soldier was killed at random by two black suspects near Fort Campbell, KY.
In Smyrna, GA a white Marine Corps veteran was invited to an all black party by a co-worker. After he got there, he was chased out and beaten to death by a black mob. If the races had been reversed, this would be made of tv movie material. Instead it was only a tiny blip in the local news.
The month of May also saw widespread racially motivated mob attacks against white people. Baltimore, Newark, and New York City saw multiple attacks each. There were also mob attacks in Denver, CO, Coral Springs, FL, Sacramento, CA, Tampa Bay, FL, and Saint Louis, MO.
You can rest assured that many more violent black on white crimes occurred in the month of May that were not mentioned in this article. Ask yourself how many of these victims would have received national media attention if they were black and the perpetrator was white?
It is time to put real pressure on the so-called “mainstream” media to accurately report crime. US Attorney General Eric Holder says that white people who won’t talk about race are “cowards.” So let’s give Holder what he wants and start speaking up. (visit article)
Again, interactive map available HERE
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Manchester City have finally offloaded maverick striker Mario Balotelli - and set their sights on David Villa to replace him.
Balotelli will undergo a medical at AC Milan on Wednesday after City agreed to sell him for £17million, with the fee potentially rising to £19.5m depending on add-ons.
And City are set to make a last-ditch attempt to sign Barcelona’s £15m-rated forward Villa, after Arsenal were forced to give up their pursuit of him.
The Mirror has learned that City have already made an enquiry about Villa, with a view to rushing through a deal before Thursday night’s transfer deadline.
(Image: Getty)
City boss Roberto Mancini wants to bring his quota of senior strikers back to four after finally getting rid of Balotelli and sees Villa as the ideal recruit.
Ex-Barca officials Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, now City's chief executive and sporting director respectively, could use their contacts at their former club to help seal a deal.
Although Barca do not want to sell Villa, Eastlands bosses are hoping an offer of £15m could tempt them to part with the 31-year-old, who has a poor injury record.
Villa has struggled to re-establish himself as a regular at Barca after missing virtually the entire 2011-12 season with a broken leg suffered early in the campaign.
City may also explore the possibility of taking Villa on loan for the rest of the season, before moving for Real Madrid striker Gonzalo Higuain - their top transfer target - next summer.
Balotelli’s turbulent two-and-a-half year spell at City finally came to an end after Milan finally agreed to pay £17m for the controversial 22-year-old forward.
City paid Inter Milan £22m for the Italian in August 2010 and were determined to hold out for the price they wanted, despite the player’s stock having fallen this season.
Balotelli scored just one Premier League goal this season and a training-ground bust-up with Mancini earlier this month was the final straw for the club, who decided to get rid of the player.
(Image: Angel Martinez)
The Azzurri star has agreed a four-and-a-half year deal with Milan, and agreed to take a £40,000-a-week pay-cut to make the move happen.
In total, Balotelli made 75 appearances for City, scoring 30 goals.
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The 22-year-old's combination of occasional genius on the pitch and more frequent madness off it is something we are really going to miss - check out our run-down of the most magical Mario moments.More than 20,000 illegal African immigrants have entered Mexico in the past two months seeking to eventually get into the United States, Excelsior reports Thursday.
Mexico’s National Migration Institute has extended 12,500 permits to these African migrants that allow them to travel freely. Excelsior reports the amount of Africans entering Mexico is set to exceed the usual 800,000 Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans who enter the country seeking to reach America’s border.
Mexico is not only being inundated with African migrants but also with Haitians. In the border town of Tijuana, 300 Haitians arrived on Sunday alone.
There have been almost 10,000 foreigners in the border town of Tijuana in the past five months, and activists project this could reach 16,000. There has been violence due to this influx in foreigners and police have had to intervene.
Maria del Rosario Lozada Romero, director of migrant care in the area, told Excelsior, “They themselves cause this disorder, they don’t cooperate, and they hit women.”
More than 4,300 Haitians have entered the San Diego border crossing of San Ysidro between October 2015 and August 31, 2016, the San Diego Union Tribune reports. The Haitians along with the African migrants typically originate from Brazil where they were working or just took a boat to with the purpose of reaching the US. South American countries have liberal immigration policies allowing the migrants to reach Central America with ease.
These immigrants either seek asylum in the United States or cross over illegally. Immigrants from Haiti along with Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan can live free of risk of deportation in the United States due to Obama administration policies.When the Pill came on the market in 1960, it was enthusiastically embraced by the medical profession and the public. But by the end of the decade, after a crisis over the drug Thalidomide (which was prescribed for morning sickness and caused birth defects) and increasing reports of potential health risks from the Pill, confidence in the drug was ebbing. In 1969 concerns came to a head with the publication of The Doctor's Case Against the Pill. In this controversial book, medical journalist Barbara Seaman combined the testimony of physicians, medical researchers, and women who had used oral contraceptives to build a case against the safety of the Pill and to indict the medical-pharmaceutical establishment that had marketed it.
Senator Gaylord Nelson. PD.
Taking on the Pill
Shortly after publication, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson read Seaman's book. Nelson was in the midst of conducting hearings on the pharmaceutical industry, investigating abuses in the use of antibiotics, barbiturates and tranquilizers. After finishing Seaman's book, he decided to take on the birth control pill as well.
A Hearing Without Women's Voices
In January 1970 experts assembled in the stately Senate chamber and began giving their testimony on the hazards of the Pill. Alice Wolfson, a member of the radical collective D.C. Women's Liberation, was sitting in the audience listening to the experts. Her group had come to the hearings because they had all taken the Pill at one time or another and had experienced side effects. The group was outraged that their doctors had never informed them of the risks when they prescribed the Pill. As they sat in the chamber and heard one male witness after another describe serious health risks, they were furious that there wasn't a single woman who had taken the Pill there to testify.
Outrage on Two Accounts
After hearing one expert say, "Estrogen is to cancer what fertilizer is to wheat," the women spectators could no longer contain their anger. They stood up and started hurling questions at the men on the dais. The feminists set the room abuzz when they demanded, "Why are you using women as guinea pigs?" and "Why are you letting the drug companies murder us for their profit and convenience?" When told by Senator Nelson to sit down and remain quiet, they retorted, "We are not going to sit quietly! We don't think the hearings are more important than our lives!" Although Senator Nelson was the driving force behind the hearings, the young protesters were so angered by his failure to include women in the hearings -- and by what they viewed as his patronizing behavior --that they went on the attack. The group decided to protest the structure of the hearings and the men leading them, in addition to speaking out about the medical dangers of the Pill.
Making National News
The feminists' grievances gained national attention. National television networks covered the proceedings, and Wolfson's group appeared frequently on the nightly news during the hearings. An estimated eighty-seven percent of women between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five followed the hearings. Eighteen percent of them quit taking the oral contraceptive as a result of the hearings.
Impact of the Hearings
In the hearings' aftermath, hormone levels in the Pill were lowered to a fraction of the original doses. A few years after the hearings, prescription rates rebounded, and the number of users in the United States peaked at approximately nineteen million.
The real impact of the hearings was not on Pill usage, but on the nascent consumer health movement. D.C. Women's Liberation succeeded for the first time in making informed consent a national issue. In the aftermath of the hearings, the U.S. government would require the pharmaceutical industry to include a patient information sheet with complete information on side effects in every package of birth control pills sold. The growing women's movement was prompting women to assert control over their bodies, and in doing so it changed forever the way Americans take prescription medications.NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The bad news about state budgets just keeps getting worse. Only three weeks into the new fiscal year, gaps are already opening up. And the shortfalls are only expected to grow.
"If you think legislators are breathing a sigh of relief because their budgets are passed, think again," said William Pound, executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
State legislators and governors had to contend with deficits totaling $142.6 billion as they closed out fiscal 2009, which ended on June 30 for 46 states, according to the conference. Three states have yet to pass balanced budgets for fiscal 2010, as officials tussle over painful budget cuts and tax increases.
But even some states that approved budgets are going back to the drawing board as revenues drop faster and more sharply than they had estimated.
Legislators from around the country, who are meeting in Philadelphia, gathered Tuesday to discuss their common plight. Gallows humor was abundant, according to Corina Eckl, director of the conference's fiscal program.
An Arizona official joked that the state's financial plight is comparable to the Grand Canyon, while an Illinois legislator said his state's budget situation is so scary, it's best told around a campfire at night.
"The revenue forecasts are continuing to underperform even the most pessimistic of projections," Eckl said. "There's still a lot of this ahead of us."
At least 12 states and the District of Columbia are confronting gaps totaling $24 billion in budgets already adopted, according the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities, which focuses on policies affecting low- and moderate-income families and tracks state budgets.
In a sign of what other states may have to contend with, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers have reached a compromise to close a $26 billion budget gap. The spending plan, however, is anything but pretty and has raised the ire of many groups within the state.
The agreement, which was approved Friday by the state legislature, calls for slashing $15.5 billion in spending, including some massive cuts to education, social services and corrections, as well as borrowing $2 billion from local government, shifting money from other funds and other accounting gimmicks.
Surprise revenue drops
Vermont legislators were disappointed to learn last week that a $28 million gap has opened in their $1 billion budget, which lawmakers approved in early June after overriding the governor's veto.
The state has already cut more than $100 million in spending over the last five quarters, said Rep. Michael Obuchowski, chair of the legislature's joint fiscal committee. To balance the budget, officials hiked taxes and fees by $50 million.
"We're getting to the point where we're going into the marrow," he said. "We will have to look at whole programs and furloughs. There isn't anything easy left."
Gov. Jim Douglas, who became the first Vermont governor ever to veto a budget, will propose ways to eliminate the shortfall in coming weeks, said spokeswoman Dennise Casey. The governor has criticized lawmakers for passing an unsustainable budget.
Tough decisions
Colorado officials, who finalized the state's fiscal 2010 budget in May, found out they were facing a $384 million deficit just days before the start of the new year.
"This means essential and important state services will be reduced even more, impacting the safety net that protects families in every corner of the state, and challenging our ability to invest education, health care and infrastructure," wrote Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. in a newspaper op-ed piece Monday.
Officials already squeezed $1.4 billion out of the fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010 budgets by taking other painful steps. Among them: closing a women's prison, reducing the state's workforce, lowering rates for doctors providing Medicaid services and temporarily eliminating a senior property tax break. They also depended heavily on using federal stimulus funds, tapping into other state funds and dipping into reserves.
Even though the state has had to take these measures, Colorado has considered itself relatively lucky, said Evan Dreyer, the governor's spokesman. Though it is certainly affected by the national recession, Colorado's unemployment rate has remained relatively steady at 7.6%, nearly two percentage points below the national level.
Now, the more difficult decisions must be made. Ritter has asked all state agencies to determine how they would cut 10% of their budgets. State employees, who must take four furlough days, won't get raises before July 2011.
"Cuts in this plan will be deep and painful," Ritter said.
How has President Obama's $787 billion stimulus program affected you or your community? Are you seeing a benefit from the Making Work Pay tax cuts or the additional $25 in unemployment benefits? Are you seeing construction jobs or other stimulus-funded work in your neighborhood? Do you still have a job because of stimulus funds? We want to hear your experiences. E-mail your story to [email protected] you could be part of an upcoming article. For the CNNMoney.com Comment Policy, click here.Experts fear this year's flu season could be particularly severe, and are wondering if the vaccine might need to be redesigned in the face of new strains that make it less effective.
Every year, scientists look to Australia for a glimpse of what might be in store for North Americans come flu season. And this year the numbers aren't pretty.
In October, over 215,000 cases of the flu had been confirmed by Australian laboratories, far higher than the 59,000 diagnosed in Australia during the "swine flu" H1N1 pandemic in 2009, researchers wrote in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.
There are three types of flu: influenza A, B and C. Influenza A is the most dangerous and has lead to pandemics like "swine flu" or "bird flu," while B is usually much less serious, but can still be deadly. Type C is the least serious, and is usually not recorded by researchers.
This year's predominant strain of influenza A is H3N2, and researchers estimate that the vaccine will only protect 10 per cent of those who receive it. The vaccine prevents 40 to 60 per cent of cases on years when the strains are well matched, but that rate can be much lower for specific variants.
A'mismatch'
Scientists meet at the World Health Organization early every year to predict what strains will be most prominent, and then make and distribute those vaccines over a period of months based on those predictions — putting medicine a few steps behind the quickly-mutating influenza.
When there's a mismatch between the strains the vaccine was created to prevent and what strains actually spread, people get sick, which is what happened last year.
"This mismatch most likely contributed to the severity of the 2014–2015 influenza season and the substantial related morbidity and mortality among people over 65 years of age," wrote researchers in the the New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers said the issues with the vaccine last year and this year show that it might be time to focus on creating a "universal" vaccine that would protect against seasonal variants of the illness and be more durable.
But they say it's still extremely important for people to get vaccinated, as herd immunity — when enough members of a community get vaccinated to prevent a dangerous outbreak — can protect vulnerable members of the community, like children, seniors and people with serious illnesses that impact their immune system.
Health Canada This image from Health Canada shows the spread of influenza across Canada during the week of Nov. 19 to 25, 2017.
Health Canada has reported increased levels of both influenza A and B this year with 2,080 confirmed cases as of late November, and noted that the levels of influenza B were as high as they usually are in mid-February.
As of Nov. 25, 371 people across Canada have been hospitalized due to the flu and eight have died.
Southern Alberta and southern Ontario have been the two hardest-hit regions so far.
Visit Health Canada's website to find out where you can get a flu shot in your province.
CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story did not clarify that the effectiveness of flu shots can vary from strain to strain and year to year.
Also on HuffPost:If you threw a dart at the heart of India but your aim was off, a little low and to the right, you would hit the village of Matenar, in the administrative division of Bastar, in the state of Chhattisgarh. Though the region’s lush forests once found mention in ancient Sanskrit epics, Bastar now evokes for many Indians the threat or fear of the Naxalites, Maoist guerrilla groups that have waged a fifty-year insurgency against the national government. But Bastar also represents the ugly side of India’s Janus-faced democracy. The place where your errant dart fell is fabled for its mineral wealth, especially iron, coal, tin, and bauxite, and yet its inhabitants, most of whom belong to India’s indigenous population, the adivasis, are among the poorest in the country. Visitors to Chhattisgarh see dense jungle, small huts, and immense mines, but few schools, health centers, or hospitals. New construction seems devoted mostly to four-lane highways—the better to transport government troops into the state and minerals out of it.
In the past decade alone, more than two thousand people, most of them ordinary civilians, have died in the conflict between government forces and the Maoists. The aim of the police, who in many cases might more properly be called state-sponsored vigilantes, is to establish, with maximum force, federal sovereignty over Bastar—and to make the land safe for mining companies. In 2011, no less an authority than the Supreme Court of India compared Chhattisgarh to the Congo described in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” With a startling forthrightness, the Justices observed that “predatory forms of capitalism, supported and promoted by the State in direct contravention of constitutional norms and values, often take deep roots around the extractive industries.”
Late last year, I went to Matenar to attend a meeting organized by Soni Sori, an adivasi schoolteacher turned activist. Though Sori and I had never met, I had come to know of her through the news. In 2011, she was arrested and accused of acting as a conduit between the Maoists and a large Indian conglomerate, a charge that she denied. While she was in police custody, she was subjected to horrific treatment—verbal abuse, beatings, electric shocks. At one point, after she refused to sign a confession, her interrogators inserted stones into her vagina and rectum. Sori was granted bail in 2014, not long after the police official who she claimed had overseen her torture was awarded a gallantry medal by the Indian government. Then, last February in Chhattisgarh, she was attacked on the street by three men. They threw a chemical substance in her face that burned her skin, and warned her that her daughter would be assaulted next if Sori didn’t stop talking about police atrocities.
On the day of the meeting, Sori’s face appeared almost healed. As she rushed around helping with arrangements for lunch, visiting journalists and lawyers met in small groups, talking to adivasis from adjoining districts, some of whom had walked for a day or more to get to Matenar. Off to the side, a handful of plainclothes policemen took down names in their notebooks; one shot footage of the crowd on his mobile phone. The meeting, which took place at the village council hall, was to be a jan sunwai, a public hearing, during which anyone could get up and talk. I had chatted earlier with a nineteen-year-old woman named Suneeta Pottam; of her group of young adivasi women, she was the only one who spoke Hindi. When she spoke at the meeting, though, she presented her account in Gondi, her voice rising high and shaking in anger. The word that I heard repeated was “police.” I imagine she was telling the audience what she had told me before—that a number of unarmed civilians around Korcholi, her home village, had lately been killed by security forces, that women were routinely sexually assaulted, that one young couple had been taken away alive and returned dead, the woman’s body stripped of clothing.
Pottam had also told me the story of Sodhi Sannu, a nine-year-old boy who was shot, allegedly by state forces, while picking tomatoes last February. Sodhi’s mother and neighbor had rushed out of their homes at the sound of gunfire. They had seen blood but not been allowed to approach. Was the boy dead? If so, his body was never returned to the family. His father, Sodhi Hurra, was at the meeting, too. He rose to speak, sobbing as he described what had happened. Afterward, I asked him whether he had a message for the authorities. “If they have eaten his flesh, tell me,” he replied. “If not, let them tell me where he has been buried. I’ll collect his bones and perform his last rites.” Later, on the phone, I asked Chhattisgarh’s inspector general of police, Shiv Ram Prasad Kalluri, about the missing child. He dismissed the relatives’ story as “absolutely rubbish.” Then, knowing that I worked in the United States, he went on. “Why are you bothered about us?” he asked. “Are we bothered about America? You look after your own place. You look after Trump. We are educated, we are competent, and we are capable of taking care of our country.” (On Tuesday, in what appears to have been an administrative rebuke, Kalluri was transferred from Bastar to police headquarters in Raipur.)
Sodhi Sannu’s case is part of a public-interest lawsuit filed last year by Pottam and others in Bilaspur High Court, in Chhattisgarh. The petitioners call for an investigation into several recent killings. But they may never learn what happened to Sodhi and others. It is common for the police to harass and intimidate journalists and lawyers in Chhattisgarh, according to Amnesty International, and some of the lawyers who helped Pottam file her petition have been forced to leave their homes or restrict their practices.
What is it that gives the men in uniform in central India the power to treat their fellow-citizens with such contempt and disregard for law? I cannot help but think that the repression of adivasis is in some fundamental way tied to the instrumentalized purpose through which their surrounding environment is viewed. The land is there for the taking; any and all violence seems to be justified in mining its riches. In 2008, a group constituted by India’s Planning Commission warned against the “rapacious exploitation” of the tribal population of Chhattisgarh, a phrase that seems particularly apt when one considers the behavior of the security forces toward adivasi women. But Sori, for her part, is undeterred. She told me that her supporters keep reminding her of the truth behind her mission. “The world that the corporations want—lights, wealth—will feed one or two generations,” she said. “But, if they save their land from the government, they will feed many more.”By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
From Barack Obama, the first African-American president, the pendulum has ominously swung to the Ku Klux Klan’s choice, Donald Trump. Just elected the 45th president of the United States, Trump opened his campaign calling Mexicans “rapists,” and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico (and to make Mexico pay for it). He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country, insulted people with disabilities, bragged about committing sexual assault, denied climate change and said he would jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It is important to note that Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump prevailed in the Electoral College. Ironically, on election night 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Trump will assume the most powerful position in the world, the presidency of the United States, with the House of Representatives and the Senate remaining in Republican control. His power could be almost entirely unchecked.
While people around the world express shock and financial markets plummeted as the election results came in, here in the United States, the Beltway prognosticators offer “mea culpas,” and pollsters attempt to explain the failure of their scientific methods. This political upset is truly without precedent in U.S. history. In the aftermath of this bitterly fought, often crude, vastly expensive and punishingly long election, two questions dominate: How did this happen, and where do we go from here?
First, Trump’s campaign was overtly racist, and this seems to have motivated a terrifying number of voters. An increase in white voters was matched by aggressive efforts to depress voting by people of color. This was the first national election in more than 50 years conducted without the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Systematic efforts to restrict voting in communities of color flourished in the South, including in the two key battleground states of Florida and North Carolina.
The media played a critical role in creating President-elect Donald Trump. The Tyndall Report, which tracks how much airtime different issues and candidates receive on the major news networks, summarized media coverage of the candidates in 2015. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage, at a time when he had 16 Republican challengers. “ABC World News Tonight” aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, according to Tyndall. On March 15, 2016, after the primary day dubbed “Super Tuesday 3,” the networks played all the candidates’ speeches, except for the speech by Sanders. The networks actually spent more time showing Trump’s empty podium, filling the time until he spoke, than playing any words of Sanders’, who addressed the largest crowd that night.
Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves told a Morgan Stanley-hosted media-industry conference, speaking about the volume of political advertising that the “circus” of Trump’s campaign was attracting: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … The money’s rolling in.” As world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky says, “The media manufacture consent.”
Another element contributing to Trump’s unexpected win: the FBI. On Friday, Oct. 28, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to congressional Republicans suggesting more emails had been discovered “that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. This was 11 days before the election. Nine days later, he stated publicly that the emails offered nothing new. Early voting was happening during those nine days, with Hillary Clinton under the cloud of potential renewed FBI investigation. According to Business Insider |
somehow manages to survive (Critical Hit on Rob that was forced re-rolled by Travis using his Inspiration which then resulted in a Fumble by the Worg). Some of the Kobolds were put to sleep by a spell by Trenchant. One of the Worgs gets the side of his head struck hard and the creature finds it hard to attack (Fumble - Reduced attack rolls) and another Worg gets a injury to his foot reducing his ability to avoid blows (Fumble - Reduced AC). Sir Krondor gets off his horses to get better swings at the Worgs and Labarett gets pulled off to the ground, as one of the Worg’s jaws clamp around his leg and pull him off his horse. Balasar nearly comes unstuck in a poor swing with his mace but manages to avoid any ill or harm (Fumble roll but used a Luck point to get a re-roll). Sir Krondor takes a heavy blow as one of the Worgs bites him, but the Dwarf manages to stay up on his feet (Critical Hit on Bob but he made his Strength Save throw).
- In a desperate move, Valder casts a Fireball spell at the front rank of the party, shaping it around his allies, and engulfing the Worgs and Kobolds with fire. It kills most and leaves only a few very badly burnt foes.
- Valder yells out triumphantly, “See! I AM A REAL WIZARD!”
- One by one, the party dealt with the remaining foes until all were killed.
<And as the party catch their breath after that battle, just before midnight, deep within the Changrove Forest, on their way to Anwich, that is the end of the session.>
XP Allocation
Group - Combined (This is equally divided by the number of players who were involved)
Quests (Only quests that are completed or rendered undoable, during this session, are shown here)
- Avenge Your Fallen Comrades = 300 XP (Krondor, Trenchant, Labarett ONLY)
- Helpers Of the Winterhaven Refugees = 200 XP
- The Second Dark Exchange = 100 XP (Nac ONLY)
Creatures Overcome
- Winged Kobolds = 1000 XP
- Cultists (Dragonwing) = 1800 XP
- (Non Lethal Duel) Knight Of The White Tower = 200 XP (Balasar ONLY)
- Kobolds = 300 XP
- Worgs = 600 XP
Individual (This is only given to that person and is not divided amongst all players)
Special Bonus (Outstanding Role Playing)
Nil
XP Levels and Player Allocations
Player : Start + Received = Total (Notes)
Phil : 15361 + 587 = 15948
Rob : 16322 + 721 = 17043
Arthur : 11658 + 453 = 12111
Bob : 6500 + 587 = 7087
Travis : 6500 + 587 = 7087
Paul : 6500 + 293 = 6793
NPC (Valder) :??? + 243 =???
NPC (Naillae) :??? + 243 =???President Trump, in his first significant official act as president, signed legislation Friday allowing retired Gen. James Mattis to run the Pentagon as defense secretary.
Via Fox News:
A Senate vote to confirm Mattis, 66, is scheduled for later in the day.
But Trump first needed to sign the bill passed by Congress granting him a waiver to serve, given the law on the books that bars former service members who’ve been out of uniform for less than seven years from holding the top Pentagon job.
Sitting in the Senate reception area less than an hour after assuming office, Trump signed the measure granting Mattis a a one-time exception. Congress last allowed an exception to the law in 1950 for George Marshall, a former five-star Army general.
Trump also signed nomination papers for Cabinet choices and a presidential proclamation declaring a national day of patriotism, according to a tweet from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Congressional leaders attended the signing ceremony, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
After the ceremony, Trump gave McConnell the pen he used to sign the papers nominating his wife, Elaine Chao, to head the Transportation Department.
Although Senate Democrats agreed to a vote on Mattis, they are blocking efforts to confirm Mike Pompeo to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
David Popp, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, told FoxNews.com that Republicans would like to hold “as many [confirmation] votes as possible,” but “that’s up to the Democrats.”
Shortly after Trump became president, the Department of Housing and Urban Development also suspended the Obama administration’s planned reduction of mortgage insurance premium rates, a move that had been intended to make home ownership more affordable.Are you looking for solution to build a cat tree house to save some money?
This thing can be made in the half price than the ready-made one. So, if you want to be an expert of its making, then you have come to the right place.
Here, we are giving a complete guideline which can be applied for any model of it.
Cats always love to climb and jump. That is their genetic nature. But in our classic homes, these pets do not get the chance of doing fun. But having a cat tree house can provide hours of fun and entertainment to your kitty without bringing any odd change in your home decoration.
But this product is quite costly and all of them do not meet the requirements of the customers. For these people, the perfect solution is that they should build a cat tree by their own. If they do so, it will be a cat trees and you can get it according to your decoration and needs.
Step-01: Design & Place
Before going to market to purchase the materials, you have to make a plan of its design first. Which type of material will be needed, that can be found by sketching out its shape on the paper. There you have to consider some major things when you are giving it the shape of a cat tree.
First, find out how many cats will use it. According to its number, you should go ahead of your plan. Considering your cat’s personality is also mandatory. If it likes to climb, then your tree should be tall. There should also be a place of its taking rest and sleep.
You have to measure your space limitations. Select the suitable place where you will keep it and this position will not be odd following its size. Do not try to do anything with your assumptions. If your carpentry skill is not enough good, you can keep its design simple and that will help you to finish it successfully.
If you have not any past experience about building it, then you can Google or watch tutorials of it. There you will get pictures or video and you can learn the procedure step by step. That can be a huge inspiration when you will see the models which people have already made.
Step-02: Materials
For the horizontal platform, take the plywood and pick cardboard, PVC pipe or dimensional lumber for vertical support. To cover the wood’s body, the carpet will be ideal. So pick these things to run it effectively.
Now take your essential tools to complete the assembly. Electric stapler, table saw, hand saw, screws, hammer and nails, utility knife, sandpaper and wood glue will be needed. Make their arrangement before starting the process. Keep them orderly and give more importance to the small parts. These things easily get lost.
Pick the concrete form tube, if you like to make a covered area to let them perch. They are strong enough to create the tunnels for the pets.
Step-03: Sizing the Materials:
Gather you all plans as a guide and start cutting the lumber and plywood sections following your measurement. Cut the dimensional lumber by the hand saw and use the table saw or the handled circular saw is effective for sizing the plywood’s sheets. Give smooth finishing to its rough edges by the sand paper.
Step-04: Base of the Tree
You have to make its base first. The sturdy base is essential to prevent its tipping. Its base should be extended from the middle point than any other component or platform of the pet tree.
There you will need 2 squares same pieces of plywood to give a proper thickness. Glue the pieces together and that will make it more durable.
The base should be larger according to the height of the cat’s tree house. The basic measurement of its foundation is about 24 inches or 60 cm and it really works smoothly.
Step-5: Carpeting the Base
Use well-upholstered fabric or carpet to cover its upper side and that step has to be done before adding any vertical supports.
Now cut the carpet and keep it little larger than the base from its all sides. After cutting it, wrap the plywood base’s edges by the extra part of the carpet. To hold it in its places, use the staple gun and staple them over the fabric.
To give a compact look the carpet, you have to cut 4 small notches at its corners and beneath the base, fold them neatly.
Step-6: Vertical Supports
Without these supporting stands, it cannot hold up the platforms. Attach them to the base and you can use wood glue, nails, screws or bolts to stick them.
Flip and face down the carpeted side of the base and then start drilling holes on this side. Mark the spots and create there the holes where the stands should be installed. Through the holes insert nails or screws to attach the stands and after that drive the connectors into the supports.
If you like to cover these supports by carpet, you should not do it before installing it. After attaching them you should cover it and that is easier to do it at that stage when they are in the secured place.
Many people like to add scratching poles for their cats. So wrap two or three supports with sisal rope. First, apply the glue on the body of the stand and then start the wrapping. Do not forget to secure their ends with staples, wire brads or scotch tape. Keep them in the places where they will not be noticed by the kitties.
If they find it, they will scratch it out. So after stapling them, you need to use a hammer to tap them down. Make it sure that they are not sticking out much.
Step-7: Horizontal Perches
After adding the supports with the base, now take the plywood perches to attach with the support. Use glue or wood screws to the top of both ends of the vertical stands.
Having the screws to its ends will help you to attach 2 perches with it. Moreover, each screw will go through the perch to connect another stand with it.
If you want to make some more floors to increase its height, then you can build other floors in that way. But do not build so many decks that the base cannot hold them safely.
Step-8: Carpeting the Perches
Carpeting these parts actually depends on your design.
If you want to use screws to attach them then you need to use the fabric before bracing them. Otherwise, it will be tough to cover them and it will create a problem during screwing them.
Again, if you go for the glue, the joining part should be done before adding the fabric. There the naked surface of both pieces is needed to make a strong bond. So, attach them and after that, cut and place the carpet according to its design.
You have to cut it like you have done for the base. Place the extra part underside of the perch and staple them properly. So the edges will not be noticed by the cat.
Step-9: Ladder and Condo
If you want to give more comfort to your cat, you can add a condo in its any floor. So it will get a place to take rest and it can be a great place for fun. For this part, you can use solid wood or plywood.
Many people like to attach a ladder to this pet tree. So make it and attach it to its 1st floor. It will help them to reach to the first storey comfortably and of course, wrap its whole body.
Step-10: Finishing Touch
After completing its making, check its every part that you have properly installed them or not. Always try your best to give a flat fit to its stage’s carpet. And one more thing, the more the base will be heavy, the more it will be durable. So you can add extra weight to improve its stability.
Finally…
Cats have sharp nails and during their climbing and playing, they will love to scratch the body of this tree house. That’s why; you should cover its pieces as far as possible to maintain its longevity. So, this is our complete guideline and we hope that, when you will create it in real life, your cat will like it surely.It may not have been pretty, but as a high-variance strategy, it had the best chance at being effective.
With the Thunder down 92-82 with six and a half minutes left in Game 5, OKC Coach Scott Brooks decided that Omer Asik needed to get well-acquainted with the Oklahoma City fans. And by well acquainted, I mean he's going to get yelled at every thirty seconds of game-time while at the free-throw line.
Obviously not a fan of Kazaam, Brooks harkened the days Shaq would love to forget and employed the Hack-Asik strategy for the rest of the fourth quarter. In that time, Asik shot 16 free throws, making 11 of them and essentially clinching the game for the Rockets. The Thunder fans were left unamused, and now the series moves to Houston for Game 6.
I personally enjoyed reading the reaction on Twitter. I found the words "garbage", "hero coaching", and "idiotic" strewn about with little care for the ideas behind the strategy. Trust me, I didn't want to argue; it turned an exciting series into an excruciatingly-slow fourth-quarter to watch. I almost turned to the Sharks-Canucks Game 1. (Almost.)
However, the numbers don't lie: Scott Brooks had a specific reason for his gameplan. And in that situation, it's a reasonable and correct one.
Sure, the Thunder's strategy didn't work in Game 5. But if I'm Coach Brooks, and I'm in the same situation in Game 6, I'm not afraid to go back to it. And the reason is an idea that none less than Rockets GM Daryl Morey has been touting all playoffs: increasing the variance.
Increasing the Variance
To say Asik is poor at free-throw shooting is like saying James Harden's beard is kind of cool: you're severely understating the severity of the issue. In 299 free throw attempts during the regular season, Asik held a 56.2 percent free throw rate. In points-per-possession terms, that averages out to 1.124 points per possession expected from the Rockets, with a roughly 20 percent chance that he will miss both free throws.
The chance for an offensive rebound increases the expected offensive efficiency slightly, but how often does that occur? The Rockets finished the regular season 17th in offensive rebounding during the regular season, and leading boards man Asik isn't going to help much from the free throw line. As estimated by John Hollinger, offensive rebounds may add about.02 expected points per possession. While something, in this case, it's not enough to make a large difference.
During the regular season, the Rockets averaged 1.097 points per possession, slightly under what Asik's free throw shooting would be expected to give them. Given a pace of 94.7 possessions per 48 minutes (the average between Houston's NBA-quickest pace and OKC's slightly slower pace), that would be a 2.76 point difference over a whole game, even taking offensive rebound chances. Given Asik's poor free-throw shooting, Oklahoma City is losing a little bit of efficiency by putting him on the line, but not much.
However, the main reasoning actually comes on the Oklahoma City offensive side. You see, the Thunder take a decent amount of three-pointers; their 27.5 attempted threes per playoff game trailed only Houston entering tonight's Game 5. And what happens when you shoot a lot of threes? If you make them, it works very well; just ask the Game 2 Warriors. If you don't, then you'll lose; just ask the Game 4 Knicks. But either way, the variance is increased so that there is a larger pool of possibilities from which to draw.
Considering Oklahoma City was down ten with six minutes left, they needed to create as many possessions as possible to increase the number of chances for these highly-variable three-pointers to fall. Remember, Houston's potential points per possession is capped at two by fouling - something that has use when the Rockets shot a Stephen Curry-esque 40 percent from long-range in tonight's game and 36.6 percent from long-range on the season. OKC, meanwhile, was eligible to hit three points per possession if they made their threes.
And given Oklahoma City's offensive history, there was a solid chance they would have done just that. Oklahoma City averaged 1.124 points per possession during the regular season. Recognize that number? You should - it's exactly the same points-per-possession that Houston averaged through Asik's free-throw shooting. Only difference is that OKC had a more highly-variable outcome because each possession could result in three points instead of two.
That's exactly how comebacks happen, when both teams hold similar averages but one team has a higher potential for greatness than the other. OKC also held a bigger bust potential, but given they were already down 10, that point is moot.
Finding the exact odds of victory for the Thunder with the Hack-Asik strategy versus their normal defense is next to impossible using our metrics. You would need to find a finite way to estimate the number of possessions at the end of the game if the Thunder had played it out, and considering how basketball games move differently towards the end due to changing game situations, that's just not reasonable.
As a Coach, Brooks' job isn't to please the fans or to make things interesting; it's to try everything in his power to win a basketball game. How do you win a basketball game? By limiting the other team's possibility to score while allowing yourself the chance to go on a run.
It might not be pretty, and it may not have worked, but the rationale behind the Thunder's Hack-Asik strategy is sound. It's all about the variance, my friends.Hi! It's me again! As promised, i updated the Resident Evil 7 Font with some new Glyphs. You can see in the Preview Image what i changed or added. A user namedasked for acute accents, here you areBut i have one thing to say... i am often on Youtube and other DeviantArt Pages and i see often that people use the Font without giving me any Credits... that's really disapointing... I only ask for putting my name and the link to my deviantart page in your art / video description... When i see this happen more often in the future i will never make ReCreations of Fonts ever again... just because of these People... it really sucks.... Nevertheless you others enjoy the work i did here!Also it is not allowed to use my work in any waym to make money out of it! JUST FOR FREE USE!Have fun!Coming up-more of this #exclusive video of that @FDNY brace rope rescue on Upper East Side today. Saved an 81-yr old man's life! pic.twitter.com/8VKiDSiWFo — Stacey Sager (@staceysager7) October 27, 2016
He had two choices…to jump or to burn, neither of which would have been survivable. This was quite an extraordinary rescue -#Comm Nigro — FDNY (@FDNY) October 27, 2016
A firefighter lowered from the roof of a burning Upper East Side apartment building rescued a man during a six-alarm fire that killed one person.The dramatic rescue came during the fire that destroyed an entire apartment building on East 93rd Street between First and Second avenues.Firefighters spotted 81-year-old James Duffy hanging out his fifth window and yelling for help just before 3:30 a.m. Thursday.They tied a rope around firefighter Jim Lee of the New York City Fire Department's Rescue 1, who was battling the blaze from the roof, and lowered him down to rescue Duffy."You couldn't see anything over the edge, there was so much smoke and flames going out the window," Lee later said.Eyewitness News obtained exclusive video showing the rescue as it happened:Although blinded by the heavy smoke and flames, he was able to grab the man and they were both then lowered to the ground to safety."I told him to stay calm and when we got down, I said, 'hope you enjoyed the ride.' He sort of smiled and he was thankful," Lee said.Duffy suffered serious burns and was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital/Cornell where he is stable and recovering.He told Eyewitness News over the phone on Thursday night that he would like to thank the firefighter who saved his life."First off, I'd call it a miracle on 93rd. A miracle happened, he was there at the right time and got me out, so I would call it the miracle on 93rd," Duffy said. "Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it, you saved my life. And like I said, it's a miracle that he was there and professional enough to do his job in a professional manner and got us both out without getting hurt too much.""The chief told me he was in critical condition, but he was able to talk to me," Lee said of Duffy.After they got to the ground, the rope broke. It had been burned through by the flames shooting out the windows."This is the type of rescue that is really extraordinary," FDNY Chief of Department James Leonard said."He really put his life at risk. It doesn't happen that often in this department, maybe once every couple years, that we have a member who puts his life in this position and save a life because of their teamwork, their training and their bravery."The FDNY later posted this photo and message showing the firefighter involved in the rescue:Fox News host Eric Bolling reportedly sent unsolicited lewd photos to female co-workers several years ago via text message, according to The Huffington Post.
“We were just informed of this late Friday afternoon via a Huffington Post inquiry and plan to investigate the matter," a Fox News spokesperson told The Hill.
The spokesperson later confirmed to The Hill on Saturday that Bolling had been suspended as an investigation continues.
"Eric Bolling has been suspended pending the results of an investigation, which is currently underway," a Fox spokesperson said.
A dozen sources told Huffington Post that at least two of Bolling’s female colleagues at Fox Business and one at Fox News received the photos of male genitalia from Bolling.
The women who received the photos said they knew the messages were from him because they recognized his phone number from previous correspondence.
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One of the recipients of the photos told Huffington Post that Bolling didn’t respond when she told him not to send her similar messages again.
Bolling, a former commodities trader and CNBC host before coming to Fox News in 2008, co-hosts the Fox News show "Specialists" and hosts "Cashin' In."
The allegations against Bolling follow a tumultuous year for Fox News. Top-rated host Bill O’Reilly was forced out of the network after after The New York Times reported that he paid $13 million to five different women who accused him of sexual harassment.
The network has also faced several sexual harassment allegations from contributors. Julie Roginsky, who departed the news organization in June, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in April claiming that Ailes sexually harassed her and that when she refused his advances, she was denied a job opportunity.
Fox Business host Charles Payne was also suspended from the network last month after allegations of sexual harassment from a Fox News guest who alleges she was "banned" from the network after ending a relationship with Payne.
Updated August 5 at 4:29 p.m.Vintage styling with modern day technology. Now where’ve we heard of that before? Oh, yes! The amazing Porsche 911 by Singer: a nineties 911 that’s had its genetic code spliced with important DNA from newer Porsche models. Well, that logic has now been given a shot of Americana thanks to the Equus Bass 770.
Under the full aluminium silhouette of a 1960s fastback Mustang, there’s the supercharged 6.2-litre LS9 V8 engine from the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1. For people who don’t remember Jeremy’s review, that block develops 640bhp and 605lb ft of torque. This is a lot more than Steve McQueen ever experienced in Bullitt.
According to its makers, this big engine allows the Bass 770 to get from 0-62mph in 3.4 seconds - that’s Ferrari 458 Spider fast - and max out at the double ton. It’s not just big power either. It’s fitted with carbon ceramic brakes, a magnetic suspension system with adjustable shock absorbers and a double clutch gearbox. New school indeed.
And as you can see, they’ve tinkered with the design slightly. It now has a slightly grumpy-looking face and the classic ‘stang badge has been italicised - most definitely for legal reasons. Even so, it still has that hardcore, muscle car look and the beating V8 to go with it. Inside it’s got all the mod cons: USB connectivity, sat nav and ISO fix so you can scare your kids.
But, like the Singer, it all comes at a price… £156,000. And that’s only for the basic one. You can pay more to have a designer customise your car to whatever spec you desire. We’d probably do that and spec a different name because Equus Bass 770 isn’t very Muscle car is it? Equus is actually a Hyundai sold in some parts of the world, Bass is a fish (or something that comes out of subwoofers) and 770 is one of the big, scary numbers Rachel Riley tells you to solve on Countdown. It’s not in the same league as Mustang, Charger and Challenger. So what would you call it?Pin 1 11 Shares
Mixing Concrete.
The main object of mixing concrete (cement, sand, coarse aggregates and water) is to obtain a uniform and easily workable concrete paste.
Properly calculated quantities of the concrete ingredients are thoroughly mixed to obtain concrete of desired quality.
This mixing is done manually on water-tight platforms with the help of shovels.
For major jobs, mechanical devices called MIXERS are used which come in many designs and sizes.
The concrete mixers have rotating drums that can be tilted into one design. Internally, they are provided with blades that mix the ingredients intimately when the drums are made to rotate.
Great care is required for transporting fresh concrete till it is laid on the job.
Jerks and disturbances should be avoided as it will lead to segregation of coarse aggregates from fine particles.
The fresh concrete is generally placed in some sort of frame or formwork, of a proper design in the construction work.
The formwork should be water-tight, rigid, strong, and made wet before placing the concrete.
As far as possible concrete should be dropped vertically in the formwork. Inclined dropping will lead to segregation.
Read More: Soundness of Cement & Its Test by Le Chatelier Apparatus.
Great emphasis is laid on workmanship while laying the concrete. A bad workmanship may spoil even the best designed and mixed concrete.
Proportioning for Mixing Concrete.
This signifies relative quantities of essential components that are mixed together to make concrete. Thus a concrete mix of “1:3:5” signifies three parts of sand and five parts of coarse-aggregate for one part of cement.
The quality of concrete depends to a great extent on these relative quantities. Various methods have been applied to decide the proportions.
In ordinary construction, arbitrary method is generally applied where the experienced mason decides the ratios of sand and coarse aggregates to be mixed with each volume of cement.
In major construction work, however, other more reliable methods have to be adopted.
The water cement ratio is an important aspect in proportioning of aggregates. It involves the determination of an exact quantity of water that should be mixed with the concrete aggregates to form concrete of desired qualities.
It had been observed that with increasing quantity of water used, the strength of concrete is adversely effected.
The Slump Test gives a measure, in a broad sense, about the workability of concrete of a given mix design.
It indicates subsidence (slump) when concrete from a conical cylinder is allowed to stand on its own. The greater the subsidence, the higher the slump and thinner is the concrete mix.
The fresh concrete is often described as dry, stiff, medium, wet and floppy depending upon the slump. The slump is also used to decide about relative proportions.
Grading of aggregates is determining the average grain size of the aggregates before they are actually used in construction. This is applied to both coarse and fine aggregates.
The basis for mixing coarse and fine aggregates of specific fineness modulus is the presence of voids or open spaces when the aggregates are packed together.
In pure coarse aggregates packing may leave 30-40 percent voids, which can be removed only by filling with finer particles. Similarly, in fine aggregates also voids are left that have to be filled with still finer particles of cement.
This is essential to obtain concrete of compact and void free character.
Read More: Cement Manufacturing Process: What is Cement made of.
Methods of Mixing of Concrete.
Mixing concrete is done either manually or with the help of machines.
Mixing Concrete by Hand.
This is as yet the most common method applied for common construction. In this method, a water-tight platform is made from bricks, steel or wood at a convenient distance from the actual place of Construction.
The cement and aggregates are first placed in predetermined proportions on this platform. Then, they are mixed thoroughly in the dry state using shovels.
After this, water, also in predetermined quantity is added gradually while mixing is kept continuous.
This process is continued till concrete mix of designed consistency is obtained.
Only such volumes of ingredients are mixed in a batch so that the prepared concrete is used within 30 minutes after adding water.
How to Mix Concrete by Machine.
Sometimes, for major jobs concrete mixer machine is used to mix the concrete. For major construction jobs with concrete, machine mixing is an absolutely essential method.
A concrete mixer is a device that homogeneously mix cement, aggregates, and water to form concrete.
A typical concrete mixers uses a revolving drum to mix the components.
Concrete mixers of several designs and capacities are available.
For smaller volume works, portable concrete mixers are often used so that the concrete can be made at the construction site, giving the workers much time to use the concrete before it hardens.
A simple concrete mixer essentially consists of a central drum which can be rotated about an axis.
It may be of tilting or non-tilting design. It is invariably power driven. For achieving thorough mixing, the mixer drum is provided with steel blades fixed at various angles.
Concrete mixers are of two general designs: the batch mixer and the continuous mixer.
In the batch mixer, only a small quantity of concrete is prepared at a time.
In the continuous mixer, predetermined proportions of ingredients are continuously fed from the top and volumes of concrete ready for use are available regularly.
Watch the video below for better understanding.
Precautions in Mixing Concrete by Machines.
Following precautions are necessary while mixing concrete ingredients by mixers:
All the ingredients are fed into the drum before mixing is started. And this is especially true for water, which must be added simultaneously with sand, cement and coarse aggregate. Great care must be taken about the time spent on mixing the batch. It must be neither more nor less than required for complete blending. In either case, the quality of concrete will be effected adversely. After one batch of concrete mix is removed, the interior of the mixer drum must be cleaned thoroughly. Otherwise, lumps of hardened concrete from earlier batches may form a part of next batch, and thus spoil the quality of concrete. This condition is valid for batch type mixers. In continuous mixers, regular cleaning after fixed intervals is necessary. Concrete from the mixer also has to be used within 30 minutes from the time when its preparation was started (that is when ingredients and water were added to the drum).
Placing of Concrete.
After being mixed, concrete is transported to the site in such a way to prevent segregation and to keep the mix uniform.
Concrete from platforms or mixers has to be transported to the job place. There it is laid or deposited in the formwork of suitable material according to the design requirement.
The placement of a concrete is a very important operation, which largely determines the success of a structure and its durability.
Therefore, great care has to be taken in handling concrete from mixing place to the job as well as while placing it in the formwork.
Any method of transportation should protect the concrete from the effect of weather.
Handling and Transport.
The coarse aggregates are most likely to segregate or separate out quickly from the mix during transport.
Hence great care must be exercised to prevent their segregation. All sorts of jerks to the transporting medium must be avoided.
Further, no water should be mixed with concrete while it is being transported. This will destroy the effect achieved by mixing the ingredients.
Careless dropping at the place of construction will also result in segregation of coarse aggregates. This must also be avoided.
Common methods used for transporting concrete are: manual transport in iron pans; in wheelbarrows, in concrete buggies and pipelines, belt conveyors, and chutes.
Selection of a particular method is decided according to the nature of job and type of concrete mix being transported.
An experienced engineer is the best judge to take a decision in this regard.
Formwork.
When concrete is to be placed in a building for particular members as floors, walls, beams, columns, arches, and sills, etc., proper formwork is first made from suitable material to hold the fresh concrete.
The role of this formwork is no less important in the ultimate quality of concrete work than any other aspect of concrete making.
It is necessary that:
The formwork is correctly designed and properly tied up. The formwork is perfectly watertight so that there is no loss of water from the fresh concrete, after it is placed in this formwork. The form work is quite rigid and strong as to bear the load of the concrete. Before placing the concrete, the inner surfaces of the formwork must be cleared, cleaned and wet. This last precaution is necessary to prevent loss of water from fresh concrete. While placing, it is necessary that concrete is dropped vertically into the formwork. Inclined placing increases chances of segregation.
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Read More: Setting of Cement – Process, Tests, & Time.Bob Iger likely to extend Disney CEO tenure: Sources 4:21 PM ET Wed, 6 Dec 2017 | 02:30
Disney CEO Bob Iger will likely remain at the company to oversee any potential merging of Disney and Twenty-First Century Fox assets, CNBC has learned.
The company would extend Iger's contract if a deal with Fox were finalized, according to sources.
CNBC's David Faber first reported in November Fox held talks to sell some, but not all, of its assets to Disney.
Sources confirmed this week the companies were close to finalizing terms of the deal.
The deal would include Fox's Nat Geo, Star, regional sports networks, movie studios and stakes in Sky and Hulu, among other properties. It would not include Fox's news and business news divisions, broadcast network or Fox Sports.
Comcast, meanwhile, continues to pursue a deal with Fox, as well, although Fox views Disney's bid as superior, sources told CNBC.
Since taking the helm at Disney in 2005, Iger has overseen the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, which includes the "Star Wars" franchise. He has held several executive positions with the company during the last two decades.
Shares of Disney closed down 1.6 percent Wednesday.
Reporting by Julia Boorstin and David Faber, writing by Sara Salinas.
Disclosure: Comcast owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal.As previously rumored, Intel is officially announcing number of low-power versions of its Ivy Bridge processor line for ultrabooks and tablets. The new chip lineup will draw much less power than the current mobile processors — as low as 7 watts. That's a dramatic reduction when compared to the current 17 watt low-power chips. Intel says that the new low-power chip will enable thinner and lighter tablets and laptops with longer battery life. It also claims the range has up to five times the performance of the Nvidia's Tegra 3 (now surpassed) mobile SoC.
The company has confirmed that the chip will power Lenovo's upcoming IdeaPad Yoga 11S, but we're also expecting to see one of the chips in Microsoft's upcoming Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet, due for release at the end of this month.DETROIT - Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson spoke Wednesday afternoon in Detroit racing to find support in hopes of reaching the debate stage in coming weeks.
Johnson spoke at 12:30 p.m. at the Westin Book Cadillac to the Detroit Economic Club.
Many conservatives and liberals are looking to third-party candidates this election, driving Johnson’s numbers. The latest CNN Poll of Polls showed Johnson at 9 percent support nationwide. He needs 15 percent to participate in the debate.
The Libertarian candidate boasted that he and his running mate former Governor of Massachusetts William Weld is the only third-party campaign that will be on the ballot in all 50 states.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is expected in Flint on Wednesday. Trump spoke to the Detroit Economic Club earlier this month.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine was in Ann Arbor on Tuesday.
Copyright 2016 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit - All rights reserved.If the Palestinian bid for United Nations recognition as a state is as meaningless as it is made out to be — “merely symbolic,” “won’t change a thing,” etc. — why is it that Israel, the United States, Canada and others are attacking it so ferociously and are desperate to defeat it or consign it to procedural oblivion? Because the request is not meaningless; it is full of meaning. It has already raised the profile of an issue they would rather bury. It is dominating the 66th session of the General Assembly.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds a copy of the letter requesting Palestinian statehood as he speaks to the United Nations General Assembly (Sept. 23, 2011) ( STAN HONDA / AFP )
It highlights Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his promise of a Palestinian state by this fall, outmanoeuvred as he was by Benjamin Netanyahu and pro-Israeli forces in Congress and |
...what are you talking about? How could I have created the entire Dalek race? How did I get here in Rose Tyler's body?" she said.
"WE WERE GIVEN EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS BY THE DOCTOR TO FIND THE DOCTOR. YOUR BRAIN WAVES MATCH THAT OF THE DOCTOR. YOU ARE THE DOCTOR. WE WERE ALSO TOLD TO BRING THE BODY OF THE DOCTOR TO THE DOCTOR." yelled the lead Dalek.
Suddenly the Daleks brought in the body of a man in a black suit. He had long dark hair. Pale skin with white shoes. He looked to be about 23 years old. Clean cut face with a black tie.
Rose looked stunned.
"Who...who is that man?" she asked while looking surprised.
"THAT IS THE DOCTOR, DOCTOR. YOU ARE THE DOCTOR. HE IS THE DOCTOR. YOU ARE BOTH THE DOCTOR." The Dalek yelled.
I don't understand. That isn't possible at all. The last thing I remember I was with the Master right before he reset time. How can this be me? How could I regenerate again past 12? This just doesn't..."
Suddenly Rose burst into a golden aura. Energy came flowing out of her mouth and into that of the sharp dressed unconscious man. The Daleks watched as Rose fell to the floor and the mysterious man awoke.
"Daleks! Make sure Rose Tyler is okay. I don't want a scratch on her or I'll turn you into a new toolbox. Am I clear?" Said the man in black.
"WE LIVE ONLY TO SERVE THE DOCTOR AND TO DEFEAT THE MASTER." all the Daleks yelled out at once.
"Right. Well I now have my entire self back. Well...sort of jumbled together but hey, who's really keeping count right? I think that was the 12th Doctor I just absorbed...I never really fancied him. I was always partial to my 10th version the best but that seems rather cliche." The Doctor said as he reached for something in his pocket.
He pulled out a newer looking sonic screwdriver while a large black box appeared in the room. It was a brand new and much sleeker TARDIS.
" I know this all seems kind of strange. How am I here? How is this happening. But rest assured my 12th version of myself, all your questions will be answered tomorrow...or yesterday. Anytime I suppose. Really, it all just boils down to that Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey stuff."
It would seem like the Doctor was listening to a voice inside his head.
"Well you see this regeneration was quite different from any other. I know it's difficult to understand. And I'll have you know I like the new TARDIS. I mean how long have we used blue now? But look seriously man, once the regeneration is complete you'll fade into the depths of my head and I wont be able to hear you. I'm terribly sorry about that. I guess I could tell you real fast the quick version of what happened while I still can."
The Doctor snapped his fingers and the TARDIS doors opened up. The Daleks were leaving the room with Rose unconscious.
"Don't worry man! She'll be fine. You're really starting to sound like the 10th Doctor you know that? He fancied her quite a lot. But yeah, time did indeed reset. The master if you can remember stole your body and pushed you into a deep part of your subconscious. That part being me. You, we're absorbed into Rose Tyler and somehow were shot through time and space into last week...a very random spot where this version of Rose lived."
The Doctor rolled his eyes.
"Look, I can't slow down. Just listen to me, you don't have a lot of time left. Okay? Now we were split into two parts. The part of me sharing my 12th body with the master, and the part of you sharing the other part of my 12th mind. I needed to track down the rest of me to properly use the TARDIS. I tell ya, it was one hell of a task getting to this spot in time without you to complete me. Now the rest you'll just have to figure out on your own. How did I escape the master? How did I program these new Daleks? How did I regenerate with the master in my old body? I'd tell you but, ya know...spoilers."
Suddenly the Doctor shot out a golden aura. The regeneration was complete.
"I think it's time to stop the master and undo all the horrible things he has done."
The Doctor snapped his fingers and the TARDIS doors closed. The familiar sound of it filled the room as it slowly vanished away.
Doctor Moon was standing from a distance watching.
"I don't really know what you are, or what is going on, but rest assured I will find out. Mark my words." Doctor Moon said with determination.
To be continued in Chapter 3 -Verizon's new XLTE network is as fast as lightning, but that's not why it wins the award for America's fastest mobile network this year. In a nation where we now have four LTE networks battling for dominance, Verizon Wireless takes the crown by being the reliability and coverage king.
For our fifth year of Fastest Mobile Networks testing, we brought in a slew of new partners and asked our readers to run their own tests, supplementing our 80,000 cycles of drive testing over 30 cities and thousands of miles. We found that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, at least, are mostly over the LTE hump in major cities. Sprint still has a way to go before it delivers a truly competitive experience.
T-Mobile provided the year's big surprise, with a powerful showing where it won half of our cities outright. The carrier's performance in the nation's biggest cities was reliably great, although we saw it decline in Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina where the carrier is spectrum-constrained.
But when we left those major metros, often T-Mobile's LTE network would completely drop off the map. Our out-of-metro results, as we drove past cities like Kalamazoo, Macon, and Yuma, showed very little availability of either Sprint's or T-Mobile's LTE networks, while Verizon's system stayed admirably strong.
And while AT&T won last year's prize, this year Verizon really stepped things up with XLTE. That's Verizon's term for LTE running on AWS 1700MHz spectrum as well as its previously used 700MHz spectrum. The 700MHz gives Verizon terrific rural coverage, and XLTE boosts speeds in major cities like New York and Boston in a huge way.
For more coverage of Fastest Mobile Networks, see our partners at ChipChick, ExtremeTech, GearDiary, Phonedog, Phonescoop, and Slashgear.
Why Drive Tests Matter
We put our cars on the road because drive testing is the only way to separate network performance from device performance. This year, we chose LG G2 phones to test LTE, because they're available on all the major carriers and support all of the fastest networks. We drove thousands of miles in three C-MAX hybrid cars supplied by Ford.
When we compared our drive testing with our crowdsourced results, we saw dramatic differences in performance between phones, especially between older and newer devices that support different strains of LTE.
Testing multiple networks in the same place at the same time also matters. Speed tests are generally slower indoors, so if you test one network inside and one outside, it may not be a fair fight. By driving around with multiple devices, you get the best comparison.
Where We Tested
For the first time, all four wireless carriers had LTE in almost all 30 of our test cities, with the exception being Sprint in Denver. We drove to the same 30 major cities we traveled to in 2012 (and with only one change from 2013), evenly spread across six regions of the country.
Outside our 30 cities, our drivers traveled on a mix of interstate and U.S. highways and stopped in smaller cities along the way. The data we collected contributed to a "suburban/rural" score for each of our six regions.
Sensorly provided us with more than 80,000 tests performed everywhere from Aberdeen, SD to Zanesville, OH. Since almost all of those tests were on Sprint and T-Mobile—we just didn't attract AT&T or Verizon users, apparently—we couldn't use those tests to compare carriers, but we pulled out some really interesting comparisons between the hundreds of devices Sensorly's users tested with. Most importantly, we discovered that if you're a Sprint or Verizon user, you probably need a new phone.
What We Tested
This is fastest mobile networks, so we're focusing on data speed and reliability. We didn't test call quality, dropped calls, or coverage. For the best assessment of voice call quality according to our readers, check out our annual Reader's Choice awards results. To get a picture of wireless coverage near you, go to Sensorly's website and you'll see crowdsourced coverage maps for all the major U.S. mobile carriers, enhanced with the data from our test drives.
Mobile networks are constantly changing, and almost always for the better. And because speeds vary based on tower location, network load, device used, and even the weather, we can't predict performance in a specific location; rather, we're giving a snapshot of a few days' worth of usage in several locations across a metro area. Hit the next page for our regional and national winners.On the June 19 broadcast of SBS program “Running Man,” the cast members of new SBS Monday-Tuesday drama “Doctors” make an appearance.
At the start of the episode when the producer asks the cast members if they know who is going to guest today, Yoo Jae Suk responds, “Yea, that girl that Kwang Soo tried to start something with, but it didn’t work out…” referring to model-actress Lee Sung Kyung.
Yoo Jae Suk continues, “There’s also Seo Hyun Jin,” referring to female guests that Lee Kwang Soo has had failed love lines with.
“But what’s intriguing is that these girls will have something with Lee Kwang Soo, but it won’t work out. And then afterwards without fail, they get big,” Yoo Jae Suk says.
The cast members minus Lee Kwang Soo enthusiastically agree.
Yoo Jae Suk concludes with a little PSA for future female guests, “You shouldn’t actually get with Kwang Soo.”
Meanwhile, you can watch “Running Man” on Viki below!
Link to video: www.viki.com/videos/1096428v-running-man-episode-304
Source (1)Labor market mobility in the United States has declined. Interstate migration is down (graph at right from Molloy, Smith, Trezzi and Wozniak) and so is in-state-migration, especially for the less well educated. Where once people responded to shocks by moving to opportunity now they are likely to stay put and retire early or take-up disability insurance. Ben Leubsdorf at the WSJ reviews some of the evidence:
“A state typically returns to normal after an adverse shock not because employment picks up, but because workers leave the state,” economists Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz wrote in a 1992 paper. This time might be different in some ways. Three economists wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper last year that compared with the prerecession years, mass layoffs after 2007 prompted a “muted” migration response and many workers instead dropped out of the labor force.
In a new paper, also cited by Leubsdorf, Danny Yagan at Berkeley suggests that reduced migration is only part of the problem. What has made the aftermath to the 2008-2009 recession so bad is that migration is low at the same time that it has become more necessary than ever. The 2008-2009 recession was especially localized, it hit some places harder than others and in a way that appears to be permanent. But migration has been too slow to solve the problem.
The usual story is that in-and-out migration equalizes wage, unemployment and employment rates across the nation. Some places may be harder hit than others but movement quickly makes the US into one labor market. In the aftermath of this recession, however, that isn’t happening for employment rates. Using a clever research design that looks at workers with similar education and skills doing the same jobs at the same large firms but in different locations, Yagan finds that location continues to matter years after the recession has ended. Workers who worked in the places hardest hit in the 2007-2009 recession have employment rates today that are 1% lower than similar workers in regions that were less hard hit. Convergence has been unusually slow:MADISON, Wis. -- Members of Wisconsin's defense jogged off the field after stopping Rutgers near the goal line and surrendering only a field goal late in the first quarter last Saturday. Yet when they arrived on the sideline, defensive coordinator Dave Aranda unhappily huddled his players near the bench and lit into them about lowering pad level, pushing back and stopping the run.
The unit had done well to limit the damage in an eventual 48-10 blowout victory. But it hadn't done enough to prevent Rutgers from pounding the ball for four first downs on the drive, and Aranda wanted to send a stern message. The moment was illustrative of what separates this season's defense: a certain expectation of excellence other teams simply can't fulfill.
Wisconsin's defense responded by not allowing a touchdown for the fourth time in six home games -- Rutgers' lone score would come on an interception -- and making quarterback Chris Laviano look like a Pop Warner player. He completed only 4 of 14 passes for 31 yards with no touchdowns and one interception despite entering the day leading the Big Ten in completion percentage.
Saturday's performance helped the Badgers rise to No. 1 in the country in scoring defense (11.0 points per game) and No. 3 in total defense (267.1 yards). Certainly, few FBS teams have been better defensively this season. And the more Wisconsin plays, the more the Badgers' defense states its case to be considered one of the best the program has ever seen.
Wisconsin coach Paul Chryst cited the defense's talent, leadership, willingness to be coached, ability to embrace and care about teammates and trust in each other on the field as reasons for success.
"They don't read the clippings, they don't rest on their laurels," Chryst said. "They rise up to each challenge, and they're fun to be around."
Since suffering a 35-17 loss to Alabama in the season opener, Wisconsin's defense has surrendered an average of 8.0 points per game. During one stretch, the Badgers did not allow more than three points in three consecutive games, the first such stretch for the program since 1937.
Some will argue Wisconsin has not played a high enough level of competition to accurately gauge how good the defense truly is this season. Wisconsin, for example, won't play the four best teams in the Big Ten East, and its seven wins are against teams that are 17-42. But the Badgers have played two teams that rank in the top five in the league in scoring offense. Those teams -- Nebraska and Iowa -- each average at least 32.6 points per game. Against Wisconsin, they combined to score 31 points. According to SportSource Analytics, Wisconsin leads the country in relative scoring defense, holding opponents to just 36.4 percent of their points-per-game average on the season. Michigan is second at 42.0 percent.
"We might not be the biggest, but we do have a lot of athletic guys, a lot of faster guys who can just make those plays and be put in certain spots to be successful," Badgers cornerback Darius Hillary said. "And that’s something that Coach Aranda always hones in on. He even asks us what he can do to make the defense a lot better. It kind of goes both ways. We give our input. The next day, we might see a coverage that we were just talking about the other day. It's definitely a blessing."
Players agree Wisconsin's athleticism has allowed the defense to thrive in Aranda's 3-4 scheme. But experience, knowledge and skill have been equally important. Wisconsin's four starters in the secondary, Hillary, Michael Caputo, Sojourn Shelton and Tanner McEvoy, have combined to play in 169 games with 123 starts. Outside linebackers Joe Schobert and Vince Biegel have played 79 games with 48 starts and are considered among the best duos at their position in the country.
Even the inside linebackers with limited experience have performed well. Freshman Chris Orr replaced Leon Jacobs against Troy and recorded a team-high 14 tackles. Jack Cichy replaced an injured Orr against Rutgers and tied for the team lead with eight tackles.
"There's something special about the chemistry between us all working together," Caputo said.
From a historical standpoint, this defense stacks up with any the Badgers have had. Wisconsin has ended the year as the NCAA leader in scoring defense only twice before, in 1951 (6.6 points) and 1998 (10.2 points). But that 1998 team actually allowed 11.9 points per game when including its Rose Bowl victory against UCLA. It also surrendered 292.6 yards per game -- 25.5 yards more per game than this year's team.
Many consider the 1951 "Hard Rocks" defense to be the gold standard in program history, and it's difficult to argue with the statistics that group compiled. But, 64 years later, in an era in which offenses are far more complex and teams have more passing avenues than ever, this season's group might be almost as impressive.
No, this Wisconsin defense would not rank in the top 10 in program history in total defense. Nine of the top 10 total defense marks, however, were set from 1946-63. Only the 2006 team, which surrendered 253.1 yards per game, cracks the program's top 10 for scoring defense among teams from the past 50 years. That defense surrendered more points per game (12.1) and also featured a worse run defense than the current version.
The next four games will determine how history remembers the 2015 defense. Don't be surprised if statistics indicate it's one of the program's all-time greats.Just a few days ahead of the February 24 and 25 elections, the Italian media are ignoring the success of the former comic and self-declared populist. However, according to the polls, Grillo and Berlusconi could give rise to an unprecedented coalition of anti-Europeans.
Interviewed a few days ago on a popular TV show, outgoing prime minister Mario Monti admitted he did not know how to use Twitter, or what Fifty Shades of Grey referred to, while carefully avoiding talk of civil partnerships, and passing quickly over the San Remo Song Festival.
At the same time, the former comedian and founder of the Five Star Movement (M5S) Beppe Grillo was haranguing a crowd in Marghera near Venice. In the crowd were ordinary people, embodying the problems and anxieties of everyday life: work, childcare, motherhood, the difficulties SME owners face. Wrapped up in hats and coats, they stood there in the cold, in great numbers, from the afternoon into the evening, listening to Grillo and others who came out onto the platform.
And yet the next day neither La Repubblica nor Corriere della Sera devoted a single line to Beppe Grillo. As if he does not exist. But they'll get a rude awakening. [Since then, the two most widely read newspapers in Italy have devoted several articles to the candidate's breakthrough in the polls.]
Something is going on in Italy. Is this movement good or bad? Of course, we can discuss that. But either way it is a major phenomenon. The Five Star Movement is standing at 17 per cent in the polls, a figure that very few parties in Italy have been able to get past.
“We will open up Parliament like a can of tuna,” Grillo declares. And the crowd goes wild. “The era of representation is finished. We no longer believe in it. We will break the bank. And if not today, then a year from now. It's just a matter of time. And really, we may just get there today.” Beppe Grillo never stops. “Populists? Yes, we are populist – and let them hear it!” And the crowd chants aloud: “Po-pu-li-sti!”
Treated like a little dictator
The "Tsunami Tour", as he has named it, recalls old-fashioned politics, but also the kind adopted by a certain Barack Obama – who knows how to use Twitter (and how!). And who certainly knows about the existence of Fifty Shades of Grey, if he has not already read it. Because it is obvious that as long as you do not come down to the street, you do not exist, and you have no credibility.
During his meetings, Beppe Grillo often mentions the foreign television crews that have come to follow his campaign. From all around the world, from Denmark to Canada. Journalism, after all, is not limited to analysis and interpretation; it is also a story, a narrative. If a foreigner were to flip open La Repubblica or the Corriere della Sera, he would learn nothing of what has happened during this election campaign. He would be unable to get any idea of the state of mind of the Italians and of the two questions that worry the country: who will vote for the Five Star Movement, and who shudders at the mere thought of it?
The media who think of themselves as the benchmark treat Beppe Grillo like a little dictator. The Five Star Movement only makes the news when someone in it rebels against its leader, or when there is something to spill about the “guru” Gianroberto Casaleggio, co-founder of the movement with Beppe Grillo. As if all those people, all those Italians who braved the cold to gather in the street on a weekday, were lobotomised second-class citizens. One may wonder how a comedian is proving so successful. To write about it may even be a duty. In any case, the movement cannot be ignored.
A place in government?
For the rest, it's enough to look at the polls. Published on February 6, the latest survey of voter intentions for the senatorial elections from [pollster] SWG (Studi e Proiezioni Elettorali) gives the centre-left coalition 34.4 per cent (the Democratic Party 29.6 per cent), and the Monti coalition 11.5 per cent. On polling day, it may happen that Monti and his allies fail to get past 10 per cent. That would mean the centre-left and Monti together would fall short of 45 per cent threshold.
The same number can be arrived at by adding the 28.7 per cent of the centre-right (the People of Freedom is at 19 per cent) and the 17.5 per cent of Beppe Grillo (18 per cent for the Chamber of Deputies). If we look just at the numbers, the Berlusconi-Grillo tandem (46.2 per cent), as hypothetical and unimaginable as it may be, is rallying more votes across the country today than the Bersani-Monti duo (45.8 per cent). And yet the newspapers are talking only about the latter.
To state things clearly, in the very unlikely event that Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi were to forge an alliance, it would be difficult for the head of state not to ask one of the two men to form the government.
An Italy split in half
Worrying figures? Fantasy scenarios? Yet these are real numbers. And more than numbers, they represent minds, hearts, people, and families. There are two Italies. One that we could briefly be described as European – responsible, credible, but given to procrastinating and getting lost in squabbles and unnecessary debate. And one that is difficult to identify. Because Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi are not alike, even if they do have some things in common.
Italians who will vote for Bersani or Monti are as numerous as those who will vote for Beppe Grillo or Berlusconi. And the elections are only 17 days off! This is the reality. Let us act. Something is going on in Italy. Something strong. Something intense. And that has nothing to do with the little dog of Mario Monti. Notify the Twitter stars. And perhaps even the political leaders, can yet turn things around.The virtual mining of Bitcoins is using up so much energy that it is causing electricity blackouts in some countries, it has been revealed.
Experts say the high-tech activity is consuming a higher level of power than in 159 countries across the globe - amid fears it will use more than the world by 2020.
Bitcoin mining hardware uses approximately 31 terrawatt hours of energy per year - compared with 23 in Ireland and 309 for the whole of the UK.
It is creating a 'colossal' carbon footprint as the value of one coin surges to more than £12,000 amid violent swings in the cryptocurrency market.
Bitcoin mining hardware uses approximately 31 terrawatt hours of energy per year - compared with 23 in Ireland and 309 for the whole of the UK (stock photo)
Analytics firm Digiconomist estimates that every Bitcoin transaction uses up enough energy to power nine home in the US for one day.
The virtual currency is made up of lines of computer code which are digitally signed each time they travel from one owner to the next.
Transactions can be made anonymously, making the currency popular with libertarians as well as tech enthusiasts, speculators - and criminals.
Tech-savvy users called'miners' use their computers to make complex calculations in a bid to verify that a 'block' of Bitcoin transactions are genuine.
Analytics firm Digiconomist estimates that every Bitcoin transaction uses up enough energy to power nine home in the US for one day (stock photo)
It is similar to cracking a code - and it takes more than 1.7billion attempts each time using an enormous amount of computing power as well as electricity.
Users often combine their processors virtually to work together completing millions of calculations per minute between them.
In reward for their efforts, the miners who crack each code are rewarded with a share of the currency in the form of 12.5 newly created Bitcoins.
But for the average person, the costs involved with mining are so high that it is no longer worth getting involved.
The virtual currency is made up of lines of computer code which are digitally signed each time they travel from one owner to the next (stock photo)
One facility in China - where half of the world's Bitcoin miners are based - has 25,000 computers running up a daily energy bill of $40,000.
According to The Times, Eric Holthaus said: 'In only a few months from now, at Bitcoin's current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what's available.
'New stress on the grid means more facilities using dirty technologies.
'By July 2019 the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses.
'By February 2020 it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.'
In Venezuela, Bitcoin mining has caused blackouts while experts say the mass amounts of energy consumed could instead be used to power homes and businesses.
The virtual currency is in an extremely volatile phase following enormous value growth in recent weeks.
Bitcoin lost almost a fifth of its value in 10 hours on Friday, having surged more than 40 percent in the preceding 48 hours sparking fears the market may be heading for a price collapse.
In a hectic day on Thursday, Bitcoin leapt from below $16,000 to $19,500 in less than an hour on the US-based GDAX, one of the biggest exchanges globally.
Some market watchers attributed the lurch higher to the coming launch of Bitcoin futures on major exchanges.A Twitter push to oppose Donald Trump's presidential bid has gained a high-profile fan: Marco Rubio.
The Florida senator, who has tussled with the billionaire since Thursday's CNN Republican debate, joined the #NeverTrump movement on Twitter.
"Donald Trump is a con artist -- and he cannot be our nominee. #NeverTrump" Rubio tweeted on Friday.
The Twitter hashtag has supporters from across the political spectrum -- including conservatives -- vowing to oppose Trump should he win the Republican nomination.
"#NeverTrump. Agree? Add your name here," Rubio tweeted. The link brings users to Rubio's campaign site.
And Rubio wasn't letting up Saturday morning as he fired off more tweets using the hashtag.
"It's time to take the mask off Donald Trump. #NeverTrump."
Rubio made many of the same points at a Saturday press gaggle. He sought to deflect concerns that he's yet to win a contest while Trump has won New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada after a second place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
"Our party, after four states have voted, according to all the polls, is on the verge of being taken over. The party of Lincoln and Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by a con artist named Donald Trump," Rubio told reporters.
On Friday, Rubio mocked Trump for spelling errors in his tweets, including the word "choker" several times. In his Saturday comments, Rubio went after Trump in the most personal terms.
"He's learning how to spell," Rubio said. "But he's flying around on 'Hair Force One' and tweeting. So here's the one tweet he put out. He put out a picture of having makeup put on me at the debate. Which is amazing to me that the guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup. Donald Trump likes to sue people. He should sue whoever did that to his face with that."
During a Saturday campaign appearance, at Mt. Paran Christian School in Kennesaw, Georgia, Rubio told the audience of several thousand that his office has received calls from former Trump University students claiming to have been defrauded by the mogul.
And Rubio's keeping up his anti-Trump Twitter efforts. He wrote Saturday afternoon: "Donald Trump will never be the nominee of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. #NeverTrump."
© LAKANAThe presidential campaign for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is defending a controversial endorsement from an anti-Semitic pastor, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.
Kansas pastor Mike Bickle endorsed Cruz. He also runs a campaign of his own called the “Israel Mandate,” which has the goal of “partnering with Messianic Jews for the salvation of the Jewish people,” according to JTA.
Bickle has made some troubling comments, including a sermon in 2011 predicting that God will send “hunters” against Jewish people who refuse to convert to Christianity. Six years earlier in 2005, he said, “a significant number of Jews will be in work camps, prison camps or death camps.”
But Bickle’s remarks have earned the ire of the Anti-Defamation League, which told the Times of Israel that “Mike Bickle’s views about why God allowed Jews to be killed in the Holocaust, as expressed in a 2011 speech, are abhorrent, intolerant and unacceptable. We assume that Senator Cruz accepted Bickle’s endorsement without knowing about these comments. We hope that when these comments are called to the Senator’s attention, he will clearly and forcefully reject Bickle’s hateful ideas.”
Nick Muzin, an adviser to Ted Cruz’s campaign, brushed the remarks off, telling Jewish Insider, “My understanding is that he was paraphrasing the words of the prophets Jeremiah and Zechariah. I know that he has made support for Israel and the Jewish people a central part of his mission.”
According to JTA, Ted Cruz has employed “dog whistles” that allude to negative sentiments toward American Jews, including talk of rival Donald Trump’s “New York values,” even calling the popular Yiddish expression “chutzpah,” a “New York term.”Bernard Palissy, self-portrait in faience, reproduced in a lithograph
Detail of a Palissy still-life platter of c. 1550 (see below for the whole piece)
Bernard Palissy (c. 1510 – c. 1589) was a French Huguenot potter, hydraulics engineer and craftsman, famous for having struggled for sixteen years to imitate Chinese porcelain. He is best known for his so-called "rusticware", typically highly-decorated large oval platters featuring small animals in relief among vegetation, the animals apparently often being moulded from casts taken of dead specimens. It is often difficult to distinguish examples from Palissy's own workshop and those of a number of "followers" who rapidly adopted his style. Imitations and adaptations of his style continued to be made in France until roughly 1800, and then revived considerably in the 19th century.
In the 19th-century, Palissy's pottery became the inspiration for Mintons Ltd's Victorian majolica, which was exhibited at the London Great Exhibition of 1851 under the name "Palissy ware".
Palissy is known for his contributions to the natural sciences, and is famous for discovering principles of geology, hydrology and fossil formation.[1] A Protestant, Palissy was imprisoned for his belief during the tumultuous French Wars of Religion and sentenced to death. He died of poor treatment in the Bastille in 1589 (1590 according to Burty 1886).[2][3][4]
Early life [ edit ]
According to his friend Pierre de L'Estoile, Palissy was born in 1510. The location of Palissy's birth is not certain, but it is believed to be either Saintes, Périgord, Limousin or Agen. He lived most of his life in Saintonge.[1] Palissy was born to a poor family, and while his education did not include Greek or Latin, it did instruct him in practical sciences including geometry and surveying. Early in his life, Palissy was commissioned by the crown to survey the salt marshes of Saintonge.[1] In his memoirs, Palissy tells us that he was apprenticed to a glass-painter. At the end of his apprenticeship he spent a journeyman year acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France, including Guyenne, Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Burgundy and the Loire.[1] He later traveled north to the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine Provinces of Germany, and to Italy.[1]
Workshop of Palissy, rusticware platter, 1575-1600
Palissy returned to Saintonge where he married and had children. Other than what he tells us in his autobiography, namely that he worked as a portrait-painter, glass-painter and land-surveyor, we have little record of how he lived during the first years of his married life.[4]
Interest in ceramics [ edit ]
In 1539 or 1540, Palissy was shown a white enamelled cup that astonished him, and he began a project to determine the nature of its production. The piece of fine white pottery may have derived from Faenza, Urbino, Saint-Porchaire or even China.[1] In Palissy's time pottery covered with beautiful white tin-glaze painted with enamels was manufactured throughout Italy, Spain, Germany and the South of France. A man as travelled and as acute as Palissy, however, would have been acquainted with its appearance and properties.[4]
At the neighboring village of La Chapelle-des-Pots, Palissy mastered the rudiments of peasant pottery as it was practised in the 16th century. He may also have learned of manufacture of European tin-enamelled pottery.[4] In his work Palissy produced ceramics using a great many ingredients including tin, lead, iron, steel, antimony, sapphire, copper, sand, saltwort, pearlash, and litharge.[1]
Rustic pottery [ edit ]
Rusticware featuring casts of sea life (1550)
For nearly sixteen years Palissy labored to recreate the pottery that he had seen, working with the utmost diligency but never succeeding. At times he and his family were reduced to poverty; he burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house to feed the fires of his furnaces. Meanwhile, he endured the reproaches of his wife, who, with her little family clamouring for food, evidently regarded her husband's endeavors as little short of insanity. All these struggles and failures are faithfully recorded by Palissy himself in his autobiography.[4]
Palissy failed to discover the secrets of Chinese porcelain or white tin-glaze maiolica, but invented a style of rustic pottery, called "Palissy ware," for which he is now famous.[1] Analysis[5] confirms that Palissy used coloured lead glazes, lead silicates with added metal oxides of copper [for green], cobalt [for blue], manganese [for brown and black] or iron [for yellow ochre] with a small addition of tin [for opacity] to some of the glazes. The pottery is decorated with reliefs mimicking wildlife from Palissy's native Saintonge marshes, and includes fish, crustaceans, reptiles, ferns and flowers.[1]
In 1542, a peasant revolt against the "gabelle" salt tax in Saintonge brought royal forces, headed by the Duc de Montmorency, near Palissy's home. The duke was impressed by Palissy's artistry and commissioned him to build retreats at the Château d'Écouen and Meudon.[1] Palissy's work there included the construction of wild gardens and ceramic creatures, following a romantic style similar to Italian artists Vasari, Cellini, and Michaelangelo, and foreshadowing the baroque period.[1]
Work in Paris [ edit ]
In 1548 Palissy was brought to Paris under the protection of Montmorency and Catherine des Medicis. Despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1546, Catherine asked him to construct gardens for her in the Tuileries and, in 1562, gave him an official title in her court: "the king's inventor of rustic figurines."[1]
Palissy was outspoken in his Protestant religious beliefs, and sometimes chastised influential officials by quoting from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.[3] According to contemporaries, Palissy would criticize traders, judges, or Parliamentary counsellors, and benefices by citing the Book of Ezekiel: "They are accursed, damned, and lost... Woe be to you, shepherds, who eat the fat and clothe you with the wool, and leave my flock scattered upon the mountains."[3]
Although Palissy was Protestant, these nobles protected him from the ordinances of the parliament |
fine.
• Brown and Roethlisberger, who have connected more than any other receiver/quarterback over a four-season span in NFL history, displayed some of the chemistry they share when the pair had a chat of more than 2 minutes following the play. Brown and Roethlisberger were discussing routes, signals, strategy and how each should react to certain defensive plays.
Chris Adamski is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at [email protected] or via Twitter @C_AdamskiTrib.
Joe Rutter is a Tribune-Review steelers reporter. You can contact Joe via Twitter.Chuck Blazer, former CONCACAF general secretary and chief financial officer, in Jack Warner’s authorised biography “From Zero To Hero”, which was written by Trinidad Guardian sport editor Valentino Singh.
“Jack (Warner) is a measure of reality for those who like bullshit.”
National Security Minister Jack Warner’ initially offered a trademark response to the latest and most deafening furore to engulf him in relation to his lack of restraint around other people’s money.
“I tell you on Friday when I reply to (Opposition Leader Keith) Rowley make sure you have a front row seat,” Warner told CNC3, “because I’ve been quiet on Rowley for far too long and the time has come now for me to go after Mr Rowley frontally.”
Exactly what did PNM leader Keith Rowley have to do with Warner’s 21-year stint as CONCACAF president and the Confederation’s subsequent investigation headed by former Barbados chief justice and attorney general Sir David Simmons?
Let FIFA, Warner said, worry about FIFA.
It was a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful plea.
Trinidad and Tobago is believed to have a short attention span. Next Friday will be exactly seven days after the damning CONCACAF report.
Warner deduced that, if he could ride the outrage out for that long, he might survive. He could not.
This evening, Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar announced Warner’s resignation but gave every indication that he was pushed. And the politician whose personal email address reads “dsurvivor2011” was finished as a cabinet member.
It was in 2011 that Warner beat a hasty exit from FIFA in the wake of bribery allegations. He thought he could use his government post to survive but it proved to be the start of the end for the former history teacher.
Three years ago, then Integrity Commission chairman Eric St Cyr recommended that Warner choose between his government portfolio and his FIFA position. Had he left football then, the Chaguanas West MP might have avoided the fall-out with Blazer and FIFA president Sepp Blatter and lasted the term as a cabinet member.
If Warner gave up his government post, he might have continued to benefit from the lax scrutiny afforded to most sporting administrators.
But, like Icarus, Warner was intoxicated with his own success and it was a matter of time before he flew too close to the sun.
It is ironic that after years of using his FIFA credentials to buy and bully Trinidad and Tobago citizens and, quite possibly, commit crimes within this country’s boundaries, it is the football body that sent him to his political grave.
Two years after his promised tsunami barely produced a ripple, Blatter had the last word and his new CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb pulled off a remarkably clean hit.
The FBI, in all likelihood, will be next in line for its pound of flesh.
But what does it say for Trinidad and Tobago that its Government, watchdog bodies and many of its citizens were so willing to bend over at even the promise of a sniff of Warner’s ill-gained wealth?
What country is so morally bankrupt as to allow itself to be lectured to on matters of corruption by FIFA?
Warner was no aberration. He was a product of Trinidad and Tobago society; a larger-than-life amalgamation of all our worst qualities.
First Citizens Bank, with present Finance Minister Larry Howai as CEO, approved suspicious mortgages on his behalf. The Trinidad and Tobago Customs allowed ex-FIFA vice president Mohamed Bin Hammam to enter local soil with over a million US dollars cash and then looked the other way when close to two dozen Caribbean officials departed with US$40,000 each in envelopes.
Former President Maxwell Richards, Persad-Bissessar and almost everyone else stayed silent as 23 Chaconia medal recipients and World Cup 2006 players were cheated out of bonus payments promised to them.
Police and Fire officials did nothing as fans cheered on the “Strike Squad” in a shamelessly, over packed death trap on 19 November 1989.
According to Warner, these are all FIFA crimes that should be of no interest to the Prime Minister. And all aided and abetted by supposedly distinguished countrymen whom Warner understood better than they knew themselves.
Warner never tried to convince anyone of his innocence. He does not have a record for facing his questioners be they FIFA, CONCACAF or other investigators, Andrew Jennings, James Corbett or Wired868 editor Lasana Liburd.
Stripped down to its bare nucleus, Warner’s argument has repeatedly been the same: Does this really affect you? Would it not be easier to look the other way?
For decades, the answer was “yes.”
Persad-Bissessar and then United National Congress Deputy Chairman Fuad Khan refused to probe Warner when Haiti accused him of stealing US$690,000 in aid money after its tragic 12 January 2010 earthquake that caused over 300,000 deaths.
Former Commissioner of Police Dwayne Gibbs and Police Service Commission (PSC) Chairman Ramesh Deosaran tried to abort police probes into the Minister’s role in the Bin Hammam bribery affair while present acting CoP Stephen Williams has displayed no stomach for this investigation.
Integrity Commission chairman Ken Gordon looks set to leave office with several files on Warner still in the to-do box.
Congress of the People (COP) founder Winston Dookeran, Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) leader David Abdullah, National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) Chief Servant Makandaal Daaga, former attorney general Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, ex-prime minister Basdeo Panday, Sport Minister Anil Roberts, Downtown Owners Merchants Association (DOMA) head Gregory Aboud and other prominent businessmen and, of course, the constituents of Chaguanas West all played dumb when it suited them.
From Daaga to Roberts to Persad-Bissessar, Warner spotted a trait that runs deep in Trinidad and Tobago. It can be summarised in two words: “Me first.”
Trinidad and Tobago, despite over 50 years as an independent nation, still appears too politically immature as a people to see the link between corruption and hardship; we seem unable to grasp that millions pocketed and wasted by politicians and their cohorts might have a direct relation to ill-equipped hospitals, unsafe roads, the loss of our gas subsidy, inadequate basic services like water and, of course, the enduring crime scourge.
Warner knew a population inclined more to self-preservation than communal love would turn a blind eye to its neighbour’s suffering once someone felt there was a dollar in it for him. And he preyed on Trinidad and Tobago’s selfish streak for decades.
As Blazer sagely noted, Warner exposed Trinidad and Tobago’s safeguards for its sportsmen, supporters and taxpayers as bullshit.
He cheated footballers, bullied fans, manipulated auditors and ignored lawmen and the courts. Everyone was at the mercy of his greed.
Be good, sang American rapper Lil Wayne, or be good at it. Warner was very good at it.
“Together we aspire, together we are achieve” became “when it suits me I will conspire, when it suits me I will deceive” as Trinidad and Tobago hurtled down the international transparency index.
There will be a feeling of relief that Warner has finally left Cabinet. But he does not fall alone. He has never operated in a vacuum.
Warner is a product of Trinidad and Tobago. His departure is not the end of our society’s longstanding romance with corruption. But, if the two-island republic looks inward, perhaps his fall from grace might be the start of something more dignified for us all.aZoX Profile Joined December 2010 Canada 358 Posts Last Edited: 2011-10-27 19:49:47 #1 Poll: I Will Attend
YES!! (280)
92%
No (24)
8%
304 total votes (280)92%(24)8%304 total votes Your vote: I Will Attend (Vote): YES!!
(Vote): No
Hey,
I've just released the annoucement for our next BarCraft.
Check it out:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=279967#1
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131832186923320
http://www.reddit.com/r/BarCraft/comments/lrbi5/barcraft_montreal_mlg_providence_by_vuugocom/
Hey,I've just released the annoucement for our next BarCraft.Check it out: My name is Marko, I'm behind BarCraft Montreal | Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/markoo1234
TT1 Profile Blog Joined December 2008 Canada 8896 Posts #2 <3 azox ab = tl(i) + tl(pc), the grand answer to every tl.net debate
aZoX Profile Joined December 2010 Canada 358 Posts #3 On August 31 2011 08:39 TT1 wrote:
<3 azox
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!
Looking EPIC so far!
FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!Looking EPIC so far!FnaticMSi to sponsor :D? My name is Marko, I'm behind BarCraft Montreal | Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/markoo1234
BlueyD Profile Joined April 2010 Canada 437 Posts #4 Make this happen! Zealot Chaaaaarge!
aZoX Profile Joined December 2010 Canada 358 Posts #5 P.S
I would need MLG's high res logo for Orlando and more...
BTW is PrimaDog still running all the organisation of these?
Please have him to email me if anyone knows him.
[email protected]
Thanks My name is Marko, I'm behind BarCraft Montreal | Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/markoo1234
EAGER-beaver Profile Joined March 2004 Canada 2790 Posts #6 Epic, can't wait! Will be coming with a bunch of friends. Simon and Garfunkel rock my face off
Primadog Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 4405 Posts #7 Remember to make a facebook rsvp page :p Thank God and gunrun.
aZoX Profile Joined December 2010 Canada 358 Posts #8
+
my 5000 FB homies at
I PM it to you right after PrimaDog? Will have a gigantic one w/ our 8000+ fans at www.facebook.com/club1234 my 5000 FB homies at http://www.facebook.com/markolafleur I PM it to you right after PrimaDog? My name is Marko, I'm behind BarCraft Montreal | Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/markoo1234
Yougobois Profile Joined August 2011 Canada 85 Posts #9...) I wish i didn't move to Ottawa last week! Hope you have a blast guys! (I'm so jealous now...) Holy Check!
tl4life Profile Blog Joined December 2010 Canada 245 Posts #10 you don't exactly have the best reviews when on google :s
will probably show up anyway but don't expect me to pay 7.50$ for a water.
GL TERRAN IS LOSING! TERRAN IS LOSING!
TT1 Profile Blog Joined December 2008 Canada 8896 Posts #11 On August 31 2011 08:43 aZoX wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 31 2011 08:39 TT1 wrote:
<3 azox
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!
Looking EPIC so far!
FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!Looking EPIC so far!FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =] i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =] ab = tl(i) + tl(pc), the grand answer to every tl.net debate
Kennigit Profile Blog Joined October 2006 Canada 19375 Posts Last Edited: 2011-08-31 00:43:56 #12 Oh god this sounds amazing. I'm actually starting to get more jealous of Barcrafts than going to MLGs rofl. At least i know where to come next time i'm in Montreal though!
systemzzone Profile Joined August 2010 Canada 28 Posts #13 I would like to come and if I do I'll make sure to bring some friends!!
.gypsy Profile Blog Joined October 2007 Canada 554 Posts #14 On August 31 2011 09:35 TT1 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 31 2011 08:43 aZoX wrote:
On August 31 2011 08:39 TT1 wrote:
<3 azox
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!
Looking EPIC so far!
FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!Looking EPIC so far!FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =] i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =]
YEAAAAAAAAH PAYAM PARTAYYYY WOOOOOOOOOOOO~ DRINKS ON YOU...CHEERS! YEAAAAAAAAH PAYAM PARTAYYYY WOOOOOOOOOOOO~ DRINKS ON YOU...CHEERS! https://www.twitch.tv/gypsy93
Louuster Profile Joined November 2010 Canada 2101 Posts #15 wowo starcraft + club 1234?!?!? Somehow those two things dont go together in my head but that sounds awesome. I guess its gonna be a different night than your usual crowd Kim Taek Yong fighting~
Celerios Profile Joined October 2010 Canada 65 Posts #16 100% i'll attempt. I was talking today with a friend about barcrafting in montreal, and this topic appears.
Love the idea, the place is great :D, i'll spread the word. I'm not poor... my macro is just good.
Primadog Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 4405 Posts #17 On August 31 2011 09:02 aZoX wrote:
Will have a gigantic one w/ our 8000+ fans at
+
my 5000 FB homies at
I PM it to you right after PrimaDog? Will have a gigantic one w/ our 8000+ fans at www.facebook.com/club1234 my 5000 FB homies at http://www.facebook.com/markolafleur I PM it to you right after PrimaDog?
I'll work on the summary listings in the weekend. Very exhausted atm. I'll send you a pm if I can't find some info. I'll work on the summary listings in the weekend. Very exhausted atm. I'll send you a pm if I can't find some info. Thank God and gunrun.
mark05 Profile Joined March 2009 Canada 807 Posts #18 I will be attending this 100% for sure wow this will be so amazing, but yea club1234+sc2 really is two opposites in my head but oh well, no doubt fun will be had yes, I'm MarkOhFive
Monsty Profile Joined November 2010 Canada 230 Posts #19 This place seems so out of place for starcraft 2...but if you plan to hold the official Barcraft of montreal, I'll also definitely try to make it!! I have a bunch of friends trying to find a place to watch tournaments together, you might have solved the problem!
Thank you very much for your support! I'll do my part and spread the word! No one is taller than the last man standing.
aZoX Profile Joined December 2010 Canada 358 Posts Last Edited: 2011-08-31 02:15:14 #20 On August 31 2011 09:34 tl4life wrote:
you don't exactly have the best reviews when on google :s
will probably show up anyway but don't expect me to pay 7.50$ for a water.
Hey,
It's not 7,50$, it's 4,50$, but as it's a Sunday, and daytime, and SC2, i'm dropping the prices on about everything for this.
On August 31 2011 09:35 TT1 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On August 31 2011 08:43 aZoX wrote:
On August 31 2011 08:39 TT1 wrote:
<3 azox
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!
Looking EPIC so far!
FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
I think you should skip Orlando and come at 1234 instead ah!Looking EPIC so far!FnaticMSi to sponsor :D?
i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =] i might not go to orlando, well see wat happens =]
If you're not going to Orlando you have to come over, drinks on the house for you.
Hey,It's not 7,50$, it's 4,50$, but as it's a Sunday, and daytime, and SC2, i'm dropping the prices on about everything for this.If you're not going to Orlando you have to come over, drinks on the house for you. On August 31 2011 10:30 Louuster wrote:
wowo starcraft + club 1234?!?!? Somehow those two things dont go together in my head but that sounds awesome. I guess its gonna be a different night than your usual crowd
Why wouldn't they! They do fit perfectly together, we're venue, we have ALL KINDS of event here people aren't aware of! And i'm sure that the SC community is much cooler then a lot of our actual clients
Why wouldn't they! They do fit perfectly together, we're venue, we have ALL KINDS of event here people aren't aware of! And i'm sure that the SC community is much cooler then a lot of our actual clients My name is Marko, I'm behind BarCraft Montreal | Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/markoo1234
1 2 3 4 5 24 25 26 Next AllPolish man faces jail after rigging his flat with a fake booby trap using disarmed hand grenades, bullets and an old alarm clock
Bonifacy Wisniewski, 55, tied device to his front door to deter burglars
Neighbour called police fearing his flat could be caught up in exposion
Bomb squad experts found that alarm clock didn't even have batteries
A Polish man is facing jail after creating a fake booby-trap at his flat by tying disarmed hand grenades, bullets and an old alarm clock to pieces of string.
Bonifacy Wisniewski, 55, rigged the device to his front door to deter burglars at his apartment block in Zator.
A neighbour who knocked on his door to complain about loud music rang police after fearing his flat could be caught up in an explosion.
Bungler alarm: Bonifacy Wisniewski rigged his flat to make it look like a booby trap by tying disarmed hand greandes, bullets and an old alarm clock to pieces of string outside his door to deter burglars Bogus: Bomb squad experts who examined the device said the alarm clock didn't even have batteries in it
Bomb squad experts who examined the device declared that although the grenades were real they had all been disarmed.
However, it was still illegal because they could technically be re-armed.
Likewise, the man was not licensed to own the ammunition that was also positioned around the flat.
Facing jail: Owning the hand grenades was still illegal even though they were disarmed because they could be re-activated and he was not licensed to have the ammunition
A police spokesman said: 'Even the clock did not have any batteries in it.
'It looks effective but would never have caused an explosion.
'Nevertheless it was completely illegal just to possess it and a report has been sent to prosecutors.'Inch by inch, Canada and the West are being drawn into an African war we don’t understand. Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists Canadian troops are not involved in any meaningful way in Mali’s civil war. But they are.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists Canadian troops are not involved in any meaningful way in Mali’s civil war. But they are, writes Thomas Walkom. ( KAMBOU SIA / AFP/GETTY IMAGES )
We now have an unspecified number of special-forces commandos in Mali — in addition to one C-17 cargo plane and the 35 military personnel that go with it. As usual, Canadians had to find out about the commando deployment from someone other than our own government. The Star’s report Tuesday came from anonymous sources in the Defence Department. The CBC had to find out from French television that Canadian special forces are also operating in Niger, which borders on Mali.
Article Continued Below
But then everything about Canada’s role in Mali is treated by Ottawa as a state secret. Canadians learned of the initial C-17 deployment only after Mali’s president tweeted the information on the internet. When that initial, one-week deployment was extended, we were first told not by our own government but by Mali’s ambassador to Canada. The pattern continues. On Tuesday, International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino announced that Canada will give Mali $13 million. He said it was for humanitarian aid. But he made the announcement from Ethiopia where, at a summit hosted by the African Union, other nations had just pledged $455 million to fund a military expedition against Malian rebels. What are our special forces doing in Mali? Some reports say they are there to protect the C-17 crews. Others say they are guarding Canada’s virtually empty embassy.
If the government follows past practice, it will never say. It claims that commando operations must be secret. And Niger? French television said Canadian special forces are there for training. It didn’t say whether they were training others or being trained.
Article Continued Below
Canada is not the only nation being sucked inexorably into Mali. The New York Times reports that the U.S. is planning to base unmanned drones in Niger for use against Malian rebels. The BBC reports that Britain is sending 330 troops to Mali and neighbouring states. The French, who have 2,150 troops in place, insist their war aims will soon be achieved. But The Associated Press quotes a senior U.S. State Department official as saying that the war in Mali is bound to last for “several years.” Meanwhile, who exactly are we fighting in Mali? The usual government line is that the rebels are Islamic militants set on turning Mali into a terrorist base. But as reports from the ground demonstrate, the reality is far more complicated. There are at least four different armed rebel groups operating in the country’s north. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azwad, a Tuareg separatist group, claims it holds the town of Kidal. It used to be allied with the Islamist Ansar Dine. Now, according to AP, the separatists say they want to work with the French against some (but not all) Islamists. But they say they will still fight Mali’s army which, according to reports from Reuters, is said to be busy executing those who look Tuareg in towns liberated by the French. Ansar Dine, meanwhile, has fractured into two groups, one of which is more pro-Tuareg than the other. Both factions distinguish themselves from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM. And AQIM, according to Niger’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Bazoum has — until recently — been working hand in glove with Mali’s government. In November, Bazoum told the foreign affairs commission of France’s National Assembly that Mali’s former president, deposed last year by the army, had given AQIM free rein in the north in exchange for a share of the terror group’s lucrative kidnapping revenues. There. I hope all of this explains why we’re militarily involved (or, as the Harper government would say, not militarily involved) in this war. Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Read more about:The ramps will be closed so an epoxy overlay can be applied to the road.
The closures will occur from 8 p.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Friday and from 8 p.m. Friday to 8 a.m. Saturday.
Ramps from the 31st Street Bridge to northbound Route 28 will close overnight Thursday and Friday.
• Friday at 5 a.m.: a new traffic pattern, which forces all traffic �" north and southbound �" to the Troy Hill side of the road, will open.
• Beginning Thursday at 8 p.m. and ending at 5 a.m. Friday: all southbound traffic will be forced to exit Route 28 at the East Ohio Street ramp.
• Beginning Thursday at 8 p.m. and ending at 5 a.m. Friday: northbound traffic will be intermittently stopped.
• Beginning Wednesday at 8 p.m. and ending at 5 a.m. Thursday: southbound traffic will be intermittently stopped.
The last phase of the Route 28 reconstruction project will cause a few delays next week:
Traffic patterns on Route 28 will change again next week, but for motorists who travel the oft-maligned roadway, the end of decades of construction is in sight.
According to PennDOT spokesman Steve Cowan, completion of the most recent five-year, $120 million reconstruction of a section of the highway near and in Pittsburgh is expected to be open by Thanksgiving.
“We’re on schedule for a late-November full reopening of the road,” Cowan said. “The next phase of the project starts next week.”
Lanes shift next week
That phase, beginning on Friday, will shift traffic lanes away from the Allegheny River and toward a new retaining wall on the Troy Hill side of the road.
“There will still be two lanes southbound and one lane northbound,” Cowan said. “Crews will be working to reconstruct the northbound lanes.”
The new phase will offer drivers some relief, according to Cowan.
“Currently, the lanes split and the right lane forces traffic to East Ohio Street,” he said. “This phase will re-establish the East Ohio Street exit.
“Both lanes now will take you southbound and have a separate East Ohio Street ramp.”
Cowan said the current lane alignment has caused some traffic headaches.
“Especially early on, people were riding the right lane until they had to get over to keep going on 28,” he said. “It created a problem in both lanes. That will now be eliminated.”
Cowan said, with a little more than two months left in the project, PennDOT and motorists should be equally excited.
“We’re right at the finish line,” he said. “We can see the end in sight.”
The project’s completion will make Route 28 a four-lane expressway from Pittsburgh to Kittanning.
It’s a project that started in the 1960s and took about 50 years to complete.
Work took place in spurts followed by years-long dry spells. Obtaining funding for each section, which cost tens of millions each, was a political battle that often raged for years.
A missing link from East Deer, Tarentum and Harrison, was completed in 1984, and converting Route 28’s “death stretch” in what is now the southern end of the expressway in and near Pittsburgh occurred in incremental steps.
R.A. Monti is a freelance writer for Trib Total Media. Comments regarding this story can be sent to [email protected] or 724-226-4666.Colorado Rapids Soccer Club announced today that head coach Pablo Mastroeni has signed a new contract through the 2019 MLS season.
The Rapids legend returns for his fourth season as head coach after leading the club to a second-place finish in the 2016 regular season, as well as a trip to the Western Conference Championship.
“We are excited to announce the re-signing of Pablo as head coach of our club for years to come,” said Colorado Rapids President Tim Hinchey. “Over the course of his managerial career, Pablo has proven that he is one of the top young head coaches in this league. We are delighted with his ongoing development and the level of commitment that he has shown towards this organization. We’re looking forward to the continued success of the club under his leadership.”
Mastroeni helped lead the team to a 15-6-13 record in 2016, while also guiding the Rapids to the most successful regular season in club history. The Rapids’ record-breaking season included most points (58), most points at home (39), most wins at home (11), longest single-season unbeaten streak (15), fewest losses (6), fewest goals allowed (32), fewest goals allowed at home (7), most shutouts (13), and highest regular season finish (2nd).
“I have been extremely fortunate to be a part of this organization, both as a player and now as the head coach,” said Mastroeni. “I appreciate the trust and confidence demonstrated by the Kroenkes – and I’m eager to get back to work to prepare for yet another successful campaign. With the help of my coaching staff, we have been able to transform the culture of this organization and I’m very excited about the direction in which this club is headed.”
After missing out on the Playoffs in the first two seasons under Mastroeni, the club secured the second seed in the Western Conference, while also becoming only the fifth team in MLS history to finish a regular season undefeated at home (11-0-6). The Rapids defeated the LA Galaxy in a two-leg series thriller in the Conference Semifinals before being eliminated by Seattle Sounders FC in the Conference Championship.
Mastroeni closed his playing career as Colorado’s most decorated player. He was named to the MLS All-Star Team in his first seven seasons with the club (2002-2008), and earned Rapids MVP honors three times (2007, 2008 and 2010). Mastroeni still holds club records in games played, games started, and minutes played.
In a 16-year career in Major League Soccer with the Miami Fusion, Rapids and LA Galaxy, Mastroeni was a nine-time MLS All-Star and played in 334 MLS regular season games. In 2010, Mastroeni captained the Rapids to their first MLS Cup in club history.
Mastroeni also represented the United States Men’s National Team at the 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cups, and won the CONCACAF Gold Cup in 2005 and 2007. In total, he made 65 appearances for the United States.I’m going to nerd out about Alien Star Menace’s download spike some more; bear with me.
Above is a graph of the entire lifetime downloads of Alien Star Menace on Android. You notice a beginning spike, which is expected - app stores tend to have a “What’s New and Hot” list, and press is picking up the game for the first time, and people are mentioning it, and there’s just a general umph that goes along with release.
And then over a year later, you see the most recent spike. Which is on track to surpass initial release.
These things happen, but usually there’s an identifiable reason - you get mentioned by a big influencer or there’s a promotion or update some-such. ASM doesn’t have any of those that I can find. Best I can guess: Android changed its ranking algorithm and people are seeing the game who wouldn’t normally.
Following this trend, the game is climbing in ranking in some countries in… unexpected ways. Take China:
That’s over the course of 2 and a half weeks. I’ve *never* seen this kind of gradual ranking increase - usually a small game spikes for maybe a week (or less) and then falls off quickly. ASM has grown over time and is now in the top 200 strategy games in China.
This is echoed in a few countries (I’m looking at you lovely, sexy Canadians), but certainly isn’t the norm: the game made a flash in the US rankings and was super high in Luxembourg (??) before vanishing.
The moral of this story: there is no moral. I’m just confused but intrigued at what’s happening. Keep your games in the stores, kids: you don’t know when people are going to find them.Take an honest look at yourself. Where are you in your life? What have your priorities been up till now and what do you intend to do with the time you have left? We are a mixture of light and shadow, of good qualities and defects. Are we really the best we can be? Must we remain as we are now? If not, what can we do to improve ourselves? These are questions worth asking, particularly if we have come to the conclusion that change is both desirable and possible.
In our modern world, we are consumed from morning till night with endless activity. We do not have much time or energy left over to consider the basic causes of our happiness or suffering. We imagine, more or less consciously, that if we undertake more activities we will have more intense experiences and therefore our sense of dissatisfaction will fade away. But the truth is that many of us continue to feel let down and frustrated by our contemporary lifestyle.
The aim of meditation is to transform the mind. It does not have to be associated with any particular religion. Every one of us has a mind and every one of us can work on it.
Is change possible?
The real question is not whether change is desirable; it is whether it is possible to change. Some people might think they can’t change because their afflictive emotions are so intimately associated with their minds that it is impossible to get rid of them without destroying a part of themselves.
It is true that in general a person’s character doesn’t change very much over the course of their life. If we could study the same group of people every few years, we would rarely find that the angry people had become patient, that the disturbed people had found inner peace, or that the pretentious people had learned humility. But as rare as such changes might be, some people do change, which shows that change is possible. The point is that our negative character traits tend to persist if we do nothing at all to change the status quo. No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.
Aggression, greed, jealousy, and the other mental poisons are unquestionably part of us, but are they an intrinsic, inalienable part? Not necessarily. For example, a glass of water might contain cyanide that could kill us on the spot. But the same water could instead be mixed with healing medicine. In either case, H2O, the chemical formula of the water itself, remains unchanged; in itself, it was never either poisonous or medicinal. The different states of the water are temporary and dependent on changing circumstances. In a similar way, our emotions, moods, and bad character traits are just temporary and circumstantial elements of our nature.
A fundamental aspect of consciousness
This temporary and circumstantial quality becomes clear to us when we realize that the primary quality of consciousness is simply knowing. Like the water in the above example, knowing or awareness is neither good nor bad in itself. If we look behind the turbulent stream of transient thoughts and emotions that pass through our minds day and night, this fundamental aspect of consciousness is always there. Awareness makes it possible for us to perceive phenomena of every kind. Buddhism describes this basic cognitive quality of the mind as luminous because it illuminates both the external world through perceptions and the inner world of sensation, emotion, reasoning, memory, hope, and fear.
Although this cognitive faculty underlies every mental event, it is not itself affected by any of these events. A ray of light may shine on a face disfigured by hatred or on a smiling face; it may shine on a jewel or on a garbage heap; but the light itself is neither mean nor loving, neither dirty nor clean. Understanding that the essential nature of consciousness is neutral shows us that it is possible to change our mental universe. We can transform the content of our thoughts and experiences. The neutral and luminous background of our consciousness provides us with the space we need to observe mental events rather than being at their mercy. We then also have the space we need to create the conditions necessary to transform these mental events.
Wishing is not enough
We have no choice about what we already are, but we can wish to change ourselves. Such an aspiration gives the mind a sense of direction. But just wishing is not enough. We have to find a way of putting that wish into action.
We don’t find anything strange about spending years learning to walk, read and write, or acquire professional skills. We spend hours doing physical exercises to get our bodies into shape. Sometimes we expend tremendous physical energy pedaling a stationary bike. To sustain such tasks requires a minimum of interest or enthusiasm. This interest comes from believing that these efforts are going to benefit us in the long run.
Working with the mind follows the same logic. How could it be subject to change without the least effort, just from wishing alone? That makes no more sense than expecting to learn to play a Mozart sonata by just occasionally doodling around on the piano.
We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering.
If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.
(To be continued)111
I found a recipe by a chef who bought the sauce, read the label for ingredients, and kept making it until he got it right. He said that the type of mayo used will affect how it tastes...I haven'...
I'm confused because I have been cooking for a long time... sure do know how to follow a recipe and I followed this to the letter. I know yum yum sauce and this wasn't it. Not sure why this is...
Serenity Sandril |
which has players like Spotify, Pandora and Apple's iTunes Radio.
Some of these streaming services can be used on any mobile device, unlike Samsung's version.
However, the South Korean firm said it was still confident of attracting users.
"We feel that while the music space is very competitive there is room for improvement," said Daren Tsui, vice president of music at Samsung Media Solutions.
Samsung said its new service would be free to download and have no adverts for a "limited time".
The firm has previously ventured into music streaming with a service called Music Hub, which was launched in 2012.
However, that was shut down recently.SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) — The Trump administration retaliated Thursday against Russia’s expulsion of U.S. diplomats by ordering the Russian consulate in San Francisco to be closed.
The administration also ordered the reduction of the number of Russians in the Washington, D.C., embassy and consulate in New York.
The State Department said the move was in response to the Kremlin forcing a cut in U.S. diplomatic staff in Moscow. Spokesman Heather Nauert said the move brings the U.S. and Russia into “parity,” with each having three consulates in the other country.
“In the spirit of parity invoked by the Russians, we are requiring the Russian Government to close its Consulate General in San Francisco, a chancery annex in Washington, D.C., and a consular annex in New York City,” Nauert said in a statement. “These closures will need to be accomplished by September 2.”
Moscow forced the cut in American diplomatic staff earlier this year in retaliation for U.S. sanctions. Washington had to reduce its diplomatic staff by 755 people.
“While there will continue to be a disparity in the number of diplomatic and consular annexes, we have chosen to allow the Russian Government to maintain some of its annexes in an effort to arrest the downward spiral in our relationship,” Nauert said.
The newly arrived Russian ambassador to the United States invoked Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in saying Moscow will carefully consider its response to the order to close its consulate in San Francisco and scale back operations in Washington and New York.
Anatoly Antonov flew into Washington on Thursday, hours after the State Department’s announcement of the closure.
Russian news agencies quoted him as saying: “We have to act calmly and professionally. Speaking like Lenin, we don’t need hysterical impulses,” citing a Lenin maxim.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had said the U.S. would respond by September.
“The United States hopes that, having moved toward the Russian Federation’s desire for parity, we can avoid further retaliatory actions by both sides and move forward to achieve the stated goal of both of our presidents: improved relations between our two countries,” Nauert said. “The United States is prepared to take further action as necessary and as warranted.”
There was no immediate reaction from the Russian government. But given the back-and-forth nature of the escalating tensions over the past year, it was likely the Kremlin would feel compelled to respond by taking further action against the U.S.
Nevertheless, the United States argued that the score has been evened, urging Russia not to retaliate for the retaliation. U.S. officials pointed out that Russia, when it ordered the cut in U.S. diplomats, had argued it was merely bringing the size of the two countries’ diplomatic presences into “parity.”
TM and © Copyright 2017 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten. The Associated Press contributed to this report.With All His Heart
Alaska's Kaare Odegard Spearheads Hospital Campaign
by Avash Kalra/Staff Writer
When Alaska Nanooks defenseman Kaare Odegard returned to Fairbanks for his junior season, he was a long way from his home in Red Deer, Alberta — over 2,000 miles away across western Canada.
And he likely felt even further away than that.
Odegard's father, Scott — whom Kaare describes as his "biggest fan" — suffered a nonfatal but massive myocardial infarction (heart attack) just weeks before the 2011-12 hockey season began. In fact, he was still in the hospital when Kaare had to return to Alaska earlier this fall.
Then came a simple idea. And a determination to follow through.
Explained Odegard, "I came up to Alaska and just had a vision — that I wanted to start a charity to benefit people with heart problems in Fairbanks and in the surrounding areas."
Odegard then found himself an ally. Shawn Head, the office manager for the Nanooks' team, knew where Odegard was coming from — unfortunately, all too well. Head's father passed away from a heart attack at the age of 55.
But together, drawing on their personal experiences with their family members, Odegard and Head have established a hospital foundation campaign called "With All Your Heart," as Odegard hopes to make a difference in the community of Fairbanks — a community that has, in turn, supported him through his young hockey career thus far.
"We approached the hospital foundation in Fairbanks," said Odegard. "We're going to have two different fundraising activities, and all the donations and proceeds, which are tax-deductible, go to the Harry and Sally Potter Heart Center at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.
"We're having a dinner and silent auction at the beginning of the new year, which will include items from pro hockey players who will donate pictures and jerseys."
And while the campaign aims to help the community of Fairbanks, fans and supporters can get involved from anywhere, pledging support based on the performance of the Alaska Nanooks themselves.
"For every goal we score, for every win, every power-play goal we score, for every successful penalty kill, every time one of our players has a hat trick, for every shut out — people can donate a certain amount of dollars to the fund," explained Odegard.
Turning a traumatic personal experience into something positive is almost certainly easier said than done. But in doing so, Odegard has found that the campaign has been fully embraced by the community in Fairbanks — and specifically, by the patients and their families at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.
"I was able to take a full tour of the cardiac unit at the hospital," said Odegard. "Numerous people came up to me and tell me their story. That's the reason why I wanted to start the heart campaign, I felt helpless.
"There wasn't much I could do to help my dad back home. When people take the time to come thank me, that's great. It's a humbling experience for sure."
Meanwhile, Odegard's father — who is currently recovering — and the rest of his family have provided their full support to Odegard's efforts. Odegard's mother and grandmother flew to Fairbanks for the Nanooks' recent weekend series against Western Michigan.
"My dad wasn't cleared to fly up and watch the games," said Odegard, before pausing and then humbly adding, "He said he's really proud of me."
As for the future of the campaign? Odegard, a Business Administration major, may just have found a calling.
"I'd like to continue doing charity work," said the junior defenseman. "If you're in the position to help people out and make a difference, you have to take advantage of that. I'd love to see "With All Your Heart" keep going. I'll do my best to keep it off the ground."
Visit the web site to learn more about the With All Your Heart campaign.The newest government in the world was designed with help from comments on the internet. God help us all. After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution, this one not based on its parent country of Denmark but rather made from the original ideas of its citizens. Iceland’s small population of 320,000 elected 25 assembly members from 522 ordinary candidates (including lawyers, political science professors, journalists, and many other professions), who in turn opened their process up to the public in an unprecedented fashion. The Constitutional Council was highly active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, where they solicited comments and suggestions for the new government. On Friday July 29th, 2011, the Iceland parliament officially received the new constitution, comprised of 114 articles divided into 9 chapters. Set to be reviewed, and then put before vote for ratification by October 1st, the internet-assisted document marks a possible paradigm shift in governing. In the 21st Century, we’re writing our constitutions with social media. The future is a crazy place.
From the elections to the website, Iceland has gone to great length to make their citizens feel involved and enabled by the process of writing the new constitution. Candidates for the constitutional assembly gathered thousands of signatures to appear on the ballot, and discussed their views publicly on 50 radio show presentations. The candidates also wrote about themselves on public websites including Wikipedia and Facebook. After The Constitutional Council was formed, there was a constant upstream of their proceedings to Twitter, and Facebook, along with regular photo updates on Flickr. You can find videos of The Constitutional Council on YouTube, but they’re in Icelandic. Just to give you a taste, here’s the inaugural meeting…opening with a song!
In many ways then, the new Iceland constitution was the first to ever be born completely in the public eye. Sure, constitutional assemblies are often open to some sort of public scrutiny, but Iceland’s was broadcast on the internet. Council members regularly interacted with commenters, and every week the latest drafts of the various chapters (or the work related to their writing) were shared via a public website. Live broadcasts of the open council meetings were shown every Thursday via their site as well as Facebook. There was even a regular e-newsletter. Iceland used the web like never before to open up their process to the world and attract the attention of their public.
Yet the enthusiasm from the public hasn’t exactly been stellar (maybe they didn’t like the singing?). Despite the historic nature of the constitutional elections, little more than a third of Iceland actually voted (83,531 or 35.95% of the ~230,000 eligible voters). That election, by the way, was deemed invalid by the Supreme Court of the nation due to problems with voter privacy, and the parliament had to eventually appoint the same elected candidates to the Constitutional Council in order to get things rolling. It’s unclear how that debacle tainted the opinion of the council in the eyes of the Icelandic public. While the social media presence has been active during the writing of the constitution, the main website only garnered about 1600 comments. That’s certainly a lot for the Council to wade through, but I’m not sure you can call it a mandate from Iceland’s people – especially when you consider many comments were made from interested parties from all over the world.
The lessons we are to learn from Iceland’s new constitution, then, are a mixed bag. It’s absolutely amazing that an entire structure of government was made with help from social media and in total view of the world. Anyone from Reykjavík to Rio de Janeiro could watch and even give input to how Iceland should be governed. But that didn’t guarantee widespread public support nor even success. The new constitution is 700+ pages of ideals that may or may not be ratified come October, and whose ultimate benefit to Iceland is uncertain. Crowd-sourcing a constitution was a remarkably ballsy move, but it will take years before we know if it was a smart one.
1000 points to Iceland for being progressive, daring, and crazy enough to undergo this revolutionary approach to government formation. 1,000,000,000 points to whoever can find a way to learn from this example and successfully leverage the power of social media to truly make the world a better place to live.
[image credit: www.stjornlagarad.is]
[source: AFP, www.stjornlagarad.is]Share. Project Morpheus, 30fps, PS Plus and more all addressed. Project Morpheus, 30fps, PS Plus and more all addressed.
Exit Theatre Mode
After months of speculation, we finally have a release date for PS4 exclusive Driveclub. But while the announcement that the game had been delayed a little longer gave us the answer to one question, it also caused a whole load of others to spring up, from how the PS Plus version of the game would work, to what benefits (if any) we should expect from the delay.
So we asked you for your most pressing questions to put to game director Paul Rustchynsky, in a bid to get you all the answers you want. You didn't disappoint and, thankfully, neither did he, candidly responding to a huge range of your points from microtransactions to the controversial decision to stick at 30fps rather than push for the higher 60fps that its next-gen rivals boast.
Rustchynsky cites the dynamic menu as one of the reasons for the delay, saying the system the team had created previously was too slow and cumbersome. "Dynamic menu doesn't mean a lot to most people, but it means a lot to us because it connects them on so many different levels. Every menu you look at inside the game, there's a list of activities. It's a window to what goes on inside of Drive Club, and that's present all the time." Rustchynsky also says that the activities are specific to whatever section of the game a user is in and that part of the extra development time was spent on creating the companion app that gives users access to the information on a second screen.
We also discuss special editions, how car customisation will work, whether you'll be able to shun the online social features to play solo, and just what's really going on with the rumours about Project Morpheus integration. For all the answers to these questions and more, check out the video, and keep your eyes on IGN in the coming weeks for loads more Driveclub info.
Exit Theatre Mode
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.What! Did you just say it’s NOT lawful to hit an attacker after you mace him? Yes, the police officer says patiently while he waits for the indignant chatter to die down. This was one of several self-defense classes I’ve taken over the years. Each class left at least one memorable remark that I’d mentally file under self-defense techniques. I’ll share a few more tips that have stuck with me.
“Every woman should practice screaming in her car while driving. If they are practiced screamers they’re more likely to scream instead of freezing up and losing their voice in times of danger.”
“Scream FIRE! People tend to shy away from violence but run to witness a fire.”
“If you don’t practice frequently it will be hard to recall self-defense techniques when we’re scared and facing an attacker. So every time you’re alone or in a dark parking lot recite in your mind eye jab, ear slap, throat strike, groin kick.”
The one lesson taught in every self-defense class was that martial arts can only help you if you master the techniques which take many years. I knew a girl in middle school that took karate and was shocked when she was handily beaten up by another girl. My young mind wondered how she could get beat up if she knew moves like the ones I saw in the movie Karate Kid. I learned that fighting skills take more than a few classes to master. They need to be practiced so often that they become second nature. This is known as muscle memory. The self-defense instructors wanted us to develop muscle memory in our thoughts and awareness. No matter our age, physical capability, or hectic schedule, our thoughts and awareness are things that we could work on every day.
I started reflecting on the things I had learned about self-defense techniques after a reader asked if I would write an article about ways to keep women safe in times of chaos. I’m NOT a self-defense expert but it is an important topic worthy of study and I’m happy when I can oblige a reader. I believe there is so much we can learn from history and other cultures. There are many ways to develop a self-defense mindset. It does not always imply acquiring an arsenal. Below are stories that illustrate mental toughness.
Mental Toughness
Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is being stressed more and more in self-defense. There are a couple reasons for this. First, it’s becoming common for businesses to ban self-defense weapons. I had my purse searched when I when to the movies recently. The movie theatre’s policy is that carrying or displaying weapons of any kind, real or toy is prohibited. Second, mass shootings are happening in public places such as schools, nightclubs, concerts, malls, airports, and movie theaters. All of which have bans on weapons and are places were you can easily find yourself trapped. This makes situational awareness your only avenue to protect yourself.
Situational awareness is being aware of your surroundings and utilizing them to protect yourself and others. Here are some stories to illustrate:
A friend of mine shared with me that it’s a habit of hers to locate the fire extinguisher in every building she entered. Working for an emergency call center she was exposed to all types of violent crimes so I was not surprised that she was observant of her surroundings. While doing research for this article I discovered several self-defense instructors teach weaponizing a fire extinguisher in life threating situations like a mass shooting in a public place.
This YouTube video was made by Rick Capozzi. Check out their upcoming training events here.
I interviewed a woman that just got out of a relationship where the abuse was starting to escalate. I asked her what her, “What safety advice would give others?” She responded, “Back-up into an option”. This reminded me of a story in Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born A Crime, he talks about how his stepfather was a violent man. If his stepfather entered the room, Trevor would find a way to position himself closest to the door so that he could always escape from a bad situation. Another story found in the Born a Crime shared that it was not uncommon for an attacker, who got violent with a woman in the kitchen, to have boiling water or grease thrown on the attacker. The book was not about abuse or self-defense but throughout this hilarious recounting of his life, Trevor uses situational awareness time and time again. Being alert to your surroundings is the most consistently taught self-defense technique through the ages.
Confidence
In the 80’s, a study was conducted on how predators pick their targets. The results indicated that it wasn’t the length of hair, age, revealing clothes, or good looks that made someone a more likely target. Body language is how predators pick their would-be victims. Inmates of violent crimes watched footage of pedestrians and were asked to identify who would have been a potential victim. The same women were chosen time after time. Instinctively the criminals picked up on signs of vulnerability, lack of self-confidence, or a weakness. These women are naturally more likely to be compliant. So you may want to practice hurrying your pace, walk with a purpose, square your shoulders, and improve your posture because signs of confidence have been determined to detour many predators.
Increasing one’s confidence can be achieved many different ways. I have personally witnessed how preparedness and empowerment can boost another’s confidence. Night had fallen as I walked out of the women’s conference with three of my girlfriends. We were in a big, unfamiliar city and one lady started to get really scared during the first of ten blocks we had to walk back to the parked car. She clutched tightly to our friends on each side of her and kept saying she had a feeling that someone was going to attack us. She was becoming hysterical and slowing our progress to the car. I had packed four canisters of mace in my purse prior to our trip, one for each of us. Pulling them out, I handed one to each of them. There was a noticeable change in her body language as she let go of our friends and gripped the mace. She felt empowered and more confident holding a method to defend herself, we all did. Confidence can help us work through our fears and empower us to stand up for ourselves in dangerous situations.
Personal Constitution
We all have a code that we live by. This code is our sense of right and wrong, how we treat others, and how we expect to be treated. This code is continually adapting to our ever-changing world. Our laws indicate that as a society, we believe that physical violence is wrong. This is reinforced at school, at work, in the community and hopefully at home. Unfortunately, violence still plagues our communities. One high-risk group is foster children. There are several actions states take to protect foster children and lessen the potential of violence. One method is educating foster parents and children about acceptable treatment in the form of a Foster Child Bill of Rights. Here are two lines from the California’s Rights of Foster Children:
“1. To live in a safe, healthy, and comfortable home where he or she is treated with respect.
2. To be free from physical, sexual, emotional, or other abuse, or corporal punishment…”
This constitution helps instill foster children with the confidence to speak out against any who would harm them. They are less likely to have the internal debate on whether they deserve abuse. Having a personal constitution can be a powerful tool for anyone. It can set a standard in our lives and help us decide how we should act in difficult situations. Maya Angelou, a famous writer and civil rights activist, experienced violent acts throughout her life. Because of her life experiences, she added this sentence to her personal constitution, “I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed”.
Personal constitutions are what make people fight back when their lives are threatened, help others out of dangerous situations, and stand up to tyrants. A self-defense program taught by Gracie Jiu-Jitsu begins their training empowering women with their basic fundamental rights “we have the right to control our bodies and our boundaries”. A personal constitution does not just happen. It takes forethought, reflection, and repetition.
Network
Never be far from help! This is a safety technique taught to victims of spousal abuse but can apply to anyone. Get to know your neighbors and exchange phones numbers. Neighbors can generally arrive quicker than law enforcement and can act as a witness. For many years neighbors have actively protected each other. The Neighborhood Watch program “is one of the oldest and most effective crime prevention programs in the country, bringing citizens together with law enforcement to deter crime and make communities safer.”
Another method of utilizing your network is to program the speed dial on your phone with the numbers of friends and family members that would come to your rescue. Recently, I discovered an SOS feature on my smartwatch. I program in my emergency contacts and when I press my home button 3 times it will send an SOS text with a map of my location to the emergency contacts. There are also apps that can be downloaded on your phone that work in a similar manner.
When possible use the buddy system. As violence against police is on the rise, many police departments are considering or have already implemented a buddy system for law enforcement. It’s believed that at least one of them would be able to call for backup (help) if there is trouble. Think about it, the police are trained in self-defense techniques, carry a gun, mace, taser, and baton and they still need to implement the buddy system for safety. If a well armed and trained organization uses this simple system then women should definitely be using it.
Appearance
The photo above is of two Ethiopian women from the Mursi tribe with lip plates. This disfigurement of their lips, I discovered in a documentary, was first implemented to ward off slave traders. Girls have their lip cut, usually around puberty but before the piercing, the bottom front teeth are removed. This act of protecting themselves became a tradition and is now seen as a sign of beauty. This is not an act forced upon them, it is a choice that each girl makes for herself. It is believed that there are three tribes that still wear lip plates but it’s becoming more common for girls to opt out of this tradition. This is an extreme example of changing your appearance and I do NOT recommend anyone try this. It’s just an illustration that appearance can change the dynamic of a situation.
Another method that women have used over the ages to detour unwanted attention from males is to dress like a male. Historically women would crossdress to join the military, get a job such as a reporter, and increase safety when traveling alone.
Traditional women’s clothing covered from neck to ankle and included several layers. This fashion could slow attackers down and possibly buy women several seconds to fight back or allow time for a good Samaritan to come to the aid of someone calling for help. Dressing modestly and wearing layers is a tradition still practiced today.
Decisiveness
Violent acts are being witnessed and experienced at an increasing rate. Have you thought about how you would respond to someone harming you or a stranger? If you never put thought into it then chances are you will freeze giving all the control to the assailant. The first several seconds are the most vital during an attack. Make sure you are not wasting those precious seconds deciding how you feel about harming a bad guy. Mental toughness comes from first preparing your mind. Would you be willing to jab eyes, rupture an eardrum with an ear slap, punch a throat, or aim a kick to the groin? It’s not uncommon for some hesitation if you have never considered it before. Would you act the same for getting robbed versus being herded to a dark alley? Setting boundaries play an important role on whether a person feels comfortable fighting back. Then decide how you will enforce those boundaries (unarmed or armed).
This YouTube video was made by Gracie University.
Exercise
The thought of violence causes many people to seize up with fear. Confidence is the second component to mental toughness. How would you like to have more confidence in the face of fear? Who wouldn’t?! Research shows that regularly exercising boosts your brainpower, strength, endurance, and confidence. It has also been proven to help moderate stress and tap into creativity (think situational awareness). Any of these items could improve your chances in a self-defense scenario but constant exercising can increase all of these attributes. There are lots of enjoyable methods of exercising so find something you enjoy and develop a sustainable routine. Practicing self-defense techniques can also help you face fear by learning tools that teach you to deal with an attacker. Search your area for self-defense classes and support them if you can by attending. YouTube has a variety of self-defense exercise routines and training videos. Below are links to some of them:
Self Defense Exercise Routine Videos
Wrist Release (Scroll to the bottom, Under Women Empowered Videos, Lesson 1)
Bear Hug Break-Away
Defense against a Choke from Behind
HANDS OFF! Self Defense for Women – Major W.E. Fairbairn 1942 – PDF
Armed Self Defense
Safety defense weapons for women were not as commonplace as they are today. Throughout history, small knives were the weapon that women used to defend themselves. Knives are common in households and easy to hide. Shakespeare referred to them as bare bodkin. Hairpins (hair knives) were popular in ancient Japan and Mexico. In Argentina, when the economy collapsed, crime was so rampant that women would carry kitchen knives in their purses.
Nowadays, we have more self-defense weapons to choose from. There are tasers, mace, tactical pens, collapsible batons, Kubaton keychains, whistles, and handguns. Safely practice with several of these methods and see if there is an option that feels right to you. Before committing to conceal carry a weapon, check with your local laws to find out if its legal. Training with your weapon and learning how to correctly carry the weapon should be your top priority. It would also be smart to study up on The Five Principles of Self Defense Laws.
Armed Defense YouTube links:
Gun Draw from Purse
How to Use Pepper Spray
Self-Defense With Tactical Pens
Knowing self-defense techniques will not eliminate the threat of violence.
They can, however, strengthen mental toughness and empower women to fight for their rights.
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After you submit your email below, check your inbox for your first checklist! SubmitOn Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton gave a speech denouncing the alt-right, a movement mostly composed of young white nationalists from online. As Clinton introduced the concept to her audience, a cry rang out from somewhere in the crowd:
“Pepe!”
Christ, here we go with the memes again.
Pepe the Frog started as a generic meme character who could stand in for the poster and express almost any emotion, although rage and smug superiority were his go-to expressions. Now he’s an alt-right icon beloved of Trump supporters—Trump himself is often depicted as a bright green Pepe.
The guy who shouted “Pepe” at the Clinton event is apparently an anon from 4chan‘s /b/ board, and he was liveblogging from the balcony as fellow anons cheered him on.
Overall, a pretty harmless prank. But, as Deadspin points out, it’s totally appropriate that the memers were there to cry out as Clinton railed against their chosen political philosophy, which is part genuine racism and part trollish shit-stirring. While Clinton didn’t mention memes or Pepe in particular, it’s not surprising that anons would take her speech as a challenge.
The trollish right-wing subset of meme kids thrives when there’s a “boss” to defeat—see e.g. Gamergate‘s war on Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Gawker Media—and Clinton is their current big bad. Pranking her rally is a rare Pepe indeed.
Update 1:38pm CT: Breitbart News, the alt-right website that gave us current Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon and continues to spin the news however it can for the GOP presidential nominee, interviewed a man who claims to be the one to shout “Pepe!” during Hillary’s speech. And Sean Lewandowski—no apparent relation to ousted former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski—did indeed stream parts of the rally on Periscope.
“I had been planning on attending since I first read she was coming to Reno, originally I had no intention of doing anything other than documenting the event on Periscope… then she started attacking a true patriot, and someone I really look up to, Alex Jones,” Lewandowski told Breitbart.
“As for the ‘Pepe’ shout,” he explained, “[s]he gave me the opening by saying ‘alt right’ with a bit of a pause, so I pounced. It was just to kind of throw off her false narrative and a shout out to the fellow patriots on ‘Frog Twitter’ for all their hard work in trying to get Donald Trump into the White House. About [three] seconds after I screamed ‘Pepe,’ I was escorted out by Secret Service.”
Just 73 days to go until the election.A planned, but as-of-yet not introduced bill is being hyped by Israel’s far-right coalition, which would give the Interior Ministry broad power to revoke the residency of Arabs deemed to be a threat to “state sovereignty.” Incredibly, the bill will also allow the ministry to expel their relatives, even if they haven’t done anything.
Though it’s being couched as an “anti-terror” measure, the bill also covers people who the government perceives as “inciting violence” through speech or activism, as well as “rioters” and rock-throwers. And obviously all of their families.
Interior Minister Gilad Erdan embraced the idea to give him this huge new power, which Jerusalem’s mayor couched as granting the Israeli government to nullify citizenship or residency of “bad people.” Naturally, the bill only applies to Arabs, and seems to be focused squarely on occupied East Jerusalem.
With public protests a virtually constant thing in East Jerusalem’s remaining Arab neighborhoods, and every protest labeled a “riot,” the bill would give the Interior Ministry the ability to effectively ethnically cleanse those neighborhoods in fairly short order, as virtually everyone has at least one relative involved in one protest or other.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzJust two days ago, point guard Ricky Rubio was working out on the floor of the TD Garden in Boston, hoisting shots and trying to bring himself up to something close to game speed. He didn’t look like a guy who was ready for game action, and speaking before the game, Timberwolves coach Rick Adelman discussed how his team has been able to hang in the Western Conference standings despite not having their ace point man.
Despite that, according to a report from ESPN 1500 in Minnesota, Rubio might be closer to a return than most expect—he could even be pushing to play tonight when the Timberwolves face the Cavaliers at Target Center in Minneapolis.
Such a quick return would be a surprisingly fast recovery for Rubio, who tore his ACL and LCL in March, had surgery on March 21 and was expected to need at least nine months to recover. He returned to Timberwolves practice last weekend, and the team wanted to see how his body responded to that. There was no significant pain but the Wolves are being cautious, even though Rubio may insist that he is ready to take the court again.
Minnesota is 8-9 on the year, and is also anticipating the return of small forward Andrei Kirilenko from back spasms that have sidelined him for the past week.
If Rubio does not play on Friday, he could still make his season debut soon. The Wolves have four days off before their next game, at home on Wednesday against the Nuggets.An outbreak of Ebola that has claimed more than 8,400 lives in West Africa appears to be slowing down, though the battle to contain the disease is not over, the UN special envoy on the virus has said.
"The change in behaviour that we've been hoping for, working for, anticipating, is now happening everywhere," Dr David Nabarro told Reuters news agency in an interview on Thursday.
"The facilities to treat people are available everywhere," he said. "Safe burial teams are providing safe and dignified burial services everywhere and the result is that we're seeing the beginnings of the outbreak slowing down."
The worst epidemic of the virus on record has infected about 21,200 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea since it was detected in March, according to the World Health Organisation.
The government of Liberia said earlier on Thursday that it could be free of the virus by the end of next month after success in curbing transmission.
It said the country had only 10 confirmed Ebola cases as of January 12.
"It's an incredible drop," Nabarro said, adding that he believed the Liberian figures were "absolutely correct."
Nabarro described "a remarkable collective change in patterns of behaviour" and said Liberia had "come to terms with the reality that the outbreak of Ebola is being driven by the way in which people behave."
More than 3,500 of the 8,400 dead were from Liberia.
The hemorrhagic fever is spread through contact with bodily fluids of infected people or the highly contagious body of someone who has died of the virus. Nabarro said burial practices that involved people touching and cleaning bodies of Ebola victims had helped fuel the outbreak.
"Death-related practices in the region had been responsible for a quite dramatic spread of the virus," said Nabarro. He said that as people realised the dangers they adopted safer behaviour that led to a drop in infections.
The three hardest-hit countries now have the capacity to quickly set up mobile centres to handle localised outbreaks.
"Those who are involved in the response have worked out that they can organise rapid mobile responses in case there's a flare up anywhere, so they can set up small temporary treatment facilities wherever they are needed," Nabarro said.
He said that the support of the US, British and French military, which built treatment centres in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, had also played a crucial role in containment efforts.AMERICA appears to be a much less inviting prospect to migrants than it once was. This may please some lawmakers, who might point to the effectiveness of tough state-level laws and at improved border security. But although $12 billion will be set aside to guard the frontier in the next fiscal year, fewer people are actually being caught trying to cross it. In 2007, 20% fewer arrests were made by the Border Patrol than in 2006. In the six months to March this year, arrests are down by 17% on a year-to-year basis. Using this imperfect measure, migration has slowed dramatically. Big fences and hostility do play a part, but the economy is a big factor. In boom times, more arrests are made at the border as more people cross looking for work.
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A teenage lesbian couple in Australia are changing schools after they were barred from attending a ball together.
Hannah Williams, 16, wanted to take her girlfriend Savannah Supski, also 16, to the event at Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar in Melbourne but the Year 11 student was told she could only attend the ball with a boy.
Hannah told the Sydney Morning Herald that she was “very upset” by the decision.
She added: ”I put a lot of effort into trying to fix things. I had meetings with principals; looked through the Equal Opportunity Act; all my friends put posters up around the school and the teachers ripped them down. There was an easy solution; they just needed to let me go with my girlfriend.”
Her father Peter made a complaint to the Equal Opportunities Commission and met with school officials but decided not to take the case further because Hannah was becoming stressed.
The girls have now decided to move to another school where same-sex couples can attend formal events.
The principal of Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar, Heather Schnagl, said the aim of the ball was to encourage girls to socialise with boys and said that all the girls would bring female partners if one was allowed to.
She added that age was also an issue as Savannah was 15 and in Year 10 at the time of the event. However, Hannah says her friends attended the event with younger boys.Washington just got a golden opportunity to end its decade-long excursion into central Asia and deplete the power of its Pacific rival/banker, all in one fell swoop. The Chinese are seeking bases in the tribal regions of Pakistan, precisely where the U.S. fights its drone war.
The plugged-in Asia Times Online reports that China wants to set up military hubs in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province. China's reasoning will sound familiar to American ears: That's where |
6 Mike Evans-Iowa v. #2 Chris Perry-Oklahoma State
Similar to the last match, I feel there’s a pretty simple conclusion to be reached: Chris Perry is just better than Mike Evans. I have been beyond impressed with Perry’s improvement this year. He is more offensive, taking more shots and is even more dominant on top than before. Watching him dominate Logan Storley in their dual was an eye opening moment for me. Then he follows it up with a dominant win over Matt Brown at the Scuffle. All the momentum and skill is on the side of Chris Perry.
Mike Evans is very much the same guy he’s always been. He can ride you if you are not an elite guy, but if you’re upper echelon, you get away. He will struggle to take you down as his attacks often can lack good set ups. Evans wants to stand and push and wear you out and maybe force you into a bad shot. Perry is perhaps the most cerebral and tactical wrestler in all of D1 wrestling right now. Barring some sort of Carver Hawkeye magical moment, I don’t see this resembling a close match. Perry won’t blow him out score-wise but he is the better guy in all 3 positions. It will take a Herculean effort from Evans to get this win.
Chris Perry WBD Mike Evans
Iowa-12
Oklahoma State-10
184
#4 Ethen Lofthouse-Iowa v. #17 Nolan Boyd-Oklahoma State
The room was rife with 184 options for the Cowboys: Blue Chipper Jordan Rogers and Kyle Crutchmer. However, Nolan Boyd the Oklahoma native and somewhat unheralded recruit has come from obscurity to take the starting job for the Cowboys. He brings a combination of grit, size and strength that I think suits the Cowboys well for now and the future.
He’ll have a tough task with Ethen Lofthouse, who is in his senior season and is seeking his third All American finish. Lofthouse has been very solid this year, but hasn’t faced much elite competition. He fell to Ruth and beat Ophir Bernstein and Nikko Reyes before falling close to Jimmy Sheptock.
Boyd has notched some good wins himself beating Ben Stroh, Matt McCutcheon, Rogers, Wes Phipps and Blake Stauffer. He did lose a head scratcher to Kasper, however. I think this is a fairly close match, but don’t see Boyd able to string together enough consistent offense to get the win. I like Ethen by a point or 2 here.
Ethen Lofthouse WBD Nolan Boyd
Iowa-15
Oklahoma State-10
197
#16 Nathan Burak-Iowa v. #12 Blake Rosholt-Oklahoma State
Here’s another tight one. The Hawkeyes pulled Buraks Redshirt last week in dual action where he fell to Braden Atwood and beat Nick McDiarmid. Neither guy is coming into this match with much momentum on their side.
Rosholt is who he is at this point. He did fine at the Scuffle, losing only to Cox and Schiller and beating Mattiace. However, he hasn’t shown signs of building much off of his All American finish last year when we saw him beat Kyven Gadson and Christian Boley. Some of Blake’s struggles are a result of a tough schedule. Yes he has 6 losses, but they're to Scott Schiller (twice), J’den Cox (twice), Travis Rutt and Shane Woods. Yeah the Woods loss stands out, but that’s really his only bad loss (and Woods is solid) in a season where he’s beaten a very tough Nick Bonaccorsi, Jace Bennett and Frank Mattiace.
Burak has fallen to Boley (who Rosholt has beaten) and the aforementioned Atwood this year. Combine that with the fact that Rosholt was a 3-2 winner a year ago, he’s nothing if not the favorite coming into this match. Rosholt has beaten better guys historically and this year, and their losses are probably comparable.
If you look at who the guys have wrestled, and don’t get bogged down in records(which yield very little information), the information aligns clearly with Rosholt being a narrow winner here.
It’s going to be close, but give me Blake.
Blake Rosholt WBD Nathan Burak
Iowa-15
Oklahoma State-13
285
#3 Bobby Telford-Iowa v. #15 Austin Marsden-Oklahoma State
So it comes down to the big boys. I came into this season really high on Austin Marsden. He was in a great training situation, and looked great this Spring wrestling freestyle. I thought he had the tools to jump levels and be a top 6-10 guy this year. So far, I was off. He’s more/less the same guy. He beats who he should beat: Stolfi, Tasser, etc. However, he loses to guys I once thought he would beat: Ross Larson, Jimmy Lawson, Jeremy Johnson. Those losses show me he’s not there yet. He can keep it close with anyone as his 4 losses are by a combined 5 points. He hasn’t shown the offense I thought we’d see from him coming into this year. He had a nice double he liked to shoot, but this year it’s been a rare sight.
Enter Bobby Telford. He’s having a fine season, still very much the same guy: great on top, hard to score on, good at finishing shots when he takes them. Telford nearly had the Midlands title in his grasp when Adam Coon found a way to get out of a situation that you rarely see guys get out of.
The Coon loss (which Adam seems to be a fan of distributing) is the only loss on the year for Telford who has beaten the very tough JT Felix, Mike McClure and Jimmy Lawson this year (albeit narrowly). I don’t see much hope for Marsden here. I don’t know how he scores on Bobby apart from a possible escape. I think Telford takes this one by a point or 2 and seals the dual for the Hawkeyes.
Bobby Telford WBD Austin Marsden
Iowa-18
Oklahoma State-13
Watch this Marsden match and tell me I was crazy for thinking he'd have a big year!
Watch more videos on Flowrestling
So there you have it, the Hawkeyes leave the Oklahoma State dual with a win. The Cowboys have been particularly pesky historically for the Hawkeyes, even at Carver Hawkeye. All it takes is the Cowboys winning one match I have them losing (looking especially to Collica and Dieringer) and the dual is theirs.
Here’s my rank for the matches I’m most sure about the outcome(win or loss) to the least.
Josh Kindig over Brody Grothus
Thomas Gilman over Eddie Klimara
Bobby Telford over Austin Marsden
Tyler Caldwell over Nick Moore
Ethen Lofthouse over Nolan Boyd
Chris Perry over Mike Evans
Tony Ramos over Jon Morrison
Josh Dziewa over Anthony Collica
Derek St. John over Alex Dieringer
Blake Rosholt over Nathan Burak
Be sure to tune in LIVE on the Big 10 Digital Network!Real Madrid Real have position covered if Pepe leaves
Pepe is the best foreign centre-back in Real Madrid's history
Pepe has an heir, and the first in the line of succession to the throne of the Portuguese centre-back at Real Madrid is Jesus Vallejo.
The decision has already been made; If Pepe leaves, Vallejo arrives.
A smooth transition without noise or uncertainty, nor the economic demands of the summer transfer market.
Real wanted to find a player who wouldn't threaten Raphael Varane's position as a starter alongside Sergio Ramos, something that the Frenchman has been fighting for, for six seasons.
Vallejo, who will turn 20 on January 5, has made a spectacular leap into European football's consciousness after a stunning season at Eintracht Frankfurt, where he was loaned this season.
On June 30, Zinedine Zidane will have him at his disposal if Pepe's renewal doesn't come to fruition.
Indeed, it's precisely because of the youngster's form that the Portuguese's contract discussions have stalled, but Madrid are treating the matter with calmness because they have the position covered in any event.
If their 33-year-old centre-back goes, they acquire one of the most promising defenders in European football at no cost and 14 years younger than Pepe.
Triumphant season
Madrid signed Vallejo from Zaragoza in the summer of 2015 for six million euros and left him there last season.
This year the decision was to send him to the Bundesliga, the same process that was followed with Dani Carvajal, and the result has been spectacular.
Real themselves have been amazed at the player's level of performance - to the point that they see him ready to take the leap and become part of the first team.
Vallejo is an undisputed starter at Eintracht, where he has played the last 14 league games.
"I have not seen such a player either as a footballer or as a coach. This guy is a scandal," said team coach Niko Kovac said at the end of October.
Recently, the German club got in touch with Madrid to try to prolong the transfer but Los Blancos have another plan.
Presently, the situation of Pepe is still unknown, although the reality is that the Portuguese has a foot and a half outside the club.
As reported on Sunday by MARCA, Pepe has two astronomical offers from Chinese teams that will take him away from Madrid.
That, coupled with the stalled negotiations, make the player more out of the club than in it.Did you know that back in Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World Florida, there is a little hidden secret? While going to Walt Disney World may have been a wish come true, most of us have more than one wish, and Disney knows that. Sooo what better way to make a wish, then to make it in Jiminy Crickets Wish Book. Yes there is such a thing!
If you head on over to Pinocchio Village Haus and go on in. You will find the Jiminy Cricket room to the left. Look for the glowing blue light, and there tucked in a corner you will see the Blue Fairy, waiting to grant wishes. Below her is the Book of Wishes. This is where you write your wish. Heads up though, there isn’t a pen or pencil there, so be sure to bring your own.
We took a few videos of how this works:
This is how to find the Wish Book:
This is TECHNICALLY how it is supposed to work:
Have you written a wish in the Wish Book? If not, did you know about the Wish Book?
Be Sure to Check out the Signing in at Hollywood Studios Writers Stop for a little more secret magic4-Year-Old Re-Elected 'Mayor' Of Minnesota Town
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jeff Baenen/AP Jeff Baenen/AP
His second job will be at a pre-school.
As a student.
Four-year-old Bobby Tufts was re-elected "mayor" over the weekend in the tiny northern Minnesota community of Dorset. We say "mayor" because Dorset doesn't really have a government. It doesn't even have many people — "22 to 28, depending on whether the minister and his family are in town," according to CBS Minnesota.
But Dorset does bill itself as the "restaurant capital of the world" and does have an annual "Taste of Dorset" festival, which was held over the weekend. At that festival, folks can "vote" for mayor as many times as they like, for $1 per ballot.
For the second year in a row, Bobby won. Now, according to his mom, the mayor's agenda includes "raising money for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Red River Valley in Fargo, N.D., and a new welcome sign for Dorset."
Back in May, Mayor Tufts was profiled by CBS Minnesota.Over the next several decades we (humans) will have to change our understanding of what is feasible and what we need to be doing to have a future. The future does not include growth of the GDP or profits. Capitalism as it has been practiced in the 20 th century and now hanging on in the early 21 st century is dead. Or rather, at this juncture in history, it is moribund. It served its purpose to raise mankind's understanding of what is possible in this world. It was a necessary step in the evolution of knowledge but its time has come and gone.
Short of a miracle (let's pray for it!) energy flows are about to decline in a serious way. And as a result growth is an utterly fatuous notion. Unfortunately, the majority of the population, and especially the economists and politicians, don't get it. The economists still firmly believe that if energy costs (oil, coal, etc.) rise as a result of constraints on production then we will simply substitute other sources (wind, solar PV, etc.) and keep going as we have been for the last two hundred years. This is both stupid and foolish. It is a complete failure of intelligence and wisdom.
Real Profits
As growth depends on the continual increase in energy flows, more energy available to do useful work, so profits depend on more net energy available per unit of time, the energy that is left over after accounting for the energy needed to acquire energy.
We need to look more closely at the uses of energy in the economy. My energy mentor, Charlie Hall et al, produced a simple but complete model of energy flows in the world economy that does a good job of summarizing the situation [1, 2]. It starts with an investment of energy to obtain more energy. This is the energy used to build and operate energy extraction, capture, conversion, and distribution infrastructure. When all is well, the amount of usable energy returned from this investment is many times larger than the energy invested. Or, there is a net energy profit. That profit is then what is available to the rest of the economy to drive the activities of several major sectors. The first major use of energy profit is to maintain the existing asset base. Assets tend to wear out with use and time. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the structures of material goods that we use. So a substantial fraction of the energy flow is directed at work processes that repair or replace these assets. Many kinds of intangible assets, e.g. intellectual properties, also need on-going maintenance work.
The maintenance of assets is the minimal level of work and requisite energy flow in the economy. So these two uses of energy profit, reinvestment in energy capture to keep the energy flowing, and maintenance of the rest of the asset base or capital, constitute the minimum economic activities needed to maintain a steady-state condition in which energy flows at a constant rate and assets are maintained at a constant level.
Historically, humans have discovered and exploited methods of energy capture that have far exceeded the minimum profit needed to just maintain the social economy. Agriculture, exploitation of wind and hydro power, and later fossil fuels, have all allowed humans to generate huge energy profits from nominal investments. Under these circumstances there has always been considerably more available energy for human purposes than could actually be used. This led to the development of two additional uses of energy profits. The first is growth of the economy itself. This first, and foremost, means growth of the population (human bodies are a material asset in the strict sense of the term). But it also means growth and development of all other kinds of assets, both those needed to directly support the culture and those that extend the culture (new kinds of products, services, and arts). The measure of an economy's size is the population plus the asset base, measured in embodied energy units. Once money was invented as a convenient way to represent work, both potential future and past accomplished, assets, at least, could be monetized and the size of the monetary pool could be used to measure the economy size, or at least be a reasonable surrogate measure.
One way of slicing the excess energy available (above that needed for just maintenance) is between necessary and discretionary asset production. Necessary assets are those deemed needed to maintain a given quality of culture. For example building more homes of comparable size to meet the needs of an increasing population would be in this category. Discretionary energy expenditures would include things like building much larger houses than strictly needed to maintain the cultural milieu. Discretionary spending of energy might satisfy egos and desires, but is not, strictly speaking, needed to maintain a given level of affluence. What it is needed for is the evolution of culture. And arguably, a major part of the human condition is involved in the co-evolution of the species and the culture. So from that standpoint it is pointless to denigrate what might now seem to us as excesses of the past. In a real sense these were necessary to promote the evolution of knowledge and understanding. But, all stories of expansion and development do come to an end eventually.
The Energy Budget
Energy flows through the economy (all sectors) have to be budgeted in order to assure the proper balance of energy inputs to the various subsystems. Figure 1 shows this budget roughly. Of especial importance is the feedback of usable energy to the energy capture and conversion capital for maintenance (top white arrow). This is what keeps the usable energy flow into the whole economy up to demand.
Figure 1. The energy budget for the economy consists of various flows of usable energy into investments in maintenance and growth. Not shown is the waste heat output from each energy conversion process. After Hall, et al, the "Cheese slicer" model in reference [1].
The figure shows energy feedback to maintain the current asset base and the flow of energy directed toward work processes involved with producing new assets, labeled 'growth'. This process takes new material resources from the Ecos and converts them into human usable form. Both non-energy related and energy capture assets (capital) are created and fed into the two subsystems. This represents adding assets to the economy at a higher than ordinary maintenance rate; in other words, growth.
Growth applies to all asset classes and human biomass (population and girth) and, importantly, to the energy capture and conversion capital assets. The latter need to grow in order to increase the usable energy flows into the economy assuming that there is more raw energy than is currently being converted available. The amount of growth of all other non-energy assets is now greatly determined by open markets just as the neoclassical economists claim. There is no value judgments placed on what happens in terms of choices about what gets produced. The market is value-free or amoral in this regard. Whatever the buyers want will get produced and sold. Energy will be directed in the appropriate directions to satisfy these desires without anyone actually controlling the process.
But suppose the supply of raw (gross) energy is not only fixed, but actually starting to decline. Instead of excess raw energy that could be exploited by simply putting more energy capture/conversion capital into play, suppose that the raw energy arrow started to contract in size. In that case it would not be profitable (in terms of usable energy return on the investments in energy capture/conversion) to grow that capital equipment. This is exactly the case for fossil fuels today. We have passed the peak of gross energy production (oil) and are now starting down the decline side of Hubbert's peak. The input energy arrow is starting to shrink. As it does, the usable energy produced and available to the economy for budgeting is getting smaller as well. Note that all of the investments made in the energy capture/conversion process are now starting to provide a smaller return per unit. This is exactly what is meant by a declining energy return on energy invested (EROEI (ERoEI, EROI, and EROeI are all the same concept but different authors insist on slightly different versions of the acronym to maintain their personal sense of internal consistency!)). As the marginal returns start to diminish (the logistic goes through its third inflection point), the investments in both growth of capital and maintenance will start to diminish. After all, profits are starting to decline so who, under our current capitalistic system, would invest in lower profit margins? Of course this can exacerbate the situation with respect to production of usable energy.
Rational Realignment of the Energy Budget, Post-Peak Oil
Figure 2 shows the results of a rational response to a decline in gross and net useable energy flows. Investments in energy capture/conversion capital should diminish as the EROEI declines past a point where an acceptable profit is being made. But at the same time the energy put into growth should be diminished (growth curtailed) so that an adequate flow to maintain current assets can be continued.
Figure 2. The energy budget starts to diminish as the raw energy supply shrinks or declines. Investments in the energy capture/conversion capital shrinks in response to poor EROEI. As well the energy flow to growth is diminished as overall useable energy flow is restricted. This model assumes that a rational choice will be made to continue servicing maintenance to current assets, so the reduced energy flow results in a lower growth rate.
Unfortunately, who, besides economists, said the economy and the markets are rational? Or, more to the point, the individual participants in the market decisions are not rational. Nor do they anticipate changes that will have a time lag between the restriction in energy flows and the 'pain' they will eventually experience. The market mechanism for conveying information is price denominated in dollars (or money value). This is problematic for at least two reasons. First monetary values have been effectively decoupled from the underlying real physical value (in work units - energy) by many distortions, mostly due to the invention of debt (in the form of borrowing by speculation on future earnings) and bizarre financial instruments that pose as money. Second the time lag for effective changes in monetary measures of real economic importance are much longer than the actual time scales for changes in energy flows. Thus, at no particular time is there a direct and causal relation between the money supply and the energy supply. But in our modern capitalistic marketplace, decisions are based on monetary valuations. This leads to all kinds of anomalies, like market bubbles that further distort whatever weak relation still exists.
We have been witnessing the results of these distortions in the current financial meltdown. There has been a massive correction with respect to bringing the relation between money and energy back into focus. But the decision makers continue to fail to recognize the actual cause of the problems. They are still believing that the key to economic success (defined as growth of the gross domestic product - GDP - year over year) is to continue to channel energy flow to the growth process. This is based on the fact that our economy is seen now as a consumer-oriented one. It is healthy if we are producing more goods and services and aggregating the monetary transactions (sales) to show that our GDP is growing.
There are many motivations for believing this way. One is that that is the way it worked in the past. When the raw energy was expanding (we were on the up side of Hubbert's curve) this expansionary logic actually worked fine, except, of course, that we were damaging the environment in doing so. Another is a more subtle interaction between economics and politics. There is a huge political pressure to provide the workers with jobs and cheap goods so that they are "happy". In the democratic nations politicians get and hold their jobs by promising the people that they will do everything in their powers to assure the continuance of business as usual (BAU).
And so, in our less than rational market system, we continue to direct energy flows into the growth production function even though it has meant diminishing our investments into new energy capital (e.g. into renewable energy sources because they have much lower EROEI, at least by historical precedents). Or at least we have not rerouted a significant energy investment that way. Instead we continue to try to expand the fossil fuel raw energy inputs, even as the evidence mounts that this is an impossible route to take. We also continue to budget energy flows to the growth processes in the vain hopes that money will prove to be more powerful than energy. This is, of course, the epitome of foolishness, the antithesis of wisdom.
The proper response to the reality of diminishing energy flows from fossil fuels would be to greatly reduce the flow budgeted to growth and redirect it toward investment in alternative energy capture/conversion capital. It would also be rational to start lowering our energy investment in maintaining large parts of the asset base that are non-productive or discretionary. For example, what would be wise is to start converting much of the standing housing stock into multi-family living quarters instead of trying to revive the new house building industry. The maintenance energy feedback into the standing stock would be to make that stock more efficient in using energy. We need to cut the wasteful parts of the asset base like luxuries and unnecessary entertainments. As per my previous post (on Question Everything), I feel strongly that some of that energy has to be dedicated to preserving the valuable artistic treasures of the past as well as support current humanities. No easy decisions there. But if we don't do something along those lines, we have lost our humanity.
That brings us, finally, to the crux of the matter, the decision processes needed to respond rationally to the realities of energy contraction. Capitalism is now based on a single pursuit, profit in monetary measures. And that profit applies equally to the growth processes as it does to the energy capital. Yet under the constraints of the real world, the one dictated by the laws of physics, not only is growth no longer rational, neither is the use of profit potential as a guideline of where to put investments. In other words, the market as the main mechanism for decisions regarding energy budgets is now counterproductive. Indeed profits not involved with either the capture of new usable energy or the increase in efficiency for our machines that use that energy have to go the way of the Dodo bird!
Capitalism driven by the profit motive worked pretty well in a growing energy flow economy. We should not be anxious to demonize it outright just because it also led to problems with cost externalities that damaged the Ecos. After all, we humans were actually starting to become aware of that problem and were starting to seek ways to amend it. The problem with capitalism and profit motive today is quite different however. It only works when energy supplies are growing and technologies are making strides to improve overall efficiencies. Today we now know that the former condition is no longer true. Energy supplies are starting to contract and there is nothing on the horizon in the way of alternative energy sources that can come close to the power production from fossil fuels. We may be able to eek out a stable (steady-state) flow of some exosomatic energies from these sources to provide future society with a basis for living a comfortable life, but they will never be able to support BAU. Not even close.
As far as new technologies improving efficiencies, there will, of course be some of that developing, especially if we direct some energy investment toward that end. But reality must intercede again to point out that efficiency gains in real machines suffers from the same Law of Diminishing Returns as in all other physical systems. Efficiencies have upper bounds, both theoretical and practical for all machine types. It is hard for techno-cornucopians to accept but the fact is that our engineering work for the last hundred years has helped us achieve close to the practical limits for many of our modern machine types already. In other words, we can't look for huge gains in efficiencies in our prime movers (though there might be big gains to be made in our heat trap systems, e.g. buildings, through improved insulation and other such measures). We can and will have to stop wasting energy resources on trivial, non-productive or previously discretionary uses. And there may be substantial savings to be realized there (but note that stopping waste is not the same as improving efficiency since, by definition, wasting a resource is something you don’t have to do and can just stop without any technological advances).
An Uncomfortable Conclusion
The conclusion is not comfortable but is imperative. Capitalism, as it has been practiced in a market and democratic governance system, is going to die. It will die in one of two ways. Either people will start to exercise some rationality and some wisdom and realize that as the energy supplies diminish the capacity to do useful work also diminishes. They will then seek to reorganize our governance structures/institutions in such a way as to rationally respond to the reality. Somehow I have a hard time seeing this kind of response. From outright denial, to outright insistence on exceptionalism and blind faith in market mechanisms, I suspect that most people will be blind-sided by reality.
This leads to the alternate more likely response. People will demand, and politicians will give them, continued support for direction of the energy budget into growth and discretionary asset production as long as they possibly can. For all practical purposes this is exactly what we already see. Think about the state of critical infrastructure in the US. Some of it is falling apart from neglect. Some of it is decaying due to inattention and restriction of energy flows into work to manage it properly. What are the outward signs of this neglect? Aversion to taxes and regulations is an obvious example. The attitudes of libertarians (regardless of political party) is a prime example of psychological resistance to grasping the true nature of what is happening to human economies. Additional examples of the political aversion can be seen in Obama's reliance for economic advice from the very architects of the destruction of financial regulations designed to prevent some of the kinds of bubbles that have arisen in the banking and stock market sectors. I must be frank. I am not hopeful for rationality and wisdom to prevail in the near future.
We (Homo sapiens) may be lucky enough that after the SHTF due to mismanagement of the economic energy budget, there may be a spark of rationality and wisdom available and recognized that we can turn to in our despair. Unfortunately even this possibility is highly problematic. More likely mankind will be subjected to a mean and uncaring dictatorial hand, a person or persons not eusapient, but harsh and vindictive. After all, the stock from which to choose potential candidates for leadership is composed largely of minimally sapient beings to begin with. Evolution help us.
For readers interested in an alternative view to the prevailing beliefs you may want to read my series on Sapient Governance here.
Many thanks to Charlie Hall and his associates for so many good insights into the nature of our predicament. I treasure the time I spent with him at SUNY-ESF.
[1] Hall, Powers, & Schoenberg (2008). "Peak Oil, EROI, Investments and the Economy in an Uncertain Future", in Biofuels, Solar and Wind as Renewable Energy Systems, David Pimentel (ed). Springer, New York.
[2] Hall, Balogh, and Murphy (2009). "What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have?", Energies, 2, 25-47; doi:10.3390/en20100025The DIDGET blood glucose meter connects to Nintendo DS and DS Lite gaming systems, awarding points for consistently testing blood sugar levels and meeting blood-glucose targets. Kids can use the points to unlock different levels in video games online and through their gaming systems.
The battle to control type-1 diabetes in children could get a little easier -- as long as the kids keep playing with their Nintendos. Bayer Diabetes Care unveiled a new gadget Monday that aims to help kids manage their disease by tapping into their love for video games.
Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile onset diabetes, is different from the type commonly associated with obesity -- that's Type 2. Type 1 is an autoimmune disorder for which there is no cure yet, and it usually arises in children. About one in every 400 Americans age 20 or younger have the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Blood-glucose testing is the most important means of managing diabetes, but as endocrinologist Larry Deeb notes, kids don't exactly welcome the tests. They might be OK with them if they're part of a game, however.
"Diabetes is certainly an incredible intrusion into a child's life, and it's an intrusion they really don't want, whereas children play games all the time," says Deeb, a pediatric endocrinologist at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and a Bayer consultant.
Didget operates like any other blood-glucose meter, but it comes with an online "world" accessible only to Didget users. Kids can interact with other diabetes patients and play games.
The device sells for $74.99 and is available at various pharmacies. Though Didget hooks up to a Nintendo DS, you don't need one to use it.
In other Type 1 diabetes news, earlier this month, endocrinologists at Massachusetts General Hospital announced a new clinical trial on an artificial pancreas. Unlike other artificial pancreas devices, it adds a monitor for the hormone glucagon, which counteracts insulin -- useful if a patient's blood-sugar level drops too much. In the trial, the system was able to control blood sugar in a small group of diabetic patients even when they ate high-carbohydrate meals. That's an improvement over previous artificial pancreas devices. That study is reported in the April 14 issue of Science Translational Medicine.In order to curb the increasing amount of plastic bags and other products disposed of in civic spaces across Kerala, the Clean Kerala Company will now collect shredded plastic from residents and municipality authorities for road construction. The Clean Kerala Company is an organisation formed under the State Local Self-Help Government and it has been involved in statewide waste management initiatives like converting solid waste to CNG, collecting and recycling e-waste, organising plastic collection drives, etc.
Products made of thermosetting plastic are often some of the most dangerous because they do not decompose and emit toxic fumes when burnt.
It is important to find a sustainable alternative to disposing plastic, which is why the state government has issued orders appointing CKC as the nodal body for collecting shredded/granulated plastic.
Using plastic waste for laying roads reduces road fatigue and improves the quality of roads; they are more resistant to cold weather and rainfall. The entire process of creating the mixture to lay such roads is simple — the aggregate mix is heated at 165 degree Celsius and is transferred to the mixing chamber while bitumen is heated to 160 degrees Celsius. Shredded plastic waste of a particular size is added to the aggregate and is mixed with bitumen. The resulting mixture is used for laying roads.
According to reports, Kabeer. B. Harun, Managing Director of CKC said that the municipalities and residents can give away plastic products that have been passed through a shredding machine to CKC that will buy them for Rs. 15 per kilo.
The state government has also issued orders to every local body, directing them to use plastic in at least 10% of the roads laid in the areas under its jurisdiction. To lay these roads, contractors will have to approach CKC, which will then issue a supply order allowing them to purchase granulated plastic for Rs. 20 per kg.
According to the CKC website, it was formed with “the objective of ensuring hygiene management of the state through the adoption of innovative and scientific methods and proven technology, adhering to the concept of active participation of the public and private sectors.”
Kabeer also told Manorama News that CKC has proposed to set up three recycling parks across Kerala in Kozhikode, Ernakulam and Thiruvananthapuram.
To know more about CKC, visit their website.
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NEW: Click here to get positive news on Whatsapp!Chinese expatriate appointed as tribal leader for his contributions to society
A former teacher from Shanghai who has lived in Nigeria for four decades has been appointed a tribal chief, becoming the first Chinese expatriate to receive such an honour in Africa.
Hu Jieguo, 68, said he first went to the western African country in 1975 to help his father with his textile factory business, the Guangzhou Daily reported. Hu was working as an English teacher at a middle school in Shanghai until then.
Appointed as tribal chief in 2001 for his contributions to local society, Hu is a successful businessman and a celebrity in the country, the report said.
He worked at his father’s factory until 1997, when he set up a restaurant in a prime location in Lagos as he said he was interested in working with people, not machines.
The Chinese food restaurant is popular, especially with government officials. He counts the Nigerian president and the foreign affairs and cultural ministers as customers and has become friends with them.
Hu said Nigerians shared similar values as the Chinese, including an emphasis on family and education.
In 1999, he spent 30 million yuan (US$4.34 million) to fund the building of four public primary schools. Hu said although he earned no profit from his investment, the projects added to his good reputation among local residents and indirectly boosted his business.
There are 60,000 Chinese expatriates living in Nigeria and many of them call Hu when they have problems in their lives.
Hu urged his fellow Chinese expats to “integrate themselves into the local society” if they want their business to grow, rather than regarding Nigeria simply as a place to make short-term profits.
The tribe that has welcomed Hu allows polygamy, but he only has one wife.
Chinese-Black billionaire Michael Lee ChinWhen was the last time you kissed passionately?
If you can't remember you could be in trouble. Never mind the agonies of living a sexless life, a jobless life or even a penniless life -- it's a kiss-less life that could be the hallmark of misery on a number of levels.
Yes, I made up that word -- kiss-less -- because all the while we don't have a word for living without kissing we could be overlooking one of the leading causes and indicators of unhappiness in our time.
Sound far-fetched? A first-world problem? Bear with me...
Everything from our mental, emotional and physical health to our relationship satisfaction can be improved by regular, intimate kissing.
In case you are in any doubt, I am primarily talking about passionate, heartfelt adult kisses, usually on the mouth and often sexual but not necessarily so.
Shakespeare himself, in King Henry VI, said: "I can express no kinder sign of love, than this kind kiss."
But it's not just literature that has long hailed the superlative powers of kissing -- there is some science to back it up too.
Isn't this really all about love? Yes, partly, but as it turns out, kissing could be a better barometer of love (in couples) than almost anything else, including sex. After all, people don't have sex for a number of reasons, but about the only excuse for not kissing is a |
to disclose that offers of free premium channels for three months required consumers to actively cancel the channels after an introductory period to avoid being automatically charged for them, the FTC alleges.
The agency is seeking a court order permanently barring DirecTV from similar activity going forward and a financial judgment that could be used for refunds to affected customers.
DirecTV denies the agency's claims. “The FTC’s decision is flat-out wrong and we will vigorously defend ourselves, for as long as it takes," a company spokesperson told the Post in an e-mailed statement. "We go above and beyond to ensure that every new customer receives all the information they need, multiple times, to make informed and intelligent decisions. For us to do anything less just doesn’t make sense.”
AT&T announced last May it was acquiring DirecTV in a $49 billion deal -- a mega-merger aimed at creating a telecom and television giant that could challenge cable rivals. The merger would boost the chunk of the pay-TV market controlled by AT&T significantly, bolstering its existing U-Verse TV base with 20 million some DirecTV subscribers in the United States. But the deal is still pending before federal regulators, who are also considering other significant consolidation schemes in the television space, like the Comcast Time Warner proposal.
DirecTV has been in trouble with the FTC before -- paying settlements when facing charges that it violated the Do Not Call provisions of telemarketing rules. AT&T has also had run-ins with the enforcement agency. Last year the company agreed to pay $80 million to the FTC for consumer refunds as part of a settlement over bogus charges attached to wireless bills. The agency is also pursuing charges against AT&T related to alleged throttling of data on so-called unlimited plans.
Update: This story has been updated with a response from DirecTV.
Related:
Why Comcast, AT&T and other Internet providers might not sue the FCC after all
The FCC’s net neutrality decision could mean stronger privacy rules for Internet service providers
The FTC is suing AT&T for throttling its unlimited data customersOne big problem remained. A doctor stood to the left of my hospital bed, blinking. Behind him was a drip stand, also blinking, its pulsating red light fastidiously metering out the vile chemotherapy that heroically dribbled through a needle and into my vein.
A painfully aloof cancer was ravaging my left leg: osteogenic sarcoma. This was a rare and sophisticated network of malignancy with a big appetite and a tight schedule. The doctor noisily blinked once more. The odds of saving my left leg were as thin as the bone that once grew there.
The best-case scenario was the installation of an "extended prosthetic knee". Which to the ears of my 12-year-old self sounded pretty mint. Then there was option B. This choice was called "amputation". I'd seen enough pirate films to know that it required me to bite on a stick and do all I could to not scream. But thanks to the colourful array of medical drugs I was on, with names that jostled like dinosaurs, I couldn't even eat soup without vomiting, let alone keep a twig between my teeth. That option seemed flawed.
Finally, option C: the deluxe package. This was just straight-up death, possibly via a peppering of pulmonary tumours. Option C was even more of a metaphysical mouthful than what'd come before. So my pre-pubescent brain filed this eventuality in a compartment labelled: "that sounds weird".
To the right of the hospital bed stood my immediate family: my stunned parents, and my numb siblings. Stoically, they also blinked. Then we all stared hopefully towards the frozen TV that clung to the wall.
I sighed. Then I gave my big problem my undivided attention. I couldn't get Sonic the Hedgehog to defeat Doctor Ivo Robotnik at the end of level five. Star Light Zone was simply too hard. I craved to liberate the animals of South Island from their mechanised incarceration. It's all I had left. Picking back up my black Sega controller, I un-paused Sonic from his mid-air leap and vanished from the oncology ward once more.
Unlike the rest of my life, things were flourishing with Sonic. Yes, my hair kept falling out of my head and into my lunch, which was not cool. And I couldn't walk, constantly dreading the repulsive gauntlet of school life on crutches. I hadn't spoken to a girl in years and puberty was hiding furtively somewhere else in this hospital. But once Sonic was rolling, I was free. This hedgehog's gallant bounds made life palatable the moment the pad hit my palms.
I loved Sonic and his perpetual energy. This gaming obsession warmed my sepia hospital room like a sunrise.
My classmates from a strangely distant high school in Macclesfield had philanthropically donated a Mega Drive. It was a gift to commemorate my contracting of cancer and to aid me in the art of distraction from bone saws, spinal epidurals, the cavalcade of vomit bowls, endless needles and the lingering bruises from failed cannula sites.
The plan worked. I loved my Mega Drive. I loved Sonic and his perpetual energy. This gaming obsession warmed my sepia hospital room like a sunrise. Regardless of what exotic brew of chemotherapy they dosed me with, or whether I lay in my home bed or a medical bed, the only true constant in my life was that hyperactive hedgehog's defiant smile and spinning red sneakers. As I boisterously hammered the controller, all thumbs and mutters, the chemo needle wiggled painfully in my forearm. Like a spur in a horse's flank, each noxious twinge hurled me further into a pixelated world of escape.
Days whispered into weeks. Weeks exhaled into months. The more needles that went into my arms, the more I curled up. Morphine entered my spine, but I simply became one with my blue hero. Hickman lines were inserted into the top of my heart to radically accelerate the chemo hitting my blood. In defence, I imagined myself a ball, bristling with 500 sharpened quills.
It was the nurses that first complained about my mania with speed – an obsession further fuelled by the availability of a wheelchair. I sped round corners, terrorising porters and playing chicken with lane-hogging beds. I just couldn't stomach the inertia that made me visible.
I began to recreate the slopes, loop-the-loops and jumps of South Island. Using nothing more than hospital ramps, a wheelchair and my own belligerent momentum I liberated myself. Thundering down the sterile corridors, my wheels red hot with hope, I craved the blurring colours of flight.
The grey pain of NHS reality urged me deeper into this Technicolor warren. Mechanised wasps stung me with medical lasers. Armoured bugs fussed towards me in motorised cyclic loops before scurrying off. I scratched away my opiated, itchy dawn dreams by pressing restart.
The 'ching!' of shiny rings sponsored an assumption that if I could just gather enough of them then I could win another life. Or at least salvage half a leg.
My doctor's slippery behaviour started to mirror Robotnik's own evasive presence at the end of each level. I'd stumble upon him, quietly laying in wait for me, before unleashing increasingly toxic concoctions into my circulation.
An acrid metallic taste took over my mouth. The methotrexate they plied me with popped me further out of my body as this journey descended ever deeper into a mechanical, bionic hell. I was compelled to push on further towards Scrap Brain Zone and the final reckoning. The quest for the six Chaos Emeralds had become a mortal wager.
Often I had to pause. This pinball world became drenched in nausea. My throat burned with acid as old industrial pipes flared with fire on screen. Lifts patiently ferried me up and down the levels. I bounced across the TV sets of static that raged into the white noise of infinity. My azure avatar chased the sparkle of fleeting power-up invincibility that seemed my only hope to survive.
I drank golden hoops at supersonic speed. The "ching!" of shiny rings sponsored an assumption that if I could just gather enough of them then I could win another life. Or at least salvage half a leg.
Dr Eggman's trail of golden halos teased me on. Podiums appeared, podiums dissolved. I leapt boldly over chasms that would seize an entire life. Hopping between lava beds and feinting past thrusting, syringe-like spikes I charged towards an industrial atrium that hissed with septic funk. Once there I calmly awaited the boffin and his final reckoning. My foot tapped nervously.
Eventually the doctor emerged, bustling manically around the room with all manner of instruments and cronies. I balled up, bounced and thrust every spike in his direction. His attacks stung. My body flashed. A 16bit soundtrack blared mindlessly into the future. Then, eventually, silence. A lot of blinking resumed, both on the screen and off. Nerves shattered, Sonic's smog of pixels began to disperse. His lurid colours faded. The hum of a hospital resumed.
A fox flicked off the television set. Then stared me down benevolently, cast open the curtains before prattling on brightly about my stitches. Stitches? I'd had my operation? The fears of amputation tore through my mind. I struggled up in bed, looking blearily towards my toes in panic.
My mind flashed through a dozen shades of relief. I clearly had two feet.
The needles, drains, pipes, quills and cannulas retracted, and I realised I'd conquered South Island. The Chaos Emeralds were mine.
One left leg wallowed in bandages like a fuzzy white zeppelin far up in the sky. This frozen white of cloth was completely numb. I couldn't feel a thing, but it certainly wasn't any shorter than the right leg. In fact, it looked much longer, but perhaps that was the morphine being sneaky again. Either way, regardless of the shared occupancy of titanium knees and fleshy junctures it was still very much attached to me, as I was attached to it.
Then all the needles, drains, pipes, quills and cannulas retracted and I realised I'd conquered South Island. The Chaos Emeralds were mine. The mechanical terror of Dr Robotnik was vanquished and I didn't have to chew on any sticks in the process.
Perhaps the next game was tracking down my abstracted puberty lost in this hospital over the last 18 months. Where did that fox just scamper off to? Was it a nurse? Or was it Miles Prower, aka Tails, come to fetch me for the follow-up adventure.
According to the consultants, one in six cancer sufferers face their tumours for a second time later in their life. But I barely even cared, as I was all set for Sonic 2.Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
CNET
If a court has told you to keep a low profile and not communicate with someone, it's best to stay off Facebook.
Facebook still counts as communication.
This advice was apparently not taken by Maria Gonzalez and her Facebook activity may now land her in jail.
As the New York Law Journal reports (registration required), Gonzalez was under a protection order. She was not allowed to contact her sister-in-law Maribel Calderon.
However, she reportedly created a Facebook post calling her sister-in-law "stupid" and tagged her.
She also added these words, according to the law journal: "You and your family are sad...You guys have to come stronger than that!! I'm way over you guys but I guess not in ya agenda."
When you're tagged on Facebook, you receive a notification. This is what led to Gonzalez being charged with second-degree criminal contempt. This can lead to a year in jail.
Gonzalez's attorney, seeking to dismiss the charges, reportedly told the court that the protection order didn't specifically exclude communication via Facebook.
Acting Westchester County Supreme Court Justice Susan Capeci reportedly disagreed. She said that the phrase in the protection order that read "by electronic or any other means" was sufficient to cover any Facebook communication.
Gonzalez's court-appointed attorney Kim Frohlinger didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. However, she told the New York Post that she wouldn't appeal the ruling.
It's always worth thinking before posting to Facebook. This is especially true when there are emotional -- and legal -- aspects involved.
Though you might think some part of Facebook communication is private or at least subtle, the truth is that once it's done, it's out there.
And once something is out there it can, as the saying from cop shows (and the law) goes, be used against you.Two former SS officers in their 90s have been charged with facilitating hundreds of murders at the Stutthof concentration camp during the Second World War.
The unnamed suspects, aged 92 and 93, were charged as part of an ongoing investigation by German prosecutors into Nazi-era crimes during the occupation of Poland.
Read more
The state prosecutor’s office in the western city of Dortmund said the guards’ actions during their time at the Stutthof concentration camp, made them “accessories in numerous killings” reports AFP.
The 92-year-old officer was stationed at Stutthof for 11 months between 1944 and 1945, while the 93-year-old suspect was a guard at the camp for over two years from 1942 to 1944.
Both are accused of involvement in 1944 of the mass killing of more than 100 Polish prisoners in a gas chamber, 77 wounded Soviet prisoners of war, and hundreds of Jews who thought they were bound for a labor camp.
They are also being held accountable for their role in the outbreak of deadly diseases in the camp, such as typhus, which led to the death of several hundred prisoners.
READ MORE: Pose with Hitler?! Indonesian museum offers happy snaps in front of Auschwitz display for ‘fun’
The two have denied any involvement in the deaths, and Stutthof court must now decide whether the case should go to trial. Many cases in Germany’s effort to prosecute the last remaining Holocaust criminals have failed to go to trial as the aging defendants are often deemed unable to face prosecution.
About 65,000 people died at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1939, when it was established by Nazi Germans, and 1945, when it was liberated. The region is now known as the Polish city of Gdansk.A U.S. Postal Service program to open "mini post offices" inside dozens of Staples stores has drawn a sharp rebuke from postal employee unions.
Workers are concerned the experimental locations -- staffed by Staples (SPLS) employees, not Postal Service employees -- will lead to the closure of traditional post offices and the loss of jobs with good wages and benefits.
"The Staples-USPS deal has to be looked at in the context of a drive towards privatizing the U.S. Postal Service," said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. His group is a network of local unions that represents over 220,000 current and retired mail workers.
"We are willing to support this program as long as it's staffed with United States Postal Service employees," he said.
Staples declined to comment on the unions' concerns and said it doesn't discuss agreements with vendors, but said the pilot program is intended to offer "added convenience for our customers."
"Staples continually tests new products and services to better meet the needs of our customers," said spokeswoman Carrie McElwee.
Related: Price of stamps to go up more than expected
And Postal Service spokeswoman Darleen Reid-MeMeo rejected the idea that the Staples program was "an attempt to replace stand alone Post Offices."
The post office, whose financial struggles are well-known, is adapting, Reid-MeMeo said. The Staples pilot is the next step of a program that already has over 65,000 retail partners -- including grocery stores and pharmacies that sell stamps and village stores that sell flat-rate boxes in rural areas.
Sarah Ryan, a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Washington, said she thinks the Staples partnership does little to help traditionally underserved postal customers.
"The interesting thing is this won't do anything to help people who are in rural or lower income neighborhoods," Ryan said. She has studied privatization and the Postal Service and is a former retail clerk at a Seattle post office and held elected positions in the local postal union.
Related: Can package delivery save the Postal Service?
"This is the first time since the Sears deal that there's an effort to move the retail into a national, corporate chain," she said.
In the 1980s, the Postal Service and Sears (SHLD) struck an arrangement similar to the one at Staples today. Postal unions protested and the program was eventually canceled.
This time around, Dimondstein said, the union president, said workers want guarantees their jobs will be protected and not outsourced to Staples.
"We do not have any problem with the people of this country getting expanded access to postal service," said Dimondstein. "We are willing to support this program as long as it's staffed with United States Postal Service employees."
The Postal Service counters are currently available at just over 80 Staples stores in and around San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Worcester, Massachusetts, said Reid-MeMeo, the USPS spokeswoman. She said the postal service is "always looking to expand access to postal products and services in locations where our customers frequent."
-- CNN's AnneClaire Stapleton contributed to this reportLawyers for the French police units that guard President Francois Hollande, his ministers and high profile people say they will launch a lawsuit against the government because the massive terrorism threat since the January shooting has stretched resources to the limit.
According to Laurent Franck Lienard, lawyer for the Personalities Police Protection Service (SDLP), the officers have been at full stretch and have clocked up 1.3 million hours of overtime. It has left them stretched to the limit, with some so unable to concentrate that they have been accidentally misusing their weapons. Lienard said:
"When you are worn-out, when you are extremely stressed, when you have to be extremely vigilant, when you drive fast and when you are armed [mistakes are made], and the truth is that there have been several inadvertent shots fired which are linked to fatigue."
On one occasion an officer accidentally fired a round in the presidential palace, which set off a terror alert. On another, a policeman shot himself in the thigh.
© AFP 2018 / JOEL SAGET Eiffel Tower Shut Down Following Terror Scare
Apart from filing a case over the non-payment of 1.3 million hours' overtime, a complaint will also be filed for "moral harassment". According to the police union, officers say they have been bullied by superiors when referring to the extension of their working hours.
The complainants say officers are exhausted, suffering poor health and are unable to carry out inherently important police work, such as high-speed driving, carrying a weapon and even remaining constantly vigilant.
"This is not sustainable, especially since our days are long: most often, they start at 0800 and end at 2300. Sometimes we have to protect a personality throughout the night, if they go to a party," according to one officer identifying himself as Antonin in an Over the Obs article, who noted that it puts "a family life on hold".
Terror Alert
France has been on high terror alert since January 2015 when Saïd and Chérif Kouachi forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris and shot 11 people dead and wounding 11, before fleeing and killing a policeman outside.
© REUTERS / Handout via Reuters TV Gunmen flee the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in this still image taken from amateur video shot on January 7, 2015, and obtained by Reuters
They identified themselves as belonging to the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen. Both were eventually gunned down in a village, after taking a hostage.
The shootings were followed by another hostage-taking event involving Amedy Coulibaly who was a close friend of the Kouachi brothers. Coulibaly entered and attacked people in the kosher food superette in Porte de Vincennes where he murdered four Jewish hostages and held fifteen other hostage. Police ended the siege by storming the store and killing Coulibaly.
© AP Photo / A woman lighting a candle outside the kosher grocery where Amedy Coulibaly killed four people in a terror attack, in Paris, France.
Since then, there has been a series of other terror incidents across France, which included one case when a man was decapitated during a suspected Islamist terrorist attack at a chemical factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier near Lyon, southeastern France.Original Episodes
The following are original episodes of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, as they originally aired, with their original songs. The recently released DVD's contain all of Billy Van's genius, but some of the music has been altered for rights purposes.
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Episode: Love me Two Times (The Doors)
Description: The Count invents a "Sun Light Flashor", Bwana takes a look at a Kinkajou, and Pet-Vet brings Igor a kitten!.
Source: BETA SP dub from an original master used to air the show at CHCH. Obtained from CHCH (ONTV) in 1999.
Download: frightenstein-lovemetwotimes.mp4 734mb MP4
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Episode: Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Description: The Count invents invisible ink, Bwana takes a look at gorillas, and Pet-Vet brings Igor a turtle.
Source: Uncertain. Definitely taped from TV during the Showcase era. Probably recorded on VHS on EP mode. Might even be from a duplicate VHS. Poor quality, but watchable.
Download: frightenstein-aintnomountain.mp4 785mb MP4
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Episode: Amos Moses
Description: The Count shows off his sandwich maker, Bwana presents his cougar photos, Gronk hams up hovercrafts, and Pet-Vet has a duck.
Source: Taped from TV during the Showcase era. VHS on SP mode. Excellent audio quality, low resolution video, but watchable.
Download: frightenstein-amosmoses.mp4 787mb MP4The short film that is said to have inspired Excalibur before disappearing for three decades will finally be made available to the public, as director Roger Christian has announced that Black Angel will be released through iTunes and Netflix in 2014.
The 25-minute movie about a knight getting lost in a fantasy realm as he returned home from the Crusades was the directorial debut for one-time set designer Christian, who worked with George Lucas on the original Star Wars. That relationship led to the short's original release, accompanying The Empire Strikes Back on its European and Australian theater release -- after which, the short pretty much disappeared (literally; the negative was believed lost until a couple of years ago).
STORY: Long Lost 'Black Angel' to Be Shown at Mill Valley
Fully-restored by the Bay Area Visual Effects Society and Emeryville, CA's Athena Studios, Black Angel received its "world re-premiere" last week at the Mill Valley Film Festival ahead of next year's release on digital platforms. Talking to the LA Times about the film's return to circulation, Christian said that he's "waited three decades to be able to show this film to audiences once again," adding that he's "so grateful" for the assistance he received in making it available once more.
Ahead of the movie's official release, Athena Studios has made clips available online to allow audiences to see what they can expect next year.LOS ANGELES -- A minor fender bender in a Dodger Stadium parking lot over the weekend led to the beating of a driver and the arrest of four people more than a year after a San Francisco Giants fan was left with brain damage after an attack on opening day, police said Monday.
The latest attack occurred Sunday, when the victim, a man in his 20s, had a collision with another driver and three other men pinned him down, police said.
The other driver kicked and hit the victim in the head and face while he was on the ground, police Sgt. David Armas said.
"It was just a minor fender bender that just got totally out of hand," he said.
The victim, whose name was not released, had scrapes and cuts to his face, but his injuries were not life-threatening, Armas said. A woman in the victim's car who is eight months pregnant was not hurt, but she was examined at a hospital as a precaution, he said.
The four men were arrested for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon. They were identified late Monday as Arthur Morales, 20; Alan Trujillo, 29; Alejandro Briceno, 29; and Ulises Briceno, 26.
The men have been released after posting bail, $30,000 each.
In a statement, Dodgers officials praised stadium security and Los Angeles police for a "quick security response (that) prevented the confrontation from escalating further."
Security responded within moments, according to the statement issued Monday.
Dodger President Stan Kasten said the organization is committed to providing a safe, family-friendly environment for fans.
The violence came after Giants fan Bryan Stow was beaten last year. Two men have pleaded not guilty to charges including mayhem and assault. Stadium officials beefed up security after that attack.
Stow's family has filed a lawsuit against the team and previous owner Frank McCourt, claiming security cutbacks were partially to blame for the attack.
The Dodgers were sold earlier this year to an ownership group that includes NBA legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson.
Dodgers security staff and uniformed off-duty Los Angeles police were at the stadium Sunday and responded quickly.
Cmdr. Andrew Smith said the officer who detained the suspects was an off-duty LAPD officer who was working in uniform for the Dodgers.
Dodger Stadium is one of the few places that LAPD allows officers to be hired by an outside organization and to wear their police uniform, Smith said.
Police were out in full force on opening day last month and reported a drop in the number of arrests and public drinking citations from opening day the previous year.
Police have said officers wearing rival team jerseys will be at every home game.
"We've maintained that high presence throughout the year," Smith said.
The beating occurred after the Dodgers' 6-5 win over the St. Louis Cardinals.No. 4 Florida Gators head coach Will Muschamp met with the media on Monday to review the team’s shutout victory over the Jacksonville State Gamecocks and preview Saturday’s game against the No. 10 Florida State Seminoles.
INJURY UPDATES
Sophomore quarterback Jeff Driskel, who sprained his ankle two weeks ago and did not see the field against Jacksonville State, “will play” on Saturday against Florida State. Muschamp said Monday that Driskel could return to practice but will be held out until Tuesday for precautionary reasons and so he can get additional treatment. From there, he will see how well Driskel can play and how comfortable he is on his ankle, which will determine how much field time he sees Saturday.
“He will play in the game. To what degree? The week will determine that on how his health continues to improve,” he said. “We’re going to see how the week goes. I don’t know. I know right now, based on [Sunday], that he will play in the game. How much he’ll play, whether he’s going to start, I don’t know that right now.”
Muschamp was careful not to name Driskel the starter but that does not mean the designation will not come later in the week. He has yet to see Driskel practice on his injured ankle and is hedging his bets right now. If Driskel practices in full this week, especially towards the end of the week, there should be no doubt that he will start and be active for the full compliment of plays on Saturday.
Also coming off the injury report are redshirt sophomore linebacker Neiron Ball (ankle), redshirt sophomore right tackle Chaz Green (ankle), redshirt junior wide receiver Andre Debose (knee) and sophomore fullback Hunter Joyer (thigh), all of whom will take Monday off as a precaution before returning to practice on Tuesday. Each is expected to be healthy enough to take on FSU in six days.
Muschamp said Saturday that sophomore safety De’Ante Saunders and redshirt sophomore guard Ian Silberman (shoulder) are out for the season, though no specifics were provided on Saunders.
Read the rest of what Muschamp had to say…after the break!
PLAYER AWARDS
Offensive Players of the Game: Senior running back Mike Gillislee
Scrap Iron: Redshirt junior center Jonotthan Harrison, redshirt junior right guard Jon Halapio, senior left tackle Xavier Nixon
Big Plays: Gillislee, redshirt senior tight end Omarius Hines, freshman RB Matt Jones
Defensive Player of the Game & Ball Hawk: Senior Mike LB Jon Bostic
“What a great example for our young players of a guy that listened and was a really good football player last year but certainly has taken the next step and is playing really good football at linebacker here at Florida.”
Special Teams Players of the Game: Junior LB Darrin Kitchens, redshirt senior kicker Caleb Sturgis
TOUGHNESS RETURNS TO FLORIDA
One year ago, Muschamp spoke honestly with his team following the Florida State game, labeling the players as “soft” for the way they played just minutes earlier as well as throughout the entire season. He repeated those comments to the media after the game. Rather than shrink and hide, Florida responded in a major way and has become one of the toughest teams in the country.
“When you’re 4th-and-1 and you’re trying to run a quarterback sneak and you lose 13 yards, that will trigger it,” said Muschamp on Monday, remembering last year’s game. “I think it was a culmination of things that just get built up, a little frustration, and you say what’s on your mind. That’s what I did with the team in the locker room when the game was over. It has been our challenge as we move forward from that point in our offseason program.
“Really it turned for me in our bowl practice. I thought we had an outstanding bowl practice. When you’re 6-6 at the University of Florida, it’s never good after experiencing it. You also find out who is on board and who is not with your football team. I knew then, with that team, our team right now, that we had a bunch of guys that were bought in to what we were doing. There were no guys wavering. There was no guys wondering if we were doing the right things. That’s really where I saw some good things coming.”
Muschamp added that the Gators are “night and day” now compared to how the team was last season. “Look at the adversity we have faced throughout the year in different games, different circumstances, different places and how we’ve handled it,” he said. “Top-to-bottom, offense, defense, special teams, coaching staff, everybody included has been night and day.”
Redshirt senior defensive tackle Omar Hunter, who spoke before Muschamp did on Monday, relayed a similar sentiment as to how Florida responded from his coach’s “soft” comment. “It played a huge role. Even this offseason, approaching it with those comments he made, our whole offseason program with Coach [Jeff] Dillman coming in preaching to us about mental toughness and physical toughness overall,” he said. “That [comment was] pretty bad. That’s pretty bad. Guys really took that comment hard. They went to improve and get better. We know coach loves us, loves this football team, and this football team loves coach. Hearing that from him did make us a little more focused and hungry to get better this offseason.”
NOTES AND QUOTES
» Muschamp on this week’s opponent: “Obviously a good football team. E.J. Manuel is playing like a senior quarterback should play. … It’s very obvious on film, as he directs his football team, that it is his football team. … Defensively, Mark Stoops does an outstanding job. I think they’re first in the country in everything.”
» Muschamp on the importance of winning rivalry games: “Sure. There’s a list of things, too. Being undefeated at home is important. beating your rivals is important. winning your division is important. Going to Atlanta is important. There’s a big list of them. That’s one of them.”
» Muschamp on pass interference penalties being more excusable than most: “I’m never happy about a penalty. I just think that sometimes, the way we play, that there is contact and it’s a judgment call. … There’s never a good penalty, so don’t misunderstand what I’m saying.”
» Muschamp on players not knowing the team is No. 4 in the BCS: “They’re very good soldiers.”
» Muschamp on Florida’s not winning games in a “sexy” manner that pleases those watching: “My wife told me I was sexy after the game. She said, ‘We don’t win sexy, but you’re sexy.’ That’s a positive. There’s something good in that, I guess. She was kidding.”
» Muschamp on how the Gators have improved heading into this game from a year ago: “We’re very different, differently equipped this year than we were a year ago. I think we’re much better on the offensive line and that’s really where we really struggled against this group last year. They rushed four guys and stopped the run and were able to play guys in coverage and forced the quarterback to throw the ball off rhythm.”
» Hunter on UF-FSU: “It’s a big game. There’s a lot riding on this game. Any time you play a rival, it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be a hard-fought game. The team that makes the least amount of turnovers and mistakes is going to win the game.”
» Hunter on if the players are talking about playing in a BCS bowl game: “I haven’t heard anything from a teammate saying about BCS or anything like that. Everything has been Florida State this week.”
» Hunter on if he would vote for Johnny Manziel to win the Heisman Trophy: “No, I’d vote for Jeff Driskel … because he’s our quarterback.”
» Hunter on the rivalry from his perspective: “I used to always think that Florida State was the best team in Florida. I grew up a Florida State fan a little bit. Those were some fun games. I hope we keep [the rivalry] up and hopefully we can win. … The one that sticks out for me is probably the Braveheart game with Tebow, his face covered in all that paint. That’s probably the most memorable game.”It took a long time for SMS to find widespread adoption, both because of the cellular networks themselves (coverage was far from ubiquitous in 1992) and phones whose buttons revolved around dialing rather than typing. But then the smartphone arrived. In the US alone, the volume of messages surged from 12.5 billion per month in 2006 to 45 billion a year later. By June 2017, there were 781 billion messages passing around in the country. Messaging was suddenly easy, and SMS was ready and waiting to take advantage of that newfound freedom.
There's little doubt that texting has influenced communication in the years since. Where texting was once seen as a rarity or even rude, it's frequently the first choice for communication -- how often are you annoyed when someone calls you instead of sending a brief message? Accordingly, it's entirely common to see services that are available through SMS, whether it's ordering pizza or getting music recommendations. Twitter's original 140-character limit (which was just lifted in November) was built around SMS' 160-character ceiling to enable tweets in an era before the mobile internet was widely available. The effects of SMS haven't always been positive (they've facilitated spam, for instance), but it's clear there's no going back.
The question now is whether or not SMS has a healthy long-term future. The combination of smartphones and near-ubiquitous mobile internet access has led to an explosion of messaging services and social networks that do much more. WhatsApp by itself was delivering 55 billion messages per day as of July, and that's not including other heavyweights like Facebook Messenger, Apple's iMessage or Google's Hangouts. SMS will likely stick around for a long time, as it's the most practical option for anyone who either can't get a smartphone or doesn't live in an area with reliable, affordable mobile data. However, it's entirely possible that SMS will go the way of GSM, fading away (it's certainly declining in the UK) as people move to far more sophisticated technology.One of my favorite quirks about craft beer is the creativity breweries showcase when it comes to branding and packaging their products. Can designs, bottle labels, freight packaging, and even bottle styles are different and unique from each brewery. My love of sports uniforms and team branding is what got me started on really focusing on how my beer looks on the shelf, as much as how it tastes once I crack it open. There are many great beer design sites to keep track of the ever growing craft beer market and it’s countless designs. Sites like My Beer Buzz and Oh Beautiful Beer are two of my favorites.
While browsing these sites, I have yet to find an overall branding design that has struck me like Modern Times Beer of San Diego, California. The brewery teamed up with design company Helms Workshop. The company took Modern Times founder Jacob McKean’s brewery namesake of a former Utopian society and forward looking historical icons, and put them into the design. With the help of a professional typographer, the design was born.
““Jacob wanted a classic design with a timeless feel, and he felt strongly that a matte white can would help differentiate Modern Times,” said Helms Workshop designer Erick Montes. “With the three colored stripes as a bold unifying theme and a drop shadow highlighting the logos curves, the final design really does stand apart.” -BeerPulse January 2013
All Modern Times products are canned, except for a few Special Release bottles each year. The can and bottle uniform design features sleek, matte white cans with three colored stripes along the bottom, and the Modern Times name in script. The name of the particular beer is arched at the top and matches the color of the three stripes below. Finally, the script logo is outlined in the certain colors of that beer, and the secondary logo |
feel free to say hi at [email protected] and keep the conversation going.Top neocon Bill Kristol respects the Cruz campaign for its brazen theft of delegates and backroom politics.
Kristol told Newsmax TV he admires Cruz for “paying attention to detail and hustling and working hard for every delegate even if they didn’t get all the votes.”
The founder of the “Never Trump” movement and editor of the neocon “redoubt” The Weekly Standard compared the dirty tricks of the Cruz campaign to playing poker.
“You’re playing a good hand of poker, play the hand,” he said. “Don’t say at each card, ‘Boy, I’m playing really clever here.'”
Kristol advocates a brokered convention as the best way to prevent frontrunner Trump for gaining the Republican nomination. In March he said party officials need to work on moving 50 percent of the delegates over to an “acceptable” candidate.
“We have to stop the momentum,” he said after Trump swept seven states on Super Tuesday.
Kristol circulated a memo at the time urging the party to back establishment vetted candidates such as the former presidential loser Rick Perry or Tom Coburn, a former Oklahoma senator. He suggested a third party if Trump takes the nomination.
Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we'll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at [email protected] — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015
The response by the RNC to Kristol’s third party idea was strident. RNC spokesman Sean Spicer told Breitbart News that “any effort to facilitate a third party ultimately is helping to elect Hillary Clinton.”
“If it’s Trump-Clinton, I’d work with others to recruit a strong conservative third party candidate, and do my best to help him win (which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially when people—finally—realize Trump shouldn’t be president and Hillary is indicted),” Kristol wrote in an email.
Kristol’s neocon comrades believe a Clinton presidency would be preferable to a Trump one.
Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, and the “Prince of Darkness,” Richard Perle, all believe a Clinton presidency will continue the neocon foreign policy agenda resulting in the longest war in American history (Afghanistan) and the invasion of Iraq that cost over a million Iraqi lives.
“The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton,” Kagan wrote for The Washington Post. “The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”
In other words, the neocon agenda can be “saved,” or revived, under Clinton who, as secretary of state, demonstrated in Libya she is an advocate of violent regime change in the Middle East.Description
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International Shipping Please read the Please read the shipping information page especially if you are ordering from outside the United States, as all extra import, duty and/or other taxes may apply.
These are BS-AF-W chips that have not passed Tier 1 or Tier 2 quality control. This is usually due to a failed or failing wire bond on the package or a device that did not show a hysteresis response under low current testing conditions used by our automated quality control setup. In all cases, there are at least four (4) known good devices on the chip. These chips are intended for preliminary testing of circuits and measurement equipment (for example to insure there are no transient voltage spikes that could kill a device) and in general just playing around without worrying too much about frying a device. Burn and Learn!
Limit one per customer.
The BS-AF-W Memristor is not a complete product. It is intended solely for use for preliminary feasibility evaluation in laboratory/development environments by technically qualified electronics experts who are familiar with the dangers and application risks associated with handling electrical mechanical components, systems and subsystems. It should not be used as all or part of a finished end product. If you are pursing a commercial use or application, please contact us.A DEAF and pregnant woman from Kington who avoided prison for sexually abusing a young boy has now been jailed for five years after top judges said her original sentence was too soft.
Julie Fellows first molested the victim when he was just six-years-old and abused him again when he was a teenager.
The 30-year-old, of Llewellin Road, Kington, denied any wrongdoing but was found guilty of indecent assault and sexual activity with a child following a trial at Worcester Crown Court in August.
She was pregnant when handed a two-year suspended sentence, after Judge Robert Juckes QC said she would be "completely isolated" behind bars because of her deafness.
But she was today handed a five-year jail term by judges sitting at the Court of Appeal, in London, who said the original sentence was "unduly lenient".
Lord Justice Davis said the judge was right to take into account her deafness and the fact she was pregnant, having previously suffered a stillbirth.
However, he said the judge went "altogether too far" and didn't give enough weight to the serious offences and the severe impact on the victim.
The court heard Fellows groomed and abused the boy when he was six and she was 14.
During a later encounter, when he was a teenager, she reminded him of the abuse and engaged in sexual activity with him.
Her sister Jennifer, 32, of Hatton Gardens, Kington, who is also profoundly deaf, abused the same victim and was given a one-year suspended sentence after admitting indecency with a child and inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
Jennifer's sentence was not challenged, but the attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, complained that Julie's was nowhere near tough enough.
Lawyers representing Mr Wright argued that, because Julie's crimes were more serious and because she continued to deny her guilt, she should have been handed a lengthy jail term.
Agreeing, and jailing her for five years, Lord Justice Davis said her crimes were so serious that the suspended sentence was not enough, especially as she had shown "no remorse".
Sitting with Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb and Judge Peter Rook QC, he added: "In our view, the sentence imposed doesn't reflect the gravity and sustained nature of all that occurred.
"During the first offending, the victim was very little, he was a boy of six-years-old, and she was significantly older.
"It has been said she was a child herself, but the fact is she was much older than him, she would've known what she was doing was wrong, and there were elements of grooming.
"The damage to the victim has been profound."
Fellows must surrender to Hereford police station by 4pm tomorrow to start serving her sentence. Her baby is due in January.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The left likes to talk a great deal about the need for both parties to work together — for Republicans to reach out to Democrats, for ideologies of all types to band together for the country’s common good, for conservatives to cross partisan lines and partner on matters of Great National Importance, politics be danged.
Well, Democrats are hypocrites. They say all that while calling for the likes of impeachment of President Donald Trump and a summer of mass resistance. But amid their hypocrisy is still a gold nugget worth grabbing.
And it goes like this, Republicans: Quit the infighting.
It’s time to halt the anti-Trump hate and band together for the common good of conservatives and the country.
The fate of the party — the fate of this nation — rests on Republicans’ ability to stop wasting precious time and quit burning hard-won political capital.
Elections are coming, and the GOP is letting rancor ruin the party, and for what? Because some still can’t acknowledge and accept that Trump is the president.
And to be fair, Trump — as quite right as he is for calling out the establishment and RINOs of the bunch — nonetheless often fuels the fiery distractions from political business with 120-character count responses on Twitter that may make for good media coverage, that may soothe a pride that’s been savaged by pols and press alike, but that, in the end, doesn’t help Joe and Jane American any.
It’s high time to put a cap in all this Republican v. Republican mudslinging.
The truth is, we’re seven-plus months into the new administration with nary an Obamacare repeal passed, and at this point, it’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong — who’s RINO and establishment-minded. It’s about the chance to accomplish something great.
Truly, Trump supporters already know Congress is filled with RINOs. They’ve known that way before Trump even took office. Conversely, Trump critics know this president isn’t the smoothest-talking diplomat in the room. He’s not changed in tone since campaign days. So what more to prove by continuing the jabs and slams and petty name-calling and blaming?
It’s time to start the healing process. Bury the hatchet, guys.
Let’s move on to the legislation and policies that are supposed to be core to the Republican Party — that are supposed to separate the Republicans from the Democrats.
GOP, quit attacking your president. Trump, stop blasting the congressional members you need to pass your agenda.
To all Republicans: Realize the window of opportunity to undo the progressivism of Barack Obama and usher back the capitalism, the sovereignty, the limited-government basics that made this country great in the first place doesn’t stay open indefinitely.
Conservatives in America voted Republican for a reason — and it wasn’t to watch the next match of Trump v. McConnell, or Trump v. McCain, or Trump v. Ryan. It was to make America great again.
So let’s get going on that. The clock’s ticking, elections are dawning and voters — remember the voters? — are still expecting great things.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Rebels offer ceasefire as doctor says seven civilians have been killed in an air strike
The regime of Muammar Gaddafi has initiated a concerted effort to open lines of communication with western governments in an attempt to bring the conflict in the country to an end.
Libya's former prime minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, told Channel 4: "We are trying to talk to the British, the French and the Americans to stop the killing of people. We are trying to find a mutual solution."
Although the regime last night rejected a rebel offer of a ceasefire if Gaddafi withdraws his military from Libya's cities and permits peaceful protests, senior British sources said the Gaddafi government was open to dialogue.
"If people on the Gaddafi side want to have a conversation, we are happy to talk," one said. "But we will deliver a clear and consistent message: Gaddafi has to go, and there has to be a better future for Libya."
The regime rejected the rebels' ceasefire conditions, saying government troops would not leave cities as demanded.
However, signs that the regime was looking to reach out to the west came after the Guardian reported that a meeting had taken place between Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gaddafi's influential son Saif al-Islam, and British officials on Wednesday in London. Ismail is a fixer who has been used by the Gaddafi family to negotiate arms deals and has considerable contacts in the west.
Ismail and Moussa Koussa, the Libyan foreign minister who defected to Britain on Wednesday night, are not the only current and former supporters of the regime to have been in contact with Britain.
British officials have been in contact with a number of Libyan officials in recent weeks in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, according to a spokesman for David Cameron. He stressed that Britain had not been negotiating any possible trade-offs aimed at sealing Gaddafi's exit from power. "There are no deals."
The disclosure of the dialogue came as the revolutionary leadership in the east laid down conditions for a ceasefire, after a visit by the UN's special envoy Abdelilah al-Khatib to the rebel capital, Benghazi.
"We agree on a ceasefire on the condition that our brothers in the western cities have freedom of expression and also that the forces that are besieging the cities withdraw," said one of the leadership, Mustafa Abdul Jalil. "Our aim is to liberate and have sovereignty over all of Libya."
The rebels' initiatives were announced as the first credible report of civilian casualties from the western air campaign emerged. Suleiman Refadi, a doctor who has worked with the rebels, told reporters that seven civilians, including three girls from the same family aged 12 to 16, were killed on Wednesday in an air strike.
Refadi said three youths and a fourth girl were also killed when missiles hit a government ammunition lorry and destroyed two houses about nine miles from Brega and what is now the frontline. About 25 people were injured. The report was not independently confirmed.
In Tripoli, gunfire was heard near Gaddafi's compound. Reuters reported that residents said they saw snipers on rooftops and pools of blood on the streets.
The rebels made it clear their offer of a ceasefire should not be seen as a sign of weakness. In an attempt to finally bring order to its chaotic military campaign, the leadership deployed the first of its newly trained troops in the move on Brega, which was seized by the government earlier this week, and hauled up rocket launchers.
They were also seen to have communications equipment, which the rebels have asked foreign governments to provide.
The newly uniformed soldiers included officers who, the rebels said, would establish lines of command to end shambolic confrontations in which revolutionaries have only been able to move forward under the cover of western air strikes and have been unable to hold ground because they lack plans for defence.
While the rebels prepared for a new offensive in the east, Gaddafi's forces meanwhile launched a fresh assault on Misrata, the last enclave in the west still under the revolutionaries' control. Libya's third largest city was hit with tank and artillery fire.
"It was random and very intense bombardment," a spokesman, called Sami, told Reuters by telephone. "We no longer recognise the place. They are targeting everyone, including civilians' homes."From 1997 to 2005 Daft Punk was never overly aggressive with their releases. They put out three albums within that time: one every four years. They were very successful in doing so and I was always unconsciously aware of their music, but never reaching the level of calling myself a fan. The era of Daft Punk seemed to have come and gone without strongly affecting me in one way or another.
Then, following eight years of my forgetting their existence, they decided to make their big return with a FUCKING DISCO ALBUM. Crazy right?
Not so much. Somehow Daft Punk managed to combine new and old sounds in an arrangement that makes a weird sort of sense. The album sounds distinctly old school and futuristic at the same time. Synthesizers and vocal effects are mixed in with classic guitars and strings in a way that not only avoids being off-putting, but is actually very pleasant and cohesive. The result is something that can only be described as elevator music from the future.
The record is pressed on two black vinyl discs and held in a gatefold jacket. Also held in the first sleeve is a booklet containing lyrics, credits, and additional artwork. The artwork is tasteful in its simplicity and due to the instrumental nature of a lot of Daft Punk’s work I found myself not requiring a lyric sheet to follow along. That said, a booklet is always a nice addition and adds to the experiences of unpacking and the first listen.
This record also sounds great. Of the LPs in my collection so far I would rank this #1 with regards to increase in quality from its digital counterpart. Every note rings crystal clear and you’ll find yourself noticing instruments and intricacies that you had no idea were present before. The vinyl edition of this album is 100% worth the investment; in fact you’re missing out by using another format.
Song to song the album flows seamlessly. Each song steps in to serve a distinct purpose, bringing funky high energy and slow jams, instrumentals and lyrical tunes, clean classical instruments and synthesizers. I could ramble all day, so instead I’ll try to focus in on a few key favorites:
Giorgio by Moroder
This song serves as a perfect explanation as to what was trying to be achieved on this record and as a showcase of the talent that came together to produce it.
Starting with spoken word from Giorgio Moroder (known for pioneering Italian Disco and EDM; news to me) we’re told a more or less classic story of the struggling musician and the entire concept for the album is laid out: combining new sounds with old and not getting bogged down with musical rules. There’s bar noise in the background and instruments are incrementally introduced to build suspense. At the end of the monologue a metronome separates us from the kick-in to the rest of the song.
From here the song is a meandering instrumental showcase of all of the sounds that are being played with on the record. Multilayered synthesizers lead us around for a while complimented by clean guitar notes giving the song an jazzy improv feel. Giant string sections come in out of nowhere before cutting out completely. Drums take the lead for a while before letting the bass guitar run with a solo section. The song comes to an ending climax with drum pad effects, electric guitar riffs and a full orchestral background. The song is chaotic and bonkers and perfect.
Apart from the spoken sections this song is entirely instrumental, which is very appropriate. There’s enough going on without a vocalist to distract you and the song is an absolute treat to experience.
Within
Following all that madness the band decides to slow it down a bit with a delicate piano intro. There’s something very soothing about this song. It’s interesting because as the piano works its way through it’s progression it’s joined by a synthesizer, almost unnoticed. It doesn’t seem to change much at the time but the subtle modern tones prime us for the vocal effects to come.
A song this slow, bare, and emotional shouldn’t make a lick of sense with such a heavy vocal effect. I can’t imagine executing it myself without the resulting track sounding corny and killing the emotional texture. But Daft Punk pulls it off. I think this song provides proof of concept that vocal effects are acceptable musical practice and can actually add significant value. I’ll be leaving that to the experts though.
Get Lucky
And of course, the hottest of all jams: Get Lucky. This song was making its rounds during the same summer Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was topping the charts. I argued incessantly that Get Lucky was the superior tune and would have more longevity. I often lost the popular vote, so this paragraph serves solely to boast my retrospective and smug satisfaction.
Like any song that even attempts to be this funky the bass guitar doesn’t get enough credit. You might think you’re bobbing your head to those quick-strum guitar chords; you’re not. That’s the bass my friend. Don’t get me wrong…the guitar and the hand claps certainly don’t hurt the funk level.
When you combine these attributes with the fact that everything Pharrell Williams touches turns to gold, you’re left with an inevitable smash hit. I still can’t get enough of this song four years later, and I get excited every time I realize I’d let it sit on the back burner a while.
This is the best album of the 2010s, and I don’t say that lightly (considering how hard I fanboy-ed over To Pimp a Butterfly). It’s not even inside the genres of music that I’m typically attracted to, but it’s so well put together and so unique that I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. If you were asleep for the entirety of 2013 and this album didn’t come across your radar then I would highly recommend that you close this window and get your disco-electro on immediately: Buy it here (or here for Canada).
So that’s that. Ten reviews! I’m usually the type of guy who either does something twice, or 4000 times. Hopefully getting the review-count into the double digits fares well for the life of this blog!
Up next: Run the Jewels 3! RTJ! RTJ! I know. I’m a few weeks late. But I’m a Canadian and despite pre-ordering, shipments outside of the US were delayed…and then Amazon was out of stock…and then they had to ship it. So it’s in the mail! I should have my hands on it soon, and I’m plenty eager to get talking about it.
I hope you’re enjoying the reviews, and I hope you’re telling your friends! Thanks for hanging out, and until next time:
I’m Not Your Dad.MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Seven weeks to the day since the troubled healthcare.gov website was launched, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in Miami, meeting with so-called “navigators” who are helping the public get signed up for coverage.
Sebelius is a member of the President’s Cabinet. With all the suits, security and cameras following her, you would have thought that President Obama was visiting Tuesday afternoon in what was clearly a highly orchestrated media event to focus on the positive, after so many negative media reports about the Obamacare sign-up process.
Sebelius, wearing green, walked through the front doors of North Shore Hospital near Miami Shores where she shook hands with hospital staff and members of the Epilepsy Foundation who are staffing the Obamacare Navigation center housed off the hospital’s lobby. There she met with the team helping South Floridians to sign-up on line or on paper.
“So she is being helpful,” asked the secretary to a couple sitting at one table of a navigator. “Absolutely,” they responded.
At a second table, the secretary met Carmen Salero who was trying to sign up online. As the secretary and Salero made small talk, CBS4’s Brian Andrews noticed the site crash on the lap top in front of them.
“The screen says I’m sorry but the system is temporarily down,” Andrews pointed out. “Uh oh,” responded the secretary. “That happens every day,” said Salerno, “it must mean a lot of people are on there trying to get coverage.”
A throng of cameras and reporters trailed the secretary’s every move in the small room. “I didn’t mean to bring the Paparazzi,” the Secretary joked as she met Willy Williams of Miami who was working with a navigator to get signed up. “It went down three times,” said Williams referring to the site, “but we’re just going to keep trying,” he added.
Nick Bianchi, who owns a Social Media Consulting firm on Miami Beach, was selected by HHS to meet the secretary personally based on what he posted on Twitter about his positive experience during the sign up process.
“I selected a silver plan,” Nick said. “The website didn’t work for me so I ended up waiting on papers from the provider I selected.” Nick told the secretary his new plan, effective January 1st, will run a little more than $300.00 a month. “Hearing your situation is really helpful,” the secretary told Bianchi.
Later, at a news conference, Secretary Sebelius told reporters, “The only way to change the narrative is to change the narrative and get people connected with the coverage they need.” She said that she was told that since Tuesday morning, at least two more South Floridians had successfully signed up for the program. She repeatedly said the government website did not have enough testing before it was launched.
“Had I known then, what I know now, things would have been different,” she added.
In response to a question from CBS4’s Brian Andrews about what she learned from her visit to South Florida today, the secretary said it’s the frustration so many are feeling.
“They are frustrated with the web experience they had but they are eager enough to get coverage that they are going to return over and over again.” The secretary went on to say she knows some people out there have just had it. “We know we’re going to have to work really hard to get you to come back,” she said.And it's down – AGAIN! Obamacare website crashes TWICE on enrollment deadline day
More than six hours of website outages plagued healthcare.gov on the last day for enrollment, harkening back to the system's disastrous October 1 launch
White House spokesman Jay Carney makes stressed-out epic gaffe: 'Six out of ten people without insurance can get insurance for $100 a day or less'
Administration claims enrollment numbers'significantly above 6 million,' but still won't say how many have paid
Carney defended the new policy of allowing people who have started the signup process to complete it later
On the final day of enrollment this year for medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government website that runs the program went offline. Again.
And White House Press Secretary Jay Carney found himself in the awkward position of taking a victory lap – citing enrollment totals of more than 6 million – while last-minute customers were frozen out of the system.
Carney appeared rattled at the beginning of his daily press briefing, committing an unforced error that quickly attracted scorn on social media.
'Six out of ten people without insurance can get insurance for $100 a day or less,' he said, instead of citing monthly prices.
Scroll down for video
The Obama administration's health care website stumbled on deadline day for new sign-ups. Visitors to HealthCare.gov on Monday morning saw messages that the site was down for maintenance Oops! White House press secretary Jay Carney was rattled by the Obamacare news on Monday, saying in error that some uninsured Americans could get coverage for '$100 per day' -- instead of '$100 per month'
Medical insurance enrollment fairs across the country saw an increase in participation over the weekend and on Monday, putting new levels of strain on the website as volunteers enrolled people on-site
BREAKING: on deadline day to enroll for new coverage, http://t.co/GBDCZGg2qN is DOWN. Users cannot log in to accounts pic.twitter.com/TdzCnpma5j — Peter Doocy (@pdoocy) March 31, 2014
Healthcare.gov was unavailable for six hours in the early hours of Monday, came back online for a half-hour, and then began connected visitors to its 'virtual waiting room,' a program that contacts users when the website has the capacity to serve them.
By midday, however, even that stopgap system was offline, leaving new potential enrollees with no options.
The website appeared to return to service around 1:45 p.m., but suffered additional glitches as late as 2:10.
'The tech team monitoring Healthcare.gov in real time has identified an issue with users creating new accounts,' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright said Monday.
'The application and enrollment tools are unavailable to new users at the moment. The tech team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.'
While the website was knocked offline, Vice President Joe Biden appeared in a pre-taped video interview on the Rachel Ray Show to encourage even more Americans to go online and enroll.
'I think people are going to be really, really surprised how well this has turned out,' he said.
'Get in the queue, now. Get in the queue. There is still time today.'
The White House blamed its online problems on a crush of last-minute customers, including more than 8.7 million Web visitors in the last week and 1.2 million on Saturday alone.
Carney reminded reporters in his afternoon briefing that due to a last-minute policy shift unveiled last week, anyone who manages to begin the enrollment process will be permitted to finish it at a later date.
He compared the situation to long lines on Election Day, and the generally accepted practice of allowing people to vote if they're in line when the polls close.
But the White House's new policy only requires insurance-seekers who missed Monday's midnight deadline to check a box and claim that they tried in earnest to enroll in time.
Carney parried a question about how many previously uninsured Americans will be covered because of Obamacare, and how many of them were newly insured after Obamacare's strict minimum requirements caused the cancellation of their previous policies.
'In some cases it's kinda hard to measure this,' he said, because the insurance marketplaces's normal 'churn' regularly eliminates some policies every year anyway.
What to do? Americans have struggled with online signups and call centers, leading tens of thousands to flood in-person events staffed by 'navigator' volunteers
People using the healthcare.gov website have encountered tech glitches as everyone entering the system -- including millions of new Medicaid enrollees -- competed for scarce computer resources on the final day More than six million Americans have chosen health insurance plans on healthcare.gov and websites run by 14 states and the District of Columbia, but the question of how many have actually paid for coverage is a thorny one
He also boasted on Monday that the six-month enrollment total for Obamacare policies will be'significantly above 6 million,' but declined to say – as he has many times before – how many of those enrollees have actually become insured by paying their premiums.
'We don't have those figures,' he insisted.
Estimated compiled by MailOnline from states that report such numbers indicate that as many as one out of five subscribers haven't paid, lowering any White House numbers by 20 percent. That would take a possible 6.5 million enrollment total down to 5.2 million.
Republicans are counting on Obamacare's dysfunctions – not just the enrollment roadblocks, but higher costs, limits on care and smaller physician networks – for a political windfall in November.
'We're not really going to know whether [Obamacare] worked or not until the third or fourth year. And of course, that's two elections down the road, Washington and Lee University Law School professor Timothy Jost told Reuters.
'What I worry about is that we won't be able to figure out whether it's worked or not until it's too late.'
White House senior adviser David Plouffe said Sunday on the ABC News program 'This Week' that the GOP will fail in its bid to parlay Obamacare's failures into a sweep and a takeover of the U.S. Senate.Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld The writer has been a long-term adviser on strategy issues to the boards of several major multinational corporations in Europe and North America.He is board member and former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and recipient of the LIfetime Achievement Award (2012) of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism. More from the author ► The writer has been a long-term adviser on strategy issues to the boards of several major multinational corporations in Europe and North America.He is board member and former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and recipient of the LIfetime Achievement Award (2012) of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
“The 2014 ADL Global 100 Survey has spotlighted many aspects of contemporary anti-Semitism. Among them are the widespread anti-Semitic prejudices in the Muslim world. However, there are few studies providing detailed data on Muslim anti-Semitism. In 2009, I published the first North American study comparing levels of Muslim and Christian anti-Semitism.The sample size of each group was one hundred people. It was then compared to one hundred Jewish North Americans as a baseline.”
Steven Baum is an Albuquerque-based clinical psychologist who has been in private practice for over 30 years. He developed an interest in the psychology of genocide and then focused on the psychology of anti-Semitism during the next decade. He has published numerous articles and books on anti-Semitism, genocide and hate, and is the founder and editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
“From the study, it became clear that the Muslims interviewed were more anti-Semitic than Christians in the United States and Canada. The average or mean test scores endorsing negative Jewish stereotypes – after statistically separating out anti-Israel sentiment items – were more than double those of North American Christians. When separating culture from religion, Arab Muslims came out as the most anti-Semitic. Arab Christians and Non-Arab Muslims from Bosnia and Pakistan were less so, yet still anti-Semitic. Mainstream North American Christians were not very anti-Semitic at all.
“Next I tried to statistically identify those key elements which were linked to the higher anti-Semitism scores. Christian anti-Semites were often people whose personal experience and identity had been threatened which created helplessness and increased anti-Semitism. By contrast, Muslims believed their group experience and group identity, i.e., their socio-cultural and religious worlds, were invariably threatened by Jews.
“There were exceptions however. A minority of Muslims scored low levels of anti-Semitism approximating the anti-Semitism rates of their Christian counterparts. The least anti-Semitic Muslims did not identify with their social and group sense of self, but with their more evolved individuated personal identity. They were less authoritarian, less conforming, less religious and more psychologically developed. These emotionally evolved Muslims did not view their religious group as facing Jewish threats and tended at times to be more sympathetic to Jews.
"Such findings are consistent with studies of rescuers during the Holocaust and related genocides. If one excludes rescuers whose motives were financial or political, psychological examination found rescuers to come from more educated, more liberal-minded households, to be less conforming with traditional standards, more individuated, as well as more emotionally developed.
“In this study, most Muslims were strongly identified with their group and their culture's hatred of Jews. Whether one was Shia or Sunni, this made no difference when it came to anti-Semitism. Both groups hated Jews equally.
“The social beliefs of a nation may well be pathological and like superstitions, are often dismissed as fanciful and silly. But when such beliefs turn political and become supported by a state’s religion, its government and popular culture, the average person accepts the saturated social beliefs as real. Given the appropriate conditions, one may act on these beliefs in the future.
“Assimilation may include adopting their new culture's values, dress and style but does not eliminate well-entrenched beliefs like anti-Semitism. In my study, the Muslim’s anti-Semitic ratings did not show declines with more years of residence. There were even slight increases
“How developed one’s identity and personality are, appears to be a key factor in prejudice as well. In 2004, Belgian researchers Vassilis Saroglou and Philippe Galand began investigating group identities of 246 native and immigrant Mediterranean Muslim youths. The researchers found that Muslim immigrants differed from native-born Belgians on a series of psychological tests: Muslims were found to be highly religious, uninterested in exploring themselves and less open to new experiences. Not surprisingly, these traits correlated statistically with anti-Americanism.
https://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/psyreli/documents/2004.Identity.pdf
“What the survey suggests is that the most anti-Semitic people were the most culturally and religiously bound. Those who were more individualized and more assimilated, were less anti-Semitic. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton anticipated the study's findings during an interview when asked why there is dehumanization and violence. His response was to transcend ‘the oldest most primitive problem, which is our tribalism, our tendency to go beyond a natural pride in our group [identity].
“There were other psychological findings as well. Extraversion was statistically correlated to less anti-Semitism and Christianity. Neuroticism and psychosis were correlated with greater levels of anger, authoritarianism, Islam, and being Arab. Yet North American Christians originating in the Middle East, are also likely to be anti-Semitic. Thus anti-Semitism does not always develop from religion. An important factor is how one’s culture adds poison to the mix.”
Baum concludes: “One needs to be very careful about drawing too many conclusions from the study, but it does provide us with findings which indicate where more research is required.”TORONTO – Jason Bay’s rapid ascent to stardom in the big-leagues was matched by an equally rapid decline that has him all but officially retired, a sad end to one of the top baseball careers ever enjoyed by a Canadian.
“I haven’t filed papers or anything yet, but I don’t really see a scenario where I would play this year or beyond, really,” the 35-year-old from Trail, B.C., told sportsnet.ca Saturday. “I had some offers, and an offer to play in Japan, actually, which could be fun for a life experience. I talked to Kevin Youkilis who’s doing it, but taking the whole family over there defeats the purpose of being at home and doing the family thing.
“The writing has been on the wall, I just haven’t made it official, per se. This is probably the end of the road.”
Bay, a three-time all-star and the 2004 National League Rookie of the Year, finishes his career with 222 home runs, third among Canadians all-time behind Larry Walker (383) and Matt Stairs (265). Justin Morneau is one back of Bay and will presumably move past his friend next season, but that won’t diminish his standing among Canucks.
Baseball Canada honoured Bay on Saturday during its annual awards banquet, making the longtime left-fielder the sixth inductee to its Wall of Excellence. The accolade offers a reminder of the type of elite, middle-of-the-order hitter Bay was at the beginning of his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and for a season and a half with the Boston Red Sox.
Things started to go backwards for him after he signed a $66-million, four-year contract with the New York Mets, who last November agreed to terminate his contract a year early. Bay then signed with the Seattle Mariners, posting a.204/.298/.393 slash line with 11 homers in 68 games until his August release.
“I’ve been on the back-end side of the curve for a couple of years and have seen this coming,” said Bay. “I got a chance to play at home last year which was nice. I got let go and it ended up being a really good thing because I got to spend the latter part of the summer with my family, and notice that I didn’t miss baseball as much as I thought I would. That was the tell-tale sign for me; I told my wife it was a blessing in disguise, rather than getting let go in the off-season and wondering if I want to do it again.
“The decision gets made for you sometimes, and I’m actually pretty happy with it. The consolation of not playing is getting to be a dad. … It was time.”
Bay’s time with the Mets was marred by a pair of concussions around some sub-par play, making him a lightning rod for frustrated fans. Often described as a bust, he remains unsure why things changed so dramatically for him once he left the Red Sox as a free agent following a huge 2009 season, which included 36 home runs and a.921 OPS.
“I don’t really feel like the injuries depleted me to the point I couldn’t perform at a high level,” he said. “I’ve had the question a lot, and maybe that was just my time. I don’t know. I hate to leave it to chance, but it wasn’t anybody else’s fault but my own.
“The ballpark wasn’t a great fit, and it was really the first time I had struggled. If you haven’t struggled before, you just keep doing the same things you |
very influential man. The Collectors would regularly scout for up-and-comers in the academic world to find new projects to fund. Many years ago, in his early twenties, Reggie Holt met Richard and groomed him to be part of the Collectors. Many of the men here tonight funded Richard’s work and saw it through Congress. Obviously, they saw the opportunity. For laying the groundwork, they have benefitted tremendously.”
“How did you meet Richard?” I asked.
“When I was completing my PhD at the Dullins Academy, I was asked to speak on a panel about the future of bio-enhancement for MOSAIC Protocol series robots. Richard spearheaded the project, so he was also on the panel. Not long after the panel discussion, he asked me to dinner. After that, he would call me when he was in town. Those occasions grew more frequent as time went on. He was fifty-two when we married and I was twenty-eight. After twenty-two years of marriage, he died six years ago. Since then, I’ve dedicated my inheritance to continuing his vision and direction. So, I guess you can say I felt I owed a party to the Collectors.”
“What was his vision?” I asked.
“To free humanity from manual labor and diminish error from our supply of basic needs so we can live more productive, creative lives. It was the core goal of his work and the very purpose of MOSAIC. Assets, infrastructure and communication. Integrating MOSAIC as a public institution was a dream far beyond what he thought was achievable in his lifetime, but it happened. He had a way of getting that timing just right. This garden represents my own extension for that vision; these plants may hold solutions for a sustainable future. That knowledge is invaluable. There are many problems we may not yet know, and of course a few that we do.”
“Like what?”
Rita smiled. “This garden is full of mystery,” she said. “Perhaps some things are better left unknown until the time comes that we need them. We have a lot of work to do. You’ve had plenty of questions, and now I have one for you. How did you become acquainted with Reggie Holt? He rarely leaves his estate long enough to socialize with strangers and you don’t seem like the type of person would associate with someone like him.”
“Well, it’s a funny story. I was at the museum the night of your exhibition and ended up with a ticket,” I spouted before realizing it made me sound petty. “No offense. I really didn’t know anything about your work at the time.”
“No offense taken,” said Rita, “So you’re not his apprentice and you’re not an escort, why did he bring you? It’s rather peculiar to me.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, laughing it off. “To be completely honest, not a clue. He said he brought me because I’m a stranger, and nobody here likes a stranger. My very presence is amusing to him. I don’t get it.”
“Hm, yes. Collectors are uniquely reclusive types,” said Rita. “I have spent two years building this place and dedicating it to Richard just so I could have something impressive enough to draw them all here. If you want their attention, you must astound them. It has to be an offer they can’t refuse.”
“It’s none of my business, but it seems to me everyone has it in their mind that you’re going to sell SayaTech.”
“Well. It’s amusing they would think that,” said Rita. We strolled around another bend, past an alternate set of solid doors that stood on our left. She pointed toward them. “That’s the banquet hall. Shortly, we’ll have a toast and serve dinner as well as open the gardens for everyone else.”
“These gardens will definitely astound,” I said, “but you had better make sure they know about those Greenthumb plants and anything else lurking in here. That thing is dangerous. It kind of makes me nervous.”
“It’s very simple, Bennet,” she said, “Be mindful and stick to the paths. You’ll be alright.”
OPULENCE
Rita’s mention of a toast reminded me of my sobriety. Returning to the lobby, all I could spot were the estate’s Protocol One staff dishing out snacks and non-alcoholic beverages. The room was dry. The Collectors were right where we left them, standing in their social circles with escorts behind their respective patron.
Mr. Holt took notice of our return.
“Ah, Rita!” he said cheerfully, “And Bennet, my gracious guest! There you both are! Rita, I’m thrilled to see you’ve met Bennet, my guest for the evening.”
“Bennet,” she responded, “is quite the character, Reggie.”
“The decor is exquisite,” complimented Mr. Holt, “I am certain your gardens are just as stunning. What say you, Bennet?”
“It’s a nice place,” I said. “Big trees, flowers, apples. But just look out for the Greenthumbs.”
“Reggie,” said Rita, “I can ensure you will have many surprises this evening. But for now, I have something to show you. Please follow me, would you?”
They left me standing awkwardly in the lobby. Sal Lannard, the only human being who might recognize me, was standing with several Collectors. I wandered over and eavesdropped.
“…far as I see it, those executives are no different. Threats work, at the very least. Obviously, bribes are faster and far less expensive.”
“Oh, stop the rhetoric and bragging, Sal,” bickered another gentleman, “you teach us nothing. Remember how badly you wanted Sun Comm right after President Channing was elected? It’s mine. No threats or bribes necessary.”
“Your ego makes you short-sighted, Eric,” said Sal, waving him away.
“I don’t know why either of you care about Sun Comm,” chimed in a surly gentleman, “Useless old media. And further ruined since the day you took control. I was glad to get rid of that trash.”
I recognized one of them; Eric Olsen the Third. He was a short and skinny fellow with a pointed chin and nose. He wore a dark fedora with thick sideburns trimmed with careful precision to meet his jaw line. If all American news and information was a flood, Sun Communications was the levee that managed the flow. Eric owned it all. I thought he would be taller.
“Tell me, Sal,” said Eric, “What have all of those threats and bribes achieved for you in the past three years? Hm? You are incapable of finishing a deal. And as for your ‘trash’, Oscar, making the Sunn Comm deal gave me leverage during the entire Channing Presidency! Oscar, the only reason you haven’t been bought out is because Reggie Holt seems to think you’re the only one who could convince Sal to give you baseball. Call me short-sighted, but just know your impotence makes you worthless. That goes for both of you.”
“Bah! I would never sell baseball!” Sal exclaimed as if someone had demanded his first born child. The Collectors noticed me hovering behind Sal. Several murmured to each other. A few others sauntered off.
“Sir, what is your name?” asked Oscar. He wore a purple-tinted monocle, had the mouth of a bullfrog and dual neck wattles that lumped over his collar. They bounced when he spoke.
“Bennet Kapshandy,” I said, “And you are?”
“Oh,” he said disappointingly and turned away with disinterest. He whispered something to the two generously-aged gentlemen next to him and shuffled away.
An uncomfortable silence arrested the vicinity. Sal Lannard chewed on the slobbery end of a cigar that he hadn’t lit, or even cut for that matter. Without a drink in my hand, it seemed frivolous to discuss alcohol, so I defaulted to the next icebreaker I could think of.
“Those are incredible shoes! Are they made of alligator?” I complimented the man standing next to Sal.
“No, they’re not,” he responded and looked away as if my words were an offending odor.
“Oh, what are they?” I prodded. I figured at the very least I could get him to brag about his material goods. Alas, he continued to look the exact opposite direction. His nostrils flared and he coughed as if I had just told him I was testing for a hernia.
Sal Lannard pulled a flask from his jacket and took a swig. I couldn’t muster the courage to ask.
“Do you know which way the bathroom is?” I asked. The room may as well have been empty.
“Ok. No problem,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender, “I’ll just go find it now.”
I sighed and walked off my frustration. Mr. Holt would have appreciated my attempts at conversation and their pretentious responses. One of Rita’s P-Ones directed me to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The red carpet path extended from the lobby and into the bathroom, which subsequently had its own lobby. Around the corner, a line of gold-plated urinals were installed, with an adjacent row of enclosed stalls featuring thick mahogany doors and brightly polished handles.
I chose the furthest urinal. My idling mind meditated on two parallel thoughts: first, the absurd realization that I was pissing into gold, and secondly, my conversation with Rita. Why would she want to impress these old snobs? I understood her late husband’s connections, but she seemed was so apart from them. SayaTech was well-respected by the public, so there seemed no need for politics. If she was interested in selling it for any reason, then why the big show? Any wise collector could see SayaTech was a good investment or they wouldn’t have come in the first place. Everything seemed so unnecessary.
The Protocol One bathroom attendant Bac-Flashed my hands, massaged my shoulders, adjusted my back, sprayed mouthwash, offered me a courtesy wet towel and a peppermint. His suit collar bore a small white embroidered SayaTech logo. His nametag was printed STEVEN.
“So, Steven, you live here in the estate?” I asked him curiously as I wiped my brow.
“Yes, sir,” he acknowledged.
“How often does Rita throw parties like this?” I questioned.
Steven’s eyes looked upward for a moment as he concentrated, then said, “In twelve years of my time at the Saya Estate, this is the first party.”
“Interesting,” I said, wadding up the towel and tossing it to him. “Thanks, Steven.”
I returned to the lobby and was pleased to see Rita and Reggie had returned. Despite not really knowing them, they did acknowledge my presence, which made me feel slightly better about being there. They were both pressed into a tight group composed of Eric, Sal, Bullfrog-Smiler, Hernia-Cougher, and a couple of other men. Their heads were down, preoccupied with some object of interest. I planted myself just behind Reggie and Rita, squeezing in between them and the escorts.
“Hi guys, I’m so glad you’re back,” I said.
“Bennet!” said Mr. Holt in a tone of enthusiasm I didn’t realized he was capable of, “Feels like I haven’t seen you in days! How are you, my friend?”
Flabbergasted, I said, “I’m, um, fine, Reggie. Just returning from the golden urinals.”
Reggie laughed raucously, “Bennet, you must see this. See what Rita has. A sample from her garden.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Opulence, she calls it,” said Mr. Holt, “A botanical with some interesting properties. Extremely rare. Of course, I was inclined to try.”
In Rita’s hand was the locket she had been wearing. It was twisted partially open and a lime green powder filled the deep groove inside. Carefully, she tapped a very tiny portion onto the fingertips of each Collector. They dabbed it on their tongue.
“We uncovered it in Brazil,” she announced, “It is an extremely potent derivative of something quite ancient we uncovered,” she explained, “A flowering plant. It’s unlike anything else we’ve ever found in nature. We presume this species must have died off entirely.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Well, I’ll just say this,” Rita said as she tapped a portion onto Sal Lannard’s finger, “No matter what happens tonight, we will all feel great doing it.”
It sounded good to me. I extended my finger.
“None for you,” said Rita as she closed the locket. The Collectors chortled.
“One in ten plants mature enough to produce it,” she said, “And they can only be grown in costly lab conditions. Gathering this much took nearly a year and twelve of my best staff. It shouldn’t even exist. If there were a price, Reggie is probably the only one here who could afford it.”
My heart sank as she put the pendant back around her neck. I felt like a dog. The Collectors were equally pleased with their privilege as they were amused by this rejection.
Sal reached over to envelop Rita in a big bear hug. She quickly dodged his attempt. Eric tapped his fingers contemplatively and asked, “Rita, how much for SayaTech? All of it. Just name your price.”
“How bold of you, Eric,” she said, “But I’m afraid you’re too late. It’s not for sale anymore.”
“Who bought? Gregory Hemmings? He has been an incessant thorn in my side. I swear he has an infatuation for whatever it is I want. Always outbidding me at the Glory Auctions,” complained Eric. He glared at the tall, lanky character in the opposite corner.
Gregory Hemmings wore a wide-rimmed cowboy hat. On his waist was a flashy belt buckle featuring the bold, shining emblem for Handsome Meats. Handsome Meats was the only remaining natural cattle ranch in the country, proudly under his sole ownership. He had made the intelligent decision to start buying up the budding Meat Growing industry when the prohibition on lab cultivated meats had lifted. At the time of the Saya banquet, he had conglomerated ninety-percent of the industry under a plethora of brand names. The other ten-percent were owned by another gentleman in the room named Vim Bruley, also in attendance. The other Collectors paid Vim to keep it, just to keep Gregory from owning it all.
“I decided,” said Rita assertively, “To keep SayaTech for myself.”
“Quite an investment for a debutante,” said Eric. He looked at the other Collectors, “Could be risky, you know. There are people here who will try to take it from you by any means necessary. One favorable President, a few willing Congressmen, a lengthy campaign of negative press,” he passively threatened, “You do understand that you’ll need allies if you intend to keep it yours in the long-term. Would you consider a partnership?”
“I’ll consider it, Eric. Thank you for the offer,” said Rita, flashing a polite smile. I could tell it was false; once you’ve seen a sincere smile on a person, you can easily tell when they’re faking it.
“Whatever Eric would pay, I would double it,” said Sal.
“Double? Hah!” Eric hollered, “You would probably name it after sandwich. And besides, you don’t even have the kind of money nor the intellect to manage this kind of company.”
“The Hell I don’t!” Sal spat back.
“…and even if you did,” Eric said, “You wouldn’t deserve it!”
“Rita,” chimed Mr. Holt with humble sensibility, “There is far too much ego in this room for mature and productive discussion. I’m not inclined to make an offer if you want to keep your company. I’m really not interested in this sort of deal, anyway; I’d much rather stir the pot. Richard and I were close, you know. Whatever your intentions may be, I want to ensure you’re well taken care of for a long, long time. We should talk about your plans for the future.”
“Thank you, Reggie. You will know my plans soon enough, as well as the rest of you,” said Rita, tapping her necklace pendant. “If you would excuse me, I must be a proper host and ensure the others are accommodated.”
Twenty minutes had passed since Rita had opened her locket. Accepting my sobriety, I waited patiently for dinner and assumed the role of observer along with the escorts. The tone of conversation had become comically brazen; Collectors lobbed egotistical challenges about who was more rich, capable and competent. The ambience had grown into a hedonistic romp, frenzied by the designer drug.
Bitterly, with feelings hurt, I watched as Collectors sought out Rita for second and third helpings of Opulence. Several were dancing with escorts to the orchestral version of Increduloso by the 2120’s pop star Sinsiduous.
The band switched to an inoffensive tune. The wide doors at the far end of the lobby swung open and a flurry of Protocol One staff marched in to usher everyone to their respective seats. Eerily, as if every part of their being had been decreased to half-speed, the Collectors concentrated carefully on basic motor skills. I found Mr. Holt meandering meticulously in the general direction of the banquet hall.
“Reggie,” I called out, “Are you alright?”
“Feels like I’m underwater,” said Mr. Holt. He gazed at his own hands. A toothy smile crossed his face and he said, “…in a good way.”
“Recreational drugs! Really!” I exclaimed, “I didn’t realize you were so adventurous, Reggie.”
I held out my hand, offering to help him inside.
“Bah!” scoffed Reggie. Ever so slowly, he pushed his hand against my chest and moved me aside at non-threatening speed. His speech was coherent but sluggish and his face tensed to pronounce every syllable, “Uniqueness and novelty are the nature of a Collector. Nobody turns down such an opportunity. Do you realize how jealous they are that Rita took you to the gardens before the rest of us?”
“They won’t bat an eye at me,” I said. It was difficult to hide my frustration.
“Of course not! Do you want to know who they thought you were? A janitor, or a landscaper. Maybe a distant cousin or a family member. When they knew I had brought you, when they knew that, two of them asked if you were the mythical ‘Protocol Two’. They thought I had acquired through some bribe or campaign. Oh, the looks on their faces! I am so very glad I brought you.” He raised his hand, the same hand for petting his jewelry, and tried to pat me on the cheek. I backed away, disgusted.
“It was the best part of my night,” laughed Mr. Holt, “Until Opulence.”
Through the doors of the banquet hall, we were promptly directed to our seats. There were fifteen large round tables, each with a nametag placed evenly around a centerpiece vase filled with a colorful bouquet. Eighty-four seats in all. Forty-one for Collectors, forty-one for guests, and another table set for only two individuals. I glanced at the nametags as we walked by: Richard Saya and Rita Saya.
In the front of the room was the central stage. It was a tree, rather, conformed from its very roots into the shape of a stage. Holes carved into the bark were carefully plugged with accent lighting to brighten the stage and highlight the person standing on it. A root system along the far back of the stage framed a large solid door on the back. Tendrils gripped along the walls, reaching high to the ceiling. The tree was a living stage, an exquisite piece of work combining nature, art and design.
With childlike wonder and infatuation for novelty, the Collectors gazed at the decor as they meandered to their seats.
HOW TO KILL A GOD
The applause for Rita was a polite one as she approached the podium. It grew into a cheerful clap, and soon escalated into a roar of pure Opulence-induced affection that muted her footsteps.
The staff signaled everyone to take their seats and quiet down. Rita activated the podium’s console to position the Vocal Amplifier, leaned forward and said, “Greetings, Collectors. Thank you for coming this August evening.”
Many applauded. The others murmured across the tables or were still ogling the centerpieces.
“I’ve brought you all here on this glorious evening to demonstrate what we have been able to achieve at SayaTech, and more importantly, the journey ahead. I promise by the time I’m finished, I will have explained the part you play in this new direction. But before I begin, I would first like to honor the brilliant SayaTech scientists and our friends at the Dullins Academy who have been invaluable in making all of it possible. All of the Living Art I will reveal tonight has been possible only because of them.”
Opulence was indeed taking hold of the room; the Collectors glowed with appreciation. They were no longer mere observers; they were part of the show. In their minds, perhaps they were the star. Not a single one of them seemed to notice there were no members of the Dullins Academy present.
“If my late husband Richard were here today,” continued Rita, “he would be honored by your kind reception. He would also find it quite remarkable that I had managed to get you all into the same place at one time!”
A few chuckled at her dry attempt at humor. Others sat on the edge of their seats.
“Perhaps, just perhaps,” she said, “He would have been more amazed by this than the gardens I built to lure you here.”
More guests laughed. Escorts chimed in musically, a strange sound since so many had been configured with an identical vocal tuning. Other Collectors slapped their tables and knees, laughing so hard it brought tears to their eyes as if Rita were delivering a stand-up routine.
I’m certain Rita had expected this; she had to be aware of what Opulence does to a person. She seemed as sober as I was, so I could only presume she hadn’t indulged with her guests.
“Many of you knew Richard well,” said Rita. “Many of you believed in him. Richard and I shared a vision for a better world, to free humanity from the confines of manual labor, and to eliminate waste and error through productive computation. And what we have achieved, I can assure you, is far beyond his wildest expectations. In his honor, I’ve set a place for him.”
Rita gestured towards her dinner table. Applause.
“Richard lived in the present and dreamed of the future. But the success of my work depends on the past. Our planet is filled with untapped biological bounties, and every time we find new code, we unlock answers. SayaTech research is laying the groundwork for progress in every branch of science: biology, ecology, archeology, geology, paleontology, and aeronautics, just to name a few. SayaTech brings them together, and I have no doubt we’ll find solutions to problems that will touch all life on our planet. This is the new revolution of biotech. Our evolutionary past is only the beginning of this new future.”
Rita’s robot staff scurried one by one through double swinging doors on either side of the banquet hall, each holding a bottle of wine. They promptly halted at a table. Carefully, they poured precise portions of wine into each Collector’s glass, and thankfully, my own. A portable bar self-assembled on the right wall and two robots stocked it with a variety of beverages. Within twenty seconds, the room was served.
I grasped my glass with anticipation and resisted the temptation to drink before the toast.
“A toast my friends,” said Rita, raising her glass, “To life. To the future. To Opulence!”
“To Opulence!” the Collectors bellowed with no respect for tone and timing. They chugged their wine in large painful-looking gulps. Rita’s staff promptly refilled their glasses. She placed her own glass on the platter held by the tuxedoed robot behind her and raised her arms.
“The night has only begun!” she exclaimed, “There is so much to show and tell. Please, drink,” Rita encouraged, “Dinner will come shortly and we’ll open up the gardens.”
Rita glanced at me for a moment. I raised my glass to her but was ignored. The Collectors, thirsty for wine, called out for second and third refills. Rita’s P-Ones ran hastily to and from the bar to procure more bottles. Dinner was also served, and oddly enough, her staff placed an entire three course meal before each of us.
“My friends and colleagues, mankind’s goals are ambitious ones. Today, our lifespan is six-fold from our earliest ancestors. Food is in such abundance that no American starves without trying to. The water is clean and we cannot find enough ways to use and store all of the energy we produce. But overcoming our weaknesses and dependencies do not come without cost. We must accept responsibility for our destiny. This responsibility was once attributed only to the will of Gods.”
“I do not imply the Gods are dead, because we still suffer. And when we suffer, the Gods are strongest. We return to them for the strength to endure and prevail against what we cannot control. Yet when we are prosperous, fed, and safe, we depend on ourselves. Never before in history have we depended more on ourselves.”
Lights dimmed, except the spotlights aimed at the podium. Collectors swayed gently in chairs as if they were seaweed anchored to the ocean floor. Wide grins and blank expressions made it difficult to tell if anything said made sense to them. Were they hallucinating? I could not tell.
“We abhor humanity’s weaknesses. For ages we have struggled against fear, hunger, disease, death and darkness, the very things that give Gods their strength. When we depend less on them, the Gods are weakened. With enough time, the traditions of worship are distorted or forgotten. The teachings become myth and truth becomes lore. Their purpose becomes irrelevant. Divine symbols are given new meanings. The Gods may watch and weep, but they cannot prevent their own demise; by their very nature, they are incapable of change. By their very nature, they must be resolute if they are to be depended on. Humanity must suffer if they are to be remembered. A forgotten God is a fallen God.”
Sal Lannard pushed his chair back from the table and rose from his seat. Like mindless cattle, the others soon followed. I curiously watched as Mr. Holt wandered towards the back corner of the room; what were they seeing and hearing?
“Collectors, the object of your affection is not different from these Gods,” continued Rita, “Money must be resolute if it is to be depended on. To have any value, it must be trusted. Money must serve a relevant purpose. It is a symbol of power and prosperity. It is revered by those who have it and coveted by those who want it. Money is an obsession so powerful that every holy book ever written is forced to acknowledge its importance. Like Gods, many currencies have fallen along with the civilizations that harbored them. But the idea of money has remained.”
Clap —- clap —– clap. Incapable of normal motion, many applauded slowly and cautiously. Escorts matched their unorthodox applause. The Collectors grinned wide, like Cheshire cats, as if their smiles would tear right through their faces to spread even wider. Rita stood patiently, waiting for the applause to cease. After several minutes, Reggie Holt and the others had stopped clapping and roamed aimlessly about. They wafted in clumsy, lumbering motions, as if they were trapped in a bowl of molasses.
“Money is certainly a powerful idea. To understand it on these terms, we must look at the human weakness that compliments its strength. This weakness is economical. Scarcity. A limited supply of food, water, energy and medicine has plagued humanity since the very beginning. Yet today, there is no financial need to produce. Why does money persist? Why do the people not do away with it once and for all? Why do we strengthen this horrible God with these games of power and greed, and thereby weakening industry and government, the very source of our strength? Is it possible to kill an almighty, parasitic God such as this?”
Rita leaned forward on her podium and spoke assertively, “It is possible. First, we act when it is weak. We eradicate its purpose. We distort tradition. We make it irrelevant to our livelihood, and useless in our politics. And then, we must forget it entirely.” She paused briefly to watch the spectacle of many as they shuffled about like dumb animals. “And Collectors, it pleases me to see that you are all well on your way to forgetting.”
It was impossible to tell if they were cognitive enough to grasp her words. They ignored their meals, drifting blindly like jellyfish with slow, meticulous propulsion that lacked predictable intention. Some men embraced and kissed random escorts who didn’t seemed to mind the attention. One man came to greet me, shook my hand and introduced himself to me as “The Cranky Dog”.
Dilated eyeballs. Mumbles of gibberish. Flushed faces. Opulence was very, very strong. The addition of booze seemed to make them more active.
POP-POP! Rita clapped loudly into the microphone and startled me to attention. Slowly, the Collectors turned and stared in her general direction. “I see you all have grown bored of my rambling. Raise your hand if you would like a little music? A visit to the gardens?”
Rita raised her hand. The Collectors followed suit. I sat, dumbfounded.
“This is the new era; we can no longer resist it. You, the disciples of money, drag your God selfishly through existence, cowering behind it for strength when it is truly a weakness. This is the end. This is the logical extension of Richard’s goal. There is no room left for this establishment. I do hope you now understand why I threw this party. Thank you for indulging me; the gardens are now open.”
Rita’s modest, warm eyes stirred into pools of darkness with an inky blackness that only absorbed the light that shined upon her stone complexion. There was a calculated, rehearsed coldness about her. Her lips tightened and she gave a hand signal to her Protocol One staff with militant assertiveness. The staff nodded and retrieved stacks of leis, wigs and party hats from boxes along either side of the stage. One by one, we were each given headwear and each guest was directed towards the garden.
“Yes, yes!” encouraged Rita with gleeful exuberance, “Remember – hold nothing back, and feel GOOD about it!”
Many carelessly wandered into the garden. Others, seemingly unaware of their surroundings, had simply ignored her. They chewed at the food on the tables around them, stabbing at steaks and vegetables with the tableware in their vicinity. They unpredictably contorted their bodies into erratic and unusual poses, others mimicking what they saw them doing.
A song faded in; something classy. I didn’t recognize it; maybe two centuries old. As if prompted by the sound, Rita’s staff immediately stopped what they were doing. They stood motionless as if they had been deactivated. A new process queued and four of them simultaneously sprung into action. Each walked to a respective door, punched a code into the panel and locked them with a loud thunk like a vault. They sealed every door but the garden.
My eyes darted about, confused and anxious. The rest of Rita’s staff handed out Flavor Chips to the escorts. Every robot inserted the chips into the taste ports under their tongues. Their eyelids fluttered. As if possessed or remotely controlled, every last one of them climbed the stage and lined up shoulder to shoulder as if participating in an army drill. Together, they stood motionless.
And now, the end is here
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I traveled each and ev’ry highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way….
POP. POP, POP-POP. Loud bangs resounded from the stage. One by one, each robot signaled a report and their heads flew backward as if someone had shot them in the face. They fell lifeless onto the stage floor, their limp limbs chaotically braided over one another.
“Pop chips,” I thought. Pop chips, in the early days of Protocol One, were much like flavor chips used to appreciate flavor and socialize with humans. Pop Chips have an entirely different purpose. Pop Chips override Protocol One independence to force maneuvers and safely destroy them. They were a voluntary kill switch a robot would use if they were aware they had become defunct, dysfunctional, or beyond repair. Once inserted, a countdown begins. A transmission is forced to MOSAIC to assume the best coordinates to self-destruct and signal a clean-up crew. A loud pop signals an overheated core that literally fries the synapses and produces a signature synthetic burning odor.
Why would so many young, full-functioning robots voluntarily destroy themselves? And why would they move to the stage? These Pop Chips couldn’t have been standard issue, or the robots would have marched outside before popping. They were either hacked or custom programmed.
The Collectors who noticed were laughing and clapping at the spectacle. Two Collectors had followed the robots onto the stage and were hunched over the piles of robo-corpses, amused as if it were some kind of performance.
Things were out of control; fear overwhelming me, I looked to Rita for answers. She stood silently in a dark corner, near the door on the back of the stage. “Rita,” I said, “What is this? What the hell going on?”
She shot me a look and frowned, turned and passed through the solid stage door. The same deep, audible click of a door lock signaled above the music. Every exit but the gardens were locked tight.
It was in that moment I realized everything, all of this, was expected. I was in extreme danger, and that bitch knew it. She planned all of this and abandoned me here; my heart pumped so hard my face became numb. I panicked and worried it was the onset of something that would cause me to behave like the Collectors.
By now, the Opulence and booze drove the Collectors completely mad. The garden emanated a chilling mix of laughter and the gargling of painful strangulation. Actions had escalated into mostly irrational and increasingly violent behavior. Someone knocked a wine glass off the table. Another man who noticed began throwing glasses aimlessly across the room. Another man watched the glass break against the wall and began to chew on his own. His eyes grew wide with satisfaction when he crunched down. A trickle of blood dripped down the side of his mouth. He chewed, swallowed hard and began coughing.
Eric Olsen the Third was stomping his steak. He excessively twisted his heel on it with satisfaction, as if it were a cockroach he had been hunting for days.
Sal Lannard plopped down onto the stage like a beached whale alongside his defunct escort. “Ingrid, Ingrid,” he said, and proceeded to make out with her, his fat tongue lashing out across her melted face. He ran his fingers through her hair, which due to melting, fell out in clumps. He grabbed harder and tore it from her dead scalp with long, painful rips.
Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way
My adrenaline surged. I had to act before something happened to me. With every ounce of courage I could muster, I climbed the stage, stumbled across Sal and the pile of dead robots. With all of my might, I twisted the latch on the door. I pounded until my wrists and hands ached, screaming for help, asking Rita why she would leave me with those animals, and shouting obscenities until my voice went hoarse.
From the corner of my eye I realized I was drawing attention. None of the Collectors appeared to be in any condition to cause me physical harm as long as I avoided them. Their attention spans were worthless and they quickly moved on to something else. Carefully avoiding them, I walked the perimeter to test ventilation shafts, but the ducts were unreachable and sealed from somewhere deep behind the wall. Helplessly, I draped a tablecloth over myself, grabbed a steak knife and hid behind two upturned tables in the far corner of the room opposite the garden. Two Collectors, observing me, responded in kind by grabbing tablecloths, but quickly forgot why they had done so and wandered elsewhere.
What happened next was the most disgusting, unimaginable horror of my life which has haunted my dreams ever since.
Reggie Holt, sitting on the floor, had also dragged a tablecloth from a table. Its contents crashed to the floor. He blinked at the mess and sorted through the pile. Laughing, he picked up a fork and stabbed at the chair cushions while muttering incomprehensible nonsense. Another Collector sat next to him and followed his actions. Had they regressed to childhood? Become zombies?
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew…
Mr. Holt glared at his new companion and howled like a feral animal. He grabbed him by the tie, pulled him close and bit a piece of flesh from his neck. I gasped, but the other man didn’t squirm or struggle; instead, they both laughed, as if sharing a joke.
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
Mr. Holt spat the flesh into the man’s face. The other man, ignoring bloody neck wound, reached across the floor and grabbed a large steak knife in his left hand and the steak it was intended for in his right. He clutched the ball of filet like a baseball and shoved it into Mr. Holt’s open mouth. He grinned wide as he pushed it deep down his throat until his furthest knuckles touched Mr. Holt’s lips. Mr. Holt gagged uncontrollably until the morsel passed beyond his gag reflex. His arms flailed with lethargic desperation and contorted amusement that made it unclear if he understood he was dying.
And now, the end is here
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state |
streaming competitors. They're also concerned AT&T will use usage caps, overage fees and "zero rating" to give its own content an unfair advantage. But because there's about 100 AT&T lobbyists at any one moment lobbying DC lawmakers to approve the deal, most analysts now think it should sail through with modest, if any, conditions.
It will be just the latest victory for a company that has recently convinced government to kill consumer broadband privacy protections, dismantle net neutrality, end an effort to bring competition to the cable box, and is now pushing government to further hamstring regulatory oversight of one of the least competitive markets in America. Last week, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Trump spent much of a full day lavishing praise upon one another, including this bit of heady telecom sector analysis from Donald:
"With Stephenson seated to his right, Trump said AT&T was "like two companies" — "you started, then it was made different by government and now here you are again." The president added that such a reinvention over the years was "not easy to do."
Of course AT&T didn't "re-invent" itself as-so-much as it got blown up by government for being a predatory monopoly, after which it slowly but surely re-assembled itself via a wave of brand acquisitions (SBC, Ameritech, Bellsouth and ultimately the AT&T brand itself). It then lobbied state and federal governments to not only ignore the lack of competition in the broadband market, but to pass laws protecting it from competition. So yes, while that's impressive in and of itself, the end result has been a company with an indisputably vicious history of anti-consumer policies, anti-competitive behavior and outright fraud.
And while AT&T has been caught repeatedly lying about the job and broadband investment benefits of blind deregulation and M&As, that never gets factored in to assessing the credibility of whatever AT&T's pushing today. And it's clearly not going to be a problem for a Trump administration that has already been taking credit for telecom sector jobs it had absolutely nothing to do with. AT&T's merger pitches are always rife with bullshit and bravado on the job creation and broadband expansion front, but with Trump's help, you can expect AT&T to take things to an entirely new level once the deal is formally approved later this year.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, doj, donald trump, fcc, investment, mergers, tax cuts
Companies: at&tCLOSE Exotic V8, advanced features propel most daring GT350 ever. Mark Phelan Detroit Free Press
The 2018 Mustang GT adds Michelin performance tires. (Photo: Ford)
As the weather cools and drivers put away their summer tires and dreams of muscle car glory, Ford and Michelin provide cause for hope: The fastest ever Mustang GT is coming for 2018, thanks to a quick-shifting new transmission and sticky performance tires.
The 2018 Mustang GT will accelerate from zero to 60 m.p.h. in less than 4.0 seconds, the kind of quickness usually associated with super cars like the $119,000 Porsche Carrera GTS and $121,900 all-wheel-drive Jaguar F-type SVR.
The 460-hp, 5.0L V8-powered 2018 Mustang will be in dealerships shortly. Prices start at $35,095. The 10-speed automatic transmission — already available on the F-150 pickup and Raptor sport truck — adds $1,595. The super-sticky Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S summer tires are part of a $3,995 performance package that also includes Brembo six-piston front brake calipers, a Torsen limited-slip rear differential, heavy duty springs, brake rotors and more.
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Michelin PS 4 tires are usually seen on supercars and have staggered widths — the front tires are narrower than the rear. An electronic drag mode that eliminates wheelspin and manages engine rpm is also part of the package that lets the GT hit 60 m.p.h. in less than 4.0 seconds.
Michelin and Ford developed the tire’s materials and tread patterns specifically for the Mustang. Like most high-performance summer tires, they’re not for year-round use. Ford does not recommend using them when the temperature falls below 45 F.
The Pilot 4 S tires will also be available on the 526-hp Mustang GT350, which uses a unique flat-plane crank 5.2L V8. Despite being more powerful and offering the Michelin tires, the GT350 will not be faster than the GT to 60 m.p.h. That’s thanks to the 10-speed automatic transmission, which is faster and more efficient than the GT350’s six-speed manual.
The Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger are locked in a performance battle unlike anything since the 1960s height of muscle car mania. The 840-hp Dodge Demon has bragging rights for absolute power and acceleration, while the Mustang and Camaro slug it out over the best combination of acceleration and handling.
Contact Mark Phelan: [email protected] or 313-222-6731. Follow him on Twitter @mark_phelan.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2x0fUj2“It’s really a disappointment that we’re in this situation,” Mayor Ravenstahl said. “Our colleges and universities are giving less and less while they increase tuition and executive pay and expand their campuses, removing high-value land from the tax rolls. The cost to provide public safety and public works services continues to increase, but our revenue continues to decrease.”
The tax, which would take effect as early as July, would range from about $20 a year for students at cheaper schools like the Community College of Allegheny County to just over $400 for students at the city’s priciest university, Carnegie Mellon.
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As a town-gown clash, the issue pits local taxpayers against mostly out-of-state students. But it is also a struggle between the old Pittsburgh and the new, as the mayor tries to force the city’s youngest residents to support some of its oldest.
Other cities have considered going this route. This spring, for example, Mayor David N. Cicilline of Providence, R.I., proposed a $150-per-semester tax on students at the city’s four private colleges. The State Legislature, however, did not take it up.
And in Boston, Mayor Thomas M. Menino created a task force in January to explore increasing voluntary payments from the city’s universities and hospitals.
“City officials see this as an untapped revenue source, and if Pittsburgh succeeds, I think you will see a lot of other cities immediately move to do the same,” said Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education, a lobbying group for universities. He added that if the Pittsburgh City Council approves the mayor’s proposal, the matter will surely go to the courts.
Students and university officials are not pleased.
The added cost “could prevent prospective students from coming to Carnegie Mellon, and Pittsburgh would be missing out on some of the best talent from around the world,” said an editorial published this month in The Tartan, the student newspaper at Carnegie Mellon.
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Officials at the University of Pittsburgh said they would “vigorously oppose any attempt to impose a service or privilege fee on our undergraduate and graduate students.”
But Mr. Ravenstahl said he was left with no other option.
He said that he asked the universities and other tax-exempt nonprofits to pay $5 million annually to the city, and that in lieu of the tax he would find the other $10 million by dipping into reserves, cutting services and getting Harrisburg to increase the commuter tax rate.
Mr. Ravenstahl said the city currently forgoes about $50 million in real estate taxes from nonprofit institutions.
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The universities rejected his request last week.
In a four-page letter, the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education said it refused to consider payments as long as the mayor continued the threat of a tax that it called divisive, illegal and unenforceable.
The council added that the city’s colleges and universities pay $23 million annually in taxes to the city for payroll, parking, business privileges and any real estate not directly related to their educational missions.
Politically, Mr. Ravenstahl risks few votes in leaning on universities for revenue because college students rarely vote in local elections. And many of the constituencies that supported Mr. Ravenstahl’s re-election in November have been vocally supportive of his tax plan.
“This is a turning point for us,” said Joe King, president of the Pittsburgh firefighters’ union. He said that after Miami-Dade County in Florida, Allegheny County has the second largest number of seniors of any county in the United States and that in his union alone he has 900 retirees and 450 surviving spouses whose pensions need to be financed.
“Without the tax, the fate of those pensions could be in trouble,” he said. “We are not asking young people to carry more than their due. We’re just asking them to pay for what they use.”
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But students say they already do.
“We have jobs in Pittsburgh so we pay taxes on that income, we rent apartments so we pay taxes on that, we have cars here, which provide parking taxes,” said David Gau, an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, adding that he resented the portrayal of students as freeloaders. “We go to a variety of events like symphony, sports games, plays, concerts, and there are amusement taxes on those that produce even more revenue from us.”
“Why try to divert new people from coming here with a college tax?” added Mr. Gau, 21, who is from Kennett Square, Pa. “It’s the furthest thing from fair.”
Chad Ellis, 28, a graduate student in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and a Pittsburgh homeowner, agreed.
“Holding students hostage in negotiations with nonprofits to come up with money to pay for bloated city pension plans is divisive,” he said.A prominent Indian economist believes that bitcoin needs to be regulated in India before it will become a legal currency.
In a Q&A interview with the Economic Times, Dr S.P. Sharma, chief economist at the PHP Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was questioned on whether he thought bitcoin would be accepted legally in the country.
India is one nation that has been pushing a digital payments agenda. As part of the government’s cashless initiative – in light of last November’s demonetisation – there has been ‘notable growth’ in the bitcoin market in India, according to Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister.
This is despite the fact that bitcoin doesn’t have a legal status in India; however, neither is it illegal, says Sharma. It is because of this grey area that the economist has reservations about bitcoin’s legal acceptance in the country.
“Unless the cryptocurrency is properly and comprehensively regulated and monitored by a robust institution, I don’t see bitcoin becoming a legal currency in India,” he added.
The question as to whether India will regulate bitcoin remains unanswered. This is currently an issue that is being debated within the country’s government. If it is regulated it may fall under the remit of country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). However, it could be regulated by the Securities and Exchanges Board of India (SEBI).
Yet, while regulatory oversight has yet to be determined, reports suggest that bitcoin is ‘unlikely to be declared illegal in India.’
Furthermore, the government is even considering its own digital currency, which will function similarly to bitcoin.
Of course, while India appears to be supportive of cryptocurrencies, the longer it takes for authorities to establish a regulatory and legal framework for them, the greater the threat of risks, says Sharma. These include regulatory risks, scalability risks, the risk of hacking and extreme volatility.
“Bitcoin wallets are stored in computers or mobile devices; if those devices get stolen you may permanently lose access to your holdings,” he added. “Further, since it’s not regulated by authorities, you may not be able to report it either.”
He also believes that as demand for bitcoin grows in India, illicit schemes will continue to be set up while stating that investors should be aware of the risks.Hannelore Schmatz (16 February 1940 – 2 October 1979) was a German mountaineer. She collapsed and died as she was returning from summiting Mount Everest via the southern route, the first woman and first German citizen to die on the upper slopes of Everest.[1]
Biography [ edit ]
Schmatz was on an expedition via the South East Ridge route with her husband when she died at 8,300 metres (27,200 ft). Gerhard Schmatz was the expedition leader, 50 years of age at the time and the oldest man to summit Everest. On the same expedition was the American Ray Genet, who also died while descending from the summit. Exhausted from the climb, they had stopped to bivouac as the night approached, despite the fact that their Sherpa guides had urged them not to. Ray Genet died later that night and both the Sherpa and Schmatz were distressed, but decided to continue their descent. At the height of 8,300m Schmatz sat down and said "Water, Water" to her Sherpa and died.[2] Sungdare Sherpa, one of the Sherpa guides, remained with her body, and as a result, lost most of his fingers and toes.[3]
Genet's body ultimately disappeared under the snow, but Schmatz's body was swept further down the mountain.[4]
For years, Schmatz's remains could be seen by anyone attempting to summit Everest by the southern route. Her body was frozen in a sitting position, leaning against her backpack with eyes open and hair blowing in the wind, about 100 metres above Camp IV.[5]
In 1984, police inspector Yogendra Bahadur Thapa and Sherpa Ang Dorje fell to their deaths while trying to recover Schmatz’s body on a Nepalese police expedition.[6][7]
Chris Bonington spotted Schmatz from a distance in 1985, and initially mistook her body for a tent until he got a closer look.[4]
Lene Gammelgaard, the first Scandinavian woman to reach the peak of Everest, quotes the Norwegian mountaineer and expedition leader Arne Næss, Jr. describing his encounter with Schmatz's remains, in her book Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy (1999), which recounts her own 1996 expedition.[8]
The wind eventually blew Schmatz's remains over the edge and down Kangshung Face.[9]
See also [ edit ]All those fighting for women’s liberation are aware that sexual assault and domestic violence are among the most damaging manifestations of women’s oppression, the world over—they are inextricably linked to women’s low social status and the sexual objectification and dehumanization of women’s bodies. Yet legal and law enforcement systems, university administrators, and so-called “conventional wisdom” in capitalist society are all predisposed to disbelieving women when they say they have been raped or sexually assaulted. In contrast, feminists and socialists are predisposed to believing women who make accusations of rape and sexual assault.
This article examines the phenomenon of sexual assault from a Marxist perspective—that is, analyzed in the context of capitalist social relations. Like imperialism and war, oppression is a necessary byproduct of the rule of capital. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of surplus value; the various forms of oppression (such as sexism, racism, and homophobia) play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority, on a global scale. This approach allows Marxists to understand not only the root causes of oppression but also which strategies can most effectively combat it.
To be sure, sexual assault is not inflicted by “the system” as a whole, but by individual people. Nevertheless, women’s oppression does not originate with individual people—it stems from institutional inequality that is organized from above, in the traditional family structure, the legal system, and other social structures that define women as second-class citizens. It therefore can be ended at the individual or personal level only if we do away with the capitalist system.
Likewise, Marxists understand that police and other law enforcement agencies function as an armed wing of the capitalist state, enforcing laws that maintain class and social inequality. The prevalence of police terror against unarmed Black men and boys demonstrates the role of the police all too clearly. On this basis, we know that increasing police power can never be the remedy for oppression, including rape and sexual assault—as feminist legal scholar Aya Gruber argued after she examined FBI reports of the 8 percent of reported rapes in 1997 that police had determined to be “unfounded or false.” Gruber notes that “‘Unfounded’ does not mean ‘false,’ but only that police decided the case was not pursuable, a decision that itself could be influenced by gender stereotypes.” She goes on to quote legal scholar Michelle J. Anderson:
Police may think a rape claim is false or unfounded if the victim had a prior relationship with the attacker, used drugs or alcohol at the time of the attack, lacked visible signs of injury, delayed notifying police, did not have a rape exam, blames herself for the rape, or did not immediately conceive of the assault as a rape.1
Police thus play an outsized role in determining whether a reported rape even enters the judicial process.
Rape and the US legal system: when “no” means “yes”
In 1927, the US Justice Department defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” That definition was not revised until 2012, when it announced a sweeping change in the definition: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
The press release announcing this change in definition acknowledged that until 2012, “the Department of Justice thus included only forcible male penile penetration of a female vagina and excluded oral and anal penetration; rape of males; penetration of the vagina and anus with an object or body part other than the penis; rape of females by females; and non-forcible rape.” Because “the definition is used by the FBI to collect information from local law enforcement agencies about reported rapes,” the Justice Department’s own statistics on rape and sexual assault are thus unreliable in most respects prior to 2012.2
In the twentieth century, the legal system espoused standards of “proof” that assumed women claim to say “no” when they actually mean “yes.” The Yale Law Journal argued in 1952:
When her behavior looks like resistance although her attitude is one of consent, injustice may be done the man by the woman’s subsequent accusation. Many women, for example, require as a part of preliminary “love play” aggressive overtures by the man. Often their erotic pleasure may be enhanced by, or even depend upon, an accompanying physical struggle. The “love bite” is a common, if mild, sign of the aggressive component in the sex act. And the tangible signs of struggle may survive to support a subsequent accusation by the woman.3
Nearly fifteen years later, the same approach remained intact. As the Stanford Law Review claimed in 1966:
Although a woman may desire sexual intercourse, it is customary for her to say, “no, no, no” (although meaning “yes, yes, yes”) and to expect the male to be the aggressor.... It is always difficult in rape cases to determine whether the female really meant “no.”... The problem of determining what the female “really meant” is compounded when, in fact, the female had no clearly determined attitude—that is, her attitude was one of ambivalence.... Furthermore, a woman may note a man’s brutal nature and be attracted to him rather than repulsed.4
The women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s challenged these assumptions. Yet legal and law enforcement opinion continues to embrace the same myths from a century ago: that “real” rape occurs only when a stranger jumps out of the bushes, not on dates or between acquaintances or family members; that women’s sexual assault claims should be distrusted because women often “ask for it” by dressing certain ways, flirting, or sending nonverbal signals that mean “yes” even if they say “no”; that women cannot be believed unless they can provide convincing evidence that they physically “resisted”; that women whose sexual histories show they have previously had sexual intercourse must be considered “promiscuous” and therefore untrustworthy; and the list goes on and on.
On January 24, 2011, Toronto police constable Michael Sanguinetti unwittingly demonstrated how little law-enforcement opinion has changed in recent decades when he advised female students, at a forum on campus safety, “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this—however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”5
This attitude, like those described above, is drenched in sexism and represents just part of a substantial body of legal and law enforcement opinions dismissing women’s claims of sexual assault with derision and contempt, especially if the accuser and the accused were not strangers—even though, as we now know, such situations comprise the vast majority of rapes.
What we now call “marital” or “spousal rape” did not exist within the US legal system until 1975. Until then, every state had a “marital exemption” that allowed a husband to legally force sexual intercourse upon his wife, presumably because this was considered a husband’s “right” to demand and a wife’s “duty” to accept. By 1993, thanks to the 1970s-era women’s movement, all fifty states and the District of Columbia had passed laws criminalizing marital rape. However, married women still find it very difficult to prosecute their husbands for rape due to varying state laws that require a higher standard of “proof” (such as demonstrating injuries suffered); courts also tend to be far less punitive in such cases than in stranger rapes.6
Thus, the problem extends far beyond the legal and law enforcement systems. The notion that “she was asking for it” is the all-too-common reaction to women’s accusations of rape and sexual assault, especially in situations of “acquaintance rape” or “date rape.” While reactionary legal codes and practices do not automatically reproduce themselves in popular culture, history has shown that in the absence of a broad-based opposition, so-called “conventional wisdom” tends to reflect the prejudices dished out by legal and other societal “experts.” This is certainly the case at high schools and on college campuses, where the concentration of young people makes date rape a more common occurrence than in the population at large.
Colleges and universities systematically cover up rape accusations—while callously mistreating young women who gather the courage to come forward to make them.7 The age of social media has brought about yet another way to rape and demean high school and college-aged women: groups of young men gang-rape young women at parties and then post pictures of the attacks on social media, as in the 2012 Steubenville, Ohio rape case.
Thus, after being raped, these same women suffer the humiliation of being shamed and called “sluts” by their peers—which, on a number of recent occasions, has led to suicide.8
The racial component of rape
It is not the case, however, that legal and law enforcement systems treat all sexual assault complaints equally. Rape has had a toxic racial component in the United States since the time of slavery, as a key weapon in maintaining the system of white supremacy. Both Black women and Black men have been its victims; as legal scholar Susan Estrich notes, “Between 1930 and 1967, 89 percent of the men executed for rape were Black.”9
In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis argues that rape is “an essential dimension of the social relations between slave master and slave,” in which white masters routinely raped enslaved Black women.10 She describes rape as “a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist and, in the process, to demoralize their men.”11 The institutionalized rape of Black women survived the abolition of slavery and took on its modern form: “Group rape, perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations of the post–Civil War period, became an uncamouflaged political weapon in the drive to thwart the movement for Black equality.”12
Davis goes on to argue that “the fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous.... Viewed as ‘loose women’ and whores, Black women’s cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy.”13 Often, the same Southern racists who systematically lynched Black men in the name of protecting the “virtue” of white women were also systematically raping Black women, as Danielle L. McGuire shows in her important book At the Dark End of the Street. As McGuire argues, “Decades before radical feminists in the women’s movement urged rape survivors to ‘speak out,’ African American women’s public protests galvanized local, national, and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity.” 14
One of the most famous examples of the “Black man as rapist” stereotype is the 1931 case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men between the ages of thirteen and nineteen who were accused of raping two young white women on a freight train in Alabama. A lynch mob gathered outside the jail where they were held. All but the youngest, Roy Wright, were quickly found guilty by all-white juries and sentenced to death. Even after one of the women, Ruby Bates, recanted her rape accusation and appeared as a witness for the defense—arguing that the women had had consensual sex on the train with white men—the court battles continued. The Communist Party campaigned on their behalf for many years—with Ruby Bates speaking publicly on their innocence. All but two of the accused served time in prison. Andy Wright, the last remaining prisoner of the group, was not released on parole until 1950. Finally, on November 21, 2013—eighty-two years after they were first arrested—the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue posthumous pardons to the three Scottsboro Boys who had not yet been pardoned or had their convictions dropped.
This history is not a relic of the past. The race of both accuser and accused continues to strongly influence the outcomes of rape accusations, and a substantial number of inmates have been exonerated after being convicted of false rape charges and serving years or decades in prison. Author Brandon Garrett examined the first 250 DNA exonerations in the United States—and found that 62 percent were Black inmates. When combined with DNA exonerations of Latino prisoners, the rate went up to 70 percent. In all, Garrett discovered that 89 percent of prisoners exonerated had been convicted of sex offenses: 68 percent of cases were rape convictions and an additional 21 percent were rape/murder convictions.15 Unlike the Justice Department’s statistics, exoneration studies are rooted in empirical reality rather than supposition.
In 2012, a report by researchers from the National Registry of Exonerations estimated that the number of exonerated prisoners numbered roughly two thousand, although that number is being updated all the time. It also disclosed that, of the exonerated inmates in their database, “93 percent are men, 7 percent women; nearly 50 percent are black, 38 percent white, 11 percent Hispanic and 2 percent Native American or Asian; 48 percent had been falsely convicted of homicides, 35 percent of sexual assaults (23 percent adult, 12 percent child), five percent robberies, five percent other violent crimes, and seven percent drug, white-collar and other non-violent crimes.” The researchers also reported that “in adult rape cases... false convictions were typically based on eyewitness mistakes, ‘more often than not, mistakes by white victims falsely identifying black defendants.’”16
Estrich notes that the difficult-to-meet burden of proof that prevents white men from being convicted of rape appears to vanish when the accused is Black: “The stranger (particularly the black stranger engaging in intercourse with the white woman), is at one end of the spectrum, in which no resistance is required” for prosecutors to win a rape conviction, adding, “White women are not required to resist black men, but black women are.”17
Racial, ethnic, and religious oppression: necessary features of global capitalism
Racism is endemic to the United States not only due to its history of slavery. Indeed, sustained discrimination against immigrant groups has played a prominent role, forcing many Latin Americans and Asians into low-wage labor. More recently—and especially since the onset of the “War on Terror” in 2001—Arabs and Muslims have been targeted for repression and stereotyped as innately predisposed to violence and the oppression of women. Such propaganda has been all too successful in depicting Muslim men as unredeemable terrorists and Muslim women as their willing and subservient accomplices.
Racial, ethnic, and religious oppression are all necessary features of capitalism on a global scale—with ramifications far beyond US borders. As Tithi Bhattacharya, author of “Explaining Gender Violence in the Neoliberal Era,” (ISR 91) comments,
In August of this year, a young Hindu woman in the Sarawa village in India claimed that a group of Muslim men had gang-raped her and then and one of them had forcibly converted her to Islam and married her. Given the context of a recent Narendra Modi victory, this allegation immediately fuelled the flames of ethnic tension and nearly led to riots with armed Hindu gangs hunting down Muslim “rapists” to protect the virtue of “pure” Hindu women. Last week, the young woman retracted her claim and revealed how her rightwing anti-Muslim family had forced her to bring rape charges because in reality she was in love with one of the accused.18
Bhattacharya adds, “Since the colonial period in India, the figure of the Muslim male as ‘rapist’ has been in sustained usage by the Hindu Right to whip up violence against Muslim communities who are a minority in India. Scholars have shown how a rhetoric of ‘defilement’ is frequently used to paint Muslim minorities’ relationship with the Indian body politic—Muslims have ‘raped’ or are hell-bent on ‘raping’ India.”19
Likewise, Bhattacharya notes,
A similar sinister figure of the Muslim male “rapist” is part of the dehumanizing trope created by Zionists in the context of the continued violence of Israel against Palestinians. Ali Abunimah correctly situates this phenomenon to share key features with US racism. The “rape libel,” writes Abunimah, “is one of the worst that can be leveled against any group of people, for it is often a justification for dehumanization and organized violence.” He further points out that such a libel “was notoriously used to justify lynchings of black men in the southern United States during the Jim Crow era. But now the defamatory stereotype of the ‘black brute’ intent on raping white women is being joined by the racialized Muslim brute.”20
US women’s liberationists and the contradictions of rape awareness
The generation of 1960s-era women’s liberationists successfully brought the issue of rape to the nation’s attention. Unfortunately, white separatist-feminists such as Susan Brownmiller conceived of rape as a biologically determined phenomenon. As Brownmiller argued,
When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it.... Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.21
In defining rape in purely male-female terms, Brownmiller ignored the profound impact of racism and white supremacy, which led her to draw racist conclusions. Brownmiller uses the case of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Jim Crow Mississippi. Brownmiller describes Till and his killer as sharing power over a “white woman,” using stereotypes that Angela Davis calls “the resuscitation of the old racist myth of the Black rapist.”22 Brownmiller’s own words were, “Rarely has one single case exposed so clearly as Till’s the underlying group male antagonisms over access to women.... Emmett Till was going to show his black buddies that he, and by inference, they could get a white woman and Carolyn Bryant was the nearest convenient object. In concrete terms, the accessibility of all white women was on review.”23
As noted above, Black feminists such as Davis criticized Brownmiller’s racist conclusions scathingly, but their criticisms were largely ignored by the political mainstream—and even by many liberal feminists. Because of the centrality of racism in the United States historically, adopting an intersectional approach—which integrates race, class, and gender oppression—is much more appropriate than treating rape as purely a “women’s issue.”
Nevertheless, the women’s liberationists of the 1970s did manage to gain mass recognition that rape is a result of women’s oppression and that it is far more common than had previously been acknowledged. Brownmiller’s book was named one of the ten best books of 1975 by the New York Times Book Review, while TIME named Brownmiller one of its “Women of the Year.”
By the 1980s, liberal feminists were beginning to succeed in challenging the prevailing myth that “real rape” necessarily involves two strangers. In 1982, Ms. published an article arguing that “date rape” or “acquaintance rape” was far more common than rape committed by strangers. The response from readers was so enthusiastic that Ms. sponsored an extensive study of rape directed by psychologist Mary P. Kos, that surveyed 6,100 undergraduate students from thirty-two college campuses across the United States. The study, published in the 1988 book I Never Called it Rape, finally provided the evidence: one in four women students surveyed “had an experience that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape.” 24 The publication of this report gave confidence to campus feminists to begin organizing against date and acquaintance rape—a struggle that continues today. Although the right wing has continued to agitate against what it describes as so-called “victim feminism,” this has proved a center of struggle for women students on college campuses.
Our evolving understanding of sexual assault
But our understanding of the phenomenon of sexual assault has continued to evolve since the start of the twenty-first century. Recent studies have unveiled numerous problems with previous statistical analyses. Researchers have begun to document that sexual assault is far more widespread than previously acknowledged—and that most prior studies drew conclusions based on unreliable data and/or outdated assumptions. The following list outlines numerous problems with previous sexual assault statistics:
1. The percentage of rapes and sexual assaults reported to police is so low that most statistical studies base their conclusions on conjecture rather than fact.
Since the majority (and perhaps the vast majority) of sexual assaults are never reported to police, Gruber argues, “As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown.”25
2. Relying on law enforcement statistics means that researchers vastly underestimate the occurrence of sexual assaults.
As Soraya Chemaly argued in the Nation in June 2014,
Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.... After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period. That’s more than 1 million rapes.26
In addition, though law enforcement agencies rarely acknowledge it, police themselves engage in domestic violence and sexual misconduct. According to the National Center for Women and Policing, “at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence”—based on self-reporting by police officers.27 Moreover, as Zoë Carpenter reported in the Nation in August 2014,
There are many opportunities for someone, if they were a predator, to engage in crimes of sexual violence that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do because of the power and authority they have [as a police officer].... Researchers have to rely on arrest reports and press accounts, which leave out unreported or unprosecuted cases. But even that limited evidence suggests sexual assault is a significant issue in police forces.... According to the Cato Institute, more than 9 percent of reports of police misconduct in 2010 involved sexual abuse, making it the second-most reported form of misconduct, after the use of excessive force.28
3. Until quite recently, sexual assaults of men have been systematically underestimated.
The assumptions that sexual-assault victims are overwhelmingly female and that nearly all rapists are male have guided the vast majority of previously available research. That assumption meant that researchers did not ask the kinds of questions or survey the populations that might show otherwise.
Thus, in 1997, the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 91 percent of rape victims are female and 9 percent are male, and that 99 percent of arrestees for rape are male.29 But as noted above, the FBI acknowledged in 2012 that its previously narrow definition of sexual assault—which defined rape as a crime committed only against women—has resulted in unreliable statistics, since it has not properly documented police records of sexual assaults that did not fit this restrictive definition.Moreover, most previous research on sexual assault (including that conducted by the Department of Justice and the CDC) did not include research on transgender people, while sexual assault among prisoners was systematically undercounted. Likewise, all those not living in households (the homeless, immigrants held in detention centers, people with disabilities in a variety of institutional settings, people in nursing homes, etc.) went either uncounted or greatly undercounted.30
Researchers have only recently begun to try to estimate the occurrence of male sexual assault. In June of this year, legal scholars Lara Stemple and Ilan H. Meyer published the results of their exhaustive two-year study in the American Journal of Public Health, which found “widespread sexual victimization among men in the United States.” This research is not grounded in anti-feminist “men’s rights” principles. On the contrary, as they explain, their groundbreaking research is guided by explicitly “feminist principles that emphasize |
this: What do the latest U.S. jobs numbers means for the Federal Reserve and its huge stimulus program?
The U.S. central bank has indicated it could soon begin to pull back from its monthly bond-buying program known as quantitative easing, or QE, which could come as early as this month.
But the Fed's policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, is concerned over the elevated level of unemployment, and this will play a big role in its decision.
The best guess, according to some economists today, is that today's jobs report won't change the timeline.
"Our best guess is that the cumulative evidence of improvement over the past year will convince a majority of officials that tapering should begin at the next FOMC meeting in another couple of weeks' time, but we're not going to pretend this is a certainty," said Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics in Toronto.
"Over all, with other indicators like initial jobless claims pointing to a strengthening labour market and the activity surveys indicating a pick-up in economic growth, we still expect the Fed to go ahead with the taper later this month.
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The article in Slate titled CPI Unchained by Matthew Yglesias must be read and comprehended by every American that may possibly be depending on receiving Social Security. While the politicians are claiming that the battle over the fiscal cliff will not involve Social Security, every American citizen will need to remain vigilant.
It is easy to manipulate a program as big as Social Security in forms that are not immediately evident. In his piece Mr. Yglesias details some shenanigans that both Republican and Democratic politicians seem to support. Specifically it involves indexing Social Security to inflation differently.
Mr. Yglesias explains it this way.
The way the index works is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics sends its minions out through the country to find out what things cost. They write this down, and the bureau notes the change over time. Then it weights the change in the price of different things according to how large a share they are in the typical consumer’s overall basket of purchases. An increase in the price of cars is a bigger deal than an increase in the price of violins because the average American spends much more on cars than on violins. The bureau also adds in some fancy math and a bit of hand-waving to try to account for changes in the quality of goods and the arrival of whole new products. The idea is to track the prices of a constant basket of goods over time. “Chaining” the index means taking a slightly broader view of how the baskets should work in order to account for switching behavior. One reason people buy pork, for example, is that it’s cheaper than beef. But so is chicken. So if pork prices rise, price-sensitive shoppers will probably shift and buy less pork and more chicken. In other words, the price of pork went up, but the overall impact on meat prices is smaller than a naïve look at the movement in pork prices would suggest.
One must realize that over the years this type of indexing progressively make social security recipients poorer and poorer. Not only does it affect current recipients, but future recipients as their starting base would have started from a declined position, than had Social Security kept pace with real inflation.
One should note that Social Security is an entitlement that most have worked for. It is a pact between workers and society. One works during their most productive years knowing that they will receive a living stipend that they paid for based on their level of income.
Whenever America has “wanted” to go to wars to protect mostly the interests of the Plutocracy, mostly middle class, and poor Americans have bled and died to fight these wars. Middle class America has paid for the country’s infrastructure and military thorough regressive taxes, low wages, and the purchase of overpriced products. Middle class America has afforded the wealthy their wealth and security.
Dependable Social Security is the least that must be afforded to American retirees. They have earned it. While it is true that the baby boom will put a strain on Social Security, that strain is temporary and must be amortized over a generation.
Currently the wealthy pays no Social Security taxes over $110,000 of their income. This means the person who makes $110,000 pays the same amount of social security as that person that makes $100 million. This is patently unfair and should be where the solution to the Social Security shortfall starts. While there is a fallacy that there are not enough rich people to make up the shortfall, real arithmetic makes that the lie that generally goes un-refuted in the mainstream med The top 20% of Americans make over 50% of all income, the top 40% almost 75% of the income.
One should not believe that there is some attempt to soak the rich. The very hardworking middle class citizen is simply being made poor by the systematic pilfering through various methods. Indexing Social Security as described above removes the duty of those that have not paid their fair share into it and whose wealth because of compound growth, have extracted more capital from society consummate with their work or deeds. Social Security is an entitlement that must remain unchanged.
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Within the canon of snowboarding few protagonists have been as prolific, inspiring, and influential as Terje Haakonsen. Both on the snow and off, Haakon has strived to manifest change through action. Whether conjuring new dimensions of board control in the middle of a backcountry line or steering the collective conversation towards riders having more control of our sport, Terje leads by example. Building larger halfpipes, creating the World Snowboard Tour, bending the back elbow on banked turns, boosting thirty-feet above the deck of a quarterpipe, chucking backside rodeo 720’s, putting a drawing of Jeff Brushie’s dog peeing himself on a pro model topsheet, calling the President of the IOC a Nazi sympathizing fascist, these are just some of the things Terje did first and did better than anyone else. SNOWBOARDER was graced with a rare chance to catch up with “The Sprocking Cat” while he was on a mid-winter respite in Hawaii to discuss Subjekt: Haakonsen, the revamped Arctic Challenge, the IOC, and other topics.
For those who don’t remember or weren’t even riding yet, what were your goals for the event when you created The Arctic Challenge a decade and a half ago?
There were a few. I wanted to have the pipes bigger. I thought it was safer and smoother with bigger transitions. In small pipes I would have too much speed for the walls and I would fly out of the pipe or pop into the flats. I wanted to present snowboarding on TV how we the riders wanted it to look and show what we actually could do. I also wanted to have other things to do when we were not riding the pipe, like good freeriding. We built a skateboard ramp, and there was fishing and surfing to be done—basically, having and showing a good experience on and off of the snow. Also the food we eat is important to the quality. We had jam sessions at the first ones, a format most guys like except for live TV. So we have been compromising. It seems like snowboarders always have to compromise for something. The lifestyle stuff you need a good location for, so we haven't done the fishing and surfing since we are no longer holding The Arctic Challenge in Northern Norway.
What have been some of the highlights of The Arctic Challenge over the years?
I guess there has been some highlights if we not only talk about riding. The years we were up north had all kinds of "highlights." The boat rides in storms, some good rock concerts, midnight sun, surfing, and the seal lasagna. Riding wise, I think our first halfpipe and quarterpipe were stand outs with Stamsund/Lofoten as a location. With sun the whole week, we had some great sessions just experimenting really. In 2001, we made out first quarterpipe in the ski-jumping stadium at Homekollen. The riding on that one was almost just as good as we see now. Heiki had the highest air: 9.3 meters. Gian Simmen did a backside five, six-seven meters out. Fourteen-year-old Shaun White was going bigger than most. He also won his first pro event ever in the pipe there, in front of me and Danny Kass. Did I mention the whale burgers? In 2004 in Tromsø, Travis Rice and Andy Finch had a quarterpipe battle that upped the anti on the tricks and height. Travis had so many variations and Andy sent it high during that jam session. We had some scary moments too, though. In 2006, the quarter was so icy and the tranny was too tight, so we had cracked helmets and sent more than a few to the hospital. Only highlight that year was the urban city comp we put on because Oslo was full of snow. In 2007 and 2008 we had good quarters and good riding. Sunny Midtstuen and Holmekollen arena was good years. In the 2008 quarterpipe we had an eight-man final where only one guy didn't do tricks over six meters high. I think it's good when the whole pack have the chance to make top three. Kevin Pearce won his second Arctic quarterpipe back-to-back. Some years the weather just made it so difficult to organize and to ride at the level we wanted to. I think our second slopestyle was a good one. We had girls again and there was some drama about the course, but I think they were all proud when it was done because they rode good in a course that was not just a walk in the park. We have, of course, failed on more than one thing, but I think our experiment has brought new ides for shaping, judging, and how you can hold an event.
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Describe how the latest incarnation of The Arctic Challenge will be different than past events?
Well, this one will be more like our pilot year in 1999. No formal competition, but different sessions where we will have winners. I hope when the riders are there we can discus and talk about the future of transition competitions. I always try to make the riders have a say in the competition, for their own safety and for the outlook on TV. They are the ones that are on TV and it is their sport that gets presented. This year, like a few others years, we didn't have the sponsors to have slopestyle and quarterpipe. So, we are doing the pipe and we think the pipe needs new life. It has been the golden run format for so many years and that's why we just see back-to-back flipping and not a freestyle session with creativity and with variations. Also, when all the pipes are always the same, it is just tailored for those few guys to practice their golden run. They usually know what place they could get with their run before even showing up! So, we want to get the guys together and discuss what could be done better. We will work together with SPT make a pipe with hip entries and a few more elements than a stock pipe. It will be similar to the Danny Davis Peace Pipe project. There are actually more than a few guys out there that think things can be different. Just look at skating, it's always changing. We don't have a solution for what is best and we don't think there is one perfect format. But, we believe this could get more guys back to the pipe and we would see more creative riding and different winners. We will see more variation on tricks and get the sessions to be more impulsive.
What are the dates and location? Can you tell us what the venue and setup will be like?
We are going to have it during the Oslo Winter Festival, which has lot of different things happening on snow, like the Snowsk8 Boardercross World Championships, because we can. There will be a big air event hosted by the Norwegian Federation. It's going be from the 13th to the 15th of March. We will session everyday and have a few competitions on the 16th. Oslo Winter Park has a great pipe set up with a lift and it's tucked away from wind. It is maybe a little short, but SPT has been making a really good pipe there the two last years and the riders have been coming back and staying longer to ride the beast.
Besides Danny Davis and Arthur Longo who are some other riders people can expect to see at the 2014 Arctic Challenge?
From what I know today, Ben Ferguson, Markus Keller, and Iouri Podladtchikov are confirmed. The Nippon crew with Kazuhiro Kokubo, Ayumu Hirano, and Taku Hiraoka got invites. Really hope Ayumu doesn't have to go back to school that week. We are going to call Scotty Lago today. I'm actually writing Shaun White again today. He has been invited to every Arctic Challenge and it would be great to have a guy that rides pipe that well there. That guy has got some incredible board skills and it sucks to see him not embrace the stuff that got him to where he is today. A lot of people would be stoked to see him back in the mix. I am hoping to get a few guys that don't really focus on pipe that much, but they love riding and riding anything. Riders like Mark McMorris and Staale Sandbech are two really good snowboarders, not just slopestylers. I think Sage is on the list too. I'm out travelling so I'm not 100% updated on the list. I will be tomorrow though.
When was the last time you watched Subjekt: Haakonsen? What did you think of it?
I'm not sure. It has been a while. I still think the music is good and Dave and Wooly did an amazing job. Most of the kickers and airs are pretty small, but the freeriding is free. I think there is only one park jump in it and by that I mean no park jumps in the backcountry either.
Do you ever wish you hadn’t doubled up the switch frontside inverts in your full handplant halfpipe run?
I guess for perfect hand plant run I should have done a phillip 66 and McEgg at the end. I did two runs, I think. The first one I made it to the third hit and second one I guess I failed when I did the switch invert on the wall and not the coping, so then I had to do the switch invert again. It was a small pipe with fast snow. It's not easy to keep up the speed when it's back-to-back plants. I love handplants though. Do you?
Subjekt set the archetype for future biopics like Jake Blauvelt’s Naturally, Horgasm and The White Album yet is still regarded as the best one ever. Why do you think it holds up so strong and is still inspiring and entertaining eighteen years later?
Not sure. You should ask someone else. If I have to guess I think its the freeriding and slashing and hitting everything even if it's not the perfect jump. And like I said, Wooly and Seoane put some good tunes and a good feel to it.
Can you recall how many days you actually spent with the camera out filming with Dave Seoane for Subjekt?
I'm sure we could get close to a right number if we go through the trips. We did quite few trips and just like today, you score or you don't get shit. And back then 16mm or super 8 films would turn to shit or get lost (laughs). But that didn't matter Wooly said, because only we would know.
So is there a lot of unseen footage that is buried in a box somewhere?
There are a lot of DV tapes for sure, everything but riding on those. It's going to be a good laugh to go through them one day. Riding shots, there are a few, but very little. Nothing incredible, that's for sure.
How much easier is it to film today now that everything is digital as opposed to film?
I think it's harder and it takes a lot more work. Digital is good, because you can see what you got right away and perfect it. But now the guys have all kinds of rigs that come with the camera. And of course the riding level is up. We are also so exposed to action sports now, that it takes a lot more to get people exited or stoked.
Have you ever thought about collaborating with Dave Seoane on a follow up to Subjekt Haakonsen and Haakon Faktor?
It has been in our conversations, but nothing is planned. I was not too stoked on Faktor, so it would be cool to make the third one.
What is your opinion of how snowboarding was organized, portrayed and publicized at the Sochi Olympics?
I didn't see the slopestyle, but I heard the guys showed a good picture of competition snowboarding. It was good to see that not every national team had their same skiing suit on. Everybody can do an event. You can hire folks that know a lot about snowboarding. But when they don't include the athletes there will be more things done wrong. And the pipe, the filming was actually better this time. But having no spectators on the sidelines really takes the atmosphere out of the pipe event. Judging is hard, but I think there were obvious mistakes in both events from what I heard.
How do you feel when your personal Olympic stance is brought up in relation to how today’s riders react to similar challenges so many years later?
Sixteen years later I get the same questions. Nothing has changed for the better and everybody knows more about what is going on. So it's funny to see all these riders, coaches, managers, companies and core media still bend over like this is the biggest thing that they don't want to miss. It is a contest that actually messed up their own bread and butter. It's not hard to understand that they are the cream of the cake, if you don't have the cream you don't have the event. I hoped the top cream would start telling them who it should be and not let guys that don't do our sport or do skiing tell them how to do snowboarding. The Olympics is a good window for any sport, no question about it, but it's OK to have some values. Without the riders there is no Olympics. The riders have the power Everybody knows that IOC takes profit before values.
Tell us about setting the fastest time at this years Mt. Baker Banked Slalom switch and why didn’t you win the main event with that time?
I think they messed up my qualification time with my fakie run time at the prize giving and winning qualifications doesn't mean anything. I fell both of my runs on the final day and you don't win then.Married! Jodie Foster ties the knot with Ellen DeGeneres' ex-girlfriend Alexandra Hedison in secret ceremony after having dated for less than a year
Jodie Foster is a married woman.
The 51-year-old actress has wed her girlfriend of less than one year, 44-year-old Alexandra Hedison, the star's rep confirmed to MailOnline.
The couple said their vows 'over the weekend,' according to E Online. 'They're totally in love,' a source added.
The brunette photographer is the ex-girlfriend of Ellen DeGeneres.
Scroll down for video
Congratulations: Foster and Hedison, pictured in October, wed in a secret ceremony over the weekend, her rep confirmed to MailOnline on Wednesday In March the Elysium star and her girlfriend were spotted with wedding bands on their ring fingers.
While Alexandra's ring was evident as she strolled along with her arm around her partner in Beverly Hills, Jodie's band was visible later in the day as she dropped her car off at body shop.
Both rings were simple gold bands.
In love: Foster showed off what looked like a wedding ring in March, just after her girlfriend displayed her own gold band
Committed: Jodie's ring on her left hand was evident as she ran errands
The couple looked very content as they strolled along having gone for a quick shopping trip at Barneys New York.
Alexandra slung her arm over Jodie's shoulder as they enjoyed a quiet moment together.
And later in the day, Jodie, who was dressed down in a T-shirt and yoga pants, showed off her own band as she dropped her car off at a body shop in LA. Before Alexandra, Jodie had been in a 20 year relationship with female producer Cydney Bernard. They split in 2008. They have two sons together: Charles, aged 15, and Kit, aged 13.
Alexandra dated Ellen for over three years with their relationship ending in 2004, reportedly because the Oscar host met actress Portia de Rossi, who she has since wed.
Foster came out as gay during an acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards in 2013.
'This is not going to be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the stone age – in those very quaint days when a fragile girl would open up to trusted friends and family and coworkers and then gradually proudly to everyone who knew her,' she said during the awards show.Men’s Rights Activists, and anti-feminists generally, are forever warning anyone who will listen that excessive feminism could, any day now, bring about the end of western civilization itself.
This is not a terribly new or original idea. And a post on Nazified pickup artist blog Chateau Heartiste today reminds us just how old and unoriginal this notion is.
The proprietor of that blog, James “Heartiste” Weidmann, brings his readers’ attention to a lengthy quotation from a 1911 book by a fellow named Octavius Beale.
[U]nreasonable demands for exaggerated “rights ” of women will always find a limit in the fact that the majority of men will constantly prefer for wives those who do not claim such rights, but who rather seek their happiness in cultivating and developing their specially feminine virtues and attributes, apart from any aim at equality with men.
Take that, feminist cat ladies with no husbands!
These attributes will also therefore be preferably inherited, whilst the extreme tendencies of the women’s rights movement will usually not come into heredity, but will constantly tend to die out.
Well, he was half right. Feminism did die out, for a time, but then it came back.
Notwithstanding, should woman-rule —contrary to all expectations— become so strong in any single State that it will be able to enforce all its demands, even the most extreme, that result could only be possible where the men are completely degenerated.
Degenerated, huh? Can you see where this is going?
Such a nation would soon be supplanted and dissolved by healthier peoples, who might, perhaps, stand on a lower scale of culture.
I believe he is referring to what the Nazis of today like to call “white genocide.” Back in 1911, Beale called it “Racial Decay” — which was in fact the title of his book.
Amazing how quickly and easily Beale slid from antifeminism to white supremacy. Just as so many antifeminists do today.
Heartiste follows up Beale’s dire, racist warning with a dire, racist warning of his own.
After declaring “equalism” to be “a corruption of civilized man’s soul,” he tries his best to rally the troops in defense of their white “tribe.”
[F]emcuntery will only achieve wrecking power in a nation of degenerated men unable and unwilling to act to preserve their culture and protect their tribe. Women are followers and will follow their nation right into the abyss if it guarantees their social standing among peers; as I’ve been saying, it’ll take shitlord men with big balls to bring their women to heel and their nation back to greatness.
Heartiste, seriously, no one wants to hear about your balls.
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Like this: Like Loading...For the last five years or so, we have listed out some of the great Black Friday shopping deals our sponsors have. This year we are excited to see more manufacturers relax the MAP pricing and allow their retail partners offer great products at great prices. While there are plenty of other merchants and vendors with great deals, we wanted to say “Thanks!” to our wonderful sponsors who help keep the lights on, the servers running and allow us to focus on sharing all the great reefing stories from around the globe. So please visit our sponsors pages and tell them Reef Builders sent you.
Neptune Systems – Typically it is stores and online merchants that have Black Friday deals, but Neptune Systems has decided to join the action by lowering MAP pricing for the shopping rush. All of Neptune’s resellers have the option to sell at 10% off their entire product line from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. So, if you have been thinking about a grabbing an Apex or more accessories for the one you already have, you have four days to make it happen! Most of the online stores will be participating including BRS, Marine Depot, Aquarium Specialty, Premium Aquatics, and more.
Bulk Reef Supply – As usual, Bulk Reef Supply is really making Black Friday fun by starting early, rolling out daily doorbusters and even launching YouTube video to share the daily deals. They are offering 30% off or more on lots of door busters and having some great site-wide deals. In addition to this, you can get 15% off Vertex Aquaristik products, 10% off Reef Octopus, 10% off select Maxspect lights. Make sure you check out the site every day for deals galore.
Aquarium Specialty is going all in for this holiday shopping season with an across-the-board 16% discount on everything in stock. From through December 1, Aquarium Specialty will give you not 10, not 15, but 16% discount on orders using the coupon code “thanks” and this handy little video further explains the Black Friday deals you can find at Aquarium Specialty. Additionally some specialty aquarium items are enjoying bigger price cuts like 25% off Cobalt Neotherm heaters bringing every size under $50, 30% super high porosity CerMedia and 20% off both models of the Vertex Libra dosing pumps.
LEDgroupbuy – For all of you DIYers, there are some great deals over at LEDgroupbuy.com because they have marked everything 20% off. Looking for some serious LED goodness? How about the MakersLED 5up Professional Driver or the 70w Lumia 5.2 you have been eyeing? Even the high CRI 130W CREE CXA3590 is available at this discount. Make sure to scour the entire site and use the coupon code blackfriday2014 at checkout to get the 20% off deal. Although the deal will end on Dec 1 at 11:59PM EST, make sure to get in early as it is first come, first serve on all stock while supplies last.
EcoTech Marine – Who says EcoTech Marine products are never on sale? For the Black Friday shopping weekend, EcoTech Marine is offering some great deals. Take 15% off the EcoTech Marine Vortech MP10 or MP10W or 15% off the EcoTech Radion XR-15 models like the XR-15 FW or XR-15w. Check out your favorite EcoTech vendor or the EcoTech website to purchase.
Tunze USA – Another great manufacturer is getting in on the action. Tunze is extending some great offers to its retailers. For example, Bulk Reef Supply is doing a huge Osmolator Door Buster special, where you can grab the ATO for $146.99. Most dealers will be doing a promotion for Tunze Stream pumps with most models at buy 5 get 1 free. You may also see Stream pumps discounted as much as 25% off (excludes only the 6015, 6020 and 6040).
Rapid LED – These guys are rolling out some one-day deals including today’s deal (Nov. 25) of 20% off all Onyx fixtures with code ONYXHoliday. Tomorrow (Nov. 26) you can get 20% off all LEDs with code LEDHoliday. Thursday through through Cyber Monday you can get 15% off storewide (some restrictions apply, see site for details) with code RAPIDHoliday.
GHL North America is offering 25% off their entire range of accessories for GHL products this weekend. This excludes the Mitras LED, dosers and controllers but everything else is fair game. This includes sensors and related accessories, all powerbars, SMS units, expansion cards, expansion module, pump control and illumination accessories.
ALL ITEMS ARE SPECIAL ORDER AS WE HAVE TO ORDER FROM GHL AT THIS PRICE REDUCTION. ESTIMATED DELIVERY WEEK 4 DECEMBER
Premium Aquatics – Looking for a nice 16% off discount? Premium Aquatics has its storewide Black Friday Deals locked in. There are some great deals but what stood out for us was you can snag an Innovative Marine 30L Nuvo aquartium for $299.99 (deal is good from Nov 24 to midnight EST on Dec 1) or grab some Aqua Illumination Hydra 26 and 52 LEDs for 15% off. You can even get 15% off Ecotech Marine 15% off MP10 and MP10w, 15% off XR15 PRO. Additionally get 10% off all Neptune items, 10% off Coralvue Reef Octopus, Maxspect, Coralvue and Giesemann T5’s, 20% off select Bubble King skimmers and Red Dragon Pumps and much, much more. The sale goes from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1 and some exclusions apply.
Unique Corals — Unique Corals will be having its annual “Black Friday” sale, starting Thursday, Nov. 27 at 12:01AM, through Sunday 11/30/14 at 11:59PM. Customers will receive 20% off (non stackable) on all livestock, by using coupon code “UCTG20” at checkout.
Drs. Foster & Smith – There are some great deals all over the site for the holidays but some of the best deals include saving up to 40% off on LED Lighting, 25% off on aquariums, and much, much more. Starting Friday at 9 am, you can even save on many MAP items as well. They are also going to be offering 15% off site wide (excluding items currently on sale and MAP priced items).
AquaIllumination – AquaIllumination is also extending great deals to its retail partners including saving 15% off Aqua Illumination Hydra 26 and 52 LEDs. You can even get 10% off the AI Controller, AI Director and classic mounting rails. Check out your favorite AquaIllumination vendor or the AquaIllumination website to purchase.A United Nations official who is an expert on poverty will visit the U.S. – one of the world’s richest nations – to study how the country deals with impoverished communities from coast to coast.
While the U.S. is awash in personal wealth that totals $153 trillion, according to Fortune Magazine, it also has pockets of extreme poverty.
Philip Alston, who works with the United Nations to monitor human rights and poverty that exists across the world, has been crisscrossing the country for a 15-day tour of some of the country’s poorest neighborhoods.
The U.N. official will visit Alabama this week to explore the state’s poverty, inequality and “barriers to political participation.”
Alston started his U.S. tour last Friday and will also visit California, West Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, AL.com reported.
Alston said he will go to California to investigate the state’s homeless problem and will visit West Virginia to look into the dwindling industrial jobs available there.
ALABAMA CHURCH COMPARES ROY MOORE TO JESUS
"Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States. But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality," Alston wrote in a statement.
On Thursday Alston will be visiting Lowndes County, Ala. to look into any problem the area has with health care, sanitation and gaining access to safe drinking water.
In September, a study found a small amount of people living in Lowndes County had tested positive for hookworm – a parasite that enters into the body through the skin, The Guardian reported. The parasite sucks the blood out of the host after it attaches itself to the small intestine. The parasitic disease is common in poverty-stricken areas.
ROY MOORE’S SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS CLOUD ALABAMA SPECIAL SENATE ELECTION
The county has 11,000 residents with an average income of $18,000 a year, The Guardian reported.
Alston will also visit Montgomery to meet with civil rights advocacy groups and civil service members in the area.
"I would like to focus on how poverty affects the civil and political rights of people living within the U.S., given the United States' consistent emphasis on the importance it attaches to these rights in its foreign policy, and given that it has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Alston said.
The U.N. official will also look into voting rights in the state and “government efforts to eradicate poverty in the county, and how they related to U.S. obligations under international human rights law.”
He planned to meet with “government officials, people living in poverty, academic experts and civil society organizations,” AL.com reported.
On Friday, Alston was slated to hold a press conference in Washington, D.C. to speak about what he found during his trip and give ideas and recommendations on how to address the problems he saw. His full report will be presented in 2018 before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.Anvil Industry is proud to launch AFTERLIFE, our new 28mm scale tabletop wargame.
NEW: Free RULES available now! - Everything you need to play a trial game of AFTERLIFE! CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
To see the game in action, have a look at our recent appearance on Beasts of War's Weekender (Our segment starts at 47 minutes in):
http://www.beastsofwar.com/the-weekender/weekender-afterlife-kickstarter-power-airbrushing/
An interview with Joel (Afterlife designer) on Bell of Lost Souls:
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2014/10/interview-afterlife-shards-of-liberty.html
Talk Wargaming Review of the first prototype miniatures:
http://www.talkwargaming.com/2014/10/product-preview-afterlife-shards-of.html
Volume One: The Shards of Liberty charts the first major battles in the AFTERLIFE Narrative, following elite Republic strike teams as they launch a surprise attack into the heart of Unity Council territory.
Our "Shard" pledge levels include miniatures for two starting factions, The Unity Council and The Republic, plus dice, digital rules, mission and other content required for the game.
Highest quality miniatures, manufactured in resin to flawlessly capture every detail.
Innovative tactical rules which keep both players involved, including fog of war, pinning, detailed rules for fighting in structures, off table artillery/air strikes, electronic warfare and more!
Exciting narrative based missions, as well as free game play with standard mission objectives.
We will work hard to make AFTERLIFE an incredible gaming experience, and with your help we can do much more. Thank you for your support!
The Pledges
To work out your AFTERLIFE pledge, choose a base pledge amount and select that reward. Add up the cost of any extra Add-Ons and options you want included, and adjust your pledge to the final total. The list of available ADD-ONS is located toward the bottom of this page under the main pledge levels! After the KS has ended we will send out a survey to find out what you want us to send you.
We have prepared an easy to use pledge calculator on our website (optional, work it out in your head if you like!) - CLICK HERE
The Cataclysm pledge is ideal for people who don't have an existing collection of AFTERLIFE miniatures, or wish to greatly expand their current collection. Splitting THE CATACLYSM with a friend will give each of you a sizeable starting army!
The Pledge contains everything shown in the image above! Over 100 miniatures! Its made up of the Shard Strike pledge (with two lots of counters/markers), plus every add on from this Kickstarter, plus one of everything in our current range!
Please note: All Units of more than one figure will have as many different poses as there are miniatures (no duplicated poses). The images shown are digital renders, and the final designs may change or be updated as the project continues. We plan to have all figures digital sculpts completed by the end of the project.
The world of AFTERLIFE
Battles in AFTERLIFE are fought across a dystopian future Earth after the collapse of the Unity Council, an organisation which although oppressive, had maintained peace (of sorts) and order for almost two hundred years.
We have created a huge amount of detailed background information, including faction and character biographies, and the history of the Unity Council and the recent Cataclysm, the starting point for the narrative. All this information can be found on our dedicated game website - www.afterlifevolumes.com
If you are interested in the back story and narrative of AFTERLIFE, we recommend making a cup of tea or other choice beverage and having a good read through the website.
The Game
AFTERLIFE is a 28mm scale game using D10 mechanics and an alternating activation system which keeps both players constantly involved in the action. Smaller games might see an elite team of a only a dozen miniatures attempting to achieve an objective, while other battles will pit larger forces against each other with several objectives (including of course, wiping out your opponent).
Click here to view/ download the rules.
Also check out this gameplay video demonstrating some of the core mechanics, including Activation, Detection, Shooting and Special Character rules:
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Add-Ons
Who We Are:
Anvil Industry is based in London, UK. We currently have four full time workers. We have been manufacturing high quality resin components and miniatures for the past three years, and are now launching our new game! Our miniatures, including all rewards in this Kickstarter, are manufactured in house with our own equipment and skilled staff.
We design our figures digitally and then create high resolution 3D prints. Every detail of the design is captured in the final resin model, and we have the highest possible quality control standards. |
: Armin is indeed brilliant…but our battles must still continue for much longer!
Thus, Erwin’s experience and ability to command still—mmph!
I also want others…to come back to life…
Several hundred others…
–
PAGE 22
Hanji: After joining the Survey Corps…these endless stories of parting began.
–
PAGE 23
Hanji: But…you also understand this, no?
No matter what or whom, we will always end up separated by life and death.
–
PAGE 24
Hanji: None of us can possibly accept this easily.
We can barely keep our minds clear…
Painful…
It’s so painful. I know.
…but even so, we must move forward…
–
PAGE 25
–
PAGE 26
Eren: Captain…
Do you know…about the ocean?
–
PAGE 27
Eren: It’s a giant lake…that stretches infinitely towards the horizon…
And…it’s filled with saltwater…
Armin told me all of this.
Flocke: Hey! Quit struggling!
Eren: He said that we will leave the walls behind together…and go see the ocean…
–
PAGE 28
Eren: But that was only his childhood dream…I forgot all about it within two days of him telling me…
My mind only thought about revenge for my mother…to eliminate all the Titans…these creatures that filled me with such hatred…
But he was different…Armin wasn’t only here to fight…
He continued to chase that dream!
–
PAGE 29
Levi: Everyone get outta here, now!
I have to let Erwin consume Bertholt at this spot!
Hanji: Let’s go, Mikasa.
Jean: Shit…SHIT…
Connie: Armin…goodbye…
–
PAGE 30
Eren: Armin…
–
PAGE 31
[FLASHBACK]
Armin: Everything up to the horizon is all saltwater!
And there are even fish that can only survive in saltwater!
Eren, you’re still in doubt, right?
But they’re there for sure! You’ll see eventually!
Eren: W.hatever you say, I guess…
–
PAGE 32
[FLASHBACK]
Levi: If your dream became reality…what will you do after that?
Erwin: I really…have no idea. I’ll only know after the dream is fulfilled.
[CURRENT DAY]
Levi: Every single one of you have this attitude…
[FLASHBACK]
Erwin: I…want to see that basement first…no matter what…
–
PAGE 33
Levi: Like a brat who has yet to grow up…screaming and yelling without end.
[FLASHBACK]
Kenny: Everyone’s the same. If you don’t devote yourself to something…how can you withstand this world?
–
PAGE 34
[FLASHBACK]
Kenny: Every person…is enslaved by something…
Including that guy…
–
PAGE 35
Erwin: Teacher…
…regarding what supposedly doesn’t exist…
…how do I investigate and prove otherwise?
–
PAGE 36
Levi: Erwin?
[FLASHBACK]
Give up your dream and go to hell, and take the new recruits with you.
I’ll take care of the Beast Titan.
–
PAGE 37
Erwin: Levi…thank you.
–
PAGE 38
–
PAGE 39
Bertholt: …??
Ehh??
!!
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
–
PAGE 40
Bertholt: Every…everyone!! PLEASE SAVE ME!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
ANNIE!!
REINER!!
Mmph——-
–
PAGE 41
Flocke: Captain…
Why did you…choose him?
Levi: …can you forgive this guy? (T/N: He’s referring to Erwin)
–
PAGE 42
Levi: He had no choice but to become a demon.
And that is also what all of us wished for…
We even planned to retrieve him just as he won freedom from hell…and call him back into it…
Just as you did.
–
PAGE 43
Levi: But we must…let him have a good rest.
Erwin…even though I promised you that I would get rid of the Beast Titan…
It looks like there will be a delay.
Hanji: …he has already left us…
–
PAGE 44
Levi: …I see.
–
THE SPIRIT OF THE SURVEY CORPS – IT RETAINS ITS GLORY BECAUSE LEGACIES CONTINUE TO BE PASSED ON.
[To be continued in Bessatsu Shonen October 2016 issue, with release date of early September]This post may contain affiliate links; please read the disclosure for more information.
We once again take to the skies to give you the best view possible of the ongoing expansion of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Things are actually starting to get exciting over on the Toy Story Land area as structures are beginning to rise, meanwhile, Star Wars Land remains mostly a dirt pile. (Click images for larger res if you are into that kind of thing)
This side of the park is a disaster currently, and guests can really see this if they come in through the World Drive entrance to the park. A new car entrance and a parking lot expansion rounds out the construction you can see beyond the current borders of Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Here you can see guest vehicles entering what’s left of that entrance, while just behind the fence, land clearing continues.
Here we see the one set of facades remaining from the Streets of America.
The billboard is the only sign of what was the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids playground area.
Some temporary trees were rolled into the PIXAR Place area as otherwise the view beyond the walls would be nothing but blue skies.
This road going through the middle of the site likely separates the Star Wars and Toy Story Lands.
I’m kind of amazed at the one tree and small piece of concrete still standing from the Premiere Theater area…
They are beginning to carve out space for the attractions.
Disney recently released the above concept art for the Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios, which matches the shape of the site above pretty well if you turn it around (as our photos are looking from what will be the backside).
We now focus our view over towards the Toy Story Land area.
That square is the extent of Toy Story Land, minus the eventual new entrance that will cross into the Toy Story Midway Mania attraction just across that road.
You can already make out the main thoroughfare of Toy Story Land, although it is just a dirt path winding down the center of the above photo.
This big concrete box is most definitely part of the Slinky Dog Dash attraction, as it can bee seen behind the buildings of the load station in the concept art for Toy Story Land (included below). The attraction features a launch of a moderate speed and this box will likely hold the mechanics that can make that launch happen. The foundations for the Alien Swirling Saucers ride system are in place below that site. It seems this land is racing ahead, possibly not as far off as we once imagined.
It’s nice to finally start to see things that are recognizable after so many months of prep work. You can almost envision what this area will look like now if you compare it to the concept art.
We also have a video flyover of the site to share with you:
Of course, we will continue to keep you in the loop as work progresses on all facets of the massive expansion of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Stay tuned for more!(CNN) -- Members of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Thursday are taking a hard look at faulty data on the Obama administration's Recovery.gov Web site.
The site is fixing errors that appeared to show hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars were spent in nonexistent congressional districts, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said Wednesday.
The job errors, first reported by ABC News, were seen on Recovery.gov summary pages breaking down how many stimulus dollars were received in each state's congressional districts.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, said the jobs reporting is "entirely deceitful."
"No government agency, private sector group or research economics has any idea what the reliable calculation track for these numbers would be," he said.
Issa even went so far as to say that Recovery.gov was something of a propaganda campaign.
"Propaganda, a noun -- information especially of a biased or misleading nature used to promote a political cause or point of view," he said. "Mr. chairman it is very clear today not by the witnesses here, not by, in fact, Recovery.gov directly but by how this is being treated, how these jobs continue to be claimed, and how, in fact we are dealing with 3.8 million lost jobs and yet we are told to focus on the 640,000 saved jobs and how much worse it would be."
Arizona's page, for example, showed the state's 52nd, 15th and 86th congressional districts received hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money, according to CNN affiliate KNXV. However, no such districts exist in Arizona, which has only eight congressional districts.
A report released Wednesday by the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity said it found such errors on pages for all 50 states, four territories and the District of Columbia. More than $6.4 billion in stimulus funds were shown as being spent -- and more than 28,420 jobs saved or created -- in 440 false districts, it said.
The districts didn't exist, but the money and jobs did, Obama administration officials have said. And the people who are to blame are recipients who apparently didn't know which congressional district they were in, the officials said.
"We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they just throw in a number for their congressional district," Ed Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which operates Recovery.gov, said Monday.
In an appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on Tuesday night, Vice President Joe Biden said the errors didn't indicate unaccounted-for spending but rather were the result of political ignorance.
"There was bad civics classes for those" who reported the data, Biden said. "They had to fill out a form, what district are you in, and there was no such district."
By Wednesday evening, incorrect districts appeared to have been removed from the states' summary pages. Arizona's page, for example, listed only the state's eight real districts and a category called "unassigned congressional district," which appeared to contain all the money that had been attached to the nonexistent congressional districts.
Arizona's "unassigned congressional district" row had $39,577,600, which is roughly the total that the Franklin Center said was previously linked to nonexistent districts.
Money that was reported as having been spent in a nonexistent district would be moved, in databases on the site, to the correct one in cases where the recipient reported a ZIP code, the board said Wednesday evening. Recipients who didn't submit a ZIP code will need to make corrections "during the next reporting period, which begins on January 1, 2010," the board said in a news release.
The errors raised the ire of Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wisconsin, and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. On Monday, he said the mistakes "are outrageous and the administration owes itself, the Congress and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes."
"Credibility counts in government, and stupid mistakes like this undermine it. We've got too many serious problems in this country to let that happen," Obey said.
CNN's Alexander Mooney, Kate Bolduan, Ed Hornick and Jason Hanna contributed to this report.Subaru of America has agreed to settle a class action accusing it of knowingly selling cars that have a defect causing them to burn excessive amounts of oil. Subaru has agreed to extend warranties on affected vehicles, and reimburse vehicle owners for expenses related to the defect.
On Jan. 4, the lead plaintiffs asked the court to approve this preliminary settlement. “This proposed settlement will provide most class members with as much or more compensation as they may have obtained had this case proceeded through certification and trial,” the lead plaintiffs assert.
The original class action lawsuit filed by lead plaintiffs Keith Yeager and Michael Schuler alleged that Subaru knew that certain models of vehicles had defective piston rings that would cause extra oil to burn off the engine. According to the class action lawsuit, Subaru did not tell consumers about the oil burning defect, and that deception caused car owners to spend “considerable money on extra engine oil, but also on engine repairs trying to fix the underlying problem.”
In addition, the class action lawsuit claims that Subaru “improperly denied many warranty repairs, and then, more recently, secretly changed the scope of its warranty coverage without telling affected drivers.” Since the original filing, seven other named plaintiffs have been added to the Subaru class action lawsuit, alleging the same defect in different model vehicles and states.
To settle the oil burning defect class action lawsuit, Subaru has agreed to increase the warranty on vehicles with the defect from the original 5-year / 60,000-mile warranty, to an 8-year / 100,000-mile warranty.
In addition, Subaru has agreed to compensate vehicle owners for the following expenses: “(i) vehicle repairs (including parts and labor); (ii) rental cars; (iii) towing; and (iv) the purchase of up to six quarts of oil per vehicle.” Subaru has agreed to pay 100% of those costs, if claimants can provide reasonable proof of their expenses.
Finally, Subaru has agreed to provide a free “oil consumption test” as well as “TSB repairs” for any owners or leasers of defective vehicles.
The Subaru oil burning defect lawsuit is asking the court to certify a Class of all “current or former owners or lessors of [defective Subaru models] originally purchased or leased in the continental United States and Alaska.” Notice of the settlement will be mailed directly to Class Members, who will have to file claims to receive compensation.
The actual Subaru models that are part of the potential settlement and details on the claim filing process were not immediately available. Keep checking TopClassActions.com or sign up for our free newsletter for the latest updates. You can also mark this article as a “Favorite” using your free Top Class Actions account to receive notifications when this article is updated.
The plaintiffs are represented by Matthew D. Schelkopf and Jospeh G. Sauder of Chimicles & Tikellis LLP, Eric H. Gibbs, Dylan Hughes, and David Stein of Girard Gibbs LLP, and Richard D. McCune, Jae K. Kim, and Michele M. Vercoski of McCune Wright, LLP.
The Subaru Oil Burning Defect Class Action Lawsuit is Yaeger, et al. v. Subaru of America Inc., et al., Case No. 1:14-cv-04490, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
UPDATE: On Apr. 12, 2016, the Subaru oil burning settlement is now open! Click here to file a Claim Form or visit www.OilConsumption.SettlementClass.com for details.
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ATTORNEY ADVERTISING Top Class Actions is a Proud Member of the American Bar Association LEGAL INFORMATION IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE Top Class Actions Legal Statement ©2008 – 2019 Top Class Actions® LLC Various Trademarks held by their respective owners This website is not intended for viewing or usage by European Union citizens.My Secret Santa truly spoiled me! I have to be one of the luckiest gals on here. My Secret Santa, must have looked not only through my RedditGifts post, but through my post history to find what could be a perfect gift tailored to me. I love different styles of socks (I use them for the gym) and am a tea fanatic. I received multiple teas from my Secret Santa’s region, cool and stylish socks as well as unique, region specific snacks such as Silkworm Pupa; gotta add that to a new taste I’ve never tried, and I’m pretty excited about that. I received a larva plush animal to add to my collection as well, and only would a dedicated and wonderful Secret Santa would know I collect plush animals! Thank you so much, Secret Santa!Listen to the folks who run some of our biggest electric utilities:
Tom Fanning, chief of Southern Company, in 2016 about its nuclear project in Georgia, which is years behind schedule: “It has gone beautifully. And we’re on schedule.”
Kevin Marsh, CEO of SCANA, in 2016 about South Carolina’s V.C. Summer nuclear project a few months before it collapsed: “We’re excited about where we are.”
Lewis Hay, CEO of Florida Power & Light, in 2011 about nuclear upgrades that cost twice as much as promised: “Our customers should greatly benefit.”
And Fanning again in 2015, this time about his company’s clean coal project in Mississippi, which isn’t burning coal or cleaning it: “We’re on a real winning streak right now.
They should have said "thank you," because money they torched on these and other power plants wasn’t theirs.
It was yours.
Over the past decade, state legislatures across the country rewrote rule books for how power companies pay for new power plants, shifting financial risks away from electric companies to you and everyone else.
This rule change ignited a bonfire of risky spending — $40 billion so far on new power plants and upgrades, a Post and Courier investigation found.
Flush with your cash, utilities tried to build plants with unproven technology; they launched projects with unfinished designs and unrealistic budgets; they misled regulators and the public with schedules that promised bogus completion dates; they hid damning reports from investors and the public; they tried to silence critics and whistleblowers.
Then, when delays and cost overruns couldn’t be ignored, they asked state regulators to charge you more for their failures.
And what happened to these high-stakes gamblers?
Over the past five years, executive teams of six utilities that bet on these plants won $520 million in salaries, bonuses and other personal compensation, the newspaper found.
For this story, a Post and Courier team of reporters interviewed more than 50 industry experts, utility and construction insiders, whistleblowers and others, as well as lawmakers from states that opened the doors to these risk-shifting laws. Reporters pored through tens of thousands of pages of reports, government filings and other documents.
The result is a tale about power — political and electric. It’s about how an industry helped change rules so it could make big bets with your money.
These bets include the now well-documented boondoggle in South Carolina — the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion — $9 billion sunk into two abandoned reactors that may never produce enough juice to run a nightlight.
But they also involve bets on clean coal plants in Mississippi and Indiana.
And nuclear reactors in Georgia.
And projects in Florida and North Carolina that never got off the ground but still cost customers billions of dollars.
These rule changes largely flew under the public’s radar as industry insiders worked elbow-to-elbow with lawmakers to craft laws with obscure acronyms and benign language such as “advanced cost recovery.”
But the results are as plain as the extra money you pay on your power bill, the fewer dollars you have for groceries.
They are as real as the tuition increases at Mississippi universities because of higher power bills.
As painful as the money schools in Georgia forgo for teachers and lesson plans.
The story could begin in many ways. So why not start with a woman in Mississippi who was about to grab her shotgun.
‘A coal plant is coming’
Barbara Correro is a feisty woman, small in stature with a rebellious streak. She says “yes, ma’am” instead of “yes, sir” when she agrees with a man. A retired nurse, she lives in Kemper County, Mississippi, which is on the border of Alabama. It's one of the poorest counties in the country with about a third of its 10,000 residents living in poverty. Its population has shrunk by 100 people a year over the past decade — despite all the money that was spent a short drive from Correro’s property.
Correro’s home sits hidden in piney woods near cotton fields and rolling hills that also hide deposits of lignite, a form of coal. Longtime residents here talk about how people used to cut off chunks of lignite along river banks to supplement firewood in the winter. It’s sometimes called “brown coal” or “wet coal” because it usually contains large amounts of water. This moisture makes it less efficient to burn in traditional coal plants. Yet, in the mid-2000s, Correro and her neighbors heard a rumor: “A coal plant is coming.”
Those rumors hit home one day when a tanker truck showed up near her driveway. The crew told her they were doing tests for the coal plant. Across from her gate was a pond that she said “was 150 percent on my land.” Without permission, the crew sucked water from her pond into the tanker trucks.
“That’s when I told them they have two hours to get out of there before I shoot that pump.”
They moved. “The tank truck? That was about intimidation,” she said.
More trouble was ahead. A holding company bought thousands of acres around her house. Properties were sold, pitting neighbors who needed money against those who wanted to stay.
She remembers a community meeting not far from her home. An official with Mississippi Power said, "We want you to see the faces of the people you will be working with," according to a story then in the Kemper County Messenger. Other officials told residents they would be fairly compensated for any land that was mined, but they would have to move.
“They were so arrogant,” Correro said. “They were basically telling us that they would close roads, buy land, do what they wanted.”
Behind the scenes, Southern Company and Mississippi politicians had orchestrated a complex but potentially lucrative trade — courtesy of federal taxpayers. Southern Company and a Florida utility had been working on a government-subsidized “clean coal” project near Orlando, one that had fizzled. A Department of Energy memo acknowledged the plant was not “technically or economically feasible” in Florida.
Enter former Southern Company lobbyist Haley Barbour, the avuncular Republican Party stalwart. Elected governor of Mississippi in 2004, Barbour and Southern Company persuaded the Department of Energy to move the foundering project and its $270 million in federal grants from Orlando to Kemper County — and then make it much bigger, more expensive and pin costs mostly on federal taxpayers and Mississippi customers.
The more Barbara Correro learned about the plant, the more she thought it was wrong for Kemper County. In her mind, Southern Company and its subsidiary, Mississippi Power, were gambling with their money and land.
When ground broke in 2010, "I was heartbroken," she said.
Risky as it was, the Kemper County project was part of a much larger gamble — a spending frenzy on new power plants.
The spree’s origins are mostly in the mid-2000s, but it's also helpful to step farther back in time, to the late 1800s and Thomas Edison, who didn’t invent the light bulb.
Monopolies are born
Hard to believe, given the tidy stories about Edison that schools have taught, but historians have long known Edison’s contributions were more nuanced. Other inventors, including Britain’s Joseph Swan, created incandescent bulbs years before Edison filed his patents. Yet Edison did something more important.
He invented longer-lasting bulbs. Then he developed ways to connect groups of bulbs to generators, a grid that could supply electricity to large numbers of customers. In 1882, Edison built the first electric utility on Pearl Street in New York City, igniting a movement to light the world with electricity instead of flames.
A surge of new electricity entrepreneurs in the early 1900s wired one city after another. But many of these young power barons realized that large and duplicative transmission systems were expensive and inefficient. They bought competitors, then urged state governments to regulate their businesses as “natural monopolies.”
It seemed like a fair deal: In exchange for being regulated, utilities solidified their monopoly status and baked in guaranteed rates of return for their investors. Meantime, state public service commissions would make sure utilities charged customers reasonable rates.
But today, the heirs of Edison’s original Pearl Street grid have become a $220 billion industry, one that has shrunk to a patchwork of powerful public and private fiefdoms.
Public service commissioners, some elected, some appointed by lawmakers, are still responsible for balancing needs of consumers and utilities. Yet, when it comes to weapons of influence, consumers increasingly find themselves outgunned.
During the past decade, power companies and their allies spent $1.4 billion on federal lobbying, campaign records show. They gave $112 million to federal candidates. They shoveled millions more into statewide races. They poured money into campaigns of public service commissioners in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama — states that elect regulators. Relationships got cozy.
In Georgia, electric industry lobbyists ply commissioners with expensive meals and send them smoked hams for Christmas, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found. Between 2014 and 2016, Georgia Power bought commission staffers and contractors more than 200 meals and refreshments, a review by the Energy and Policy Institute found. Most were small meals, though earlier this year, Georgia Power lobbyists spent $7,700 to feed commissioners and staff at a single dinner at the Lake Oconee Ritz-Carlton. In 2012, a commissioner asked a lobbyist to pave the way for his granddaughter to sing the national anthem at an Atlanta Braves game.
In South Carolina, the state Legislative Audit Council faulted public service commissioners for getting too close with lobbyists and other industry representatives. In response, lawmakers created the Office of Regulatory Staff to defend the “public interest” in cases before the Public Service Commission. But the law defines “public interest” as a balancing act between the needs of customers and “economic development” forces. And this reform push did away with the state’s consumer advocate, who had successfully fought rate increases in the past. Critics said the law tilted the balance against customers at a critical moment.
In the mid-2000s, power companies across the South, including SCANA, NextEra, Duke Energy and Southern Company, had their robust lobbying machines running at full throttle.
An energy gold rush had begun.
The rule writers
The lobby of the South Carolina Statehouse is a pleasant place to visit. The room’s 19th century treatment is reminiscent of Edison’s time, with stained glass windows, leather couches, mahogany doors and a paint palate of warm browns. When in session, lobbyists and lawmakers huddle around a life-size statue of John C. Calhoun. School groups weave through these conversations on their way to the chambers. John M. Bryan, former professor of art history at the University of South Carolina, once said the lobby’s openness “symbolizes accessibility of government to all people.”
But in the spring of 2007, operatives for South Carolina’s utilities often met behind closed doors, away from the public din of the Statehouse lobby. One meeting took place in a conference room of Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, a politically influential law firm with an office then next to the Capitol grounds. Belton Zeigler, one of the firm’s lawyers at the time and former general counsel for SCANA, was the host. The subject: A new bill called the Base Load Review Act.
Though he wasn’t a lawmaker, Zeigler had helped draft the bill. Its first words were: "An act to protect South Carolina ratepayers."
It was a dramatic break from the past.
Power companies in South Carolina had raised money for new plants by selling bonds and tapping other financial markets. Then, when the plants came online, they incorporated these borrowing costs in rates.
Put another way, customers paid for new plants when they received something for their money — electricity.
It was like buying groceries: You pay the store and get your food.
But traditional lenders were leery about backing nuclear plants given the financial failures of so many reactor plans in the 1980s.
So power companies came up with another source of money — yours.
And they had just the tool to pry it loose.
Legislative lightning
This tool went by several tongue-twisting acronyms and terms: CWIP, short for “construction work in progress”; AFUDC, short for “allowance for use of funds during construction”; and “advanced cost recovery.”
But they all did the same thing — shift risks of construction projects from power companies to their customers.
Instead of billing you when new plants went online, power companies did it as they licensed, designed and built them.
This tool suddenly made you an investor in a future power plant. It was like paying a grocer as it builds its store — with the hope that groceries might be a little cheaper when it opens.
Water and sewer utilities routinely use cost recovery and CWIP laws for small or predictable upgrades, such as pipelines.
But using these pay-as-you-go tools for nuclear reactors was another matter.
Supporters said new CWIP laws would generate billions of new dollars and help ease rate shock when plants came online. A handful of critics predicted they would encourage big bets on dicey projects.
“There are checks and balances when you pay something out of your pocket,” said Louie Miller, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Mississippi. “When it’s other people’s money, it’s easier to take a risk.”
But power companies couldn’t collect any of this new money without help from elected officials.
Which in South Carolina and across the South seemed inevitable.
‘Trust the people in authority’
In North Carolina, the race for nuclear never took off Like other Southeastern states, North Carolina passed its own law letting utilities charge in advance for big power plants like nuclear reactors.
Bobby Harrell, then-Speaker of the House, said power companies made a persuasive case: They needed more generating plants to keep up with future demand.
“When you’re in the General Assembly, you have a need to be able to trust the people in authority,” Harrell, a Republican, said in a recent interview.
Glenn McConnell, then-Senate President Pro Tempore and another key supporter, warned: "We don't need blackouts like in Baghdad here in South Carolina."
Tommy Moore, a Democrat from Aiken and a champion of the bill in the Senate, said a move toward nuclear energy made sense at the time: Costs of coal plants were rising and natural gas prices were still high. “I don’t remember anyone breathing any caution.”
The spring 2007 meeting with Belton Zeigler, the former South Carolina Electric & Gas lawyer, had been billed as a chance for manufacturers to weigh in. But some attendees left feeling the bill was a done deal.
As industry representatives suggested tweaks, Zeigler cast most of them aside.
"I can remember when we hit a brick wall Belton would say 'I hear you,’ " said Scott Elliott, an attorney for the South Carolina Energy Users Committee, a group that represents industrial customers. “I hear you” really meant the language already was etched in stone, Elliott said. Zeigler declined to comment for this story.
By then, the bill was already filed in the House and Senate, and power companies had done their legwork. They had pumped more than $510,000 into lawmakers' campaigns before the session. More than two-thirds of the lawmakers signed on as sponsors.
Greased by campaign cash, the bill sped through the Legislature at the political equivalent of lightning.
“When you see the title, nothing about it seems controversial,” said Rep. Robert Brown, D-Hollywood, one of the law’s few opponents. “Some people probably went along and voted for it without really knowing what they were voting on.”
The Senate passed it on a voice vote, wiping away fingerprints of those who supported or opposed it.
Chip Campsen, a Republican from the Isle of Palms, was one of the few senators who voiced a no. He’d studied the bill’s language and saw it shifted risks from utility shareholders to customers, which seemed wrong to him.
“There are very few votes over the years that bother you, but this one... I could not believe we did that.”
Legislators once spent five months arguing about whether to name the right whale or the bottlenose dolphin the state marine mammal. But it took just seven days to move the Base Load Review Act from a Senate subcommittee directly to a final vote on the House Floor. Only 6 of 104 House lawmakers opposed it. It contained no penalties if utilities messed up their projects. Or spending caps.
When the bill went to then-Gov. Mark Sanford for his approval, Sanford declined to sign or veto it, which meant it automatically became law. Tom Davis, Sanford’s chief of staff at the time and now a Republican senator in Beaufort, said it was a “foregone conclusion this was going to be law” no matter what Sanford did.
“This bill was entirely industry driven — in the drafting of it, in the advocacy of it, in terms of putting pressure on legislators,” Davis said. “It was probably the clearest case I could ever see of a special interest using all of its power and leverage to get something passed.”
States of influence
At least 11 states passed similar pay-as-you-build laws during the 2000s. Florida utilities lobbied for a nuclear "cost-recovery" bill that left Susan Bucher, a Democrat in the Florida House, wondering: “You’re going to make my senior citizens pay for something they will never see?”
She stood on the House Floor to voice her opposition: “What happens if they don’t complete the plant?”
The Legislature answered with a vote of 158 to 1.
It was a heady time for power companies. In a short period, state elected officials across the country, and especially in the fast-growing South, had created new sources of money they didn’t have before. With an all-you-can-eat buffet of customer cash and taxpayer-funded subsidies, power companies proposed one expensive project after another. Early estimates called for more than $80 billion worth of new power plants and upgrades in the South alone, a Post and Courier analysis showed.
Industry cheerleaders said these plants could transform the South into an electricity powerhouse, one primed to take advantage of future laws that penalized generators for releasing large volumes of carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming.
Mississippi lawmakers went all in, passing a law that encouraged both nuclear and "clean coal" plants, including the project in Kemper County — a “home run for Mississippi and the nation,” Gov. Haley Barbour wrote the Secretary of Energy in 2010, shortly before the groundbreaking.
The Kemper County plan was ambitious. Massive diggers would strip mine lignite from the hills and fields around the plant. The lignite would then be converted into synthetic gas. This gas would be burned to spin turbines that generated 582 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 430,000 homes. Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide emissions would then be diverted from the plant’s stacks, captured and sold to oil extraction companies. Southern Company said the plant’s technology could be replicated and sold across the world.
Kemper's potential was one of the reasons Brett Wingo was eager to work on it. His grandfather had been a coal miner in northern Alabama. Wingo did engineering work on the gasification island, the portion that turned lignite into gas.
“I wanted to be part of a solution that saved the industry.”
He never thought he’d end up calling the project a fraud.
Construction of a whistleblower
Wingo is a tall man with a low-pitched Alabama twang and a restless energy about him. In a recent interview, his right fist was sore from pounding it during a rare loss by the University of Alabama’s football team. He lives near Birmingham and commuted every week to Kemper County, a two-hour drive. Since he worked on the plant’s original designs, he knew its anatomy like a surgeon.
“It’s like a huge petrochemical plant with giant flares and columns. You had to do the engineering right. There was enough ammonia to kill everyone on the site.”
He won internal awards for his work and was placed in programs to nurture promising managers. He thought the gasification and carbon sequestration technology was sound, but by 2013, he knew the project was in trouble. Already, Mississippi Power had admitted to state regulators that it had hidden $366 million in cost overruns.
Wingo suspected it was way behind schedule, which could add dramatically to its overall costs. Two important deadlines were fast approaching.
The first was May 14, 2014. If the plant wasn’t online then, Southern Company would lose $133 million in federal tax credits — money the company and its shareholders would have to eat instead of customers.
The second was Dec. 31, 2014. Miss that one, and Southern shareholders would swallow another $150 million in federal tax breaks.
Wingo told his superiors that they'd likely never make those deadlines.
But they seemed to ignore his warnings. In public meetings with Wall Street analysts, Southern executives painted pictures of "tremendous progress." They were on track to make those 2014 deadlines — and keep those federal tax breaks.
Then, during the summer of 2013, Wingo was told to build a new plan for the plant’s start-up, a chance to dig deep into the inner workings of the project's overall schedule.
He would soon learn whether his suspicions about the deadlines were right.
'Impossible to make it'
Construction schedules for nuclear, coal, bridge and other major projects are typically done using powerful software programs such as Oracle’s Primavera P6 and Microsoft’s Project.
Much more complex than spreadsheets, these programs allow you to identify hundreds of thousands of tasks: inspections, supply purchases, man-hours, productivity rates and costs. Diligent managers then arrange these variables and many other tasks in logical sequences. For instance, to make reinforced concrete, a schedule might call for installation of rebar, inspections and then the pouring of concrete.
When the data is fully loaded, the program spits out bar charts, cost scenarios — and dates when tasks should be finished. It also gives you a final completion date, along with probabilities this date will be met.
Wingo and his colleagues worked for five weeks to craft their new schedule. They punched in data for more than 5,000 tasks. When they were finished, he sent his findings up the corporate ladder.
“I told them that it was impossible to make that May 1, 2014, deadline, and that it probably wouldn’t be finished well into 2015 or later.”
But time and again, Fanning and other Southern Company executives reassured Wall Street analysts: Those deadlines were still good |
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Source: https://github.com/huangnoah/zkstore
References:
http://books.zkoss.org/wiki/Small_Talks/2008/June/Using_Columnlayout_Component
http://books.zkoss.org/wiki/ZK_Component_Reference/Layouts/ColumnlayoutSearch Gallery Mass Effect Shepard's Love Interests Garrenh 26 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 1 Garrenh 66 Advertisement Advertisement Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 2 Garrenh 162 Mass Effect - Ladies' Day Off Garrenh 817 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 3 Garrenh 50 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 4 Garrenh 130 Mass Effect: Poker Time Garrenh 235 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 5 Garrenh 137 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 6 Garrenh 64 Mass Effect Cartoon Mock-Up 7 Garrenh 722 Mass Effect Cartoon - Commission Garrenh 465 Joker, we need evac, now! Garrenh 162 Commander Shepard - Walking Dead Style Garrenh 104 Sassy Femshep Garrenh 63 Commander Shepard - Adventure Time Style Garrenh 11 Commander Shepard - Daria Cartoon Style Garrenh 9 Commander Shepard - Samurai Jack style Garrenh 23 Commander Shepard - Futurama Style Garrenh 8 Commander Shepard - Calvin and Hobbes Style Garrenh 102 Commander Shepard - South Park Style Garrenh 10 Commander Shepard - Comic Book Style Garrenh 24 Commander Shepard - American Dad! Style Garrenh 32 Mass Effect NES Cart Garrenh 25 Commander Shepard Skin Idea for Guacamelee Garrenh 28Each year, we like to run a series of posts called "90-in-90." The idea is that we'll take a look at every player on the roster, from the very bottom to the top and break them down a few ways. This roster will certainly change, and some days we'll have more than one so it's not exactly 90 players in 90 days. At this point, it's a name we're keeping around for street cred.
The San Francisco 49ers parted ways with Carlos Rogers, Tarell Brown, and Donte Whitner this offseason, opening the door for a lot of new faces in the secondary. One player who will compete to offer some depth in the secondary is Dontae Johnson. The 49ers used a fourth round pick in the 2014 NFL Draft to select Johnson out of N.C. State.
The scouting reports are all pretty similar. Aside from some relatively short arms (31 1/2"), Johnson has all the physical tools. He stands 6'2 and weighed in at 200 pounds at the Combine. He ran a 4.45 40, and generally wowed. The primary negative, and it's kind of a biggy, is that he has a lot of work to do on his technique, and generally learning how to be a defensive back in the NFL.
Johnson played both cornerback and safety in college. In the offseason workout program he focused primarily on cornerback. Given the work he has to do to improve at some of the basics, I could see the 49ers working him in slowly at cornerback, and maybe eventually getting him some more time at safety.
Here are a few scouting reports:
NFL.com
ESPN.com
CBS Sports
NN
Expected 2014 impact:
Johnson will compete along the outside, but with Tramaine Brock locked in as one starting cornerback, Johnson is left to compete with Chris Culliver and Chris Cook for the other starting job. I would be surprised if Johnson claimed that role, and really, he could end up being a relatively frequent inactive player in his first year. Of course, if Culliver and/or Cook struggle this season, it opens the door for him. Culliver is trying to come back from a torn ACL, and Cook was wildly inconsistent during his time with the Minnesota Vikings.
Odds of making the roster:
A fourth round pick isn't guaranteed a lot of things, but it would be quite the surprise if he did not make the 53-man roster. The real question is how frequently he will be active. If the 49ers decide to get him some time at both cornerback and safety, that could boost his chances. If he focuses strictly on cornerback as a rookie and Cook and Culliver are holding their own, I suspect he will not be active too frequently.The Selective Service System today defended its use of a mailing list compiled by a national chain of ice cream stores to advise young men that they were liable for draft registration.
However, a Selective Service spokesman, Wil Ebel, said the Government was returning the computerized list of 167,000 names to the company.
''The use of this commercial list was entirely appropriate and we don't have any moral qualms,'' he said. ''But it appears the list broker may have sold us the names without the permission of the originator, and in these circumstances we feel it best not to use them.''
Alexander Hehmeyer, executive vice president and general counsel of Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor Restaurant, a chain of almost 100 ice cream stores, said both he and the company were ''upset and outraged'' by this ''act of big brother government.'' Benefits vs. Sacrifices
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Mr. Hehmeyer added that he did not feel the benefits of such Government tracking programs were worth the sacrifices. ''We have to learn where to draw the appropriate line,'' he said.You know Space Fence, the system that tracks almost every object orbiting planet Earth. What I didn't know is that their software is amazing, with a user interface out of a good sci-fi movie. I really want to play this game:
Space Fence to Defend Astronauts and Satellites Against Orbital Debris The International Space Station and the space shuttle Discovery almost had to dodge some deadly… Read more Read
Operated by the Air Force 20th Space Control Squadron and created by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, Space Fence is a multistatic radar system capable of detecting almost everything that moves in orbits up to 18,641 miles (30,000 kilometers). From the Hubble or the International Space Station down to the four-inch long metal shards that resulted from the collision of a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite in 2009, this thing can track anything.
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Space Fence is vital for our life down here. Thanks to this tracking system, space sciences can move forward, Earth-monitoring, weather and communications satellites can be put in orbit, and astronauts can fly spacecraft or the ISS in an almost safe way. [Lockheed Martin]A federal appeals panel on Wednesday dismissed what attorneys for the Lavabit email service said was “immense public concern” surrounding the government’s request for the site’s encryption keys, and instead upheld a lower court’s earlier ruling.
Wednesday’s decision out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirms a judge’s ruling from last summer in which Lavabit owner Ladar Levison was found to be in civil contempt for failing to immediately adhere to the government’s demands for info on a single user amongst his email service’s 400,000 or so customers.
Levison of Dallas, Texas was compelled last June to install a pen/trap device on his servers to collect information about an unnamed Lavabit subscriber widely presumed to be former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, but refused to cooperate at first because he said that supplying the government with the court-ordered data in a decrypted form as requested would have compromised his security-centric internet business and the privacy of its nearly a-half million customers.
According to Levison, supplying investigators with the secure socket layer, or SSL, keys that encrypted and decrypted all traffic coming in and out of his site was the only way to provide the government with the data pertaining to the one user in question. After weeks of legal back-and-forth with the Department of Justice last summer, Levison suggested that he personally log and decrypt the sought-after information himself and deliver it to the government. Federal agents insisted that they needed real-time access to communications, however, and moved that he be charged with civil contempt for failing to provide the assistance necessary to decipher those messages.
Levison ultimately supplied the requested SSL keys, but only after six weeks of disputes in and out of court that ended on August 5, 2013 with the government asking for sanctions due to his continuing failure to comply with their orders. Almost perfectly in concurrence with the surrendering of those keys, Levison shut down Lavabit and issued a statement saying that continuing to provide his service would make him “complicit in crimes against Americans.” With the matter still entirely under seal at the time, Levison was barred from even acknowledging that he had been approached by the Dept. of Justice, let alone had handed them his SSL keys.
Indeed, Judge G. Steven Agee of the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote on Wednesday that, without the type of encryption implemented by Levison, “internet communications move exposed en route to their destination, allowing outsiders to ‘listen in.’”
“When a private key becomes anything less than private, more than one user may be compromised,” Agee agreed. “As a result, exposing one key-pair could affect all of Lavabit’s estimated 400,000-plus email users.”
Nevertheless, Agee said that the Fourth Circuit was no place for the encryption matter and its subsequent impact on the privacy of Lavabit’s customers to be heard. Instead, his three-person appellate panel affirmed the District Court’s early finding of contempt and refused to rule any further on the underlying issues largely considered to be much more important by web experts.
“As a party appealing from a civil contempt order, Lavabit may ask us to consider ‘whether contempt was proper’ and may challenge ‘the order alleged to have been violated’ unless ‘earlier appellate review was available,’” Agee wrote. Levison, however, failed to challenge the statutory authorization of the court’s request for user data, he said, and instead had argued in appeal at length about the repercussions of relinquishing SSL keys.
“There is such willingness and a desire to argue about secret keys being provided…and the government’s going to take full advantage of that and spy on everybody,” the appeals panel said during oral arguments in January,“What was ordered here was with respect to a particular target to provide unencrypted data pursuant to that order.”
“We’re only here,”one judge added during those arguments,“because of [Lavabit’s] refusal to do what the initial request was — which was the pen register. The encryption key became a red herring.”
On Wednesday, Agee all but refused to acknowledge the encryption issue. “The matter of what questions may be taken up and resolved for the first time on appeal is one left primarily to the discretion of the courts of appeals, to be exercised on the facts of individual cases,” he quoted from a precedent-setting case. "In this circuit, we exercise that discretion sparingly. Our settled rule is simple: ‘[a]bsent exceptional circumstances... we do not consider issues raised for the first time on appeal.”
“Lavabit tenders other reasons why we should exercise our discretion to hear its Pen/Trap Statute argument, but we find no merit in those arguments,” he added.
“It makes no difference then that Lavabit’s Pen/Trap Statute argument presents a supposedly 'pure question of law,'" Agee wrote elsewhere, “... or that Lavabit was unrepresented during some of the proceedings below, or that Lavabit believes this case to be one of 'public concern.'"
After Wednesday’s opinion was revealed, the attorney who argued in the Fourth Circuit against the government in January told the Associated Press that the court’s decision fell short of endorsing the government’s own conduct with regards to compelling companies to hand over user data.
"The court did not say the government's actions in this case were legal," Ian Samuel told the AP.
"This is not a decision that says the government's surveillance theories in this case are correct. It's really a story about an unrepresented litigant in closed proceedings happening,” Samuel added to Politico. “It's really a story about an unrepresented litigant in closed proceedings happening at warp speed about 1000 miles from his house understandably not raising the issues the way counsel" would have.
Brian Hauss, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed in a statement circulated to reporters on Wednesday that “The court focused its decision on procedural aspects of the case unrelated to the merits of Lavabit’s claims.”
“On the merits, we believe it’s clear that there are limits on the government’s power to coerce innocent service providers into its surveillance activities. The government exceeded those limits when it asked Lavabit to blow up its business—and undermine the encryption technology that ensures our collective cybersecurity—to get information that Lavabit itself offered to provide,” added Hauss. His group, the ACLU, was among several that submitted briefs to the Fourth Circuit in support of Lavabit ahead of January’s arguments.
By Wednesday afternoon, neither Lavabit nor the government yet to announce if and how they would proceed with the case. Earlier this year, however, the ACLU’s Hauss told RT’s Andrew Blake that “It would be deeply troubling” if government decided to follow through with finding Levison in contempt.
“If the government were to start coercing internet service providers to fundamentally undermine their services, on pain of obstruction of justice charges, I think a lot of companies would respond by either shutting down or designing services that are effectively impossible to wiretap in any way,” he said.“That would be a tremendous waste of resources, and it would effectively prevent law enforcement from getting even the targeted information it needs to build a case. That’s why it’s so important for the government to show restraint when coercing service providers to assist in its investigations."Girl killed, man hurt in LSD shooting in Lincoln Park
A 15-year-old girl and man were shot as they were on Lake Shore Drive near Fullerton early Saturday. The girl died. | Sam Charles / Sun-Times
A 15-year-old girl was killed and a man wounded in a shooting on Lake Shore Drive in the Lincoln Park neighborhood early Saturday.
Veronica Lopez and the 28-year-old man were in a vehicle in the 2400 block of North Lake Shore Drive just before 1:30 a.m. when a black Nissan pulled alongside them and someone inside opened fire, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
They took themselves to Presence Saint Joseph Hospital, but Lopez was later transferred to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 2:59 a.m., authorities said. She lived in the 5100 block of West Fullerton.
The man was shot in the arm and suffered a graze wound to the head, police said. His condition had stabilized.
Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Lopez does not appear to be the intended target of the shooting. The two people in the car with her during the shooting are both documented gang members, and investigators believe the shooting was either gang- or road rage-related.If there is one uniting feature of the national protests surrounding the shooting death of Ferguson teen Michael Brown, it is the notion that he had his “hands up” just before his killing.
Today, columns of protesters march in major American cities with their hands raised chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The organization Hands Up United, an activist group which advocates for criminal justice reform and the firing and prosecution of a variety of Missouri-based law enforcement figures, was founded on this idea. Several of members of the news media have latched onto it, and some even suggest that it serves to call into question the conduct of Officer Darren Wilson.
Not everyone in the press is, however, as infatuated with this idea. In the wake of the Ferguson grand jury’s determination that no criminal charges could be filed against Wilson, one of the claims that was called into question by the evidence presented was the suggestion that Brown had his hands raised in surrender when he was shot and killed.
“It’s a lie,” exclaimed MSNBC host Joe Scarborough after observing that even some members of the U.S. House of Representatives had adopted this gesture in the halls of Congress in solidarity with the slain teen. “They know it’s a lie. They know the cops didn’t shoot him with his hands in the air. They know it’s a lie, and they’re doing this on the Capitol floor?”
This assertion from Scarborough seems to have frustrated some of his fellows in the press. “To those who say #HandsUpDontShoot perpetuates a lie, 16 witnesses say #MichaelBrown had his hands up at some point,” tweeted CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Wednesday. “Only 2 say he didn’t.”
The origins of this oversimplification of the evidence presented to the grand jury might have been a popular chart published by PBS’s News Hour (a higher resolution version of which can be found here):
Judging from this chart alone, the majority of witnesses whose testimony was presented to the Grand Jury testified that Brown did have his hands raised at the time of his killing. This, many also suggest, was a gesture of submission – one which went ignored when he was callously gunned down by former Officer Wilson.
There is no sugarcoating it: This is a misreading of the evidence.
“[T]he witness accounts contained in thousands of pages of grand jury documents reviewed by The Associated Press show many variations about whether Brown’s hands were actually raised – and if so, how high,” an AP report on the actual witness testimony read.
Some witnesses said the 18-year-old Brown had his hands held high toward the sky on Aug. 9 as officer Darren Wilson gunned him down. Others thought they saw his hands partially raised, at about shoulder height. To some witnesses, his palms appeared out, as if surrendering. To others, his palms seemed open, as if glancing at his wounded hand or gesturing with an attitude of “what are you going to do about it.” Some said Brown’s hands were not raised at all. The truth may never be certain. Despite a three-month grand jury investigation and an ongoing federal probe, no one has publicly disclosed any photos or videos capturing exactly what transpired.
To summarize, some of the witnesses who said Brown’s hands were raised were not credible (one claimed that Brown was shot in the back – an assertion not corroborated by the results of several autopsies). Others say his hands were raised only partially, some of which may have been an involuntary reflex prompted by having been shot. Still other witnesses claimed that Brown raised his hands in a gesture of aggression.
This context changes matters rather significantly, and it is nothing short of a lie to suggest that all these witnesses agree that Brown was capitulating at the time of his death (though I do not believe this was Cuomo’s contention).
The Washington Post’s Paul Cassell noted the problems associated with PBS’s chart, some of which that news outlet even conceded.
PBS acknowledged that its chart “doesn’t reveal who was right or wrong about what happened that day, but it is a clear indication that perceptions and memories can vary dramatically.” This concession is required, because a fair assessment (such as the grand jury was tasked with making) involves not simply toting up the number of witnesses on competing sides, but determining the quality of their accounts. The grand jury observed the demeanor of all of the witnesses and, perhaps even more important, had other evidence (including physical evidence) to sort out which witnesses were giving credible testimony.
An incredibly thorough visual representation of the myriad ways in which this PBS chart misleads its readers can be found here. That extensive graphic explains why merely suggesting that the majority of witnesses claim Brown had his hands raised deceives the reader. The six of those 14 witnesses, some of whom were the most credible, only suggest that his hands were half raised.
The most important notion which cannot be explained in charts, and which all journalists have a responsibility to relate to their audiences, is the truism that witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Those who grasp onto testimony that does not comport with the more sound physical evidence to which the grand jury was privy are clinging a faith-based conviction that Brown was the aggrieved party in this incident.
None of this matters, of course, to those who seek to perpetuate the myth that Brown was surrendering when he was somehow fatally shot in the top of his cranium. The truth is of no matter when emotionality and “larger truths” about social justice are being exposed. But myths only have half-lives while factual evidence has staying power. Eventually, the myth will fade as will the public’s interest in this incident. The members of the press who went out of their way to commit sins of omission in the service of a sexy and inflammatory narrative are only doing damage to their own credibility, not to mention national comity.New Delhi, May 4: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal once again lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing the PMO of providing a forged BA degree leading newspapers for publication. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo claimed that Delhi University has no records of the Political Science course being pursued by Narendra Modi in 1978.
“No records in DU related to his enrolment, his degree, his mark sheets and convocation. Why is the Delhi University refusing to reveal information related to PM’s degree? Because he does not have it,” Kejriwal said on Twitter. (ALSO READ: #FakeDegreeFekuKi: AAP-tards clash with BJP bhakts over Narendra Modi degree row)
See the text below photos of degrees. Is this story a built up for an “accident”? pic.twitter.com/k6A7W9QnQ9 — Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) May 4, 2016
Meanwhile, senior AAP leaders including Ashish Khetan, Ashutosh and Raghav Chaddha accused the PMO of publishing a forged degree in leading newspapers in a bid to mislead the nation. “No degree or marksheet or admission form of PM Narendra Modi ji exists in DU records. Modi ji’ BA degree published in today’s TOI is forged,” Khetan said.
No degree or marksheet or admission form of PM Narendra Modi ji exists in DU records. Modi ji’ BA degree published in today’s TOI is forged. — Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) May 4, 2016
“Photoshopped degree of Modi ji printed in leading newspapers. No admission record, marksheet,degree,convocation details exist in University,” said AAP national spokesperson Raghav Chadda. Meanwhile, Ashutosh claimed that Delhi University is violating the orders of Chief Information Commission by refusing to provide information regarding Modi’s degree.
DU Refuses to show degree of PM MODI despite CIC order.It is now confirmed that PM’s degree is फ़र्ज़ी.I,Ashish,Raghav,Rishi met CPIO. — ashutosh (@ashutosh83B) May 4, 2016
The political storm picked up in the last week when Kejriwal wrote to CIC demanding the information panel to release the details of Prime Minister;s educational qualifications in the public domain. Subsequently, CIC wrote to PMO, as well as Delhi University and Gujarat University, instructing the institutions to release all available information at the earliest.Atlanta Food & Drink Events: May 25 to May 29
Monday May 25
Cotton Candy Week at The Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead | The Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead | 11 AM
The Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead celebrates Memorial Day and kicks off a “sweet” summer with “Cotton Candy Week.” From Monday, May 25 through Sunday, May 31, guests can enjoy a different cotton candy flavor each day during lunch and dinner in The Cafe. The flavors are as follows:
Monday, May 25 – Strawberry Lavender
Tuesday, May 26 – Peppermint Bark
Wednesday, May 27 – Lemon Espelette
Thursday, May 28 – Black Truffle
Friday, May 29 – Strawberry Lemonade
Saturday, May 30 – Watermelon Mint
Sunday, May 31 – Chocolate-covered Strawberry
Each serving of cotton candy will be $3, and drink pairings are also available.
Bone Lick BBQ Memorial Day Cook-Out | Bone Lick BBQ | 2 PM
Celebrate the unofficial start to summer at Bone Lick BBQ during its annual Memorial Day cook-out. Beginning at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 24, 2015. Join award-winning pitmaster Mike LaSage and the Bone Lick crew in the restaurant, on the patio and its expansive sidewalk for a daylong party featuring live bands, DJs, plenty of barbecue, local brews and much more.
Tuesday May 26
Gunshow hosts “Hired Guns” Dining Event | Gunshow | 6 PM
The 2015 “Hired Guns” continues on May 26 and 27 with Greg Denton and Gabrielle Quiñónez Denton, chefs and co-owners of the renowned Portland, Oregon restaurant Ox. Space is sure to go quickly, so guests are encouraged to make reservations by registering for this event. Menu items may vary in price.
Wine Dinner with Chef Matt Marcus of Portofino | Vino Venue | 7 PM
Vino Venue welcomes Chef Matt Marcus of Portofino for a delicious 5-course dinner. Each course will be served with wine expertly paired by our own Michael Bryan. The menu includes:
FIRST COURSE
Strawberries and Cream
Lemon whipped Mascarpone, pickled green strawberries, second picking strawberries, pickled ramp
SECOND COURSE
Hydro Bibb
With radish, goat cheese, and broken sherry and shallot vinaigrette
THIRD COURSE
Foraged Mushroom Risotto
FOURTH COURSE
Whole Roasted Dairy Cow Tenderloin
English pea, heirloom tomato, pink eye bean, and Point Reyes succotash, celery leaf and calabrese salad
FIFTH COURSE
Dark/Milk Chocolate Semifredo
Blueberry and Chambord compote
Ponce City Market Preview Dinner with Linton Hopkins | 4th & Swift | 7 PM
James Beard Award-winning chef Linton Hopkins will take over the 4th & Swift patio, giving a sneak peak of Hop’s Chicken. The menu at Hop’s will feature Springer Mountain chicken, fried-to-order, from-scratch biscuits, and a selection of sides including coleslaw, macaroni and cheese and seasonal salads.
Wednesday May 27
Authentic Mexican: Making A True Mole | The Cook’s Warehouse Decatur | 6:30 PM
Mole is a famous sauce with two very different legendary tales. There are as many variations of Mole as there are cooks, but the best flavors are found in the ones that stay true to the authentic methods, ingredients, and recipes. (Avoid those versions that are watered down for convenience!) Tonight, April will share an authentic Oaxacan Mole recipe, which consists of almost 30 ingredients!
• Oaxacan Mole served with rice, pureed beans and corn tortillas
• Choco-Flan
Viva Italia! The Food and Wine of Italy | Vino Venue | 7 PM
Ahh the Tuscan Life! This class includes a primer on Italian pronunciation; 7-9 wines for tasting plus Italian dishes, including cheese, salumi, antipasto, red sauces and fish; an overview on the 20 regions of Italy, with emphasis on the top 3 wine regions; a history of Italian production through current day; visual presentation and pictures of regions.
Summer Soup, Salad & Dessert in the Garden | Atlanta Botanical Garden | 6:30 PM
Enjoy a glass of wine and relax while learning four recipes to incorporate local produce into flavorful dishes for summertime dining pleasures with instructor Chef Julia Leroy.
Thursday May 28
Italian Basics Hands On | The Cook’s Warehouse Midtown | 6:30 PM
Join Chef John Wilson as he embarks on a culinary tour of Italy – one that is sure to tantalize your taste buds! The simple, hearty fare of Italy provides the inspiration for this class, which includes:
• Caesar Salad with Homemade Croutons
• Basic Risotto with Parmesan Cheese and Chives
• Chicken Piccata
• Almond Biscotti
PASTA 101: Let’s get Cranking! | Vino Venue | 7 PM
That’s Amore! Learn the art and science of fresh pasta making from one of our professional chefs in this hands-on cooking experience while enjoying regional wine. The menu includes:
Basic Pasta Dough
The Shapes: Ravioli, Tortellini & Fettuccine
Seasonal Sauces
Salad
Dessert Pasta
And wines, expertly selected, to accompany your creations.
Foundation Social Eatery’s Patio Party | Foundation Social Eatery | 6 PM
Foundation Social Eatery invites diners to join the restaurant for a patio party on Thursday, May 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. In celebration of the warmer weather, the outdoor event will feature passed appetizers, live entertainment by Kyle Vincent and a special beverage created exclusively for the event.
Atlanta Food & Wine Festival | Midtown | 11 AM
The fifth annual Atlanta Food & Wine Festival will take place May 28 – 31 in Midtown, Atlanta. Whether you would like to join us for a few hours at one of our great dinners or events, including our new Sunday Brunch, or spend the weekend eating, drinking and indulging in the South, the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival has a ticket option for you!
Foxeria del Sol | Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q | 6:30 PM
Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q and Taqueria del Sol are joining forces again for Foxeria del Sol. Held at the Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q, Foxeria del Sol will benefit Hogs for the Cause, a nonprofit organization that operates as the premier funding source for pediatric brain cancer outreach services in the United States. Foxeria del Sol is a four-course dinner kicking off at 6:30p.m. featuring a cocktail hour with signature appetizers from Taqueria del Sol and Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q.
Parrothead Patio Parties | Tin Lizzy’s Buckhead | 5 PM
On Thursday, May 28, Tin Lizzy’s at Perimeter, Emory Point, and Buckhead will be hosting Parrothead Patio Parties featuring live music and prizes from 5 to 8 p.m. There will also be a chance to win tickets to the sold-out Jimmy Buffett concert that will be on June 2 at Gwinnett Arena. Attendees are encouraged to dress up like parrotheads and take advantage of Tin Lizzy’s $4 margaritas. The Sugarloaf location of Tin Lizzy’s will be giving $5 off food purchases with proof of Buffett ticket the day of the concert.
Friday May 29
Judgment of Paris | Vino Venue | 7 PM
Before 1976, no one considered California to be a producer of quality wine. The Judgement of Paris changed this forever. This wine competition, organized by Stephen Spurrier (a British wine merchant), included two blind tastings carried out by French judges. One tasting involved top quality Chardonnay and the other Bordeaux versus California Cabernet Sauvignon. California topped France in both categories putting it on the map as a top producer of quality wine. Join us for this interactive class, where we will taste through current vintages of six to eight wines that were seen at the competition. All AWS courses with wine include light nibbles such as cheeses, salumi, olives, nuts, and a selection of crackers and fresh breads (some are Gluten-Free options).
The Red Stripe Candler Park Music & Food Festival | Candler Park | 5:30 PM
Friday, May 29 & Saturday, May 30 at Atlanta’s Candler Park! 2 day of live music!
+ Dozens of Atlanta’s Food Trucks & Festival Food Favorites
+ Artist & Craft Market
+ Saturday Morning 5K Run benefiting Atlanta ContactPoint
Wine Class: Spain – Discover Vibrant Rioja | Total Wine & More | 6:30 PM
This is the perfect class for red-wine enthusiasts. Rioja is Spain’s most recognizable and popular winegrowing area, known for delicious and elegant Tempranillo-based reds. This seated class will delve into the different winemaking styles within this famous region and examine the multiple levels of aging requirements within Rioja. Eight wines will be featured.
Please follow and like us:A Red Cross pool safety posted that some have called racist. (Photo: Courtesy Margaret Sawyer)
DENVER -- The Red Cross is developing a new pool safety poster after some criticized the organization for being racially insensitive in a previous version of the poster.
Margaret Sawyer said when she first saw the Red Cross poster depicting "cool" and "not cool" pool behavior, she assumed it was outdated. The only examples showing "not cool" behavior involve dark-skinned children.
"I just kept thinking 'It looks like they're trying to do something here that shows all kids together of all different backgrounds but they're clearly not hitting the mark,'" she said.
William Fortune of the Red Cross, said the children in that photo "were more designed to be children rather than any racial motivation."
Fortune said the poster was never meant to be offensive, and the organization strives to be inclusive.
"We're committed to diversity and inclusion in everything that we do," he said.
The poster also caught the attention of Ebony Rosemond of Largo, MD. Rosemond runs an organization called Black Kids Swim, a group dedicated to helping African-American youth engage in swimming.
She said America has a history of racism surrounding pools and swimming. She noted a history of violence toward African-Americans to discourage them from swimming in public pools, and beaches that banned African-Americans which forced them to swim in dangerous locations.
She called the poster step backwards.
"When I saw the poster, I just, was just very saddened that the Red Cross had chosen to put out an image that might one, discourage African-Americans from trying swimming if they were new to it, and also something that would extend a negative stereotype," she said.
Fortune added that when producing materials, they undergo several layers of scrutiny before production.
"It makes me really question who is sitting at the table at the executive levels at the Red Cross? What is the representation like? What is the diversity like in the people who really get to say 'yes or no?'" Rosemond said.
Fortune said the posters have since been removed and the organization is developing "more appropriate material."
Rosemond said she wants the Red Cross to think harder about the impact of their material and send out a more deeply felt apology.
"I think the Red Cross can go further, they can issue a much more public apology and a much more nuanced apology that really gets to the root of what they did and what community specifically they hurt,"' she said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/28XQlm8He That Increaseth Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow : How Hamlet Demonstrates That Conscience does Make Cowards of Us All
It is among the most pleasurable, and the most maddening, enterprises in life to read The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Pleasurable because of its inexhaustible depth, its perfect turns of phrase, and its expansion of the art form that is the English language. Maddening because of the impenetrable layers of madness throughout the text, and within its many characters. At the end of the play, one is left feeling that something profound has been said, but that one is powerless to reiterate what it was. In Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal treatment of Hamlet he identified eleven essential unanswered questions in the play, among which are, “Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude... bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Hamlet’s father...? Is vengeance morally justified in this play, or is it to be condemned? Is Hamlet’s madness feigned or true, a strategy masquerading as a reality or a reality masquerading as a strategy?” (103). This ambiguity, which is really Shakespeare’s negative capability, is part of the beauty of Hamlet. It forces one to see the mess of consequences facing individuals. It emphasizes that men and women with great power infect these consequences into innocent persons.
This important dissonance is masterfully portrayed in Gregory Doran’s recent adaptation of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Doran). David Tennant’s performance as Hamlet in this film is essential to the confusion, and frustration, that Shakespeare originally intended for audiences. Reviews of this production are mostly positive, but many have complained about a lack of consistent interpretation. They want Doran to provide answers to Greenblatt’s questions as has been attempted by most cinematic versions. He refuses to do so.
Andrew Billen, for example, in The NewStatesman, gave rave reviews of Tennant’s performance, but complained when he was done that, “I still do not understand his Hamlet – or Doran’s” (Billen). He cites, for example, Doran’s choice to make The Ghost tangible, “Seen by everyone. An undeniable fact from which Hamlet dare not flinch” (Billen). That, coupled with Tennant’s, “playful, spiteful... but never deranged” performance leads Billen to conclude that this Hamlet only feigns madness, but never succumbs to it (Billen). A choice that, for Billen, is inconsistent with the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude in her closet. In this scene The Ghost is only visible to Hamlet, and can walk through walls. In the opening scene, The Ghost cannot pass through Horatio, but must walk around him (Doran). “Why would Shakespeare have written that scene,” Billen asks Doran, “if not to show that Hamlet... had temporarily lost it?” (Billen). Yet Tennant plays the scene with, “perfect limpidity, a son and mum levelling with each other,” consistent with Tennant’s choice to assert Hamlet’s constant sanity (Billen).
Billen’s complaints do not seem warranted. Tennant’s performance is not so much an inconsistent interpretive choice, as a choice to remain true to Shakespeare’s text. The inconsistency between the tenability of The Ghost in the opening scene and the esoteric visibility of The Ghost in Gertrude’s closet is a real, textual, inconsistency. Yes, one means of interpretation is to use the scene to create doubt about Hamlet’s sanity. It also can create doubt about The Ghost’s reliability or nature. It can call Gertrude’s integrity or even sanity into question.
Tennant simply portrays an inconsistency that is true to Shakespeare and leaves the viewer with the pleasurable and maddening task of finding answers. Billen is |
the user's firstborn child.
The experiment was intended to highlight the dangers of connecting to unknown Wi-Fi networks, the Guardian reports. While only six people clicked through the Herod clause, another 33 devices connected once the researchers removed all Terms and Conditions. Meanwhile, users left their personal data -- including passwords -- completely vulnerable to the network.
A company would probably have trouble getting you to hand over your pride and joy (even if you were technically contractually obligated), so don't panic. But this hapless agreement to terms is pretty common: A 2011 survey found that 58 percent of adults would rather read an instruction manual or credit card bill than go through online terms and conditions. Even the phone book was a more palatable read for 12 percent of those surveyed.
And we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that people basically never read the things they agree to online -- because if we did, we'd spend about 76 days a year doing it. In fact, this new study isn't the first of its kind: On April Fool's Day in 2010, a host of U.K. shoppers were tricked into signing away their immortal souls.
But hey, wait, what if you always read the terms and conditions? Consider this: In a 2008 study, the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm concluded that Internet users probably only actually read about 20 percent of the words they "read." We've convinced ourselves that we're master speed readers, but we're actually just skimming.
People read text online differently than print, studies have found, with eyes flitting about from word to word instead of traveling linearly. That's okay -- the brain isn't naturally suited to one way of reading or the other, so we can probably force ourselves to stay good at both if we try. But when presented with a solid wall of text in the form of a contract that also happens to be on a screen, People use their skimming skills instead of the line-by-line reading that might protect them from legal snares.
But there's a difference between a solid skim and not reading something at all, and surely it takes a special level of inattention to accidentally sacrifice your child or soul. Scientists can't be sure yet whether our shrinking attention spans are the result of our tech-heavy life -- or if the distractions are just giving us an outlet for our naturally flitting focus. But either way, maybe we should start demanding distraction-proof bullet points at the top of all of our contractual agreements.
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Music lessons spur emotional and behavioral growth in children, new study saysThe quick take The marketing materials and the box might boast of the 4K display on the Z5 Premium. But what you actually get for 99 percent of the time is just a more expensive, larger version of the other Xperia Z5 phones. This phone is a little too far ahead of its time.
The good Pretty good looking
Decent camera
Great fingerprint scanner The bad Complete lack of 4K content made available by Sony
Glossy fingerprint magnet
Far too expensive for what you actually get over the other Z5 phones 6.07 in 154.2 mm 2.98 in 75.7 mm 0.31 in 7.9 mm Display: 5.5-inch IPS display 3840x2160 (4K) resolution
Cameras: 23MP Exmor RS rear camera 24mm wide angle G lens 4K video capture 5MP front camera
Battery: 3430 mAh battery
Chips: Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor 3GB of RAM 32GB internal storage microSD card expandable Fingerprint sensor
Software: Android 5.1.1 Lollipop
Sony Xperia Z5 Full Review The Xperia Z5 Premium completes Sony's trifecta of high-end Android smartphones for late 2015. As the name hints, this one is the range-topper, but for the most part it's the same as the other two Xperia Z5 phones where it really matters. The Xperia Z5 range goes from the 4.6-inch Compact now up to the 5.5-inch Premium, meaning that you don't have to have a large phone to also have the best hardware available. But while the approach of a singular, consistent experience across multiple devices is one we applaud, that's not what Sony is shouting about with this phone. The Xperia Z5 Premium is the world's first smartphone with a 4K display, and it's that which you'll see across the marketing materials. We've already spent some good time with the smaller phones in the lineup, so now it's time to see if Sony's Ultra HD Xperia is worth your time. Here's our review. About this review I (Richard Devine) have been using a UK retail version of the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium for about a week on EE using a mixture of 4G, 3G and Wi-Fi. The phone was kindly loaned to us by Clove Technology and you can buy your own here for £574.80. Also, as many parts of this review mirror those already written within our review of the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact, this will be more of a mini-review referencing the previous coverage throughout.
Rip it out Unboxing video Before we get too far along with the review, it's worth taking a look at everything inside the Z5 Premium's box. Let's unbox this thing, then get into the details in the review.
Meat and potatoes Sony Xperia Z5 Hardware For the most part the Xperia Z5 follows the same pattern as the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact. Much of the hardware is shared with the other two models in the lineup. Indeed, at 5.5 inches the Z5 Premium completes the size coverage too. Sony has 4.6-, 5.2- and 5.5-inch models of the Xperia Z5. Something for everyone. As I originally pointed out in our review of the other two phones, this is a smart move from Sony and one that we welcome across the board. Generally speaking, the high-end goes hand-in-hand these days with large displays, but not everyone wants that. Whether you want a small phone, a large phone or something in between, Sony has you covered without having to sacrifice on specs or experience. The Z5 Premium goes back to being a glossy fingerprint magnet The Z5 Premium continues the "Omnibalance" design language we've been seeing from Sony for some years now, just as with the other Xperia Z5 phones. The one immediate difference this time around though is on the rear. While the other Z5 phones ditched the glossy back for a more understated yet still stylish matte finish, the Premium goes back to the gloss. And that means it will show up just about every single fingerprint you ever lay on it. I've got the black one here, so it's at least not that noticeable in passing. That mirrored finish version, though, that must be tough to keep smear-free. The black model is a very good-looking phone, though. It's black on black on black, with the only accents coming from the chrome camera ring and the matte silver power button. It's a good look. It also helps to distract from the huge top and bottom bezels that continue to be an Xperia trademark.
Also, as on the other phones, there's a physical camera button, which is still fantastic. The volume rocker is also down low on the right hand edge. Which I disapprove of less on this bigger model, since in my left hand I now wrap my fingers around the phone in such a way that my pinky can easily catch it. And of course, the fingerprint scanner is embedded within the power button half-way up the right side, just like the other phones, meaning you'll need very long fingers or just to use the phone right-handed to make use of it. Weirdly, the larger model feels more comfortable to hold. Weirdly, though, this larger model feels more comfortable to hold and use than the smaller ones. I couldn't tell you exactly why, and it makes little sense. It's a big, flat slab after all. But there it is. The cameras both back and front are the same 23MP and 5MP shooters, respectively, as on the other phones, which includes 4K video recording capabilities on the rear one. And as we discovered previously, the overheating problems of old when it comes to actually shooting 4K video are largely gone. Which is important for this phone. Because that brings me to the display. The world's first 4K display on a smartphone. Nothing can take that away from Sony. It is an Ultra HD display and it is on a smartphone. But here's the kicker: it comes off as little more than marketing hype. I'll explain.
So many pixels Sony Xperia Z5 Premium: The 4K display — or lack of What Sony is doing with the Xperia Z5 Premium's 4K display isn't totally without sense and reason. Most of the time you're "just" looking at a 1080p representation of whatever is on the screen. As the official explanation goes:
"Xperia Z5 Premium uses its 4K display when you're viewing either the 4K content you've captured using your device or third-party 4K content from streaming services – all other content (including the homescreen and apps) are displayed in 1080p Full HD or lower resolution to simply optimize performance, power consumption and battery stamina so you can use the device for up to two days without charging."
No real issues there. If running a 4K display at 4K resolution is going to drain your battery as quickly as you can pour a bottle of water onto the floor, then it's no good. So, logic. But the issue is the complete lack of content that makes it worth even having a 4K display at all right now. The issue is the complete lack of content Some units sent to reviewers had a tiny amount of video pre-loaded to show it off. My retail unit did not. You can't get it from YouTube, Amazon or Netflix at this time (really, the only places you'll find 4K content worth watching right now), and you're limited to sideloading or shooting your own. I don't own a 4K TV or computer monitor so I also don't own any 4K content to try that with. So I shot a quick video. And truth be told I'm not sure my eyes could tell the difference between it on the Z5 Premium and on another 1080p phone I loaded it up on. At 5.5 inches it's probably overkill for video.
Do we need 4K on a smartphone? Just because a phone maker thinks we do, doesn't necessarily make it so? Do we actually need 4K on a smartphone yet? Here's a quick run through of the arguments both for and against it. Do we really need 4K on a smartphone yet?
Photos, on the other hand, look gorgeous. If you're using the Z5 Premium in manual mode and shooting full-res 23MP images they look better on this phone than on any other I've seen recently. More clarity, more scope to zoom in, more detail, it's a superb thing for the keen mobile photographer. But while good it may be, it's probably not something that should make you throw your money at Sony. Naturally the world will progress to a more 4K dependent one. VR will become more popular and more pixels are something you really want there. Eventually we'll be able to stream 4K video, but at this size, it's probably not going to be that much of a difference in what you can see.
What's it like to use Sony Xperia Z5 Premium Software As with the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact, the Premium comes out of the box running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with a smattering of Sony customizations sprinkled over the top. That's a good way to describe it, too, as Sony has come a long way from the Xperia of old where you'd be hard pushed some time to recognize the operating system beneath. What's on top is light, doesn't hamper performance and is mostly a pleasure to use. You've got a mixture of regular Lollipop elements, like the notification shade and the task switcher, blended together seamlessly with Sony's launcher and custom applications. Speaking of, many of the pre-loaded applications, or bloat as we often refer to them, can be removed really easily. PlayStation fans are well catered for and naturally Sony has preloaded its own music and video services, too. It's important to also remember that you'll need to be within the Album or Video apps to view 4K content right now. And as with all of Sony's other recent phones you might want to check out the Xperia Lounge. It's like an owners club for Xperia smartphones and offers up exclusive content only available through the app. Much of it may not interest you but there's always a chance you'll find something awesome in there. How to take a screenshot on the Sony Xperia Z5 The value add to Sony's software continues with things like built in screen recording and being able to live stream to both Twitch and YouTube whatever you're playing on your phone. You may never understand Twitch streaming, but if you're a keen Clash of Clans streamer, an Xperia Z5 might well be the phone for you. Sony has also been pretty open so far with regards what its doing with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It's currently testing it semi-publicly on the Xperia Z3, so all signs should point towards relatively swift action. But until there's a date, there's not a lot to talk about. For more on the software, be sure to refer back to our original Z5 review or even the Xperia Z3+ review. For better or worse things have stayed mostly the same throughout.
Snap away Sony Xperia Z5 Premium Camera Both the rear and front shooters on the Xperia Z5 Premium are the same units as on the other two phones in the range. Sounds familiar, right? That's not a bad thing since the camera is one other thing Sony makes big boasts about. The 23MP EXMOR RS sensor on the back will, for the most part, take oversampled 8MP images in Superior Auto mode just as previous phones before it have. For casual photographers this will be the best way to use it and you'll get pretty great looking shots out of it most of the time. In good light, it's up there with the best of them and it's not too shabby when things get a little darker.
Sony Xperia Z5 camera tips and tricks If you're looking for a few quick tips and tricks to get yourself up and running with the camera on your new Xperia Z5, you're in luck. We've pulled together a quick five to get you going in the right direction. Five camera tips and tricks for the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact
But since it's the same camera as on the other phones one of our biggest criticisms carries over: There's no optical image stabilization. When Huawei, Samsung, LG and even Apple on the competing side are using OIS in their phones, why isn't Sony? For a claim such as the "world's best camera on a smartphone" it's something you'd expect to find. And as with the other Z5 phones, it suffers at times for lack of it. Software can only do so much and in non-optimal lighting conditions you'll soon find some less clear areas on your photos.
What we do now have on the Xperia Z5 Premium thanks to a recent software update is a new camera app from Sony. The essence remains the same as before, but it's cleaner-looking and makes getting to some key features that little bit easier than before. Of course, the best feature remains the hardware shutter button with its two-stage action. Half press to focus then plunge it down all the way to take the shot. Outside of some of Microsoft's highest-end Lumia phones, a physical camera button is something not often seen. And it's something we'd like to see more of as phone cameras continue to get ever more impressive. But functionally it's the same. Which is good. Superior Auto will do a decent job at matching the shooting conditions with suitable settings, there are still a bundle of camera mini apps that you should or shouldn't use (seriously, don't use the AR effects, it's not worth the horrible performance issues), one of which is 4K video recording.
On the Z5 Premium, 4K recording is more of a big deal because you can actually see the content you shot at native resolution. I'm no JJ Abrams so my efforts on the whole are rather poor. but quality generally is just OK. Both in terms of what it's recording and the thing you're looking at it on. I was maybe ready to be wowed a little more, but the footage is shaky, not overly crisp and won't be replacing dedicated 4K cameras any time soon. And be prepared for the inevitable battery drain that accompanies it.
It can't go all night Xperia Z5 Premium Battery life While Sony used to be all about actual two-day battery life, truth now is it's about up to two-day battery life. You should be able to comfortably make it through a day so long as you stay away from things like 4K video. Expect around 4 hours screen on time in that, maybe more depending on your use, which isn't horrible. The battery life is also one of the factors in Sony's decision to have its 4K display tuned down most of the time. If you're processing for all of those pixels all of the time, you're not going to see much battery past lunch time most days. So, aside from this, the battery life is OK. Just as with the regular Z5 and Compact, it's decent without being exemplary. As with those other phones, Sony is doing a bunch of stuff to help you maximize your power. Stamina mode will allow for some user-defined presets on how the phone behaves away from the charger, and QuickCharge 2.0 will help you top up in a hurry. It'd be nice if Sony was including a QuickCharge power brick in the box with this reasonably-expensive phone, so bear that in mind if you want to juice up at warp speed. Some folks will no doubt be able to make it through two days with the Z5 Premium. I'm most certainly not one of them.
Sony Xperia Z5 Premium: The bottom line Anyone hoping for a real wow factor with this phone based on the specs or the marketing hype will be sadly disappointed. While the Z5 Premium isn't a bad phone by any stretch, it simply doesn't live up to that hype or the pretty steep retail price. With UK pricing set by Sony at £600 ($713 accounting for VAT) or thereabouts, the first thing we'd suggest is that you shop around for a deal. But above all that, it's just not worth it. Not unless you absolutely want a Sony Xperia Z5 and you want the Z5 with the largest screen available. The 4K display is too far ahead of its time. We aren't yet in a world where 4K tablets with much heftier batteries are a thing, and there's very little use for one on a smartphone. But what about future proofing? OK, say that's actually a legitimate argument. The battery in the back of the phone probably won't cut it with more 4K more of the time. Software updates are one thing, but you can't upgrade the physical thing inside the phone. So honestly, I don't buy it. I'd go for a 4K TV before a 4K phone. And that's the sad truth. The Z5 Premium is lost behind a whole lot of marketing spiel. It's easy to get swept up in the marketing and specs, but it ultimately leaves you, the consumer, a little short. What this is 95 percent of the time is a larger version of the Xperia Z5 that costs a fair bit more with the only gain being a larger, but still 1080p, display. The Premium in its name feels a little shallow.
Should you buy the Xperia Z5 Premium? No There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting an Xperia Z5. But, honestly, we couldn't recommend you spending your money on the Premium unless you absolutely have to have a 5.5-inch display. What you should do is save your money and get either of the smaller ones. Our recommendation still lies with the Z5 Compact. A high-end phone in a small body which is the cheapest of the bunch while being almost identical on the hardware front. Where to buy If you are wanting to pick up a Sony Xperia Z5 Premium for yourself there are a few places in Europe to get one from right now. Check out some of the links below to get your order on. Buy from Clove
Buy from Amazon UK
Buy from Carphone Warehouse
Reviewing the Sony Xperia Z5 and Z5 Compact Much of the Xperia Z5 Premium is a shared experience with the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact. Sony's flagship comes in three sizes with a mostly consistent experience. So for a little background be sure to check out our review of these. Sony Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact reviewOverview Production 1956–1958 Body and chassis Body style 2-door convertible
2-door coupe Layout FR Powertrain Engine 315 CID 4-bbl. 230 hp (172 kW) V8[1] Transmission two-speed automatic Dimensions Wheelbase 115 in (2,921 mm) [2] Length 203.5 in (5,169 mm) Width 79 in (2,007 mm) [3]
1957 Dual-Ghia D-500
1958 Chrysler Dual-Ghia Coupe Prototype
Dual-Ghia is a rare, short-lived, automobile make, produced in the United States between 1956 and 1958. The idea for a sporty limited production car came from Eugene Casaroll, who controlled specialized vehicle builder Dual-Motors Corporation based in Detroit, Michigan; the name Dual-Ghia is representative of the collaborative efforts between the two builders.
The design for a luxurious sports car was to be a modified version of the Ghia-built 1954 and 1955 Dodge-based concept cars known as the Firearrow I, II, III, IV and the nearly production-ready Firebomb; which had all been designed by Luigi Segre with some possible influence from Virgil Exner. With so many cars designed along the same theme, Chrysler may well have intended to produce the Firebomb and/or the Chrysler Falcon as a response to the Ford Thunderbird and Chevrolet Corvette; for whatever reason neither made it to production. After gaining rights to the Firearrow/Firebomb design, Casaroll asked Ghia's U.S. representative (and eventual Dual-Motors VP) Paul Farago to further develop the Firebomb into a production-friendly vehicle. The series-produced design utilized an even greater number of standard production MoPar fittings, the (road-legal) Firebomb two headlamp configuration, incorporated modest tail fins and was somewhat more slab-sided and square-edged in comparison to the Firearrow/Firebomb series. While a four-place convertible was the only official body type at least one coupe was built.
The "world's longest assembly line" involved transporting a Dodge frame and drive-train to Italy, where the bodywork and interior was fabricated by the coachbuilders at Ghia; once the partially completed vehicles were back in the U.S. Dual-Motors handled the rest. Performance was excellent, due to the cars being powered by the 315 cu in (5.2 L) Dodge hemispherical-head short-stroke V-8 engine. Possibly built with a 361 cuin Dodge wedge engine.[4]
Rarity [ edit ]
With a retail price close to $7500, the Dual-Ghia D-500 was about $200 more expensive than most American production luxury cars. It cost, for example, about $200 more than Cadillac's Eldorado Biarritz convertible. However, its price did not even come close to that of the ultra-luxurious 1956 Continental Mark II at $10,400, or the 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham at $13,074. Of the 117 cars produced, 32 still existed in July 2006. The cars were mostly bought by American celebrities, such as Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden and Richard Nixon. Desi Arnaz owned one, but he wrecked it. Ronald Reagan owned one, which he lost in a high-stakes poker game with then-President Lyndon Johnson, who kept the car for several years. Dean Martin had one at one point as well, according to his son Ricci. Dean Martin can be seen driving his Dual-Ghia in the film Kiss Me, Stupid. Musician Rick Danko owned one from 1958, which was auctioned by Sotheby's for close to $350,000.[5]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]In the ancient Bahraini village of Aali, where some graves date to 2000 B.C., the Amir Mohammed Braighi mosque had stood for more than 400 years – one of the handsomest Shiite Muslim mosques in this small island nation in the Persian Gulf.
Today, only bulldozer tracks remain.
In Nwaidrat, where antigovernment protests began Feb. 14, the Momen mosque had long been a center for the town's Shiite population – photos show it as a handsome, square building neatly painted in ochre, with white and green trim, and a short portico in dark gray forming the main entrance.
Today, only the portico remains.
"When I was a child, I used to go and pray with my grandfather," said a local resident, who asked to be called only Abu Hadi. "The area used to be totally green, with tiers of sweet water wells."
"Why did they destroy this mosque?" Abu Hadi wailed. "Muslims have prayed there for decades."
In Shiite villages across this island kingdom of 1.2 million, the Sunni Muslim government has bulldozed dozens of mosques as part of a crackdown on Shiite dissidents, an assault on human rights that is breathtaking in its expansiveness.
Authorities have held secret trials where protesters have been sentenced to death, arrested prominent mainstream opposition politicians, jailed nurses and doctors who treated injured protesters, seized the health care system that had been run primarily by Shiites, fired 1,000 Shiite professionals and canceled their pensions, detained students and teachers who took part in the protests, beat and arrested journalists, and forced the closure of the only opposition newspaper.
Nothing, however, has struck harder at the fabric of this nation, where Shiites outnumber Sunnis nearly 4 to 1, than the destruction of Shiite worship centers.
The Obama administration has said nothing in public about the destruction. Bahrain – and its patron, Saudi Arabia – are longtime U.S. allies, and Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet.
27 religious structures destroyed
Members of the Shiite opposition assembled a list of 27 mosques and other religious structures demolished or damaged in the crackdown. A tour by McClatchy of several townships suggests the number of buildings destroyed is far greater.
The demolitions are carried out daily, Shiite leaders say, with work crews often arriving in the dead of night, accompanied by police and military escorts. In many cases, the workers have hauled away the rubble, leaving no trace, before townspeople awake.
Bahrain's minister of justice and Islamic affairs, Sheikh Khalid bin Ali bin Abdulla al Khalifa, defended the demolitions in an interview, claiming that any mosque demolished had been built illegally, recently, and without permission.
"These are not mosques. These are illegal buildings," he said.
That claim, however, is easily challenged. In Aali, for example, the government rerouted a planned highway some years back so as to preserve the Amir Mohammed Braighi mosque, residents say.
McClatchy visited three other sites where "before" photos of the destroyed mosques showed they were well maintained, decades-old structures.
Some sites had a wistful air. At the Sheikh Aabed Mosque in the village of Sitra, once a ramshackle building that residents said was more than a century old, prayer rugs and other religious paraphernalia covered the ground.
US official: Bahrain's Sunni leadership is 'vindictive'
The State Department told McClatchy that it's "concerned by the destruction of religious sites." The statement noted that the Bahraini government had international obligations to preserve the common cultural heritage.
In private, U.S. officials are harsher. One, who's not in Bahrain, said that by bulldozing Shiite mosques and persecuting the political opposition, the government was treating its people like a "captive population."
Another U.S. official visiting the area described the Sunni leadership as "vindictive" and indicated the Obama administration was deeply worried about Bahrain's rapid downward spiral. Both officials asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Shiites have long complained of bias and discrimination here, despite massively outnumbering the entrenched Khalifa dynasty, whose prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa ibn Salman al Khalifa has held the office for the past 40 years.
In mid-March, the government, after a month of protests, abandoned dialogue with moderate Shiites and Sunnis and invited Saudi Arabia to dispatch some 1,500 troops to help quell the unrest. The government imposed a state of emergency and began a crackdown on dissent. Among the first government acts after Saudi troops arrived was the destruction of the iconic Pearl Square, the traffic circle where demonstrators had camped out for weeks.
The government even recalled the half-dinar coins that featured the roundabout.
Most ominous is that hate speech of the sort that preceded the 1994 Rwandan genocide is now allowed in public. The pro-government English language Gulf Daily News recently gave prominence to a reader's letter that compared Shiites to "termites" that should be exterminated.
"The moral is: to get rid of the white ants so they don't come back... " said the letter, signed only, "Sana P S."
Bahrain television has carried the canard that the Shiite sect allows its followers to lie, implying that what they say can't be trusted.
How the conflict could become international
The crackdown also threatens to turn what had been an internal conflict into an international one.
Shiite-led Iran, which lies across the Gulf, is actively vying for influence in this predominantly Shiite state and has condemned the organized destruction of Shiite culture. The upheaval also has stirred passions in Shiite-ruled Iraq.
But Arab language television channels, including Al Jazeera, which is owned by the emir of Qatar, and Al Arabiya, which is Saudi owned, have been mostly silent about the wanton destruction.
Justice minister's perspective
Sheikh Khalid, the justice minister, brought Arabic language spreadsheets to a McClatchy interview stating the reasons for destruction as well as a book of records of the demolition program, complete with photographs. But he couldn't locate a reference to or photographs of Nwaidrat's Momen mosque in his briefing book, which listed all structures by number, not name.
He declined to provide a copy of the briefing book or the spreadsheet to McClatchy, saying they were "internal correspondence," and asked that no photograph be taken of him holding the briefing book.
Asked whether tearing down a long-standing, functioning place of worship would be viewed as a criminal offense in Bahrain, Sheikh Khalid appeared taken aback.
"If there is a fault or a mistake and [they] can prove it, the same place will be rebuilt in a much, much better shape," he later said.
And if they were operating under the law, why did the state demolition crews destroy the building after dark, when residents couldn't photograph the action?
"It is very difficult to do it in the morning. It is a kind of respect for people's psychology," Sheikh Khalid replied. "We were trying to put it in a way that it will not hurt he people. At least they do not see it while it is being demolished."
Because the material he was provided didn't list mosques by name, the justice minister also couldn't say for sure whether other religious structures visited by McClatchy were old construction, new construction, legal or illegal, or on private or public land.
He said there had been 41 "procedures" against religious structures in Bahrain's capital, Manama, but in many instances, those taken down were just temporary structures. He could only point to two Sunni religious structures that had been taken down.
Sheikh Khalid himself had earlier stated publicly that Bahrain had approximately 600 religious structures, and only 10 percent had been demolished. But he declined to confirm that figure.
Deep discouragement
Every foreign resident and most Bahrainis contacted by McClatchy seemed deeply discouraged about the future of communal relations on this once-promising island, but Justice Minister Khalid disagreed.
"I think we've reached the maximum bottom we can reach," he said. "My conviction is that things will not get much worse." One day later, he chaired a press conference where he announced plans for the trial of 47 doctors and other medical personnel.
Asked Monday if the trial might not remind many abroad of the show-trials that dictators such as Joseph Stalin had held, Sheikh Khalid said quietly, "There were also trials of doctors at Nuremberg."
He was referring to the trials of 21 physicians who took part in the Nazi program to euthanize the mentally ill, retarded, and physically disabled or in medical experiments on patients without their permission.
(Hannah Allam in Cairo contributed to this story.)Advertisement
This amazing lightning blazed from the ground to the clouds during severe weather in Oklahoma City on May 18, 2017.Mysterious lightning emanating from the ground and striking into the clouds has been seen in Oklahoma City and has been photographed and recorded by numerous witnesses.
image via Twitter
The odd lighting has many witnesses baffled, most have never seen the ground to sky lightning ever before. And the phenomena is said to be very uncommon, although does occur in nature from time to time.
image via: StormHighway.com
Upside-down lightning strikes are yet another curious twist in the tale. These strikes, which appear to form frequently at the tops of tall towers, can burst through the clouds and reach atmospheric heights of up to 90 kilometers.
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“Ground-to-cloud lightning strikes have been observed since the 1930s, but it is only recently, with the growing use of wind turbines, that it has become a real concern.” – Aleksandr Smorgonskiy,a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
In a normal strike, the negative ions from the cloud rush downwards and meet the positive ions rushing upwards. In an upside-down strike, the positive ions rush upwards far quicker, forming an electrical “circuit” with the clouds and the upper atmosphere.DC fans have seen a lot of trailers and clips from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and one intrepid YouTuber edited them together in a handy supercut.
Released by M1llion, the video cuts together all the promo footage in a predicted chronological order. It begins with Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) witnessing the destruction of Metropolis, builds with the superhero face-off, and finishes with Batman, Superman (Henry Cavill), and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) fighting off Doomsday.
Affleck described his character’s arc to EW beginning with Batman as a full-fledged vigilante in Gotham. “He’s projecting his own sense of failure, his own sense of disillusionment, his own cynicism onto Superman.” Meanwhile, Cavill explained Superman’s “weakness is that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He doesn’t want to scare anyone, and in that you can take advantage of him.”
Directed by Zack Snyder and featuring Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will be released in theaters on March 25.ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Region’s debts owed to oil companies have decreased by 25 percent as the region has paid back an estimated $1 billion to oil companies over the past eight months.
Dr. Aras Khoshnaw head of the Kurdistan Strategic Investigation and Information Center told Rudaw that loans the Kurdistan Regional Government had borrowed from the oil companies since 2014 have been reduced from $4 billion to just $3 billion as the KRG has started paying back its debts over the past eight months.
Khoshnaw added the process of paying the companies their gross payments has encouraged the companies who had oil agreements with the KRG to return and resume their work in oil fields.He added, the companies have asked the KRG to increase its oil export capabilities as they have increased their productions.This could be done through two ways, he noted, either through the opening of another route for oil exports, or by adding extra refineries.According information available to Khoshnaw, the Iraqi government owes the oil companies $70 billion.The Iraqi government during Nouri al-Maliki premiership cut the Kurdistan Region’s national budget share in early 2014, a move which forced the KRG to borrow large amounts of money from oil companies or delay their payments in a bid to offset its budget deficit to meet the region’s internal needs, notably the salaries of civil servants.
Additionally, lower world oil prices, the influx of more than 1.8 million refugees and IDPs, and increased military expenses because of the war with ISIS which began in the summer of 2014 have been economic challenges for the KRG.
The KRG signed two agreements in early October and November last year with two international financial institutions — Deloitte, and Ernst and Young — to audit the region’s oil and gas sector.I grew up believing that I should save myself for marriage. That’s what my parents and my pastor said I should do, and I believed them. But looking back on it now, four years after getting married, I regret waiting until marriage to have sex with all three members of Yo La Tengo.
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I was a nervous wreck, wracked with doubt and anxiety that all could have been avoided if I’d just gotten it out of the way and had sex with all three members of Yo La Tengo before getting married.
Worst of all, I now understand that sex with Yo La Tengo is a beautiful thing. It’s perfectly natural, and nothing like the big scary sin that my parents made it out to be when I was growing up.
It would have better prepared me for the experience itself. All throughout high school and college, I was the |
0001) - Understanding Stats (0002) - Strength-Based Builds (0003) - Dexterity-Based Builds (0004) - Faith-Based Builds: a variable primer (0005) - Blueblood Sword builds (0006) – Northern Regalia Builds (0007) - Meat Cleaver Builds (0008) – Magic-Based Builds: a variable primer ------------------------------------------ Non-Specific Build Information and Basics: ------------------------------------------ (0009) - What is “Stunlock”? (0010) - Talisman of Beasts: the best item in Demon's Souls? (0011) - Freke is not your friend: Steal From Him (Spell Hijack) (0012) - Character Tendency and You (0013) - Thomas, a Generous Soul: Duping and Other Amusements ------------ Comparisons: ------------ (0014) - Shield Basics (0015) - Rings (0016) - Weapon Buffs (Curse versus Light Weapon) (0017) - Warding versus Second Chance: Which and Why? (0018) - Negative Status (Plague vs. Poison vs. Bleed) (0019) - Counter Hit (the Demon's Souls Critical System) ----------- Techniques: ----------- (0020) - Off-hand Katana/dual wielding (0021) - Push/Stun Breaking (0022) - Parrying in PvP: Setup Parries & Blind Parries: a brief primer (0022.i) - Setup Parries & Notes (0022.ii) - Blind Parries (0022.iii) - A few final notes on parries (0022.iv) - Setup Parry Series (0023) - Backstabs: a brief primer (0023.i) - Pivot BS (0023.ii) – Locked/Running BS (0023.iii) – Rolling BS (0023.iv) – Counter BS (0023.v) - Original Counter BS (BS Reversal) by True R. (0023.vi) - A few final notes on back-stabs (0024) - Roll Punishing (0025) - Pivot Casting, Toggle Casting/Instant Cast and Spell Usage w/ Nick1Nintendo. (0025.i) Soul Ray (0025.ii) Fireball (0025.iii) Ignite (0025.iv) Firestorm (0025.v) Firespray (0025.vi) Homing Soul Arrow (0026) - Cross-Up/Dead-Angle (attacking through shields) (0026.i) - Cross-Up/Dead-Angle Part 2 (Turtle Killer) w/ ggDoom. (0027) Stealth in PvP: a Brief Discussion, w/ Meralonne and God's Poison. --------------- Weapon Primers: --------------- (0028) - Great Axes/Blunts (0029) - Poles (0030) - Asian Swords (0031) - Large Swords (0032) - Katana (0033) - Rapiers (0034) - 1-Handed Swords/Blunts/Axes (0035) - Daggers (0036) - Spears (0037) - Claws/Fist Weapons (0039) - Great Swords (0098) - Friendship and You (0099) - Guide FAQ & Legality & Other Stuff ___ ___ ___ ___ /__/\ ___ / /\ / /\ / /\ \ \:\ / /\ / /::\ / /::\ / /:/ \ \:\ / /:/ / /:/\:\ / /:/\:\ /__/::\ _____\__\:\ / /:/ / /:/~/:/ / /:/ \:\ \__\/\:\__ /__/::::::::\ / /::\ /__/:/ /:/___ /__/:/ \__\:\ \ \:\/\ \ \:\~~\~~\/ /__/:/\:\ \ \:\/:::::/ \ \:\ / /:/ \__\::/ \ \:\ ~~~ \__\/ \:\ \ \::/~~~~ \ \:\ /:/ /__/:/ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \:\/:/ \__\/ \ \:\ \__\/ \ \:\ \ \::/ \__\/ \__\/ \__\/ ------------------------------------------------- ===(0000) - Introduction, and about this guide=== ------------------------------------------------- "It is far harder to kill a Phantom than a Reality." - Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays Welcome to my guide! Here is a brief intro before we get started. Enjoy! -------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What should I know about Demon's Souls before reading this? -------------------------------------------------------------- A: You should have a competent grasp on game mechanics. I explain most stuff in some degree of depth, however, you should still know what a Parry is, or what a Push is. You should know about Character Tendency, World Tendency, Eye Stones, etc. You should also know how to get stuff. I'm not including farming info, the locations of weapons, or anything like that. That stuff is outside the jurisdictions of this guide, and are readily available in quite a few places on the web. Also, all builds are aimed at the 120 level. This is where the sternest level of PvP takes place. You can make proper adjustments to go higher or lower depending on your needs. 125 is now considered the standard PvP cap. As a side-note, generally if you plan on playing in body form, you can go quite a bit higher and still keep your PvP steady. The same rules apply for a Red Eye Stones. If invading, your SL likely shouldn't exceed 120 due to the fact you can only invade players of a higher Soul Level. I play on SL 110 characters, and I can invade into 4-1 basically 24/7. There are a several terms that are not intuitive, and may require some investigation on your part. It doesn’t help that there are no set terms for techniques/states in this game (unlike say modern fighting games which DS does share some traits with). This can make things a little confusing when traversing forums and the web. I've included a brief legend in this introduction. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: This guide is big. How the heck can I find what I want in this mess? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A: Ctrl +F There's a table of contents, and almost everything is coded by a bracketed number. Punch it into the search function to quickly and easily find what you need. ----------------- Simplified Legend ----------------- There are a lot of terms in this game relative to PvP. Some are intuitive, some are not. You will find as you read this guide from end to end it becomes increasingly cryptic. This is not chosen by design, but it allows me to express my ideas quickly. Here are a few things that will carry you pretty far in regards to the contents of this guide. WD = While dashing. Context is generally in regards to executing a move. WD R1 means the special while-dashing R1 attack. Moves are stance sensitive. WR = While rolling. Context is generally in regards to executing a move. WR R1 means the special while-rolling R1 attack. Moves are stance sensitive. WB = While blocking. Context is generally in regards to executing a move. WB R1 means the special while-blocking R1 attack. Moves are not stance sensitive, as they require a shield and are thus 1-handed. Only Spear/Rapiers are capable of WBs. ">" = Chain inputs. Context is generally in regards to executing a series of attacks that may or may not combo. R1 > R1 > R1 would imply three R1 swings in rapid succession. "/" = Either or. Context is generally in regards to a choice with two successful outcomes that may be executed. R1 > R1 > R1/R2 would imply two R1 swings in rapid succession and a 3rd consecutive attack that can be either a R1 or an R2. f+R1/Push/Shove. Any move performed by pressing a direction on the analog stick and R1 at the same time. Generally a non-damaging push attack that staggers. However certain weapons have special attacks from this input. Pushes landed with every non-Curse enchant will deal damage. Hit-Stun/Stun. The stun against an enemy awarded for landing a successful attack, and for certain weapons guaranteeing the following attack may land. Hit-Stun varies by attack. Often called "stagger". CH = Counter-Hit/Critical-Hit. Any attack landed while the opponent is dashing, in guard break, in a "pushed" state, rolling, or attacking themselves. Provides 38%-42% more damage on average, and can affect stun length. Applies to BSes, ripostes, slash, and spells. Essentially all attacks are eligible. Hyper/Hyper Armor. An attack that is uninterrupted by normal means, and any hit landed against a Hyper Armor attack will not provide Hit Stun. Generally large weapons like Great Axes and Great Swords provide the most Hyper Armor attacks. Hyper Armor attacks largely cannot be Parried. Phantom Range. A characteristic of any attack/weapon in which a hit is possible despite appearing to narrowly miss an opponent's Hit Box. A product of lag resulting in miscalculated hit detection. Generally some weapons and weapon swings are more capable of this than others. Phantom Hit. Any hit resulting from Phantom Range. KB. Knockback. Any move that knocks an opponent down. Comes in two types: "Flings" and "Grounds". Flings will knock an opponent away, and Grounds will simply drop them where they are. Glancing Blow. Typically found on large weapons. Some large weapon swings when narrowly missed still produce a very small amount of damage, and a stagger. A sort of AOE capability. Oki/Okizeme. Moves used to attack opponent's whom are rising from a grounded state. BS. Shorthand for "backstab". Varies with different techniques (Roll BS, Pivot BS, etc.). Other terms often used here and on forums will be "Run Stab", "Lag Stab", "Roll Stab", etc. )\.--..-,.-.,-. /`-..-,.-.,-. )\.--. (._.' ),,,. (,' _ \ ),,,. ( (._.' `-.`. \( |( )/ ( '-' ( \( |( )/ `-.`.,_ ( \ ) \ ) _ ) ) \,_ ( \ ( '.) ) \ ( (,' ) \ \ ( ( '.) ) '._,_.' )/ )/ )/ )/ '._,_.' ---------------------------------- ===(0001) - Understanding Stats=== ---------------------------------- Stats are the most rudimentary thing in Demon's Souls after basic game play. Knowing how to properly increase your stats will determine the quality of your build. ----------------- Diminishing Gains ----------------- Stats at large govern the damage for spells, miracles, and almost all weapons. However, all stats in Demon's Souls suffer from one thing: Diminishing Gains. This means you get the biggest jumps in damage from your stats from 1-30. 31-50 will still provide decent growth, however 51-99 is god awful. So you'd think this would encourage balanced builds right? Not at all. What this instead means is you'll focus keenly on a few choice stats (always Vitality), or find a series of “sweet spot” gains for utilizing particular setups (BBS/Cleaver). --------------------------------- 40 is the new 50 for damage stats --------------------------------- Golden Age builds were aimed at mostly 50 points for damage stats. A lot of people now go for 40, as the damage loss works out to about 10%-20%. -------------------------------------------------------- Melee class? Customize your Endurance to suit your needs -------------------------------------------------------- Another Golden Age rule that is instead a preference now. Generally, melee builds went with 40 Endurance to maximize stamina. As the metagame matured a lot of players started using less, simply because they were able to play with less, and enjoyed the points in another stat. Do as you please. --------------------------------------- Get the knowledge... go with a homebrew --------------------------------------- Although this guide is strongly dedicated to builds, there's no need to follow any exact formulas I've outlined. Even if you decide to ignore the build templates, you can it least get a good idea about how to spend your stat points wisely, and make a tight build of your own. This guide will never be even close to definitive in terms of PvP builds. There are way too many variations out there to even try. Wikidot builds archive: http://forums.demonssouls.info/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8457 Mud Chan's Damage Calculator: https://sites.google.com/site/darksoulstats/ -------- Vitality -------- =Effects= - Maximum HP increases. =Important breakpoints= - 10 VITALITY = 572HP - 20 VITALITY = 792HP (+220) - 30 VITALITY = 1100HP (+308) - 40 VITALITY = 1325HP (+225) - 50 VITALITY = 1500HP (+175) - 60 VITALITY = 1588HP (+88) - 99 VITALITY = 1900HP (+312) =Notes= As you can see, Vitality falls off completely after 50. Beyond that, it's largely a waste of points. It peaks in gains from 20-30, but you should largely consider taking it to it least 40. 50 is what most builds aim for. ------------ Intelligence ------------ =Effects= - Maximum MP increases. - Spell memory slots increase (the total number of magic spells you may equip). =Important breakpoints= - 14 INTELLIGENCE = 2 spell slots, 97MP - 15 INTELLIGENCE = 100MP without accessories - 18 INTELLIGENCE = 3 spell slots, 119MP - 24 INTELLIGENCE = 4 spell slots, 157MP - 30 INTELLIGENCE = 5 spell slots, 200MP - 40 INTELLIGENCE = 6 spell slots, 280MP =Notes= As you can see the effectiveness of investing into Intelligence largely tapers-off after 18. 15-18-24-30 should always be your goal, as you require 100MP to cast Second Chance, and some builds rely on Curse Weapon which requires 3 spell slots, and finally builds often splash additional Intelligence for slots to gain Warding in addition to Curse. --------- Endurance --------- =Effects= - Maximum stamina increases. - Equip weight increases (you are able to wear increasingly heavy armor without suffering movement penalties). - Fire resistance increases. - Poison resistance increases. - Bleed resistance increases. =Important breakpoints= - 10 ENDURANCE = 91 stamina, 39 pounds equip weight - 20 ENDURANCE = 110 stamina, 49 pounds of equip weight - 30 ENDURANCE = 133 stamina, 59 pounds of equip weight - 40 ENDURANCE = 160 stamina (maximum stamina), 69 pounds of equip weight =Notes= 160 stamina is the maximum, and Endurance should never exceed 40 because of this cap. A lot of people will debate continuously on the merits of slightly less Endurance versus the full 40. If your build and play-style does not require stunlocks, blocking, or stamina-hungry weapons, you can probably take a fair portion of your Endurance allowance, and put it somewhere else. Anywhere from 20-something has become exceedingly common place... template your stamina based on your preference. -------- Strength -------- =Effects= - Physical damage increases on appropriate weapons. Please note this “damage increase” is only applicable to bare-handed attacks, or to weapons that receive a bonus according to Strength. =Notes= Strength breakpoints aren't relevant. You will always want the minimum possible unless you are pumping Strength, or trying to use a certain weapon. KEEP IN MIND that you can cut down on a third of a weapons Strength requirement by 2-handing the weapon. This can save you points if you decide your build/style is suited to a 2-handed style enough to abandon 1-handed use altogether. --------- Dexterity --------- =Effects= - Physical damage increases on appropriate weapons. Please note that again, this increase is only relative to weapons that receive a bonus according to Dexterity. =Notes= Dexterity, like Strength should not be invested into unless it's required for your build. Yes, this largely means abandoning the use of a bow in PvM, however if you are not ready for that commitment then you are not ready for a tuned PvP build. ----- Magic ----- =Effects= - Spell power increases (note that this is only spell power, and not miracle power). - Physical/magical damage increases on appropriate weapons. Please note that again, this increase is only relative to weapons that receive a bonus according to Magic. =Important breakpoints= - 6 MAGIC = Base Magic for a Temple Knight. If making a Strength or Dexterity build, this should stay at 6 (unless hijacking spells). - 10 MAGIC = required to learn spells from Sage Freke or his apprentice, however note that Yuria DOES NOT require 10 Magic to teach spells (IE Cursed Weapon). HOWEVER, you may level your Magic to 10, and then delevel it to base 6 Magic while still retaining all the spells you have learned (although to remember them you will need to speak with Yuria). - 12 MAGIC = effective use of Northern Regalia - 16 MAGIC = effective use of the Insanity Catalyst - 18 MAGIC = effective use of the Blueblood Sword - 30+ MAGIC = beyond 30 Magic the Light Weapon + Insanity Catalyst combo will begin to have diminishing returns on further points invested into Magic. It would be considered wise to stop here if using this combination. If you are pushing for increased damage, taking it slightly further would not be completely unwarranted though. - 50 MAGIC = the maximum Magic you should aim for with a caster build. Beyond this gains are hilariously paltry. ----- Faith ----- =Effects= - Miracle power increases (note that this is only miracle power, and not spell power). - Miracle memory slots increase (the total number of miracles you may equip). - Magic damage resistance increases. =Important breakpoints= The one and only breakpoint required to know is 16 Faith to have 2 miracle slots, and thus use of the mighty Second Chance. I cannot express how important this is. Investments beyond 16 should be reserved for a Faith build only. The sole argument to the contrary is with Meat Cleaver builds. ---- Luck ---- =Effects= - Item drop rates. - Disease resistance increases. - Increases the damage of the Blueblood Sword. =Important breakpoints notes= Luck should never be increased for any reason. The only case to the contrary would be if you're using the Blueblood Sword. As for the gains associated with the Blueblood Sword, you get the highest gains up to Luck 20, thus it would be wise to stop there if using that weapon. Increasing it further is not a mistake if craving greater damage, however anything beyond 30 may largely be a waste as the gains become rather paltry at that point. Standard builds aim for 20-30. ------------ ===Builds=== ------------ "There is a Shadow under this Red Rock." - T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland Here we'll be going over several builds, and generally variations on each of them. These builds represent the latest PvP climate in DS, and as such are widely proven by both myself, and many other prominent PvP players. I recommend checking out Mud Chan's Stat calculator to plan your damage stats accordingly: https://sites.google.com/site/darksoulstats/dark-souls-calculators Also Wikidot has composed a large build library that I advise you to take a look at. Its quality stuff, and it’s tended to quite often, so if you want up-to-date stuff, head on over: http://forums.demonssouls.info/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8457.-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-..-.-. '. S )'. t )'. r )'. e )'. n )'. g )'. t )'. h ) ).' ).' ).' ).' ).' ).' ).' ).' ------------------------------------ ===(0002) - Strength-Based Builds=== ------------------------------------ ------------------------- Golden Age Crushing Build SL120 Temple Knight (1-21 point(s) remain) ------------------------------------------ Vit - 50 Int - 18 End - 30-40 Str - 40-50 Dex - 12 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ----------------------------- Dragon Bone Smasher Variation SL120 Temple Knight (0-10 points remain) --------------------------------------- Vit - 67 Int - 18 End - 30-40 Str - 34 Dex - 12 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck – 7 -------------------------- Crushing 5-Slot Meta Build SL121 Temple Knight (0-10 points remain) --------------------------------------- Vit - 50 Int - 30 End - 30-40 Str - 40 Dex - 12 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------ NR Strength Splash SL120 Temple Knight (5-15 points remain) ---------------------------------------- Vit - 50 Int - 18 End - 30-40 Str - 40 Dex - 12 Mag – 12 Faith - 16 Luck - 7 -------------------------------------------- (0002.i) – Common Strength Weapons/Utilities -------------------------------------------- - Common Strength Weapons Include the Following: 1) Dragonbone Smasher +5 2) Crushing +5 Weapons (notably Hammer, Great Axe, Knight Sword) 3) Northern Regalia/Dragon weapons as a Warding Crush. ----------------------------------- (0002.ii) - Strength Build Factoids ----------------------------------- 1) This build comes in dozens of flavours: Regular, Dragonbone, and 5-Slot. 1a) A Drangonbone build is capped at 34 Strength to effectively maximize DBS's 2-handed bonus. It then gouges Vitality, thus taking advantage of DBS's incredibly high static damage, and ignoring its diminishing gains while being held in the 2-handed grip, and still maximizing its 2-handed damage. 1b) The 5-Slot build is a relatively new inclusion into this guide, but something I (and likely others) have been using for some time. It's a meta build designed to gain access to both Warding and Curse in exchange for 10 or so Strength to better combat other Strength/Dex builds in a mirror match. 2) The above stat-point distributions of both builds allow you to equip a cracked Talisman of Beasts for use of the Second Chance miracle and the bugged version of the Curse Weapon spell. Levelling Magic to 10 allows you to learn Sage Freke's spells, then promptly de-levelling it back to 6 allows you to keep those points invested into Magic while still accessing the spells you've learned (you will require Yuria however to remember spells). 3) Again, you may be wondering why the DBS build only has 34 Strength. Basically, since Strength weapons receive a 50% bonus in double grip 34 Strength is the equivalent of 50 Strength (34 x 1.5 = 50). After 34 Strength the gains slow quite a bit. Beyond 66 Strength, 2-handing a weapon of no longer provides additional AR for added points into Strength. 4) The Priest starting class will give you an extra point on many Strength builds if you don't mind abandoning Hammer use. __ __ __ __ /\ \ /\ \ /_/\ /\ \ / \ \____ / \ \\ \ \ \ \_\ / /\ \_____\ / /\ \ \\ \ \__/ / / / / /\/___ // / /\ \_\\ \__ \/_/ / / / / / // /_/_ \/_/ \/_/\__/\ / / / / / // /____/\ _/\/__\ \ / / / / / // /\____\/ / _/_/\ \ \ \ \ \__/ / // / /______ / / / \ \ \ \ \___\/ // / /_______\ / / / /_/ / \/_____/ \/__________/ \/_/ \_\/ ------------------------------------- ===(0003) - Dexterity-Based Builds=== ------------------------------------- ---------------------- Golden Age Sharp Build SL120 Temple Knight (0-24 points remain) ------------------------------------- Vit - 45 Int - 18 End - 30-40 Str - 14-18 Dex - 40-50 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------- 5-Slot Meta Variant SL120 Temple Knight (0-14 points remain) ------------------------------------- Vit - 43 Int - 30 End - 30-40 Str - 14-18 Dex - 40 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------- NR Dexterity Splash SL120 Temple Knight (2-12 points remain) ------------------------------------- Vit - 43 Int - 18 End - 30-40 Str - 18 Dex - 40 Mag – 12 Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ---------------------------------- Common Dexterity Weapons/Utilities ---------------------------------- - Common Dexterity Weapons Include the Following: 1) Gripless/Hiltless +5 2) Meat Cleaver (surprisingly) 3) Sharp +5 Weapons (notably Katana, Sais, Kilij, Estoc) 4) Northern Regalia/Dragon +5 (Warding Crush) ---------------------- Dexterity Builds notes ---------------------- 1) The above stat-point distributions of both builds allow you to equip a cracked Talisman of Beasts for use of the Second Chance miracle and the bugged version of the Curse Weapon spell. Levelling Magic to 10 allows you to learn Sage Freke's spells, then promptly de-levelling it back to 6 allows you to keep those points invested into Magic while still accessing the spells you've learned (you will require Yuria however to remember spells). Unlike Strength, depending on your style you can largely get away without using Curse Weapon, which opens up the door to things like Warding, Cloak and clouds. 2) The 5-Slot build is a relatively new inclusion into this guide, but something I (and potentially others) have been using for some time. It’s a meta build designed to gain access to both Warding and Curse in exchange for 10 or so Dexterity to better combat other Strength/Dex builds in a mirror match. Although the stat spread makes it slightly worse against every other build essentially, I believe it to be the dominant of the 3 builds. 3) 18 Strength gives you access to one the strongest Dexterity weapon: Gripless/Hiltless. You can also equip a Dark Silver Shield, or if you feel like something with a bit more hit resistance, Knight's Shield is an incredible alternative if you find yourself sucking up physical attacks with a shield a lot..--.. _.._ |__|.'|.'.._|.--..| < | |'__ | |.' |_ | | __| |__.:--.'. | |.' || |.'''-. |__ __|/ | \ || |'--..-'| |/.'''. \ | | `" __ | || | | | | / | | | |.'.''| ||__| | | | | | | | | / / | |_ | '.'| | | | | | \ \._,\ '/ | / | '. | '. |_| `--' `" `'-' '---' '---' --------------------------------- ===(0004) - Faith-Based Builds=== --------------------------------- ----------------------- Standard Variable Build SL120 Temple Knight ------------------- Vit - 40-50 Int – 15-18 End - 40 Str - 14-26 Dex - 12 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 40-50 Luck – 7 --------------------------------------- (0004) – Common Faith Weapons/Utilities --------------------------------------- - Common Faith Weapons Include the Following: 1) Large Sword of Moonlight 2) Blessed +5 weapons (Crescent Axe, Great Axe, Knight Sword, Guillotine Axe, Claymore, Great Sword) 3) Baby's Nail (backup) 4) Istarelle ------------------ Faith Builds notes ------------------ 1) What Faith lacks in sheer output over its Strength relatives is makes up for in diversity. - No Weapon buffs provide 2-3 free spell slots. Free Warding at least. - HP regeneration provides a favourable matchup versus turtling strategies. - Gouged Magic defence helps greatly with every non-physical build. Notably Magic-based builds that rely on medium output split damage weapons will suffer large damage losses over the course of a fight. - High Magic damage provides a built-in Warding crush. - Although uniques are not top notch, LSoM is a great weapon in a turtle-heavy meta. 4) The Priest starting class will give you an extra point on many Faith builds if you don't mind abandoning Hammer use.,---,.,---,..--.--.,'.' \,'.' \ / / '.,---.'.' |,---.'.' || : /`. / | | |: || | |: |; | |--` : : : /: : : /| : ;_ : | ; : | ; \ \ `. | : \| : \ `----. \ | |. || |. | __ \ \ |': '; |' : '; | / /`--' / | | | ; | | | ; '--'. / | : / | : / `--'---' | |,' | |,' `----' `----' ------------------------------------- ===(0005) - Blueblood Sword Builds=== ------------------------------------- ------------------------- Standard 1-Hand BBS Build SL120 Royal (1-11 points remain) ------------------------------- Vit - 40 Int - 15+ End - 30-40 Str - 18 Dex - 18 Mag - 30 Faith - 18 Luck - 20 ------------ Luckless BBS SL120 Royal (14-24 points remain) --------------------------------- Vit - 40 Int - 15+ End - 30-40 Str - 18 Dex - 18 Mag - 30 Faith - 18 Luck - 7 --------------------------------------- (0005) – Common BBS Weapons/Utilities --------------------------------------- - Common BBS Weapons Include the Following: 1) Blueblood Sword 2) Insanity Catalyst 3) Backups in the form of NR and Moon/Dragon weapons. ----------------------------------------- (0005) – Blueblood Sword Builds Explained ----------------------------------------- 1) It should also be noted since almost all the damage from a BBS build is magic, and not physical, it can be used quite well in one hand even if requirements for Strength are not met. This also makes it basically immune to Scrape tactics. 2) Luckless BBS is a new build aimed at players who focus more on combos and harassing strikes then BSes/ripostes. The damage per hit with base Luck as long as Light Weapon is engaged loses about 15-ish percent, but provides quite a few points to access a larger Vitality pool, or even Warding. Although the loss of damage is not sorely missed, your BS damage will sink to just under 1k (BP with Foe, in +2 WWT), which means you will not be able to one-shot blues with a clean BS. This can be a favourable trade depending on your style, but it's not for everyone that's for sure. The big draw is Warding access without a doubt, to improve Dexterity/Strength matchups. _ _ ___ | \| | | _ \ |.` |===| /egalia (& other Gouge builds) |_|\_| |_|_\ _|"""""|_|"""""| "`-0-0-'"`-0-0-' -------------------------------------- ===(0006) - Northern Regalia Builds=== -------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Northern Regalia Vitality Gouge SL120 Temple Knight (0-21 points remain) ---------------------------------------- Vit - 76 Int - 15 End - 25-40 Str - 14-20 Dex - 14 Mag - 12 Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------------ Northern Regalia, 5-slot SL120 Temple Knight (0-21 points remain) ---------------------------------------- Vit - 61 Int - 30 End - 25-40 Str - 14-20 Dex - 14 Mag - 12 Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------- Dragon/Makoto Gouge SL120 Temple Knight (0 points remain) ------------------------------------- Vit - 83-91 Int - 15-18 End - 40 Str - 14-18 Dex - 12-13 Mag – 6 (10, then delevel to 6 once Sage Freke's spell are obtained) Faith - 16 Luck – 7 -------------------------------------- (0006) – Common NR Weapons/Utilities -------------------------------------- - Common NR weapons include the following: 1) Northern Regalia 2) Dragon +5 weapons 3) (special) Morion Blade & Clever Rat's Ring (as left hand weapon when two-handing main attack) 4) Makoto +5 --------------------------------------------- (0006) - Northern Regalia Builds Explained --------------------------------------------- 1) Friend's/Foe's Ring seems to have rather impressive results with this build (although this may be largely attributed to the fact that I see it seldom used except on hosts and new players, and thus the damage was largely less than impressive). Despite NR users should all technically deal similar damage, I found it varied greatly person to person (from neutral CT NR to host NR, to soul form NR, to Friend's/Foe's NR). Frankly, you never know what you're getting. Be forewarned: in phantom versus phantom combat NR can hit brutally hard. 2) As a Large Sword of average range, it presents no particular strengths or weaknesses in terms of matchups (unlike Claymore which has many solid matchups due to its increased range). Even its absolutely worst matches often result in a series of R1 trades. Large Swords are odd beasts in this glorified game of paper/scissors/rock. 3) These two particular builds are sample builds (the Gouge build seems obvious, the 5-slot Variation is a bit less so, however they're all pretty liquid). The +/- 6 Strength variation on both of them that allows for exclusive 2-handed use if so desired. 4) The Dragon/Makoto gouge builds are lumped here because they are more-or-less the same as NR, with the exception of different weapons. Dual Makotos are swell, and Dragon weapons although somewhat weak can secure a victory. Basically, if you lie the idea of a Gouged build, and don't like NR, consider these (although a NR build can still use Makotos with a few points invested into Strength). 5) NR is a stamina-light playstyle generally. Since you will never swing the weapon more than twice in a double grip, you can certainly remove a large portion of Endurance if you feel comfortable with it. ___ ( ) ___.-..-..--..---. | |_ ( )'\ / \ /.-, \ ( __) |.-..-. ; |.-. ; (__) ; | | | | | | | | | | | | |.'` | | | ___ | | | | | | | |/ | /.'| | | |( ) | | | | | | |'_.' | / | | | | | | | | | | | | |.'.-. ; | ; | |'| | | | | | | |'`-' /'`-' |'`-' ; (___)(___)(___) `.__.' `.__.'_. `.__. ------------------------------------------ ===(0007) - Standard Meat Cleaver Build=== ------------------------------------------ ----------------------- iCat LW Cleaver returns ----------------------- LW Cleaver was something TMRaven originally advocated, but after we discussed it in some degree of length, we decided it was a bit too rickety to include in the older guides (or at least I convinced him). That was a long time ago, and things have changed drastically in PvP. The shakiness of a MC build utilizing LW no longer isn’t that bad. A lot of builds these days are focused on diversity over sheer min-maxing, which opened the door for this old gem (also, a meta not full of katanas helps). Again, due to insanely rigid stat spreads, you’re not getting the best spread, or a variable spread... but this build will work nicely in a Warding-glutted meta. This revision is one of ggDoom’s creations. Praise be to him, and TMRaven. -------------------- iCat Light Weapon MC SL120 Temple Knight (0 points remain) ------------------------------------- SL120 Temple Knight Vit - 40-45 Int - 14 End - 35-40 Str - 28 Dex - 30 Mag – 30 Faith - 16 Luck - 7 ------------------------------------------------ (0007.i) – Common Meat Cleaver Weapons/Utilities ------------------------------------------------ - Common MC Weapons Include the Following: 1) Meat Cleaver 2) Dragon, Crushing, Quality, and Blessed weapons 5) Talisman of Beasts/iCat ----------------------------------------- (0007.ii) – Meat Cleaver Builds Explained ----------------------------------------- 1) Although inferior in damage output to a Crushing style build using a Cursed Great Axe, Cleaver still has a clear advantage on the range front improving Polearm matches, and it also has the ever-present backstab vacuum Cleaver is famous for. Similar to BBS this build suffers from a wide stat spread, keeping your Vitality at 40-ish or so. This can cause you to suffer at higher levels of play. Consider a Crushing build with Crescent Axe (similar damage, similar range, same move set) if you're concerned. The only primary difference between the two is that Cleaver does considerable damage through certain shield blocks and Warding that a Crushing build simply can't due to Cleaver's on-board magic attack and builds that can use iCat LW. If this is worth more than your Vitality, then go with Cleaver. 2) Cleaver is one of the few weapons that gets a great return on Sticky White Stuff. This is solid in longer duels since you aren't forced to eat a spice before re-applying Curse Weapon. This also means Cleaver can still perform quite admirably without Curse, and again opens up spell slots to things such as Warding. Without a doubt this is the largest distinction between Cleaver and his Crushing GA/CA cousins. This is also good for wrecking Warding spam post duration of Curse using SWS as a rebuff. --------------------------- GG |
Fangio was born in June 1911 in the small city of Balcarce near Buenos Aires, Argentina to parents who were Italian immigrants. He was diminutive in stature and like most Argentinean boys played football. He was bowlegged and good at kicking a football around and was initially nicknamed “El Chueco” (the bowlegged one). Born into a modest family, he dropped out of school when he was thirteen years old and worked as a mechanic’s assistant. From this early work started his lifelong love of cars, which eventually led to a career in racing.
Fangio undertook compulsory two-year military service when he was twenty-one. His commanding officer recognized his driving skills and appointed him as a driver. On returning home from the army, Fangio devoted his time to rebuilding cars. In 1934, he started his racing career in stamina building cross-country marathons in a Model T Ford car that he had rebuilt. Later he raced with Chevrolet cars and won the Argentine National Championship in 1940 and 1941. During these grueling races, he fought against arch rival Oscar Galvez winning many a race over the next few years.
After a period of inactivity due to the Second World War, he resumed his racing career in 1946. In 1948, Fangio and Galvez were sponsored by the Argentine government and sent to race in Europe. Fangio won four out of six Formula 1 races he entered in 1949 with a Maserati car. The Argentinean driver, who spoke mostly Italian and very little English, astonished his European rivals with his driving skills.
Formula 1’s first World Driving Championship was organized in 1950 with a total of seven races. In the first championship, points were awarded to the top five finishers – 8, 6, 4, 3, 2 points respectively. The best four results of each driver in the seven races were taken and a driver was also awarded one point for the fastest lap.
Each team had three cars participating in the championship. In the early days of Formula 1, a driver could take over a teammate’s car and both of them would share the points won equally, regardless of the laps driven. Team orders in F1 were born at this early stage of its history.
In 1950, Fangio drove an Alfa Romeo and finished second to teammate Nino Farina. The Argentine drove in six out of the seven races that season winning in Monaco, Belgium and France. He retired from the races in Great Britain, Switzerland and Italy (all won by Farina). The Alfa Romeo team did not participate in the Indianapolis 500 race that season. With Farina and Fangio winning the same number of races, Farina’s fourth place finish in Belgium saw him edge Fangio into second place to win Formula 1’s first ever drivers’ championship.
In 1951, Fangio was crowned champion for the first time driving for the Alfa Romeo team at the ripe old age of forty. The Argentinean driver edged out Ferrari’s Alberto Ascari. The championship had expanded to eight races that year with a newly added race in Spain. Fangio again won three races in the season. The second championship had the same rules as the first one.
The legend of “El Maestro” was born with his first drivers’ title. Fangio would go on to win four more titles with three other teams – Mercedes, Ferrari and Maserati. Fangio was the only driver in Formula 1 history to win championships with four different teams (Schumacher and Prost, the two other drivers with four or more WDCs, won titles with two teams only). As all great champions, he had an indomitable spirit to win and could be quite ruthless in moving to the teams with the best car for the season. He would also not hesitate to take over a teammate’s car in case of a mechanical failure.
In 1952, the World championship was run under new rules and the Alfa Romeo team could not participate. Fangio suffered multiple injuries including a broken neck in a crash in a Maserati car in a non-championship race in Monza. He recovered from his injuries and returned to competitive racing the following year driving again for the Maserati team. In 1953, he finished in second place behind the previous year’s champion and archrival, the Italian Alberto Ascari (still at Ferrari). Fangio had only one win that season in the last race in Italy.
In 1954, Fangio returned to his championship winning ways after switching to the Mercedes Silver Arrows team mid-season. He won the first two races for the Maserati team and then went on to win four of the six remaining races with Mercedes. It was a dominant performance by the Argentinean driver that season. This was followed by three more titles from 1955 to 1957.
In 1955, Fangio again won the title with the Mercedes team alongside the legendary Stirling Moss. In 1956, he moved to the Ferrari team where he won his fourth World Championship edging out the unfortunate Moss, who was now driving for Maserati. The “El Maestro” did not enjoy an easy relationship with Enzo Ferrari who was in the process of building one of the fabled teams of Formula 1 racing in the following years.
In 1957, Fangio won his fifth and last title after returning to Maserati. The legendary Argentine once again beat Stirling Moss, who was driving for the Vanwall team by then. Fangio’s dominance in this decade was one of the reasons the legendary British driver never won a world championship. A win at the German Grand Prix on the Nordschleife circuit of Nurburgring in what is considered one of the greatest Formula 1 races of all time helped seal Fangio’s fifth title and his legendary status as a Formula 1 driver.
In that race, Fangio started from pole position and built a 30 second lead over his two Ferrari rivals, Collins and Hawthorn. The Argentine was a master strategist and had started on half a tank of fuel and also planned to have a pit stop to change tyres. After building a sizable lead, he pitted on the thirteenth lap and had a disastrous pit stop. Fangio came out 50 seconds behind the Ferrari drivers but set one fastest lap after the other to catch his rivals. This included one lap where he was a full eleven seconds faster than the two drivers in front of him, eventually passing them on the penultimate lap and winning the race.
This championship-clinching race is often regarded as one of the greatest drives in Formula 1 and one of Fangio’s greatest wins. It was also his last win as Fangio retired after the sixth race of the 1958 season, the French Grand Prix. The five titles he won, including four consecutive titles from 1954 to 1957 stood as a record for the next 46 years. In 2003, Michael Schumacher won his sixth title which included four straight titles from 2000 to 2003. In 2004 Schumacher won his seventh and last title which included five consecutive championships to break another of Fangio’s records.
After over sixty years of Formula 1 racing where the season has expanded from seven races to twenty races hosted around the world, many of Fangio’s records still stand. He has the highest winning percentage of any F1 driver with 46.15% winning 24 races of 52 starts. His contemporary and rival Alberto Ascari is second on the all time list with 40%. Compare this with the modern greats like Schumacher with 29.55% (91 wins in 308 races), Ayrton Senna with a winning percentage of 25.31% (41 wins in 162 races) and the current three-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel with 25.74% (26 wins in 101 races). Schumacher’s performance was not helped by the unsuccessful return with Fangio’s old team Mercedes, but even during his first career the legendary German could not assert such total dominance over the rest of the field.
Fangio had 29 pole positions in 52 races and started on the front row an astonishing 48(!) times in all. He had 23 fastest laps in his career and no wonder the brilliance and dominance of this driver is still remembered to this day. Fangio raced in an era with no seat belts and no fire proof race suits, when racing was hazardous and life threatening. Fangio is the oldest ever Formula 1 drivers’ champion winning his last title when he was 46 years old.
Fangio was a master at coaxing the maximum out of his car and finishing long and energy sapping races. Fangio’s driving was based on the principle of “not driving as fast as possible but only as swiftly as necessary.” This was a blessing for the confection of metal and rubber on whose cooperation he was reliant. After his legendary drive at the German Grand Prix he said: “I have never driven that quickly before in my life and I do not think I will ever be able to do it again.”
After retiring, Fangio sold Mercedes-Benz cars in Argentina and was named the President of their Argentinean operations in 1974. His post-retirement days took a dramatic turn in 1958, when he was kidnapped for twenty-six hours by Fidel Castro’s rebel troops to embarrass then Cuban President Batista, but Fangio was released unharmed and spent his later years as a successful businessman. He was inducted into the International Motor Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and eventually died in 1995 at the ripe old age of 84.
The standard this great Formula 1 driver set in the early years of Grand Prix racing was one of excellence of the highest order. To this day drivers measure themselves against his records and legendary driving skills. The “El Maestro” Juan Manuel Fangio will always have a special place in the annals of Formula 1 racing.
Sources : FOM, GrandPrix.com, maseraticelebratesfangio.com, New York Times, WikipediaI know that many folks think that finding good, renewable talent in recruiting is tiresome to talk about. Hence, a few of our staff hates recruiting talk period.
While I respect that, it's also important to realize what you need to recruit for in the future. If you're not looking at issues on your roster 2, maybe even 3 years down the road and hoping you can just plug in walk-ons to fill it, that's a problem.
And, yes, the Nebraska Cornhuskers have one of if not the most storied walk-on programs in America. However, in the end, it doesn't make up for laziness in recruiting.
A friend of mine, Kevin Koenig and his buddies did some numbers crunching when it came to the two-deep of Nebraska and comparable programs across FBS.
They all compared the top 40 S&P teams at Football Outsiders and their 2 deep in Week 5 or 6 of their seasons. These are going off the depth charts provided in a team's game notes.
How many walk-ons are in the 2 deep across the board? The numbers may shock you.
Here is the chart.
This is what happens when you have a lot of marginal guys on your recruiting classes that don't have very many Power 5 offers. Granted, you do indeed find kids that work out, but more often than not you're looking to have to plug in with walk-ons and such.
Iowa has almost as many walk-ons in the 2 deep as Nebraska does, and has lower-ranked recruiting classes. However, the Hawkeyes are 6-0 while Nebraska, as we know, is far from that. It does not mean that Mike Riley's staff is not as good, but it does mean that Mike Riley's staff has their work cut out for them.
Development is one thing. Recruiting is another thing. Both, however, will get you to promised lands like the CFB Playoff and Conference championships.
To look at what Nebraska is dealing with right now, lets look at the '13 recruiting class and what they are doing now. The Huskers signed 25 kids out of that class. Where are they now?
Josh Banderas – LB – starter
Cethan Carter – TE – starter
Maliek Collins – DT – starter
Tre’Vell Dixon – DB – gone
Matt Finnin – OT – just now got to the 2 deep due to being buried.
Nate Gerry – S – starter
Kevin Gladney – WR – gone
Randy Gregory – DE – contributed but left early for NFL
Zach Hannon – OL – buried on depth chart
Greg Hart – TE - gone
Dwayne Johnson – OG – gone
Boaz Joseph – DB – buried on depth chart
David Knevel – OT – 2nd string
Chongo Kondolo – OG – starter as a Sr JUCO
Courtney Love – LB – split with Hart
Drake Martinez – LB/S – at Michigan State
Kevin Maurice – DT – has done well on backup duty
Gabe Miller – OL – medical redshirt
Dimarya Mixon – DE – gone
AJ Natter – DE – buried on depth chart
Marcus Newby – LB – starter/co-starter
Terrell Newby – RB – starter
Johnny Stanton – QB – back to Cali
Earnest Suttles – DE – not on team
Adam Taylor – RB – buried, will probably split town
-----------
It's not only important to get good kids, but also contributors on the bottom of the class. The more of those you have, the better you will be off. Granted, every class will have kids that don't work out. That's human nature, but the less you have of those, the better off your program will be.Image: Supplied.
By Jeffrey Charles
I’m in an interracial marriage.
I’m a white guy. A white guy who goes all the way back to the First Fleet. And I am married to an Australian Chinese girl.
This is what you’d see if you saw us walking down the street: a white guy that looks like a vampire, next to a petite Asian girl and a baby that’s a mix of the two of us. What would you think about us?
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I’ll give you an insider’s perspective.
Many assume that I have a fetish for Asian women. This fetish is also known as ‘yellow fever’. I’ve heard this term from Asian and white people. ‘Yellow fever’ is the colloquial (and kind of racist) term for anyone non-Asian who is crazy about Asian people.
I don’t think I have ‘yellow fever’. I’ve dated white girls. I’ve been attracted to women from many different ethnic groups. I find the term to be sort of offensive and racist. Like there’s something abnormal about me being married to a Chinese woman. I haven’t gone on a rant when I’ve received this question, but I do think less of people that ask me the question.
Another question I’ve been asked is: Are you an ‘Egg’? That is, white on the outside, yellow on the inside. I’m not an ‘egg’. I like Chinese culture, but I’m not trying to be Asian.
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Unfortunately, I get other kinds of racist of racist propositions and questions. On several occasions I’ve been asked to make friends with someone’s brother because that person is also ‘married to an Asian’. It’s as if I’ve met every Asian person in the world, and I’ve never even been to China.Representative Scott Taylor of Virginia says if his daughter had been among Senate candidate’s alleged victims, ‘I’d break his fingers and worse’
A Republican congressman has said he would have beaten up Roy Moore, the GOP nominee for a US Senate seat in Alabama, if any of the women who have made sexual misconduct allegations against the judge had been his daughter.
Trump hails 'invisible' plane in remarks to coast guard: 'The enemy cannot see it' Read more
“The 14-year-old girl that was there, I can tell you right now if it was my daughter, I’d break his face, I’d break his fingers, and I’d probably do a lot worse,” Virginia representative Scott Taylor told CNN on Wednesday.
Taylor, a former navy Seal, said he did not “feel comfortable” with Moore’s response to the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which include the claim that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl in 1979, when he was 32. Moore has denied all such allegations.
“All I know is what I’ve seen,” Taylor said. “I saw the man give his interview. Me personally, I don’t think it was sufficient enough.”
Moore’s campaign – which on Wednesday confirmed the departure of its communications director, John Rogers – did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Republican party is increasingly at odds with Donald Trump over Moore and the Alabama race. On Tuesday, the president indicated that he did not accept the accusations against Moore. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior Republicans have said they do.
Asked how he felt about the potential election of an alleged “child molester” to the Senate, the president said Moore “totally denies it”.
“He says it didn’t happen,” Trump told reporters. “You have to listen to him, also.”
Republican leaders are concerned that win or lose in Alabama on 12 December, Moore will damage the party’s brand before the 2018 midterm elections.
As Moore has refused to drop out, controversy over alleged sexual misconduct by prominent men has spread in politics to include accusations against Trump, Bill Clinton and two congressional Democrats, the Michigan representative John Conyers and Minnesota senator Al Franken.
Texas Republican Joe Barton in scandal over sexually explicit photos Read more
The Washington Post published its explosive allegations against Moore two weeks ago. Since then, other women have come forward. Moore, near-level with Democrat Doug Jones in the polls, has said he does not recall dating any young women without their mothers’ permission.
“If you are a liberal and hate Judge Moore, apparently he groped you,” his campaign told the Post last week. “If you are a conservative and love Judge Moore, you know these allegations are a political farce.”
In his remarks this week, Trump came close to endorsing Moore, saying: “We don’t need a liberal person... a Democrat” in the seat vacated by attorney general Jeff Sessions.
Speaking to CNN, Taylor suggested that though Trump supported Moore’s opponent, Luther Strange, in the primary, the president had “probably looked at raw politics and the alternative, of course, would jeopardize his agenda in a very close Senate”, where tax cut legislation is pending.
The congressman added: “I think you have to listen to the women. Clearly, this isn’t an isolated case now.”
Taylor represents Virginia’s second congressional district, a competitive seat in a state that saw Democratic successes in elections this month.Anton Ognyev reckoned he was pretty savvy about scams having grown up in Ukraine.
"There, you are very alert – you are targeted every day."
But the computer graphics worker, who moved to Wellington nine years ago, was sucked in by scammers who posed as Inland Revenue workers.
Now, he wants others to know how convincing some scams have become.
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He also questions why it seems so easy for scammers, who are really based overseas, to rent local phone numbers through which they can conduct their frauds.
His problems began when Ognyev's wife received a call from someone claiming to be from Inland Revenue.
The caller left a message for Anton saying he was due a tax refund of few thousand dollars and left a local contact phone number and claim number.
Coincidently, Ognyev was expecting a similar-sized refund after filing his tax return through his accountant.
"When you call a Wellington number, you don't expect trouble," he said.
Distracted with work, Ognyev called back and gave his driver's licence details as an "ID check". Then the scammer, who had an Indian accent, asked for some bank account details. Ognyev got suspicious and hung up.
It might not seem like much harm done. But Ognyev knows the scammers could use his identity details to apply for a fraudulent loan in his name which could blot his credit record.
"I got very worried and you need to make lots of calls. It takes up days because you think 'what is going on, what else should I do, should I shut my bank account, call police?' and are you not able to think about other stuff."
He has replaced his driver's licence, and his eftpos card as the scammers also had the last four digits of his bankcard – he assumed from a third-party data breach.
Those digits of a bankcard are stored by online retailers to identify transactions, but can be quoted back to people once in the hands of scammers, to gain victims' trust.
Ognyev said the scammer he spoke to sounded like a well-trained call centre operator.
"The conversation style was very similar to what you have when you call Inland Revenue or any other agency."
International reports suggest many of the so-called "Microsoft tech-support scams" that have plagued Kiwis are run by once-legitimate tech support companies in India that turn to "the dark side" while business is slack.
The scammer was not pushy and didn't immediately make suspicious demands, he says. "They were happy to just get as much information as they could."
Chris Hails from cyber-safety organisation Netsafe said the "Inland Revenue" scam was endemic.
"With people who are'scam-aware', savvy and clever, often it is just a moment of weakness; you are tired, hungry or in the middle of cooking dinner and for some reason you fall for the initial hook, and then they work you through the process because they are good at what they do."
Ognyev was right to fear his driver's licence ID could be used to perpetuate other frauds, Hails said. Criminals were not just after cash and would use stolen identities for "romance scams" and other frauds.
It didn't take much for foreign scammers to get "04" or "09" phone numbers from the likes of Microsoft-owned Skype or in blocks from telcos, he said.
"There are numerous places you can buy them for legitimate and other purposes and they are virtually untraceable.
"You can contact the 'owner' of the number who has leased it out and have it disconnected but it is like 'whack-a-mole'."
But Hails, like Ognyev, questions whether phone companies are doing enough to identify who rents phone numbers, or to quickly block those that are used for frauds.
The phone number on which Ognyev called back his scammers now plays a recorded message saying it has been disconnected because of "suspected fraudulent activity".
But he said he was told by police that telcos were not very co-operative in shutting such numbers down.
"My concern is how many people get the same call as me, give over some important details and forget about it?"
Hails said Netsafe would "love to see a solution that would allow a central notification of these numbers that could then block scam calls coming into New Zealand".
"The telcos do something similar with mobile text spam, so I can't help but think there must be the technical capability to do it."
Telecommunications Forum chief executive Geoff Thorn said that if telecommunications firms found out frauds were being carried out through local phone numbers, they would take action to block those numbers.
He wasn't aware of concerns regarding the identity checks carried out on people who leased numbers, or of undue delays having them disconnected if they were used for fraud.
The industry body administers New Zealand's phone number administration deed and was the right one for people to approach if they had concerns, he said.
"This is the first time it has been raised with me as an issue. If [Netsafe] is seeing major problems then they should be talking to us."Cut the leek at the lower end of the green top and run water over the leaves as they separate. Usually the rings of the white part have dirt embedded in them towards the top. Slice the leek in an X across the top and gently clean the dirt from between the rings under cold water.
Leeks are a member of the onion family but with a milder sweeter flavor. They look like overgrown green onions or scallions. The white part grows below ground, so leeks are usually pretty dirty and need plenty of washing.
Everybody loves Scalloped Potatoes and this is a main dish variation with sweet, rich caramelized onions and lush gruyere cheese. It is so warming and comforting and familiar but with the twist of the browned onions. Even though this is full fat gruyere cheese, that ounce and half goes a long way to making this a rich, luscious dish without tipping the scales too much as far as saturated fat is concerned. Remember, it's about the quality of the calories you eat. This will work using rice flour and have about the same nutrition, but it will be gluten free.
Potato and Three Onion Gratin
Servings = 4 | Serving size =about 2 cups
Cooking Time = 60 Minutes
This recipe can be multiplied by 2, 3, 4, 5.
This recipe makes fantastic leftovers. Multiplying this recipe would require multiple pans.
1 tsp olive oil 1 large leek (cleaned and sliced into half rounds) 2 large shallots (sliced) 1 medium red onion (sliced) 2 lbs Idaho potatoes (unpeeled; thinly sliced) 2 cloves garlic (sliced) 2 cups 2% milk 1 Tbsp all purpose flour 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg 1/4 tsp salt fresh ground black pepper (to taste) 6 ounces gruyere cheese (grated)
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line a 2 quart oblong Pyrex dish with aluminum foil.
While the oven is preheating, place the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the green part of the leek and the sliced shallot. Cook, stirring frequently, for about 3 minutes. If the heat is too hot, reduce to medium so that the onions don't burn.
Add the white part of the shallots and the red onion and cook until they are browned. Stir frequently.
While the onions are cooking, layer half of the potatoes in the bottom of the Pyrex dish. After the onions are golden brown, layer them on top of the potatoes.
Sprinkle the sliced garlic evenly over the top of the onions. Layer the remaining potatoes on top and press down slightly.
Whisk the milk, flour, nutmeg, salt and pepper together until the flour is well blended. Pour the milk mixture over the top of the potatoes. Cover the pan with foil and place in the oven.
Cook for 50 minutes and then top with the gruyere cheese. Return the pan to the oven and cook, uncovered, for another 7 10 minutes until the cheese is melted. Serve.By PETER ADLER
Alexander Ovechkin should fear no more. It seems very likely there will be no Team Russia at the Olympic Games next year anyway, so, he will not be missed.
It all has to do with the more or less recent scandal involving Russian government’s knowing participation in Russian athletes’ doping. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), in an attempt show it has a backbone, banned the official Russian team from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, and relented only to permit individual athletes under an independent and neutral banner.
When it became obvious that the IOC planned a similar approach for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang in South Korea, Russian authorities described themselves as scandalized.
According to reliable sources, a recent IOC meeting was informed in an official letter from the Russian Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) that Team Russia will either come in under the flag of its country, wearing its country’s emblem on its members’ uniforms, or there will be no Team Russia, period.
In addition, the KHL told the IOC it plans to instruct its schedule makers to adjust their league’s schedule to run through the Olympic Games without any interruptions.
A group of national Olympic committees that has been investigating the matter said it hasn’t arrived at any mutually acceptable agreement yet because it needs to investigate further individual accusations of wrongdoing that would involve Russian athletes who have been supposed to go to Pyeongchang. Only then, the group said, it could recommend punishment on case-by-case basis and make suggestions as to whether the scandal is so overwhelming that it should lead to the expulsion of the entire Russian delegation, permitting only those athletes whose records are clean to participate, but not under their national flag.
The IOC is basically investigating two individual matters: individual athletes and their use of performance enhancing drugs, and the Russian government involvement.
The government involvement came to light officially for the first time during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Unofficially, it has been known, and often proven beyond any reasonable doubt, since the Soviet Union first took part in the Olympic Games in 1952 in Helsinki, Finland.
IOC President Thomas Bach rejected out of hand several proposals that Team Russia be simply banned from the Olympic Games, but Gunilla Lindberg, Secretary General of the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) would later confirm that the matter was not closed and that the final decision is to be expected by early December.
The Games are scheduled to take place Feb. 9 to 25, 2018.
Several European hockey associations expressed concern about the situation: if the KHL does not break for the Olympic Games, does it mean their players who skate for a number of the league’s teams would not be able to dress for their countries’ Olympic teams?
Canada has several players playing in the KHL, too, and some of them have been on Hockey Canada’s preliminary Olympic rosters.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has not made its official position public yet, but U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief, Travis Tygart, insists the Russians should be banned from the Olympics outright. Anything less, he said, would equal letting them off the hook without any punishment.
WADA is set to meet in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, next week.The plan to turn Eurojust, an existing body based on non-binding judicial co-operation, into an investigator, with the power to order arrests and trials, is the first step to creating an EU public prosecutor.
The Commission's proposals welcome the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty as allowing "greater ambition" in giving the EU new justice and policing powers to sweep aside national "obstacles to effective law enforcement".
"The administration of justice must not be impeded by unjustifiable differences between the member states' judicial systems," said a Commission document.
Eurojust, which brings together prosecutors, magistrates, or police officers, currently assists existing national serious crime investigations through information sharing.
Key to the EU ambitions to forge a "solid common European procedural base" are new proposals, to give "Eurojust powers to directly initiate investigations", especially in the growing area of tax fraud.
"The Commission will prepare the establishment of a European Public Prosecutor's Office from Eurojust, with the responsibility to investigate, prosecute and bring to judgement offences against the Union's financial interests," said the document.
Transparency International, an anti-corruption campaign group, has welcomed the proposals and called for the new prosecutors powers to be extended to all cross-border serious crime.
"The missing link is an efficient European Public Prosecutor Office that is equipped with the authority to direct the work of domestic judicial institutions," said Jana Mittermaier, the group's EU spokesman.
But Tony Bunyan, of the European Civil Liberties Network (ECLN), is concerned about the plan.
"There is nothing transparent. Eurojust morphs into a European prosecutor. How does it affect the rights of people?," he asked.
"We are seeing EU agencies becoming institutions in their own right without open debate."
Other Commission proposals tabled on Tuesday will lead to a European ID card register, internet surveillance systems and automated EU exit-entry border systems operated by machines reading fingerprints.
"These policies constitute an attack on civil liberties and are evidence of dangerous authoritarian tendencies within the EU," said Mr Bunyan.
William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, said a Conservative government would use a British justice "opt-out" to stay out of the new scheme.
"Britain has a choice whether we opt in or not," he said. "A Conservative government's default position will be that we shouldn't. People should know that Labour has signed up to many such proposals in the past and that the Lib Dems, given their support for common EU policies here, would likely want Britain to sign up to the lot."Les Paul — the Waukesha native known for his hand in creating the solid-body electric guitar and innovative recording techniques like sound-on-sound recording — would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Tuesday.
Sue Baker was a close personal friend of the famous inventor and musician, and she’s currently the program director of the Les Paul Foundation. She described the "Wizard of Waukesha" as inspirational.
"He was always trying things, whether it was music, or early technology, or just fun kid stuff. He was always thinking," she said.
In addition to his technological contributions to the music world, Paul was also an innovator of sound. Baker attributed some of Paul's musical creations to his mother, Evelyn Polfuss. Once, said Baker, when Polfuss had traveled to Chicago to see Paul perform, she said she thought she had heard him perform on the radio. But Paul told her she was wrong — he was on the stage instead of the radio.
According to Baker, his mother replied: "'Well then Lester, you better do something about it, because you all sound alike to me.'"
So Paul went back to his home in Hollywood, set himself up in his home studio, and he said he didn’t come out of the garage until he had found a new sound.
That unique sound involved licks, trills, chording sequences, and novel fretting techniques and timing.
Even though he became a musical legend and moved away from Waukesha, Baker said those who knew him said he never lost that "Midwest charm."
"What they mean is that you’re a genuine person, that you really care about other people, and you don’t see yourself more important than anyone else. And that epitomized who Les was," she said.Since it was first announced at Gamescom 2014, I’ve been very interested to see more of The Tomorrow Children. The brutally beautiful art style appeared fantastical yet dystopian in equal measure, but I found it difficult to imagine what the actual gameplay would entail. After spending some time with the game during the recent public beta, although a lot of details have become clearer, just as many questions have arisen as a result.
The Tomorrow Children takes place in what is known as The Void. The Void is a blanket term for the mysteriously barren landscape that surrounds you. If you venture too far into The Void, your character will be swallowed up by the ground, preventing you from travelling too far and exploring the featureless wastes around you. Within The Void are Islands, which are effectively large areas through which you can tunnel for resources. These resources can then be transported to Towns, where, if you earn enough Toil points through resource collection and general jobs, you can put down some roots and build a house. You can travel to other towns through the Subway system, but if you want to travel to Islands and collect more resources, you’ll probably need to rely on the bus service to ferry you to and fro.
In terms of gameplay, The Tomorrow Children plays very much like any resource-gathering game. Minecraft is the obvious example, as in both games you spend a lot of time carving out tunnels through landscapes and hunting for materials. If you tunnel into a particularly dark area, you’ll need to make sure that you have some sort of light source, as travelling too far into the darkness will make your character phase out of existence for some unknown reason. You can carry a lantern, but holding it will stop you from picking up other objects, so you’ll probably want to find one of the light-emitting plants that can often be found on the Islands, and then move them into strategic positions so that your exit tunnel is clear. This is the bulk of the game, digging and chipping away at Islands until you fill your backpack with resources, and you then need to travel back to town to drop them off.
Unlike Minecraft however, The Tomorrow Children doesn’t offer anywhere near the same amount of customization and imagination. You can’t create yourself a secret, underground lair, carve giant sculptures, or craft components such as doors or windows. Instead, you’ll tunnel through a wall, find a vein of minerals, which you’ll excavate and then take back to town, plopping them in a big pile.
If you’re having difficulty parsing this information, you won’t be alone. Although it does make more sense within the context of the game’s world, The Tomorrow Children contains plenty of new concepts that you’ll need to familiarize yourself with, such as The Void, Islands, Coupons and Toil. Before the beta launched, a post on the PlayStation Blog tried to explain these aspects so that players could hit the ground running, but it’s a tough sell in written form and may seem daunting on paper. The amount of new terminology is going to be a difficult sell when upon the game’s full release. Luckily, the beta contained a fairly decent tutorial, which helped to explain some of these mechanics more thoroughly.
With the mechanics fully explained, the main question that exists is “why?” What benefit is there to toiling away and gathering resources? This is the main question that still remains unanswered. You will earn Coupons for your efforts which can be exchanged for better tools and items, but all in the service of performing the same tasks. You can build a house, but these are pre-designed houses; not the player-constructed fantasy projects that you would get in the likes of Minecraft and Terraria. The full game may have these areas fleshed out, but it wasn’t clear in the beta what the point of it all was.
If anything, the aim of the game seems to be cooperation between you and the online players who have taken residence in the same town. Your resources go into a pile in the centre of town, which everyone can use to build the town bigger. The buildings you can create are pre-designed constructions, so every town will have a town hall, bus stop, subway tunnel, a few samey-looking houses and a smattering of monuments, if they last long enough. During my time with the beta, I travelled to several different towns and, despite a few variances with building placements, they all looked the exactly the same. Building an identikit house next to another player is hardly an incentive to keep playing.
The bus service sometimes drops you off in a random location where there is no Island, though. Upon arriving in a flat, |
the opportunity, they did exactly the same thing to get their tax overhaul across the finish line, my colleague Dave Weigel notes. What's more, Republicans basically made no effort to win over even moderate Democrats who might have been gettable with a little more effort.
"The passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was often covered as a Republican family drama," Dave writes. "Senate Democrats, 10 of whom face reelection next year in states won by President Trump, made cameo appearances — often when the president campaigned in their states. But even the most gettable Democrats, such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), were generally ignored by Republican negotiators as they brought their own party in line. Republicans have admitted as much."
AHH, OOF and OUCH
The first baby born as a result of a uterus transplant in the U.S. lies in the neonatal unit at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. (Baylor University Medical Center via AP)
AHH: For the first time in the United States, a woman born without a uterus has delivered a baby. Doctors at Baylor University say the baby was born to a woman who had a successful uterus transplant, making it the first such birth outside a Swedish hospital that pioneered the procedure in 2014, The Post’s Cleve R. Wootson reports. (That was Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, where a total of eight babies have been born with the assistance of uterus transplants, per the New York Times.)
The successful transplant and birth are a major step for thousands of women unable to conceive, although Cleve notes that the transplants are meant to be temporary. The transplant gives women enough time to have a child and then the uterus is removed so the woman can stop taking the required immune-suppressing drugs. Baylor’s clinical trial is meant to include 10 woman and eight have received transplants so far, including the new mother. One woman is pregnant, two are trying to conceive and four others had failed transplants and had to have the organs removed.
“To make the field grow and expand and have the procedure come out to more women, it has to be reproduced,” Liza Johannesson, a uterus transplant surgeon who left the Swedish team to join Baylor’s group, told the New York Times. “It was a very exciting birth. I’ve seen so many births and delivered so many babies, but this was a very special one.”
OOF: The group Save My Care has launched this television ad against Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for voting for the Senate tax bill that repeals the ACA's individual mandate. Collins, who had voted against the Senate's previous health-care bills, has said she supports repealing the mandate alone because its penalty is paid predominantly by lower and middle-income Americans. But supporters of the health-care law are outraged because the Congressional Budget Office has said 13 million fewer Americans would choose to get coverage without the mandate.
Charlottesville, Virginia, where consumers are experiencing some of the biggest premium hikes in the country. (Photo by Norm Shafer/ For The Washington Post).
OUCH: Residents of Albemarle, Va., which includes the college town of Charlottesville, are seeing the biggest premium spikes in the country on the Obamacare marketplaces -- and they're directly feeling the pain because many of the town’s residents are people who buy their own insurance plans and earn too much money to qualify for federal subsidies.
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephanie Armour reports some area residents have grouped together, writing letters to lawmakers and starting a Facebook page to urge Congress not to repeal the individual mandate and to approve cost-sharing subsidies that help offset costs for lower-income consumers. They have access to only one insurer – Optima Health -- after other insurers exited this year under heavy losses.
Residents told the Wall Street Journal they are making a personal plea to lawmakers. Before the overnight vote late last week, a few people drove to Capitol Hill to talk to staffers of Virginia members.
“People feel we’re victims in a really ugly political game,” 38-year-old Ian Dixon told the Journal. Dixon, an app developer in Charlottesville, said he will see his premiums for his family of four spike from $988 a month to $3,158 a month. “We have to take this up to Capitol Hill,” he said.
--A few more readables from The Post and elsewhere:
A Radical Move: Giving Up Income to Get Health Insurance Anne Cornwell had bad news: Health insurance costs for her and her husband this year would be hugely unaffordable. But she found that taking a big pay cut would qualify them for subsidies. The New York Times
Health & Science Senate’s huge tax bill would have potent ripple effects for health-care system Medicare and a public health fund could lose billions of dollars if Congress doesn’t protect them. Amy Goldstein
GOP Medicaid work rules imperil care for opioid abusers Governors say they'd exempt those with drug problems but critics fear many would fall through cracks. Politico
MEDICAL MISSIVES
To Your Health 'The Woebot will see you now' — the rise of chatbot therapy Dozens of online apps now offer instant therapy for the lonely, the confused and the anxious. Amy Ellis Nutt
To Your Health A model tattooed her eyeball purple. She now could lose her eye. "The whole point of me being public... is to help people realize the damage that could be done,” Catt Gallinger said. Amy B Wang
INDUSTRY RX
Why a CVS-Aetna Merger Could Benefit Consumers Consolidation in health care has generally not been good for Americans. Here’s why this seems to be an exception. New York Times
DAYBOOK
POST PROGRAMMING: The Washington Post will gather top health officials, practitioners, thought leaders and advocates for a discussion about the fight against HIV/AIDS on Tuesday.
Coming Up
Axios hosts an event on the new era in health care on Tuesday.
Former vice president Al Gore will host a 24-hour live broadcast about climate activism through The Climate Reality Project on today and Tuesday.
The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies holds a hearing on addressing the opioid crisis on Tuesday.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies will host the launch of OPEC’s World Oil Outlook 2017 on Thursday.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee holds a hearing on the “Implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act: Responding to Mental Health Needs” on Wednesday.
The Senate Special Committee on Aging holds a hearing on “America’s Aging Workforce” on Wednesday.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee holds a hearing on the “Implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act: Progress and Path Forward for Medical Innovation” on Thursday.
The House Veterans Affairs Committee holds a hearing on the VA Medical Surgical Prime Vendor Program on Thursday.
SUGAR RUSH
GOP 'optimistic' as tax bill heads to conference:
President Trump takes a victory lap after tax overhaul passes Senate:
"Saturday Night Live" addressed Michael Flynn's cooperation in the Russia probe and the new allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men:
Australian politician Tim Wilson asked his longtime partner to marry him during a speech on same-sex marriage:Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
May 23, 2016, 1:57 AM GMT / Updated May 23, 2016, 1:57 AM GMT By Alex Johnson
At least six more members have tried to take their lives in the past few days in a Canadian aboriginal community of 2,000 that has declared a state of emergency over repeated suicide attempts, its chief said Sunday.
There have been more than 100 suicide attempts and one death since September among the residents of Attawapiskat, in a remote section of Ontario on Hudson Bay.
Chief Bruce Shisheesh of the Attawapiskat First Nation, a Cree community, said Sunday on Twitter that two serious cases were reported Saturday, following four suicide attempts late last week. There was no immediate information on the conditions of the residents Sunday.
Related: Spate of Suicide Attempts Hits Canadian Tribe
Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency last month after 11 of the tribe's members attempted suicide in one weekend and 28 tried to do so in March. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent teams of doctors and mental health workers last month to address the issue.
Shisheesh told the CBC last month that there's no single explanation for the horrifying number of suicide attempts. He said homes in the remote community are crowded with 14 to 15 people, bullying at school is rampant, sexual and physical abuse are common and drug abuse is at crisis levels.
"We need help in Attawapiskat," Shisheesh told the network.One year ago, I began this life-changing journey called yoga.
I must admit, though, that I had taken a few classes before—but only on vacation. The things we do on vacation do not really count, or do they? I say that since although I came home talking about it, I did not bring yoga home with me, into my daily life. That is what made February 2, 2011, a special date. It was on that day that my yoga practice took root in my real life.
It was not love at first sight, either. It was barely “like” at first sight—just enough spark was there, though, and I kept trying. Something kept drawing me back to class—6:30 am class, even! It has to be something special to interest me at that hour. Before long, I was hooked. And one year later, yoga is in my life to stay. Now I am ready to profess my adoration, with all the tenderness and enthusiasm of new love.
Here is my love letter to yoga, on our 1-year anniversary:
Dear yoga,
Today is our 1-year anniversary. Did you remember?
By my notes, we had our first real date on February 2, 2011. We arranged to meet in the cold, pre-dawn hour before work. I was not sure what to wear or how to do my hair. I was nervous and awkward, but you were kind to me anyway.
We saw each other again a few times that month. By March, I began to suspect that you were something special. I started making an effort to see you more, brimming with shy enthusiasm. You returned my advances and showed up to meet me each and every time I asked to see you at 6:30 am.
By April, I wanted to spend more time with you. I had enjoyed our early morning sun saluting, making the sun rise together, but I was ready to see you in the daylight hours too. I was ready to take our relationship to the next level.
I took what felt like a giant leap of faith: I joined a studio, just to get to know you better. I was excited but scared about this step. It felt like a big commitment, a lot of money. I was worried what people would think when they saw us together. (Certainly, I did not think I looked like your type.) But I wanted to know more about you, and this seemed like the best way.
Again, you were kind. You held my hand as we explored each other in this new light. You introduced me to your circle of friends and teachers. I was shy, but you were patient and they were welcoming. I should have known you would have the most wonderful friends!
We spent the summer months going hot and heavy: sweaty Saturday mornings, still with bedhead; planned meetings after work; the occasional furtive hour at lunchtime. I even took you on vacation with me. Some days, you were gentle. Other days, you left me breathless and ecstatic. I admit that, some days, you challenged and even frustrated me. Many other days, you made me feel radiant and beautiful.
We were becoming so comfortable together, seeing each other almost every day. I was secretly beginning to think long-term about our relationship.
Then, in the fall, I began graduate school. I found less room for you in my life. Much to my surprise, you were not jealous. Every time I made time for you, you were there. You waited patiently for me. Homework piled on, but we made the best of the time we had together.
The holidays were busy too, and I did not make time for you often enough. And still, you welcomed me with open arms. I realized that I deeply missed you when I was away. Without you, my life was missing something. I felt incomplete without you.
Then came the New Year, and with it, new resolutions and commitments. For my resolution, I declared my commitment to you—to us. I chose to dedicate time to you every day for 40 days. It was a big step, but I was ready to devote myself. 26 days in so far, and I am so glad to be with you daily.
One year into our relationship and I still look forward to spending time with you. That makes an anniversary worth celebrating! And celebrate we did, with a sweaty, hot and packed vinyasa flow class. I took a spot right up front, so that everyone could see how proud I was to be with you.
Our first year together has been such a gift. I realize now that I spent the whole year learning about you, but you spent this whole year teaching me about myself. The more I loved you, the more you taught me to love myself. I am so grateful for that gift.
Thank you for a beautiful year. Here’s to many more!
Love, Emily
Emily Hassman is an IT trainer by profession, a grad student by night, and a yogini in all the moments in between. She lives outside Atlanta—and no, don’t call it Hotlanta. She blogs at Videos of Kittens.
Edited by Assistant Yoga Editor Soumyajeet Chattaraj.MyGolfSpy Labs – Your Distance Reality Check!
Question: How far do you hit the ball (on average) with your driver? Think about that for a second and then say that number out loud or write it down.
Question #2: Ok…now…how far do you really hit your driver? Now write that number down. Do they look the same?
If so…you’re most likely lying to yourself. Yes you. I’m sure we all know some other guy (or quite a few) that lies through his teeth about how far he hits the big stick. But question is…are you lying too?
Well…from what we found in our latest “MyGolfSpy Labs” research…you might be surprised how many people are lying about how far they hit the ball and by how much. These aren’t your average “little white lie” we’re talking about. These numbers for many were shocking!
Are Your Pants On Fire?
Golfers are liars. Yup, I said it. This game, which is supposed to be all about honor and integrity, is filled with liars.
Let’s back up a bit. When we here at MyGolfSpy were kicking around ideas for our next MGS Labs article, we came upon the question, “How far does the average guy think he hits it (vs) how far does he really hit it?” Through my experience as a club fitter and golf instructor, I felt that I had a pretty darned good idea what the answer was, but, being the data-driven types, we went out to get the numbers.
Testing Procedure
Our study looked like this: We asked 10 golfers of varying ability levels how far they hit their driver (total distance), 5 iron, 7 iron, and pitching wedge (carry only). Then we had each golfer hit 5 shots with each of those clubs on a launch monitor. Testers included: (Pat 15 Handicap) (Dave 23 Handicap) (Michael 13 Handicap) (Tom 5 Handicap) (Rich 18 Handicap) (Mike 30 Handicap) (Joel 13 Handicap) (Dan 17 Handicap) (Danny 8 Handicap) (Meredith 7 Handicap)
The data appears below.
Interesting Observations:
100%…yes ALL testers lied about how far they hit the ball (vs) how far they really hit the driver.
The longer the club the bigger the lie was.
90% of the testers lied about how far they hit the 5-iron.
Out of 200 shots, 116 (58%) were hit outside of 5 yards within their estimate.
There is a definite correlation between handicap and knowing/hitting your distances. Our lowest handicap test subject hit 18/20 shots within 5 yards of his estimate. Our highest handicapper missed his driver estimate by an astounding 86 yards!
There were 11 sets out of 40 where a test subject hit zero shots within 5 yards of their estimate. Surprisingly, the driver had as many as the PW and 7I: two each. The 5I saw five subjects achieve this “feat.”
Our test subjects averaged almost as many shots within 5 yards of their estimate with the 5 iron as with the driver (1.4 vs. 1.3)
So…What Does All This Data Tell Us?
Your Average – Is Not Your Longest Drive
First of all, the average golfer has no concept of what “average” means. Ask a golfer how far they hit their driver “on average,” and you’re going to be told how far their best drives go. Golfers seem to have no recollection of all the drives that sail high and right, only the ones that go long and straight. While Bob Rotella may approve of this from a golf psychology perspective, I think that this self-delusion ultimately does the golfer a disservice.
If you don’t have an honest assessment of how far (and what direction) your ball goes, how can you expect to improve?
For 7-Iron & PW, Golfers Are Pretty Accurate
Second, most golfers were quite successful with their 7 iron and PW. If we look at the pitching wedge data, we see that 8 of our 10 testers hit at least 3 shots within 5 yards of their estimate. In fact, if we remove Dan and Danny, our testers, as a group, underestimated their pitching wedge yardage. If we turn to the 7 iron and remove Dan and Danny again (sorry, guys), the difference between the estimates and actual distances shrinks to a mere four yards. That’s good golf.
Shocking 5-Iron Numbers
Third, the average golfer needs to get rid of his long irons, which seems to include the 5 iron. (Mini rant: Big thanks to the OEMs for the jacked up lofts. You’re really helping the average guy enjoy the game more. (And yes, that’s sarcasm, folks.) Only our 4 lowest handicap players had an average within 10 yards of their estimate, the other 6 hit a COMBINED TOTAL of 1 shot within 5 yards of their estimate. Even if we exclude the two…characters…who missed their estimates by an average of 46 and 47 yards, we’re looking at an average miss of 16.5 yards. That can be the difference between being on the green and giving your ball a bath. You can attribute it to bad technique, lack of club head speed, too-strong lofts, or all of the above, but your average golfer does not hit their 5 iron with enough consistency to take it to the course. What’s worse, the super strong lofts let these guys hit the ball a mile, once in a blue moon, and create the expectation that a 5 iron should always go that far.
Course Management
Fourth, given all that we’ve said above, the average golfer needs to think long and hard about their tee box selection. If we accept the that the average drive is roughly 216 yards and the average 5 iron is 160 (both numbers that are driven up by our low handicappers, but we’ll leave that be), then the average golfer probably should not be choosing tee boxes that put them more than 370 yards away for the average par 4. Similarly, you should be looking at the par 3 lengths. If they’re much longer than 160, what are you going to hit? 200+ yard par 3’s are increasingly common, but that doesn’t mean that they make sense. Is hitting 3W into a par 3 fun?
This information also has a lot of implications for course management. If I know that I’m going to hit my 7 iron the right distance over half the time, and my pitching wedge the right distance almost 75% of the time, I want to play to my short irons. Now, I know it’s not manly to lay up. Top Flite even had an ad campaign ridiculing it. But if the object of the game is to get the ball in the hole with fewer strokes, we have to consider that hitting a long iron into a well-protected green is not a great play for most golfers.
Moral: Be Honest With Yourself
Ultimately, what we’d like you to take away from this “Lab” report is the following: be honest with yourself. Go to the range, or, even better, get on a launch monitor, and find out how far your clubs actually go. Not “how far they went that one time when it was downhill, downwind during the drought of ’89,” but how far you hit an AVERAGE shot. And build your game around that. Or get some professional instruction so that you can hit it better. Or get your clubs fit. Just don’t be a liar.Beloved White House staffer Jake Brewer, of Alexandria, died Sept. 19, after losing control of his bike at a sharp curve during the Ride to Conquer Cancer. President Obama is one of many who have offered their condolences. (WUSA9)
Beloved White House staffer Jake Brewer, of Alexandria, died Sept. 19, after losing control of his bike at a sharp curve during the Ride to Conquer Cancer. President Obama is one of many who have offered their condolences. (WUSA9)
A White House staff member was killed Saturday in Howard County while taking part in a bicycle ride to raise money to combat cancer.
Police said Jacob Thomas Brewer, 34, of Alexandria, died in the Mount Airy area about 3:40 p.m. when his bicycle went out of control at a sharp curve on Old Frederick Road. It crossed the double yellow line and collided with an oncoming vehicle, police said.
The Web site for the Ride to Conquer Cancer reported “a fatal accident involving” a participant in the two-day, 150-mile ride, which began Saturday in the District. The Web site had warned that roads would be open to traffic.
Brewer’s mother said he was in the fundraising ride because of a close friend who was a cancer patient. He “lived life large and tended to live life for other people,” Lori Brewer Collins said.
[Update: Brewer remembered as ‘epitome of a public servant’]
On the White House Web site, Brewer, known as Jake, is listed as a senior policy adviser in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which is part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The ride would go on, Brewer’s mother said. He was a man who could “make things happen,” she said, and that was what “he would have wanted.”
Opening ceremonies for the ride were scheduled for 7 a.m. Saturday at RFK Stadium, where the ride was to conclude Sunday.Published: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 @ 10:34 AM
— The end of daylight saving time caused a unique situation in Urbana on Sunday morning.
Police there arrested a man twice in one day, but at the same exact time.
Chief Matt Lingrell explained that Niles Gammons of Urbana was arrested for operating a vehicle while intoxicated at 1:08 a.m., then released with a summons to appear in court this week. An hour later, it was again 1:08 a.m. and police caught Gammons driving under the influence once again.
According to a statement from police, Sgt. David Reese observed Gammons driving the wrong way down a one-way alley in the 100 block of North Walnut Street. During his contact with Gammons, Reese determined he was driving impaired and had Gammons submit to field sobriety tests.
It was discovered that Gammons had pennies inside his mouth.
“It is a false myth that pennies will offset the results of a breath test,” Lingrell said in the release. Gammons was discovered to be in possession of a small amount of marijuana and had a blood alcohol content above the legal limit to drive.
He was issued citations for OVI, obstructing official business and minor misdemeanor drug abuse. He was placed under an administrative license suspension, ordered into court on Nov. 5 and released to the care of a responsible party.
Exactly one hour later, while on patrol in the municipal parking lot off of the 100 block of Miami Street, Sgt. Reese saw the same vehicle Gammons had been driving earlier back up suddenly from a parking spot. The vehicle almost collided with the police cruiser. Reese observed it was again 1:08 a.m. and it was Gammons driving.
“Gammons admitted that he knew he was under suspension from the previous arrest,” the release said.
He again was arrested for OVI and was transported to the Urbana Police Division, where he submitted to another breath test and was again found to be over the legal limit to drive.
He was issued a new citation for OVI and ordered to appear in court.
On Monday he appeared in Champaign County Municipal Court and a pre-trial hearing was set for Nov. 15.Credit: DC Comics
Credit: DC Comics
Step aside, Hal Jordan, and prepare for two new recruits to take the lead. Launching in June as part of DC's Rebirth, the new ongoing series Green Lanterns pairs Jennifer Cruz and Simon Baz in what former Marvel exclusive writer Sam Humphries calls "Lethal Weapon with alien technology."
Kicking off with Green Lanterns: Rebirth #1 illustrated by veteran GL artist Ethan Van Sciver, the bi-monthly series itself will be drawn by Robson Rocha and Adrian Syaf. In it, Humphries promises to explore the entire emotional spectrum through the eyes of these two rookie recruits.
Newsarama chatted with Humphries after the Rebirth announcements at WonderCon 2016 to find out how Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz fit into the DC Universe, what his first arc, “Red Dawn,” is all about, and how his Earth-bound Green Lanterns will still be “epic” on a cosmic scale.
Newsarama: Sam, let’s talk about Green Lanterns.
Sam Humphries: Yes! Green Lanterns. I’m glad you enunciated the “S” cause that’s what this book is all about. The plural. There are two new Green Lanterns of Earth. These are the Green Lanterns of Earth, Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz. And I’ve been calling it “Lethal Weapon with alien technology.”
Nrama: Let’s talk about Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz. These are characters who have been established in the DC Universe, but this is their first real spotlight. What’s your take on these characters and their relationship?
Humphries: Their relationship is what this story is all about. They’re partners, they’re rookies, they’ve been thrown into this situation but they don’t know what to make of each other. They don’t know if they can trust each other. They don’t know if they should be afraid of each other. And just like that dynamic that you see in other great cop movies and TV shows, that’s the kinda dynamic that we’re gonna start with, and we’re gonna give it a real strong DC Universe twist.
Credit: DC Comics
Nrama: We know Simon and Jessica are coming up against the Red Lanterns in an arc called “Red Dawn.” Are the Red Lanterns coming to Earth where these two Green Lanterns are stationed?
Humphries: Hal Jordan is off in space. Earth is under the protection of two rookie Green Lanterns. If you’re the Red Lanterns, this is the best news you’ve had all month, especially if you’re Atrocitus and Bleez, and you’ve figured out that Earth is crucial to the survival of the Red Lantern Corps. All of a sudden, the best Green Lantern in history is off in space, and you’ve got these two rookies who may be strapped with the most powerful weapon in the DC Universe, but they don’t really know how to use it yet. So they’ve decided that Earth is crucial to their future, but the humans who live on it are expendable. So we’ve got rookie Green Lanterns, but epic stakes.
Nrama: Aside from the Red Lanterns, are there any other parts of the Green Lantern mythos that you’re bringing in? And can we expect any of that unique Sam Humphries twistas well?
Humphries: Yes to all of the above, absolutely. When it comes to the Green Lantern mythos, nothing is off the table – and I mean absolutely nothing. Within the first few arcs we’re gonna touch on every color in the emotional spectrum, every corps that’s out there. Virtually everyone who wears a ring these days.
And yes, there are new things that I’m bringing to the table. One of the most amazing Green Lantern stories of all time is “Sinestro Corps War.” And what’s amazing about that is, you take the core concept of what the Green Lantern Corps is, and you take the green and make it yellow. And it’s still part of the core concept, but all of a sudden, you’ve taken one epic idea and you’ve made it twice as epic. And if you’ve got green and yellow, you’ve got all the other colors, and you’ve made it seven times as epic. And that’s what we’re gonna do, building on the core of Green Lantern, which is courage over fear. That’s what Rebirth is all about – building on what makes these characters and these legacies great.
Nrama: Between Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz, who is the character you identified with most easily? Is there one of them that was harder to grasp?
Humphries: I did really respond to Jessica Cruz right off the bat, and Simon was a little more difficult for me to figure out. But since I’ve been working on it, it’s flipped a little bit. They’re more even, but now I feel like I’ve got a really strong handle on Simon, and Jessica is the one who’s still surprising me.
Nrama: Simon and Jessica are the two Green Lanterns of the Justice League. Will their status as rookies affect their role on the team?
Humphries: They may be rookies, but they are going to be involved in the very heart of the DC Universe moving forward. There’s one big thing that we teased to today that I don’t even want to say the name of it out loud. There’s one big thing coming after Rebirth that’s gonna rock the DC Universe, and Simon and Jessica are gonna be front and center for what’s going on. So yes, they’re in Green Lanterns, yes they’re in Justice League. They’re gonna be in all the major things that are happening in the DC Universe. Yes, these are the Green Lanterns of Earth. It’s gonna be an amazing experience.The front office has made it clear it is open to non-traditional approaches to get the most out of its staff. Dan Straily, Jeff Locke and Jose Urena will be in the running for the final rotation spot, but it appears all three will make the Opening Day roster.
MIAMI -- If the Marlins decide to go with eight relievers and 13 pitchers, there is a strong possibility two of the spring candidates for the rotation could open the season in the bullpen.
MIAMI -- If the Marlins decide to go with eight relievers and 13 pitchers, there is a strong possibility two of the spring candidates for the rotation could open the season in the bullpen.
The front office has made it clear it is open to non-traditional approaches to get the most out of its staff. Dan Straily, Jeff Locke and Jose Urena will be in the running for the final rotation spot, but it appears all three will make the Opening Day roster.
• Hot Stove Tracker
Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill said manager Don Mattingly, pitching coach Juan Nieves and vice president of pitching development Jim Benedict are figuring out how to get the most out of what the organization has.
Straily, acquired Jan. 19 from the Reds, is the presumed favorite to be the fifth starter. Locke, a free-agent addition in December, had been a front-runner before the Straily deal.
Video: Frisaro on Marlins dealing prospects for Straily
Locke may still win the job, but if he doesn't, he could pitch in long relief and jump into the rotation if necessary.
"It may not be your traditional look," Hill said, "that your starter goes seven innings, he hands it to a setup man in the eighth and the closer comes in the ninth. There may be situations where the starter is out in the fourth or the fifth, and a bridge guy takes you to the sixth, and then you've got a setup man in the seventh and the eighth, and a closer in the ninth."
Miami also intends to give Urena every chance to make the club. The hard-throwing right-hander is out of options, so he can't be sent to Triple-A New Orleans if he doesn't get on the roster. He'd have to first be designated for assignment, and chances are slim that he would clear waivers and come back.
The Marlins could end up trading Urena, but they haven't made strong attempts to do so because they believe he has too much upside. Miami doesn't have much big league-ready starting pitching depth, and the club doesn't want to part with Urena.
Video: LAD@MIA: Urena tosses 8 2/3 scoreless innings
Lefty Justin Nicolino has pitched in the big leagues, but with one more option, he could wind up at New Orleans if he doesn't win an Opening Day spot.
Right-hander Luis Castillo was another potential candidate who could have been called up, but the Marlins sent the prospect to the Reds in the Straily trade, and his departure further increases Urena's chances to claim a roster spot.
On Tuesday, Miami acquired right-hander Severino Gonzalez, who has an option and projects to start off in New Orleans' rotation, from Philadelphia. Gonzalez, though, may wind up in the big leagues at some point in a long-relief role.
If Locke ends up in the bullpen, he could be the lone lefty in that unit, but he may be used as a specialist rather than in long relief.
Video: SEA@PIT: Locke retires Cano to end the 6th
"That's a possibility," Hill said. "But as we've said, we weren't as concerned with the handedness as we were with the quality. So if [Locke] is one of our best five, he will be in our rotation. If not, he will be in consideration to move to the bullpen."
The Marlins have created depth in the bullpen with the free-agent signings of Brad Ziegler and Junichi Tazawa. They join closer A.J. Ramos and right-handers Kyle Barraclough, David Phelps and Dustin McGowan.
Phelps and McGowan are multi-inning candidates.
"When you look at how we've put the pitching staff together, we may have two or three who are considered long guys to take the ball whenever Donnie sees fit to get it back to the seventh and eighth innings," Hill said. "I would say it's more of a bridge to get to the back end."Apple Moving into Downtown Location?
A confidential source has tipped Austinist off on a new Apple store possibly opening in the Scarborough building on Congress and 6th. Could it be true? Let's look at the facts: - An Apple logo sign was seen being loaded into the building.
- The windows are covered with black plywood, assuring complete privacy.
- Apple often leans towards interesting / historical spaces. Check!
- The iPad 2 comes out the same day SXSW starts, coincidence?
- It might be a pop-up store, seeing as the space is less square footage than is usually required. If it does turn out to be true, you heard it here first!
UPDATE The Statesman confirms that it is indeed a two week pop-up store for SXSW.It's never been easy being a teenager. Now, try being a teenager looking for work.
Only 1 in 4 teens is working today – the lowest proportion since the end of World War II, according to one researcher. Although some programs are trying to help young Americans get jobs, the unemployment rate for 16-to-19-year-olds who want to work now stands at 24.2 percent, according to the May report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Friday. Among African-American teens, the rate is 40.7 percent.
"I am not hesitant about calling it a crisis," says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group.
It's a crisis with potentially important implications. When teens can't find work, they have time on their hands and can be prone to getting in trouble. One particular problem can be higher incidences of teen pregnancy. Also, in the long run, teens who don't work miss out on developing important skills for later on, such as learning to take orders from supervisors, getting along with co-workers, and coping with criticism.
"The more work experience they have, the higher the wage when they reach ages 20 to 25 years," says Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "Many employers who are hiring say the kids don't have the'soft' skills, but the only way to get them is to be in the workforce. So not having a job today affects employability in the future."
The scarcity of jobs for teens comes at a time when many are starting to search for summer jobs. In 2009, as part of the Obama stimulus program, Congress set aside $1.2 billion for youth activities, including summer jobs. But that money is now gone.
As a result, even jobs such as working as a lifeguard are expected to be in shorter supply. For example, New York City will create 23,000 summer jobs, down from 52,000 two years ago.
Many mayors are scrambling to raise money from the private sector to fund summer jobs. In Louisville, Ky., Mayor Greg Fischer has collected $420,000 in pledges – enough money to provide summer jobs for a couple hundred kids, says Michael Gritton, executive director of KentuckianaWorks, a workforce development agency.
Using money from the US Department of Labor (DOL), Louisville also runs a KentuckianaWorks Youth Career Center, which assists teens in finding more-permanent jobs. At the center, counselors help with such skills as building a |
.
The subcommand "share" can be used instead of a class to specify your shared hotbar.
share [number] on
Make cross hotbar [number] shared.
share [number] off
Unshare cross hotbar [number] and assign it to your current class/job.
share [number]
Toggle between on/off.
remove [number] [slot name]
Remove the action assigned to [slot name] on cross hotbar [number]. Replace [slot name] with "all" to remove all actions from cross hotbar [number]. /addpvptrait
/apt ALIASES:
/addpvptrait, /apt
USAGE:
/apt "PvP trait 1" "PvP trait 2" "PvP trait 3"
→Set the specified traits to be used in PvP encounters. This command requires that you specify three traits.
>>Example:
/addpvptrait "Increased HP" "Increased Action Speed" "Decreased Damage Taken"
"(Sets Increased HP, Increased Action Speed, and
Decreased Damage Taken as PvP traits.)" /mountspeed USAGE:
/mountspeed
→Opens and closes the ground mount speed interface. /waterfloat USAGE:
/waterfloat
→Perform a back float in water. No system message is displayed with this emote. /waterflip USAGE:
/waterflip
→Perform a somersault under water.
No system message is displayed with this emote. /puckerup USAGE:
/puckerup [subcommand]
→Close your eyes and pucker your lips.
>>Subcommands
motion
Perform motion only.
Both text and motion will be displayed when no subcommand is specified. /easternbow USAGE:
/easternbow [subcommand]
→Perform a bow in the Far Eastern fashion.
>>Subcommands
motion
Perform motion only.
Both text and motion will be displayed when no subcommand is specified. The following text commands have been adjusted:
Command Description /macroicon The category pvpaction has been added.
* This argument is required when setting PvP actions. /fieldmarking The arguments d, 1, and 2 have been added. /search Arguments for new jobs and areas have been added. /addpvpaction (/apa) In accordance with changes to PvP actions, the functionality and help text for this command has been adjusted. /additionalaction (/aaction) To accommodate the introduction of role actions, the help text for this command has been adjusted. /action, /hotbar, /crosshotbar (/chotbar) With the addition of text commands specific to PvP actions, the above text commands no longer function with PvP actions. /hotbar, /crosshotbar In accordance with changes to PvP areas, the help text for the above text commands has been adjusted. In order to prevent erroneous input, text commands are no longer automatically entered when players click on text commands or confirm them.
New phrases have been added to the auto-translation dictionary. New music has been added. In order to reduce server congestion after the release of patch 4.0, players who are inactive for thirty minutes will be logged out automatically. * We will continue to monitor server activity and remove this feature when server congestion is determined to no longer be an issue. Certain Logitech illuminated keyboards are now supported. The title screen logo and opening movie have been changed. The data center select screen has been adjusted to make it easier to determine which data center is closest to you. The background of the World select screen has also been adjusted. Topics selected on the launcher are now opened in a web browser. DirectX 11 support under Config in the launcher is now automatically set to on (Windows only). Samurai and red mage have been added to the solo rankings for the Palace of the Dead. Any achievements obtained while playing the game on PlayStation®4 will now be shown under your activities. The item players exchange to obtain a silver chocobo feather via the Recruit a Friend Campaign has been adjusted. The following items have been added to the Optional Items section of the Mog Station. Tales of Adventure: A Realm Reborn Tales of Adventure: Heavensward Tales of Adventure: One Paladin's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Monk's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Warrior's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Dragoon's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Ninja's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Bard's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One White Mage's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Black Mage's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Summoner's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Scholar's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Dark Knight's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Machinist's Journey I Tales of Adventure: One Astrologian's Journey I
Please check the special site for details.
Resolved Issues
The following issues have been addressed.
An issue wherein an object that needs to be obtained in the Levequest “It's a Trap” is positioned too high.
An issue wherein damage would not be displayed in the chat log when hit by Zantetsuken in the FATE "Steel Reign."
An issue wherein the first digit would not be displayed in the flying text that appears over a party member when receiving 200,000 or more damage in Alexander - The Burden of the Father (Savage).
An issue wherein a player was able to move out of the area and become KOed under certain conditions in “Cape Westwind.”
An issue wherein the rewards may not have been obtainable when completing “Thok ast Thok (Extreme)” under certain conditions.
An issue wherein remaining party members would continuously be queued to enter “the Diadem” when a player entered the instance from an estate, and the client force-quit at the same time the instance was commenced.
An issue wherein ”/beginnerstatus” and “/returnstatusoff” could not be used to remove a status in an estate.
There was a mistake in the explanation for “Minimum IL” in the duty finder settings.
An issue wherein other jobs/classes may have been displayed despite specifying a current class/job when performing an advanced search with the Party Finder.
An issue wherein directly after summoning a pet in Sic mode, it would not be affected by recast time and use a pet action.
An issue wherein additional Second Chance points may have been consumed when choosing to retry in Wondrous Tails.
An issue wherein the animation would not loop properly when the emote “Songbird” was used.
An issue wherein the crafting log would not open under certain conditions.
An issue wherein subdivisions for The Lavender Beds would not be displayed in the minimap.
An issue wherein the class for repairing a certain item was incorrect.
An issue wherein certain indoor furnishing items were categorized incorrectly.
An issue wherein only up to 135 stored items would be displayed in the Armoire.
An issue wherein the water effect would not display properly on the neck of certain races when sitting inside the “Oriental Bathtub.”
An issue wherein the screen would remain black after fading out when choosing to view certain cut scenes from the Unending Journey.
An issue wherein the indoor furnishing “Nidhogg Miniature” could not be placed on lower and middle racks of certain furniture.
An issue wherein indoor furnishings could only be selected in mouse mode under certain conditions.
An issue wherein the displayed effects shown when trying on certain items differed from the effects that are actually displayed.
An issue wherein equipping the Moonfire Vest and Moonfire Halter as a Lalafell would cause graphics for certain motions to display incorrectly.
An issue wherein equipping the Hawkwing Cyclas as a Roegadyn male would cause graphics for certain motions to display incorrectly.
An issue wherein copying the layout in HUD Layout Mode under certain conditions may have caused the window to become misaligned.
Other various issues have also been addressed.
Known IssuesNovember 14 was a big day for the Trudeau government’s infrastructure plans.
In the afternoon, Prime Minister Trudeau attended a “summit” for foreign investors focussing on investment in areas like infrastructure, technology, natural resources, and renewable energy.
The summit was hosted by Blackrock Capital Investment Corporation, the world’s largest asset management company with $5.1 trillion dollars under management. All told, BlackRock brought two dozen of its clients to Toronto from around the world to meet with Trudeau. Blackrock clients include many of the world’s largest pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors.
Cabinet ministers attending the event included Finance Minister Bill Morneau, Minister of International Trade Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Natural Resources Jim Carr, Minister of Innovation Navdeep Bains, Minister of Infrastructure Amarjeet Sohi, Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly, and Minister of Health Jane Philpott.
Earlier in the day, the Liberals met with Canadian institutional investors such as the CPP Investment Board, the Caisse de dépôt, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, OMERS, and Brookfield.
The two meetings are a follow-up to the work of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth which on October 21, released three reports calling for a national infrastructure bank, a greater effort to attract foreign investment and a major boost to immigration. Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced that the government had decided to pursue the bank model proposed in the infrastructure report only a week later in his Fall Economic Update.
The Advisory Council is chaired by Dominic Barton, managing director of McKinsey & Co., an elite business consulting firm operating globally. Mark Wiseman, senior managing director at BlackRock, was an influential member of the Advisory Council.
While the Advisory Council’s reports focussed on immigration as well as direct foreign investment, it is the infrastructure bank proposal that is creating the most buzz in international finance circles and was the real focus of both the Blackrock summit and the morning meeting with large Canadian institutional investors.
Examples of potential infrastructure bank projects listed in the Council’s report include toll highways and bridges, high-speed rail, port and airport expansions, city infrastructure, national broadband infrastructure, power transmission and natural resource infrastructure.
At the heart of the Council’s proposal for an infrastructure bank is the belief that the bank could leverage project-specific private capital at a four-to-one ratio from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, private equity, insurance companies and other institutional investors. What this really means is that because the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government traditionally split infrastructure funding equally, for every dollar the three levels of government collectively put into a specific project, the bank would attempt to leverage four dollars from private pools of capital for direct investment in that project. This is clearly spelled out on P. 29 (Chart 2.2) of the November 1, Economic Update.
Of course, whether the government can successfully leverage private equity at the four-to-one ratio is an open question. Ottawa’s previous efforts to attract private infrastructure investment – including through an agency focused on public-private partnerships called PPP Canada – have had limited success.
In addition to the government investment in the bank and the leveraging of private capital for specific projects, the Advisory Council’s report recommends that Ottawa should privatize – in full or in part – some of its existing assets as a way of raising money that could be spent on other infrastructure priorities.
That advice comes as the government recently hired Credit Suisse AG to analyze several privatization options for Canadian airports and Morgan Stanley to look at privatizing ports.
As a complementary measure to providing financing, the report also wants the new bank to act as a national “centre of expertise” on infrastructure.
In the Council’s view, the proposed bank’s three roles as: 1) a centre of infrastructure expertise; 2) a financing vehicle for Public-Private Partnerships (P3’s); and 3) a recipient of proceeds from the privatization of existing public assets, are tightly intertwined. In reality, the idea of creating a centre for expertise is a good idea that can stand completely on its own while the proposed financing model with its reliance on private equity partnerships, is deeply flawed and needs a fundamental re-think. The privatization of public assets such as ports and airports is an idea that should be abandoned immediately.
First, the centre for expertise.
According to Council members Mark Wise and Michael Sabia, the centre of expertise activities would include:
assembling a national infrastructure gap inventory.
working with federal, provincial and municipal governments to develop a national infrastructure plan.
hiring experts in finance, engineering, project management and procurement to ensure that the two sides of the bargaining table are evenly balanced.
negotiating the operating contracts that set the rules for service levels, capital requirements, pricing changes and so on.
providing operational expertise – in procurement, in the management of tender processes and in the co-ordination of siting and permitting – that would be available to governments for large investments, even on projects that the bank does not finance.
These are sensible ideas and to the extent that government mis-management of large scale infrastructure projects is often given as the reason for involving the private sector in the first place, building up public sector infrastructure expertise is a legitimate government priority.
But the financing model proposed for the new bank’s projects is deeply problematic.
The problem with the private financing of infrastructure – higher costs
Put bluntly, the government’s case for involving private capital in the bank’s projects is bad policy because private investors in these schemes demand a much higher rate of return than the government borrowing rate.
Michael Sabia, who in addition to being a Council member is also CEO of Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt pension fund, let the cat out of the bag in a March 3 speech to the Toronto Region Board of Trade :
“For long term investors, infrastructure offers something that’s not easy to find today: stable, predictable returns in the 7 to 9 per cent range with a low risk of capital loss – exactly what we need to meet our clients’ long term needs”.
But while structuring infrastructure deals with a private equity component may be attractive to institutional investors, that doesn’t make it good public policy. That’s because there’s plenty of low-cost public financing available to the federal government to finance infrastructure directly. According to the Bank of Canada, the federal government can float a one-year bond at under 0.6 per and issue a thirty-year bond at around 2 per cent.
In fact, there has never been a better time for governments to borrow to finance infrastructure directly. It simply makes no sense for the federal government to guarantee private “partners” a seven to nine per cent return on infrastructure investments when the government can float long-term bonds at two per cent or less. CUPE economist Toby Sanger did the math and calculated “that financing at two per cent for a $100 million project amortized over 30 years adds $34 million to its cost, while eight per cent adds $165 million — almost five times as much in financing costs and doubling the total cost, including the principal”.
This is consistent with the 2014 findings of Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk who found that Ontario’s Public-Private Partnerships (P3’s) had cost Ontario taxpayers nearly $8-billion more on infrastructure over the preceding nine years than if the Ontario government had successfully built the projects itself. A full $6.5 billion of the overpayment of $8 billion came from the higher borrowing costs of P3’s relative to traditional government infrastructure financing.
Ms. Lysyk found that the province assumed that there was less risk of cost overruns and other problems with P3’s than with public sector financing and project management. But, she said, the province actually had no historically based evidence on public sector overruns to back up that assumption. Private partnerships, meanwhile, are more expensive because companies pay far more than the government does for financing, and receive a premium from taxpayers in exchange for taking on the project risks. In Ontario, the auditor found that this “risk premium” paid to private partners was often more than 50% over the project “base” costs!
In most cases, she said, the least expensive solution may simply be for government to get better at building infrastructure itself, rather than farming it out to the private sector and its much higher borrowing costs.
Put bluntly, Canadians will have to pay more for infrastructure if private investors in infrastructure projects are going to get the kind of returns that they will demand. And this means higher user fees for the average Canadian on top of their taxes paid to fund the government’s share of the projects.
Moreover, nowhere in the Advisory Council’s report does it acknowledge that if new revenue streams can be created to give private (and mainly foreign) capital the high rate of return that it wants, then those very same new revenue streams can be created to increase government returns for 100% publicly-owned infrastructure projects. In other words, if the government feels it can withstand the political heat from the imposition of user fees and other charges ultimately passed on to the public, why not pocket the new revenue itself?
The real need – greater government expertise in infrastructure
If creating new ways to allow private sector participation in financing public infrastructure doesn’t make economic sense and the real need is to develop greater expertise in government in delivering infrastructure, should the emphasis even be on a “bank” in the traditional sense?
University of Toronto professor Matti Siemiatycki doesn’t seem to think so. Siemiatycki has written two reports for the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario outlining what he would like to see in a new infrastructure agency (not bank) and the emphasis is not on finance but on developing government expertise in infrastructure. In his reports, Siemiatycki proposes the formation of an arm’s length federal institution known as the Canadian Infrastructure Investment Agency (CIIA).
In Siemiatycki’s words, “the CIIA would be positioned as a national centre of excellence supporting rigorous project evaluation, procurement best practices and project financing under a single roof.”
Moreover, if there is to be a bank, Siemiatycki says it must be capitalized with funds that add to — not replace — existing federal funds budgeted for infrastructure. In his November 1, Fall Economic Statement, Finance Minister Morneau re-allocated $15 billion in existing infrastructure funds to the new bank much to the consternation of many infrastructure hungry municipalities.
Conclusion
As detailed above, there is a strong case for creating an arm’s length centre of expertise to improve the federal government’s infrastructure game in project management, financing and related areas. Council members Michael Sabia and Mark Wiseman have made some very useful suggestions on this front and Professor Siemiatycki has provided a number of other excellent recommendations in his two reports.
And ironically, there is even a strong argument for a public infrastructure bank along the lines envisioned in the 2015 Liberal election platform. In their platform, the Liberals pledged to “establish the Canadian Infrastructure Bank to provide low-cost financing for new infrastructure projects”. The platform goes on to say that the advantages of such a bank would be that:
“The federal government can use its strong credit rating and lending authority to make it easier and more affordable for municipalities to build the projects their communities need”.
“Where a lack of capital represents a barrier to projects, the Canada Infrastructure Bank will provide loan guarantees and small capital contributions to provinces and municipalities to ensure that the projects are built”.
The fact is that the central purpose of the bank as proposed in the Liberal election platform still makes perfect sense: namely to allow lower levels of government access to the low-cost financing that the federal government enjoys by virtue of its size and strong credit rating.
What doesn’t make sense is to invite private asset managers to invest in bank financed infrastructure projects expecting a return of seven to nine percent when the government can float long-term bonds to finance infrastructure at two per cent.
Yet that is precisely what last Monday’s meetings were all about.
Canadians can only hope that the Prime Minister and his key economic ministers will go back and read their 2015 election platform before implementing their deeply flawed proposal.
______________________________________________________________________________Founded by 24-year-old Ruben Galindo and 29-year-old Antonio Garcia of Mexico City, AirTM is a service that depends on the Bitreserve API to make transfers from the “new money” in the cloud to the “old money” of the cash system.
The two founders wanted to solve what they found to be an unfair problem in today’s remittance system. Garcia told Cointelegraph, “You're accustomed to hearing about all the hell that Mexicans go through to get to the U.S. and to work really hard to send money home, doing hard jobs that Americans don't want to do.” He continued:
“But for remittance, we need to be established in both the source and destination countries and that's a lot to bite off for a small startup. So we're focusing first on harsh currency regimes where there's a compelling use case for us — to help our brothers and sisters in Argentina and Venezuela to protect their wealth from devaluing currency due to the country's fiscal mismanagement.”
The Basics
The duo had met on numerous occasions through a common interest in Bitcoin, where they discussed the pros and cons of digital currency over beers. The epiphany of AirTM came to them, however, when they both signed up as interns at Bitreserve.
“Bitreserve's message of inclusion, free and instant transactions, and real-time transparency really spoke to us both,” says Garcia. The founders cite Halsey Minor, the founder of Bitreserve and CNET, as their inspiration.
“Our mediation solves any problems. We are like Uber in that we connect clients who want money in the cloud, with cashiers who want to make money from helping clients consummate those transactions.”
The app will not reinvent the wheel with complex and in-depth UI. “There are just three buttons on our app — deposit, withdraw, and send. First use case is wealth preservation. Second is cross-border payments and remittance.”
Pegging Fiat to Fiat
The service is currently still in alpha testing, but it is set for release in Argentina in August. “Venezuela and Mexico will follow soon after,” said Garcia. “Then China and Europe. But we can't really say when. We want to nail one country and then move on to others. We don't want to try to drink the ocean.”
They plan to make money by taking a small cut from the cashier’s commission.
AirTM is similar to the money-transfer network Abra, but with a twist. Abra depends on a peer-to-peer network of tellers and clients, without the necessity for a bank, whereas AirTM matches clients with cashiers, both of whom must have access to the old money system of banks, and the new money system of Bitreserve.
A client makes a deposit by sending fiat money via bank transfer to a cashier. The cashier sends the client money to the Bitreserve cloud, the value of which the client can peg to the currency or precious metal of their choice.
In principle, with Bitreserve's real-time transparency, clients know their value is safe because Bitreserve publishes a real-time proof of solvency. Whereas countries like Greece could impose a restriction on how much money the populace can withdraw, fiat money that is safely stored in the cloud is easily accessible via AirTM, simply by finding a cashier willing to trade.
Withdrawals involve the reverse transaction between client and cashier. “Our Escrow and Bitreserve's focus on membership and financial identity make the transactions safe,” says Garcia.
The Gift of API
AirTM has no need to worry about compliance with AML or KYC, since the Bitreserve signup and verification process handles that tedious responsibility. Bitreserve, which has numerous developers already using their API, helped the Gsp and Garcia get on their feet. “The Bitreserve team has been super helpful connecting us with investors, lawyers, banks, everything,” says Garcia.
To use AirTM, users need a Bitreserve account, and to use Bitreserve one must provide identification and other information about sources and uses of funds. Both cashiers and clients will have to be fully identified by Bitreserve in order to use AirTM, rendering any attempts to move dirty money quite difficult.
When asked about Bitcoin as a payment option, Garcia said that the digital currency is a direct-payment option with AirTM. The end user never sees or needs to know about Bitcoin. Instead, cashiers use the bitcoin rails to move value into Bitreserve.
AirTM enables clients to hold value as stable currency (USD, EUR, etc.) in Bitreserve's cloud money system. Cashiers facilitate those deposits and withdrawals by first acquiring Bitreserve's cloud money. The only way to do that today is via Bitcoin. Therefore, the founders say, “AirTM is not really a Bitcoin app. It's a Bitreserve app.”America was founded on three documents: The Declaration of Independence; The Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, and the Constitution. These documents give conclusive proof that America is a Christian nation. One does not need a law degree or a degree in history to grasp this truth. It is obvious to anyone who does not have an agenda. Let us review the documents and show this proof.
Declaration of Independence: Click to read The Declaration has many references to God throughout the document. The most famous one is that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”
Here are more references to God found in the document:
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”
Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World”
With a firm Reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence” The Declaration of Independence does not identify the God whom they are addressing. This could be left open to interpretation and opinion.
The Constitution: Click to read The body of the Constitution makes no reference to God. The Constitution honors the Christian Sabbath. The President was given 10 days to sign a bill into law. The counting of the 10 days does not include the Sabbath. This is found in Article 1, Section 7, and Clause 2 which in part follows: “If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law,”
When the Constitution was completed on September 17, 1787, it was signed by the delegates then to be ratified by the states. The delegates signed the Constitution in the “Year of our Lord.” This is a direct reference to Christianity. This is found in Article 7 which in part follows:
“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, GO WASHINGTON–Presidt. and deputy from Virginia” The Paris Peace Treaty of 1783: Click to read The Paris Peace Treaty was the document which formally ended the Revolution and granted the United States independence from Great Britain. In a real sense, the United States formally became a nation on September 3, 1783.
When the United States became a nation, it was done in the “name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.” The preamble to this Treat states it is based upon the “Holy and undivided Trinity.” The concept of the holy Trinity is unique to Christianity. This statement means the United States was founded on the Christian faith. The complete Preamble follows: “In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity”
The Treaty then ends just like the Constitution with a statement it is being signed in the “Year of our Lord.” The witnesses representing the United States were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and D. Hartley. The section in part follows:
“In witness whereof we the undersigned, their ministers plenipotentiary, have in their name and in virtue of our full powers, signed with our hands the present definitive treaty and caused the seals of our arms to be affixed thereto.Done at Paris, this third day of September in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three”
D. HARTLEY
JOHN ADAMS
B. FRANKLIN
JOHN JAYOriginally published March 2, 2011 at 5:00 PM | Page modified March 2, 2011 at 5:09 PM
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AS we consider the legalization of marijuana, we must bear in mind the impact on our youth. Politics aside, the legalization debate is sending a confusing message that's contributing to a rise in marijuana use among teens.
In the Seattle Times' Feb. 20 editorial calling for the legalizing of marijuana and Editorial Page Editor Ryan Blethen's Feb. 27 column, the potential impact on youth was blithely dismissed.
As the head of an agency that provides treatment to youth who abuse drugs and alcohol, I venture to say no one talked with experts in my field.
The number of middle-, junior- and high-school students experimenting with marijuana is the highest since the 1980s, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Puget Sound agencies that treat substance abuse in youth, like Youth Eastside Services (YES), report marijuana is the No. 1 drug of choice for teens battling addiction. And most experts would say the legalization debate is one of the factors accounting for this increase.
At YES, we work with youth in schools, teen centers and in our substance abuse and mental health treatment programs. Across the board, our counselors report a change in attitude toward marijuana. Most teens see it as less dangerous and we hear them talk about the drug being natural, medicinal and "almost legal."
Contrary to popular belief, marijuana is an addictive substance. Moreover, the potency of marijuana today has doubled and even tripled when compared to that of the 1960s, '70s and '80s — making for powerful highs and powerful addictions.
It typically costs YES more than $1,000 to provide substance-abuse treatment to a single youth, to say nothing of the costs of recovery support. While insurance can cover some of this expense, for those who lack insurance or income to cover the costs, it's often subsidized by taxpayers.
Since the Times is supporting selling pot in liquor stores, let's look at alcohol and the comparison it provides. Alcohol is the No. 1 drug used by teens. Why? Because it is legal, they see their parents using it, it's more accepted and because they have easy access to it. Youth can get it at home, they can ask others to purchase it for them, they can even purchase it themselves (with enough perseverance or a fake ID). And unfortunately, some parents even make it available to their teens.
Local and national studies show that approximately 25 percent of teens have had a drink in the last 30 days. And 80 percent of those are binge drinkers. Not all teens who drink will become alcoholics, but those who do have a significantly higher chance of developing alcoholism as an adult — 40 percent higher for those who start drinking between ages 14 and 17.
If we legalize marijuana, kids will see their parents using it, it will be more accepted and they will have easier access. It's not a stretch to say we will see an increased use and more problems with addiction with kids and their parents.
We also can't dismiss a recent Harvard study showing that marijuana has an especially negative impact on the developing brain. Regular marijuana use results in poorer school performance and attendance as well as loss of interest in other activities. In addition, pot use is associated with respiratory and mental illness, poor motor performance and impaired cognitive and immune system functions. Furthermore, addiction can be associated with increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
To look at only the taxpayer benefits of legalizing pot is short-sighted and potentially dangerous. Marijuana is a powerful drug that needs full consideration of all its impacts and costs. And without a doubt the impact and costs associated with our youth should be at the top of that list — not relegated to a small consideration.
Patti Skelton- McGougan
is executive director
of Youth Eastside Services.Student loan debt in the United States has skyrocketed since 2003, increasing by more than 450 percent, a new report says.
According to an analysis of statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published by FOX Business Network on Friday, student loan balances have increased by 457 percent over the past 14 years, drawing a comparison between the first quarter of 2003, when the student loans stood at $241 billion and the first quarter of 2017, when that number jumped to $1.34 trillion.
The report also indicated that student loan delinquencies have remained high with 11 percent of total loan debt being at least 90 days in default during the first quarter of this year. It further added that the amount of balances falling into arrears has averaged about 10 percent annually over the past five years.
(New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax)
Additionally, the price of higher education across the United States continues to surge, as the 2016-2017 school year witnessed that the average cost for a private, nonprofit four-year degree was more than $45,300, seeing a 3.4-percent rise over the previous year.
This comes as student debt can sometimes amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that many college graduates struggle to pay back loans amid a weak economy and ailing job market.
The FOX Business report, meanwhile, noted that mortgage debt has increased only 74 percent to $8.6 trillion and auto loan debt jumped 82 percent to more than $1.16 trillion since 2003. Overall household debt was up 75 percent over the same time frame.1. It's a great perfume base.
Before you spritz on your favorite scent, dab a bit of petroleum jelly onto your pulse points. This will make your perfume last all day long.
2. It can remove makeup stains on clothes.
Got a stain on your shirt? Rub petroleum jelly with a damp cloth on the stained area. It also works for your sheets and pillows.
3. It gives you the perfect manicure.
The next time you do your nails at home, apply petroleum jelly on your cuticles to keep nail polish off the skin around your nails.
4. It removes gum.
Nothing’s as annoying as having gum stuck on your shoe and clothes. But yup, petroleum jelly can fix that, too.
5. It moisturizes the skin.
Embarrassed by your dry and cracking elbows? Lather on some petroleum jelly on your dry skin before you hit the sheets. You’ll wake up with soft and moisturized skin. You can also do this trick for dry and cracked heels.
6. It repairs broken makeup.
Make instant multitaskers! Mix a bit of petroleum jelly with your loose pigments or powder cosmetics and make your own cream blush or eyeshadow.
7. It can remove your makeup.
If you can’t get rid of waterproof mascara or eyeliner, use a bit of petroleum jelly instead. Your makeup will be gone instantly.
8. It helps earrings go through your earlobes easily.
If you don’t wear earrings often, your piercing will close up sooner or later. So if you can’t put your studs back in after a long time, put petroleum jelly on the piercing and around the area. You will be able to put in your studs easily.
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Authorities said Carolina Panthers second-year linebacker Shaq Thompson and former Duke University quarterback Anthony Boone were involved in a head-on collision Sunday morning in Weddington.
Officials said Thompson’s 2016 Chevrolet SUV crossed the center line on Potter Road around 7:45 a.m. and collided with Boone’s 2004 Lexus SUV.
Thompson had alcohol in his system at the time of the crash, but it was not a factor in the wreck, according to a Union County Highway Patrol spokesman.
Thompson blew under the legal limit of.08 and passed all sobriety tests administered after the collision.
Shaq informed us he was involved in a traffic accident and we are in the process of gathering more information," Carolina Panthers spokesman Ryan Anderson said.
Officials said Thompson reached for his cell phone after dropping it on the floorboard, which caused him to cross the center line and collide with Boone.
According to the incident report, Thompson's vehicle crossed the center line in a curve while traveling south on Potter Road. Thompson swerved right in an attempt to get back in his own lane but collided with Boone's vehicle in the center of the road.
Boone and Thompson were not together Sunday morning and the accident was random, authorities said.
Boone was transported to Carolina’s Medical Center in Charlotte, where he is currently being treated for a broken pelvis and ribs.
Thompson refused medical attention at the scene and returned home after the accident.
Boone was listed in good condition Tuesday morning, according to a hospital official.SANTA CLARA – The 49ers were free to go their separate ways following activities Thursday to conclude the mandatory minicamp.
But quarterback Brian Hoyer said there are plans for the quarterbacks and receivers to work together before the club is set to report back to Santa Clara for the opening of training camp in late-July.
“Yeah, we're going to get together and do a little thing, I think,” said Hoyer, who appears to be the 49ers’ unchallenged starting quarterback for the upcoming season.
“We haven't determined the location, yet. It's still in the works, but we have a good commitment on the amount of guys that are going to be able to make it.”
Hoyer is uniquely positioned to lead workouts because of his previous experience in coach Kyle Shanahan’s system. Hoyer started 13 games in Shanahan’s offense with the Cleveland Browns in 2014.
Hoyer was the starter for seven Browns victories as the primary starter. Over the past two seasons without Hoyer and Shanahan, the Browns compiled a 4-28 record.
“He’s incredibly knowledgeable of the system,” 49ers left tackle Joe Staley said of Hoyer. “You kind of expect that, being with him (Shanahan) before. He’s taken control of the huddle from Day 1... He’s done a really good job of communicating.”
Hoyer’s previous experience with Shanahan has enabled him to build on what he already knew and begin to see the offense through the eyes of the head coach. Like many players on both sides of the ball, Hoyer said he continues to learn a great deal about the deeper meaning of every individual play from Shanahan.
"This time around, I'm trying to see it through Kyle's eyes whereas last time I was just trying to keep my head above water," Hoyer said. "I just tried to know the play and run the play, whereas now with a little bit of background, I want to see it how he sees it.
"One of the coolest things, I thought, is when we have our team meetings Kyle puts up plays and he explains them both from an offensive perspective and a defensive perspective. So, I sit next to (outside linebacker) Dekoda Watson and he's like, 'Man, I never even knew half of this stuff like who has got a certain gap and how we're trying to affect that gap.' I think that's one of the great things about Kyle as a coach, is that he is able to break it down to the simplest level, whereas I think a lot |
the handful of studies that have been conducted so far, scientists have found that calling up information from memory, as compared with simply restudying it, produces higher levels of activity in particular areas of the brain. These brain regions are associated with the so-called consolidation, or stabilization, of memories and with the generation of cues that make memories readily accessible later on. Across several studies, researchers have demonstrated that the more active these regions are during an initial learning session, the more successful is study participants' recall weeks or months later.
According to Karpicke, retrieving is the principal way learning happens. “Recalling information we've already stored in memory is a more powerful learning event than storing that information in the first place,” he says. “Retrieval is ultimately the process that makes new memories stick.” Not only does retrieval practice help students remember the specific information they retrieved, it also improves retention for related information that was not directly tested. Researchers theorize that while sifting through our mind for the particular piece of information we are trying to recollect, we call up associated memories and in so doing strengthen them as well. Retrieval practice also helps to prevent students from confusing the material they are currently learning with material they learned previously and even appears to prepare students' minds to absorb the material still more thoroughly when they encounter it again after testing (a phenomenon researchers call “test-potentiated learning”).
Hundreds of studies have demonstrated that retrieval practice is better at improving retention than just about any other method learners could use. To cite one example: in a study published in 2008 by Karpicke and his mentor, Henry Roediger III of Washington University, the authors reported that students who quizzed themselves on vocabulary terms remembered 80 percent of the words later on, whereas students who studied the words by repeatedly reading them over remembered only about a third of the words. Retrieval practice is especially powerful compared with students' most favored study strategies: highlighting and rereading their notes and textbooks, practices that a recent review found to be among the least effective.
And testing does not merely enhance the recall of isolated facts. The process of pulling up information from memory also fosters what researchers call deep learning. Students engaging in deep learning are able to draw inferences from, and make connections among, the facts they know and are able to apply their knowledge in varied contexts (a process learning scientists refer to as transfer). In an article published in 2011 in the journal Science, Karpicke and his Purdue colleague Janell Blunt explicitly compared retrieval practice with a study technique known as concept mapping. An activity favored by many teachers as a way to promote deep learning, concept mapping asks students to draw a diagram that depicts the body of knowledge they are learning, with the relations among concepts represented by links among nodes, like roads linking cities on a map.
In their study, Karpicke and Blunt directed groups of undergraduate volunteers—200 in all—to read a passage taken from a science textbook. One group was then asked to create a concept map while referring to the text; another group was asked to recall, from memory, as much information as they could from the text they had just read. On a test given to all the students a week later, the retrieval-practice group was better able to recall the concepts presented in the text than the concept-mapping group. More striking, the former group was also better able to draw inferences and make connections among multiple concepts contained in the text. Overall, Karpicke and Blunt concluded, retrieval practice was about 50 percent more effective at promoting both factual and deep learning.
Transfer—the ability to take knowledge learned in one context and apply it to another—is the ultimate goal of deep learning. In an article published in 2010 University of Texas at Austin psychologist Andrew Butler demonstrated that retrieval practice promotes transfer better than the conventional approach of studying by rereading. In Butler's experiment, students engaged either in rereading or in retrieval practice after reading a text that pertained to one “knowledge domain”—in this case, bats' use of sound waves to find their way around. A week later the students were asked to transfer what they had learned about bats to a second knowledge domain: the navigational use of sound waves by submarines. Students who had quizzed themselves on the original text about bats were better able to transfer their bat learning to submarines.
Robust though such findings are, they were until recently almost exclusively made in the laboratory, with college students as subjects. McDaniel had long wanted to apply retrieval practice in real-world schools, but gaining access to K–12 classrooms was a challenge. With Bain's help, McDaniel and two of his Washington University colleagues, Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, set up a randomized controlled trial at Columbia Middle School that ultimately involved nine teachers and more than 1,400 students. During the course of the experiment, sixth, seventh and eighth graders learned about science and social studies in one of two ways: 1) material was presented once, then teachers reviewed it with students three times; 2) material was presented once, and students were quizzed on it three times (using clickers like the ones in Bain's current classroom).
When the results of students' regular unit tests were calculated, the difference between the two approaches was clear: students earned an average grade of C+ on material that had been reviewed and A− on material that had been quizzed. On a follow-up test administered eight months later, students still remembered the information they had been quizzed on much better than the information they had reviewed.
“I had always thought of tests as a way to assess—not as a way to learn—so initially I was skeptical,” says Andria Matzenbacher, a former teacher at Columbia who now works as an instructional designer. “But I was blown away by the difference retrieval practice made in the students' performance.” Bain, for one, was not surprised. “I knew that this method works, but it was good to see it proven scientifically,” she says. McDaniel, Roediger and McDermott eventually extended the study to nearby Columbia High School, where quizzing generated similarly impressive results. In an effort to make retrieval practice a common strategy in classrooms across the country, the Washington University team (with the help of research associate Pooja K. Agarwal, now at Harvard University) developed a manual for teachers, How to Use Retrieval Practice to Improve Learning.
Even with the weight of evidence behind them, however, advocates of retrieval practice must still contend with a reflexively negative reaction to testing among many teachers and parents. They also encounter a more thoughtful objection, which goes something like this: American students are tested so much already—far more often than students in other countries, such as Finland and Singapore, which regularly place well ahead of the U.S. in international evaluations. If testing is such a great way to learn, why aren't our students doing better?
Marsha Lovett has a ready answer to that question. Lovett, director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, is an expert on “metacognition”—the capacity to think about our own learning, to be aware of what we know and do not know, and to use that awareness to effectively manage the learning process.
Yes, Lovett says, American students take a lot of tests. It is what happens afterward—or more precisely, what does not happen—that causes these tests to fail to function as learning opportunities. Students often receive little information about what they got right and what they got wrong. “That kind of item-by-item feedback is essential to learning, and we're throwing that learning opportunity away,” she says. In addition, students are rarely prompted to reflect in a big-picture way on their preparation for, and performance on, the test. “Often students just glance at the grade and then stuff the test away somewhere and never look at it again,” Lovett says. “Again, that's a really important learning opportunity that we're letting go to waste.”
A few years ago Lovett came up with a way to get students to engage in reflection after a test. She calls it an “exam wrapper.” When the instructor hands back a graded test to a student, along with it comes a piece of paper literally wrapped around the test itself. On this paper is a list of questions: a short exercise that students are expected to complete and hand in. The wrapper that Lovett designed for a math exam includes such questions as:
Based on the estimates above, what will you do differently in preparing for the next test? For example, will you change your study habits or try to sharpen specific skills? Please be specific. Also, what can we do to help?
The idea, Lovett says, is to get students thinking about what they did not know or did not understand, why they failed to grasp this information and how they could prepare more effectively in advance of the next test. Lovett has been promoting the use of exam wrappers to the Carnegie Mellon faculty for several years now, and a number of professors, especially in the sciences, have incorporated the technique into their courses. They hand out exam wrappers with graded exams, collect the wrappers once they are completed, and—cleverest of all—they hand back the wrappers at the time when students are preparing for the next test.
Does this practice make a difference? In 2013 Lovett published a study of exam wrappers as a chapter in the edited volume Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning. It reported that the metacognitive skills of students in classes that used exam wrappers increased more across the semester than those of students in courses that did not employ exam wrappers. In addition, an end-of-semester survey found that among students who were given exam wrappers, more than half cited specific changes they had made in their approach to learning and studying as a result of filling out the wrapper.
The practice of using exam wrappers is beginning to spread to other universities and to K–12 schools. Lorie Xikes teaches at Riverdale High School in Fort Myers, Fla., and has used exam wrappers in her AP Biology class. When she hands back graded tests, the exam wrapper includes such questions as:
Based on your responses to the questions above, name at least three things you will do differently in preparing for the next test. BE SPECIFIC.
“Students usually just want to know their grade, and that's it,” Xikes says. “Having them fill out the exam wrapper makes them stop and think about how they go about getting ready for a test and whether their approach is working for them or not.”
In addition to distributing exam wrappers, Xikes also devotes class time to going over the graded exam, question by question—feedback that helps students develop the crucial capacity of “metacognitive monitoring,” that is, keeping tabs on what they know and what they still need to learn. Research on retrieval practice shows that testing can identify specific gaps in students' knowledge, as well as puncture the general overconfidence to which students are susceptible—but only if prompt feedback is provided as a corrective.
Over time, repeated exposure to this testing-feedback loop can motivate students to develop the ability to monitor their own mental processes. Affluent students who receive a top-notch education may acquire this skill as a matter of course, but this capacity is often lacking among low-income students who attend struggling schools—holding out the hopeful possibility that retrieval practice could actually begin to close achievement gaps between the advantaged and the underprivileged.
This is just what James Pennebaker and Samuel Gosling, professors at the University of Texas at Austin, found when they instituted daily quizzes in the large psychology course they teach together. The quizzes were given online, using software that informed students whether they had responded correctly to a question immediately after they submitted an answer. The grades earned by the 901 students in the course featuring daily quizzes were, on average, about half a letter grade higher than those earned by a comparison group of 935 of Pennebaker and Gosling's previous students, who had experienced a more traditionally designed course covering the same material.
Astonishingly, students who took the daily quizzes in their psychology class also performed better in their other courses, during the semester they were enrolled in Pennebaker and Gosling's class and in the semesters that followed—suggesting that the frequent tests accompanied by feedback worked to improve their general skills of self-regulation. Most exciting to the professors, the daily quizzes led to a 50 percent reduction in the achievement gap, as measured by grades, among students of different social classes. “Repeated testing is a powerful practice that directly enhances learning and thinking skills, and it can be especially helpful to students who start off with a weaker academic background,” Gosling says.
Gosling and Pennebaker, who (along with U.T. graduate student Jason Ferrell) published their findings on the effects of daily quizzes in 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE, credited the “rapid, targeted, and structured feedback” that students received with boosting the effectiveness of repeated testing. And therein lies a dilemma for American public school students, who take an average of 10 standardized tests a year in grades three through eight, according to a recent study conducted by the Center for American Progress. Unlike the instructor-written tests given by the teachers and professors profiled here, standardized tests are usually sold to schools by commercial publishing companies. Scores on these tests often arrive weeks or even months after the test is taken. And to maintain the security of test items—and to use the items again on future tests—testing firms do not offer item-by-item feedback, only a rather uninformative numerical score.
There is yet another feature of standardized state tests that prevents them from being used more effectively as occasions for learning. The questions they ask are overwhelmingly of a superficial nature—which leads, almost inevitably, to superficial learning.
If the state tests currently in use in U.S. were themselves assessed on the difficulty and depth of the questions they ask, almost all of them would flunk. That is the conclusion reached by Kun Yuan and Vi-Nhuan Le, both then behavioral scientists at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank. In a report published in 2012 Yuan and Le evaluated the mathematics and English language arts tests offered by 17 states, rating each question on the tests on the cognitive challenge it poses to the test taker. The researchers used a tool called Webb's Depth of Knowledge—created by Norman Webb, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research—which identifies four levels of mental rigor, from DOK1 (simple recall), to DOK2 (application of skills and concepts), through DOK3 (reasoning and inference), and DOK4 (extended planning and investigation).
Most questions on the state tests Yuan and Le examined were at level DOK1 or DOK2. The authors used level DOK4 as their benchmark for questions that measure deeper learning, and by this standard the tests are failing utterly. Only 1 to 6 percent of students were assessed on deeper learning in reading through state tests, Yuan and Le report; 2 to 3 percent were assessed on deeper learning in writing; and 0 percent were assessed on deeper learning in mathematics. “What tests measure matters because what's on the tests tends to drive instruction,” observes Linda Darling-Hammond, emeritus professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a national authority on learning and assessment. That is especially true, she notes, when rewards and punishments are attached to the outcomes of the tests, as is the case under the No Child Left Behind law and states' own “accountability” measures.
According to Darling-Hammond, the provisions of No Child Left Behind effectively forced states to employ inexpensive, multiple-choice tests that could be scored by machine—and it is all but impossible, she contends, for such tests to measure deep learning. But other kinds of tests could do so. Darling-Hammond wrote, with her Stanford colleague Frank Adamson, the 2014 book Beyond the Bubble Test, which describes a very different vision of assessment: tests that pose open-ended questions (the answers to which are evaluated by teachers, not machines); that call on students to develop and defend an argument; and that ask test takers to conduct a scientific experiment or construct a research report.
In the 1990s Darling-Hammond points out, some American states had begun to administer such tests; that effort ended with the passage of No Child Left Behind. She acknowledges that the movement toward more sophisticated tests also stalled because of concerns about logistics and cost. Still, assessing students in this way is not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy: Other nations, such as England and Australia, are doing so already. “Their students are performing the work of real scientists and historians, while our students are filling in bubbles,” Darling-Hammond says. “It's pitiful.”
She does see some cause for optimism: A new generation of tests are being developed in the U.S. to assess how well students have met the Common Core State Standards, the set of academic benchmarks in literacy and math that have been adopted by 43 states. Two of these tests—Smarter Balanced and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—show promise as tests of deep learning, says Darling-Hammond, pointing to a recent evaluation conducted by Joan Herman and Robert Linn, researchers at U.C.L.A.'s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). Herman notes that both tests intend to emphasize questions at and above level 2 on Webb's Depth of Knowledge, with at least a third of a student's total possible score coming from questions at DOK3 and DOK4. “PARCC and Smarter Balanced may not go as far as we would have liked,” Herman conceded in a blog post last year, but “they are likely to produce a big step forward.”MACHIAS, Maine — A Washington County Superior Court jury found a man not guilty of arson Thursday in connection with fires that were set in trash cans and a Dumpster at an Irving gas station and convenience store in Baileyville.
The jury of nine women and three men deliberated about two hours before returning the verdict in favor of Aaron Neddeau, 20, of Baileyville.
Neddeau, who was charged in connection with the June 7, 2012, incident, did not testify. However, a co-defendant who earlier pleaded guilty to a lesser offense testified in Neddeau’s defense and took responsibility for the fires.
Ryan Laking, 20, of Waite, pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal mischief in October 2012 and was sentenced to three years in prison with all but 80 days suspended. Laking, in custody for allegedly violating his parole, testified on behalf of Neddeau and claimed responsibility.
Several people testified for the prosecution, including the store manager, a Baileyville police officer and a fire official.
Two plastic trash cans outside and a dumpster were damaged in the fires. However, the incident potentially could have been much worse, according to authorities. One trash can that was set ablaze was located between two gas pumps, and another was near tanks of propane for sale.
Assistant District Attorney Paul Cavanaugh showed jurors footage of security cameras that recorded some scenes of the incident. In one scene, Neddeau can be seen placing a piece of plastic atop one of the burning trash cans.
“You saw what he did,” Cavanaugh reminded the jury in rebutting the closing argument of defense attorney Jeff Davidson.
Davidson argued that the video footage showed Neddeau pouring beer on the flames and attempting to cover one fiery trash can with a piece of plastic in an effort to extinguish the fire.
Davidson maintained that Neddeau did not start a fire, cause it, or help maintain it — essential elements in proving guilt in an arson case. In addition, his client lacked criminal intent to damage or destroy property, Davidson told the jury in his closing argument. His client was “just being stupid and drunk,” he said.
Justice E. Allen Hunter presided over the two-day trial.Spread the love
“It’s within my legal rights [to film].” “No it’s not, you don’t have any legal rights right now.”
Caldwell, ID — A video taken by a group of BMX bicycle riders brings up some serious allegation of rights violations on behalf of a Caldwell police officer.
Joe Dondero and a group of friends were riding bikes at the Plaza Skate Park, a public park in Caldwell, when an officer, with apparently nothing better to do than to harass people for riding bikes 12 minutes after the park closed, showed up.
“He just rolled in and said the park is closed. Go home. He gave us maybe 30 seconds. He said, ‘did I stutter?’ Basically that was enough to tick off some people and that is exactly what happened,” Dondero told 6 on your side reporter Chris Oswalt.
The situation then quickly escalated and turned into 5 bike riders all being detained and searched.
“I’m still blown away at how this accelerated from five guys riding their bikes at the park. They searched everybody. They didn’t find any drugs or alcohol. We were just riding our bikes at the park like we have done several times,” Dondero said.
A friend of Dondero was able to film a portion of the stop, while you cannot see the officer, you can clearly hear everything.
“Okay. You guys are detained. You’re not free to leave. You’re out past 11 in a municipal park. That means that is a misdemeanor,” said the officer.
“We were trying to leave but he pulled out and said we are all detained,” one of the bikers says. “He told us to leave and we were listening to him.”
Then the officer notices the cellphone and tells the person filming to put it away. Knowing that he is well within his rights to film his police interaction, the man states that he will not put it away because it is, “within my legal rights to film,” to which the officer responds, “No it’s not, you don’t have any legal rights right now because right now you just broke the law.”
Only a 2 minute segment of the video was released to FOX 9 news, but an attorney for the group possess a full 20 minute version.
When the video was shown to Caldwell police chief, Chris Allgood, by FOX 9’s Oswalt, he claimed that he had not seen it and apparently launched an investigation into the incident.
Dondero and one other were ticketed for trespassing. Dondero was also charged with resisting arrest and obstructing; charges that he plans on fighting in court.
Below is the entire uncut 2 minute video of the rights violation caught on tape.Federal agents want the state of Michigan to turn over records in a medical marijuana investigation of seven people in the Lansing area.
The U.S. Attorney’s office is asking a judge to order Michigan to comply with a subpoena.
In a court filing last week, prosecutors said the state is resisting because of privacy provisions in Michigan law, reports the Associated Press
Federal drug agents want to see the records of medical marijuana patients and caregivers for seven people.
The seven are are not identified in court documents.
There are no details about the investigation, according to AP.
In a court document, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Bruha said possession and distribution of marijuana are illegal under federal law.
Michigan voters legalized medical marijuana in that state in 2008.Michelle Rodriguez Continues to Offend Over Trans Role in (Re)Assignment
Michelle Rodriguez (best known for her roles in the Fast and Furious franchise and Avatar) appears in an upcoming movie as... wait for it... a man who unwillingly goes through sexual reassignment surgery. The film, (Re)Assignment, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and hasn't been sitting well with the trans community. The plot has Rodriguez's character seeking revenge on the surgeon who altered her gender. The surgeon is, sadly, played by Sigourney Weaver, who has in the past been a great ally to LGBT people, even starring in the early gay-themed film Prayers for Bobby. Despite feedback from the trans community, Rodriguez stands by the role. As she told Reuters:
“What is transgender? Is it a psychological thing or is it an operation, and does the LGBTQ community own the operation? Do they have a branding right over a sex change? Are they mad that somebody decided to take their branded transgender operation and use it on heterosexual people? It’s a B-movie noir genre comic book take on something. I’m bisexual. I do guys. I do girls. You can’t really argue with me because I’m you."
She goes on to talk about her considerations when choosing to take on a role:
“If I do a movie, I’d never do a movie with the intention of offending anybody in the LGBT community because I’m a part of it.”
Rodriguez may be bisexual but she's got a lot to learn when it comes to listening, especially since the trans community has expressed disdain with this harmful premise since the film was first announced back in October of 2015. At that point, the backlash against the movie was bad that GLAAD issued a statement calling it “disappointing” for its “sensationalistic” depiction of gender-confirmation surgeries.
h/t: PinkNewsMauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi, regarded as the most tortured man in the history of Guantanamo Bay, has been released after being held without charge for nearly 14 years. He was reunited with his family in his native Mauritania on Monday.
Slahi, dressed in a traditional Mauritanian wide-sleeved robe known as a boubou, was greeted by his family and scores of friends as he arrived at his home in a working-class neighbourhood of the capital Nouakchott.
In his first comments broadcast by national television, the former prisoner thanked the Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz for "his efforts to bring him home".
Appearing cheerful and in good health, he did not comment on the conditions he faced in detention, which featured heavily in his book.
Slahi authored the memoir The Guantanamo Bay Diaries, which became an international bestseller in 2015.
He was arrested in Mauritania in 2001 and taken to Amman by the Jordanian armed forces.
He was then held in solitary confinement for more than seven months and was later taken to Bagram air base in Afghanistan. From there, he was flown to Guantanamo Bay and subjected to numerous counts of torture, according to firsthand reports documented in his memoir.
US guards at Gitmo used forced sleep deprivation techniques, shackling in stress positions, long bouts of excruciatingly loud heavy metal music and sexual threats against his mother.
His book made him the highest-profile Gitmo detainee unconnected to the 9/11 plot, where he wrote about longing to be united with his children, starting a small business and even welcoming his old prison guards for tea.
After appearing before a six-agency-panel-parole-board (PRB), the board decided on 14 July that he did not pose a strong enough threat to national security.
The decision to release Slahi came in part because of his “highly compliant behaviour” during his 14-year incarceration without charge.
Their decision also mentioned Slahi’s “candid responses” to board questions, “to include recognition of his past activities, clear indications of a change in the detainee’s mind-set”.
“We are thrilled that the PRB has cleared our client,” said Nancy Hollander, one of Slahi’s attorneys. “We will now work toward his quick release and return to the waiting arms of his loving family. This is long overdue.”
Among the evidence the PRB reviewed was a letter of support submitted by a former US military guard at Guantanamo who was assigned to Slahi for 10 months.
Born in 1970, Slahi was taken to Guantanamo Bay in 2003.
Slahi had won a scholarship to study in Germany where he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Duisburg. In 1991, he had fought with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan when the Americans were funding and equipping anti-communist resistance cells. After his time in Afghanistan, he travelled back to Germany for work and returned to his native Mauritania in 2000.
Slahi has been open about his involvement in Afghanistan and publicly stated that he had never been an enemy combatant against the US.
Slahi’s February 2016 US intelligence threat assessment said that “throughout his detention,” Slahi had “maintained his support for jihad, but clarifies that his notion of jihad neither condones the killing of innocent people nor supports [Osama] Bin Laden’s version of justice”.
During his incarceration in Guantanamo Bay, Slahi was selected to be part of a “special interrogation plan” approved personally by former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld in 2003.
In Guantanamo, Slahi was held in the infamous Camp Echo in solitary confinement for years.
His torture was so severe - from being sleep deprived, shackled in stress positions and being sexually molested - that the marine colonel assigned to prosecute him quit.
He had also written in 2009 to his lawyers that all his confessions were the result of torture.
A federal district court judge determined that Slahi’s detention was unlawful and ordered him released in 2010. The US government successfully appealed that decision, and his case for unlawful imprisonment is still pending.
There are currently 61 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo Bay, 30 of whom have been cleared for release.
Younger brother of Mohamedou Slahi posing with a redacted copy of his brothers memoirs (AFP)
His book documents in great detail the level of torture he faced during interrogations throughout his incarceration inside Guantanamo Bay.
It is based on 466 handwritten pages of prison camp memoirs Slahi wrote in 2005, which prison guards had marked “top secret” with many of his notes being redacted.
His lawyers only had access to them in a classified setting and had fought for years for the book to be published.
It was published with many redactions in January 2015.With 90 percent of the districts counted, Ayatollah Khamenei’s allies had won about 75 percent of the 200 seats in those districts, according to Press TV, Iran’s state-financed satellite channel, quoting the Interior Ministry.
The headline in Kayhan, the newspaper closest to the supreme leader, read, “Principalists win big.”
The Principalists are the coalition of Khamenei supporters. There are no real political parties in Iran, only murky, shifting alliances of political figures, but even the 30 seats so far headed toward a runoff election could not dent Ayatollah Khamenei’s majority. Full results are expected Monday or Tuesday, and runoff elections by next month.
The outcome, which could drastically reshape the domestic political landscape, is not expected to affect foreign policy. Ayatollah Khamenei has long pushed a confrontational stance toward with the West, particularly over Iran’s nuclear program, which is popular at home and accepted as being for peaceful purposes.
The government had repeated endlessly that a big election turnout would send a truculent message to the West at a time of heightened international tension over the nuclear program. The Interior Ministry announced a national turnout of 64 percent, prompting self-congratulation from the government.
The Foreign Ministry issued a statement on its Web site saying that by turning out in droves, Iranians “especially in this sensitive historical era, have shown that, despite all of the conspiracies, pressures, and sanctions, and the bleak portrait painted by the media of global arrogance, they will continue defending independence and the national interest.”
Noting that in previous parliamentary elections the turnout was only slightly higher than 50 percent, opposition figures questioned the Interior Ministry figure. They noted in particular that many reformist supporters had stayed home, protesting the continued house arrest of Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hussein Moussavi, leaders of the pro-democracy Green movement during the tumult of 2009.
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Since the ruling mullahs had portrayed the vote as a religious duty, and since some Iranians might have voted to signal their dismay over a possible military attack on Iran, it is possible that that turnout was higher than usual, said Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, another former lawmaker living in exile, “But I don’t believe their turnout figure is correct.”
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The Green movement, which demands a more transparent democracy, mushroomed in the wake of the contested 2009 presidential elections. These were the first national elections since then, but the violent suppression of that movement largely ended public protests. Also, foreign correspondents, who had once been allowed to roam freely during elections, were bused to specific polling places this time, and the government limited the number of visas issued to journalists seeking to cover the election.
A few bellwether constituencies indicated the shape of the election’s outcome. A Khamenei relative and ally, Gholamali Haddad Adel, came in first in the voting for 30 hotly contested seats in Tehran, according to results from the Fars news agency. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s sister Parvin lost in her home province of Garmsar, Mehr news reported. Khamenei loyalists even did well in rural areas and provincial cities where Mr. Ahmadinejad’s populist message once resonated, news reports indicated.
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Ayatollah Khamenei is not expected to try to eliminate the presidency until Mr. Ahmadinejad’s second term expires in June 2013. “Ahmadinejad is an unpredictable maverick, so it’s not in Khamenei’s interests to make him feel totally humiliated,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst and often sharp government critic at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But Parliament, which had already demanded that Mr. Ahmadinejad appear to answer policy questions, will have a mandate to ride herd on the president much more closely.
“Ahmadinejad will be much weaker,” said Mr. Mousavi Khoeini, the former reformist lawmaker now living in exile. If Mr. Ahmadinejad tries any of his “antics,” he said, like his attempt last spring to fire the intelligence minister, a Khamenei ally, then “Khamenei has the leverage to respond very strongly and swiftly now.”
There has long been an inherent tension in the Constitution between the post of supreme leader and that of president. It was not an issue under the founding revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, because his word was basically considered divine law. But Ayatollah Khamenei possesses weaker religious credentials, so he has to outflank his rivals in the presidency by using his control over the security services, the military and the media.
He has evidently tired of the constant tug-of-war, as well as the messy unpredictability of presidential races that automatically created a competitor and spawned the protest movement that threatened the Islamic Revolution.
“We could not have had any other result because Khamenei is going to run the country himself,” said Nooshabeh Amiri, a founder of Rooz Online, a news site.
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Mr. Haddad Adel is expected to be elected Parliament speaker again. The current speaker, Ali Larijani, is a Khamenei ally, but he has differed with the supreme leader publicly and is not considered loyal enough, analysts said.
Mr. Haddad Adel has been speaker before and claims a family advantage. He is the father-in-law to Ayatollah Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, who ran the Parliament election campaign for his father’s allies and is considered Ayatollah Khamenei’s enforcer.
The next year, with Mr. Haddad Adel as the helm, Parliament is expected to eliminate the post of president and elect its speaker as prime minister.
“You cannot have so many kings in one country.” Mrs. Amiri said.TORONTO – Annually one of the biggest events in Canadian television, last night’s snow-covered 105th Grey Cup presented by Shaw captivated viewers nationwide, becoming the most-watched since 2013 and growing 10% over 2016, according to overnight data from Numeris. An average audience of 4.3 million Canadians tuned in to TSN (4.1 million) and RDS (220,000) to watch the Toronto Argonauts dramatic come-from-behind victory over the Calgary Stampeders in the instant-classic championship game.
Overall, nearly 10 million unique viewers, or almost 30% of Canadians, watched some or all of the Argo’s dramatic 27-24 victory over the Stampeders. The game achieved a 34% share, meaning more one in three Canadians watching television across Canada on Sunday were tuned into the game.
The audience for the 105th Grey Cup presented by Shaw peaked at nearly 6 million viewers late in the fourth quarter as Stampeders’ quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell’s Hail Mary pass was intercepted by Argo’s defensive back Matt Black, sealing the Argo’s Grey Cup victory.
Fans of the winning team rallied around televisions, with audiences in the Toronto/Hamilton market up +58% on TSN compared to last year’s championship game.
The 105th Grey Cup presented by Shaw finished as the most-watched program of the day, with TSN becoming the most-watched channel in Canada on Sunday.
Additional ratings highlights:
• Livestreaming audiences for the championship game on TSN Digital platforms marked an increase of 22% compared to last year’s Grey Cup
• The magical halftime performance by CTV’s THE LAUNCH mentor Shania Twain during the Shaw Halftime Show attracted an average audience of 4.3 million viewers
• A total of 10.6 million Canadians watched some part of TSN and RDS throughout Sunday
• Nearly 2 million viewers tuned in to TSN’s Countdown to Kickoff pre-game show, and an average audience of 1.9 million viewers stayed to watch TSN’s extensive post-game coverage
The 105th Grey Cup presented by Shaw caps off a successful CFL ON TSN post-season that saw the CFL’s Western and Eastern Semi-Finals become the most-watched divisional semi-final series in three years. As well, the Eastern and Western Finals delivered an average audience of 1.4 million Canadians, growing +19% year-over-year.Times Square.Friday. Late afternoon. January 18, 2012.
For about an hour, some RUDE Theatre-of-the-Absurd took over one block in Times Square. Was the dildo really necessary?
The reason for the counter-protest was posted at Huff Po
“The Westboro “Baptist” “Church” plans to take its offensive picketing techniques to Times Square. From the group’s website: New York City is the epicenter of international commerce. These people care more about the almighty dollar than the Almighty God. New York also represents fag central. Millions of fags and their enablers proudly promote their filth |
he would rather wait for the statement of his father, President Rodrigo Duterte, who was also implicated by Lascañas in the alleged DDS.
Instead, the vice mayor posted a photo of him and friend Tan in his Instagram account.
Tan refused to give a comment regarding the allegations.
Duterte later used his Facebook account to post his statement.When I joined Rackspace nearly two years ago, the thought of working with a community to build an open cloud platform seemed almost Utopian. I say almost because at the time, the vision was close enough to be in focus but still an arm’s length away. Though we’ve always advocated and supported open source, we had just committed to creating an open cloud using OpenStack at the core.
I’m excited to announce that the Rackspace Cloud is now powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system defined by a community of thousands of developers and hundreds of organizations including NASA, IBM, Red Hat, Morphlabs and Piston Cloud Computing. The Rackspace Cloud is the world’s first available large-scale, production-ready OpenStack cloud backed by our award winning Fanatical Support.
The next generation Rackspace Cloud offers a cloud architecture comprising a host of new and enhanced Rackspace products, including Rackspace Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, Cloud Databases, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks and a new Control Panel.
Customers can sign up for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack now through a “Limited Availability” program. To ensure the best experience and to accommodate customer demand, we will begin onboarding a limited number of customers May 1. We will continue granting access to new customers during the program so that in a few short months we expect that the OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud will be open to everyone.
With Cloud Servers now powered by OpenStack and coupled with Cloud Files, the OpenStack object storage platform, we are truly driving innovation and progress as the foundation for the future of cloud computing, which we firmly believe will be based on open standards.
The Rackspace Cloud Portfolio
The Rackspace Cloud now offers a portfolio of new and enhanced Rackspace products all backed by Fanatical Support:
These products are now in “Limited Availability” – as they are available for customers to sign up for, are production workload ready, and include service level commitments, 24×7 support and regular billing:
• Rackspace Cloud Servers now runs the latest version of OpenStack Compute (“Nova”) in Essex, OpenStack’s fifth release. The Cloud Servers platform leverages OpenStack and Essex to boost its performance, scalability, stability and maturity, making it suitable for large-scale deployments. During development, we used a continuous delivery and integration model in which every code change was run through automated tests so we could rapidly make changes and confidently deploy new features. • A new Control Panel that leverages the best techniques and practices of modern web design to offer a fast, intuitive way to configure, update, manage and monitor your Cloud Servers, Cloud Files, Cloud Load Balancers, DNS and more.
These products are now in “Early Access” – as they are available for customers to sign up for, are production workload ready, but have limited support available, no service commitments and no billing:
• Cloud Databases gives our customers a fast and scalable MySQL database with automated management of common database tasks. We designed Cloud Databases with performance in mind and utilized a highly-available SAN-based storage architecture. • Cloud Monitoring (now in Early Access) adds scalable, programmable monitoring through a rich API to take the guesswork out of application and website availability. Customers can leverage Cloud Monitoring to configure items to monitor and define how to process alerts.
These products are now in “Preview” – as we are currently inviting customers to test the early versions of these products:
• Cloud Block Storage will be integrated into Cloud Servers, designed to give customers flexible volumes which can be attached to or detached from servers, while offering customers a choice between high performance SSD storage or standard block storage. • Cloud Networks is designed to utilize software-based networking to let users manage logically abstracted network services programmatically and build on-demand Layer 2 private networks leveraging network isolation and port filtering.
The evolution of the Rackspace Cloud relied heavily on the contributions of many Rackers, and also more than 50 companies and hundreds of developers who made significant contributions to Essex – proving that open models foster innovation, collaboration and high quality systems. Our customers also played a huge role by putting our next generation cloud to the test during the Cloud Servers Beta. Throughout the beta we signed up large customers running high performance environments and their feedback regarding its reliability has exceeded our expectations.
Openness is key to the Rackspace Cloud and we give customers the power to choose our public cloud, or leverage it in their own data centers. And on top of our cloud we provide customers with our famous brand of customer service called Fanatical Support, which our customers have come to expect from us. For more than a decade, our business has relied on our commitment to Fanatical Support and our OpenStack cloud is further proof of that. We’re not just installing software; we’re investing in how to run the cloud and how to run it well.
Today signifies a new beginning – open clouds are here. We will continue developing and using open standards to ensure our customers have the freedom to choose from a broad portfolio of cloud products and services. And openness will remain a strategic tenet for us as we build out our cloud offerings and help shape this new era of cloud computing.
Welcome to the future.
Sign up now for the Rackspace Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack (Limited Availability) and we will provide access starting May 1.
Check out this video showcasing the OpenStack-based next generation Rackspace Cloud:From my wonderful publisher Open Books…
Only 2 days remain until the official release of ReelRoyReviews, a book of film, music, and theatre reviews, by Roy Sexton!
Please note that, in addition to online ordering, the book currently is being carried by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan and by Memory Lane Gift Shop in Columbia City, Indiana. Memory Lane also has copies of Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series.
Here’s what Roy thought about 12 Years a Slave: “…a haunting portrait of an America in which religious fervor (and hypocrisy) corrosively coupled with economic disparity prop up a cruel caste system whereby our humanity is a commodity traded too easily for blood and cash.”
Learn more about REEL ROY REVIEWS, VOL 1: KEEPIN’ IT REAL by Roy Sexton at http://www.open-bks.com/library/moderns/reel-roy-reviews/about-book.html. Book can also be ordered at Amazon here.Joining the club as a nine-year-old, Nicolas Colazo, left, went on to make 105 appearances for Boca Juniors.
Melbourne City have completed their squad for the A-League season ahead, having landed Argentinian winger Nicolas Colazo from Boca Juniors.
Colazo, 26, trained with City for the first time on Tuesday morning at AAMI Park ahead but won't play in the club's FFA Cup quarterfinal against the Western Sydney Wanderers on Wednesday night.
City have yet to complete the paperwork surrounding the left-sided player's marquee move from Boca Juniors, which wraps up coach John van 't Schip's offseason shopping.
"We are finished with our signings, which I am very happy with. We go forward," the Dutchman said.
Colazo landed in Melbourne on Monday and is aiming to play in Round One of the A-League.
"He had the opportunity and liked the opportunity to join us in this project. We're happy," Van 't Schip said.
"He's a player that can play up front, midfield and even in defence... technically strong and a good left foot."
Colazo joins countryman Fernando Brandan, Socceroos great Tim Cahill, Danish international Michael Jakobsen and home-grown talents Bruce Kamau, Luke Brattan and Neil Kilkenny as City's major signings.
And Van 't Schip says the rest will all be in the frame to face the Wanderers, a match he labelled as "a great test."
"It's very important to see where we are only a few weeks before the A-League starts," he said.
"It's a cup game and we want to win."
Local fans should see Cahill and Jakobsen in home debuts, but Van 't Schip was coy on whether they would start, particularly given Cahill's success as a Socceroos super-sub against the United Arab Emirates a fortnight ago.
"He had a big impact in the short time he came on," he said.
"[Cahill] looks good, he feels good and he's ready to play.
"[Jakobsen's] in a good condition because he came out of a league playing in Norway.
"He's a player we want to have normally in the starting line-up.
"He has a very good pedigree, a good defender, a good age. We expect a lot from him."
Against the Wanderers, City are coming off back-to-back friendly beltings to Wellington and Newcastle.
In a 4-1 loss to the Phoenix, the coach blamed a heavy training load in Sunday's 4-0 loss to the Jets, Van 't Schip fielded a youth side.
The biggest loss of the last fortnight, however, was Corey Gameiro, who ruptured an ACL for the third time in as many years while training in Townsville.
"It's very disappointing," he sad.
"For him the most. It's tough. It's mentally very hard.
"We're trying to do what we can to support him."Launch Gallery Expand Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee speaks during a panel discussion on violence against women in Washington on September 16, 2011. © 2011 Reuters
(New York) – The decision to award the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to three women, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman, recognizes that democracy and lasting peace cannot be achieved without giving women the full opportunity to participate, Human Rights Watch said today. It also highlights the challenges that women continue to face, in Yemen and all over the world, to ensure that their human rights remain at the top of the agenda.
"This is a tribute to all women whose tireless work and brave protests helped bring about peace and democracy, and to those women who are still fighting for it today,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The job is still at best only half done, and the world needs to support efforts to build societies based on respect for human rights of all. We should not forget those women who are still suffering in conflicts today, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Cote d’Ivoire, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
Human Rights Watch also urged the Chinese authorities to release the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, the writer and dissident detained in December 2008 for his involvement in drafting a pro-democracy and human rights manifesto. Governments represented at the 2010 Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo should call for Liu’s freedom and for an end to the persecution of his family and supporters, Human Rights Watch said.About
Inspired by fast-paced, dungeon crawler classics Doom and Wolfenstein, Dread is a beautifully hand-crafted dungeon crawler, filled with endless secrets and epic boss fights.
Initially we focused our efforts on a mobile version of the game, but with your help, we'd be able to create more immersive version on the desktop and Oculus Rift!
All we need is the generous donations from people like YOU!
Explore Hand Crafted Levels
Nothing in Dread is generated.
Every single enemy, item, event, and key is there for a reason. Older games like Doom put incredible level of thought and design into each level, and we wanted to capture that with Dread!
Unique Enemies and Dungeons
Shoot rock golems in an earth temple? Check.
Mow down endless zombies, ghouls, and slimes in the depths of a crypt? Check.
Fighting soldiers in a futuristic space station? Check.
We've got all the basics you'd find in first-person shooters.
But even better than that, we will be continuously creating fresh content for your gaming pleasure on mobile, desktop, and Oculus Rift.
“In those moments where you’re not quite sure if the undead are really dead, dead, don’t get all stingy with your bullets.”
Epic Boss Fights
Each level of Dread will have a series of mini-bosses and gigantic boss fights to fight your way through.
And of course, each fight will be unique for you to figure out the best way to defeat them.
“A zombie once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
Mobile Version of Dread
Dread was initially designed with the mobile game market in mind. Each step of our project has been thoroughly thought through to create an enhanced experience wherever you like to game.
Frankly, the vast majority of mobile games suck.
Mobile devices have been identified by app developers as the latest “get rich quick” scheme, causing thousands of Flappy Bird clones and Angry Bird wannabes to flood the market.
As developers, we see this, and it frustrates us.
Which is why Dread needs to be created. The most abused genre is by far the first-person shooter genre.
Barely functioning, 12 frames-per-second, low resolution graphics, clones of “AAA” shooters make up the majority of the first-person shooter mobile market.
Developers simply don’t care much anymore about the end product being good, just runnable enough to make a few dollars. We've spent countless hours pouring into the mobile version of Dreadso that it would not be just a marketing after-thought project.
What Will be Included in the Mobile Version of Dread?
1. Full resolution textures, dynamic shadowing, and full-screen shaders to provide a depth to first-person shooters never seen before on the mobile platform.
2. 60 frames-per-second that gives us a fast-paced, fluid gaming on your phone.
3. Interactive battlefield dungeons to explore!
Dread will be available for iPhones, iPads, Android Phones & Tablets
"You’ve got red on you."
Every member of our team has a full-time job, just like you.
We've worked as hard as possible to get Dread out to the public in a timely manner, but we've found it challenging to do so while managing everything else of life.
We need Kickstarter so that our first-person shooter game can be developed on mobile, desktop, and the Oculus Rift platforms.
Getting Dread fully funded will enable us to work full-time on the project and bring the best possible user-experience for you and your friends.
We Want to Hear From You!
Questions about the game?
Suggestions?
Any features you’d like to see?
Know what movies the above quotes came from?
Feel free to let us know! We promise to respond to every single message we receive.
Click "Contract Us" at the top right to get in touch with us!For the language extinction process, see Language death
"Dead language" redirects here. For the album by The Flatliners, see Dead Language (album)
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers,[1] especially if the language has no living descendants.[2] In contrast, a dead language is "one that is no longer the native language of any community", even if it is still in use, like Latin.[3] Languages that currently have living native speakers are sometimes called modern languages to contrast them with dead languages, especially in educational contexts.
In the modern period, languages have typically become extinct as a result of the process of cultural assimilation leading to language shift, and the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign lingua franca, largely those of European countries.[4][5][6]
As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.[7]
Language death [ edit ]
Sisters Maxine Wildcat Barnett (left) and Josephine Wildcat Bigler; two of the final surviving elderly speakers of Yuchi, visiting their grandmother's grave in a cemetery behind Pickett Chapel in Sapulpa Oklahoma. According to the sisters, their grandmother had insisted that Yuchi be their native language.
Normally the transition from a spoken to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death by being directly replaced by a different one. For example, many Native American languages were replaced by English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch as a result of colonization.
In contrast to an extinct language, which no longer has any speakers, or any written use, a historical language may remain in use as a literary or liturgical language long after it ceases to be spoken natively. Such languages are sometimes also referred to as "dead languages", but more typically as classical languages. The most prominent Western example of such a language is Latin, but comparable cases are found throughout world history due to the universal tendency to retain an historical stage of a language as liturgical language.
Historical languages with living descendants that have undergone significant language change may be considered "extinct", especially in cases where they did not leave a corpus of literature or liturgy that remained in widespread use (see corpus language), as is the case with Old English or Old High German relative to their contemporary descendants, English and German.
Some degree of misunderstanding can result from designating languages such as Old English and Old High German as extinct, or Latin dead, while ignoring their evolution as a language. This is expressed in the apparent paradox "Latin is a dead language, but Latin never died." A language such as Etruscan, for example, can be said to be both extinct and dead: inscriptions are ill understood even by the most knowledgeable scholars, and the language ceased to be used in any form long ago, so that there have been no speakers, native or non-native, for many centuries. In contrast, Old English, Old High German and Latin never ceased evolving as living languages, nor did they become totally extinct as Etruscan did. Through time Latin underwent both common and divergent changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon and continues today as the native language of hundreds of millions of people, renamed as different Romance languages and dialects (French, Italian, Spanish, Corsican, Asturian, Ladin, etc.). Similarly, Old English and Old High German never died, but developed into various forms of modern English and German. With regard to the written language, skills in reading or writing Etruscan are all but non-existent, but trained people can understand and write Old English, Old High German and Latin. Latin differs from the Germanic counterparts in that an approximation of its ancient form is still employed to some extent liturgically. This last observation illustrates that for Latin, Old English, or Old High German to be described accurately as dead or extinct, the language in question must be conceptualized as frozen in time at a particular state of its history. This is accomplished by periodizing English and German as Old; for Latin, the most apt clarifying adjective is Classical, which also normally includes designation of high or formal register.
Minor languages are endangered mostly due to economic and cultural globalization and development. With increasing economic integration on national and regional scales, people find it easier to communicate and conduct business in the dominant lingua francas of world commerce: English, Chinese, Spanish and French.[8]
In their study of contact-induced language change, American linguists Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman (1991) stated that in situations of cultural pressure (where populations are forced to speak a dominant language), three linguistic outcomes may occur: first - and most commonly - a subordinate population may shift abruptly to the dominant language, leaving the native language to a sudden linguistic death. Second, the more gradual process of language death may occur over several generations. The third and most rare outcome is for the pressured group to maintain as much of its native language as possible, while borrowing elements of the dominant language's grammar (replacing all, or portions of, the grammar of the original language).[9]
Institutions such as the education system, as well as (often global) forms of media such as the Internet, television, and print media play a significant role in the process of language loss.[8] For example, when people migrate to a new country, their children attend school in the country, and the schools are likely to teach them in the majority language of the country rather than their parents' native language.
Language revival [ edit ]
Language revival is the attempt to re-introduce a recently extinct language in everyday use by a new generation of native speakers. The optimistic neologism "sleeping beauty languages" has been used to express such a hope.[10]
Hebrew is an example of a liturgical language that has successfully been revived for everyday use. The revival of Hebrew has been largely successful due to extraordinarily favourable conditions, notably the creation of a nation state in which it became the official language, as well as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's extreme dedication to the revival of the language, by creating new words for the modern terms Hebrew lacked. Revival attempts for minor languages with no status as liturgical language typically have more modest results. The Cornish language revival is an example of a major successful language revival: after a century of effort there are 3,500 claimed native speakers; enough for UNESCO to change its classification from "extinct" to "critically endangered".
Recently extinct languages [ edit ]
This is a list of languages reported as having become extinct after the year 2000. For a more complete list, see List of extinct languages.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]David Whitt, an African-American member of the activist group We Copwatch, says he was arrested in Ferguson, Mo., by St. Louis County police this morning.
Whitt claims he was on his bike when he stopped to film police meeting behind a store in preparation of the grand jury decision on Officer Darren Wilson who fatally shot Michael Brown on Aug. 9.
“I wasn’t blocking traffic,” Whitt told PhotographyisNotaCrime.com. “I had stopped my bicycle on the curb to record them and they came up to me in 20 seconds, telling me they were going to cite me for not wearing a helmet.”
“They started going in my pockets, I said, ‘You can’t go in my pockets,’” added Whitt. “They didn’t like me recording, but that’s what I do because they’ve been saying all kinds of lies about the protesters.”
Whitt says he was locked in jail for a few hours, but has been released. He promised to post video of his arrest at a later date.
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Mediaite.com reports that Tory Russell, co-founder of the Hands Up United organization, urged police in Ferguson to keep calm when the grand jury announces its decision (video below).
“I am urging calm. I’m urging calm for the police officers to not pepper spray me, tear gas me, mace me and shoot rubber bullets,” Russell told CNN. “People need to urge the police to be calm. Stop hurting kids, stop traumatizing our communities.”
“Why don’t you keep calm and serve the communities?” added Russell. “I’m paying your bills, you need go ahead and do what I tell you to.”
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Sources: PhotographyisNotaCrime.com, Mediaite.com / Image Credit: Jamelle Bouie
undefinedSen. Lindsey Graham Lindsey Olin GrahamWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission MORE (R-S.C.) said Monday that he does not believe the Senate will pass a major healthcare bill before the end of the year.
"I don’t think there will be. I just don’t think we can put it together among ourselves,” Graham said about passing the bill this year, Bloomberg reported.
Graham's remarks come as Senate Republicans plan to meet Tuesday to discuss options to repeal and replace ObamaCare, as the Senate GOP's healthcare working group considers the details of the Senate plan.
While upper chamber leaders like Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn John CornynGOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system Senators grill drug execs over high prices Cornyn less popular than Cruz in Texas: poll MORE (R-Texas) have pressed senators to finish healthcare by the end of July, Graham and Sen. Richard Burr Richard Mauze BurrFive things to watch as Michael Cohen testifies Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators MORE (R-N.C.) have questioned if healthcare can be done in 2017.
The Republican-majority House passed a bill in early May that repeals and replaces key provisions of ObamaCare, which many Republican lawmakers have vowed to repeal. The vote is now in the hands of upper chamber.
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Some Senate Republicans hope to have a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score before voting on the legislation on July 4, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) admitted last week it may be hard to garner enough votes for the healthcare legislation.
“I don’t know how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment,” McConnell said, referring to the healthcare bill.
While Republicans have majority power in the upper chamber with 52 seats, just two GOP defections would would likely lead to a 50-50 tie in which Vice President Pence could cast the deciding vote.
Graham previously warned that the GOP healthcare bill "should be viewed with caution" before the CBO had come out with its score.
The CBO score for the House bill estimated that 23 million more people would become uninsured by 2026 than if ObamaCare remained in place. And the score also said the Republican bill would reduce the deficit by $119 billion over the course of 10 years.Various sources are suggesting that Gulfstream Aerospace will reveal the much anticipated P42 aircraft project in the coming weeks.
If “P42” doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry. Most people who fly Gulfstreams for a living probably haven’t heard of it either. But among those who follow the nitty-gritty details of the industry, most believe it’s going to be the successor to the G450 line, an design which (sans avionics upgrades and a few minor changes) has been in production since 1985. Thirty years is a long time for any model to remain viable in the competitive world of new aircraft sales, and it speaks volumes about the quality and capability of the product that it’s been king of the hill for so many decades.
It’s All in the Timing
Assuming P42 is indeed a G450 replacement, one wonders “Why now?”. I think the answer is that Gulfstream faced no serious competition until recently. While there have been higher flying, faster, and larger models for a long time, it’s only now that those elements are becoming available in a single design at a competitive price point and operating cost.
Falcon and Bombardier present the primary challengers, having recently announced the development of airplanes with the cabin size, speed, and range to threaten sales of a model Gulfstream has been building for decades. While GAC could have chucked the 450 design a long time ago, the smart move is to leave an airplane in production as long as it continues to sell. The proof is in the numbers: there are about 850 Gulfstream IV/450-series aircraft in service, and the order book is still quite full.
Of course, you remain successful by staying ahead of the Joneses, and that’s what P42 is all about. AIN hinted at this in their EBACE convention coverage earlier in the year:
General Dynamics chairman and CEO Phebe Novakovic said last month that 60 percent of Gulfstream’s order intake during the first quarter was for the G450 and G550. And in the fourth quarter of 2013, China’s Minsheng Financial Leasing placed a 60-aircraft order with Gulfstream estimated at about $3 billion, the bulk of which is for G450s and G550s. But there is trouble looming on the horizon for the legacy large-cabin Gulfstreams. The $45 million Dassault Falcon 5X, announced in October at the NBAA Convention, took direct aim at the G450. The 5X, which is expected to enter service in 2017, offers a range of 5,200 nm, 700 nm more than the G450, and a 98.4-inch cabin cross section that largely matches that of the G650, Gulfstream’s widest jet. Striking another blow, Dassault launched a Falcon 7X derivative (8X) here at EBACE that similarly challenges the G550. “But don’t think for a minute that Gulfstream is idly sitting by,” business aviation analyst Brian Foley told AIN. “Gulfstream has plans to respond to Dassault, but it’s a balancing act as to when you make an announcement. Too soon, and you hurt sales of your existing products; too late, and it appears you’re hastily reacting to the market.”
Whatever P42 turns out to be, it’s going to represent a major shift for Gulfstream. Most of the existing fleet is related to a half-century-old derivative of a turboprop. The changes and updates to that line, while significant, have also been incremental. A bigger wing here, new avionics there, engine upgrades or a longer fuselage from time to time. The big question is this: will P42 be a clean-sheet design, or a derivative of the G650?
I’m guessing it’s the latter. Once the G650’s technology has found success in the marketplace, why not leverage that investment by offering models to suite different mission requirements and price points? It not only amortizes the billion dollar development cost, but also ensures a greater likelihood of success. Gulfstream has done this before, and not just with the G-IV/SP/300/350/400/450/etc line. Their G280 has been successful in large part because they mated a scaled-down G550 airfoil to a stretched G200 airframe.
Agent 86 Would Be Proud
Whatever P42 is, one of the program’s most impressive aspects thus far is the cone of silence that surrounds it. With more than 13,000 employees situated at facilities around the world, Gulfstream Aerospace is not exactly a small enterprise. In addition, they work closely with Honeywell, Rolls-Royce, Parker Aerospace, and countless other suppliers and subcontractors. Collectively, tens of thousands of individuals probably have exposure to and knowledge of P42, yet even in our ultra-connected world, a place where everyone totes around a 24/7 internet connection and high-resolution camera in the palm of their hand, the vault door has remained firmly closed. That’s impressive.
Compare this to the sieve-like atmosphere at Apple, where the whole world seems to know about products while they’re still on the drawing board. Is it just the fact that jets are “big money”? I don’t think so. The unit cost might be high, but the volume is incredibly low when compared to the millions of products a firm like Apple will sell in a single week.
Your Father’s Oldsmobile
Speaking of older technology, I was re-living the 1969 landing of Apollo 11 via firstmenonthemoon.com, and as always where Apollo is concerned, I was fascinated by the computing power — or more accurately, the lack thereof — in that project. The outdated iPhone any schmoe can grab for nearly free these days has infinitely more muscle than the IBM/360 mainframe which guided humans to a smooth lunar landing.
(By the way, if you’d like to get an in-depth look at what all those blinking lights on the mission control consoles really did, I highly recommend this Ars Technica article.)
But what really got me was the realization that from a chronological and computational power standpoint, the Gulfstreams that I fly are more closely related to that Apollo-era hardware than they are to today’s computers. The first moon landing was in 1969, just sixteen years before the G-IV went into production. Yet that airplane has been flying for nearly thirty years.
While the airframe itself belies the aircraft’s age, the avionics don’t. When asking to extend a centerline or compute a VNAV flight path, there’s enough time to grab a sip of coffee before the system displays a solution. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. The Honeywell SPZ-8400 is capable of doing everything a more “modern” avionics suite does, from VNAV approaches and WAAS to TAWS, GPWS, TCAS, and all the other bells & whistles. But it’s like using any other computer more than a few years old: the lack of power can be clearly felt.
The presence of older technology in avionics is not limited to business jets. I recall that the space shuttle had some pretty ancient stuff in it as well. When the orbiters received their glass cockpit avionics upgrades in the early 2000s, the five General Purpose Computers which form the heart of the shuttle’s computer system were mild upgrades of the existing AP-101 units. Even the “new” boxes weighed in at sixty-four pounds a piece and drew 600 watts each.
It’s worth noting that the AP-101S shares the same system architecture as the IBM/360 mainframe from the lunar program. If the shuttle was flying today, it would undoubtedly be using those exact computers, partly because of the difficulty and expense involved in certifying space-worthy hardware. But also because if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Perhaps that will be the legacy of not only the long-lived Gulfstream II/II/IV/V/x50 airplanes, but the upcoming P42 mystery bird as well.Click to find out more.
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Pictures: Screen captures from Visit Finland’s video.
The lady of the automatic response system is repeating the same message: “The number you have called cannot be reached at the moment.”
I’ve been trying to call Tinja Myllykangas, a young Finnish woman living 300 kilometres from the nearest town in the Lapland wilderness, a dog whisperer with 85 sled huskies, who has become famous across the globe after a French photographer Brice Portolano documented her life in a freezing cold of minus 35 degrees Celcius in January.
After digging further, I find a note on Myllykangas’ safari company’s website that she is available again in November 2016.
Bummer. I would have liked to ask her simple questions, such as “What is it like to live in the wilderness?” and “What’s the deal with the dogs?” and “Why is your phone most often off?”
While I would have loved to hear her voice, luckily, she has already answered to the aforementioned questions and more in articles scattered around the web.
Visitfinland.com tells us that Tinja’s home is next to the Muotkatunturi, in the area of Inari and Utsjoki. Her cabin lacks electricity and running water. She cooks her food on a wood-burning stove or outside on an open fire. “The chores never feel like a burden. This is a way of life I chose for myself. I get so much joy and energy from living at one with nature that I don’t feel the need for any material possessions,” she said.
While Tinja grew up with animals as a child, the dogs, which are mostly huskies, are swarming around her because she wanted to help canines that other people couldn’t keep for various reasons. “Sled dogs need a lot of exercise and many aren’t prepared for that. Here, the dogs can do what they were born to: pull a sled,” she said. Tinja also owns horses and even dog wolfs, which means that one of their parents or grandparents was a wolf. According to Tinja, they are very faithful animals and follow the owner everywhere.
Tinja receives several safari requests weekly during winter but she’s not looking for commercial profit. “I like being on my own with my dogs and horses. I think being alone is the most peaceful way of life there is. All this has come out of my love of animals, I didn’t set up a dogsledding business for commercial reasons. It’s about my own love of nature and living out here in the wild,” she said on the photographer Portolano’s website.
Tinja moved to the wilderness in 2008 after living six years in Jyväskylä, where she earned a degree in biology. To her, the urban lifestyle doesn’t compare with having the untouched natural wilderness on her doorstep. “I love the winter. The colder it is, the more energised I get. The darkness isn’t bad at all; even during the polar night, the dark period we call ‘kaamos’, you get a lot of light from the moon and the stars,” she said. For the past two years, she has been living with Alex, a former professional skier, who works now as a race musher.
Portolano, who has photographed many people in the wilderness, recalled in an interview for LensCulture when he tried to get a hold of Tinja but almost quit trying. “Sometimes it can be very challenging – most of these people are rarely connected to their computers and it’s often very hard for them to get back to me on time. Take Tinja for example: I almost gave up after having no reply from her for a long time. Then, two months later, in the middle of winter, I was there, in northern Finland.”
Portolano shot his photo essay “Arctic Love” with Tinja in 20 days. When he arrived in Lapland in early January, the polar night was just ending and the sun was slowly coming back. The first day lasted only 9 minutes. During the 20 days, the maximum daylight available was around one hour.
The photo essay features 16 images with a lovely, dominating blue hue on top. Tinja is portrayed as a strong-willed blonde, with eyes of blue steel, and the viewer gets a glimpse of her life both inside and outside of the cabin. The winter landscape of Lapland is naturally stunning and the grey and white huskies pulling the sledge add some motion and contrast to the white-blue scenery. Some of the pics feature breathtaking Northern Lights.
After looking at the pictures and spending a day researching |
over the years. With his acting, Lurie appears to rely more on pure intuition and trust in the material and director he's working with than pure technique. He starred in—while composing and performing the scores for—Jim Jarmusch’s two best films, Down by Law, with Tom Waits, and Stranger Than Paradise. He also appeared in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, Wim Wender’s Paris Texas, and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
There was also a unique excursion into television with a quirky, tongue-in-cheek early-1990s Bravo/IFC “fishing” show called Fishing with John, in which Lurie would go on fishing trips to various outposts of the globe with such hipster celebrity friends as Waits, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper. There was little of the good ol’ boy banter of a standard fishing show. One critic called the program—which Lurie starred in, produced, directed, and scored—Waiting For Godot on water. It was full of obtuse, purposefully ridiculous, and often hilarious interactions between the fishing buddies. There was also an unreliable narrator prone to such musings as: “How deep is the ocean? No one knows.” At the end of the episode guest-starring Dafoe which involved ice fishing on a frozen lake, he announced, “On January 19th, John Lurie and Willem Dafoe died of starvation.”
Things were humming along nicely in several fronts for Lurie until 2004, when he was diagnosed with Advanced Lyme disease. The debilitating condition forced him to spend most of his time in his Soho apartment, making it difficult to pursue his music and acting careers. Fortunately, he had another relatively untapped talent to fall back on. Stuck inside all day smoking cigarettes, he returned to painting.
After three decades of living in New York, Lurie decided to leave. He spent some time in a Turkish village, stayed at his friend Flea’s place in Big Sur, and resided for a while in Palm Springs, before ending up on a Caribbean island. He was a painter now—not the type of hobbyist painter you become when you're stuck at home and need to stay busy, or when you want to leverage your celebrity to sneak your way into a new field—a real painter who was selling his work. His mother had taught art at a university, so his lessons had started at an early age. Painting was a career Lurie could have successfully pursued even before he'd gained a name for himself in other fields, although there were always the doubters—the ones who resented this arriviste who’d crashed their exclusive party.
Lurie's paintings, which often project an intentional sense of naiveté, are striking for their extraordinary dream-like quality. Some have eccentric-sounding titles like, “The Spirits Are Trying to Tell Me Something But It’s Really Fucking Vague,” and “King Pig Turned Flowers Into Language,” that people may often read more significance into than the artist intended. The paintings are full of beautiful colors and the quirky, droll humor that's a common thread in all of Lurie's work, including his music. You might see some echoes of Paul Klee or Bruegel or Jackson Pollock, but the paintings don't fit neatly into any particular category, just like his music. You'll also see a lot of flora painted with great skill, and animals—especially birds.
Now 64, Lurie still struggles with his Lyme disease, but he remains a real, modern day Renaissance man who’s always defined himself by his refusal to recognize boundaries for his creative energies and diverse talents. To do a blues album (The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits) that he'd sing and play guitar and harmonica on, he adopted the persona of Marvin Pontiac, the son of an African father and Jewish mother. Lurie’s art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world, and his soundtrack for Get Shorty was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Lurie, once the quintessential urban artist, is still far from New York these days. He's still living on the same Caribbean island. In an email exchange with him, I asked him what island life was like. He said he could see the ocean from his place, and that there are mango trees, papaya trees, and flowers everywhere. In the dry season, iguanas walk through his yard. I asked him how the painting life compares to the music life. “Painting became for me what music once had been,” he said. “I didn’t suspect that was possible. And the wonderful thing about it, you can just do it, at home in the middle of the night. No broken sound systems, dishonest promoters, no musicians who don't understand the concept of calendars or clocks. Of course, the art world tends to be creepy but I keep my distance. I just make these things that I find beautiful. They hypnotize me.”First, you layer the gingersnaps across the bottom of a casserole dish -- we used Murray's gingersnaps. Then, you hydrate the gelatin in a dish and, in another bowl, combine your egg yolks, cornstarch, salt, and sugar. After heating the milk, you add 1 cup to the yolk mixture, and then combine it all back in the saucepan. Add the pumpkin purée, then the gelatin, vanilla, and cinnamon. Then add in the mascarpone cheese -- the creamy, classic ingredient for a perfect tiramisu.
In another small bowl, microwave a few tablespoons of the applejack with a tablespoon of sugar. Use this to liberally brush the gingersnaps in the pan.
Layer the mascarpone-pumpkin mixture over the gingersnaps, and repeat this pattern for two more layers, making sure to brush each layer with the applejack. Top with crushed leftover gingersnaps, and freeze!
Make sure you take time to thaw this recipe out -- several hours at room temperature will do the trick! I took this out before my potluck began, and it was at its creamy, layered best by early evening.*Cabs must be requested by phone and Berg Injury lawyers will cover up to $20 and any remaining balance must be paid in cash. When you call, you must tell them about the Berg Injury Lawyers Promotion. Cabs may not be hailed.
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Please note that the maximum reimbursement value is $20 and not $25 as previously listed.
To help keep your drunken ass off the road, Halloween revelers in San Francisco, East Bay, North Bay, South Bay, Tri-Valley and Sacramento can get their cab rides home paid for all Halloween night (until 10 am).
Law firm GJEL Accident Attorneys are sponsoring their free “Drink and Alive Free Cab Program” program.
The program is simple. All you have to do is make the right choice to take a cab ride, Uber, or Lyft home if you’ve been drinking. Pay for the cab up front, and GJEL will reimburse you for it up to $20.
Please note this is only for safe rides home – not for bar hopping.
Free Cab Rides Home for Halloween 2018
Begins: October 31, 2018 – 5 pm
Ends: November 1, 2018 – 10 am
FREE – Pre-Registration Required
The Free Cab Ride Rules:
Because cab rides are intended for residents who otherwise might attempt to drive home after drinking. Pre-Registration required – reimbursement coupons are limited
Rides must be in the Bay Area area, San Jose, Oakland, Tri-Valley metro area, or Sacramento.
Rides must be taken between October 31st at 5 pm to November 1st, 2018 by 10 am.
You must be of legal drinking age to qualify (21 and over)
Valid for one, one-way ride to a safe destination – This is NOT for bar hopping
Limit one reimbursement per household
Maximum value of $20 anywhere in the Bay Area, San Jose, Oakland, Tri-Valley metro area, or Sacramento. Redemption Instructions The only catch here is that you have to mail proof via snail mail. But it’s not bad considering you’ll get up to $25 (please note that submissions via email are not accepted). Claim a “ticket” using the registration information. Taking an Uber/Lyft? Take a screenshot from the Uber/Lyft app showing the starting and ending destinations, the date and time, and price. Print this out and mail along with a photocopy of your valid driver’s license (to prove you’re over 21) and your PayPal associated email address (for reimbursement). Mail this to the address below. Taking a Cab? Mail your cab receipt, a photocopy of your valid driver’s license, and your PayPal associated email address (for reimbursement) to: Drink and Alive Free Cab Program
GJEL Accident Attorneys
2 Orinda Theatre Square #230
Orinda, CA 94563 Reimbursements will be processed within 30 days of receipt. Please direct any questions to [email protected]. All submissions must be received by no later than November 10, 2018. If you have any questions about the program, feel free to call: 1-866-294-6918. GJEL
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Categories: **Annual Event**An Afghan woman immortalised on a celebrated National Geographic magazine cover as a green-eyed 12-year-old girl was arrested Wednesday for living in Pakistan on fraudulent identity papers.
The haunting image of Sharbat Gula, taken in a Pakistan refugee camp by photographer Steve McCurry in the 1980s, became the most famous cover image in the magazine's history.
Her arrest highlights the desperate measures many Afghans are willing to take to avoid returning to their war-torn homeland as Pakistan cracks down on undocumented foreigners.
Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) arrested Gul for fraud following a two-year investigation on her and her husband, who has absconded.
Investigators, who have uncovered thousands of fraud cases over the last decade, launched a probe into her application shortly after she procured the card.
"FIA arrested Sharbat Gula, an Afghan woman, for obtaining a fake ID card," Shahid Ilyas, an FIA official, told AFP.
Ilyas said the authorities were also seeking three National Database Registration Authority (NADRA) officials found responsible for issuing Pakistan's national identity card to Gula, who have been at large since the fraud was uncovered.
He said that Gula faces seven to 14 years in prison and a fine of $3,000-$5,000 if convicted.
In reality she is unlikely to serve such a harsh sentence -- many Afghans who have been convicted in similar cases have been deported before they could be sent to prison.
Officials say Gula applied for a Pakistani identity card in Peshawar in April 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi.
Thousands of Afghan refugees have managed to dodge Pakistan's computerised system to get an identity card.
The photo attached to her application featured the same piercing green eyes seen in McCurry's famous image, only older.
The original photograph was taken in 1984 in a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
McCurry later tracked her down, after a 17-year search, to a remote Afghan village in 2002 where she was married to a baker, and the mother of three daughters.
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- Uncertain future -
Pakistan has for decades provided safe haven for millions of Afghans who fled their country after the Soviet invasion of 1979.
The country hosts 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees, according to UNHCR, making it the third-largest refugee hosting nation in the world.
The agency also estimates a further one million unregistered refugees are in the country.
Since 2009, Islamabad has repeatedly pushed back a deadline for them to return, but fears are growing that the latest cutoff date in March 2017 will be final.
Meanwhile refugees are increasingly worried about their future in Pakistan as the country cracks down on those who have obtained fake ID cards.
Officials say NADRA has so far reverified 91 million ID cards and detected 60,675 fraudulent cards.
A NADRA official told AFP that 2,473 foreigners, mostly Afghans, had voluntarily surrendered their ID cards which were obtained fraudulently.
Some 18 NADRA officials were under investigation for issuing ID cards to foreigners and eight were arrested, the official said.
More than 350,000 Afghan refugees have returned home from Pakistan this year, UN data shows, with the torrent of people crossing the border expected to continue.
They face an uncertain future in an Afghanistan still at war and already overwhelmed by so many internally displaced people fleeing fighting that officials warn of a humanitarian crisis.A lawsuit in which activists accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of seeking SOPA-like powers has ended without resolving much of anything.
Whoever was behind the accused piracy website MovieTube seems to have disappeared. MovieTube didn't respond to the complaint, and it blew off a scheduled August 18 hearing. Yesterday, US District Judge Paul Crotty entered a default judgment (PDF) and injunction handing over the MovieTube site to the MPAA. Crotty also ordered the site owners, if they're ever found, to pay a $10.5 million penalty for willful copyright infringement (or $75,000 per infringed work).
MovieTube was shuttered shortly after the complaint (PDF) was filed, which resulted in the MPAA dropping its request for a controversial preliminary injunction. MPAA lawyers asked for a broad order that would have affected not just MovieTube but loads of intermediary service providers.
The MPAA sought an order banning "search-based online advertising services (such as through paid inclusion, paid search results, sponsored search results, sponsored links, and Internet keyword advertising), domain name registration privacy protection services, providers of social media services (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) and user-generated and online content services (e.g., YouTube, Flickr and Tumblr)" from providing any services to MovieTube. Banks, advertisers, and payment processors would have been barred as well.
That remedy—a lightning-fast court-ordered shutdown that would affect all services connected to an alleged piracy website—is essentially what the entertainment industry sought but failed to get during the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The MPAA's efforts were alarming enough to Internet companies that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Yahoo teamed up to file an amicus brief (PDF) asking the judge in the case to not grant the MPAA the relief it sought.
However, once MovieTube shut down, the MPAA withdrew its request for the broad preliminary court order—perhaps seeing that it was headed toward a rapid default judgment that would give it control of the infringing sites.
In the end, the MovieTube saga isn't so much about what that site actually did; rather it's a preview of a legal battle that will likely be fought out in a future case. The two-bit piracy site, which openly stated on one of its Facebook pages that it did "not need to respect US laws," isn't going to end up paying millions to the MPAA or anyone else. The MPAA believes current law gives it the right to keep asking for a "back door" to SOPA-like remedies, but the opposition from Internet companies will be vigorous.EDIT: Upvated the vector and fixed errors, added more crystal sparkles, included SVG File.So, I originally went out looking for a vector pose so I could make another Sunset Shimmer, since people seemed to like the one I made before.That, and there was a severe lack of show accurate vectors of her, and I like making vectors that others can use, as well as making them for fun.So, I searched the MLP Wiki gallery for Rarity (A Unicorn) poses, and came across this pose. I paused, took a good look at it, and went to deviantart and looked for multiple variations of "Crystal Rarity MLP", but could not find this pose. I found an older drawing of MINE in the top that was of crystal rarity, but few actual screenshot vectors. I even went to the MLP Vector Club gallery to look, and still couldn't find it. (If it does exist out there I'm sorry >.< )So, about 4 hours of straight vectoring later, I give you a Crystal Rarity.I really enjoyed making her, and loved messing with different layers to make her hair so shiny. Rarity, due to her lighter coat, is harder to do the crystal effect for, and I had to keep messing with the opacity and colors to make it as accurate as I could.I do not own My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.Credits go to and Vector taken from a screenshot of the show.A NOTE: The SVG files are linked for 3rd party editing (color adjustment for a work, better integration into a wallpaper, etc)Downloading a file does NOT give you the authority to recolor the vector, re-upload it claiming it as your own, or to use it as an adoptable or base.Dog lovers just celebrated National Puppy Day, but I will resist telling you about our pair of rapscallion Welsh corgis called Dodger and Dylan.
Yeah, right.
When they joined the family about 56 dog years ago, I could carry each under an arm like loaves of bread. They may have grown to a svelte 25 pounds each, but I can’t really say they’ve “grown up.” They’re still more like teenagers, exuberant (but never petulant), easily bored, enthusiastic when friends – that includes the UPS man – show up.
They may be twin brothers who conspire against their parents, but they have distinct personalities.
Dodger thinks he’s Alpha, and he’s sort of a jock. If he can’t find a tennis ball to chase, he’ll grab a pine cone and drop it at my feet. He's unusually agile and coordinated.
Dylan (described as “an old soul” by the breeder when he was four months old, and he does seem to be able to see to the depths of your being) is more the explorer. On our morning walk in the woods, he’s the first to spot a squirrel, deer, wild turkey, or fresh pile of bear scat.
But enough about me. Any number of Monitor colleagues could be writing this. Peter Grier has beagles. Gail Russell Chaddock has bassets.
But what you really want are cute photos and videos. Google has more than 70 million results for “cute puppies.” Here are a few to get you started:
This one describes itself as “Cuteness Overload: Cutest Puppies Ever Seen on Video.”
Then there’s “Daily Puppy” with a “live puppy feed” – Oo…there’s Teddy the Welsh corgi! – and advice on adopting or buying a puppy, training, clothing, dog doors, and pet meds.
And here's a puppy "nursery cam."
Some puppies are doing very good work, although they may not realize it. Like the puppies being trained by prison inmates as guide dogs for the blind, or those trained to become therapy dogs for returning war veterans with PTSD. (Read “Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him” by former US Army Captain Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalván, severely wounded in Iraq.)
Some puppies have frightening stories to tell too. Like the 27 who were rescued last month from a fire in Las Vegas. The owner of Gloria Lee's Prince and Princess Pet Boutique has been charged with arson. Those raised to fight other dogs, or the one’s whose lives started in notorious “puppy mills.”
But as the world turns ominously today, puppies can be an inspiration, joyful, enthusiastic, and loyal.
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And at the risk of upsetting your line of thinking these days on the crisis in Ukraine and the Russian leader who ordered the military invasion of Crimea, I will just say that even Vladimir Putin – the former KGB colonel – gets all warm and squishy in the presence of his puppy.
See photos of Mr. Putin and his Karakachan (Bulgarian shepherd) “Buffy” here.Kangertech has been very busy so far this year, producing an even larger range of products for the consumer who enjoys tasteful E-cigarette products with a performance to match the style. Today’s review features one of their new starter kits, the Emow 1300mah.
Packaging
The Emow kit arrived in a slim well-designed box, featuring a picture of the Emow on the front, which is an exact replication of the actual size of the unit to found inside.
On the rear is a list of the contents you’ll receive with this starter kit, and their new authentication sticker along with the product security code online verification system attached below this.
To check the authenticity of your new Kangertech product, just apply a droplet of water to the Kangertech Logo, and it should disappear. Dry the wetted logo with a cloth and it will reappear again.
Kangertech has also included a sample of the authentication logo on a sticker inside the box. These two methods will help you confirm that you have purchased a legitimate Kangertech product, rather than a cloned copy.
Unboxing
Removing the inside container from the outer shell, you will find the Emow securely held in the centre by two slightly protruding plastic moulds. Simply ease both of these to one side and remove the new device.
Attached to the 1300mah Emow battery are the Clearomizer and a sticker with quick start instructions printed onto it. Please be sure to remove this sticker before operating your device.
Lifting the now empty plastic container up by the two finger grooved cut outs on each side will reveal the rest of the contents to be found inside. These include a user manual, one pack of five replacement 1.5ohm coil heads, an adapter, a USB cable, along with the authentication logo that I have already mentioned.
Also please be sure to check the warranty period should it be included with this device prior to purchasing.
What’s new
Kangertech is clearly not a company to sit on their laurels and seem to be ever advancing the technologies and performance standards of their products, which can only be to the benefit of us the consumer. I have included a breakdown of the Emow for you to see how many times the word New appears.
One new Emow VV Battery: 1300mAh adjustable voltage battery, which can also fit the vision spinner 2 battery as well.
The all new Aerotank Mow Atomizer, which comes in a matching Pyrex glass and Stainless finish and holds 1.8ml of E-juice. The two Pyrex windows on both sides of the tank allow for easy viewing of your current E-juice levels. A new upgraded dual coil low resistance head assembly, in Stainless Steel, and the all new Airflow Control Valve V2 helps to contribute to a large vapour output for its size. I think you get the idea!
The Emow also comes in a choice of five different colour configurations allowing for a greater range of choice, and customer satisfaction. These can be viewed on the Kangertech website or at your local authorised Kangertech dealer with the standard 510 eGo threading. The inclusion of their new air control ring is another smart and useful addition that allows for a balanced adjustment of the air intake.
As this is a bottom fed tank the airflow ring is situated just above the thread for unscrewing or attaching the tank to the main body of the device, you will be pleased to know that Kanger have again made the control ring smooth but firm as they have done with the Areotank Mega and Mini, so slippage is unlikely to occur with this version as well. Likewise, the drip tip supplied with the Emow is very comfortable to vape with, helping to produce effortless vapour output.
A suggestion for using this is to try a smaller opening when Vaping thicker E-liquids, and increase it for thinner liquids as a rough guide. Remember less air flow will create the sensation of a tighter draw, and a larger airflow will create that of an airier one. If in doubt adjust the airflow ring until you find the balance that best works for the juice you are using at the time.
The sleek and stylish battery housing includes a five press on/off button that is very comfortably situated for ease of continued use. Five quick presses inside two seconds will activate the battery power for your device, displaying an illuminated rainbow effect for visual confirmation of this around the power switch.
You now have the choice of three simple but useful preset power options. By pressing the power button three times in quick succession inside one, second the colour display around the power switch will change each time you perform this action from Red 3.7v Green 4.2v and White 4.8v. When the battery power is low, the circular window around the power switch will flash fifteen times. At this point connect the USB charger as shown in the instruction booklet and recharge the device.
For the purpose of this review, I used the included Aerotank Mow along with the Aerotank Mini & Mega, atop of the beauty ring supplied with the latter.
I have also used a selection of different E-juices with varying flavours and PG/VG, mixtures including 100% VG on all three power settings for this device.
REACH compliant
If you intend to use this range of E-Liquids, please make sure they meet the current requirements set out by your countries regulatory bodies.
For EU countries, more information on this can be found here along with REACH’s partner agencies from around the globe.
E-Liquids may contain diacetyl (DA) and acetyl propionyl (AP) or other carcinogenic ingredients or disease-causing substances, so please be aware of this and seek medical advice before using any of the products used in my reviews.
People can suffer from allergies to chemicals that may be present in the makeup of certain types of E-liquids or produced in their vapour. People can become sensitive to, or even allergic to Nickel or Titanium used in Temperature Controlled designed coils. Again, please be aware of this and seek medical advice before using any of the products used in my reviews. Also, check with your E-liquid supplier or the equipment manufacturers directly before purchase and use.
You might find this range of calculators provided by Steam Engine particularly useful, so thank you to Lars for allowing me to include them in my reviews. These calculators are currently under development, and the information that they contain may change at any time without notice. Please read the How It Works section for a more in-depth understanding. And never leave your device charging unattended, make sure you are using the recommended battery for your device, and always remember, SAFETY FIRST.
Potential Polycarbonate problems
It is well known that certain e-liquid ingredients can cause cracking or even melting of polycarbonate plastic or acrylic tanks and tubes. For further information on this subject, please check with your E-juice supplier or contact the manufacturer directly.
Performance
The first thing I noticed when using the Emow for the first time was its compact and comfortable size. Placement of the recessed fire button is situated right under your thumb as you place it in your hand. Pressure to activate it is minimal, with a soft reassuring, click for confirmation.
The battery housing is the first I have used personally that allows me to use a larger tank without feeling that it is overbalanced (top heavy), which is nice if, like me you wish to have more E-juice on board when you’re travelling away from home. That said for most of us unless you are a particularly heavy user, the included 1.7ml Aerotank Mow is more than sufficient for a working day’s vape as is the 1300mah battery size.
The three separate voltage options were more than sufficient to produce amazing vapour output from all three tanks included in this review. If you have read my reviews on the Aerotank Mega & Mini, it will come as no surprise that vapour production, as well as flavour representation, is also superb using the included Aerotank Mow as well.
The air adjustment ring is firm but smooth to operate, and when combining this with the three voltage options included, you have a great variety of choice when setting the best flavour vapour balance for your brand of E-juices and personal tastes. And don’t be in the least bit surprised by the amount of both vapour and flavour produced!
Venting of the tank appears to be sufficient, with the inclusion of six small holes around the circumference of the bottom of the battery housing.
Conclusion
I have been amazed over the last month at just how far advanced the new technologies have become over their predecessors, particularly in the case of the newly designed clearomizers.
They have the ability to produce a flavour that I would only have expected to experience using my more expensive RBA’s.
This is a very elegant device with excellent performance for its size, around that of a fountain pen, and fits very nicely into your inside jacket pocket, or your wife’s handbag as I have found out!
Kangertech also produces a larger version of this unit called the Kanger Emow Mega which I hope to review for you at some point as well. My advice is, vape it but don’t try to sign cheques with it just yet!
For further details on the Emow, Prices, and to enter your unique product security code to identify its authenticity, contact Kangertech directly or your nearest stockist.
Thanks to KangerTech for providing the Technical specifications for this review and Images of the EMOW.
Contact:
Shenzhen Kanger Technology Co.Ltd.
A1 building Haocheng Industrial Park NO.66,
Hexiu Road,
Heping Village,
Fuyong Town Bao’an District,
Shenzhen City.
Skype: Kanger-james
Contact: James Zhu.
Tel: 86-75527240540
Mobile: 86-13923728907
E-mail: [email protected]
China contact: [email protected]
KangerTech US Service Centre
11555 Medlock Bridge Rd, Unit 100, Johns Creek, GA 30097
Phone: 1-888-799-1988
Quality feedback: [email protected]
US Service contact: [email protected]
Copyright © 2015 Vape On Watt Reviews
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator.
[email protected] end to end along the crowded sidewalks of downtown Cleveland are tables layered with T-shirts, buttons and bobbleheads.
It's a carnival atmosphere where sellers call out to passersby, as if they could be missed wedged between restaurants on one side and busy street traffic on the other.
Most of the souvenirs are harmless. They are about Donald Trump, of course, offering to Make America Great Again.
A button attacking Hillary Clinton refers to Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who had a sexual relationship with Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton. (Carla Turner/CBC) But there are a few buttons and the odd T-shirt about his Democratic opponent for U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, that might make even her harshest critics wince.
"Life's a bitch. Don't vote for one," says one of the buttons, complete with a picture of an angry Clinton, screaming at no one in particular.
"Hillary sucks! But not like Monica!" reads another, referring to Monica Lewinsky, whose sordid affair with Bill Clinton is legendary. Monica and Hillary photos are side by side on the button.
Another button mentions Hillary's body parts and connects them to Kentucky Fried Chicken. "KFC Hillary Special. 2 fat thighs. 2 small breasts. … left wing."
"They buy 'em, " says Steve Scanlon, a large man who sells his wares from the comfort of a chair parked beside his souvenir stand. He says the Clinton-bashing buttons are hot sellers, even with women.
"It's the way society is, I guess. I don't like it but I just sell them."
CBC's Adrienne Arsenault walks through the crowd outside the convention arena in Cleveland.
Down the street, another man in army fatigues and a baseball cap sorts through a box full of buttons, unable to find any of the objectionable ones about Clinton.
A button mocking Clinton's body and politics compares her to a fast-food meal. (Carla Turner/CBC) "I used to have them. But I guess I sold out," he says, without giving his name.
"I think they are hysterical," says Jennifer Rak, a Republican from Ohio who stopped to buy a souvenir with her mother Dale Hinsley of Indiana.
Both women initially dismissed the buttons as simply good fun. But then the conversation took a more serious tone. Making it clear she is not a supporter of Hillary Clinton, Rak says women in power positions are often criticized for their success.
"And that's why when women get to the top they are looked at as bitches because they've probably overcome a lot of things "
"They are really just strong, like men," says Hinsley, who then launches into a familiar theme here about Clinton's foreign policy record.
"She is a liar and a con and her and Bill have lied and cheated and as far as I'm concerned she's responsible for those guys killed in Benghazi."
A T-shirt depicts Donald Trump disposing of Clinton. (Carla Turner/CBC) Referring to the KFC Hillary Special button, Rak says women have always been objectified.
But, she says, "If you want to equate that I have two small breasts and don't have a brain, then we have a problem, which is I guess is what they're saying."
"Those are truly objectionable", says Ryan Claassen, associate professor of political science at Kent State University.
"These displays indicate a disturbing level of hostility toward women among people I would expect better from," he says.
"Wow. I wish I could say I was surprised," said Anita Rios, president of Ohio NOW, the National Organization for Women.
"This is how the ugly rhetoric of the Trump campaign, levelled at Hillary and at women in general, trickles down to create space for the nastiest forms of misogyny," she said.
Women's groups and the Democrats have repeatedly criticized the Trump campaign for policies that are unfriendly to women. Some call it a war on women.
Trump has declared he would ban abortion and suggested women should be punished for getting one.DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel tried on Friday to allay German fears about a proposed U.S.-EU trade pact, telling a group of business leaders that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could stimulate growth and create jobs.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel smiles during her visit at a factory of Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche in Penzberg May 5, 2014. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
Speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce, Merkel said there were unjustified fears in Germany about the pact that some say could boost the economies of the European Union and United States by $100 billion a year each.
“It is one of the most cost-effective growth stimulators that anyone can imagine,” Merkel said of the TTIP. She called it a great project, well worth fighting for, and said she hoped it could be completed by 2015.
Germany’s experience has been that free trade agreements have always led to more growth and job creation, said the chancellor.
There have been increasingly vocal protests against TTIP in Germany in recent weeks, and Merkel was confronted by a group of
demonstrators at a European election rally in Hamburg on Monday.
Germany’s opposition parties, the Greens and Left, have spoken out forcefully against the pact. But Merkel said concerns about a lowering of environmental, food and consumer protection standards, which have dogged the talks, were unwarranted.
The German public’s concerns have been exacerbated by leaks from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of global surveillance by the National Security Agency, including the alleged monitoring of Merkel’s cellphone.
“The lack of transparency surrounding the NSA is not helpful for the discussion about an economic agreement,” she said. Berlin has pushed the United States in vain for a “no-spy” agreement.
Trade experts predict the United States will have to make concessions on data privacy in TTIP talks with the EU.
Merkel said the trade agreement would strengthen transatlantic relations, and argued for closer energy policy cooperation with the United States in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.[SIZE=-1]This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his \tmid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had \tcome to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and \tamiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally \tsmoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent \teuphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually \tpersuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to \tentertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation \trather than by chemistry.
[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my \tback in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not \tcannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly \toutlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between \tVolkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hub |
peppers to kill a spotting bacteria. The phage binds to specific receptors on the surface of the E. coli cell, causing it to die, says Joan Todd, with Elanco Animal Health, the Eli Lilly subsidiary that makes the product. In cattle, a phage that is specific to E. coli O157:H7 is sprayed on the animals one to four hours before they're slaughtered. "They like to have them soak," says Dan Schaefer, director of beef research and development at Cargill in Wichita. Cargill is testing the spray at one of its plants. The phages used in Finalyse EC have been shown safe for the environment, humans and cattle, they "have no impact on other forms of life or the environment, and because they target specific bacteria, they will naturally break down without a suitable host," Todd says. Probiotics: 'Exclusion' cultures Basically these are bacterial cultures much like those in yogurt, given to cattle in their feed. They're called "competitive exclusion" cultures because they out-compete the bad bacteria and exclude them in the animals' guts. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia in Griffin, spent years investigating them. They can be persnickety. One for E. coli O157:H7 "worked really well for a while and then it stopped working for a while," he says. Doses required are often higher than those claimed by the companies that sell them, he says. Currently these aren't approved by USDA or FDA as E. coli reduction methods, so the companies that market them can't make any specific claims for them. Sodium chlorate: A'suicide pill' This chemical is used in part to do environmentally safe paper bleaching. But administered in extremely small amounts, it also plays a deadly trick on E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella. In the oxygen-free environment of a cow's gut, these bacteria are able to obtain energy from nitrogen. But they can't tell the difference between nitrogen and chlorate, so if there's chlorate present, they try to use that. This turns the chlorate into bleach, killing the bacteria from the inside without harming the animal. "It's like a suicide pill," says Robin Anderson, a microbiologist for USDA's Agriculture Research Service in College Station, Texas, who began work on the chemical in 1998. Eka Chemicals in Marietta, Ga., is working to license sodium chlorate. It's in the regulatory approval process with FDA. Grain vs. high-quality hay Research in Texas, Kansas and Idaho has shown that switching cattle from grain to a more expensive diet of high quality hay before slaughter may lower E. coli O157:H7 rates, though the findings have not always been consistent. From an epidemiologic standpoint, it's clear that these pre-slaughter interventions lower the E. coli O157:H7 burden in the cattle, says Guy Loneragan, a professor of animal science and expert in O157:H7 in cattle at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. The question is whether investing money on the ranch and feedlot will save money at the packing plant. "Obviously the bottom line is food safety. But it's a question of where is the most appropriate place to invest the money," Loneragan says. "We're not quite sure of the extent of the financial reward and how it should be shared." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more[1] Location of the Argyn tribe (after M.S. Mukanov),
The Argyn (Kazakh: Арғын) tribe (or clan) is a constituent of the Kazakh ethnicity. The present-day Argyns of Kazakhstan are generally regarded as descended from a nomadic people known as the Basmyl and both names are said to mean "mixed tribe". The Argyn are a component, of the Orta jüz (Орта жүз; "Middle Horde" or "Middle Hundred"). Kazakhs historically consisted of three tribal federations: the Great jüz (or Senior jüz), Middle jüz, and Little jüz (or Junior jüz).
There is evidence for the Argyns' mixed origins in three facts. Firstly, while modern Argyns speak Kazakh, the Basmals were reported to have their own language.[3] Secondly, the Argyns appear to be genetically linked to peoples of the Caucasus and dissimilar to most Kazakhs.[4] Thirdly, the Basmals were first recorded in an area that is now in western China, and still home to a Kazakh minority.
The name of the Argyns probably corresponds to that of the "Argons" mentioned by Marco Polo in a country called "Tenduc" (around modern-day Hohhot) during the 13th century.[5] Polo reported that this clan who had "sprung from two different races: to wit, of the race of the Idolaters of Tenduc and... the worshippers of Mahommet. They are handsomer men than the other natives of the country, and having more ability, they come to have authority; and they are also capital merchants."[5]
See also [ edit ]Known for harboring both Lena Dunham and the Underground Railroad—though not at the same time—Oberlin College has long been an emblem of the sheltered yet sensitive liberal arts college. So when The New Republic reported last month that Oberlin had released an online resource guide counseling professors to avoid potentially trauma-inducing "triggering" subjects such as “heterosexism, cissexism, [and] ableism,” commentators were less than surprised. In the Los Angeles Times, an op-ed compared the trigger warning policy to nearby Antioch College’s infamous consent policy and surmised, “maybe it's an Ohio thing.” A blogger for The American Conservative joked, “Honestly, I wish Putin would invade and occupy Oberlin.”
In fact, the group most surprised by Oberlin’s new trigger warning policy may have been the professors of the college themselves. Marc Blecher, a political science professor at Oberlin, told me he had never heard of his college’s trigger warning guidelines until he read about them in The New Republic. The language came from a task force appointed in fall 2012 to review Oberlin’s sexual offense policy, but Blecher said the new policy had been mentioned only vaguely at faculty meetings. At the time, no one “realized that what was going to come out the other end was so central to our academic mission.”
When he did realize, Blecher began talking to other colleagues, who also hadn’t heard of the trigger warning policy, and they quickly set up informal meetings with various deans and administration officials. These discussions culminated at a previously planned listening session where Blecher says around 30 to 35 faculty members showed up to voice their displeasure at the new rules.
In the faculty’s eyes, trigger warnings threaten not just academic freedom but the intrinsic nature of the liberal arts educational model. “We need to … challenge students, to conduct open inquiry in classrooms, to make students feel uncomfortable,” explained Blecher. “Making students feel uncomfortable is at the core of liberal arts education.”( ) — The Salt Lake City Council and Mayor Jackie Biskupski have jointly published a plan to tackle climate change and carbon pollution after both made a promise last year to hit sustainability benchmarks by 2040.
In its plan, titled "Climate Positive 2040," the city promises to utilize 100 percent renewable energy sources to fuel electricity by 2032 and create an 80 percent reduction in energy and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The City also aims to reduce the community footprint by at least 50 percent before 2030.
“Salt Lake City is committed to lead on climate change and act in ways that bolster the long-term vitality of our community and the health of our planet,” said Mayor Biskupski in an April 11 press release for the project. “Investing in renewable energy, clean transportation systems, and sustainable food programs not only reduces carbon pollution, it also builds an identity for our City and hope for the future.”
Climate Positive 2040 is broken into nine different sections: renewable energy, clean transportation, highly efficient buildings, air quality, sustainable food, zero waste community, collaborative solutions, city operations and resilient city.
In each section, the plan outlines how the City plans to address numerous issues that stand in the way of the goals set on Nov. 1, 2016. Though not each section specifies how exactly it will implement such ideas, most circulate around community collaboration and joint partnerships with local businesses.
Renewable energy
The City plans to work with local companies, like Rocky Mountain Power, and other counties, like Summit and Park City counties, to create plans and studies on renewable energy within the city. It will also encourage residents to switch to solar power if possible.
Clean transportation
The City plans to tackle transportation pollution by encouraging public transportation with discounted memberships, facilitating bicycles and pedestrians, utilizing electric vehicles and reducing air travel emissions.
Highly efficient buildings
By working with Rocky Mountain Power and Questar Gas, the City plans to build more energy efficient buildings and help transition older buildings to more sustainable models. It will also work to adjust building and construction codes.
Air quality
The City plans to support pollution reduction legislation and create energy benchmarks to work on inversion and other air quality issues.
Sustainable food
Along with forming a task force, the City will work to improve access to low-carbon and diverse foods, as well as reduce food waste.
Zero waste community
The City plans to first engage residents in waste reduction, improve local recycling capabilities and develop a waste management system.
Collaborative solutions
The City will work with climate change awareness groups that are already working within the community, like the Utah Climate Action Network, Urban Sustainability Directors Network and the Western Adaptation Alliance.
City operations
The City intends to "lead by example" by lowering energy consumption within city departments, following Net Zero Energy standards with construction, create renewable energy generators, develop its electric vehicle fleet.
Resilient city
The City will work to create climate response plans, enable climate leaders within the community, work with each city sector to create individualized plans and coordinate with the Utah Climate Action Network.
The plan also asks residents to try and implement the following habits into their daily lives:
Commit to solar.
"Electricity emissions are the largest part of our community carbon footprint," the plan reads. "Install solar panels on your home or business, or enroll in the Rocky Mountain Power Subscriber Solar program."
Adjust your thermostat.
"Every degree saves 3% on cooling and heating costs," the plan reads. "By setting your thermostat to 60 at night in the winter and 78 when you’re away in the summer, you can reduce your annual footprint by 1,800 pounds of CO2."
Reduce your meat consumption.
"Choose foods that are less carbon and water intensive, such as fruits, vegetables and grains," the plan reads. "Going vegetarian once a week will reduce your household footprint by 700 pounds of CO2 annually."
Ride with Hive.
"This program makes transit more affordable and accessible," the plan reads. "The Hive Pass offers a 50 percent discount to Salt Lake City residents and covers use on regular buses, TRAX, and the S-Line Streetcar."
For more information on Climate Positive, visit.Bible Absurdities
Compiled by Donald Morgan
Links to other articles in this series:
Key to Abbreviations
Introduction to the Bible and Biblical Problems
Fatal Bible Flaws?
Bible Atrocities
Bible Inconsistencies: Bible Contradictions?
Bible Precepts: Questionable Guidelines?
Bible Vulgarities
IMPORTANT: These lists are meant to identify possible problems in the Bible, especially those that are inherent in a literalist or fundamentalist interpretation. Keep in mind, however, that what constitutes a valid problem is to some extent a matter of opinion. You may disagree that these are, in fact, genuine biblical problems, but it is the author's opinion that a perfect and omnipotent God could, should, and would see to it that such problems did not exist in a book which s/he had inspired.
GE 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven(s) and the earth." (One might ask what "existed," and where God dwelt, before he created heaven and earth. Of course, if God were pure spirit the question could be considered moot, but inasmuch as the God of the Bible allegedly participated in a wrestling match, ate solid food, was seen face to face, spoke with Moses, etc., it would seem that he possesses physical attributes, including form.)
(Note: Some biblicists contend that biblical chronology fixes the date of creation at 4004 B.C. thereby making the earth about six thousand years old. Some present-day creationists stubbornly adhere to a young earth timetable in spite of overwhelming evidence that the earth is actually billions of years old.)
GE 1:3-5, 14-19 There was light ("night and day") before there was a sun. (Note: If there were no sun, there would be no night or day. Also, light from the newly created heavenly bodies seems to have reached the earth instantaneously though it now takes thousands or millions of years.)
GE 1:12, 16 Plants began to grow before there was sunlight.
GE 1:29 Every plant and tree which yield seed are given to us by God as good to eat. (Note: This would include poisonous plants such as hemlock, buckeye pod, nightshade, oleander.)
GE 2:15-23, 3:1-5, 1TI 2:14 Eve was created after Adam had already been given the prohibition about eating the forbidden fruit. Eve believed the serpent (the craftiest of all of God's wild creatures) when he assured her that she would become wise and would not die if she ate the fruit. Eve has been blamed for causing Adam to fall, and ultimately for the fall of mankind. (Note: Prior to eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve would have had no knowledge of right and wrong; they would not have known that it was a sin to disobey God or to obey the serpent. After they ate the forbidden fruit, God placed a guard around the "Tree of Eternal Life" to keep them from eating its fruit. He could have done the same for the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" before Adam and Eve disobeyed. In addition, even though the prohibition regarding the forbidden fruit was made to Adam before Eve came on the scene, Eve has been blamed for the Fall; 1TI 2:14 says: "... Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.")
GE 3:1-5 The serpent speaks human language (presumably Hebrew).
GE 3:14-16 God curses the serpent, Eve, and Adam for what they have done. (Note: This is inconsistent with God's omniscience; God should have known full well, ahead of time, what the outcome would be. Since God created the three as well as the Tree of Knowledge, he is ultimately responsible for the Fall.)
GE 3:14 The serpent eats dust for the rest of his life (by command of God).
GE 4:15 A mark is placed on Cain as a distinctive identifying symbol when there were only three (known) persons on earth.
GE 4:17 Cain builds and populates a whole city in only two generations.
GE 6:4 There were giants on the earth at one time. (Note: No evidence exists to supports this assertion.)
GE 6:5 God is unhappy with the wickedness of man and decides to flood the earth to eliminate mankind. All living things including plants, animals, women and innocent children are also exterminated. (Note: This is like burning down a house to rid it of mice.)
GE 6:15 The size of Noah's Ark was such that there would be about one and a half cubic feet for each pair of the 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 species to be taken aboard.
GE 7:17-19 The flood covered the entire earth at the same time. (Note: There is no evidence of a worldwide flood, but rather of many, widespread, but local floods.)
GE 7:19-20 The flood covered the earth with water fifteen cubits (twenty plus feet) above the highest mountains.(Note: This would require steady, worldwide rainfall at the rate of about 6 inches per minute, 360 inches per hour, 8640 inches per day--for 40 days and nights--so as to cover the entire earth with an endless ocean 5 miles deep, thus burying 29,000 ft. Mt. Everest under 22 ft. of water. How did the author know the depth of the water? Did Noah take soundings? And where has all this water gone?)
GE 8:20 Noah's first recorded action following the flood is to sacrifice one of every clean animal and bird. (Since so few animals were saved, this could be considered rather wasteful and defeating--especially given that the stated purpose of taking the animals aboard the Ark was to keep them alive [GE 6:20]. To see a discussion of the various ways this verse can be interpreted, and in turn the different ways to approach the Bible generally, see addendum.)
GE 8:21 The odor of Noah's sacrifices was pleasing to the Lord.
GE 9:12-16 God first creates the rainbow. (Note: Apparently the laws having to do with refraction of light were null and void prior to this time.)
GE 18:1, 7-8 God eats solid food with Abraham.
GE 30:37-43 Jacob alters the genetic characteristics of cattle by letting them view a striped rod. (Note: His purpose in doing so was to fleece Laban of his cattle.)
GE 32:24-30 God takes part in a wrestling match. He wins by injuring Jacob's hip.
GE 38:27-29 Twins are being delivered. One puts out his hand and the midwife binds it with a scarlet ribbon to identify him as the firstborn. But he draws back his hand, and his brother is born first (thereby obtaining the rights of the firstborn son).
EX 4:24 The Lord sought to kill Moses (one of his own prophets.)
EX 12:30 The Lord kills all the first-born of Egypt and there is not a house where there is not at least one dead. (This means that there was not a house in Egypt that did not include at least one first-born---a most unusual situation.)
EX 12:37, NU 1:45-46 The number of men of military age who take part in the Exodus is given as about 600,000. Allowing for women, children, and older men would probably mean that a total of more than 2,000,000 Israelites left Egypt at a time when the whole population of Egypt was less than 2,000,000.
EX 17:14 God says that he will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek.
DT 25:19 "... you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you must not forget."
(That remembrance is now permanently preserved in the Bible.)
EX 28:34-35 Entering the holy place without wearing bells can result in death.
LE 11:20-21 There are winged creatures (birds or insects) that go around on all fours. (Note: There are no birds that go around on four legs, and all insects have six or eight legs.)
LE 11:6 (States, incorrectly, that the rabbit, or hare, chews its cud.)
LE 14:33-57 God himself believes that a house or clothes can have leprosy and he details the remedy.
LE 14:49-53 The cure for leprosy involves incantations and the blood of a bird.
NU 11:31-33 A "wind from the Lord" brings such an abundance of quail that "he who gathered the least gathered ten homers," or about 62 bushels. Altogether, this would have been enough to fill several thousand boxcars. Unfortunately, it was immediately followed by a great plague (food poisoning?) from the Lord.
NU 22:21-30 A donkey sees an angel, recognizes it as such, and then speaks in human language (presumably Hebrew) to his master.
DT 1:1 Moses speaks to "all" of Israel, perhaps 2,000,000 people (see EX 12:37 above).
DT 2:14 All of the "men of war"--some 600,000--who left Egypt in the Exodus were dead just thirty-eight years later. (See EX 12:37 above.)
DT 7:15 Moses promises his people that the Lord will take away all sickness.
DT 25:5-9 A man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother's widow. If he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders.
JS 10:12-14 God obliges Joshua by making the sun and moon stand still (so that he can finish his battle by daylight).
JG 3:21-22 (KJV) "Ehud... took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out."
JG 7:12 The camels were without number as the sand of the sea.
JG 15:15 Samson slays 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass.
JG 16:17-22 Samson loses his strength as a result of having his head shaved. (Note: This is not psychosomatic since he began to lose his strength while he was still asleep.)
JG 20:16 There were seven hundred men who were left handed and could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.
1SA 5:8-9 God causes "emerods" (hemorrhoids or tumors) amongst the Philistines (who have captured the Ark of the Covenant, where God was thought to reside).
1SA 13:5 The Philistines had "... troops like the sand on the seashore in multitude."
1SA 16:14-23 Evil spirits can come from God (and be exorcised with God's help).
1KI 3:12, 16-28 Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, can think of no better way to determine the natural mother of a child in dispute than to threaten to divide the child in half. (Note: This does not take into account the possibility of mental derangement on the part of the natural mother.)
1KI 4:29 God gave Solomon wisdom as measureless as the sand on the seashore.
1KI 6:2, 2CH 3:3 Solomon's temple was only about ninety feet long by thirty feet wide, yet:
1KI 5:15-16 153,300 persons were employed to build it.
1KI 6:38 It took seven years to build.
1CH 22:14 ~7,500,000 lbs. of gold and ~75,000,000 lbs. of silver were used.
1CH 23:4 24,000 supervisors and 6,000 officials and judges were employed to manage it. (Note: Inasmuch as there seems to be uncertainty as to the exact weight of the biblical talent, some estimates place the weight of gold at more than 13,000,000 lbs. and the weight of silver at more than 116,000,000 lbs.)
1KI 10:24 The whole world sought an audience with Solomon to hear his wisdom.
1KI 17:2-6 The Lord commands ravens to bring bread and meat to Elijah.
1KI 18:33-38 Fire consumes wet wood, stones, and dust, and "licks up" water.
2KI 6:5-7 An iron axe head "swims" (or floats).
2CH 9:23 All the kings on earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom.
2KI 13:21 A man who is being buried comes alive after touching the bones of Elisha.
2KI 16:2, 20, 18:1-2 Ahaz was thirty-six years old when he died. His twenty-five-year-old son Hezekiah succeeded him. Thus Ahaz was a ten or eleven year old father.
2KI 19:35 (KJV) "...the angel of the Lord...smote...an hundred four score and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning... they were all dead...."
2KI 20:11 The shadow on a sun dial moves backwards.
2CH 7:5, 8-9 Solomon sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep in one week. This is 845+ animals per hour, 14+ animals per minute, for seven days straight.
2CH 21:20, 22:1-2 Ahaziah was forty-two when he became king; he succeeded his father, who died at the age of forty. Thus, Ahaziah was two years older than his father. [Note: Some translations use "twenty-two" here in an attempt to rectify this discrepancy. The Hebrew is clear, however, that 2CH 22:2 is 42. The Hebrew words involved are Strong's H705 and H8147, "forty" and "two," respectively.]
2CH 13:3 Abijah sent 400,000 men into battle against Jeroboam's 800,000 men. This is a total of 1,200,000 men, all of them Jews. (Note: Assuming one additional woman per man of fighting age, plus two persons per man [either older persons or children] would put the Jewish population of the surrounding area at a minimum of 4,800,000 persons; hardly feasible.)
2CH 13:17 500,000 Israelites are slain in a single battle. (Note: This is more than were lost in any single battle of World War II, and even exceeds the number of deaths that resulted from the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.)
ES 6:6, JB 19:27, PS 7:9, 16:7, 73:21, PR 23:7, 16, IS 10:7, JE 11:20, 17:10, 20:12, MT 9:4, LK 2:19, 9:47, AC 8:22, RO 10:9-10, HE 4:12, RE 2:23 (See KJV especially.) Thought occurs in the heart. The kidneys ("reins") are the seat of conscience.(Note: This is not merely a poetic use of these terms, as is now claimed. In early times, it was actually believed that various body organs other than the brain were responsible for our thoughts, feelings, actions and the like. The heart was believed to be the seat of thought processes and beliefs, while the kidneys were thought to be the seat of conscience.)
JB 9:6 (KJV) God shakes the earth out of its place and makes its pillars tremble.
JB 9:7 God can make the sun not rise and seal up the stars.
JB 28:28, PS 111:10, PR 1:7, 9:10, 15:33, IS 33:6 Fear of the Lord is equated with obtaining wisdom.
PS 121:6 It is apparently possible to suffer moonstroke as well as sunstroke.
PR 19:23, 22:4 Fear of the Lord brings freedom from trouble(s). Humility and fear of the Lord bring wealth, honor, and life.
PR 20:30 Blows that wound cleanse away evil.
IS 30:26 The moon will someday be as bright as the sun now is. (Note: Until relatively recent times, the moon and the planets were thought to give off their own light.)
IS 38:8 The shadow of the Sun is made to move backwards.
IS 40:22 The earth is a circle. (Note: The earth is really a sphere, not a circle, and this verse does not imply a sphere as some believers like to infer.)
JE 20:7, EZ 14:9 Jeremiah says that the Lord deceived his own prophet. God himself says that he deceives his own prophets in order to get rid of them.
EZ 37:1-10 Dry bones come alive.
AM 8:9 The Sun will be made to set at noon in "clear day."
MT 4:8 There is a high mountain from which all the kingdoms of the world can be seen. (Note: This implies a flat earth.)
MT 4:23-24, 9:32-33, 12:22, 17:14-18, MK 1:23-26, 32-34, 5:2-16, 9:17-29, 16:9, LK 11:14, 4:33-35, 8:2, 27-36, 9:38-42, AC 8:7, 16:16-18 Both physical and mental illness are caused by demon possession and can be cured by exorcism.
MT 7:7-8, LK 11:9-10 Ask and it will be given. Seek and you will find. Everyone who asks, receives.
MT 13:41 Jesus will send his angels to purge his kingdom of evildoers and sin. (Note: How did evildoers get into his kingdom in the first place?)
MT 17:20, 21:21, MK 9:23, 10:27, 11:23, LK 17:6 Faith can move mountains. Nothing is impossible if you have faith [as small as] a grain of mustard seed.
MT 18:19 If two [believers] agree about anything they ask, God will do it for them.
MT 21:22, MK 11:24 Whatever you ask in prayer, if you have faith, you will receive it.
MT 24:29-30 Although the sun and the moon have been darkened and the stars have fallen from heaven, there is still enough light to see.
MT 26:52 All who take the sword will perish by it.
MT 27:52-53 The bodies of dead saints arise and go in force in the city.
MK 11:12-14, 20-21 Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. (Note: Rather than cause the fig tree to wither and to bear fruit never again, he could have performed a miracle and made it bear fruit even out of season.)
MK 16:17-18 Those who believe are able to handle snakes and drink any deadly poison without suffering harm. (Note: Many unfortunate believers have died as a result of handling snakes and/or drinking poison; this kind of assertion negates the Bible as a useful guidebook for life. It should also be noted that the oldest manuscripts of Mark end at MK 16:8; as the footnotes to The New Oxford Annotated Bible put it, verses 9-20 cannot have been part of the original text of Mark.)
LK 1:39-42 The fetus in Elizabeth's womb jumps for joy when Elizabeth hears Mary (who is pregnant with Jesus).
LK 22:28-30 Jesus assigns each of his twelve disciples (including Judas, his betrayer) a place (or throne) in his kingdom.
JN 6:24-30 A large crowd of persons (probably several thousand) asks Jesus for a sign so that they might see and believe. This occurs immediately following the Feeding of the Multitude which should have been one of the greatest miracles and most convincing signs of all time.
JN 8:51 Jesus says: "... if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death."
JN 12:34 A crowd of persons (speaking in unison?) asks Jesus a thirty word question.
JN 16:23 Jesus says: "Whatever you ask in my name, my Father will give you."
RO 10:17-18, CN 1:23 The gospel had already been preached to every living creature even in Paul's time.
2CO 12:2 There are at least three heavens.
2CO 12:4 There are things which cannot be told--things which man cannot utter.
GA 1:8-9 An angel (from God?) who preaches a gospel contrary to that of Paul will incur Paul's wrath.
1TI 5:11 Younger widows want to marry because their sensual desires overcome their dedication to Christ.
1TI 6:10 The love of money is the root of all evil(s). (Note: Some translations emend the text to read, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evils," or something similar, in an attempt to ameliorate an obvious problem. Those additional words are not there in the Greek of the oldest and most reliable manuscripts.)
TS 1:12 "One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretans are always liars...." (Figure the logic of this verse--if you can!)
HE 7:1-3 Melchizedek had no mother or father, no beginning or end.
RE 14:1-4 Heaven is to be inhabited in part by 144,000 virgin men who have not been "defiled" by women.
RE 21:16 The city of New Jerusalem (where the residents of heaven reside) is only about 1500 miles square.
Links to other articles in this series:
Key to Abbreviations
Introduction to the Bible and Biblical Problems
Fatal Bible Flaws?
Bible Atrocities
Bible Inconsistencies: Bible Contradictions?
Bible Precepts: Questionable Guidelines?
Bible VulgaritiesWeek 1 in the NFL brought a few surprising results and the games in Week 2 could be in for more of the same. With many teams that opened on the road last week having their home opener, NFL tickets on the secondary market still have some season opening prices. Four of the five most expensive games on the secondary market this week will be a team’s home opener.
Below are the five most expensive games of the week by average price on the secondary market, according to TiqIQ.
Chicago Bears at San Francisco 49ers | Avg. Price: $283.92 | Get-in: $148
History will be made in Santa Clara this Sunday as the 49ers play their first regular season home game at Levi’s Stadium. They will take on the Bears and host the NFL’s most expensive game on the secondary market this week for their Sunday Night Football game. According to TiqIQ, the average secondary price for 49ers vs Chicago Bears tickets is $283.92 with a get-in price of $148. Despite it being the first game, the game will have a secondary market price below the season average for 49ers tickets at home. The 49ers have a $375.57 average at Levi’s Stadium this year, owing a large piece of their steep price to a November 27 meeting with the Seahawks, which currently has an average price of $552.15. Though the average ticket price is high, SF parking is available from $12 to $38, so there aren't too many additional fees.
Arizona Cardinals at New York Giants | Avg. Price: $264.19 | Get-in: $54
The Giants have grown accustom to looking flustered on the field since last season, and their Week 1 loss to the Lions was no different. Big Blue took a 35-14 defeat from Detroit, catalyzing a below-season average price for their home opener against the Cardinals this weekend. The average secondary price for Giants vs Arizona Cardinals tickets is $264.19, 10.7% below the season average of $295.98 for New York Giants tickets. The get-in price for Sunday’s game is currently just $54. The Cardinals head to MetLife Stadium with a 1-0 record after escaping with a 18-17 win over the Chargers last week.
Dallas Cowboys at Tennessee Titans | Avg. Price: $248.11 | Get-in: $65
The Cowboys and Titans game at LP Field on Sunday will bring surprisingly high secondary market prices to Tennessee on Sunday. The Titans upset the Chiefs last weekend on the road, posting 26 points against Kansas City en route to a Week 1 victory. They will play the Cowboys at home this week, who were embarrassed by the 49ers in Dallas last Sunday, putting up feeble offensive numbers as a sea of red and gold looked on from the stands. The average price for Titans vs Dallas Cowboys tickets this week is $215.15 on the secondary market, serving as the most expensive game on the Tennessee Titans schedule this season. The get-in price for this Sunday’s game is $65.
Miami Dolphins at Buffalo Bills | Avg. Price: $244.11 | Get-in: $156
Riding high off a victory on the road against the Bears last week are the Bills, who host the fourth most expensive game in the NFL this Sunday when they play the Dolphins. The average price for Bills vs Dolphins tickets is $244.11 on the secondary market, 73.1% above the season average of $140.96 for Buffalo Bills tickets at Ralph Wilson Stadium. The Dolphins also took a huge win out of Week 1, beating the Patriots at home 33-20. The get-in price for Sunday’s game in Buffalo is $156. The high price of the game comes on the heels of several great storylines within the franchise. Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly recently announced his cancer remission while Terry Pagula, owner of the cross-town Buffalo Sabres, made a new investment when he bought the team earlier this week.
Kansas City Chiefs at Denver Broncos | Avg. Price: $218.21 | Get-in: $72
The Broncos were fortunate to escape their home opener with a win against the Colts last week after Andrew Luck orchestrated a series of late-game scoring drives. They welcome the Chiefs to Sports Authority Field on Sunday for a divisional matchup. The average price for Broncos vs Kansas City Chiefs tickets is $218.21 on the secondary market with a get-in price of $72. Despite owning the fifth top-priced game this week, Sunday’s game will |
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The band slid into one of the highlights of the night, “Every Soul,” off of their new album PLUMP. (Read the review here). This version is a must hear, demonstrating the band’s talent for jamming; a testament to how far these guys have come. The building was exploding with energy after this version, and the band rode this energy right into “Carter Candlestick.”
Up next was a new tune of PLUMP, called “Five,” which featured Mihali Savoulidis on acoustic guitar. “Five” slowed things up a bit and gave both the band and crowd a breather. “Dr. Remidi’s Melodium” followed, and contained a “X-files” theme tease while showcasing Ryan Dempsey’s talents on keys and allowed Zdenek Gubb to dump his bass all over everyone lucky enough to be in attendance.
A standard version of “Dusk ‘Til Dawn” followed “Remidi’s,” and featured Brook Jordan singing leading vocals. It’s not often that Jordan sings, so it’s always a treat to hear the drummer vocally.
The band ended the set with the fan-favorite, “Doinkinbonk!!!.” This song was one of the first songs written by bassist Zdenek Gubb, and features some of the funkiest bass lines to really demonstrate his talent. This is another must hear version, and one of the best jams from the evening. The band stretched this version out and eventually they slid their way into a delicious “Funky Town” jam before segueing seamlessly back into “Doinkinbonk!!!.” Moments like this are what make Twiddle special and is a reason they are selling out venues all over the country.
The guys weren’t quite finished yet, as the end of Doink segued into their elusive cover of The Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon.” Fans could be heard singing along with the band. “Rocky” morphed into a YEM-like vocal jam and put the band’s Phish influences on display.
The show concluded with an encore featuring the bluegrassy tune “Hattibagen McRat,” sending fans out into the night begging for more. The band is heading out for another three night run next weekend at Buffalo, Clifton Park, and NYC, and the shows are sure to sell out, so don’t miss them!
Peep the setlist below, via uTwiddle.
Setlist: Twiddle at The Westcott Theater, Syracuse, NY – 2/20/16
One Set: Syncopated Healing, Every Soul, Carter Candlestick, Five, Dr. Remidi’s Melodium[1], Dusk ‘Til Dawn, Doinkinbonk!!! > Funky Town > Doinkinbonk!!!, Rocky Raccoon[2]
Encore: Hattibagen McRat
Show Notes: This show was a part of the “Plumperdump” 2016 Winter Tour.
[1] “Dr. Remidi’s Melodium” contained a “X-Files” Theme tease.
[2] “Rocky Raccoon” ended with a vocal jam.
Check out the full gallery of images below, courtesy of Dave DeCrescente Photography:Valencia's players celebrate embracing their team mate Eliaquim Mangala scored a goal during the Spanish La Liga soccer match between FC Barcelona and Valencia at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain, Sunday, March 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez) (Photo: Manu Fernandez, AP)
Spanish futbol is coming to Futbol Club Cincinnati.
FC Cincinnati will host Valencia Club de Fútbol, better known as Valencia CF, in its summer international friendly this July, Cincinnati officials announced Monday.
The match is scheduled for Monday, July 24, at the University of Cincinnati's Nippert Stadium.
Valencia, also known as Los Che, Els Taronges (The Oranges) or Los Murciélagos (The Bats), play in La Liga, Spain’s top division, where the team finished 12th in 2016-17.
The summer friendly will mark FC Cincinnati’s second against an opponent from one of the world’s best leagues.
Cincinnati hosted Crystal Palace FC, an English Premier League team, last July in a sold-out matchup. Tickets for Valencia are not on sale yet.
Despite its lower finish last season, Valencia is historically one of the top teams in Spain and Europe. A six-time league champion, the club has also won major trophies in European competition, including a UEFA Cup.
While Crystal Palace played in the most popular league in the world, Valencia is packed with one of the better rosters on the planet. Cincinnati fans should be familiar with at least a handful of names.
Nani, a Portuguese international and former Manchester United player, is the most notable. Both Enzo Perez and Ezequiel Garay are Argentinian internationals, while Diego Alves has played for Brazil, Zakaria Bakkali has played for Belgium and Simone Zaza plays for Italy.
The friendly will occur after the European transfer window opens, meaning personnel changes could alter the current roster. Alvaro Negredo, who played on loan at Middlesbrough in the Premier League last season, will likely return to his parent club.
This won’t be the Spanish club’s first visit to Ohio, though. Los Che played Columbus Crew SC in May 2015, where the visitors won 1-0.
Valencia was supposed to visit the U.S. in 2010, but pulled out late. One of the expected opponents, Philadelphia Union, also played Crystal Palace last season.
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FC Cincinnati President and General Manager Jeff Berding declined to comment Monday when asked which other teams would play Valencia during the club's time in North America.
A Spanish team wasn’t the original target for FC Cincinnati, however.
After last year’s success, Cincinnati wanted to play another English team, which would likely sell out Nippert Stadium again simply because of the Premier League’s popularity.
Therefore, Cincinnati initially targeted the biggest names in the Premier League. During the offseason, Berding said at a high school soccer fundraiser that the club wanted one of the top teams in England.
According to multiple sources, FC Cincinnati initially negotiated with Manchester City, a former Premier League champion and one of the most popular on the planet.
The deal went unsigned, however, presumably when City accepted an invitation in the 2017 International Champions Cup to play Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur.
Other English teams weren’t as freely available this summer, or at least, for a reasonable price. In 2016, eight of the Premier League’s 20 clubs made a preseason trek to the U.S. – an amount expected to be drastically higher than 2017.
While league notoriety might affect ticket sales, Valencia is no small name. Playing against Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid on a regular basis, Valencia is regularly one of La Liga’s top teams. The league itself is considered one of the best in the world.
The Enquirer will update this story.A handful of extremely right-wing Senators are trying to block implementation of rules designed to curtail deceptive marketing and recruiting by for-profit colleges. Senators Jim Risch (ID), Tom Coburn (OK), Jim DeMint (SC), Ron Johnson (WI), and Mike Lee (UT) are all seemingly fine with taxpayer dollars, in the form of federal student loans, lining the pockets of these profiting colleges that aren't delivering on education. For example:
Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly-traded for-profit company based in San Diego, with online and traditional programs that have grown quickly in recent years. Bridgepoint... experienced a 167 percent increase in profit in 2009, from $81 million in 2008 to $216 million in 2009, according to HELP Committee data. But between 2008 and 2009, more than 60 percent of its bachelor’s degree students withdrew by the summer of 2010.... On Feb. 4, the Education Department released new data showing that for-profit students account for nearly half of all student loan defaults, even though they account for less than 15 percent of students nationwide. The department has also published data showing that some for-profit schools overcharge students and offer inadequate training, leaving them burdened with heavy debt and unable to get jobs after graduation.
Here's what that looks like:
And here's what it means, from James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario.
Though increased enrollment appears to imply increased opportunity, many students are in higher risk of drop-out and loan default when choosing a for-profit college. The for-profit education sector is in large part to blame for the sharp rise in student loan defaults, accounting for almost half of total defaulters. In the graph [above], the Department of Education has concluded that despite only having 12% of total enrollments, for-profit schools disproportionally account for 48% of total student debt defaults. Since for-profits are so effective in securing Federal loans and grants for their students, this means that the schools are in essence receiving an indirect subsidy from the government and taxpayers, while leaving students in the red. While an increasing number of students enroll in for-profits and take on large amounts of student debt, they also increase their risk of drop-out. A report published last year by the Education Trust shows how devastating dropout rates are, with only 22% of students enrolled at for-profit four-year universities graduating within six years, as compared to 55% and 65% at public and private non-profit universities, respectively. Many students enrolling in these institutions are left without credentials and burdened with debt, yet the schools are able to retain their profits made from students’ tuition.
The high rates of both drop-outs and defaults in these colleges should be enough for responsible lawmakers to demand some accountability—as the Department of Education has done with these rules. Responsible lawmakers, obviously, are not part of the teahadist wing of the GOP, which doesn't want to pay public school teachers, but has no problem with public money subsidizing the ripping off of millions of American college students for the private good of a few. Same old GOP story.Northbound traffic is down to one lane, and all lanes of southbound traffic are open, according to those at the scene.
The tanker is in the Great Miami River, and the cab is up on the highway. The semi was hauling plastic beads, most of which have gone into the river. Some of the beads can be seen floating on the river.
Safety officials have brought in equipment to contain the spill.
The driver was taken to the hospital and was alert and talking at the time he was transported. There is minor damage to the bridge wall, and the Ohio Department of Transportation will handle repairs, according to authorities.
The driver will likely will cited for failure to control.
“No matter what the weather is like, you, as the driver, are responsible for your vehicle,” said Sgt. David Matthews.
News Center 7 has a crew at the scene and will update this story as more information becomes available.Welcome to the final part of our PSD2 series, where senior figures from across banks and fintechs, as well as industry experts gauge their views on whether PSD2 will be the biggest shake-up to banking in six centuries.
Brian Gaynor, Executive Director, J.P. Morgan
PSD2 will provide an environment for new payment methods to emerge and grow across Europe. Not since the implementation of the euro currency has there been an opportunity to provide common payment methods across the EU, which to date have been localised and restricted by national boundaries. Many new initiatives will emerge based on the openness to initiate payments coupled with the availability of mobile and the emergence of instant payments. Only time will tell which of these emerging brands will become common standards across the EU.
But as a European initiative, will these new payment methods be able to break the boundaries of the EU and become global? The only truly global payment methods are cards. The card rails, irrespective of brand, are familiar to all consumers; localised but global. Cards have proven to be adaptable and grow, balancing the needs of merchants and consumers, convenience and risk.
Cards will continue their growth as the global payment method, but in the face of increasing competition from new EU systems spawned by PSD2 as well as those emerging in other regions, such as Alipay.
Gene Neyer, Head of Industry and Regulatory, D+H
PSD2 is ‘turning banking inside out’. Open access shifts control to the customer who will be able to pick and choose products and services from different banks and fintechs. This represents a definite sea change from today’s product centric model. Banks will be forced to consider their strengths and weaknesses and choose what they want to represent to their customers going forward – a superior producer (like Walmart) or a platform and a destination (like Amazon). The business model shift will have to be accompanied by an architecture refresh; banks burdened with siloed infrastructure, will have a hard time competing with banks whose capabilities are harmonised across the enterprise.
This is an opportunity for banks to reassert their strengths, and to leverage both the consumer trust developed over the centuries and the massive technology investments that have made many banks into technology powerhouses in their own right. The financial industry has been re-inventing itself for centuries, as it did when it moved from paper ledgers to electronics. PSD2 is a major milestone, but banking will carry on.
Anish Kapoor, CEO, AccessPay
It’s certainly the biggest and most fundamental shift in banking that I believe we’ll see in our lifetime. It’s more about a shift away from banks that have all the controlling access to financial services, and opening up APIs to third-party providers. PSD2 is arguably the biggest change in terms of the way and which businesses and consumers manage their financial services; the future of banking is going to look very different to the way it does today. I think PSD2 is just starting that process; there’s a bigger shift going on in the market in that direction.
Chris Skinner, Author and Editor of The Finanser
I think 600 years is slightly overstating the case. Most banks haven’t been around for 600 years, and it’s just a change to the technology structure of the bank. Banks claim that it’s a massive change as they’re being forced to open up their data to third parties, but on the other hand, I would expect that it will not be such a revolution, it’ll be more of a evolution towards more collaborative banking because banks are being regulated to work with third parties in partnerships, and that’s actually a good thing because it will be create a better customer experience.
By their nature, banks have historically done everything themselves, end to end. But with technology, particularly the open sourcing structures of apps, APIs and analytics, is creating a much more open marketplace where many different players can be involved in delivering the capabilities to the client and as a result, banks are going to have to work in partnership with many different technologies providers, not just doing things themselves.
Brett King, CEO, Moven
I think you can say that in terms of access to banking, it represents a very significant change for the structure of the UK banking market. But the most significant change in the last 600 years? I would argue that the internet and the smartphones’ impact on banking on a long-term basis are more impactful.
If we were to start from scratch today and build a banking system – would it look like the banking system that we have today? The answer to that question is no. If you look at markets that give us indication of the future of financial services, such as China, India or Kenya, these are the geographies where we’re seeing these new types of payments systems emerge that are radically different. The exciting and interesting opportunity here is for us to think about the context of payments in very different ways.
Anyone with access to the PSD2 layout will be able to come up with revolutionary payment experiences. In that respect, it’s very exciting to think about the greenfield payment experiences that can be embedded in a consumer’s life around service providers that doesn’t need to be
bank oriented. As a result, I think some of the innovation we’re going to see in payments will be incredible.
Evelien Witlox, Global Head of Payments & Cards at ING
PSD2 is a major milestone on the way to an open financial services market. It will be a great test for a range of financial institutions who need to rethink and redefine their business models. This is really the game changer of the decade; the inevitable, unstoppable opening up of the
payments infrastructure for competition and new entrants.
This regulation creates both a challenge and an opportunity for both incumbent banks and new entrants. Since it allows for payment initiation by third parties and sharing of account information with third parties, PSD2 is potentially highly disruptive. While some banks may be relegated to being pure account service providers, ING is taking the opportunity to develop multi-bank or bank independent services ahead of PSD2 that work to the benefit of customers.
PSD2 is also encouraging a move towards open banking and integration through the mandated use of APIs. Technical development of API solutions is the most visible part of the challenge for banks and they need to focus more on the support processes as well as security across
the value chain. To prepare, ING is itself implementing an API-based architecture in order to learn how to deliver better, faster services internally – before translating those findings through to customers.
Sophie Guibaud, VP of European Expansion at Fidor Bank
Not only does PSD2 challenge existing banks, as it could see them pushed out of their customers’ sight, but it presents them with a brilliant opportunity to win the hearts and minds of competitor’s customers too. How well a bank adapts to PSD2 will dictate how successful they are for many years to come.
Read part two of the series here.19 January 2016
Bath Rugby is delighted to confirm the signing of second row Elliott Stooke from Aviva Premiership and West Country rivals Gloucester Rugby.
22-year-old Stooke has represented England throughout the age groups, including a call-up to the England Saxons in January 2014.
The lock, who originally hails from Worcester, has made nearly 70 appearances for the Cherry and Whites since his debut in the 2012/13 season, and has impressed with his hard work and influential play both in the tight and the loose.
“Elliott is a powerful athlete and we’re looking forward to seeing him continue his development with us here at Bath,” said Mike Ford, Head Coach at Bath Rugby. “He has a great skillset for a young player, along with a great attitude, and I have no doubt he’ll fit into the Club really well.”
Speaking of the move, Stooke commented: “It’s been a hard decision to make, but I’m really excited about the move to Bath. They’re an ambitious club, and the coaches work incredibly hard to help develop each individual player at the same time as making sure the team is growing. It’s a hugely talented squad to join up with, and it is a great environment for a young player like myself to be part of.
“I’d like to thank everyone associated with Gloucester for the support they have given me over the years, and I’ll be making sure I do all I can to play my part to make the rest of this season successful before I leave.”Read the most important Node.js news & updates from this week: Migrating from Java to Node, Extending Slack with Node.js, IoT and Node, Top 10 of 2016, Unit-testing cheat sheet.
The 7 must-read Node.js articles of this Week:
In September 2015, Romans Bermans have joined a 2 months old startup which had a team of 4, enough funding to get going for a year and a challenging vision for the future.
In 15 months we went from a prototype of our platform through a Java, Spring, MySQL stack deployed on AWS to a total rewrite in Node.js, Restify, Firebase deployed on GCP.
It is 2016 and Slack is the new e-mail. For many distributed teams or companies like Auth0, Slack has become the default communication solution.
In this post I will show how you can easily extend Slack with Node.js using Slash Webtasks, a solution we have created at Auth0 that builds on the serverless concepts. Using this approach you can automate processes, run your devops, generate reports, and more, in a powerful yet simple and efficient way.
To summarize this year, we collected the 10 most important articles we recommend to read. These include the biggest scandals, events, and improvements surrounding Node.js in 2016.
Left-pad
Yarn
Debugging with Chrome DevTools
Node.js Security Project overtake
Node.js Developer Survey
and many more.. Read the full article for the details.
Tod Kurt knows a thing or two about IoT devices. As the creator of blink(1), he’s shipped over 30,000 units that are now out in the wild and in use for custom signaling on everything from compile status to those emotionally important social media indicators.
Tods' talk at the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference covers the last mile that bridges your Internet of Things devices with its intended use. This is where IoT actually happens, and of course where it usually goes astray.
Notable changes:
buffer.fill() now works properly for the UCS2 encoding on Big-Endian machines.
disconnect() now returns a reference to the disconnected worker.
The built-in list of Well-Known CAs (Certificate Authorities) can now be extended via a NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS environment variable.
Remove stale timeout listeners in order to prevent a memory leak when using keep alive.
Allow obvious key/passphrase combinations.
Including base argument in URL.originFor() to meet specification compliance.
Improve URLSearchParams to meet specification compliance.
The Node.js Community Store got opened this week, allowing you to order Node themed t-shirts, stickers and water bottles.
Using mocha/chai/sinon for node.js unit-tests? This list got you covered!
Last week we read fantastic articles about npm5, Clean Coding, switching to Yarn, CI with Jenkins, Node Maturity Checklist and V8 ❤️ Node.jsRail union RMT claims Greater Anglia plans to close all but seven ticket offices
Stock photo of Greater Anglia train. Picture: Sonya Duncan ARCHANT EASTERN DAILY PRESS (01603) 772434
Rail union RMT has vowed to fight what it says are moves by Great Anglia to close all but seven of its ticket offices - relying on customers to buy their fares online or from ticket machines.
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But the rail operator has denied it wants to shut the bulk of its offices, but it is considering closing seven of its little-used ticket offices.
The union, whose full title is National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, said Greater Anglia told RMT officials it plans to cut its number of ticket offices from 64 to seven - those at London Liverpool Street, Colchester, Norwich, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Ipswich and Stansted Airport.
An RMT spokesman said this would happen over the next three years. He said Great Anglia also planned to introduce more ticket machines and ‘revenue staff’, which would have further implications for jobs and services.
Mick Cash, RMT general secretary, said: “The union is appalled at this planned attack on ticket offices and station staff across the Greater Anglia franchise which would wipe out the vast bulk of these vital passenger services over the next year.
“The union will fight with every tool at our disposal to halt these disastrous plans which are all about cutting public services to pump up private profits.”
But a Greater Anglia spokesperson said they had no plans to leave just seven offices open, only that they were considering closing a number of their lesser-used outlets.
The offices under consideration for closure are Walton, Thorpe-le-Soken, Alresford, Dovercourt, Great Bentley, Harwich International and Great Chesterford.
The spokesman said: “We have no plans to reduce the number of Greater Anglia ticket offices to seven.
“However, we are currently reviewing responses to a public consultation about proposals to close seven little-used ticket offices.
“There are no current proposals to close any other ticket offices.
“We will continue to consult with our colleagues and the trades unions on any proposed changes to ticket office arrangements.”
Greater Anglia has the franchise for the region’s rail until 2026. It operates 133 stations, 69 of which do not have ticket offices.Thai Monks Find the Path to “Beervana”
When life gives you lemons, so the saying goes, make lemonade. And when it gives you beer? Well, it doesn’t take a genius to find a use for the beverage itself, but then there’s the question of all those empty bottles.
Some of us might ask ourselves, “What would the Buddha do?”
The monks of Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple, in eastern Thailand’s Sisaket region, have come up with their own unique answer to that question. Using more than a million beer bottles collected from local people since 1984, they have constructed an assortment of buildings ranging from the temple itself to the crematorium, water tower, and even the bathrooms.
The mountains of green and brown bottles find their way into designs that are elegant and thoroughly traditional. Check out this amazing roof:
And this mosaic made of, yes, bottlecaps!
As an added bonus, the bottles’ transparency ensures that the temple’s interior won’t be dark and gloomy—in other words, instant enlightenment!
Strictly speaking, Buddhists are urged to “refrain from taking intoxicants,” so the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew monks may miss out on some of the fun of obtaining their unusual building materials. But since there’s apparently no shortage of beer bottles in Sisaket, what better way to save souls than to save empties?
The monks may even want to consider brewing some of their own beer someday—anyone for a Buddhweiser?
(link)
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RedditLast of its kind Supermarine Spitfire to be auctioned for charity
P9374, one of only two original Mk. 1 Spitfires to still be flying, is to be donated by the American entrepreneur and philanthropist who masterminded its painstaking restoration, and offered in the Exceptional Sale on 9 July
This summer, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain, Christie’s London is proud to present a unique and remarkable piece of British history at auction: an authentic and immaculately restored Vickers Supermarine Spitfire Mk.1A – P9374/G-MK1A.
This Spitfire, a thing of beauty but also an iconic war machine that helped save Britain in 1940, and ultimately to win the Second World War, will be offered in The Exceptional Sale on 9 July 2015, with an estimate of £1,500,000-2,500,000. For more on the history of Spitfire P9374 and the remarkable story of its painstaking restoration, see our full interactive documentary presentation, featuring videos, interviews and picture galleries.
There are only two remaining Mk.1 models restored to the original specification and still flying today, P9374 and N3200, both belonging to the American philanthropist and art collector Thomas Kaplan. As part of a generous gift, Spitfire P9374 will be sold at Christie’s to benefit the RAF Benevolent Fund and Panthera, a leading wildlife conservation charity. Spitfire N3200 will be going to the Imperial War Museum Duxford. ‘As history tells us all,’ says Kaplan, ‘there comes a time when one simply has to step up... to act with passion, and to remember with gratitude the few that actually do.’
Explore the full story of the discovery and reconstruction of Spitfire P9374. This interactive documentary goes behind the scenes at Duxford Aerodrome to follow its extraordinary restoration. Image courtesy of the Peter R Arnold Collection
In September 1980 the wreckage of Spitfire P9374 emerged from the sands of Calais beach where it had crash-landed after being shot down on 24 May 1940 during the air battle of Dunkirk. Flying Officer Peter Cazenove, later a veteran of the ‘Great Escape’, was flying the aircraft when it was attacked and hit. Before executing his belly-landing on Calais beach, Cazenove had radioed that he was OK, adding, ‘Tell mother I’ll be home for tea!’
Cazenove was soon captured and taken as a Prisoner of War, while Spitfire P9374 was consumed by successive tides and sunk deeper into the sands. Sadly, Cazenove passed away shortly before the recovery of his aircraft.
Post-recovery the Spitfire went first to the Musée d’l’Air at Le Bourget, Paris, and subsequently to further collections until the parts eventually ended up with the Aircraft Restoration Company / Historic Flying Ltd. at Duxford, who have since brought this remarkable Spitfire back to life. Twelve highly skilled engineers have spent three years carrying out what is considered to be the most authentic restoration of an original Mk.1 Spitfire to date, incorporating many components from the original plane into the build.
The completed aircraft successfully returned to flight for the first time since the Second World War on September 1, 2011. It was flown by John Romain, Pilot and Chief Engineer at the Aircraft Restoration Company, who later remarked, ‘This is a fantastic restoration to be justifiably proud of. Spitfire P9374 is a truly lovely aircraft, and she flies beautifully.’
Says Thomas Kaplan: ‘When my great childhood friend, Simon Marsh, and I embarked upon this project, it was to pay homage to those who [Winston] Churchill called "the Few", the pilots who were all that stood between Hitler's darkness and what was left of civilisation. The upcoming events of July 9th are, more than anything else, concrete gestures of gratitude and remembrance for those who prevailed in one of the most pivotal battles in modern history.’
Auction times 9 July
The Exceptional Sale 2015
London, King Street
Viewing times
23–24 May
VE Day Anniversary Air Show
IWM Duxford
Cambridgeshire
CB22 4QR
Book a ticket online at iwm.org.uk
4–9 July
Churchill War Rooms
Clive Steps
King Charles Street
London SW1A 2AQ
Contact
Nic McElhatton
[email protected]
+44 (0)20 7752 3290
For more features, interviews and videos, see our Christie’s Daily homepageLast Week, Assemblymember Phil Ting (D – San Francisco) introduced AB 694, a bill to recast California’s far-to-the-right law to clarify cyclists’ right to control a lane where necessary.
CVC 21202
California Vehicle Code 21202 is the state’s “shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway” law. The law contains a list of exceptions which includes a “substandard lane width” clause, but the abridged vehicle code cheat sheet used by California law enforcement agencies does not contain these exceptions, and side-of-the road appeals to the actual law or to common sense (“There’s literally not enough passing room!”) are often met with a response of “Take it the judge.”
To help address some of the confusion involved with 21202, Ting introduced his first attempt to reword the far-right-law during the 2016 legislative session with AB 2509. Unfortunately, he had to table this earlier bill due to lobbying efforts from influential individuals in a certain state agency tasked with highway safety.
Dave Snyder from the California Bicycle Coalition and (I believe) Jim Baross from the California Association of Bicycle Organizations met with these individuals, worked on their concerns, and the result is the re-wording proposed in AB 694, which as of this writing completely removes the text “as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway” and replaces it with more standard language for slow-moving vehicles:
21202. (a) Any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at that time shall ride in the right-hand lane or bicycle lane, if one is present, except under any of the following situations:
(1) When overtaking and passing another bicycle or vehicle proceeding in the same direction.
(2) When preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.
If the cyclist is riding in a lane that’s “wide enough for a vehicle and a bicycle to travel safely side by side,” then the cyclist must stay far enough right to allow faster traffic to pass, assuming no hazards. Another cool exception: the cyclist may legally move left into the lane “when approaching a place where a right turn is authorized.”
This bill validates the common “vehicular cycling” practice of “taking the lane,” which many A-to-B cyclists must practice on vast swaths of California roads where decent cycling infrastructure doesn’t exist.
I’ve seen concerns that the bike lane exceptions already provided for in CVC 21208 (California’s mandatory bike lane law) aren’t enumerated in this new proposal; this might be worth bringing up with Ting’s staff and with the Assembly Transportation Committee, which is where this bill is probably headed next after it passes muster with the Rules Committee.
Bipartisan love for Idaho Stop in California
Assemblymembers Jay Obernolte (R – Big Bear Lake) and Ting have introduced AB 1103, which will allow cyclists to treat stop signs as yields if it passes. Co-sponsors of the bill are Richard Bloom (D – Santa Monica), Rocky Chavez (R – Oceanside) and Kevin Kiley (R – Rocklin).
Personal claim to fame: Wikipedia says I invented the phrase “Idaho Stop” in 2008, though I can only claim credit for popularizing the phrase. I think I first heard “Idaho Stop” as such from long time California bike advocate Jim Stallman in 2007.
Bike share expansion for state employees
The California Department of General Services operates a bike share program for state employees working in the Sacramento area. California Senator Henry Stern (D – Malibu) wants to expand this program to state employees throughout California. Good luck.
Sunsets eliminated
Do you remember AB 417 that exempts bicycle plans from environmental review under California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)? Do you remember that this exemption sunsets the beginning of next year? How time flies. Assemblymember Obernolte AB 1218 removes the sunset and extends that exemption indefinitely.
You might also remember AB 1581 from 2007, which mandates the use of traffic light actuators that can detect bicycles and motorcycles. This law also sunsets on January 1, 2018. State Senator Jean Fuller (R – Bakersfield) introduced SB 672 to extend this law indefinitely. Fuller’s bill also adds a provision for the state to reimburse local governments for the extra cost of actuators that can detect bicycles and motorcycles.
& cetera
AB 1222 would include a mandate to add a section on distracted driving safety to the California Driving Manual.
Scott Weiner’s SB 760 codifies a Complete Streets policy as state law.
Ad: You can really help me out by checking out last week’s top selling items at Amazon in various bicycle related categories. Thanks!
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PocketWe don't particularly enjoy posting about auto accidents, as totaled cars and injured humans is never a good conversation starter. Every once in a while, though, we get an opportunity to post about a crash that didn't happen thanks to the quick thinking and selfless nature of a good samaritan. Such a near miss happened yesterday in San Francisco when a driver on the Golden Gate became unconscious and her Jeep Grand Cherokee came to a stop in the second lane from the center divide. John Beatty almost rammed his Ford F-350 into the back of the Jeep, but stopped just in time. The 50-year-old man from Mill Valley, CA then noticed the Jeep began to creep forward and to the left. Realizing it was headed towards the divide and into oncoming traffic, Beatty positioned his truck in front of the SUV so that it would hit him instead of crossing over. He then guided the Jeep across two lanes of road, which had fortunately been cleared of traffic when other drivers began to realize what Beatty was doing. Unfortunately, there is a sad ending to this story, as the unconscious driver of the Jeep eventually died at the hospital. If it hadn't been for Beatty, however, you would've heard about a fatal multi-car accident on the Golden Gate bridge last night.Thanks for the tip, Patrick![Source: sfgate.com]At the theme park #BuiltForKids, the U.S. men and women who work tirelessly to keep us safe are invited to spend the day on us with complimentary, single-day admission during the entire month of September!
Get the whole family together because first responders can also purchase up to four same-day tickets at 50 percent off! If you’re looking for even more brick-tastic fun, upgrade tickets to LEGOLAND Water Park for just $20 each.
To receive complimentary and discounted tickets, eligible personnel must present his or her employee ID or professional organization membership card at the LEGOLAND Florida Resort ticket windows on the day of their visit.
Don’t want to just spend the day? Stay the night and receive a 10 percent discount at LEGOLAND Hotel, the colorful, 152-room tower right next to the theme park! The hotel discount is available online only, so make your reservation today at www.LEGOLAND.com/hero2016. Proof of eligibility is required at check-in; otherwise, the prevailing room rate will be charged.
Eligible U.S. personnel include:
Fire and rescue first responders
Emergency medical services employees (EMT/EMS)
Municipal and county police and sheriff’s officers
Highway patrol officers
Corrections officers
State and federal law enforcement officers
Fish and wildlife field officers
U.S. Forest Service rangers
National Park Service personnel
Homeland Security agents
Environmental Protection law enforcement officers
Remember that the theme park and water park will be closed on select dates in September. Be sure to check out our LEGOLAND Hours for the month of September before you go. Let me know down in the comments which branch of service you are a part of and if you plan to take advantage of this great deal.
Check the LEGOLAND Florida Park Hours and for LEGOLAND Florida Discount Tickets before you go.Columbia University Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) collaborate strongly with Simmaron Research on ME/CFS studies. Recently Dr Horn |
5 C C5 T 6 9 36 22 A4 [6] active R 47 M 5 D C4 T 5 5 8 7 A5 [9] active R 29 M 4 D T4 T 6 23 43 47 A6 [15] active R 28 F 156 A T4 T 5 6 6 20 A7 [17] active R 57 F 4 D C4 TM 7 - 24 1 A8 [18] active R 67 M 5 D T2 T 6 12 48 11
Table 1 Baseline data for SCI patients in the study. American spinal injury association (ASIA) classification (A-D); injury: traumatic (T), transverse myelitis (TM), visual analog scale (VAS); The Leeds Assessment of Neuropathic Symptoms and Signs (LANSS)] Pain Scale; The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MGPQ): Beck depression inventory (BDI).
Sham 2mA tDCS Mean Difference T statistic P Age in years 39.6 (8.6) 47.8 (15.8) -8.125 -1.28 0.221 Time from injury (mo.) 69.1 (103.2) 24.4 (53.3) 44.7 1.09 0.295 VAS pain (1-10) 6.4 (1.7) 5.3 (1.4) 1.087 1.4 0.183 BDI (1-63) 19.1 (13.5) 14.8 (14.9) 4.25 0.60 0.560 BRF Pain Severity
[0-10] 6.5 (1.8) 4.47 (0.92) 1.99 2.76 0.015* BRF Pain intensity
(0-10) 5.6 (2.2) 3.2 (1.78) 0.812 2.39 0.032* MGPQ (0-76) 37.3 (21.4) 27.0 (15.1) 13.4 1.34 0.202 LANSS (0-24) 14.8 (5.1) 11.0 (6.4) 3.88 1.29 0.212
VAS: visual analogue scale; BDI: Beck’s depression inventory; BRF Brief pain inventory; MGPQ: McGill pain questionnaire; LANSS: Lans assessment for neuropathic symptoms and signs
Table 2 Baseline assessments for the two treatment groups. Means and standard deviations are shown for the two treatment groups as well as independent t-tests results for comparison.
All patients tolerated the daily application of tDCS, with no adverse effects reported during the week of administration, or in the follow up period. Patients described the stimulation, irrespective of treatment, as mild tingling without pain, under one or both of the electrodes. There were no significant differences for ratings of stimulation sensation between groups, (Table 3). The detection of treatment type by the participants, obtained on the last day of administration, were 3.0 (1.5) for the sham and 4.0 (1.4) for the active, which were not significantly different (mean difference (-1.0; CI-2.57 to 0.57); t(14)=1.37; p=0.19).
Perception of stimulation Sham tDCS Group 2 mA Anodal
tDCS Group T-test (df=14) P value Itchiness (0-3) 1.75(0.9) 1.13(1.0) 1.33 0.21 Burning (0-3) 1.38(0.74) 1.13(1.25) 0.48 0.63 Tingling (0-3) 1.75(1.1) 0.75(0.5) 1.82 0.09 Pain (0-3) 1.0(0.0) 0.63(0.5) 2.05 0.06 Detection of type of tDCS
treatment (1-5) 3(1.5) 4(1.4) -1.37 0.19
Table 3 Perception and Detection of tDCS treatment: Rating of perception on last day of treatment on different types of sensation under one or both electrodes (0-no sensation to 3-strong sensation). Assessment treatment identification as sham or active using: (1) definitely sham, (2) might be sham, (3) unsure, (4) might be active, (5) definitely active.
VAS pain
Figure 1 illustrates the VAS pain scores for the two treatment groups over the time course of the study. The baseline average VAS pain score was 6.4 (CI 5.2 to 7.6) for the sham group and 5.3 (CI 4.1 to 6.5) for the active group, respectively. The ANOVA revealed no significant differences between treatment groups, F(1.14)=0.96, p=0.34, ÃÂ p2=0.064, but a significant effect of time, F(5.5)=5.41, p=0.001, ÃÂ p2=0.28; while there was no significant interaction effect, F(5.5)=1.13, p=0.352, ÃÂ p2=0.075. In post hoc comparisons, for the main effect of time, there was a significant mean difference between baseline and two weeks post treatment, (1.75 [CI: 0.25 to 3.2]; p=0.016). At two weeks post treatment, the mean VAS pain scores was 4.4 (CI 2.4 to 6.5) for sham group and 3.8 (CI 1.76 to 5.8) for active group, respectively as showed in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Showing the VAS pain scores for the two treatment groups over the time course of the study. D3: VAS recorded at day 3 of the monitoring period; WK1:VAS recorded one week post treatment; WK2:VAS recorded two weeks post treatment.
Leeds assessment for neuropathic symptoms and signs (LANSS)
LANSS neuropathic pain scores at baseline for the sham (15.4 CI 10.4 to 20.5) and active group (11.0 CI 5.4 to 16.3) were similar to the LANSS scores at two weeks post treatment: the sham group (15.6 CI 8.7 to 22.5) and active group (9.0 CI 1.56 to 16.5), respectively. The ANOVA revealed no significant treatment effect, F (1.11)=1.72, p=0.22, ÃÂ p2=0.14, as well as no significant effect of time F(3.33)=0.24, p=0.87, ÃÂ p2=0.02, or interaction of treatment x time, F(3.33)=0.33, p=0.81, ÃÂ p2=0.03.
The McGill pain questionnaire
The mean McGill pain questionnaire (MCPQ) score at baseline was 37.3 (CI 22.4 to 52.2) for the sham group, and 27.0 (CI 13.0 to 41.0) for the active group, respectively. While at post 2 weeks, these scores were 38.3 (CI 22.6 to 53.9) for the sham group, and 23.6 (CI 9.0 to 38.3) for the active group. There was no significant effect of type of treatment on scores on the McGill Pain Questionnaire, F(1.13)=2.54, p=0.135, ÃÂ p2=0.16, nor a significant effect of time F(2.26)=0.96, p=0.40, ÃÂ p2=0.07, but the interaction of treatment × time was statistically significant, F(2.26)=3.58, p=0.042, ÃÂ p22=0.22
The brief pain inventory (BPI)
Severity: As noted at baseline, the brief pain inventory (BPI) score for severity was 6.5 (CI 5.3 to 7.8) for the sham group and 4.5 (CI 3.3 to 5.6) for the active group were significantly different (t=2.77, p=0.015). While at post two weeks, this score was 5 (CI 3.2 to 6.8) for the sham group and 4.3 (CI 2.6 to 6.0) for the active group. The ANOVA revealed no significant effect here: for treatment, F(1.13)=1.88, p=0.19, ÃÂ p2=0.13, however, a significant effect of time F(2.26)=3.89, p=0.033, ÃÂ p2=0.23, but a non-significant interaction of treatment × time F(2.26)=2.56, p=0.10, ÃÂ p2=0.16.
Intensity: At baseline the BPI score for intensity, for the sham group was 5.3 (CI 3.6 to 6.8) and 3.74 (CI 1.4 to 6.1) for the active group were significantly different (t=2.39, p=0.039). While at post two weeks, these were lower, with the sham group score of 3.7 (CI 1.4 to 6.1) and 3.0 (CI 0.83 to 5.2) for the active group. The ANOVA showed no significant effects of treatment, F(1.13)=1.36, p=0.26, ÃÂ p2=0.09, time, F(2.26)=1.58, p=0.22, ÃÂ p2=0.11, or interaction of treatment x time, F(2.26)=0.84, p=0.44, ÃÂ p2=0.06.
Clinical global impression of change (CGIC): The clinician’s impression of change in the pain using the CGIC was assessed at the end of the 5 days treatment with a mean of 2.7 (CI 1.9 to 3.6) for the sham group and 3.2 (CI 2.6 to 3.1) for the active group. At reassessment, two weeks later, these scores were 2.9 (CI 2.0 to 3.7) for the sham group and 2.4 (CI 1.8 to 3.1) for the active group respectively. The ANOVA for treatment, F[1.12]=0.68, p=0.42, ÃÂ p2=0.05, and time F(1.12)=0.012, p=0.74, ÃÂ p2=0.01, were not significant, however, there was a significant interaction of treatment x time F(1.12)=5.65, p=0.035, ÃÂ p2=0.32.
Patient Global Impression of change (PGIC): For the selfassessed patient impression of change (PGIC) the mean score was 3.1 (CI 1.4 to 4.8) for the sham, and 3.3 (CI 1.6 to 4.9) for the active group and hence were not significantly different at baseline. While at post two weeks, this was 3.13 (CI 1.4 to 4.8) for the sham, and 3.2 (CI 1.6 to 4.9) for the active group respectively. The ANOVA showed no significant effect of treatment, F(1.12)=0.18, p=0.66, ÃÂ p2=0.02, or time F(1.12)=0.48, p=0.5, ÃÂ p2=0.04, or interaction of treatment x time F(1.12)=0.12, p=0.74, ÃÂ p2=0.01.
Becks depression inventory (BDI): We also evaluated the mean BDI depression scores, which was 17.3 (CI 5.6 to 29) for the sham group and 14.9 (CI 4.0 to 25.8) for the active group and were not significantly different at baseline. At post two weeks these were 13.6 (CI 2.7 to 24.4) for the sham group and 15.1 (CI 5.0 to 25.3) for the active group respectively. The ANOVA revealed no significant effects of treatment, F(1.13)=0.026, p=0.87, ÃÂ p2=0.002, or time F(2.26)=3.012, p=0.067, ÃÂ p2=0.19, but a significant interaction of treatment × time F(2,26)=4.91, p=0.016, ÃÂ p2=0.27.
Discussion
The overall aim of this study was to examine whether 2 mA daily treatment with anodal tDCS produced a clinical significant reduction in chronic pain following SCI. Our findings did not show a treatment dependent difference in the main measure of self-reported VAS pain and other measures obtained post treatment in general. There was a reduction of 2 points on the VAS for the sham group and 1.5 points for the active group at two weeks post treatment observed in both groups sampled in this study. However, we noted some significant interaction effects with a small reduction in MGPQ scores for the active treatment, as well as small increase in both CGIC and PGIC.
Anodal tDCS of the motor cortex has been reported to increase the pain threshold and to provide relief from neuropathic pain [14]. One of the studies we used as reference for our experimental protocol was that of Fregni et al. [11] which evaluated a follow up period following 5 days of anodal tDCS for up to post 16 days. This study gave a strong indication that tDCS may be an effective treatment for central pain due to traumatic SCI, showing a reduction in mean pain of 37% at 16 days, post treatment for the active treatment only. In our study, we found that there was a significant reduction in VAS pain measures over the time of the study, but of only 31% (sham) and 28% (active) treatment, respectively. There was a non-significant reduction in pain ratings after 5 days of trial but similar for both the sham and active treatments.
Wrigley et al. [2] examined changes in neuropathic pain scores following 5 days of similar dosage for up to one year, and did not find a statistically significant reduction in overall pain intensity in patients with neuropathic pain following SCI. They suggested that the reason for the lack of tDCS efficacy was the prolonged period since injury onset in their patients, since a negative correlation between pain intensity changes after tDCS treatment and duration of SCI had already been noted by the Fregni et al. [11]. Wrigley et al. [2] suggested the possibility that central changes resulting from neuropathic SCI pain had become consolidated, so that tDCS could not modulate the central pain related system.
In our study, the time from injury varied from patient to patient, with some as short as 3 months and some as long as 325 months, but overall there was no group difference at baseline, despite, the sham group average time from injury was 69 months while for the active group this was 24 months. This difference in the time from the injury between the groups resulted from the randomization process but in order to examine this impact on findings, other studies should consider shorter times since injuries for future evaluations of this form of treatment. Our results albeit of a small sample here, do show that pain perception was diminished in both groups overall, therefore, the time from injury should not be correlated with the reduction of pain in our patients unlike the Fregni et al. [11] and Wringley et al. [2] trials.
Additionally, we noted a reduction in self-reported pain measures (VAS) during the active period for both the sham and the active treatment. That finding could be linked to the placebo effect associated with the tDCS administration. It is worth considering, therefore, the impact of placebo treatments and their potential effects in pain relief since its impact may be particularly important for non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) studies. In our trial, there was no differences between the two groups in terms of detection of the type of treatment. Of note in this regard, is a recent study which investigated the placebo effects of tDCS on depression demonstrating that tDCS reinforces brain networks activated by the expectation of therapeutic benefit, in other words, tDCS fortifies the placebo response to which it may, in part, contribute. Therefore, the investigators suggested that tDCS and placebo pills should be combined to increase the patients, expectation on efficacy for pain, as it is well known that the analgesia induced placebo pills effects are associated with activity in the insula, cingulate, and thalamus, which are regions believed to be polarized by tDCS montages commonly used in pain trials [15].
A recent trial by Yoon et al. [16], which studied the brain metabolism changes after tDCS stimulation over the motor cortex in patients suffering from pain after SCI, showed a statistically significant decrease in pain ratings after the active tDCS.
A study by Soler et al. [17] suggested that the analgesic effect of tDCS differed according to the subtype of spontaneous pain, and those findings were confirmed by Fregni et al. trial.
The precise mechanism responsible for the active effects of the tDCS remain unknown, but it has been reported that tDCS over M1 induces activity changes in a number of brain regions, and that the unilateral M1 tDCS evokes significant activity changes in both the underlying M1 as well as M1 on the contralateral side of the brain. It is possible that those analgesic effects are possible through the tDCS influence on activity within regions such as the somatosensory thalamus.
In our study, we decided to refer to validated safety protocols [16] which included the use of relatively large wet sponges (25 cm2 to 35 cm2) and currents of 1 mA to 2 mA applied for duration of 20 min. For purpose of further studies, it might be useful to review those safety parameter in order to systematically elucidate the impact of the stimulation current settings, currently limited from safety purposes, on the analgesic outcomes looking, for example, at longer stimulation periods as well as thinking to use higher intensity and/or to apply it for longer interval of time each session, furthermore aspects related to electrode position and stimulation polarity could be revised. or it could be useful to review the stimulation protocols with regard to specific patient population.
The study by Yoon et al. [17] evaluated the underlying neural mechanisms of tDCS using [18] FDG-PET imaging, they found an increased metabolism in the medulla and decreased metabolism in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) after active tDCS compared with sham tDCS. The left DLPFC changes were negatively correlated with pain relief. These results suggested that the analgesic effects of tDCS are associated with attentional modulation of pain perception through the DLPFC and medulla. Moreover, the increase in metabolism after active tDCS in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sAAC) and insula suggest that tDCS modulates emotional components of the pain system.
The mechanism of tDCS is still not very well known, a work by Fritsch et al. [19] has shown that tDCS works on brain plasticity also by creating changes in the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which has been associated with pain processing. In view of that we think that further studies looking at the relation between neurophysiology, biological markers and tDCS could be useful to improve our understanding on the tDCS effects on brain areas and furthermore for the optimisation the current stimulation protocols.
Our trial protocol overcame one of the Fregni et al. [11] study limitations since while in the before mentioned study subjects were allowed to change their medication regimen, we kept medications unchanged for all trial duration, which represented a challenge for the study.
Moreover, a study by Liebetanz et al. showed how antiepileptic medication and particularly carbamazepine interfere with the capability of motor cortex to react with sustained excitability changes to tDCS [20]. That is interesting to consider since, as mentioned, in our protocol we decided to continue the standard pain medications that the subjects were taking at the time of the trial. Since carbamazepine is one of the first line medication for neuropathic pain and the most of the subjects involved in our trial were on this treatment, we might hypothesize that a reduction in cortical effect after tDCS stimulation might be considered as a result of reduced excitability associated to long term neuroactive medication use in our population.
Another issue we faced has been linked to the hypothesis that the response to the tDCS stimulation could be variable in relation to the characteristic of the SCI lesion [12]. In facts, the links between pain and other variables such as level of injury, aetiology, completeness of SCI and psychosocial issues have not been extensively studied and an attempt at try to identify the SCI patients that show more improvements after the active treatment could be important to optimize future clinical trials. In our study we found clinical differences between the two groups which are related to the randomization, our sample population was randomized in a way that in the Sham group 6 participants out of 8 were complete SCI (AIS A), while in the Active group only 2 out of 7 were AIS A. Studies have suggested that variables such as advanced age at the time of injury, nature, onset intensity, bullet injury as a cause of trauma, early onset of pain in the weeks following the injury and associated symptoms (fatigue, infection, spasticity, constipation, urinary retention, joint pain, mood changes) are negative prognostic factors, whereas symptoms typically associated with neuropathic pain such as dysestesia, paroxysmal pain, location of SCI in thoracic and lumbar segments and sublesional pain are associated with positive response to brain stimulation, on the other hand completeness or incompleteness of the lesion has a neutral link with the response to the tDCS treatment [12].
Some strong points of our study protocol are that it has been designed and conducted in a double blinded manner and this is important since pain is a subjective variable and its evaluation as well as perception undergoes a significant placebo effect which is partially avoided with a double-blind trial method. Furthermore, it emerged that patient couldn’t guess if they received the active or the sham treatment, in fact no significant differences emerged when patients were questioned about that during the trial. This finding confirms that tDCS can be used efficaciously in double blinded studies.
After the brain stimulation, no one showed adverse effects, neither in the short term nor after the follow ups, therefore the safety of tDCS have been confirmed by our study.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it does appear to be a reduction in some pain measures particularly during the active phase (5 consecutive days of 20 mA tDCS stimulation), but comparisons between sham and active treatment group indicate that this could be a partial placebo type effect, as the group differences are not significant.
Our data show that in individuals with longstanding neuropathic SCI pain, tDCS focused over M1 does not provide pain relief, our results are similar to the study by Wringley et al. [2] and differ from the Fregni et al. study [11] which inspired our study design.
In conclusion, even if anodal tDCS is a non-invasive, low risk neuro stimulation technique to treat one of the most bothersome among the consequences of SCI, such as chronic pain is, we still need to prove its real efficacy and we are yet not ready to prescribe it as an active for chronic pain.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr. Salman Lari for his assistance in conducting this trial.
ReferencesFinally, a lawmaker is speaking out against the corrupt Deep State.
Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) told MSNBC there needs to be a purge at the FBI and DOJ.
If only we had an Attorney General who was worth a crap.
Via Pam Key at Breitbart.com:
ROONEY: I’m very concerned that the DOJ and the FBI, whether you want to call it deep state or what, are kinda off the rails. When you look at what the Strzok guy was texting, you look at that Ohr guy talking to the dossier Clinton op research people, and the McCabe guy’s wife takes $600,000 from Clinton-related sources while running for state senator.
JACKSON: Congressman, you just called the FBI and the DOJ off the rails, something that you’re okay with talking about here? How does that not sort of undermine the work that the agencies are doing?
ROONEY: I think the American people have very high standards for our government agencies and to see people like these—
JACKSON: Are the agencies not living up to the standards?
ROONEY: Well, those aforementioned examples are really nerve-racking to me and undermine my confidence that the agencies don’t respect the Constitution and will not put the ends before the means.
JACKSON: That’s a pretty broad brush you’re painting with.
ROONEY: Yeah, but we have seen a lot of ends-before-the-means culture, both out of the Obama administration and out of Hillary Clinton, with her $84 million dollars of potentially illegal campaign contributions or the Clinton Foundation, Uuranium One. People need a good, clean government.
JACKSON: Do you think people don’t have a good, clean government? I have to let you go, but the point I’m trying to get at, the ones looking at the comments you’re making and say Republicans are working to essentially trying to discredit the Department of Justice and thus discredit the Russia investigations. Is that not what you’re doing?
ROONEY: No, I don’t want to discredit them. I would like to see the directors of the agencies purge it. And say, look, we have a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here, those are the people I want the American people to see and know the good work is being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state.It's no secret that Laura Jane Grace is a punk rock inspiration to the transgender community and beyond. The Against Me! frontwoman will release her very own memoir Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout on November 15 via Hachette Books, available wherever books are sold. Pre-order the memoir here now, and check out the cover art and announcement on Grace's Instagram below.
Read more: Laura Jane Grace talks about transition, family and suicide attempt on podcast
The cover art was designed by graphic artist Christopher Norris (A.K.A. Steak Mtn.), who also designed the cover of Against Me!'s 2014 LP Transgender Dysphoria Blues, and the memoir was written with help from Noisey's Dan Ozzi.
“The book mixes narrative about Laura’s life—growing up with dysphoria and playing in our generation’s most influential punk band—with amazing journal entries she’s been keeping since she was a kid,” Ozzi says to EW.
Watch more: APTV Acoustic Session: Laura Jane Grace – “True Trans Soul Rebel”The MSNBC star (left) also started a Twitter hashtag to express support for Sarah Sanders, who Brzezinski is urging to turn on her boss.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski is still fired up about President Trump’s tweet mocking Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and took her frustrations out on first lady Melania Trump and first daughter Ivanka Trump.
“[Trump] should have apologized for being a sexist pig,” Brzezinski said. “And the women around him, his wife, who has a platform against cyber bullying, that’s a joke. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Brzezinski then shifted her attention to Ivanka Trump, “Who came to Washington… to develop a platform for women,” but has stood by her father.
“Go home. You’re doing nothing if you stand by this president,” Brzezinski said of the first daughter.
Brzezinski began her attack on the women around Trump on Tuesday, when she responded to Trump’s attack on Gillibrand by telling female staffers they’re “worth nothing” unless Trump deletes his tweet.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski is still fired up about President Trump’s tweet mocking Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and took her frustrations out on First Lady Melania Trump.
Trump tweeted early Tuesday: “Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!”
Many, including the MSNBC morning show co-host, saw the message as a sexual double entendre.
"Go home [Ivanka]. You’re doing nothing if you stand by this president" - Mika Brzezinski
“Sarah Huckabee Sanders, good luck today in the briefing. Don’t lie. And do not defend the President of the United States for what he did. If you do… you should resign,” Brzezinski said when reacting to the tweet on live TV. “But everybody else, working around the president, if your day is not consumed by getting him to take down that tweet, please leave. You are worth nothing.”
Hours later, when Sanders took the podium for a White house press briefing, she ignored Brzezinski’s request and said only people with their “mind in the gutter” would have interpreted the tweet as sexist.
(Brzezinski shifted her attention to Ivanka Trump, “Who came to Washington… to develop a platform for women,” but has stood by her father.)
“He's talking about way the system functions as it is -- politicians beg for money, that's not something new” she said. “No way this is sexist at all.”
Brzezinski said, “I don’t know how she does that,” after the clip was aired on “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.
The MSNBC star also started a Twitter hashtag to express support for Sarah Sanders, who Brzezinski is urging to turn on her boss.
“Tell her it’s OK to step up and say the truth about the president's tweet,” Brzezinski wrote. “Retweet to show your [sic] support women and truth!”The Obama administration is about to lose an extraordinary opportunity to prosecute one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers. It will fail to break up a network that annually smuggles hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States. And it will miss delivering a devastating blow to the most dedicated U.S. adversary in Latin America, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.
You wouldn’t have known that from watching the White House meeting last week of Presidents Obama and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia. They gathered to celebrate the completion of an “action plan” that could lead, maybe, to congressional ratification of a long-stalled free trade treaty between Colombia and the United States. Remarkably, they said nothing in public about the judgment of no-confidence Santos has made about Obama — a product of Obama’s previous neglect of a valuable ally.
In fact, the U.S.-Colombian trade plan, which leaves the treaty several steps from ratification, may matter less than the decision Santos announced two days before reaching Washington. The democratically elected Colombian leader is a graduate of the University of Kansas and a lifelong friend of the United States. He nevertheless confirmed that he will deliver a man named Walid Makled Garcia, whom Colombia arrested last August on a U.S. warrant, to his native Venezuela rather than to the United States.
Few people had heard of Makled before last year, but he has recently made himself famous thanks to a series of jailhouse interviews. In them, Makled, whom the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has accused of shipping up to 10 tons of cocaine a month from Venezuela to the United States, has described bribing or collaborating with scores of the highest officials of Chavez’s government — including his general in chief, the head of military intelligence, the commander of the Navy and some 40 other generals.
Makled says he has videotapes and other evidence documenting his transactions with the generals and with other senior government officials — provincial governors, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries. He says he has information about Venezuela’s help for Hezbollah and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
All this, he said repeatedly in an interview with the Univision network, “I will tell to the prosecutor” in New York, where Makled has been indicted on drug charges. That could give the Justice Department the evidence to indict, and the Treasury Department the grounds to sanction, scores of Venezuela’s top leaders.
It could also lead, as Carl Meacham of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff told me, to “a massive turning point in how people look at the Chavez regime.” A self-styled socialist regarded as the successor to Fidel Castro would be reborn as the heir of Manuel Noriega — ruler not of a revolution but of a narco-state.
Only Santos says he will deliver Makled to Chavez — who scurried to make an extradition request ahead of the Justice Department. Chavez, who had a falling-out with Makled when one of the trafficker’s brothers ran for office without his permission, has charged Makled with two murders. He has also offered Santos a rich array of concessions: an end to the near-state of war between their countries; payment of the nearly $1 billion Venezuela owes to Colombian exporters; the return of Colombian drug traffickers captured in Venezuela. It goes without saying that if Makled goes to Caracas, his allegations about the regime’s drug trafficking will be quickly stifled.
Why would Santos make such a dirty deal? The Colombian has been excusing himself to old American friends by saying he didn’t know how important Makled was before he promised him to Chavez at a meeting last November. In public he cites unconvincing legal technicalities. But another part of his reasoning is undoubtably a judgment about Obama.
Even while holding Santos and his predecessor Alvaro Uribe at arms’ length, the U.S. president has shown no stomach for taking on Chavez. He just spent a week touring Latin America without once mentioning Venezuela — or visiting Colombia. Santos knows what Colombia will gain from sending Makled to Venezuela — and he can guess how Chavez, who has threatened war more than once, might react if the trafficker is delivered to the United States. But would Obama really use Makled to put pressure on Chavez? Would he back up Colombia if Venezuela sent its army to the border again?
Santos guessed that Obama eschews such aggressive U.S. leadership — and it seems he was right. Though Republican members of Congress and DEA officials are seething over the Makled decision — Sen. Richard Lugar calls it “a reversal of years of cooperation” — Obama seems to have shrugged it off. According to Santos, when the Makled case came up in their White House meeting, Obama said he “understood.”
[email protected] want to know more about what plants are really up to underground. They want a better view of how roots work, and interactions with soils. So, researchers from the James Hutton Institute and the University of Abertay Dundee invented a soil that's see-through enough that they can study the rhizosphere up close.
From the James Hutton Institute:
After two years of painstaking research to find a compound that could replicate soil chemistry, Dr Dupuy and his colleagues found success with a synthetic composite known as Nafion, often used in power-generating fuel cells. This artificial soil is not especially transparent on its own: it becomes translucent when saturated with a special water-based solution. The product is a substrate which is very similar to real soil in terms of physical and biological variables, such as water retention, ability to hold nutrients and capability for sustaining plant growth.
As Gizmag points out, "Forming the polymer into pellets allows it to mimic soil particle properties, such as forming channels, retaining water and nutrients and sustaining plant growth. Fluorescent dyes can also be added to it to aid studies."
The scientists say that the research could have impacts for important issues like food security, figuring out how to breed crops that need less resources like fertilizer, and how climate change affects crops. The results of the researchers' work is published in PLoS OneWASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States is boycotting a U.N. conference on racism next week over a document that "singles out" Israel in its criticism and conflicts with the nation's "commitment to unfettered free speech," the U.S. State Department said Saturday.
The Congressional Black Caucus criticized the boycott, saying President Obama's decision "set the cause back."
The Obama administration made the decision not to attend the Durban Review Conference in Geneva "with regret," a State Department statement said.
Two months ago, the administration had warned that it would boycott the conference if changes were not made to the document to be adopted by the conference. In recent weeks, discussions over the document have fueled several revisions, but the changes to the language didn't meet U.S. expectations, the statement said.
The current draft is "significantly improved," but "it now seems certain these remaining concerns will not be addressed in the document to be adopted by the conference next week."
State Department officials say the document contains language that reaffirms the Durban Declaration and Programme of |
ers they would have to move their campsites off the property by Oct. 10.
He and his partner, Ashley Baker, were hoping to get an apartment elsewhere in Vermont with some family assistance, and he said he had put his name on a waiting list at Anew Place, a Burlington long-term transitional housing shelter. Other campers have moved their tents, looking for other places to sleep in the city.
"It's wrong, what the city is doing," Walls said. He said he felt like he was being punished for the actions of others.
Buy Photo Ashley Baker, 32, who is homeless and lives in a tent in Burlington's South End, pauses for a photograph on Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS)
Baker agreed. She said she just wanted the city to give them a chance.
She also called on Burlington residents to stand up for the people in the camps.
"Be on our side, that's all we need," Baker said. "They do what the community says."
More:
Kevin Pounds, the executive director of Anew Place, said the organization has consistently had a waiting list of over a dozen people for the past few months and beds are filled as soon as they open.
"My understanding is that there isn’t really any capacity at any of the shelters," said Lacey-Ann Smith, the Burlington Police Department's community affairs liaison. In her role, Smith does outreach to campers throughout the city. She said that while she thought clearing a camp is a better temporary solution for avoiding potential violence than doing nothing, "it's far from a perfect system."
Because of the stretched capacity of local shelters, and the barriers to housing many campers face, Smith said she expects many of the people who will be displaced from Sears Lane to end up finding a new place to camp.
Burlington's year-round shelters also have high criteria, like sobriety, Smith pointed out, which some people who prefer camping may not be able to meet. A low-barrier seasonal shelter, which does not require sobriety, will open on Nov. 1 on, Smith said.
Kim Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Community Health Centers of Burlington, which will run the low-barrier shelter for the second year this winter, said there will be 37 beds, up from 35 last year.
Last winter, the shelter was full every single night, she said.
Buy Photo Nick Walls, 32, who is homeless, speaks at his campsite in Burlington's South End. Photographed Aug. 23, 2017. (Photo: JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS)
"We can definitely do with way more of these shelters," she added. Mayor Miro Weinberger has advocated for the low-barrier shelter to be open year-round, and city councilors approved putting city funds towards a year-round, low-barrier shelter last spring.
Smith said city officials had considered holding off on displacing the camp until Nov. 1, when the low-barrier shelter was open, but chose to move forward after consulting with Safe Harbor, the because of safety concerns.
"There is a level of tension in the homeless community," she said. "We should not be just waiting for something to happen."
An email exchange between Smith and Deputy Chief Shawn Burke obtained by the Burlington Free Press shows that in mid-August, police were discussing whether to recommend removal to the Office of the City Attorney after an incident where a resident of the camp reported that a man brandished a gun during a fight. (The name of the alleged victim was redacted in the obtained documents, but Ashley Baker told a Free Press reporter she was the person shown the gun.)
"The investigation into this case has not been very fruitful," Burke wrote on Aug. 17. "What is telling is the pattern of escalating behavior which has lead to violence in other encampments." He then authorized Smith to send police reports from 9 incidents at Sears Lane dating back to June 1 to the City Attorney's office.
Stephen Marshall—an advocate for the homeless who lived at the Sears Lane camp last summer—said that disruptive campers can create problems, but that the police's approach creates more problems and leaves homeless people without police protection.
More:
"The homeless in this community are members in this community and deserve the same protection," he said. Burlingtonians have the duty to create a minimum of safety, resources and dignity for everyone in the community, including the homeless, he said, calling for camps with trash pickup, hygiene facilities and other services.
A camp displacement causes stress and turmoil, especially in the face of full shelters. Some people are uncomfortable in shelters, he said.
Both Burke and Smith said that the Burlington Police do not decide when to clear a camp and said the decision rests with the City Attorney's office.
A draft policy of the city's policy on encampments --which the city has used for the past two years and has yet to finalize--says "if, based on the location, an assessment of the living conditions health or safety issues, reported interference with the ability of others to use the property, or repeated legal violations at the site, the BPD determines the encampment should be disbanded, BPD will consult with the City Attorney."
The policy goes on to give a checklist of actions that should be followed if the attorneys determine the camp can be "legally disbanded," including notifying the mayor's office and providing written notice at least three days before the city plans to remove the camp.
Buy Photo ANEW Place, a long-term homeless shelter in Burlington that also offers transitional housing. (Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)
"I will have to speak to our colleagues at the police department about their interpretation of the policy," said Gene Bergman, an assistant city attorney. Bergman said the city attorney's office provides legal advice, but the decision is made in consensus. Burke acknowledged the decisions are made in consensus, but said he viewed the police department's relationship to the city attorneys as "more hierarchical" than Bergman and said the police wouldn't go against their recommendations.
Burke said he could see how homeless campers who are victims or witnesses to crimes might fear bringing police attention to their camps, since it might put their living arrangement at risk, but said the police's first mission is safety. He cited two murders in encampments, one in 2016 and one in 2015.
Jay Diaz, an ACLU of Vermont lawyer who has been raising questions about camp evictions for over a year, said clearing a camp for alleged safety concerns punishes campers for calling police for help. He said he had spoken with people who had items stolen or tents vandalized and then received eviction notices when they called the police for help.
Diaz said clearing camps raises other legal issues, including concerns about state and federal protections for property.
Moving their possesions, including sleeping bags, warm clothes and tents, has been a concern for Sears Lane campers, Nick Walls said last week. The city's draft policy states that the Howard Center's Street Outreach and other social service workers "are available" to help dismantle and remove the camp. Walls said nobody had offered him help.
Buy Photo From left, Deputy Chief Shawn Burke, Chief Brandon del Pozo and Deputy Chief Janine Wright listen to remarks at the annual Queen City Police Foundation award luncheon on March 13 at the Hilton Hotel in Burlington. (Photo: AKI SOGA/FREE PRESS)
Smith on Thursday said that the police will store valuable items left behind and work with social service workers to get them back to their owners.
In June of 2016, Chief Brandon del Pozo told Diaz via email that the city had no obligation to store "dumped/abandoned" property, and expressed concerns about the cleanliness of the items. On Friday, del Pozo said the police would store items of "obvious value" like medications or sleeping bags, but said they might have differences in opinion on the value of certain items.
Buy Photo Nick Walls, 32, who is homeless, speaks at his campsite in Burlington's South End. Walter Putnam, 55, at left, is a former resident of the camp. Photographed Aug. 23, 2017. (Photo: JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS)
Courts across the country have also ruled that a person can't be punished for being homeless and sleeping outside if they have nowhere else to go, Diaz said.
He said he didn't think the safety issues raised by police, he said, addressed those concerns.
"Certainly, all people deserve to be safe," he said. "But more importantly, these people are still individuals. Where are they supposed to go?"
On Friday evening, Diaz sent a letter to Mayor Miro Weinberger saying that were Burlington to proceed with the eviction of Sears Lane and other camps, "it would likely violate the constitutional rights of the residents of those encampments."
After listing several legal precedents, Diaz wrote that the ACLU demands "the City of Burlington cease its practice of evicting homeless individuals from public property without affirmatively providing them a place to shelter themselves."
If the demand is not met, "we'll certainly work with members of the community to put a stop to this," Diaz said.
He said the hope is that the city will change without a lawsuit--but the organization is exploring all of its options.
Contact Jess Aloe at 802-660-1874 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jess_aloe
Read or Share this story: http://bfpne.ws/2kuL9kMAnthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown is back, and the next episode of Season 7 takes the host to Chicago. But instead of chowing down on deep-dish pizza and hot dogs dragged through the garden, he visits the Windy City's Chinatown in this preview. Bourdain confesses he didn't realize quality Szechuan fare could be found in Chicago.
"Look, I knew Chicago was a city of very diverse neighborhoods — everybody says so," Bourdain explains in the clip. "But this, I didn't know about. Now I do."
Bourdain dines with Stephanie Izard, who recently opened her own Chinese restaurant Duck Duck Goat, and her colleague Peter Wong. Izard believes getting out into those diverse neighborhoods is the best way to approach the city. "Well I think a lot of people come and they think that Chicago is, like, on the Magnificent Mile," she says. "They're like, 'Oh, should we go down to Navy Pier?' And I'm like, 'No!'"
In a second clip, seen below, Bourdain heads to the famous Second City, where he learns the history of Chicago's comedy scene. Parts Unknown: Chicago airs this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.Monaco grosses $120K before launch Pre-orders earn enough to pay off Indie Fund investment, says dev
Rachel Weber Senior Editor Tuesday 30th April 2013 Share this article Share
Companies in this article Pocketwatch Games
Heist hit Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine made enough money to pay back its Indie Fund investment before it had even launched, revealed its creator Pocketwatch Games.
"Man our direct sales have been crazy good with all this press," said developer Andy Schatz on Twitter.
"After Steam/Humble fees we've grossed $120K since December 10. Have to pay back $100K loan from Indie Fund first."
Monaco pre-orders went live on the Humble Store in December, followed by Steam pre-orders on April 17. Three days later and Monaco had made $120,000, despite not launching until April 24.
Indie Fund clearly has a talent for picking winners, Dear Esther made enough to repay its $55,000 investment in just 5.5 hours, and Q.U.B.E. by Toxic Games sold over 12,000 copies after 4 days on Steam, allowing it to repay the investment of $90,000.
"For me the most significant thing about the early success with regards to Indie Fund is that it shows that there are many ways of approaching funding, from crowdfunding to investment models like Indie Fund, to personal loans - I know a number of devs that have taken loans from other devs - to the traditional publisher model," Schatz told Joystiq.
"More options means the studios can customize their relationships to fit their personalities and their projects."It's important to know that Sam Dodson isn't being charged with filming inside a courthouse in defiance of the law. That's important, because he was arrested for videorecording in the lobby of the Keene District Court, in Keene, New Hampshire, during the course of media coverage of a case there. Dodson's camera use defied the wishes of a judge who banned photography anywhere in the courthouse despite a state-wide policy permitting cameras in the courtrooms themselves. To top it off, it's likely that the judge's policy is rooted in nothing more than embarrassment that one of his courtroom tantrums was filmed and uploaded to YouTube last year.
Dodson, a professional videographer, independent journalist, and member of the libertarian Free State Project, was at the Keene District Court on April 13, 2009, to cover the arraignment, ironically enough, of Dave Ridley, another Free Stater, for video recording at court. In the lobby, camera in hand, he was ordered to turn off his equipment based on a flyer taped to the wall banning photography. Seeing that the flyer cited no legal basis, he refused. And so he was arrested -- as were several other people supportive of Dodson. Only Dodson remains in jail, on a hunger strike, a month later. Officials keep him confined on $10,000 cash bail because he refuses to formally give his legal name -- an exercise of his right to remain silent -- as a protest against his arrest. Of course, his identity is known to the authorities.
The arrest seems to fly in the face of court policies clarified and formalized just last year. As the Keene Sentinel reports:
The rules for recording public hearings in courtrooms are relatively clear: The Supreme Court says it’s allowed unless “there is a substantial likelihood of harm to any person or other harmful consequence.” But those foggy gray areas beyond the courtrooms remain untouched by state law.
The specific district court rule states:
The presiding judge should permit the media to photograph, record and broadcast all courtroom proceedings that are open to the public. The presiding judge may limit electronic media coverage if there is a substantial likelihood of harm to any person or other harmful consequence.
If recording is permitted inside the courtroom, why would it not be permitted in the lobby and hallways open to the public, where security concerns would seem to be minimal?
According to the Sentinel, Judge Edward J. Burke banned photography in the courthouse "in an effort to protect juveniles and victims of crimes walking through the lobby from being caught on film without their consent." That seems like a tenuous excuse given that people run the risk of being photographed in any public place at any time.
A more likely reason for the ban is Burke's mortification over a video of him throwing a courtroom tantrum in November of last year. In that video, Burke repeatedly snapped "have a seat" at a defendant before ordering the man arrested just seconds later. The seemingly confused defendant had begun to sit in compliance with an order to do so, then stopped and began to stand when his name was called. Viewed over 58,000 times, the video portrays Burke as petulant and petty.
That video just slightly predates Burke's February general ban on photography in the courthouse.
As of today, Dodson is charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest or detention and refusing to be processed. All of these charges would seem to be related to the arrest itself and its aftermath, not to Dodson's supposedly forbidden camera use. Perhaps the authorities aren't as certain about the legal basis for Burke's photography ban as they'd like the public to believe.
And, as of today, photography remains forbidden in the lobby of the Keene District Court -- not as a matter of law that anybody can cite, but to spare a hot-tempered judge further shame.
Dodson's docket number is 09-CR-01825-1828. An audio recording of Sam Dodson's arrest can he heard below.
Labels: civil liberties, government out of boundsSo let’s be real, CrossFit terms can get confusing. WODs, AMRAPs and EMOMs, oh my!
When you walk into a gym for the first time, the acronym overload is real and for the first six months, you’re doing good just to get through the WOD, much less memorize the differences between a hang clean, a power snatch and a push jerk.
That’s where we come in. Whether you’re new at CrossFit or need a better resource for your new members, FitnessHQ has you covered.
RELATED: Meet the CrossFit Girls
Some concepts are more difficult to explain than others. Some movements need a video demonstration to truly do them justice. Some movements you’ll have to work on with your certified coach to really catch the gist. But here, you can find our simplest explanations for things, visuals and a solid start to learning the ins and outs of the CrossFit world.
Be sure to let us know if there are more words, phrases or movements that you think merit a place in our CrossFit glossary.
The First Acronym You Need to Know
WOD – Workout of the day.
Workout Types
AMRAP – As many rounds as possible of a workout in a given amount of time, using the number of reps or times completing the WOD as a score
– As many rounds as possible of a workout in a given amount of time, using the number of reps or times completing the WOD as a score Bear Complex – a five lift complex consisting of a power clean, a front squat, a push press, a back squat and another push press.
– a five lift complex consisting of a power clean, a front squat, a push press, a back squat and another push press. Chipper – A WOD that consists of a series of movements that are not repeated. In addition, the participant must complete all of the reps for the exercise before moving on to the next. One of the classic chippers in CrossFit is the “Filthy Fifty” that consists of doing 50 reps of box jumps, jumping pull ups, kettlebell swings, walking lunges, knees to elbows, push presses, back extensions, wall balls, burpees, and double unders.
– A WOD that consists of a series of movements that are not repeated. In addition, the participant must complete all of the reps for the exercise before moving on to the next. One of the classic chippers in CrossFit is the “Filthy Fifty” that consists of doing 50 reps of box jumps, jumping pull ups, kettlebell swings, walking lunges, knees to elbows, push presses, back extensions, wall balls, burpees, and double unders. Couplet – a WOD consisting of two exercises. An example of a couplet in CrossFit is Fran, which includes thrusters and pull ups.
– a WOD consisting of two exercises. An example of a couplet in CrossFit is Fran, which includes thrusters and pull ups. EMOM – Every minute on the minute
– Every minute on the minute Fight Gone Bad
For Time – Complete the workout as quickly as possible, using the time it takes to complete it as your score
– Complete the workout as quickly as possible, using the time it takes to complete it as your score Metcon – Short for metabolic conditioning, a metcon usually features a set of movements repeated for a certain time period, like what you would see in an AMRAP. Metcons are usually short, intense, and require constant movement and muscle use.
– Short for metabolic conditioning, a metcon usually features a set of movements repeated for a certain time period, like what you would see in an AMRAP. Metcons are usually short, intense, and require constant movement and muscle use. Tabata – High-intensity interval training system that requires four minutes per exercise. For each exercise, you will do 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest, resulting in 8 rounds in 4 minutes. The BIG key to Tabata workouts, at least as they relate to CrossFit is that only the lowest score is counted, so you don’t want to go all out in the first round only to end up fizzling out later.
– High-intensity interval training system that requires four minutes per exercise. For each exercise, you will do 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest, resulting in 8 rounds in 4 minutes. The BIG key to Tabata workouts, at least as they relate to CrossFit is that only the lowest score is counted, so you don’t want to go all out in the first round only to end up fizzling out later. Triplet – a WOD consisting of three exercises. An example of a triplet in CrossFit is Helen, which includes running, kettlebell swings and pull ups.
Olympic Lifts/Weight Movements
Back Squat – Completing a full squat with the barbell resting on the back of your shoulders. For a video demonstration of a back squat, click here.
– Completing a full squat with the barbell resting on the back of your shoulders. For a video demonstration of a back squat, click here. Clean and Jerk – Combine a power clean or squat clean and push jerk or split jerk. For a video demonstration of a clean and jerk, click here.
– Combine a power clean or squat clean and push jerk or split jerk. For a video demonstration of a clean and jerk, click here. Curtis P’s – See also, the devil. No just kidding…sort of. Curtis P’s are a squat clean followed by two forward lunges with the barbell in the front rack position and then a push press.
– See also, the devil. No just kidding…sort of. Curtis P’s are a squat clean followed by two forward lunges with the barbell in the front rack position and then a push press. Deadlift – For a video demonstration of a deadlift, click here.
– For a video demonstration of a deadlift, click here. Front Squat – Completing a full squat with the barbell in the front rack position. For a video demonstration of a front squat, click here.
– Completing a full squat with the barbell in the front rack position. For a video demonstration of a front squat, click here. Hang Position – Starting a lift from the knees.
– Starting a lift from the knees. High Hang Position – Starting a lift from the hip pocket.
– Starting a lift from the hip pocket. Muscle Snatch – The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip, also known as a snatch grip, while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will move the bar from the ground to overhead without bending your knees. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a muscle snatch, click here.
– The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip, also known as a snatch grip, while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will move the bar from the ground to overhead without bending your knees. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a muscle snatch, click here. Overhead Squat – Completing a full squat with the barbell in the overhead position. Here’s a video demonstration of an overhead squat.
– Completing a full squat with the barbell in the overhead position. Here’s a video demonstration of an overhead squat. Power Clean -The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a little bigger than a hip-width grip while positioning your feet shoulder-width apart. Your shoulders should extend slightly over the bar while your back remains flat and your chest stays up. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, flipping your elbows quickly under the bar and receiving it in the front rack position with your knees slightly bent. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a power clean, click here.
-The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a little bigger than a hip-width grip while positioning your feet shoulder-width apart. Your shoulders should extend slightly over the bar while your back remains flat and your chest stays up. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, flipping your elbows quickly under the bar and receiving it in the front rack position with your knees slightly bent. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a power clean, click here. Power Snatch – The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip, also known as a snatch grip, while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, dropping quickly underneath the bar and then pressing it out overhead. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a power snatch, click here. For tips on how to improve your power snatch, click here.
– The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip, also known as a snatch grip, while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, dropping quickly underneath the bar and then pressing it out overhead. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a power snatch, click here. For tips on how to improve your power snatch, click here. Push Jerk – From the front rack position, you will push the bar into the overhead position by bending your knees and dropping under the bar, receiving it in a partially overhead position. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and your grip on the bar should be a little wider than your shoulders. For a video demonstration of a push jerk, click here.
– From the front rack position, you will push the bar into the overhead position by bending your knees and dropping under the bar, receiving it in a partially overhead position. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and your grip on the bar should be a little wider than your shoulders. For a video demonstration of a push jerk, click here. Push Press – Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead by bending your knees and then locking them out while driving up.Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a push press, click here.
– Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead by bending your knees and then locking them out while driving up.Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a push press, click here. Shoulder Press – Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead without bending your knees or using your legs. For a video demonstration of a shoulder press, click here. Sometimes also referred to as a strict press.
– Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead without bending your knees or using your legs. For a video demonstration of a shoulder press, click here. Sometimes also referred to as a. Snatch -The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, dropping quickly underneath the bar into a squat and catching the bar in the overhead position before driving up and completing the lift. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a snatch, click here. For tips on how to improve your snatch, click here.
-The bar will start on the ground and you will grip it with a wide grip while positioning your feet shoulder width apart. You will perform a slow pull to mid-thigh, where you will then “explode” and throw your hips forward, dropping quickly underneath the bar into a squat and catching the bar in the overhead position before driving up and completing the lift. You should use a hook grip for this lift. For a video demonstration of a snatch, click here. For tips on how to improve your snatch, click here. Snatch Balance – Start in the standing position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and you should have a snatch grip on the bar. Drop underneath the bar in a full squat while pushing the bar up. Once you hit the bottom of the squat, pause for a second and then return to the standing position while keeping the bar overhead. For a video demonstration of a snatch balance, click here.
– Start in the standing position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and you should have a snatch grip on the bar. Drop underneath the bar in a full squat while pushing the bar up. Once you hit the bottom of the squat, pause for a second and then return to the standing position while keeping the bar overhead. For a video demonstration of a snatch balance, click here. Snatch Press – Start in the standing position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and you should have a snatch grip on the bar. Then, without using your legs and keeping your core engaged, push the bar into the overhead position. Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a snatch press, click here.
– Start in the standing position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart and you should have a snatch grip on the bar. Then, without using your legs and keeping your core engaged, push the bar into the overhead position. Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a snatch press, click here. Split Jerk -From the front rack position, you will push the bar into the overhead position by bending your knees and dropping under the bar, receiving it in a partially overhead position with one foot in front of you and the other foot behind you. Be sure to talk with your coach about the proper way to exit this lift to prevent injury. For a video demonstration of a split jerk, click here.
-From the front rack position, you will push the bar into the overhead position by bending your knees and dropping under the bar, receiving it in a partially overhead position with one foot in front of you and the other foot behind you. Be sure to talk with your coach about the proper way to exit this lift to prevent injury. For a video demonstration of a split jerk, click here. Squat Clean – Receiving your clean in the squat position. For a video demonstration of a squat clean, click here.
– Receiving your clean in the squat position. For a video demonstration of a squat clean, click here. Squat Snatch Press – Start in the squat position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. You should have a snatch grip on the bar. Then, without using your legs and keeping your core engaged, push the bar into the overhead position. Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a squat snatch press, click here.
– Start in the squat position with the bar positioned across your back like you would have it for a back squat. You should have a snatch grip on the bar. Then, without using your legs and keeping your core engaged, push the bar into the overhead position. Use a hook grip for this movement. For a video demonstration of a squat snatch press, click here. Strict Press – Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead without bending your knees or using your legs. For a video demonstration of a strict press, click here. Sometimes also referred to as a shoulder press.
– Moving the bar from the front rack position to overhead without bending your knees or using your legs. For a video demonstration of a strict press, click here. Sometimes also referred to as a. Sumo Deadlift High Pull – Keeping a narrow grip on the bar and your feet more than shoulder width apart, lift the bar to the middle of your chest. Your hips and shoulders should rise simultaneously and you should initiate the movement with a shrug, followed by a pull. The lift is complete when you’re at full extension. For a video demonstration of a sumo deadlift high pull, click here.
– Keeping a narrow grip on the bar and your feet more than shoulder width apart, lift the bar to the middle of your chest. Your hips and shoulders should rise simultaneously and you should initiate the movement with a shrug, followed by a pull. The lift is complete when you’re at full extension. For a video demonstration of a sumo deadlift high pull, click here. Thruster – Starting with your barbell in the front rack position, you will do a full squat and then come to full extension while pushing the bar overhead. Your feet will be shoulder-width apart and your grip should be slightly outside of your shoulders. Your elbows should not touch your knees during this movement. For a video demonstration of a thruster, click here.
Other CrossFit Movements
Abmat Sit Up – A sit up using an Abmat with your feet pressing together in the front. Your hands should touch the floor behind your head when you begin the movement and end by touching your feet. For a video demonstration of an Abmat sit up, click here.
– A sit up using an Abmat with your feet pressing together in the front. Your hands should touch the floor behind your head when you begin the movement and end by touching your feet. For a video demonstration of an Abmat sit up, click here. Air Squat – squatting below parallel while driving your knees out over your toes and keeping your chest up. For a video demonstration of an air squat, click here.
– squatting below parallel while driving your knees out over your toes and keeping your chest up. For a video demonstration of an air squat, click here. American Kettle Bell Swing – A kettle bell is actually a piece of equipment, but when CrossFitters refer to kettle bells in a WOD, they are referring to a movement where you begin with your feet hip-width apart. You grasp the kettle bell by its handle with both hands and hang it between your legs. Then, you thrust your hips forward and use the momentum to swing the kettle bell over your head. For a video demonstration of a kettle bell, click here. Sometimes also referred to as just a Kettle Bell Swing.
A kettle bell is actually a piece of equipment, but when CrossFitters refer to kettle bells in a WOD, they are referring to a movement where you begin with your feet hip-width apart. You grasp the kettle bell by its handle with both hands and hang it between your legs. Then, you thrust your hips forward and use the momentum to swing the kettle bell over your head. For a video demonstration of a kettle bell, click here. Sometimes also referred to as just a. Back extension – Done using a GHD machine and not be confused with a hip extension. For a video demonstration of how to do a proper back extension, click here.
– Done using a GHD machine and not be confused with a hip extension. For a video demonstration of how to do a proper back extension, click here. Box Jumps – For a box jump over, you will start on the ground with your feet shoulder width apart. Boxes come in various sizes, the most common being 12 inches, 20 inches, 24 inches and 30 inches. To complete a box jump, you will start on one side of the box and jump on top of it, landing with both feet and standing all the way up with your hips fully extended. For a video demonstration for how to do a box jump, click here.
– For a box jump over, you will start on the ground with your feet shoulder width apart. Boxes come in various sizes, the most common being 12 inches, 20 inches, 24 inches and 30 inches. To complete a box jump, you will start on one side of the box and jump on top of it, landing with both feet and standing all the way up with your hips fully extended. For a video demonstration for how to do a box jump, click here. Box Jump Overs – For a box jump over, you will start on the ground with your feet shoulder width apart.Boxes come in various sizes, the most common being 12 inches, 20 inches, 24 inches and 30 inches. You will jump on the top of the box, making sure both feet touch before stepping or hopping down to the other side. In a box jump over, a full hip extension is not required.
– For a box jump over, you will start on the ground with your feet shoulder width apart.Boxes come in various sizes, the most common being 12 inches, 20 inches, 24 inches and 30 inches. You will jump on the top of the box, making sure both feet touch before stepping or hopping down to the other side. In a box jump over, a full hip extension is not required. Burpees – You will start in a standing position with your feet shoulder-width apart. You will place your hands on the ground in front of you shoulder width apart, pulling your body down to a pull up position. Your chest and thighs must touch the floor and your feet cannot come off the ground unless you are modifying the burpee. You will then jump and bring your feet to your hands before jumping. Although you will end up in a full standing position, a burpee is not considered valid if you do not jump as you come up off the floor and clap your hands above your head. For a video demonstration of a burpee, click here.
– You will start in a standing position with your feet shoulder-width apart. You will place your hands on the ground in front of you shoulder width apart, pulling your body down to a pull up position. Your chest and thighs must touch the floor and your feet cannot come off the ground unless you are modifying the burpee. You will then jump and bring your feet to your hands before jumping. Although you will end up in a full standing position, a burpee is not considered valid if you do not jump as you come up off the floor and clap your hands above your head. For a video demonstration of a burpee, click here. Burpee Box Jumps – Do a burpee and then jump onto the box and over to the other side for one rep. Full extension is not required at the top of the box unless otherwise specified in the WOD or by your coach.
– Do a burpee and then jump onto the box and over to the other side for one rep. Full extension is not required at the top of the box unless otherwise specified in the WOD or by your coach. Butterfly Pull Up – A type of kipping pull up. For a video demonstration of a butterfly pull up, click here.
– A type of kipping pull up. For a video demonstration of a butterfly pull up, click here. Chest to Bar Pull Up – Like the name suggests, this is a pull up where your chest much touch the bar for the rep to count.
– Like the name suggests, this is a pull up where your chest much touch the bar for the rep to |
est.
He described recent reports of chaos as "breathtaking."
"Now is the time for leaders to listen to diverse Venezuelan voices and work together peacefully to truly find solutions."
Military exercises
The United States is picking its words carefully, aware that Maduro is holding it up as a principal agent of the mounting woes he is facing.
But two senior US intelligence officials last week warned that the odds of public revolt are rising.
Maduro has ordered military exercises for Saturday to prepare for what he calls the threat of an armed intervention backed by the United States at the behest of the "fascist Venezuelan right."
In his decree, Maduro put security to the fore, to fend off "destabilizing actions that mean to disrupt life inside the country or its international relations."
Soldiers are to help police keep order, backed by the local civilian committees, and are to be deployed to distribute and sell food.
Individuals, companies or non-governmental organizations in Venezuela with links to foreign entities are to be put under scrutiny and their finances frozen if deemed to be political or destabilizing.
The text also opens the way to expropriations of businesses not seen to be doing enough to supply staple foodstuffs, and other steps as needed as long as they don't violate constitutional protections on human rights.
The measures are to last for 60 days with the option of being renewed for further periods of 60 days.
'Authoritarian'
The opposition says the state of emergency is an attempt to quash efforts to call a referendum on removing the unpopular president from office.
"This government is acting in an authoritarian manner to keep itself in power," opposition lawmaker Tomas Guanipa told a press conference.
Seven in 10 Venezuelans want a change in government, according to recent polls.
The discontent with 53-year-old Maduro, the hand-picked successor of the late Hugo Chavez, has gone hand-in-hand with the economic unraveling he has presided over since becoming leader in 2013.
Maduro has said the state of emergency could be renewed to extend through 2017.
The company seizures could notably affect the Polar group, Venezuela's biggest food and beverage company, which halted beer production on April 30, saying it had run out of barley.
Venezuelan businesses say they are currently operating at less than 45 percent capacity because the government will not allow them to buy increasingly scarce dollars to pay foreign suppliers.
The opposition won legislative elections in December, but its agenda in the National Assembly has been stymied by the Supreme Court, which it condemns as beholden to Maduro.
It is now seeking to organize a recall referendum, and says it has collected 1.8 million signatures to launch the process.
But the vote must be held by the end of the year to trigger new elections, and the opposition accuses the authorities of stalling.
After January 10 -- four years into Maduro's six-year term -- a successful recall vote would simply transfer power to his hand-picked vice president, Aristobulo Isturiz.
Isturiz said Sunday there would not even be a vote, alleging irregularities in collecting signatures.
(AFP)MONTREAL — The Conservatives’ operatives who have been shooting footage of Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his annual jaunt to the North presumably plan to use it for a campaign ad and not for a farewell video. But this fall Harper will still have two significant opportunities to assess the temperature of the political waters before he takes the plunge and asks Canadians for a fourth mandate.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper draws more inspiration than he cares to admit from Jean Chrétien’s example, writes Chantal Hébert. ( Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
One test will involve actual voters in Ontario, the province that stands to determine the final outcome of the 2 015 election. The second will take place within the narrower confines of the Conservative caucus and the House of Commons. Each could have short and long-term consequences for the men who lead Canada’s three main parties but in particular Harper, who already has four campaigns and almost a decade in power under his belt.
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Harper has until Oct. 25 to set a byelection date to fill the GTA seat left vacant in the wake of Jim Flaherty’s passing. For as long as the former finance minister was its MP, the riding of Whitby-Oshawa was not on anyone’s list of top seats at play and that likely would not have changed had the Conservatives succeeded in bringing Flaherty’s widow, Christine Elliott, over to the federal arena. But Elliott, who was reelected to the Ontario legislature in the spring, has set her sights on the provincial Tory leadership and Tim Hudak’s succession. Whitby-Oshawa landed in the Conservative column in 2006 and Flaherty increased his share of the vote to more than 50 per cent over the two subsequent elections. But it was previously in Liberal hands and the party has been on a bit of a byelection roll since Justin Trudeau became its leader. Flaherty’s former seat is also a rare GTA riding that can boast some solid NDP history. Ed Broadbent held it for as long as he was party leader.
Whoever ends up running for Harper in this riding might want to avoid banking too much on Flaherty’s ghost to keep non-Conservative challengers at bay. Earlier this summer the byelection that took place to fill Olivia Chow’s Trinity-Spadina seat illustrated the limits of such calculations. This could be the last federal byelection before next year’s general campaign. The Conservatives, who have been plagued with a long string of mediocre poll results, including some that show them a long way off from the leading Liberals in Ontario, could use a strong win, if only to bolster party morale.
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Ditto for the New Democrats. At the very least, they need to hang on to the second place they secured in 2 011. The Liberals, of course, are looking to maintain their pre-election momentum. The byelection will be a must-watch for strategists and observers alike. Moving inside the parliamentary beltway for the second test, the fall session of the House of Commons is expected to feature a decisive vote on a private member’s bill that purports to reverse the erosion of MPs’ influence. Its author, Conservative MP Michael Chong, has secured the support of some of the opinion leaders within the government caucus. In a free vote it would have a decent shot at becoming law, especially if two dozen or more Conservative MPs who are not running for re-election feel freer to support it. But that does not mean the prime minister or, for that matter, the other party leaders have cause to like the bill. One of its key provisions would see a leadership review triggered at the call of 20 per cent of a party caucus, and a leader could be ousted on the basis of a majority vote of his MPs. If such a law had been in place in Canada this summer, chances are the Bloc Québécois Leader Mario Beaulieu would already be out of a job. He lost one quarter of his tiny caucus since taking on the leadership last June with another defection potentially to come. Harper draws more inspiration than he cares to admit from Jean Chrétien’s example. Under Chong’s regimen, it would not have taken long into Chrétien’s third majority mandate for the Liberal caucus to seek a review of the prime minister’s leadership. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Read more about:Xiaomi has been releasing devices like crazy this year. This China-based company has released the Redmi 2 handset on January 4, which was followed by the launches of Mi Note, Mi Note Pro, Mi Headphones and Mi Box Mini on January 15. The company has just released yet another device, the one that has leaked already, several times in fact. I'm talking about Xiaomi's Bluetooth Gamepad, which is this company's first gamepad, and it at least seems like a solid piece of hardware, anyhow, let's see what's what.
This thing comes with Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity, which basically allows you to connect it wherever you want, be it your smart TV, Android Box, smartphone, tablet, etc. Xiaomi has confirmed that this thing is compatible with Google's Android OS, so you really should have no problem pairing this up with your device. Regarding its design, this thing resembles the Xbox controller a whole lot and it has a two built-in motors for better gaming experience. Xiaomi says that its battery can last up to 80 hours of gameplay and the device offers 3 axis accelerometer. There are a bunch of images for you to check out below the article, but the device looks really good. Its design offers a lot of curves and the company says it's ergonomic, so it should fit anyones hand quite nicely. Xiaomi's Bluetooth Gamepad has a 10-meter working distance and it measures 156 x 104 x 65mm while it weighs 220 grams. This thing is available in Black color only and its availability is unfortunately limited to China, at least for now.
The main selling point of this thing is its price though, as with most Xiaomi devices actually. Xiaomi's Bluetooth Gamepad costs only 99 Yuan ($16), which is only a fraction of the price you'd pay for some more popular and well-known controller. We haven't tested this thing just yet, it just got launched, but I'm rather intrigued. This thing is extremely cheap compared to some more popular offering and I'm interested in seeing how it performs, how about you? Would you be interested in buying this if it's any good, do you like its design?Aldermen on Wednesday raised questions about the speed camera ticketing system rolled out this year by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, asking whether it is the best way to slow traffic and whether it is following state law.
Ald. Willie Cochran, 20th, raised the issue during hearings on Emanuel's proposed 2015 budget when Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, whose duties include auditing administration programs, was testifying.
"We are all faced with our communities coming to us, (saying) that we want speed humps in our neighborhood to control traffic, we want to slow down traffic in our neighborhoods," Cochran said. "But on the other hand, we have a community that also is irate about the speed cameras in the communities, and with where they are placed."
Later, Ald. John Arena, 45th, raised the issue of whether the program was complying with state law, which requires that tickets be issued only when children are in the area.
Ferguson said monitoring speed cameras was on his list of audits for next year.
"We didn't think it was appropriate or fair to actually take a look at it while it was in its on-boarding phase," Ferguson said. "And in order to assess its merits and performance we wanted to have a reasonably lengthy period where data was accumulated so we can take a look at where we can best add value."
Ferguson has previously criticized the city's oversight of the red light camera program, partly in response to Tribune investigations that turned up alleged corruption involving a former city manager and irregularities in the operations of the cameras under the since-fired vendor.
The inspector general also said he would welcome taking on oversight of the City Council, a job now held by Legislative Inspector General Faisal Khan. A majority of aldermen have proposed shifting the duties to Ferguson, but that proposal has languished in the Rules Committee.
Two influential aldermen, including Carrie Austin, 34th, chairman of the Budget Committee conducting the hearings, oppose the shift. When Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, started asking Ferguson about the proposal, she cut him off, going so far as to shut off his microphone in the council chambers.
"I had a series of questions prepared on that that I will not ask now," Reilly said. "Geez, well that kind of screwed up my afternoon. What can I talk about?"
Austin said she did not want the issue discussed because it was in Rules and because Khan is suing Emanuel and key aldermen, claiming they have limited his budget to curtail his powers. But earlier in the day she commented on the lawsuit, saying Khan was "full of molasses."
Ferguson also said his relationship with Emanuel, who reappointed him to the watchdog post this year, has improved because of "maturation" on both their parts.
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Twitter @ReporterHal27 November 2010 – Photovoltaic manufacturing is still undergoing change in terms of technology and materials. Production costs per module need to come down to a more profitable level whilst maintaining durability and enhancing performance and functionality. AMI is organising the 2nd international conference on Polymers in Photovoltaics 2011 from 12-14 April 2011 at the Maritim Hotel in Cologne, Germany to discuss these issues. Senior Consultant, Kerry Satterthwaite will outline the market situation and future prospects, and lead manufacturer Solarfun will talk about the latest developments in modules.
A wide range of polymer materials is in use in solar modules in functions such as backsheets, silicon encapsulants, sealants and adhesives, and innovative front sheets. Multilayer, multi-material structures are now common for backing sheets with different functions provided by each layer. Industry standards are being developed by bodies such as Underwriters Laboratories and TUV with flammability and weathering performance testing. Polymers offer flexibility in production and use, however they must be properly specified and selected and there must be good inter-material adhesion and compatibility under the high performance conditions of moisture, sunlight, wind and snow in different areas of the world.
Renolit Belgium has entered the market with innovative backsheets including an integrated encapsulant layer for crystalline silicon PV modules. PET is increasingly being used in backsheets, so much so that a shortage is being predicted in the marketplace. Toray Films Europe supplies advanced PET films for photovoltaics. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics supplies a range of materials for solar applications and is looking at lightweighting options with plastics components. On the manufacturing side, Davis-Standard supplies extrusion expertise and equipment for encapsulant and backsheets.
Increasingly, polymers are being used as front sheets, for example the fluoropolymers PVDF and ECTFE from Solvay-Solexis, which also find use in backsheets. Another plastic for front sheets is PMMA, from companies such as Evonik Rohm, which is being tested in PV, BIPV and CPV.
Sealants and adhesives are critical for module performance. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory is involved in most aspects of module and materials testing for the photovoltaic industry, and Dr Michael Kempe has recently completed a study on testing of edge-seal materials. Saes Getters of Italy supplies a novel edge sealing “getter tape”, and 3M Deutschland is a leader in these applications.
The Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics has studied many aspects of polymer materials, and has reviewed the processing and mechanical behaviour of the encapsulants used for embedding solar cells. ECN is another lead research institute in photovoltaics and has looked at the balance between encapsulation quality and robustness. A small range of polymers are used in encapsulation, Specialized Technology Resources, Inc. is looking at next-generation materials. Huntsman Advanced Materials is one of the companies developing new materials and concepts for high efficiency modules. UV curing technology is being tested for encapsulants by Sartomer USA. Module manufacturing equipment is supplied by Meyer Burger Technology (Switzerland), and the company has looked at the use of EVA compared to other encapsulants for crystalline PV. In France, the Institut National de l’Energie Solaire is coordinating the European IMPRESS project, which is looking at injection moulding of encapsulants and PV frames.
AMI’s Polymers in Photovoltaics 2011 Conference brings together top materials experts, module component and module manufacturers to discuss the best materials and manufacturing technologies for the solar industry. It offers a meeting point for the industry to debate business trends and improvements in materials and properties. It provides a unique opportunity to network with the wide range of professionals who work with and produce photovoltaic systems worldwide.
Contact
Dr Sally Humphreys
Business Development Manager
Applied Market Information Ltd
Tel: +44 117 924 9442
Fax: +44 (0) 117 311 1534
[email protected]
www.amiplastics.com
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Browse our On Sale Today category to take advantage of today’s hottest deals and discounts.Social news site Reddit last month announced that it was creating something called “Reddit notes,” which would be used to help the company allocate around 10% of its company equity to active users. The giveaway had been something Reddit had originally promised to do upon raising $50 million in new venture capital funding in the fall.
At the time, I suggested that other startups should pay close attention to how Reddit structured these “notes,” particularly as a method for rewarding customer loyalty.
But now the Reddit “notes” seem to be on hold.
Earlier today, Reddit fired Ryan X. Charles, who it had hired last September as its cryptocurrency engineer. The company had hinted that notes would be at least partially based on cryptocurrency technologies, so I asked Charles what his departure meant for the program. His reply:
Notes over and not going to happen at all due to the legal difficulties and disinterestedness in bitcoin of the new execs… I don’t think they understood the legal difficulty in December. Until recently, they had not seriously thought about the project at all.
I have reached out to Reddit co-founder and executive chairman Alexis Ohanian for comment, and will update this post if I hear back.
UPDATE: Ohanian has responded, by saying the following: “We will be issuing redditnotes; our research leads us to want to wait until the law and technology around cryptocurrency are further along before deciding exactly how. We want to make sure we can give the community the full value of the equity when they receive it in the future, and today we haven’t been able to find a way to do that within existing regulations.”
Sign up for Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter on venture capital and private equity.Feyenoord midfielder Marko Veijnovic has received death threats at his home following the club’s recent poor run of results.
The 26-year-old was threatened in front of his wife by a group of men who pulled up in front of his house in two cars, the Telegraaf reports.
Police in Rotterdam have arrested seven people in connection with the incident, one of whom is reported to have admitted the offence.
Veijnovic’s wife called police and gave them details of the cars following the incident on Saturday evening.
Summer signing
The midfielder, a Dutch national of Bosnian Serb descent, was Feyenoord’s most expensive buy last summer when he signed for €3.5 million from Vitesse Arnhem.
He came on as a substitute in Sunday’s home game against ADO Den Haag, but could not save his team from losing 2-0. Feyenoord have now lost five games in a row in the Eredivisie, which represents the worst run of results in the club’s history.
The Telegraaf says the club is considering whether to arrange extra security for a number of players.The United States is a melting pot of different racial and ethnic groups, but it has not been clear how the genetic ancestry of these populations varies across different geographic regions. In a landmark study published by Cell Press December 18th in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 160,000 African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans, providing novel insights into the subtle differences in genetic ancestry across the United States.
"Our study not only reveals the historical underpinnings of regional differences in genetic ancestry but also sheds light on the complex relationships between genetic ancestry and self-identified race and ethnicity," says lead study author Katarzyna Bryc of 23andMe and Harvard Medical School.
Over the past 500 years, North America has been the site of ongoing mixing of Native Americans, European settlers, and Africans. Although much of the world has been genetically characterized, the United States has received less attention from population geneticists because of its complex ancestry patterns. Moreover, the relationship between genetic ancestry and self-described racial and ethnic identities in each region of the United States has not been deeply characterized.
To address this gap in knowledge, Bryc and her collaborators analyzed DNA sequence variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the genomes of 5,269 self-described African Americans, 8,663 Latinos, and 148,789 European Americans. These individuals actively participate in 23andMe research by submitting saliva samples, consenting for data to be used for research, and completing surveys. 23andMe is a personal genomics company that provides direct-to-consumer genetic testing and services that include the analysis of DNA samples to generate ancestry-related genetic reports.
The researchers found that regional ancestry differences reflect historical events such as waves of immigration. For example, Scandinavian ancestry is found in trace proportions in most states but comprises about 10% of ancestry in European Americans living in Minnesota and the Dakotas. They also found that individuals identify roughly with the majority of their genetic ancestry, contrary to expectations under a social "one-drop rule." Indeed, more than six million Americans who self-identify as European might carry African ancestry, and as many as five million self-described European Americans might have at least 1% Native American ancestry.
"These findings suggest that many individuals with partial African and Native American ancestry have 'passed' into the white community, thereby undermining the use of cultural labels that separate individuals into discrete, non-overlapping groups," Bryc says. "Taken together, our results suggest that genetic ancestry can be leveraged to augment historical records and inform cultural processes shaping modern populations."Oh sure, there are plenty of stories circulating now - like Joan's FP post today - about people finally being able to get quality, affordable health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. But that's only half the story.
After I was successfully enrolled (which by the way only took half an hour for myself, my wife, and my three offspring), I was almost instantly given the news that I qualify for coverage! Yay! followed by a page of other news about the new law. I've been keenly interested so I was already aware of most of that information.
The one exceptional item - the thing that I am convinced has Republicans foaming at the mouth - was buried at the end of that page.
Here's an actual screenshot from my session:
Do you see it? Do you understand why the Republicans have been so anxious to "kill the bill?" Pronouncing the website a train wreck, trying to keep people away?
Here, let me make it a little easier to see:
Still can't see it? Let me zoom in real close:
Right there, on that page, is everything the Republicans hate: a program designed to help people of modest means, run by the government - AND giving those same people an opportunity to exercise their franchise.
If there really was a left-wing conspiracy funded by George Soros, I'd put in an expense request to get the list of people who had created an account on healthcare.gov, and around October 1, 2014 I'd mail them each a postcard with a very simple message:
You know that health plan that you signed up for last year? Democrats made that happen. Not a single Republican voted for it. In fact Republicans did everything they could to keep it from happening. Remember that when you vote.
Demonstrating that government(when the right people are in charge) - and then telling the people that same government just helped that they can do something togovernment working? No wonder the Republicans are in a frenzy.
UPDATE 1:51pm EST (scoop won't let me use the update feature)
Reclist? thanks everyone! (first time)
As a follow-up - as noted in the comments, just because people can register to vote does not necessarily mean they will exercise that right - either by habit, or because of obstacles Republicans are trying to put in the way. In either case, the answer is the same: stay engaged. Don't agonize, organize!
UPDATE 2 10:00am 11-Dec-2013 (scoop apparently doesn't like my Chrome installation, either)
First, let me apologize for leaving out the VA/Tricare option from the poll. "Tricare for all" would be an excellent improvement to our health care delivery system.
Several commenters noted that the ACA would be saving their families a lot of money starting next year. Others pointed out that due to the increased competition, their employer-sponsored plans were going to be MUCH cheaper, saving the company and employees thousands of dollars.
By coincidence (and I don't believe in coincidence), I got an email this morning from Families USA, an advocacy group that has been pushing for better healthcare for all Americans. They have set up a website and a Facebook campaign to make it easier to share these kinds of success stories. So if you have one to tell, please do!
Families USA MyCoverageStory.org website
Families USA ACA success story Facebook campaignMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Women have taken to the streets over the draft law, as Tom Burridge reports
Thousands of Spaniards have protested in Madrid against a draft law backed by the government that would restrict the right to abortion.
Activists carried banners saying "Allow mothers to decide" and "Deciding makes us free".
The law would limit abortion to cases of rape, and instances where the health of the mother was at serious risk.
Under current legislation, any woman can have an abortion within the first 14 weeks of becoming pregnant.
'Risking women's lives'
Correspondents say Saturday's demonstration was one of the largest since Spain's centre-right government backed the new legislation in December.
Supported by several Spanish opposition parties, protesters called on Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, who drafted the law, to resign.
"I came because I think this takes our country back many years regarding women's rights, criminalising something that shouldn't be a crime," said demonstrator Ana Alonso.
"We overcame this a long time ago and we have a right to have abortion performed under proper conditions without risking women's lives and their health."
Image copyright AFP Image caption Demonstrators carried a figure of the justice minister dressed up as a vampire
Image copyright AFP Image caption Women's groups travelled from across Spain and other countries to take part
Image copyright AFP Image caption Correspondents say this was one of the biggest demonstrations against the proposals
The new law says early termination is no longer a right, and would only be allowed in cases of rape or when two doctors judge the mother's health to be at serious risk.
Currently women have the right to abort up to the 14th week of pregnancy, rising to 22 weeks in case of foetal deformities.
The current law, brought in by Spain's previous Socialist government in 2010, was opposed by the Catholic Church and conservative groups.
They say abortion law should not be based on a woman's right to decide, but the right to life of the unborn child.
The ruling Popular Party made changing the law one of its main promises in its 2011 election campaign.
The opposition Socialist Party has warned that the measure would send women into dangerous backstreet clinics for abortions.
The law still needs approval of parliament but is expected to pass because the Popular Party has a large majority.Bachus visited The News the morning after a standing-room-only crowd of 2,000 people attended a health care public forum he hosted in Birmingham Monday night.
TUSCALOOSA | Social Security could face a deficit within two years, according to U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus who met with The Tuscaloosa News editorial board Tuesday.
�The situation is much worse than people realize, especially because of the problems brought on by the recession, near depression,� said Bachus, R-Vestavia Hills, in an interview with the Tuscaloosa News editorial board.
Bachus, the ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, said most people seem unaware of the impending crisis. He initially said Social Security could face "default" within two years, but his staff responded later saying the Congresssman intended to say "deficit."
�What this recession has done to Social Security is pretty alarming,� he said. �We�ve known for 15 years that we were going to have to make adjustments to Social Security, but we still thought that was seven or eight years down the road. But if things don�t improve very quickly, we�re going to be dealing with that problem before we know it.�
The solvency of Social Security, which provides pensions for people older than 65, has not played a major role in the current debate about health care in Congress. Bachus said it will not likely be addressed in any health-care bill the House eventually passes, although if a Social Security bailout is needed, it will invariably have an impact on government health-care programs.
In the debate over health-care reform, Bachus said that he could support a bill that includes privately administered, nonprofit health-care co-operatives, and the elimination of fraud and waste in existing government programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
The creation of health-care co-ops run by members is an idea that has gained momentum as Democrats and President Barack Obama seem to have moved away from insisting on a �public option,� a government-run alternative to private health insurance offered by for-profit companies.
�I cannot vote for a bill that has the government intruding into the private sector, subsidizing health care and eventually putting the insurance companies out of business,� Bachus said.
As for the looming Social Security crisis, Bachus said solutions are beginning to be discussed.
�We could raise the retirement age, or in the worst case, cut back on some benefits,� he said. �But that is something we are just now beginning to get a handle on.�
Bachus visited The News the day after a standing-room-only crowd of 2,000 people attended a health care public forum he hosted in Birmingham on Monday night.
Unlike some town hall meetings that have turned chaotic across the country as members of Congress have returned to their districts during the August congressional recess, Bachus said there was �only a little friction� between opponents and supporters of various health-care proposals advanced by the Democratic majority in Congress.
�I think everyone was for the most part civil and we had a lot of people just agree to disagree,� he said. �But you can tell that health care is an issue that has energized the country, because I have never had a town meeting with 2,000 people. And we even had to turn away a lot of people because of fire department regulations.�
Reach Tommy Stevenson at [email protected] or 205-722-0194.FLINT, Mich. — It was the Fourth of July, a warm summer night in 2014, but Tim Monahan was shivering in a thick blanket as he watched fireworks from his front yard here. By the next afternoon his temperature had shot to 104.6, and doctors at the hospital he had checked into puzzled over what was wrong.
Two days later, they had an answer: Legionnaires’ disease, a virulent form of pneumonia caused by a type of bacteria that can multiply in water systems. Mr. Monahan, now 58, was given antibiotics and eventually recovered, but his case turned out to be at the leading edge of a Legionnaires’ outbreak that sickened at least 87 people in the Flint region, killing nine of them, from June 2014 through October 2015.
State officials still say they cannot conclusively link the outbreak to Flint’s contaminated water supply, partly because sputum cultures were not collected from patients. But the possibility of a link was raised in internal government emails as early as October 2014, and state officials did not inform the public of the outbreak until last month.
The Legionnaires’ cases started popping up as Flint residents were complaining about the foul-smelling, discolored water flowing into their homes after the city switched to a new water source, the Flint River, in April 2014. Soon they were reporting rashes and stomach ailments, and whistle-blowers eventually pointed to alarming levels of lead in the water supply and in children’s blood.Jared Genser is a Washington lawyer and senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
Next week, Russian President Vladimir Putin will learn from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) whether Russia will be banned from competing in the Winter Olympics in February in PyeongChang, South Korea, for orchestrating a state-run doping program that helped at least 695 athletes dodge drug testing. In recent weeks, Putin has rather ironically said that the United States is pushing for Russian athletes to be disqualified to interfere in Russia's presidential elections in March.
For decades, the Russian state has engaged in a systematic effort to pump its athletes full of performance-enhancing drugs in search of Olympic gold. Whistleblowers have alleged that up to 99 percent of Russian athletes have taken performance-enhancing drugs, with one explaining, "You can't be on the national team without using [performance-enhancing drugs]. If you don't take them, you have no future in sport."
This culture of cheating was fostered from top to bottom. The stunning Netflix documentary "Icarus" reported that the doping program was supported by Putin himself. The head of the Russian anti-doping organization's Moscow lab admitted that he had devised drug cocktails and administered steroids to athletes. Russian security forces facilitated the swapping of urine samples to prevent athletes from getting caught. And coaches told athletes that they wouldn't be successful without drugs.
Yet the Russian state has evaded all culpability from the IOC for corrupting the Olympics. Instead, Russia's athletes have personally borne the brunt of the consequences. More than 100 Russian athletes were banned from competing in the 2016 Rio Olympics, including the full weightlifting and track and field teams. And many others have had medals stripped from them for doping in prior Olympics.
While athletes deserve strong penalties for doping, the IOC has patently refused to address the culture of contempt fostered by Putin. Not only did he reject the evidence proving that Russia ran the country's doping program, but also state-owned media even fabricated news reports saying that the World Anti-Doping Agency's lead investigator had "dropped his charges of Russian state alleged participation in the doping abuse."
Ultimately, the Russian athletes who were pumped full of drugs by the state will pay the highest price for Russia's quest for gold. Studies on the use of performance-enhancing drugs indicate that long-term health impacts can be severe, including kidney failure, liver damage, increased likelihood of heart attack and deterioration of essential brain systems.
Putin has long understood that Russia's hosting and winning the Olympics generate national pride and garner Russian support for his expansionist foreign policy. From 2013 to March 2014, Putin's domestic approval rating skyrocketed after the February 2014 Sochi Olympics and Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014.
Putin's approach to the Olympics is just another example of his disregard for the international order. In short, he expects international institutions to bend to his will. When they don't, he dissociates from them. In just the past two years, Putin signed a law enabling Russia's top court to ignore its obligations under international human rights treaties, withdrew from the International Criminal Court the day after it concluded that Russia's annexation of Crimea was an occupation and terminated Russia's cooperation with the United States on a key nuclear pact that had required Russia to destroy its plutonium stockpiles.
But the Russian people care enormously about the Olympics, and Putin can't just refuse to compete. The IOC, therefore, is doing no favors to anyone if it responds to Russia's impunity with a mere slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, reports suggest that it is unlikely to impose a total ban on Russia — and may instead merely impose a financial penalty, which would be the practical equivalent of a free pass for the Russian state.
The only serious response would be for the IOC to ban the Russian team from competing under its own flag. If individual Russian athletes are found to be clean under rigorous international standards, they should be allowed to compete as neutrals. The sight of a Russian winning Olympic gold but standing on the podium without the Russian flag or national anthem would show that the Olympics stand for principle and fair play. It would also set an important example for Putin that there are consequences for flouting the rules of the international community.VICTORIA — B.C.’s conflict commissioner is getting a $67,000 raise, after MLAs on both sides of the legislature agreed he has so much work that his position should be made full-time.
Paul Fraser, part-time conflict commissioner since 2008, will now be paid $269,365 a year, after a vote in private by the all-party legislative management committee last week was approved by Premier Christy Clark’s cabinet.
“The legislative assembly management committee recommended that the members’ conflict-of-interest commissioner be made a full-time position, and as such that he be compensated accordingly,” according to a statement by the Justice Ministry,
“An increased workload for the commissioner has necessitated expanding the position to full-time, so that the commissioner can manage questions from members to ensure that they are dealt with in a timely manner.”
The conflict commissioner advises MLAs about conflict of interest matters, and investigates any allegations that politicians benefited personally by decisions they made.
He most recently issued an opinion clearing Energy Minister Bill Bennett of a potential conflict of interest involving wildlife harvest allocation policies while at the same time having a financial interest in a guide-outfitting business.
Fraser hired an outside commissioner to rule on a case involving Premier Christy Clark in 2013 because of a family conflict. Fraser’s son, John Paul, is deputy minister in charge of government communications.
Previous conflict commissioners had their salary set at $202,000 or 75 per cent of the salary of the auditor general of B.C. A new cabinet order changed the formula to 100 per cent of the auditor’s salary.
Fraser was re-appointed in 2013 by a committee of MLAs to a five-year term.
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and widely used in analyses of mean rest-CBF and of regional rest-CBF (multiple regression analyses and, in the case of the regional rest-CBF analysis, cluster-level statistics [40] for corrections of multiple comparisons were employed). However, there were many analyses in this study, and across the studies of this project, which can falsely increase risk of rejecting the null hypothesis with an increased number of tests. Thus, the results should be taken cautiously until replicated.
This is the first study to investigate the association between rest-CBF and cognitive functions among healthy young subjects. Recent neuroimaging studies focused on the associations between resting brain activity and cognition using the paradigm of TID and functional connectivity between different brain regions during rest. Our findings showed that mean and regionally specific rest-CBF during rest in healthy young subjects correlated with cognitive functions. The significance of the regional rest-CBF results did not change when the effect of rGMD was corrected. The findings suggest that, even in young cognitively intact subjects, resting brain activity (possibly underlain by default cognitive activity or metabolic demand from developed brain structures) is associated with cognitive functions.Australia’s most dangerous predators
By Chris Ord |
IT’S ALL VERY WELL to spend millions of dollars on Oprah Winfrey spruiking our wide, open spaces, but watch that publicity lose its gloss when actor Sam Worthington brings up the subject of Australia’s dangerous creatures on The Late Show with Dave Letterman.
Letterman: “Can you just go out and play?
I mean it’s dangerous in Australia.”
Worthington: “You’re aware of the dangerous animals. We have dugites…which is like one of the most poisonous snakes in the world…and if it bites you, you have 10 seconds…You have redback spiders; same thing, if it bites you, you have 10 seconds.”
Letterman: “So what’s a person to do?”
Worthington: “Pray.”
Which is exactly what Tourism Australia did when their media monitors caught wind of The Late Show interview: prayed that no-one was watching. Three and a half million isn’t many, is it?
And that’s the problem with the rep garnered by Australia’s creepy crawlies: yes we have some of the world’s most dangerous, but like Worthington’s most famous effort, Avatar, they’re also unfairly maligned if you consider the context. In general, Avatar didn’t harm anyone and for the most part neither do the creatures in our bush. It doesn’t help that the likes of Worthington (along with a legion of Poms and Kiwis) tend to blow things out of all proportion. I mean, honestly: a dugite (a type of brown snake found only in the south of Western Australia) while dangerous does not kill in 10 seconds. If it did, the seven year-old Perth boy who was bitten after a dugite crawled into his bedroom and wrapped around his arm while he slept, would not be alive. After seeking medical attention quickly, he made a full recovery.
And a red-back spider? From the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne: “Red-back spider bite is thought to be the commonest serious spider bite in Australia, particularly over the summer months. An antivenom was introduced in 1955 and no deaths attributed to treated redback spider bites have been reported since.”
Then there’s the online hysteria, an entry after a list of the world’s deadliest snakes reading: “Everything in Australia wants us dead, and everything has the capability to make that a reality. (Ianz09)” That reality, Ianz09, is about as plausible as Avatar. Still, there are a few creatures lurking in Australia’s wild places that, wrong time, wrong place, can cause, as the Monty Python crew would say, “just a flesh wound”, or so. Okay, so it’s a flesh wound you may want to get to the hospital in a hurry to treat, but it won’t necessarily kill you as quickly as Hollywood would have you believe. Unless it’s a crocodile. They’ll kill you quite quickly, actually.
FUNNEL-WEB SPIDER
(Atracinae)
A bite from this highly venomous spider can kill a human in two hours, with a toxic cocktail that switches on all your nerves at once.
While no-one has died from a funnel-web bite for more than 30 years, the spider remains a creature that raises hairs on the back of everyone’s neck. The Australian Venom Research Unit’s Dr Ken Winkel reckons the funnel-web is peerless, worldwide, in terms of how venomous it is.
“No other spider can kill an adult in two hours,” he says of the funnel web, which is a spider of ancient classification, more primitive than most. “They are a black and hairy, an almost demonic-looking spider – so they don’t do themselves any favours in the likeability stakes. And they are aggressive, especially the males in the summer looking for a mate.”
Ranging from 1-5cm, funnel-web spiders live in burrows in the ground, or in stumps, tree trunks or ferns. What most people think of as a funnel web is actually a collection of about 35 different species, many of which are dangerous. The Sydney funnel-webs, Atraxrobustus, garners the most attention. They carry a very powerful neurotoxin which can be administered in large doses – hence they get a particularly bad reputation and are responsible for 13 of Australia’s 27 recorded deaths from spider bites in the past 100 years. “But there are other species of funnel-webs that can cause trouble,” says Ken. “Particularly the tree-dwelling variety in northern NSW where the female is as dangerous as the Sydney funnel-web.” There is also a variety that lives around the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast hinterland whose venom, while not as bad as its Sydney cousin, can still cause serious illness.
A funnel-web’s venom is packed with at least 40 different toxic proteins (called peptides). Only one, robustoxin, is really dangerous to humans. Like snake neurotoxins, robustoxin disrupts nerve signals, but in the opposite way. Instead of shutting down nerve signals, it switches them all on at once, causing massive electrical overload in the body’s nervous system. The protein attaches itself to nerve synapses and prevents them from switching off – salivary glands, tear ducts and sweat glands all run uncontrollably, muscles begin to spasm, blood pressure climbs as vessels contract and then falls to dangerously low levels. Most fatalities occur from either cardiac arrest or a pulmonary oedema, where the capillaries around the lungs begin to leak and the patient effectively drowns.
As with with snakebite, first aid for a funnel-web envenomation is pressure-immobilisation while ensuring breathing and circulation are maintained along with urgent hospitalisation.
DISTRIBUTION: The Sydney funnel-web spider is found within 100km of the city. In the tropics and subtropics, they favour rainforests and higher altitudes, but in southern states they live in drier eucalypt forests and woodlands, as well as snow country.
HOW AND WHERE IT’LL STRIKE: Keep your hands out of deep, dark places. Get to hospital quickly if you’re fanged and apart from a case of arachnophobia, you’ll live.
NUMBER OF DEATHS: Nobody in Australia has died from a spider bite since 1980 after the successful introduction of antivenom for all native species.
DID YOU KNOW? Not all creatures are affected by funnel-web poison: mice, rabbits, guineapigs, dogs and cats are relatively immune and often survive 100 times the lethal human dosage. In general the male is five times more dangerous than the female.
BLUE-RINGED OCTOPUS
(Hapalochlaena maculosa, h. lunulata)
Tiny it may be, but this octopus can cause serious damage. With a painless sting, you won’t even know you’ve been bitten.
“The blue-ringed octopus represents a double-edged sword,” says Ken. “They are uncommon, reclusive, and don’t like human activity.” So pretty harmless, then? “Well, you need to work hard to be bitten. The last-recorded fatalities were instances where humans proactively interacted with the creature. That said, I know of a tourist recently who picked up a shell, put it in his pocket and there was a blue-ringed octopus inside, which bit him – they are quite small, smaller than you’d think.”
Under 12cm as a matter of fact, and its body is the size of a golf ball. They live in reef flats and tidal pools, secrete themselves in rocks and in crevices and, as in this case, have a habit of squatting in dead shells and discarded cans. The tourist in question got a nasty fright – through its salivary glands the blue-ringed octopus administers a powerful nerve toxin called tetrodotoxin, which causes a paralysing effect within 10 minutes. There is no antivenom.
“If you happen to be by yourself you may be in trouble,” says Ken. “But if someone is with you and knows to support your respiration – CPR if necessary – and you seek medical help urgently, then you will live.” As with snakebites, pressure-immobilisation is recommended for blue-ringed octopus envenomation. And just because you can’t see blue rings flashing at you from the rockpool, don’t think that it’s not a blue-ringed: the creature’s usual colour is a mottled brown. The bright, blue rings appear on its skin only when it is threatened (and thus you are in some danger of a bite).
If you do get bitten, it won’t be painful and may go unnoticed. But the toxin acts quickly and symptoms include weakness, numbness around the face, nausea and vomiting. Death may occur in as little as 30 minutes, especially in the vulnerable (children, the elderly, or people with heart and other health conditions).
DISTRIBUTION: Entire Australian coastline in warm, shallow waters.
HOW AND WHERE IT’LL STRIKE: Keep your hands and feet out of small, underwater crevices.
NUMBER OF DEATHS: It has only been attributed with causing three known deaths. There have been no deaths since the 1960s and hospital admissions are exceedingly uncommon.
DID YOU KNOW? The blue-ringed octopus has blue blood, three hearts and enough poison to kill 26 humans. The same nerve toxins injected by a blue-ring are found in the flesh of fugu fish – a pricey delicacy beloved by the Japanese. The ingestion of fugu that’s not been expertly prepared leads to more hospitalisations than blue-ringed octopus bite.
IRUKANDJI & AUSTRALIAN BOX JELLYFISH
(Carukia barnesi, malo kingi and chironex fleckeri)
It’s searingly hot and all you want to do is cool off in the ocean…but beware the deadly, silent and invisible killers lurking under tropical waters.
The Irukandji jellyfish is oft quoted as the most dangerous jellyfish, perhaps because less is known about it. It is highly poisonous and is also an unseen menace, being a tiny, translucent 1-2cm diameter bell. No wonder the Irukandji people, near Cairns, didn’t know it was the jellyfish causing a mysterious illness among their people.
The Irukandji’s four stinging tentacles trail up to 30cm behind them. Get stung by them and you can develop what is known as ‘Irukandji syndrome’. The sting site itself is only moderately painful, with little tissue damage, but approximately 30 minutes later, a victim develops symptoms, including severe back and abdominal pain, limb or joint pain, nausea, vomiting, profuse sweating and agitation. They may also experience numbness or paraesthesia – a sensation of tingling, burning, or pricking of the skin – and psychological phenomena such as a feeling of impending doom. Victims often require hospitalisation and serious painkillers and intravenous narcotics.
Despite the Irukandji’s reputation for causing illness, Ken rates the box jellyfish – a related but different grouping – as “undoubtably the most dangerous in the world”. It has been labelled as “the most lethal creature known to mankind”.”We still have a fatality every year or two from the box jelly,” Ken says. “In terms of creatures with the ability to kill quickly – a couple of minutes – it is almost peerless.”
The box’s lethality resides in its ability to deliver a significant amount of venom via hundreds of thousands of injections at once. “The Irukandji has four tentacles, one on each corner, whereas the box has up to 15 tentacles coming from each corner. That’s up to 60 tentacles all with millions of injection harpoons filled with venom.”
First-aid for box jellyfish stings involves pouring vinegar over the site, removing tentacles and taking painkillers; however, the vinegar does not remedy the poison already injected. The result of a sting is severe localised pain, often associated with vigorous attempts by the patient to remove the tentacles, confusion, agitation, unconsciousness with respiratory failure and/or cardiac arrest. Due to the rapidity of onset of symptoms, immediate first-aid is vital and cardiopulmonary resuscitation may be required.
DISTRIBUTION: Box jellyfish prefers to be near the coast, whereas Irukandji species tend to be both close to shore as well as further offshore, including near offshore reefs. They are both found near South East Asia.
HOW AND WHERE IT’LL STRIKE: Both jellyfish have tentacles that are generally invisible, can entangle you and have millions of harpoons that inject a lot of venom at once. The box jellyfish in particular is the only one on this list that can kill in minutes. Ergo, highly dangerous.
NUMBER OF DEATHS: Jellyfish account for more than 80 known deaths since 1883. The box jellyfish was responsible for 79 deaths, and Irukandji the other two.
DID YOU KNOW: Named after the Irukandji people, the Irukandji was first identified in 1961 by Dr Jack Barnes who, in order to prove it was the cause of so-called Irukandji syndrome (named in 1952), he captured the tiny jelly and allowed it to sting himself, his son, and a lifeguard.
INLAND TAIPAN
(Oxyuranus microlepidotus)
Get fanged by one of these guys and you’re in for a bumpy ride: this snake has the most toxic venom of any land snake in the world.
When it comes to boasts, this one takes the cake: the biggest yield recorded for one bite was 110mg – that’s enough to kill 100 humans. If you get envenomated, you’re in for a bumpy ride. The venom has a neurotoxin that immobilises by paralysis, the poison binding to nerve endings, blocking electrical activity and shutting down communication between the brain and muscles. You’ll experience headaches, nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, blurred vision and dizziness, sometimes accompanied by convulsions and, in severe cases, coma.
The neurotoxin is also a myotoxin, meaning it eats away at muscle tissue. Your urine may turn reddish-brown as muscles dissolve and are passed through your kidneys. In turn they are badly damaged by filtering so much tissue debris out of your blood, and kidney failure is a common complication and cause of death. Internal bleeding is the other major complication. The snake’s second main toxin is a anticoagulant, which prevents blood-clotting by removing the body’s supply of its natural blood-clotting agent, fibrinogen. This causes persistent bleeding from the bite site and can lead to more serious – sometimes fatal – internal haemorrhaging, especially in the brain.
Though it could potentially kill an adult human within 45 minutes, the inland taipan is not particularly aggressive and, with no known fatalities, and the only known bites being inflicted upon snake handlers effectively looking for trouble, you could say they present less of a threat than other snakes.
Dr Ken Winkel from the Australian Venomous Research Unit at the University of Melbourne, rates the brown snake as Australia’s most dangerous based on the combined factors of venom toxicity (highly toxic), temperament (more ‘nervous’ than the inland taipan), distribution (widespread across mainland Australia) and likelihood of encounter given their diverse habitat (higher). “The brown snake – considered the second-most venomous land snake in the world – is much more nervous and more likely to strike,” says Ken. “While there are no known deaths from the inland taipan, every year there is death by a brown because it is more widely distributed and it doesn’t mind urban and farm areas.”
Of all Australian snakes, the brown is responsible for the most carnage. “Of the average 500 to 600 annual admissions to hospital attributed to snakebites, 50 per cent can be attributed to browns,” Ken says. He points out that Victorians do have more trouble with the tiger snake, which accounts for more hospitalisations in that state than the brown. Even so, Australia-wide there are only about 2-4 deaths a year as a long-term average over the past 30 years for all snakebites.
DISTRIBUTION: There have been sightings in northern NSW and in northern SA so the true range is unknown.
HOW AND WHERE IT’LL STRIKE: You’re unlikely to encounter it, unless you’re a desert dweller. But if you do, and it bites, you’re in strife.
NUMBER OF DEATHS: All recorded bites to date have been to snake handlers and no deaths have been documented.
DID YOU KNOW? If the situation is handled calmly, it can take hours before a serious paralysing effect presents in an adult bitten by a taipan or other venomous Australian snake. Using immobilisation and bandage pressure, you can buy yourself hours, if not days to get assistance. It is better to stay put and send for a chopper than try to walk out of the bush when bitten.
SALTWATER CROCODILE
(Crocodylus porosus)
Regarded as one of nature’s most effective killing machines, you don’t stand a chance if a hungry saltie takes a liking to you.
The salty has reason to look so smug as it eyes you off from the riverbank: it is the world’s largest reptile and regarded as one of nature’s most effective killing machines. Most salty attacks occur between late September and January when crocodiles are hungry after the dry season and are preparing to breed. On land they are fast (faster than a horse over short distances) and in the water you won’t know they are there until you’re cuddling one as you succumb to its signature ‘death roll’.
When they strike a large animal (like us), crocodiles usually grab a head or limb and then roll you into the water, generally breaking your neck or drowning you, so they can then dismember you into manageable bite-sized chunks. Their immensely powerful jaws will easily crush your bones. “Holding a 5 kilogram croc around the neck is hard when it really starts to struggle. With a much larger animal (say 500 kilograms) you have little chance,” says Professor Grahame Webb, Australia’s leading expert on crocodiles and chief of Crocodylus Park, a crocodile research and education centre in Darwin. Grahame reckons salties deserve their fearsome reputation. “Those who sugar-coat salties and the danger they present are doing themselves, the public and crocodiles in general a great disservice,” he says. “Dive into a river in their territory and there is 100 per cent probability you will be taken. Salties are a serious predator.”
Salties are also smarter than your average bear. Croc researcher Dr Adam Britton says that while crocodilian brains are much smaller than those of mammals (as low as 0.05 per cent of body weight in the saltwater crocodile), they are capable of learning difficult tasks with little conditioning. He suggests that saltwater crocodiles learn faster than lab rats and can track the migratory routes of prey as seasons change.
Stay away from attack zones: Mangrove swamps, waterways and riverbanks are all favourites. If your adventures necessarily take you to such places, he suggests remaining in something safe like your 4WD or a sturdy boat.
He adds a warning: “Don’t let alcohol dampen the resolve to not go swimming in areas where there are salties, especially at night.”
DISTRIBUTION: Found in coastal-river systems, coastal areas, some offshore islands and in some cases hundreds of kilometres from salt water. Protected since 1974, numbers have recovered almost back to pre-colonial populations.
HOW AND WHERE IT’LL STRIKE: If you enter their domain without regard, extremely high. If it’s at night and you’re drunk, pretty much a certainty you’ll be doing the death roll mambo with one.
NUMBER OF DEATHS: 1-2 known deaths per year, usually highly publicised due to their viciousness and aggression. 4-10 non-fatal attacks per year.
DID YOU KNOW? The longest croc ever measured and verified was 6.4m (21ft). It could have weighed more than 1000kg. In Australia, there are unverified reports of crocs up to 8m.Share This On Social
The British investment bank Barclays lowered its forecast for crude oil prices in late 2018, but stressed that supports the optimistic attitudes of the raw material. The analysts expect the European benchmark Brent crude to be traded at price of 67 USD per barrel at the end of next year, against previous forecast for 77 USD per barrel.
“We maintain a bullish stance since this price is still 10% above the curve of futures”, the Barclays.
The bank left its forecast for the average price of Brent oil in 2017 unchanged at 57 USD per barrel. In the second quarter of this year, experts expect this sort of oil cost an average 62 USD per barrel.
British bank expects US light crude oil WTI cost an average of 56 USD per barrel in 2017 and 65 USD per barrel in 2018.New Cruise Search Select a Destination: (any) All Destinations Africa Alaska Alaska Gulf Northbound Alaska Gulf Southbound Alaska Inside Passage Asia Australia Bahamas Baja Mexico Bermuda CANADA Canada Canada/New England Canada/New England *OLD* Caribbean Coastal Cruise To Nowhere Eastern Caribbean Eastern Europe Europe Far East Greek Isles Hawaii Mediterranean Mexico Middle East New England New Zealand Northern Europe PACIFIC NORTHWEST PACIFIC NORTHWEST Panama Canal South America South Pacific Southeast Asia Southern Caribbean Tahiti Transatlantic Transcanal Transpacific US Atlantic Coast US River Cruise Western Caribbean Western Europe Western Europe Western Mediterranean World Cruise Sailing Month: Nights: All 3-6 Nights 7-9 Nights 10 Nights + Select a Cruise Line: All Cruise Lines Ama Waterways Azamara Carnival Celebrity Costa Crystal Cunard Disney Holland America MSC Cruises Norwegian Oceania Princess Regent Seven Seas Royal Caribbean Seabourn Silversea Uniworld River Viking River Cruises Windstar Select a Ship: Select a ship Select a Departure Port: (any) Acapulco, Mexico Anchorage Baltimore, Maryland Baltra (Galapagos) Bayonne, New Jersey Boston, Massachusetts Charleston, South Carolina Copenhagen Fengdu, China Fort Lauderdale, Florida Galveston, Texas Harwich (London), England Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii Houston, Texas Istanbul, Turkey Jacksonville, Florida Long Beach, California Los Angeles, California Miami, Florida Mobile, Alabama New Orleans, Louisiana New York, New York Norfolk, Virginia Passau Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Port Canaveral, Florida Rome, Italy San Diego, California San Francisco, California San Juan, Puerto Rico Seattle Southampton, England Sydney, Australia Tampa, Florida Tikehau, Tahiti Vancouver Venice, Italy Common Questions First Time Cruisers
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Unikrn EU will attempt to expand the company’s real-money esports betting from the UK and Australia to the wider European region. The platform will feature both skill and spectator betting, tournaments, team ownership, and a casino.
On top of this, Unikrn has been granted a betting license by the Malta Gaming Authority. Rahul Sood, CEO of Unikrn, said:
“For a little over a year, Unikrn EU has been working with the Malta Gaming Authority to acquire our new license. Malta has some of the highest regulatory requirements and processes, they are by every measure the gold standard and one of the most respected authorities for responsible and ethical wagering.”
Unikrn’s cryptocurrency, UnikoinGold, will be the primary means of participation for the platform. The company’s coin sale, which was announced back in September, is still in progress, but has already raised over $30 million with two weeks remaining.
“Our vision for UnikoinGold is to make it the universal esports and gaming token,” said Sood. “We see a future where UnikoinGold is in the hands of millons of gamers and esports fans, ushering in incredible opportunities to use UnikoinGold inside and outside of Unikrn’s own properties.”
UnikoinGold has become the highest funded esports-related coin sale, perhaps part in-due to the company’s willingness to allow users to purchase the coin with CS:GO skins. The token sale won’t wrap up until October 22.
While Sood’s aspirations seem a bit lofty, his company will likely continue to make waves in esports betting and cryptocurrency. Hoping to combine the ideas presented by companies like Firstblood and Skincoin, the new venture will combine features from several other platforms, such as tournament hosting and other user activities outside of traditional gambling.A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York, who I have known over ten years and trust, has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya.
The hideous King of Bahrain has called in troops from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait to attack pro-democracy protestors in Bahrain.
Can you imagine the outrage if Gadaffi now called in the armies of Chad. Mali and Burkina Faso to attack the rebels in Ben Ghazi?
But do you think that those in power, who rightly condemn Gadaffi’s apparent use of foreign mercenaries, will condemn this use of foreign military power by oil sheiks to crush majority protestors in Bahrain? Of course they won’t. We just had Sky News rationalising it by telling us that the Gulf Cooperation Council have a military alliance that a state can call in help if attacked. But that does not mean attacked by its own, incidentally unarmed, people. NATO is a military alliance. It does not mean Cameron could call in US troops to gun down tuition fees protestors in Parliament Square.
This dreadful outrage by the Arab sheikhs will be swallowed silently by the West because they are “our” bastards, they host our troops and they buy our weapons.
I do hope this latest development will open the eyes of those duped into supporting western intervention in Libya, who believe those who control the western armies are motivated by humanitarian concern. Bahrain already had foreign forces in it – notably the US fifth fleet. Do you think that Clinton and Obama will threaten that they will intervene if foreign armies are let loose on pro-democracy demonstrators? No they won’t.
Whether this will have any effect on the railroading of public opinion behind military intervention in Libya remains to be seen. I am fascinated to hear, for example, whether Ming Campbell and Phillippe Sands, who wrote of Our Duty To Protect The Libyan People, also believe we have a duty to pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain to protect them from attack by foreign forces.
We know from Iraq and Afghanistan, Serbia, Lebanon and Gaza that the “collateral damage” from the initial bombing of Libyan air defences will kill more people than are dying already in the terrible situation in Libya. While a no-fly zone would help rebel morale, most of the actual damage rebels are sustaining is from heavy artillery; without a no tank, no artillery and no gunboat zone, a no-fly zone will not in itself tip the military balance.
It appears that getting rid of Gadaffi may be a longer slog than we would like, but an attempt at a quick fix will lead to another Iraq, and give him an undeserved patriotic mantle. It was former UK Ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles who said western military intervention in Libya should be avoided above all because of the law of unintended consequences. One consequence has happened already, unintended by the liberals who fell in behind the calls for military attacks on Gadaffi. They helped cause the foreign military suppression of democracy in Bahrain. For Clinton and Obama, it is a win-win forwarding US foreign policy on both Libya and the Gulf, where they don’t want democracy.
People of good heart should weep.We Own It founder Cat Hobbs makes the case for a Facebook we all own.
Just like the railway, Facebook is a private monopoly running a public service. We, the public, don't have real competition and consumer choice, but we don't have a democratic say as citizens either.
The internet has been a virtual wild west, fast-moving and little regulated, with tech companies competing for territory. But now there are clear natural monopolies developing.
Author Jonathan Taplin points out that Google has an 88% market share in search advertising, Facebook (and subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77% of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74% share in the e-book market.
Economic theory - and real life experience - suggests monopolies need to be regulated, if not brought into public ownership. Here are five reasons why all of us should own Facebook.
1) Public ownership needn't mean state control
Nick Srnicek argued today in the Guardian that Google, Amazon and Facebook are 'platform monopolies' and suggested they should be nationalised. He explains that reaching a critical mass of users is key to the success of these businesses, and it's why they're so entrenched.
He's right. But if you're shouting "I don't want Theresa May getting hold of my Facebook data", we'd agree!
The solutions we need here are surely international, not national. And these companies have powerful data about private individuals - we should be wary about how governments could use this, especially in dangerous political situations. Could we create some kind of new cooperative, democratic, accountable institution rather than relying on nation states?
We believe in a broad definition of public ownership. It can be local, regional, national or international. And it can involve different models like cooperatives and community ownership - as long as profits are reinvested and there is democratic control.
We could think really imaginatively about what it would mean for the public to collectively own some of the public spaces on the internet. Put aside the practical challenges for a moment - we'll come back to those.
But what's the problem anyway? Those clever people at Facebook and Google know exactly what we want, don't they? And they're delivering? Not really..
2) Tech companies profit when you're addicted to the internet
If you've ever felt addicted to the internet, you're not alone. We're all endlessly scrolling through Facebook, messaging on Whatsapp or watching the next YouTube video. We might prefer to be out in the sunshine, playing with our children, or getting things done - but we're staring down at our phones. And it's not a coincidence.
We are the product here. Tech companies make money by advertising to us. So the more time we spend online, the better. These companies are in a race for our attention, and they're using their smartest designers in Silicon Valley to take as much of it as they can. These designers often protect their own children and themselves from their own technology.
They know that we get a shot of dopamine every time we see a notification. Those notifications make the internet addictive. Unpredictable but often rewarding - just like gambling in a slot machine, but easier to access.
They know that humans thrive on social praise and respond to social pressure. So they tell us when a message has been seen, so we feel pressure to always be in conversation.
They incentivise teenagers to collect'streaks' of ongoing communication on snapchat, even if they have nothing to say - no wonder so many teens are staying indoors instead of going out partying. When we're feeling lonely, they give us somewhere to go.
They know how inertia works. So they autoplay the next video, they always give us something more to look at, they leave out any'stopping cues'.
If we don't do something about it, the battle for your attention will only get more brutal.
3) We could have technology that prioritises human well being, instead
Do we want to be checking our smartphones every few minutes in a state of addled confusion? It doesn't have to be this way.
Time Well Spent is a new movement which calls for better tech design. Its founder, Tristan Harris, explains the manipulative tricks that tech companies use to hijack our attention. He says designers could instead be tweaking technology on a large scale to make us less distracted online.
This could involve creating a new metric for measuring success on the internet which helps us live the lives we want. Couchsurfer is leading the way on this - it measures success by clocking up good time spent with new friends, and subtracting time spent online, counting it as a cost.
Perhaps there's a way of creating another metric that would work against fake news and for useful, authentic news sources?
But why would private tech companies want to do any of this? Why would they put our well being ahead of their profits from advertising?
4) Publicly owned social media could help us solve problems
Professor Philip Howard argues that 'Facebook is now public infrastructure and should be treated as such'. He believes the platform could help us solve social problems using big data. Public health, national security and democracy could all potentially benefit.
Social media - and the internet in general - creates an exciting marketplace of ideas that could help us all. But the barriers to entry are getting higher and higher.
When We Own It started up in 2013, there was much more 'organic reach' on Facebook (a good response to a post meant it would reach a bigger audience). Now, it's increasingly a place where organisations must pay to connect with their supporters and reach new ones. That trend is set to continue.
The deck is stacked in favour of multinationals with big advertising budgets, while smaller start ups (which may have good ideas) struggle to get a foothold.
5) We need communities, not corporations, to decide how online spaces work
The internet itself is a public space and so are social media. Facebook and Twitter are places where people share information, explore new ideas, promote products and coordinate political activity. They're not going away anytime soon - and we wouldn't want them to.
But right now, they are places where the rules are set and enforced by unaccountable corporations. For example, Facebook decides on the range of ‘reactions’ we can give (creating profitable data about our emotional states |
year so guests can continue singing along to their favorite songs with Anna and Elsa.
The last day for guests to ride Maelstrom will be Oct. 5, 2014. After that, construction will begin on the Frozen ride, which is expected to be completed in early 2016.Premier Discovers Oil Offshore Falklands At Isobel Deep
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Premier discovers oil offshore Falklands Islands at its Isobel Deep prospect, in well 14/20-2, moving the area closer to production.
The UK based Premier Oil announced the news Monday Jan 11th, stating that the firm has “successfully confirmed the oil discovery encountered in the original Isobel Deep well.”
Premier also gave details of new discoveries found, whilst completing the well.
Premier Discovers Oil Offshore
The drilling operations took the well to a total depth of 9888 feet (3014m), encountering a number of oil bearing sandstones between depths of 8412 feet (2564m) and 9386 feet (2861m), with no oil-water contacts being made.
Premier Oil will now take time to calibrate data gained from its latest well with that form existing 3D seismic surveys, to better determine the extent of the reservoirs and, to plan further plans for the licence.
Drilling operations are currently plugging and abandoning the well, inline with company plans, before moving on to Premier’s Chatham prospect.
Commenting on the news, Premier’s Exploration Director, Robin Allan, said: “The results of this well confirm the success of the Isobel Deep 14/20-1 well announced in May last year.”
“We have encountered a substantial oil bearing interval, which confirms the potential of this part of the North Falkland basin as a standalone discovery.”
“This successful re-drill of the Isobel Deep oil sand along with the additional discovery of new oil-bearing sandstones, is extremely encouraging for the prospectivity of the area with a proven petroleum system and a number of prospects established.”
Further evaluation will now be required to calibrate the well with the existing 3D seismic in order to determine future plans and the extent of the discovered resource.
Operations have now been suspended and the well will be plugged and abandoned as planned. The rig will then move to the Chatham well location.Trucker David Fredericksen uses a fire extinguisher to fight a raging fire after a Lincoln carrying a woman and her one year old granddaughter crashed into a semi on Interstate 10 in Biloxi, Mississippi on August 11th, 2014. The car crashed into the semi's fuel tank, causing an explosion and fire that shut down the westbound lanes of Interstate 10 at Highway 49. Both the woman and her granddaughter were rescued without serious injury.His son posted the dash cam video on Youtube with the following comments:[quote]The time shown on the video is wrong, this happened monday, august 11th 2014A car t-bones a semi truck on I10 near Biloxi, Mississippi. The car struck the fuel tank of the semi causing a large fire ball. The doors of the car were jammed shut and the driver suffering a broken leg and could not exit the vehicle.Luckily my father had a fire extinguisher on hand to fight back the flames and give enough time to pull the driver and her 1 year old granddaughter out of the flaming vehicle. Once the passengers are free from the vehicle the flames rapidly grow in strengthconsuming the vehicle.Thankfully my father had the presence of mind, bravery, and forethought of carrying a fire extinguisher, to be the first person on scene to risk his own life in order to possibly saveanother and to inspire others and lead them into taking action. Everyone involved in the rescue effort is a hero in my books.The police and fire department responded within minutes of the accident and also deserve praise.Remember to treat truck drivers well as they are often the first responders in automobile accidents.Everyone involved was okay, the driver of the vehicle suffered a broken leg and all others had only minor injuries.My father said he was surprised he was the first one there while everyone else stayed in their vehicles. It takes a huge amount of bravery to be the first to lend a hand. My guess is most people were hesitant to help because they figured the occupants could not have survived.When he went to pull the child out of the car the smoke made it very difficult for him to breathe and his only thought was getting the child out of the vehicle.[/quote]For licensing/usage please contact: [email protected] flags and corruption by the CIA, FBI and US Government to create an endless war against Islam, plus the financial gains for the elite interested in conflict in the middle east are discussed with Sibel Edmonds. Where is the conspiracy coming from, and what is behind fear mongering over ISIS in Iraq and Syria? We look at the new domino theory, 9/11 conspiracy, The Lone Gladio and Edmonds’ history as a whistleblower in this full length Buzzsaw interview hosted by Sean Stone.
GUEST BIO:
Sibel Edmonds is editor of Boiling Frogs Post, founder-director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, and author of the acclaimed book Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, and The Lone Gladio, a Spy Thriller. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. Ms. Edmonds has been subjected to several government-asserted State Secrets Privilege orders, and the U.S. Congress has been indefinitely gagged and prevented from taking up her case through unprecedented retroactive classification orders issued by the Department of Justice. She is nationally recognized as the most classified woman in the United States. She has an MA in public policy from George Mason University and a BA in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University.
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EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:01 Welcome to Buzzsaw.
00:50 Introducing Sibel Edmonds.
01:00 Working for the FBI, becoming a whistleblower and translating and interpreting intelligence.
07:10 The FBI, CIA and U.S. government surveillance, blackmail and foreign bribery.
16:40 Americans funding extremist cells and carrying out terror events.
23:40 Was 9/11 U.S. propaganda to promote war against Islam?
33:10 Financial gains of U.S. intervention.
41:20 Domino effect in the Middle East and “The Lone Gladio.”
49:50 Thanks and goodbye.Guests: Hal Lublin Hal Lublin Guests: Danielle Radford Danielle Radford Guests: Mike Eagle Mike Eagle
It’s the final stop before the last Big 4 WWE show of the year!
Survivor Series continues to have tons of wrenches thrown into it at the 11th hour. Turns out Alexa Bliss will be facing Charlotte on Sunday after she beat Natalia for the Smackdown Women’s title. Between this, Roman Reigns returning, and Jason Jordan being replaced on the RAW team, there’s a lot going on. But is all of this serving to make for a better show, or is it just showing how haphazardly WWE is putting this together?
Speaking of Roman he and the Shield finally had their first match as a unit in years. They’re all set to face the New Day in few days. Should they have wait for a bit longer for that Shield reunion? How about that RAW invasion? What are the stakes as we approach Sunday?
And how excited is Danielle to have a fourth season of Lucha Underground confirmed?!
Main Event
Triple H is officially the fifth member of Monday Night RAW’s Survivor Series team! Between him, Kurt Angle, Shane McMahon and John Cena, that’s FOUR part-time wrestlers split across each team. Is this the best way to utilize a partite performer in WWE? What is? Should a part-timer ever be champion? We’ll talk about it.Mary Gatter, the Planned Parenthood senior executive who infamously was caught on tape saying “I want a Lamborghini” while discussing and arranging the sale of body parts of aborted babies has been caught again.
As LifeNews reported in 2015, Mary Gatter, the Medical director at Planned Parenthood Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley in California, was caught selling aborted baby body parts to undercover investigators posing as officials with a biotech company that acts as a middleman to sell aborted baby body parts to universities and other places that conduct such research.
In the prior video, Gatter discusses the pricing of aborted baby body parts — telling the biotech company officials that the prices for such things as a baby’s liver, head or heart are negotiable. She also tells the officials that she could talk with the Planned Parenthood abortion practitioners to potentially alter the abortion procedure to kill the baby in a way that would best preserve those body parts after the unborn child is killed in the abortion.
In this new video, Gatter is again caught haggling over per-specimen pricing for livers, lungs, and brains, even while insisting the purchaser must do all the work to harvest.
The video is the second of a never-before-seen batch of undercover footage being released by The Center for Medical Progress.
At a Planned Parenthood conference evening reception, CMP investigators posing as buyers from a biotech company are introduced to Dr. Gatter for the first time by Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of Medical Services.
“I wanted you to meet Mary Gatter,” says Dr. Nucatola, before Dr. Gatter steps forward.
Gatter was for many years the Medical Director of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, before moving to the same position at the Pasadena affiliate, and then being elected President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Medical Directors’ Council. As Medical Director at PPLA, Gatter oversaw the affiliate’s partnership with Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, a local for-profit fetal organ and tissue harvesting company.
“I did it in LA, I’m committed to it, I think it’s a great idea,” says Gatter to the purported body parts buyers. Discussing the number of abortions at her Pasadena clinic, Gatter asks, “What kind of volume do you need and what gestational ages?”
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must De-Fund Planned Parenthood Immediately
During the conversation, Gatter advises, “You know, you have to pay a little money to use the space.” After asking for a ballpark figure, the buyer observes, “Most people now seem to be doing per specimen.”
“Per specimen. Like $75 a specimen?” Gatter replies. After the buyer asks for clarification, Gatter repeats, “$75 a specimen, or $50 a specimen?” The buyer replies, “What we’ve been quoting is $50 per specimen. I think some people are doing more, some slightly less.”
Gatter then comments, “Yeah, $50’s on the low end, $50 [per specimen] was like 12 years ago.”
The buyer then explains, “What we like about per-specimen is that way we’re not paying for [fetal] material that we can’t use, you know?” Gatter nods, saying, “Yeah yeah, yeah.”
Federal law permits reimbursement for specified costs in a fetal organ or tissue donation, but prohibits the purchase and sale of the organs and tissues themselves (42 U.S.C. 289g-2).
The buyer continues, “If we can get a liver, a lung, and you know, a brain–” before Gatter interjects, “But you would show up to do this? You would send somebody,” to which the buyer answers affirmatively. Gatter concludes the conversation saying, “Yeah I’d be willing, give me a call.”
According to contracts and invoices, the real-life fetal organ and tissue wholesaler companies Novogenix, StemExpress, and Advanced Bioscience Resources all made monthly payments to Planned Parenthood based on the number of resalable fetal specimens the wholesalers’ workers could harvest inside the abortion clinics. Planned Parenthood told Congressional investigators it kept no contemporaneous records of actual costs for reimbursement under the law.
The Novogenix contract promises Planned Parenthood Los Angeles $45 “per donated specimen.” Planned Parenthood Los Angeles does over 15,000 abortions every year, but has never publicly admitted how much money they received total under their contract with Novogenix. In December 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Select Investigative Panel both referred Planned Parenthood Los Angeles and Novogenix to the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice for further investigation and criminal prosecution.
CMP project lead David Daleiden notes, “The fact that Novogenix, StemExpress, and ABR stationed their own workers inside Planned Parenthood abortion clinics to perform the harvesting, packaging, and transport of aborted baby body parts demonstrates that Planned Parenthood had no reimbursable costs under the law. The volume-based sums that Planned Parenthood charged these businesses for baby parts are criminal trafficking and profiteering in fetal body parts. The U.S. Department of Justice should take heed of the Congressional investigations’ criminal referrals and prosecute Planned Parenthood to the full extent of the law, and taxpayers must stop being forced to subsidize Planned Parenthood’s criminal abortion empire.”The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, or BAMPFA, has adopted an ambitious plan for achieving a targeted budget deficit reduction of $582,000 set by the recently unveiled campus fiscal year 2018 budget, including plans to generate $850,000 in new revenue, increase its endowment by $5 million and reduce the number of scheduled exhibitions as part of cost-saving measures.
As part of its Tuesday announcement of its fiscal year 2018 budget, the campus-provided draft versions of campus divisional dashboards — budget proposals which detail the financial expectations of various campus bodies, including BAMPFA.
Campus administration plan to reduce the $110 million structural budget deficit by about $54 million over the next fiscal year, and to do so, has set budget improvement plans for nearly all divisions across campus.
Despite a years-long trend of incremental reductions in campus support to BAMPFA, the fiscal year 2018 budget sees no reduction in campus monetary support for BAMPFA, according to BAMPFA media relations manager AJ Fox. BAMPFA director and chief curator Lawrence Rinder added that he was not concerned about the state of the museum in the overall campus budget.
“I feel confident that Chancellor Christ understands the value of the arts to the core mission of UC Berkeley,” Rinder said in an email. “She has already shown support both for BAMPFA and the Arts and Design Initiative, the mandate of which is to support the arts across campus.”
That initiative — which earlier this year hosted a campuswide “Made at Berkeley” exhibition spanning multiple departments and schools — highlights the connections between the various arts-oriented facets of the campus. The “arts units” of the campus “have thus far been asked to share the burden of the deficit on an equitable and fair basis in relation to other campus units,” according to Rinder.
That’s not to say the burden is light — according to BAMPFA’s budget dashboard, the museum will have to focus “on a more limited number of prioritized programs” in response to “shifting financial realities.”
Rinder admits that this language foretells a reduction in the number of exhibitions BAMPFA will be scheduling. But he is also confident that these adjustments can be leveraged for the better.
“We should be able to do this by relatively modest changes such as increasing the amount of time that exhibitions are on view.,” Rinder explained in an email.
This, according to Rinder, would “have the added benefit of enabling greater viewership and in-depth appreciation” of the exhibits that are shown in these longer runs.
Cost-cutting aside, a common theme across many of the arts-oriented segments of campus is the importance of philanthropy and fundraising in stabilizing operating budgets against the uncertain winds of public funding. But Rinder revealed that for BAMPFA, a key change beyond hiring additional fundraising staff and restructuring internal departments has made a massive impact: location.
In early 2016, the museum completed a move from its old location on Bancroft Way — a venue deemed seismically unsafe — to its new home on Center Street.
That move has been a boon for the museum, as the more centralized, city-oriented location has attracted a wider audience than the more sequestered Woo Hon Fai Hall on Bancroft Way has in recent years, according to Rinder.
“Our confidence stems as well from the dramatic increase in attendance and membership that we have enjoyed since our move to downtown Berkeley,” Rinder said in an email. “These metrics are a signal that we will be able to enjoy a larger pool of potential donors, some of whom should be able to ‘move up the ladder’ and become significant donors and/or trustees.”
Through this confluence of increased membership and targeted fundraising, Rinder said in an email BAMPFA has projected an income goal for the fiscal year 2018 that “represents an increase of approximately $850k over last year, of which approximately $350k is intended to cover anticipated expense increases.” In this way, the museum is on track to tackle the $582,000 target set for it by Christ’s budget, according to Rinder.
Patrons of BAMPFA, and the arts in general, may have a reason to remain hopeful about the museum’s continuing prospects.
“I have seen no evidence that the arts will be specifically targeted for unusually deep cuts,” Rinder said in an email.
Imad Pasha is the arts & entertainment editor. Contact him at [email protected]. Tweet him at @prappleizer.The New Jersey Assembly has passed a bill, which may allow Tesla to carry its sales directly to customers without involving an intermediary. The bill will now be presented to state Senate for approval and if passed, will permit every zero-emission vehicle producer to sell directly to consumers.
Earlier this year, state Motor Vehicle Commission objected on Tesla for setting up company-owned outlets and engaging straight with consumers. The commission demanded that the manufacturer should be blocked from direct sales.
Although the sales figures aren’t very impressive in the US, Tesla’s direct selling strategy has concerned automotive dealers in every state across the country. After this legislation is approved by state senate and signed by Governor Chris Christie, Tesla Motors will be allowed to sell its zero-emission electric vehicles in the country through its own outlets.
Moreover, the sanctioned bill included that the manufacturers would demand its dealers not more than once in ten years to renovate the facilities. This decision has been admired and supported by New York State Automobile Dealers’ Association.
Besides the confrontation from independent automotive dealers and fuel companies, Tesla Motors is expanding itself across United States with its own display and sales centers. Recently, the company opened a new gallery at Dallas’ North Park Center, which is the first one in North Texas.A Deltona man confronted by his grandmother for drinking her two bottles of wine bit her on the shoulder, investigating Volusia deputies said.
A Deltona man confronted by his grandmother for drinking her two bottles of wine bit her on the shoulder, investigating Volusia deputies said.
Blake Hale, 19, also gave his 70-year-old grandpa a bloody nose, an arrest report shows.
Deputies were called to the Albury Avenue home in Deltona at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday where 59-year-old Sue Wilson reported her grandson had bitten her, investigators said.
Wilson said Hale was acting drunk when she came home and she noticed two bottles of her wine were empty, deputies said.
The woman reported Hale became defensive, angry and started yelling obscenities at her. The verbal argument escalated into a physical confrontation and Hale started to bite Wilson on the shoulder as she walked out the front door, the report said.
Wilson had a bite mark on her right shoulder, deputies said.
When deputies made contact with Wilson's 70-year-old husband, he reported Hale had punched him and given him a minor bloody nose.
Deputies arrested Hale and charged him with battery on a person 65 years or older and battery, the arrest report states.The first in a slated trilogy, Mad Shelia seems to have something in common with Mad Max.
We knew China had thriving cottage industry for cheap-and-nasty movie knock-offs, but crikey, this one really takes the cake.
Check out the trailer for Mad Shelia (疯狂希莉娅) (Youku version here), the new Chinese movie that will start streaming online Friday and looks just a little suspiciously like the classic Australian post-apocalyptic franchise Mad Max.
Beijing-based New Film Media 新合艺影视 is behind the film, which was shot in Inner Mongolia. There are at least two of them on their way; Mad Shelia – Virgin Road (疯狂希莉娅——处女之路) and Mad Shelia – Vengeance Road (疯狂希莉娅——复仇之路), according to local media reports. Those titles couldn’t possibly have been inspired by The Road Warrior or Mad Max: Fury Road.
Shelia is almost like “Sheila,” which, for those of you unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, is another word for “woman”; so it’s at least possible the filmmakers are giving a nod to its Antipodean origins. According to media reports, the story is about a post-apocalyptic world where said women are seen as possessions and assets in a resource-scarce economy. Sound familiar?
Cheap-and-nasty B-grade movies like this are known colloquially as wang da, which is short for wangluo da dianying (网路大电影) or “big internet films.” With no pesky actor unions to worry about, some of these films are made in less than 10 days with crews working around the clock to get them done.
The Mad Shelia movies started filming in October 2015 and took director Lu Lei, who is also CEO of New Film Media, eight months to make, according to Tencent Entertainment.
Mad Max: Fury Road (疯狂的麦克斯：狂暴之路) never made it to Chinese cinemas, no doubt due to its intense nature, but it was almost immediately available for legal streaming on various online platforms, so Chinese viewers are aware of it.
The Chinese version looks like it shares a lot of the original madcap spirit of the “Ozploitation” original, as well as its shoestring budget. While Mad Max: Fury Road was made for a whopping US$150 million, the original 1979 Mad Max was made for just AU$450,000 (around US$332,000).
Mad Shelia will be streaming on Tencent Video here starting Friday, November 25.Share. Introducing Douchebag to Coon And Friends. Introducing Douchebag to Coon And Friends.
South Park is one of the only franchises I'd be happy to see annualised, after The Stick of Truth showed us that a modern South Park game plays just like an extended episode - outside of combat, the two mediums are almost indistinguishable. The Fractured But Whole continues that trend pretty literally - it takes place immediately after the events of The Stick of Truth, with South Park's not-so-charming group of 4th graders now LARPing as Superheroes, with their own hypothetical movie franchises and Netflix series'.
Exit Theatre Mode
After Ubisoft's press conference yesterday, where we already saw a meaty amount of gameplay, I was able to feast my eyes on an extended demo, with more fart sound effects in 20 minutes than I've ever heard in any other video game. We started out with our protagonist, literally called Douchebag, looking for Coon And Friends in Eric Cartman's house. There's a keypad barring you from the basement, though, with inscriptions of words I can't write here without getting an angry email from a young IGN reader's mother. So, you set off to find the code, interacting with cabinets and drawers that deliver an odd variety of crafting loot, though we didn't get to preview the crafting system.
Upstairs in Cartman's show-accurate house, we were introduced to'sphincter control' - a proponent of Ubisoft’s clearly very serious goal to introduce more “interactive humor” to South Park: The Fractured But Whole. Our protagonist mounted Eric Cartman’s toilet, and, based on how long the Ubisoft representative held down the ‘x’ button, an increasingly long fart noise complimented Douchebag’s facial expression of 'clenched agony'. Basically, you can control how long your character poops for, and you can fart seemingly whenever you want to, including using those farts to break items and get extra loot. The ‘fart for loot’ system is likely also a part of another of Ubisoft’s very serious goal to promote more “exploration” in The Fractured But Whole than there was in The Stick of Truth, and to make that exploration feel fully interactive.
Beyond the farts, though, going on to explore Cartman’s house to find the keycode plays very similarly to The Stick of Truth, and then eventually punching in the correct code leads to a flawlessly transition cutscene, complete with authentic South Park humor and voice acting. The segment lead into the introduction of Douchebag that we saw at Ubisoft’s press conference, but with a little more time spent to show off the new combat system, and the classes. Classes in The Fractured But Whole are unlocked as you progress through the game - though we don’t know exactly how, just yet - and you can seemingly swap between them at any point in time, as well as combine classes in later stages of the game. The names and special abilities are inspired by common superheroes but have classic RPG roles like tanks and healers, which suggests a very heavy dependence on party-based combat.
The Fractured But Whole still features a turn-based combat system, but that’s probably the only similarity it has to the first game’s combat. Now, you have the option to move a character anywhere within a grid in order to attack someone else, or position yourself away from someone else - you might not want to keep your squishy characters near the opposing damage dealer, for example. Moving a character thankfully doesn’t use up a ‘turn’, but it does seem like it’ll require a lot of careful thought. If you have two characters in the range of a character that does a move with splash damage, for example, they’re both going to get hurt.
The combat actually seems intimidatingly complicated compared to The Stick of Truth - it’s a lot more like Fire Emblem than the pseudo ‘QTE’ style the first game had, and it’s likely to require an acute understanding of each character in your party, and the opposing team’s party. I definitely need to see more of it to make a proper assessment on whether I like it or not, though, so let’s get back to farts.
Because it’s a Ubisoft game, South Park: The Fractured But Whole also features a very cheeky (pun absolutely intended) version of Parkour, known as ‘Fartcour’. We saw Douchebag jumping between buildings to find some loot on a roof, aided by his own farts, and Kyle's kite. Different pairings of characters will allow for different kinds of these non-combat abilities that are in place to lead you to different items - whether they be some kind of collectibles or loot - seemingly depending on characters’ individual classes.
Overall, it seems like South Park: The Fractured But Whole is going to feel just like another extended episode of South Park - which is exactly what I want - except with more tactical, JRPG-style combat upgrades, more significant classes, and a more in-depth party system. It’s like South Park: The Stick of Truth just matured a little - oh, also, did I mention farts?
Alanah Pearce is an editor at IGN, and she has never written the word 'fart' so many times in one article. She's glad you're here to witness this monumental new record. You can find her on Twitter at @Charalanahzard.President Barack Obama. (Disney / ABC Television Group ) (CC BY-ND 2.0)
The Obama administration financed 70 fossil fuel projects in countries from India to Australia to South Africa with nearly $34 billion through the Export-Import Bank, an investigation by The Guardian and Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environment Reporting Project has found.
The Guardian reports:
This unprecedented backing of oil, coal and gas projects is an unexpected footnote to Obama’s own climate change legacy. The president has called global warming “terrifying” and helped broker the world’s first proper agreement to tackle it, yet his administration has poured money into developments that will push the planet even closer to climate disaster.
For people living next to US-funded mines and power stations the impacts are even more starkly immediate.
Guardian and Columbia reporters have spent time at American-backed projects in India, South Africa and Australia to document the sickness, upheavals and environmental harm that come with huge dirty fuel developments.
In India, we heard complaints about coal ash blowing into villages, contaminated water and respiratory and stomach problems, all linked to a project that has had more than $650m in backing from the Obama administration.
In South Africa, another huge project is set to exacerbate existing air pollution problems, deforestation and water shortages. And in Australia, an enormous US-backed gas development is linked to a glut of fracking activity that has divided communities and brought a new wave of industrialization next to the cherished Great Barrier Reef.A store manager and an alleged shoplifter were caught on camera in a shocking tug of war.
Read: Cops: Woman Arrested For Shoplifting Over $800 Worth of Flip-Flops
Kody Youmans, a 16-year-old customer, shot video of the incident at a Rite Aid in Oregon.
"It was insane," he told Inside Edition. “They were really going at it.”
He said the altercation “started in the parking lot. [The manager] went up to her and said she stole things. He grabbed it from her and she lost her balance and fell. She followed him back into the store.”
Youmans' footage shows the manager holding on to the woman.
“I am not going to let go!" he is heard saying. "We are calling the police and we are going to handle this the right way. You shoplifted. You can't just shoplift."
The action got really wild when the woman, identified as Sarah Jarvis, started kicking.
“I am going to take you down," the manager warned her. "Stop it."
Youmans said, “She was swinging at him and he warned her a number of times, saying, ‘I am going to take you down for this.’"
Read: 'Real Housewives' Star Kim Richards Was Reportedly Living Out of Her Car Before Shoplifting Arrest
The alleged shoplifter, who ends up on the ground inside the store, is heard saying, “You threw me to the ground and hurt me.” She did not appear to be injured in the footage.
Security expert Tony Roman said the store manager should have left it to the police. "It's much better if he flags down a police officer... and allows the professionals to do their job," he told Inside Edition.
Youmans said he believed the store manager behaved appropriately. Other people also tried to step in to help, he said.
“It was kind of funny," he said. "One woman was acting like a referee.”
With the police on the way, the struggle finally came to an end. An officer grabbed hold of her and said, “You turn around on me and it's going to be big trouble for you."
Even the woman realized the time had finally come to give it up when police arrived on the scene.
In Oregon, shoplifting can be punishable with up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
Watch: Suspect Steal $100 Bill From Kid's Hand: CopsDear Mr. President,
As I write this letter, I brace myself for another round of nerve-wracking explosives being detonated above my home in the mountains of West Virginia. Outside my door,pulverized rock dust, laden with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives hovers in the air, along with the residual of heavy metals that once lay dormant underground.
The mountain above me, once a thriving forest, has been blasted into a pile of rock and mud rubble. Two years ago, it was covered with rich black topsoil and abounded with hardwood trees, rhododendrons,ferns and flowers. The understory thrived with herbs such as ginseng, black cohosh, yellow root and many other medicinal plants. Black bears, deer, wild turkey, hawks, owls and thousands of [other] birds lived here. The mountaincontained sparkling streams teeming with aquatic life and fish.
Now it is all gone. It is all dead. I liveat the bottom of a mountain-top-removal coal-mining operation in the Peachtree community.
Mr. President Obama, I am writing you because we have simply run out of options. Lastweek, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, Va., overturned a federal court ruling for greater environmental restrictions on mountaintop-removal permits. Dozens of permits now stand to be rushed through. As you know, in December, the EPA under George W. Bush allowed an 11th-hour change to the stream buffer zone rule, further unleashing the coal companies to do as they please.
During your presidential campaign, you declared:"We have to find more environmentally sound ways of mining coal than simply blowing the tops off mountains."
That time is now. Or never.
Every day, more than 3 million pounds ofexplosives are detonated in our state to remove our mountains and expose the thin seams of coal. Over 470 mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed in this process, the coalscooped up and hauled away to be burned at coal-fired power plants across our country and abroad. This includes the Potomac River Plant, which generates the electricity for the White House.
Mountaintop removal is the dirty secret in our nation's energy supply. If coal can't be mined clean, it can't be called clean. Here, at the point of extraction, coal passes through a preparation plant that manages to remove some, but not all, of the metals and toxins. Those separated impuritiesare stored in mammoth toxic sludge dams above our communities throughout Appalachia.
There are three sludge dams within 10 miles of my home. Coal companies are now blasting directly above and next to a dam above my home that contains over 2 billion gallons of toxic waste. That is the same seeping dam that hovers just 400 yards above the Marsh Fork Elementary School. As you know, coal sludge dams have failed before, and lives have been lost.
My family and I, like many American citizens in Appalachia, are living in a state of terror. Likesitting ducks waiting to be buried in an avalanche of mountain waste, or crushed by a falling boulder, weare trapped in a war zone within our own country.
In 1968,I served my country in Vietnam as part of the 1st Battalion 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division. As you know, Appalachians have never failed to serve our country; our mountain riflemen stood with George Washington at the surrender of the British in Yorktown. West Virginia provided more per capita soldiers for the Union during the Civil War than any other state; we have given our blood for every war since.
We have also given our blood for the burden of coal in these mountains. My uncle died in the underground mines at the age of 17; another uncle was paralyzed from an accident. My dad worked in an underground mine. Many in my family have suffered from black-lung disease.
These mountains are our home. My family roots are deep in these mountains. We homesteaded this area in the 1820s. This is where I was born. This is where I will die.
On Jan. 15, 1972, U.S. Sen. John D. Rockefeller made a speech at Morris Harvey College. He declared: "The government has turned its back on the many West Virginians who have borne out of their property and out of their pocketbook the destructive impact of strip-mining. We hear that the governor once claimed to have wept as he flew over the strip mine devastation of our state. Now it's the people who weep."
Our state government has turned its back on us in 2009.
Peachtree is but one of hundreds of Appalachian communities that are being bombed. Our property has been devalued to worthlessness. Our neighbors put their kids to bed at night with the fear of being crushed or swept away in toxic sludge. And theoutside coal industries continue their criminal activity through misleading and false ads.
Mr. President, when I heard you talk during your campaign stops, it made me feel like there was hope for Peachtree and the Coal River Valley of West Virginia. Hope for me and my family.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that we cannot escape history: "The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
I beg you to re-light our flame of hope and honor and immediately stop the coal companies from blasting so near our homes and endangering our lives. As you have said, we must find another way than blowing off the tops of our mountains. We must end mountaintop removal.
I also ask you to please put an end to these dangerous toxic-sludge dams.
With utmost respect, yours truly,
Bo Webb
Naoma, W.V.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/127877/As the first step in our process of analysis we identified the needs and challenges of elderly which were reported from the experts’ perspective (main category “Individual demand”). In the second step we identified the reported basic and advanced technologies and their contributions to organizational aspects for care service provider (main category “Technology for care”). The third main category (“Health and quality of life by AAL”) summarizes the findings of the individual’s benefits of AAL solutions.
Individual demand (C1) 2 Main categories Sub categories C1: Individual Demand C1.1: Needs of elderly C1.2: Problems of elderly C2: Technology for Care C2.1: Basic technologies for care C2.2: Advanced technologies for care C3: Health and quality of life by AAL This category defines two sub categories (see Table). It describes the most important individual needs and individual problems of elderly with demand for support by care giving organizations or their relatives.
Needs of elderly (C1.1) In general the experts agree on the point that dependent elderly want to be treated as competent and sovereign individuals, regardless from the disabilities they are suffering from. They have the desire to be supported in a loving way. The individual’s needs are influenced by the personal circumstances of their life and social environment: ‘…we do |
mental illness," particularly of schizophrenia, have in fact led (contrary to early researchers' and family advocacy groups' predictions), to an exacerbation of public stigma (including greater perceived seriousness, permanence and dangerousness) (Pescosolido et al., 2010; Phelan, 2002; Schnittker, 2008; Schomerus et al., 2012). As an illustration, public opinion research suggests decreased interest, compared to 50 years ago, in marrying someone with a serious mental illness because of possible genetic causes (Pescosolido et al., 2010). In addition, exploratory qualitative research among individuals with depression suggests a mixed picture even for this ostensibly less-stigmatized disability: although it may be common for depressed individuals to adopt a biomedical model, and even use this model to mitigate self-blame, "unintended" negative consequences also follow, including the objectification and somatization of the "illness," and the "shifting of ownership" and "responsibility for managing" the problem away from the individual, with a consequent disinvestment in self-directed behavioral change (Schreiber & Hartrick, 2002, p. 99-100). Our primary purpose in rehearsing the current state of affairs with respect to biomedicalization is to underscore the extent to which the absence of an academic and empirical discourse guided by c/s/x experiences has allowed a strongly pathologizing approach to and conceptualization of "mental illness" to proceed largely uncontested within academia (and, hence, given the power and status of academic discourse—in the eyes of the general public). We now consider the implications of clinicalization in greater detail.
Greater Professionalization/Clinicalization A second key consequence of the absence of an academic branch of the c/s/x movement can be located in the greater professionalization and clinicalization of psychiatric disability and the absence of more substantively cross- or transdisciplinary work. By professionalization and clinicalization, as distinguished from medicalization, we mean to describe the process whereby the power to generate knowledge about particular phenomena is allotted not just to credentialed academics, but academics that have specifically been trained to "treat" individual abnormality or pathology. 4 While disability studies researchers herald from a wide variety of clinical and non-clinical disciplinary homes (including sociology, anthropology, English, communication, public health and education, as well as occupational and physical therapy and medicine), mental health research in the US remains almost wholly dominated by clinically trained investigators. Consequently, while much work in disability studies celebrates and explores such themes as disability culture, disability history, disability and the arts, disability identity and disability theory, the literature on psychiatric disability tends to revolve around clinical treatment and rehabilitation. Even those non-clinically oriented US social science texts that address broader sociopolitical issues (e.g. Coleman, 2008; Estroff, 1981, 1993; Luhrmann, 2007; Morrison, 2005) nevertheless tend to ultimately focus on clinical sociopolitics as opposed to, for example, explorations of mad culture. 5 This trend arguably also extends to work on consumer-run organizations and mutual support groups, which tend to be investigated in terms of their impact on clinically-relevant outcomes rather than, for example, their effects on identity and spiritual expression or their contribution to the development of shared political and (sub-)cultural narratives (Brown & Wituk, 2010). Another consequence of clinicalization lies in the instantiation and reinforcement of the belief that only individuals with highly-specialized training can help, support or understand individuals with psychiatric disabilities. Thus a student experiencing a first psychotic break may find herself suddenly abandoned by friends and colleagues (who have absorbed the cultural message that they should simply defer to professionals) precisely when she needs them most. Several reviews of the rehabilitation literature (e.g., Anthony, 1993; Young & Ensing, 2010) suggest that this orientation may also be problematic to the extent that it supports rehabilitation models that are inconsistent with the actual experiences or desires of people with psychiatric disabilities. For example, qualitative work among people with psychiatric disabilities emphasizes the importance of self-care, which Young and Ensing (2010) find is largely absent from the recovery literature, perhaps because, as they note, "self-care is simply not perceived as very interesting or informative" from a clinical standpoint (p. 24). This orientation may also undermine more emic or indigenous forms of self-understanding inasmuch as it encourages (or even requires) patients to embrace the language of clinical diagnosis and various institutionally proscribed semantic delimitations of psychiatric symptomatology in order to speak to clinicians and/or obtain culturally appropriate "support". As Rose (2001) notes, this clinical or therapeutic discourse is inherently positive in the sense that it produces new possibilities of experience and selfhood, but possibilities whose unintended consequences may prove to be significantly damaging. A patient, for example, might be taught to distinguish between "normal" and "delusional" thoughts—the former properly hers, the latter the consequence of cognitive or neural dysfuntion—potentially leading to the experiential dis-integration of the otherwise assumed connection between agency and "her" conscious mental processes. While clinical control of diagnostic language may not be wholly negative or destructive, socioethnographic work amply documents the dangers of "engulfment" in a clinically framed 'chronic patient' role or identity (Estroff, 1989, 1993; Link, 1982, 1987; Schur, 1971). Moreover, there is little acknowledgment in the mainstream clinical rehabilitation literature that the relationship between clinicians and patients is also a relationship almost irreducibly marked by asymmetrical power relations (Rose, 1996). Clinicalization, that is, reinforces not only the belief that only sanctioned clinicians can understand and attend to psychiatric disability but also that this assistance can only be accomplished through a very specific, and in most cases intrinsically hierarchical, relationship. On the one hand, the clinician—whether biomedical, behaviorist or psychodynamic in orientation—remains neutral, objective, and aloof, while the patient "confesses" his or her emotional (subjective, raw, naive) problems (cf Butchart, 1997; Foucault, 1978; Hook, 2007). Through processes of guided subjectivization—the patient's identification both as the subject that speaks and the (psychopathological) subject of speech—his or her self-experience is thus brought in line with the "norms of psychological expertise" (Rose, 1996, p. 96). Both quantitative and qualitative research in the clinical disciplines makes this relationship even more explicit: the consenting research subject at once symbolically concedes "understanding" of his or her disorder to the academic researcher while at the same time reifying his or her position as an informant or provider of data that will only become 'externally valid 'once it has been combined with dozens of other narratives, reports or data points and 'transformed' by expert clinical scientists (Rose, 2009; Turner & Beresford, 2005). The authority of the clinician has been further naturalized in both clinical practice and the psychiatric research literature through the elaboration of the construct of "lack of insight" or anosognosia (Amador & David, 1998). In this discourse, mere disagreement with a psychiatric label and/or the legitimacy of a past or current hospitalization is often recast as a neuropsychiatric deficit or further sign of underlying psychopathology. An example of this can be found in the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (Beck et al., 2004), which counts disagreement with the statement "other people can understand the cause of my unusual experiences better than I can" as an example of a deficit of "insight." In order to prove his or her mental health, then, patients must learn to accept the clinicians' semantic, diagnostic, and psychological authority. To the extent that scholarship on psychiatric disability continues to be controlled by researchers whose expertise is defined in large part by virtue of their neutral and objective second-hand observational knowledge and explicitly clinical expertise, it is not difficult to appreciate some of the barriers to the inclusion of either psychiatrically disabled academics or academic or "scientific" perspectives that are explicitly informed by first-person experiences and narratives. To some extent, that is, the very premises of clinical expertise are uncomfortably challenged by the potential counter-authority of direct (lived) experience. In disability studies, conversely, the importance of first-person perspectives, as well as the integration of disability with other aspects of identity, including academic identity, is well-accepted. Indeed, disability studies has been characterized as a place from where "crips strike back" (Davis, 1999). As an illustration, Zola's (e.g., 1981, 1982) often autobiographical and cross-disciplinary writings revolutionized our understanding of the sociopolitical and personal aspects of the lived experience of physical disability. However, the equivalent to this type of work in American psychiatric disability research is largely absent; what is more, the prevailing research environment, as we explore in more depth below, may in fact actively inhibit the emergence of such scholarship.
Consumer/Survivor Researcher Academic Climate Ultimately, the greater biomedicalization and clinicalization of psychiatric disability/disorder reviewed above has resulted in an academic environment that many cite as inhospitable to scholars with psychiatric disabilities (Jamison, 2010; Jones et al., in press; Karp, 2002). Evidence indicates that the academic environment is problematic throughout the typical academic career trajectory, from graduate training through tenure. While part of this inhospitability may stem from a general discomfort with disease and disability of all types (Goodwin & Morgan, 2012), much empirical research documents the high prevalence of profoundly negative and yet widely socially accepted stereotypes regarding individuals with significant psychiatric disabilities (Corrigan, Markowitz & Watson, 2004; Pescosolido et al., 2010; Schomerus et al., 2012). Hinshaw (2008) explores some of the reasons why such stigma may actually be particularly pronounced within clinical mental health disciplines, leading to a culture of silence and non-disclosure. As Price (2011) and Reiss (2010) discuss, the consequences of stereotypes centered around dangerousness and unpredictability have recently become particularly salient in the wake of a series of widely-publicized school shootings as well as more general acts of violence in which students or faculty with some form of psychiatric disability were implicated. These include the Virginia Tech, NIU, Jared Loughner and Aurora shootings, and the recent murder of a graduate student by a faculty member with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at the University of Idaho. While legitimately motivated by concerns for both student safety and legal liability, academic institutions, as Reiss (2010) notes, have responded to the danger posed by'mentally disordered' academic community members through an array of initiatives designed to screen, redirect and/or monitor "risky" individuals. This discourse of risk, in turn, may further legitimize the public's fear of mental illness, and strengthen the objectification of students and faculty with psychiatric diagnoses. In addition to such general psychiatric stereotypes, stereotypes more explicitly directed at the mental or cognitive (in)capacity of academics with psychiatric disabilities may be particularly destructive. Price (2011), for instance, discusses a myriad of ways in which individuals with mental disabilities—disabilities that affect intellectual energy and socio-academic relationships in addition to intellectual function—are specifically stigmatized in the context of academic work. Although no existing empirical work has directly assayed the prevalence of academic stereotypes among faculty and students within doctoral training programs, a study including both undergraduate and graduate student with psychiatric disabilities found that among those who sought academic accommodations, a full 56% reported feelings of embarrassment or shame, the same number (56%) reported a fear of being stigmatized by faculty due to their requests, and almost half (42%) reported actual negative experiences with accommodations such as faculty member's unwillingness to cooperate (Salzer, Wick & Rogers, 2008). In addition to the negative consequences of academic stigma among members of the university community, recent research has documented the damaging effects of psychiatric-specific stereotype threat on academic performance: college students subtly primed with their psychiatric status, that is, were found to significantly underperform un-primed controls on academic tests (Quinn, Kahng & Crocker, 2011). These academic forms of stigma are perhaps most likely to negatively impact doctoral students, pre-tenured and adjunct faculty, whose success depends so strongly on successfully projecting an image of academic confidence and competence. In the context of higher education, stigma and stereotyping may also constitute a threat to perceptions of the quality of individuals' research. Thus even if an aspiring academic with a psychiatric disability makes it through a doctoral program and obtains a university appointment, his or her research may be suspect due to assumptions of additional bias, subjectivity, personal overinvolvement, weak boundaries, or a general lack of rigor (Rose, 2003, 2008, 2009; Saks, 2007, 2009; Sweeney et al., 2009). Arguably, such stereotypes, as suggested above, follow from the medicalization and clinicalization of mental health discourse to the extent that these discourses tend to privilege neutrality, emotional distance, and second or third-hand observation. Further, in fields in which explicit activist scholarship is rare, researchers' commitment to the advocacy community runs the risk of being viewed as proof of such academics' "compromised" science. In addition to concerns about the social consequences of requesting accommodations, there is also concern surrounding the fact that accommodations specific to psychiatric issues are often inadequate, particularly among graduate students and faculty, for a variety of both practical and legal reasons (Jones, Harrison, Aguiar & Munro, in press). Thus, although students with psychiatric disabilities now represent the single largest disability sub-group receiving campus disability services in the US (Government Accountability Office, 2009), many disability services offices are far better equipped to deal with cognitive and physical disabilities than psychiatric issues (Collins, 2000). In addition to these immediate institutional barriers, legal research suggests that individuals with psychiatric disabilities are often significantly less well protected by key legislation such as the ADA compared to other disability groups, particularly in the context of education and employment (Stefan 2000, 2001; Swanson et al., 2006). In a comparative paper, Sahlin (2009) even more specifically unpacks many of the difficulties involved in obtaining faculty accommodations for psychosocial impairment in the US, given the often excessive legal deference granted academic institutions regarding determinations of "unfair advantage," "undue [institutional] burden" and the "essential functions" of academic employment. As an illustration of several of these issues, Saks (2007), in her autobiography about her experiences completing graduate work after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, details the lack of accommodations offered by the university where she studied and open discomfort exhibited by faculty whenever she acknowledged symptoms (exemplified in a tendency to simply suggest she go directly to a mental hospital). As a consequence, and to avoid being viewed as incompetent, she overcompensated in her graduate work to such an extent that her thesis was deemed by her examiners to be of a quality equal to what is typically expected in a doctoral dissertation —also notable is that it was completed while, unbeknownst to others, she was experiencing auditory hallucinations so severe they led to her hospitalization (Saks 2007). Inadequate accommodations and stigma also pose a threat to many faculty members with psychiatric disabilities, as other personal histories demonstrate (Jamison, 2010; Karp, 2002). Jamison (2010), for example, highlights the vulnerability of junior faculty who choose not to disclose a psychiatric disability in her depiction of a chancellor's garden party she attended in the midst of a manic episode: While she thought herself to be having "a fabulous, bubbly, seductive, assured time" (p. 26), it was later pointed out to her that she was dressed provocatively, wearing much more makeup than usual and seemed hysterical. Karp (2002) additionally describes the profound sense of loneliness occasioned by his vulnerability as a junior faculty member prior to tenure, describing sleepless nights accompanied by the knowledge that his intense teaching load could not be reduced even though he was experiencing clinically-significant symptoms. While such personal accounts highlight the barriers and challenges of succeeding academically as a researcher with psychiatric disabilities, it is noteworthy that these issues are almost wholly absent from the research literature. Our review indicates that the only published discussions of these themes in the U.S. have been limited to select reflections on the inclusion and exclusion of students with psychiatric disabilities from undergraduate and master's level social work programs (GlenMaye & Bolin, 2007; Stromwall, 2002) and, to a lesser extent, doctoral programs in psychology (Jones et al., in press). Even in texts in which the plight of academics and students with disabilities is discussed more generally, issues specific to psychiatric issues are often not mentioned. For example, while Olkin (2002) very helpfully unpacks the potential difficulties experienced by doctoral students with disabilities enrolled in clinical psychology training programs, she makes no mention of any issues or concerns—particularly pronounced in such contexts—regarding the unique challenges that might arise in the context of psychiatric disability (including potentially significant barriers to licensure). Mentoring is another area in which individuals with psychiatric disabilities may be disadvantaged. While the value of mentoring minority doctoral students and junior faculty has been well-documented and discussed (Jeste et al., 2009; Shavers et al., 2005; Smith, Smith & Warkin, 2000; Waitzkin, Yager & Parker, 2006), discussion of the mentorship of junior colleagues with psychiatric disabilities is virtually non-existent. One implication of this lack of discussion is that people with psychiatric disabilities may face not only many of the same challenges as other visible minority groups but also the additional burden of sorting through complex issues of disclosure and identity (particularly in the face, as discussed above, of substantial socially acceptable stigma) (cf Goodwin & Morgan, 2012; Saks, 2009). Although it would be problematic to suggest that non-disabled senior faculty cannot appropriately mentor junior colleagues, given the frequency with which "like me" faculty are often sought as mentors (Rockquemore, 2011), the double invisibility of many researchers—invisible due both to the nature of their disability and their decisions not to publicly disclose—arguably decreases the pool of recognizable mentors even as it reinforces an academic culture of silence. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that even a figure as prominent as Marsha Linehan, the esteemed developer of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), waited until the very end of her career to publicly disclose her own struggles with borderline personality disorder (Carey, 2011, June 23). Although we have thus far discussed many of the challenges that face graduate students and faculty in academia, this discussion has excluded the arguably more basic issue of graduate admission. In addition to abundant (but anecdotal) stories of discrimination in the doctoral admissions process, a recent survey of psychology graduate admissions directors led to the categorization of disclosures of personal mental health issues as a "kiss of death" (KOD) in the admissions process (Applby & Applby, 2006). The authors explain: The discussion of a personal mental health problem is likely to decrease an applicant's chances of acceptance into a program. Examples of this particular KOD in a personal statement included comments such as "showing evidence of untreated mental illness," "emotional instability," and seeking graduate training "to better understand one's own problems or problems in one's family." More specifically, one respondent stated that a KOD may occur "when students highlight how they were drawn to graduate study because of significant personal problems or trauma. Graduate school is an academic/career path, not a personal treatment or intervention for problems." The authors further warn prospective graduate students to "avoid references to…mental health [because] such statements could create the impression you may be unable to function as a successful graduate student" (Applby & Applby, 2006, p. 23). Psychiatric disability, these authors suggest, may more or less directly imply some level of academic incompetence or risk regardless of one's academic record, at least for some admissions directors. (Notably there were, to our knowledge, no public outcry concerning these findings, a situation that seems highly unlikely were race or sexual orientation likewise implicated as a "kiss of death.") Clearly enough, graduate students and faculty with a range of different (physical and mental) disabilities and chronic illnesses face significant barriers and an often inhospitable climate in higher education. The development of disability studies programs and curricula, on the other hand, has clearly led to at least pockets of explicit support for and acceptance of academics with disabilities. To the extent that both psychiatric disability as a research area and students and faculty representing the full spectrum of psychiatric disability are significantly under-represented in disability studies, however, academics with psychiatric disabilities are arguably at even more of a disadvantage. They have, that is, no disciplinary safe haven.On Sunday, Michael Moore made Republican electors an offer, saying he will pay any fines incurred for voting against their state's results.
He says on Facebook, "I am writing you not as a card-carrying Democrat (I'm not) who voted for Hillary (I did), but simply because I am an American who, like you, deeply loves this country and its people."
Moore continues, "Tomorrow is the day you are supposed to gather with your fellow electors and choose the next President of the United States. I am not going to ask you to vote for the person who got the most votes...I'm simply asking you to vote your conscience and PLEASE do not put our nation in danger by choosing Donald J. Trump."
In making his case against the president-elect, the filmmaker lists a number of causes for concern.
RELATED: Electoral vote results by state
They include, "Russia hacked into our election in order to help Trump," the president-elect, "has refused to attend nearly all the daily national security briefings," and, "I think you know something is wrong with this man. He just doesn't seem 'right.' One crazy comment or action after another. He may not be well. Don't you have a responsibility to protect us..."
To the electors concerned about repercussions, Moore writes, "...some states have made it 'illegal' for you to vote any other way than for Trump. If you don't vote for him, your state will fine you $1,000. So here's my offer to you: I obviously can't and won't give you money to vote tomorrow, but if you do vote your conscience and you are punished for it, I will personally step up pay your fine which is my legal right to do."
Electors are scheduled to cast the official votes for president on Monday, notes ABC News.Islamic State terrorists are "moving in migrant flows, hiding in plain sight", the head of the Armed Forces has warned.
In comments that could reignite the debate around ID cards, Sir Stuart Peach said Britain should think about how it "manages identity" due to the global reach of IS militants who deliberately destroy their identity documents to travel illegally into other countries.
Sir Stuart warned that IS, also known as Daesh, represents the closest danger.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, he said: "I worry about the global reach of Daesh as an idea - copycat, using the internet - more than the internet - using social media, popping up all over the world.
"The Chinese state has accepted they have a problem. This is not now a localised phenomenon, it is now a wider phenomenon.
"And of course we face…a potential network of combat-experienced terrorists".
He added: "They are moving in migrant flows, hiding in plain sight.
"One of the obvious deductions…is how we manage identity in a world where people are deliberately trying to destroy their identity documents and/or they move in migrant flows."
Sky News looks inside an Islamic State prison
Sir Stuart's comments come as British military personnel arrive in the Middle East to train "moderate" Syrian opposition forces, who are attempting to open up a second front around IS stronghold Raqqa.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the Syrian forces were being trained in infantry, medical and explosive hazard awareness skills.
Speaking ahead of a summit of defence ministers in London, Sir Michael added that Britain is taking a leading role in the fight against IS "through our airstrikes, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and our training".
At the meeting, the Defence Minister will reveal that he has agreed to "surge" the number of data recovery experts to exploit material obtained as IS forces are defeated or flee from Mosul in Iraq.After a 5 year long investigation, forensic evidence has concluded that President Obama's birth certificate presented to the public is w...
http://humansarefree.com/2016/12/obamas-birth-certificate-investigation.html
After a 5 year long investigation, forensic evidence has concluded that President Obama's birth certificate presented to the public is without a doubt, 100 percent fake.
This isn’t about whether Barack Obama’s country of birth was the United States or somewhere else. This is about whether or not the birth certificate put forth by the government and Obama was indeed fraudulent.Over the course of a 5 year investigation overseen by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and conducted by Mike Zullo, involving PhD graduates in 4 different labs, and other professionals, the birth certificate put forward by the government at the time, has been declared a fake. Sheriff Joe Arpaio held a news conference on the 16th, aired live on Fox 10 to discuss his department’s findings. You can view the entire segment below.9 points of forgery were discovered; copied and pasted onto Barack Obama’s birth certificate from a birth certificate belonging to a Johanna Ah’ Nee.Both certificates came from Hawaii, 1961, just 16 days apart. The 9 points forged from the certificate belonging to Ah’Nee were pasted “digitally” onto the Obama document.The 9 points ofinclude [mark 13:12]:Section 6a Place of Birth, the city —Section 6b Place of Birth, the island —Section 7b “Residence of Mother” —of document in SectionandSection 6c – box crossed ‘‘ to “Is Place of Birth Inside City or Town Limits?”Section 7d – box crossed ‘‘ to “Is Residence Inside City or Town Limits?”Section 7g box crossed ‘’ to “Is residence on a farm or plantation?”Thewhere the cross marked ‘yes’ to the questions were also forged.Two specialists from two different continents (Hawaii and Italy) with no knowledge of the other, assisted in the investigation, and both concluded very similar outcomes, resulting in the 9 points of forgery.The date stamps [mark 27:27 on the clip below] at the lower angle at the bottom of the documents suggest that it is highly probable that the document is a forgery.Coupled with the other points discovered, suggests that it is 100 percent a forgery because of the “textual juxta-positioning” relationship of certain words to each other on the document.Reid Hayes, co-author of 5 books, a board member of the scientific association of forensic examiners, and a court qualified hand writing and document examiner with 40 years’ experience, released this conclusion.“The Obama certificate of live birth posted on whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 is a fraudulently manufactured document. Evidence indicates that this certificate of live birth of Johanna Ah’ Nee is one source utilized in the construction of the certificate of live birth … “the nail in the coffin” that provides the certificate of live birth is inauthentic…” In other words, it is a fraudulent document.The intention was to clear the document, says self-confessed Republican, Zullo. But it wasn’t to eventuate if he were to remain true to his discipline as an investigative officer, after evidence began to mount.Stonewalled by two places that could have cleared the issue up, Zullo was as much as thrown out by Kapalani medical centre as he was from the Department of Health in Hawaii, both avoiding the question of genuine verification of the contents of the birth certificate, not that there was simply a birth record on file. [mark 35:00 and 39:45].Zullo was also clear that Johanna Ah’ Nee is not a suspect; her birth certificate, according to her, had remained in a locked filing cabinet until 10 days after the Obama certificate surfaced online. [mark 40:05]Falsifying a document like this is a federal offense. It is also speculated that the birth certificate was simply created – which can be done on face value, according to Hawaiian laws.All in all, the document is false, but the context and circumstances are still unknown. It disappeared and reappeared from the bound documents it belonged in, to the White House and back again.Zullo has more questions than answers – but the document is now proven by specialists in their field, on either side of the world, as fake.Ironically, revisiting the laws of Hawaii, Zullo points out “Hawaii law says that the Department of Health in Hawaii must create a birth certificate merely on the representation from anyone that a birth has taken place. It doesn’t tell you anything. Somebody just reported it.” [mark 39:00]There are ways to amend a certificate years later [mark 37.25], where the amended information becomes the real information in the file. And that there is no way to determine if it is an amended certificate.It begs the question as to why this certificate was ever amended – or if it was created entirely. It is a federal offense. The Johanna Ah’ Nee document is a source of the activity – it’s a “safe bet.” Technically, Obama should be impeached.What is Obama, to this day – and the government – hiding? It also begs the question: why hasn’t this news gone viral?ADVERTISEMENT
The Vatican and China have reached a deal that would be a major step towards normalizing relations between the Catholic Church and the world's largest formally atheist regime, The Wall Street Journal reports. All that's needed for the deal to go through is the final nod from Pope Francis and President Xi Jinping. To call this a bombshell would be an understatement.
In this deal, the Catholic Church would recognize eight bishops who have been ordained by the Chinese government without the Vatican's permission. China's regime has set up a state-run and state-sponsored "Catholic Church" that competes with the underground Church, recognized by the Vatican. Although in practice the boundaries between these two bodies tend to blur, in reality they are very distinct. After all, Catholicism isn't Catholicism without obedience to the pope. The move would be a major coup for Pope Francis, who has made no secret of his conciliatory attitude toward China and eagerness to reach some sort of live-and-let-live settlement with China's still-formally-communist regime. This comes at a time when Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds in China and, under Xi Jinping, the country's authoritarian government is further cracking down on liberal expression and dissent.
The pope surely thinks of such a deal as a coup. But, if approved, it would be an unmitigated catastrophe. It would not only be morally indefensible, it would also amount to nothing less than a dynamiting of Chinese Catholicism.
Today in China, faithful Catholics still must worship clandestinely. The Chinese government has systematically oppressed Catholics who refuse to kowtow to the Chinese government's vision of a subservient Catholicism. Faithful and clergy alike are subject to various levels of harassment and imprisonment, and reports of "disappearances" of "unregistered" priests and bishops are still common, according to the U.S. State Department. Chinese Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei spent 30 years in prison for defying the government's demands regarding his religion. Beda Chang, a Jesuit brother of the pontiff, was tortured to death for refusing to cooperate with the Chinese government.
Does the pope of Rome believe the martyrs of Chinese Catholicism suffered and died for a lie?
Less poignantly, but more significantly, the difference between the actual Roman Catholic Church and the "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association" is not just about appointments, diplomacy, and ecclesiastical power politics. It's easy to forget when the media are dominated by stories about Chinese business tycoons, but China's government still officially pledges fealty to the ideology of communism, which Catholicism professes to be opposed to everything Christians are supposed to believe.
The "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association" demands of its adherents the denial of something which sits at the heart of Christianity: supreme allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord, even when it conflicts with allegiance with earthly authorities. This message has been at the heart of Christianity from the start. This is one of the core lessons of Christianity's founding event, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: Christians believe there are many reasons Jesus was crucified, but one of them was because he refused to bow down to the political authorities of his day. The texts of the New Testament call on Christians to be good citizens of their homeland and to respect its laws, but also to refuse to obey earthly kings when their demands conflict with those of their divine king. Without this belief, Christianity is ultimately toothless, and therefore meaningless, and this point is the crux of the disagreement between China and the Vatican.
On top of being immoral, though, such a deal would also, for all intents and purposes, destroy Chinese Catholicism.
Christianity is growing like gangbusters in China, for a reason which is plain as day: It provides a stark alternative to the reigning ideology, which everyone knows is bankrupt. The Christian sects that get adherents in China are the ones that don't sell out to the government, but provide a true alternative to it.
This story has played out in the Church's history countless times, which is why it's so baffling to see a pontiff willing to make the same mistake all over again. Historically, the Church has grown when it has been counter-cultural. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church," the ecclesiastical writer Tertullian once said. It was the Catholic martyrs' impressive witness that drove so many Romans to Christianity, despite the fears of persecution. The Catholic Church in France became moribund once it allowed French kings to appoint bishops and abbots, turning it into a spiritually empty bureaucracy. Even in the 20th century, it was when the Catholic Church refused to kowtow to hostile regimes that it grew and strengthened — and, in many cases, ultimately prevailed — and when it tried to accommodate that it withered.
Which boils down to one issue: How much does the Vatican trust in the promises that, as Catholics, they are required to believe Jesus gave to his Church?
In today's political context, the physical safety of the pope from martyrdom is more or less assured (although John Paul II famously faced a nearly successful assassination attempt that left him crippled for life), but it was not always so. Reportedly, the famous obelisk that sits at the center of St. Peter's Square used to sit at the center of the Coliseum where Peter, the fisherman of Galilee, met its own fate. The obelisk is meant to serve as a reminder to the Supreme Pontiff that he too, like all Christians, might be one day asked to give up his life for Jesus, which is why the obelisk is visible from the pope's office in the Apostolic Palace. Despite the gold and pomp with which he is surrounded, the pope is supposed to give himself up for Christ with the same abandon as St. Peter did. But it is also supposed to be a reminder that the Church is meant to prevail against all her earthly enemies, as it prevailed against Rome, then the mightiest empire the world had ever seen.
How would a pope who not only believed in that promise, but viewed it as a self-evident fact of life, behave towards China?Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, was interviewed by Jessica Desvarieux on the Real News about domestic opposition to a deal with Iran:
Wilkerson: All Iran has to do is limit its enrichment to what would be normally done under a civilian program, under probably at the outset and for a couple of years (maybe five) very rigorous inspection and immediate access to anywhere by the IAEA until Iran has substantiated to the international community that its program is purely civilian, in exchange for substantial sanctions relief. The outlines of a deal, indeed, the specifics of a deal have been there for some time.
DESVARIEUX: And who would be opposed to a deal like that? And why?
WILKERSON: First and foremost, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremely right-wing government in Tel Aviv. If you’ve seen what they’ve laid down as their deal parameters, if you will, it leads off with no enrichment at all, that is to say, they do not want any nuclear program whatsoever in Iran. And then you come to this country and you find Netanyahu’s allies in people like Senator John McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham from my home state, and others who are bordering on being traitors, in my view, because they won’t let this president have room to achieve a diplomatic solution. They’re all angry now that he didn’t bomb Syria, that he in fact, in conjunction with Putin, came up with a deal that may be extremely challenging to implement. But nonetheless it’s kept the bombs from dropping, which is a good thing. And so they’re moving on to Iran, with Graham even saying he’s going to move for legislation to authorize the use of military force against Iran in the next four to five months. So these people are bordering on being traitors. …
Desvarieux: [D]uring [Chuck Hagel’s] confirmation hearing, you heard a lot about his remarks in the past about how the GOP and Congress actually really is under the intimidation–or being intimidated, I should say, by AIPAC and other lobbying groups there on the Hill who are very pro-Israeli politics and things of that nature. Do you feel like them coming out with these types of remarks and proposed legislation is just really feeding to that whole argument?
WILKERSON: Absolutely. When Chuck Hagel was being asked by Senator Graham during his confirmation hearing to cite one time, one time that Israel had been influential on U.S. policy, all Senator Hagel had to say was “You, now, Mr. Graham”. That’s all he had to say. Of course, he could have cited Ronald Reagan’s inability to sell F-15s to Saudi Arabia, to give AWACS to Saudi Arabia, and so forth, all of which AIPAC and the Jewish lobby in this country stopped. So Israel has an enormous impact on U.S. foreign policy, but it’s beginning to be so detrimental to U.S. foreign and security policy that people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, with their hands out to the Jewish lobby for more donations |
of The Persuasion Revolution: The only place on Internet that makes persuasion classy & fun! Get your free copy of The Non-Icky Persuasion Toolkit at www.ThePersuasionRevolution.comAP Photo/Julio Cortez
UPS has reversed its firing of 250 workers for taking part in a 90-minute strike in February, the company told Business Insider on Wednesday.
The reversal comes after a public uproar over the mass firing, which we reported last week.
UPS officials decided to rehire the workers as part of an agreement reached Wednesday in a meeting with union officials.
" The 250 UPS employees involved in the walkout who were terminated for their actions will have their terminations reduced to a two week suspension without pay for each participant," UPS spokesman Steve Gaut told Business Insider in an email. "UPS has chosen to settle the matter in order to return to normal operations at the site."
As part of the agreement, the branch of the union representing the workers, Teamsters Local 804, will compensate UPS for damages associated with the Feb. 26 walkout, Gaut said.
Union officials also acknowledged in the agreement that the strike was "illegal and unauthorized and will undertake other actions within the bargaining unit to correct the situation," he said.
The union disputes that claim.
"The work stoppage on Feb. 26 was legal and permitted under the union contract with UPS," a Teamsters Local 804 spokesman told Business Insider. "Under the agreement reached with UPS, Local 804 acknowledges that the union’s internal procedures for authorizing a strike were not properly followed on Feb. 26 and we have agreed to communicate the proper procedure to all union members."
The UPS employees who were fired walked out on their jobs on Feb. 26 to protest the dismissal of one of their coworkers, Jairo Reyes.
As part of the settlement reached Wednesday, Reyes' discharge will be reduced to a suspension without pay for the period from Feb. 26 until he returns to work.
"We're looking forward to turning the corner and getting on a new road with UPS," Teamsters Local 804 President Tim Sylvester said. "The drivers delivered their message to UPS about unfair treatment. Now every one of them will be back delivering packages."
A group advocating for the fired workers called the resolution a victory.
"After several weeks of sustained worker and community pressure, UPS has reversed the firing, and all 250 workers, including Jairo, are getting their jobs back," Joe Dinkin of The Working Families Party told Business Insider in an email. " This is huge news. And it proves that even in an economy where the power of employers over workers is stronger than ever, when workers stand together, they can still win."
More From Business InsiderPraveen Halappanavar, whose wife died of septic shock in hospital after a miscarriage, says'she was just left there to die'
The widower of Savita Halappanavar – the 31-year-old dentist who has become an international symbol for those opposed to Ireland's strict anti-abortion laws – has condemned the "barbaric and inhuman care" she received in hospital, as an inquest ruled that she had died from medical misadventure.
The jury returned its verdict – on the day Savita and Praveen Halappanavar should have been celebrating their wedding anniversary. The Indian couple married five years ago.
Praveen Halappanavar said after the verdict that he had yet to find out properly why his wife had died. He said he had pleaded with medical staff at Galway university hospital for his wife to be given an emergency termination to save her life. She died in October last year of septic shock and E coli in her bloodstream after a miscarriage.
The coroner said the verdict did not imply that failings in systems at the hospital caused her death. However, speaking outside the inquest, Praveen Halappanavar said: "The care she received was no different from if she had stayed at home … She was just left there to die."
Savita Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when she died following the miscarriage. Her husband claimed the couple had been informed she could not be given the termination they believed would save her life "because this is a Catholic country". Midwife Anna Maria Burke apologised at the inquest for her words.
Halappanavar's plight became the focus of an international outcry against Ireland's strict anti-abortion laws, which the Fine Gael-Labour coalition in Dublin has promised to reform. The proposed legislation is likely to include changing and clarifying the law to allow doctors to carry out emergency abortions. In the republic, there has to be a "real and substantial" risk to the mother's life before obstetricians can intervene, but there are no clear guidelines on measuring that risk to help them decide.
At Galway county hall on Friday, the jury endorsed all nine recommendations of the coroner, Dr Ciaran MacLoughlin, including that the Irish Medical Council should lay out exactly when doctors can intervene with a termination to save the life of the woman. MacLoughlin had said this would provide clarity for patients and doctors.
The jury also endorsed recommendations that blood samples should always be followed up to ensure errors do not occur; that proper sepsis management training and guidelines are available for hospital staff; and that there is effective communication between staff on call and those coming on duty in hospitals.
Dr MacLoughlin had recommended that a dedicated time should be set aside at the end of each shift for this to happen. He had also recommended that modified early warning score charts are introduced in all hospitals as soon as possible; and that there is effective communication between patients and relatives to ensure they are fully aware of treatment plans.
The final two recommendations are that medical and nursing notes are kept separately and that no additions are made to notes where the death of a person will be subject to an inquest.
Offering his condolences to Praveen Halappanavar, MacLoughlin said: "You showed tremendous loyalty and love to your wife … You will also be watched over and protected by the shadow of Savita, who was in our thoughts during this painful and difficult journey."
The chief operating officer at the Galway Roscommon Hospital Group has acknowledged that there were lapses in the standards of care provided to Halappanavar. Speaking after the inquest, Tony Canavan said the deficiencies identified during the inquest would be rectified by the hospital and that all recommendations made by the coroner would be taken on board.
In an interview with the Guardian, midway through what were often harrowing proceedings inside the Galway court house, Praveen Halappanavar said: "Savita loved the limelight; she enjoyed the attention. And it's all for her, and maybe something out of this will be for good in the long run."
He said his wife loved living in the fashionable west of Ireland city of Galway, and had an eclectic range of friends. She had started classes in 2010 for local children, teaching them to dance.
Her death may have left a lasting legacy for the country the couple settled in, given that it has precipitated momentum towards relaxing access to abortion in Irish hospitals.
But for Praveen Halappanavar the future is uncertain, as he is unsure whether to stay in the state where his wife was so lethally let down.
After the jury's verdict, Praveen Halappanavar vowed to continue to seek answers and insisted that someone should be held accountable.
He said: "They could have intervened from day one because they knew the foetus wasn't viable."The focus on inequality misses the mark on more than substance, he argued. In a country where only a quarter of voters identify as liberals, and two-thirds believe that “big government” is the main threat to the nation’s future — and where over the last decade the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged governorships, seats in Congress and half of its seats in state legislatures — focusing on income redistribution could amount to political suicide. Instead, he argues, Democrats should aim at what he defined as the scarcity of opportunity afflicting so many Americans, “the great moral cause of our time.”
Image Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is among the progressive Democratic leaders hoping the party can appeal to voters who feel as if their lives and aspirations have been derailed. Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
Mr. Cowan’s exhortation might be understood as the typical call for repositioning that follows a lost presidential election. Third Way, which organized the gathering, is, after all, an intellectual heir to President Bill Clinton’s centrist politics — more skeptical of deregulation than in the Clinton era, and less interested in fiscal balance, but equally at loggerheads with the Democratic Party’s left.
And yet the Democratic infighting over message and strategy in the wake of November’s stunning defeat suggests that something existential is going on. Only eight years after they boldly proclaimed the economic crisis to be a critical opportunity, Democrats lost touch with their voters.
The financial crisis and ensuing recession scrambled Americans’ fears and desires, leaving an electorate defined by some variety of anger: at stagnant paychecks, at bank bailouts and government spending, at police shootings of blacks and at women’s lower wages; anger against a “rigged system.” Unfortunately for the Democratic Party — the party of government — most voters tend to think government is doing the rigging.
The most inspiring campaigners, Senator Sanders on the left and Donald J. Trump on the right, did not convince voters of the wisdom of carefully honed policy prescriptions. They ran on an apocalyptic vision of America under siege, with clear enemies in sight. Mr. Trump, an interloper of scant ideological baggage who took over a Republican Party at least as clueless as Democrats about voters’ preoccupations, offered the more powerful apocalypse.Romney was just sewing up the Republican nomination, with Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul, all bowing out in the first two weeks of May, but the defeat of an old stalwart like Lugar by a Tea Partier like Mourdock was filling conservative commentary about the future of the political party. It would be hard to imagine that Romney hadn't noticed. The night after Herman Cain finally endorsed Romney, with Michele Bachmann by his side, the presumptive nominee was in Boca Raton, Florida, at a fundraiser. That's where he brought out the old saw about the 47 percent, added that they were all Obama voters, and said, "My job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Even now, conservative blogs are loving the sentiment it. The National Review's Jim Geraghty writes today:
Folks in the media are asking, "how could he say this?" Folks on the Right, who see a growing dependency mentality sucking away the nation’s drive, work ethic and independence, are asking, "how could he say this only behind closed doors?"
Well, because first of all, it's false. The 47 percent are not uniformly Democrats or Obama voters. More important, the 47 percent are not welfare queens -- people "dependent upon government," in Romney's words, "who believe that they are victims." Of the 47 percent who didn't pay income tax in 2009, more than 60 percent of them paid payroll taxes, because they had a job. 22 percent of them were old people. 190,000 of them were soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq that year. But the clearest fact is that conservatives are watching their candidate get declared unfit for office because of something they've been saying for months.
Apology Tour
Romney has framed his foreign policy critique of Obama around a conservative meme, that Obama went on an "apology tour" around the world, saying he was sorry how much America sucks. This is never happened. But as New York's Jonathan Chait explained last week, it has been a persistent meme in conservative circles, particularly after Karl Rove wrote a Wall Street Journal column headlined "The President's Apology Tour" in April 2009. (Obama had been in office for less than 100 days.) Over three years later, the "apology tour" was the reference point for Romney's quick and widely-criticized response to news that protests outside American embassies had led to the death of a State Department worker, later revealed to be U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. (The death count eventually hit four.) Romney issued a statement saying:
"I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."
The next day he held a press conference to say he was standing by his remarks. Conservative blogs cheered -- "Romney is right" was the headline at both The Weekly Standard and The National Review. But in the mainstream media, and among some Republican leaders, the comments backfired, making Romney look ill-equipped to act "presidential" during a crisis. More important, they backfired among non-pundits. A Pew Research Center poll found that of those who followed the news, 48 percent disapproved of Romney's comments, and just 26 percent approved. By contrast. 45 percent approved of Obama's handing of the situation, and 36 percent disapproved.‘SIMPLICITY is what loved by everyone and so does the importance of an elegant website, user friendly rises. Fortunately, Magento makes this thing possible. Magento bolsters different sites with one single installation. One of the Magento’s propelled features include Magento multi store functionality. It is one of the most outstanding features of Magento eCommerce platform. This feature permits us to manage and effectively handle multiple websites and online stores using a single admin panel.
Thus, it eliminates the complications and the dilemma that website owners face when they need to run their multiple stores together and that too with the ease. The administrator can deal with the products of child websites through one single admin panel. In short, this astounding feature accompanies with brilliant service ability. Thus, wiping out all the difficulties and problem that site owners face when they have to run their different stores together and that too effortlessly.
Hence, without a doubt today Magento is one of the most effective ecommerce development platform ever built.
Say ‘HI’ To Magento’s Marvelous Feature – ‘Multi Store Functionality’!
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The main aspect of selecting the URL structure for your store is your own personal choice. Well, you can select same domain name with different directories, i.e. www.kodematix/aboutus.net and www.kodematix/contactus.net
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Kodematix has architectures several eCommerce websites with the help of Magento. Our professional team consists of experts in creating multiple Websites in Magento. They easily manage this difficult task and provide a 100 % satisfaction to our clients who are looking to run their multiple online stores for their business.Donald Trump’s campaign just began broadcasting the first installment of what it’s calling a nightly campaign coverage show exclusively on Facebook Live. The show, which will be broadcast on Trump’s Facebook page at 6:30PM ET from today until Election Day, is hosted by campaign advisors Boris Epshteyn and Cliff Sims, as well as The Blaze commentator Tomi Lahren. For the first episode, the trio is interviewing campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and adviser Jason Miller, according to Wired.
It's important to note that, while the production has all the hallmarks of a television news broadcast with hosts wearing formal attire and onscreen graphics similar to Fox News chyrons, it's not claiming to be journalism. Instead, it's selective coverage with a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton bent, more akin to cable news commentary and punditry than an unbiased news source.
"We all know how strong the left wing media bias is."
The show may have been purposefully designed as such to appeal to Trump supporters who once received a majority of their information from Fox News, but have since gravitated to more fringe publications over the course of the last 18 months. Clinton, on the other hand, does something similar with The Briefing, which is designed to look like a digital media operation with an emphasis on sleek design and social video production. Both are in a way masquerading as something they're not — you could argue The Briefing is far more subtle — to play to the preferred tastes of their primary audience.
The Trump campaign's show is an expansion of a strategy devised shortly before the third and final presidential debate last week, when Epshteyn and Sims did pre- and post-debate shows on Facebook Live and wracked up more than 9 million video views. Part of the program will also involve live streaming every one of Trump’s rallies and providing commentary before and after those events. In the first 10 minutes of the broadcast, the inaugural episode has more than 55,000 active viewers on Facebook.
"We all know how strong the left wing media bias is. This is us delivering our message to voters," Epshteyn told Wired in an interview. "It has nothing to do with Trump TV. It’s about using 21st century technology and communication in a way that’s effective." Since the debate night Facebook broadcasts, Trump’s campaign has been tight-lipped on its post-election plans and whether it would pursue a media venture to monetize the candidate’s massive audience of conservative voters.
It would certainly make sense, and this nightly news show could be the first step, despite Epshteyn’s claims otherwise. Trump notoriously despises the mainstream media for what he perceives as a unilateral bias against him and his campaign. Today, at a rally in St. Augustine, Florida, Trump said, "The media isn’t just against me, they’re against all of you." These supporters, whom are already distrustful of major news organizations, are now being sold a direct line to Trump, one crafted and filtered by campaign staffers to appeal to voters who already turn to the candidate’s Twitter account and Facebook page as a primary source of information.
Update 8:03PM ET, 10/24: Clarified that while the show is in a news format, it is not in fact claiming to be journalism or to compete in any way with traditional news organizations.A family video of Paul Babeu soon after he became headmaster at a boarding school for troubled teens proves he knew of the perverse and abusive discipline at the school.
Babeu, a former Chandler police officer and the sheriff of Pinal County since getting elected in 2008, is running for Congress for the second time. When he ran in 2012, he was accused by his Mexican lover of threatening (vis a vis Babeu's attorney) to have the man deported, an explosive tale first reported in New Times. The Republican sheriff ultimately couldn't escape the heat of the scandal. He pulled himself out of the Congressional race in May 2012 and focused on his re-election as sheriff.
Paul Babeu discusses how people were put in corners for "weeks" at a time and other abuses at the boarding school where he once served as headmaster.
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The story about the boarding school first was reported by ABC 15 News (KNXV-TV) in February 2012, about a month after the story about Babeu's lover. As reporter David Biscobing detailed, the DeSisto School in Massachusetts shut down in 2004 after failing to comply with state standards. Babeu worked there as headmaster and executive director from 1999 to 2001, during a time when the abuses documented by the state of Massachusetts were taking place. Babeu denied that he knew about practices discovered in an investigation of the school.
But in a family videotape from Christmas 1999 obtained by Biscobing and aired last week, Babeu can be heard discussing the same measures found to have put the about 60 DeSisto students at risk, in addition to being "excessively punitive." As the video makes clear, Babeu not only knew about the practices — he appears to have liked them.
Sitting at a dining room table in a relaxed setting, Babeu explains to family members the harsh methods used by the boarding school, made up of about 40 percent special-needs children. Babeu gloats about how students were forced into Dickies-type farming outfits and sent to perform manual labor, were forced to hold hands, and made to sit in a corner every day for "weeks."
The DeSisto School
In a November 2001 court motion, representatives of the Massachusetts Office of Child Care Safety ask a court to shut down the school's operations because of such abusive practices, in addition to improper restraining of students and allowing students to strip-search other students.
The video was released by Babeu's sister, Lucy Babeu, a longtime enemy of her brother's. Babeu writes her off as "mentally unstable" in a statement he gave Biscobing. As New Times also detailed in 2012, Lucy Babeu accuses her brother of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old DeSisto student. Sheriff Babeu denies the allegation, but former students interviewed by New Times writer Monica Alonzo in 2012 said there was no doubt the headmaster and student spent a lot of time together.
"Systematic psychological or physical abuse of defenseless children is reprehensible," Babeu's Congressional opponent, Democrat Tom O'Halleran, said in a statement. "Parents entrusted their children in the care of the school, and Paul Babeu was the headmaster. His responsibility was to protect those in his care and not look the other way while they were harmed, and as reported by the State of Massachusetts, dehumanized."
Babeu's first bid for Congress was derailed after the tough-on-immigration Republican was outed by his gay lover, a Mexican immigrant who accused the sheriff of threatening to have him deported.
A. Micheal DeSisto, who founded the school in 1978, died in 2004. In a 2004 Boston Globe article, Frank McNear, the executive director who followed Babeu, claimed that neither cornering nor sending people to "the farm" were practices in use at the time.
"There were practices in the '80s and early '90s that are no longer done here," McNear told the Globe. "I don't even like to drag this stuff up again because it hasn't happened in a really long time."
Babeu's video disproves McNear's statement, as well.
Biscobing's damning report also notes that while Babeu's campaign website touts Babeu's "effectiveness in personnel management" at DeSisto, Massachusetts investigators found no evidence that background checks were completed of 17 of 27 staff members.
Babeu released the following statement to New Times last week about the video:
"This 16-year-old video of a family Christmas gathering shows nothing new. As the administrative head of the school, I had no responsibility over student discipline. I had no role in student affairs The school had a psychiatrist and six therapists in charge of student care and the teaching was supervised by another director. All this has been established and I was never directly or indirectly involved in any incident. I was never named or even interviewed in any lawsuit or complaint, which is common for a school for at-risk youth."
The video, however, shows in dramatic fashion exactly what Babeu knew about the twisted practices at DeSisto. His response to that knowledge is well-established: Babeu took no action to stop "cornering," sending students to the "the farm" or other cult-like abuses.Im Tirtzu releases hard-hitting video accompanying its report on leftists who are 'planted' inside Israel yet assisting its enemies.
Zionist group Im Tirtzu has released a powerful short video to accompany the shocking report it compiled, which examines 20 Israeli NGOs that receive foreign funding and are actively involved in anti-Israel activity.
The report illustrates how much money was received by each extreme leftist organization, all of which participate in or actively create programs and media that harm Israel. Such activity includes disseminating anti-Israel propaganda across the globe, working towards preventing the punishment of terrorists, and defending murders of Israeli citizens.
The foreign funding includes the New Israel Fund (NIF), foreign governments, the EU - and over 13 million shekels from a Palestinian foundation based in Ramallah.
Matan Peleg, the CEO of Im Tirtzu, told Arutz Sheva, “We knew that these organizations were sponsored by foreign governments, but we were very surprised at the sheer amount of foreign help that is going to these organizations. I have no words to describe how bad the situation is.”Danny Ings is closing in on a full return to fitness and could feature before the end of the season, prompting a tribute to the striker from Jürgen Klopp today.
The Englishman has been out of action since last October following an anterior cruciate ligament injury which brought a sudden halt to an impressive run of form.
Ings has spent the past seven months in rehabilitation and shown his strength of character and resolve in recovering quickly enough to re-join training and perhaps give the manager a fresh option in the coming weeks.
Klopp said: “That’s very good news. I saw a lot of his sessions with the rehab department. It has looked really good for a few weeks.
“I heard about [the tribunal] for the first time since I’ve been in England. I’m not a specialist and can’t say anything about the amount of money or something like this.
“We respect the decision, that’s what I can say. For me as a manager, it’s more important that the player is close to being available hopefully.
“We have to see. I didn’t see the session yesterday, I have to speak to the U21 coach and Danny. We have a few games to play and we’ll see what happens.
“We will see if there is an opportunity this season and if we should try it then or not. Or if he should use the summer break for improving everything and then he will start 100 per cent in pre-season.
“That’s very good for us. Now this new point of development with being back in training is very good for him.”
The boss added: “He’s a great guy. I have had half an hour with him on the pitch – it was so unlucky I can’t believe. Since then I know much more about him as a person than as a professional football player.
“So if he is as good as a player as he is as a person, we can really look forward to seeing him on the pitch.
“In a very difficult moment in your career, very young, not the best news, it can help you build character for sure. My opinion is that he already had a good basis on the character side. Now, 100 per cent, he has developed.
“It’s the same with Joe Gomez, to be honest. It’s a little bit more complicated injury, so it will need a little bit more time but he is the same kind of guy.
“It is really good to have them here. I have had a lot of good moments with these two boys, having lunch and talking about private things. That’s really nice. We’re waiting for their comeback on the pitch.”Egypt’s foremost Muslim Brotherhood official called on the Arab world Thursday to replace negotiations with Israel with “holy Jihad,” claiming that if Jews are allowed to pray on the Temple Mount they will destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and supplant it with the third temple.
Mohammed Badie, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared in a public message published by Egyptian daily Al-Ahram that “the Zionists only understand force,” and that Arabs cannot hope to achieve justice from the Jews “through the corridors of the United Nations or through negotiations.”
‘Zionists only understand the language of force and will not relent without duress,’ Badie continued. ‘This will only happen through holy Jihad, high sacrifices and all forms of resistance’ Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, but he resigned all official positions in the movement upon taking office. He has said that his government would uphold the Camp David peace accords with Israel, and recently named a new ambassador to Israel.
“The time has come for the Islamic nation to unite around one man for the sake of Jerusalem and Palestine,” Badie said. “The Jews have dominated the land, spread corruption on earth, spilled the blood of believers and in their actions profaned holy places, including their own.”
“Zionists only understand the language of force and will not relent without duress,” Badie continued. “This will only happen through holy Jihad, high sacrifices and all forms of resistance. The day they realize we will march this path and raise the banner of Jihad for the sake of God, is the day they will relent and stop their tyranny.”
Badie, 69, has headed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt since 2010, and before that served on its governing council for more than a decade. Trained in veterinary medicine and an academic by profession, he served time in jail for political activity as a young man but was pardoned by president Anwar Sadat.Daniel Chamberlin explains the discreet charm of the Grateful Dead. Illustrations by D.C. Berman.
Originally published in the July 2004 issue of Arthur, which is currently available for purchase in our online store. Click here to check it out.
I’M NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR TIE-DYED CLOTHING. My girlfriend and those friends of mine who truly have my best interests at heart forbid it. For most people this is an obvious and easy style rule to adhere to. But during certain times of the year I am overwhelmed by the Grateful Dead. I listen to nothing but live recordings of Dead concerts while immersing myself in books detailing the minutiae of their 30-year career. I search through David Dodd’s “Annotated Grateful Dead Lyric Archive,” reading up on the roots of “Fennario,” a made-up world of timber forests and treacherous marshland mentioned in two of my favorite songs, “Dire Wolf” and “Peggy-O.” Judging from the number of Dead recordings in my collection one can draw an easy conclusion that I am a certifiable Deadhead.
This is a problem because alongside New Age or contemporary country, “Grateful Dead” is a genre of music with acknowledged questionable merits. This has something to do with the schizophrenic quality of said music: the May 14, 1974 “Dark Star” performed in Missoula, Montana sounds like “In A Silent Way” as interpreted by Sonic Youth but nearly every performance of “Lazy Lightnin’” sounds like coke-snorting yuppies getting funky in tie-dyed Izods. The Dead toured with both Love and Waylon Jennings in the ‘70s but were collaborating with Bruce Hornsby and Joan Osborne by the ‘90s. I hear their influence on classic Meat Puppets and latter-day Boredoms albums, but their official inheritors are cornball bands like The String Cheese Incident and Phish. They count among their fans legions of Hell’s Angels as well as Tipper and Al Gore. There are a lot of ways to listen to the Grateful Dead. As legendary concert promoter and longtime Dead booster Bill Graham once put it, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.”
Mostly though, the Dead’s bad reputation is due to their fans. My latent Deadheadism causes my girlfriend to worry that at a certain point of saturation, she’ll come home from work to find me reeking of patchouli oil, clad in vibrant pajama bottoms and a tank top decorated with capering bears, my dilated pupils being the only reason I haven’t yet found something to juggle. “Fukengrüven, sister!” I’ll say as she comes through the door.
My most recent Grateful Dead binge kicked off when Islamic militants decapitated Nicholas Berg on the Internet. Oh yeah. No more NPR for me. Instead, a free-falling relapse into this December 26, 1969 Dead show at Southern Methodist University. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann is late getting to the venue, so Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir lay down this sublime acoustic set of murder ballads and old Christian folk songs that they refer to as “sacred numbers.” It’s the only known recording of their version of “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” which is really something to be excited about for a closet Deadhead like me. The show provides a wonderful escape—the Dead always seem so detached from reality and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
I was looking for a similar kind of escape in 1991 while en route to my first Grateful Dead show. I wanted to see if the Deadheads might offer a more organic, hedonistic alternative to the existentialist discomfort of my central Indiana high school experience.
My friend Jeremy’s ancient brown Cutlass Sierra didn’t have any air conditioning. He and I sat sweating on its stained tan upholstery as the soft fabric that lined its cabin ceiling sagged like the belly of an obese cat. There was a hole in this ceiling liner through which his passengers had squirreled little pieces of trash and souvenirs of high school pranks: cigarette butts, Taco Bell sauce packets, fully-expanded tampons.
Jeremy was my first friend with a car—he was a senior in high school, I was a sophomore—and he played chauffeur for many of the relatively mundane adventures that characterized my teenage years. Examples given: Skating clandestinely at the loading dock of a Wal-Mart. Watching obscure hardcore bands play at the Broad Ripple Community Center. Driving in circles around a Bob Evans restaurant until perplexed waitresses gathered at the windows to watch us. It was on one such trip to a hole-in-the-wall punk rock record store that Jeremy purchased the Meat Shits tape we were listening to that hot June afternoon as we sat in a sea of traffic outside the Deer Creek Amphitheater. This Meat Shits album had 666 individual songs. Their music and their photocopied album art were comprised of cut-and-pasted shards of pornographic imagery, guitar noise and obscene lyrics. Though secretly I was growing to love the Dead, I publicly declared their music to be drippy psychedelic glop. This Meat Shits album, this was where it was at.
Jeremy was a Dead fan, though I don’t know that he would’ve called himself a Deadhead. His car’s bumper was covered with punk stickers—Ramones, Misfits, anti-war slogans—but a skeleton wearing a crown of roses was plastered on the back window. He thought the Dead were a good acid rock band, no more no less. We didn’t have tickets to the show; we were just going to wander amid the freaks in the parking lot scene outside.
From what I could tell from my public high school classmates, if you liked the Grateful Dead, you were most likely a drug addict. There were probably a few Deadheads who didn’t spend their free time tracking down pot dealers or dropping acid during gym class. But the quintessential Deadhead for me was a lanky, mullet-sporting fellow with the nickname “101.” The handle came from his claim that he was well-versed in “one hundred and one homemade ways to get high.” Over lunch he would regale me with tales of huffing gasoline in his garage, emerging hours later with.22-caliber rifle in hand. He would then take up position in his backyard in order to defend it from an onslaught of talking gophers. These hallucinations were often unfortunate squirrels or neighborhood cats. Backyard safely defended, 101 would head inside, get busy with some model airplane glue and settle in for reruns of “The Jeffersons.”
“But 101,” I’d ask, “what’s so great about watching TV after sniffing glue?”
“Because when you’re high,” he would reply, “the Jeffersons come out of the TV and watch their show with you, dude.”
Sometime during my junior year 101 stopped coming to school. The rumor, circulated by his friend Matt, was that he had stolen his parents’ credit cards and their car and high-tailed it to Florida. Nobody ever heard from him again.
Matt was in my chemistry class and sat across the table from me with his lab partner, Donovan. Together they would amuse themselves during lectures by grabbing large beakers and holding them up to their mouths, inhaling make-believe bong hits. It was funny the first day or two, but by the second semester the joke seemed more like a junkie’s force-of-habit. It was Donovan who gave me my first taste of Grateful Dead music. He was a nice guy and when he wasn’t passed out on his desk he could be quite funny. He was also from Australia, and in the cultural melting pot of central Indiana his shade of vanilla qualified as exotic.
My |
, informing the psychologies and politics of the lighthuggers' "ultranaut" crews for example.
In the novel "2061: Odyssey Three" by Arthur C. Clarke, the spaceship Universe, using a muon-catalyzed fusion rocket, is capable of constant acceleration at 0.2 g under full thrust.
The UET and Hidden Worlds spaceships of F.M. Busby's Rissa Kerguelen Saga utilize a constant acceleration drive that can accelerate at 1 g or even a little more.
Ships in the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey make use of constant acceleration drives, which also provide artificial gravity for the occupants.The scene that surrounded the Columbus Blue Jackets during Game 4 of their first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series at Nationwide Arena was unfathomable for longtime fans in the area.
Here was a team the city could call its own, playing in a state-of-the-art building with a rollicking crowd roaring with every opportunity by the home side. The noise flowed onto the ice surface in waves, the fans screaming for the goal that would extend the series against the Pittsburgh Penguins, the perennial NHL powerhouse and burgeoning rival.
The eyes of the hockey world were on the Ohio capital as the pesky Blue Jackets attacked, looking to make the statement that after a 15-year journey they had arrived as a force.
Ed Gingher, who runs the city's only AAA youth hockey program, was there that night. He is heavily invested in what the Blue Jackets do because it directly impacts the talent pool available to feed his program; plus he does some work for the franchise. He is devoted to the sport, having played and coached it for much of his life.
"I've never heard a building as loud as the one in Columbus during that series," Gingher said.
Then, it got louder. The Blue Jackets, down to the last seconds of the game and in danger of trailing the best-of-7 series 3-1, saw the hockey gods reward the patience of a franchise and its fans.
Defenseman Jack Johnson, an enemy from his University of Michigan days turned hometown hero upon his trade to Columbus from the Los Angeles Kings, dumped the puck into the Pittsburgh zone with 30 seconds remaining. Columbus trailed 3-2 and had pulled the goalie for an extra attacker. Ryan Johansen, the first-round savior, beat wandering goalie Marc-Andre Fleury to the puck and threaded a pass through three Penguins onto the stick of Brandon Dubinsky, who was imported for just such a moment. Dubinsky flicked his wrists, and the puck beat a diving Fleury across the goal line to tie the game.
The dream remained alive for Columbus and came into clearer focus when Nick Foligno scored in the third minute of overtime, delivering the Blue Jackets all the way back from three goals down and turning a likely insurmountable series deficit into a best-of-3 against the star-studded Penguins.
Columbus Dispatch reporter Aaron Portzline, an Ohio native who has covered the team since the beginning, was struck almost as much by the behavior of the fans as what was happening on the ice during the comeback.
"Just being above the crowd in the press box and looking down on those people, the sheer joy of the win in Game 4 was something that those people had waited so long to witness," Portzline said. "To taste a victory and the way it happened; it felt like a coming of age for the city and the sports fans in the city in that this is what it has felt like for other cities. It made people realize the next level that there is, gave them a taste of it and that the best is yet to come."
"I remember looking at the crowd in there and it was so loud in there. But, there were so many people as they were standing and cheering, they were processing. They were sort of trying to grab on to what this meant in the moment. Somewhere in that cheer was an 'Oh my god' moment."
Suddenly, fans were sleeping outside Nationwide Arena to get tickets to Game 6, even after the Blue Jackets lost Game 5 in Pittsburgh. An area of the city once shuttered after 5 p.m. was now the focal point for much of the hockey world.
Forward Jared Boll has been with the Blue Jackets since 2007, their longest-tenured member.
"Every year, it's seems like the fan base has grown and they've been more excited about the team and hockey in general," he said. "My first few years they were excited to go to the games and have a good time, but now it's grown more into they expect us to do well.
"They expect us to play hard and win games. That's the way it should be. They want to see a winning product on the ice and they want to see good hockey. I think that's good for the city."
Despite the building belief that the Blue Jackets were on the cusp of something magical, Game 6 did not deliver on the scoreboard. Evgeni Malkin, one of the best players in the world, scored a hat trick to help the Penguins take a four-goal lead, just enough to withstand another furious rally. The Penguins won the game 4-3 and the series 4-2.
But the Blue Jackets were far from defeated.
Fans camped out overnight at the Nationwide Arena prior
to Game 6 of the 2014 Stanley Cup Playoffs first round
against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Photo: Jamie Sabau/NHLI (Click to enlarge)
The series that played out across 190 miles of Route 70 delivered the Blue Jackets their welcome-to-the-NHL moment and intensified the Pittsburgh-Columbus rivalry. This wasn't the four-and-done playoff series against the Detroit Red Wings from five years earlier. It was instead the moment when the Penguins and many others in the NHL realized that Columbus' hard work during the prior 18 years had paid dividends.
Duke Johnson, the general manager of The Ohio State University Ice Rink, also was at Nationwide Arena for the coming-of-age moments last spring. He has been a season-ticket holder since Day One, he said proudly.
After the growing pains, losing most of its games for more than a decade, the feeling of standing side-by-side with other fans and holding dear something new and exciting was a high point for Johnson, who began playing hockey back home in Omaha, Neb., and played professionally in Europe before settling at OSU.
"The team finally came together and it was a real positive experience to go to the games when we got to the playoffs to play Pittsburgh," Johnson said. "Everybody talked about how exciting that type of hockey is, which was different than it was for years. I think it did help the growth for this year. It's amazing what winning can do. Even if you are not winning, you are competing and you can be really happy.
"That's what they did last year. They competed every night last year, and that is what you are looking for."
Hockey is hot in Columbus. The Blue Jackets are trying to claw their way out of an early-season tailspin caused by an almost unimaginable number of injuries, and the fans believe it will happen.
Plus, the 2015 Honda NHL All-Star Game is coming to town. For three days starting Jan. 23, Columbus will again be the focal point of the hockey universe, playing host to the sport's biggest stars and personalities.
Columbus can't wait for the opportunity to strut its stuff.
Yes, the Ohio State football team, which won the national championship game against Oregon on Monday, is the clear-cut king of the sports mountain in Columbus, but the city is no longer just a college town. It's a hockey town too.
"Columbus has forever been a college town," Portzline said. "That's how a lot of people still see Columbus. It's Ohio State, let's not kid ourselves. Columbus is huge, but it doesn't feel it. It was a college town. The world's biggest college town, that's how people saw it; how Columbus saw itself. So, its rivals were Ann Arbor, Bloomington, West Lafayette, State College.
"I think with the Blue Jackets, now you are playing Los Angeles, now Pittsburgh hates you, now you are playing the Rangers, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal. It has put Columbus in conversations with cities that it was never in a conversation with. I think it has helped change the mindset of people. It's changed the perspective and the view of the self for a lot of people in Columbus as well."
Columbus is a major-league city these days, but the journey has been anything but conventional.
Football is king in Columbus, specifically the college brand played by the Buckeyes. There is no denying this. The scenes following the national championship game attest to the power the program holds over the city and much of the state.
Hockey could rarely compete. As late as 1991 there were two sheets of ice in Columbus: The Ohio State University Ice Rink and the Ohio State Fairgrounds Coliseum.
A string of minor-league teams played at the Coliseum, but few found longevity.
The Checkers were first in line, occupying the Coliseum as part of the International Hockey League circuit from 1966 to 1970. In 1971, the Golden Seals took up the IHL mantle and lasted two years, replaced by the Owls, the final attempt at IHL hockey in the city. They lasted four years and relocated after the 1976-77 season.
The ECHL arrived in 1991 with the Chill, but the start of a real rebirth was almost 15 years away.
Not only was the Coliseum an outdated venue considered by many unable to sustain a professional team, but there was little other hockey infrastructure in the city.
Ohio State was its only recreational rink. It ran 22 hours day and hosted college activities, the city's youth program (Capital Amateur Hockey Association), and a four-team adult program. There was one high school with a hockey program: Upper Arlington.
Other cities in Ohio were considerably ahead on the hockey curve.
Cleveland could bill itself as a former NHL city, home of the Cleveland Barons from 1976-78. The Cleveland Crusaders of the World Hockey Association were a tenant from 1972-76.
The Cleveland Lumberjacks of the IHL had a successful nine-year run starting in 1992. At their peak, the Lumberjacks averaged more than 9,000 fans per game. The youth programs in the area were vibrant.
Columbus Blue Jackets mascot Stinger was once the name of a WHA team in Cincinnati between the years of 1975 and 1979. (Photo: Getty Images) Columbus Blue Jackets mascot Stinger was once the name of a WHA team in Cincinnati between the years of 1975 and 1979.
Cincinnati had the Stingers in the WHA, multiple entries in the American Hockey League, and the Mohawks in the IHL.
NHL forward Mike Rupp grew up in Parma Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He played youth hockey there, went to the Lumberjacks games, was selected to play in the Ontario Hockey League, and became a first-round selection of the New York Islanders (No. 9) in the 1998 NHL Draft.
Rupp played 39 games for the Blue Jackets in 2005-06 and enjoyed the experience, but he remembered being highly skeptical when Columbus was awarded a franchise by the NHL in 1997, joining an expansion class that included Nashville, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minn.
"Everyone wondered why it was going there, I think," Rupp said. "People probably thought Cincinnati would be better even though Columbus is obviously the capital. In Cleveland, it was more, 'Why aren't we getting one? We should be the team. We had the team.'"
There were a lot of doubters, but a perfect storm was forming in Central Ohio that helped the Blue Jackets hit the ground with some momentum.
The latest and greatest of the minor-league teams in Columbus arrived in 1991 with expectations it would go by the wayside like its predecessors.
But general manager Dave Paitson was young and energetic. He believed the Chill could beat the odds. Even though Paitson came from the Indiana Pacers of the NBA, where he began his career in sports, he had a bit of a hockey background, having spent three years with the Indianapolis Ice of the IHL. More importantly, he had a marketing background and understood that the Chill could not survive by counting on hockey fans alone.
"We went all-out with a slap-people-across-the-face manner," said Paitson, now an associate athletic director at Sam Houston State University. "But people liked it because it was fun and hockey is a great sport when you get in to see it. So we had success where other people hadn't found that formula and, obviously, we did."
Espen Knutsen holds the distinction of being named
Columbus' first-ever All-Star when he played in the
2002 NHL All-Star game in Los Angeles.
Photo: Getty Images (Click to enlarge)
The Chill became the talk of the town, filling Fairgrounds Coliseum on a regular basis. They drew more than 5,800 fans a game and became a national success story, featured on network news and in major sports publications.
"It just caught fire," Paitson said. "That got media attention, and all of a sudden we are getting national media attention. Why? I couldn't tell you. Sometimes you have to be a little fortunate. The timing was right for hockey with that cycle of minor-league hockey. It was a little bit timing, a little bit of need in the city, and a little bit how we approached it. And then people just embraced it."
Paitson sells himself and the Chill short in that explanation.
The Chill made people embrace hockey and the team. Wacky contests during intermissions and viral marketing before the concept was fully developed assured them of full houses even when the team was not playing its best. Chill games became more than hockey games, they became social events. More than a few non-hockey fans were converted by attending the big-top atmosphere created by Paitson and his assistants.
The Chill made an even bigger contribution than raising hockey's profile in a town that cared excessively about college football and more casually about college basketball.
"It's Ohio State football first second and third, and then Ohio State basketball, and nothing else matters," Paitson said. "That's the way it was."
The Chill thawed out in 1999, playing their last season at the Fairgrounds and drawing fewer than 4,000 fans a game, which was still a good number in the ECHL. But with the Blue Jackets and the NHL on the horizon, the Chill decided to end their eight-year run in Columbus. After a dormant season, they relocated to Reading, Pa.
But the Chill established a blueprint that could become the syllabus for a high-level marketing class at Ohio State, and deeper roots that would nourish and stabilize the interest in hockey that was developing in the city and open the door for the Blue Jackets.
"It really was a series of dominoes that almost really had to fall in perfect order for things to happen on the timeframe that was there with NHL expansion," Paitson said. "Had we started any later, I don't see how Columbus would have made it in and would have been able to build that groundswell."
The Chill's legacy is visible throughout Columbus in the form of ice rinks, which feed a growing demand to play the game.
Remember the stats from 1991? Two rinks, the one youth organization, the one high school team, the four adult teams? It's totally different now.
The city added 11 rinks in the past 24 years. Five of those have been part of the Chiller franchise, which was started by the Chill soon after it arrived in Columbus.
Though there was some altruism in building the first Chiller, in nearby Dublin, the Chill did it out of necessity. With the paucity of available ice time, they were forced to hold early-morning practices during the week, a trend that was not ideal for management and did not endear the organization to its players.
"The pitch to our owner was, 'Listen, there isn't anything in the community,'" Paitson said. "There had been rinks here before and they had come and gone too, but I thought if we could manage this right and put it in the right place, we could make that part of the business work the other 22 hours of the day. But we really needed a practice facility. Practicing at 6 a.m. to 7:15 -- that's all the time we had -- was not a great selling point. It wasn't easy and it wasn't enough time on the ice either."
The first Chiller was a huge success and others followed every few years: Chiller Easton (1997), which featured a NHL sheet and an Olympic sheet; Chiller Ice Works (2001); and Chiller North (2004). NTPRD Chiller, which opened in 2003, is in nearby Springfield.
The influx of rinks changed the face of hockey in Columbus.
"The one lasting thing [the Chill] left this city that should never be forgotten is it is the Chill who started building rinks, before the NHL arrived, before the NHL said we think we want to be there," Portzline said. "They started building the rinks. All this grass-roots hockey, all these suburban kids saying I want to play hockey that started with the Chill and was pushed to a different level with the Blue Jackets."
Gone are the days when the hockey community was cultish, with each participant wearing his or her hockey accoutrements as a badge of honor while trudging toward whatever undesirable ice time was available at the OSU rink.
"When you talk about 20 years ago, yes, everybody came through here," said Johnson, the OSU rink manager. "Today, with all the Chillers in town, and they are mostly Chillers, there are a lot of people that don't come here anymore. Being with the university, I have two varsity teams, and our goal is to help the student athlete, so those teams take up quite a bit of time. We don't have much youth hockey anymore here, there's no high school hockey here; it's all gone to the Chillers. Now there are people in town that don't know we are here. That's how much it has changed.
"It's bittersweet because you don't meet the same type of people you were meeting before because there are people that have not been here."
But the growth in the game and the level of skill being displayed because of the rink-building boom is undeniable.
According to numbers collected by the Blue Jackets in a survey about the state of the game in the area, there were 4,500 youth and 2,800 adult registered players in 2012. The Chiller Ice Hockey League is the third-largest USA Hockey registered adult league in the country. More than 2,500 children are in the Junior Jackets Learn to Play Program, which has experienced 15 percent growth since its founding in 2002.
There are six youth hockey organizations and 20 high school programs.
High-level players in Columbus are starting to get noticed throughout the country, playing for the prestigious National Team Developmental Program run by USA Hockey, showing up at the World Junior Championship, playing in the Canadian Hockey League, and dotting Division 1 college rosters in the United States.
Connor Murphy, who came to the Columbus area in 2002 when his dad, Gord, was hired as an assistant coach by the Blue Jackets, spent his formative years in the city's youth system and plays for the Arizona Coyotes after being selected in the first round (No. 20) of the 2011 NHL Draft.
Cole Cassels was drafted by the Vancouver Canucks in the third round (No. 85) in 2013. Like Connor Murphy, Cassels is the son of an NHL player, Andrew Cassels, who relocated to Columbus to work for the Blue Jackets.
Forward Sean Kuraly, drafted by the San Jose Sharks in the fifth round (No. 133) in 2011, is having a dominant freshman season with the University of Miami Red Hawks.
Others are on the horizon, some playing for the AAA Blue Jackets, a program started in 2004. This season, the U-18 team, made up entirely of players from Ohio, has been ranked as high as No. 3 nationally. Last season, the AAA peewee team won the prestigious Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament.
"I would say it has been fast-tracked here over the last five to seven years where we have seen great strides in our players as they are taking full advantage of the opportunities that are there," said Gingher, who runs the AAA program. "It's fun to watch."
In a week's time, Columbus gets to put its hockey growth in front of fans of the NHL when the All-Star Game comes to Nationwide Arena.
The growth of the Blue Jackets, who are again morphing into a team to be respected across the rest of the League after its playoff showing last year and weathering those early-season injuries to key players, will be in the narrative.
The hockey infrastructure also will be part of the tale that needs to be told during hockey's midseason gala.
But the growth of Columbus as a city and supporter of professional hockey will be perhaps the most evident story of the weekend.
The fans who crammed Nationwide Arena last spring proved this is a major-league city that has allowed the Blue Jackets to ease, ever so slightly, the stranglehold enjoyed here by the Ohio State football program.
Word is getting out, louder and faster by the day, that hockey is a big part of the fabric.
"When I was there for a year, we were terrible and the fans were awesome," said Rupp, who played for six NHL teams. "When I was [with the New Jersey Devils] before Columbus, we could do whatever we wanted and no one would ever recognize us, but in Columbus, people would want to pay for a meal, or when you brought your car in to get serviced, people would be like, 'Oh, I'm a big fan.' It just took me back to being a kid from Ohio and seeing it. These people love it, they just love it.
"I would like to see where it can go. I don't think they have tapped that yet. The All-Star Game is a big shot in the arm toward that."
R.J. Umberger arrived in Columbus in 2002 from nearby Pittsburgh to play college hockey for OSU. Six years later he was back as a member of the Blue Jackets. He stayed until 2014, when he was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers.
He's told all his NHL friends who will be making the trip to Columbus to take part in the All-Star festivities that they are going to be impressed by the city, the citizens, and the passion for the sport.
"I told a couple of guys on [the Flyers], [Claude] Giroux and the like, who might be going to the All-Star Game, I said you're going to be blown away how good it's going to be here," Umberger said. "The fans are crazy. You talk about some of the things these fans went through the first 10 years and how passionate they were to stay with the program, the organization those years, it's amazing.
"It's really changed since the [2014] playoffs. You go places and people know who you are. Other than Ohio State football, hockey is the big thing here now. People are grabbing onto it. You see it in youth hockey. The youth hockey teams are going all around the country and doing well. People are talking about this area. It's got a lot to do with ex-Blue Jackets guys staying here and ex-Ohio State players staying here and coaching these kids. It's making this place very attractive."
Paitson may have had the best seat in town to watch the growth. He arrived as an outsider, selling hockey at a time when it wasn't a prime property and helped grow it into a sport people in the city were ready to consume and embrace, paving the way for the Blue Jackets.
He hopes to be back for the All-Star Game on Jan. 25 (5 p.m. ET, NBCSN, CBC, TVA Sports) to experience how far the process has moved along, but if not, he knows he helped author an incredible hockey story.
"You look at downtown Columbus today and you think about what it was and what it is today and it is mindboggling really. It's just great. It was what the city needed," Paitson said. "Columbus is such a great sports town. Somebody was going to make something happen there at some point, there's no doubt.
"It's too good a town for that not to happen."March 26, 2017 09:09 IST
Top al Qaeda leader Qari Yasin, who was involved in multiple deadly attacks in Pakistan which claimed dozens of innocent lives, has been killed in a US drone strike in eastern Afghanistan, the Pentagon has said.
Yasin, who is said to be responsible for plotting the September 20, 2008 bombing on a Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and attack on a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009 in Lahore, was killed on March 19 in Paktika Province of Afghanistan.
"The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice," US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said on Saturday.
Pentagon said Yasin was killed in a US counter terrorism strike and the senior leader was responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including two American service members.
The senior terrorist figure from Balochistan had ties with Tehrik-e Taliban and had plotted multiple al Qaeda terror attacks, including the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad in which US Air Force Maj Rodolfo I Rodriguez and Navy Cryptologic Technician Third Class Petty Officer Matthew J O'Bryant were killed, it said in a statement.
Yasin was also responsible for the 2009 attack on a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Six Pakistani policemen and two civilians were killed and six members of the team injured, the Pentagon said.
The Pentagon's confirmation comes a few days after the Pakistan Taliban confirmed that Yasin had been killed in a US drone strike.
Describing Yasin as a "close assistant" of the Pakistani Taliban, spokesman of the outfit Mohammad Khurasani said that the senior al Qaeda leader was a "trainer of Mujahideen."
Three of Yasin's "companions" were also killed in the US drone strike, he said.
The US had been hunting Yasin for at least four years, according to Long War Journal.
Representative imageIt's been more than 30 years—during the Blizzard of 1978 to be exact—since Neil Stuart saw "thundersnow," a weather phenomenon featuring the unusual combination of thunder, lightning and snow. The National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist was 10 years old, living near Boston. The storm—which he says "is famous in meteorological circles" and influenced his career path—dumped 27 inches (67 centimeters) of snow on the ground over two days. The heaviest snow, however, came during a six-hour thundersnow storm that delivered one foot of snow over a six hour period.*
Seeing thundersnow come down is "like watching a time-lapse movie of the snow building up, because it falls so quickly," Stuart says.
Thunder and lightning during a snowstorm is different from a run-of-the-mill snowstorm; it is extremely rare—fewer than 1 percent of observed snowstorms unleash thundersnow, according to a 1971 NSW study. But recorded observations of the phenomenon date back to 250 B.C., say ancient Chinese records translated in 1980 by atmospheric scientist Pao-Kuan Wang, now of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Today, researchers are interested in thundersnow for its predictive value. According to Patrick Market, an associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri, a 30-year study of snowfall found that when lightning is observed during a snowstorm, there is an 86 percent chance that at least six inches (15 centimeters) of snow will fall within 70 miles (113 kilometers) of the flash. Researchers are trying to determine the combo of atmospheric conditions required to create thundersnow to help them better predict heavy snowfall—which they define as at least eight inches (20 centimeters) falling at a rate of three to four inches (7.5 to 10 centimeters) per hour—and issue warnings about hazardous weather before it hits, giving people time to prepare, take cover and get off the road. (The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that more than 800 deaths were caused by snow-related traffic accidents in 2007.)
By the time the lightning flashes during a thundersnow-storm, it is often already too late to prepare local residents for the whiteout on the way. "If we're talking about the observation of thundersnow," Market says, "the predictive value is on the order of minutes to hours."
*Correction (4/06/09): This article originally stated that the 27 inches of snow accumulated over six hours instead of two days.
Thundersnow-storms share some characteristics with summer thunderstorms. In both, a region of relatively warm air causes moisture to condense into clouds. A temperature gradient then forms with colder air farther up and warmer air closer to Earth's surface. If the relatively warm air begins to rise, the turbulence causes some water molecules to lose electrons and others to gain them, forming charges within the atmosphere that lead to electrification (discharged as lightning) and a sudden heating and expansion of the air. Thundersnow is unique, scientists believe, because due to the subzero temperatures, interactions between supercooled liquid water, ice crystals and larger ice particles can also generate lightning. In both types of storms, thunder results from the sound waves created by the rapid cooling and contraction of the air superheated by the lightning.
In the U.S. thundersnow is most likely to form in mountainous regions like the Rockies (thanks to warm air pockets caused by sudden changes in elevation) as well as in the vicinity of comparatively warm and large bodies of water such as the Great Lakes. Snow requires a cold environment, adequate moisture to form clouds, and rising air; thundersnow makes an appearance when a fourth ingredient is added: thermal instability, which is created by the addition of relatively warm air. (Market estimates that temperatures need to get cooler by at least 7 degrees Fahrenheit (four degrees Celsius) per mile of altitude as warm air travels upward to create the needed turbulence. Scott Steiger, an assistant meteorology professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, recently discovered that there are about six thundersnow storms a year in the lower Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario) region, most of them in November and December.
"These storms don't move, so they can dump up to seven feet [two meters] of snow in one day," he says. "They are very intense snowstorms, but they are very local."
When thundersnow occurs away from mountains and lakes, its heat sources aren't found near the ground but rather at altitudes upward of 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). It is these less-frequent occurrences—in more populous areas in the Great Plains and the Northeastern U.S., as during the 1978 blizzard—where this type of storm has the greatest potential to cause damage. During a March 1 thundersnow storm that covered parts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, two to three inches (five to to 7.6 centimeters) fell per hour, an extremely rare occurrence in that part of the country, Stuart says. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport reported visibility of only about 1,320 feet (402 meters) for more than an hour around noontime that day, and there were power outages in some areas of northern Georgia due to the heavy, wet snow, he adds.
Market last month joined a team of storm-chasing University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign researchers using various radars to examine what takes place inside storm clouds to cause snowfall. The team is surveying atmospheric conditions in several locations in Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. A field mill, a device that measures electric fields near the ground, will be used to determine whether there is an accumulation of charged ice particles in the clouds above. The team next year plans to fly into snowstorms in NWS planes and drop parcels containing thermometers, barometers and other devices that, like weather balloons, will measure temperature on their way down. If the team encounters thundersnow during its study, it may be able to confirm the conditions needed to produce it, making such icy tempests easier to forecast.
"With some lead time, [be it] hours or even a day or two," Stuart says, "we can see a big storm and predict which areas will see extreme snowfall."Move by Gulf nations to order Qataris out of their countries amid ongoing row has had huge impact, say campaigners
Human cost of the Qatar crisis: 'families are being torn apart'
At the office of Qatar’s national human rights committee, those most affected by the week-long Saudi-led blockade against the tiny emirate come each evening to seek help, clutching their documents.
Many have been directly affected by the decision announced by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates last week to order Qataris out of their countries, part of an escalating dispute over accusations the emirate is supporting terror and regional unrest that resulted in airspace, and land borders with Qatar, being closed.
“We’ve seen 700 people already in the past week,” said one official at the centre. “Every night it’s been like this.”
Those coming for help face myriad problems: families of mixed Gulf nationalities have been threatened with separation; others have lost jobs or places in education during the crisis.
Officials tell the story of a Saudi man who died at Hamad hospital in Qatar, and whose sons were allegedly prevented by Saudi Arabia from attending his funeral, a reported incident that has gained wide currency inside the emirate.
It echoes similar accounts gathered by human rights groups, including Amnesty, and by the Guardian, describing similar cases.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest People buy food staples at a supermarket in Doha. Photograph: @shalome05/AP
Among those seeking help are not only Qataris affected by the crisis, but Saudis and Bahrainis resident in the emirate.
Fawaz Abdullah Bukamal, 35, is a Bahraini media worker for a Qatari sports channel. Resident in Qatar since he was one month old, last week he was dismissed from his job because of the crisis and ordered by Bahrain to return home.
Turkey demands an end to Qatar blockade as humanitarian crisis deepens Read more
“I’ve lived in Qatar all my life then last week [after Bahrain recalled all its citizens in Qatar] the TV sports channel I work for told me they don’t need me any more.
“But I can’t go back to Bahrain. My life is here and my wife, who is Bahraini too and in hospital expecting a baby. In Bahrain we don’t have anywhere to live or have employment.
“I want to stay and I’m asking the government here to help me.”
The seriousness of the situation has led Amnesty to warn that new restrictions, imposed a week ago, are tearing families apart. The group documented the case of a Saudi Arabian man living in Doha with his Qatari wife, unable to visit his seriously ill mother in hospital in Saudi Arabia.
“[If ] I go home,” he said, explaining his dilemma, “I can’t see my wife. [If] I stay here, I can’t see my mum.”
Amnesty has also described the situation of a newlywed Qatari woman, who told researchers she had been in the process of moving to Bahrain to live with her husband, a Bahraini national, when the measures came into force.
“I was so happy. Before the ban, while I was looking for a job in Bahrain, I would go there every weekend to see my husband, my family, my house. When they did this, how could they not think of the people?” she said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Portraits of Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani on the back of vehicles and text reading in Arabic: ‘Tamim the glorious’ in Doha. Photograph: Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
Although on Sunday, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain announced that they planned to “take into consideration” the impact of the crisis on mixed-nationality families, few are convinced that it will mitigate the problems.
As the cases brought to the national human rights committee make clear, the embargo has hit all aspects of the shared social fabric of the Gulf region.
Among those waiting to be seen at the centre on Sunday was a 28-year-old Qatari woman, who asked to remain anonymous, and who had recently bought two apartments as an investment in the UAE.
“Because they cut relations, now I don’t know what will happen to [the apartments]. I waited for almost a week before deciding to come here,” she said.
“It was an investment for my future. I have to carry on paying the loan but even my bank account in the Emirates is frozen, I’m told. I am really worried.
Plan to airlift 4,000 cows to isolated Qatar to maintain milk supplies Read more
“It is not just about the money,” she added, beginning to cry. “The emirates never felt like a foreign place to me. I hope everything will be OK and we won’t forget our friends and family there.”
Another widely affected group has been Qatari students in neighbouring countries, some paying up to $40,000 (£31,400) a year for an education that has now been put on hold just before the end-of-year exams.
Among them is Dana al-Mansouri, 22, a third-year medical student. “I’m studying in the Emirates in Ajwan city,” she explained. “When we heard the announcement last Monday [saying Qataris had 14 days to leave] I went to the chancellor.
“It was just before my exams and they said at first that they would try and come up with something to help. Then I had a call saying, ‘It’s not legal for you to do the exams,’ and they said, ‘You have to leave the country.’ This was last Tuesday.
“It was so bad. It was mentally exhausting. Now I’m happy to be home where I feel safe. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned.”
On Tuesday, Qatar moved rapidly to open an air and sea bridge via Iran, Turkey and port facilities in Oman, in an attempt to ease the blockade and allow food and supplies to enter the emirate.A A
EVERETT, Wash. - A 19-year-old Everett man was killed in a fiery car crash during a police chase Monday near Everett, officials said.
The incident began at about 9 p.m. when a 1994 BMW sedan was reported stolen from the 14600 block of 58 |
? They're being lazy while the prelims guys are working hard? Well, in this case, yes, but at UFC 148 the roles were reversed. The prelims and first half of the main card were all dull, with the emotion of the final fights being all that saved the show (your mileage on Tito vs. Forrest may vary).
The main problem at UFC 149 was an overall lack of urgency. From Hector Lombard to Tim Boetsch to Urijah Faber to Brian Ebersole to Shawn Jordan the card was filled with fighters who weren't engaging in the fight. And they all did so for different reasons - Faber is terrified of being Mike Brown'd again, Boetsch feared Lombard's power, Ebersole was so calm he became complacent, Jorden seemed dwarfed by the moment. Can the UFC stop this? Not really. They already do a good job incentivizing action, between their bonuses and the way they reward exciting fighters with high profile fights. Any further push in that direction devalues wins and loses too much for a sport.
So what can the UFC do? They can adjust fan expectations. And the way to do that is, in my opinion, simple. The UFC needs to move away from the PPV model.
SBN coverage of UFC 149: Faber vs. Barao
They've taken strides with this over the past year, adding higher profile fights to their Fox and FX shows, and increasing the regularity of non-PPV events. But they need to take that further.
The reality of sports is that some games/fights/events will be boring. It's inevitable, and no sport can rid itself of this problem. Sports fans tend to accept this and move on - if a game stinks, turn the channel and tune back in next time for a better one. But when you ask fans to pay $50 to watch you've created different expectations. Now when the event is bad, you've let your paying customer down, and they're upset. UFC on Fox 2 was by no means a great show, but it was free and so there was not the same sense of tangible frustration you're feeling in the wake of UFC 149. Had this been a free show, fans would have complained a bit, sure. But they would have then just moved on. Now? Fans will, hopefully, be more cautious about spending that $50 next time.
Dana White has always said he wants the UFC to be as big as a major sport. To do that, they need to become a free sport anyone can watch. The PPV model can only take them so far, and it's now beginning to hurt them. And before anyone says "Well, it's working for boxing", let me ask - is it? Is boxing in 2012 really the sport you want to hold up as the gold standard for what works?
Of course the real trouble here is that, despite that frustration, PPVs still can sell. UFC 148 looks to have done over 1 million buys, making it one of the all time top UFC PPVs. And as long as they can still generate those kinds of sales on PPV, they'll keep using it. But they also will keep letting down their fans. And, in the long run, that's not worth it.
I applaud the UFC for actively working to bring more free fights in recent years, especially with the Fox deal. But UFC 149 showed that they need to take that further. Stop asking fans to pay so much for a product that can't always deliver. Be a real sport, warts and all. After all, that's what you've always wanted, right?BISMARCK, N.D. (Mar. 29, 2015) – Last week, Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed a bill into law authorizing the farming, production, and sale of industrial hemp in the state, effectively nullifying the federal prohibition on the same.
Introduced by Reps. David Monson (R-10) and Alan Fehr (R-36) along with Sen. Tom Campbell (R-19), House Bill 1436 (HB1436) passed 87-5 in the House last month. A 46-1 vote in the Senate this month sent the bill to Dalrymple’s desk for a signature.
HB1436 not only sets up the framework to effectuate a commercial hemp farming program in the state, it expressly rejects any need for federal approval before growing hemp in the state. It reads, in part: “A license required by this section is not conditioned on or subject to review or approval by the United States drug enforcement agency.”
Passage into law ensures that North Dakota will join join five other states – Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vermont – that have already passed similar measures.
Farmers in SE Colorado started harvesting the plant in 2013, and farmers in Vermont began harvesting in 2014, effectively nullifying federal restrictions on such agricultural activities. On Feb. 2, the Oregon hemp industry officially opened for business and one week later, the first license went to a small non-profit group who hopes to plant 25 acres this spring. The Tennessee Agricultural department recently put out a call for licensing, signaling that hemp farming will start soon there too. And a law passed in South Carolina in 2014 authorizes the same.
Experts suggest that the U.S. market for hemp is around $500 million per year. They count as many as 25,000 uses for industrial hemp, including food, cosmetics, plastics and bio-fuel. The U.S. is currently the world’s #1 importer of hemp fiber for various products, with China and Canada acting as the top two exporters in the world.
During World War II, the United States military relied heavily on hemp products, which resulted in the famous campaign and government-produced film, “Hemp for Victory!”.
But, since the enactment of the unconstitutional federal controlled-substances act in 1970, the Drug Enforcement Agency has prevented the production of hemp within the United States. Many hemp supporters feel that the DEA has been used as an “attack dog” of sorts to prevent competition with major industries where American-grown hemp products would create serious market competition: Cotton, Paper/Lumber, Oil, and others.
Early in 2014, President Barack Obama signed a new farm bill into law, which included a provision allowing a handful of states to begin limited research programs growing hemp. The new “hemp amendment”
…allows State Agriculture Departments, colleges and universities to grow hemp, defined as the non-drug oilseed and fiber varieties of Cannabis, for academic or agricultural research purposes, but it applies only to states where industrial hemp farming is already legal under state law.
HB1436 follows up on the farm bill’s authorization for state-level hemp research, but goes a step further by authorizing commercial development of the crop as well.
“Any person licensed under this section is presumed to be growing or processing industrial hemp for commercial purposes or research”
This is an essential first step forward, but the key is whether or not courageous farmers in North Dakota will start growing industrial hemp without further authorization from Washington D.C., as is happening today in both Colorado and Vermont.
ACTION ITEMS
Take action in your state to push legislators to introduce and support bills to legalize hemp farming by clicking HERE.
Michael Boldin [send him email] is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center. He was raised in Milwaukee, WI, and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on twitter – @michaelboldin and Facebook. http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.comThe first 2 books of this series are very good. Spunky heroine and lots of feel good stuff for the reader, despite being highly derivative. The first book is great fun and the next was is intense in a good way. The wind starts going out of the sails starting with the 3rd book. Alexis becomes a pawn of greater forces and instead of being able to take control like she did previously, she grumbles her way through this exposition of the political universe the author has created. Whining isn't a good fit for her. It isn't until the end that she wraps herself in glory, but at too high a cost.
In the 4th book Sutherland explores the issue of post traumatic stress, an issue he feels that science fiction has neglected. Sort of like a romance writer exploring the issue of STD's. All well and good, but by now Alexis is far removed from the magical girl of the first book. In addition, the writing itself is becoming more turgid and repetitive. The good stuff seems to have just vanished.
I would have quit the series but the 5th book is named Privateer. I have always found those kind of books to be a lot of fun, so I gave it a chance, which I regret. In this one I had to force myself to keep pushing through the turgid writing. As Alexis observed:, "It was as though her ship were stuffed into a basket, unable to move..." The same thing I was thinking about the novel. Worse, Alexis herself has lost her moral compass, which up to now had been her concern for her crews. In this one she has no qualms about leading them into unnecessary mortal danger so that she can search for her lover, and keeps her motivation for the decision a secret from them. To cap it off, there is no true ending to the book, and not even a cliffhanger. It just stops, followed by an author's note that it was too long and would resume in the next volume. It was too long because of the plot that went nowhere, endless repetition, and endless details about mudbanks and other unbelievable details of the dark space. He even invented a character whose job was to unload tedious info dumps on the reader. So at this point the Alexis I loved in book 1 seems to vanished and the writing is just too bad to keep wading through. But 5 stars for the 1st 2 books.They got him.
For more than a week, the man on the neon-green Kawasaki with no license plates had careened down Route 9 through Bayville, Pine Beach and Beachwood, hitting speeds of more than 100 miles per hour during rush hour.
Today was no exception. Christopher Lane, 23, Browns Mills, was spotted speeding down the center of two-lane Route 9 in Bayville, making obscene gestures at police as he flew by around 7:30 a.m.
"Today he gave us the finger as he passed by," Berkeley Detective Sgt. James J. Smith said.
But this time, Lane didn't complete his journey.
This time, Berkeley Detective Joseph Robertazzi and Beachwood Detective Sgt. Glen DeMarco were watching Lane from the vantage point of a New Jersey State Police helicopter they had boarded during the early morning hours from a ballfield in Manitou Park.
It didn't take long to spot him. Lane entered Route 9 northbound in the area of Ocean Gate Drive in Bayville around 7:30 a.m. and roared down Route 9.
The helicopter tracked him as he entered the Garden State Parkway northbound, then got off at Exit 91 in Brick Township. He was finally apprehended at a commercial business near 4th Street and Monmouth Avenue in Lakewood.
"The New Jersey State Police helicopter directed a responding Beachwood Police vehicle to the business where the suspect was arrested without further incident," Smith said.
Lane was taken to the Beachwood Police Department where he was interviewed by detectives. He admitted his involvement in rides over the past week, on Aug 22, Aug. 23, Aug. 24, Aug. 28, Aug. 29 and this morning, Smith said.
Lane, whose address is 50 Sepulga Drive in Browns Mills, had been staying at his girlfriend's house in Bayville. Police seized his 2005 Kawasaki ZX6.
Lane was charged with seven counts of second degree eluding and various other motor vehicle violations. Berkeley Municipal Court Judge James Gluck said Lane's bail at $205,000 with no ten percent option, Smith said.
Lane told police he eluded police because he had traffic warrants and a suspended driver's license, Smith said.
He now faces much more than that.
"He really put the motoring public in harm's way," Smith said. "The safe apprehension of this suspect would not have been possible without the cooperation of all of the police units involved. The State Police helicopter was the edge we needed to get this guy."
In most of the instances over the past week, police from area departments did not follow Lane in a high-speed chase because of the danger to other motorists, Smith said.
Police departments from Berkeley, Beachwood, Pine Beach and South Toms River assisted in the investigation, he said.Sticking to the conventional: Alastair Cook sweeps during his half-century in the first warm-up match © Getty Images
Could Alastair Cook pull out the reverse sweep during the Test series against Pakistan? For one of England's most orthodox batsmen, and an increasingly rare link back to the traditional form of Test batting, it would appear an unlikely prospect. But the importance of England not becoming bogged down by Pakistan's spinners has been pinpointed by Paul Farbrace, the assistant coach, as a key route to success this winter
Cook is one of three left-handers likely to be part of England's top seven at the start of the series. His opening partner is set to be Moeen Ali, while Ben Stokes will bat at No. 6. They are going to be facing two spinners, legspinner Yasir Shah and left-armer Zulfiqar Babar, turning the ball into them with fields that are likely to stifle their leg-side scoring options.
England had an early taste of such a tactic during their opening warm-up match when, on occasions, the Pakistan A spinners - the two who bowled the most, Zafar Gohar and Mohammad Ashgar, were left-armers - had a seven-two leg-side field.
England have previously been criticised for their obsession with the conventional sweep in Test cricket, instead of hitting straight down the ground, and Farbrace said that playing straight should be the preferred option in the first innings. However, he believes that all variations of the sweep could have a key part to play, especially deeper into the Test matches.
"Second innings, the sweep is going to be a huge part of the game," Farbrace said. "Even [in the first warm-up], we saw to the left-handers with a seven-two leg-side field bowling into the stumps, it might be that the left-handers have to learn to reverse to get the ball into the offside, just to manoeuvre the field.
"People talk about 'you've got to play straight' but all you're looking to do with the reverse sweep is play it once or twice to manoeuvre the field. What the best batsmen do against spin is manoeuvre the field to where they want the fielders to be to create gaps to knock the ball into. That's something you have to do. On slow pitches, you have constantly to be rotating the strike and getting the ball into gaps."
The biggest danger, Farbrace says, is when a batsman becomes stuck at the single end, giving a spinner the time to work him over. After the warm-up match Mark Wood conceded how England will have to play a different game compared to their expansive Ashes cricket, but it must not go from bash to block.
The 2007 vintage of Alastair Cook attempts a rare reverse sweep © Getty Images
"The bowler builds pressure, fielders around the bat, and eventually you bat-pad one and you get out," Farbrace said. "The key for our batters is, one, to adapt to the conditions very quickly and have the options to play the sweep, reverse sweep, whatever it might be. Even hitting over the top, down the ground, all of our batsmen have got to have that option within their game as well."
England's 3-0 whitewash against Pakistan in 2012 will be a regular reference point, but since then they have drawn in Sri Lanka and won in India so their record in subcontinental conditions - which the UAE can be bracketed as - is not as bad as some would make out.
In two of the victories - Colombo and Mumbai - the now absent Kevin Pietersen was to the fore making 158 and 186 with astonishing strokeplay, including the switch hit, and quick footwork that did not allow the spinners to dominate.
However, Cook was also immense, making 94 against Sri Lanka and three centuries in India. He played to his strengths, working off his pads, playing square into the off side and picking off anything that was dropped short. So the odds of Cook moving away from his method are slim. The first innings of the recent Ashes series was also instructive when he tried to attack Nathan Lyon early on and edged a cut. His is the long game. For anything more extravagant from the lefties, you probably need to look to Stokes.
But not over-hitting has been a key message from short-term consultant Mahela Jayawardene who is working with England until the end of the first Test. The outfield in Sharjah for the first warm-up match was slow, reducing value for shots, but England's batsmen are being told not to get frustrated.
"Rather than trying to hit the ball harder because the ball is not getting to you as easily as it might do at home, the key is to let the ball come a bit more, hitting more under your nose, actually looking to bunt the ball into gaps," Farbrace said. "If you see a long hop, the natural reaction is to pull it as hard as you can…[Jayawardene] is talking about letting the ball come, hitting it as late as you can, guide it into gaps. You're only going to get one [run] anyway.
"We saw people whacking the ball hard still only getting ones. Rather than whacking it and nicking behind, just guide the ball. They are the very simple things that he's talked about. And it is simple. There's nothing rocket science about what he's talked about. He's just offered some of his thoughts."
How many of those thoughts England's batsmen implement, only time will tell.
Andrew McGlashan is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.And The Award For Most Corrupt Nation Goes To...
Enlarge this image toggle caption Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
Each year, Transparency International releases its Corruption Perception Index, and this year, like most, the Scandinavian countries and New Zealand were at one end of the spectrum as the least-corrupt nations in the world.
In the category of most-corrupt, there was a three-way tie: Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia.
The index by the watchdog group measures the perception of corruption in a country's public sector. It ranks nations on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (squeaky clean). Two-thirds of the 177 countries on the list scored below 50.
The U.S. was among the least corrupt at No. 19 on the list, with a score of 73.
Other takeaways:
-- Corruption in Spain, reeling from the effects of the economic crisis, worsened. It dropped six points to 59, and was 40th on the list. Greece, by contrast, was 80th, with a score of 40 — an improvement over its score last year. Reuters reports:
"Spain's five-year economic slump, which has forced it to adopt tight austerity laws, exposed how cozy relations between politicians and construction magnates fed a disastrous housing bubble. The former treasurer of the governing People's Party (PP) told a judge that he had channeled cash donations from construction magnates into leaders' pockets, and he was found to have 48 million euros in Swiss bank accounts. The king's son-in-law, Inaki Urdangarin, was also charged this year with embezzling 6 million euros in public funds."
-- Corruption is getting worse in Arab Spring nations Yemen, Libya and Syria. The Associated Press reports:
"With the ouster of longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh last year, the lawlessness that followed led to an expansion of corruption in army, police and government agencies. "In Libya, bribery and embezzlement were common under slain dictator Moammar Gadhafi's 42-year rule. But the collapse of his government in an uprising supported by a Western bombing campaign has done little to root out corruption.... "And in Syria with the ongoing civil war, smuggling, bribe paying and other issues have increased with the breakdown of state order."
Corruption this year in Egypt was the same as last year, but the AP noted that the data for the country were collected before the coup that ousted President Mohammed Morsi in July.
-- Myanmar showed the biggest improvement. The Southeast Asian country emerged from nearly five decades of military rule in 2011. It gained six points, climbing to 157th position. It was 172nd last year. Other big "improvers" were Brunei, Laos, Senegal, Nepal, Estonia, Greece, Lesotho and Latvia.
-- The biggest "decliners" were: Syria, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Mali, Spain, Eritrea, Mauritius, Yemen, Australia, Iceland, Slovenia, Guatemala, Madagascar and Congo Republic.
You can click on the map below to see how countries fare in the rankings.
But as the Guardian's Data Blog notes, Transparency's index has garnered its share of critics. One criticism is that the index conveys an "elite bias," but the organization points out that its index is "limited in scope, capturing perceptions of the extent of corruption in the public sector, from the perspective of businesspeople and country experts."A young man got engaged to his fiancé last evening at a lavish ceremony in a plush suburban hotel, as his father played the perfect host. The only jarring note in this otherwise familiar picture of ceremonial opulence was struck by the presence of cops at the function, who joined the usual crowd of aunts and uncles as they watched over the proceedings. Both father and son are conmen under arrest, who have allegedly cheated a Singapore-based private company to the tune of Rs 7.5 crore.Rajesh Thandiram Jain and 25-year-old Mohit Jain had been arrested by the Malad police yesterday from their residence at Sterling Tower in Lokhandwala Complex, Andheri (West). The arrests were made on the basis of an FIR filed with the Malad police against Rajesh, his wife Seema and son Mohit under Sections 409, 420, 468, 471 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code.The father-son duo, however, didn't want the long arm of the law to come in the way of yesterday's engagement and the planned nuptials that will ensue on January 23 at a five-star hotel.On Friday, Jain had filed for anticipatory bail at the sessions court, citing his son's impending nuptials. The application was rejected. Not convinced, Jain moved the Bombay High Court yesterday, seeking anticipatory bail. The Court, however, had a better idea.According to sources, the court asked the Jains about the scale of arrangements that had been made for the wedding, to which they replied that they had printed almost 2,000 cards, each worth Rs 450, and also booked several five-star hotels for guests.Reprimanding them for making such lavish arrangements on one hand and swindling a company on the other, the court denied bail, and instead asked the cops to accompany the two to the engagement ceremony, so everyone would know that they were under arrest."The Honorable High Court rejected Jain's plea, but ordered the police to take him to his son's engagement and marriage ceremonies," said Ashok Saraogi, lawyer of the complainant Dharmendra Vishwanath Poddar. Poddar, a resident of Malad, is an authorised representative in India of the Singapore-based Greenworth International Pvt Ltd. He had complained against the Jains on January 3 to the additional commissioner of police, on the basis of which the FIR was lodged.Rajesh and Mohit are owners of Thandiram Textiles. They had imported textile yarn worth Rs 7.5 crore from Greenworth International through Poddar. But when the consignment reached India, the Jains produced fake bank documents and got their hands on it without having paid a penny for the same."We are following the order of the Honourable court and arranging to accompany the accused to the engagement and wedding ceremonies," said Chandrakant Gurav, an inspector attached to the Malad police station.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Democratic Party will meet the week of July 25 next year to nominate its 2016 presidential contender, gathering one week after Republicans convene to pick their White House candidate.
Democratic Party officials said on Friday they were still in final negotiations with three cities - New York, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio - to host the nominating convention.
“We are still in discussions with three excellent cities and are looking forward to a diverse and inclusive convention that displays our party’s values,” Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in announcing the dates.
Republicans will hold their 2016 convention from July 18 to 21 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Both parties will gather for their conventions a month earlier next year than the late summer time slots they used in 2012 in order to give their presidential nominees more time to raise money and campaign for the general election.Soon reopening my commissions to help my wifeHello everyone,
I don’t have great news concerning me, today.
You probably already heard about my wife, Mimiko, thanks to the drawings I realized where she appeared. Well, for few months, she complained of pain in the jaw. Her dentist sent her to consult an occlusodontic specialist, and the diagnosis is quite serious. Mimiko suffers from a serious disorder of TMJ, an irreversible dislocation of the jaw. The concern is that it’s impossible to put her jaw back in place by conventional ways: either the doctor reconstructs her teeth to recreate a disposition that will support (and relieve) her jaw, or she will have to undergo an surgical operation. If we don’t do anything, she will end up having osteoarthritis in her jaw and she will suffer all her life. She already has a little osteoarthritis... The process is not slow. It's already started. We would prefer to avoid an operation to Mimiko... So only the dental reconstruction option remains. But, sadly, it’s extreGet the biggest Arsenal FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Samuel Eto'o wants to join Arsenal this summer - to prove Jose Mourinho wrong.
Eto’o’s representatives have made overtures to Arsenal to alert them about the Cameroon striker’s availability as a free agent. They have made it clear that Eto’o wants to go to the Emirates and that is his number one priority.
Arsenal are keen to strengthen their strike force and are close to a deal for Real Madrid starlet Alvaro Morata but the Spanish giants are insisting on a buy-back clause.
But Arsenal will need more than one striker and Eto’o, 33, could be an option after he was left enraged by Mourinho’s comments earlier in the season when he questioned his age in damning remarks about his strikers.
Mourinho was filmed by TV cameras making comments suggesting that he thought Eto’o was older than he actually is.
The former Chelsea striker mocked Mourinho with a goal celebration after the off-the-record remarks but last week called the Blues boss a “fool” and a “puppet” in a renewed attack.
READ MORE: Why Arsenal need to sign Samuel Eto'o
It is understood Chelsea wanted to keep Eto’o but he was determined to quit because he was so angry and disgusted by Mourinho’s remarks.
Eto’o has had lucrative offers from the MLS and also the Middle East but there is only one club in his mind and that is Arsenal.
Ex-Barcelona and Inter Milan striker Eto’o wants to stay in London but the biggest factor is that Arsenal would give him the platform to put two fingers up at Mourinho.
Arsenal do need to strengthen their strike force this season and Eto’o is convinced he can still do a job at the top level.
Gunners boss Arsene Wenger is on the trail of Morata, Loic Remy and is keeping tabs on other strikers but Eto’o could be another option, especially as Nicklas Bendtner left on a free which leaves them another man down.
Eto’o is available on a free and his extra incentive of trying to outsmart Mourinho would be a big driving force.Melbourne based promotion Hex Fight Series has joined forces with Japanese MMA organisation Rizin Fighting Federation.
The deal will reportedly open up opportunities for Hex FS fighters to compete under the Rizin FF banner and vice versa.
The Aussie promotion joins a host of Rizin FF affiliated organisations from around the world including Bellator MMA, Pancrase, BAMMA and KSW.
Headed by the former Pride Fighting Championship president Nobuyuki Sakakibara, Rizin FF has held three events since December last year. The promotion has showcased the likes of Shinya Aoki, King Mo and Fedor Emelianenko in that time and recently announced the signing of former UFC fighters Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic and Wanderlei Silva.
Hex Fight Series held their sixth event in June and since 2014 have featured fighters like Brian Ebersole, Steve Kennedy, JJ Ambrose, Francisco Trevino and Gustavo Falciroli.From Chronicle Staff Writer Susan Slusser
In today’s Chronicle, here’s a breakdown of what the Oakland rotation is very likely to look like to start the season, and the bullpen. The position players look set, too, with Rule 5 player Mark Canha in good position to win the 25th spot.
So here, an annual reminder: The Opening Day roster doesn’t really mean that much. Change starts right away. No one is locked into place.
But yes, we spend a lot of time during the spring predicting exactly that, the Opening Day roster….because what else are we going to do? However, if someone isn’t on it, there’s no need to panic. Most teams are fairly good at moving pieces around based on performance as the season goes along, and the A’s are among the best at it. Love a guy who’s one of the final cuts? You’ll probably see him at some point soon, that’s pretty common.
Oakland’s front office also doesn’t go off spring training results much. Usually, they have a good idea of what the roster is going to look like before the spring games even begin. It takes either injuries or severe under-performance to change things – and yes, Ryan Cook’s in that category, his roster spot now in jeopardy unless he turns in some clean innings soon.
But a good spring? Unless there is a direct, specific competition (say, the A’s rotation battle) and all else is equal, a good spring often doesn’t mean a ton to teams. Lots of players have fantastic springs only to fizzle during the regular season. I hear this idea of “fair” from fans a lot this time of year…..there’s no “fair” or “unfair.” Teams have guys they already have in mind for spots for a reason, or they want to maximize their roster options and keep guys who are out of options to start the season, or keep their Rule 5 guy. Players with options left or on minor-league deals can have a phenomenal spring and start the season in the minors because the team can send them down without losing them. It’s strategic.
And yet, those players, if they’ve had good springs, put themselves into position for big-league jobs as needs arise, and arise they always do. That is the reason to have a great spring: to impress the coaching staff and front office for future needs. Pat Venditte has done that. Tyler Ladendorf has done that. So has Billy Burns. “Fair” isn’t in the A’s lexicon. They’re trying to build a roster for the season, not Opening Day, and keeping as many potentially valuable pieces as possible is very much a part of that.
Now: Barry Zito is a special case. He is on a minor-league deal, but there is more than likely going to be interest in him elsewhere to be a big-league starter. The A’s aren’t going to have an opening in their rotation, and Zito would prefer to start than pitch in long relief. They’ll let him go elsewhere if he has a big-league opportunity – they might get a little something for him a trade, but they’re not going to hold up anyone for him. And yes, he has had a very nice spring and only looks better and better – but he’s not starting games. Again today, he is pitching second behind Sonny Gray. Had the A’s really wanted him to be a potential starter, he’d be starting games and seeing big-league hitters most of the time. But he’s getting innings and a chance to show what he can do…to everyone. There are teams that need starters more than the A’s do, and he has a handshake agreement with the A’s – he can split if he wants. This is a good thing for Zito. Sure, the A’s might come to regret it if Zito has a Kazmir-like season someplace, but the team had a rotation in mind well before signing Zito to a minor-league deal to let him showcase his stuff, and those A’s starters are part of the A’s longterm plans, starters who will be here for several years.
Also in today’s Chronicle, a feature on Jesse Hahn, who is likely to be pitching behind Gray in the rotation, and his biggest fan back him and his inspiration, his sister Melissa.
And maybe lost in the shuffle over the weekend, Rule 5 guy Canha and his unusual means of finding hitting advice. Canha is also picking up the pace lately, and hitting lefties and righties.
In today’s news: Josh Reddick (oblique) and Alex Hassan (hamstring) are making progress and likely to be in games later this week. Brett Lawrie is getting a second day off after a hard workout the other day; he’ll play tomorrow. The A’s are just extra cautious with him and Coco Crisp, wanting to keep both on the field for the regular season.
The lineup – updated after Coco Crisp was scratched with a sore elbow:This is the fourth year that I’ve chronicled some of the best brain science and psychology stories from the past 12 months, and every year it gets a little harder because the amount of research published each month just keeps growing. So this year, I’m narrowing the list by choosing the top 10 stories covered on Neuropsyched in 2012. I’ve focused on pieces covering research and research-spawned developments (in other words, there aren’t any top 10 lists in this top 10 list).
1. Humans Aren’t the Only Apes that Have a Midlife Crisis
Withdrawal, frustration, sadness -- all are considered hallmarks of the human midlife crisis. Until now, the collection of factors cited as bringing on the angst have included societal and economic pressures that exert psychological forces strong enough to bend our lives into the famous U-shaped curve of happiness.
But research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could drastically alter those assumptions by bringing another no-less-ominous factor to the table: biology. It seems our cousins the great apes also experience midlife crises, and they don't need the allure of a new Lexus or hair transplants to get them there.
First, let's put the midlife crisis in perspective with what has been the accepted definition for many years. By midlife, the challenges of achievement have wound down and been replaced by responsibilities like raising a family, paying for a house, and trying to climb the next tenuous wrung on the corporate ladder. Taken altogether, these pressures drop us to the bottom of the U in the U-shaped curve of happiness.
But then, after what could be 10-15 years or more, the pressures start letting up. The burdens become less arduous, and we start our ascent from the bottom of the U into happier days when we experience more freedom to pursue what makes us fulfilled.
If social / psychological explanations were solely adequate for enlightening human behavior, the description I just gave could live on forever more. Good thing there are a few other primates on the planet to set us straight.
Researchers Andrew Oswald, a behavioral economist from the University of Warick and Alexander Weiss, a primatologist from the University of Edinburgh, assembled an international team of experts to conduct a "well-being census" of 336 chimpanzees and 172 orangutans of all ages living in research facilities and zoos spanning five countries.
The team worked with the primates' keepers and asked them to complete questionnaires designed to assess the mood, pleasure-seeking drive, and other personality traits of the apes across each of their life spans. The keepers were also asked to assess how effective each ape was in achieving the human equivalent of goals -- becoming dominant, winning a mate, or learning to use a tool or toy in a novel way.
The results of these and other questions were analyzed and composite well-being scores were plotted along the apes' life spans. As it turns out, they also have a distinctive U-shaped curve, and it looks a lot like ours. Around the age of 30, the approximate midpoint of an average chimp's or orangutan's life span, the apes experienced less energy, lowered moods, less willingness to engage with the group, and less gumption to achieve anything new.
What this finding tells us is that we have every reason to believe that biology exerts a strong influence in the human midlife crisis as well, although it's not exactly clear why. Neurobiology, among other disciplines, now has the stage to carry on new research that could eventually unlock the reasons.
"This opens a whole new box in the effort to explain the midlife dip in well-being," Andrew Oswald told the L.A.Times. "It makes one's head spin."
2. Receiving a Compliment has Same Effect as Receiving Cash
Compliments may not pay the rent, but according to new research, they help improve performance in a similar way to receiving a cash reward.
Researchers recruited 48 adults for the study who were asked to learn and perform a specific finger pattern (pushing keys on a keyboard in a particular sequence as fast as possible in 30 seconds). Once participants had learned the finger exercise, they were separated into three groups.
One group included an evaluator who would compliment participants individually; another group involved individuals who would watch another participant receive a compliment; and the third group involved individuals who evaluated their own performance on a graph.
When the participants were asked to repeat the finger exercise the next day, the group of participants who received direct compliments from an evaluator performed significantly better than participants from the other groups. The result |
of the president’s fragile ego. Here is what 83-year-old Utah senator Orrin Hatch had to say about a president who watches television for four-to-eight hours a day; goes on a golf vacation nearly every weekend; and who has effectively turned the White House into an “adult daycare center,” according to other Republican senators:
Mr. President, I have to say that you’re living up to everything I thought you would. You’re a heck of a leader. And we’re all benefiting from it. This president hasn’t even been in office for a year and look at all the things that he’s been able to get done — by sheer will, in many ways … I came from very humble roots. And I have to say that this is one of the great privileges of my life to stand here on the White House lawn with the president of the United States who I love and appreciate so much … We’re going to make this the greatest presidency that we’ve seen, not only in generations, but maybe ever.
Tennessee congresswoman Diane Black opted to debase herself with a bit more concision, saying “Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our President.”
Meanwhile, Paul Ryan praised Trump’s “exquisite leadership,” and thanked him for “getting us over the finish line.” Mitch McConnell declared Trump’s entire first year in office to be an “extraordinary accomplishment.”
Ben Carson thanked God for giving America a president who is “courageous” and “willing to face the winds of controversy in order to provide a better future for those who come behind us.”
"We have a nation that is worth saving."
MOMENTS AGO: @SecretaryCarson leads a prayer at a Trump Cabinet Meeting. pic.twitter.com/LR9gSLknEd — 🇺🇸Patriot 24/7🇺🇸 (@TrumpTrain45Pac) December 20, 2017
Three members of the Trump cabinet chose to perform their sycophancy in writing.
Good to see it went on when the cameras went away pic.twitter.com/UXheIthdwn — Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) December 20, 2017
During the celebratory press conference, Trump returned these compliments.
“All friends — I look at these people,” the president said, gazing out at all the sycophants gathered on the south lawn of the White House. “It’s like we’re warriors together.”A full tribunal of inquiry into the alleged smear campaign against Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe is now likely after a day of division and contradiction in Government.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin will meet this morning in an attempt to agree a way forward through a controversy that has brought the nine-month-old minority Government to the brink of collapse.
The Cabinet will discuss the establishment of a tribunal this morning, and although some Ministers privately despair at the establishment of a potentially lengthy and expensive process, most acknowledge it is now inevitable.
Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Labour are all in favour of a tribunal of inquiry.
Who is Sgt Maurice McCabe? In 2008, Sgt Maurice McCabe raised concerns about quashing of penalty points. Claims that he was the subject of a smear campaign are to be examined in a tribunal of inquiry. The Garda whistleblowers: read more I found this helpful Yes No
Facing a Sinn Féin motion of no confidence, the Government is likely to propose a motion of confidence in itself, which will replace all scheduled Dáil business today and be voted on tonight.
An agreement with Fianna Fáil to continue its support for the Coalition is essential if the Government is to survive the vote, though sources in both camps said last night they expected agreement to be reached, with neither side keen to deal with an election at this point.
However, a stormy Cabinet meeting is expected today, with Minister for Transport Shane Ross seeking answers as to why Ministers were kept in the dark at last week’s meeting about the false abuse allegations about Sgt McCabe being made to Tusla.
Tusla allegations
Prime Time
In response to Ms Zappone’s statement, the Taoiseach insisted he was not aware of the detail of the allegations and had no knowledge of the “serious and disturbing issues” that have since arisen.
Contradictions in accounts of a meeting between the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald and the Fianna Fáil justice spokesman Jim O’Callaghan remain, though a statement from the Minister last night said the “discrepancy should not stand in the way of investigating and establishing the truth”.
Sources said this was a sign that the parties were moving towards a resolution.
The Supreme Court judge asked to conduct the proposed commission of investigation into the treatment of Garda whistleblowers told the Government last week that he believed the draft terms of reference could cover the Prime Time revelations. Meanwhile, Sgt McCabe last night made fresh allegations against Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan. The commissioner has denied any knowledge of a smear campaign and insisted she would not stand aside.Advertisement
Apple has released the open source Darwin code for its macOS 10.12 Sierra. The code includes some of the major elements of the Sierra platform.
An official online library lists the code of macOS components such as file system driver, boot cache and user notifications. Also, it includes necessary documentation to help developers access the open source offering.
This is not the first time when Apple has courageously provided the source code of Darwin. It started this trend several years back, following the release of OS X 10.0.
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Unlike releasing the entire code of its platforms, Apple has opted to release just its Darwin resources. It is also worth noting that the Cupertino company has not provided any open source licenses. Instead, the software comes with the Apple Public Source License version 2.0.
Developers can access the Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra from Apple’s open source website. The source code would help in developing new experiences for the latest macOS.
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PrintShare. How Razer created the first Windows 8 gaming tablet. How Razer created the first Windows 8 gaming tablet.
Housed in what was once a posh department store in the heart of downtown San Francisco, you'll find Razer's systems product group — the team responsible for the company's growing range of PC products, including 2011's Blade gaming laptop. Made up of designers, engineers, and software developers, the team designs each product from the ground up, beginning with rough sketches and the smallest inklings of an idea all the way up to the polished devices that ship to consumers. This month, the group will launch the Edge, the company's very first tablet but also the first gaming-centric Windows 8 tablet to hit the market, powerful enough to run full PC games like Crysis 3 or Tomb Raider. To learn more about how Razer brought the Edge to life, we visited the systems product group for an exclusive look at the development process and earliest manifestations of the upcoming tablet.
Exit Theatre Mode
Before the Edge, there was Project Fiona. Introduced at CES 2012, Project Fiona was a concept tablet PC flanked by two side-mounted controllers, almost like a Wii U Gamepad on steroids. Fiona was met with enthusiasm from the press and fans, and while the company clearly stated its intentions to bring it to market, it was clearly rough around the edges. What some may find surprising, however, was that it was the product of only months of development, borne from hand-carved foam models and an ambition to design the world's first gaming tablet.
In preparation for our visit, Razer excavated many of these early examples, filling two large tables to showcase how rapidly evolved. It began with sketches and hand-made ergonomic prototypes from 2011 forged by the group's designers and engineers with direction from Razer's CEO Min-Liang Tan. The goal was to create a tablet that maintained the portability of a tablet, but offered the precision of integrated controllers. To hone the concept, the team called upon even the most rudimentary of models, even cardboard panels bonded by painters tape or foam cutouts with fishing weights attached. Primitive as it may sound, each helped establish the vision for the device, setting guidelines for its overall weight and dimensions. It also allowed the company to quickly investigate some concepts before settling on Fiona's side-mounted controllers. At one point, Razer considered fold-out handles and controllers that magnetically slid out from the base of the tablet, but given the impact on weight and thickness, were eventually nixed.
“ [Project Fiona] was like a concept car.
As its CES debut approached, 20 handmade Project Fiona prototypes were produced, only a handful of which remain in the world today — the rest have been destroyed for security purposes. Project Fiona won a series of Best of CES awards and the praise it received fast-tracked the development of a commercial variant, but there was one common criticism — the permanently attached side-mounted controllers had to go.
"[Project Fiona] was like a concept car," senior industrial designer Francois Laine told IGN. "We noticed that [people at CES] started to say that it was weird — that it was nice — but a bit weird to have handles permanently attached to it. So we started thinking about this idea about how we make it modular and being able to snap different accessories on the tablet."
In order to make the concept modular, Razer risked losing the rigidity and durability of the side-mounted controllers. To get around the issue, Razer called upon custom-tooled aluminum framing, which would serve as the base of the Edge and the gamepad attachment and lock together. While the solution would add some bulk, it would give the Edge the look and feel like one unified product. Solving the same problem with the Edge's keyboard dock was not so simple, and even now as the launch approaches, the company is still refining it. Amongst the spread of rough mock-ups, Razer had placed some seemingly near-final versions of the keyboard dock that had actually been scrapped.
“We always evaluate how easy it is to use, we want something that is obvious, and if it's not obvious, we kill it," Laine said. "We’re in a time when people expect really good quality for their products, and the consumer doesn’t know how difficult it is to design those things. But they expect perfection. To make it feel natural and obvious. So we work hard to make things obvious."
But the struggles of making the Edge modular paled in comparison to designing the tablet itself. Packing the powerful components of a full-sized gaming laptop into a tablet form factor would be a feat of engineering and design. The company would have to find a way to provide enough ventilation for the Edge's powerful graphics processor and ensure the heat it gave off didn't negatively impact other components. Many of the issues were solved internally, but the company sought out the help from hardware partners like Intel to custom-tailor solutions to their needs.
The team also had to strike a balance of performance, battery life, and portability. The subject was in constant debate, but the company also gathered feedback from its fans as part of its much-touted crowdsourcing campaign.
"We investigated what would give us the thinnest and lightest product and what would give us the most powerful product — and there are design trade-offs we had to make," John Wilson, Razer's VP of engineering explains. "There is a weight concern, there's a thickness concern and with the help from the fans, we realized there was a middle ground."
“ We don’t design things to look cool, we design things to make sense.
Wilson's staff of engineers and the design team had to work closely to determine the exact weight of each component in order to hit a target weight and thickness, and in face of the seemingly unsolvable, devise new solutions — a prime example is the built-in battery. Unwilling to add weight and bulk to implement a larger battery, the team designed an add-on battery system that could be integrated into the gamepad controller and keyboard dock, extending use but without drastically impacting design.
"We don’t design things to look cool," Laine explained. "We design things to make sense for the user. All you see is based around constraints and making it work."
In addition to its own established goals, Razer also had to adhere to licensing guidelines set by Microsoft, which dictated everything from the type and number of buttons it could use to the minimum thickness of the bezel. The frame around the screen, we'd learn, could not be thinner than a certain measurement.
Although Razer is proud of the end result, it's already looking at ways it can improve in the future. Wilson says that the company is constantly researching technology that will be available within the next two years and would allow the company to make its products thinner, lighter, and more powerful. It's also keeping a close eye on other platforms, like Android.
"We're starting to see new titles that are really starting to push the limits of [Android] hardware," Wilson said. "Combine that with streaming services, and other approaches to get content onto your product, it's kind of an exciting prospect."
So, what's next for the systems product group? Unsurprisingly, the team couldn't say and all evidence was carefully hidden from our prying eyes, but Wilson promises big things are coming. Could it be a new Blade laptop or a new category entirely? We'll have to wait and see.
Be sure to check back on Thursday, March 28th at 8am PST for our comprehensive review of the Razer Edge.
Scott Lowe is IGN's resident tech expert and Executive Editor of IGN Tech. You can follow him on Twitter at @ScottLowe and on MyIGN at Scott-IGN.The current situation
There are currently 754 MEPs but when Croatia joins later this year, it will get 12 seats, bringing the total to 766.
Why new numbers?
When the Lisbon treaty was being negotiated, it was decided to put a cap on the total number of MEPs to prevent the European Parliament growing indefinitely every time a new member state joins the EU. This is why the treaty sets a number of restrictions:
The maximum number of MEPs is 750 plus the president
The maximum number of MEPs per country is 96
The minimum number of MEPs per country is 6
The division of seats should be according to degressive proportionality, meaning the more citizens a member sate has, the more seats it will get, but also the more citizens each MEP will represent. So MEPs from smaller countries represent fewer people than their colleagues from larger states.
The allocation of seats is also being adjusted to take into account changes in the population of member states. While some got bigger, others got smaller.
Parliament can submit a proposal on its composition to the European Council, which must then decide by unanimous vote. EP can then approve or reject the decision by the Council, but it cannot change the content of the proposal.
Proposal
For the next parliamentary term, Germany would have to give up three seats, while 12 will lose one seat each (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania), according to the proposal adopted on 19 February by the constitutional affairs committee. The next elections for the European Parliament will take place in May or June 2014.
The committee also agreed to submit a new proposal before the end of 2015 to establish a durable and transparent system for allocating seats among EU member states before each European election. This should take into account demographic developments and not exclude the possibility of reserving a number of seats to members elected on transnational lists.
Next steps
The proposal will be discussed in full plenary on 13 March and voted on by all MEPs the following day.
Proposal for 2014-2019 approved by the EP's constitutional affairs committee
Member States Seats - current allocation Seats - proposed allocation 2014-2019 Difference Germany 99 96 -3 France 74 74 = UK 73 73 = Italy 73 73 = Spain 54 54 = Poland 51 51 = Romania 33 32 -1 Netherlands 26 26 = Greece 22 21 -1 Belgium 22 21 -1 Portugal 22 21 -1 Czech Republic 22 21 -1 Hungary 22 21 -1 Sweden 20 20 = Austria 19 18 -1 Bulgaria 18 17 -1 Denmark 13 13 = Slovakia 13 13 = Finland 13 13 = Ireland 12 11 -1 Croatia* 12 11 -1 Lithuania 12 11 -1 Slovenia 8 8 = Latvia 9 8 -1 Estonia 6 6 = Cyprus 6 6 = Luxembourg 6 6 = Malta 6 6 = TOTAL 766 751 -15
* Croatia will join the EU on 1 July 2013Andrew L. Zarauskas, 60, of Union, N.J., was found guilty today by a federal jury in Bangor, Maine, of illegally trafficking and smuggling narwhal tusks, and associated money laundering crimes, announced Robert G. Dreher, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division.
The defendant was convicted of conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, smuggling, and money laundering violations for buying narwhal tusks knowing the tusks had been illegally imported into the United States from Canada, as well as selling or attempting to sell the tusks after their illegal importation.
“The Justice Department takes seriously our responsibility to prosecute those who engage in the illegal trade of any protected wildlife species,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Dreher. “Zarauskas and his co-conspirators flouted U.S. law and international agreements that protect marine mammals such as the narwhal for their own personal financial benefit. The Justice Department will continue to investigate and prosecute those engaged in this insidious trade in order to protect species for future generations to enjoy.”
"The success of this investigation was a direct result of the uncompromising cooperation between special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA and Environment Canada. It is this type of international teamwork which exemplifies the ongoing fight against illegal wildlife trafficking." said William C. Woody, Assistant Director for Law Enforcement for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“This investigation is an example of excellent coordinated efforts between NOAA, Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Law Enforcement” said Logan Gregory, Special Agent In Charge for NOAA. The protection of Marine Mammals and enforcement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act is a high priority for OLE and we will continue to work with our enforcement partners and the Department of Justice to ensure compliance.”
From 2002 to 2008, Zarauskas knowingly purchased approximately 33 narwhal tusks that he knew were illegally imported into the United States in violation of federal law. A narwhal is a medium-sized whale with an extremely long tusk that projects from its upper left jaw, often referred to as the unicorn of the sea. As marine mammals narwhals are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and are listed on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). It is illegal to import parts of marine mammals into the United States without the requisite permits/certifications, and without declaring the merchandise at the time of importation to U.S. Customs and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Narwhal tusks are commonly collected for display purposes and can fetch large sums of money.
According to evidence presented at the trial, Zarauskas conspired with others, including persons located in Canada, to illegally import the protected tusks for re-sale in the United States and to launder the funds used to purchase the narwhal tusks by transporting, transmitting, or transferring checks and money orders from New Jersey to Canada, intending that the money be used for further illegal imports of narwhal tusks.
On Jan. 7, 2014, Jay G. Conrad, of Lakeland, Tenn., who had been charged in the same indictment, pleaded guilty to conspiring to illegally import and traffic narwhal tusks, conspiring to launder money, and illegally trafficking narwhal tusks. On that same date, a plea agreement was also unsealed in which Eddie T. Dunn, of Eads, Tenn., pleaded guilty in the District of Alaska to conspiring to illegally traffic, and trafficking, narwhal tusks.
Throughout the conspiracy, Zarauskus and his co-conspirators made payments to the Canadian supplier for the narwhal tusks, by sending the payments to a mailing address in Bangor, Maine, or directly to the supplier in Canada. The payments allowed the Canadian supplier to purchase and re-supply Zarauskus and Conrad with more narwhal tusks that they could then re-sell. Conrad sold between $400,000 and $1 million worth of narwhal tusks and Dunn sold approximately $1.1 million worth of narwhal tusks as members of the conspiracy.
Earlier this week, President Obama announced the National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking, recognizing that record high demand for wildlife products, coupled with inadequate preventative measures and weak institutions has resulted in an explosion of illicit trade in recent years. Like other forms of illicit trade, wildlife trafficking undermines security across nations. While t he Department of Justice has long worked to protect threatened and endangered wildlife species through its enforcement of the Lacey Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, among other laws, the National Strategy identifies priority areas for increased interagency coordination, with the objectives of harnessing and strategically applying the full breadth of U.S. Government resources to end the pernicious trade in protected species both at home and abroad.
Zarauskus and Conrad are to be sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge John A. Woodcock in the District of Maine. A sentencing date has not been set. They each face a maximum of twenty years incarceration for their involvement in this narwhal tusk trafficking scheme, and a fine of up to $250,000. Dunn is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Ralph R. Beistline in the District of Alaska on March 20, 2014, and may be imprisoned up to five years and fined $250,000. Co-defendant Gregory R. Logan is pending extradition from Canada to the District of Maine.
The case was investigated by agents from National Oceanic and Atomospheric Administration Office of Law Enforcement, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement and in coordination with Environmental Canada Wildlife Enforcement Division and the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs. The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Todd S. Mikolop and James Nelson of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section.FORT SILL, Okla. — An Army platoon leader was shocked to learn that his entire platoon had converted to Christianity en masse this week, despite his condescending and lengthy talks about his own lack of belief in God.
“I just can’t understand it,” said 1st Lt. Edward Garrison from his office, still dazed at hearing the news. “I mean, you figure there will be one or two kids who are always the, you know, the smallminded, the kids who are too afraid to be moral on their own. But my whole platoon? And after I spent so much time encouraging them to be free thinkers and humanists?
“This is just too much,” he added, before departing early for the day, telling his commander he felt ill.
Garrison’s soldiers claim that rather than dissuade them, his militant atheism actually drove them toward religion.
“I grew up Catholic,” said Sgt. 1st Class Eric Hernandez, the platoon sergeant, who noted that he fell away from religion later in life. “But with the lieutenant always throwing it in my face, saying I worshipped a dead guy nailed to a tree, making remarks about all priests being pedophiles, that shit just got to me.”
Noting that his cousin was studying to enter the priesthood, Hernandez told reporters he got so upset that he finally prayed about it. “That’s when the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘fuck the lieutenant.’ So I started going back to Mass, and now I’m as devout as my parents ever were. Because screw that guy.”
Other soldiers in the platoon concur with Hernandez’ general sentiment, noting that Garrison, upon discovering a soldier practiced an active faith, would make snide comments about having an imaginary friend or reference the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
“He even made us watch this stupid-ass Richard Dawkins documentary in the dayroom during lunch,” said Sgt. Tom Hemry. “The lieutenant thinks that Dawkins is like the patron saint of atheists. That guy is more like the patron saint of condescending assholes. It’s like those anti-smoking ads, and how they’re so obnoxious they make you want to smoke.”
Hemry then related how he convinced the other soldiers in his squad to start going to the local Southern Baptist church.
“At first it was just to piss off that idiot lieutenant, like, really throw it in his face,” Hemry said. “But after sitting in there for a couple of weeks, we realized that these people aren’t morons, they’re actually pretty nice. And have you seen how hot Southern Baptist girls are? So we stuck around, and after awhile it wore off on us.”
At press time, Garrison had retreated to the serenity of the Fort Sill Freethinkers Society weekly meeting for comfort and reassurance.Family of military utility helicopters
The Bell UH-1 Iroquois (nicknamed "Huey") is a utility military helicopter powered by a single turboshaft engine, with two-blade main and tail rotors. The first member of the prolific Huey family, it was developed by Bell Helicopter to meet a United States Army's 1952 requirement for a medical evacuation and utility helicopter, and first flew in 1956. The UH-1 was the first turbine-powered helicopter produced for the United States military, and more than 16,000 have been built since 1960.[1]
The Iroquois was originally designated HU-1, hence the Huey nickname, which has remained in common use, despite the official redesignation to UH-1 in 1962.[2] The UH-1 first saw service in combat operations during the Vietnam War, with around 7,000 helicopters deployed. The Bell 204 and 205 are Iroquois versions developed for the civil market.
Development [ edit ]
A Bell XH-40, a prototype of the UH-1
In 1952, the U.S. Army identified a requirement for a new helicopter to serve as medical evacuation (MEDEVAC), instrument trainer, and general utility aircraft. The Army determined that current helicopters were too large, underpowered, or too complex to maintain easily. In November 1953, revised military requirements were submitted to the Department of the Army.[3] Twenty companies submitted designs in their bid for the contract, including Bell Helicopter with the Model 204 and Kaman Aircraft with a turbine-powered version of the H-43. On 23 February 1955, the Army announced its decision, selecting Bell to build three copies of the Model 204 for evaluation with the designation XH-40.[4]
Model 204 [ edit ]
Powered by a prototype Lycoming YT53-L-1 (LTC1B-1) engine producing 700 shp (520 kW), the XH-40 first flew on 20 October 1956[5] at Fort Worth, Texas, with Bell's chief test pilot, Floyd Carlson, at the controls. Two more prototypes were built in 1957, and the Army had previously ordered six YH-40 service test aircraft, even before the first prototype had flown.[3][6] In March 1960, the Army awarded Bell a production contract for 100 aircraft, which was designated as the HU-1A and officially named Iroquois after the Native American nations.[7]
The helicopter quickly developed a nickname derived from its designation of HU-1, which came to be pronounced as "Huey". The reference became so popular that Bell began casting the name on the helicopter's anti-torque pedals.[2] The official U.S. Army name was almost never used in practice.[8] After September 1962, the designation for all models was changed to UH-1 under a unified Department of Defense (DOD) designation system, but the nickname remained.
While glowing in praise for the helicopter's advances over piston-engined helicopters, the Army reports from the service tests of the YH-40 found it to be underpowered with the production T53-L-1A powerplant producing a maximum continuous 770 shaft horsepower (570 kilowatts).[N 1] The Army indicated the need for improved follow-on models even as the first UH-1As were being delivered. In response, Bell proposed the UH-1B, equipped with the Lycoming T53-L-5 engine producing 960 shp (720 kW) and a longer cabin that could accommodate either seven passengers or four stretchers and a medical attendant. Army testing of the UH-1B started in November 1960, with the first production aircraft delivered in March 1961.[3]
Bell commenced development of the UH-1C in 1960 in order to correct aerodynamic deficiencies of the armed UH-1B. Bell fitted the UH-1C with a 1,100 shp (820 kW) T53-L-11 engine to provide the power needed to lift all weapons systems in use or under development. The Army would eventually refit all UH-1B aircraft with the same engine. A new rotor system was developed for the UH-1C to allow higher air speeds and reduce the incidence of retreating blade stall during diving engagements. The improved rotor resulted in better maneuverability and a slight speed increase.[6] The increased power and a larger diameter rotor required Bell's engineers to design a new tail boom for the UH-1C. The longer tail boom incorporated a wider chord vertical fin on the tail rotor pylon and larger synchronized elevators.
Bell also introduced a dual hydraulic control system for redundancy as well as an improved inlet filter system for the dusty conditions found in southeast Asia. The UH-1C fuel capacity was increased to 242 US gallons (920 liters), and gross weight was raised to 9,500 lb (4,309 kg), giving a nominal useful load of 4,673 lb (2,120 kg). UH-1C production started in June 1966 with a total of 766 aircraft produced, including five for the Royal Australian Navy and five for Norway.
Model 205 [ edit ]
While earlier "short-body" Hueys were a success, the Army wanted a version that could carry more troops. Bell's solution was to stretch the HU-1B fuselage by 41 in (104 cm) and use the extra space to fit four seats next to the transmission, facing out. Seating capacity increased to 15, including crew.[9] The enlarged cabin could also accommodate six stretchers and a medic, two more than the earlier models.[9] In place of the earlier model's sliding side doors with a single window, larger doors were fitted which had two windows, plus a small hinged panel with an optional window, providing enhanced access to the cabin. The doors and hinged panels were quickly removable, allowing the Huey to be flown in a "doors off" configuration.
The Model 205 prototype flew on 16 August 1961.[10][11] Seven pre-production/prototype aircraft had been delivered for testing at Edwards AFB starting in March 1961. The 205 was initially equipped with a 44-foot (13.4 m) main rotor and a Lycoming T53-L-9 engine with 1,100 shp (820 kW). The rotor was lengthened to 48 feet (14.6 m) with a chord of 21 in (53 cm). The tailboom was also lengthened, in order to accommodate the longer rotor blades. Altogether, the modifications resulted in a gross weight capacity of 9,500 lb (4,309 kg). The Army ordered production of the 205 in 1963, produced with a T53-L-11 engine for its multi-fuel capability.[N 2][12] The prototypes were designated as YUH-1D and the production aircraft was designated as the UH-1D.
In 1966, Bell installed the 1,400 shp (1,000 kW) Lycoming T53-L-13 engine to provide more power for the aircraft. The pitot tube was relocated from the nose to the roof of the cockpit, to prevent damage during landing. Production models in this configuration were designated as the UH-1H.[8][13]
Marine Corps [ edit ]
In 1962, the United States Marine Corps held a competition to choose an assault support helicopter to replace the Cessna O-1 fixed-wing aircraft and the Kaman OH-43D helicopter. The winner was the UH-1B, which was already in service with the Army. The helicopter was designated the UH-1E and modified to meet Marine requirements. The major changes included the use of all-aluminum construction for corrosion resistance,[N 3] radios compatible with Marine Corps ground frequencies, a rotor brake for shipboard use to stop the rotor quickly on shutdown and a roof-mounted rescue hoist.
The UH-1E was first flown on 7 October 1963, and deliveries commenced 21 February 1964, with 192 aircraft completed. Due to production line realities at Bell, the UH-1E was produced in two different versions, both with the same UH-1E designation. The first 34 built were essentially UH-1B airframes with the Lycoming T53-L-11 engine producing 1,100 shp (820 kW). When Bell switched production to the UH-1C, the UH-1E production benefited from the same changes. The Marine Corps later upgraded UH-1E engines to the Lycoming T53-L-13, which produced 1,400 shp (1,000 kW), after the Army introduced the UH-1M and upgraded their UH-1C helicopters to the same engine.
Air Force [ edit ]
The United States Air Force's (USAF) competition for a helicopter to be used for support on missile bases included a specific requirement to mandate the use of the General Electric T58 turboshaft as a powerplant. The Air Force had a large inventory of these engines on hand for its fleet of HH-3 Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters and using the same engine for both helicopters would save costs. In response, Bell proposed an upgraded version of the 204B with the T58 engine. Because the T58 output shaft is at the rear, and was thus mounted in front of the transmission on the HH-3, it had to have a separate offset gearbox (SDG or speed decreaser gearbox) at the rear, and shafting to couple to the UH-1 transmission.
Twin–engine variants [ edit ]
The single–engine UH-1 variants were followed by the twin-engine UH-1N Twin Huey and years later the UH-1Y Venom. Bell began development of the UH-1N for Canada in 1968. It changed to the more powerful Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6T twin-engine set. The U.S. also ordered the helicopter with the U.S. Air Force receiving it in 1970. Canada's military, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Navy first received the model in 1971.[14]
In 1996, the USMC began the H-1 upgrade program by awarding a contract to Bell Helicopter for developing the improved UH-1Y and AH-1Zs variants.[15] The UH-1Y includes a lengthened cabin, four-blade rotor, and two more powerful GE T700 engines.[1] The UH-1Y entered service with the USMC in 2008.[16]
Design [ edit ]
The UH-1 has a metal fuselage of semi-monocoque construction with tubular landing skids and two rotor blades on the main rotor.[17] Early UH-1 models featured a single Lycoming T53 turboshaft engine in versions with power ratings from 700 shp (522 kW) to 1,400 shp (1,040 kW).[6] Later UH-1 and related models would feature twin engines and four-blade rotors.
All aircraft in the UH-1 family have similar construction. The UH-1H is the most-produced version, and is representative of all types. The main structure consists of two longitudinal main beams that run under the passenger cabin to the nose and back to the tail boom attachment point. The main beams are separated by transverse bulkheads and provide the supporting structure for the cabin, landing gear, under-floor fuel tanks, transmission, engine and tail boom. The main beams are joined at the lift beam, a short aluminum girder structure that is attached to the transmission via a lift link on the top and the cargo hook on the bottom and is located at the aircraft's center of gravity. The lift beams were changed to steel later in the UH-1H's life, due to cracking on high-time airframes. The semi-monocoque tail boom attaches to the fuselage with four bolts.[18]
The UH-1H's dynamic components include the engine, transmission, rotor mast, main rotor blades, tail rotor driveshaft, and the 42-degree and 90-degree gearboxes. The transmission is of a planetary type and reduces the engine's output to 324 rpm at the main rotor. The two-bladed, semi-rigid rotor design, with pre-coned and underslung blades, is a development of early Bell model designs, such as the Bell 47 with which it shares common design features, including a dampened stabilizer bar. The two-bladed system reduces storage space required for the aircraft, but at a cost of higher vibration levels. The two-bladed design is also responsible for the characteristic 'Huey thump' when the aircraft is in flight, which is particularly evident during descent and in turning flight. The tail rotor is driven from the main transmission, via the two directional gearboxes which provide a tail rotor speed approximately six times that of the main rotor to increase tail rotor effectiveness.[18]
The UH-1H also features a synchronized elevator on the tail boom, which is linked to the cyclic control and allows a wider center of gravity range. The standard fuel system consists of five interconnected fuel tanks, three of which are mounted behind the transmission and two of which are under the cabin floor. The landing gear consists of two arched cross tubes joining the skid tubes. The skids have replaceable sacrificial skid shoes to prevent wear of the skid tubes themselves. Skis and inflatable floats may be fitted.[18]
Typical armament for UH-1 gunship |
, Browns, L.A. Chargers, New Orleans Saints and Houston Texans. The intrigue from so many quarterback-needy teams is testament to Kizer’s ideal size and arm strength. But as the process comes to a close in the next few weeks, he is still being dogged by accuracy issues. Most specifically, teams have problems with his performance under duress.
Basically, when the pocket gets ugly, Kizer’s accuracy is all over the place. While the concern isn’t on the level of Christian Hackenberg one year ago, there is reticence over a similar flaw.
Kizer has slipped from a potential top-five pick to a fringe first-rounder who could slip into the second.
Deshaun Watson isn’t the surest lock to be a successful NFL quarterback. His arm is noted to be adequate for the position but not exceptional. His timing and accuracy can be diced up depending on the situation. And even his physique is thought to need some fine-tuning. But there appears to be a consensus of some safety as Watson being the guy who has the most reliable first-round grade based on his overall body of work.
He produced a lot of tape and faced every imaginable scenario that evaluators wanted to see. When it comes to looking for intangibles or performances in different scenarios, there isn’t much mystery because Watson left Clemson with 38 games (and 35 starts) under his belt.
Like Trubisky, Watson does a lot of things well. He also has maxed out the scale on intangibles and leadership qualities. But unlike Trubisky, his game has been nitpicked with nearly three times the tape available to NFL evaluators. That can sometimes become a negative because it can be a suggestion of a ceiling. In a way, evaluators feel like they know exactly what they are getting with Watson, while Trubisky is seen as a player with room to grow and with his best football ahead of him. Is there something that could ultimately vault Watson ahead of Trubisky on draft day? One evaluator said there is: Watson’s wealth of high-intensity, championship-caliber games. Those include two ACC championship games and four college football playoff contests. The impressive postseason games against Oklahoma, Ohio State and Alabama (twice) will carry a lot of weight on draft day. At the very least, enough to make Watson appear to be a safe first-round quarterback. Possibly among the teams that have done the most work on him, a group that includes the Browns, 49ers, Jets, Cardinals, Texans, Chiefs and Jacksonville Jaguars.
Every few drafts, there is a volcanic “media heat” quarterback. Almost always, it’s a guy who wows everyone with exquisite arm talent. This year, that’s Mahomes, who has drawn some media comparisons to Hall of Famer Brett Favre’s unforgettable cannon. That’s some serious praise and probably overhyped.
One evaluator said it was more along the lines of Jay Cutler, noting that the challenge was determining if Mahomes was more Favre or Cutler when it came to intangibles and leadership – not arm strength. That undertaking, along with the possibility that Mahomes may be on the draft board longer than Trubisky or Watson, has led to personal visits or workouts with more than half the NFL since the scouting combine. Among those who have done the most work on Mahomes: The Browns, Chiefs, Texans, Saints, Chargers, Cardinals, Bears, 49ers, Giants, Jets, Steelers and Bills.
Where Mahomes lands might ultimately depend on what his other traits show in his meetings. One evaluator raved about Mahomes’ love of football. Another lamented his lack of natural athleticism, comparing him to Carson Palmer, a quarterback with a huge arm who can be statuesque in the pocket against a pass rush. Almost all shared some form of universal agreement that Mahomes’ ultimate destination will depend on how a team feels about the development left ahead for him – which could be immense because Mahomes’ elite arm allowed him to improvise and go off script a lot. Teams don’t see a lot of mechanical discipline in his game. Instilling that might take some time – if it’s doable in the first place.
Such a high-risk, high-reward proposition could lead to Mahomes being a stunning and unexpected high pick. Conversely, he could slide right into the second round.
More from Yahoo Sports:
• Dan Wetzel: What changed about Hernandez in his final days
• Awful 4th quarter ruins Westbrook’s historic night
• Patriots star deletes tweet thanking President Trump
• Officials reveal new details in Hernandez suicideOne of the helicopters that carried Seal Team Six to Abbottabad crash landed inside the Bin Laden compound. Though the troops blew up the stricken craft to preserve the secrecy of the technology on board, part of the tail landed outside the walls and survived to show this was no ordinary Blackhawk.
The tail rotor had extra blades, which would have made it much quieter than the standard design. Similar modifications to the main rotor would have further silenced the approach.
And according to Aviation Week, the "silver loaded" paint job would have also made it difficult for infra-red sensors to detect the helicopter. This would have been particularly useful if Bin Laden had been armed with heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles.
Now officially acknowledged as the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel, the Beast of Kandahar is an Unmanned Arial Vehicle, or drone. Until 2009 it was known only from grainy photos taken by plane spotters at Kandahar airport, with its stealthy shape prompting fevered speculation among aviation enthusiasts about its capabilities and purpose.
It does not carry missiles, and reports that it was used to monitor the Seals’ Bin Laden operation seemingly confirm its role is one of surveillance and reconnaissance, feeding back live full motion video to commanders via satellite. Seals on the ground may also have been able to monitor the feed via their portable displays, effectively allowing them to see the round corners of the compound.
The craft could also have been used to keep tabs on Bin Laden’s house in the months before the operation, without alerting Pakistani radar.
Recon Scout Throwbot
Developed by US firm Recon Robotics, the Navy Seals bought these remote control robots in 2009.
Around the size of a beer can, the robot is equipped with an infra red camera to see in the dark and a wireless transmitter to beam video back to the operator’s handset.
Recon Robotics has sought to commercialise the design, offering it to police forces. More recently it has developed a magnetic version in collaboration with the US Navy that can stick to the side of a ship and climb aboard.
Fast-Tint Protective Eyewear
The Office of Naval Research announced it had delivered the first 30 pairs of these new protective sunglasses to the Seals in January.
“Currently, warfighters are using a set of interchangeable lenses that require them to stop and manually switch lenses to adjust the goggles to a particular light environment,” said program manager Stephanie Everett.
"But they can't take the time to stop and remove and replace the lenses."
Instead, FTPE lenses contain customised dyes that assume an amber, blue or dark grey tint when different electrical charges are applied. They can change automatically in response to the environment or Seals can change the tint manually at the push of a button.
And unlike the colour-changing lenses already available from opticians - which can take minutes to darken - the transition is almost instant.
“Transition time is less than 0.5 seconds,” said Everett.
Transformer TX
This ongoing research project aims to solve the problem of ferrying small groups of troops, including special forces such as the Seals, around on the toughest terrain. To the excitement of technology watchers, it aims to do so by building a flying car.
According to the specifications drawn up by DARPA, the Pentagon agency responsible for many of the most outlandish military technologies, The Transformer TX should have a range of 250 nautical miles on a single tank of fuel.
In September, the agency awarded a $3m contract to AAI Corporation to start work on its design, which resembles a jeep with a helicopter rotor on the roof. The planned vehicle also has folding wings to generate extra lift and allow vertical take off and landing for four troops and their gear.
The project is due to run for five years, so the Transformer TX won’t see action in the mountains of Afghanistan soon, but its proposed capabilities were surely inspired by the type of combat special forces have seen there.Africa and the Left
Few continents have been as lost on the left as Africa. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been openings, however. From the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s, to the Arab Spring, there have been plenty of opinions on offer. But, the idea of Africa, as a site of political struggle, between the West, and its inhabitants, is relatively new. That is, to post-Cold War progressive politics. Ask veterans of the anti-colonial struggle in France, for example, from the 1960s, and you’ll get a very different answer.
Hence, the challenge of France’s recent intervention in Mali, and the complexities it engenders. Led by a leftwing French government, one that made the furthest attempts of any French leadership to date, to atone for France’s conduct in the Algerian conflict, its actions have been confounding. Coming on the heels of other recent European military operations in Africa, most signfiicantly, the Libyan War, many progressives as begun a process of soul searching, about their lack of preparedness for these interventions, and what they might mean.
Today’s translation from the Italian is a good example. A flyer found in central Turin, at the beginning of February, it asks precisely these sorts of questions. We’ve reproduced the text in its entirety, below, including the lack of line breaks. Click on the photograph for a closer look.
Opening of the first series of: “Knowledge in motion”
Culture creates conflict, conflict creates culture
Mali war, western interventions in Maghreb: why?
One of the main subjects of international press (right now) is France’s intervention in Mali. Everyone, more or less, has read at least one article about this topic. Between a meeting and small talk, we found ourselves unsatisfied with regards to how the subject is treated in Italian and foreign newspapers. Everything is limited to the “here and now.” It’s not possible to find a temporal dimension that goes beyond contingency, beyond the single, today-related event. Nonetheless, history, more or less recent, is full of interventions for democratization, of humanitarian wars, of armed missions for peace. Only thinking of the most striking cases in the international media, such as US intervention in the Middle East, you could get lost among the unaccountable journalists who attempted to reveal the long-term premeditation and interests, all but humanitarian. What makes Mali intervention different? Why is it disconnected from the history of relationship between France and its African former colonies? Starting from these questions, we found ourselves talking about another war, a media one: the Arab Springs, Tahrir Square. Why yesterday’s rebels were freedom heroes, while today’s are black bloc? Situations are radically different, but, (for) the redeeming and necessary essence of the “western democracies” intervention remains the same. Which are the differences between these situations? Where do they converge? On which historical basis are they founded? Which geopolitical scene do they outline? From these questions begins the first series of “knowledge in motion,” open questions that have no immediate answer. Rather, they require a well-structured, timely analysis, (offering) different points of view. This is what we would like to create.
7 pm dinner
9.30 pm shooting of the docu-movie “…that day they killed happiness” about Thomas Sankara, key figure of the anti-colonialist Africa struggles in the 70s and 80s
Following: music with Dj Krif.
Sunday 10th February @ VerdiLab Vicolo Benevello 4/b
Translated from the Italian, by Giulia Pace. Introduction and photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit.If you’re looking for a fun get away for the whole family, Salt Spring Island is one of our top travel destinations in British Columbia. This tranquil little island becomes a hub for visitors in the the spring and summer, and is a quick and easy getaway for those looking for a day trip, or a week long vacation.
Located off the south end of Vancouver Island, this charming seaside community offers a variety of activities and attractions for foodies, nature, and art lovers.
Mount Maxwell
There’s no denying that the view from the top of Mount Maxwell is simply breathtaking. Only a short drive from Ganges, it is an absolute must when visiting Salt Spring. Some very ambitious folks prefer to make a day of it and hike or bike up Mount Maxwell, but regardless of how you get there it’s worth the trip.
Salt Spring Studio Tour
There is no shortage of creativity to be found on Salt Spring Island. A great way to see the island and experience the boundless talent of it’s artisans is to take the Salt Spring Studio Tour. Sample breweries, visit vineyards, explore fine art, sculpture, textiles potters and much more.
Ganges Summer Market
image courtesy of TourSaltSpring.com
One of Salt Springs main summer attractions is the Ganges Summer Market. Here you will find the best of what local artisans have to offer. You’ll find everything from fine art, custom kitch, handcrafted furniture, pottery, incredible food, organic produce, family entertainment, and much more. This ocean side market is a must!
Where to Stay
While there’s no shortage of places to stay on Salt Spring Island, if you’re traveling with your family it’s always nice to have a place to relax and swim. While we’ve stayed at a variety of places on the island, one place that keeps us coming back time and again is Cusheon Lake Resort. These quaint log cabins, nestled right on the shore of the lake provide fun for the whole family; including canoe and boat rentals, a playground for the kids, expansive picnic area, hot tub and much more.
For those looking for a more rugged experience you could not find a more stunning location to set up your tent or park your RV than the Ruckle Park Provincial Campground. Tenters will enjoy being camped directly on a small bluff overlooking the ocean with easy access to the beach, while RV camping is tucked away in the cool forest just a few minutes stroll from the ocean. Ruckle Park also offers a variety of day hiking excursions and tons great nature watching experiences, historical outbuildings with livestock and is close to amenities."42" is the strange name of a new school for code writers in Paris. And it isn’t just the name that’s odd. 42 is free, it doesn’t give grades — and it may just start cranking out the best programmers in the world.
Did we say, no grades? 42 doesn’t even have classes. Or teachers, in the traditional sense. What it does have, though, is lots of computers.
About 1,000 brand-new Macintosh computer screens stand on rows of desks in 42’s enormous, open workspaces. A 22-year-old student named Theo Hunerblaes shows up — at noon — for day three of 42’s inaugural school year.
“We don’t have schedules,” he said. "In the afternoon, we’ll have a meeting about our next project. We’ll be upstairs, sitting on the floor, as usual. That’s how it is here.”
Getting here in the middle of the day is fine, but not everything goes. Hunerblaes sets his backpack at a work station, shakes a colleague awake, and tries to explain to me why you’d even call this a school.
“It’s a little bit like a cult,” he says. "But at the same time, it’s all very open. You learn to work in teams. You share everything you learn. If not, you’re lost.”
French education authorities are not very happy about 42. It’s a private school, so you might think, what’s the big deal? Private schools can make up all the rules — or lack of rules — they want. But France’s education ministry and teachers’ unions are bashing it, upset that an untested, unaccredited and free school could draw away so many of their potential students.
Judging by 42’s first round of applicants, the establishment’s angst is understandable.
This summer, 70,000 candidates applied. Then 4,000 finalists were invited to the school. They moved into the half-finished school itself, camping on the floor, sharing communal bathrooms, working 15 high-octane hours a day, 7 days a week. For a month.
Just 800 people made the cut.
It was their first taste of 42’s teaching methods. No theory, no traditional rote learning. 42 is hands-on and project oriented. Like the real world. Which is the school’s main draw, said co-founder Nicols Sadirac. At the moment, France needs tens of thousands of IT specialists, he said, but graduates from traditional schools increasingly lack the experience modern companies expect.
“The problem is the world has changed,” he said. “And now the French education system has a hard time to adapt. And we are in world competition about the digital world.”
Sadirac said France has the fifth-largest economy in the world overall, but ranks 25th in the new digital economy.
42 wants to reverse that trend. Lest anyone doubt the brain power Sadirac has gathered in this three-story building, here's an example. During the month-long try-out, some students hacked into Apple’s latest operating system — called Mavericks — on a lark.
“It’s already patched and part of the new Mavericks,” Sadirac said. And 42 got a special thank you in the system’s dedication.
Perhaps 42 may just be more dangerous than the NSA.
“Not yet,” Sadirac said, with a laugh.
Back in the workspace, student Hunerblaes is busy creating what he called the “building blocks” of coding for an assignment. “We’re nerds,” he said. “Geeks. A lot of us here come from the world of video games. Others are designers for webs and apps.”
And some have no coding experience at all. Cue more gasps from the establishment.
Oh, and just why is the school called 42? For those of you who aren’t geeks, 42 is from the Douglas Adam’s novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The number represents the “answer to everything,” arrived at by a supercomputer working over millions of years.
For Hunerblaes and the other students, the bar’s been set high.At first glance, it looks like the Victoria Police Department might be slowly coming to its senses.
Late last year, Vic PD turned up its nose at a report issued by the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which stated that the force's Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) system violated the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
The system uses cameras mounted on cruisers to check licence plates against police databases looking for a number of different infractions (and other more problematic information like attempted suicides). In her report, the commissioner made several recommendations for bringing the system into compliance with provincial law.
Victoria police Chief Jamie Graham, however, issued a statement in which he "respectfully disagreed" with the commissioner, declaring that his force would continue to use the system despite her findings.
Other police forces, though, were more amenable to the idea that they shouldn't break the law. In this province, Saanich Police suspended use of ALPRs until privacy concerns could be addressed and the system brought into compliance.
But Saanich isn't the only police force taking a more privacy sensitive approach.
Police in Ottawa, for instance, recently announced that until the public has had an adequate chance to provide input on the program, and until privacy concerns have been addressed, squad cars there will not be equipped with ALPR scanners.
Where Denham's findings were quickly dismissed by Victoria police, Eli El-Chantiry, chair of the Ottawa police service board, has declared "it should have been (disclosed), not hidden... I can assure you we will not agree to anything that's going to contradict (Ontario's) privacy commissioner."
But earlier this week, at long last, it was announced that privacy upgrades are in the cards for the Victoria ALPR program. Denis Boucher, superintendent for the RCMP's E Division traffic services, which provide the technology to Vic PD, announced the changes at a Victoria Police Board meeting. Boucher stated that both hit and non-hit data would be collected by the cameras while a car is on shift, but would be deleted at the end of the day. Other concerns expressed by Denham are also supposed to be dealt with.
While these changes are welcome, they once again fall short of Ottawa's proactive approach. The Ontario Provincial Police's ALPR technology, used by the Ottawa police, will delete "non-hits" within 20 minutes, and Ontario Commissioner Ann Cavoukian is pushing for the department to cut that to 10 minutes.
"My goal is to have this done automatically; as soon as determination that's it's a non-hit, the next step, immediately, should be deleted," she told the Ottawa Citizen.
And apparently the illegal scanning by Victoria police will continue until the fixes are implemented. Unlike their counterparts in Saanich and Ottawa, Victoria police have no intention of switching off the cameras during privacy compliance upgrades.
It's looking more and more like the problems with ALPR are not the technology or the requirements of legitimate police work, but the attitude toward privacy and privacy law of Victoria's police chief.
There is a better and more privacy protective way to use this technology, and Chief Graham should embrace it. If he doesn't, the Victoria Police Board should force him to do it.39.6K Shares Share
“Don’t cry.”
As a sensitive child, adults often told me this, but hearing it only made me feel more ashamed of crying. They told me not to let bullies get to me, which made me feel weak for letting them. They told me people have control over their emotions, which made me wonder why I was the one exception.
When we tell children these things, we hope it’ll make them tougher, but it actually makes them feel like they’re not tough enough. And, in my experience, it makes them wonder if there’s something wrong with them for feeling the way they do.
And when well-intentioned advice starts to make people question their own mental stability, it becomes gaslighting.
Gaslighting – manipulating people into questioning their own perceptions – is often described as an emotional abuse tactic.
But beyond its employment by verbally and emotionally abusive people, gaslighting is actually built into our language.
It rears its head every time someone with hurt feelings is accused of being too sensitive, taking things too seriously, or taking offense too easily. It also shows up in some of the supposed wisdom we teach our children – and often continue teaching people well into adulthood.
After constantly hearing that I shouldn’t be feeling what I was feeling and that my observations couldn’t be trusted, I began to label myself hysterical, dramatic, and other words used to make people – especially women – discount their emotions.
To this day, when someone offends or hurts me, there’s always that little voice in the back of my head saying “Maybe you’re just blowing it out of proportion” or “Maybe this is your problem.”
In our current culture of gaslighting, people not only blame individuals for their emotional reactions, but also dismiss the concerns of entire communities as the complaints of the “PC police” or “social justice warriors.”
Professors complain about pressure to provide content warnings for assigned readings even when nearly 8% of Americans experience PTSD at some point and could be forced to relive their trauma if they encounter triggers.
As a culture, we do not honor people’s feelings or lived experiences.
If we were more careful about what we told other people, encouraging them to examine and address their emotions rather than suppress them, we might be able to create a culture where individuals felt comfortable expressing their feelings in healthy ways and others took them seriously.
Here are some things we should stop saying to our children and stop telling one another as adults if we want the people we care about to trust their perceptions and honor their emotions.
1. ‘Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones, But Names Can’t Hurt You’
Contrary to this popular platitude, it is absolutely normal for names to hurt you.
Being teased can be just as damaging psychologically as being beat up is physically.
Saying that names can’t hurt anyone ignores all the kids who have suffered from mental health issues and even died by suicide due to verbal bullying. It also ignores the effects of comments that are racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive.
Perhaps those who say “names can’t hurt you” don’t mean that names never hurt people. Maybe they’re just saying they don’t have to.
And there is value in telling people that the hurtful things people say about them aren’t necessarily true and don’t deserve to be taken to heart. But even when we logically know this, what does and doesn’t hurt us is largely out of our control.
We’d be better off telling people that the names people call them are not objective facts and usually have more to do with the person saying them than the person receiving them, but it’s still normal to find them hurtful.
That would do more to prevent people from hurting than denying that they are hurt.
2. ‘There’s No Use Dwelling on the Past’
This saying implies that remaining hurt over something in the past is a character flaw, especially when it means we don’t forgive another person.
But we can’t always control when unpleasant memories resurface, and we can’t always “get over” hurtful incidents at will.
If someone has wronged you and never apologized, it’s understandable to still be angry, and the fact that their offense occurred in the past does not excuse it.
Sometimes, the people who say “there’s no use dwelling on the past” are the same ones whose actions you’re dwelling on – in which case, they’re trying to defend themselves at the expense of hearing you out.
Other times, people just want you to feel better because they know it feels awful to replay something unpleasant – and it does. But again, it’s largely out of your control. Nobody is trying to dwell on the past.
Telling someone not to dwell can also trivialize what they’re dwelling on, especially if it was traumatic.
For example, telling someone who was emotionally, physically, or sexually abused not to dwell ignores the fact that abuse affects people throughout their entire lives.
And saying “there’s no use” in any scenario promotes unrealistic expectations.
Since when did people only do useful things? There’s no use in getting sick, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen sometimes or that sick people shouldn’t receive medical attention or time off work.
3. ‘Nobody Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Consent’
This quote is usually attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but actually of unclear origin. It can be used to impart one useful message: What other people say about us is not the word of God, and the fact that someone else views you as inferior doesn’t mean you have to agree.
But people have taken the phrase too far and used it to shift responsibility from people who make others feel inferior toward those who are feeling inferior. It’s a worthy goal not to let unconstructive criticism affect us, but that doesn’t make the criticism okay.
I’ve also heard a variation of this phrase: “Nobody can make you feel anything.”
A friend first told me this after I complained that someone else “made” me feel bad, and I thought it was clever. I felt empowered by the idea that I was impervious to others’ comments (even though, in reality, I wasn’t). But later on, the same friend used this phrase when something she said made me feel bad, as if my thin skin were the problem and not her.
After hearing “nobody can make you feel anything” from several people repeatedly, I began to question myself whenever someone actually did make me feel bad. “You’re just thin-skinned,” I’d tell myself. “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, so why are you consenting?”
I’ve since realized that immunity to others’ opinions is a great achievement, but not a realistic expectation. And if someone else makes you feel bad, the right thing for them to do is to examine what they said, not blame you. No matter how thick or thin your skin is, people are still responsible for how they treat you. What someone says and how you react are two separate issues that shouldn’t be conflated. 4. ‘Offense Is Taken, Not Given’ Like “nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent,” this phrase is sometimes intended to empower people to reject others’ opinions, but it’s usually used instead to defend people making offensive remarks. When we’re told that taking offense is our own choice, we start to label ourselves as nitpicky, whiney, or argumentative whenever someone offends us. If something makes us feel bad, we blame ourselves, rather than realizing that our perspectives are valuable and we’re likely picking up on something that was indeed offensive, whether intentionally or not. Silencing people who take offense also works to the disadvantage of people who make offensive statements without realizing it and want to avoid hurting anyone again. Listening to people who are offended and asking them what they took issue with can start valuable discussions about language, pop culture, and other means by which oppressive ideas propagate. It can also help people understand why their words could have been hurtful to someone whose perspective they hadn’t considered and to be mindful of other perspectives in the future. 5. ‘We Seek Confirmation of What We Already Believe’ An ex-partner first used this saying with me when I pointed out a sexist double-standard in a movie (specifically, displaying female nudity but not male nudity when both characters were naked in the scene). He told me I saw sexism because I was looking for it. Hearing that your thoughts stem from preconceived notions rather than genuine observations can really make you doubt your own intellect. In my case, I became hesitant to contribute to conversations about gender – a topic I had been studying for years – because I wondered if my insights were even credible. My opinions on gender were not valuable, I told myself, since I was thinking about sexism to begin with and therefore biased. If I noticed something problematic, it was only because I was seeking out an opportunity to be offended. The assumption that someone has a certain experience simply because they expect to is just wrong. The fact that you think about an issue makes you more credible, not less. It insults someone’s intelligence to say their observations are merely the results of chips on their shoulders. 6. ‘Smile’ (Alternatively, ‘Don’t Cry’) When people tell you to smile or not to cry, what they really mean is that they wish you would feel happier (unless they’re a street harasser who just wants you to become more aesthetically pleasing to them). However, what you do with your face is 1) largely involuntary and 2) nobody’s business. People don’t generally cry on purpose. In fact, many people are embarrassed to cry. When you tell someone not to cry, you’re telling them to fight even harder to hide their emotions. And while smiling may put some people in a better mood, it can also feel disingenuous. After people are repeatedly told to smile or not to cry, they start to feel like they have to pretend everything is okay when it isn’t. And, beyond that, they start to doubt that they’re not okay, as if feelings can be objectively evaluated and theirs are incorrect. When people believe their feelings are wrong, they repress them rather than addressing the problems behind them. To avoid silencing others in this way, we have to provide a safe space for people to show their true emotions, even if these emotions are unpleasant. 7. ‘Thought Shapes Reality’ Once, I was feeling a bit depressed for no particular reason. When a family member asked me why, I said, “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m deciding to feel this way.” She said we do decide how we feel, which made me think there was something wrong with me for deciding to feel depressed. Saying that we choose how we feel trivializes mental illness by implying that we could just get rid of anxiety or depression through the power of positive thinking if we tried hard enough. Some people also gaslight others by applying this reasoning to physical illness: Mind trumps matter, the argument goes, so you could think away that migraine if you really wanted to. Positive thinking is useful, but it’s limited. Sometimes, all the positive thoughts in the world cannot make you feel better, and that’s not a failing on your part. *** Some of these phrases aren’t always harmful, and some contain valuable messages, but often, these messages could be conveyed in different ways that help people feel better without blaming them for feeling bad in the first place. For example, instead of saying “You shouldn’t feel _______,” you could say “You ought not to have to feel _______.” Though this phrasing may sound awkward, it makes it clear that it’s okay for someone to feel what they’re feeling, but you’re sorry they do, and the negative thoughts they may be having don’t necessarily reflect reality. Doubting people’s experiences isn’t just unproductive; it’s counterproductive. Telling people that what they’re thinking or feeling is incorrect doesn’t help them work through these thoughts and feelings. It just represses them so that they come back to haunt the person later. When we trust other people’s perceptions and emotions instead of implying that what they’ve experienced didn’t really happen, we help them gain control over their feelings. So, if we truly want to help people take others’ words and actions less personally, we’d be better off letting them feel hurt so that they can gain a greater understanding of where that hurt is coming from. Blaming people for getting upset or offended is also simply not accurate. People usually feel upset for a reason. And taking these reasons seriously is far more productive, healthy, and compassionate than denying that someone’s feelings exist. 39.6K Shares Share Suzannah Weiss is a New York-based writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Seventeen, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Bustle, and more. She holds degrees in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Modern Culture and Media, and Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown University. You can follow her on Twitter @suzannahweiss. Found this article helpful?
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Report finds charities and non-government organisations operate in ‘insidious’ environment where ‘self-censorship’ is rife
Australian charities are avoiding political advocacy and “self-silencing” out of a fear that dissent will attract political retribution, a new report has found.
Published by Pro Bono Australia and the Human Rights Law Centre, the Civil Voices report found that charities and non-government organisations operate in an “insidious” environment where “self-censorship” is rife because of funding agreements, management pressure and the “implied repercussions” of political speech.
One of the report’s co-authors, University of Melbourne associate professor Sarah Maddison, said the findings were “fairly insidious”.
Charities fight Coalition's attempt to limit advocacy Read more
“We’ve moved away from the really overtly hostile period of governance of the civil society sector,” Maddison said. “Instead what we are seeing is that the sector itself has taken on board some of those concerns into a mode of operation that we’re calling self-silencing.
“Our once vocal, sometimes strident, advocacy sector, bringing the voice and the experience of Australia’s most marginalised communities to the fore and helping government make better policy, has been effectively silenced both by governments and now by itself.”
The report surveyed 1,400 people in the charity sector, and found 65% of state-based NGOs feel restricted in what they can say publicly by funding agreements, compared to 42% of national organisations.
As well, 69% of organisations believe organisations that dissent from the government risk having their funding cut, and 53% believe NGOs are pressured to amend public statements to be in line with government policy.
Mining lobby calls for 10% limit on environmental charities' spending on advocacy Read more
While some charities are limited in their advocacy by explicit funding agreements, Maddison said the responses showed “public debate is further limited through self-censorship because of implied repercussions stemming from fears of government funding cuts or loss of DGR status”.
Responses revealed groups were “erring on the side of caution” when it came to advocacy, with some organisations indicating they were, for example, “a benign organisation and not politically active” or suggesting they are “not into lobbying in potentially controversial areas”.
Twelve per cent of those surveyed reported feeling internal pressure from either charity boards or management not to engage in political advocacy.
The report comes as charities gear up to fight what they see as government attempts to limit their ability to advocate.
Last week the federal government introduced legislation to parliament that would ban or limit the use of donations from overseas for advocacy in Australia, and an Treasury inquiry is seeking to limit how much advocacy environmental groups and other charities can engage in.
That followed a parliamentary report into the 2016 federal election, which called for a ban on foreign donations not just to political parties and “associated entities” but also to “third parties”, which could include any organisation or charity that advocates changes to policy in Australia.
Treasury has also suggested environmental groups should be forced to spend up to half their money on “remediation” rather than campaigning.
Emily Howie, a director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the Civil Voices report demonstrated the extent to which government action was undermining debate and democracy in Australia.
“Community organisations have enormous expertise to contribute, drawn from the work they do, whether it’s running a homeless shelter or protecting the environment,” she said.
“When you sideline the not-for-profit sector from public discussion, you silence the voices of the most marginalised people, undermine policy making and, ultimately, diminish our democracy.”
Howie said the new law could have “absurd consequences”.
“Unfortunately, this announcement is consistent with a broader, undemocratic trend of government attempting to silence the not-for-profit sector, through gags in funding agreements and threats to hamstring advocacy groups’ ability to fundraise,” she said.
“All governments find criticism of them inconvenient or uncomfortable, but that’s part and parcel of a good democracy.”In an unforgettable ceremony following his Game 7 save, Madison Bumgarner received a brand new 2015 Chevrolet Colorado. Unfortunately for Bumgarner and Chevy, that car was recalled earlier this month due to an airbag flaw.
The Los Angeles Times reports that General Motors ordered dealers to stop selling the cars at the beginning of the month because faulty wiring that could "cause the driver airbags not to function as designed."
• Taylor Swift sings 'Shake it Off' with Amar'e Stoudemire
The problem can be fixed with reprogramming of |
, and this is just a way for me to get a — not a competitive advantage as much as just equal the competition."...
The easiest solution is simply that the league provides the bat. And so maybe the league will bring out two to three bats a game, everyone has to use the same one and that's kinda it.Depending on how big a fan of spoilers you are, this could come as either excellent or horrible news. “Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” the first film in Warner Bros.’ Justice League franchise, which will be out in 2016, will include the character of Robin as well.
This time though, Batman’s ever-faithful sidekick will be female.
According to ComicBook.com, one extra from the set in Michigan agreed to breach their NDA and talk about what they’d seen so far of the film, which is now shooting there and in Detroit.
The biggest surprise is finding out that the script includes Robin, who will be female. This has sparked rumors that Jena Malone (“The Hunger Games,” “Sucker Punch”) will be appearing as Carrie Kelley / Robin.
The extra also talks about a scene shot at the Art Museum on the campus of the Michigan State University, which will see Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor get into a very violent fight – so violent that it will require a military intervention, but also include “fireworks, paparazzi and heavy special effects.”
“Dawn of Justice” will see Henry Cavill reprise his role as Superman from “Man of Steel” and Ben Affleck make his Batman debut. The film is directed by Zack Snyder, who directed “Man of Steel,” but it’s not a sequel to this one, aiming instead to introduce all the superheroes that will appear in the “Justice League” movie.
Warner Bros. has been working for years on a superhero film franchise to rival Marvel’s, but it seemed to get started with the wrong foot with Affleck’s casting. Gal Gadot’s casting as Wonder Woman only made matters worse, just like Jesse Eisenberg’s as Lex Luthor. Who knows how the fans will react to a female Robin.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 22, 2016, 5:19 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 22, 2016, 5:19 PM GMT By Ken Dilanian
A scathing report by the House Intelligence Committee, backed by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, concludes that Edward Snowden was a disgruntled, serial liar who leaked for petty reasons, put American soldiers at risk and remains in continuing contact with Russian intelligence services.
The 37-page review, filled with redactions of classified material, does not accuse Snowden of being a spy, but it seeks to poke holes in nearly every aspect of his account of why he gave reporters reams of classified documents he obtained as a contractor — and trusted insider — with the National Security Agency.
Snowden immediately began denouncing the report on Twitter from his home in Russia, saying its core claims were made "without evidence" and that it established nothing worse than he might have been hard to work with.
His lawyer, Ben Wizner, told NBC News he considers the report "a failed attempt to discredit Edward Snowden, whose actions led to the most significant intelligence reforms in a generation."
"The report wholly ignores Snowden’s repeated and courageous criticism of Russian surveillance and censorship laws," Wizner said. "It combines demonstrable falsehoods with deceptive inferences to paint an entirely fictional portrait of an American whistleblower."
Rep. Adam Schiff, who represents a bright blue district in California and is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the two-year review of classified documents explodes many myths advanced by Snowden supporters.
"Snowden and his defenders claim that he is a whistleblower, but he isn't," Schiff said. "Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy, and its compromise has been of great value to America's adversaries and those who mean to do America harm."
The report takes direct aim at Snowden’s stated motives for removing an estimated 1.5 million documents from NSA in what officials have called the most significant leak of national security information in American history.
It portrays him as a serial exaggerator and fabricator who first exaggerated the importance of his job at the CIA — where he worked before joining NSA — and then lied about having ethical qualms about it. It says he cheated on a test that got him a job with NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations office, known as TAO.
Snowden has said that his "breaking point" was Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s false statement to Congress in March 2013 that the intelligence community was not collecting millions of records on Americans. As Snowden and other NSA employees knew, that was not true — the NSA had for years been secretly gathering storing domestic calling records for use in terrorism investigations.
The report says that Snowden began downloading secrets eight months before, just a few weeks after a spat with his NSA supervisors.
One issue of contention, the report says, was a software patch Snowden installed while working at an NSA facility in Hawaii that caused servers to crash. After a manager complained in a mass email, Snowden fired back to a much more senior NSA official, leading to a rebuke that his conduct was unacceptable. He apologized — and then began unauthorized downloads of material, the report says.
The report's passage on Snowden’s alleged contacts with Russian intelligence services is mostly blacked out, but it quotes the deputy chairman of a Russian defense committee in parliament, who said in June that Snowden did share information with Russian intelligence.
On Twitter, Snowden pointed out that the Russian politician also said he was speculating. But the near-universal view across the U.S. intelligence community is that the Russians have access to much of what Snowden obtained.
Snowden has consistently denied cooperating with Russian intelligence. In 2014, he told NBC News during an exclusive U.S. broadcast interview that he had "no relationship with the Russian government at all" and was not a spy. He told Yahoo News he gave the Russians "the stiff arm."
In terms of damage, the report says the Pentagon identified eight "high risk issues" stemming from the Snowden leaks, including information that would put troops at risk if, as U.S. officials assume, the Russian and Chinese militaries now possess it.
The report lists 21 examples of ways in which Snowden’s leaks caused "massive damage" to U.S. national security. But each one is blacked out.
In arguing that Snowden cannot be considered a whistleblower, the report points out that the vast majority of what he took — most of which has never been disclosed — had nothing to do with electronic surveillance issues or privacy and civil liberties.
The report also notes that he spied on colleagues, invading their personal privacy, and that he hunted for personnel records about promotions and hiring at NSA. And it says investigators could find no evidence he ever expressed any concerns to colleagues about the nature of NSA’s surveillance work.
Snowden’s disclosure that the NSA had been keeping phone calling records on nearly every American led to the overhaul of that program, and some other modest changes in the rules for U.S. surveillance.
But most of his leaks had little impact on how the NSA does business. His disclosure of the so-called PRISM program, for example — under which the federal government spies on foreigners by gathering data from U.S. internet providers — did not lead to the abandonment of that program, which is considered extremely valuable even though it incidentally collects some American data.
However, the law governing that program expires next year, and some commentators have wondered whether Democrats in Congress will support extending it under President Donald Trump.
The reporting on Snowden’s disclosures by the Guardian and the Washington Post won major awards, as Snowden noted on Twitter.
"Not one page mentions this journalism won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, reformed our laws, and changed even the President's mind," Snowden said.
Yet the report notes with irony that in 2012, Snowden met with a training officer at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland and expressed concerns that he failed a test designed to train NSA operatives how to use the PRISM program while adhering to privacy and civil liberties standards.
"At no point during the visit did Snowden raise any concerns about how the NSA used" the program to collect internet data from American companies, the report said.
"This extensive report shows Snowden is no hero," said Rep. Lynn Westemoreland, a Georgia Republican who chairs an intelligence subccommittee that oversees NSA. "He should be brought to justice for his reckless actions."Victorians had a fascination with natural history. This manifested itself in various ways, not the least of which was in fashionable clothing and décor. A Victorian parlour, for example, might feature a scientific display of pinned butterflies. While insects, such as butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, and grasshoppers, were often depicted in Victorian jewellery, with some insect brooches and hairpins set en tremblant (on a spring) so that the jewelled insect would tremble and shake as if it were actually alive.
Of these various insects, butterflies were undoubtedly the most popular of the Victorian era. Embroidered butterflies decorated women’s ball gowns, enamelled butterfly pins adorned lady’s hats, and diamond butterfly hair ornaments accented fashionable coiffures. But the butterfly was not only striking in its own right, it was also symbolic of something greater. As Rosemary McTier explains in her book An Insect View of Its Plain:
“In the complex symbolic language of the Victorian era, flies represented humility and butterflies the soul…”
The belief that butterflies represented the soul was fairly widespread. In the United Kingdom, regional folklore could be quite specific on the matter. For instance, in Ireland, butterflies were thought to be either the souls of dead grandfathers or the souls of the newly dead waiting to pass through Purgatory. While in Devonshire and parts of Yorkshire, they were believed to be the souls of unbaptized babies.
Much of these beliefs can be attributed—at least in part—to the notion that the metamorphosis of a butterfly was symbolic of the phases of human growth. Since there was a long-standing idea that, upon death, the soul would escape the body and simply fly away, the final phase of the butterfly’s life—wherein she emerges from her chrysalis and takes flight—was naturally connected with the last journey of one’s immortal soul.
It was therefore quite unlucky to kill a butterfly…Except under certain circumstances. For instance, in his 2011 book, Some Notes on English Animal Lore, author T. Rhiselton Dyer relates the popular Devonshire belief that:
“…anyone neglecting to kill the first [butterfly] he may see in the season, will have, it is generally supposed, ill-luck for the remainder of the year.”
Butterflies were also symbolic of death in general. As the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore states:
“Butterflies and moths were associated with death, sometimes merely as omens, sometimes as the soul or ghost.”
These butterfly omens came in many ways. For example, in the nineteenth century United States, some people thought that a trio of butterflies was an omen of death. Others subscribed to the popular belief that if a butterfly landed on your shoulder it was a sign that you would die relatively soon.
Such associations might make one wonder that Victorians were so keen on adorning their clothing and their homes with butterfly motifs. However, Victorians had a great love of symbolism, whether via insects, animals, or flowers. By the second half of the nineteenth century, they were also becoming quite comfortable with the idea of death. Victorians of all classes carried memento mori, either in the form of jewellery—often carved in the likeness of a skull or an hourglass (to illustrate that one’s earthly time was growing shorter)—or in the form of a photo of a dead loved one or a brooch containing a lock of a deceased loved one’s hair.
Spiritualism was also on the rise in the second half of the Victorian era, with many participating in séances or attempting to contact the dead. Even Queen Victoria herself—by this point in a state of deep mourning after the death of Prince Albert—was suspected of engaging in a secret séance at Windsor Castle.
In this context, butterflies as a fashion accessory seem rather tame. Nevertheless, it is always good to know the deeper meanings that exist in some elements of Victorian dress and décor. At the same time, it is important to remember that, to some people, butterflies were not so much symbolic of the supernatural as simply elegant and beautiful—perfect accessories for the fashionable Victorian lady.
Before closing, I must note that butterflies also featured regularly in Japanese art and fashion, such as the painted fan below. The Victorian love for Japonisme encouraged the use of Japanese motifs in fashion and home décor which was yet another reason butterflies were so much in fashion toward the end of the nineteenth century. For more on Japonisme, you can read my article linked below:
Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Victorian Fashion
Thus concludes another of my now twice monthly features on animals in literature and history. Butterflies are one of my favourite creatures in the animal kingdom. However, rather than pinning one to your hat, I recommend admiring them in their natural habitat. Below is a link to the butterfly rainforest feeding station cam at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Butterfly Rainforest Feeding Station Cam at the Florida Museum of Natural History
Sources
Daniels, Cora Lynn. Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences. Vol. 2. Honolulu: University of the Pacific Press, 2003.
Dyer, T. Rhiselton. Some Notes on English Animal Lore – Birds, Animals, Insects, and Reptiles. Read Books Ltd., 2011.
McTier, Rosemary Scanlon. An Insect View of Its Plain: Insects, Nature and God in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Muir. London: McFarland & Co., 2013.
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
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In his most recent financial disclosure statement, Donald Trump notes he has billions of dollars in assets. But the presumptive GOP nominee also has a tremendous load of debt that includes five loans each over $50 million. (The disclosure form, which presidential candidates must submit, does not compel candidates to reveal the specific amount of any loans that exceed $50 million, and Trump has chosen not to provide details.) Two of those megaloans are held by Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany but has US subsidiaries. And this prompts a question that no other major American presidential candidate has had to face: What are the implications of the chief executive of the US government being in hock for $100 million (or more) to a foreign entity that has tried to evade laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans, that was recently caught manipulating markets around the world, and that attempts to influence the US government?
Trump’s disclosure form lists 16 loans from 11 different lenders, totaling at least $335 million, and the aggregate amount is likely much more. Deutsche Bank is clearly his favorite lender, and Trump’s financial empire has become largely dependent on his relationship with this major player on Wall Street and the global markets. The German bank has lent him at least $295 million for two of his signature projects. In 2012, Deutsche provided Trump with $125 million to help him buy Trump National Doral golf course. Last year, it handed Trump a $170 million line of credit for his new hotel project on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.
Should Trump move into the White House, four blocks away from his under-construction hotel, he would be its first inhabitant to owe so much to any bank. And in recent years, Deutsche Bank has repeatedly clashed with US regulators. So might it be awkward—if not pose a conflict of interest—for Trump to have to deal with policy matters that could affect this financial behemoth?
Richard Painter, an attorney who teaches at the University of Minnesota and who was the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, says a situation in which a sitting president owes hundreds of millions of dollars to any entity, especially a bank that jousts with regulators, is disturbing. There have been wealthy presidents and vice presidents, Painter notes, pointing to John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nelson Rockefeller, but none were as heavily leveraged as Trump. “They had large assets and usually diversified assets. They weren’t in a situation where someone could put pressure on them to do what they want,” Painter remarks. “Whereas having a president who owes a lot of money to banks, particularly when it’s on negotiable terms—it puts them at the mercy of the banks and the banks are at the mercy of regulators.” Painter adds: “In real estate, the prevailing business model is to own a lot but also owe a lot, and that is a potentially very troublesome business model for someone in public office.”
Members of a Trump cabinet would have to recuse themselves from any government business that would have a direct impact on their personal financial interests. If a Treasury secretary held this sort of loans, he or she could not participate in policy deliberations and actions that might have an impact on Deutsche Bank—and that would likely be many. But the president and vice president are excluded from this requirement. As president, Trump would have no obligation to divest his vast business holdings, though recent presidents and presidential candidates have taken steps to avoid any concern. President Barack Obama has even put off refinancing his Chicago home to save money because it would mean establishing a financial relationship with a bank, and that could prompt questions. In 2011, Mitt Romney promised to use a blind trust for his substantial personal business interests, though there were concerns regarding how “blind” the trust was.
Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank means he is in league with a financial giant that has been at odds with US government regulators and has attempted to skirt reforms designed to prevent Wall Street firms from wrecking the US economy once again. Last year, around the same time Trump secured the $170 million for the Washington project, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $2.5 billion fine to regulators here and abroad for its role in rigging interest rates. This included $600 million to the New York State Department of Financial Services, $800 million to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and $775 million to the Department of Justice. As Reuters reported, “Slamming Germany’s largest lender for ‘cultural failings,’ regulators squarely blamed senior staff for misleading them, failing to be open and cooperative, and prolonging the investigation.” From roughly 2003 to 2010, as the news service put it, the bank ran a scam to “fix rates…used to price hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans and contracts worldwide.” The bank also recently reached settlements in lawsuits alleging it had manipulated prices for precious metals and their derivatives.
Like most big banks, Deutsche Bank has been at odds with regulators over the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform measure. But it went to unusual lengths to dodge some of the law’s requirements. For years, the bank operated in the United States through two subsidiaries that were legally considered to be American entities. Yet in 2012—after Dodd-Frank was enacted—the bank tried to rewrite its own corporate structure to make it less American. Under the new law, a foreign-based bank’s subsidiaries were required to maintain certain minimum levels of capital—as much as $20 billion worth of reserves in Deutsche Bank’s case—so that the bank could weather another financial catastrophe like the one that occurred in 2008. The consequence of the rule also restricted how freely an American subsidiary of a foreign bank could invest and how much risk it could assume. This was the point of the law: to prevent gargantuan financial firms from behaving recklessly, collapsing, and, once more, requiring a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Rather than accept these limitations, Deutsche Bank reorganized itself, moving its commercial banking subsidiary out of the holding company for its American operations, which also contained its investment arm. Deutsche Bank then claimed this banking subsidiary was not subject to the new Dodd-Frank regulations. The Federal Reserve didn’t fall for this stunt. The bank eventually was forced to comply with Dodd-Frank requirements.
That was only the beginning of Deutsche Bank’s problems with Dodd-Frank. Last September, in its first enforcement action on new Dodd-Frank provisions, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Deutsche Bank $2.5 million for failing to report properly on its trading of swaps, which are complex financial derivatives.
And like most big banks, Deutsche Bank lobbies heavily in Washington. Last year it spent $600,000 on a stable of lobbyists. In 2010, the year Dodd-Frank was enacted, the bank spent nearly $2.6 million on influence-peddlers in the nation’s capital.
So how might Trump, should he become president, handle the conflict of interest posed by his relationship with Deutsche Bank?
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but previously Trump has said (without mentioning Deutsche Bank specifically) that he would avoid any conflicts of interest by installing his children at the top of the Trump business empire.
“There would be enormous tax consequences from just giving it all to the children,” Painter says. “But just merely letting his [children] run the business doesn’t solve the problem. You really have got to figure out a way to sell your interest in the business and sell off the risk.” Other wealthy presidents have tended to own assets that could easily be unwound or sold off. But for Trump, disposing of his real estate holdings would be a special challenge. “I think what you need to do is wind down or sell off the real estate portfolio, and that probably takes time,” Painter says. “It’s not like liquid securities that are easy to sell. Or he’d need to start to focus on paying off this debt.”
Selling the parts of the businesses that he has mortgaged might be particularly difficult, because some of the debt may be tied to him personally. In the past that has led to problems, even with Deutsche Bank. In 2005, Trump borrowed $640 million from Deutsche Bank and several other lenders for the construction of a Chicago hotel tower. When he failed to pay back the money on time in 2008, the banks, including Deutsche Bank, demanded he pay up the $40 million he had personally guaranteed. In response, Trump sued Deutsche Bank for $3 billion, saying the project’s financial troubles were the fault of the economic recession, essentially an act of God, and accusing the bank of undermining the project and his reputation.
Trump and Deutsche Bank patched things up, and hundreds of millions of dollars in credit subsequently flowed from the German behemoth to Trump. But with all his debt to Deutsche Bank coming due before the end of what would be Trump’s second term as president, there’s more to this relationship than what’s on the financial ledger. The American public, too, has much at stake when it’s possible that the next president will be deeply in debt to a global financial player that has been caught trying to use its influence to rig the financial system.By Brian McGlinchey
Activists affiliated with New Hampshire-based “Declassify the 28 Pages” are at it again.
Continuing to make the redacted 28 pages on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers a campaign issue, they recently asked Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush if he would declassify them.
Bush’s answer: “I don’t know what the 28 pages are, so please explain it.” (Video below.)
The exchange took place at an August 7 town hall in Barrington, New Hampshire. Bush added, “Look, I can’t commit to something until I see it. Since I don’t have classified information, I can’t tell you what it is or tell you whether it should be declassified.” When the woman offered to explain what the 28 pages are—as Bush himself had asked in his initial reply—he stopped her from doing so.
There are two potential explanations for Bush’s answer, and neither is flattering to the former Florida governor. Bush is either so poorly informed on national security matters that he is truly unaware of a well-documented and intriguing 13-year old controversy surrounding his brother’s decision to classify a full chapter in the report of a 2002 joint congressional inquiry into September 11, or he was feigning ignorance to dodge discussion of yet another sensitive Bush family topic.
Jeb’s Links to the 28 Pages: Family, Florida and Saudi Arabia
There are many reasons why Bush’s claim of ignorance on this topic invites skepticism. First, of course, is the fact that his brother sits at the center of the controversy.
Then there’s the fact that, for more than a dozen years, the most prominent voice calling for the declassification of the 28 pages has been Bush’s fellow Floridian Bob Graham. While Bush was governor, Graham represented Florida in the Senate and co-chaired the unprecedented joint inquiry that produced the 28 pages. When the 28 pages were released, Graham publicly decried the redaction and was among 46 senators who signed a letter to Jeb’s brother urging their release.
Also during their governor-senator overlap, Graham published “Intelligence Matters,” a book that was very critical of the Bush administration’s actions before and after the September 11 attacks, including the decision to redact the 28 pages.
Among the criticisms advanced by Graham were well-substantiated claims that the Bush White House went out of its way to shield the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from scrutiny of its ties to the 9/11 hijackers. Graham has since said the 28 pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier” of the 9/11 attacks.
If the family and Florida connections to the 28 pages aren’t enough to put the issue on Bush’s radar, Graham’s claim that the 28 pages implicate Saudi Arabia in the devastating terror attack should be an attention-getter, given the Saudi royal family and the Bush family are deeply connected in ways that are both personal and financial.
$1.4 billion has reportedly made its way from the Saudi royal family to entities tied to the Bush family, and lobbyists for Saudi Arabia are helping to fund Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. On the same day in February, two different lobbyists for Saudi Arabia gave a combined $15,000 to Bush’s super PAC, and one of them has already raised another $32,400 in bundled contributions for the Bush campaign fund.
Congressman Walter Jones—who has introduced a House resolution urging the release of the 28-pages chapter—has said, “There’s nothing in it about national security. It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.”
Help us spread the word. Make a gift to 28Pages.orgClimate change is already reshuffling the UK's wildlife calendar, and it's likely this will continue into the future, according to new research published this week in the journal Nature.
The results suggest that seasonal events -such as the timing of flowering in plants and breeding in birds - are generally more sensitive to temperature change, than to changes in precipitation such as rain and snowfall. Plants and animals respond differently to temperature changes at different times of year.
Seasonal relationships between predators, such as insect-eating birds and plankton-eating fish, and their prey could be disrupted in the future. This could affect the breeding success and survival of these species, with possible consequences for UK biodiversity.
The analysis shows that, given these patterns in climate sensitivity, species in the middle of food webs, such as some insects and plankton species, which feed on plants but are themselves fed on by predators, are likely to change their seasonal "behaviour" the most in future.
The study was led by ecologists at the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, working in collaboration with 17 other organisations - research institutes, non-governmental organisations and universities. The analysis involved more than 370,000 observations of seasonal events including long-term records, spanning the period 1960 to 2012, covering 812 marine, freshwater and dry-land plant and animal species from the UK, from plankton to plants, butterflies to birds and moths to mammals.
The data represented three levels of the food chain, primary producers (such as flowering plants and algae), primary consumers (such as seed-eating birds and herbivorous insects) and secondary consumers (such as insect-eating birds, fish and mammals).
Species records were combined with national temperature and rainfall data to show that plants and animals not only vary greatly in their sensitivity to climate change, but that species at different levels in food chains have been responding to climate in different ways. Using the current best estimates of climate change, the study forecasts that by 2050, primary consumers will have shifted their seasonal timing by more than twice as much as species at other trophic levels -- an average of 6.2 days earlier versus 2.5¬¬-2.9 days, although there is substantial variation among taxonomic groups.
The lead author of the study, Dr Stephen Thackeray from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said "This is the largest study of the climatic sensitivity of UK plant and animal seasonal behaviour to date. Our results show the potential for climate change to disrupt the relationships between plants and animals, and now it is crucially important that we try to understand the consequences of these changes."
Dr Thackeray added, "Our findings highlight the importance of managing ecosystems within a'safe operating space' with respect to the likely impacts of projected climate change."
The study combined data collected as part of long-running scientific monitoring schemes, and also extensive citizen science initiatives, capitalising on the rich tradition of biological recording in the UK.
Co-author Dr Deborah Hemming, from the Met Office, said, "We are lucky in the UK to have a long history of people fascinated with observing and recording events in nature. By quantifying the relationships between these phenological records and climate data across the UK, we identify many phenological events that are extremely sensitive to climate variations. These provide ideal early indicators, or sentinels, for monitoring and responding to the impacts of climate variability and change on nature."
###
Co-author Sian Atkinson, senior conservation advisor with the Woodland Trust, said, "Volunteers with our Nature's Calendar project contribute thousands of records each year on the timing of seasonal events. The resulting database is an invaluable resource for scientists studying the potential impacts of climate change. This piece of research demonstrates how very valuable such records are in helping us to build a picture of the likely impacts of climate change for our wildlife."
The study was carried out by scientists from the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Met Office, Rothamsted Research, The Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, British Trust for Ornithology, The Woodland Trust, Butterfly Conservation, University of Cambridge, Sea Mammal Research Unit, The Freshwater Biological Association, University of Lincoln, Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Edinburgh, The Australian National University (Australia), Coventry University, Pozna? University of Life Sciences, (Poland), University of Aberdeen, and the People's Trust for Endangered Species.
The work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.Queensland Senator Glenn Lazarus tells protesters he will shirt-front Tony Abbott. Credit:Tony Moore Senator Lazarus urged people to add their signatures to a Change.org petition – which has already attracted 55,000 signatures - and started calling for independent monitoring of the coal seam industry. "Once I feel I have enough signatures – I will – and I will be very clear with this – I will shirt-front Tony Abbott," he said to loud applause from around 400 ant-coal seam gas protesters. "And I will show him the petition and I will voice the concerns of the people of Chinchilla – anyone who has concerns with CSG mining. "And I will tell him - and make sure he understands it – that the people of Queensland and Australia do not want CSG mining or open cut mining anywhere in this country or in this state."
Senator Lazarus played 21 Tests (and one Super League Test) for Australia during the late 1980s and 1990s and is considered one the game's best front rowers before entering federal politics. "I took that very seriously that I was representing Australia – both here and abroad – very seriously," he told the crowd. "And I just feel that if we can get this message out to everybody that we can slowly but surely get a groundswell of supporters that Australians would not want to have this happening to Australians. "I just feel that it is un-Australian to the people on the land and that live on the land." Senator Lazarus disagreed with criticism that the recent Senate Inquiry he chaired into the previous Queensland Governments was merely a "platform for the Greenies".
"My response to them is that the environment is very important," he said, telling that three-quarters of the issues raised at the inquiry were environmental issues. "The lives of these property owners living off the land are very important and there are a lot of issues that particularly the previous state government has introduced to these people." He told the protesters of one Chinchilla farmer – Joe Hill - who is battling a burst mine tailings dams that was allowing contaminated water to spread over his farm. "I rang him and he was on his farm standing there – and his words to me were that the dam's banks had burst and poisonous water was flowing down across his property – and he could do nothing about it." That claim was immediately rejected by Queensland's Environment Department on Thursday afternoon who said they had checked on Mr Hill's complaint last week and found it was irrigation water supplied to the dam.
"The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection has inspected the site where a large privately owned and operated dam, on private land, broke its bank," a spokesman said. "Water samples taken by EHP officers have confirmed the water is of high irrigation standards, therefore there is no concern of environmental contamination or harm from the spill. The water comes from an irrigation project, the Australian Petroleum Exporters Association said. "The landowner is one of several participants in the Fairymeadow Road Irrigation Pipeline (FRIP) scheme which provides treated water to landowners for agricultural use," a statement read. "Water supplied to the dam as part of the scheme is treated by reverse osmosis and meets both recognised irrigation and stock water standards (ANZECC Guidelines).
"Routine water sampling and plant safeguards where water quality exceeds certain limits provide assurance that all water supplied under the scheme meets these standards." However Senator Lazarus said he wanted to get an inquiry underway into the human impacts of coal seam gas mining on families and rural communities of CSG mining. "I am calling on a moratorium to halt all projects that have been approved to stop and scale back on existing coal seam gas mining projects," he said. "And I would really dearly like to see a Resource Ombudsman set up so that the people of the land can go to – or a body of people that people can go to voice their concerns. Senator Lazarus said he would be happy to speak the Greens to begin negotiations on ways to attract parliamentary support for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into coal seam gas.
Earlier Darling Downs farmer Shay Dougall, from Hopeland, explained the constant difficulties her rural farming township faced from coal seam gas miners despite 34 of the 40 farming families rejecting the mining company advances. Fairfax Media reported Shay's story – and the government's response - on Thursday morning. Veteran conservationist Drew Hutton called on the Palaszczuk Government not to approve the next stage of New Hope's Acland coal mine outside Toowoomba and called on them to honour promises for greater scrutiny of coal seam gas companies. Queensland Greens senator Larissa Waters – an environment lawyer before politics – said only a groundswell of public opinion – not legal avenues - could produce policy change. "The law is terrible, the law does not give you any rights, and it does not protect the environment," Senator Waters said candidly.
"That is why I joined the parliament and it has been an absolute honour to bring your concerns to parliament and to the ears of the greater populace. "Don't give up," she told the crowd outside Queensland Parliament. "This is a big fight, but it is one we are all up for."(KUTV) — Salt Lake City Council and Mayor Jackie Biskupski announced the locations of four new homeless shelters in the city after months of hushed planning and inter-office deliberating.
After choosing 11 preliminary sites, the council and the mayor narrowed it down to four. The shelters will be built in the following areas.
653 East Simpson Avenue
275 West High Avenue
131 East 700 South
648 West 100 South
"They represent more than land, they are space of hope for those in need," Biskupski said.
Salt Lake City Council Chair James Rogers said the council will "consider a formal resolution for these sites."
All council members were present for the conference.
The shelters will be used to provide various services to the homeless, including job-skills training and medical treatment, according to a press release by the mayor and the city council. In October, city council members for new shelters alone.
"Today is the finale for a very long and difficult process," said local businesswoman Gail Miller at the press conference.
Unlike the existing shelters, which can hold around 1,100 people, the new shelters will hold
"Each of these sites have gone through a very rigorous process to get to this point," Biskupski said at the press conference announcing the locations.
The announcement comes after
The first deadline for a list of specific site, set by the Homeless Services Site Evaluation Commission, was in September. When that wasn’t met, the deadline was moved to Oct. 10. But when the city announced it would bump its original number of new shelters from two to four, that deadline was missed as well.
The most recent deadline, Nov. 21, came and went with no further information.
In addition to timeliness, the council and mayor have been criticized for a lack of transparency.
resulted in heavily redacted emails between city council officials that revealed little other than that plans were in the works. Another email showed one councilman was upset that certain sites had been removed from considerations “without any council discussion.”
The Central City Neighborhood Council released a statement on the announcement, welcoming new neighbors and urging community oversight of the resource centers.
While our neighborhood greets this challenge with optimism, |
away from Sodom’s destruction? What is the “logic” or scientific” explantion behind this fact.
Answer:
I do not believe that there is any “scientific logic” to what happened to Lot’s wife. What happened to his wife is presented in the Bible as a miracle. I believe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was also a miracle. A miracle, by definition, is an event which violates the normal, physical laws of nature. Therefore, science can never be used to “explain” a miracle. It can only be used to help identify a miracle. There is no way, under unmiraculous natural laws, for a human to be turned into salt. Salt is principally the compound sodium chloride. Our bodies only contain a few grams of sodium chloride, so, outside of a miracle, this could not have happened.
If there is no “scientific” explanation of this miracle, then we can reasonably ask why God chose to do this to Lot’s wife. I believe that there is a fairly small number of examples in which God did something just once and had it recorded in scripture to teach us who read the Bible a very important lesson. The flood in the time of Noah is an example of this. Also, what happened to Ananias and Saphyra in Acts is a one-off example of God doing something out of the ordinary in order ot make a point for us.
Then we can reasonably ask, what was the point God was making with Lot’s wife. I believe the answer is very simple. The message of what happened with Lot’s wife is this: When we leave our life of sin, we should never look back. Like Jesus said in Luke 17:32, “Remember Lot’s wife.” He also said in Luke 9:62, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Like I said, God has used one-time events to teach us solemn lessons. Life in the world beckons us to come back. It is always tempting to return to our life of sin. Hebrews 3:7-4:11 is a long treatise on the same topic. Because the Jews looked back while wandering in the desert, God said that they did not enter his rest. He reminds us to not look back–to “make every effort” to enter heaven.
I believe this is the explanation of what happened to Lot’s wife.
John OakesBackground
Trial
Jury selection and revolt
According to media reports, Clark thought that women, regardless of race, would sympathize with the domestic violence aspect of the case and connect with her personally. On the other hand, the defense's research suggested that women generally were more likely to acquit than men, and that jurors did not respond well to Clark's combative style of litigation. The defense also speculated that black women would not be as sympathetic as white women to the victim, who was white, because of tensions about interracial marriages. Both sides accepted a disproportionate number of female jurors. From an original jury pool of 40 percent white, 28 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent Asian, the final jury for the trial had ten women and two men, of which there were nine blacks, two whites, and one Hispanic.[14][51] At the start of trial, twelve jurors and twelve alternates were selected from a pool of 250 potential jurors. Over the course of the trial ten were dismissed for a wide variety of reasons. Only four of the original jurors remained on the final panel.[52] During the middle of the trial, a number of the jurors staged what the media called a "revolt". After being sequestered for 101 days, thirteen of the eighteen jurors refused to enter the courtroom until they were granted a meeting with Judge Ito. Eventually, the jury returned with thirteen members wearing black or dark-colored clothing in what was described as a "funeral procession".[53][54]
Prosecution case
Defense case
Verdict
Media coverage
Aftermath
Other theories
In popular culture
Exhibits
The suit Simpson wore when he was acquitted on October 3, 1995 was donated by Simpson's former agent Mike Gilbert to the Newseum in 2010. The Newseum has multiple trial related items in their collection, including press passes, newspapers and the mute button that Superior Court Judge Lance Ito used when he wanted to shut off the live microphone in court so lawyers could talk privately during the trial. The museum's acquisition of the suit ended the legal battle between Gilbert and Fred Goldman, both of whom claimed the right to the clothing.[181] The Bronco from the famous police chase was on display at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee as of late 2016.[182]
See also
References
BibliographyMore than a year ago a controversial “six strikes” program (officially titled “Copyright Alert System“) was created by movie and music trade groups (together with the biggest ISPs) with the goal of deterring piracy. Although the program has many flaws, its creators have been stressing its educational rather than punishing nature. Nonetheless, the participating rights holders reserved the right to subpoena identities of the “most persistent” infringers with the purpose of suing them. It has not happen so far: the PR disaster that labels brought upon themselves by going after individual file-sharers is still fresh in people’s memory, and I doubt that the labels really want to step onto the same rake again: it seems that the lawsuit provision was added mostly as a strong deterrent.
So, while the actual rights holders are hesitant to pursue the litigation route, those who don’t have reputation to begin with, are now trying to camel-nose the weakest point of the program.
I already wrote about Lipscomb/Nicoletti/Schultz’s request to commence a fishing expedition to Comcast’s private data storage. At that time it was only a request. This time it was granted — in two courts.
First, in Illinois, Judge Brown granted plaintiff’s motion on 6/18/2014 in the eventful Malibu Media v. John Doe (ILND 13-cv-06312). It is worth noting the usage of the word may, which can be a scrivener’s error, or (I hope!) a hint to Comcast (emphasis is mine):
It is hereby ordered that Plaintiffs Motion is granted. Plaintiff may serve a third party subpoena on Comcast in the form attached as Exhibit A to this Order, and Comcast may comply with that subpoena.
Next, in Indiana, Magistrate Dinsmore ordered that “Comcast should comply with Plaintiff’s subpoena” in Malibu Media v. Tashiro (INSD 13-cv-00205).
The last of the three known fishing attempts of this kind is pending in Michigan (Malibu Media v. John Doe, MIED 13-cv-11432). An interesting nuance here is that the trolls want to depose not only the defendant’s previous provider, Comcast (the one the defendant was using at the time of the alleged infringement), but also his new one, AT&T. Please remind me: where did we see the names of these two ISPs together in a single lawsuit? Facepalm.
Why does Malibu needs this information in the first place?
The answer is simple: the trolls don’t have sufficient evidence against the defendants to win a jury trial. Period. After examining the defendats’ hard drives, after invading the neighbors’ privacy (in Illinois Malibu interrogated defendant’s neighbors with the court permission), the trolls still want a very vague data that cannot prove much to begin with!
Comcast must intervene
I understand that Comcast is overwhelmed by the blizzard of subpoenas from the copyright trolls and cannot object to all of them. Nonetheless, ISPs did fight for their customers and for their reputation in the past. The performance of their attorneys in AF Holdings v. Does 1-1058 in DC and Lightspeed v. Smith in Illinois was excellent. Again, priorities are priorities: not all cases are created equal: some warrant picking up a fight, and some are simply critical.
This is such a case. Complying with these overreach subpoenas without giving a good fight will open a can of worms, no doubt. Today it is the “six strikes” data; tomorrow it will be the browsing history. Since the entire trolling “business” is premised on the pressure to settle rather than collecting evidence for a jury trial, every tiny bit of the victim’s privacy that trolls put their fingers on will be used to extract a ransom. None of us are completely free of vices. Everyone has something deeply private that can be leveraged by blackmailers.
A gruesome analogy
I’m risking to be prosecuted according to the Godwin’s Law, but I can’t stop thinking about the following analogy. As the Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge wrote in one of his articles,
The Netherlands used to keep track of people’s religion as part of the public records. The intent was noble as always: by keeping track of how many Jews, Catholics, and Protestants there were in a city and its different parts, you would be able to plan for an appropriate amount of synagogues, Protestant churches, and Catholic churches, their proportion to one another, and so on. Then, World War II came around. There were almost no Jews at all in the Netherlands after World War II. According to Wikipedia, less than 10% survived (14,346, compared to an earlier population of 154,887). As it turns out, it was very convenient for the… new administration… to have access to the collected data, and it was indeed used against the citizens, as it always is in the end.
The difference here is that we are not talking about the government, yet the alliance of the copyright cartel and ISPs is no less scary when it comes to data retention, even for “educational purposes.” Was “six strikes” conceived in good faith? Maybe. Is it about to be cynically abused by the porn trolls? Hell, yes.
Related
¹6/30/2014 update: Techdirt also paid attention to this news.would've been Nazis, etc. Reply
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I hate that response sfm.
THE RULE OF LAW/DUE PROCESS, MUTHERFUCKERS.
Anyone potentially guilty of a crime is nevertheless protected and entitled to their day in court, not shot or choked to death by police. Cops aren't even reliable interpreters of the law (as evidenced by how often they fuck up and violate rights when citizens rightfully exercise protest against warrentless search/seizure + groundless apprehensions); that's what fucking lawyers are for.
White people love screaming about "innocent and proven guilty" until it's black people coming for that right. Reply
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Innocence isn't relevant, the job of the police is not to play judge, jury, and executioner to people selling cigarettes on the corner or a kid playing with a toy gun. I hate this argument. Especially when the police treat heinous white criminals e.g. Charleston shooter with decency and basic human respect. Reply
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I hate hearing that argument so much. So they deserve to die b/c they sold loose squares, talked 'disrespectful' to the police or ran from the police. Makes no sense at all. Reply
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Victim blaming murdered children is so low. Reply
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It means the same thing (sends a clearer message IMO) and people won't get butthurt over it. Why not #blacklivesmattertoo It means the same thing (sends a clearer message IMO) and people won't get butthurt over it. Reply
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the hashtag is not about pleasing white people and catering to their feelings. Reply
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bc black lives > white feelings Reply
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lmao as if that would make a difference to people like this guy anyway Reply
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because anyone with common sense should be able to comprehend what they mean with that hashtag.
of course every life matters but in the context of the conversation and movement, black lives matter. Reply
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People shouldn't be getting butthurt but look into it before freaking out Reply
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*Looks at my LJ note* jinxthcat-racist
Makes sense Reply
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What are people like in that vid going to say back?
#alllivesmattertoo? lol @ the responses in my post. If the ORIGINAL hashtag was #blacklivesmattertoo instead of #blacklivesmatter people wouldn't have any issues with it, in fact they would be happy that there would be less misconceptions like the guy in the video. The "TOO" at the end suggests that black people are being told that their lives DON'T matter, which gets the point across clearer.What are people like in that vid going to say back? Reply
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Because black people have to pacify their right to live so white people don't feel a type a way about it? gurl bye.
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i thought you cared about VICTIMS tho Reply
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By not including the 'too' it says that black lives matter at all, period. Full stop. By not including the 'too' it says that black lives were not a priority and never treated with the equality and dignity that the All Lives Matter crowd says people have proclaimed. By not addressing the issues of police brutality, the All Lives Matter crowd is just saying that so they don't have see the flaws in the system that they often and so rigorously defend. Watch this link ( People have been polite, to the point of death, even in church that white people have said is what black people need to comply with and have still been accused of doing something wrong (a congressman said that the people in the church in Charleston were sitting there waiting to die). Even when black people invite white folks to come and sit and pray with them and die as a result, it's still something that is seen as something that needs to be debated. It doesn't get more peaceful than sitting in church for prayer and bible study. Black people have been nice and polite and respectful for centuries and it still gets people killed for jaywalking or knowing their rights or being in their car and following their directions or being a little kid in the park and playing. I mean, how much more polite do people have to be?By not including the 'too' it says that black lives matter at all, period. Full stop. By not including the 'too' it says that black lives were not a priority and never treated with the equality and dignity that the All Lives Matter crowd says people have proclaimed. By not addressing the issues of police brutality, the All Lives Matter crowd is just saying that so they don't have see the flaws in the system that they often and so rigorously defend. Watch this link ( https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/881490075274451/ ) because it won't embed. It's only a minute and says what everyone here is trying to say. Black Lives Matter is here working for the most disenfranchised that will eventually spread out and benefit every life. Reply
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Lol because that hashtag sounds like whiniest plea as opposed to a strong, bold statement declaring the humanity of blacks be acknowledged and respected.
But y'know, you do this every time so.... Reply
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i can't tell if youre being serious or not...
the reason the hashtag even exists is because unarmed black youth are being murdered in the streets. its about police brutality and racial profiling and the extreme realities of being a black body in 2015.
framing the hashtag or even having this conversation is moving attention away from the actual problem here and refocusing it on this inclusion/exclusion dynamic. this is a conversation being had about black lives.
i dont understand why youre fighting so hard to say maybe if they would have included too then all lives matter people wouldnt feel so butt hurt. this isnt about everyone, this is about a community who is constantly being disparaged by the dominant power group.
the fact that the hashtag has to exist at all should be reason enough to understand why there is no too at the end.
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If you think the hashtag should be changed to stop white people from being butthurt you really don't think Black lives matter at all tbh. Reply
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oh god. you were being serious... Reply
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Why should it have to be more palatable for assholes? Reply
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Who cares if white feelings are hurt, let them be Reply
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Because these cops/people who agree with them are, with their actions (and sometimes their words), straight-up saying "black lives don't matter." Reply
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I explained the diff in killings of black persons. He said, verbatim, "There's a reason for that."
ughhhhhh. the terrible thing is you know a number of white people feel this way but aren't bold enough to out right say it Reply
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yup Reply
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But a black person punching him would've been right up his street. Reply
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The shit she would've dealt with afterwards wouldn't have been worth it for that fucker. Reply
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the church i went to as a kid literally held an "all lives matter" prayer walk in houston today for the cop who was shot and killed on friday
the sheriff also went off and said "black lives matter? all lives matter? how bout cop lives matter??" and good lord the point has just flown over everyone's goddamn head Reply
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heard about this on her snapchat. "we only got into one fight this year!"
more power to her Reply
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ia....ONTD please find out who this deflated white balloon is, expose ha Reply
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Mte on all accounts. These fuckers need to be dragged
She has a crazy amount of restraint, idk how she did it Reply
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mte call these assholes out!
she has more patience than I could ever have Reply
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.... to silence her/put it over her mouth? you have really bad comprehension skills shes trying to get the camera out of her face Reply
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whenever I see " #alllivesmatter " I think of that tweet like "do y'all also go into funerals and say I, TOO, HAVE FELT LOSS" Reply
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beyond done with fuckers like him... Reply
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that guy can go fuck himself with a cactus Reply
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don't hurt the poor cactus bb Reply
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i have faith in my yugioh cards Reply
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Basically at one point during the night Empire's Jussie Smollett shouted out "Black lives matter" when the person that was sitting next to Chesaleigh and her husband responded with "Bullshit!".
lol
i guess the person is not a heavy internet user... Reply
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lol i fell asleep during this.
the VMAs good this year? Reply
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omg I missed this part in particular Reply
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what happened here??? Reply
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oh shitt i never saw this Reply
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"Don't play with me bitch...unless you're Taylor Swift! Where are you Taylor? Come sing with me! #squadgoals Reply
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My original comment was going in on them and ending with an Oprah gif saying they all just need to die.
But I was made aware of a promise I made to not go in.
Even if I do wish he'd die horrifically in a car crash.
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gross Reply
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I said it and I realize that it's very harsh but I'm done being nice. What's the point of trying to reason with an asshole who will never get it and never respect you? Fuck it. Reply
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My cousin just died in a car crash, that shit's not funny. Reply
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this made me so angry to see omfg
good for her for calling out these soggy noodles Reply
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LinkSarah Schisel (Photo: Courtesy of Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office)
MANITOWOC - A Manitowoc woman was arrested Wednesday evening on suspicion of threatening her neighbor with a pistol over a dispute about a missing duck.
According to the Manitowoc Police Department, Sarah Schisel, 69, approached her neighbor in the 1000 block of Hamilton Street at around 7:20 p.m. Wednesday to prove she did not have her neighbor’s pet duck.
RELATED: Car crashes into Manitowoc duplex garage
RELATED: Man tries to run people over at Washington Park
Schisel wanted her neighbor, a 36-year-old man, to search her garage and see that his duck was not on her property. She then drew a pistol from her shirt pocket and pointed it toward his stomach. The neighbor reacted by disarming Schisel and pushing her to the ground.
Schisel later told police she was aware that bullets were in the gun and that the gun safety was off. She was arrested on suspicion of reckless endangerment and carrying a concealed weapon.
Read or Share this story: http://htrne.ws/29gkMJSAfter traveling to Budapest and conducting a lengthy interview with Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, the New York Times decides to bury it. Times reporter David Streitfeld's account of the interview and his questions to Kertész differ significantly from the accounts given by the other three people who were in the room during the conversation - including that of Imre Kertész. Rather strange.
Federalism is the only hope for Europe: the no man's land between confederation and federation is not sustainable any more – says Andrew Duff, British liberal and federalist politician. He has just published a book about the future of the EU – we asked him whether it is hopeless to talk about federalism after the rise of euro-scepticism at the last EP-elections. Interview.
Gábor Vona, the president of Jobbik, and Lajos Rig, the Jobbik candidate who has apparently won Sunday's by-election, will not, contrary to the campaign promise, be stripping to their waists to dispel rumors about certain tattoos. Vona says that it is the 21st century that has defeated the parties of the 20th century in yesterday's vote to elect a parliamentary seat for a constituency in western Hungary. According to the party president, Jobbik does not receive any unfair, dishonest funding from Russia, nor from Iran. Mandiner reached Mr. Vona on the phone just minutes after his press conference in Tapolca on Sunday night.
There's often a morsel of truth in what former US Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Kounalakis says. For example, as she writes in her recent New York Times Op-Ed that on August 27th, the Austrian police did really find a freight truck on the highway to Vienna carrying 71 dead people. Sadly, this is the only point that Mrs. Kounalakis got right. Let's see, what really happened, why it happened and if it really has anything to do with Hungary or the Hungarian past.
This is the game perfected in the Middle East. This is Pallywood, or how to manipulate a media already hungry for sensation, a media already adept at twisting the truth. Sacrificing their own misery and inhumanity, sacrificing their innocent and unguarded children, the actors in Pallywood attempt to extract as much as possible from unwitting audiences around the world. Until recently, we Europeans, we Hungarians were able to witness these bizarre scenes only on the ten o’clock news. But now its pounding at the gates. Quite literally.
This is an unendurable state of affairs. No matter what sort of humanitarian approach may be cited, it is insane to allow completely unknown individuals to wander around Europe with no real restrictions.
We began our research based on an online caution for foreign writers and ended it with the discovery of a series of stolen works. We found that Hungarian SF magazine Galaktika regularly published articles from foreign writers without permission. The editor-in-chief states royalties are complicated issues in the world and that even Michael Jackson’s agent is unfamiliar with which radio stations play his music, and how many times it is played.
André Goodfriend: “We Don't Want To Be Seen As the Policemen of Hungary” The chargé d'affaires told Mandiner that there are former or current public officials in many countries within the EU who are not permitted in the U.S., but they and their governments never made this information public. Mr. Goodfriend also talked about the incoming ambassador, the visit to Mr. Bitó's salon, and whether the U.S. can understand the special Hungarian interests in Ukraine. 3 2
Hungarians, Get Out of the Country! – Approved by UEFA Hungary recently played a football match against Finland in a partially closed stadium as a sanction for the Hungarian supporters' chants during a previous Romania-Hungary match. Romanian fans at the same match, however, were not sanctioned for rhymes against the Hungarian minority in their country. 2 4
Alone Against the World The Hungarian government's behavior has got us into conflicts where we have little to gain and perhaps much to lose. They simply seem to neglect the possible political price for national and international political actions. 2 2
Hungary and the European-election: leftist numbness in challenging times This is not your typical campaign before a typical election. On Sunday, Hungarians will vote in the European Parliamentary elections for the third time. But for a number of reasons, the campaign has been unusually low-key. 1 1
Vaclav Klaus: Hungary With Mr Viktor Orbán Is Different "I am not a eurosceptic. And I am definitely not a euronaivist. I am a eurorealist", says Vaclav Klaus, the former president and prime minister of the Czech Republic. Mr Klaus, a harsh critic of the current state of the European Union, came to Budapest to share his views on Europe and its crisis. Interview. 1 3
Fidesz's Supermajority in the UK and Non-Majority in Germany The victory of the governing parties in Hungary raised reasonable questions about the fairness of the electoral law. So I looked at other systems and tried to calculate what outcome would such results produce in other countries. 2
Fidesz's Encore Fidesz gained a clear majority, possibly even a supermajority on Sunday. How did they achieve it? What paralyzed the Socialist's campaign so badly? What will the new term of Viktor Orbán look like, and what message did he send to the EU in his victory speech? 2
Election in Hungary: Anti-Mainstream Parties Are Back in Parliament Fidesz scored a landslide victory in the April 6 election, propelling the strong government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to a second successive term to lead Hungary. The old left again suffered a disastrous defeat, while two other parties – the radical right-wing Jobbik and the green-liberal LMP – have reason to be pleased with their results. 1
The Return Of The Socialist Zombies Two stories, two political scandals. The web of old Socialist Party-affiliated networks has emerged again to remind the Hungarian voter of those years that set the stage for the disastrous defeat of the Socialists and Liberals in 2010. Emerging now just a few weeks before the election, these latest controversies might be a big step for the Left - toward a second, terrible defeat. Hungary really deserves more, a better political opposition that can win voter trust. 3But I'd totally pay to see this movie.
You know what I've never once thought? "There should be female versions of Freddie Krueger and Jason Vorhees!" And even if I had, I certainly wouldn't have followed that thought with, "Let's put them in skimpy outfits and sex 'em up!"
But someone did. Someone at Japanese collectible company Kotobukiya. In partnership with New Line Cinema (according to the bottom corner of the poster), Kotobukiya has taken two iconic characters made them bishoujo. The company kept their iconic weapons and (some of) their clothing while simultaneously removing everything else that made the characters unique and adding muscles and bust.Vorhees is no longer this disgusting lake figure and Freddy isn't burned. But they are all bloody and cut up. Because I guess that's what passes for sexy these days?
They release at the end of the month for $70 each. You really shouldn't buy them. But they're worth staring at for a few seconds just to see what Japan's been up to lately.
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Click to open photo gallery:A new rendering of Disney’s upcoming Star Wars Land has been released. The concept art by Walt Disney Imagineering’s Greg Pro gives us a better look at the currently under construction theme park world which is expected to be called The Star Wars Experience. Hit the jump to see what we can learn from this new piece of concept art.
Disneyandmore points out that this new piece of Star Wars Land concept art seems to be different from the previously released pieces from the initial announcement at D23 Expo 2015 and the recently aired Disneyland 60 television special:
They theorize that Big Thunder Mountain maybe used to “avoid a visual intrusion that wouldn’t fit with Disneyland Frontierland nearby” by essentially hiding these pillars of stone “from another planet.” That might be some of the thought going into the tall rock pillars but the new concept art appears to be a look at the Star Wars Land coming to Hollywood Studios in Orlando Florida’s Walt Disney World and not the one being built in Anaheim California’s Disneyland.
Jim Hill noticed that the entrance on the right side of the concept art shows the same arch seen in a recently released piece of Hollywood Studios’ Toy Story Land concept art.
That said, we don’t know just how much the two lands will be different from each other, if at all. I assume that because the layout of the land isn’t exactly the same, the configuration will be slightly different, but everything we’ve heard seems to suggest that most of the rides, restaurants, shops and experiences will be mostly the same.
Now how does this new Star Wars Land rendering match up with the rumored land layout posted by MiceAge? Lets take a closer look:
Some visible pieces seem to line up, like the Millennium Falcon attraction and the shops and market, although many of the details in this concept art are not visible enough to fully confirm the layout. But it does seem like we are looking at the right orientation — which means that is probably not Big Thunder Mountain in the background, as the famous coaster would be located south of this area. However, as Disneyandmore theorized, the rock pillars could serve as a backdrop to Frontierland and in effect not stick out as a weird new science fiction franchise addition in the background of the rest of Disneyland.When Disney began making live-action adaptations of its library of classic animated movies, the project seemed fairly straightforward. The first films they chose, Maleficent was a fairytale filled with human actors. Angeline Jolie’s cheekbones aside, it wasn’t a cutting edge film. It was a traditional story shot in traditional ways. And it would have been easy for Disney to stay on that path, but the studio opted instead to take a left turn into more wild terrain.
The Jungle Book presented a fairly obvious dilemma: Bears and panthers are hard to control but naturally look amazing and CGI is controllable but hard to make look that life-like. Director Jon Favreau had to find a creative solution and, in doing so, he and his team developed new technologies to make “live-action” elements look as real as possible, without terrifying the kids.
“The trick was to look at how others had done virtual environments before us and see how we could work with those technologies, and then figure out a way to get the performance of one individual kid seeming like it was in a live-action movie,” Favreau explains. “And to see if we could integrate the practical and CG elements together so it’d feel live-action.”
Favreau got a lot of help and the expertise of VFX supervisor Rob Legato, who did groundbreaking work on Avatar. The movie proved a critical and box office victory and Favreau found a new way to practice his craft. The filmmaker discussed the detailed process he created with Inverse, offering up some insight into his next Disney live-action challenge.
You did motion capture before you filmed at all. What was the timeline, step-by-step?
We started off as though we were doing an animated film. We had a story department and artists and we were doing keyframe illustrations and color studies and character design, all the things youd do if you were doing a Pixar film. Then we broke the pattern by then treating the film as though it were a motion capture film, like Avatar. So we went to sets on a volume that were contoured properly, but didnt have any art direction. They were just platforms and people wearing motion capture suits, and we recorded all the performances for blocking and camera blocking, and refined the set design at the same time. Then we edited the film, so it looked like an hour and a half-long video game when we were done.
Then once we decided we liked the cut and the performances and voice performances, we then went to the blue screen stage. There we took Neel, who played Mowgli, got him in makeup and costume, built as much set as we needed around him for him to interact with. And then everything else was blue screen with puppets and performers, so we could get each shot that was in our video game cut of the movie. Then we would cut his coverage in, and wed see if it all fit together.
When we were done with that, it went into proper post-production, where it would on a movie like Iron Man. There we built the animation and the characters surrounding him to match his performance. There were really four phases to the whole thing, and each one borrowed from a different type of filmmaking.
How did it work with the animals during the third level of production? Were they not entirely rendered, or fully animated?
We were using a game engine, and using light files so we could move them in real-time, and adjust the environments in real-time. So when we were motion-capturing, you could look on the screen and see the environment, animals, and Mowgli, all moving together. But it wasnt the level of finish or animation that you’d see in a motion capture. It looked more like what youd seen in a video game. There was enough there for you to determine what the cut of the film should be, but not enough to release it for people to see. It gets real expensive when you start getting everything to look photo-real, so you save that final render for the last phase.
Did you have to position Neel in exact ways on stage, or could you place him throughout the frame as needed in post?
When we were doing the early stages, like the motion capture, there was a lot of discovery at that point. But when we started using the 3D cameras and were on the real sets, it was treated as though we were doing a real movie. If you walked on the set, it would look like any other live action film, except there was a lot of blue screen. We were using Simulcam, which was developed for Avatar, where you could look at the monitor and see the blue screen elements mixed with the environments, so you could actually line up your characters with the horizon and other animals. Once you get used to it, it was very intuitive, but for people who came by the set, it looked like something that they’d never seen before.
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Was there any technology you had to develop to make this thing possible?
A lot of people who worked on Avatar worked on this film as well. The big difference was that we had a lot of interactivity, so it was a matter of not just using motion capture for performance, but also having the live action elements knit together and being able to touch and in some cases be right on top of and in back of the animals. And to have those connection points are very difficult. The way fur interacts with wet fingers, that’s something they didn’t have to worry about on Avatar. So a lot of fur tools, and water tools have come a long way. We had to generate an environment, too. Avatar was a hyper-real environment, it was another planet. This was supposed to look like the jungles of India, which we had to match very closely so it never took you out of the reality of the piece.
There’s an uncanny valley, and its different for humans and animals, but something still hash to look real. But at the same time, you don’t want those predatory animals to look so hyper-real that they’re terrifying for kids.
You kind of create your own rules system. There are certain things you cant mess with, but certain animals you can get away with [changing] more than others, because it’s all a matter of how familiar the audience is with something. People are very familiar with human faces. The panther’s face, we could exaggerate the proportions a bit and still have people think they were looking at the real thing. And sometimes that helped the performance, the way that we changed it.
We had a lot of fun with scale, to help match up with what was in the 1967 film, when the animals was much larger. We made the environment much bigger and more creative, but definitely drew inspiration from what happened in nature. We didn’t really have problems with the environments of the animals, it usually comes with the anthropomorphic faces of the animals, so we avoided doing anything intentionally that skewed it too much.
You’re going to do The Lion King next, which is a “live-action” film — but I can’t imagine there will be much actual “live-action,” right?
No, there’s not. The puzzle to solve on this one is how do you make it look as photo-real and as much as a live-action film as possible, when the all elements you’re using are being generated digitally? We learned a lot of things from The Jungle Book, and there are a lot of sequences in it that dont include any live-action. And it fits right in, and it feels as though youre watching a live-action movie |
(of two values a and b ) Such that a==b evaluates to true.
One of the subtlest concepts in Lua. Manual §3.4.4
1 == 1.0 --> true (integer vs float does not matter) {} == {} --> false (two new empty tables) 'abc' == 'abc' --> true (strings are not reference types) 0/0 == 0/0 --> false (NaN is not equal to itself)
Escape
A technique to encode a character that has a special meaning or is hard to type by an escape sequence consisting of several other characters.
"\x9a" -- Hexadecimal encoding of a byte "\u{20AC} -- The Unicode character '€' in hexadecimal encoding "%%" -- The way to represent a percent sign in a pattern.
Humans find it hard to write escape sequences correctly, but Lua offers an option %q to string.format that will do it for you.
Execute
Actually do some work. See function.
Expression
A piece of Lua code, shorter than a statement, that specifies how a value should be calculated. Manual §3.4
(2+2)^5 -- arithmetic expression age <= 65 -- boolean expression '--'.. " this is" -- string expression (gsub('Number # wins",'#','7')) -- function call expression (only the -- first value is used, and you need the parentheses for that)
File
Data stored outside one's program, usually on a disk, under the control of the operating system.
A file may contain text, in which case it is a text file. Otherwise it is a binary file. Manual §6.8
First-class value
A value that can be:
assigned to a name
used as a key as well as a value in a table
used in expressions
given as an argument to a function
There are minor exceptions: nil and NaN may not be used as a key.
Floating-point
A subtype of number that represents a number as a mantissa (i.e. a number between 0.5 and 1) multiplied by a positive or negative power of 2. Integers up to about 9e15 can be represented exactly.
Free
To inform the memory manager that an allocated block of memory is no longer required.
Function
A self-contained part of a program that performs a particular task. One of the eight types of Lua. Lua is unusual in that a function is a first-class value.
See Declaration, Parameter, Argument, Scope, Closure. Manual §3.3.6, §3.4.10.
_G
On startup, _G is a global variable equal to _ENV. There are no rules for _G. The name might be an abbreviation for "global", but Lua does not actually use it for any purpose.
Garbage
Memory which is allocated but no longer needed.
Lua has an internal function called a garbage collector which regularly frees such memory for reuse.
Global
Strictly: having unlimited scope. In practice the term refers to perhaps the most idiosyncratic feature of Lua. Manual §2.2
When a name is not in any local scope, not even as an upvalue, Lua looks for a key of that name in a table called _ENV which is guaranteed always to be in scope. The entry in _ENV with the given name is the global variable of that name.
string -- these two notations are _ENV.string -- equivalent
There is nothing pervasive about global variables. All their values may be switched at the drop of a hat by simply assigning a different table to _ENV. If that table is empty, all global variables are instantly reset to nil.
Identifier
A word in Lua code that starts with a letter or an underscore, after which only letters, underscores and digits are allowed. Catch_22 -- But not 'Catch-22': hyphens not allowed _ENV -- Global names used by the system look like this. _VERSION -- Users should avoid the underscore-capitals pattern. The term has a different special meaning in the API and debug library.
Implementation
The way the details of Lua are handled on a specific computer.
You are not supposed to know what they are, and if you do know, you are not allowed to rely on that knowledge. So I will not even try to explain implementation details like endianness, word size, array part, hash part, etc. But see Internalize and Memoize.
Index
The position of a specific byte in a string. An integer-valued key. A natural index is a positive integer-valued key.
If a floating-point number that happens to equal an exact integer is used as an index, it will be coerced to integer.
Inf
Short for "Infinity". An exceptional value of type number (also written 'INF' and 'inf'), which arises the result of overflow, division by zero etc. If you need the notation Inf, assign such a value to the name. Inf is not a Lua keyword, but appears in output, as does -inf.
Inf and -Inf are a legal keys in a table.
Inf can freely be used in expressions, and behaves the way one would think it should.
Inf = 1/0 0-Inf -- -inf Inf + 1 -- inf Inf-Inf -- -nan 1/Inf -- 0.0 1/(-Inf) -- -0.0 Inf < Inf -- false math.type(Inf) -- float
Initialize
To assign a value to a name simultaneously with its declaration. Uninitialized names are treated as having value nil.
Integer
A subtype of number that can represent integers up to about 9e18 exactly. The three extra digits come at the expense of not being able to represent anything except integers.
Internalize
To store in a hidden special-purpose table.
An implementation detail of Lua, used for efficient storage and comparison of strings.
Interpret
To compile code and execute it in one go, especially inside a REPL. An interpreter is a program that does this. The interpreter is the program lua bundled with the Lua distribution.
Invoke
To call, especially in a formalized way or as a consequence of another call.
Key
The first element of a key-value pair in a table. Any value except nil and NaN may be used as a key.
Language
(short for programming language): A specification for composing text that can be understood by both humans and computers.
Examples: Ada, APL, Basic, C, Fortran, Go, Guile, Java, Lisp, Lua, Pascal, Python, Ruby, Scheme.
Library
A table of functions that serve a common purpose.
Libraries extend the power of Lua. Apart from the global library, a number of standard libraries are automatically loaded when Lua starts up. Manual §6
Custom libraries can also be returned by a module.
Literal
An expression that defines a constant of type string, number or table.
1.3475e4 -- floating-point literal 12346 -- integer literal "the quick brown fox" -- string literal {'Jock','Bill',name='Friends'} -- table literal
Load
To make a function, or a table of functions, available to Lua. There are several ways to do this. Manual §6.1
fct = load "return 'Hello, World'" -- load a string fct = loadfile "myfunc.lua" -- load a file fct = require "mylib" -- load a library
Local
Having limited scope. Manual §3.3.7
Logical
The operations and, or and not are known as logical operations. They operate on all values, not only on booleans. The result of not is boolean, but the result of the other operations is to select one of the operands. Manual §3.4.5
Their action is determined by the truth of the first value.
a and b -- if a is false, then a (and don't evaluate b); else b a or b -- if a is true, then a (and don't evaluate b); else b
The point about evaluation is important. It can be used to avoid illegal operations.
v = a.k -- an error if a is nil v = a and a.k -- nil if a is nil
Lua-L
A mailing list for asking help on, and in general discussing every aspect of, Lua. One can subscribe via a webpage or via e-mail.
Memoize
To store the result of a function call in a table upvalue so that, next time, it can be looked up rather than re-calculated.
do local cache = {} function myfunc(arg) local result = cache[arg] if result == nil then -- calculate'result', read it from a database on your -- computer, query the Internet, whatever. end return result end end
Memory
The part of a computer in which data is stored only while your program is running. Memory is thought of as bytes numbered from 1 upwards to several trillions and beyond. Those numbers are known as addresses. Memory is allocated by a memory manager, which at the lowest level is the system itself. See also Free. The faculty by which a Lua-L member remains aware of past own contributions.
Metamethod
A user-supplied function that is called to perform an operation, bypassing the default action, usually because the operation would otherwise be undefined, but also when a raw operation is to be supplanted by a customized one. Manual §2.4
Metamethods are kept in a metatable.
Metamethods can be used (abused?) to customize Lua almost beyond recognition.
Method
A function in a class whose first parameter is an object of that class.
A special notation, known as an object-oriented call, may be used to call a method.
class.fct(obj,x,y) -- normal call to class.fct obj:fct(x,y) -- object-oriented call to the function 'fct' -- of the class to which 'obj' belongs
If obj belongs to class, the two calls are equivalent.
A similar notation may also be used to define a method. The following two definitions are equivalent.
function class:fct(x,y) -- code comes here end class.fct = function(self,x,y) -- code comes here end
Module
A function that loads a library. Manual §6.3
Mutable
Capable of being changed during the running of a program.
Values of type nil, boolean, number and string are immutable. Values of type coroutine, table and userdata are mutable. Values of type function are immutable except via the debug library.
Name
A word in a Lua program that can be associated with a value.
x = 1.23 -- 'x' is a name, 1.23 is a constant number value
Lua syntax demands that a name satisfy the rules for an identifier. Manual §3.1
NaN
Acronym for "Not A Number". An exceptional value of type number (also written 'NAN' and 'nan'), which arises as the result of an undefinable arithmetic operation. NaN is not a Lua keyword, but appears in output (in some implementations, even the nonsensical '-nan' may be printed). If you need the notation NaN, assign such a value to the name.
NaN is not a legal key in a table, but counts as true.
NaN = 0/0 NaN + 1 -- NaN. All arithmetic operations involving NaN have -- result NaN. NaN <= NaN -- false. All comparison operations involving NaN have -- result false except the following. NaN ~= NaN -- true. The only Lua value with this property.
Nil
One of the eight types of Lua. There is only one value of this type, likewise called nil. Its purpose is to act as a placeholder where a value is needed, but no proper value is available.
tbl = {1,4,nil,nil,10} -- tbl[5] is 10 fct = load(code,nil,nil,data) -- the data table must be the 4th argument
None
The absence of any value whatsoever, not even nil. Can only be tested for in a vararg or in the API. A user-defined sentinel used instead of nil as a value in a table so that the key is not deleted. In some other languages, a predefined value is supplied for that purpose.
Number
One of the eight types of Lua. The possible values can be integers, floating-point numbers, Inf, -Inf, and NaN.
n = 1 -- integer x = 1.0 -- floating-point
See integer, floating-point, subtype.
Object
A value of type table or userdata that is associated with a class table. See method.
Operation
A basic computing task like addition, multiplication, concatenation etc., involving one or two values, called operands, and expressed in Lua by putting an operator in front of a single value, or between the two values.
n = #tbl -- '#' is the length operator s = name.. id -- '..' is the concatenation operator
Pair
Two related values, especially a key in a table and its associated value.
for k,v in pairs(tbl) do -- start of a loop that iterates over all -- key-value pairs k,v in 'tbl'
Parameter
A local name used in the definition of a function for the value that will later be passed as an argument.
function fct (a,b,c) -- a,b,c are parameters fct(1,2,3) -- 1,2,3 are arguments
Parentheses
A pair of delimiters with several uses.
To delimit a list of parameters or arguments. To specify precedence of operations in a complicated expression. To adjust the number of return values in a function to 1. See vararg.
Pass to
See Argument.
Pattern
A string that describes properties and substrings that another string might have. Most patterns are instantly recognizable by the many percent signs in them.
The string library contains several functions that exploit patterns. Manual §6.4.1
Pointer
The actual address in memory where something is stored. Usually displayed in hexadecimal notation.
math --> table: 0x22a8aa0
Precedence
A pecking order of Lua operators. Manual §3.4.8
Priority
The position of an operator in the precedence table. Operators with higher priority are performed first.
Procedure
A synonym for function, especially when the function is one that does not return any values.
Program
A set of instructions to be performed by a computer. To write such instructions in a programming language.
Prompt
To give a hint that a terminal user should type something. A character string used for that purpose. -- the usual Lua prompt -- the prompt when wat you typed was not enough name? -- a typical prompt issued by an appplication
Raw
As originally defined, i.e. ignoring metamethods.
Reference
A pointer that looks like a variable to the programmer.
In Lua, the mutable types function, table, coroutine and userdata are accessed by reference.
a = {name="Jack"} -- the variable 'a' has a reference a --> table: 0x22c8810 b = a -- 'b' now also has that reference b --> table: 0x22c8810 c = {name="Jack"} -- 'c' has a reference to a different table c --> table: 0x22c9ba0
Release
A version of a software package that is officially made available by its developers.
Lua releases have three-part numbers, e.g. Lua 5.3.4. These are called minor releases; if the third part is dropped, it is called a major release, e.g. Lua 5.3. Each minor release is considered to be merely a bugfix of the previous one: no features are added or changed, and the virtual machine is the same.
REPL
Acronym for Read-Evaluate-Print Loop. Basically what the Lua interpreter does.
Scope
The part of a program inside which a local variable is visible, i.e. recognized by the compiler. The scope starts when the variable is declared and goes to just before an unmatched end, or up to and including an unmatched until. The end can be matched by a previous begin, if, while or function. Manual §3.5
local a,b -- a and b are now visible begin local a -- the previous variable called `a` is now shadowed c = a + b -- the scope of the most recent `a` ends here end -- this `end` is matched by the previous begin -- for the most recent `a`, it is unmatched. d = a+b -- the original `a` is visible again repeat local i until i>10 -- the scope of i ends here
Semi-global
Visible in the whole file but not global.
A semi-global variable is declared as local near the top of the file, and is an upvalue to every function that uses its name.
Sentinel
A special value in a list that cannot be mistaken for a genuine element of the list. Used to indicate that the list stopped at the previous element.
Sequence
(Loosely) some items coming one after the other. An escape sequence. A table with exactly one border. Manual §3.4.7 {1,2,3,4} -- a sequence: border at index 4 {1,2,nil,4} -- not a sequence: borders at index 2 and 4
Shadow
To make a variable that is currently visible invisible by declaring a local variable of the same name. See scope.
Shell
A program that executes operating system commands. If it does so by responding to what a user types in, it is an interactive shell or command window.
Statement
A part of a chunk that cannot be split any further into smaller chunks. (This definition is a loose one: for a precise definition, one needs to study the syntax of Lua). Lua is unusual in that the statement separator ';' is almost entirely optional.
a = b; func(1,2,4) -- two statements, separated by a semicolon a = b func(1,2,4) -- still two statements
String
A sequence of bytes. One of the eight types of Lua. Strings can be delimited in an infinite number of ways. string is a standard library containing functions that involve strings. Most of those functions can be called using object-oriented syntax. data = "Laurie, Dirk" pattern = "([^,]+),%s*(.*)" surname, name = string.match(data, pattern) -- these two calls surname, name = data:match(pattern) -- are equivalent
Subtype
A further classification of values of a specific type. The type number has subtypes integer and float. See also userdata.
type(1) --> number type(1.0) --> number math.type(1) --> integer math.type(1.0) --> float
Table
A collection of (key,value) pairs, called entries. One of the eight types of Lua.
The keys in a table are distinct. If the value is nil, the entry may not actually be stored, and the key is lost. See also Array, Sequence, None.
a.r = nil -- delete the entry with key "r"
table is a standard library containing functions that involve sequences. Manual §6.6
Those functions cannot be called using object-oriented syntax straight off, but you can do it with metatables.
Text
A string or file that is designed to be readable by a human.
Text files typically contain only characters that have an understandable appearance on the screen, and whitespace.
Thread
(On an operating system) Part of a task that runs at the same time as other threads. (In Lua) An opaque (can't be looked into) data structure that holds all the information needed to support the running of a virtual machine.
Truth
The property whether a value counts as true or false in an if statement or a logical. Manual §3.4.5
nil and false count as false, all other values (including 0 and NaN) count as true.
Tuple
The bare contents of an array, without delimiters.
{1,2,nil,4} -- an array 1,2,nil,4 -- a tuple
May appear as a parameter list, an argument list, a return list, the right-hand side of an assignment, or inside a table constructor. Manual §3.4.11
A tuple is not a first-class value: it is several values, not thought of as comprising a whole.
Type
A classification of values as one of nil, boolean, number, string, function, table, coroutine or userdata.
The type of a value determines how it is stored in the computer, what operations on it are allowed, and how it is represented when printed. Manual §2.1
Unary
(of an operation) Involving only one value.
Upvalue
A local defined outside but referred to inside a function. See also semi-global.
Local variables defined outside a function but not referred to inside are not upvalues to the function.
do -- start a block local settings = {} -- visible only to functions in the block set_width = function(w) settings.width = w -- implicitly defines an upvalue `settings` end end -- end the block
Userdata
A block of memory that can only be accessed via its own methods. One of the eight types of Lua.
The definition of a userdata and the basic methods for accessing it need to be written in the API. A userdata can be full (i.e. it can be manipulated from Lua) or light (i.e. all Lua can do with it is to determine whether two values are raw equal). These are not true subtypes since they are treated as one type inside Lua and as two types inside the API.
Value
A block of memory organized as one of Lua's eight types.
Values can be mutable or immutable. All values in Lua are first-class values, unlike some other commonly used languages.
Vararg
A tuple of unspecified length, denoted by three dots.
Mainly used in the parameter list of a function, where it must appear last. Inside such a function, it is also available for use wherever a tuple could be used.
function fct(z,...) -- typical vararg parameter list local x,y =... -- assign first two elements of the vararg local p,q = select(4,...) -- assign elements 4 and 5 of the vararg local t = table.pack(...) -- create an array containing the vararg local u = {...} -- the same, but u.n is not set local s = 10+... -- add 10 to first element of vararg print(...) -- print everything in the vararg print((...)) -- print only the first element return z,20,... -- returns a new vararg end
Variable
A name associated with a value.
See dummy, local, global, initialize.
Virtual machine
A program (or part of one) running on a computer known as the host, that can execute instructions for a different machine by representing the components of that machine as a data structure on the host.
Lua code is compiled for a virtual machine that has never been built as hardware, with a design that changes with every major release.
Visible
See scope.
Whitespace
A character such as a blank, tab, line feed or carriage return that may be present in a text file but is not visible. In Lua any sequence of whitespace characters outside comments and strings is treated as being equivalent to one blank.
Zero
Zero is a unique number, having three representations that are all different, but equal.
0 -- integer zero 0. -- floating-point zero -0. -- negative zero
They can be distinguished by programming tricks, but only the integer zero can be a table key. Either of the others will be silently coerced to an integer.Sweet Potato French Toast & Plum Syrup – In the Instant Pot!
We normally have scrambled eggs for breakfast.. every. single. day. I don’t mind it during the week, but on the weekends when we have a little more time- I’m ready to switch the breakfast menu up! I’m not a huge fan of sweets for breakfast, so the sweetness of the sweet potatoes and plums is enough for me. Feel free to add a sweetener to your plum sauce, or use traditional maple syrup!
Be sure to pick a maple syrup that is actually maple syrup- many of the commercial brands are actually just corn syrup, water, and caramel color. (Yikes). You can purchase organic and 100% maple syrup here:
CANADIAN FINEST Maple Syrup | 1 Rated Maple Syrup on Amazon – 100% Pure Certified Organic Maple Syrup from Family Farms in Quebec, Canada – Grade A Dark (Formerly Grade B),16.9 fl oz (500mL)
Equipment:
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Wash and scrub your sweet potatoes. Carefully cut them longwise into slices.
Add 1 cup of water and 1 tablespoon vanilla to the Instant Pot
Place trivet in the Instant Pot, and set your sweet potato slices on top.
Add the lid, and be honest with yourself- how thick did you really cut your sweet potato slices? If you are a master chef, and cut thin, beautiful, uniform slices, you can set your Instant Pot to Manual – 1 minute. If you are like me, and have uneven and thick slices- you better go with Manual – 2 minutes. 😀
In a mixing bowl, mix eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla salt
When the time is up in the Instant Pot, wait 5 minutes, and then use the quick release method.
Remove the sweet potatoes and let the slices cool until you are able to handle them.
While they are cooling, dump the water out of your Instant Pot (carefully!).
Add 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, and set the Instant Pot to Saute.
When the oil is hot- add the plums to the Instant Pot. Using a wooden spoon, stir every few minutes as the plums break down. Saute until broken down to a “syrup” consistency. At this point, you can easily remove the skins, if you haven’t already. Turn the Instant Pot off, and stir in sweetener (totally optional).
Turn the frying pan on medium-high, add coconut oil.
Dredge the slices in the egg mixture, fry on both side until golden brown.
Repeat until all the slices are fried up.
Top with plum syrup and more cinnamon!
I actually cut one of my sweet potatoes into thick wedges- essentially paleo sweet potato french toast stick for my toddler. He LOVED them! I just happened to have plums in the fridge, this would absolutely work with other stone fruit- peaches, apricots, etc. 😀Hi all..
Bumblebee v.1.6.43 has been released…
This has been some crazy days, with A LOT of feedback and bugs…
If you want to speed up the work, send me a Red Bull here.
If you get your machine running with bumblebee, please run the bumblebee-submitsystem.
Right now I’m getting so many problems reported in, that I have lost the overview completely…
Therefore I will now introduce a new way to report bugs regarding bumblebee..
Procedure as follows:
Install the newest version of Bumblebee…
If you have had any previous installation of Bumblebee/Prime-ng installed.. Please run the bumblebee-uninstall tool and reinstall afterwards (no need for reboot)..
If you still have a problem, please create an issue on github:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/issues
Then run the bumblebee-bugreport tool and send the created package to [email protected]
I know it’s easier just to send an email.. But this will help me get the bugs organised and hopefully provide help faster..
Thanks..
Martin Juhl
First of all… The project has been renamed to bumblebee (the support and right hand of Optimus Prime)
From now on all howto/software updates will be done on github: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee
Only status and tests will be kept here…
The Installation should now be completely automatic…
Now 3D is enabled on both the Intel and the nVidia at the same time..
The Intel card is running the Desktop and the nVidia card can be used for
the thougher applications with the command “optirun32 <application>” or
“optirun64 <application>”…
So now we just need somebody to write an application for automatically
balance which applications should be run on which card.. and shut the nVidia
card down, when not used..
But still I think it is a good step forward…
Up’s:
We got nvidia acceleration on our Linux games and programs.. wine as well..
We got CUDA support… Also for SDK 4.0 which windows doesn’t support for the optimus drivers.
Down’s:
A few programs doesn’t work.. this far I have only found Diablo 2.. which gives some weird double/single buffer error in wine…
This seems to be a Nvidia problem in general, and nothing to do with this solution.. Diablo works with the -w parameter for window mode, and other people with just an Nvidia card is reporting this problem as well..
Still not transparent/automatic switching like in Window$.. but a big step the right way..
No acceleration from the Intel card.. so Nvidia 3D or none…
Vdpau doesn’t seem to be working on the Intel screen, only on the none-watchable nVidia screen … we might need to implement something like VNC to get it to work…
Drains battery pretty fast… Not as bad as I feared… got battery for 2+ hours…
Further Idea’s:
Combine this with the acpi module hack, to get more battery time, when the Nvidia card is not used.. auto-shutdown??
Maybe a seperate X-server for the Nvidia card is the way to go, so we can shut that down as well when not used.. Working in prime-ng V.2.0..
Try to get both the Intel and the Nvidia libraries installed at the same time, so that 3D is enabled for both cards.. Working in prime-ng V.2.0..
I will now update this with a version number.. this should make it easier to look for changes: v.1.4.2 (latest: Support for more laptops and performance and tests)
OUTDATED FROM HERE AND DOWN… GO TO GITHUB INSTEAD…
I have found a way to use the nvidia card in machines WITHOUT the optimus mux…
There are still a few flaws… but in my regard they are few…
This has been testet succesful on:
Machine User Alienware M11X R2 Martin Juhl Asus N82Jv André Ventura Acer EeePC 1215N Ellington Santos Asus N61Jv (X64Jv) Ted Acer Aspire 5745PG Miguel Belmonte Dell Vostro 3300 Peter Liedler Acer EeePC 1215N Fedor Indutny
First of all I have this running on my Alienware M11X R2, on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 64-bit.. And haven’t tried it on any other configurations.. so I hope you can report back, if it works on other laptops (it should) and other distributions….
Here it goes:
First of all download the following:
General:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/xorg.conf
32-bit deb-based:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/turbojpeg_1.11.1_i386.deb
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/VirtualGL_2.2.1_i386.deb
64-bit deb-based:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/turbojpeg_1.11.1_amd64.deb
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/VirtualGL_2.2.1_amd64.deb
32-bit rpm-based:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/turbojpeg-1.11.i386.rpm
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/VirtualGL-2.2.1.i386.rpm
64-bit rpm-based:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/turbojpeg-1.11.x86_64.rpm
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/VirtualGL-2.2.1.x86_64.rpm
Source:
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/turbojpeg-ipp-1.11.1.tar.gz
http://www.martin-juhl.dk/optimus/VirtualGL-2.2.1.tar.gz
Files can also be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualgl/files/
Ok… Installation:
Start by installing the nvidia driver:
sudo aptitude install nvidia-current (ubuntu)
then put the xorg.conf in /etc/X11/
It might be necessary to change the “ConnectedMonitor” under the Nvidia-device section and BUSID’s for the Intel and Nvidia Card..
Here is what I got so far:
Laptop Intel BusID Nvidia BusID ConnectedMonitor Alienware M11X PCI:0:2:0 PCI:1:0:0 CRT-0 Dell XPS 15 PCI:0:2:0 PCI:2:0:0 CRT-0 Asus N61Jv (X64Jv) PCI:0:2:0 PCI:1:0:0 CRT-0 Acer EeePC 1215N PCI:0:2:0 PCI:4:0:0 DFP-0 Acer Aspire 5745PG PCI:0:2:0 PCI:1:0:0 DFP-0 Dell Vostro 3300 PCI:0:2:0 PCI:1:0:0 DFP-0
after that, install the two files you downloaded above:
sudo dpkg -i VirtualGL* (deb)
or
sudo rpm -ihv VirtualGL* (rpm)
Note:
Turbojpeg or libjpeg-turbo is not needed, and actually gives a lower performance.. I left the links if you want to experiment..
Performance Tests can be found at the end…
Now run:
sudo vglserver_config
answer as below:
1) Configure server for use with VirtualGL in GLX mode
2) Unconfigure server for use with VirtualGL in GLX mode
X) Exit
Choose:
1
Restrict 3D X server access to vglusers group (recommended)?
[Y/n]
n
Restrict framebuffer device access to vglusers group (recommended)?
[Y/n]
n
Disable XTEST extension (recommended)?
[Y/n]
y
… Creating /etc/modprobe.d/virtualgl.conf to set requested permissions for
/dev/nvidia* …
… Attempting to remove nvidia module from memory so device permissions
will be reloaded …
ERROR: Module nvidia is in use
… Granting write permission to /dev/nvidia0 /dev/nvidiactl for all users …
… Modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf to enable DRI permissions for
all users …
… Adding xhost +LOCAL: to /etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup script …
… Disabling XTEST extension in /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc …
Done. You must restart the display manager for the changes to take effect.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Your system uses modprobe.d to set device permissions. You
must execute rmmod nvidia with the display manager stopped in order for the
new device permission settings to become effective.
1) Configure server for use with VirtualGL in GLX mode
2) Unconfigure server for use with VirtualGL in GLX mode
X) Exit
Choose:
x
Then:
append the following two lines to /etc/profile or to your ~/.bashrc if that exists..
VGL_DISPLAY=:0.1
export VGL_DISPLAY
VGL_COMPRESS=yuv
export VGL_COMPRESS
VGL_READBACK=fbo
export VGL_READBACK
Now you need to make sure that your Desktop Enviroment runs the following command after starting up..
vglclient localhost &
In KDE this is archived by creating: ~/.kde/share/autostart/vglclient.desktop (you might need to create the autostart folder as well):
[Desktop Entry]
Comment[da]=
Comment=
Exec=vglclient localhost &
GenericName=
Icon=exec
MimeType=
Name=vglclient
Path=
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=desktop_kdebase
and reboot…
Hopefully your computer comes back up..
now you should be able to start applications with:
vglrun <application>
and the nvidia card will be used for acceleration..
btw. <application> needs to contain the full path to the application if not in the path…
It is still the Intel card running the rest.. and for now I haven’t found a way to activate acceleration for both cards.. so no fancy compiz effects.. but thats no problem for me, as long as I can use my nvidia card for gaming :D…
Hope this will help someone..
Nvidia Always on in Gnome or KDE:
This is experimental.. might be unforeseen problems:
KDE:
Create: /usr/share/xsessions/kde-plasma-vgl.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=/usr/bin/startkde-vgl
TryExec=/usr/bin/startkde-vgl
Name=KDE Plasma Workspace Nvidia Accelerated
Comment=The desktop made by KDE
Create: /usr/bin/startkde-vgl:
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/vglrun -d :0.1 /usr/bin/startkde
and run:
chmod +x /usr/bin/startkde-vgl
Gnome:
Create: /usr/share/xsessions/gnome-vgl.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=XSession
Exec=/usr/bin/gnome-session-vgl
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-session-vgl
Name=GNOME Nvidia Accelerated
Comment=The GNU Network Object Model Environment. A complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=desktop_kdebase-workspace
Create: /usr/bin/gnome-session-vgl:
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/vglrun -d :0.1 /usr/bin/gnome-session
and run:
chmod +x /usr/bin/gnome-session-vgl
The Accelerated sessions should now be available in gdm or kdm..
KDE or Gnome doesn’t work with Desktop Effects, but everything else seems to work.. (applications are automatically started with the Nvidia card)
Performance:
I’m using glxgears and getting:
~ 1700 fps with libjpeg-turbo
7362 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1472.247 FPS
6651 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1330.055 FPS
6507 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1301.198 FPS
9399 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1879 |
combat hazing, some of which Kirk cited in her email -- she said the “key to successful change is a strong system of peer governance, in which students embrace meaningful rites of passage -- not unsafe ones.”
A consortium of fraternities uses the Fraternal Health and Safety Initiative, a curriculum developed by a risk management consultant, James R. Favor & Company. On its website, the program emphasizes consistent resources and training for fraternity chapters.
Kirk pointed out that some fraternities have also simply eliminated the traditional rush, in which hazing acts are more common.
Hazing-related deaths have also forced universities to examine their practices.
Utah State University in 2011 agreed to review its hazing training as a part of a legal settlement with the Stark family, whose son, Michael, died in 2008 after being tied up and forced to chug vodka.
Lake recognized that colleges lean toward education to prevent hazing, but recommended studying the proclivity for certain age groups to engage in hazing, which is typically the undergraduate population, he said. Though bullying remains at every age, not so with hazing, he said, and the answer likely lies with the development of the brain.
“As we get more desperate to find solutions, I’m not entirely sure that more punishment is the answer,” Lake said. “Justice, yes, but ultimately what we’re looking for [is] to find a way to reduce the phenomenon. And so far we really haven’t done that.”Can you experience déjà vu of a place or situation you've never encountered? — Ellen Smucker-Green Nashville, Tenn.
Alan Brown, professor in the department of psychology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, responds:
Déjà vu is a startling mental event. The phenomenon involves a strong feeling that an experience is familiar, despite sensing or knowing that it never happened before. Most people have experienced déjà vu at some point in their life, but it occurs infrequently, perhaps once or twice a year at most.
Although déjà vu often feels supernatural or paranormal, glitches in the brain might be to blame. One possibility is that a small seizure occurs in brain regions essential for memory formation and retrieval—the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, areas deep in the middle of the brain. When you see your grandmother, for example, spontaneous activity in these regions creates an instant feeling of familiarity. With déjà vu, a brief synaptic misfiring might occur in these areas, creating the illusion that the event has occurred before. In support of this idea, studies show that some individuals with epilepsy have a brief déjà vu episode prior to a seizure, with the focal area of the seizure often falling in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus.
Other phenomena might also help explain déjà vu, such as inattentiveness. Because we often navigate the world on autopilot, we take in much of our surroundings on an unconscious level. People who text on their cell phones while walking are only superficially aware of the shops and pedestrians they are passing. Perhaps an episode of déjà vu begins during such a moment. When we emerge into full awareness, we might do a perceptual double take. We are struck by a strange sense of familiarity because we saw the scene just moments before, unconsciously.
In a recent study, Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University and I investigated this idea. We showed participants dozens of unique symbols. Some of them were flashed too quickly for participants to consciously detect before they were revealed for longer viewing. Our participants were significantly more likely to identify a novel symbol as familiar if they had subconsciously glimpsed the image before.
A third possibility is that we have forgotten the prior experience. The psychology literature is replete with stories of adults visiting a notable place, such as a castle, and becoming overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of having been there before. Their parents, however, clued them in: they had been to the castle as a very young child. Similarly, television and photographs can breed a false sense of familiarity later on. For example, having watched a documentary on a castle a decade ago might lead to a sense of déjà vu when you visit it.
So, yes, it is possible to experience déjà vu related to a completely new place. Our brain is always searching for connections. As a result, we can sometimes make links that simply aren't there.BATON ROUGE -- The LSU football team (2-0) jumped USC into the No. 2 spot in the latest USA Today Coaches' Poll released on Sunday.
Also, the Tigers remained ranked No. 3 by the Associated Press, just as they opened the season, following a second-straight home victory Saturday.
LSU, which beat Washington 41-3 on Saturday, next play host to Idaho on Sept. 15 in Tiger Stadium. Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. on TigerVision pay-per-view. Details on ordering the broadcast in Louisiana and Idaho, as well as viewing options for those outside the states of the competing teams, will be available Monday.
The AP Top 25
Sept. 9, 2012
Team (First-Place Votes), Record, Points, Previous
1. Alabama (48) 2-0 1,486 1
2. USC (8) 2-0 1,414 2
3. LSU (4) 2-0 1,404 3
4. Oregon 2-0 1,299 4
t5. Florida St. 2-0 1,160 6
t5. Oklahoma 2-0 1,160 5
7. Georgia 2-0 1,155 7
8. South Carolina 2-0 1,025 9
9. West Virginia 1-0 1,017 9
10. Michigan St. 2-0 995 11
11. Clemson 2-0 868 12
12. Ohio St. 2-0 772 14
13. Virginia Tech 2-0 734 15
14. Texas 2-0 716 17
15. Kansas St. 2-0 714 21
16. TCU 1-0 542 20
17. Michigan 1-1 429 19
18. Florida 2-0 427 24
19. Louisville 2-0 316 23
20. Notre Dame 2-0 310 22
21. Stanford 2-0 260 25
22. UCLA 2-0 250 NR
23. Tennessee 2-0 177 NR
24. Arizona 2-0 149 NR
25. BYU 2-0 110 NR
Others receiving votes: Boise St. 106, Arkansas 79, Nebraska 79, Oregon St. 77, Mississippi St. 70, Baylor 54, Wisconsin 44, Louisiana-Monroe 23, Ohio 17, Georgia Tech 15, Oklahoma St. 13, South Florida 12, Arizona St. 10, Iowa St. 5, Northwestern 5, North Carolina 1, Utah St. 1.
USA TODAY SPORTS TOP 25 COACHES' POLL - Sept. 9, 2012
Rank School (record), Points, Last week's rank (First-place votes)
1. Alabama (2-0) 1455 1 (42)
2. LSU (2-0) 1380 3 (5)
3. USC (2-0) 1363 2 (11)
4. Oregon (2-0) 1292 4 (1)
5. Oklahoma (2-0) 1203 5
6. Florida State (2-0) 1153 6
7. Georgia (2-0) 1120 7
8. West Virginia (1-0) 1024 8
9. South Carolina (2-0) 1008 9
10. Michigan State (2-0) 950 11
11. Clemson (2-0) 904 12
12. Texas (2-0) 730 15
13. Virginia Tech (2-0) 704 18
14. Kansas State (2-0) 696 20
15. TCU (1-0) 649 17
16. Stanford (2-0) 455 21
17. Florida (2-0) 452 23
18. Michigan (1-1) 440 19
19. Notre Dame (2-0) 398 22
20. Louisville (2-0) 280 24
21. Arkansas (1-1) 246 10
22. Wisconsin (1-1) 151 13
23. UCLA (2-0) 147 NR
24. Nebraska (1-1) 135 14
25. Arizona (2-0) 120 NR
Dropped out: No. 16 Oklahoma State (1-1), No. 25 Boise State (0-1).
Others receiving votes: Boise State 104; Oklahoma State 97; Mississippi State 88; Tennessee 71; Brigham Young 70; Arizona State 58; Baylor 57; Cincinnati 29; Oregon State 28; Georgia Tech 24; South Florida 21; Louisiana Tech 13; Rutgers 12; Virginia 11; Iowa State 10; Northwestern 9; Wake Forest 6; Mississippi 3; Ohio 2; Texas Tech 2; Washington 2; Louisiana-Monroe 1; Nevada 1; Texas A&M 1.Gregg Popovich seemed to get Boris Diaw. Popovich let him be Bobo, as well as Borista and Tea Time. Popovich understood his personality, and he shared his global curiosity, and he knew how to zing him with humor.
A story in Sports Illustrated this month told of that. “Sometimes we’re up 30,” Diaw said, “and he’s like, ‘I’m just going to leave you on the court so you can lose some weight.’”
Had things gone differently this spring, Popovich would have left Diaw on the court in Oakland last night. Diaw, as he showed in the Spurs’ lone win against Golden State this season, could have been invaluable in the postseason against the Warriors’ small lineups.
But what happened last week suggests this relationship is closer to the end than it has ever been. Popovich gave up on Diaw in Oklahoma City, and it wasn’t because of an injury or matchups.
As it has been before, Popovich sees something in Diaw that he doesn’t get.
An espresso machine in the locker room was a non-issue, as was a photo that Diaw posted on Instagram Sunday. When the Spurs came together to wear costumes (Diaw opted for a skeleton-themed outfit), it was another sign how well this group got along.
As for Diaw once joking about his offseason training regimen with a glass of red wine in his hand: Popovich got that, for sure.
In these ways, Bobo was everyone’s favorite. LaMarcus Aldridge is the one who nicknamed him “Tea Time,” and Manu Ginobili went further this past season when he summed up his good friend.
“His worst day is many times better than most of our best days,” Ginobili said. “He lives in a different place.”
In that place, Diaw could envision a behind-the-back pass, as well as an unusual photo shoot. According to Sports Illustrated, Diaw had members of his national team pose two years ago in the form of animals he had seen on his safaris.
Tony Parker, for example, was a tiger. Diaw showed he could laugh at himself by comparing himself to a hippo, albeit with this caption:
“Lethargic, even nice, but it is the most dangerous of all. Every year tourists underestimate it, and in getting a little too close, they pay the price.”
Diaw could be dangerous to opponents. He was in the 2014 title run, and his Game 6 then against the Thunder was nothing like last week’s. He scored a season high 26 points that night.
But the “lethargic, even nice” side has been there, too. Diaw came off the bench with the Spurs leading in the second game of the 2013 Finals, and he never took a shot or grabbed a rebound in 11 minutes. The Heat won by 19 points.
Popovich reacted in the next game by using a dozen Spurs. Tracy McGrady, heading to retirement, played seven minutes. Diaw didn’t play a second.
Popovich thought Diaw had committed basketball’s worst sin. He hadn’t competed.
Popovich kept pushing Diaw back into the flow, sometimes with humor and sometimes with anger. But this season, according to staff, Popovich thought Diaw too often reverted to his hippo ways.
Last week it came to a head. After Diaw had been ineffective against the Thunder, Popovich reacted in Game 6 as he had before. Every Spur played except for Diaw. It was his only DNP of the season.
In the past, Popovich lived with Diaw because of his gifts. Even if Diaw sometimes frustrated Popovich, how many players out there could do what he did?
Finding an upgrade isn’t easy. That’s why Diaw could be invaluable against Golden State a year from now, too.
But Diaw is now 34 years old, and his contract has a clause that could help the Spurs change this summer. While Diaw is scheduled to earn $7 million next year, the Spurs will owe him only $3 million if they release him by June 30.
“I’m sure I piss Pop off every now and then,” Diaw told the Express-News this season, “but I think he gets it.”
Popovich gets it, all right. He also wants to get more.Photo by Brooke Novak via Wikimedia Commons, creative commons license
For only the second time in 13 years, the Florida Panthers are above 50% in face off percentage at 51.9%, at success rate that has them sitting at a pretty #5 in the league. FO% is a somewhat obscure statistic, it really doesn't translate into winning if you win more then 50% of the faceoffs you take, nor do you win a shiny medal if you are #1 in the category, but FO% should not be discarded as a arbitrary measure of success. Want proof? Alright, the four teams ahead of us in the category are Detroit, Washington, San Jose and Vancouver, teams who have firmly taken hold of playoff berths and each are legitimate contenders. And then there's the Panthers...
Lets look at it this way. San Jose is #2 in the category, but is signficant because they have the fewest points of teams ahead of the Panthers in FO% with 62 points. Shall we compare centers? Why yes, lets do!
San Jose Sharks Florida Panthers
Joe Thornton 54.1% Stephen Weiss 54%
Joe Pavelski 54.8% Mike Santorelli 48.6%
Logan Couture 51.2% Michael Frolik 41.7%
Torrey Mitchell 49.4% Marty Reasoner 54.9%
Scott Nichol 60.2% Shawn Matthias 49.4%
So what? We've got some centers with comparable numbers to those of San Jose, and yet our centers are low salaried nobodies compared to a very, very solid San Jose squad. An explanation? You don't have to be a NHL star to work hard and win your faceoffs, your team doesn't have to be in the top five in points to be a top five face off team! How about this, since the last time the Panthers ended above 50% (50.7% in 05-06), we have averaged over 4 years at 48.6%, good for the the bottom 5 in the league this year! Thank you Dale Tallon for bringing in Marty Reasoner and Mike Santorelli, who have not only been good in face offs but in every other area of play this season.
FO% is an important statistic, come to think of it. Teams who are sporting percentages better then 50% are playoff teams or, like the Panthers, are ever improving teams (yup, NYI and NJD count). Teams below 50% are kinda treading water and many are not exactly a lock for the playoffs. So admire our face off efficiency and enjoy the ride during this glorious rebuild, Panthers faithful!
Hold your horses everybody, WTF is that?!?!? There's someone on the Panthers who's 100% on face offs!! That would be none other then Dennis Wideman! Yup, that's right, He's one of only 10 defensemen to win a faceoff this year, way to capitalize on the chance Denny!Naomi Klein is by all accounts a wonderful person – warm, low-key, modest, committed and enormously hard-working. She also looks terrific in a crisp white shirt, which is what she wore for a recent photo shoot for Vogue. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Vogue is interested in fashionable intellectuals, and right now there's no intellectual more fashionable than Ms. Klein. She told Vogue that her new book, This Changes Everything, is "a book about climate change for people who don't read books about climate change."
Ms. Klein and her new book are being written up everywhere. Its publication brilliantly coincides with today's big UN climate-change gabfest in New York, which has been billed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a last chance (yet another one!) to save the planet.
Just one problem. The leaders of three of four of the world's top carbon polluters – China, India and Russia – didn't bother to show up. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel stayed home. Stephen Harper has been widely excoriated for his failure to attend, but it turns out he's got lots of company.
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The thesis of This Changes Everything is that global warming is a war of capitalism against the planet, and that we need a people's uprising to reclaim true democracy from the venal and corrupt politicians who have been co-opted by Big Oil. If this sounds like the Occupy movement all over again, you're right. "We need an ideological battle," Ms. Klein told the Guardian.
But wait. What about the rest of the world? Do they need an ideological battle, too? How do we get them to sign on? Every effort at global collective action has so far been a colossal flop, and there is not a hope in hell that that is going to change.
China alone now accounts for a whopping 28 per cent of the world's C02 emissions – twice as much as the U.S. Over the past five years, China's emissions increased more than the rest of the world combined; on a per-capita basis, it now out-pollutes the EU. India produces less than 7 per cent of the world's total emissions, but most of its people still live in a state of energy starvation. India's most pressing health problem isn't climate change. It's indoor pollution from dung fires.
The developing world is now responsible for nearly 60 per cent of global emissions. Even if the developed nations make substantial cuts to CO2, over the coming decades emissions growth in the developing world will dwarf their efforts. Yet in every interview, excerpt and review I've read about her book, Ms. Klein has nothing to say on this subject. Talk about denial! No book on climate that ignores elementary facts like these can be counted as a serious work.
The folks who revere Ms. Klein and gushingly review her books don't have a clue about this stuff either. I wouldn't expect Vogue to know. I wouldn't even expect the Guardian or the Nation to know. The CBC should know, but frequently does not. As for The New York Times – its chief climate drum-banger is currently Mark Bittman, who was formerly the newspaper's chief recipe-writer. He knows how to make a mean Thai beef salad (you should look it up) but is shockingly ignorant about the climate facts of life. He thinks Ms. Klein walks on water. He, too, says that neoliberalism is the problem and reclaiming democracy is the solution. He thinks we could fix the climate – if only we took on the evil greedy corporations and put our minds to it. As for the rest of the world, he doesn't seem to know it exists.
This is the most childish form of magical thinking. It's like asking kids to clap their hands so that Tinker Bell won't die. For activists, climate change is a simplistic and self-centred morality tale that pits our greed and wickedness against the Utopia of a kinder, gentler, fairer, better world. In fact, climate change is a complex and fiendishly hard problem, with huge uncertainties about what lies ahead and even greater uncertainties about effective policies to address it. The activists should do themselves a favour, and grow up.Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, officially abbreviated as DDR5 SDRAM. DDR5 is planned to reduce power consumption once again, while doubling bandwidth and capacity relative to DDR4 SDRAM.[2]
A 2016 presentation by Intel suggested a JEDEC plan to release a 2016 DDR5 SDRAM specification, with the memory being available for end user purchase in 2020.[3]
In March 2017, JEDEC announced its plan for the DDR5 specification release in 2018.[4] JEDEC's Server Forum 2017[5][6] claimed a date to offer a DDR5 SDRAM preview on June 19, 2017 accompanied by a DDR5 SDRAM Workshop on October 31 – November 1, 2017.[7] Rambus announced a working DDR5 RAM in September 2017, with availability not expected until Q3 2018.[1]
On November 15 2018, SK Hynix announced completion of its first DDR5 RAM chip. It runs at 5200 MT/s at 1.1 Volts.[8]The football season is over. The Patriots completed one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history to win the championship and are favorites to repeat. Are preseason Super Bowl odds accurate?
For starters, since 2001 there have been 58 teams that had preseason odds to win the Super Bowl of 10/1 or better per SportsOddsHistory. That works out to about four teams a season that the oddsmakers believe to be true contenders for the title. Of this group 41 (75.8%) squads made the playoffs. That success rate increases to 80.6% (29 out of 36 teams) in the last ten years.
The preseason Super Bowl favorite has reached the championship game seven times since 2001 and won the Super Bowl twice. The last team to accomplish this feat were the Pats – 8/1 preseason favorites before winning Super Bowl 51.
This is the eighth time since 2005 that New England has been the preseason favorite to win it all. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have reached the Super Bowl three times as preseason favorites.
Are preseason Super Bowl odds accurate? Yes. The true title contenders (10/1 or better odds) have reached the postseason at a high rate and the preseason favorite has played in the Super Bowl nearly half the time.
No football, no problem
We are in the thick of the NBA and college basketball seasons
Start getting Pro System picks today
Preseason Super Bowl OddsDavid Cameron's new environment minister was thrust into the spotlight yesterday after questions were raised over her close links to agriculture lobbying.
The Sunlight Centre, an anti-lobbying group which campaigns for more transparency in politics, called for more scrutiny of Caroline Spelman's former directorship of the food and biotechnology lobbying company Spelman, Cormack and Associates. Spelman, 52, set up the firm with her husband, Mark Spelman, in 1989.
Although she resigned as a company director last year, the firm remains in the hands of her husband and still has her maiden name – Cormack – on the company's letterhead.
The Sunlight Centre said it had forwarded a letter about a possible conflict of interest in Spelman's appointment to the permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – the department Spelman now heads.
"Her husband, Mark Spelman, remains a director of the company still trading under the secretary of state's name in sectors closely related to issues for which she is responsible," the letter said. "Given that the company is still using her maiden name to trade, a name by which she would have been known when active in farming politics in the 1980s, this is clearly of public interest."
According to Companies House, the company address was also transferred from Spelman's constituency home, where it was registered until May last year – around the same time she also transferred over company shares to her husband and resigned her directorship.
Spelman has made no secret of her agri-lobbying past. She served as sugar beet commodity secretary for the National Farmers Union in the early 1980s before becoming an MP and was deputy director of the International Confederation of European Beet Growers in Paris.
She faces questions over how suitable she is to hold a portfolio which includes responsibilty for GM crops and farming subsidies for the department her firm spent a decade lobbying.
The Sunlight Centre said it had called for more transparency over which agri-businesses her former company had had dealings with, and urged clarification over her role in negotiations involving the sugar beet industry. Spelman's agri-lobbying links were also highlighted by the rightwing Guido Fawkes blog, run by the political-agitator Paul Staines.
A Defra spokesman said: "Caroline Spelman relinquished the unpaid directorship of Spelman, Cormack and Associates in June 2009. The secretary of state and Defra's permanent secretary will be ensuring in the usual way that the secretary of state's private interests are declared and handled in line with the ministerial code." He added that the company had made no revenue in the past five years.
Although there is no suggestion that Spelman has acted untowardly, the issue raises uncomfortable questions for the new prime minister, who said in February that secret corporate lobbying was "the next big scandal waiting to happen".
Cameron promised tougher controls, proposing a two-year hiatus on lobbying for ministers who had left government. "It's an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money," he said. It is not clear how Cameron will deal with the issue around Spelman, who had long been a member of the Tory shadow cabinet, holding positions including communities and local government secretary.
In March, the former cabinet ministers Stephen Byers and Geoff Hoon, along with a number of others, were caught up in a sting operation earlier in the year, apparently offering lobbying services.
It is not the first time that Spelman has come under scrutiny. In 2008 she was criticised for the so-called "Nannygate" affair in which misused her parliamentary staffing allowance to pay her children's nanny, against parliamentary rules, and was ordered to repay the amount.By Bruce Campbell, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Bruce Campbell is the director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, based in Copenhagen. The views expressed are the writers’ own.
Few people expected much concrete progress ahead of the ongoing international climate change talks taking place in Warsaw. Sadly, it seems the doubters were right to be skeptical as negotiators have failed to tackle one of the biggest climate challenges: changing agriculture technologies, practices and policies to make sure the world can feed itself.
When Typhoon Haiyan – one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded – slammed into the Philippines, the world was given a brutal reminder about the need for urgent action, an urgency given a tearful face when the head of the Philippine delegation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) made an impassioned plea for action.
Haiyan devastated central Philippines, a mostly agricultural region. But while images of the damage focused on flattened urban areas, the storm also crushed farms and plantations that produce rice, sugar, coconuts, and other key crops. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations estimated that the typhoon, which struck at the beginning of the rice-planting season, destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of the country’s most important staple.
While directly connecting climate change and specific storms has always been difficult, it is easy to see the impact of these super storms on food security. In early October, for example, Cyclone Phailin plowed through East India with almost as much force as Haiyan. Damage to insured crops in the states of Odisha and Bihar alone has been estimated at $45 billion.
On a global scale, the accumulated potential impact of these storms on the world’s food supply is quite frightening. Yet while super storms generate the headlines, equally pressing tragedies are slowly unfolding on fields and farms across the developing world with relatively little attention. Farmers, especially small-scale farmers, are struggling to cope with a climate that is both shifting – the crops they grow now may not bear fruit in future weather conditions – and increasingly unpredictable, with drought one year and too much rain the next. They’re battling weeds, pests and crop diseases that will continue to spread to new regions.
But there is potential relief for even the world’s poorest farmers. With access to better seeds and fertilizer, better planting techniques and better technology to anticipate and plan for seasonal weather changes, they could survive. With strategies to manage their risk, such as diversifying crops or buying weather-based crop insurance, they could thrive.
One problem is that the process of growing food itself actually releases 7.3 billion to 12.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide – some 14 to 24 percent of total global emissions. Trying things like growing trees on farms and practicing low-till agriculture are therefore "climate-smart" because they can simultaneously increase production while minimizing environmental impact. These approaches are essential if we want to meet our food needs while preserving scarce natural resources and cutting our climate footprint.
The danger climate poses to agriculture – and, correspondingly, the threat our current approach to agriculture poses to the planet’s climate patterns – have been recognized at the Warsaw talks. A leaked draft report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that because of global warming, food production will flatten out, decreasing by as much as two percent every decade, failing to keep pace with rising demand, which is expected to increase by as much as 14 percent each decade.
And the risk for climate-driven hunger is greater in the tropical regions, where adaptive capacity has not kept pace with the impact of climate change. In vast parts of Africa, for example, the growing season will shrink by an estimated 20 per cent within two generations. Life is already extremely harsh in these areas; less food will be devastating.
Unfortunately, this looming agriculture crisis has not led to responsible action from climate diplomats. Over the past few years, U.N. negotiations have sidestepped the question of how to fund climate change adaptation for agriculture in the least developed nations, passing the buck to whatever forum takes place next.
Lost in this evasion is the United Nations’ potential to kickstart widespread analysis of the problem and potential solutions, such as cataloguing known climate impact on agriculture and assessing what still needs further research.
Most importantly, though, agriculture needs to take center stage when all national governments discuss climate change. The ever-increasing demand for food cannot be met by a shrinking capacity to produce food. The poorest people have the least amount of responsibility for climate change, yet already suffer the most from it. Negotiators need to devote their attention to the inextricable link between climate change and agriculture – not the opposite, which is what we are seeing now as climate negotiators focus narrowly on national interests and domestic politics.
More and more developing nations are moving forward and addressing the climate crisis with whatever resources they can cobble together. If climate negotiators continue to drag their heels, the rest of the world may simply leave them behind.Genesis Clarity is so profoundly deserving of attention that I had to dedicate a second post to it. I’ve recommended this to everyone who will listen and mentioned it on my week in music a few days ago, but I can hardly find any chatter online. I’ve got one friend who’s listened, so I’ve only got one person to talk about it with. Let’s change that!
This kind of discovery needs to be shouted from the rooftops. It’s a revelation. Suryummy has created a true blue adventure.
When you buy music on Bandcamp, you’re buying into a community. It’s a place where, like Soundcloud and last.fm, you’ll be immersed in great, unknown music from the moment you step inside. You become familiar with labels, especially the ones with a great track record of similar minded artists, guaranteeing that, if you’ve got a taste for certain styles of sound, you’ll find a reliable source for more.
This is the case with Beer on the Rug, a label that’s becoming my go-to for adventurous, unabashedly out-there (yet super accessible) electronic music. The bands, like best of 2015 members Pulse Emitter and Seabat, explore radically spaced out sounds from brand new angles. So when I got an email about the newest label release, Suryummy’s Genesis Clarity, I had the trust to give it a listen.
As usually happens, taking a chance lead to good things. This is probably my favorite Beer on the Rug offering yet. It’s a bold mixture of easy grooves and exotic timbres, layer upon layer of transparent synth formations passing by in a far flung digital odyssey. It’s space music of the highest order, folding early Warp Records pathos – SETI broadcasts, video game fever, hippie optimism – in a modern production envelope.
Listening feels like lift up through the rainy skies of some distant future metropolis, ready to swerve through asteroid belts, erupting in crescendos across the rings of Saturn.
Here’s the full album streaming.
After a week on steady rotation, I’m convinced more than ever that Suryummy captures the narrative sweep of early Underworld in a way that few artists even want to try. There are meta structures rising and falling across several overlapping sets of tracks, and the whole thing has an unshakable whiff of pure adventure. Infectious rhythm gives way to heady, beatless passages, slowly dilating time. Tension builds into perfect eruptions, serving as signpost constellations along the way.
Transportive things happen on Genesis Clarity, leaving an unmistakable glow in its wake.
Highly recommended for fans of: Future Sound of London, Boards of Canada, The Orb, Caribou, Dream Catalogue artists, etc.
Genesis Clarity is available digitally by clicking on the Bandcamp stream, the album is also coming to CD in super limited quantities, for those who prefer buying a physical product (I do). Release is March 11.Mitt Romney, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has put a total of $9.5-million into his family foundation from 1999 through 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.
Mr. Romney is estimated to be worth at least $200-million, but he has not released his tax returns, so it’s hard to tell how much of his income went to charities beyond the family fund.
During that time, the foundation, called the Tyler Charitable Foundation, made grants of $7-million, most of it going to the Mormon Church, otherwise known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Grants totaling $4.7-million were made to the church, with the largest grants in 2008 ($1.8-million) and 2003 ($1.9-million). The foundation awarded $525,000 to Brigham Young University, the Mormon university that is Mr. Romney’s alma mater.
The foundation still has more money to give: It had assets of $10-million as of December 2010. Other notable grantees from 1999 to 2010:
United Way of Massachusetts, $152,000
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Right to Play, $111,500
George W. Bush Presidential Library, $100,000
City Year, $65,000
Harvard Business School, $60,000
Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, $36,050
The Heritage Foundation, $25,000For the mountain, see Hohgrat
Groot () is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in Tales to Astonish #13 (November 1960). An extraterrestrial, sentient tree-like creature, the original Groot first appeared as an invader that intended to capture humans for experimentation.
The character was reintroduced as a heroic, noble being in 2006, and appeared in the crossover comic book storyline "Annihilation: Conquest". Groot went on to star in its spin-off series, Guardians of the Galaxy, joining the team of the same name. Groot has been featured in a variety of associated Marvel merchandise, including animated television series, toys and trading cards. Vin Diesel voices Groot in the 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy, its 2017 sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and reprised the role in the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War and will do so again in Avengers: Endgame (2019) while Krystian Godlewski played the character via performance capture in the first film. Since his film premiere and animated series debut, Groot has become a pop culture icon, with his repeated line "I am Groot" becoming an Internet meme.[1]
Publication history [ edit ]
Groot first appeared in Tales to Astonish #13 (November 1960), and was created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby.[2] "Groot" is the Dutch word for "large", possibly referring to his stature and ability to grow in size.[3] He appeared again in The Incredible Hulk Annual #5 (Oct. 1976), alongside five other monsters from Marvel's anthology horror comics of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In The Sensational Spider-Man #−1 (July 1997), Groot was featured in a nightmare of the young Peter Parker.
Groot reappeared in 2006 in the six-issue limited series Nick Fury's Howling Commandos, and appeared in the Annihilation: Conquest and Annihilation: Conquest – Star-Lord limited series. Groot went on to join the Guardians of the Galaxy in the series of the same name, and remained a fixture of the title until its cancellation with issue #25 in 2010. Groot appeared in its follow-up, the limited series The Thanos Imperative, and, alongside fellow Guardian Rocket Raccoon, Groot starred in backup features in Annihil |
Gianotten said: “MPavilion is a project that hopes to provoke discussion around what architecture can do both globally and in an Australian context. We’re interested in treating this pavilion not just as an architectural object, but as something that injects intensity into a city and contributes to an ever-evolving culture.”
MPavilion 2017, photo (c)John Gollings
OMA, MPavilion 2017, side view, (c) OMA
OMA, MPavilion 2017, axonometric view, (c) OMA
OMA, MPavilion 2017, side view, (c) OMA
OMA, MPavilion 2017, architectural model, (c) OMA
MPavilion is an initiative of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, supported by City of Melbourne, State Government of Victoria, through Creative Victoria and ANZ.
The Naomi Milgrom Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that exists to initiate and support great public design, architecture and cultural projects.
Images and photos, courtesy of MPavilion. http://mpavilion.org/introducing-mpavilion-2017/Hey all, thanks for coming by! Every now and then while Kerry and I are shopping at our local Wegmans supermarket, we take a stroll through their mix a six-pack area to see if they have anything unique. They have one of the largest mix a six-pack areas I've seen. A lot of the selection is seasonal and flagship beers, but every now and then we find some special releases mixed in. Last month, they had some 21st Amendment Lower de Boom! I quickly put two in our six-pack, one to drink now and another to save in the cellar.
All 8.4 fl. oz. of Lower de Boom
After checking out 21st Amendment's website, I learned that Lower de Boom is part of the Insurrection Series. The other two beers listed as part of the Insurrection series are Marooned on Hog Island and Hop Crisis. I have high hopes for this beer, let's see what it's made of!
Lower de Boom
21st Amendment Brewery
American Barleywine
11.5% ABV, 92 IBUs
Canned on 02/05/13
Enjoyed on 06/12/13
21st Amendment Lower de Boom
Appearance and Aroma : Lower de Boom pours a bronze color with a small off-white head. The aroma is of sweet molasses, caramel, honey and if I dig my nose in hard enough, I can grab some pine aromas out of the beer.
Flavor and Mouthfeel : Big hops and big malt! Caramel, molasses, pine bitterness. Some dark fruits if I try real hard. A touch of an alcohol burn in the finish. Full bodied. There was enough carbonation to tickle the tongue, but it didn't come close to interfering with the beer.
Overall : Very good beer. I'm not sure I like it as much as Bigfoot or Monster, but I'll definitely be buying this one again (if it's released again, that is!).
Have you had 21st Amendment's Lower de Boom? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments!
Find Mould’s Beer Blog on these Social Networks!MONTREAL — In photos, the event seems innocuous, healthy even. Rosy-cheeked children chase a ball around the snow-packed surface at Montreal’s Fête des Neiges.
But a Quebec anti-obesity group says the ubiquitous Tim Hortons and Timbits logos on display – on banners, on rink boards and on the jerseys worn by the young ball hockey players at the family-oriented winter festival – is illegal advertising leading children down an unhealthy path.
“I have no problem with Tim Hortons encouraging kids to play outside, but when they use aggressive advertising to place their products, that’s where I have an ethical problem,” said Corinne Voyer, the director of Coalition Poids.
She said research shows that diet plays a bigger role in obesity than physical exercise.
‘When they use aggressive advertising to place their products, that’s where I have an ethical problem’
In a complaint filed Friday with Quebec’s consumer protection agency, the Coalition Poids accuses Tim Hortons of violating a Quebec law that prohibits advertising aimed at children.
Noting that the company also sponsors Timbits hockey, soccer and skiing in Quebec, Voyer said the Fête des Neiges complaint is the tip of the iceberg. “We have not complained yet on those issues, but it is coming,” she said. “We are compiling a file.”
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in North America to ban advertising aimed at children under 13 years of age. Since a 2009 conviction of Saputo Inc., maker of Vachon snacks, for using a cartoon gorilla to peddle cakes to preschoolers, Quebec has become more active in enforcing the law.
McDonald’s was fined $12,000 for a TV ad promoting Chicken McNuggets, Burger King was fined $12,000 in relation to the toys included in its children’s meals and General Mills, makers of Lucky Charms cereal, was fined $2,000 for online games featuring the cereal’s leprechaun character.
Last November, Coca-Cola pleaded guilty and was fined $27,000 for a Fanta Zone water park it sponsored in the La Ronde amusement park, where the Fanta logo was prominently displayed and the games were orange.
Quebec’s law withstood a 1989 test before the Supreme Court of Canada, when Irwin Toy challenged it as limiting free expression. The court ruled that children are not as equipped as adults to evaluate advertising. “The legislature reasonably concluded that advertisers should not be able to capitalize upon children’s credulity,” the court wrote.
A spokeswoman for Tim Hortons did not respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday. Geneviève Boyer, a spokeswoman for Société parc Jean-Drapeau, which stages the Fête des Neiges, said no changes are planned to the Tim Hortons zone during the event’s final weekend.
“The advertising of Tim Hortons on the site currently is not presented in a way to be attractive to children,” she said. Even if children develop a Timbits craving after their ball hockey game, the only product Tim Hortons is selling on site is coffee, she said.
The Tim Hortons complaint is part of a multi-pronged offensive by Coalition Poids. It also filed a complaint Monday against the dairy company Natrel for handing our free chocolate milk to children at Quebec City’s winter carnival. The giveaway was tied to Natrel’s sponsorship of a popular children’s movie, La Guerre des Tuques 3D.
On Tuesday, Coalition Poids joined other health organizations in calling on the Quebec government to require warning labels on sugared drinks.
Modeled after the labels on cigarette packages, the proposed warning would advise consumers that sugared drinks contribute to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. The groups want Quebec to require the labels on energy drinks, soft drink, sport drinks, iced tea and vitamin water.
National Post
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TODAY marks the 25th anniversary of the infamous day when “a nation held its breath”, as the Republic of Ireland emerged victorious from a second round clash with Romania at the Italia ’90 World Cup Finals.
For those who watched it on TV screens across the land, the memory is as fresh today as it was a quarter of a century ago, as the population celebrated the greatest ever victory by our national soccer team.
Those who were too young to remember it, or weren’t born at the time, may wonder what Ireland was like back on that day when our hopes and dreams rested on the boot of David O’Leary. So here’s a quick guide to 5 things Ireland still had back in 1990.
1) It was still legal to rape your wife
Back in 1990, Ireland still hadn’t gotten around to sorting out pesky things such as criminalising rape in marriage, so if you wanted to celebrate the epic victory of Jack’s lads by going home and bedding your missus only to find out that she “wasn’t in the mood”, then she was just shit out of luck. The act was eventually made unlawful in December of the same year, making this the last World Cup where an Irish man could legally have sex with his wife whether she wanted it or not.
2) Magdalene Laundries were still going strong
While Packie Bonner sailed through the air to block that last shot by Timofte, Magdalene Laundries were still doing their best to straighten out fallen women across Ireland. Young, unmarried women who fell pregnant after our victory in Genoa may have found themselves “put under pressure” to hand over their newborn babies while atoning for their sinful ways. Furthermore, there is no evidence as to whether or not the nuns who ran the laundries allowed these women to watch the World Cup.
3) You could be arrested for being gay
When O’Leary slotted that ball into the net, the entire nation hugged and kissed each other, with the exception of gay people who knew better than to show affection to each other in public at the time. Until the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland in ’93, when we were all singing ‘Give It A Lash Jack’, you could have been thrown in jail for being gay, thus missing the quarter-final against Italy.
4) Nobody had been molested by members of the Catholic Church
Ireland was a blissful place during the Summer of 1990 as not one child had ever been sexually abused by a paedophile priest at that time. In fact, the arrest of Fr. Brendan Smyth in 1991 in relation to decades of abuse was the first time that anyone had ever heard of a priest doing such a thing. That is to say, people had heard about these things, but nobody knew about them. Well, you know, everyone knew about them, but nobody really…you know, talked about them. In fact the church was doing such a damn good job of covering it up that we all just kicked back and enjoyed the football!
5) Irish women were being treated as incubators
Catastrophic foetal anomaly? Victim of rape or incest? A danger to yourself and your unborn child? It didn’t matter: back in 1990, if you were pregnant, then you were staying pregnant. In fact, women who were in the middle of an unwanted pregnancy during Italia ’90 would sometimes find themselves in a situation where they had to actually leave the country to get terminations elsewhere, or face legal action. Just one of the many ways in which the Ireland that chanted “Ole Ole Ole” at every sporting event 25 years ago is completely different to the Ireland that chants “Ole Ole Ole” at every sporting event today.I’ve generally been of the view that the earlier that the Republican primaries and caucuses begin, the better off Mitt Romney’s campaign will be.
This is a pretty straightforward case: Mr. Romney is a well-prepared candidate and leads the field right now according to most polling and non-polling indicators. It isn’t a very large lead, and as Chuck Todd notes, I’d be a little bit careful in anointing any candidate with the “inevitability” label when he’s still polling at just 20 or 25 percent. But it’s a lead nevertheless, and the sooner the voting begins, the less chance there will be for another candidate like Gov. Rick Perry to gain a firmer footing as his campaign gains experience. (Earlier voting dates have also made it much harder for additional candidates like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to enter the race.)
Mr. Romney’s campaign evidently agrees with this thinking: it pushed for an earlier date for the Nevada caucuses, according to reporting by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Des Moines Register, which were recently moved to Jan. 14 from Feb. 18.
But there is one potential wrench the works — which could cause the plan to blow up on Mr. Romney and harm his chances of winning the nomination. That is if New Hampshire were to move its primary date all the way up to December, as New Hampshire secretary of state Bill Gardner has threatened to do in response to the moves made by Nevada and other states.
New Hampshire’s laws require that the state’s primary be held on a Tuesday, that it occur before any other primary (but not necessarily any other caucus), and that there is a full week’s buffer between it and the next nomination contest. The latest date that would meet these rules is Dec. 27, 2011. But that date, as well as Dec. 20, would come too close to the Christmas holiday, so Mr. Gardner has instead suggested dates of Dec. 6 or Dec. 13.
This would leave New Hampshire as something of an orphan on the schedule. Holding its primary on Dec. 6, for instance, would leave a four-week gap between it and the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, during which time much egg nog would be consumed and much of the momentum from the contest might be lost. Some research suggests that the “bounce” from winning an early primary, while it can be significant, tends to evaporate relatively quickly.
Meanwhile, although the first four or five states have moved up their dates, the primary calendar is still fairly back-loaded overall. Based on the dates listed at Josh Putnam’s excellent Web site, Frontloading HQ, the bulk of primaries and caucus are not taking place until March or later, with some important contests like California and New Jersey not scheduled until June.
So chances are that a December date would diminish the importance of New Hampshire from an electoral perspective, both because it is so disconnected from the rest of the calendar and because Mr. Romney’s rivals might have more of an excuse for a poor performance there. Candidates like Mr. Perry and Herman Cain could cite the difficulty of competing in New Hampshire on a compressed schedule, and against a candidate in Mr. Romney who has a residence in the state and is something of a native son. The news media, annoyed that the earlier date would require them to revisit their own plans for the campaign, might be happy to play along. It’s hard to know exactly how the spin war would unfold, but it’s possible that New Hampshire could come to be regarded as something of a curiosity or even a beauty contest.
Now consider how these scenarios might play out given the rest of the calendar. First, imagine that we had a schedule like in 2008, with Iowa voting in the first week of January and New Hampshire about a week later. A loss in Iowa would not be good news for Mr. Romney — particularly given that in the past, New Hampshire has shown something of a penchant for underdog, up-and-coming candidates. Still, New Hampshire would represent a hedge or buffer for Mr. Romney, and a win there would allow his campaign to recover from any loss in momentum.
If New Hampshire were already to have voted in December, however, the sting of a poor performance from Mr. Romney in Iowa could linger. While the next voting contest — Nevada on Jan. 14 — would still be a relatively good one for Mr. Romney because of the high number of Mormons there, he’d be more likely to enter the contest with unfavorable rater than favorable momentum. By the time Nevada voted, and South Carolina voted the following week, any gains Mr. Romney might have made by winning New Hampshire in December would long have been forgotten about.
Fortunately for Mr. Romney, there is a relatively elegant solution to this problem. Although Mr. Gardner has threatened the “nuclear option” of moving his state’s primary to December, he ultimately isn’t asking for all that much. If Nevada moved its caucus date to Tuesday, Jan. 17 from Saturday, Jan. 14 — just a 72-hour shift — New Hampshire’s statutory requirements would allow it to slot in on Jan. 10, giving us a January calendar that very much resembled the one we had in 2008.
If Mr. Romney’s campaign had significant enough influence on Nevada to compel it to move its caucus to January in the first place, it might now benefit from encouraging the state to comply with Mr. Gardner’s demands and move its caucus back a few days.MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Democrat Doug Jones shocked this state, and the country, by defeating Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s Senate special election Tuesday, a victory that sounds a loud warning to the White House and the Republican Party.
President Trump had thrown his full support behind Moore, who was a controversial figure even before multiple allegations emerged that he had pursued inappropriate relationships with teenagers as an adult.
Jones’s victory is a shot in the arm for Democrats, who are hoping that anger at Trump and congressional Republicans will fuel a “wave” election in 2018, flipping the U.S. House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate, blue.
“Tonight is a night for rejoicing,” Jones told a jubilant crowd in Birmingham after defeating Moore 670,551 votes to 649,240, with 100 percent of the vote counted.
Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members for an infamous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, will be the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate in 20 years. He fills the seat left vacant by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Moore’s defeat means that Trump has now suffered three consecutive losses. He first backed Moore’s opponent, Luther Strange, in the Republican primary only to see him lose to Moore. Then, last month, voters in Virginia turned out in historic numbers to deliver a massive rebuke to Trump in the elections for governor and state legislature.
Nonetheless, Trump put forth his best face Tuesday night. “Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard-fought victory,” the president tweeted. “The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!”
Moore gave brief remarks to his supporters, but did not concede the race, saying a recount was still possible. But state law requires a half-point margin or less to trigger a recount, and Jones bested Moore by 1.5 points.
Roy Moore leaves the stage after speaking in Montgomery, Ala., Dec. 12, 2017. (Photo: Mike Stewart/AP) More
After suffering decades of stinging losses, Alabama Democrats celebrated a historic night. House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, who is just 35 years old, pledged that it would spark a resurgence for the party.
“This is just the beginning,” Daniels said in a phone interview. “This gives us the momentum we need.”
But it wasn’t just Democrats who were overjoyed by the result Tuesday night. Alabama is an overwhelmingly Republican state, and Jones received votes from many in the GOP who could not abide the thought of Moore winning. There were more than 22,000 write-in ballots cast, making up almost two percent of the electorate.
After Jones was declared the winner, a veteran Republican in the state, Hatton Smith, reached us by phone. Smith, who was an adviser to Luther Strange in the Republican primary, said, “We got a bunch of Republicans here that want to tell you something.”
He held up his phone and the sound of a group of people cheering loudly came over the phone.
“It’s good over evil,” Smith said. “The state of Alabama won.” He added: “Here’s to 2020 when we defeat Doug Jones.”
Moore, a former judge who was removed from office twice before running for the Senate, was hit by multiple allegations from women who said he sexually pursued them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers. One woman said Moore touched her sexually when she was 14; another said he sexually assaulted her when she was just 16 years old and he was an assistant district attorney.
Moore vehemently denied the allegations, but several high-profile Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said they believed the women. Trump, however, never abandoned Moore, even recording a robocall for him in Alabama that decried Jones as a “puppet of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.” Trump won the state last year by 28 points, and his failure to push Moore over the finish line could spell trouble for the unpopular president’s political strategy going forward.One of my earliest goals for Wyrmwood was to work with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to provide collectible heirloom Deck Boxes. After a rigorous collaborative process, I couldn’t be more pleased to present our officially licensed Magic: the Gathering gaming accessories. We begin with the first heirloom quality deck boxes to feature the iconic mana symbols.
The Alpha Edition is handcrafted from Peruvian Walnut, and contrasting inlays of natural materials. We don’t use dyes or stains, so we turned to nature to capture the feel and color of each mana source. These hand inlaid boxes are limited edition: which will you choose? Our Blue Mana Symbol is created with crushed turquoise, real bone for Black Mana, malachite for Green, brass for White, and coral for Red. Included is an Alpha Cut Deck Divider, with a matching suede liner. These are limited edition, individually numbered to 100. Retail: $200 You can be one of the first to add one or a set to your collection here.
The Unlimited Edition is a more modest domestic wood interpretation. Each is engraved with the Mana Symbol of your choice in American Cherry. There’s a saying in woodworking: “Wood ages, plastic decays.” Nowhere is that more apparent than with Cherry. These boxes are guaranteed to last a lifetime of gaming, and the Cherry wood gains a beautiful golden patina over the years. Each includes a suede lined Deck Divider. Retail: $100 You can show the world what kind of mage you are by ordering one, or the set, here.
Rounding out the new Wyrmwood offerings is the limited edition Leather Playmat. Genuine doe tan leather with the classic Magic: the Gathering logo calls back to the early days of MTG. Limited and numbered to 100, this is the first leather official Magic: the Gathering Playmat. Find this highly limited collectible here.RT’s broadcasting provider in the West Bank, Pal Media, has been sealed off following raids by Israeli security forces on Palestinian outlets. The raids led to the closure of some broadcasting stations suspected of inciting terrorism.
Eight Palestinian media organizations, which Israel suspects of distributing and broadcasting materials inciting terrorism, were raided in a joint operation of the IDF, the Israel Security Agency security (Shin Bet) and Civil Administration operating in the West Bank on Tuesday night.
The military also closed broadcasting stations including Pal Media, one of the biggest Palestinian companies providing services to RT, as well as many other media outlets operating in the region such as TransMedia, the BBC, France 24 and the Lebanese Al Mayadeen.
The Israeli forces sealed off Pal Media’s office at dawn, confiscating all equipment and materials, according to RT correspondent on the ground Yafa Staty. An IDF official told the correspondent that the closure is aimed at the Al-Quds, Al-Aqsa and Palestine Today channels.
قوات الاحتلال تغلق مقرات شركات ترانسميديا وبال ميديا ورامسات الإعلامية في الخليل ونابلس ورام الله وبيت لحم لمدة 6 شهور وتصادر معداتها فجراً. pic.twitter.com/QmZAWmdwJg — شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) October 18, 2017
Israel said in a statement that they seized equipment and documents of companies Al-Aqsa and Al Quds TV channels, which were providing services to Hamas considered illegal by the IDF Central Command.
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“The Israel Defense Forces closed this Pal Media office after it was found out that it had contributed to and broadcasted calls and incitement to terrorist acts which undermine security,” the IDF statement pinned on the office door says.
The broadcasting stations’ shutdown led to clashes between the military and locals in Ramallah and Nablus, in which some Palestinians were injured, according to Palestinian news agency Wafa. In Ramallah a man was wounded by “an Israeli rubber-coated steel round,” Wafa says.
Wafa reports that Amer Jabari, the director of the TransMedia office in Hebron, and his brother, cameraman Ismail Jabari, were arrested.
“The operation is part of the expanded counterrorism effort, in which the security forces operate against all elements of terrorism including incitement,” the IDF said, adding that the security forces will continue their efforts against it.
Palestine has denounced the Israeli forces’ “aggression” against the media headquarters in the West Bank. The autonomy’s foreign ministry called the actions “piracy” used by “occupants to hide their daily crimes and attacks on our people, as well as a failed attempt to intimidate the media and impede them from exposing the crimes.”
READ MORE: Israel to expel Al Jazeera, block broadcasts & revoke journalists’ credentials
Pal Media and RT offices have already fallen victim to the Israeli forces’ raids. In 2014, they broke into the Ramallah office and seized hardware and videotapes as well as breaking a computer and office furniture. In June 2017, Israeli military raided Pal Media’s headquarters in the city, targeting the Palestinian Al-Quds channel.
Israel has previously raided TransMedia, which runs several offices across the country, including two offices in Jerusalem, the area disputed by Palestinians and Israelis, and an office in Hebron in the West bank. In March 2016 their office in Ramallah was ransacked during an operation against the Palestine Today TV station accused of incitement on behalf of “Islamic Jihad.”MALAPPURAM: Eight BJP and RSS workers have been arrested in connection with the murder of an Islam convert at Kodinhi near Tirurangadi in the district one week ago.The arrest was recorded by Tirurangadi police on Sunday.It was on November 19, Faisal alias Anilkumar (Unni-30) son of Ananthakrishnan Nair native of Kodinhi, was found dead in a drain at Kodinhi.Faisal who was working in abroad was converted to Islam six months ago at Riyad and his family also embraced Islam recently.According to police brother-in-law of Faizal, Vinod, who is local BJP leader, is prime accused of the case and he got help from other party workers for the murder.Faizal was attacked while he was going to pick up his relatives from Tanur railway station in an autorikshaw at Farooq Nagar around 500 metres away from his house, around 5am on Saturday.After the incident mother of Faizal had revealed that Faizal received death threat from his brother-in-law for embracing Islam.Faizal worked as house driver in Riyad embraced Islam at Riyad, with the help of his friends there. His wife and three children embraced Islam and completed a religious study class at Ponnani recently.Level39 boss Eric Van Der Kleij. Level39 As boss of Canary Wharf's Level39, Eric Van der Kleij is one of the most important people in the fintech scene in London — and possibly the world.
There are over 150 fintech businesses housed in Level39, which despite its name now covers three floors in One Canada Square.
"People tell us it's the biggest space of its kind worldwide," Van der Kleij told Business Insider during a recent visit to Level39, a fintech-dedicated office space. "We've not measured so I don't want to make any claims."
Level39 was set up in 2013 by the Canary Wharf Group to encourage a new generation of finance firms to come to the East London office peninsula — financial technology, or fintech, startups.
"Canary Wharf deserves credit because this is not cheap," says Van de Kleij. "This is a serious long term investment. But I think it's a good thing because what we want is one of these companies to turn around and say can you build me my new headquarters in Wood Wharf."
Just over 2 years on, the space has broadened out to welcome "smart city" and cybersecurity startups too, as well as opening new space for high growth businesses on Level 42 and 24. The building can now house a startup from being a 2-man operation up to a 20-plus team.
"They want to eat the banks' lunch"
The huge number of startups under Van der Kleij's nose gives him a good overview of what exactly the fintech world is up to.
"We find they fit into two camps," he says. "There's the camp that wants to help the existing world of financial services to improve, to be more transparent, to provide better customer choice, to lower their costs. And then there are those that want to be the new bank, they want to eat the banks' lunch. We love both of them."
Level39's kitchen space. Level39
Van der Kleij is very excited about one particular type of new technology — the blockchain, the software that runs bitcoin.
"The real powerful work being done in fintech is blockchain," he says. "I can tell you now with certainty that every major western bank we've spoken to, and some eastern ones, are looking at blockchain technology."
The blockchain creates bitcoins, allows transactions to happen, and creates a public record of all transactions, shared across hundreds of computers. Transactions can't be reversed and are much faster than the current system.
Banks currently have to interact with each others' systems when transferring money between accounts. This can be a slow, cumbersome, and a costly exercise, given how old many of the banks' computer systems are.
But if a secure, transparent, piece of software could automate these types of interbank transfers, it would be vastly quicker and cheaper. Barclays, UBS and Citi are all exploring how it could be used.
There are potential applications beyond payments too — Santander says it has 25 use cases for blockchain technology, while BNP Paribas says the technology could make some companies that hold stock "redundant."
"Very similar dynamics to music"
Van der Kleij calls blockchain "the real frontier" of finance and likens its evolution out of bitcoin to the rise of peer-to-peer technology out of illegal music-sharing website Napster.
He says: "In the world of music you had Napster as the unregulated challenger to the establishment. What they did is prove that technology can enable peer-to-peer file sharing to take place without the establishment controlling it. What that industry did is they wisely embraced that technology to reduce their costs and you now have the iTunes Store, Spotify. That transformed the model of music distribution.
Startups at Level39 overlook the UK headquarters of some of the world's biggest banks. Level39 "Who's the Napster? It is companies involves in open ledger or blockchain technology. Of course its origins came from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is incredibly interesting and very exciting but very challenging for the regulator because of the privacy it affords.
"The challenge is we don't want this to become the money launder's weapon of choice, which is what the regulator is worried about. It has very similar dynamics to the world of music."
Level39 residents working on bitcoin and blockchain technologies include CodeStack, BitReserve and Coinjar.
Van der Kleij is confident that, as with music, blockchain technology will mature and enter the mainstream — we'll get our iTunes or Spotify of finance.
Not only will blockchain adoption make banking faster and cheaper, he also thinks the blockchain has the potential to make banking safer.
"You know the thing that caused the big problem in the financial crisis?" he asks. "It was these derivative mortgage-backed securities. Cunning people were repackaging different mortgage securities into products. When institutions bought them they had no real way of looking at the underlying assets they were buying because they were so complex. If they were forced to build that on blockchain, an investment manager could press a button and see the truth because of the immutability."
For now though, it's early days for the blockchain.Here are the latest PlayStation VR games Sony teased at E3.
So far E3 2017 has been a turbulent experience to say the least. Several truly exciting announcements muddled within a pile of less-than-thrilling reveals have resulted in a bag of mixed reactions by the gaming community.
However, as far as virtual reality is concerned, the expo has actually been fairly generous in terms of new games and experiences. Over the weekend Bethesda revealed a full Fallout 4 VR experience as well as a Doom spinoff entitled Doom VFR.
Well according to Sony’s own press conference held last night, it looks as though we now have a plethora of PSVR content to look forward too as well. From Skyrim to Final Fantasy, here are some titles PlayStation owners can look forward to in the near future:
Skyrim VR
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this years E3 it’s that Bethesda will do anything and everything to ensure you’re playing Skyrim for the next 10 years. The company has announced an official port for the Nintendo Switch featuring motion control elements as well as plans for a second attempt at paid game mods. Now the company has officially revealed Skyrim VR, allowing players to experience the full version of the critically acclaimed title entirely in virtual reality. That is so long as you own a PSVR.
Based on the video above it appears as though the game will feature locomotion mechanics as opposed to teleportation-based movement. Currently Skyrim VR will remain a PSVR exclusive, further adding to Bethesda’s ever-growing list of questionable decisions. I would be shocked however if the game wasn’t accessible on the Vive at some point in the future.
Bravo Team
Developed by Supermassive, the team behind Until Dawn, Bravo Team appears to be the PSVR’s attempt at a tactical shooter experience.
According to PlayStation, “Bravo Team is set in a fictional modern-day Eastern European city. When your escort mission goes wrong and results in the President’s assassination, a country threatens to tear itself apart…and your team along with it.”
Based on the trailer provided it looks as though close-quarters combat will be a large part of the experience, forcing players to think and move tactically in order to survive. With other VR military shooters such as Onward and Pavlov gaining much attention by Vive and Oculus owners as of late, Bravo Team could be just what the PSVR needs to further expand its community.
Final Fantasy XV: Monster of the Deep
Coming out on top of my list of virtual reality tie-ins I genuinely did not expect to see is of course Final Fantasy XV: Monster of the Deep. Coming this September, this spinoff of Final Fantasy XV does away with most of the game’s primary mechanics in favor of casual fishing and cooking.
Players join the main characters for a fireside bro-down where they’ll fish for exotic sea creatures, grill some food on the fire and get into a few scrapes with some less-than-cooperative wildlife.
Seeing as simply traveling and bonding with this close-knit entourage ended up being the most enjoyable aspect of the main game for many players, it makes total sense to release a virtual reality side-experience that basically asks you to bond further with your ragtag crew.
Star Child
By far the press conference’s most mysterious, yet captivating, VR announcement, Star Child seems to be a sci-fi misadventure featuring an unknown protagonist exploring a subterranean network filled with advanced alien technology.
Not much information is given beyond that, but based on the side-scrolling visuals featured in the trailer it’s possilbe the game could feature a top-down, almost “god-like” viewing perspective akin to experiences such as Lucky’s Tale.
At one point our lead hero is actually saved by a towering giant who blocks an incoming enemy attack by lowering his hand between the creature and the protagonist. Perhaps we’ll play from the perspective of the giant as we escort the hero through various dangerous scenarios? That would definitely explain the 2D side-scrolling. Either way I’m all kinds of interested.
Moss
Speaking of top-down views, Moss is a cute adventure that appears to channel the viewing perspective of Lucky’s Tale with the style and aesthetic of Unravel. Starring a small mouse with some badass, all-natural accessories, Moss will have players navigate their new furry friend across beautiful outdoor environments while overcoming various obstacles along the way.
Based on the trailer it appears as though the game will feature several elements of puzzle-solving and combat. Players will spectate the action from an overhead view as they carefully lead their miniature protagonist through dangerous dungeons and other precarious situations.
The Inpatient
Yet another title from Supermassive, The Inpatient actually serves as a prequel set 60 years before the events that take place in the developer’s 2016 BAFTA award-winning horror game, Until Dawn. Set at the Blackwood Sanatorium, it seems as though you serve as a patient suffering from some form of memory loss.
Several instances in the trailer point towards this being a stealth-survival experience of sorts, tasking players with avoiding detection as opposed to fighting. Not much else is known about this upcoming title, but seeing as it shares the same universe as Until Dawn I can only expect an experience resulting in some seriously wet pants.
Superhot VR
How good is Superhot VR you ask? It’s so good that despite already being released on both the HTC Vive as well as the Oculus Rift, the time-warping combat puzzler is getting yet ANOTHER release, this time on the PSVR.
Now it might sound like I’m little bias, but that’s only because I am. Superhot VR is one of the best experiences I’ve had in a VR, so it’s beyond thrilling to hear that PSVR owners will have a chance to live out all their Matrix fantasies as well.
So there you have it! Just when the PSVR began gathering some dust due to lack of games, we received a healthy abundance of content to look forward to. Hopefully they can keep the ball rolling and continue to expand the catalog of high quality VR titles.The rough draft of the Declaration of Independence is preserved in Washington. The draft, written by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin before adoption by the Congress.(AP Photo)
There’s no better time of year to talk about declarations than on July 4th, the day the second Constitutional Convention meeting in 1776 approved the Declaration of Independence. Here’s a new one by Jennifer Barnett, a classroom teacher for more than 20 years who decided it was time for teachers to have a declaration of their own and wrote one. Barnett currently serves as Teacher Leader in Residence for the Center for Teaching Quality. A member of the Collaboratory and co-author of Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools … Now and in the Future, Jennifer blogs, manages a tech help wiki, and spends far too much time on Twitter.
By Jennifer Barnett
No historical document speaks to me more deeply than the Declaration of Independence. It’s a fascinating study of history, philosophy, and law embedded with deep nuggets of truth about the human spirit.
But as a teacher leader, what I love the most about the Declaration of Independence is the opportunity for personal reflection it provides. Every time I digest it, I nourish my soul and reinvigorate my purpose |
current deals in 2015. And there could be competitive teams in Buffalo, Houston, New York (Jets), St. Louis and maybe even Denver just waiting to plug a hole under center. Bradford's case could be fascinating if he thrives in the offense of coach Chip Kelly, though the Philadelphia Eagles czar is showing he's loathe to pay premium dollars even for stellar players. Elsewhere, Russell Wilson and Cam Newton are highly likely to sign new megacontracts in the coming months while Robert Griffin III and Nick Foles could be searching for new employers next offseason.
2. No. 1 receivers — 2A) Demaryius Thomas, 2B) A.J. Green, 2C) Julio Jones, 2D) Dez Bryant: Thomas and Bryant have already been franchised, while Green and Jones may face a similar fate in 2016. All are dynamic, all-pro level talents who could be hot commodities despite varying shades of red flags: Green has had minor injuries, Jones has made major foot issues, Bryant's challenges have come off the field, and Thomas' production has been boosted by playing with Peyton Manning.
3. Pass rushers — 3A) Justin Houston, 3B) Von Miller, 3C) Ryan Kerrigan, 3D) Jason Pierre-Paul, 3E) Aldon Smith, 3F) Greg Hardy: Could be an amazing group. Houston, who currently bears the Kansas City Chiefs' franchise tag, will likely cash in soon after nearly breaking the NFL's single-season sack record last year. Kerrigan may not seem quite worthy of inclusion in this bunch at first blush but is coming off easily his best season (13½ sacks) and doesn't show up on the medical charts, police blotter or have substance-abuse issues in his past like the others.
4. Trent Williams: He's got the tools to be the league's premier left tackle and showed quite a bit of toughness while playing through significant injuries in 2014 — all reasons he's likely to make a mint from the Washington Redskins. Russell Okung, Nate Solder, and Anthony Castonzo aren't quite on Williams' level but probably have better chances to cash in next year.
5. Muhammad Wilkerson: Take away J.J. Watt, and Wilkerson could make a solid argument as the NFL's top 3-4 defensive end (though he does benefit by playing with fellow New York Jets stud Sheldon Richardson). Wilkerson is also a New Jersey native who's established himself as a team leader and seemingly one of the Jets' core players. Hard to believe he'll escape.
6. Marcell Dareus: He can play the nose, three-technique and will likely see time at end this year. Coming off his first all-pro campaign, Dareus could be in store for even bigger things in Buffalo this season under defensive mastermind Rex Ryan. But Dareus has had missteps off the field. Also keep an eye on Nick Fairley, who could reap the benefits of his one-year, prove-it deal playing on the St. Louis Rams' loaded D-line.
7. Bobby Wagner: He's not quite Kuechly, but he's in the area code when it comes to elite middle linebackers. Wagner was so crucial to the Seattle Seahawks' success in 2014 that he garnered an MVP vote given the impact he made after returning from a midseason toe injury.
8. Potential No. 1 receivers — 8A) T.Y. Hilton, 8B) Alshon Jeffery: Hilton stamped himself as Indianapolis Colts QB Andrew Luck's top option when Reggie Wayne went down with a knee injury in 2013. But Hilton's size (5-9, 178) could keep his earning power one floor below the other wideouts on this list. Jeffery is plenty big (6-3, 216) but must show he can still produce with Brandon Marshall no longer around to draw the opposition's top corner.
9. Coby Fleener: Another member of the Colts' arsenal, this 26-year-old tight end has steadily improved over his first three seasons. Fleener doesn't block much, but someone will pay him handsomely for the receiving skills he features from all points of the field.
10. Marshal Yanda: Guards aren't sexy, but there currently isn't a better one in the league than Yanda. Don't be surprised if he commands a package exceeding $50 million.
***
Follow Nate Davis on Twitter @ByNateDavis
PHOTOS: Notable NFL players on the move in 2015(Reuters) - A 30-foot (9-meter) hole has appeared in a section of the tallest dam in the United States that is expected to worsen, but there was no immediate threat it will fail, endangering thousands of area residents, California state officials said on Friday.
65,000 cfs of water flow through a damaged spillway on the Oroville Dam in Oroville, California, U.S., February 10, 2017. REUTERS/Max Whittaker
State authorities and engineers on Thursday carefully released water from the Lake Oroville Dam in Northern California as water levels in the reservoir rose due to heavy rain and snow.
There was no imminent or expected threat to public safety or the dam, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office said, and the California Department of Water Resources said the structure was sound.
Still, authorities advised people living along the Feather River below the dam to gather important belongings and consider shelter if an evacuation warning is issued.
The earthfill dam is just upstream and to the east of Oroville, a city of more than 16,260 people 65 miles (105 km) north of Sacramento. At 770 feet (230 meters) high, the structure, built between 1962 and 1968, is the tallest dam in the United States, besting the famed Hoover Dam by more than 40 feet (12 meters).
Water levels at the dam on Friday were over 894 feet (273 meters), less than 7 feet (2 meters) from the top, said Doug Carlson, a spokesman for the Department of Water Resources.
On Tuesday, officials began noticing large chunks of concrete missing from the dam’s spillway. Erosion eventually caused a 200-foot-long (60-meter-long), 30-foot-deep hole to form near the center of the spillway, a structure used to control the release of water.
As the spillway continued to crumble, an emergency spillway was being considered, the department said on Twitter.
The department said it preferred not to use the emergency spillway because it would dump water onto trees and put debris into the Feather River, a source of water for parts of California.
Video on the sheriff department’s Facebook page showed about 35,000 cubic feet of water per second being released down the enormous slide into the river, but officials said the additional flow would not necessarily cause flooding.
“Flooding is based on total flow to the Feather River,” the Butte County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. “The current forecasted total flow is not expected to exceed 75 cubic feet (2 cubic meters) per second, which is less than the flow in 2006 and half of the flow in 1997.”
(This story corrects conversion in first paragraph to 9-meter instead of 90-meter.)Copyright by WAVY - All rights reserved
PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) -- Stephen Rankin, a former Portsmouth Police Officer charged with murder, was in court Monday for a motions hearing -- where 109 pages and seven disks worth of information was presented.
Rankin is facing charges of first-degree murder after he allegedly shot and killed 18-year-old William Chapman in April, who was unarmed in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Evidence from Rankin's defense will include witnesses who claim that Chapman lunged at Rankin.
Before the hearing on Monday, 16 Portsmouth police officers sat behind former officer Steve Rankin in support.
During the hearing, Circuit Court Judge Johnny Morrison told Commonwealth's Attorney Stephanie Morales, "They still don't have any discovery. There is no reason they shouldn't have some sort of discovery by now," Judge Morrison said, making it clear defense should have the evidence which is essential to prepare Rankin's defense.
Outside Rankin's attorney James Broccoletti said, "We filed the discovery motion September 18. The court called it a boiler plate, nothing unusual, standard. It took us two months and five days to get this."
During the hearing, Morales, who is finding herself on the defense says she is prepared to hand over the evidence, "The Commonwealth is ready to provide the discovery and it is ready today."
She then handed over 109 pages and seven disks worth of information to Broccoletti. "I think her words were there is much more to come, but there's a little left to give or something like that. That seemed to be an inconsistent statement. We are going to have to see what is there," Broccoletti said.
10 On Your Side asked Morales why she delayed to hand over the evidence. She refused to comment, but the following statement was sent by Morales' office:
The Commonwealth was not satisfied with the lack of specificity of the order, and notified the defense of this. The Commonwealth cannot provide certain items of discovery until an order is entered; i.e., a criminal history. The Commonwealth is not to provide discovery until the entry of an order. The discovery order was entered today, at which time the Commonwealth has provided discovery and is in compliance with the order.
WAVY also asked Rankin's Attorney Nicole Belote about that statement and she replied:
The discovery order provided to the Commonwealth's Attorney in the case complied fully with Rule 3A:11, and as Judge Morrison correctly pointed out, the motion and order were standard and what he sees everyday without objection by Ms. Morales' office. At no point in time were we made aware of a concern regarding a 'lack of specificity of the order. Instead, we were advised, on October 11, 2015, that the Commonwealths Attorney needed thirty (30) days to provide discovery responses; such request was agreed to. The motion to continue was filed more than thirty (30) days later because discovery responses had not been provided and we had received no communication regarding when responses could be expected and Mrs. Morales' response explicitly confirmed the same."
Judge Morrison refused a defense motion to continue the February 22 trial due to the issues with evidence, "By filing the motion we got what we wanted, and she handed over the evidence, and we have to look at it and see what's there, and the judge gave us the chance to re-file motions at a later point (to ask for a continuance)," Broccoletti told 10 On Your Side.
The second issue dealt with by Judge Morrison is how Rankin entered the courthouse. He was allowed to enter through restricted access gates suggesting privilege because he was a former police officer and a friend of the court. The standard is for all people to come through the main doors and to be checked through security.
Judge Morrison became concerned when he saw Rankin in a restricted area behind the courtroom. The judge told Rankin's attorney, "And I am saying this. I want to make sure we all avoid the appearance of impropriety. You understand?"
Attorneys Broccoletti and Belote both said, "Yes, sir."
Portsmouth Sheriff Spokesperson Capt. Lee Cherry says they did let Rankin in due to security concerns and past threats. "I can certainly understand his reasoning, but at the same time, it is also our responsibility for the security of this courthouse."
Chapman's family spokesperson Earl Lewis says Rankin's special access does look improper, "The treatment is totally different. If you were a regular civilian you would not be brought in the back, you come in through the front door, just like everybody else."
Cherry counters, "We have done this before in cases where we felt we could have a volatile situation in the courthouse. It won't be the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last time."
The trial date for Rankin is still set for Feb. 22, 2016 despite Rankin's attorney's request for a continuance, and motions will be heard on January 5, 2016.For many people, a good cup of coffee is one of the great pleasures of life. But too much of the stuff can kill you, as explained in a new ASAPScience video that spotlights the curious and sometimes dangerous effects that caffeine has on the human brain.
"It turns out that there is a lethal dose of caffeine," Mitchell Moffitt, co-creator of the ASAPScience YouTube series, says in the video, "which is somewhere around 150 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of your body."
That's a lot of joe. If you weigh 154 pounds, Moffitt explains, you would need to drink about 70 cups of coffee at once to fatally overdose. Although the number could vary depending on the kind of coffee you prefer and how it's made, that's one beverage binge that even the most compulsive java junkie would be hard-pressed to pull off.
"You wouldn't be able to physically fit that much in your stomach," Moffitt says. "You would also start experiencing mania and hallucinations before getting to this point."
Good to know.Only 16 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement "the influx of refugees will result in more economic opportunities than problems for us," according to the survey conducted by the Ipsos Institute on behalf of the Hamburg researcher Horst Opaschowski.
The percentage of Germans who believe "Germany will gain recognition in the world by accepting so many refugees" was only slightly higher at 20 percent.
The survey also showed that a majority of Germans - 56 percent - believe the country is not up to the challenge of dealing with the influx. In small towns of less than 5,000 people, this figure rose to 66 percent.
Amid the sharp spike in refugees in Europe in 2015, German policy is crafted on Chancellor Angela Merkel's "we can manage" approach.
Statistics from the German Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) indicate that through November 2015, Germany had seen more than double the number of refugees of last year. The figures also show that a third of all asylum seekers in Germany came from Syria in 2015.
The findings on German sentiment on the refugee crisis come after another survey released last week showed that some 50 percent of those surveyed were looking at the coming year "with great skepticism and mixed feelings." Only 27 percent had said this ahead of 2015.
Similarly, only 18 percent of the 1,000 respondents said that they viewed the coming year "with great confidence and optimism," compared to 45 percent a year ago.
"The mood's tipping. The German angst is coming back," researcher Horst Opaschowski concluded.With its latest T-series Ultrabook, Lenovo is blurring the line with its upscale X1-series more than ever before. This is no frumpy corporate laptop. Instead, the ThinkPad T460s is a thin, light and durable beauty.
But the big question here, oddly, is what you lose as the T-series gets ever more svelte. Consider my Lenovo ThinkPad T450s First Impressions from a year ago today, for example. In that article, I lauded the device’s dual batteries, one of which was removable. And it’s legacy VGA port, key for many corporate environments.
Neither feature is available in the T460s. Instead, we get a non-removable battery, as is common with most of today’s Ultrabooks (including the X1-series), though in this device it’s split into two internal batteries. And that VGA port has gone the way of the dodo, replaced with a more modern full-sized HDMI (plus a miniDisplayPort port, which was available last year as well).
But what we gain is perhaps more important. Because this year’s T-series picks up the design language Lenovo uses on the gorgeous X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga. And the result is a more attractive and premium design which Lenovo says retains the legendary toughness of its T-series predecessors thanks to its carbon fiber reinforced body with a magnesium alloy bottom.
In real world terms, the T460s is thinner and lighter than its predecessor and edging neatly into X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga territory. It weighs just 3.1 pounds, down from 3.5 for the T450s, and 2.8 pounds for the recently-released X1 Yoga.
It is also sleeker looking, with an X1-like wedge-shaped front-end, instead of the thicker, bulbous design of previous Ts. It is, in other words, much more like an Ultrabook than was the T450s.
The ThinkPad T460s is also powered by some more modern technologies, including of course a 6th generation Intel Core processor (codenamed Skylake) and a new “in-cell touch” LCD layer that helps reduce the thickness and weight of the display panel. Maximum RAM is doubled, to 24 GB. The fingerprint reader has been replaced with a more modern “finger press” unit (as opposed to a swipe). Plus that HDMI port.
Much about the T460s will seem familiar to T450s owners: The screen is still 14 inches, and can still be had in a productivity-focused anti-glare/matte design running at 1080p (1920 x 1080) or 1440p (2560 x 1440). It features 3 USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, full-sized SD card, and SIM slots, in addition to the mDP and HDMI video-out solutions. And in a nod to its corporate customer base, the T460s features an old-school ThinkPad Dock connector on its bottom. (X1 series devices utilize a more modern OneLink+ docking port.)
As a ThinkPad, the T460s is of course provided with the vaunted ThinkPad keyboard, TrackPoint and touchpad. Indeed, they appear to be identical to the versions found on the X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga. Though, unlike the keyboard in the X1 Yoga, the T460s’ keyboard does not retract into its base because this device can lay flat, but not be folded backwards into a tent.
Put simply, Lenovo is making it harder than ever to choose between the T-series and the X-series. If you’re a ThinkPad fan, you may know that the “s”-class T-series devices are thinner and generally lighter than other T-series devices (where “s” stands for “slim”) and that you pay a premium for that for that differentiation. So the question here is how or whether the T460s sits comfortably betwen the “non-s” T460 and the X1 Carbon.
The T460s starts at $1089, which is $200 more than the starting price of the T460. The X1 Carbon, meanwhile, starts at $1269, while the X1 Yoga starts at $1549. So there’s your logical progression in pricing. (And note, too, that Lenovo always has some sale going on; you should never pay those actual prices.)
The review unit T460s works out to about $1450 (or $1300 at today’s sale prices). That’s for a 2.4 GHz Core i5-6300U processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of SSD storage. Not cheap, but in the right range for a device of this quality. A similarly-equipped X1 Carbon would cost $1459/$1289ish, or about the same.
I’d get the X1 Carbon, frankly. But with the T460s, you get a few extras. That Ethernet port, for starters. The dual video out solutions. More RAM (the X1 Carbon hits 16 GB, max). And the optional SIM tray.
Battery life is also a big question, as always. Lenovo rates the T460s for “up to 10 hours of battery life,” or what it calls “all-day” battery life. But you can no longer bring along extra batteries, which was a key selling point of previous versions. Given the thinness of this design, real-world battery life is an open question.
So there’s always more to explore. I’ve got a few big trips coming up,and hope to put the ThinkPad T460s—and the ThinkPad X1 Yoga—through the wringer We’ll see how it performs in real life.
Tagged with Lenovo, ThinkPad, ThinkPad T460sScience can be glorious; it can bring clarity to a chaotic world. But big scientific discoveries are by nature counterintuitive and sometimes shocking. Here are ten of the biggest threats to our peace of mind.
1. The Earth is not the center of the universe.
We’ve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary. When Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets instead orbit the Sun,
… his contemporaries found his massive logical leap “patently absurd,” says Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It would take several generations to sink in. Very few scholars saw it as a real description of the universe.”
Galileo got more grief for the idea than Copernicus did. He used a telescope to provide evidence for the heliocentric theory, and some of his contemporaries were so disturbed by what the new invention revealed—craters on a supposedly perfectly spherical moon, other moons circling Jupiter—that they refused to look through the device. More dangerous than defying common sense, though, was Galileo’s defiance of the Catholic Church. Scripture said that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and the Holy Office of the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of heresy for saying otherwise.
2. The microbes are gaining on us.
Antibiotics and vaccines have saved millions of lives; without these wonders of modern medicine, many of us would have died in childhood of polio, mumps or smallpox. But some microbes are evolving faster than we can find ways to fight them.
The influenza virus mutates so quickly that last year’s vaccination is usually ineffective against this year’s bug. Hospitals are infested with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria that can turn a small cut into a limb- or life-threatening infection. And new diseases keep jumping from animals to humans—ebola from apes, SARS from masked palm civets, hantavirus from rodents, bird flu from birds, swine flu from swine. Even tuberculosis, the disease that killed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, is making a comeback, in part because some strains of the bacterium have developed multi-drug resistance. Even in the 21st century, it’s quite possible to die of consumption.
3. There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.
Paleontologists have identified five points in Earth’s history when, for whatever reason (asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions and atmospheric changes are the main suspects), mass extinctions eliminated many or most species.
The concept of extinction took a while to sink in. Thomas Jefferson saw mastodon bones from Kentucky, for example, and concluded that the giant animals must still be living somewhere in the interior of the continent. He asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them.
Today, according to many biologists, we’re in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappear—mastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.
4. Things that taste good are bad for you.
In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study enrolled more than 5,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, to participate in a long-term study of risk factors for heart disease. (Very long term—the study is now enrolling the grandchildren of the original volunteers.) It and subsequent ambitious and painstaking epidemiological studies have shown that one’s risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, certain kinds of cancer and other health problems increases in a dose-dependent manner upon exposure to delicious food. Steak, salty French fries, eggs Benedict, triple-fudge brownies with whipped cream—turns out they’re killers. Sure, some tasty things are healthy—blueberries, snow peas, nuts and maybe even (oh, please) red wine. But on balance, human taste preferences evolved during times of scarcity, when it made sense for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to gorge on as much salt and fat and sugar as possible. In the age of Hostess pies and sedentary lifestyles, those cravings aren’t so adaptive.
5. E=mc²
Einstein’s famous equation is certainly one of the most brilliant and beautiful scientific discoveries—but it’s also one of the most disturbing. The power explained by the equation really rests in the c², or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524. When that’s your multiplier, you don’t need much mass—a smidgen of plutonium is plenty—to create enough energy to destroy a city.
6. Your mind is not your own.
Freud might have been wrong in the details, but one of his main ideas—that a lot of our behaviors and beliefs and emotions are driven by factors we are unaware of—turns out to be correct. If you’re in a happy, optimistic, ambitious mood, check the weather. Sunny days make people happier and more helpful. In a taste test, you’re likely to have a strong preference for the first sample you taste—even if all of the samples are identical. The more often you see a person or an object, the more you’ll like it. Mating decisions are based partly on smell. Our cognitive failings are legion: we take a few anecdotes and make incorrect generalizations, we misinterpret information to support our preconceptions, and we’re easily distracted or swayed by irrelevant details. And what we think of as memories are merely stories we tell ourselves anew each time we recall an event. That’s true even for flashbulb memories, the ones that feel as though they’ve been burned into the brain:
Like millions of people, [neuroscientist Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections… As clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
7. We’re all apes.
It’s kind of deflating, isn’t it? Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can be inspiring: perhaps you’re awed by the vastness of geologic time or marvel at the variety of Earth’s creatures. The ability to appreciate and understand nature is just the sort of thing that is supposed to make us special, but instead it allowed us to realize that we’re merely a recent variation on the primate body plan. We may have a greater capacity for abstract thought than chimps do, but we’re weaker than gorillas, less agile in the treetops than orangutans and more ill-tempered than bonobos.
Charles Darwin started life as a creationist and only gradually came to realize the significance of the variation he observed in his travels aboard the Beagle. For the past 151 years, since On the Origin of Species was published, people have been arguing over evolution. Our ape ancestry conflicts with every culture’s creation myth and isn’t particularly intuitive, but everything we’ve learned since then—in biology, geology, genetics, paleontology, even chemistry and physics—supports his great insight.
8. Cultures throughout history and around the world have engaged in ritual human sacrifice.
Say you’re about to die and are packing some supplies for the afterlife. What to take? A couple of coins for the ferryman? Some flowers, maybe, or mementos of your loved ones? If you were an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, you’d have your servants slaughtered and buried adjacent to your tomb. Concubines were sacrificed in China to be eternal companions; certain Indian sects required human sacrifices. The Aztecs slaughtered tens of thousands of people to inaugurate the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan; after sacred Mayan ballgames, the losing team was sometimes sacrificed.
It’s hard to tell fact from fiction when it comes to this particularly gruesome custom. Ritual sacrifice is described in the Bible, Greek mythology and the Norse sagas, and the Romans accused many of the people they conquered of engaging in ritual sacrifice, but the evidence was thin. A recent accumulation of archaeological findings from around the world shows that it was surprisingly common for people to ritually kill—and sometimes eat—other people.
9. We’ve already changed the climate for the rest of this century.
The mechanics of climate change aren’t that complex: we burn fossil fuels; a byproduct of that burning is carbon dioxide; it enters the atmosphere and traps heat, warming the surface of the planet. The consequences are already apparent: glaciers are melting faster than ever, flowers are blooming earlier (just ask Henry David Thoreau), and plants and animals are moving to more extreme latitudes and altitudes to keep cool.
Even more disturbing is the fact that carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change, and the predictions for what’s to come range from dire to catastrophic.
10. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine.
Everything you probably think of when you think of the universe—planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dust—makes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there. The rest comes in two flavors of “dark,” or unknown stuff: dark matter, at 23 percent of the universe, and dark energy, at a whopping 73 percent:
Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might be—exotic and still hypothetical particles—but they have hardly a clue about dark energy. … University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”
The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua. … [Dark energy] has inspired us to ask, as if for the first time: What is this cosmos we call home?
But astronomers do know that, thanks to these dark parts, the universe is expanding. And not only expanding, but expanding faster and faster. Ultimately, everything in the universe will drift farther and farther apart until the universe is uniformly cold and desolate. The world will end in a whimper.Asked Wednesday if he had any response to criticism by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz that no president had done worse in office than Barack Obama, White House press secretary Jay Carney delivered the perfect reply.
"Which president was he talking about?" he deadpanned at his final White House briefing.
"It's always good to hear from former Vice President Dick Cheney," he added.
In a Tuesday op-ed, the Cheneys assailed President Barack Obama for "abandoning" Iraq to Islamic militants who have been gaining territory in their march to Baghdad. They proclaimed, perhaps with some lack of self-awareness, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."
"He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America," they added.
Departing from Carney's stone-faced approach, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the Senate floor to lambaste the former vice president for doling out advice about a costly conflict that many believe was a misguided effort engineered by the Bush administration.I am banned from Facebook
November 22, 2013
I am banned from Facebook.
This morning I decided to vent on the current state of our obesity crisis in America. I was motivated by constant body (fat) acceptance campaigns strewn all over the internet followed by comments with the context of ‘you go girl!’ and ‘more power to you!’ The popular and unrelenting support received to those who are borderline obese (not just 30-40lbs overweight) frustrates me as a fitness advocate who intimately understands how poor health negatively effects a family, a community and a nation.
I am a firm believer that one should love their body in order to start loving and nurturing it. I’ve written about self-love many times throughout my 8 years of blogging online. What I don’t like is the fine line we are walking today – which is love and accept your body versus love and progress your body. We should celebrate any person who makes their fitness and nutrition a priority. There is no one-size-fits-all in fitness. It’s unfortunate that we don’t see more variety in the physiques that bombard our media streams. I get that. That’s why I’ve never posted a motivational poster with a fitness model attached to the message (you can now look at my FB history) because I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that ‘fitness’ looks a certain way.
Please start your keyboards now (as I know many are thinking I encourage people to look like me) because I’ve never said that. I am not a size 0 like most runway models and I don’t have a six pack like most fitness models. I am not a paid celebrity. I don’t work in a gym. I have a stressful life. I don’t have the perfect marriage. I have struggled with food addiction. And I was not blessed with the best genetics. I run when I’m tired. I avoid food when I’m stressed. I discipline my constant desire for chocolate. I am barely 5’4. I have stretchmarks. I have excess skin – and while not perfect, I know this is how my body (not everybody) manifests after children through consistent nutrition and exercise.
I have a passion for fitness. This passion is rooted in both love and hate. I love seeing people empowered by their physical strength and I love witnessing people translate their fitness success in other areas of their life. While fitness changes lives, the lack of fitness destroys lives. I hate the pain of watching my mother not take care of herself. I hate watching friends pop prescription pills for cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. I hate reading news about our healthcare crisis and I hate seeing people blame others for their lot in life.
That’s why I started writing fitness articles in 2004. That’s why I created a fitness nonprofit, Fitness without Borders, in 2007. That’s why I began a free mom-me fitness group in 2009 and that’s why I posted “my vent” this morning on Facebook. There are free resources when people are ready to make change, but one cannot desire change if one’s environment deems it okay to stay where they are. With the majority of Americans overweight we are unknowingly normalizing our unhealthy nation – and while it’s a fine line we are walking – it’s a line I’m going to cross.
You can either sit on the sidelines or get roughed up trying to win the game. I’m not going to play this life sitting on the bench talking about change… I’m going for it.
My personal history allows me to come from a place of empathy, experience, concern and most of all – conviction. Find your passion, discover your conviction and stand for something. You might get criticized, you might ruffle feathers – you might even get banned from Facebook…
But if you believe in something, nothing will stop you.
Here is my deleted post:
WARNING VENTING AHEAD:
I woke up this morning to news stories about how overweight nearly obese women should be proud of their bodies (as they posed in lingerie). I think we should all accept how any healthy body through good nutrition and exercise manifests but I’m starting to get annoyed and here’s why:
1. We have a health issue in America with over 2/3 overweight or obese.
2. We have a healthcare crisis. We spend over 3 trillion in healthcare yearly!
3. We have a childhood obesity issue, with many children suffering from adult diseases like diabetes.
4. We have magazines everywhere praising the celebrity (with all her resources) for being fit after months of giving birth and scorn the “real every day mom” who is able to be successful.
5. We keep blaming the culprit (school lunches, fast food, etc) when the real change starts at home – ESP those who lead, which are the parents.
There are some serious contradictions in our society. I know many people still get riled up with me and my convictions but the truth is I KNOW how it is to work your ass off and not have energy at the end of your day. I know how it feels to be overweight and not drop an ounce after years of disordered eating. I know how difficult it is to raise multiple children – all born a year apart – and make my fitness and nutrition a priority. Lastly, I know how it feels like to grow up with an unhealthy mother wondering if she will live to see your wedding day.
I know it’s hard. I know it’s not easy to break habits and build new ones. I know your environment challenges you and I know making your health a priority amongst the many priorities to stay afloat in today’s world is difficult. But I will tell you this: IT IS WORTH IT.
We need to change this strange mentality we are breeding in the U.S. and start celebrating people who are a result of hard work, dedication and discipline. I’m not bashing those who are proud and overweight, I am empowering those who are proud and healthy to come out and be the real role models in our society. (Vent done)
Isn’t that nuts? They also deleted my post. While I’m certain this may be computer-generated
when several critics reported my post as offensive, you would think Facebook would be more
assertive about what defines ‘hate language’. (I’ve seen much worse on Facebook)
They said it would be 12 hours – but I have a feeling it will be a few days.
Poor baby misses daddy. He was in LA for a week at Team Rubicon’s headquarters
to assist with the operations in the Philippines and is now in Illinois
helping with the storms and tornado aftermath there. Check out this awesome
article written about him:
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/21/246432031/in-tornado-ravaged-illinois-war-zone-veterans-find-a-mission
I loved this turkey cake pop project with the boys. Even though I’m slightly OCD, I
let my boys get involved in the decorating process.
They didn’t turn out pinterest-perfect but they are perfect in my book!
I finally re-filmed my DVD! |
20,000 American Indian and Alaska Native students attending the tribal colleges across this country. Currently our scholarships serve less than 21% of those students so we appreciate any opportunity to bring resources into our scholarship program.” Disney California Adventure Park will be hosting the premiere and sponsors will be offering opportunities for the guests in conjunction with the event. Commenting on the premiere event, Tom Staggs, Chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said, “All of us at Disney Parks are thrilled to host the world premiere of ‘The Lone Ranger,’ at Disney California Adventure. Disney brings unforgettable stories and characters to life in our movies and in our parks and resorts, so there’s no better place than Disney California Adventure to start this trailblazing film on its journey.” Time Warner Cable, a title sponsor of the world premiere of Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ “The Lone Ranger” will stream the event LIVE from Disney California Adventure Park. [... ] A one-of-a-kind Lone Ranger Ninja motorcycle from Kawasaki, a sponsor of the premiere, will be displayed at the event and will be available for the stars in attendance to autograph. The bike will be auctioned off at a later date, with all proceeds going to the American Indian College Fund. Subway is providing sandwiches for the premiere guests. Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ “The Lone Ranger” opens in theaters July 3, 2013.
Below, a trailer for the film:
Sunshine Circle
The new awnings installed on the Carthay Circle Restaurant terraces are complete. They as nice as you’d expect minimally-themed new awnings to look. They don’t look terrible, but they aren’t nice either. It’s too bad they couldn’t have gotten some thematic consideration, but they get the job done and that’s what’s most important for guest comfort.
Some nice wrought-iron to match the window awning and balcony railings would have been a great touch
Nearby in Hollywood Land, the Monstrous Summer All-Nighter specialty hot dog at Award Wieners is still being offered.
Over in Cars Land, the fountain at the Cozy Cone Motel is getting some work done.
Don’t miss the new MiceChat Podcast!
If you didn’t catch our latest MiceChat podcast, we bring you our guide to the best new attractions of summer 2013. Take a listen below!
Limited Time Magic
[center]Embark on Mickey’s Compass Quest
at Disneyland Park
June 3 – 9, 2013[/center]
Disneyland is offering “Mickey’s Compass Quest” an interactive in-park game that you can participate in after you see the new “Mickey and the Magical Map” show in the Fantasyland Theatre. Below is Disney’s description of the event:
Celebrate the opening of the all-new live show “Mickey and the Magical Map” at Disneyland Park with a little extra Limited Time Magic! This June, Guests who join Mickey Mouse on this musical journey to imagination and back will be invited to extend their experience, courtesy of Mickey’s Compass Quest. Once the show comes to a close at the Fantasyland Theater, fetch yourself a map and follow a series of show-inspired clues to secret spots around the park. Uncover hidden markers, complete each challenge and take home a special reward! What are you waiting for? The quest awaits!
[center]Mickey and the Magical Map: Show and Presentation
A Limited Time Annual Passholder Magic Event
at Disneyland Park
June 4 and June 11, 2013[/center]
Annual Passholders can attend a special showing of the new “Mickey and the Magical Map” show and a behind-the-scenes presentation on the creation of the show. Event details below:
Celebrate the opening of the new magical, musical show, Mickey and the Magical Map. Annual Passholders are invited to attend special, Passholder performances of this thrilling production. After the performance there will be a special behind-the-magic presentation by some of the creative team responsible for the production.
Mickey and the Magical Map: Show & Presentation Dates
May 28, June 4 & 11, 2013 Show & Presentation Location
Fantasyland Theatre in Disneyland Park Show Time
5:40 p.m. Event Information All participating Annual Passholders (ages 3 and older) must present their active Annual Passport for event admission to the event Cast Member at the Fantasyland Theatre in Disneyland Park, who will validate and scan the Passport and check event availability. Photo ID may be required.
Each participating Annual Passholder may bring up to three (3) guests, and such guests need not be Passholders themselves. Children under 3 years of age may attend the event as a guest of an active Passholder.
All members of your party must enter the theater together.
This and That
Back in Fantasyland, a few leftover scrims that were installed on the “it’s a small world” facade for the now-defunct “The Memories, the Magic and You!” show are looking pretty grimy. It would be nice to finally just get rid of them altogether.
Nearby, the turkey leg stand across from the Matterhorn Bobsleds entrance is now serving the BBQ-glazed pork shank that was introduced as part of Walt Disney World’s New Fantasyland food offerings.
It’s as big as a turkey leg and the same price, too
Outside the parks, a Wii U pop-up store and free play zone has sprung up in Downtown Disney between the ESPN Zone and Earl of Sandwich. The Wii U area is set to stick around through June 23.
You can test drive the Wii U and one of its games in one of several big game boxes that are complete little mini living rooms with HD TVs, gaming consoles and cushy chairs. A Wii U Guru will help you out if you need any help or have any questions.
A fun photo-op puts you in the world of Super Mario Bros.
Nearby, the Disneyland Hotel’s main entrance sign that guests see when driving into the Hotel entrance has been ripped out and is now being replaced, likely with a new sign that will complement the hotel’s recent retro remodel.
And back in Downtown Disney, Monsters University is being promoted at the AMC Theaters
Fun at the Farm
Finally, to end today’s Dateline Disneyland, we’re going to take a quick field trip to Knott’s Berry Farm where the park recently unveiled its new Boardwalk area and a radically revamped Timber Mountain Log Ride. I attended the media event last week to help with help cover the event for MiceChat’s In the Parks blog. I wanted to share some personal thoughts on the Knott’s projects and encourage you all to read the In the Parks blog where MiceChat blogger Jeff Heimbuch reviews and recaps the new offerings, with a full ride-through video of the newly refreshed Timber Mountain Log Ride.
Knott’s Berry Farm is often scoffed at by dedicated Disney fans as not being up-to-par with Disney, and in some ways, those fans are right. Knott’s doesn’t have the budgets needed to have rides comparable to Disney’s Audio-Animatronic spectacles and E-Tickets, but I wouldn’t let that turn you away from a trip to Knott’s. In recent years, the park has undertaken a significant effort to offer a higher-quality experience and that shows when you enter the park and explore its totally refurbished Ghost Town.
Knott’s Ghost Town is a gem in Southern California’s various theme parks and Knott’s management has realized this and completely revitalized the area. Ghost Town shines and offers a truly special experience throughout. All of Ghost Town’s peek-ins have been restored, a working blacksmith forges unique items you can buy, and you can even go panning for gold or ride a real stagecoach. Knott’s may not have the Rivers of America or Big Thunder Mountain, but Ghost Town offers an amazingly charming and authentic wild west experience that Disneyland just can’t compete with.
The park’s crown jewels, however, are the Calico Mine Train and the Timber Mountain Log Ride. Despite its dated figures and sets, the Mine Train is a fantastic experience, packing in a lot of charm and a surprising amount of awe, first in the ride’s magnificent cavern sequence and then again when the Calico glory hole is revealed. Considering the ride is over 50 years old, it remains a remarkable experience even today.
The big news from Knott’s last week, however, was the re-opening of its historic Timber Mountain Log Ride, which has just completed a major $5 million overhaul with new sets, scenery, special effects and animatronic figures. The project was led by Garner Holt Productions, the company that is now in charge of much of Disney’s Audio-Animatronics development.
The ride unfortunately didn’t open in time for its big rededication on Thursday, and I was unable to return before this writing to ride the refreshed ride. I’ve seen video and publicity images, however, and have been told that now, more than ever, the log ride is now Knott’s premier attraction. I’m excited to head back to Knott’s to finally experience the ride very soon.
Below, a ride-through video of the Timber Mountain Log Ride from MiceChat’s In the Parks blog:
Don’t miss a great historic exhibit about the Timber Mountain Log Ride in the park’s Wilderness Dance Hall, including great concept art and scale models:
Thursday also marked the grand opening of Knott’s new Boardwalk area. The Boardwalk replaces the massive Perilous Plunge attraction, and in its place are three new family-friendly rides. The offerings here aren’t much to write home about, but it’s part of a bigger picture Knott’s is working on and is a good step forward for the park as it continues its efforts to reinvent itself as a quality destination with a variety of offerings for the entire family. The new Boardwalk area in general is quite nice and if maintained as well as Ghost Town, it will continue to be a great area for years to come. The area is colorful and full of energy and stands in stark contrast to other areas and attractions around it that are showing their age. I hear plans are to spread the TLC around, which is good news and I hope it pans out.
The Pacific Scrambler packs more punch that it may seem. We have an on-ride video below:
Surfside Gliders and the Coast Rider wild mouse coaster:
Coast Rider is essentially an un-themed version of California Adventure’s Goofy’s Sky School. The ride is what you’d expect, but it fits alongside Knott’s Berry Farm’s other coasters and offers a much-needed family-friendly option for younger kids and pre-teens.
What’s great about the new Boardwalk area is that it helps bring some new life to a corner of the park that seriously needed it. The color and activity add a lot back here. While it might not reach Disney-level theming, a lot of care went into the new area and it shows. Decorative fencing and some beautiful landscaping surround the new Coast Rider roller coaster, helping soften the industrial harshness of the coaster. This is a new level of showmanship for Knott’s and worth taking note of.
Is the new Boardwalk a must-see if you’re visiting Southern California? Maybe not, but Knott’s as a whole is worth a visit if you’ve got the time. If you’re a local, there’s little excuse to not pay the park a visit (season passes are currently only $88 – less than a single day’s admission to Disneyland!). The folks in charge are leading the historic little theme park into a new era and I’m personally excited to see where they take it.
Dateline Disneyland is sponsored by our good friends at the
Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel & Water Playground. A short walk from the park, HoJo Anaheim is conveniently located next to Matterhorn Mountain at Disneyland with nearby dining, freeway access, FREE parking and FREE Wi-Fi. For more information on HoJo Anaheim, room rates, or to book your stay today, visit HoJoAnaheim.com/MiceChat
MiceChat.com and Annual Passholder Discounts
Available Every Day!
The HoJo Anaheim is now offering deeper discounts for Disneyland Resort Annual Passholders! On select nights, Disneyland Resort Annual Passholders can get rooms for as low as $59 per night, plus tax. For more information visit the HoJo Anaheim Innsider Boards which features an up-to-date listing of available nights, or call (714) 776-6120 and ask for In-House Reservations to book. If your date isn’t listed, the HoJo Anaheim still offers rooms for 20% off their best available rate if you call (714) 776-6120.
Weekly News & Information Round-Up Weekly Theme Park Hours
June 3 – 9, 2013 > [B]Disneyland Park[/B] [B]California Adventure[/B] Mon.-Thurs.:
8am – 12am
Fri.-Sat.:
9am – 12am
Sunday:
8am – 12am Mon.-Thurs.:
8am – 10pm
Fri.-Sat.:
9am – 10pm
Sunday:
8am – 10pm [CENTER]
visit the For a complete listing of theme park hours,visit the Disneyland.com Theme Park Calendar [center] Closure and Refurbishment Schedule [/center] [b][center]Disneyland Park[/center][/b] [b]Big Thunder Mountain Railroad:[/b] Closed for extensive refurbishment through October 30.
[b]Market House:[/b] Closed for conversion and expansion for new Starbucks location. Opens fall 2013.
[B]Alice in Wonderland:[/B] Expected to close in 2013 to install permanent safety railing on outdoor ride portion. [b][center]Disney California Adventure[/center][/b] None. [b][center]Downtown Disney and Disneyland Resort Hotels[/center][/b] None. [center] Headline Roundup
A quick look at noteworthy Disney theme park headlines from around the web.[/center] A Disneyland outdoor vending Cast Member was arrested and held on $1 million bail for a dry ice explosion in Mickey’s Toontown early last week.
This year’s D23 Expo will feature a special concert with Disney Legends Richard Sherman and Alan Menken.
Walt Disney World guests found a gun on an attraction ride vehicle after it became dislodged from a previous rider’s pocket.
Disney has reportedly signed the directors of “Kon-Tiki” to helm “Pirates of the Caribbean 5.”
Alright, that wraps up this week’s edition of Dateline Disneyland. Thanks for reading! Are you planning on attending “The Lone Ranger” premiere? What do you think of Disneyland’s new ticket prices? Join the discussion and let us know in the comments section below! We’re only here because of generous readers like you. Do you enjoy reading Dateline Disneyland every week? Consider helping us out by donating so we can pay the bills and keep the weekly updates coming! You can donate with a click of a button via PayPal, click here! For more Disneyland news, be sure to read MiceChat’s weekly In the Parks blog. And be sure to check out our sister blog, Dateline Disney World – a fantastic weekly photo blog covering Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida! Thanks for reading. See you at Disneyland!
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FTC-Mandated Disclosure: Promotional consideration for this edition of Dateline Disneyland was provided by the Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel & Water PlaygroundIn May 2014, Nissan announced its return to the top tier of Le Mans racing, with a revolutionary, apparently back-to-front LMP1 hybrid.
Fast-forward a year and a bit. It’s 3pm on the Sunday of Le Mans 2015, and one of the three GT-R LM Nismos entered into this year’s race has made it to the chequered flag, far behind the winning Porsche 919.
Nissan’s Le Mans racer explained
Not, on the surface, a glorious return to La Sarthe for the Japanese maker, but one that demonstrates just how brutally tough Le Mans is for a new team. And one, as it turns out, with positives as well as negatives. We spent the race in Nissan’s pit box, and here’s what we found out.
How was the pace?
Not Porsche-rivalling, but Nissan expected as much. The GT-R’s qualifying time was around twenty seconds slower than the fastest Porsche, with pace significantly hindered by the disconnected rear-drive hybrid system, a casualty of the limited development time (Nissan’s already tight schedule, remember, was further impacted by a failed crash test in March, causing the team to miss the Silverstone and Spa races).
Nissan’s Le Mans car: the driver’s view
As seen in F1’s early dabbles with electric drive, if your hybrid racing car loses its e-power, you’re going nowhere fast. It also puts massive extra strain on the petrol engine and brakes, which have to do without hybrid assistance.
Nissan knew it was going to be off the leading pack, so used Le Mans to gain as much data as possible instead, like a public test session. And they did indeed get a car to the finish line - much more than a consolation prize given the difficulties present. With what they’ve learned stored on the team’s servers, the car will get faster next year.
What were the positives?
Tyre wear (especially on the undriven rears) was very healthy, and bodes well for the car’s balance as soon as it starts kicking out the 1250bhp it was designed to.
And despite running front brake temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees - and a fraction of their rivals’ regenerative braking - the pit crew reported brakes were only half-worn when replaced at the intended pit-stops. Plus, fuel consumption was up there with the (albeit faster) leading Audis, Toyotas and Porsches.
The science behind the front-engine design does appear to work, but the GT-R needs more time to be finessed before it can go racing at ten-tenths.
“We managed 600 laps across the three cars, which I’m very proud of,” designer Ben Bowlby told us. “It showed this to be a worthwhile engineering approach which we will now develop further.”
What about reliability?
Car #23 was victim to a clutch niggle that plagued it through the race. Fair enough - it was literally pieces right up until the green flag dropped on Saturday, and had barely turned a wheel in anger before Le Mans.
Amazingly, #23 made it to the dying hour of the event, before Jann Mardenborough was treated to flames from the transmission at the bottom of the Mulsanne straight. A gutting end to a brave effort.
Resplendent in crowd-pleasing retro blue livery, car #21 was killed off by a suspension failure in the night, leading to its front-left wheel shearing clean off. Usually cars can limp around to the pits in tripod mode, but the front-drive Nissan started to lunch its engine with the differing axle speeds.
That sent the traction control into a tailspin, and power was shut off. The team wasn’t even able to recover its stricken car, left at the mercy of trophy hunters until after the race.
And what of car #22, which soldiered on to the 3pm flag? Well, it wasn’t without incident, chief among which was the moment it collected a flying tyre (not from the sister car) at 186mph on the Mulsanne straight. Talk about rotten fortune.
The impact ripped the bonnet - headlights and all - clean off the top of the car. In the middle of the night. It also smashed the radiator and decimated the front splitter. Though #22 hobbled back to the pits still running, the lengthy repairs needed sent the car down the order.
Such is the brutal nature of Le Mans. Even if your car runs faultlessly for all 1440 minutes, there’s no telling what the weather, your opponents, or Lady Luck will throw at you.
The cars have to be built like tanks, drive like rocketships, and sip fuel to boot. It’s the design brief from hell.
As Nissan’s motorsport boss Darren Cox remarked: “Le Mans shouldn’t be easy, it’s the world’s toughest race. We came here with very short lead times, so we knew this year was all about learning, and we chose to do that learning in public, which is often uncomfortable, but means we will be back much stronger next year…”
How long does Nissan need to hit full stride?
Several team members I spoke to estimated the project was between five and eight months behind where it ought to have been. Of course, the problem here is that, post-Le Mans, time will not stand still for Nissan to get its act together.
Audi, you can bet your branded baseball caps, will be conducting a full inquest into how its latest, greatest R18 e-tron relinquished its dominant crown to the upstart Porsches.
The 919, remember, was only competing its second Le Mans the prototype class, and runs a theoretically less efficient petrol engine. Audi had the better strategy on paper, and the champagne on ice. Porsche will be doing much the same analysis to try to stay a step ahead.
Meanwhile, Nissan will be hiring, debriefing, and catching up. The drivers will be a year older, wiser, and more used to this crackers racing car. The future is bright.
So Nissan will be back at Le Mans next year?
That’s the plan. And it’d be much poorer without them. You’ll probably read a few sniping reports that front-wheel drive was a stupid idea and Nissan’s bold Le Mans effort was fatally flawed and deservingly slow. Here are a couple of reasons why that’s codswallop.
First off, in true racing cliché form, you have to give the team a big hand. It was a superhuman effort. In the final hour of the race alone, I saw literal blood, sweat and even tears poured into getting that battle-worn #22 across the line. For sporting grit and tenacity, the Nismo boys and girls did themselves proud.
And there’s no doubt that while slow, the Nissan was massively popular. The spectators, other teams and wider world recognised this is a car doing things differently, and as a result is probably the most interesting racing car of the last quarter-century. It deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Gordon Murray’s ground-effect Brabham BT46 F1 car and Tyrell’s six-wheeled acid trips for sheer bloody-mindedness.
What’s more, the only reason you’re reading all of this is because of how open, welcoming and accessibly Nissan has been.
Toyota puts screens up in front of its Le Mans garage to shield prying eyes from its top-secret fiddling. Nissan opens the doors, sticks on some drum’n’bass, and invites you to join in the party. Everything from the shakedown testing, to the technical layout, and now race weekend has been laid bare for the social media set to gobble up and share.
It takes big stones to allow the spotlight to be shone so brightly in your direction. But looking at its car, the fact Nissan was bloody brave was not really in doubt, was it?Story highlights The former FBI director stood silently for over 15 minutes as the students yelled
James Comey is the Gwendolyn S. and Colbert I. King endowed chair in public policy
Washington (CNN) Students at Howard University loudly protested former FBI Director James Comey Friday as he delivered a convocation address.
As Comey, making a rare public appearance since leaving the FBI, began his speech welcoming new students at Howard University, protesters could be heard yelling from the back of the room, raising their fists and shouting. Some of the slogans included "No justice, no peace, "We shall not be moved" and "white supremacy is not a debate."
Standing before a packed auditorium, Comey stood silently for over 15 minutes as the students yelled, "I love being black" and "Get out James Comey -- you're not our homey."
"I love the enthusiasm of young folks, but I wish they understood what a conversation is," Comey said as the students continued to chant, sing and clap throughout his entire prepared remarks. He said that he had received a number of invitations to speak over the place several months, but "chose to come here."
"I look forward to adult conversations about what is right and what is true," Comey concluded, as he ended to a standing ovation.
Read MoreVictims
Download Printable Document
In the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, the victim of a hate crime may be an individual, a business, an institution, or society as a whole. In 2015, the nation’s law enforcement agencies reported that there were 7,173 victims of hate crimes. Of these victims, 52 were victimized in separate multiple-bias incidents.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, 18 U.S.C. §249 required the FBI to collect data concerning hate crimes committed by or directed against juveniles. Beginning in 2013, law enforcement began reporting the number of victims who are 18 years of age or older and the number of victims under the age of 18 in addition to reporting the number of individual victims. Of the 4,198 individuals for which victim age data were reported in 2015, 3,702 hate crime victims were adults, and 496 hate crime victims were juveniles.
In 2013, the national UCR Program began collecting revised race and ethnicity data in accordance with a directive from the U.S. Government’s Office of Management and Budget. The race categories were expanded from four (White, Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Asian or Other Pacific Islander) to five (White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander). The ethnicity categories changed from “Hispanic” and “Non-Hispanic” to “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino.” (See the Methodology for more information about this program change as well as others.)
By bias motivation (Based on Table 1.)
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
59.2 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race/ethnicity/ancestry.
19.7 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
17.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
1.7 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
1.2 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
0.4 percent (30 individuals) were victims of gender bias.
Further examination of these bias categories showed the following details:
Racial/Ethnicity/Ancestry bias (Based on Table 1.)
Among single-bias hate crime incidents in 2015, there were 4,216 victims of race/ethnicity/ancestry motivated hate crime.
52.2 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Black or African American bias.
18.7 percent were victims of anti-White bias.
9.3 percent were victims of anti-Hispanic or Latino bias.
3.8 percent were victims of bias against a group of individuals in which more than one race was represented (anti-multiple races, group).
3.3 percent were victims of anti-American Indian or Alaska Native bias.
3.2 percent were victims of anti-Asian bias.
1.1 percent were victims of anti-Arab bias.
0.1 percent (6 individuals) were victims of anti-Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander bias.
8.1 percent were victims of anti-Other Race/Ethnicity/Ancestry bias.
Sexual-orientation bias (Based on Table 1.)
Of the 1,263 victims targeted due to sexual-orientation bias:
62.2 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-gay (male) bias.
19.6 percent were victims of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias.
13.5 percent were victims of anti-lesbian bias.
2.8 percent were victims of anti-bisexual bias.
1.9 percent were victims of anti-heterosexual bias.
Religious bias (Based on Table 1.)
Of the 1,402 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:
52.1 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.
21.9 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.
4.3 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
4.1 percent were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
3.6 percent were victims of anti-Eastern Orthodox (Russian, Greek, Other) bias.
3.4 percent were victims of anti-Protestant bias.
1.3 percent were victims of anti-Other Christian bias.
0.6 percent were victims of anti-Mormon bias.
0.4 percent were victims of anti-Hindu bias.
0.4 percent were victims of anti-Sikh bias.
0.1 percent were victims of anti-Jehovah’s Witness bias.
0.1 percent were victims of anti-Buddhist bias.
0.1 percent were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
7.6 percent were victims of bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
Disability bias (See Table 1.)
Of the 88 victims of hate crimes due to the offenders’ biases against disabilities:
52 were victims of anti-physical disability bias.
36 were targets of anti-mental disability bias.
Gender bias (See Table 1.)
Of the 30 victims of hate crime motivated by offenders’ biases toward gender:
22 were categorized as anti-female.
8 were anti-male.
Gender-identity bias (See Table 1.)
Of the 122 victims of gender-identity bias:
76 were victims of anti-transgender bias.
46 were victims of anti-gender non-conforming bias.
By crime category (Based on Table 2.)
Of the 7,173 victims of hate crime, 62.5 percent were victims of crimes against persons, and 36.6 percent were victims of crimes against property. The remaining 0.9 percent were victims of crimes against society.
By offense type
Crimes against persons (Based on Table 2.)
In 2015, 4,482 victims of hate crimes were victims of crimes against persons. Regarding these victims and the crimes committed against them:
18 persons were murdered, and 13 were raped. (Concerning rape, data for 12 rapes were submitted under the UCR Program’s revised definition; 1 rape was submitted under the legacy definition. See the Methodology for more information about this and other program changes.)
41.3 percent of the victims were intimidated.
37.8 percent were victims of simple assault.
19.7 percent were victims of aggravated assault.
0.4 percent (20) were victims of other types of offenses, which are collected only in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
Crimes against property (Based on Table 2.)
In 2015, 2,626 victims of hate crimes were victims of crimes against property. Of these:
72.2 percent were victims of destruction/damage/vandalism.
10.4 percent were victims of larceny-theft.
6.6 percent were victims of burglary.
5.6 percent were victims of robbery.
1.4 percent were victims of arson.
0.9 percent (24) were victims of motor vehicle theft.
2.8 percent were victims of other types of hate crime offenses, which are collected only in NIBRS.
Crimes against society (See Table 2.)
There were 65 victims of hate crimes categorized as crimes against society. Crimes against society (e.g., weapon law violations, drug/narcotic offenses, gambling offenses) represent society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity; they are typically victimless crimes in which property is not the object.Telstra’s plans to rollout Australia’s largest Wi-Fi network over the next five years involves asking existing customers to allow part of their broadband connection to be used as hotspots.
More than two million new hotspots are planned as part of the A$100 million-plus strategy to increase broadband connectivity in the places that Australians live, work and visit daily. The first 1,000-hotspots will go live before Christmas.
But only two years ago Telstra shelved its plan to build a 1,000 hotspot Wi-Fi network, citing a lack of profitability and a clear customer preference for 3G connectivity.
So what has changed?
In contrast to the fixed line National Broadband Network (NBN) quagmire, the shifting position of Telstra with regards to Wi-Fi reflects a rapidly evolving wireless telecommunications market.
The continued uptake of smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices, and the increasingly central role these devices play in social, economic and political life, is generating a phenomenal demand for wireless data.
This is outpacing the development of cellular network capacity and creating congestion and reduced service quality on these networks. Telstra’s interest in developing a Wi-Fi network to offload some of this data traffic mirrors that by its international counterparts.
The fundamental role that wireless communications now play in contemporary life has also translated into government interest in the provision of public Wi-Fi as civic infrastructure. Governments are well placed to do so since they control assets, such as light poles, on which the large number of low-range Wi-Fi access points can be mounted.
While Telstra will make use of some of its own assets, such as public pay phone booths, it is seeking to establish hotspots in partnership with governments. This will spread the cost of provision, but Telstra are also undoubtedly keen to maintain some control over public Wi-Fi developments to make sure it reduces cellular congestion without cutting into its existing revenue streams.
Telstra has also developed a business model that it believes will make sure Wi-Fi becomes a profitable revenue stream. Use of Wi-Fi hotspots by Telstra’s contracted home and business broadband customers will count towards their already monetised bandwidth allowance.
Those without Telstra home broadband services will pay a fee to access the hotspots, the pricepoint of which will likely be structured to facilitate casual use but encourage regular users to consider signing up to Telstra broadband.
Compelling as these reasons may be for Telstra to dip back into Wi-Fi provision, shareholders might be forgiven for worrying that the rollout of two million hotspots is an overcommitment, and one that will present similar headaches to those faced by NBN Co. But they should fear not, as Telstra will build just 8,000 of these hotspots, with the majority actually rolled out by Telstra’s customers themselves.
A Fon on your Wi-Fi network
A fascinating aspect of Telstra’s plan is its partnership with the European-based bandwidth sharing enterprise Fon. Telstra hopes that two million of its customers will follow the lead of Fon users around the globe and make part of the bandwidth they purchase for their home or business broadband service available to other users.
So what is Fon, and are Telstra’s plans feasible?
Fon was established in 2005 by Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. The company is headquartered in Spain, a country with a significant history of community wireless activism, such as guifi.net.
Despite affectionate references to its community of “foneros”, Fon has moved some way from its cooperative roots. Backed by some heavyweight venture capitalists, Fon broke even after four years of operation.
The company has been signing exclusive deals with foreign telcos like Telstra as a means of rapidly expanding its international hotspot network. The company now claims to have more than 13 million Fon spots worldwide. These will be available to Telstra customers through the deal.
Fon’s bandwidth-sharing scheme is not unique, but its scale and ambition sets it apart. Commentators have been intrigued by the company’s evolving blend of user-generated and commercial elements.
But its service model – which concentrates provision in private homes and residential areas – has been criticised for its variable accessibility and reliability.
This concern would seem to be amplified in the large spaces of Australian cities.
How many of the projected two million hotspots will be in low density neighbourhoods where Wi-Fi signals may not extend much beyond the front gate, or where there is little passing foot traffic? Will lingering outside houses to utilise the network boost commitment to the sharing economy, or arouse suspicion?
Such suspicion will hardly be allayed by Fon’s unfortunate description of non-sharing network users as “aliens”.
Telstra, then, will be tasked with boosting provision in commercial and tourist areas, and identifying incentives for householders to sign up and share.
Who benefits from the deal?
Specifically, it enables Telstra to secure a new footing in Australia’s rapidly evolving Wi-Fi scene. By asking Telstra’s customers to purchase and maintain a key component of the network infrastructure – the signal splitting modem – Telstra outsources infrastructure investment.
More speculatively, the new network may generate revenue from casual users and remove data traffic from mobile networks in favour of premium voice services.
Fon is aiming to build its global community but its business is currently concentrated in Europe, North-east Asia and South America. An alliance with Telstra brings Fon into the Asia-Pacific region. Partnering with major telcos may also help counter criticism of Fon’s reliability.
The new hotspot network will provide a new platform for Telstra customers to access bandwidth from their home broadband plan and, depending on pricing and performance, may provide cost effective internet access for non-customers.
More generally, roll-out of the network is likely to expand commercial Wi-Fi coverage in Australian cities, and may promote innovation and further technical development.Issa (right) initiated the conversation with Biden. | AP photos Biden agrees to Issa sit-down
Vice President Joe Biden has agreed to a sit-down to discuss the 2009 economic stimulus with incoming Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, the subpoena-wielding foil for Democrats who worry the new House GOP leadership will be all too eager to conduct political investigations.
After speaking by phone last week, Biden and Issa were scheduled to meet Monday, sources tell POLITICO. But the vice president, who has stimulus chief Earl Devaney and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer on his schedule today, postponed the planned talk.
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Issa, who has accused the White House of engaging in an over-the-top propaganda campaign to promote the $800 billion stimulus law, wants to create penalties for those that don't comply with the law's reporting requirements. More important — and more broadly — he wants inspectors general at federal agencies to have subpoena power so that they have more leverage in investigating allegations of abuse in the expenditure of government money.
Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella framed last week's discussion as cordial and the upcoming meeting as an opportunity for the California Republican and the vice president, who oversees the administration's stimulus effort, to cooperate with each other.
"There's a mutual goal of wanting transparency in stimulus dollars," Bardella told POLITICO. He said Issa initiated the conversation with Biden because he didn't want to wait until January, when Republicans take control of the House, to address potential problems in the implementation of the stimulus law.
“The purpose of the meeting between the vice president and Rep. Issa, when it happens, will be to discuss oversight of the Recovery Act and |
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