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Island, "and when we were sitting down to think about the script at a certain point it was like, 'is Cyborg Ninja in this movie or not?' and the part of me that was a little kid was like, 'there's no world in which I'm ever going to make a Metal Gear movie that Cyborg Ninja is not going to be in.' It's really easy to be like, 'it's a good character to save for the second one,' but no, no, no."
Exit Theatre Mode
Vogt-Roberts also explained that he's considering whether to include fourth wall-breaking sections, in the style of Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid (who spoke directly to the player about other games they had played):
"I actually do think that considering breaking the fourth wall is an important part of potentially what that movie would be. Finding a way to do that in an interesting way," he explained. "I think things like Deadpool have actually shown that you can play with that conceit these days.
"To me, the fourth wall breaking is a little less important than the walking philosophies and ideologies those characters represent, and getting that right and the tone right and things like that. If breaking the fourth wall makes sense, I'm all for it, [but] I'm more interested in the 'Kojima conversations' about whatever song came out then or whatever - it's that stuff that it just absolutely needs."
Exit Theatre Mode
Vogt-Roberts has spoken previously about how he wants to do series creator Hideo Kojima justice with the film, a point he reiterated to us:
"If you make a Metal Gear movie it needs to be [...] completely committed to one tone but then goofy the next moment, and then stylised and bizarre but then beautiful and reflective, and just that whole spectrum of things that is Kojima's voice."
If you wanted proof of just how far Vogt-Roberts' love for Metal Gear goes, look no further than his latest movie - the director points out that a boat in Kong is named Gray Fox, after the Metal Gear character of the same name.
Kojima himself appears to approve of the film's directorial choice - he recently called Vogt-Roberts "a genius" after seeing his new film:
I knew @VogtRoberts was a genius in his indies days but ppl will see it in @kongskullisland. Enjoy Kaiju film of Kong's island,not as reboot pic.twitter.com/H1iRfRPFP3 — HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) March 6, 2017
Kong: Skull Island arrives this week releasing on March 9 in the UK and March 10 in North America and Australia. There's no hint of a date for the Metal Gear Solid movie yet, but it seemingly has a director and a screenwriter on board.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he hopes to god Psycho Mantis doesn't look at what he's been watching on Netflix. Follow him on Twitter.ADVERTISEMENT
On Wednesday, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed the first "right-to-work" law in the traditionally union-heavy Rust Belt. A blow to organized labor, the law weakens unions by giving employees at unionized workplaces the option to skip out on paying dues. Unions turned out pretty heavily to oppose the bill, but a series of Republican victories in the state since 2006, and a change of heart by Daniels, paved the way to its passage. What are these laws, and what do they mean for organized labor? Here, a brief guide:
What is a "right-to-work" law?
Right-to-work laws, many of which were enacted in the South and West after World War II, bar mandatory union membership at businesses and prohibit unions from collecting dues from nonmembers. Joining 22 other right-to-work states, Indiana is the first to adopt the law since Oklahoma more than a decade ago. Indiana actually had a similar law on the books from 1957 to 1965, when it was repealed after Democrats took control of state government.
What are the arguments for, and against, such laws?
Daniels and other Indiana Republicans argue that the law will create a more business-friendly environment that will attract companies, and jobs, to the state. As well, says Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe, according to polls, "most Americans regard compulsory unionism as unconscionable." These laws aren't "anti-union." They promote choice. Opponents say these "right to work for less" laws erode wages, lead to lower-quality jobs, and unfairly let "free riders" enjoy union-negotiated benefits without paying for the negotiating. For what it's worth, says Andrew Rosenthal in The New York Times, "six of the 10 states with the highest unemployment have right-to-work laws."
Why is Indiana's such a big deal?
It's "a turning point in American labor history," says Abby Rapoport in The American Prospect. This is "the first time since 1957 that unions in a northern state have lost key rights," and the first right-to-work law aimed at crushing unions rather than preventing them from gaining power. Since the 1930s, the big question for organized labor has been "when will we organize the South," says Cornell University labor historian Jefferson Cowie. In Indiana, "the opposite happened. The South is slowly chipping away at the North and bringing the North into a lower wage, non-union economy."
Will other states follow suit?
Right-to-work activists in Michigan, Ohio, and Minnesota sound optimistic. But "the political factors that aligned in Indiana were so unique," says Tom LoBianco in the Associated Press, that a repeat in those states is "unlikely." Proponents in the dozen states that considered but failed to pass right-to-work laws last year have run into vetoes from Democratic governors, opposition from labor-friendly Republicans, or in other Rust Belt states, "squeamish Republicans who don't want to pick fights with private sector unions," which are weaker that they've been in 50 years but still "a clear political threat."
Will the Super Bowl in Indianapolis this weekend be affected?
Probably not. Daniels warned the unions on Monday that disrupting Super Bowl weekend would be a "colossal mistake," because "thousands of people are earning money they wouldn’t otherwise earn because of the Super Bowl." The unions apparently agree. The AFL-CIO says it will pass out pamphlets in the days leading up to the big game, but won't organize any big protests on Super Bowl Sunday. "This has always been about the fight over 'right to work,' and that takes place in the Statehouse and the ballot box," says AFL-CIO spokesman Jeff Harris.
Sources: American Prospect, AP, Boston Globe, Indianapolis Star, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, Think Progress, Washington TimesWASHINGTON — Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration.
Most of the problems involve certifying citizenship and income, key components of the national health plan.
But some of the problems are downright nutty.
One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday.
Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states and the federal exchange reported, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told The Post.
Only citizens are eligible for ObamaCare, and only people at certain income levels are eligible for tax credits and subsidies.
But in 77 percent of the applications under scrutiny, federal records differed from what applicants submitted on those two key qualifications.
The CMS responded that the agency is “committed to verifying the eligibility of consumers who apply for enrollment in qualified plans.”Main Page Gallery
Ringo Starr Biographical Background Born 7 July 1940
Dingle, Liverpool, England, United Kingdom Nationality British Occupation Drummer, singer, songwriter, actor Years Active 1957-present Parent(s) Richard Starkey and Elsie Gleave Spouse(s) Maureen Cox (1965-1975)
Barbara Bach (1981-present) Children Zak Starkey (b.1965)
Jason Starkey (b.1965)
Lee Starkey (b.1970)
“Thomas is a smashing little engine - he's Number One and never lets anyone forget it!” ―Ringo Starr on his storytelling role
Sir Richard Starkey, MBE (born on 7 July 1940), known professionally as Ringo Starr, is a British drummer, singer, songwriter and actor best known for being the former drummer of the British pop-rock band the Beatles, and the leader of his own band, Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band. He was the first narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, narrating the first two series and playing Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. He left the show after 1989 to focus on his music career and tour with the All Starr Band, after which he was replaced by Michael Angelis in the UK and George Carlin in the US.
Contents show]
Filmography
Television "Magical Mystery Tour" (1967)
"Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends" (1984-1990)
"Shining Time Station" (1989-1990)
"The Simpsons" (1991)
"Shelly Duvall's Bedtime Stories" (1992) Films "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)
"Help!" (1965)
"Yellow Submarine" (1968)
"Candy" (1968)
"The Magic Christian" (1969)
"Let It Be" (1970)
"The Point" (1971)
"200 Motels" (1971)
"Blindman" (1971)
"That'll Be the Day" (1973)
"Son of Dracula" (1974)
"Lisztomania" (1975)
"Sextette" (1978)
"Caveman" (1981)
"Princess Daisy" (1983)
"Give My Regards to Broad Street" (1984)
"Alice in Wonderland" (1985)
"To the North of Katmandu" (1986)
"Saint Street" (2012)
"The Powerpuff Girls: Dance Pantsed" (2014)
Discography
The Beatles "Please Please Me" (1963)
"With the Beatles" (1963)
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964)
"Beatles for Sale" (1964)
"Help!" (1965)
"Rubber Soul" (1965)
"Revolver" (1966)
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967)
"Magical Mystery Tour" (1967)
"The Beatles (White Album)" (1968)
"Yellow Submarine" (1969)
"Abbey Road" (1969)
"Let it Be" (1970)
"Past Masters" (1988) - compilation album set
"The Beatles Anthology" (1995-96) - compilation documentary series/album set Solo "Sentimental Journey" (1970)
"Beaucoups of Blues" (1970)
"Ringo" (1973)
"Goodnight Vienna" (1974)
"Ringo's Rotogravure" (1976)
"Ringo the 4th" (1977)
"Bad Boy" (1978)
"Stop and Smell the Roses" (1981)
"Old Wave" (1983)
"Time Takes Time" (1992)
"Vertical Man" (1998)
"I Wanna Be Santa Claus" (1999)
"Ringo Rama" (2003)
"Choose Love" (2005)
"Liverpool 8" (2008)
"Y Not" (2010)
"Ringo 2012" (2012)
"Postcards from Paradise" (2015)
"Give More Love" (2017)
Awards and nominations
Won - Oscar Awards - Best Music, Original Song Score, 1971 for "Let it Be" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- Oscar Awards - Best Music, Original Song Score, 1971 for "Let it Be" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Won - Grammy Awards - Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special, 1971 for "Let it Be" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- Grammy Awards - Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special, 1971 for "Let it Be" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Inducted - Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988 as a member of The Beatles with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988 as a member of The Beatles with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Won - Grammy Awards - Best Music Video - Long Form, 1997 for "The Beatles Anthology" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Bob Smeaton, Geoff Wonfor, Chips Chipperfield and Neil Aspinall.
- Grammy Awards - Best Music Video - Long Form, 1997 for "The Beatles Anthology" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Bob Smeaton, Geoff Wonfor, Chips Chipperfield and Neil Aspinall. Won - Walk of Fame - Recording, 2010.
- Walk of Fame - Recording, 2010. Won - Award For Musical Excellence, 2015 - From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his solo career.
- Award For Musical Excellence, 2015 - From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his solo career. Knighted - By Prince William of England for his contributions to music, 2018
- By Prince William of England for his contributions to music, 2018 Nominated - Golden Laurel Awards - Musical Performance and New Faces, Male, 1964 for "A Hard Day's Night" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- Golden Laurel Awards - Musical Performance and New Faces, Male, 1964 for "A Hard Day's Night" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Nominated - Golden Laurel Awards - Musical Performance, Male, 1965 for "Help!" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- Golden Laurel Awards - Musical Performance, Male, 1965 for "Help!" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Nominated - British Academy Film and Television Awards - Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, 1965 for "A Hard Day's Night" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
- British Academy Film and Television Awards - Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, 1965 for "A Hard Day's Night" shared with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Nominated - Daytime Emmy Awards - Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series, 1989 for "Shining Time Station".
TriviaRemembrance Sunday commemorates those who have chosen to serve Great Britain and the men and women who never returned to their loved ones.
Every year in November, Britain marks the wars that have scarred our past and the bravery of those who fought them.
In Britain, it is tradition to pause for a two minute silence at 11am on November 11, Armistice Day, to remember those killed in the two world wars and the British servicemen killed or injured since 1945.
On Remembrance Sunday, which always falls on the second Sunday in November, commemoration services are held to remember not just those who fought, but what they fought for.
Here are some of the stories of extraordinary service and bravery behind the four Victoria Crosses (VCs) awarded to British Army soldiers since the Falklands conflict.
The Victoria CrossWhen predator is a woman, are rules relaxed?
Jason Eickmeyer was a 15-year-old sophomore at Hammonton High School in New Jersey the night he said he had sex with his gym teacher. From that moment on, he counted the days until he would be old enough to marry her.
Male classmates who heard the rumors would nudge him on the shoulder, he said, and give him a knowing smile. "I got respect," he said.
Two years later, after the police came to his house and took his statement against teacher Traci Tapp, Mr. Eickmeyer was shunned and mocked. He became a Jay Leno punch line.
Friends would ask him, "How could you say you were victimized by having sex with a teacher? She was hot. She was young. She was the best thing that ever happened to you."
Turns out, he said, it was the worst thing. He stopped going to many classes, dropped out of wrestling (his ticket to a college scholarship) and became depressed. And now the 20-year-old has sued the school district, the township and Ms. Tapp, who lost her job but served no jail time after pleading guilty to harassment by offensive touching.
"When we find out it is a male teacher having sex with a female student, he should be locked away and the key should be thrown away," Mr. Eickmeyer said. "If it is a female teacher, she isn't looked on as harshly as a male."
Is there is a double standard?
Are female predators an under-reported danger or merely a titillating novelty?
In recent months in Western Pennsylvania alone, Abbie Jane Swogger, a 34-year-old special education aide at Highlands Senior High School, was charged with drug violations and corruption of minors after police found her in a New Kensington hotel with students.
Beth Ann Chester, 26, a former Moon Area teacher, is headed to trial on accusations of having sex with a 14-year-old boy.
Julie Stimmel, a North Allegheny High School teacher resigned after being suspected of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student and has surrendered her state teaching certificate. Prosecutors said they could not proceed with the case because the student was unwilling to testify.
Gordon Finley, psychology professor at Florida International University in Miami, believes such cases are just the tip of the problem. "We need to remove the veil of political incorrectness and look at it honestly. We have tons of research on male sexual predators and very little on females. We need to acknowledge that it is not insignificant numbers. It is not the occasional mentally disturbed female. It is not 2 or 10 percent. It is much higher than that."
Dr. Finley believes female predators often get lighter sentences than males. So does Robert J. Shoop, a Kansas State University professor and author of "Sexual Exploitation in Schools: How to Spot It and Stop It."
"The female is likely to get a suspended sentence," he said. "A male is likely to get a 20-year sentence. Many of these female teachers who have sex with a child go on national talk shows and say, 'I was an excellent teacher except I had sex with a 14-year-old.' It is a hard sell for many people to believe that the punishment should be the same. But they are equally destructive."
Charol Shakeshaft, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who wrote a 2004 Department of Education report on school sexual misconduct, disputes the notion of a double standard in punishment. "You see two or three cases where women are not getting sentences" and people take that as evidence that women get off light generally, she said. Her research, however, suggests there aren't "gender differences in severity of sentences."
Though sexual abuse is considered an underreported crime, Dr. Shakeshaft's report showed that 10 percent of all students said they had been the victim of sexual misconduct by an adult working in a school. And in nearly a third of those cases, the students said the incidents occurred with female teachers and employees, who make up the overwhelming number of staff.
Among all adults, sexual predators are 95 percent male, said David Finkelhor, director of Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Some men are pedophiles, who tend to be repeat offenders with children 12 and younger, leaving a wider swath of destruction, he said. But when females are sexual predators, they tend to abuse teenagers.
Dan Barber, an Erie private investigator who has tracked down many molesters, agrees with Dr. Finkelhor that female predators tend to be less dangerous than males. Mr. Barber hates to read headlines about them.
"We have these Playboy foldout young women seducing high school boys. Most responsible adults would clearly say this is wrong. We are not paying these people to have sex with the kids. 'Fire that witch.'
"But let us not make a federal case out of this. It happens. It is not a crisis. I know there are these monster pedophiles in class. Statistically, they are all men."
But others say female seducers can be devastating, too, even though they often act like love-struck teenagers themselves. For example, police have accused Beth Ann Chester, the ninth-grade health and physical education teacher, of sending a male student nude photos of herself and lurid text messages.
"They flirt and carry on a friendship," Mr. Shoop said. "They write their name on their books. They text-message them. They are not in love with the child, but they are using them for sexual gratification."
Owen Lafave was arguably the most humiliated man in the country in June of 2004 when his wife, Debra, a Tampa teacher, was booked for having sex with a 14-year-old student. She pleaded guilty, but got no jail time.
"Some of the things she did were outlandish," Mr. Lafave said in a phone interview from Florida. "She had the boy's cousin drive them around while they had sex in the back" of the car.
At first, when the case broke and sexy photos of his wife were splashed all over the paper and people questioned his masculinity, Mr. Lafave said, he wanted to hide in a cave.
But then he started to talk to some of the male victims of female predators and realized how it had devastated their lives. "As a kid, you don't have the perspective. You might think of it as a good thing. As times goes on, they have intimacy issues, substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorders. It destroys them."
That was the case for Mr. Eickmeyer, the former New Jersey high school student, who has sued Ms. Tapp for sexual assault and harassment and sued the school district and the township.
Arnold Mellk, Ms. Tapp's attorney, said, "We believe that Mr. Eickmeyer's allegations will be shown for what they are."
He also said Ms. Tapp's plea agreement concerned an incident with someone else, not Mr. Eickmeyer. But Police Detective Joel Frederico said it was Mr. Eickmeyer's statements that led to the plea. Two other males, including one who had moved in with her at age 18, were unwilling to testify, Mr. Frederico said, so the case centered on Mr. Eickmeyer. Though she did not go to jail, Ms. Tapp has been barred from public employment.
Mr. Eickmeyer said Ms. Tapp first approached him in February 2003 in the gym, telling him, "Oh, Jason Eickmeyer. So the rumors are true?"
"What rumors?" he asked.
"I heard you were pretty cute," he quoted her as saying.
They started flirting with each other in school and began talking for hours on the phone.
He asked to go over to her apartment, getting a lift from a cousin, and stopping on the way at a gas station to buy a rose. They had sex, he said, and he stayed the night, leaving totally smitten with the then-26-year-old teacher.
He said that was their only encounter, and that she turned her attention to others. "I lost control," he said.
"Boys are taken to emotional places they can't cope with," said Dr. Shakeshaft. "They are asked to keep things secret and to lie, which does harm to them. They often feel exploited and used."
"He was clearly shattered by it," Mr. Frederico said. After talking to police in 2005, Mr. Eickmeyer said, he got angry phone calls from friends, he said, and even a staff member.
"Suck it up," a friend told him. "So you had sex with a teacher. It is not the worst thing."
Cristina Rouvalis can be reached at [email protected] or 412-263-1572.
First published on March 16, 2008 at 12:00 amIzzy Brown was dubbed one of the brightest talents in English football as a youngster at West Brom but his career has stalled somewhat since.
Chelsea starlet Izzy Brown has posted a cryptic message on Twitter just hours after West Brom academy chief Steve Hopcroft claimed he left the club just as they were preparing to make him an “integral” part of the first team.
Chelsea controversially snapped up the then-16-year-old attacker in 2013, with the Baggies reportedly demanding a £1.2 million bill in a tribunal, according to the Telegraph, as they were unable to sign him to a professional contract due to Brown being under the age of 17.
The Peterborough-born winger, however, has only featured once in the Premier League for Chelsea and is currently embarking upon a season-long loan at Rotherham United after a disappointing stint in the Eredivisie with Vitesse in 2015-16.
And West Brom’s academy chief Hopcroft suggested that Brown departed the club he joined as a 13-year-old in 2010 at the wrong time in his development.
“He was the one that got away for me,” Hopcroft told The Star. “The manager at the time, Steve Clarke (below), was ready to make him an integral part of the team.
“We had a potential £20-30-40 million player who the fans would have loved, full of flair and skill. He could take on six players from his own half and score.
“I was bitterly disappointed, as was everyone in the academy. He’s still potentially a world-class player, the best we’ve lost, without a shadow of doubt.”
Later on Thursday afternoon, Brown posted a cryptic message on Twitter saying: “Don’t believe everything you read.”
SEE ALSO: Alan Stubbs promises an upturn in form from his young Rotherham side
Whether the now-19-year-old’s exclamation was in response to Hopcroft’s comments is uncertain, but what is definite is that Brown needs to make the most of a second successive loan spell away at Stamford Bridge due to the club’s reputation of letting young talent stagnate amid a succession of temporary deals.In June 2009, The Atlantic published a cover story on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development. The project, which began in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring an astonishing range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing.
Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, published Triumphs of Experience, a summation of the insights the study has yielded. Among them: “Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death. Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter. There was no significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150. Aging liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s. “I have consulted urologists about this,” Vaillant writes. “They have no idea why it might be so.”Shell Oil Co. has received another permit to drill in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, a milestone the company said will enable it to put back to work the last of five contracted rigs idled by the BP oil spill last year.
The permit is for a new well at Shell’s Europa field, located 140 miles southeast of New Orleans in nearly 4,000 feet of water. Production from the field will be tied back to Shell’s existing Mars offshore platform.
Shell, one of the largest producers in the deep-water Gulf, has two kinds of drilling rigs in the offshore region, those attached to Shell-owned production platforms and others contracted from third parties.
The company said the Europa permit will allow it to redeploy the last of five contracted rigs it has had on standby since last year when regulators enacted a ban on most deep-water drilling activity in the wake of BP’s deadly Macondo well blowout.
Though the moratorium was lifted in October, Interior Department regulators have been slow to approve new permits as they incorporate new safety and environmental rules for operating in the deep water — an ongoing source of frustration for the oil and gas industry.
“With this permit today, we can return more of our employees and contractors to their jobs,” Shell said in a statement today. “We want to acknowledge the ongoing work and progress with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to reach this important milestone, and we remain committed to the offshore and our safe operating practices.”
Shell is the operator of the Europa field with a 34 percent stake. Other partners include BP, with a 33 percent interest, Agip with 32 percent, and ConocoPhillips at 1 percent.This article is about political blacklists in the 1940s and 1950s. For the 1950 short documentary film about this, see The Hollywood Ten. For the survey of unproduced screenplays, see Black List (survey)
Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the practice of denying employment to screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and American entertainment professionals during the mid-20th century because they were accused of having Communist ties or sympathies. Artists were barred from work on the basis of their membership, alleged membership in, or sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or their refusal to assist investigations into the party's activities. Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, from the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit or verifiable, but it directly damaged the careers of scores of individuals working in the film industry.
Hollywood Ten [ edit ]
The first systematic Hollywood blacklist was instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. These personalities were subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in October.[1] The contempt citation included a criminal charge, which led to a highly publicized trial and an eventual conviction with a maximum of one year in jail in addition to a $1,000 fine.[2] The Congressional action prompted a group of studio executives, acting under the aegis of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, to fire the artists – the so-called Hollywood Ten – and made what has become known as the Waldorf Statement. It was announced via a news release after the major producers met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and it included a condemnation of the personalities involved, effectively ostracizing those named from the industry.[3] These producers instituted a compulsory oaths of loyalty from among its employees with the threat of a blacklist.[2]
Blacklist [ edit ]
On June 22, 1950, a pamphlet entitled Red Channels was published. Focused on the field of broadcasting, it identified 151 entertainment industry professionals in the context of "Red Fascists and their sympathizers". Soon, most of those named, along with a host of other artists, were barred from employment in most of the entertainment field.
The blacklist lasted until 1960, when Dalton Trumbo, a Communist Party member from 1943 to 1948[4] and member of the Hollywood Ten, was credited as the screenwriter of the highly successful film Exodus, and later publicly acknowledged by actor Kirk Douglas for writing the screenplay for the movie Spartacus.[5] A number of those blacklisted, however, were still barred from work in their professions for years afterward.
History [ edit ]
Background [ edit ]
The Hollywood blacklist was rooted in events of the 1930s and the early 1940s, encompassing the height of the Great Depression and World War II. Two major film industry strikes during the 1930s increased tensions between the Hollywood producers and the unions, particularly the Screen Writers Guild.[6]
The American Communist Party lost substantial support after the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938 and the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. The U.S. government began turning its attention to the possible links between Hollywood and the party during this period. Under then-chairman Martin Dies, Jr., the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report in 1938 claiming that communism was pervasive in Hollywood. Two years later, Dies privately took testimony from a former Communist Party member, John L. Leech, who named forty-two movie industry professionals as Communists. After Leech repeated his charges in supposed confidence to a Los Angeles grand jury, many of the names were reported in the press, including those of stars Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, Melvyn Douglas and Fredric March, among other well-known Hollywood figures. Dies said he would "clear" all those who co-operated by meeting with him in what he called "executive session". Within two weeks of the grand jury leak, all those on the list except for actress Jean Muir had met with the HUAC chairman. Dies "cleared" everyone except actor Lionel Stander, who was fired by the movie studio, Republic Pictures, where he was contracted.[7]
In 1941, producer Walt Disney took out an ad in Variety, the industry trade magazine, declaring his conviction that "Communist agitation" was behind a cartoonists and animators' strike. According to historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, "In actuality, the strike had resulted from Disney's overbearing paternalism, high-handedness, and insensitivity."[8] Inspired by Disney, California State Senator Jack Tenney, chairman of the state legislature's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, launched an investigation of "Reds in movies". The probe fell flat, and was mocked in several Variety headlines.[8]
The subsequent wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union brought the American Communist Party newfound credibility. During the war, membership in the party reached a peak of 50,000.[9] As World War II drew to a close, perceptions changed again, with communism increasingly becoming a focus of American fears and hatred. In 1945, Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the neofascist America First Party, began giving speeches in Los Angeles assailing the "alien minded Russian Jews in Hollywood".[10] Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin, a member of HUAC, held a press conference to declare that "one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this Government has its headquarters in Hollywood... the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States". Rankin promised, "We're on the trail of the tarantula now".[11] Reports of Soviet repression in Eastern and Central Europe in the war's aftermath added more fuel to what became known as the "Second Red Scare". The growth of conservative political influence and the Republican triumph in the 1946 Congressional elections, which saw the party take control of both the House and Senate, led to a major revival of institutional anticommunist activity, publicly spearheaded by HUAC. The following year, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, issued a pamphlet advising producers on the avoidance of "subtle communistic touches" in their films. Its counsel revolved around a list of ideological prohibitions, such as "Don't smear the free-enterprise system... Don't smear industrialists... Don't smear wealth... Don't smear the profit motive... Don't deify the 'common man'... Don't glorify the collective".[12]
The blacklist begins (1946–1947) [ edit ]
On July 29, 1946, William R. Wilkerson, publisher and founder of The Hollywood Reporter, published a "TradeView" column entitled "A Vote For Joe Stalin". It named as Communist sympathizers Dalton Trumbo, Maurice Rapf, Lester Cole, Howard Koch, Harold Buchman, John Wexley, Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Salemson, Henry Meyers, Theodore Strauss, and John Howard Lawson. In August and September 1946, Wilkerson published other columns containing names of numerous purported Communists and sympathizers. They became known as "Billy's List" and "Billy's Blacklist".[13][14] In 1962, when Wilkerson died, his THR obituary stated he had "named names, pseudonyms and card numbers and was widely credited with being chiefly responsible for preventing communists from becoming entrenched in Hollywood production – something that foreign film unions have been unable to do."[15] In a 65th-anniversary article in 2012, Wilkerson's son apologized for the paper's role in the blacklist, stating that his father was motivated by revenge for his own thwarted ambition to own a studio.[16]
In October 1947, drawing upon the list named in The Hollywood Reporter, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed a number of persons working in the Hollywood film industry to testify at hearings. The committee had declared its intention to investigate whether Communist agents and sympathizers had been planting propaganda in U.S. films.[14][17]
The hearings opened with appearances by Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild. Disney testified that the threat of Communists in the film industry was a serious one, and named specific people who had worked for him as probable Communists.[18] Reagan testified that a small clique within his union was using "communist-like tactics" in attempting to steer union policy, but that he did not know if those (unnamed) members were communists or not, and that |
of online entertainment a run for the money. Online apparel holds users' attention for an average of nine minutes. Online resale averages 45 minutes. Compare that to Facebook, which averages 35 minutes a visit, and you can easily see that online resale is taking time away from other online recreation.
How Big Is This Right Now?
thredUP doesn't release numbers, but they've said publicly they recently had a day where they processed 100,000 garments. It seems that they have the potential to do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. For the last four years, they've been growing at over 100% per year, if they keep that up they'll certainly reach the hundreds of millions soon. Consider the great bargain on premium denim. The average price of premium denim on thredUP is 80% off retail. With those kinds of prices and the proven desire of consumers for off-price product, it's hard to imagine this business isn't poised for continued, massive growth.
Who Should Be Worried About This?
The discount market is growing and companies like TJX and Ross Stores are leading the market. But they have no response to the growth of secondhand online apparel sales and it's inevitable that this will impact their market share. Half of thredUP customers say their secondhand purchases replace what they would have bought at TJ Maxx or Marshall's. It's probably not true that every TJ Maxx customer would shop on thredUP. But you can argue that every thredUP customer that would shop at TJ Maxx and is shopping less there and at Marshalls and Ross Stores because of thredUP. The impact of online secondhand shopping is only growing.
Of course, Amazon is the leader in online retail. But they have no capacity to compete in this sector right now. They can't handle secondhand clothes being sent to them, don't have a system to evaluate each garment's price and have no facility for handling 100,000 garments a day where each one is unique and not in a new package. They are behind in the secondhand market and it is a danger.
eBay, which will handle about $90 billion worth of product this year, has moved away from secondhand product. Over 80% of products sold on eBay today are new. They are ceding this market to comers like thredUP, The RealReal and MaterialWorld.
As the market for online secondhand grows, there will be more companies that are threatened. Macy's has expanded its effort in off-price and Nordstrom Rack and Neiman's are putting more effort into it too. As more companies enter the off-price market, they will be affected by increased competition and the new business models like thredUP that are taking market share.Pep Guardiola has become adept at using midfielders 'out of position' at centre-back. But what if that was the plan all along?
“It’s become all about specialists. Is football a collective and harmonious game? Or is it a question of putting x amount of talented players in and balancing them out with y amount of specialists?”
- Arrigo Sacchi
How Barcelona could look with Fabregas replacing Puyol
GOALKEEPER
Victor Valdes
Victor Valdes
RIGHT-BACK
CENTRE BACK
CENTRE BACK
LEFT-BACK
Dani Alves
Sergio Busquets
Gerard Pique
Adriano
CENTRE MIDFIELD
CENTRE MIDFIELD
CENTRE MIDFIELD
Cesc Fabregas
Xavi
Andres Iniesta
RIGHT FORWARD
CENTRE FORWARD
LEFT FORWARD
Alexis Sanchez
Lionel Messi
David Villa
Barca's shorn specialists
Martin Caceres
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Dmytro Chygrynskiy
By Peter StauntonArrigo Sacchi, the innovator who coached AC Milan to a pair of European Cups, once declared that the next step in the evolution of football would be the conversion of the entire pitch to one midfield area. The teams at the vanguard of tactical rejuvenation would be able to count on players to line up in a range of positions on the field of play but actually function as midfielders; closing space and passing accurately within their sectors, using the ball intelligently, moving well off it.In an interview with the author Jonathan Wilson for the prize-winning book, 'Inverting the Pyramid', Sacchi stated that the proliferation of ‘specialists’ in certain positions has only served to inhibit the fluidity potentially contained within a group of players. For example, a playmaker, such as a Zidane, demands an enforcer like Makelele.In order to progress football, Sacchi told Wilson, universality was integral; it was necessary to eliminate specialists and forge a collective of performers capable of functioning as one liquid unit, no matter their nominated position of play. The Dutch model of Total Football, formulated and implemented by Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff at Ajax in the 1960s and 70s, brought with it interchangeability. Players would nominally be named at a position but would be competent and clever enough to press high, read the nuances of the match, fill in for absent colleagues and pick up the slack in many areas of the field.The players at Pep Guardiola's disposal, their utter adherence to the ideal and a work-rate unmatched by any team in Europe mean that Barcelona could be about to bring Sacchi's prediction to bear. And the acquisition of Cesc Fabregas, quite aside from being a trophy signing, could prompt the evolution. With Cesc in the ranks, Barcelona can play, in effect, with a team of midfielders; amalgamating the separate strands of defence, midfield and attack into one. Total domination of possession, total domination of space.Fabregas' arrival could mark the gradual elbowing from the first team of Carles Puyol, not Sergio Busquets or Xavi or Thiago Alcantara. A natural leader, a primordial tour-de-force, the heartbeat of the team he may be, but Puyol is irrevocably in decline. Each passing year chisels another chip from the man of granite. His replacement in the team, gradually at first, totally later, will be Fabregas.Dani Alves and Lionel Messi have been integral components in this Barca transition. They have redefined their positions. Cesc will bring the evolution further.Pep’s preference for playing a ‘defensive midfielder’ in an auxiliary centre-back role has raised eyebrows in the past although Yaya Toure, Busquets or Javier Mascherano have yet to prove they can’t actually do it. Barca have even done it, twice, in Champions League finals when orthodox central defenders were available. Moreover, the utilisation of midfield players in the back-line has been deliberate, measured and it is in line with Sacchi's heralding of tactical evolution.Busquets has featured in the centre of defence extensively in pre-season, Mascherano played there at Wembley while the ball-playing capabilities of Gerard Pique are not matched by many of his stature. The role of the central 'defender' will become obsolete in the Barcelona system; making way for one more passer, one more ball retainer, one more playmaker.Fabregas will come into the starting XI in midfield while Busquets or Mascherano will revert permanently to the rearguard. Those two have their defensive deficiencies; slow on the turn and uncomfortable under the high ball. But even specialist centre-backs suffer those blights. And, in all honesty, how much defending are Barcelona likely to do? They routinely keep the ball for 70 per cent of any given match so aerial onslaughts and rapid, repeated raids on their defensive lines are unlikely.Martin Caceres, Henrique and Gabriel Milito have all been shown the exit door this summer; specialist defenders. They have been cast on the scrapheap onto which Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Dmytro Chygrynskiy were thrown last year. Zlatan is not compatible with the Barcelona system. Chygrynskiy never looked like a Barca player. Neither is adaptable. Neither has a second function. Guardiola is gradually ridding the team of'specialists', in a positional sense, and nurturing a squad who will treat the entire pitch as a midfield area. Rapid possession win-backs, quick passes, every man, potentially, the playmaker.Puyol and fellow veteran Eric Abidal, as well as David Villa, will be the only exceptions to the rule this season. The two defenders will be phased out. Indeed, the signing of the versatile Adriano last summer ago could in hindsight be seen as Pep's first attempt to implement a midfield of sorts in his preferred back-line although it has not quite worked like that as yet. Villa, a centre-forward by trade, has been reinvented as a wide attacking player capable of devastation in front of goal when on form. Even he is now a midfielder.Cesc has not come home to replace Xavi, that honour will eventually be bestowed on Alcantara. He has come home to eventually supplant Puyol and take Barcelona, tactically, to another realm. We stand on the precipice of Total Football, Cruyff’s Barcelona dream-team and 30 years of Masia graduates drilled to do things the Barcelona way being assimilated together in one team.The best team in the world, playing in sync, playing fluidly, using the entire pitch as their personal fiefdom, closing the spaces high up the field, perpetually recycling the ball once they seize it. It's complex and it keeps the ball and it tires you out. A Barcelona team which are far, far ahead of their rivals will evolve the game as we know it.
Follow Peter Staunton onBy Christine Harris
Most people think of sea turtles as exotic creatures you encounter while snorkeling off the shores of tropical islands, but many sea turtles will journey as far north as the Gulf of Maine. In fact, leatherback sea turtles will travel as far north as the Arctic Sea in pursuit of jellyfish. Like all reptiles, sea turtles are cold-blooded and abrupt decreases in water temperature can leave them stunned. This is what happens to dozens of sea turtles that wash ashore on the beaches of Cape Cod Bay each fall in Massachusetts.
This fall has seen the most stranded turtles of any fall on record. The turtles are juveniles that rode the jet stream northward and have been foraging in the area during the warmer summer months. As the temperatures cool the turtles begin to head south but many of them become trapped in Cape Cod Bay. A cold snap in early November quickly cooled water temperatures cold-stunning many turtles. When they become stunned the turtles can no longer swim and are carried along by wind and currents. Fortunately, coordinated efforts from volunteers, non-profit and government organizations, and numerous facilities in Florida, North Carolina and beyond have saved hundreds of these doomed turtles.
Between November 3 and November 26 the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary with the help of countless volunteers and the Cape Cod National Seashore recovered over 1,000 sea turtles, both alive and dead. Of those turtles, around 600 were found alive. About eighty percent of the turtles recovered were Kemp’s ridleys, the world’s most critically-endangered sea turtle species, while the remainder were green sea turtles and loggerhead sea turtles, also endangered species. Even a couple of unusual hybrid sea turtles have been found. Scientists are hopeful that the fact that such large numbers of juvenile Kemp’s ridleys have washed up could be an indicator that the species is being protected on its nesting grounds on the Gulf of Mexico.
With such a large number of turtles, the small Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary was soon teeming with chilled turtles. Typically stranded turtles found by the Sanctuary are brought to the New England Aquarium’s Rehabilitation Facility in Quincy, Massachusetts to continue their recovery. With the unprecedented influx of cold-stunned turtles this fall, the New England Aquarium facility quickly filled and other rehab options were needed. Fortunately for hundreds of turtles, aquariums and rehab facilities across the East stepped up to take them in.
In the early morning hours of November 26, 193 Kemp’s ridleys that were at the New England Aquarium’s Rehabilitation Facility were loaded into padded boxes and driven to Joint Base Cape Cod. There the turtles were loaded onto a Coast Guard HC-144 aircraft that flew them to Orlando, Florida. After arriving in Orlando the turtles were distributed to seven marine animal rehab facilities in Northern and Central Florida. The same morning another fifty Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles were brought to Norwood, Massachusetts where a private pilot met them and flew them to North Carolina to be distributed to aquariums.
Though the influx has slowed, turtles are continuing to be found on Cape Cod Bay beaches regularly though at this point most that are washing up are dead. A dedicated group of people continue to survey the beaches daily in search of any survivors.
AdvertisementsWhile it is a cool thing to click selfies while hanging out with your buddies, it seems like we Indians are terrible at it, at least when it comes to the safety aspect.
AFP/ Representative Image
According to the Washington Post in 2015, some 27 cases of deaths were reported from across the world while trying to take selfies. Out of the 27 more than half were reported from India.
In 2015, Indians taking selfies died while posing in front of an oncoming train, in a boat that tipped over at a picnic, on a cliff that gave way and crumbled into a 60-foot ravine and on the slippery edge of a scenic river canal. Also, in September, a Japanese tourist trying to take a selfie fell down steps at the Taj Mahal, suffering fatal head injuries.
thinkstockphotos/ Representative Image
Don't Miss 1.5 K SHARES 1.5 K SHARES 1.2 K SHARES 4.7 K SHARES
Following the drowning of two people last week, while clicking selfies, Mumbai police had this week identified 15 “no-selfie zones”in the city.
While majority of the selfie-mishaps are caused by carelessness, the craze for a 'cool selfie' like the one below could also put you in a spot of trouble.
And remember... don't try this at home!
FacebookHouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told a Lebanese Muslim immigrant Trump’s executive order permanently banning Syrian refugee resettlement “has not made us more safe,” calling it “reckless.”
“You opposed President Trump’s plan to stop refugees from coming to the U.S.,” said Nedal Tamer to Pelosi during Tuesday’s town hall hosted on CNN. “Countries like Syria. I am Lebanese American Muslim. There are countries that harbor radical Islamic groups, and [teach] teenagers to hate anyone who is not Muslim.”
That’s all it takes for some to “come as a refugee and create a problem here,” Tamer continued. “How can you guarantee the safety for all Americans… If we let these refugees to come [in]?”
Every refugee or “newcomer” who arrives in the U.S. with “hopes, dreams, aspirations” makes “America more American,” Pelosi said.
“The reason I oppose this specific thing that President Trump did was the following: Refugees have the most stringent vetting of all newcomers to our country. The most stringent vetting,” she said. “And so, when he cuts off Syria, largely those are refugees coming, the most stringent vetting. We take an oath to support the American people and the Constitution of the United States. It’s our responsibility. So we’re not casual about our reasons to, our need to protect the American people.”
“But we have to be strong, and we have to be smart. We don’t have to be reckless and rash,” she said. “And we don’t have to discriminate against people because of their religion. And so, that’s why I oppose what he’s done with the seven countries. He has no case, in my view, with the refugees.”
While thanking Tamer for his question, Pelosi also revealed she believed that billions of foreigners around the world have a “right” to emigrate to America, a common leftist talking point. She said she had visited Lebanon and hoped “the way things go, I hope people can enjoy staying home and enjoying their lives there, as well as exercising the right to come to America.”
Trump’s executive order “has not made us more safe,” Pelosi told Tamer.
Tamer has been profiled by the media before: He’s a Trump-supporting, Lebanese Muslim immigrant living with his wife and children in heavily Muslim Dearborn, Michigan, where he works in real estate. Last April, The New York Post quoted his praise of Trump and his proposals to control immigration: “I like the fact that he’s a little nuts. He’s got the good heart, he cares about America.”
In another interview last May, Tamer strongly opposed further Islamic immigration into the U.S.: “We don’t want these groups to come in here, or anyone with these refugee groups to come in here, and create any problem here,” he said to Al Arabiya English. “We’re going to pay the price, and that’s why the Muslim community and the Arab community have got to understand, every time we step forwards, we take 10 steps back because of these problems.”
“If you love this country, then you support this man. I will say this to any Arabic Muslim: if you love this country then you support this man,” Tamer added.On April 10th, 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published, and whenever I hear anyone say that they are going to “write The Great American Novel,” I am pretty sure that this is the book that is swimming in everyone’s head. I know it is the first one I think of, and I am not alone. When the movie was coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio, I celebrated this anniversary of the novel by becoming completely obsessed with the May premiere of the big Baz Luhrmann film version, and I began a big one-month countdown to the opening. I wasn’t sure if I could wait that long, but if Jay Gatsby could wait five years to see Daisy Fay Buchanan again, then I guessed I could wait one month for this film. Guess what? I survived.
But whether you loved or hated the Leo movie, the Redford version, or the play version that was performed in Galveston last month at The Grand, here are ten great things about The Great Gatsby (the book, that is) that will remind you of why it is just so, well, great.
1. Best Opening Lines in a Novel: “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
This is great because you can also use this on your own kids, even if it isn’t really true.
2. Best First Person Narrator: Even if you think that Nick Carraway is sort of a snob, he reels you into the novel as if you were part of a conspiracy, and you are in the thick of that excitement from the first page until the last. He is “within and without,” a role that Fitzgerald himself played as an autobiographical writer, and a role the reader feels as if he or she is playing when observing and judging his intricate narrative.
3. Best Settings: It is hard to beat the decadence of Long Island, both the grit and the glamour of New York City, the glimmers of France and Montenegro, and did you know that San Francisco is smack dab in the Midwest?
4. Best Golden Girl: Daisy Fay Buchanan has great lines like “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness” and “Sophisticated–God, I’m sophisticated!” and “You want too much.” You have to figure out if she is being ironic, and Nick finds this irritating in women, so therefore, he does not trust her. Or any other woman.
5. Best BFF Sidekick: Jordan Baker. I know she is morally vapid, but if it were not for her, we would have no backstory whatsoever about Daisy’s prior love for Gatsby. And she says things like “Tom’s got some woman in New York.” If that doesn’t liven up a dinner party, I don’t know what will.
6. Best Bad Guy: Tom Buchanan, AKA “Mr. Civilization is going to pieces.” I still cannot believe that he knows the word “Nordic.” Even with all of that money, he is hard to like, and Fitzgerald had accomplished something right there given the American tendency to forgive anything and everything in those who have money.
7. Best Original Symbols: Even if you have not read a lick of The Great Gatsby, you might have heard of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, or the huge advertorial eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg….. (NOTE: If you are in my 1330 university English class, and you have heard of these things from anyone called Cliff or Spark, I do not want to know about it.)
8. Most Excruciating Film Versions: Robert Redford wouldn’t even go to the premiere of his 1974 film version with Mia Farrow, and I could hardly watch Mira Sorvino playing Louisville belle Daisy Fay in the A and E miniseries version…..it is a hard novel to put on the screen because so much of it is in Nick Carraway’s head. I love Leonardo DiCaprio, just not so much in this film: to many accents, too much screaming in the Plaza Hotel scene, too many lines that were not from the novel. But if you turn the sound to mute, he was perfect!!,
9. Best Moral Dilemmas: Love or Rules? Forgetting the past, or changing it? Marriage or adultery? Learning the bond business or fasttracking to bootlegging? Goodness, the roaring twenties were not quiet for a reason, and this novel helps us figure out why.
10. Best Closing Lines of a Novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I sure wish I had written that line. But Fitzgerald did, and it is great every single time.
This is The Great American Novel, and the best part is that for right now, it still is.Spark testing is a method of determining the general classification of ferrous materials. It normally entails taking a piece of metal, usually scrap, and applying it to a grinding wheel in order to observe the sparks emitted.[1] These sparks can be compared to a chart or to sparks from a known test sample to determine the classification. Spark testing also can be used to sort ferrous materials, establishing the difference from one another by noting whether the spark is the same or different.
Spark testing is used because it is quick, easy, and inexpensive. Moreover, test samples do not have to be prepared in any way, so, often, a piece of scrap is used. The main disadvantage to spark testing is its inability to identify a material positively; if positive identification is required, chemical analysis must be used.[2] The spark comparison method also damages the material being tested, at least slightly.
Spark testing most often is used in tool rooms, machine shops, heat treating shops, and foundries.[3]
Process [ edit ]
A bench grinder is usually used to create the sparks, but sometimes this is not convenient, so a portable grinder is used. In either case, the grinding wheel must have adequate surface velocity, at least 23 m/s (4500 surface feet per minute (sfpm)), but should be between 38 and 58 m/s (7500–11,500 sfpm). The wheel should be coarse and hard, therefore aluminium oxide or carborundum often are employed. The test area should be in an area where there is no bright light shining directly into the observer's eyes. Moreover, the grinding wheel and surrounding area should be dark so that the sparks can be observed clearly. The test sample is then touched lightly to the grinding wheel to produce the sparks.[1][2]
The important spark characteristics are color, volume, nature of the spark, and length. Note that the length is dependent on the amount of pressure applied to the grinding wheel, so this can be a poor comparison tool if the pressure is not exactly the same for the samples. Also, the grinding wheel must be dressed frequently to remove metallic build-up.[1][2]
Compressed air method [ edit ]
Another less common method for creating sparks is heating up the sample to red heat and then applying compressed air to the sample. The compressed air supplies enough oxygen to ignite the sample and give off sparks. This method is more accurate than using a grinder because it will always give off sparks of the same length for the same sample. The compressed air applies in essence the same "pressure" each time. This makes observations of the spark length a much more reliable characteristic for comparison.[4]
Automated spark testing [ edit ]
Automated spark testing has been developed to remove the reliance upon operator skill and experience, thereby increasing reliability. The system relies upon spectroscopy, spectrometry, and other methods to "observe" the spark pattern. It has been found that this system can determine the difference between two materials that give off sparks that are indistinguishable to the human eye.[2]
Spark characteristics [ edit ]
(A) High-carbon steel
(B) Manganese steel
(C) Tungsten steel
(D) Molybdenum steel
(B) Mild steel
(C) Steel with 0.5 to 0.85% carbon
(D) High-carbon tool steel
(E) High-speed steel
(F) Manganese steel
(G)
(H) Special magnet steel (A) Wrought iron(B) Mild steel(C) Steel with 0.5 to 0.85% carbon(D) High-carbon tool steel(E) High-speed steel(F) Manganese steel(G) Mushet steel (H) Special magnet steel
Wrought iron Wrought iron sparks flow out in straight lines. The tails of the sparks widen out near the end, similar to a leaf.[1][5] Mild steel Mild steel sparks are similar to wrought iron's, except they will have tiny forks and their lengths will vary more. The sparks will be white in color.[1][5] Medium-carbon steel This steel has more forking than mild steel and a wide variety of spark lengths, with more near the grinding wheel.[5] High-carbon steel High-carbon steel has a bushy spark pattern (lots of forking) that starts at the grinding wheel. The sparks are not as bright as the medium-carbon steel ones.[5] Manganese steel Manganese steel has medium length sparks that fork twice before ending.[5] High-speed steel High-speed steel has a faint red spark that sparks at the tip.[5] 300-series stainless steel These sparks are not so dense as the carbon steel sparks, do not fork, and are orange to straw in color.[2] 310-series stainless steel These sparks are much shorter and thinner than the 300-series sparks. They are red to orange in color and do not fork.[2] 400-series stainless steel 400-series sparks are similar to 300-series sparks, but are slightly longer and have forks at the ends of the sparks.[2] Cast iron Cast iron has very short sparks that begin at the grinding wheel.[1] Nickel and cobalt high-temperature alloys These sparks are thin and very short, they are dark-red in color, and do not fork.[2] Cemented carbide Cemented carbide has sparks under 3 inches, which are dark-red in color and do not fork.[6] Titanium Although titanium is a non-ferrous metal, it gives off a great deal of sparks. These sparks are easily distinguishable from ferrous metals, as they are a very brilliant, blinding, white color.[7]
History [ edit ]
In 1909,[8] Max Bermann, an engineer in Budapest, was the first to discover that spark testing can be used reliably to classify ferrous material. He originally claimed to be able to distinguish different types of ferrous materials based on percent carbon and principal alloying elements. Moreover, he claimed to achieve an accuracy of 0.01% carbon content.[3][9]
Tschorn [10] produced an exhaustive treatment of spark testing. His book, Spark Atlas of Steels, along with Spark Testing by Gladwin represent the two most comprehensive texts on the subject [11]
As of the late 1980s, the industrial use of spark testing is not as common as it used to be.[12]
References [ edit ]NPA: Number of yakuza members drops sharply in 2012
TOKYO (TR) – The National Police Agency (NPA) announced on Thursday that the total number of organized crime members suffered a dramatic decline in the past year, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Mar. 7).
According to figures released by the police, Japan had 63,200 gang members, a decline of 7,100 from the year before, marking the first time since 1958 that the total fell below 70,000.
In 1992, the year that the Anti-Organized Crime Law came into effect, the total number of gang members was over 90,000. Between 2004 and 2003, the number increased by 1,200 to 87,000. In each of the eight subsequent years, however, the figure has steadily dropped.
The NPA credits the ongoing legislative push to eradicate criminal organizations as the reason for the decline. A clampdown on cash flows and gang-group activities were mentioned as specific measures that led to the drop.
An official with the NPA warns that the results could be somewhat misleading. “Since there are restrictions on the activities of those who have joined gangs, there is a possibility that some supposed non-members are actually doing business under the radar,” the official said.
In 2012, the number of arrests of regular members and associate members dropped by 2,130 to 24,139, the majority of which were due to violations of the Stimulants Control Law (6,285 cases), theft (2,794), and blackmail (1,334).‘Tis the season when things go bump in the night and crawl out from under the bed — at least on TV.
In preparation for Halloween, it’s time to plan for all the classic horror in store on the small screen. Classic horror fans will devour TCM’s themed nights for Christopher Lee, Frankenstein, and every creepy crawly thing over the course of October. Meanwhile, the brave of heart can watch the all-day Halloween movie marathon on AMC or Stephen King central on IFC. For those who scare easy but still want to get in on the monster action, Freeform’s presentation of the live action Scooby Doo movies might be best.
Read on for the specifics, and stay tuned for additions as we update the guide all month long.
All times Eastern.
Oct. 6
IFC: Stephen King marathon
7:45 a.m. Stephen King’s The Shining
9:45 a.m. Stephen King’s The Shining
11:45 a.m. Stephen King’s The Shining
1:45 p.m. The Langoliers
3:45 p.m. The Langoliers
6 p.m. Stephen King’s The Stand
8 p.m. Stephen King’s The Stand
10 p.m. Stephen King’s The Stand
Oct. 7
TCM: Terror Classic Movies — ’20s Horror
8 p.m. Nosferatu (1922)
9:45 p.m. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
IFC
12:30 p.m. The Mist
3:15 p.m. Red Dragon
6 p.m. Hostel
8 p.m. Orphan
10:45 p.m. Hostel
NEXT: Week 2 [pagebreak]
Oct. 9
TCM: Monster of the Month: Frankenstein
8 p.m. The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
9:15 p.m. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
10:45 p.m. House of Frankenstein (1945)
Oct. 10
TCM: Star of the Month: Christopher Lee
8 p.m. The Face of Fu Manchu
10 p.m. The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966)
11:45 p.m. The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1968)
1:30 a.m. Nothing But the Night (1972)
3:15 a.m. Scream and Scream Again (1970)
RELATED: Fall TV’s Emerging Trend is All About Twists
Oct. 13
AMC FearFest: Halloween marathon
9 a.m. Halloween (1978)
11 a.m. Halloween II
1 p.m. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
3 p.m. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
5 p.m. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
7 p.m. Halloween (2007)
9:30 p.m. Halloween (1978)
11:30 p.m. Halloween II
Oct. 14
TCM: Terror Classic Movies – Horror comedies
8 p.m. The Cat and the Canary (1939)
9:30 p.m. The Fearless Vampire Killers (1966)
11:30 p.m. Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
1 a.m. Young Frankenstein (1974)
3 a.m. Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967)
4:30 a.m. Spooks Run Wild (1941)
5:45 a.m. Ghosts on the Loose (1943)
AMC FearFest
9 a.m. Friday the 13th
11 a.m. Friday the 13th, Part 2
1 p.m. Friday the 13th – Part III
3 p.m. Friday the 13th: The final Chapter
5 p.m. Friday the 13th — A New Beginning
7 p.m. Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives
9 p.m. Friday the 13th Part VII — The New Blood
11 p.m. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Oct. 15
SyFy
8 a.m. Big Ass Spider!
10 a.m. The Omen
12:30 p.m. Shadow of the Vampire
2:30 p.m. Identity
4:30 p.m. From Dusk till Dawn
7 p.m. Stake Land
9 p.m. Stake Land 2
FXX
11 a.m. Helloby
1:30 p.m. Underworld: Awakening
3:30 p.m. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
5:30 p.m. Riddick
8 p.m. Deliver Us From Evil
10:30 p.m. Deliver Us From Evil
AMC FearFest
7 a.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street
9 a.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
11 a.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
1 p.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
3 p.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
5 p.m. A Nightmare on Elm Street
7 p.m. Child’s Play 2
9 p.m. Child’s Play 3
11 p.m. Bride of Chucky
NEXT: Week 3 [pagebreak]
Oct. 16
SyFy
9 a.m. The Possession
11 a.m. Stake Land 2
1 p.m. Stake Land
3 p.m. Warm Bodies
5 p.m. Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines
7 p.m. Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
9 p.m. Wrong Turn
11 p.m. Sinister
MTV
3:40 p.m. Friday After Next
6 p.m. Friday
8:20 p.m.Friday After Next
10:40 p.m.Friday
FXX
4 p.m. – 8 p.m.The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror marathon
Fox
8 p.m.The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXVII
TCM: Monster of the Month: Frankenstein
8 p.m. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
9:45 p.m. The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
11:15 p.m. Black Cats and Broomsticks (1955)
11:15 p.m. Who’s Superstitious? short (1943)
12 a.m. Kurutta Ippeiji (1926)
AMC FearFest
7 a.m. The Walking Dead all-day marathon
Oct. 17
SyFy
6 a.m. Darklight
8 a.m. Day of Reckoning
10 a.m. Sinister
12:30 a.m. Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines
2:30 p.m. Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
4:30 p.m. Wrong Turn 6:30 p.m. The Incredible Hulk
9 p.m. Maleficent
11 p.m. Silent Hill: Revelation
Food Network
4 p.m. – 8 p.m. Halloween Wars marathon
TCM: Star of the Month: Christopher Lee
8 p.m.Horror Hotel (1960)
9:30 p.m. Horror Express (1972)
11:15 p.m.The House that Dripped Blood (1970)
1:15 a.m.The Creeping Flesh (1972)
3 a.m. The Oblong Box (1969)
4:45 a.m.The House that Dripped Blood (1970)
AMC FearFest
9 a.m. Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight
10:30 a.m.The Omen
1 p.m. Damien: Omen II
3:30 p.m.Omen III: The Final Conflict
6 p.m. The Walking Dead marathon continues
Oct. 18
SyFy
7:30 a.m. We Are Still Here
9:30 a.m. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
12 p.m. Silent Hill: Revelation
2 p.m. The Incredible Hulk
4:30 p.m. Push
7 p.m. Maleficent
MTV
6:30 p.m. Carrie
9 p.m. Scream: The TV Series Halloween Special 11:02 p.m. Texas Chainsaw 3D
IFC
6 a.m. The Shining Part 1
8 a.m. The Shining Part 2
10 a.m. The Shining Part 3
12 p.m. The Shining Part 1
2 p.m. The Shining Part 2
4 p.m. The Shining Part 3
AMC FearFest
9 a.m. House of Haunted Hill
11 a.m.The Amityville Horror
1:30 p.m.Amityville II: The Possession
4 p.m. The Amityville Horror
6 p.m. The Walking Dead marathon continues
Oct. 19
ABC
8 p.m. It’s the Great Pumpkin,Charlie Brown |
resettlement. We haven’t seen these levels of evictions in the last five years since the Emergency."[5]
In response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed for study and statements by civil society groups, a report by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) - an arm of the Habitat International Coalition - detailed the social and environmental consequences of the event.[6] It stated that no tolerance zones for beggars are enforced in Delhi, and the city has arbitrarily arrested homeless citizens under the "Bombay Prevention of Begging Act 1959".m
Labour laws violations [ edit ]
Campaigners in India have accused the organisers of enormous and systematic violations of labour laws at construction sites. Human Rights Law Network reports that independent investigations have discovered more than 70 cases where workers have died in accidents at construction sites since work began.[7] Although official numbers have not been released, it is estimated that over 415,000 contract daily wage workers are working on Games projects.[8] Unskilled workers are paid ₹85 (US$1.20) to ₹100 (US$1.40) per day while skilled workers are paid ₹120 (US$1.70) to ₹130 (US$1.80) INR per day for eight hours of work. Workers also state that they are paid ₹134 (US$1.90) to ₹150 (US$2.10) for 12 hours of work (eight hours plus four hours of overtime). Both these wages contravene the stipulated Delhi state minimum wage of ₹152 (US$2.10) for eight hours of work.[9] Nearly 50 construction workers have died in the past two years while employed on Games projects.[10]
These represent violations of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948; Interstate Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Condition of Services) Act 1979, and the constitutionally enshrined fundamental rights per the 1982 Supreme Court of India judgement on Asiad workers.[11] The public have been banned from the camps where workers live and work – a situation which human rights campaigners say prevents the garnering of information regarding labour conditions and number of workers.[11]
There have been documented instances of the presence of young children at hazardous construction sites, due to a lack of child care facilities for women workers living and working in the labour camp style work sites.[12] Furthermore, workers on the site of the main Commonwealth stadium have reportedly been issued with hard hats, yet most work in open-toed sandals and live in cramped tin tenements in which illnesses are rife.[13] The High Court of Delhi is presently hearing a public interest petition relating to employers not paying employees for overtime and it has appointed a four-member committee to submit a report on the alleged violations of workers rights.[12][14]
During the construction of the Games Village, there was controversy over financial mismanagement,[15] profiteering by the Delhi Development Authority and private real estate companies,[16] and inhumane working conditions.[17]
Child labour [ edit ]
CNN has broadcast evidence showing children, as young as seven, being used in the construction of the game venues. According to Siddharth Kara, who provided CNN with the evidence, he documented 14 cases of child labor within a few days. In reply to a question whether it could have been just a case of kids being present at the construction site along with their parents, he replied: "It's not just kids playing in the dirt or using a hammer as a toy." He further stated about the kids: "They're told to do the work and they just do the work. They don't know that they should be in school or that they should be playing."[18][19]
Even though the New Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit claimed that nobody had approached her, according to CNN, they had tried to contact her as far back as 23 July 2010. In spite of repeated attempts, according to them, no official reply was ever made.[18]
Urban change [ edit ]
Mitu Sengupta, a professor of politics at Ryerson University, Canada, points out that there is a "tradition of using 'urban spectacles' such as the Olympics and World’s Fairs to enhance a city’s global recognition, image and status, and to push through controversial policy reforms that might otherwise linger in the pending file for years (it is easier to undercut local opposition under the pressure of a fixed deadline and the international spotlight).” She writes that the reforms involved are often "the invention of an affluent, globally connected minority that is relatively detached from local conditions and the local population". The 2010 Commonwealth Games, she says, are being used to invigorate an elite-driven program of urban transformation" that centers on privatization, securitization, and the construction of "monuments to vanity".[20] Sengupta expands upon this argument in a subsequent article in Z Magazine[21] Amita Baviskar, a professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, makes a similar argument, on how mega-events, like the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, are used to advance narrow agendas of urban reform that cater to the middle class and rich. She focuses on how, in preparation for the Commonwealth Games, the city's slums were bulldozed in order to make room for shopping malls and expensive real estate.[22]
Sex slavery and prostitution boom [ edit ]
There has been a boom in the number of young girls, mostly from impoverished parts of India, coming to Delhi after being offered jobs by disguised criminals, only to be taken prisoner and forced into sex slavery. The number of victims is believed to be in the hundreds. Many brothels have been running English courses for sex workers and upgrading their facilities in anticipation of a business upturn during the games.[23] Overseas prostitutes are also expected to come as tourists and ply their trade.[24] One anti-trafficking NGO has claimed that there are reports of 40,000 women being brought in from northeastern India alone. A spokesperson said that recruits from that part of India were favoured because of their lighter skin.[25] It has been reported that over 3,000 bar girls in Mumbai have stopped going to work; this has been blamed on an exodus to Delhi for the Commonwealth Games.[26]
Organisational failure [ edit ]
Vigilance-related irregularities and Over-Invoicing [ edit ]
On 28 July 2010, the Central Vigilance Commission, an Indian government body created to address governmental corruption, released a report showing irregularities in up to 14 CWG projects.[27] As per official reports, in total 129 works in 71 organisations have been inspected.[28] The detailed preliminary findings included the award of work contracts at higher prices, poor quality assurance and management, and work contracts awarded to ineligible agencies.[29]
There are also allegations of widespread corruption in various aspects of organising the games including procurement and awarding contracts for constructing the game venues.[30] The Commonwealth Games Organising Committee on 5 August 2010 suspended joint director T S Darbari and M Jayachandran following the report of the three-member panel which was probing the financial irregularities related to the Queen's Baton Relay.[31]
Also, Organising Committee treasurer Anil Khanna resigned from the post in the wake of allegations that his son's firm had secured a contract for laying synthetic courts at a tennis stadium.[32] The GlobalPost news agency reports that scandals have come to light, such as "shadowy off-shore firms, forged emails, inexplicable payments to bogus companies and inflated bills – for every purchase from toilet paper to treadmills."[33] Among the alleged corruption and defrauding of the games budget, toilet paper rolls valued at $2 were costed at $80, $2 soap dispensers at $60, $98 mirrors at $220, $11,830 altitude training simulators at $250,190.[34]
Preparation delays [ edit ]
In September 2009, CGF chief Mike Fennell reported that the games were at risk of falling behind schedule and that it was "reasonable to conclude that the current situation poses a serious risk to the Commonwealth Games in 2010". A report by the Indian Government released several months prior found that construction work on 13 out of the 19 sports venues was behind schedule.[35]
The Chief of the Indian Olympic Association shri Narendra Modi has also expressed his concerns regarding the current state of affairs. Singh has called for the revamp of the Organising Committee commenting that India now has to "retrieve the games".[36] Other Indian officials have also expressed dismay at the ongoing delays but they have stated that they are confident that India will successfully host the games and do so on time.[37][38]
As the Times of India reports, all CWG projects were to be completed by May 2009 and the last year should have been kept for trial runs. The newspaper further reports that the first stadium was handed over for trial runs in July 2010 only.[39] To put the delays in perspective, Beijing National Stadium was completed much ahead of schedule for the 2008 Summer Olympics,[40] while the venues for 2012 Summer Olympics in London are scheduled to be delivered one year before the games and the construction of the venues is on track.[41]
In August 2010, the Cabinet Secretariat took a decision to appoint 10 officers of the rank of Joint and Additional Secretaries to oversee the progress of the construction of stadiums.[42] Each officer is allocated a stadium and given the responsibility to ensure that the work completes in time for the games.
Mass volunteer walkout [ edit ]
Around 10,000 of the 22,000 selected volunteers quit, less than a week before the event. This has been blamed on a lack of training for personnel, or dissatisfaction with assignments. There are reports that some who have quit have not returned their uniforms.[43]
Poor ticket sales and attendance [ edit ]
The start of the Games saw extremely poor ticket sales, with many venues near empty.[44] In a press conference, organising chairman Suresh Kalmadi admitted that there were problems, and blamed empty venues on ticket booths not being set up outside stadiums.[45] Commonwealth Games chief Mike Fennell admitted that many venues had been nearly empty on the opening day of the Games, saying "A number of venues do not have lots of spectators [...] one area which causes us concern".[46] On the second day of competition, less than 100 people filled the hockey venue–the 19,000-seat MDC Stadium. Less than 20 people watched the first tennis match of the tournament in the 5,000-seat tennis stadium, and just 58 fans watched the netball opening match.[47]
One Indian competitor tried to buy tickets for relatives online, only to be informed by the website that tickets were sold out. When he arrived to compete, he found the venue to be empty.[48]
The streets of Delhi were deserted for the cycling road races and walking event.[citation needed]
Spectators' response at opening ceremony [ edit ]
At the opening ceremony, the chairman of the organising committee, Suresh Kalmadi, faced embarrassment, when he was booed by spectators at the start of his welcome speech to 60,000 spectators.[49] Kalmadi came under further strain when he "thanked" the late Princess Diana for attending the opening ceremony of the games. The chairman made the blunder at a press conference saying 'Yes, Princess Diana was there,’ after which he immediately corrected himself by saying 'Prince Charles and (Camilla) the Duchess of Cornwall.[50]
Opening ceremony [ edit ]
The Australian Commonwealth contingent expressed frustration over the opening ceremony, in which there were claims that the athletes and delegation support staff were "treated like cattle" and subjected to "disgraceful" and unbearable conditions.[51] Australia's chef de mission Steve Moneghetti complained about the athletes being trapped in "absolute cauldron conditions" under the main stadium before marching for the opening ceremony. The Australians were stuck in a tunnel, where Moneghetti described the temperature as exceeding 40 °C (104 °F) due to a lack of airconditioning and ventilation. When attempting to move out, the Australian delegation was stopped by staff. When the contestants were finally able to move out into the arena, they were described as being emotionally affected.
Racism allegations [ edit ]
African countries have complained that they are getting second-class treatment from the Games organisers, in spite of them offering India a hand in the preparation of the Games.[52] They have alleged that accommodation given to them was inferior compared to the accommodation provided to the Australian and New Zealand teams. They went on to state that India was complaining about being victims of racial bias in the reporting of the Games; while simultaneously perpetrating the same kind of racism against the African countries.[52][53]
Infrastructure issues [ edit ]
Transport infrastructure [ edit ]
The Delhi Airport Metro Express built by Reliance Infrastructure and CAF Beasain missed its deadline of 31 July 2010 and the private consortium was fined Rs 112.5 million.[54]
Venues [ edit ]
Less than two weeks before the opening ceremony, Fennell wrote to the Indian cabinet secretary, urging action in response to the village being "seriously compromised." He said that though team officials were impressed with the international zone and main dining area, they were "shocked" by the state of the accommodation. "The village is the cornerstone of any Games and the athletes deserve the best possible environment to prepare for their competition."[55] The BBC published photographs of the village taken two days before 23 September showing unfinished living quarters.[56]
New Zealand, Canada, Scotland and Northern Ireland have expressed concern about unliveable conditions.[57] The Times of India newspaper reports that the Scottish delegation apparently submitted a photograph of a dog defecating on a bed in the games village.[58] Hooper said that there was "excrement in places it shouldn't be" in the athletes' quarters and that members of visiting delegations had to help clean up the unsanitary things.[59] The BBC released images of bathrooms with brown-coloured paan stains on the walls and floor, liquids on the floor, and brown paw prints on athletes' beds.[60] Lalit Bhanot, the secretary general of the Organising Committee, rejected the complaint that sanitation was poor by saying that, due to cultural differences, there are different standards about cleanliness in India and the western world, a statement for which he was widely ridiculed in Indian and international media.[61] Bhanot went on to say of the athletes' village that, "This is a world-class village, probably one of the best ever."[61]
Meanwhile, Pakistan also made reservations over the condition of the athletes' village and asked for an alternate accommodation to be made available to its contingent while preparation was still in progress. The Pakistan Olympic Association president Syed Arif Hasan remarked: "We want the CGF to ensure that the athletes' village is in good condition. Athletes cannot stay at a substandard place." Hasan however added that there were no doubts over Pakistan’s participation and the contingent would leave as planned.[62]
On the other hand, England's Chef de mission Craig Hunter praised the Games Village, remarking that "the Commonwealth Games Village here [in New Delhi] is better than the Beijing Olympics". He added that the arrangements at the Games Village is much better than that at the 2008 Summer Olympics.[63]
Canada's sports minister also supported the Games, saying that big events always face issues, and the media often exaggerates them, as Canada found during the Vancouver Winter Olympics. He added that "We are coming in full force."[64]
Problems with functionality of equipment and infrastructure during events [ edit ]
On the first night of swimming, debris landed in the swimming pool, causing delays ahead of a race. It is believed that part of the ceiling or its paint had fallen off.
Before the last night of swimming finals, the filtration system broke down and the pool was turbid and murky during the warmup session and the finals; it was described as the least clear ever seen for a swimming competition. A disproportionate number of swimmers fell ill with intestinal complaints, leading to concerns over the cleanliness and sanitation of the pool.[65] Early suspicions rested on the quality of water in the swimming pools of the SPM Complex, but other competing teams, including South Africa, reported no such illness.[66] Daily water quality tests were being carried out on the water of the pools, as mandated by the event standards. Additional tests were ordered after news of the illnesses, but they also did not find anything amiss. The Australian team's chief doctor, Peter Harcourt, ruled that the "chances of the [Delhi] pool being the cause of the problem is very remote" and praised the hygiene and food quality in the Delhi Games Village.[67] He suggested that it could be a common case of Traveler's diarrhea (locally called Delhi belly), or the Australian swimmers could have contracted the stomach virus during their training camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.[67] English Olympic and Commonwealth gold-medalist swimmer Rebecca Adlington said that the water quality was absolutely fine.[68]
After the opening ceremony, the ground at the athletics arena was damaged, and the grass infield and the track was still being re-laid two hours before competition started.
Vandalism of Games Village by Athletes [ edit ]
Condoms and toilet blockages [ edit ]
An Indian newspaper during the games reported that used condoms flushed down the toilets in the athlete's village had caused some drains to become blocked, necessitating action by plumbers to clear the pipes.[69]
Athletes under investigation for trashing apartments [ edit ]
Australian athletes have been accused of vandalizing the towers of the athletes' village they were staying in by breaking furniture and electrical fittings.[70] Delhi Police did not press the case after the Organizing Committee refused to file a complaint while Indian external affairs minister SM Krishna dismissed it as a one-off incident.[71]
A washing machine was hurled from the eighth floor of the same tower. Nobody on the ground was hit, but it is unclear who the culprit was. Indian newspapers have reported that the Australian Commonwealth Games Authority agreed to pay for the damages[72] and have apologised for the incident.[73][74] The Australian High Commissioner rejected the claim, stating that the incident was the result of partying and celebrations.[70][75] Later comments by Australian officials have contradicted claims by Lalit Bhanot that they had admitted responsibility. Perry Crosswhite said that it was still unclear if athletes from other nations present in the tower at the time had been responsible.[76]
Safety and security concerns [ edit ]
Small monkeys roam Delhi's streets and prefer heavily urbanized areas with plenty of living space among buildings.[77] They cannot be killed because many Indians see them as sacred so instead a larger, domesticated monkey, the langur, is brought in to scare away the smaller monkeys.
On the second day of the games, three Ugandan officials were injured by a malfunctioning security barrier at the games' village, and a senior official from that country raised allegations of discrimination by Indian officials. Uganda's sports minister lashed out at Indian officials and demanded an apology for the accident. The officials had cuts and bruises and were hospitalized overnight for observation.[78] The chairman of the Games' Organising Committee, Suresh Kalmadi, apologized to the Ugandan High Commissioner to India for the freak car accident.[79]
Infrastructural compromise [ edit ]
On 21 September 2010, a footbridge under construction for the Games near the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium collapsed, injuring at least 23 people,[80] mainly workers, underscoring fears of poor workmanship. Commenting on the incident, Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit controversially remarked that the footbridge was only meant for spectators and not for athletes.[81] Following the collapse, Fennell expressed concern that conditions at the Games Village, which had "shocked the majority", would seriously compromise the entire event.[82] The company that was building the foot bridge, P&R Infraprojects, was subsequently blacklisted by the Delhi Government and was not allowed to get government contracts.[83]
Reportedly, progress was still slow and four or five accommodation towers built by Emaar at the Games village were unfinished, lacking facilities such as wireless internet, fitted toilets and plumbing. In addition, rubble, unused masonry and discarded bricks littered the unfinished gardens. According to sports historian Boria Majumdar, author of the Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games, India "may have to pull a miracle."[82] The father of Australian track cyclist Kaarle McCulloch visited his daughter at the Olympic village. A builder in Australia, Grahame McCulloch criticised the structural soundness of the village; he said "those buildings are the dodgiest things I have ever seen...so substandard".[48] He told his daughter not to use the balcony, fearing that it was collapsible.[48]
On 22 September 2010, part of the drop ceiling of the new Commonwealth Games weightlifting venue in New Delhi collapsed.[84]
Indian bantamweight boxer Akhil Kumar's bed in the Games village collapsed when he sat on it. "I sat down on my bed to rest but suddenly it gave way. After that I noticed that part of it has no plywood", he said[85]
On 27 September 2010, a South African athlete reported that a snake was present in his room in the Games Village. A day earlier, animal authorities had to be called in to evacuate a king cobra from the tennis venue.[86]
On 7 October, a large scoreboard crashed to the ground at the rugby venue when a supporting chain snapped. The games however were due to start a week later so no major repercussions were experienced.[78]
Terror threats [ edit ]
Following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, some athletes and their representative bodies expressed security fears during the games. In April 2010, during the Indian Premier League, two low intensity bombs went off outside the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. Although there were no casualties, this postponed the start of the game by an hour. Following this attack, foreign cricketers like Kevin Pietersen expressed fears for their safety and questions were raised regarding the safety of athletes during the Commonwealth Games [1]. The UK and Canada also warned about potential attacks on commercial targets in Delhi ahead of the games.[87][88]
Jama Masjid incident [ edit ]
On 19 September 2010, unknown gunmen on a motorbike opened fire with an automatic pistol on a tourist bus outside the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi. The attacks, which came a fortnight before the start of the games, injured two Taiwanese tourists.[89] Two hours later, a Maruti car exploded in the vicinity, reportedly from a deliberate low-intensity pressure cooker bomb which had been assembled inside. No fatalities or major damages were reported. The incidents, which were purportedly claimed by the Indian Mujahideen, provoked fears about lack of security in the city for the upcoming games. However, police in Delhi initially denied the role of any organised terror group and instead blamed the attacks on "disgruntled youths and local criminal gangs."[90] Officials suggested that a possible motive of the strike was to instill fear in people ahead of the Commonwealth Games.
Fear of dengue outbreak [ edit ]
The heaviest monsoon rains in 15 years, along with large quantities of standing water on CWG construction sites as well as in tanks and ponds, raised concerns over increased levels of mosquito-borne disease in Delhi.[91] In the run-up to the games it was reported that 65-70 cases of dengue fever were being diagnosed each day in the city, with the number of cases "likely to hit the 3,000 mark" by the opening on 3 October.[92]
Illness [ edit ]
Many swimmers were reported to have fallen ill. Initially, concerns were raised over the quality of water in the swimming pools of the SPM Complex. It was said that more than 20 percent of the English team's swimmers – about eight to 10 competitors – had been struck down with a stomach virus. The Australian team also reported that at least six of its swimmers had been sick, including Andrew Lauterstein, who had to withdraw from the 50-meter butterfly. Commonwealth Games Federation president Mike Fennell said officials would conduct tests to make sure the pools were not the source of the illness. "If there is something unsafe, you cannot swim in that water. It is a matter we have to deal with a great deal of urgency," he said.[78]
However, other competing teams, including South Africa, reported no such illness.[93] Daily water quality tests were being carried out on the water of the pools, as mandated by the event standards. Additional tests were ordered after news of the illnesses, but they also did not find anything amiss. The Australian team's chief doctor, Peter Harcourt, ruled that the "chances of the [Delhi] pool being the cause of the problem is very remote" and praised the hygiene and food quality in the Delhi Games Village.[67] He suggested that it could be a common case of Traveler's diarhoea (locally called Delhi belly), or the Australian swimmers could have contracted the stomach virus during their training camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.[67] English Olympic and Commonwealth gold-medalist swimmer Rebecca Adlington said that the water quality was absolutely fine.[68]
Boycott [ edit ]
Following the withdrawal of Dani Samuels, the women's world discus champion,[94] because "[her] safety [was] more important to them than a medal," Australia's Minister for Sport, Mark Arbib, said CWG officials expected more competitors to follow suit.
The Scottish team's departure of its first 41 boxers, rugby players, wrestlers and support staff was delayed for 48 hours, and the Welsh team set a deadline of 22 September to receive reassurances that the venues would be fit for purpose. The first batch of English athletes, which included a lawn bowls team and a men's hockey squad, said the organisers were not making nearly enough progress just a day before they were to leave. The Guardian suggested a mass walkout remained an option with the "point of no return" less than a week before the scheduled start; they claimed the "main competing countries would be likely to act in concert." They also suggested the games were on the verge of "descending into farce."
Michael Cavanagh, the chairman of Commonwealth Games Scotland, said a decision to stay away would be a joint one, as he insisted a possible knock on effects for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow would not be a factor. He said "In terms of withdrawal we don't see this as simply a Team Scotland decision, any decision to withdraw we would see as being a collective decision amongst the countries who are already there and already concerned. We can't allow ourselves to be influenced by thoughts of how it may impact on 2014, not when we have something as important as the safety of our athletes to consider."[95] Phillips Idowu, the world triple jump champion, also withdrew from the Games.[96]
Calls for boycott [ edit ]
Amidst allegations of blatant corruption, shoddy construction work at venues and security concerns for participating athletes, the 2010 Commonwealth Games have faced numerous boycott calls from individuals in India, England and Australia.[97][98]
Within India, there were calls for boycott. Other celebrities who followed Aiyar's comments in expressing a call for boycott include former Indian cricket captain and spin bowler Bishan Singh Bedi and bestselling Indian author Chetan Bhagat. Bedi said the "CWG organisers have taken the country for a ride" and urged international athletes to boycott the "embarrassing" Delhi games.[99][100] Bhagat, who is considered a youth icon in India with a huge fan following, called the Commonwealth games the "biggest and most blatant exercise in mass corruption since the country won independence six decades ago."[97][101] Bhagat, who has sold more than 4 million books in India, also urged his readers to boycott the games event and not to watch them on TV, thereby using the "golden chance" to "put the corrupt and insensitive government to shame."[97]
The Jat community seeking reservation under the OBC quota have also planned to use the Commonwealth games as a platform and force the Indian government to relent to their needs.[102]
Other countries also threatened to boycott the games. Considering the potential impact of a terror threat and other security concerns, rumors arose about a boycott of the Delhi Commonwealth Games by major participating nations including Scotland, England and New Zealand.[103][104] However, the rumors were soon put to rest by Commonwealth games committees in each of these countries who expressed a general level of satisfaction with the security arrangements.[103][104]
Australian quadruple Olympic gold medal winning swimmer Dawn Fraser called for Australia to boycott the games event, citing fears of a tragedy similar to that which unfolded in the Munich Olympics of 1972.[98] Fraser pronounced that reports of missed construction deadlines and other irregularities in games planning meant Indian authorities' "word for providing security should not be taken at its face value."[98] However, the Australian Commonwealth Games Organising Committee was quick to dismiss Fraser's fears with ACGA chief executive, Perry Crosswhite saying he believed there will be no security issues during the games event.[98] John Coates, Australia's Olympic chief, came down hard on the organisers, alleging teams were being forced to temporary accommodation at hotels. "I don't think it is a cultural thing. When you agree to host [the Games], you are required to provide the basics in terms of health and hygiene for the athletes. The Games shouldn't have been awarded to Delhi in hindsight."[105]
Other withdrawals [ edit ]
A number of athletes withdrew from the Games, for reasons related and non-related to the state of affairs in the days leading up to the event. Jamaican world record holder Usain Bolt and his predecessor Asafa Powell pulled out of the event citing the timing of the Games as a major reason for their decisions to stay away.[106] Olympic cyclist champion Geraint Thomas pulled out for fear of contracting dengue fever.[107] Other notable athletes who have announced their non-attendance include Paula Radcliffe, Jessica Ennis, Jennifer Meadows, Natasha Danvers, Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Victoria Pendleton and Beth Tweddle.[106]
Sporting controversies [ edit ]
Doping [ edit ]
Prior to the Games, four wrestlers, a shot-putter and two swimmers who were all part of India's Games squad tested positive for methylhexaneamine. Four others, who were not picked for the Games in the Indian capital, also failed drug tests conducted at the various training camps across the country.[108][109]
Oludamola Osayomi, the winner of the women's 100-metre sprint event, was reported to have tested positive for a "banned substance" which was later revealed to be the stimulant methylhexaneamine.[110] Another Nigerian athlete, hurdler Samuel Okon who placed sixth in the 110 metres hurdles, was reported to have tested positive for the same drug.[111]
In July 2011, three of the four women from India's gold-medal winning 400-metre-relay team tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Two of the racers, Sini Jose and Jauna Murmu, tested positive for the anabolic steroid methandienone, and Tiana Mary Thomas tested positive for epi-methandienone.[112]
Archery [ edit ]
While the audience's behaviour at the archery event provoked criticism from the English team, the silver medallist, Alison Williamson, praised it on the other hand.[113] Earlier reports held that the English team was upset because the loud chant of the crowd during the women's recurve event had distracted the archers. In an action condemned in the Indian media, an English archery official allegedly abused an Indian coach, telling him to "f*** off." The comment came after the Indian team registered a one-point win over England to claim the gold medal. The Indian archery head coach, Limba Ram, walked over to shake hands with officials of the rival team. In response, an English official showed his elbow in a gesture before uttering the remarks. Britain's archery team leader said she was unaware of the incident and added, "[the Indian coach] must find out whether the person was one among us. If he was not wearing a red jersey, he would not be part of the side. I will speak to the Indian coach about it." Limba Ram said that he failed to identify the person as he had chosen to ignore the one-off incident.[114] There have also been accusations that Ram was called a monkey on two different occasions by an English official.[115]
Athletics [ edit ]
Pearson won the 100m sprint before being disqualified.
During the Final of the Women’s 100m sprint final, a controversy was caused by the eventual disqualification of Sally Pearson of Australia. She had won the race on the third attempted start after one start was delayed because of excessive crowd noise and the second due to a false start by Laura Turner of England. Pearson was disqualified because she was deemed to have false-started in the second attempted restart along with Turner. This was as a direct result of a protest lodged by Team England. The controversy was caused as only Turner was disqualified from the race during the race because of a false start and not Pearson. Turner ran the race under protest. Pearson and other athletes were not informed of the protest until four hours after the race, as they were waiting to begin the medal presentation for the race. Commonwealth Games Federation president Mike Fennell called Pearson's treatment "unsatisfactory" and that the whole situation was caused by an "unacceptable communications blunder".[116]
Boxing [ edit ]
During the weigh-in for the boxing competition, the scales were giving inaccurate readings with athletes recording higher body weights on the official scales. The scales were deemed to be broken and the weigh-in was delayed 24 hours to find and calibrate new scales. The initial wrong measurements led to angry shouting between coaches, athletes and organisers.[117] During the boxing competition there have been claims made by various teams including England and Botswana that jabs were not being scored by judges. This was attributed to the removal of a white scoring zone placed on the boxers gloves which is usually present in amateur boxing events. The BBC commentating team also claimed there to be a bias in judges scores towards Indian competitors.[118]
Cycling [ edit ]
During the final of the Men’s Keirin, Malaysian Azizulhasni Awang was disqualified for aggressive interference when he forced his way past two competitors. Race winner Josiah Ng said he was "mystified" over Awang's disqualification. In the semi-final round of the keirin, Australia's Shane Perkins was disqualified for dangerous riding with the official reason not being made clear. Perkins subsequently won the classification race and was described by Chris Boardman from the BBC to "have aimed an angry V-sign at officials"; he gestured to the judges with his index and middle finger held together. No subsequent action was taken against Perkins who later said, "the officials need to go back to school", referencing poor decisions he felt had been made in the sprint and keirin events.[119]
Swimming [ edit ]
On another occasion, South African swimmer Roland Schoeman came under criticism when he referred to the crowd at the swimming as "going on like monkeys" in a post-race poolside interview. Schoeman's remarks came after he narrowly avoided being disqualified as he and England's Simon Burnett fell in at the start of the 50m freestyle when distracted by the crowd noise. The swimming has been persistently affected by Indian spectators ignoring etiquette and shouting out while the competitors were preparing for the start.[120] His comment was regarded as possibly being a racial ethnic slur, although he later said that the word was commonly used in South Africa to refer to mischievous behaviour. At an official press conference, organising committee secretary-general Lalit Bhanot took the complaints about monkeys literally. Not being aware of the complaints, Bhanot felt Delhi's wildlife was at issue: "We know especially at the swimming pool there are a lot of monkeys and we have made efforts to keep them away from the swimming pool."[121]
Wrestling [ edit ]
Australian wrestler Hassene Fkiri was ejected from the 96 kg Greco-Roman competition and stripped of the silver medal after making an obscene gesture at the international FILA judges during the final. According to an Australian official, Fkiri was furious at his Indian rival Anil Kumar, who he accused of breaking the rules a number of times in the first period by holding Fkiri around the neck and head with two hands. The Australian received his first warning after he made a comment to the referee as he walked off the mat at the end of the two-minute period; when Kumar repeated the same move in the next round, Fkiri headbutted him and was issued a second warning. He then proceeded to swing his arms uncontrollably afterwards, which resulted in his third warning and eventual disqualification. After losing, Fkiri refused to shake hands with the victor.[122]
Reactions and responses [ edit ]
Responding to media concerns, the organisers said there were 48 hours to save the Games after warnings of a pull out.[95]
Numerous Bollywood actors also expressed their dismay at the state of the Games.[123]
Four days before the start of the games, tickets for the opening, closing ceremonies, and the 100 m athletics were still not sold out.[124]
The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that despite Kalmadi's "blind optimism", the games were not going to be the best ever. Instead, it wrote that it was "probably the most interesting."[125]
The opening ceremony played a key role in improving the image of the Games. As athletes arrived and competitions started, many earlier critics changed their view. The Australian Sports Minister said that India could now aim for the Olympics, and the President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, said that India had made a good foundation for a future Olympics bid.[126][127] As the Games concluded, many observers remarked that they began on an apprehensive note, but were an exceptional experience with a largely positive ending.[128][129] Some observers accused sections of the media of bias, unfair expectations, and negative reporting.[130]
Within India, the Games saw criticism due to the Games' origins as a celebration of the British Empire, with Arindam Chaudhuri arguing for India's disassociation from the "slavish games" which he viewed as a "celebration of racial discrimination, colonialism [and] imperialism".[131]
Criticism by Mani Shankar Aiyar [ edit ]
Mani Shankar Aiyar, a senior member of the ruling Indian National Congress party and former Minister of Youth and Sports Affairs was an early whistleblower from the Indian Union Cabinet who expressed concern over extensive delays in preparation leading to unplanned expenses which he said, could have been utilized for "ensuring a better sporting future for Indian children by providing them sports training".[132] Aiyar also said that he would be "unhappy" if the Games were a success |
when Eminem’s The Eminem Show and Nelly’s Nellyville both lost to Norah Jones’s Come Away With Me.) Eminem was nominated in the category a total of three times during this period, as was Kanye West. (They went a combined 0-for-6.) Like Stankonia, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III (which lost to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raising Sand) and the Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D. (which lost to Taylor Swift’s Fearless) were stopped by MOR folk and country records.
But still, not a bad showing for the genre in the Album category. You’d think this would translate at least equally well to the Record and Song categories, especially considering the dominance of rap and rap-tinged singles on the radio in the past decade. It’s true that rap songs have consistently shown up among the Record of the Year candidates, and have occasionally even dominated the category. For instance, in 2004, the year Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won, four out of the five Record nominees were either hip-hop hits (Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”) or a song prominently featuring a rapper (Beyoncé and Jay Z’s “Crazy in Love”). However, the winner that year, Coldplay’s “Clocks,” is pitched about as far as you can get from rap while still being considered a contemporary pop song.
What’s really interesting is that in the Song of the Year category — the one that rewards songwriters rather than recording artists, which “Same Love” is up for — you can count the previous 55 years’ worth of rap nominees on one hand and still have fingers left over. There is one white guy (Eminem, for “Lose Yourself” in 2004 and “Love the Way You Lie” in 2011), one black guy (Kanye West, for “Jesus Walks” in 2005 and “All of the Lights” in 2012), and one black woman (Estelle, for “American Boy” in 2009). That’s it. That’s the list.
In essence, while the Grammys believed Lauryn Hill made the best album of the year in 1999, it did not also believe that a single song from that album was good enough to be nominated for its own award. (Even though Miseducation spun off three Top 40 singles, including a no. 1, “Doo Wop (That Thing).”) When Outkast won best album for Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in ’04, the signature cut, “Hey Ya!” was deemed one of the best recordings of the year but not one of the finest examples of songwriting. So, while the Grammys have historically displayed a willingness to at least consider that the sonic construction of a rap song might be worthy of its top Record award, this has not been typically extended to the creation of the song itself.
Again, this seems extremely weird. So much so that I suspect that even the people who vote for the Grammys will want to change their own history on Sunday.
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What if “Same Love” does win Song of the Year? How significant will it be? Will it really mean anything?
I’m tempted to say it won’t be significant at all, because deep down I don’t think award shows (least of all the Grammys) ultimately shape how the history of art forms are remembered. That “Hey Ya!” didn’t win Record of the Year obviously hasn’t affected the love people have for it. (As much as I like “Clocks,” it probably won’t outlive “Lose Yourself” or “Crazy in Love,” either.) “Jesus Walks” is better regarded today than John Mayer’s “Daughters,” even though the latter beat the former for Song of the Year in 2005. Jay Z has as many Song of the Year nominations as Hoobastank, and yet Jay Z could pay to have the members of Hoobastank dropped into a South American rain forest and hunted like wild game by billionaires. This is as it should be. Awards never stick around as long as truly great music does.
But while I believe everything I just typed, it’s not exactly true. The Grammys do matter — maybe not as an arbiter of quality, but certainly as a signpost for the current state of the recording industry and unquestionably as a driver of sales (or at least plays on streaming services). Because the media inevitably focuses way too much attention on these empty, self-congratulatory displays, their professed importance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least in the short term. (I plead guilty to this charge.) A Grammy victory reiterates and amplifies trends in pop music that the Grammy voters see as worthwhile, which then makes those trends appear to loom even larger in the culture.
Moreover, the Grammys have long mattered to rappers themselves, even when (as Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav declared in 1988’s “Terminator X to the Edge of Panic”) they claimed not to give a fuck. This has often been manifested by hip-hop artists denouncing the Grammys for being out of touch with the genre. PE boycotted the ceremony way back in 1991, following the lead of Kid ’N Play and Salt-N-Pepa, who two years earlier protested the Grammys for not televising the first-ever awarding of the Best Rap Performance statue. Though he’s set to perform on Sunday, Jay Z publicly disavowed the ceremony for several years in the late ’90s and ’00s, in spite of his success in the Rap categories. (He’s won 17 times.) “I don’t think they give the rightful respect to hip-hop,” he said in 2002.
Then there’s Kanye West, perhaps the loudest critic of the Grammys not recognizing elite rappers (namely himself) in the elite categories. Most recently, West complained that his critically adored LP Yeezus garnered only two nominations, one for Best Rap Album and one for Best Rap Song for “New Slaves.” He was similarly upset over his sophomore record, Late Registration, not winning Album of the Year in 2005. The outcry was more widespread in 2011 when My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a commercial favorite and widely acknowledged artistic triumph, didn’t even garner an AOY nomination. In an open letter to Grammy voters posted as a full-page ad in the New York Times one week after the ceremony, record company executive Steve Stoute blasted the award show for failing to “acknowledge the massive cultural impact of Eminem and Kanye West and how their music is shaping, influencing and defining the voice of a generation.”
Given the long list of luminaries that never even had a chance to compete in the Song of the Year category, a victory for Macklemore — who is commonly perceived as an interloper marketed at a largely white, non-hip-hop audience — will likely be seen not as a breakthrough but rather as a cosign of certain developments in pop that many observers believe are generally destructive. In 2013, not a single no. 1 hit on the pop chart was recorded by a black artist, in spite of many of the year’s most popular songs (like “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us”) deriving from genres originated by and normally associated with black artists. In this context, “Same Love” winning Song of the Year would perfectly capture a highly unflattering (and woefully uncritical) portrait of modern pop.
♦♦♦
There’s one other way to look at this, which is with limited optimism. Critics get upset about how the Grammys do a poor job of honoring the musical vanguard. This is true, but spotlighting the cutting edge is not the Grammys’ function. What the Grammys do is work from the rear, slowly pushing the baseline of musical stodginess in our culture forward.
It can’t be underestimated just how far back this award show is from the head of pop culture. Consider that the first instance of a hip-hop artist getting nominated in a major Grammy category occurred three years after the Pillsbury rap. Recognizing rap’s preeminence in pop music is strictly late-20th-century stuff. The Grammys still aren’t there yet.
There’s been a concerted effort for the Grammys to “go younger” in the past several years. But though the most honored artists of recent years — Taylor Swift, Adele, Mumford & Sons — are all in their twenties, the music is rooted in cozy rock, folk, and soul styles of the ’60s and ’70s. I don’t know for certain that Grammy voters are prejudiced against regarding rap music as a forum for serious songwriters capable of producing compositions as lasting as past Song of the Year winners like “Moon River,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” or [cough] “Smooth.” It’s just that the historical record strongly suggests that this is the case. “Same Love” may not be an example of exemplary songwriting in hip-hop, but if the Recording Academy proves that it can honor mediocrity in this genre with a Song of the Year award like it has honored mediocrity in other genres, then it will be a positive sign that even the most conservative among us have reached a new plateau.
Then again, if Lorde wins, forget I said anything.
This article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to Eminem winning a Grammy in 1999.TORONTO — Did a Viking longboat suddenly come ashore in Toronto this week?
Joining the Maple Leafs’ summer workouts are defencemen Andreas Borgman, Calle Rosen and 2017’s No. 1 pick Timothy Liljegren. Also in town is Finnish forward Miro Aaltonen, via the KHL.
All might end up starting with the AHL Marlies, but other than Liljegren, they aren’t teenagers and intend to catch Mike Babcock’s eye when main camp starts in about two weeks.
“I’m still a little jet lagged, but it’s good to be here,” said Borgman, the 22-year-old rookie of the year in Sweden last season, who added 10 playoff points with league champion HV-71. “Toronto was the team that showed me they were the most (competitive). It’s a great city, a great hockey town, an honour to be here (with the Leafs’ long Swedish lineage).”
He and fellow six-footer Rosen, who had 19 points in 41 regular season games with Vaxjo, signed two-year entry-level deals, picking the Leafs over other teams, in Rosen’s case the Chicago Blackhawks.
“The greatest opportunity was here,” added Borgman, who already has a swollen cheek from a visor cut in scrimmage action. “We both came with Aaltonen earlier (this summer to see the city).”
Workouts the next few days will familiarize the Europeans with smaller North American ice.
“There are changes in your game, but I will adjust,” Borgman said. “The NHL has been my dream since I was a kid (a big fan of Niklas Kronwall hits). Now feels like a good time to come, after winning in Sweden.”
HEALTHY CLASH AT CAMP
Defenceman Andrew Nielsen knew his name was going to be on the Leafs’ rookie tournament roster, but loved seeing it anyway to motivate himself for next week.
Twenty-six Leafs, including 2015 third-rounder Nielsen, will be battling with rookie teams from Montreal and Ottawa at Ricoh Coliseum Sept. 8-10. He’s been to this event a couple of times and it will be a chance to get a step up on Rosen, Borgman and older guys who won’t be playing until main camp.
“It’s one or two games to get the rust out before the big boys get there,” Nielsen said. “It will be in a rink that a lot of us (Marlies) know well.
“Competition (for jobs) is a good thing, it brings the best out of you. Having new guys here only helps that. (Borgman, Rosen and Liljegren) are good players looking to get a spot, but I’m sure me, Travis Dermott and a couple of others will have something to say about that.
“Now that there’s more guys coming to practice, you get more of a camp feel. It will be tight, but as one of the guys (management) have their eye on, I want to make it my mission to get that spot on opening night.”
PLAYERS-ONLY LEGENDS ROW
Many of the hockey people instrumental in the 100 years of Toronto’s NHL franchise never played a game.
Which has led to many discussions through the years about how Conn Smythe, Foster Hewitt, Punch Imlach and others should be honoured by today’s Leafs.
Club president Brendan Shanahan has thought about that too, but — diplomatically — says it won’t be on Legends Row, the popular statue/photo op outside the Air Canada Centre.
“The concept behind Legends Row, which was decided before I came here, was as a players bench,” Shanahan said on Tuesday as he passed through the Leafs’ practice facility. “The statues there (14 by sculptor Erik Blome, counting coming additions of Frank Mahovlich, Red Kelly, Charlie Conacher and Wendel Clark) represent many great players and teams, but it’s a players bench and not the right spot for a builder or management.”
Shanahan added there’s great respect for Smythe, the team patriarch and driving force behind Maple Leaf Gardens, hockey broadcast pioneer Hewitt and four-time Stanley Cup winning GM/coach Imlach.
He was asked if they’ll be honoured at a later date in or outside the building. “That could be,” Shanahan said. “We have not decided.”
He still plans to cap Legends Row at 14 players, rather than save one space for a Leaf in this or a future generation who might distinguish himself.
ZAITSEV PLAYS CONSULTANT
If the Leafs do beat other NHL clubs to undrafted Moscow-based KHLer Igor Ozhiganov next year, thank defenceman Nikita Zaitsev.
Another Russian the Leafs wooed from overseas a year before they signed him — and who stepped into their lineup right away — Zaitsev has been enticing his countryman for next season.
“Igor asked my opinion, I told him he should sign with the Leafs,” Zaitsev said in an excerpt from a story in Sovetsky Sport. “Actually, I was with him at one of the dinners he had with the Leafs representatives (reportedly Babcock and GM Lou Lamoriello in Moscow earlier this month). I was even his interpreter. That’s just being part of the Leafs organization. Not only you play and build your career in the NHL, but you also help others.”
[email protected] Commissioner Elizabeth Coombs has warned that new protocols must be in place before crime and security agencies can access hundreds of thousands of photographs of NSW citizens to bolster anti-terrorism efforts.
Dr Coombs has also declared that striking the balance between citizens' rights and the desire of security agencies to access their personal information is of "critical importance".
ASIO headquarters in Canberra would be among the agencies able to access the photographs. Credit:Katherine Griffiths
The comments follow revelations that the NSW government has agreed to give the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the NSW Crime Commission virtually unfettered access to photographs of NSW citizens.
On Monday, Fairfax Media revealed it has authorised Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) to release to the agencies photographs of people granted an extensive range of licences and permits without a warrant or court order, as was previously required.Emacs 23.1.93 for Nokia N900
This page describes how to build Emacs 23.1.93 debian package for the Nokia N900. Everything is done under scratchbox: I make the hypothesis you already have a usable build environment.
Let's first grab Emacs 23.1.93 sources:
$ wget -q http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-23.1.93.tar.gz $ wget -q http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-23.1.93.tar.gz.sig $ gpg --verify emacs-23.1.93.tar.gz.sig gpg: Signature made Sat 27 Feb 2010 04:16:56 AM CET using DSA key ID BC40251C gpg: Good signature from "Chong Yidong <[email protected]>" $ tar xzf emacs-23.1.93.tar.gz
Let's now get the 'debian' folder using git
$ cd emacs-23.1.93 $ git clone http://git.natisbad.org/n900-emacs-23.1.93-debian-folder.git debian Cloning into n900-emacs-23.1.93-debian-folder... remote: Counting objects: 44, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (32/32), done. remote: Total 44 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0) Receiving objects: 100% (44/44), 44.75 KiB, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (6/6), done.
If you are interested by some details about the content of the 'debian' folder, you can take a look at my previous emacs-22.2 for N900 page which provides additional details on that topic.
Let's now compile the package. If you have some laundry to do, you can probably do it now: compilation take a lot of time!
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -sd -b -i -ICVS -I.git...
At the end of the process, you should have the following:
$ ls -lh../*.deb -rw-r--r-- 1 arno 1000 25M Feb 28 17:06../emacs_23.1.93-1_armel.deb
You now just have to upload the.deb to you device and do a dpkg -i to install it. If you want to use emacs in fullscreen on your device, you may be interested by this entry.
As an additional note, I did not manage to build the stable version (22.1) of Emacs under Scratchbox (segfault of qemu) but 23.1.93 works like a charm.Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is facing a series of bad economic news as a result of his radical economic “experiment”: sluggish job growth, an exploding deficit, credit rating downgrades, inadequate pension and education funding, just to name a few. In fact, budget pressures have become so severe that Brownback recently had to reverse his no-new-taxes pledge.
But none of this seems to have bothered Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who hailed Brownback’s experiment on last weekend’s edition of “Washington Watch,” telling the Republican governor that his anti-abortion rights policies deserve some credit in shaping the state’s (mythical) economic success.
Brownback agreed, telling Perkins that his decision to sign around a dozen “pro-life bills” is part of the reason that his state is growing.
“What you’re showing in Kansas is that you can have a pro-family agenda and at the same time a pro-economic growth agenda and the two are not — rather than being mutually exclusive, they are entwined with one another,” Perkins gushed.
“They really support each other,” Brownback concurred. “One of the problems we have in the country is we’re not forming enough families.”yoga day operation doga sniffer detects ied
New Delhi: A special breed of sniffer dog, a member of 'Operation DOGA' sanitisation exercise, today detected an improvised bomb planted by security agencies near the venue of the International Yoga Day celebrations at Rajpath here as part of mock security drill.
Official sources said ITBP dog 'Sophia' found and alerted her handler about the presence of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) near the India Gate lawns which was kept by Delhi Police and other security agencies as part of the drill held on the eve of the event.
They said teh dog quickly got the wink of the live IED dug about two feet under the earth.
"However, it had no detonators as this was a mock drill on the eve of the big event tomorrow," they said.
'Sophia', sources said, is the special breed of 'Malinois' German Shepherd dog which had gained prominence across the world after they were reported to have participated in the strike of US Navy SEAL that killed al-Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Security agencies have launched a special operation, codenamed 'DOGA' combining the words 'dog' and 'yoga', by deploying a contingent of specially-trained canine squads to sanitise and ensure fool-proof security at this place in central Delhi.
The venue around India Gate-Rajpath in the heart of the national capital is expected to draw close to 40,000 people, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his cabinet colleagues and others, this Sunday for the event.London 2014 homicide rate 'to fall below 100'
The Met Police said the reduction was down to intelligence-led policing and early medical intervention
Continue reading the main story Related Stories
The number of homicides in London could fall below 100 in a year for the first time in more than 40 years, according to the Met Police.
There have been 93 homicides since January 2014, compared with more than 200 from January to December in 2001.
With a 2014 average of two a week it is "unlikely" there will be more than 100 by the end of the year, police said.
Officers said the reduction was down to intelligence-led policing and early medical intervention.
Targeting gangs
Det Ch Supt Mick Duthie, head of the Homicide Command, said: "It's taking guns off streets, it is intelligence-led policing to target gangs, stop and search.
"It is our professional response within the homicide command to make sure if offences do take place, we prosecute people.
"All these things together have helped us as an organisation reduce the incident of homicide."
Homicide rates include murder, manslaughter, corporate manslaughter and infanticide offences.
In 2001 the number of homicides was more than 200, while in 1970 it was 105, according to the Met's statistics.
There are no official figures for the 1960s, but the Met Police believe it was lower than 100.
London Air Ambulance work to ensure the system is set up to deal with injured patients
Dr Gareth Grier, a consultant from the London Air Ambulance, said: "The whole system in London is set up to deal specifically for injured patients.
"In a patient who is likely to die as a result of an injury, the clock starts ticking right from the time of that injury and some of those patients can pass away within minutes of their injury - and getting the right people there at the right time is crucial."
"Up to 18% of patients who would have previously died at the scene of an accident are surviving due to early interventions at the roadside," he added.
London homicide statistics
2013 - 101
2012 - 102
2011 - 116
2010 - 114
2009 - 128
2008 - 147
2007 - 155
Metropolitan Police statisticsCopyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved A student's mother took this picture of a lunch served at James Hurst Elementary School in Portsmouth, Virginia. (April 14, 2015)
Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved A student's mother took this picture of a lunch served at James Hurst Elementary School in Portsmouth, Virginia. (April 14, 2015)
Joe Fisher, WAVY-TV - PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WOOD) - A school district in Virginia has admitted concerns over the presentation of a student's lunch served Tuesday at an elementary school.
Dozens of people reached out to WAVY-TV after a student's mother posted a picture of the meal on social media. It shows cooked corn on a lunch platter, alongside a fish filet with a bun placed on top.
According to Portsmouth Public Schools lunch menu, which is posted online, the lunch choices served Tuesday were the following:
Spicy Cajun Fish w/Brown Rice
Cold Cut Turkey Sub (w/g)
Assorted Chef Salad (Croutons & Crackers)
Steamed Carrots & Side Salad
Fresh Orange or Canned Fruit
1% & Skim Milk
WAVY-TV contacted Portsmouth Public Schools about the controversy. They released the following statement from Food Service Coordinator Jim Gehlhoff:
We appreciate this parent's concern about the presentation of this school lunch. Poor lighting and food presentation make this lunch unappealing. Other lunch options on the day this photo was taken included a chef's salad and turkey sub sandwiches. The meal in this photo and other meals served by Portsmouth Public Schools meet nutritional and USDA requirements. The presentation of the meal pictured concerns us and we plan to address presentation of food items in a training session with all cafeteria managers. Our goal is to provide healthy food options that students will want to eat. We will take actions to ensure that presentation is addressed.Not content with the so-called gay propaganda ban, Russian lawmakers are now said to be mulling two new attacks on the LGBT community: a gay blood donor ban and a nationwide conversion service that, while supposedly opt-in, raises the specter of forced sexual orientation change attempts.
Speaking to reporters earlier this week, State Duma MP Mikhail Degtyarev, who is also a Moscow mayoral candidate, revealed that lawmakers will soon make recommendations to amend national law and reintroduce a ban on gay people from donating blood.
He justified doing this as a reasonable step because “65 percent of all HIV-positive persons are homosexuals.”
Degtyarev did not give sources for these statistics and they seem suspect given that health experts have previously warned that much more pressing is the need to tackle Russia’s significant drug problem which, health watchdogs believe, poses a greater risk at this time.
The Russian Ministry of Health and Social Development retired its ban on gay people donating blood in 2008 but has cited such bans in other countries, such as the USA, as being uncontroversial.
Perhaps even more worrying was Degtyarev’s second revelation that Russia’s lower house is working on what has been described as “anonymous consultations with psychologists, psychotherapists and sexologists” that would, in Degtyarev’s words, help them “return to normal life and become heterosexuals, as are 95 to 99 percent of our citizens.”
Given Russia’s recent intense onslaught against its gay community as highlighted by the “homosexuality propaganda law” President Putin signed in June, the video evidence of hateful violent attacks, and the vast collections of stories detailing the oppressive atmosphere in Russia, this raises alarm bells that the service could never truly be opt-in.
This also adds yet more pressure to calls for the IOC to abandon Sochi, Russia, as a host of the 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic games, with a growing number of LGBT rights and wider human rights groups saying that to allow Russia to host the games is to give tacit support and indeed reward the oppressive regime that is revealing itself more and more with every passing day.
In other related news, the United Nations has strongly condemned Russia and called on lawmakers to repeal the homosexuality propaganda ban, with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesperson Claude Cahn quoted as saying:
Such measures form the basis for standing and regular harassment, and even arbitrary detention, and help create a climate of fear for anyone working on advancing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
The past week has also seen a number of marches and protests in other countries, including a demonstration in Spain that drew hundreds, while on Sunday a number of Canadian Olympians marched in Ottawa’s Pride Parade with messages of solidarity and vowing to help advance gay rights and human rights in Russia when they attend the Sochi 2014 Games. How they will do so with the ever present threat of arrest under Russia’s propaganda law remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, and perhaps symptomatic of the wider climate in Russia, it was revealed last week that a Russian biopic on the life of the famous and celebrated composer Pytor Tchaikovsky will paint him as a man dogged by rumors of homosexuality that have just been greatly exaggerated. The makers of the film, which is partially financed by the Russian government, contend that Tchaikovsky’s sexuality is not an important issue and that, anyway, it is still of debate. This is of course nonsense.
Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality is well established based on primary sources such as his own letters and diaries and those of his (also homosexual) brother.
Whether this is a willful attempt to mislead over Tchaikovsky’s sexuality or a move to dodge the so-called propaganda law is unclear but it starkly illustrates how and why Russia’s federal and state level propaganda laws are so oppressive and why protest over the Olympic governing body’s soft approach to this issue is refusing to fade away.
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Sign this petition to ensure the IOC prioritizes the protection of LGBT athletes competing in the Winter Olympics.
Image credit: Thinkstock.U.K. Telecoms Watchdog Wants Consumers To Be Able To Exit Contracts Without Paying A Penalty If Prices Go Up Mid-Term
U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom is proposing to change the rules on fixed contracts for mobile, landline and broadband services to prevent providers forcing price hikes on existing customers. Ofcom’s current rules are open to interpretation — since comms providers only have to allow consumers to exit a contract without penalty when a contractual term change is likely to be of ‘material detriment’, leaving room for different interpretations of what constitutes ‘material detriment’.
Ofcom wants to clarify and simplify the rules, by proposing to allow consumers to exit a contract without penalty if their provider introduces any price increase during the term of the contract. The regulator also wants providers to be “clear and upfront” about the potential for price increases during a contract, as well as keeping them informed of their right to cancel the contract in the event of any price increase.
The proposed new rules follow a review conducted by Ofcom of the fairness of certain contract terms. Ofcom said it examined 1,644 consumer complaints about changes to terms and conditions during the period September 2011 to May 2012, adding that its analysis shows many consumers complained they were not made aware of the potential for price rises in what they believed were fixed contracts.
All the U.K.’s major mobile carriers have raised prices in recent months — with O2 the latest to announce mid-contract price rises last month, following similar hikes by Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and Three in the past 14 months, according to consumer advice publication Which?.
Ofcom’s preferred proposal is to modify its General Condition 9.6 to allow consumers to withdraw from a contract without penalty if providers increase prices during the contract term, but the regulator is also consulting on three other possible approaches to tackle price rises in fixed term contracts — including looking at:
whether consumer harm could be addressed solely by tackling the current lack of transparency around the potential for price increases. This is considered alongside the possible need for guidance on how providers should interpret and apply both Ofcom rules and general consumer protection laws when making price increases
whether consumers should have to actively ‘opt-in’ to any variable price contract
Ofcom is also considering the implications of maintaining the status quo but added that its current view is that these three options are unlikely to be sufficient to address the consumer harm it has identified.
The regulator also reveals it has considered a complete ban on price rises in fixed contracts but says it does not think this would be consistent with the European legal framework, so the option to ban mid-term contract rises has not been included in the consultation.
The consultation closes on March 14, 2013 and Ofcom expects to publish a decision in June 2013.
Commenting on Ofcom’s proposal, Vodafone warned that the proposed rule change risks causing consumer confusion and could also potentially increase the cost of mobile phone contracts. The carrier provided the following statement:Editorial note: If you’ve been following my tweets in the past 12 hours you’d have seen me hinting at something very cool for web developers coming out of Microsoft’s MIX09 event today. Well, it’s still at least 3 hours until MIX but it appears Microsoft’s own Expression Web team blog has let the dogs out early (their server is set to to New York time, not Las Vegas time), so consider the NDA broken 🙂
“Expression Web SuperPreview”, the name is typical of Microsoft products, it’s technically self-explanatory but mind-numbingly bland and ridiculously long.
To make matters worse, the beta being released today – a subset of the full release coming with Expression Web 3 – is called “Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer”. Granted the name is not that important for a developer tool, a kickass one at that.
Every web developer today faces the challenge of checking website compatibility across a large pool of browsers and browser versions in the marketplace. Up and until now, either you could install every browser, verify the website via a visual inspection and debug with tools specialized to that browser, or you could send a URL to a third-party screenshotting service like BrowserShots for an all-in-one visual inspection. The former is messy and tedious but gives you more control and an opportunity to diagnose problems, whilst the latter is simple but slow and useless to fix the problem. Needless to say, SuperPreview is the best of both worlds.
Note: The following screenshots come from a newer unreleased internal build of the application and does not reflect accurately what you can do in Expression Web SuperPreview today. Please don’t hurt me. I like kittens.
SuperPreview as a tool allows you to compare different rendering engines in a single unified interface. Simple clicks gives you comparisons between Internet Explorer 6, the native version of Internet Explorer installed, other browsers you may have installed locally – Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, Safari 4 – and even an bitmap images of website prototypes.
Pushing the envelopes a little, Microsoft is also building in support for remote rendering, such as those on different operating systems even. Details about this feature is not entirely clear at the moment, but I would expect this to be more advanced than just an image rendering.
On top of just a visual inspection, you have a standard set of modern HTML debugging tools like a DOM inspector, CSS inspector, element highlighting, pixel rulers and guides.
And perhaps what I think is the coolest feature, an overlay mode to compare exactly what’s different for pixel-perfect alignment. Or if you cross your eyes, the web in 3D.
Finally, how you can get your dirty web developer paws on this awesome tool, and it’s a little complicated to say the least. The beta of this software available right now is downloadable from Microsoft.com (250MB). The catch being it only supports renderings between IE6 and versions of IE installed on your computer already, but it should ease the pain of testing for IE6/7/8 compatibility for a lot of devs.
The full and final version of this product will be bundled together with Expression Web 3, sometime later this year and will run as a separate standalone application. Unfortunately for the many Mac web developers out there, because Expression Web is not an application part of the Expression Mac suite, SuperPreview will not be available.
You can watch this announcement and more from MIX09 from the livestream website starting at 9AM PST (Las Vegas time), and not EDT (New York time).Microsoft’s Surface chief will hold a keynote speech in London at the end of October. The software giant is holding its annual Future Decoded event in London from October 31st to November 1st, and Microsoft revealed to The Verge today that Panos Panay will be speaking. Microsoft typically launches new Surface devices in October, and sources familiar with the company’s plans tell us to expect at least one new device at the event.
Microsoft previously promised a Surface Pro LTE version, and we’re expecting the company to unveil this hardware alongside a possible successor to the Surface Book or the Surface Hub. Microsoft is also planning to launch ARM-powered Windows laptops this year from a range of PC makers. It’s not clear whether Microsoft will create its own Surface with an ARM processor, but company says it’s still on track for partners to release devices with Qualcomm chips.
“We are on track to see Windows 10 on Snapdragon devices become available this year as previously shared,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “Microsoft and Qualcomm continue to work closely with our OEM partners ASUS, HP and Lenovo in bringing Always Connected devices featuring always-on LTE connectivity and great battery life to market.” The Verge will be live from Microsoft’s Future Decoded event in London to bring you all the latest on Surface and Windows 10.0
For the Trekkies out there, today is “First Contact Day,” which marks the day humans and Vulcans first made contact in Star Trek lore, and the director of the latest Trek film is celebrating in style. Justin Lin, who takes over the Trek franchise from J.J. Abrams and brings his Fast & Furious expertise to the table, has shared a behind-the-scenes image from the first day of filming Star Trek Beyond (which, in case you were wondering, has long since wrapped). Not only is this image notable because it gives us a look at a pair of alien beings from the new Trek film, but it also serves as a massive tease for an Easter Egg.
Lin is opening this image up to a contest, with the first person who correctly guesses the identity of the two actors winning an official Star Trek Beyond crew t-shirt and a signed poster. Lin says the actors are not listed on the film’s IMDb credits and the only hint he gives is that he’s worked with them before, so it’s a bit of a toughie. The big guy couldn’t possibly be Dwayne Johnson could it? As for the other one, your guess is as good as mine, but I’m going with Community alum Danny Pudi as Lin helmed the classic paintball episode “Modern Warfare.”
So quick, shoot off your guesses to Lin. Also of note, he mentions that the official t-shirt for the film contains spoilers, so he can’t send it out until closer to the film’s release date. Hmm…
Star Trek Beyond finds the crew on their five-year mission and brings Idris Elba into the fold as a villainous character, with Kingsman standout Sofia Boutella playing a new ally. Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin also star as Lin works from a script penned by Pegg and Doug Jung. Star Trek Beyond opens in theaters on July 22nd.Official figures are masking a growing crisis in the labour market, with only half the vacancies advertised in UK jobcentres guaranteeing enough hours to allow jobseekers to qualify for the government's new in-work benefits regime, a Guardian investigation has found.
The analysis |
and slammed into a wall with a piece of fabric still attached.
“It would have hit me dead in the head,” Rogers said.
Next door, in Room 17, Doug Meroney peeped out the window and watched men take cover behind his black and silver Mini Cooper as they fired guns. He thinks he saw two people but he didn’t stand there long enough to know for sure.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” Meroney said. “I thought it was my air conditioning shorting out.”
In all, Rogers, Meroney and others who heard the gunfire estimate 20 or more shots were fired.
When Aurora police arrived at the motel at 9201 E. Colfax Ave. shortly after the 4:06 a.m. shooting they found two adults and a juvenile lying in different areas of the courtyard. All three had gunshot wounds.
All three underwent surgery and were expected to survived, the police reported. No one has been charged. The police said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the shooting. They did not release any further information.
Police were on scene for about six hours. Afterward, puddles of blood had dried on the pathway outside rooms and in parking spaces next to bullet-riddled cars.
The Carriage Motor Inn is home to people down on their luck, and those trying to come back up.
Meroney, who is from Canon City, said he picked the motel because it was what he could afford. He was in Aurora because he had back-to-back appointments at the VA hospital in Aurora, and space there for out-of-town veterans was full.
He picked the Colfax motel even though is wife had urged him to avoid the busy street with a bad reputation. He choked back tears as the reality of what had happened set in. Nearby, his beloved Mini Cooper had two bullet holes in the driver’s side door.
“I knew I shouldn’t do this,” Meroney said. “I’m a smart enough guy.”
Meroney said he heard a volley of shots, a pause and then more shots. When the shooting stopped and police arrived Meroney saw someone lying in a pool of blood behind a car.
A hotel resident named Keith, who declined to give his last name, said he heard more than 30 gunshots in the parking lot.
“It sounded like there were two different sets of gunshots,” Keith said. “There was a lower pop and a louder one, like someone was firing back. There were a bunch.”
He said he had been staying at the Carriage Motel for a couple of months, paying $290 a week for a room with no air-conditioning or microwave.
“I know there are a lot of drug users who stay here,” Keith said.
After police left and a tow truck hauled off a green SUV, Rogers, who has lived at the motel since June, stood outside his room waiting on his brother to help him move out.
He had called his boss at a Brighton car wash Friday morning and was given the day off to find another place. He planned to return to work on Saturday.
“I know it’s bad,” Rogers said. “I’m going to have to move to another hotel somewhere else.”BOSTON - APRIL 04: Fans enter Yawkey Way before a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on Opening Night at Fenway Park on April 4, 2010 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images) Fans enter Yawkey Way before a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on Opening Night at Fenway Park on April 4, 2010 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)
The Boston Red Sox season has started and that means it’s time for another season of Ask A Pink Hat. Adolfo heads down to Fenway Park to ask a fan some questions about the Red Sox. This woman likes baseball and her favorite player is Pedroia, but it’s not Dustin. Will she be able to tell Adolfo where the pitchers warm up or what team Carl Crawford plays for? Take a to all her great answers to Adolfo’s question.Elections Canada may recommend the government regulate contact with voters during election campaigns, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told MPs today.
Following controversy over automated robocalls and live calls during the 2011 federal election, Mayrand says his next report will look at how new technology affects campaigning. Computer technology makes it much easier to call large groups of voters and to call them repeatedly.
The report will be presented by the end of this fiscal year next spring, Mayrand told MPs on the procedure and House affairs committee.
"The purpose of this report will be to suggest improvements to the Canada Elections Act in order to deal with a number of issues relating to new technologies and social media, as well as to how political entities communicate with electors during a general election.
"Among other things, it will address issues such as voter contacts, either through automated or live calls, and whether, or to what extent, these communications need to be regulated," he said.
Mayrand said the agency has received 1,100 complaints about misleading election calls, which redirected voters to the wrong polling stations.
But he said he had no new information about the investigation.
"It is ongoing and remains a priority for the commissioner. However, until the investigation has been concluded, I am not in a position to provide additional information to the committee," he said.
Mayrand had said he would update the committee on the robocalls investigation in June, but today he said didn't expect to have more information for them in the next month.
Etobicoke Centre case brings review
Mayrand also said Elections Canada is making it a priority to strengthen its procedures for voting day, following an Ontario Superior Court judge's decision to throw out the result of the federal election in Etobicoke Centre earlier this month.
The judge set aside 79 ballots because of irregularities at 10 polling stations in the riding, which was won by Conservative Ted Opitz by a margin of just 26 votes. Opitz is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In his ruling, the judge said the case shook the "confidence that Canadians must have in our electoral process."
"In light of recent events, we have readjusted our plans, to place a major priority on strengthening measures aiming to improve compliance with the procedures and standards applicable on voting day," Mayrand said.
"Our intention is threefold: first, to review the voter registration and voting processes based on what transpired in Etobicoke Centre," Mayrand said.
"Second, to assess the effectiveness of existing checks and balances; and third, to engage key stakeholders in implementing solutions for the 2015 election. We believe this is critical regardless of the outcome of the appeal."
Mayrand said Elections Canada has to figure out a way to do real-time quality control on the day voters cast their ballots. There are 65,000 polling stations serving 12 million electors on a single day, he pointed out, and it is often the first and only day workers and volunteers have those jobs.
"That a number of errors will occur, yes," he said.
Former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who had lost the initial ballot count to Opitz, has spent $250,000 on the legal challenge. Mayrand acknowledged most candidates wouldn't be able to afford a cost like that to find resolution under Canadian election laws.
"It’s something that maybe should be considered. That’s how the act operates. I expect the court will be asked to address the issue of costs. We’ll see how it’s going to be addressed there. Otherwise we’ll need changes to the legislation," he said.
Budget cuts hit agency
Elections Canada wasn't exempt from the government's recent round of budget cuts, and one of the ways the agency is dealing with its $7.5 million cut is by delaying planned programs. The agency cut its budget by about eight per cent, Mayrand said.
The program delay means a pilot project on internet voting will wait until the next federal election in 2015, rather than happening in a 2013 by-election. The pilot project requires parliamentary approval, he said.
Mayrand says he's concerned Elections Canada may not be able to afford its salaries by 2014, so the agency is going through a zero-based budget exercise, meaning starting from scratch and allocating money from there.
For future elections, the agency is looking at establishing new locations to vote by special ballot, such as university and college campuses, and community centres serving voters with disabilities, Mayrand said.Announcing: The YNAB4 to Financier Converter tool
Totally alpha and could be completely broken, use at your own risk! Created last night in the Ballmer curve
PLEASE READ FIRST:
Before using, log out and clear local budgets! Then, try importing and playing around. When you're done, CLEAR LOCAL BUDGETS before logging back in!You should NOT sync these budgets to your account because they could be not working in weird ways!Alternatively, use Chrome's ingognito mode and do not login to your account.I hope you guys like it. ❤️ Please give me feedback and point out inconsistencies with the migration. @asromzek is working on a nYNAB migration tool, so stay tuned for that.At this point it should be OK to sync your imported budget. However, don't import multiple times -- this could cause syncing to run slower than usual.For Tampa Bay Lightning fans, tonight’s game of the Memorial Cup tournament was the biggest one so far. The 0-1 Saint John Sea Dogs, with Mathieu Joseph and Bokondji Imama, took on the 1-0 Erie Otters, who have Anthony Cirelli, Taylor Raddysh, and Erik Cernak on the ice.
I was going to try and make this about both sets of prospects, but Joseph and Imama will have to wait until the next game. Tonight the Erie Otters set two records themselves, and the Saint John Sea Dogs helped set a third in tonight’s game.
First, the score was 12-5. Final shots were 39-23 for Erie.
The combined score set a new Memorial Cup record for total goals in one game, breaking the old record of 15 set back in 1984 when the Kitchener Rangers defeated the Kamloops Jr Oilers 9-6.
Erie’s 12 goals set a new record for most goals scored by a single team in a game. The previous record as 11, set by the Quebec Remparts over the St. Catharines Black Hawks in 1974 and by the Regina Pats over the Cornwall Royals in 1980.
Dylan Strome set a new record for most points by a single player in a game with seven. The previous record of six was held by several players.
Taylor Raddysh tied the old record with Strome, but only held it for a few minutes.
Taylor Raddysh & Anthony Cirelli
Raddysh and Cirelli are playing like they can read each other’s minds. Passes are caught every time; they know where each other will be on the ice.
They include undrafted line mate Kyle Maskimovich in the fun. This has been the best line of the tournament hands down.
Anthony Cirelli has been stick handling like a God tonight, as if the Saint John players were practice dummies.
An excellent game by the Lightning forwards.
Erik Cernak
The defender has been playing on his lonesome tonight. He’s been a wall at the blue line. Nothing gets out of the Otters zone when he’s at the point, unless it’s on his partner’s side. He’s playing his physical game again, using his body to keep Sea Dogs forwards away from his net.
Mathieu Joseph & Bokondji Imama
These two play on Saint John’s best forward line. They were the starting forwards, and in the first few seconds they rushed the Otters net and Joseph hit the post.
And now, the goals by the prospects.
Taylor Raddysh puts the @ErieOtters up 1-0 with a perfect shot pic.twitter.com/xguolBSznQ — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 22, 2017
Thomas Chabot threads this pass to Mathieu Joseph through four Otters. Great vision from the #Sens prospect @SJSeaDogs #MCMemorialCup pic.twitter.com/mxehUvruuI — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 22, 2017
Anthony Cirelli wheels in and finishes with the wraparound. Great solo effort, 5-2 @ErieOtters #MCMemorialCup pic.twitter.com/Yxep93Padx — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 22, 2017
The Raddysh brothers combine as Darren feeds younger bro Taylor making it 6-2 @ErieOtters pic.twitter.com/32ktnliK2y — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 23, 2017
Troy Timpano shuts the door on Joseph's penalty shot via ref-cam @ErieOtters pic.twitter.com/dWabD236pk — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 23, 2017
Taylor Raddysh feeds Strome for the hat-trick. Thats six points for each player on the night. @ErieOtters lead 11-3 pic.twitter.com/a9CcL6TQ7P — Shayne Pasquino (@shaynepasquino) May 23, 2017
Full game highlights:
Post Game Q&A’s
Erik Cernak
Q: It was a great game for the Otters tonight. Your play on defense has been just solid. A wall at the blueline, using your physicality. Do you think it’s improved?
A: I try to play my game every game, and play well in the defensive zone. I try to be the best against the top players.
Q: Have you had any interaction with the Lightning this season? Have they recommended training habits or anything?
A: Of course, they talk to me after every game. They tell me what to work on, and where I have to be better. I have to listen to these guys and work and work.
Q: Working with other Lightning prospects, Cirelli, Raddysh, is there any work among you to try and make it there together?
A: Of course it would be nice because we played together this year, and to play together would be nice next year, but every player has his own work to do.
Anthony Cirelli
Q: Your play tonight and in both games this tournament, with Taylor Raddysh and Maksimovich, has been probably one of the top lines I’ve seen in the tournament so far. Has there been any work together, or are you just mind reading out there?
A: I don’t really know what it is. I played with Taylor at the World Juniors, and at Tampa [prospect camps]. We kind of know each other, read off each other. Maxi is an unbelievable player. He’s just easy to play with. He’s fast, he’s strong. He takes pucks to the net. He’s really smart. Playing with two unbelievable players like that, it makes everyone’s jobs easy. I don’t know - I guess know we’re clicking.
Q: You get up a bunch of goals there. Regular season, you let off the gas a little bit. But in the game like that, you can’t. Both teams understand that.
A: Yeah, for sure. Down the road, it could be a goals-for, goals-against tie break situation. So we need to get as many goals as we can and not let in any. Today everything was kind of clicking for us. We got some lucky bounces. They were in the penalty box a lot there too, so we just got to capitalize on our chances.
Q: The transition game is important for you guys, isn’t it? It’s really apparent. It’s like one, two passes and you’re up the ice. Is that something you guys work on?
A: Yeah, we’ll do some drills in practice. Moving the puck quickly and getting it up the ice. We have a lot of skilled players, fast players on the team. We try to get it, give it a go, move it up the ice.
Taylor Raddysh
Raddysh: It was a big start for us. We knew they were going to come out strong. Obviously with that quick goal there [at the beginning of the game], it gave us a lot of momentum. It happened to work out for three periods.
Qu: Do you think your speed caught them [the Sea Dogs] a little off-guard there? It seemed like at times they were just kind of trying to find themselves and you guys were going at it.
A: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe a little bit, I guess. We were all over the puck tonight. I felt like we played a solid game all around. We were skating hard, it created a lot of turnover for chances.
Q: Has the team’s confidence been this high at all, all year?
A: I guess at some points. We had some pretty good streaks throughout the season, but this is big for us. It’s the biggest tournament of the year. We’re 2-0 right now. We’re feeling pretty good. We’ll be ready to go for the Windsor [Thunderbirds] game.
Q: Do you know about the record you set yet? The team, I mean.
A: Yeah, I heard a little bit about it. I think it was the goals-for. It’s big for us. It’s pretty cool when you do good things like that.
Q: Your brother [Erie Otters defenseman Darren Raddysh] just found out now, so that’s why I asked.
A: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. [smiles]
Q: What was the atmosphere like in the locker room during second intermission, going into the third period with such a big lead when you still had another period to play?
A: We just had to stick with our game. We knew that after the first period, they were going to be coming hard. With our strong second [period] there, we stuck with it and it happened to pay off.
Q: What about you? When was the last time you scored six points in a game?
A: I think it’s maybe my first time in the OHL. I don’t think I’ve gotten six since my minor hockey league times. Yeah, it was the first time doing it here. I was talking to Stromer [fellow Erie Otters forward Dylan Strome] and he was let me it was a tie for record and he happened to break it the next shift there. [smiles]
Q: Did you have a quiet contest on the bench, between you two?
A: No, it was a friendly joke - just to let me know. It was cool for him to get that seventh [point] there.
Q: When was the last time you guys scored 12 goals in a game? Or have you ever?
A: I don’t think so. Not that I know of. I think the highest we’ve had was nine maybe? I really don’t think we’ve gone that high before.
The Erie Otters play the Windsor Spitfires Wednesday night. The winner of that game will finish the round robin 3-0 and receive a bye to the final game.
The Saint John Sea Dogs play the Seattle Thunderbirds tomorrow night. The winner of that game plays the loser of Windsor / Erie in the semi-finals. The loser is eliminated from the tournament.SHERIDAN, Wyo. (AP) — Police in northern Wyoming say a rifle discharged after a dog apparently stepped on it, injuring a 46-year-old man.
Johnson County Sheriff Steve Kozisek (KAHS’-eh-sec) says the bullet struck Richard L. Fipps, of Sheridan, in the arm on Monday.
The injury is not life-threatening but Fipps is being treated in a hospital in Billings, Montana.
Kozisek told The Sheridan Press (http://bit.ly/1sMfrgZ ) that Fipps and two others were in a remote area trying to move a vehicle that had become stuck. Fipps was standing beside his truck when he told his dog to move from the front seat to the back seat.
The sheriff says a rifle was on the back seat and it discharged toward Fipps.
___
Information from: The Sheridan (Wyo.) Press, http://www.thesheridanpress.com/
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Dutchman has been told he can leave Royals having signed last summer
Reading winger Royston Drenthe challenged fans to a FIFA 14 tournament at his house on Sunday.
The former Everton and Real Madrid wideman took to Instagram to invite local Royals supporters for a game of the popular console game and revealed the winner would receive a 'nice prize'.
Nearly 800 people put their names forward before the 27-year-old then picked out four lucky winners to take part.
VIDEO: Scroll down to watch Royston Drenthe's FIFA tournament in Reading winger's home
Challenge: Royston Drenthe invited Reading fans to his house for a FIFA tournament via his Instagram account Selection process: The Dutchman told the FIFA hopefuls to leave their mobile numbers and hope for a call
Contenders: Drenthe posted a snap of the lucky participants before wishing them luck for the tournament
Posting a picture of the participants in what appeared to be his back garden, Drenthe said:'Tournament about to begin good luck lads,' before proceeding to give a running commentary of the games as his guests battled it out.
The winner received one of Drenthe's match-worn Reading shirts and what appeared to be a cash prize - judging by the picture the midfielder shared via his Instagram account.
Having signed a two-year deal with Reading last summer, the Dutchman was reportedly told he could leave the Championship club in July and has also been stripped of his No 10 shirt.
Drenthe began his career with Feyenoord before spells with Real Madrid and Everton.
Joining the Toffees on loan in 2011, the left-footer went on to score three times in 21 appearances for the Blues.
Lounging around: Drenthe gave updates and a running commentary of the FIFA tournamentNovember 2, 2015 3 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
That our national food consumption patterns are in need of a dramatic overhaul is indisputable – almost 17 percent of children and 35 percent of U.S. adults are obese, percentages that are only rising. How to go about enacting this much-needed change, however? That's where the uncertainty comes in.
To date, few public policies have been enacted in an effort to change our national eating habits. One notable exception is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's announcement that food outlets with more than 20 locations must list calorie counts on their menus by December 2016.
But does this approach actually lead consumers to make healthier choices? A new study, conducted by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center, serves up the grim conclusion that calorie labels, on their own, do not reduce the overall number of calories ordered.
Related: FDA Extends Deadlines for Chain Restaurant to Add Calorie Counts to Menus
The study, published today, compared itemized orders from fast-food chains in New York City -- which, in 2008, became the first jurisdiction that required chains with more than 15 locations to post calorie labels on menus – with orders at fast-food chains in New Jersey (where there are no calorie labels on menus) in 2008 and then again at various points in 2013 and 2014. As such, it's the first long-term analysis of the effects of menu labeling in the United States.
In 2008, directly after calorie information appeared on menu, 51 percent of polled fast-food diners in New York City said they noticed calorie information and 12 percent said they used it to order fewer calories, versus 14 percent and 2 percent of New Jersey fast-food diners.
Despite this, the average number of calories per order remained the same. According to the study, there was "no consistent change in the nutritional content of foods and beverages purchased or in how often respondents purchased fast food." What's more, between 2008 and 2013-2014 the average number of calories purchased increased for diners in both New York City and New Jersey.
Earlier studies have suggested the effects of calorie-labeling at fast-food restaurants are minor at best, but there was a hope that the long-term impact would be more substantial. "We did not find that to be the case," the authors wrote.
Related: The 9 Highest Calorie Meals from Your Favorite Chain Restaurants
While this is a blow to the idea that nationwide calorie menu requirements will dramatically alter the way America eats, it doesn't necessarily mean the policy is useless: perhaps, as the authors speculate, it may be more effective in sit-down restaurants where dining expectations are different, or for specific groups of particularly health-concious diners. "We will have to wait and see, while continuing to monitor and analyze the policy’s impact," Brian Elbel, the study's senior investigator, said in a statement.
Still, it's disheartening news -- one that demands the consideration and implementation of additional strategies if obesity rates are ever to significantly fall. Previous research suggests more dramatic label modifications – such as using a stop sign for very unhealthy foods, listing the amount of exercise required to burn off each menu item or adding context by placing calorie counts next to the recommended number of calories in one meal – could be effective at changing consumer behavior.
Sadly, as the authors rightly note, "the likelihood of their being adopted at a policy level is limited."
Related: U.S. Nutrition Labels Get a Makeover, But New Version Won't Be Seen for YearsIn teaser adverts promoting its "Whopper Virgins" challenge, the fast food chain describes how it sought out farmers in rural Romania, Thai villagers and residents of Greenland's icy tundra to compare its signature burger with arch rival McDonalds'.
"What happens if you take Transylvanian farmers who have never eaten a burger and ask them to compare Whopper versus Big Mac in the world's purest taste test?" one of the adverts asks. "Will they prefer the Whopper? These are the Whopper Virgins."
The "undeniable" results of the chain's "unbiased" global research – which involved "13 planes, two dog sleds and one helicopter" – will be unveiled in a documentary next week, according to whoppervirgins.com, the website promoting the campaign.
"If you want a real opinion about a burger, ask someone who doesn't even have a word for burger," states the site to a haunting theme of drums and pan pipes. "Watch the whopper virgins take their first bite."
But critics have slammed the campaign as insulting and exploitative.
"It's outrageous," Sharon Akabas of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, told the New York Daily News. "What's next? Are we going to start taking guns out to some of these remote places and ask them which one they like better?"
Marilyn Borchardt, development director for Food First, called the campaign insensitive.
"The ad's not even acknowledging that there's even hunger in any of these places," she told the Daily News.
The campaign has also stirred up a welter of online commentary. Brian Morrissey, writing on Adfreak.com, likens the campaign to colonialism and declares it "embarrassing and emblematic of how ignorant Americans still seem to the rest of the world."
"It doesn't get much more offensive than this," noted The Inquisitor blog. "If visiting poor people in remote locations, some who would be at best surviving on below poverty levels and throwing a burger in their faces isn't bad enough, it gets better, because they also ask the Whopper Virgins to compare the taste of the Whopper to a McDonalds Big Mac as well.
"It's hard to place exactly where this begins on the level of wrongness."Xmas trees, fairy lights, Santa caps and snowmen dotted cities across Pakistan as Christmas festivities kicked off on Sunday.
Members of the Christian community will attend special services at illuminated churches where prayers will also be offered for the progress and prosperity of Pakistan, Radio Pakistan reported.
Residential colonies were decorated with twinkling lights and stars, and baubles such as bells, pine cones, apples, candies, tinsel and balloons bedecked trees, streets, houses and churches. Wreaths were hung outside stores buzzing with last-minute shopping on Christmas eve.
Ahead of Christmas this year, Minister for Railways Khawaja Saad Rafique also inaugurated a special Christmas Train which travelled across the country spreading Christmas cheer. The Xmas Peace Train that left Peshawar on Dec 22 will reach Karachi on Dec 31.
Explore: In pictures: All aboard the Christmas train!
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered there to be zero loadshedding today in the country.
President Mamnoon Hussain and PM Nawaz extended their heartiest felicitations on the occasion and wished Christians in Pakistan and all over the world a merry Christmas.
The government is striving to promote interfaith harmony discourage religious discrimination, they said.
Explore: Christmas in Karachi: Who needs reindeer if you have camels?
A woman holds a baby in Santa Claus cap, as they attend a ceremony with others on Christmas eve at Central Brooks Memorial Church in Karachi. ─Reuters
A beautiful illuminated view of decorated first special Christmas train in connection of Celebration ceremony of Christmas ahead of Christmas Day at Saddar Railway Station in Rawalpindi, ─Zubair Abbasi/PPI
Christians attend midnight service at Saint Anthony's church on Christmas eve in Lahore. ─AP
Pakistani Christian gather on a street to celebrate Christmas in Islamabad. ─AFP
Pakistani Christian children gather on their street to celebrate Christmas in Islamabad. ─AFP
Christians visit a grave of their family member at a graveyard ahead of Christmas in Karachi. ─AP
People pray as they gather for a ceremony on Christmas eve at Central Brooks Memorial Church in Karachi. ─Reuters
Pakistani Christian children walk past the lights decoration for Christmas celebration in Islamabad.─AFP
Pakistani balloon vendors cross a street in heavy fog in Lahore. ─AFP
A man gives final touches to a Santa Claus decoration on Christmas Eve, in a Christian neighborhood. ─AP
A man decorates a tree for Christmas in a Christian neighborhood. ─AP
People walk past an artificial decoration wreath hanging outside a shop selling various items for Christmas celebrations in Karachi. ─Reuters
A Santa Claus decoration sticker hangs on a stall where women go through various items to buy for Christmas celebrations in Karachi. ─Reuters
A man decorates a Christmas tree at the St. John Cathedral Church ahead of Christmas celebrations in Peshawar. ─Reuters
Pakistani children decorate a Christmas tree at the St John's Cathedral Church in Peshawar. ─AFP
People pray as they gather for a ceremony on Christmas eve at Central Brooks Memorial Church in Karachi. ─ReutersToday’s youth are facing a crisis. The necessity of receiving a college degree to obtain employment has forced many young people to take on massive loans to cover the cost of schooling. 71% of students receiving their bachelor’s degree will graduate with student debt, with the average accumulated debt hovering around $35,000. Women, oppressed nationalities, and LGBTQ people are doubly burdened due to pay discrimination based on gender, race, and sexual orientation, thus making it more difficult to secure an income on par with white cis-male students with which to pay back loans. With this burden attached to the majority of college students, the looming shadow of debt can be nothing else than a prolonged financial bondage thrust on an entire generation. This goes hand in hand with the increasing corporatization of higher education here in the United States, where students are treated as cash-cows ripe for monetary exploitation rather than young minds eager to expand intellectually and practically. This systematic monetization amounts to nothing less than a privatization of education and removes its accessibility to working-class people.
It’s clear that the capitalist system, with its continued assault on working people through neoliberal economic reforms and the prolonged economic downturn, cannot accommodate the educational needs of the majority of people. While the capitalist system dominates the people economically, it also constantly reproduces the conditions for the continuation of its oppressive and exploitative social relations through its ideological apparatus, the education system. The colleges, as they are currently, are centers for the indoctrination of the youth in a reactionary ruling ideology that is thoroughly racist, sexist, anti-LGBT, and classist. Recently, a movement of students has emerged across the country dedicated to fighting back against the dire economic situation faced by students shackled by debt. The Million Student March represents the day of action for this movement. The demands of the movement strike at the heart of the debt crisis by calling for a $15/hr. minimum wage for all campus workers, the cancelation of all student debt, and tuition-free public college.
Progressive Youth Organization seeks to unite with this movement on the grounds that it represents a mobilization of students, youth, and adjuncts capable of challenging the trend of university education being the exclusive purview of the elite. The cancelation of all student debt will alleviate the financial burden placed on the shoulders of current, past, and future students, thus freeing millions of young people from decades of unending debt payments. Couple this with providing free public college and a $15/hr. minimum wage, and the privatization of higher education, and its insufficient low wage employment, will take a serious blow. However, Progressive Youth Organization, while recognizing the necessity of these demands for opening up education to the people and eliminating the debt crisis, also understands the necessity for going beyond what is possible.
While the demands of the Million Student Movement represent a step forward, they do not represent an all out assault on the entire structure of the reactionary education system, as well as lacking an explicitly working-class political perspective. Mere economic reforms are not enough. The legitimization of the oppression of the working-class, oppressed nationalities, LGBT people, and women that is reproduced in the universities must be removed root and branch. Progressive Youth Organization maintains that the only way to achieve victory is by opening up the universities to the working-class and oppressed peoples through the expansion of labor certificate programs, creation of remedial programs, expanding the teaching of the history and culture of oppressed nationalities, and expanding women’s studies programs. Only in this way can the student movement continue to fight and politicize itself in a revolutionary way by creating an ideological counterbalance to the dominant racist, patriarchal, sexist, and capitalist university system.
UNITE AND POLITICIZE! OPEN THE UNIVERSITIES AND REMOVE REACTIONARY IDEOLOGY ROOT AND BRANCH! IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL!Britain will need "drastic" austerity measures to prevent public debt exploding out of control, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), has declared.
Interest payments on the UK's public debt will double from 5pc of GDP to 10pc within a decade under the bank's "baseline scenario" before spiralling upwards to 27pc by 2040 – by far the highest among the OECD club of developed countries. Greece fares better, while Britain's interest burden is far worse than Italy's.
The BIS said that Labour's plan to consolidate the budget deficit by 1.3pc of GDP annually for the next three years did not go far enough.
Philip Hammond, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "The BIS just reinforces the warnings that Conservatives have been giving about the debt trap Britain now faces unless we take action: how risky debt means a growing proportion of our national income is going to be taken up by interest payments rather than financing public services."
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) dealt a further blow to Gordon Brown, cutting its UK growth forecast for the first quarter. The organisation predicted the UK economy grew by 0.5pc in the first three months of the year compared with the fourth quarter of 2009, downgrading its earlier forecast of 0.6pc growth.
The OECD added that improvements in the G7 economies in the final three months of 2009 would ease in the first half of this year.
"Although we are seeing some encouraging signs of stronger activity, the fragility of the recovery, a frail labour market and possible headwinds coming from financial markets underscore the need for caution in the removal of policy support," said Pier Carlo Padoan, the OECD's chief economist.
The organisation predicted growth in the US, France and Canada would out-pace that of the UK in the first quarter, though the UK is expected to outperform the G7 as a whole.
These latest economic forecasts coincided with an intensifying row with business over the Government's planned National Insurance hike – and an intervention from Sir Bill Castell over the nation's stifling tax regime.
Mr Castell, the head of the Wellcome Trust and a former adviser to the Prime Minister, caught the mood of many businessmen, saying: "The UK is no longer the natural home for global business. Our taxes are too high."
There was better news for the Prime Minister in a respected survey showing a fair performance from Britain's key services sector – even though growth slowed last month.
The services purchasing managers' index (PMI) dipped to 56.5 in March from 58.4 in February, where anything above 50 signals expansion.
The number of jobs in the sector increased for the first time in almost two years, with the PMI employment measure rising to 50.3 from 48.8.
The services sector accounts for three-quarters of the economy, and the PMI implied services growth of around 0.5pc in the first quarter.
Economists have predicted the economy overall grew by about 0.5pc in the first quarter, in line with the OECD's forecast. That would spare the Prime Minister the economic and political nightmare of a double-dip recession when the official figures are published on April 23, just two weeks before the general election on May 6.The Panama Papers, which relied heavily on the leaked information from Mossack Fonseca law firm, may not just be about State actors and corporate players’ secret offshore shell companies, physical assets and bank accounts, but more about getting back at people who have turned their backs on the New World Order totalitarian regime which took decades of planning, mass murder, regime changes, false flags, and sustained environmental destruction, to construct.
The Panama Papers look more like a Rothchild dynasty’s exercising the Samson Option. But, it’s still good to know that they are now after each other’s throat.
It turns out that the Mossack Fonseca law firm is a handy work of |
A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the quark is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't go off. There'll only be a click.
Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again. Click. And again: click. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun won't fire. Although it's functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never fire. He'll continue this process for eternity, becoming immortal.
Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the quark is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.
But, wait. The man already pulled the trigger the first time -- and an infinite amount of times following that -- and we already know the gun didn't fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but he's both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled [source: Tegmark].
This thought experiment is called quantum suicide. It was first posed by then-Princeton University theorist Max Tegmark in 1997 (now on faculty at MIT). A thought experiment is an experiment that takes place only in the mind. The quantum level is the smallest level of matter we've detected so far in the universe. Matter at this level is infinitesimal, and it's virtually impossible for scientists to research it in a practical manner using traditional methods of scientific inquiry.Trump seemed to indicate he agreed with the protesters that the statue of the Confederate slave owner should not have been removed.
“The night before people innocently protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said, in reference to the group of white supremacists who spent the evening carrying torches, shouting Nazi slogans, and delivering Nazi salutes. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in — without a permit — and they were very, very violent.”
The press conference, which took place in the gold-plated lobby of Trump Tower, was to focus on infrastructure. But Trump quickly veered off-script into defending the white supremacists, pointing out that they had a permit to “innocently” protest, while the people who came to protest against them did not.
“What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch,” he said at a Tuesday press conference in New York. “But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.”
President Donald Trump defended the group of white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, telling reporters they were largely justified and have been unfairly vilified by the media. The protests ended Saturday when one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of people, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.
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President Donald Trump defended the group of white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, telling reporters they were largely justified and have been unfairly vilified by the media. The protests ended Saturday when one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of people, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.
“What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch,” he said at a Tuesday press conference in New York. “But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.”
The press conference, which took place in the gold-plated lobby of Trump Tower, was to focus on infrastructure. But Trump quickly veered off-script into defending the white supremacists, pointing out that they had a permit to “innocently” protest, while the people who came to protest against them did not.
“The night before people innocently protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said, in reference to the group of white supremacists who spent the evening carrying torches, shouting Nazi slogans, and delivering Nazi salutes. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in — without a permit — and they were very, very violent.”
Trump seemed to indicate he agreed with the protesters that the statue of the Confederate slave owner should not have been removed.
“You’re changing history. You’re changing culture,” Trump said, comparing George Washington to Lee because “he was a slave owner,” and asking rhetorically if his statue should be removed next.
Trump also defended his decision to wait more than 48 hours to explicitly condemn Nazis and white supremacists because he “wanted to make sure that, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct.”
“When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts,” Trump — who incorrectly labeled a murder in Manila as a terrorism attack last month — said.
But Trump seemed unclear on many of the facts surrounding the Charlottesville attack, at one point suggesting the white supremacists were justified because the statue removal was somehow unsanctioned by the appropriate authorities.
“I would say that’s up to a local town, community, or the federal government, depending on where it is located,” Trump said. The decision to remove the statue was made by the city of Charlottesville.Jordan Strauss/Associated Press
The Dallas Cowboys are still licking their wounds from a 4-12 2015 season that saw starting quarterback Tony Romo sidelined for 12 games because of collarbone injuries. One of the team's all-time best quarterbacks, Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, thinks he knows who the Cowboys might rely on to back up Romo in case he goes down in 2016.
Aikman spoke with Sports Illustrated Now on Tuesday.
"I believe, as I sit here today, either Johnny Manziel or Robert Griffin III will be in Dallas as the backup," Aikman said (via the Dallas Morning News).
Both quarterbacks aren't free agents as of yet. But rumors that Manziel's and Griffin's respective teams will release them have swirled around throughout the offseason.
In 2015, the Cowboys started Matt Cassel, Kellen Moore and Brandon Weeden in Romo's place. They combined for a 1-11 record with 12 touchdowns and 16 interceptions.
Manziel and Griffin III didn't have much better seasons, though. Manziel made more headlines off of the field than on with the Cleveland Browns. He appeared in 10 games, starting six of them, posting a 2-4 record.
Griffin, on the other hand, didn't even see the field with the Washington Redskins in 2015. A preseason concussion forced him to the sidelines, which left the door open for Kirk Cousins, who was awarded the starting job by head coach Jay Gruden.
Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones has expressed his admiration of the two players in the past, though.
Jones told 105.3 The Fan's Shan and RJ show in December (via the Dallas Morning News' Jon Machota) that Manziel was one of the team's top targets during the 2014 NFL draft.
Back in 2014, he gushed about Griffin on NFL Network's NFL AM (Conor Orr of NFL.com).
Well, I'm a fan of RGIII. Right on this field two years ago, or maybe it was three seasons ago, he put on a show and had a game that just floored me. And they won, and they won in large part because of his play at quarterback. I thought'my goodness, and we're going to have to be playing this guy for years and years.' And so he's got it. Once you see a player do it, especially if you see him do it two or three times, you know he can do it. And of course he's a driven young man. I'm a big admirer of RGIII.
These two do have plenty of baggage they could potentially bring to Dallas. However, whichever quarterback the Cowboys acquire will have time to acclimate to a new team behind a quarterback in Romo who, when healthy, is still capable of being a solid leader.
Both Griffin and Manziel were thrust into situations that called them to be the saviors of their franchises. While Manziel struggled in the spotlight, Griffin's success was derailed by injury. A fresh start could salvage the career of one of these two quarterbacks, and Dallas could be that perfect setting.
Stats courtesy of Pro-Football-Reference.com.There was a time when shows about regular, everyday high schoolers were the bread and butter of young adult television. But now, unless you have a murder mystery to solve, a very special boyfriend (either a vampire, werewolf or an A-list movie star will do) or a dystopian future to survive, it's as though the inner lives of teens aren't important enough to take seriously on their own.
Netflix's new drama 13 Reasons Why is here to change that.
Based on Jay Asher's best-selling book and produced by Selena Gomez, the hook of 13 Reasons Why isn't anything sexy or supernatural. It tells the story of Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford), a high school junior who decided to take her own life and the 13 reasons that led her to that choice.
Before slitting her own wrists, Hannah recorded 13 cassette tapes, each one dedicated to a different person who contributed to her decision to commit suicide. After her death, Hannah has the box of tapes sent to the first person on her list with instructions to listen to all 13 before passing them on to the next person, lest a second copy of the tapes be made public, exposing everyone's secrets and misdeeds.
When the show picks up, the tapes have already worked their way through the majority of the list and have now reached Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette), Hannah's do-gooder classmate who is understandably horrified to learn that he did anything to harm his long-time crush. As Clay listens to the tapes, the show beautifully weaves between Hannah's past and his present, spinning an intricate web that demonstrates how a few seemingly innocuous actions can lead to such tragedy — tragedy that continues to snowball long past Hannah's death.
Photo: Beth Dubber/Netflix
Unlike the book, which focused exclusively on Clay's experience listening to Hannah's tapes over the course of one night, Netflix's adaptation expands the story far beyond the lives of just Clay and Hannah, dedicating time to understanding and exploring the perspectives of everyone involved, from Hannah's grieving and confused parents (Kate Walsh and Brian d'Arcy James) to the fellow students whom she blames for her death (including Parenthood's Miles Heizer and breakout performances by Alisha Boe and Brandon Flynn).
One of the main messages of 13 Reasons Why is that you never know what someone else is experiencing, and the same rings true for the people named on Hannah's tapes. Just as Hannah made sure the tapes told her story, the show makes sure to give the same opportunity to the people on her list, attempting to expose the root cause that led them to become one of her 13 reasons. And while no one is beyond blame in this series, neither are they beyond sympathy.
13 Reasons Why takes the incidents Hannah describes in the tapes — which range from naming her Best Ass in the high school to being complicit in a sexual assault — and gives the accused an opportunity to have their own voice on the matter heard. Even the book's most spotless character, Clay, is revealed to have made some unintentional stumbles in his relationship with Hannah, forcing Clay to reassess how he's chosen to live his life. In many cases, understanding why one of her peers made such a selfish or outright cruel decision doesn't make their action any less abhorrent, but it does underscore the recurring theme that no one — not even Hannah — can truly know the full story of someone else's life.
Expanding the world of 13 Reasons Why beyond just Clay and Hannah works almost entirely to the show's benefit, but there are a few times when the show stumbles in its transformation into an ensemble drama. The focus placed on how individual tape recipients are coping with the accusations that they were to blame for Hannah's death is a fascinating study in grief, guilt and denial. But when nearly all the recipients before Clay ban together to form a makeshift gang determined to stop him from passing the tapes along any further (complete with threats to kill him if he doesn't fall in line), it sometimes verges beyond the realm of believability, which is otherwise one of 13 Reasons Why's greatest strengths.
13 Reasons Why: Watch the heart-wrenching trailer
Often after a suicide, the people left behind will feel a complex mix of anger, confusion and grief. And in many ways, 13 Reasons Why is a macabre form of wish fulfillment in that it provides all the answers to the question on everybody's mind: Why? By the end of the season's 13th and final episode, there will be no questioning why a young woman with such wit and potential decided to take her own life; the reasons behind her decision will be made excruciatingly clear. Where the show falters, however, is failing to properly explore the difference between understanding why Hannah would blame these people for her death and the validity of assigning such strong blame.
Although there are some throwaway lines here or there that mention how Hannah made a choice — to isolate herself, to not reach out for help sooner, to kill herself — the show doesn't seem nearly as interested in the role Hannah and her deteriorating mental health played in her suicide as it is with the role others played. That's not to say that the horrific incidents Hannah suffered through are not understandable reasons for depression and suicidal thoughts, but the 13 people on the tapes can't carry the burden of Hannah's death alone. Hannah was not just a passive object who was subject to the whims of those around her. She was a complicated, sensitive young woman who was slowly broken down by what felt like a never-ending cycle of objectification, loneliness and abuse, leaving her to struggle alone with a suffocating and numbing mental disorder.
To focus the blame for Hannah's death solely on outsiders not only diminishes Hannah's agency and the horrific power of depression, but it doesn't open up a way for someone watching the show who is struggling with these same issues to change their fate. It leaves a message that the power of change resides in others, rather than highlighting and emphasizing the ways someone can seek out the help they need themselves.
Photo: Beth Dubber/Netflix
Suicide is not a straightforward issue in which the cast of players can be broken down into good guys and bad guys. It's a subject that is intrinsically gray, and at times, particularly toward the end of the season, it feels as though the series is trying to fit a square peg into a circle by placing all of the blame onto the people surrounding Hannah. By doing so, it makes an incredibly complicated issue — one with no right way to emotionally process — more digestible, as though there's a clear way to get justice for Hannah and as though grief and anger can't coexist in regards to the same person.
None of this undercuts the importance of 13 Reasons Why — and the show is important. This is the kind of show that can change the way people think and act, all without ever feeling preachy or condescending. 13 Reasons Why is unflinchingly authentic in its portrayal of some of life's most challenging moments. And the times when other shows would sidestep the horror of a difficult moment through creative camera work or softened dialogue, 13 Reasons Why doesn't back down. It takes the worst aspects of these kids' lives and looks them directly in the eye, thus forcing the viewer to do the same.
This is not a show that's meant to be binged in one sitting, or even two or three. 13 Reasons Why is emotionally gut-wrenching and can leave you feeling mentally drained. At times, it can even be hard to watch — which is exactly the point, because to turn these very real and very painful issues into mere plot devices would be a disservice to all the real people who have gone through what Hannah, Clay and the other characters have endured.
13 Reasons Why might be a thrilling and emotionally satisfying series, but its aim isn't to simply entertain the viewer. It aims to challenge the viewer to be more conscientious of those around you, to be less self-involved, to be more willing to articulate your needs (particularly the need for help) and to inspire more open and honest dialogue about suicide and depression. And at that, 13 Reasons Why is an inspiring success.
13 Reasons Why premieres on Netflix on Friday, March 31.This topsy-turvy Premier League race is surely set to go down to the wire after both Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur cut Leicester’s lead at the top to two points.
It leaves both big London clubs breathing down the necks of the surprise leaders. Indeed it is leaning towards a three horse race with big spending Manchester City, though not out of it by any means, in danger of being cut adrift in fourth.
For Arsenal the hero was Danny Welbeck, out injured since April last year, who sent the Emirates Stadium hordes home happy with a dramatic late winner after Leicester’s Marcin Wasilewski gave away a stupid foul just as the referee prepared to blow the final whistle.
Leicester’s Danny Simpson was the villain after getting sent off for two yellow cards. Arsenal snatched it 2-1, with Manchester United fans no doubt bemoaning ever letting Welbeck leave Old Trafford especially given the dismal form of the unrecognisable ‘Red Devils’.
The question now is – will Leicester get back into their stride or is this the start of the collapse that pundits have been predicting for months?
Have they got the bottle or will they crack?
Jamie Vardy gave the Foxes the lead with a hotly-disputed penalty on the stroke of half-time after he tumbled over Nacho Monreal’s outstretched leg.
However substitute Theo Walcott set up a frantic finale with a side-foot finish from Olivier Giroud’s knockdown. Then, to wild celebrations in the stands, Welbeck glanced Mesut Ozil’s free-kick past magnificent Kasper Schmeichel to pinch victory.
Tottenham Hotspur picked up a huge away triumph over Manchester City at the Etihad. Again a late winner featured, this time from playmaker Christian Eriksen.
Visiting striker Harry Kane fired home from the spot in the second half after Raheem Sterling was harshly penalised for handball. Yaya Toure struck a 20-yard free-kick against the bar before substitute Kelechi Iheanacho levelled.
But Spurs earned a fifth league win in a row as Eriksen slotted home. The White Hart Lane side, once so fragile mentally, are showing no signs of blowing up. City showed bags of fight and loads of skill, yet somehow it isn’t quite happening.
Liverpool smash Villa for six for Klopp’s biggest Premier League win
Liverpool thrashed a hapless Aston Villa 6-0.
6 – This was the first time that Liverpool have had six different goalscorers in a single Premier League match. Share. — OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) February 14, 2016
Injury-prone Daniel Sturridge opened the scoring, James Milner saw a free-kick creep in after being missed by keeper Mark Bunn, and Emre Can, Divock Origi, Nathaniel Clyne and Kolo Toure all got in on the act.
The home side’s disgruntled supporters started streaming out of Villa Park following Liverpool’s fifth after 65 minutes – eight points off safety with just 12 games left they know their side is as good as relegated.
For the inconsistent Anfield side it still allows for opportunities despite all their problems this season.
A Champions League spot looks impossible but they are just three points off fifth, respectability at least.
Sunderland got the luck; Manchester United deserved nothing. Another really poor result for manager Louis Van Gaal, a man on borrowed time if the leaks are to be believed, with Jose Mourinho supposedly taking over next season.
Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson are pals who respect each other. It looks like a shoe-in. Sunderland’s Wahbi Khazri put the strugglers ahead after three minutes with a fluke free-kick from the left that went through a forest of bodies and eluded everyone.
Anthony Martial levelled after he clipped the ball over Vito Mannone, who had parried Juan Mata’s shot. But the Black Cats won it when Lamine Kone’s header from Khazri’s corner went in via a deflection off David de Gea to dent United’s top-four bid. And maybe for good.
Chelsea FC, who have surely left it too late to get involved in the race for the top four after the bizarre Mourinho suicide note, tore Newcastle apart. Do the Geordies ever travel well to London? No Dick Whittingtons are the Magpies. In the end they were embarrassed 5-1 and deservedly so.
Diego Costa opened the scoring when he slid home Willian’s pass. Pedro make it 2-0 and Costa played in Willian to score from close range. Cesc Fabregas set up Pedro for his second and Bertrand Traore turned in Cesar Azpilicueta’s cross, before Andros Townsend’s late consolation.
Football is everything to the people of the North-east; they deserve better.
For more information on our Premier League football hospitality packages please click here.Taxpayers could be on the hook for millions of dollars after authorities linked a Calgary-based group to what they’re calling a complex mortgage-fraud scheme.
After a lengthy investigation dating back as far as 2007, the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT) said they have uncovered a mortgage fraud connected to more than 20 homes in Calgary, Fort McMurray and British Columbia, ranging in price from $300,000 to well over $1 million.
“The ultimate victim here is the Alberta taxpayer,” Staff Sgt. Martin Schiavetta said Thursday at Calgary police headquarters at the Westwinds campus.
He said many of the fraudulent, high-ratio mortgages were insured through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., a federal Crown corporation.
Four people were arrested Dec. 10 and face a total of 29 criminal charges, including organized crime, conspiracy to obstruct justice, fraud, money laundering and sex assault.
The individuals are Ricco King, 42, who is from Fort McMurray but resides in Calgary; Farhan Sattar, 35, who is from Golden, B.C., but resides in Calgary; Jared Jenkins, 30, from Calgary; and Santino DiMarzo, 30, from Calgary. Sattar, who is also charged with sex assault, allegedly committed the offence against a female associate, say police.
According to police, the group allegedly used fictitious companies to commit mortgage fraud by falsifying documents related to employment records, bank statements, credit information and tax assessments.
“The accused were perpetuating crimes on a daily basis,” Schiavetta added. “Relying on increased values of homes, drawing on second and third mortgages, pulling out the equity and perpetuating further purchases of property.”
Insp. Gerry Francois noted that in the detailed, lengthy investigation, police pooled resources from across the province, combing through more than 30,000 documents.
“This is part of a new wave of organized crime that is highly sophisticated,” Francois said.
The group allegedly directed mortgage brokers, individuals in the banking industry, realtors and lawyers to facilitate the mortgage frauds.
Four fraudulent companies were also established by the group in order to obtain mortgages including Apex Medical Services Ltd., Petro-Alta Resources Corp., Harmony Skin Clinic Ltd. and Nucity Homes Inc, according to police.
Police presented a 2013 Ferrari as evidence that was seized in the fraud.
Investigators expect more charges and arrests and ask anyone who may have been involved with the individuals or the companies to review their mortgage with their lending institution and monitor their credit rating.
Two of the four men charged are still in custody.
[email protected]
twitter.com/evaferguson2It’s almost impossible to get information out of Boston Dynamics (especially after this happened). Infuriatingly (for us), the way the company does PR is to just upload awesome videos on YouTube, sit back, and let millions of people be amazed by their newest robotic innovation while we desperately try to get a post up that says something more relevant than “go watch this video right now.” We even showed up at Boston Dynamics ourselves once, and mostly all that we learned was that Marc Raibert is an enigmatic guy on a pogo stick.
Raibert, and other people from Boston Dynamics, do speak at conferences sometimes, but usually they don’t talk much about future projects, and they almost always ask that anything new (or any outtakes that they might show, which are unfailingly hilarious) isn’t recorded.
Earlier this month, at the FAB 11 Conference at MIT, Raibert gave a 7-minute presentation as part of a panel on “Making Robots,” which also included Sangbae Kim, Russ Tedrake, Radhika Nagpal, Mick Mountz, and Gil Pratt. Raibert’s presentation featured some video that we’d never seen before as well as tantalizing hints of what Boston Dynamics has been working on.
Here’s the clip that’s been going around, with Raibert showing some footage of Spot (an agile autonomous quadruped) opening a door with a manipulator mounted on it’s um, face (not nearly as scary as this), followed by ATLAS doing some dynamic walking outside, which is definitely new:
It’s tempting to look at this and wonder why ATLAS robots were falling down all over the place at the DRC Finals, but as Raibert says, the key here is that the robot is able to stabilize itself by moving quickly and balancing dynamically, which certainly works but (I’m guessing) drains an impractical amount of power and isn’t really what the DRC was designed for.
This was just part of Raibert’s presentation; here’s an image of that next slide:
On the left, you’re looking at a version of ATLAS’ leg: it’s a bunch of different parts and materials all cobbled together with bolts. On the right is Boston Dynamics’ “vision for the future:” an additively manufactured leg that has all of its hydraulic components printed directly into its structure. It looks like there’s a lot of bio-inspired design being worked in here, with the “arterial fluid routing” and a lattice structure that looks very bone-like. We haven’t seen an actual picture of this thing yet, but it sounds like BD has one already, according to Raibert:
“I can’t show you the robot yet, but we’re pursuing this pretty aggressively, and I think by the end of the year, you’ll see robots from us that use an approach of fabrication that’s more like that.”
Boston Dynamics isn’t the only company to be working on this technology; at ICRA earlier this year, we saw some prototypes of hydraulic actuators that Moog (this Moog, not this Moog) is developing for the legs of IIT’s HyQ quadruped robot:
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
These “highly integrated smart actuators” are additively manufactured, and rather than using tubing to channel hydraulic fluid, the fluid is piped directly through the structure of the actuator itself, making it highly robust. The actuator is also more compact, and weighs less.
While Boston Dynamics does have the tendency to overwhelm whatever robotics panel they happen to be on, it’s certainly worth watching the entire thing. It’s only about 45 minutes long (the talks are quick), and we’ve embedded it for you below.
[ Fab 11 ]The Arsenal Foundation is delighted to announce that Arsène Wenger and Fabio Capello will be in the dugouts for Arsenal Legends v Milan Glorie at Emirates Stadium, on Saturday, September 3.
The Arsenal manager is set to reunite with Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Robert Pires, Freddie Ljungberg* and other Arsenal favourites for the game, which is being played in support of The Arsenal Foundation.
Capello, who won four Serie A titles and the UEFA Champions League as manager of AC Milan from 1991-96, will take charge of a team of Rossoneri greats including Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi, Christian Vieri, Hernan Crespo and Gennaro Gattuso*.Tickets for this star-studded match are selling fast, so supporters are encouraged to purchase now to avoid disappointment.Tickets are priced from £20 and £10 for concessions and are available here. All net proceeds will be donated to The Arsenal Foundation.
Established in 2012, The Arsenal Foundation was founded during the club’s 125th anniversary in order to extend its good work and reach a greater number of beneficiaries around the world.
The Arsenal Foundation funds a great number of projects which use the club's name and the popularity of the game to reach disadvantaged young people. The most recent project in partnership with Save the Children saw the installation of two artificial football pitches in a camp in Iraq for internally displaced people.
*Players participating for both the Arsenal Legends and Milan Glorie teams are subject to personal availability on the day of the match.Ruby gem RSpec is powerful library for testing. Reason why many developers choose it over other testing tools is it’s expressiveness.
Now the thing is that many Ruby developers that are using RSpec on daily base care just about ensuring the test represent logical proof of code but don’t quite bother with how tests express their intention. This apply for both those that don’t bother doing TDD/BDD but even for those that do; for junior developer but also developers using RSpec several years.
I’ve decided to create series of articles titled “Expressive tests with RSpec” where I will try to show you how you can make your tests much cleaner, better to read and most importantly better to maintain.
Tests better to “maintain”? Why? …tests, like any other code needs to be kept clean and maintained otherwise (paradoxically) developers will spend more time fixing them. Tests are like kitchen equipment. Although you care just about preparing the delicious food, if you don’t clean your equipment on regular bases, preparing next meal will be harder and final product will stink after old burned pieces.
Our Example
note: Example will be Ruby on Rails based due to it’s popularity but everything I describe here apply to plain Ruby or any other framework of your choice.
So let say we are selling a product Package that belongs to a Company or a User. In Ruby on Rails world we would map this relationship like:
class Package < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :owner, polymorphic: true end # packages table: # | id | owner_id | owner_type | class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :packages end class Company < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :packages end
Now one day a requirement comes from your boss to send notification to admin when any company buys a Company package. In order to DRY the code you implement method that will tell you this information:
class Package < ActiveRecord::Base #... def company_owned? owner.company? end end class Company < ActiveRecord::Base #... def company? true end end class User < ActiveRecord::Base #... def company? false end end
Now how would you write test for method Package#company_owned??
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do #???? end
How not to do it.
So some developers would write the test like this:
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do it "should return true when it's owned by company" do package = Package.new(owner: Company.new) expect(package.company_owned?).to eq true end it "should return false when it's owned by user" do package = Package.new(owner: User.new) expect(package.company_owned?).to eq false end end
Let’s ignore the fact that we could test Company#company? and User#company? separately and then just pass dummy object to Package responding to common interface. I just want to show you point of expressing intention not to discuss polymorphism testing.
Now argument for this code style would be that it’s simple, just few lines, it represent code logic without problem and it’s expresive enough for this simple case. No need to spend more time on this test and move to next one.
Now I’m fan of not overkilling the code when it’s not needed, but to me this is nothing to do with simplicity but rather developer not focusing on test maintainability at all.
Let me try to show you how I would approach writing the test around this:
Describing intention
First of all we need to realize that in this test we are describing particular object and it’s state / behavior. We could just say something like:
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do let(:package) { Package.new(owner: owner) } #???? end
Don’t worry yet about the value of owner we will get to that.
But the thing is we are locking our test code from first few lines to name implementation. Most of times developer think they know what “names” the objects are as they are replicating domain logic. But too often they realize in middle of implementation that maybe the name of the class was not that great after all.
At that point what would the responsible developer do is to rename the Class and all the object occurrence. But lot of developers will just say “What the heck, it’s close enough I’m not going to waste time renaming everything” and carry on with the misleading object names introducing terrible burden on the rest of the team from day one of the implementation.
RSpec provides a way to get around this with described_class and subject.
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do subject { described_class.new(owner: owner) } #???? end
note 1: think about subject as if you were a scientist and you are describing “subject of study” or “subject of an experiment”
note 2: When you RSpec.describe a class, by default subject will be equal to instance of a class with no args e.g. Package.new(). That’s why sometimes you may see RSpec code that calls subject without anywhere defining the block.
note 3 Yes we could use FactoryGirl gem instead of describe_class.new but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. Bare with me please.
As a second step lets express that we are describing a particular method / interface :
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do subject { described_class.new(owner: owner) } describe '#company_owned?' do #???? end end
Now lets express that we want to describe particular contexts of this method, When owner is a Company and when owner is a User:
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do subject { described_class.new(owner: owner) } describe '#company_owned?' do context 'when owned by User' do let(:owner) { User.new } #???? end context 'when owned by Company' do let(:owner) { Company.new } #???? end end end
Developers treat context and describe as aliases which they really are but only on code level. But try to read the code as document. We are: describing Package object describing company_owned? method in context of owned being User and context of owner being Company.
The way I see it is that context is a situation, describe is definition (as definition of whats the test about)
Assertion
Now we finally getting to the actual test implementation. Now the simplest thing to do would be to write:
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do subject { described_class.new(owner: owner) } describe '#company_owned?' do context 'when owned by User' do let(:owner) { User.new } it do expect(subject.company_owned?).to eq false end end context 'when owned by Company' do let(:owner) { Company.new } it do expect(subject.company_owned?).to eq true end end end end
…but we are repeating code here.
Let’s try to wrap the subject.company_owned? into another let block called result (as if result of the method)
require 'rails_helper' RSpec.describe Package do subject { described_class.new(owner: owner) } describe '#company_owned?' do let(:result) { subject.company_owned? } context 'when owned by User' do let(:owner) { User.new } it do expect(result).to eq false end end context 'when owned by Company' do let(:owner) { Company.new } it do expect(result).to eq true end end end end
Some of you may say that it was just two lines of code “no big deal”. Why would I introduce “another” line of code to fix such a trivial duplication. Well the argument here is the same as with the use of describe_class and subject. If a developer decide to rename the method he should have as little work to do as possible no matter if it’s one call or hundred calls otherwise developers will say “what the heck method name is close enough, I’m not going to rewrite it”.
RSpec sugar
Our test works, it well comply with the Given When Then approach and it’s D.R.Y. (Don’t repeat yourself)
Lets try to read the test as a document again.
Package company_owned? when owned by User should eq to false. Package company_owned? when owned by Company should eq to true.
Seems nice. But one thing I encourage everyone to do is to spend as much time as possible reading RSpec documentation. There are lot of nice features RSpec provide that helps you express yous tests. Some of them I wrote about in the past articles ( RSpec be_within_matcher, RSpec JSON API testing ) and more I will try to describe in the future articles.
One of them is that RSpec features is that it provides matchers for given |
a minor, and false imprisonment, police said. It was not immediately clear whether he had retained an attorney.
CNN first learned of the case on Twitter.In 1938, three chemists working in a laboratory in Berlin made a discovery that would alter the course of history: they split the uranium atom. The energy released when this splitting, or fission, occurs is tremendous--enough to power a bomb. But before such a weapon could be built, numerous technical problems had to be overcome.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Photo: FDR Library Archives
When Einstein learned that the Germans might succeed in solving these problems, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt with his concerns. Einstein's 1939 letter helped initiate the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb, but work proceeded slowly at first. Two other findings in 1940 and 1941 demonstrated conclusively that the bomb was feasible and made building the bomb a top priority for the United States: the determination of the "critical mass" of uranium needed and the confirmation that plutonium could undergo fission and be used in a bomb. In December 1941, the government launched the Manhattan Project, the scientific and military undertaking to develop the bomb.
A Letter to the President
In August 1939, Einstein wrote to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to warn him that the Nazis were working on a new and powerful weapon: an atomic bomb. Fellow physicist Leo Szilard urged Einstein to send the letter and helped him draft it.
Einstein: A Security Risk
In July 1940, the U.S. Army Intelligence office denied Einstein the security clearance needed to work on the Manhattan Project. The hundreds of scientists on the project were forbidden from consulting with Einstein, because the left-leaning political activist was deemed a potential security risk.
Photo: U.S. National Archives
August 6, 1945
First atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan
"Woe is me."—Albert Einstein, upon hearing the news of the Hiroshima bombing
The Bombing of Japan
On August 9, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan, three days after bombing Hiroshima. By the end of 1945, an estimated 200,000 people had died in the two cities.
Einstein and the Nuclear Age
Although he never worked directly on the atomic bomb, Einstein is often incorrectly associated with the advent of nuclear weapons. His famous equation E=mc2 explains the energy released in an atomic bomb but doesn't explain how to build one. He repeatedly reminded people, "I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy. My part in it was quite indirect." Nevertheless, Einstein was frequently asked to explain his role—as he was when a Japanese magazine editor asked him, "Why did you cooperate in the production of atomic bombs, knowing full well their...destructive power?"
Einstein's answer was always that his only act had been to write to President Roosevelt suggesting that the United States research atomic weapons before the Germans harnessed this deadly technology. He came to regret taking even this step. In an interview with Newsweek magazine, he said that "had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing."Naturally, I hope that happens. But the opportunity we are talking about has little, if anything, to do with reading. Children are there to be part of show business, and that’s it. That doesn’t mean that some of them won’t discover that this all started with a book; that behind the world of show business, with its many moving parts and conspicuous cash flow, there always is, albeit in a subservient position, the evocative power of writing and reading.
What is your hope for this production as far as its impact on Naples and its image in the world, especially after the unflattering depictions in the movie and popular television show “Gomorrah”?
Cities don’t have their own energy. It derives from the density of their history, from the power of their literature and arts, of the emotional richness of human events that take place against that background. I hope that the visual storytelling will stir authentic emotions — complex and even contradictory sentiments. This is what makes us fall in love with cities.
Do you want to sign off on the children before they are officially cast? Do you want to make sure that they are true to your vision?
I don’t have this skill set. Sure, I’d very much like to weigh in, but I would do it cautiously and knowing that it is useless to say, “Lila has little or nothing to do with that body, that face, that gaze, that way of moving,” etc. No real person will ever match the image that I or a reader have in our minds. This is because the written word, of course, defines but by nature leaves much to reader’s imagination. The visual image instead shrinks those margins. It is destined to always leave out something that the words inspire — something that always matters.
What has your involvement been with the production? The director and producers told me you send notes on the script, and have helped them design the set out near Caserta. What do you want the set to look like?
The neighborhood is a composite of different places in Naples that I know well. That’s always the case when I write, both with people or things. I don’t know what will happen on the screen. For now, my contribution to the set design is limited to a few notes on whether they look right. As far as the collaboration on the script, I don’t write, I don’t have the technical skills to do it, but I am reading the texts and send detailed notes. I still don’t know if they will take them into account. It is very likely that my notes will be used later on, in the writing of the final draft.This is Zia Hussain Shah, 25, from Karachi in Pakistan. He is a Fulbright scholar at the University of Chicago.
Zia Hussain Shah Zia Hussain Shah
Studying divinity at a US university had been a high school dream for Shah, but the postgraduate student had his studies halted when he was returning to the US at the international airport in Karachi on 4 January – despite having the necessary documents. "I went through all the clearances for a whole year," Shah said, speaking to BuzzFeed News on the phone from his family home in Karachi. "It's almost impossible to believe." Shah said he only discovered that his entry back to the US had been blocked when he got to the airport. "We cannot let you go," Shah was told by border agents, who said they had received a confidential email instructing them not to let him pass. The incident came at the beginning of the year, shortly before there was heightened attention on US president Donald Trump's proposed ban on anyone arriving from seven Muslim-majority countries — which did not include Pakistan. It is unclear why Shah's entry was refused. US Customs and Border Protection declined to comment to BuzzFeed News on his individual case.
The student had previously been on a US-government-sponsored undergraduate cultural exchange program. In 2014 Shah had been a cultural ambassador and took courses in Washington. Ravvish, a project in Pakistan he cofounded that focuses on teaching schoolchildren conflict resolution, is still showcased on the US State Department website.
US Department of State website / Via alumni.state.gov
"I work for peace-building and empathy and this doesn't suit my profile in life to be stopped like this," he said. "What I'm doing is challenging extremism, and I've been affected by what you're working against," he said, referring to terrorism. He lost a family member in an attack in 2010. "It's something that needs to be voiced," Shah said, who has now missed a quarter of his academic year. "A lot of people are being stopped." Shah started his postgraduate programme at the University of Chicago Divinity School in September 2016 with a focus on early Islamic mysticism, and was on a state-sponsored J1 visa, he said.
He first applied for the program in May 2015 and received an offer in October 2015, having to go through security clearances that enabled him to fly to the US a year later – securing a grant and expecting to finish his studies in 2018. Yousef Casewit, an assistant professor of Qur'anic studies at the University of Chicago, told BuzzFeed News: "I had the pleasure of having him in my 'Introduction to the Quran' course last quarter and I was deeply impressed by his analytical, spoken, and written abilities.... Zia Hussain is a gem. The irony of his being denied entry into the USA is flabbergasting." In an email from the US Consulate General in Karachi BuzzFeed News has seen, Shah was told there had been no new information in February. "We recognise that individual applicants may experience inconvenience and hardship of their application takes longer to process that they expected," the email said.
After contacting the US embassy in Pakistan and his Fulbright advisers on the day he was denied entry, the Fulbright scholar said he was advised to reapply for a new visa, and had an interview at the embassy. He said he would be issued a new visa by the embassy in four to five days, but is still awaiting a new visa for over 12 weeks – which means he has missed a quarter of his studies and fears he will have to drop out. "I have a valid visa. It's a state-sponsored J1 visa for exchange students," Shah said, adding that the embassy stopped responding to his emails.
A letter from the University of Chicago to the Fulbright program officer in Pakistan confirms Shah was unable to re-enter the US at the beginning of the winter quarter 2017, and advised to take a leave of absence.
Zia Hussain Shah at a Ravvish workshop.
The university's spring quarter began on 27 March, which Shah also missed. Of the 150 Pakistani Fulbright scholars, Shah says he is the only one reading divinity, and that there are very few options of academic study on Islam in his country. As co-founder of Ravvish, a social enterprise for promoting religious-cultural tolerance and empathy among school students in Pakistan, he has conducted over 120 workshops on peace-building and conflict resolution in five cities.
Zia Hussain Shah Zia Hussain Shah had been a cultural ambassador on a US State Department program.US Open: Australia's James Duckworth stuns Robin Haase in five sets; Jordan Thompson out
Updated
Australia's James Duckworth has produced a stunning start to his US Open campaign, beating Dutchman Robin Haase who is ranked more than 130 places above him.
Duckworth, 24, went into his third US Open ranked 195 in singles, while his more-fancied opponent was placed in 62nd.
But it was the Australian who won the tight five-set contest, 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 5-6, 6-3.
Duckworth, who has endured an injury-ravaged season and poor form leading into the US Open, was only in the draw thanks to a wildcard.
After a shaky first set which included 17 unforced errors, Duckworth bounced back from a break down in the second and dominated the third — a set where he sent down seven aces to nil, and only made four unforced errors.
He played brilliantly at times and wowed spectators, including Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt, with his athleticism and Boris Becker-like dive volleys at the net.
His only stumble after turning the match around came when he twice double-faulted, blaming the floodlights, to hand Haase the fourth set.
But he regrouped after a bathroom break to charge through the deciding set and eliminate the world number 64 in three hours and 31 minutes.
Duckworth faces ninth seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the second round, after the Frenchman won his opening game in straight sets.
Thompson goes close on grand slam debut
Australia's Jordan Thompson has bowed out of the US Open with a five-set first round loss to Belgium's Steve Darcis on day one of the year's final major at Flushing Meadows.
The 22-year-old looked on course for an impressive victory in his first-ever match at the Open when he won the opening two sets.
However he was unable to stop a comeback by the world number 106, going down 7-6 (7/5), 6-4, 7-5.
Thompson was hit and miss on his serve - he sent down 15 aces, but also had eight double faults, and he only had 52 per cent of his first serves in.
The first set took 52 minutes, with Thompson breaking in the 11th game before serving out to take the lead. He then backed up, sweeping through the second set 6-3 in just 35 minutes.
The third set went to a tie-break, with Darcis getting an early mini-break, then holding on and forcing an error from Thompson on set-point to get back in the match.
Darcis then won the fourth set 6-4 to take the match the full distance.
In the ninth game, Thompson looked to have thrown his chances away when he made an unforced error on his backhand to hand the break and a 5-4 lead to Darcis.
The Australian hit back, however, to force an error on his opponent's serve on break point to level the score at 5-5, but the Belgian steadied and hit a backhand winner to go ahead 6-5, before serving out the match.
Darcis sealed the win with an ace to take the match in four hours 11 minutes.
ABC/AAP
Topics: sport, tennis, united-states, australia
First postedA man who flicked urine at police during an altercation at a hospital has narrowly escaped a prison sentence.
James William Briers had been taken to Antrim Area Hospital on May 9 but became disorderly, shouting and swearing in front of other patients before police were called to attend.
A Prosecuting lawyer outlined to Antrim Magistrates Court that after Briers (36), of Parkmount Parade, Belfast, was restrained he continued to shout, saying he was in the UDA and using strongly sexual terminology and swear words. He refused to give police his details and told them his name was “Jemima from Mars”.
Briers also banged his head off the bars of the bed and attempted to bite one of the officers.
He then urinated and flicked the urine at police.
After being cautioned, he replied: “F*** away off, I’m in the UDA.”
The court heard that during a subsequent police interview, Briers told officers he could not remember what had happened and apologised for his behaviour.
Defence barrister Aaron Thompson said Briers had put himself in a difficult position given the court’s stance on such incidents in hospitals.
Mr Thompson said Briers lives with his mother, working part time, and is a “sensible, ordinary man”.
“His behaviour in the hospital was appalling,” Mr Thompson said.
He added: “His behaviour was erratic; he urinates on himself and flicks it in their [police] direction.”
Mr Thompson said that the last thing Briers remembers is consuming alcohol in Rathcoole.
He added that a medical report from doctors noted that drugs may also have been involved, and said his client thought his drink could have been spiked.
“He is under no illusion how bad his behaviour has been,” Mr Thompson said.
He added: “He utterly lost control of himself, and his bladder, on several occasions.
“While in police custody, he urinated again in the cell.
“When sober the next morning he asked for a mop to clean his own cell.”
Referring to a Probation report, Mr Thompson said Briers had been classed as being of a low risk of re-offending.
District Judge Alan White said it had been “absolutely appalling behaviour, one of the worst cases I’ve had”.
“I have no time for this at all,” Mr White said.
He said he had to assess if Briers’ actions crossed the custody threshold.
He added that the probation report had been favourable, along with “excellent” character references, and took into account Briers’ guilty plea.
“On balance, taking all these matters into account I am prepared to suspend the sentence,” Mr White said.
Briers was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.
He was also ordered to pay a total of £325 in compensation.Unearthed Hittite artifacts in Istanbul break new ground
Ömer ERBİL ISTANBUL - Radikal
The discoveries in Istanbul’s Küçükçekmece river basin, iron god and goddess statues that were found in two different places, have created great excitement among researchers. Radikal photos / Ömer ERBİL
An archaeological discovery in suburban Istanbul could soon force a rewrite in history books as new research has shown that the early Hittites actually ventured onto the European continent, having previously been assumed to have remained only in Asia.“Istanbul has a new historic peninsula now. The first traces of the Hurrians in Istanbul shows the importance of these excavations. This is a big discovery to reach the traces of the Hittites in Europe,” said Istanbul Provincial Culture and Tourism Director Ahmet Emre Bilgili, according to daily Radikal.“We have shed light on a dark era of Istanbul,” said Culture and Tourism Minister Ömer Çelik.The traces from the Hurrian civilization – the early Hittite era – were found in the Küçükçekmece river basin in the western parts of the city.The discoveries – iron god and goddess statues that were found in two different places –have created great excitement among researchers.“The Mesopotamian works of art date back to between the 17th and 15th centuries B.C., known as the dark era of Istanbul. We have also found bitumen as well as tin and ceramic pieces dating back to the Mesopotamian era,” said the head of the excavations, Professor Şengül Aydıngün.Two Hurrian statues, bitumen, tin and ceramic pieces are from 1800 B.C. Bitumen was only used in Mesopotamia at the time and was used to make vessels waterproof. Maritime trade improved thanks to this material.Tin was more valuable than gold at the beginning of the Bronze Age. The tin in Küçükçekmece was found in cubes during excavations in the same place with the statues.This year’s excavations also revealed 301 bottles for holy water, called “Unguanterium,” as well as small bottles for perfume or pomade made between the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.Çelik said they were very pleased with the Hittite findings in Istanbul. “The two statues found in the excavations are from the Hittite era. They bring us back to 4,000 years ago. We are more hopeful for next year’s excavations. I am sure that these excavations will make a contribution to tourism. This year, we provided more than 30 million Turkish Liras for the excavations. Now we have a new page in Istanbul’s and Anatolian culture,” he said.Surface excavations around the Küçükçekmece river basin started in 2007, while a number of unknown structures in Istanbul have been unearthed over the past four years, surprising even the excavation team.The Hurrian type of goddess statue is 5.4 centimeters long and weighs 14 grams. The statue, made of iron, has undergone erosion throughout the centuries. The god statute, meanwhile, is 6.1 centimeters long but weighs only 11 grams.Such statues were used for vows and their earliest examples were found in southern Mesopotamia in 3000 B.C. Similar statues have been found in Turkey in the Alalah, Tilmen and Zincirli Oylum mounds elsewhere in Turkey.Noting that they had already known about the existence of the first Neolithic groups in Istanbul, Aydıngün said: “These groups’ traces survived for 1,000-1,500 years. After their traces disappeared, there was a big chronological gap until the seventh century B.C. The two statues that we have found are from the early Hittite period. The statues of this era were found for the first time in Istanbul. The traces of the Hittites were previously [only] found in Troy and İzmir.”Also speaking about the findings, Istanbul Provincial Culture and Tourism Director Ahmet Emre Bilgili said they had not expected to find such groundbreaking findings when they began their research in 2007.Izvor: N1
Portal KRIK objavio je u petak snimke rušenja privatnih objekata u Savamali u Beogradu, restorana Savski ekspres, kao i imovinu kompanija Iskra i Transport peroni.
Ceo snimak koji je objavio KRIK traje četiri sata i 17 minuta, a zabeležila ga je obližnja kamera. Iz tog snimka, novinari KRIK-a izdvojil su tri kratka dela na kojima se najjasnije vidi šta se te večeri dogodilo u Hercegovačkoj ulici.
Vlasnici srušenih objekata su tokom noći više puta su zvali policiju koja je odbila da izađe na teren i uputila ih na Komunalnu policiju.
Do danas se ne zna ko stoji iza ove akcije.
Prvi bager pojavljuje se u ulici posle sat i po od početka snimka, tokom kojih se vidi samo prazna ulica. Srušio je jedan objekat i nestao iz kadra.
Posle deset minuta, na isto mesto došao je i drugi bager i nastavio sa rušenjem narednih pola sata.
Na trećem snimku, vide se prolaznici koji posmatraju rušenje, potom im prilazi nekoliko muškaraca i oni se zatim udaljavaju sa mesta događaja. Na kraju ovog snimka, vidi se i trenutak gašenja ulične rasvete.EDIT -- Trying a couple new things based on PBE feedback. tl;dr mainly w seeds grant vision again and P seeds won't spawn while Zyra is hiding in a brush. Hello all! This is the rough Zyra changelist for the next patch. She's currently playable on PBE, though her Wildfire and Haunted skins' Q graphics are currently bugged (should be fixed soon!). Exact numbers being subject to balance change etc, but feel free to ask about anything you'd like more info on. Here's the rough changelist: * **Base stats** * +15 Movement speed. * **P - Garden of Thorns** * Seeds spawn around Zyra periodically, becoming faster with level and lasting 45 seconds (Max: 8 seeds planted). If an enemy Champion steps on a seed, it dies. Cast Deadly Spines or Grasping Roots near seeds to grow plants. Extra plants striking the same target deal 50% less damage. * Spells show Zyra which plants they will grow at time of cast. * Periodically spawns two seeds at the same time, though it won't place them close together. * Individual plant damage down some, plant health down to two ticks (W now has a passive to improve it), plant lifetime scales 5 - 7.5s based on Zyra's level. Necessary given that she has 2x - 3x as many plants each fight xD * Trying a version where Garden of Thorns won't spawn if Zyra is hiding in a brush until she leaves it or takes an action. * **Q - Deadly Spines** * As live Q, but updated VFX and a rectangular shape. * Grows plants outside the damage area like Grasping Roots does. * Mana cost reduced, damage reduced slightly. * **W - Rampant Growth** * Cooldown reduction passive removed. * New passive: Increases plant max Health% * Trying a version where W seeds do grant vision / vision on squish and last 60s instead of 45s. * **R - Stranglethorns** * Enraged plants gain a flurry attack for 150% damage instead of +50% attack speed. Let me know if you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them!
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SaveWould you spend £1million on a haunted house? Civil War era country mansion up for sale...complete with its own ghostly coach and horses
Henblas in Llanasa, north Wales, was built during the English Civil War
Ghostly coach and horses has been heard clattering through the gateway
Historians believe it has links to Welsh freedom fighter Owain Glyndwr
A 400-year-old haunted house has been put up for a sale - but the £1million price tag could spook some buyers.
Henblas house, in the village of Llanasa, north Wales, was built during the English Civil War and is rumoured to boast its own ghostly coach and horses which clatter through the gateway to the house.
The Grade I-listed seven-bedroom country mansion was built for a wealthy landowning family during the siege of Chester in 1645.
The Grade I-listed Henblas house lays claim to 400 years of history including a ghostly coach and horses which clatter through the gateway to the house
Henblas house lies on the North Wales coast and was built for a wealthy landowning family during the siege of Colchester in 1645 during the English Civil War
The house boasts wood-panelled drawing rooms and dining rooms and extensive formal gardens - with its own country cottage in the garden
The house played a part in both world wars, acting as a prisoner of war camp during the First World War and as an ammunition store and, later, accomodation for evacuees during the Second World War.
According to one local historian the house even has links to Welsh freedom fighter Owain Glyndwr - the last native-born Prince of Wales.
Historian Paul Parry said: 'There is a verse in Old Welsh carved on the wall which reads 'I grew trees round thee to get thee ready for me' and is attributed to Owain Glyndwr's father.
'He is buried in the local church and it is believed he could have lived here in the 14th century in an older building which would have been demolished with Henblas built on its foundations.'
The village of Llanasa is located close to the north Wales coast
The house is rumoured to be haunted by a ghostly coach and horses which clatter through the gateway
The historic country mansion built during the English Civil War is on the market for £1m
David Lawton and wife Bridget have owned the property for 40 years and brought up their five children there
The house boasts wood-panelled drawing rooms and dining rooms and extensive formal gardens - with its own country cottage in the garden.
David Lawton and wife Bridget have owned the property for 40 years and brought up their five children there.
Mr Lawton said: 'It was built for the Morgan family of Golden Grove at the time of the Civil War and actually during the siege of Chester.
'It has a wonderful history which includes having been used to house German prisoner of war officers in the First World War and evacuees in the Second World War.
'At one time it was owned by Dennis Vosper MP, Lord Runcorn, who really restored the property in the 1960s after it had fallen into some disrepair.
Conservative MP Dennis Vosper, Baron Runcorn, (left) is a former owner while Owain Glyndwr (right) reportedly has links to the historic mansion
Previous owner Lord Runcorn extensively restored the grand property
Henblas was used to house German prisoner of war officers during the First World War and evacuees in the Second World War
'We were married 60 years ago in the church in the village but I knew it before then because I was born in Prestatyn and used to cycle up here.
'It's just a bit too big for the two of us now.'
Previous owner Lord Runcorn extensively restored the grand property and bought several oak tables from his old school Marlborough College and used them to re-floor the hall room on the second floor which is 40 feet long and 17 feet wide and where one refectory table still survives.
Another notable local resident in the 19th century was Dr Edwin Parry who lost both legs in a railway accident but continued to practice as a doctor from the house.
Matthew Holmberg from Jones Peckover estate agents said: 'It has a rich and wonderful history and it is still a lovely house to live in.
'There are a number of interesting features to the house, which has three floors and a cellar.
'They including a carving of a man and a woman above the front door and also some more interesting carving on one of the gable ends.
'There is a verse in Old Welsh near the foot of the exterior wall while at the top there is a carving of a kneeling figure with the date of the house's construction.'
Another notable local resident in the 19th century was Dr Edwin Parry who lost both legs in a railway accident but continued to practice as a doctor from the houseNext week will be my first CES. Over the past couple of months, when I talked with CES veterans, they all told me that CES is a horrible experience. And yet, I am still incredibly excited. I plan to take advantage of my fresh perspective on the show to share my experience over the next few days.
But first, let’s start with figuring out why everybody keeps telling me that CES is a mess. While CES has yet to begin, I can already feel its tentacular scope. I looked at the official map of the event, and I had no idea that there were multiple areas, starting with the well-known Las Vegas Convention Center and its surrounding buildings — but that’s just Tech East.
According to this map, you can find most of the big names in Tech East. These companies, from Samsung to Intel, LG and Sony — they have been around for decades. But you can also find recent mainstream successes, such as GoPro and Monster.
The other area is… Tech West, of course! Sand Expo’s map is very different. There are hundreds of little booths cramped together in a gigantic space. I can already hear the overwhelming sound of all these booths in my head.
But Tech West is one of the reasons why I’m still excited about CES. I spent a few minutes looking at the map, recognizing startup names and even companies that I didn’t expect to see in Vegas (like Yo). Some are already getting all the media love they deserve, but I don’t know many of these companies. And I can’t wait to learn more about what they do.
I also recognized a lot of French startups (Lima, ISKN, Smokio, Prynt, Prizm…). As I wrote last year, I’m very optimistic about the French startup scene. I’ll be sure to go out of my way to meet the French startups.
Monday is the press day, with all the big companies hosting keynotes, from Samsung to Qualcomm, LG and the rest of the family. It seems to be a different kind of beast compared to the trade show experience that I expect from CES. And apparently we have to line up for hours to attend. Last year, I watched a couple of keynotes, and I can tell you that having to wait a couple of hours to see a company introduce a washing machine on stage is not really exciting.
Next week, TechCrunch will also be hosting its own Hardware Battlefield to showcase a few companies that haven’t launched their products yet. They all have been hard at work behind the scene to pitch on stage and in front of a few panels of judges. Putting the spotlight on these hustling startups seems essential to prove that you don’t need an outrageous CES budget to shine.
And then, I learned about the puzzling CES jargon. Unveiled, Showstoppers and Digital Experience are some sorts of evening events. I have no idea how it is different from the regular booths during daytime, but it should be fun. Right?
I get why everybody keeps saying that CES is a mess. It is a gigantic event with some utterly uninteresting product launches (TVs! washing machines! fridges!). I realize that I will spend a disproportionate amount of time walking from one end of a hall to another. Apparently, there is also a nontrivial chance that I will see a dead bird before the end of the show (because there was a now posthumously famous dead bird last year, and it’s basically the only thing that my colleagues remember from last CES).
And my email inbox has been smashed by an avalanche of pitches. And there are press conferences happening at 8:45am, while other things like the “Digital Experience” end at 11pm. And I’ll probably get sick.
Yet I am still extraordinarily excited. My CES experience won’t consist in chasing some big company’s latest flagship phone — this part of the show doesn’t catch my attention. Instead, I’ll get to talk with young and scrappy entrepreneurs who built some crazy device with a team of three. It has never been cheaper to build hardware prototypes — and that’s definitely what makes CES exciting today.
Read my other posts in the Tales of CES series.I am also finding Vista search problems.
I have just finished a doc file, closed it, and then went to open it again. But its not showing in recent docs.
Did a search not there. OH no!! what have I done.
Manually search with explorer and there it is.
The document is entitled 'Invoice 0178' search for 0178 in documents >result nothing.
Expand search to look in non-indexed, hidden, and system files. And it is found straight away.
Search for 0177 (the previous invoice) no need to expand the search!!!
Not for the first time I have thought that important files have bben lost.
What is the point of a search, that cannot find everything, in front of its face.
I hated going from 98 to XP, but oh my Vista. What a load of....Virtus.pro pick up their first win in Saint Petersburg after a drawn out affair against Gambit. The final score was 2-1 (16-6 Inferno, 13-16 Train, 16-13 Cache), with Filip "NEO" Kubski being the star for the Poles.
In the first elimination match of EPICENTER 2017, Virtus.pro won the pistol on the CT side of their map pick, Inferno, but couldn't get off to a good start. Gambit's force-buy proved deadly for the Polish defense on B and the Kazakhstanian side bounced back and went on to get a 5-1 lead.
In the following round, that was a full buy for both sides, Janusz "Snax" Pogorzelski opened things up with a sneaky smoke play on short, but it was the B defense of Paweł "byali" Bieliński and Filip "NEO" Kubski that held things together and got Virtus.pro another round on the board. Thanks to Jarosław "pashaBiceps" Jarząbkowski doing a lot of work with the AWP, the Polish side was able to rack up rounds, tying the score at 5-5 and finally forcing Gambit to eco. That seemed like a breaking point, as Dauren "AdreN" Kystaubayev and co. didn't seem capable of putting up a fight in the rest of the first half, finishing it 10-5 down.
NEO was on fire throughout the series
After winning the second pistol, Virtus.pro survived an anti-eco scare and won the crucial first buy round with a fast take of banana, during which they got kills on both of the B site defenders. Wiktor "TaZ" Wojtas's team had a slip up at 14-5, allowing Mihail "Dosia" Stolyarov to pick off a player in alt-mid with a Deagle and then rotate to B to lock down the site and four kills in total. However, that was only a temporary setback for Virtus.pro, who shortly finished the map 16-6.
Gambit took over the early game on Train as they won the pistol and the following two, and then, after losing a 1v1 in the first buy round, were able to reset Virtus.pro and go 4-1 up on the T side. That put the Polish side in a disadvantageous position, as TaZ and co. were forced into lacking buys, which Gambit was able to exploit.
In round 8, AdreN timed his push perfectly, walked out ivy and flanked the A site defense, winning his side the round and making it 7-1. Once again reset, Virtus.pro opted for a single AWP buy combined with four pistol-armors, and it paid off. NEO opened it up with a kill in T mid and the rest of the squad joined in to secure a perfect, clean round. The Poles recovered after that, finishing the CT half with just a single round deficit.
Gambit were on the way to take the control back, as doubles from Rustem "mou" Telepov and Bektiyar "fitch" Bahytov secured them the pistol round, and the A site force-buy offensive from Virtus.pro was handled easily by the team from Kazakhstan. However, Dosia, fitch and Abay "Hobbit" Khasenov went eco-hunting against Glocks in the next round, that backfired—and gave Virtus.pro a way back into the game (10-8 for Gambit).
After being close to defeating FaZe yesterday, Gambit are eliminated by VP
The B site defense was the backbone of Gambit's CT side, and it held strong as they clawed the score back to 14-11. NEO and pashaBiceps then combined with two apiece for a key round win on A, which broke Gambit's money, and the score was soon 14-13. In an all-important round, Hobbit and mou were able to resolve a 2v2 after plant on A, with the AWPer defusing the bomb with just 0.008 seconds left on the clock. That round got Gambit on match point, with another after plant win securing the 16-13 map win for Dosia's team.
A confident start on the Terrorist side of Cache saw Gambit go up 5-0, but Virtus.pro replied in round six, locking down the A site. NEO was once again the main man for Virtus.pro, |
profile and your current location on a map. A Google map, of course.
The more information you add to your profile, the higher your page is likely to be ranked on a Google search for your name and associated keywords, such as the name of your hometown, your job title or where you work or go to school. And the more richly detailed your Google profile is, the more Google knows about you. There's no advertising attached to Google profiles, but in the future, the company could easily sell ads targeted to your personal details, much as they've already done on Gmail.
These days, Big Brother isn't just watching you he wants to know your superpower and the name of your childhood pet. And he already knows you like to Google yourself, so don't try to deny it.
See TIME's photo gallery "The Best Shots from Google's Candid Camera."
See pictures of life inside the Googleplex.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted Tuesday that many Republican lawmakers will break from President Trump by June if he continues to push forward with his agenda.
Schumer told "The View" that while most Republicans have declined to publicly break with Trump during the first month of his presidency, many privately admit they have "real problems" with him. He also argued that some are sticking by him because of party loyalty and his nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court.
"When you talk to Republicans quietly — in the cloakroom or in the gym, they are having real problems with him," Schumer said. "Now, very few — John McCain, to his credit — but very few have had the courage to oppose him even though they know he's doing a lot of things that are against what America is all about."
"They are party loyalists," Schumer continued. "He's given them a Supreme Court nominee that they want, but my prediction is that if he keeps up on this path, which is likely — I don't think he'll change, within three to four months, you'll going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him. And that's the salvage of America. That's the hope of America."
"I think that he thinks he did it his way and he won and he's not going to change very soon," he said. "But I do think, and hope and pray, that a lot of the Republicans — they're mainstream people. I don't agree with them on the issues, but they are good people, that they will have no choice but to break with him."
Schumer was responding to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., claims that some Republican senators are worried about Trump's mental health, which he declined to speak to directly.
The New York Democrat also reiterated his claim that Trump has nominated the "worst Cabinet I have ever seen in the history of America," calling it the "swamp cabinet."We’re almost done with April, which means we’re closer than we were before to being able to stop with the standard “it’s early” caveat we heartily employ during this time of year. For better or for worse, however, it’s still early. The good news (besides the obvious fact of it being April and baseball is being played) is that most starting pitchers have made enough starts to provide us with some sample of data to comb through for patterns and changes compared to last year. There’s still a lot of noise in that data, but there’s some signal, and we’re going to see what we can get out of a fun data set today.
It’s interesting news when a pitcher starts throwing a new pitch effectively, mostly because it happens pretty rarely. What’s also interesting news is when a pitcher starts throwing a pitch he already had in his arsenal more often, especially when he does so to an extreme level. With that in mind, let’s look at a table of starting pitchers, sorted by the percentage of sliders that they’ve thrown so far in 2015:
Holy smokes, Colin McHugh! Neil highlighted how McHugh is using his slider a couple weeks ago, and now we see Chris Archer slotted in the number two spot in terms of frequency of sliders used this season, at almost 40%. Anytime someone is at 40% usage of a pitch that isn’t a fastball, it’s noteworthy, and that’s part of why we’re here. Now let’s take a look at a chart, which tells us the percentage increase in slider usage in 2015 compared to last year (along with overall usage in 2015):
Justin Masterson has ditched the change up and gone full slider this year as he tries to reclaim his lost magic, and no one is really close to him in terms of slider rate increase. After him, we find a group between 9-14%, and that’s where we find McHugh and Archer, the latter of which has a very healthy jump of slider usage, at 10.7%. That jump has coincided with something else: velocity gain. For April, it’s a bit unusual to see this (courtesy of Brooks Baseball):
Archer is throwing both his fastball and slider harder than ever in 2015, with his slider in particular up a full MPH over last season. Again, it’s early, but velocity gains in the first few weeks of April are a little surprising, and not unpleasantly so. We now have have a trifecta of pitch usage for Archer’s slider so far this season: noticeable uptick in usage, reliance on the pitch as a main weapon (Archer has actually thrown more sliders than fastballs this season), and finally, velocity gain.
That combination works well when you have a fastball as good as Archer’s. The movement profile of Archer’s slider in 2015 is similar to 2014, though he has taken about an inch of vertical drop off of the pitch. His horizontal release point has shifted a few inches, so the slider looks a little tighter and closer to the movement of his fastball to my eyes. The main point we should focus on is this, however: he’s throwing it harder and way more often. Here’s what his slider looks like this year:
So how have Archer’s changes in velocity and usage of his slider affected its performance? Archer leads the majors this year in ground ball rate off of sliders at 63%, way up from his 50% mark last season. He’s also getting more whiffs per swing, at 41% compared to last season’s 37%. His ERA and walk rate aren’t going to stay this sub-humanly low for the entire year, but changes such as these to his peripheral numbers will go a long way toward increased success.
He’s now using his slider more in all counts and situations, but the biggest change is a 25% jump in two strike usage to left-handed hitters from 2014 to 2015. It’s now become his go-to out pitch against lefties — he’s currently throwing it 59% of the time to left-handers with two strikes. In those situations, batters are 0-14 so far this season with nine strikeouts. That sort of situational jump points to his increased confidence in the pitch, something no-doubt driven by his improved control and command: his 52.7% in-zone rate with his slider this year is much improved over 2014, when he posted a 39% rate.
It might not be too much of a surprise to hear that Kevin Cash had discussions with Archer about a pitcher Cash worked with during his time as a bullpen coach in Cleveland: Corey Kluber. It’s probably just a coincidence that Kluber and Archer now feature sliders that give them a great weapon against left-handed hitters. Regardless, Archer had this to say about his conversations with Cash in late February:
“We’ve had some good talks about things Kluber did to kind of really jump on the scene,” Archer said. “Kluber’s always had the stuff. He just hasn’t had success on that level. I’m trying to apply some of those things.”
Archer has been in the same boat: he’s always had the stuff, but walked a few too many batters to be up there in the elite tier of starting pitching. So far, his control has been much improved this year, and, with the addition of more ground balls and strikeouts from his adjusted slider usage, he could be set to take a step forward. He’s 26, coming into his prime, and now he’s throwing his harder slider 40% of the time. That sort of usage puts Chris Archer in select company, but I’m sure he doesn’t mind one way or the other. If the slider works, keep throwing it.I know several of you have reached out asking about the support for ESXi 6.5 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 but as of right now, the Mac Pro 6,1 is currently not supported with ESXi 6.5. I know this is not ideal especially for customers who wish to take advantage of the latest vSphere release. The good news is that VMware is in the process of testing the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 for ESXi 6.5, however there is not an ETA on when this will be completed by.
Some of you might be wondering why this did not happen earlier? The primary reason is that hardware certification for ESXi is actually performed by the hardware vendors. Once a vendor completes the certification for a particular hardware platform or component, they submit the results to VMware and the VMware HCL is updated. If there is a piece of hardware that is not on the VMware HCL today, it is definitely worth reaching out to your hardware vendor to inquire about its status.
In Apple's case, it unfortunate as they do not participate in VMware's Hardware Certification program for ESXi which makes certification challenging. VMware intends to continue to support customers who require the use of Mac OS X Virtualization and will work towards getting the Mac Pro's certified for latest version of vSphere as mentioned earlier. Historically, testing and certifying ESXi for Apple hardware does take an additional amount of time and in some cases, code changes may even be required due to unexpected hardware changes from Apple.
I hope this gives customers some additional insights into how Apple hardware is certified for ESXi. If you would like to see this improved in the future, you may want to reach out to Apple and provide them with your feedback.
Now... before you close this blog post thinking it is going to take awhile before there is going to be an update regarding ESXi 6.5 and Mac Pro 6,1, please continue reading further 🙂
UPDATE (07/28/2017) - ESXi 6.5 Update 1 just GA'ed yesterday and is fully supported with all current Apple Mac Pro 6,1 (as you can see on the HCL here) and the workaround mentioned below is no longer required. This means you can install ESXi without any modification to the image.
UPDATE (03/25/2017) - VMware has just published the following VMware KB 2149537 which outlines the officially recommended workaround to install ESXi 6.5 onto the Apple Mac Pro 6,1. The VMware HCL has also been updated to include the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 4-Core, 6-Core, 8-Core & 12-Core systems. In a future release of ESXi, the workaround will not be required and ESXi will just install out of the box. This temporarily workaround is to enable customers who wish to run the current version of ESXi 6.5 which includes GA release, 6.5a and 6.5p01.
Disclaimer: The following section below is not officially supported or recommended by VMware. Please use at your own risk.
Early last week, I had a customer who had reached out to me that attempted an install of ESXi 6.5 on their Mac Pro 6,1. They were already aware that the platform was not officially supported with ESXi 6.5, but wanted to see if I had any ideas that they could try. When attempting to boot the ESXi installer (upgrade or fresh install), they saw the following error message in the ESXi logs:
WARNING: vmw_ahci[00000e00]: ExceptionHandlerWorld:AHCI_SIGNAL_ABORT_REQUEST signal.
vmw_ahci[00000e00]: ExceptionHandlerWorld: Abort scan took 1 (us) to complete, 0 commands aborted.
FSS: 5749: No FS driver claimed device
The customer had theorized that perhaps there was an issue with the AHCI driver but since the system would not boot further, there was not much more they could do. Looking at the error, I also agreed the issue might be related to the AHCI driver which gave me an idea. The specific driver shown in the logs is the new AHCI Native Driver which is new in ESXi 6.5. Perhaps, the new driver is not able to claim the disk drives and is preventing the boot-up. I recommended to the customer that they could actually fall back to the "legacy" vmklinux driver and see if that would allow them to progress further and to my surprise, that actually worked. Not only did the installer completely boot, but the customer was able to perform both a fresh install of ESXi 6.5 as well as an upgrade from ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 on the Mac Pro 6,1 without any issues.
Of course, we do not know if this is the real fix or if there are other issues. So far the customer has not reported any issues but it is still recommended that customers who want official support for Mac Pro 6,1 and ESXi 6.5 to hold off until it is certified by VMware. For customers who wish to push the "Not Supported" boundaries a bit, below are the instructions on how to get ESXi 6.5 booted and installed on Mac Pro 6,1.
Add the following ESXi boot option (persistent) by pressing SHIFT+O when you are presented at the initial black screen.
preferVmklinux=True
At this point, you can now successfully boot the ESXi 6.5 installer and perform either a fresh install or an upgrade. You will NOT need to perform this operational again as the change is persistent. If you prefer not to manually have to add the ESXi boot option by hand, you can create an ESXi bootable USB key and then simply edit both boot.cfg and efi/boot/boot.cfg and append the option as shown below:
kernelopt=runweasel preferVmklinux=True
I will be sure to share this information with our Engineering folks working on testing the Mac Pro 6,1 but at least we know its possible to install ESXi 6.5 🙂 Big thanks to Andrew for reaching out and I think we were both pleasantly surprised by the outcome.
FYI - For customers who use the Apple Mac Mini, ESXi 6.5 seems to run fine without any issues (e.g. fresh install or upgrade). I have not heard of any real major issues, so you should be fine. Please note that the Apple Mac Mini is not an officially supported hardware platform, please use at your own risk.Email Share +1 194 Shares
GULFPORT, Miss. — A gay Mississippi man says a male teacher at the Baptist school he attended in the 1990s raped him each week for three years as a way to force him to change his sexual orientation.
Jeff White told the Washington Blade during a July 14 interview at a restaurant near his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast the teacher at Bethel Baptist School in Walls, Miss., who he identified as Steven Barnes, scheduled an “appointment” with him each Wednesday in his classroom or the office where he forced him to have oral and anal sex.
White, now 32, said the incidents took place at the school, which is in DeSoto County in northwestern Mississippi, between 1996-1999.
An embargoed press release the Blade obtained from the National Center for Lesbian Rights identifies Barnes, who is currently an associate pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, which operates Bethel Baptist School, as the teacher who allegedly raped White.
“He would rape me because I was gay and because it would make me hate men and make me change,” said White.
White told the Blade that his parents decided to send him to the school after he came out to them when he was 14 and in the seventh grade.
“They [the church’s pastors] looked at Southern Baptists like they were liberal faggots, like they would say from the pulpit,” he said.
The church’s website says Bethel Baptist School was founded in 1971 and is “staffed with an experienced, stable and caring staff.”
Tuition for the 2013-2014 academic year was $3,850 per student.
“Character and patriotism are taught in the classroom,” reads a description of the school on the Bethel Baptist Church’s website. “The curriculum is Bible based and every student is taught the truths of God’s word.”
The church’s website includes a section titled “God’s way to heaven” with a number of statements that include “agree that your sin must be paid for with death and hell” and “turn from your sin and trust Christ as your saviour.”
“In general it was a cult,” White told the Blade. “Aside from all of that other stuff going on, there was a thousand other things that they were doing.”
A woman who answered the phone at Bethel Baptist Church on Tuesday described White’s allegations to the Blade as “the biggest lie there ever was.”
Church representatives did not respond to further requests for comment before deadline.
The American Psychological Association and other medical, psychological and professional counseling organizations have said there is no evidence that so-called conversion therapy can change someone’s sexual orientation.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June declined to accept a case that challenged a California law that bans licensed mental health practitioners from performing so-called conversion therapy on minors. The anti-gay Liberty Counsel and the parents of a teenage son challenged a similar law that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed last August.
Lawmakers in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, New York and other states have sought to ban the controversial practice over the last year.
Samantha Ames, a staff attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which has worked with many survivors of so-called conversion therapy through its “Born Perfect” campaign, and White met with DeSoto County officials for several hours on Tuesday to discuss the allegations.
The DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department confirmed the meeting took place.
“A number of the stories that we have are very disturbing and violent, this is of course a unique one,” Ames said. “It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that some people will go to to change something that has nothing to do with them.”
White told the Blade he is still angry about the teacher who he said he raped him, but he has “gotten through it.”
White earlier this year co-founded the Mississippi Gulf Coast Rainbow Center, an LGBT support group based in Waveland.
“More of what I’m able to do now is to channel that anger into the work that I’m doing,” White told the Blade. “Honestly if I hadn’t had just gotten done with it [I’d be] pissed off. I would just be sitting there whining and complaining and making melodramatic Facebook posts.”
Ames said the National Center for Lesbian Rights is “incredibly proud to have” White as a client.
“I just can’t overemphasize how proud we are to represent someone this courageous,” she told the Blade. “He’s honestly one of the bravest, one of the most determined people I have ever met and he has a unique, first-hand understanding that these attempts to change sexual orientation and gender identity are linked to a culture of hostility to LGBT people and when you combine that kind of hatred and self-loathing with a position of power, whether it’s in a religious leader or a licensed therapist, people get hurt, sometimes irreparably.”
“What’s so extraordinary about Jeff is how long and hard he fought to turn that pain into something meaningful, this LGBT center that benefits every person in his state,” added Ames. “But today he’s not just helping out other people out of the darkness, he’s shining a light on it and he knows it very well.”HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (AP) -- Two more women who lived at a Florida nursing home that lost air conditioning during Hurricane Irma have died, becoming the 13th and 14th fatalities linked to the home.
RELATED: Gov. Scott never listened to nursing home's voicemail messages | Florida suspends license center
Hollywood police spokeswoman Miranda Grossman told The Associated Press on Monday that 90-year-old Cecilia Franco and 95-year-old Francesca Andrade have died from ailments suffered when the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills lost power Sept. 10 during the hurricane's passage.
On Sept. 13, eight residents died and other residents were evacuated from the facility.
Grossman said police are treating Franco and Andrade's deaths as part of the criminal investigation.
The Miami Herald reports Franco's husband Miguel Antonio Franco, who also had lived at the home, died Sept. 13.
No one has been charged.
The state has suspended the home's license. Last week, the facility laid off 245 workers.
List of victims:
Carolyn Eatherly, DOB 8-13-39
Gail Nova, DOB 2-22-46
Estella Hendricks, DOB1-4-46
Bobby Owens, DOB 5-16-33
Miguel Franco, DOB 9-5-25
Manuel Mendieta, DOB 8-26-21
Albertina Vega, DOB 10-10-17
Betty Hibbard, DOB 1-11-33
Carlos Canal, DOB 11-4-23
Martha Murray, DOB 1-10-23
Alice Thomas, DOB 2-27-23
Dolores Biamonte, DOB 2-25-60
Cecilia Franco, DOB 4-2-27
Francesca Andrade, DOB 12-7-21
Story from our news partner NBC 6 MiamiImage: The Glass Room/Mozilla/Tactical Technology Collective
The line of people moving down Mulberry Street in Manhattan's SoHo district on Tuesday night could've easily been confused for a product launch. It was pouring rain, and the mostly-young crowd was slowly shuffling past designer handbag stores and into a shiny, brightly-lit storefront reminiscent of Apple's trademark retail destinations.
Unbeknownst to them or anyone casually passing by on the street, their smartphones were being tracked. An array of cylindrical Yagi antennas pointed outward from the storefront's windowed entrance, recording the positions and unique MAC addresses of every WiFi-enabled device that wandered by—a setup reminiscent of the "Stingray" fake cell tower devices secretly used by police to track cellphones en-masse. Inside, a huge screen displayed a map of those devices as their owners sauntered about the space, consuming hors d'oeuvres and cocktails with cheeky cyber-themed names like "The Firewall."
The "store" isn't actually a store, of course. This was the opening party for The Glass Room, a pop-up digital privacy space that's free and open to the public through December 14, courtesy of Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser, and the Tactical Technology Collective, a Berlin-based activist group known for interventions in online security and digital rights.
One of the featured exhibits at The Glass Room. Image: Janus Kopfstein
The "products" that sit on pedestals inside the Glass Room aren't for sale, and range from playful art installations to demonstrations of actual surveillance tools used by law enforcement and private corporations. Near the front is a multi-volume hardcover encyclopedia of LinkedIn passwords leaked in a 2012 data dump, printed by artist Aram Bartholl. On a large table behind the books is a glass bubble enclosing a scale model of Mark Zuckerberg's infamously-secluded home (he bought the 4 surrounding houses to ensure his privacy) as well as a reconstruction of the main offices of Palantir, the shadowy US government data mining contractor started by noted Donald Trump supporter and alleged vampiric billionaire Peter Thiel.
Further back beyond a small set of stairs are more white pedestals displaying actual surveillance products, like Snapshot, a DNA phenotyping service offered by a company called Parabon NanoLabs, which reconstructs "mugshot" facial profiles from DNA samples. (Not long ago, the same capability was first demonstrated as a speculative art project by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg.)
The Data Detox exhibit at the Glass Room. Image: Janus Kopfstein
Another display attempts to recreate a real surveillance system called Texas Virtual BorderWatch, which until 2012 used a network of 200 connected cameras to allow real-time crowdsourced policing of the US-Mexican border. There's also Humanyze, a wearable tracking device that lets companies collect "people analytics" about employees' movements and activities while on the clock, to optimize for productivity—something the device's creators unnervingly claim "will become the norm of future workplaces."
Mark Surman, the executive director of Mozilla's non-profit arm, hopes the installations will help provoke an awakening in regular people who never thought they had skin in the privacy and security game.
"Really, this is a moment where we need to get everybody as citizens thinking about the health of the internet," he said during a press preview event just prior to the space's opening.
With the imminent arrival of an administration that has openly expressed contempt towards privacy, the free press, civil rights, and the rule of law, Surman's concern seems like a huge understatement. The list of surveillance powers President-elect Donald Trump will inherit on January 20th—which privacy advocates have long fought against—is frighteningly long, and still growing: On Thursday, Congress failed to block a procedural rule change that gives the FBI the legal authority to hack millions of computers around the globe under a single warrant.
As Surman and I chatted about the closely-intertwined dangers presented by large-scale data collection, unaccountable machine learning algorithms, and the pathetically-insecure Internet of Things, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the sense that we're completely and utterly fucked. But seeing the mobilization of security-focused activist groups in the aftermath of the election, along with high-profile interventions like the Glass Room, there seems to be evidence that many people are finally done hitting the snooze button on stepping up their privacy game.
For what it's worth, the Edward Snowden-approved encrypted messaging app Signal has seen a significant jump in popularity since in the weeks since the election. And in New York and elsewhere, digital security trainings that teach threat-modeling and privacy tools are starting to spring up with a renewed sense of urgency, as activists and marginalized communities brace themselves for at least four years of a Trump presidency.
The Glass Room will also be hosting workshops on digital security and surveillance, as well as handing out "digital detox" kits—a kind of privacy 10-step program designed to reduce your data footprint.
"My mantra right now is we have to take this set of issues and bring it into the mainstream, because the stakes are going up," Surman told me. "None of this is unsolvable, we just have to try and take it seriously."
Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.Make no mistake: America and China are on a collision course and the battleground is Asia. The China-Japan dispute has little to do with a small group of islands in the South China Sea. It's about a new world power, China, wanting to assert its authority in Asia. And it's about the U.S being threatened by China's increasing power and wanting to contain it. That's what makes the current dispute so dangerous. Even if the fight dies down, the battle for dominance in Asia between the U.S. and China will continue.
For investors, the implications from this are not only the potential for increased trade disputes between the U.S and China. But also, the likelihood of rising friction between Asian countries themselves. In fact, we're already seeing it as these countries are being forced to side with either America or China. Intra-Asian trade will be impacted too. Welcome to the new Cold War.
Asia is the new battleground
I have an abiding love for history. I put it down to a combination of great high school history teacher and a realisation that if you don't understand history, you can't possibly understand the present or the future. Anyhow, I got thinking about how we've been lucky to have lived through a remarkably peaceful period since the fall of communism in 1989.
The fall spurred much self-congratulation about how liberal democracies had won the day and communism was dead for good. Francis Fukuyama's 1992 bestseller, The End of History, reflected this sentiment:
"What we may be witnessing is not only the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
The book was not only silly in theory but totally ignored the rise of communist China too.
Now some of you may say that we haven't lived through a peaceful period since 1989 at all. Two wars in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, a terrorist attack on the U.S., ongoing bloodshed in Palestine, to name but a few of the fights since that time.
Not to belittle these conflicts in any way, but they were relatively small fry compared to what happened prior to 1989. The latest Iraqi war and occupation is estimated to have had around 172,000 casualties. The September 11 terrorist attacks had casualties numbering 9,000 including 3,000 dead.
These were not total wars though. The number of countries involved was far greater in World Wars I and II, as well as the Cold War. The casualties also dwarfed those of recent conflicts. For instance, casualties during World War I numbered 22.5 million. It's hard for many people to fathom these numbers and the destruction involved.
Which brings me to the present day. I can't help but thinking that we're entering a new period of rising tensions between countries. As well as a Cold War in Asia. The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn, as well as rising food inflation, have led to the fall of several, once-considered impregnable governments in the Middle East. The installation of new governments in their place is proving problematic.
By contrast, increasing tensions in Asia have nothing to do with the economic downturn or food inflation. Instead, they've come about from the rise of China as a new world power. China is staking its claims as a world power both economically and politically, focusing particularly on its own neighbourhood, Asia. And other nations are increasingly concerned about it.
China-Japan dispute: appearances deceive
The current conflict between China and Japan is supposedly over five tiny, uninhabited islands, Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, in the South China Sea. And the abundant natural gas in the area. China has been challenging Japan's claims over the Senkaku islands and its control of them. The situation has become increasingly tense and in late January there was almost a shoot-out. Japan claims that China beamed fire control radar at a destroyer owned by the Japanese Navy - a first step to potentially firing a missile at it.
The dangers of the conflict lay with politicians on all sides wanting to prove their military credentials by appearing tougher than the one another, with little regard for the consequences. This kind of behaviour is similar to that which almost led to catastrophic consequences during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Stepping back from the minutiae of the dispute though, it's ultimately about the changing balance of power in Asia. China has already become an economic power, now being the world's second largest economy. It's Asia's largest trading partner in both exports and imports. It's seeking the political power to match its economic might. And it's aggressively building military capabilities to achieve this goal.
Japan, on the other hand, is angry over China's economic prowess and wary of its political ambitions in the region. Japan has watched its share of imports in all markets shrink while China's share has rapidly expanded. Japanese companies have been forced to shift the production of manufactured goods to China and other low-cost countries, which has contributed to the country's depressed economic activity. The current dispute is effectively Japan's way of saying: "enough is enough".
Of course, Japan's principle ally in Asia is America. The U.S. has publicly remained neutral over the disputed islands, but privately there's little doubt that it's siding with Japan.
The backdrop is that the U.S. has historically been Asia's most influential political power but the dynamics are changing with the rise of China. That's why official American foreign policy has been to "pivot" towards Asia and away from area such as the Middle East. China believes that this pivot is about the U.S. containing its power and it's right. Of course, America denies this but logic dictates otherwise.
In a previous note, I suggested that it was no coincidence that The New York Times ran arguably anti-China stories U.S. election. I love the Times and some of the stories, such as Premier Wen's family secret fortune, were fantastic pieces of journalism. But I've got no doubt that the sources feeding these anti-China articles were mostly from the Obama administration. It's part of a toughened stance towards China.
Asia is splintering
Thus far, the U.S. has played its hand well in Asia. It's strengthened relationships with Vietnam and the Philippines by subtly backing their own claims against China to territories in the South China Seas. It's also strengthened military alliances with South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. And it's managed to become a key ally to Myanmar, a country with immense potential that is starting to open up to the world, and where China arguably has blundered.
Asia itself has splintered. Countries are being forced to ally with the U.S. or China. "You're either with us or against us" in military speak. This trend is most apparent at the 10-member, Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean). Asean has practically stopped functioning because of the bickering over China's territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Last year, Cambodia chaired the association and as an ally to China, pressed its friend's territorial claims. Vietnam and the Philippines strongly objected, and the various arguments became public at Asean meetings. With Brunei now chairing the association, it's hoped these arguments will die down.
But I wouldn't count on it. Asean is pushing for a collective agreement over China's claims while China itself only wants discussions and/or agreements with the countries directly impacted by the claims. In short, expect more diplomatic posturing and possibly open hostility.
Why it matters for investors
There are several implications from this new Cold War. In any war, cold or otherwise, trade usually suffers. You're likely to see the U.S. and China introduce new trade tariffs and sanctions between the two countries. The U.S. will also start pressuring Asian allies to align their investment policies with it. From China's side, you're already seeing work to move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Of course, the elephant in the room is China being the second-largest holder of U.S. government debt. For economic reasons, China's already started to reduce its holdings due to reduced foreign currency reserve growth (which we've talked about recently).
The implications of this new war spread much further than just the U.S.-China relationship though. Intra-Asian trade will be impacted too. Consider that exports within Asia account for around 56% of total Asian exports. In other words, Asia matters more than the rest of the world. Consider also that intra-Asia trade grew 3.5x over the past decade, or a 15% Cagr. Tidy.
Hat tip: Joshua Saldanha.
China's export trade share in Asia though has fallen from 51% in 2002 to 44% now. It's become more export dependent on the rest of the world and less on Asia.
On the other hand, Asean has benefited greatly from intra-Asian trade. As a percentage of total exports, Asia accounts for 69% of Asean exports, up from 60% a decade ago. It's not hard to see that Asean could be a big loser from increased trade frictions.
Source: http://asiaconf.comUpdates with NLB comments
Slovenia’s state prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation into claims that the country’s biggest state-owned bank, Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), may have laundered nearly €1bn from Iran between 2008 and 2010, breaking an international embargo and failing to enforce rules on the financing of terrorism.
Slovenian media reported in July that 40-50 transactions took place every day from NLB bank to more than 30,000 accounts around the world, including some clearly held in fake names, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. The allegations were not further elaborated until the opposition reopened the case last week.
NLB confirmed to EURACTIV that some of its international transactions had been reviewed internally and by the central bank in 2010 and no sanctions were imposed.
“Both reviews resulted in a number of findings that served as the basis for major changes in how the area of prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing was organised and equipped,” the bank said in a written reply, adding that “the responsible persons from that period are no longer employed at NLB”.
Contacted by EURACTIV, the Slovenian government confirmed that “in the case mentioned, the Office for Money Laundering Prevention (OMLP) received a suspicious transaction report in June 2010 in relation to money laundering and Terrorist Financing Act”.
The finance ministry said in a written reply that, at the time, the OMPL “sent more than 30 requests to different state authorities and obliged entities as well as requests to over 30 foreign Financial Intelligence Units”.
“On the basis of data received and assessed the OMLP established in this case grounds to suspect money laundering under Article 245 of the Slovenian Criminal Code and also some grounds to suspect terrorist financing under Article 109 of the Slovenian Criminal Code, of which the OMLP has informed the competent authorities,” the finance ministry added.
Prime Minister Miro Cerar told parliament last week, after the opposition raised the issue: “At this point, the state prosecution, which has launched pre-trial procedures, still has to confirm or reject the existence of grounds to suspect money laundering. I’m waiting for this piece of information,
Iranian connection
The scandal centres around Iranian and British citizen Iraj Farrokhzadeh, who opened accounts at the bank in December 2008 for the company Farrokh Ltd., after authorities in Switzerland shut down his accounts at UBS.
Farrokhzadeh is thought to have moved money for Iran’s Export Development Bank (EDBI), which was blacklisted by the European Council |
stach, Keys & Co., 1861.
Bell, John. A Treatise on Baths: Including Cold, Sea, Warm, Hot, Vapour, Gas, and Mud Baths. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1859.
Blandford, G. Fielding. Insanity and its Treatment. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1871.
Flint, Austin. Clinical Medicine: A Systematic Treatise on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1879.
Maudsley, Henry. The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872.
Webster, Thomas. Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.
Yeoman, Thomas Harrison. The People’s Medical Journal, and Family Physician, Vol. L. London: George Vickers, Strand, 1850.
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You can also connect with Mimi on Facebook and Twitter.Refugee boats continued to arrive in Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, despite a recent deal between the EU and Turkey - whereby refugees will be deported back to Turkey - coming into effect.
At least five boats, carrying more than 30 refugees each, arrived from Turkey between Saturday midnight - when the agreement came into force - and Sunday morning.
We endured four years of war, bombardment, rocket attacks...I don’t want to be sent back to Turkey because my father and two sisters are in Germany and I miss them. Rola Hallak, refugee from Aleppo
The majority of the refugees who arrived were from Syria, said Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from the Greek island of Lesbos.
Under the deal struck on Saturday, for every Syrian returned, the EU will resettle one from a Turkish refugee camp.
But people who managed to reach Europe's shores were hopeful they would not be turned back.
"I don't think they will reject us because we are coming from a destroyed city. We are asking for asylum on humanitarian grounds," Ahmed, a refugee from Aleppo, told Al Jazeera upon his arrival in Lesbos.
"Not only is there war in our country but the situation in Turkey is bad for us."
Those who arrived in Greece want to make their way to mainland Europe, some in search of a better life and others to be reunited with their family members who made the journey before them.
"We endured four years of war, bombardment, rocket attacks... I don't want to be sent back to Turkey because my father and two sisters are in Germany and I miss them," said Rola Hallak, another refugee from Aleppo.
The EU-Turkey deal aims to strangle the main route used by refugees travelling to the EU and discourage people smugglers, but it has faced criticism from rights groups and thousands took to the streets of Europe in protest.
Greek premier Alexis Tsipras told his ministers on Saturday afternoon to be ready to begin deporting people the following day, as agreed, but officials said afterwards that they needed more time to prepare.
"The agreement to send back new arrivals on the islands should, according to the text, enter into force on March 20," the government coordinator for migration policy (migration coordination agency) spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis told the AFP news agency.
"But a plan like this cannot be put in place in only 24 hours."
Around 1,500 people crossed the Aegean to Greece's islands on Friday before the deal was brought in, officials said - more than double the day before and compared with several hundred a day earlier this week.
A four-month-old baby drowned when a refugee boat sank off the Turkish coast on Saturday hours before the deal came into force, Turkey's Anatolia agency reported.
Hundreds of security and legal experts - 2,300, according to Tsipras - are set to arrive in Greece to help enforce the deal, described as "Herculean" by European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker.
Paris and Berlin have pledged to send 600 police and asylum experts to Greece, according to a joint letter.
OPINION: The dark side of the EU-Turkey refugee deal
Amnesty International has called the deal a "historic blow to human rights", and on Saturday thousands of people marched in London, Athens, Barcelona, Vienna, Amsterdam and several Swiss cities in opposition.
"We're calling on the Greek government to stop aligning itself with the EU's anti-refugee policies," said activist Thanassis Kourkoulas at a rally in the Greek capital.
EU officials have stressed that each application for asylum will be treated individually, with full rights of appeal and proper oversight.
In return for cooperation, Turkey won an acceleration of its long-stalled bid for EU membership, a doubling of refugee aid to six billion euros ($6.8bn) and visa-free travel in Europe's Schengen passport-free zone.
The deal also envisages major aid for Greece, where tens of thousands of refugees are trapped in dire conditions after Balkan countries shut their borders.Just four days after a sizable April snow storm hit the central Andes ski resorts of Argentina and Chile, another round of snow, this time coming in colder, has blanketed the South American resorts from Las Lenas to northern Patagonia. Santiago, Chile recorded on April 25, 2016, it’s coldest April day in 15 years as the thermometer hit a chilly 2.6 Celsius. Normal minimum temps for April in Santiago generally hover around 10 Celsius.
With just under two months before the normal kick off dates for the Southern Hemisphere ski season, things are off to a great start as the base continues to build and signs of a strong predicted winter continue.
April 23-24 Snow Pictures from Argentina and Chile
A collection of pictures from several popular ski resorts in South America we have found on social media.
April Snow in Argentina
More Snow in Chile
While Valle Nevado, La Parva and El Colorado have seen several heafty snowstorms this month, the south has had more rain (normal for April) due to higher temperatures. All of this changed over the weekend!
Once again The Three Valley ski areas in Chile blanketed in Snow in AprilNowhere in Warsaw is the country's upswing as visible as along the road between Frederic Chopin Airport and the town center. Many foreign investors, including German media giant Axel Springer, Unilever and Kraft Foods, have set up shop in the district of Mokotow, erecting steel-and-glass office complexes with names like Tulipan House and Optimus Business Park.
American photocopier giant Xerox works out of Trinity Park. Its business is booming, and the Polish economy is healthy.
Even so, Xerox Poland's head of human resources, Sebastian Gerstmann, is worried about the future -- specifically what will happen after May 1. "I believe there is a real danger we will lose many of our well-trained computer specialists, particularly those who are about to graduate from university, because they will get better offers in Germany," he says. German Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle recently said the German economy needs at least 66,000 IT specialists. To Gerstmann, that sounds like a threat.
From May 1 onward, workers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Hungary and Slovenia will be allowed to live and work in Germany and Austria. That was forbidden up to now because Gerhard Schröder, the then German chancellor, succeeded in imposing a seven-year transition period on the EU's Eastern European member states when they joined the bloc in 2004. This moratorium on access to labor markets was supposed to protect German carpenters, welders and computer programmers against cheaper competitors from the East.
Fears Reversed
Now this honeymoon period is over, up to 50 million eastern Europeans could theoretically apply for every job that becomes available in Germany. However the underlying conditions have changed dramatically since 2004. Germany is booming, and the former communist states in Eastern Europe have shaken off the burdens of their past, and are now notching up high growth rates.
The fear has switched sides: Germans no longer worry about an influx of workers from the east. On the contrary, they are eager to get them. In fact, it is quite possible that Germany won't be able to woo enough of them to satisfy the hunger of German managers for additional labor. Now it's the turn of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to fret that their cleverest minds and best craftsmen may leave for the west.
Gerstmann says his fellow countrymen are extremely well educated, are fluent in foreign languages and are highly motivated -- exactly the skills he is now concerned about. "Polish employers will have to pay higher wages and offer better opportunities to keep people in the country," he says. After all, a computer programmer in Germany still earns twice as much as his Polish counterpart.
Opinion polls show Gerstmann is not alone in his fears: Some 40 percent of all major Polish employers fear the "negative consequences" of an open border.
Eastern European workers proved that they are extremely mobile when their respective countries joined the EU back in 2004. Two million Poles alone moved to Western Europe in search of work, heading mainly for Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Limited Movement Expected
The exodus will be smaller this time round. The German Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB) in Nuremberg expects no more than 140,000 people a year will emigrate to Germany. Warsaw-based demographer Krystyna Iglicka believes up to 1 million people will move from Poland alone, albeit spread across the next couple of years.
Although figures such as these are large enough to worry Polish and Czech employers, they are too small to satisfy their German colleagues. Germany is running out of skilled labor, and its population is shrinking. From 2020 onward, when the first baby boomers retire, it is expected that more people will leave work than young people will enter the labor market. And because the situation is similar in nearly all European countries, a bitter battle has broken out over the continent's skilled workers. The days are long gone when Germany just had to ask for workers for it to be flooded with applicants. In fact, in 2008 and 2009 more people left Germany than emigrated to the country.
Germany is now too late to cherry-pick Eastern Europe's top engineers and IT experts. The youngest and most dynamic of these are already working in Britain and Sweden, according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research. These workers settled down in these countries and started careers and families while Germany was choosing to hide behind its seven-year immigration ban.
"This hesitant attitude, based on fears of a possible negative effect on the German labor market, now turns out to have been a huge mistake," says Klaus Zimmermann, the head of the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor. At a trade conference in Warsaw this week, Zimmermann said German companies shouldn't wait for the people of Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states to turn up, but should actively recruit them while there's still time.
Looking Further East
Most of the potential immigrants will probably come from western Poland, which lies particularly close to Germany and where many young people already speak German.
Five years ago, the university in Wroclaw began preparing for the expected exodus -- by wooing the young academics of the future from countries to the east of Poland. With success: They managed to attract 500 students from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan.TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) - Veteran espionage researcher Jon DiMaggio was hot on the trail three months ago of what on the face of it looked like a menacing new industrial espionage attack by Russian cyber spies.
FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo
All the hallmarks were there: targeted phishing emails common to government espionage, an advanced Trojan horse for stealing data from inside organizations, covert communication channels for grabbing documents and clues in the programming code indicating its authors were Russian speakers.
It took weeks before the lead cyber spying investigator at Symantec, a top U.S. computer security firm, figured out instead he was tracking a lone-wolf cyber criminal.
DiMaggio won’t identify the name of the culprit, whom he has nicknamed Igor, saying the case is a run-of-the-mill example of increasing difficulties in separating national spy agency activity from cyber crime. The hacker comes from Transdniestria, a disputed, Russian-speaking region of Moldova, he said.
“The malware in question, Trojan.Bachosens, was so advanced that Symantec analysts initially thought they were looking at the work of nation-state actors,” DiMaggio told Reuters in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Further investigation revealed a 2017 equivalent of the hobbyist hackers of the 1990s.”
Reuters could not contact the alleged hacker.
The example highlights the dangers of jumping to conclusions in the murky world of cyber attack and defense, as tools once only available to government intelligence services find their way into the computer criminal underground.
Security experts refer to this as “the attribution problem”, using technical evidence to assign blame for cyber attacks in order to take appropriate legal and political responses.
These questions echo through the debate over whether Russia used cyber attacks to influence last year’s U.S. presidential elections and whether Moscow may be attempting to disrupt national elections taking place in coming months across Europe.
The topic is a big talking point for military officials and private security researchers at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Tallin this week. It has been held each year since Estonia was swamped in 2007 by cyber attacks that took down government, financial and media websites amid a dispute with Russia. Attribution for those attacks remains disputed.
THE SMOKING GUN
“Attribution is almost never a clean, smoking-gun,” said Paul Vixie, creator of the first commercial anti-spam service, whose latest firm, Farsight Security, helps firms track down cyber attackers to identify and block them.
Raising the stakes, a mystery group calling itself ShadowBrokers has taken credit for leaking cyber-spying tools that are now being turned to criminal use, including ones used in the recent WannaCry global ransomware attack, ratcheting up cyber security threats to a whole new level.
In recent weeks, ShadowBrokers has threatened to sell more such tools, believed to have been stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, to enable hacking into the world's most used computers, software and phones. (reut.rs/2rmTZmm)
“The bar for what’s considered advanced is lowered as time goes by,” said Sean Sullivan, a security researcher with Finnish cyber firm F-Secure.
The Moldovan hacker’s campaign to steal data and resell it on the web came to light only after infections popped up last year at a major airline, an online gambling firm and a Chinese automotive software maker, which are all customers of Symantec products used to secure their business networks.
Igor appears to have targeted the auto-tech company to steal its car diagnostics software, which retails for around $1,100 but Igor sold for just a few hundred dollars on underground forums and websites he had created. His aims in trying to break into the airline and gambling firm remain a mystery.
“Considering the audacity of this attack, the financial rewards for Igor are pretty low,” DiMaggio wrote in a blog post on his findings to be published on Wednesday.
As a threat, Symantec rates Trojan.Bachosens as a very low risk virus, in part because the attack singles out only a handful of specific firms rather than the wide-ranging, random attacks used by many cyber criminals to scoop up the greatest number of victims.
“I think those days are over when we can say in black and white: We know this is an espionage group,” DiMaggio said.
The Symantec researcher has not reported Igor to local authorities, calculating that exposing the methods of the attack will be enough to neutralize them.On Thursday, conservatives will be descending on Washington DC, the place they like to slam the most, to galvanize their mission to take back Congress and the presidency. Reports say this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will bring in record numbers despite it not being a midterm or presidential election year. According to The Washington Times, 7,000 people attended last year and 9,000 are expected this year.
Last year President Bush and Cheney were the stars of the event. And Mitt Romney chose the conference to announce that he was suspending his campaign.
This year, Cheney and Bush are off the agenda, replaced by ghosts of the campaign trail like Joe the Plumber (Joe Wurzelbacher) and documentarian John Ziegler, who has been making the rounds to restore Sarah Palin's self-imposed media debacle with his documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted." And of course Rush Limbaugh will be there as the biggest draw.
Other events include: "Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System"; "The Presidential Banquet with Master of Ceremonies: Rep. Michelle Bachmann"; "Bailing Out Big Business: Are We All Socialists Now?"; A book signing with Ann Coulter; "Media in the Obama Era: Is Journalism Dead?"; "The True Cost Of Global Warming Hysteria"; and "Will Congress Take Your Guns?"Regime troops shelled rebel-held villages in southern Syria Thursday, as a snowstorm slowed an advance led by Hizbullah near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a monitor said.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the army shelled Jizeh and the west of Atman village in the southern province of Daraa.
Battles raged on in several parts of Daraa, pitting rebels and a local al-Qaida affiliate against Hizbullah and their Iranian and Syrian allies, said the Observatory.
"Despite the fighting, the Hizbullah-led advance was forced to slow down by heavy snow in the area," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
The reports come on the fifth day of a major Hizbullah-led offensive in the southern provinces of Daraa and Quneitra, as well as the west of Damascus province.
The area is important because of its proximity to Jordan, Damascus and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
In recent days, pro-regime troops have seized a string of villages and strategic hilltops that rebels and the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front had been holding for around a year.
This week, for the first time in Syria's war, state television acknowledged that President Bashar Assad's army is fighting alongside Hizbullah and Iranian officers in its bid to crush a nearly four-year rebellion.
The Observatory's Abdel Rahman told Agence France-Presse on Thursday that 300 elite Hizbullah fighters are deployed on Syria's southern front.
"This really is Hizbullah's battle," he said.
On January 18, six Hizbullah fighters, including a senior commander, and an Iranian general were killed in an Israeli air strike in Quneitra.Oil ministry to recommend this in its presentation to PM Narendra Modi
Given the crippling shortage of gas, and the fact that India imports 25-30% of its needs at $12-15 per mmBtu even today, the petroleum ministry will recommend a hike in prices paid to local suppliers such as ONGC, Reliance Industries (RIL) and Cairn. The move is in keeping with the December 2012 recommendations of the Rangarajan committee. Based on the formula, today’s price will be in the $8.50-9 per mmBtu range.
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While the UPA notified the decision on January 10, it was not implemented after the election process began. Implementing the Rangarajan formula is the top item of the presentation to be made by the petroleum ministry to Prime Minister Narendra Modi any time over the next few days. “Perhaps we may have to go to the Cabinet,” a ministry official said. “We would have more clarity by Tuesday.”
Though a gas price hike has been opposed by many on the grounds it will raise electricity and fertiliser prices, this is only partially true. For one, of the biggest beneficiaries of a price hike will be the government which will get more royalties/cess, so the government can partially subsidise the affected sectors.
Also, India’s gas imports are estimated to rise from the 25-30% levels now to 42% in FY17. Even though GAIL’s gas from the US is priced at the Henry Hub price of $4.50, once liquefaction, regassifying and transport costs are added, the price will be $11-12 per mmBtu.
Paying local producers even $9-10 will be cheaper than importing gas, which is the only other alternative. A study by global consulting firm IHS Cera says 85% of India’s natural gas is viable only at prices above $10 per mmBtu — ONGC, for instance, has asked for a price of $13 if it is to develop its Mahanadi block.
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If gas prices are raised, an investment of $15-20 billion can be expected over three to four years — RIL, which has filed an arbitration case against the government for not implementing the Rangarajan formula, has itself committed to investing $8-10 billion over three to four years.
The Financial ExpressAl Jazeera America responded on Monday to a lawsuit alleging that a top executive engaged in sexist and anti-Semitic behavior even as yet another top executive said that she is leaving the embattled channel.
The TV channel on Monday said it refuted reports about intolerance or gender bias in its organization.
Also on Monday, Marcy McGinnis, who served as senior vice president of outreach at AJAM, said she is resigning from her position. In her resignation letter, McGinnis alluded to an all-hands meeting held last week by the TV channel's CEO Ehab Al Shihabi.
"Last week, Ehab reminded us at the Senior Leadership meeting and again at the All Hands meeting that anyone who felt they could not support the decisions or direction set forth by him and the Al Jazeera Media Network would be welcome to leave," McGinnis said in her letter, which was obtained by CNNMoney and reported earlier by TVNewser. "I find myself at that crossroads now and so have decided to resign."
CNNMoney previously reported that Al Shihabi told staff members at the all-hands meeting that the company will fight the lawsuit filed by Matthew Luke, the channel's former director of media and archive management who was fired in February. Publicly, AJAM isn't saying much about any of the turmoil.
Al Shihabi and the channel's president, Katie O'Brian, held a press briefing on Monday in a conference room in AJAM's lower Manhattan office.
At one point during the briefing, O'Brian began to address the resignation of McGinnis.
"Marcy has decided to leave us and she let us know today that this is -- this is her decision," O'Brian said as an AJAM attorney slid her a note with instructions to not discuss personnel matters. O'Brian read the note, and quickly wrapped up her response.
"And as we have said many times in the past when many of you have asked questions, we don't really go into personnel issues and so we're going to leave it at that," O'Brian said.
Separately, Luke is seeking $15 million in his lawsuit against AJAM, alleging that he was fired 10 days after he went to human resources to complain that his boss, Osman Mahmud, discriminated against women and made derogatory remarks about Israel and the United States.
In the complaint, Luke claims that Mahmud removed female employees from projects to which they had been assigned by other managers, and that he once tried to replace an Israeli cameraman with a lesser qualified Palestinian cameraman. Moreover, Luke asserts that Mahmud once said that supporters of Israel "should die a fiery death in hell."
Mahmud vigorously denied the allegations in an interview with The Washington Post. AJAM responded to Luke's lawsuit last week with a boilerplate statement, saying it "does not comment on pending litigation."
The channel remained mum during the press briefing on Monday afternoon, repeatedly declining to discuss the lawsuit or any of the damning accusations against Mahmud. Al Shihabi used much of the briefing to criticize what he deemed unfair media coverage about AJAM. Recent reports have indicated that the channel is currently carrying out layoffs and reshuffling programming.
AJAM lost two other top officials last week in executive vice president for human resources Diana Lee and executive vice president for communications Dawn Bridges. Lee addressed her resignation at the all-hands meeting, according to a source who was there, saying that she was leaving AJAM to pursue other things. An AJAM spokesperson said that both resignations were months in the making.
In a news release that preceded the briefing on Monday, AJAM said it refuted reports about intolerance or gender bias in its organization
"These reports are false and malicious and are designed to mar the exceptional talent and diversity of its employees and the values that Al Jazeera America upholds," AJAM said.
Related: Al Jazeera America exec tells staff he will fight lawsuit
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Osman Mahmud, AJAM's Senior VP of broadcast operations and technology.According to data of the State Electricity Regulatory Commission, in 2013 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 16.302.55 GWh of electricity has been produced, out of which, 7.123.62 GWh or 43.7% has been produced in Hydro power plants.
The rest of the electricity has been produced in Thermal power plants, and 1.47% has been produced in small and industrial power plants (which includes other forms of renewable energy as well).
From the Center for education and raising awareness on the need of energy efficiency – Energis, it has been announced that it is clear from mentioned results that Bosnia and Herzegovina is among the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to the production of electricity from renewable resources, which is very positive for the country and its citizens.
However, they emphasize that BiH also has a potential for other forms of the renewable energy resources – wind energy, solar energy, and biomass.
They are reminding that, in the last few years, several solar power plants, biomass heating plant and one wind power plant were put into operation, and that several new projects for wind power plants are the preparatory phase.
(Source: seebiz.net)Dallas is where the biggest metal show in Texas is happening and it is happening Labor Day Weekend!!! So loud...all of Dallas will hear it!!! 2 days! 6 venues! Over 50 of the best local metal bands the Dallas/Fort Worth area has to offer! and ALL FOR ONE LOW PRICE!!! Who says there is only country music and no metal scene in the great state of Texas? Looks to me it's alive and well to us!!! ZRockR will be there too! Covering as much as we possibly can of The Curtain Club, The Liquid Lounge, Reno's Chop Shop, RBC (the old Red Blood Club next to Twisted Root), Wits End, The Boiler Room...Bands like Protest, Low Gear, Interment, Splatta Fish, Exploder, LIke Bridges We Burn, Versus Our Master, Cull the Heard, Ashes of the Forgotten and so many many more! Check it out below for full list of bands and venues and if you see our guy in Dallas Lance Brown- or talk to anyone from DMS- make sure you tell 'em you found out about this in ZRockR!
For tickets:
Hit up some participating bands.
DMS Members or go to:
facebook.com/DmsPromotions
For Online Single Day passes: www.prekindle.com (search DMS METAL)
FULL LINE UP:
AUG. 29th – DAY ONE
THE CURTAIN CLUB:
8:10PM - 8:40PM - TAKE THE REIGNS
9:00PM - 9:30PM - DRIVEN BELOW
9:50PM - 10:20PM - ASYLUM
10:40PM - 11:10PM - THE CRIMSON VEIL
11:30 - 12:10 - LOW GEAR
12:30 -??? - MR. FREAK & THE FREAK SHOW BAND
THE LIQUID LOUNGE:
8:10PM - 8:40PM – THOSE WITHOUT HALOS
9PM - 9:30PM - WARRIORS OF TERRA
9:50 - 10:20 - BOW PROMETHEUS
10:40PM - 11:10PM - ASHES OF THE FORGOTTEN
11:30PM - 12:10PM - TEXAS DEATH CHAMBER
12:30AM -??? - WELLS MACHINE
THE BOILER ROOM:
9PM - 9:40PM – NO REGRETS
10PM - 10:40PM – BAND NERDS
11PM - 11:40PM - CULL THE HEARD
MIDNIGHT - LIKE BRIDGES WE BURN
RENO'S CHOP SHOP:
9PM - 9:40PM - CAMARGO
10PM - 10:40 - DEI AEMETH
11PM - 11:40PM - CHEMICHAUST
MIDNIGHT – WEAKEN THE ADVERSARY
WITS END:
9PM - 9:40PM - GOLGATHA
10PM - 10:40PM - CYHYRAETH
11PM - 11:40PM - TRANSRELIC
MIDNIGHT -??? - THE BEAUTIFUL EXCHANGE
RBC (THE OLD RED BLOOD CLUB):
9pm-9:40PM: RUINS FROM WITHIN
10PM-10:40PM: MY PRIDE MY CURSE
11PM-11:40PM: DECIDE YOUR BETRAYL
MIDNIGHT-????: FRAME THE ENEMY
AUG. 30th – DAY TWO
THE BOILER ROOM:
8PM -8:40PM: WORD TO THE WISE
9PM - 9:40PM: SQUAREONE
10PM -10:40PM: HORROR CULT
11PM -11:40PM: PROTEST
MIDNIGHT -???: FAR BEYOND REDEMPTION
RBC (OLD RED BLOOD CLUB, NEXT TO TWISTED ROOT):
7PM - 7:40 - MINDS AND MACHINES
8PM - 8:40PM: END OF ATLAS
9PM - 9:40PM: VERSUS OUR MASTER
10PM - 10:40PM: BORN & RAISED
11PM - 11:40PM: DRIVEN BY DECIET
MIDNIGHT -???: HEAVY HANGS THE ALBATROS
RENO'S CHOP SHOP:
7:10 PM - 7:40: RENATUS
8PM - 8:30PM: EXALT THE THRONE
8:50PM - 9:20PM: DIVINE RETRIBUTION
9:40PM - 10:10PM: EMPTY SHELL
10:30 - 11PM: ASPHYXIATION INFECTA
11:20 - MIDNIGHT: SPLATTA FISH
12:20 -???: INTERMENT
THE CURTAIN CLUB:
8:10PM - 8:40PM - DEFLOWERED
9:00PM - 9:30PM – FIGHTING CHANCE
9:50PM - 10:20PM – GRAY-V
10:40PM - 11:10PM – FROM WITHIN
11:30 - 12:10 – ELECTRIC VENGENANCE
12:30 -??? - EXPLODER
THE LIQUID LOUNGE:
8:10PM - 8:40PM –TRAVIE AND THE BEETUS
9:00PM - 9:30PM - AETOLIA
9:50 - 10:20 – AMONG THE RUIN
10:40PM - 11:10PM - STILLBENT
11:30PM - 12:10PM – THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT
12:30AM -??? – I BURY THE LIVING
*TIMES AND VENUES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGESAN JOSE — Officers shot and killed a man Monday night believed to be connected to a gruesome homicide last week on Lundy Avenue — less than 24 hours after police shot and killed another man while conducting a follow-up investigation to that same crime, a department spokesman confirmed.
The shooting was reported just before 7 p.m. on Kirkhaven Court at Stoneyhaven Way, San Jose police Sgt. Enrique Garcia said. The man, who has not been named, was being tailed by officers earlier Monday afternoon after he had not only been identified as one of the suspects in the death of 38-year-old Christopher Maxwell Wrenn, but officers also learned that the suspect planned to kill again Monday. His victim was believed to be a woman who was in the car with the suspect when officers began tailing him, police said.
Garcia said that at some point the suspect — who had a felony homicide warrant — realized he was being followed by officers with the department’s MERGE (SWAT) team, and led them on a chase that ended when he crashed his car on Kirkhaven Court and ran out from the vehicle.
One officer following the man jumped out of a car and ran after him. As the suspect headed toward a home on Kirkhaven Court, Garcia said he reached for his waistband. The officer opened fire, hitting the suspect, and the man was declared dead at the scene a short time later.
Garcia said the man was one of the suspects seen in footage obtained by police of last Thursday night’s homicide. Garcia said the video shows three men — each armed with a weapon — “terrorizing” Wrenn before he was killed.
“I can’t imagine what that victim was going through,” Garcia said. “They terrorized him before they killed him.”
The sister of the suspect who was killed Monday night declined to state her name when she approached media outside the crime scene. Wiping her face with a white towel, she told reporters, “This ain’t right … Read between the lines here.”
Monday night’s shooting mirrored similar circumstances from an officer-involved shooting less than a day before, when San Jose police opened fire just after 10 p.m. Sunday in front of a laundromat on Senter Road near Capitol Expressway. In that instance, officers with SJPD’s Covert Response Unit were tracking a suspect connected to the same homicide that left Wrenn mortally wounded in an office complex last week.
A third suspect in that homicide is still at-large, Garcia said, but he would not release details on that individual late Monday.
Monday night’s officer-involved shooting was the second in less than 24 hours, and the fourth for the department in nine days.
“This is a very complicated case,” Garcia said.
Contact Katie Nelson at 408-920-5006 and follow her at Twitter.com/katienelson210.On the Fourth of October, Mr. Duke gave a speech to prepare the troops.
"Everyone, we will be deposing Emperor Francis today. We'll begin by taking a Portkey I have managed to acquire to the Magical Disrict of Vienna. Then we will stun everyone we see, proceed to the Throne Room, and kill the Emperor. After we have secured the Government building, I'll come to the Palace, and I'll begin to set up a new government. You will provide security during this. Does everyone get that?"
The assembled soldiers nodded.
"Then proceed to the Portkey outside."
Gottfried Essen was bored. Guard duty in the Palace was monotonous, but it was good pay. It was three in the morning, and he was close to nodding off. He should probably get a potion. Well, at least he didn't have to guard the Emperor. Francis was not a nice man. He thought he heard a banging noise outside.
Suddenly, dozens of Brazilian soldiers burst through the door.
Eleutrio Goeuvia yelled out "Drop your wands and surrender."
Gottfried heard the man next to him scream an expletive. There was a clatter of wands on the floor. The Brazilians began stunning his fellow soldiers. This was not what he had signed up for. He dropped his wand and yelled "I surrender." A Brazilian cast a stunner his way, and that was the last Gottfried Essen remembered of the first battle of Vienna.
Emperor Francis thought he heard a faint noise outside. He wondered what was happening. As he was getting up, groaning all the way, he saw a flash of light from under his door. The door burst open, and a dozen swarthy men, who seemed to be Brazilian, burst in. "What is this?" Francis called. "Goodbye Francis. Reducto." One of the men replied. And so, Emperor Francis, ruler of the Austrian Empire since 1945, died.
Harry stepped onto the soil of his first conquest. Some of the Austrians had tried to counterattack, but most had surrendered after Francis's death and the capture of most of |
games. Bus parking passes can be purchased from the Brewers Group Sales Department at (414) 902-GRPS (4777) at least 48 hours in advance for $50 on weekdays, $60 on weekends and Cubs games, and $75 for Opening Day. Buses must park in the bus area designated in the Miller Lot and parking locations will be determined by staff. Early entry to lots is not permitted. Bus parking is for buses only and additional passes purchased cannot be used for open tailgating space. Tailgating is permitted in drive lanes at the front or rear of the bus/RV. Tailgate grids may be purchased from Brewers Group Sales at (414) 902-GRPS (4777) and grids are not available in the bus parking area. Please see "Parking/Tailgating" for more information.
A Bublr Bike Station sponsored by Brewers Community Foundation is located on the walkway near the Gantner Lot. The solar-powered station features 23 docking stations.
Please see "Accommodations for Guests with Disabilities."
Advanced parking may be purchased online at brewers.com/Parking or by calling the Brewers Ticket Office at (414) 902-4000. Will call delivery option is not available for parking purchases. Day-of-game rates apply on parking purchased for that day's game.
The parking lots at Miller Park open three hours prior to game time (subject to change). For games with start times of 6:40 p.m., parking lots will open at 4:10 p.m. There is no parking on game days on Milwaukee Road or Wheelhouse Road, and any vehicles parked in these areas are subject to being ticketed and/or towed.
Parking may be purchased the day of game with cash or credit card while space is available. Parking may also be purchased in advance; all parking passes will be scanned at entry. Please be sure to bring the correctly dated parking pass. Parking passes that do not scan for any reason may be denied entry; such instances include, but are not limited to, parking passes that are reported lost or stolen, have an invalid date, have been forwarded to another ticket-holder, or are a duplicate pass. A new parking pass at the applicable day-of-game rate will need to be purchased to gain access to the parking lot.
Policies Relating to Guest Conduct
Alcohol Policy
The Milwaukee Brewers, MillerCoors, Delaware North, and Friday's Front Row promote the responsible sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. All alcohol sales will cease in the seating bowl, concession stands and portables immediately after the end of the 7th inning. No alcoholic beverages of any kind purchased at Friday's Front Row may be taken outside of Friday's Front Row at any time. Adult guests of legal drinking age will be allowed to purchase a maximum of two alcoholic beverages per ID. All guests purchasing alcohol who appear to be under the age of 30 must present a valid U.S. government-issued ID. No alcohol will be sold to intoxicated guests or guests without a valid ID. Guests passing alcohol to minors will be ejected and prosecuted. Guests possessing alcohol who do not have proof of being at least 21 years old are subject to ejection and prosecution. The Milwaukee Brewers, Delaware North, and Friday's Front Row reserve the right to refuse the sale of alcohol to any guest. Alcoholic beverages may not be brought into Miller Park. The Milwaukee Brewers and Delaware North staff are trained in the Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management ("TEAM") courses that provide staff with the necessary tools to ensure a safe and enjoyable fan experience.
Banners
Fans are permitted to bring and display banners at Miller Park, provided the content displayed is pertinent to baseball; is not offensive; does not interfere with the game, broadcast of the game or other guests' enjoyment of the game; does not cover ballpark advertising or other signage; promote a commercial product or service, or contain any language or illustration deemed inappropriate by Milwaukee Brewers management. Items such as poles, long-stem brooms, and/or sticks are prohibited. Banners may not be paraded through any part of Miller Park or hung over railings. Approved banners and/or signs may be displayed between innings only. Maximum banner size is 3' x 5'.
Cameras & Video Equipment
Guests are permitted to bring cameras and video equipment into Miller Park, provided that they are intended for personal use only. Videotaping of any field activity, or of any Milwaukee Brewers staff or agents is strictly prohibited. Guests are not permitted to stand in the aisles, wells or walkways, or obstruct others from viewing the game while taking photographs. Camera lenses must not exceed 8 inches in length. Monopods and tripods are not permitted. Guests deemed to be violating these rules may be ejected, and the footage may be confiscated.
Carry-in Policy
Guests may not bring any cans, glass containers or alcohol into Miller Park. Soda, water or juice must be contained in factory-sealed plastic bottles. Guests may bring personal-size food items into Miller Park using appropriate containers. Aerosol cans (sunscreen, hairspray, etc.) are prohibited. All bags, purses, fanny packs or soft-sided coolers must conform to 16" x 16" x 8" or smaller in size and are subject to inspection. Hard-sided coolers are not allowed in the ballpark. Fans are encouraged to limit their carry-in items in the interest of expediting the entry process for all fans.
The following items are among those not permitted to be brought into Miller Park (items are subject to change without notice):
Aerosol Cans (sunscreen, hairspray, etc.)
Alcohol
Bags/Luggage (larger than 16" x 16" x 8")
Brooms/Broomsticks/Poles
Cans & Glass Containers
Hard-Sided Coolers
Laser Pointers
Masks
Noise Makers
Non-Factory Sealed Plastic Containers
Pepper Spray
Pets (except for service animals or during specific promotions)
Throwing Items
No open or concealed weapons/firearms (including pocket knives) are allowed anywhere inside Miller Park.
Drones
Guests are prohibited from using or possessing unmanned aircraft and radio-controlled model aircraft in Miller Park or anywhere on or within the airspace of Miller Park property.
Event Seating Policy
In order to ensure all of our guests receive the full value of their ticket investment, only those persons with a ticket for a particular seat will be permitted to occupy that seat. Our staff checks tickets to safeguard each customer's investment in a ticketed seat. Individuals in an incorrect seat will be required to return to their ticketed seat location.
Expressive Activities on Miller Park Grounds
The Milwaukee Brewers enforce the following policies related to expressive activities by members of the public on the grounds of Miller Park in connection with Milwaukee Brewers home games and other events at Miller Park: Expressive activity, including (1) parading with placards and signs, the distribution of literature or other paraphernalia and other similar activities; and (2) engaging strangers (whether passively or forcefully) on subjects of a contentious or political nature (including personal campaigning for public office) is not permitted inside Miller Park, in the parking areas of Miller Park, or on the private roadways without the prior written permission of the Milwaukee Brewers. Consistent with applicable county ordinance, commercial activities, including sales of goods, are not permitted anywhere on the grounds of Miller Park without the prior written permission of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Fan Screening
In accordance with MLB policy, all fans will be required to go through metal detector screening, via walkthrough and/or handheld detectors prior to being granted access to Miller Park. To help expedite the process and minimize delays, there are express lanes for fans entering the ballpark without backpacks or bags. Guests will be asked to remove cell phones, cameras, and other large metal objects prior to entering, but they will not be required to remove shoes, wallets, coins, keys or belts. Guests are also encouraged to take prohibited items (including pocket knives) back to their vehicles. The Milwaukee Brewers will not offer accommodations for such items and are not responsible for items left behind in the screening areas. Please see "Prohibited Items" for an updated list of prohibited items at Miller Park. For more information regarding the screening process, please call Brewers Guest Relations (414) 902-4900.
Foul Balls and Flying Bats
For safety, please beware of bats and balls and other objects that may enter the seating areas any time individuals are on the field. Guests must pay attention to flying bats and balls at all times. Guests are allowed to keep any baseball that enters the seating area as a souvenir; however, guests are not allowed to enter the playing area to retrieve balls or otherwise interfere with baseballs in play. Violators of this policy are subject to ejection from Miller Park.
Guest Code of Conduct
The Milwaukee Brewers are committed to providing our guests with an enjoyable and safe experience at Miller Park. Any guest not adhering to the following Code of Conduct or otherwise behaving in an inappropriate manner as determined by the Milwaukee Brewers will be removed from Miller Park (in addition to incurring any criminal or civil penalties that may be imposed for such inappropriate conduct).
Alcohol/Drugs The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to deny entrance or remove any guest from Miller Park who: Appears intoxicated or impaired by alcohol, drugs or other controlled substances. Is under the age of 21 and possessing alcoholic beverages. Facilitates underage drinking. Possesses illegal drugs.
Clothing/Body Art Guests may not wear obscene, profane or indecent clothing or display offensive body art. Guests must wear a shirt at all times inside of the ballpark.
Emergencies The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to remove any guest who fails to comply with any request from the Milwaukee Brewers or law enforcement personnel regarding Miller Park operations or emergency response procedures.
Interference with Game Guests may not interfere with the progress of the game or go on to the field. Guests may not interfere with a ball in play. Guests may not throw objects on the field or in the seating areas.
Language/Violence/Conduct Guests may not use foul, profane or abusive language or make obscene gestures. The Milwaukee Brewers will not tolerate the use of abusive language by fans or guests of any kind at Miller Park, whether such language is directed at another fan, on-field personnel, a Milwaukee Brewers employee, etc. Guests who use or exhibit abusive behavior observed by Milwaukee Brewers personnel or another fan will be removed from the ballpark, and Milwaukee Brewers personnel shall determine whether such individual may return to Miller Park for a future game. Guests may not conduct themselves in a way that is deemed disorderly, unruly or disruptive to other guests, Miller Park staff and workers, players, coaches or umpires. Guests may not threaten the safety of other guests, Miller Park staff, workers or on-field participants. Guests may not fight or engage in threatening behavior (physical or verbal). The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to remove any guest whose failure to adhere to acceptable levels of hygiene impedes the ability of other guests to enjoy the game.
Obstructed View Guests may not interfere with the ability of other guests to enjoy the game. Actions that are considered to impede the ability of other guests to enjoy the game include (but are not limited to): Standing or sitting in tunnels or stairs. Standing, leaning, or climbing on handrails or railings. Standing or resting feet on seats. Holding signs or banners that block the view of other guests.
Other Guests may not vandalize, damage or otherwise deface any part of Miller Park property. Guests may not use wheeled footwear, hoverboards or skateboards inside Miller Park. brewers.com Guests must comply with all rules and policies of the Milwaukee Brewers. For more information, please visit
Public Affection Guests may not participate in displays of affection not appropriate in a public, family setting.
Smoking Use of tobacco products in any form, including smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes, is prohibited in Miller Park except in designated areas. Designated smoking areas for guests are located on plaza areas on the Field Level, behind Section 106, and Friday's Front Row outdoor patio. The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to remove any guest from Miller Park who violates the Miller Park Smoking Policy.
Solicitation Guests may not solicit contributions or distribute literature on Miller Park private property. Guests may not trespass, solicit, peddle, loiter, sell or attempt to sell any tickets on Miller Park private property, with the exception of the designated Miller Park Ticket Resale Zone (located adjacent to Helfaer Field). Ticket sales inside the Resale Zone must comply with Wisconsin law. Guests may not engage in any type of sales or donation collection activities on Miller Park private property without the prior written consent of the Milwaukee Brewers. Guests may not engage in any commercial activities on Miller Park private property (including, but not limited to, the display of signage or the offering of product samples) without the prior written consent of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Tickets Game tickets are revocable licenses. The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to remove any guests from Miller Park who: Fail to produce a ticket upon request or who occupy a seat for which they do not hold a ticket. Access (or attempts to access) any non-public areas of Miller Park or other areas of Miller Park without a proper ticket, pass or credential. Misuse tickets, passes or credentials. Fail to comply with any specific restriction set forth on any ticket, pass or credential.
Weapons/Prohibited Materials Guests may not possess firearms or other weapons, fireworks or other materials/items deemed hazardous or dangerous by the Milwaukee Brewers. Guests may not use laser pointers, sirens, whistles or other items that may distract or interfere with the play on the field, interfere with the enjoyment of other guests, or interfere with Miller Park staff and workers.
Pets
Pets are not allowed at Miller Park at any time, unless indicated for special events. The only exception is a companion animal assisting a person with a disability. For more information, please see "Accommodations for Guests with Disabilities."
Prohibited Items
The following items are among those not permitted to be brought into Miller Park (items are subject to change without notice):
Aerosol Cans (sunscreen, hairspray, etc.)
Alcohol
Bags/Luggage (larger than 16" x 16" x 8")
Brooms/Broomsticks/Poles
Cans & Glass Containers
Hard-Sided Coolers
Laser Pointers
Masks
Noise Makers
Non-Factory Sealed Plastic Containers
Pepper Spray
Pets (except for service animals or during specific promotions)
Throwing Items
No open or concealed weapons/firearms (including pocket knives) are allowed anywhere inside Miller Park.
Re-Entry Policy
Guests may not exit and re-enter Miller Park using the same ticket. However, in case of an emergency, please ask Milwaukee Brewers staff for assistance.
Smoking Policy
Use of tobacco products in any form, including smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes, is prohibited in Miller Park except in designated areas. Designated smoking areas for guests are located on plaza areas on the Field Level, behind Section 106, and Friday's Front Row outdoor patio. The Milwaukee Brewers reserve the right to remove any guest from Miller Park who violates the Miller Park Smoking Policy.
Strollers
Strollers are permitted on all concourse areas at Miller Park. Only strollers that can be folded and placed under a stadium seat are permitted in the seating areas of Miller Park. The Milwaukee Brewers are not responsible for lost, stolen or damaged strollers. Strollers may be checked at a Brewers Guest Relations kiosk (Field Level near Section 116, Loge Level behind Section 221, and Terrace Level behind Section 419).
Tailgating PoliciesHaving a bit of fun at their political opponents’ (self inflicted) expense, the Alaska Democratic Party released an “#AKLeg End of Session Quiz: War on Women Edition” Wednesday evening.
The quiz highlights some of the more outlandish quotes made by members of the Majority, and asks participants to “match up the statement with the speaker”. While the topic itself isn’t chuckleworthy, and the legislation tied to the comments is downright contemptible, it’s worth making the point that so many offensive comments were made (by more than one person) over the course of a single 90-day session that one could — and did — make a game out of it.
The bad news: even if you get all the answers right, we all lose.
The Dems included an answer key, but we’ll let you guess. Or, you can retrace our coverage to piece it all together.
Give it a try, see how abreast (sorry, Rep. Hughes) of current #akleg shenanigans you are:
BONUS QUESTION: Who received credit for inaugurating “the new Alaska War on Women?”
How’d you do?Second Street in San Francisco between Market and King streets is embarking on a $20 million redo to improve pedestrian and bicycle access.
Second Street in San Francisco between Market and King streets is embarking on a $20 million redo to improve pedestrian and bicycle access.
San Francisco officials broke ground on a $20 million streetscape project Wednesday morning that will transform Second Street between King and Market streets into a safer corridor for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Second Street is part of The City’s high-injury corridor network where 70 percent of collisions occur on 12 percent of the city’s streets, according to officials.
The transformation of the street will include wider sidewalks between Harrison and Townsend streets, ADA-accessible curb ramps and new trash receptacles, bike racks, benches and pedestrian lighting.
Crews will also install high-visibility crosswalks, upgrading traffic signals, installing sidewalk bulb outs, bus boarding islands and raised bikeways, according to San Francisco Public Works.
Upgrades to the sewer system, repaving the street and undergrounding overhead utility wires, are also part of the Second Street Improvement Project.
Director of Public Works Mohammed Nuru said by the completion of the project:
“We will have upgraded sewers thanks our to San Francisco PUC. We will have a smoother roadway, and most importantly, a safer and more attractive neighborhood.”
Mayor Ed Lee said the recent water main that broke near Second and Harrison streets on Tuesday was a reminder of the sewer’s aging infrastructure and how badly the water pipes are need of replacement.
Lee added construction will be done in four phases over the next two years to mitigate impacts to the neighborhood, like San Francisco Giants fans heading to AT&T Park, or going to a concert:
“There will be an effort to mitigate all of this by breaking it up in segments so that it doesn’t interrupt everybody who wants to get to the Giants game or also the next concert.”
Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the South of Market area, said the neighborhood had always been a residential neighborhood, but largely a commercial, production, manufacturing area:
“The people in the neighborhood changed, but our streets didn’t.”
Kim added:
“Second Street was really the corridor that we had intended to be our neighborhood corridor — one that our residents could bike down safely, walk down safely.”
Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said Second Street plays an important role in the transportation network because the street connects to the ballpark, to Market Street, and that the street attracts a lot of people on foot because of new residents and businesses.
Reiskin said though that the street is known as one of the most dangerous corridors in The City and that the project is a “Vision Zero effort” to reduce traffic deaths by 2024:
“By redesigning streets such as this one that host to a disproportionate amount of these collisions, this is how we’re going to get to zero.”
The project is funded by One Bay Area Grants, federal funds, South of Market development impact fees and local Proposition K sales tax revenue.For other people named Fred, see Fred (disambiguation)
Chaves and the second or paternal family name is Guedes. This name uses Portuguese naming customs. The first or maternal family name isand the second or paternal family name is
Frederico Chaves Guedes (born 3 October 1983), known as Fred ( Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈfɾɛd(ʒ)i]), is a Brazilian professional footballer who plays as a striker for Cruzeiro.[3]
Fred began his career at América Mineiro before transferring to local rivals Cruzeiro in 2004. After two seasons there, he moved to Lyon of France in a protracted transfer saga, and won three consecutive Ligue 1 titles. He made his international debut for Brazil in 2005 and was selected for the 2006 World Cup, and was also part of their victories at the 2007 Copa América and the 2013 Confederations Cup. From 2009 to 2016, Fred played for Fluminense, where he won two Campeonato Brasileiro Série A titles in 2 years (2010 and 2012) and Campeonato Carioca (2012 – scoring in final). In June 2016, Fred signed for Atlético Mineiro.[4]
Fred scored one of the fastest goals in professional football history while playing for América Mineiro, against Vila Nova during a Copa São Paulo de Juniores match. The goal was scored 3.17 seconds after the match started.[5][6]
Club career [ edit ]
Brazil and transfer saga [ edit ]
Fred spent four seasons at América Mineiro of Belo Horizonte before he left for their city rival Cruzeiro in middle of the 2004 season. As Feyenoord had an agreement with América, the Dutch club received Magrão from Cruzeiro,[7] and retained 10% economic rights on Fred, and Fred himself held 15%.[7]
After scoring 41 goals in 43 games for Cruzeiro in the 2005 season, Fred was signed by defending Ligue 1 champions Lyon for €15 million.[7] (of which €3 million was received by Fred, 5% as a solidarity contribution, €1.4 million to Lyon's agent and €510,913 in Brazilian taxes).[7][8] Feyenoord then claimed Cruzeiro's 10% of the transfer fee, as the club alleged the fee was €1.5 million instead of the €933,908.70 in Cruzeiro's viewpoint.[7] The Dutch club sued to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and won.[7]
Lyon [ edit ]
With 14 goals in his first season, Fred was the second-highest goalscorer in the 2005–06 Ligue 1 season, and won his first league title with Lyon. Although he missed two months of the 2006–07 season,[9] Fred still scored 11 goals in 20 games, and was the club's top scorer as Lyon defended their title. During the 2007–08 season, however, Fred was injured during a training session at the 2007 Copa América.[10] He made his comeback in October 2007, but due to competition with new signing Milan Baroš and youth product Karim Benzema, Fred had limited first team opportunities. Arguably, his most known moment was scoring the goal against Real Madrid in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League after a long pass by Juninho, where he outstrengthed defenders Sergio Ramos and Fabio Cannavaro before chipping the ball over goalkeeper Iker Casillas and into the goal.[11] Fred played 15 games out of possible 20 for Lyon in the 2008–09 season. He played his last match for Lyon on 10 January 2009 after he requested to leave the club in December 2008.[12] On 26 February 2009, he was released from his contract.[13]
Fluminense [ edit ]
After being released from Lyon and refusing to return from Brazil, Fred signed a pre-contract with Brazilian club Fluminense, consequently agreeing to a five-year deal. He scored twice on his debut on 15 March 2009, as Fluminense beat Macaé 3–1.[14] Fred helped Fluminense escape from relegation in 2009, and subsequently was the leader of the team that won the 2010 Campeonato Brasileiro Série A. Later in July 2011, he went on to break the record for most goals in the Brasileiro when he scored a brace against Bahia, taking his tally to 44 goals. The record was previously held by Magno Alves. On 11 November 2012, Fred scored two goals in a 3–2 win over Palmeiras, clinching the 2012 Campeonato Brasileiro Série A for Fluminense.[15] Fred almost left the club after disagreements with head coach Levir Culpi in April 2016, but eventually remained.[4]
Atlético Mineiro [ edit ]
On 8 June 2016, Atlético Mineiro club president Daniel Nepomuceno announced on his Twitter account that the club had signed Fred. The player agreed to a two-year deal with the club, according to its press representatives.[4][16] Fred made his Atlético debut on 12 June 2016 in the Clássico Mineiro against rivals Cruzeiro. He scored and celebrated against his former club in a 2–3 defeat at the Estádio Independência.[17] Fred was the top goalscorer of the 2016 Campeonato Brasileiro Série A, along with two other players, with 14 goals. He achieved the feat for the third time in his career, which is a record (also shared, with Romário, Túlio Maravilha and Dadá Maravilha).[18]
Return to Cruzeiro [ edit ]
On 23 December 2017, Fred and Atlético agreed on the termination of his contract[19] and on the same day it was announced his return to Cruzeiro,[20] 12 years after originally leaving. He made his second debut for the club on 17 January 2018, in the season opening match against Tupi at the Mineirão valid for the Campeonato Mineiro, which ended in a 2–0 win for Cruzeiro.[21]
International career [ edit ]
Fred made his debut for Brazil as a late substitute in a friendly match against Guatemala on 27 April 2005. He scored his first two international goals on 12 November 2005 in an 8–0 friendly win against the United Arab Emirates.
Although he did not play during the qualifying campaign, Fred was named in Brazil's 2006 FIFA World Cup squad as a cover for strikers Ronaldo, Adriano and Robinho. After entering as a substitute, he scored in a 2–0 victory against Australia on 18 June when he tapped-in a shot from Robinho which had rebounded off the inside of goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer's near post in the 90th minute. The result put Brazil into the last 16 with a game to spare.[22]
In the 2011 Copa América, Fred scored an 89th-minute equaliser against Paraguay in a 2–2 draw. In the quarter-finals, he was one of four Brazil players to miss in a 2–0 penalty shootout loss against the same opposition.
In 2013, Fred was established as Brazil's first-choice centre-forward by returning manager Luiz Felipe Scolari. On 6 February, Fred scored in a 2–1 defeat to England at Wembley Stadium, and went on to score in the return fixture, becoming the first player to score at the renovated Maracanã Stadium.[23]
At the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, Fred was the joint topscorer of the tournament with five goals, and was awarded the Silver Shoe.[24] On 22 June, he scored twice against Italy in a 4–2 group stage win.[25] He later scored in a 2–1 semi-final victory over Uruguay, and capped his successful Confederations Cup campaign with two goals against Spain in the competition's final to help Brazil to a 3–0 victory.[24]
In May 2014, Fred was named in Brazil's squad for the 2014 World Cup.[26] In the opening match of the tournament, on 12 June against Croatia in São Paulo, Fred was fouled in the 69th minute,[27] resulting in a controversial penalty which Neymar converted to make the score 2–1 ahead of an eventual 3–1 win.[28] After receiving criticism for his performances in the opening two matches,[29] Fred scored his only goal of the tournament in the final group match, a 4–1 victory over Cameroon which qualified the team for the round of 16.[30] He managed just five shots on target at the tournament in six matches played.[31] Fred's prolonged run of poor form saw the player receive hostile jeers from the home crowd whenever he touched the ball in the 7–1 defeat to Germany in Belo Horizonte.[32] According to Opta Sports, Fred failed to make a single tackle, cross, run or interception during the match, and spent the most time in possession of the ball on the centre spot due to seven restarts and one kick-off.[33] Following Brazil's 3–0 defeat to the Netherlands in the match for third place, Fred announced his retirement from international competition.[34]
On 16 September 2014, it was reported that Fred came out of retirement after previously announcing retirement following the criticism he received during the 2014 World Cup.[35] Despite his intention to return to the Seleção, Fred confirmed his international career is over the following year, as he has yet to feature in a Brazil squad since Luiz Felipe Scolari's departure.[36]
Personal life [ edit ]
Fred is a convert to Protestant Christianity.[37][38][39]
Career statistics [ edit ]
Club [ edit ]
As of 7 December 2018[40][41][42]
Club Season League Cup League Cup Continental State League Other Total Apps Goals Apps Goals Apps Goals Apps Goals Apps Goals Apps Goals Apps Goals América Mineiro 2003 19 7 — — — 18 10 — 37 17 2004 7 2 3 2 — — 16 12 — 26 16 Total 26 9 3 2 — — 34 22 — 63 33 Cruzeiro 2004 24 14 — — — 1 1 — 25 15 2005 19 10 9 14 — 1 0 17 14 — 46 38 Total 43 24 9 14 — 1 0 18 15 — 71 53 Lyon 2005–06 30 13 2 1 1 0 9 2 — — 42 16 2006–07 20 11 3 1 2 0 5 2 — — 30 14 2007–08 21 7 4 1 2 0 3 0 — — 30 8 2008–09 15 2 0 0 1 0 4 2 — — 20 4 Total 86 33 9 3 6 0 21 6 — — 122 42 Fluminense 2009 20 12 6 2 — 6 5 4 3 — 36 22 2010 14 5 5 6 — — 9 7 — 28 18 2011 25 22 — — 5 2 13 10 — 43 34 2012 28 20 — — 7 3 10 7 — 45 30 2013 9 3 2 0 — 7 3 7 2 — 25 8 2014 28 18 5 4 — 2 0 11 5 — 46 27 2015 23 9 5 2 — — 14 11 — 42 22 2016 6 2 3 3 — — 12 6 1 0 22 11 Total 153 91 26 17 — 27 13 80 51 1 0 287 172 Atlético Mineiro 2016 28 12 — — — — — 28 12 2017 29 12 3 1 — 7 6 12 10 4 1 55 30 Total 57 24 3 1 — 7 6 12 10 4 1 83 42 Cruzeiro 2018 6 3 0 0 — 1 0 8 1 — 15 4 Career total 371 184 50 37 6 0 57 25 140 111 5 1 626 342
International appearances [ edit ]
As of 13 July 2014[43]
National team Season Apps Goals Ratio Brazil 2005 2 2 1.00 2006 5* 2 0.40 2007 2 0 0.00 2008 0 0 0.00 2009 0 0 0.00 2010 0 0 0.00 2011 9 2 0.22 2012 1 1 1.00 2013 11 9 0.81 2014 9 2 0.22 Total 39 18 0.46
*The match against Al Kuwait XI was not counted.
International goals [ edit ]
Scores and results list Brazil's goal tally first. Score column indicates score after each Fred goal.[43]
Honours [ edit ]
Club [ edit ]
Atlético Mineiro[41]
International [ edit ]
Individual [ edit ]
References [ edit ]County ordinance remains under examination, perception of residents concerns Buxton-Andrade
Scott Brase and Wilma Trujillo added a differnt perspective about industrial hemp during the May 19, Prowers County Commissioners meeting. (Chris Frost / Lamar Ledger)
CSU Extension Agent Wilma Trujillo and Farm Service Agency County Executive Director Scott Brase visited the Prowers County Commissioners May 19, and offered their opinions about agricultural Hemp in Prowers County.
Hemp has been making headlines in Otero County as the economic development group has announced an agreement that includes an aggressive incentive package to bring game changing development to La Junta, including up to 200 new jobs in the next 24 months.
County Attorney John Lefferdink has been researching the item and said a commercial application is available to bring hemp into the area.
County Attorney John Lefferdink reviewed the hemp application process with the Prowers County Commissioners during their May 19 meeting. (Chris Frost / Lamar Ledger)
"In Colorado you can get registered for research and development or commercial growth," he said. "Under federal law, as I understand it, under the 2014 farm bill the federal government did permit hemp growing for research and development only."
In Colorado they added commercial growth, which is a question whether it's legal under federal law.
"I don't think it is legal," he said. "Anyway if you want to get in the business this is what it takes."
The application is cost-effective, he said, and costs $500 plus $5 per acre of hemp.
"The biggest operator is Mr. Loflin in Baca County who I think has three sections of hemp," he said.
Commissioner Henry Schnabel wanted to know If raising hemp would put a farm out of compliance with other programs.
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"It does not," Brase said. "In the new farm bill there are provisions there and I have the national notice here that it does not throw you out."
You can't participate in a program with the crop (hemp) but it does not take a farm out of compliance.
"We're asking that you certify that crop just like a normal crop," he said. "We do have codes for that now."
The exception is the farm loan.
"There are still some questions about whether it will throw you out of eligibility because you are taking revenue from that crop," he said. "As of now, with limited knowledge because Washington D.C. is still looking at it, they probably aren't call your loans if you are making payments on it."
Hemp can grow in Prowers County.
"We have well-drained soils and the PH," Trujillo said. "The only thing we don't have is the moisture. It's going to be the same as corn or Milo."
The crop suffers in drought conditions, she said, and doesn't do well in high temperatures.
Commissioner Wendy Buxton-Andrade noted that sandy soils do not provide the best growing conditions, but Trujillo said they could fertilize the ground and reiterated that it would grow much like corn and wheat.
"It's just like any other crop," she said.
Buxton-Andrade asked if there was any way the county could reassure its constituents that hemp is growing and not a large amount of marijuana.
"If they (constituents) drive by a field that has been tested and it's a hemp plant compared to a marijuana plant," she said. "I want to make sure that we have precautionary measures in place, to reassure our people that we aren't having big old marijuana grows."
Trujillo said there is no physical difference between the two plants.
"Chemically you have the capacity to make a difference between the two of them," she said. "It's the concentration on the THC."
When someone plants hemp you have to notify the department of agriculture.
"When you harvest you also have to notify the department of agriculture," she said. "They have to send samples to the department of agriculture and they will test it."
There is no clear guideline if an inspector visits the grow operation.
"What they are saying is we don't have the money," she said.
The inspection cost is $35 per hour which does not take into account the travel time.
"It's expensive," she said.
Brase said most marijuana grows are indoors.
"The hemp is predominantly outdoors and the two don't want to cross paths," he said. "It will cross-pollinate."
If they do cross pollinate, the crop is ruined from both sides.
"Then it lowers the THC in the marijuana and raises them in the hemp," he said.
Buxton-Andrade said there is a new operation in Fort Lupton that will create hemp products with crops from Canada.
"I look at some information that the University of Kentucky has put together and to be profitable they recommend to go into the seed production route," Trujillo said. "In Canada they don't have the right technology to process the fiber that is profitable. "
With that said, it doesn't mean that someone isn't going to try.
"Whatever the technology is in Canada and China, that's the technology the U.S., is going to look into and maybe improve that," she said.
Commissioner Ron Cook said hemp is not allowed in Prowers County and the current ordinance would have to be changed.
"There is a question about that," Lefferdink said. "It's exclusively regulated by the Colorado Department of Agriculture, so if you want to grow it you have to get a permit."
The county does |
learned to approach his enemy's strengths as if they were weaknesses to be exploited. As early as 1944, Giap sent his tiny forces against the French army in Indochina. As with the Tet Offensive, he chose a moment to attack when it was least expected: Christmas Eve. In 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Giap lured the overconfident French into a disastrous battle and won a stunning victory by means of brilliant deployments. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1968, Giap was aiming for a quick and decisive victory to influence the result of the 1968 US Presidential campaign.
He prepared a bold offensive on two fronts. The first was to be an attack on the US Marines' firebase at Khe Sanh. Simultaneously the NVA and the NLF would stage coordinated attacks on South Vietnam's major cities and provincial capitals. This would present the Americans with a military dilemma. If they opted to defend Khe Sanh, they would be stretched to the limit when battles erupted all over the South. Giap had set the campaign's minimum and maximum objectives. As a minimum the Tet outbreak would force the halting of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam and force the Americans into negotiations. As a maximum the offensive could drive the Americans out of Vietnam all together opening up the path to liberation and unification.
The battle for Khe Sanh
The Vietnamese decided upon a daring but high-risk strategy. They worked out a plan for concerted attacks throughout South Vietnam at the start of 1968. With consummate skill and tremendous audacity, they moved large amounts of weapons, ammunition and supplies to the South for an offensive planned for the Vietnamese New Year - known as Tet. They hoped to spark a general uprising across the country.
One of the bloodiest battles in the offensive took place in Khe Sanh, where there was a small US army base. General Westmoreland believed that Giap's troops were converging on Khe Sanh as part of the policy to seize control of the northern provinces. He was basing himself on an analogy with the battle of Dien Bien Phu. But the analogy with Dien Bien Phu was misleading. The US was in a far stronger position than the French were in 1954. In "Operation Niagra" the US had unleashed the greatest air attack in military history. B52 bombers caused tremendous losses to the Vietnamese, who suffered as many as 10,000 dead, for the loss of only 500 US marines.
The attack on Khe Sanh was linked to the overall strategy. Once the general offensive was in full swing, the over-stretched American forces would be unable to come to the help of Khe Sanh and prevent the base from being overrun. In this way, Giap might indeed have repeated his triumph of Dien Bien Phu. But that was not the central idea. Actually, the Vietnamese were not trying to re-enact Dien Bien Phu, but had organised a very successful diversion to draw the Americans away from the big towns and cities, leaving them open to attack.
Westmoreland fell into the trap prepared by Giap. As a result, the Americans were caught off guard by the rapidity and scope of the offensive. Years later a West Point textbook compared the US intelligence failure to see what was happening with the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. A 1968 CIA report concluded: "The intensity, coordination and timing of the attacks were not fully anticipated," adding that the ability of the NLF guerrillas to hit so many targets simultaneously was "another major unexpected point"
The village of Khe Sanh lay in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, close to the Laotian border just below the Demilitarised Zone. It had been garrisoned by the French during the first Indochina war and later became an important US Special Forces base. Due to its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, US artillery in Khe Sanh could shell the trail and observe NVA traffic moving southwards. In 1967, the Marines took over Khe Sanh and converted it into a large fire base, while the Special Forces moved their base to the Montagnard village of Lang Vei.
Towards the end of 1967, two NVA divisions - the 325th and the 304th - were spotted moving into the Khe Sanh area and a third was positioning itself along Route 9 where it would be able to intercept reinforcements coming in from Quang Tri. The same NVA divisions had fought at Dien Bien Phu. The message was clear and General Westmoreland had no intention of duplicating the French mistakes at Dien Bien Phu. He began to reinforce the base. By late January, some 6,000 Marines had been flown into Khe Sanh and thousands of reinforcements had been moved north of Hue.
This was just what Giap wanted them to do. The NVA continued its build-up: at least 20,000 North Vietnamese were ultimately moved in around Khe Sanh. Some estimates put the number at twice that. The White House and the US media were taken in by this stratagem. They became convinced that they were witnessing the preparations for the decisive battle of the War. Day after day Khe Sanh became lead-story. TV news reports were obsessed with Giap's alleged replay of Dien Bien Phu. Finally, shortly before dawn on January 21st, the first attack began when the NVA attempted to cross the river running past the base.
The attack was beaten back but followed by an artillery barrage which damaged the runway, blew up the main ammunition stores, and damaged a few aircraft. Other attacks were launched against the US Special Forces at Lang Vel and against the Marines dug-in on the hills surrounding Khe Sanh. These attacks were clearly aimed at testing the defences. But the entire episode was a diversionary tactic that succeeded very well. The attention of the US commanders was concentrated on Khe Sanh, while the NVA and NLF forces were preparing an all-out offensive in South Vietnam's cities.
The Vietnamese attack on Khe Sanh was defeated only thanks to massive aerial bombardments of NVA positions. B-52's and strike aircraft dropped tons of bombs and napalm, with great accuracy, within a few hundred feet of Khe Sanh's perimeter. Despite bad weather and increasing anti-aircraft fire, planes and helicopters kept dropping cargo. The battle settled down into a siege. Khe Sanh was finally relieved on April 6th. Fighting continued around Khe Sanh for a time but any hope of overrunning the base had to be abandoned. But it had served its purpose, which was to act as a feint to cover preparations for a general offensive in the South.
Preparations for the offensive
Up to this time the war had been mainly in the jungles and swamps and rural areas where the NLF guerrillas had their main base of support. They now planned and executed a bold offensive, which was aimed at penetrating South Vietnam's supposedly impregnable urban areas. The General launched a major offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of the Tet lunar New Year celebrations, in order to seize the element of surprise.
Whilst the attention of the world was focused on Khe Sanh, NVA and NLF regulars were also drifting into Saigon, Hue, and most of the other cities of South Vietnam. They came in small groups of twos and threes, disguised as refugees, peasants, workers, and ARVN soldiers on holiday leave. Gradually, roughly the equivalent of five battalions of NVA/NLF infiltrated Saigon without any of the ubiquitous security police noticing, or anyone informing on them. This was a considerable achievement given the sheer scale of the operation.
There was already a guerrilla network in Saigon and the other major cities, which had long stockpiled stores of arms and ammunition drawn from hit-and-run raids or bought openly on the black-market. Through contacts and spies the guerrillas had managed to store arms, ammunition and explosives in a secret location in preparation for the attack. It was common knowledge that the guerrillas on leave from their units drifted in and out of the cities. Some who were captured during the pre Tet build up were mistaken for regular holiday-makers or deserters. In the general noisy crowd of New Year merry-makers, the NLF's secret army of infiltrators went completely unnoticed.
Weapons were brought in separately in flower carts, jury-rigged coffins, and trucks apparently filled with vegetables and rice. Tong Viet Duong, a guerrilla fighter with the National Liberation Front in Saigon describes the preparations for the Tet offensive:
"Taxis carried chrysanthemums into Saigon for the Tet market. Hidden underneath them were AK-47s. The people supported the revolution. They helped us - we were able to penetrate the security in the city. We changed our clothes and carried fake identity documents. The people of Saigon hid us in their houses."
Tet had traditionally been a time of truce in the long war and both Hanoi and Saigon had made announcements that this year would be no different - although they disagreed about the duration. US Intelligence had gotten wind that something was brewing through captured documents and an overall analysis of recent events, but Westmoreland's staff tended to disregard these generally vague reports. At the request of General Frederick Weyand, the US commander of the Saigon area, however, several battalions were pulled back from their positions near the Cambodian border.
General Weyand put his troops on full alert but - due to a standing US policy of leaving the security of major cities to the ARVN - there were only a few hundred American troops on duty in Saigon itself the night before the attack began. Later General Westmoreland claimed that he knew about all these preparations. All the evidence shows that he was not prepared for anything approaching the intensity of the attack that came and that he was still concentrating his attentions on the developing battle at Khe Sanh where he thought Giap would make his chief effort. In reality, the US army was taken completely off guard.
The offensive commences
On January 30, 1968 the North Vietnamese army and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive. The NLF broke the truce they had made for the New Year festivities and fought its way into more than one hundred cities, including the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (on January 31). Throughout the country provincial capitals were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked. Vietnamese irregular soldiers stormed the highland towns of Banmethout, Kontum and Pleiku, they then simultaneously invaded 13 of the 16 provincial capitals of the heavily populated Mekong Delta. The dimension and sweep of the offensive astonished US army generals, one of whom commented that tracking the assault pattern on a map was like a "pinball machine, lighting up with each raid."
The guerrilla army even succeeded in penetrating the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Through contacts and spies the NLF had managed to store guns, ammunition and explosives at a secret location in preparation for the attack. At 3.15 am a group of guerrilla soldiers drove up to the embassy in a taxi. Within five minutes they had killed the five guards on duty and seized the building. They failed to blast their way through the main Embassy doors with anti-tank rockets and found themselves pinned-down by the Marine guards. An intense fire fight began, which lasted all morning, and ended with the bodies of all nineteen guerrillas scattered around the Embassy courtyard.
Although the damage to the Embassy was slight, this attack on "American soil" was publicized in the USA and throughout the world and had tremendous psychological significance. Other guerrilla squads attacked the Presidential Palace, the radio station, the headquarters of the ARVN Chiefs of Staff, and even Westmoreland's own compound at Tan Son Nhut airbase. In the heavy fighting that followed, things were so bad that Westmoreland ordered his staff to find weapons and join in the defence of the compound. When the fighting was over, twenty-three Americans were dead, eighty-five were wounded and up to fifteen aircraft had suffered serious damage.
Two NVA/NLF battalions attacked the US air-base at Bien Hoa and crippled over twenty aircraft at a cost of nearly 170 casualties. They fought with great bravery. Guerrilla units fought to the death in the French cemetery and the Pho Tho race track. The suburb of Cholon became an operations base for the guerrilla attacks in Saigon and surrounding area. Fourteen guerrilla soldiers who attacked the main radio station in Saigon were under siege for 18 hours, after which they blew themselves up along with the building.
Everywhere the attacks came as a total surprise. The sheer scale and ferocity of the Tet offensive was as much of a shock to Westmoreland as it was to a stunned American public, which watched with disbelief as their South Vietnamese allies engaged in desperate hand-to-hand fighting with the guerrillas in the streets of Saigon. It took over a week of ferocious fighting to liquidate the pockets of resistance scattered around the city. The entrenched guerrillas fought against tanks, helicopter gunships, and aircraft, which blasted buildings and reduced parts of the city to rubble. Using guerrilla tactics, they fought as long as they could, and then slipped off to fight somewhere else. The radio station, factories, and a large block of low-cost public housing were flattened along with the homes of countless civilians who were forced to flee as the city dissolved into chaos.
Large areas of Saigon and Hue suddenly found themselves liberated. Guerrillas marched through the streets waving guns and proclaiming the revolution while others rounded up prepared lists of collaborators and government sympathizers. The Americans used air power to pulverize the enemy. The B-52 strikes against NV and NLF positions outside Saigon came within a few miles of the city. Even when the guerrillas were finally driven out of Saigon, they continued to put up a determined rearguard action in the surrounding government villages, forcing the US and ARVN to bomb and shell and destroy their own fortified villages, thus further alienating the rural population. A month after the beginning of the offensive, the Americans calculated the number of civilian dead at around 15,000 and the number of new refugees at anything up to two million and the fighting was still continuing.
The battle for Hue
The success of the Tet offensive varied from place to place. In some areas the attacks were beaten back in a short time, but in others there was bitter fighting. In cities like Ban Me Thuot, My Tho, Can Tho, Ben Tre, and Kontum, the insurgents entrenched themselves in the poorer neighbourhoods and stubbornly repelled efforts to push them out. By February 5th most of the fighting within Saigon was over, but it continued in Cholon until the end of the month. Although Cholon was bombed, strafed and shelled, the guerrillas held on with grim determination, and even mounted counter-offensives against the American and ARVN positions within the city. Fighting in the resort city Dalat went on until mid-February and left over 200 guerrillas dead. The total NVA/NLF death total in Saigon during the Tet offensive was nearly 1200.
However, the fiercest battle raged the ancient city of Hue, which had been captured by the insurgents and which the US army only recaptured with great difficulty. Hue was also a sacred city to the Vietnamese and the violent suppression of anti-government protests by Buddhist monks had crisis had alienated the population from the Saigon Government. The insurgents therefore found considerable support among the populace. Insurgents supported by some ten NVA battalions infiltrated Hue, the ancient Vietnamese capital, and within a few hours overrun the entire city except for the headquarters of the ARVN 3rd Division and the garrison of US advisors. Thousands of political prisoners were set free and thousands of government officials and sympathizers were rounded up and many were shot.
US Marines and ARVN counterattacked but resistance was heavy and the bitter street-by-street fighting slow and costly in lives. In the end the US forces and their allies bombarded the historic Citadel, which was ferociously defended by the insurgents backed. Then US forces crossed the Perfume River in a fleet of assault craft and on February 2Oth launched the final assault. Not until February 23rd were the insurgents finally overwhelmed. Even then, resistance in Hue continued in isolated pockets of sniper teams. The fight for Hue ended on February 25th at a cost of 119 Americans and 363 ARVN dead. American wounded during the battle for Hue came to just under a thousand, compared to slightly over 1,200 ARVN. The NVA and insurgent dead was about sixteen times that number.
The big difference in fatalities makes the battle look a one sided affair. But it wasn't. The difference in casualty figures came largely from the heavy use of artillery and aerial bombardment to devastate NVA/NLF positions. Large sections of the ancient and revered city Hue were reduced the city to piles of rubble strewn with dead bodies. Without this, the US/ARVN casualties would have been much higher. Close to 6,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the indiscriminate bombing and shellfire and nearly 120,000 citizens of Hue had been made homeless. Those parts of Hue that escaped relatively undamaged were later wrecked by days of looting by soldiers from the original ARVN garrison, who had played no role in the fighting.
Did Tet succeed?
The Tet offensive showed a considerable degree of military preparedness, skill and bravery on the part of the Vietnamese. It shook the morale of the US army, which was forcibly made aware of its own vulnerability, and it had a profound effect on US public opinion. However, from a military point of view it must be seen as a defeat for the NLF. One of the main aims was to drive a wedge between the Americans and the South Vietnamese. The Embassy attack was aimed at showing up the vulnerability of the American forces. The NLF hoped that their liberation of towns and cities would lead to an uprising against the Americans by the South's war-weary soldiers, discontented peasantry and rebellious youth. However this perspective did not materialise, or did so only on a sporadic basis.
It was a bold plan, but the perspective of a nationwide uprising was based on an incorrect reading of the situation. The NLF leadership expected large sections of the urban populace to rise up in revolt. But although the NLF had support in this cities and towns, its main base was the peasantry. The city dwellers of South Vietnam did not support the Saigon Government but were suspicious of the Stalinists. They generally remained inactive and the guerrillas did not get the support they expected. The mass executions of Catholics in Hue also alienated a section of the population that might otherwise have supported them.
When the offensive was over, the Americans remained in control and the NLF had suffered heavy losses. NVA/NLF dead totalled some 45,000 and the number of prisoners nearly 7000, while the Americans and South Vietnamese lost 6000. Within a matter of days they were driven from most of the positions they had conquered. This was both the high point of guerrilla actions in the war and the beginning of their decline. Since the planners of the offensive expected a people upraising, the most secret cells were ordered to emerge from clandestinity. When the offensive was defeated, cell members had to flee to the jungle. Thus, the Tet offensive ended in the destruction of much of the NLF infrastructure in the South. This was a heavy blow. After the Tet offensive, the regular North Vietnamese army did most of the fighting against the U.S.
However, the Tet Offensive brought about a different kind of turning point. It strongly influenced the opinion of the American public. For the first time in a major war, the power of television became apparent. Fifty million people watched the destruction brought on by the war. The U.S. government was no longer able to portray the war as clean, simple and easily won. Johnson and the generals had claimed the enemy was in decline. This was falsified by events. The moment Vietnamese commandos penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon, all the official propaganda crumbled to dust.
During Tet the Americans and their ARVN ally had suffered over 4,300 killed in action, some 16,000 wounded and over 1,000 missing in action. It is true that the enemy suffered far more but to an already skeptical US public this mattered little. What mattered was that the war now seemed never-ending, just like Iraq today. And just like Iraq, it no longer had any definite, realistic objective. The scenes of slaughter and devastation in Saigon, Hue, and other cities horrified the average US citizen, to whom the conflict now seemed senseless. The senselessness of it was reflected in the notorious comment of a US officer who explained the destruction of about one-third of the provincial capital of Ben Tre: "It became necessary to destroy it in order to save it". The same words could serve pretty well as an epitaph for the invasion of Iraq.
In Washington something akin to panic reigned in high places. Congressmen were now turning on the president. On February 7, 1968 Senator Robert Kennedy, who was preparing himself to assume the mantle of his dead brother, commented:
"It is said the Viet Cong will not be able to hold the cities, and that is probably true. But they have demonstrated that despite all of our reports of progress, of government strength, and of enemy weakness, that half a million American soldiers, with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by the huge resources and the most modern weapons, that we are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000."
General Westmoreland, supreme commander of US forces, compared the Tet offensive to the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two where the Germans staged a desperate bid to break through the US lines before meeting an inevitable defeat. But this analogy was completely false. It was not the Vietnamese but the Americans who were heading inexorably for defeat. After the war General Giap said:
"For us, you know, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic - which is why quite clearly, the Tet offensive had multiple objectives."
Although the Tet offensive had failed in its major objectives, it had a profound and lasting effect on the course of the war. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was horrendous but Giap's gambler's throw proved to be a turning point in the War. It was a media disaster for the White House and effectively ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, America's commander in chief. According to US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger:
"Henceforth, no matter how effective our action, the prevalent strategy could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or within force levels politically acceptable to the American people."
The scale of the offensive shook President Johnson to the core. The shockwave from the fighting undermined his will to carry on. McNamara resigned as Secretary of State for Defence, a disillusioned man, and was replaced with Clark Clifford. But from subsequent statements we learn that the latter had absolutely no idea where he was going:
"I'd ask questions like when is the war going to end? Well, we don't know. How many more men do you think we're going to lose? Well, we really don't know. Then I finally got down to it and said, 'What is our plan to win the war in Vietnam?' Turned out there wasn't any. The plan was just to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up."
To win even a game of chess some kind of strategy is necessary. And war - the most complicated of all equations as Napoleon called it - is far more difficult than a game of chess. A general staff needs a combination of a clear and well-defined strategy and flexible and intelligent tactics. The Americans had neither. The "strategy" outlined above in the words of Mr. Clifford ("to stay with it and ultimately hoping that the enemy would finally give up.") is the military equivalent of the philosophy of that incorrigible bankrupt Mr. Micawber, who was always "confidently expecting that something will turn up." This is very bad economics and even worse military doctrine.
The fall of Johnson
In 1963, when he came to power following the assassination of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's approval rating was over 80%. By 1967 it had fallen to 40%. Stanley Karnow wrote: "But then came Tet - and his ratings plummeted - as if Vietnam were a burning fuse that had suddenly ignited an explosion of dissent." By the beginning of March the popularity of the President was only about 30%, while endorsement for his handling of the war was only 6%. Like George W. Bush, his credibility had collapsed. A 1971 poll showed that 60% of Americans with college degrees were in favour of an American retreat from Vietnam. However, 75% of those with only high-school diplomas and 80% of those without any secondary education supported a retreat. This showed a sea change in the attitude of the American working class.
Even the mule-headed Texan Johnson finally understood that the war could not be won on the battlefield, and that he must negotiate. After years of bombing hell out of North Vietnam, he suddenly announced a cessation of the bombing: "I renew the offer I made last August to stop the bombardment of North Vietnam. We ask that talks begin promptly, that they be serious talks on the substance of peace." However, despite the opening of negotiations with the North Vietnamese, US, troop levels remained at about 500,000 and the war would drag on for another five years. More American soldiers were killed after Tet than before, and the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.
Westmoreland was pressuring Washington for 206,000 troops to carry on the campaign in the South and even to make a limited invasion of North Vietnam just above the DMZ. As the battle for Hue died out, Johnson asked Clark Clifford to find ways and means of meeting Westmoreland's request. Clifford consulted CIA Director Richard Helms who presented him the Agency's pessimistic forecast. On March 4th Clifford told Johnson that the war was far from won and that more men would not make much difference.
Clifford was not alone. Johnson's main advisors, including Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, and Maxwell Taylor; Cyrus Vance, Dean Acheson, and Henry Cabot Lodge, had all turned against the war. Recent CIA studies revealed that the programme to win Vietnamese "hearts and minds" was failing in forty of South Vietnam's forty-four provinces and that the NLF's manpower was actually twice the number that had been estimated previously.
The extreme right-wingers naturally supported the war, and condemned the Administration for not going all out for victory. But this was an increasingly minority opinion. The CIA's gloomy reports cooled the enthusiasm of even the most hawkish members of the administration. Johnson was in a dilemma. To meet the generals' manpower requests would mean either withdrawing American troops from Europe or calling up the active reserves. Neither option was politically feasible. Westmoreland therefore had to settle for half of the over 200,000 additional troops he was demanding.
In the first period of the war any opposition was usually seen as anti-patriotic and anti-American. But now the perception of the American public changed dramatically. Bourgeois liberals like Robert Kennedy achieved overnight popularity by speaking out against the war. Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, an unknown standing on an anti-war ticket, challenged Johnson for the Presidential nomination. He was supported by thousands of students and young Americans opposed to the war.
At the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Johnson polled only 300 votes more than Eugene McCarthy. This was an unprecedented humiliation. Normally an incumbent President could expect to be re-elected unopposed. The result was the final nail in the coffin for the administration of Lyndon Johnson. On March 31st, Johnson went on TV to announce a bombing halt of the North and America's willingness to meet with the North Vietnamese to seek a peace settlement. Now hopelessly demoralized, Johnson announced to an astonished world his decision not to stand again as President: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." Johnson said that would spend the rest of his term in a search for peace in Indochina.
Soon after, General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland as head of US forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland was recalled to become Army Chief of Staff - theoretically a promotion, but in practice a move to get him out of the way. Westmoreland's deputy commander, Abrams had been present at the special CIA briefing that convinced Johnson that a change of course was needed. Abrams was sent to Saigon with a mission: he was to institute a programme of "Vietnamization", that is to say, to take all necessary measures to enable the ARVN to take on the burden of the fighting, and gradually reduce the American role to that of advisors. This is the very same tactic that they are trying to carry out in Iraq. But ever since 1965 it was quite clear that Saigon was incapable of doing the job. We now see exactly the same pattern emerging in Iraq, and the end result will also be similar.
Nixon escalates the war
The resignation of Johnson did not end the war. In fact, it was actually escalated until it spread throughout the whole of South East Asia. On May 10, 1968 the peace talks between U. S. and Vietnamese officials began in Paris. But the bloody war on the ground continued. The election of the Republican hawk Richard Nixon did nothing to improve matters The American deployment that had started with only 23,300 in 1963 rose inexorably to 184,000 in 1966 and reached a peak of 542,000 in January 1969 under Richard Nixon's presidency. The war was now costing £30 billion a year: a huge drain of blood and gold even for the richest and most powerful country on earth. And the perception grew among Americans that it was unwinnable. The mood was turning against the war even in the American ruling class. But Richard Nixon belonged to that wing that believed that "one last push" could end the war, or at least compel North Vietnam to negotiate a settlement acceptable to Washington. This reminds one of George Bush and the notorious theory of the "surge" and of the famous remark of Karl Marx: "history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce."
In April 1970 the armies of the U.S. and South Vietnam invaded Cambodia, alleging the presence of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil. The real aim was to disrupt the flow of supplies to the NLF along the The Ho Chi Minh Trail and to intimidate Hanoi. The Trail passed through neutral Laos and Cambodia. As a result both had suffered heavy American bombing. General. William Westmoreland stated:
"Over the years Cambodia, the border area of Cambodia and Laos, were used freely by the enemy, but by virtue of the policy of my government, we could not fight the overt war or deploy troops overtly, military troops, into those countries."
However, in practice the USA did intervene militarily against Cambodia and Laos, violating their neutrality. In particular, Cambodia was subjected to a savage air bombardment that killed large numbers of Cambodian peasants. This fact is never mentioned as one of the main causes that led to the brutality of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces when they finally entered Phnom Pen. The Americans could not, however, invade North Vietnam for fear of the Russians, as McNamara pointed out:
"On one or two occasions, the chiefs recommended U.S. military intervention in North Vietnam and stated that they recognized this might lead to Chinese and/or Soviet military response, in which case, they said, 'We might have to consider the use of nuclear weapons.'"
Jack Valenti, aide to President Johnson, said on the same subject:
"The president was worried about China and Russia. He didn't know... in Korea nobody thought the Chinese were going to cross the Yalu with a million men, and we were caught by surprise. And I remember time after time, when the military would suggest mining Haiphong or having er... sending in war planes to bomb Haiphong, he said, 'Hell no,' he said,'some damn aviator will drop a bomb down a Russian smokestack and then I've got World War III on my hands.'"
But Nixon was not concerned about such details. Like George W. Bush he was a strange combination of a narrow-minded provincial and an irresponsible adventurer. And like Bush he displayed a pig-headed determination to follow his own agenda, regardless of the consequences. The policies of Nixon and his White House clique set off a chain of events that led to a nightmare for the people of Cambodia and had serious effects inside the USA. The result was a further intensification of the anti-war movement. The invasion of Cambodia sparked off campus protests all over the USA. On November 15, 1969 250,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington, D.C. On May 4, 1970 National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. The killings sparked hundreds of protest activities across college campuses in the United States. At the University of New Mexico the police also used murderous violence against the protesters. More than 100 colleges were closed as a result of student demonstrations against the invasion of Cambodia.
US public opinion was further shaken by news of the infamous massacre at My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered a hundred peasants, including women and children. Early in the morning of March 16 in 1968, a group of American soldiers entered a small village in South Vietnam. In "The My Lai massacre: An American Tragedy" Adam Silverman and Kristin Hill recall the events:
"The American soldiers shot at anything that moved, including cattle, chickens, birds and worse yet: civilians. The villagers did not offer any resistance; still the Soldiers threw hand grenades into huts, shouted orders and killed without distinction. The atrocities continued throughout the morning. Infants were killed, young children shot and women raped at gunpoint. Before long 500 civilians lay dead on the ground. But their work wasn't finished... after this the village was set on fire. Bodies, homes, supplies, food - everything was burned."
These events were hushed up until November 13, 1969. In March 1970 Captain Ernest Medina was charged with murder for the massacre at My Lai. This began a chain of events leading up to the My Lai Courts-Martial, ending with the conviction of Lieutenant William Calley on March 29, 1970. When the horrific facts about the My Lai massacre became known, many people's view of the war changed fundamentally. High-ranking American officers were guilty both of the massacre and the subsequent cover-up. However, in the end only four soldiers were tried and only one of them, Calley, was convicted. This murderer of women and children did not pay a serious price for his war crimes. President Nixon pardoned him after only three years under house arrest.
This was not an isolated case. The brutal massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg of appalling atrocities perpetrated on the Vietnamese people by imperialism. In his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger Christopher Hitchens he writes that the U.S. Army admits to killing 10,899 enemies during operation "Speedy Express" in early 1969, but says that they only seized 784 weapons.
The myth of America's humanitarian and civilizing mission was dealt a blow from which it never recovered. By this time, not just the American people, but also a growing section of the US ruling class had had enough of the war. Public opinion in the USA, already swinging against the War after Tet, was further alienated by the sickening callousness revealed in the court case. At this point opposition to the war was to be found not only among young people and students but also increasingly among working class Americans.
Inexorably, the USA was being sucked into a wider conflict that was spreading all over South East Asia. In February 1971 South Vietnamese and U.S. troops invaded Laos in an attempt to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This resulted in a further intensification of anti-war activity. The largest demonstrations were held on April 24, 1971. In San Francisco about 300,000 people marched against the war, in Washington between 500,000 and 750,000. These were the biggest political demonstrations in the history of the United States. In December 1972 the US air force commenced its Christmas bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam in an attempt to force the Vietnamese to the conference table. Towards the end of December the North Vietnamese announced that they would return to Paris if Nixon ended the bombing. The bombing campaign was halted and the negotiators met during the first week of January 1973.
Revolutionary implications
From a military point of view, the U.S. always enjoyed a clear superiority over the Vietnamese. They had complete command of the air and were continuously bombing the country, north and south. Theoretically, the Americans could have stayed in Vietnam for many more years. They might even have won. But in order to do so they would have needed an army of half a million soldiers, and they would have to be soldiers like Hitler's SS. Such an army did not exist. The changing mood of the working class and the soldiers from working class families made it impossible to continue the war. If the government had had prolonged the war, it would have brought the U.S. to the brink of revolution.
A total of 2,59 million Americans were sent to fight in Vietnam. The harrowing experiences of these soldiers in Vietnam had an extremely demoralizing effect on them. From returning soldiers, first-hand knowledge of the situation in Vietnam slowly began to percolate into many ordinary working class American households, producing a change in the psychology of the working class. There was increasing sympathy for the Vietnamese people. New York Times/CBS News published the results of a poll in June 1977. The question asked was: "If the president would recommend helping Vietnam, would you want your representative in congress to approve aid for Vietnam in the form of food and medicine?" 66% answered yes, and only 29% said no.
In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen describes an experiment he carried out during lectures delivered in the 1990s, when he asked the audience was asked to guess the level of education among those who opposed the Vietnam War in 1971. Most thought that 90% of college graduates were against the war, but only 60% of those with only a high-school education. The real figures are precisely the opposite. The growing opposition to the war among the American working class was the result of hard experience. Kids from poor working class homes were the overwhelming majority of those drafted to fight in Vietnam. They were the ones most likely to be killed and maimed. As in Iraq, a disproportionate number were black or Latino. Rich kids and college students could often avoid getting drafted - as the case of a certain George W. Bush shows.
The anti-war movement in the USA increasingly influenced |
gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
I congratulate the National Federation of Federal Employees the twentieth anniversary of its founding and trust that the convention will, in every way, be successful.
Very sincerely yours,
Mr. Luther C. Steward,
President,
National Federation of Federal Employees,
10 Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C.Duke! Duke! Duke!
Because, why not? He is absolutely right. We need one man in the Senate who is unapologetically pro-White. We need one man in the Senate who will tell the truth about Jewish power and influence. We need one man in the Senate who has decades of bona fide conservative nationalist credentials and experience.
Donald Trump has bragged that the Republican platform is the most “pro-Israel” platform in history. Sheldon Adelson has promised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his campaign. No one in mainstream American politics is willing to criticize and confront Jewish power. No one is pulling in the other direction.
David Duke could be that man … and watching David Duke take his seat in Congress alongside the likes of Rep. John Lewis or Rep. Luis Gutierrez or Sen. Pocahontas, well, let’s just say it would be a laugh riot!
Note: I liked the Mike Pence pick because I thought it balanced the ticket. For the same reason, I like Duke running for Senate because he balances Trump where he is weakest on Jewish issues and explicit White Identity.
If the Democrats can explicitly endorse the Black Lives Matter movement and invite Michael Brown’s mother to speak at the Democratic National Convention after she endorsed burning down Ferguson on national television, we can vote to put David Duke in the Senate, particularly after cop killers like Ismaaiyl Brinsley, Micah X. and Cosmo Setepenra opened fire in New York City, Dallas and Baton Rouge.
The SPLC claims that Black Lives Matter isn’t a “hate group.” For the record, it has produced more mass shooters over the past year and half than even the most violent fringe of the White Nationalist movement.
Update: Klansman David Duke patrolling the Mexican border and sounding the alarm on immigration in 1977 when he was 27-years-old.Ohio fracking protest. Image via Progress Ohio on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed.
“Industry likes to say, ‘We’ve been doing this for years, it’s not new technology, trust us, we know what we’re doing,'” said Brad Kelley, a professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Virginia Tech. “But that doesn’t mean the regulation or the oversight is really there.”
Most everyone — except for the fracking industry — in Ohio would likely agree. Dr. Jeffrey Dick, the Chair of the Geology Department at Youngstown State University and the Direction of the Natural Gas and Water Resources Institute, said “We’ve been doing hydraulic fracturing [known as fracking] since the 1950s.” But, he added, “We’ve been doing it in vertical wells.” Ohio, he said, has 85,000 vertical fracking wells, with about 60,000 currently producing, to what’s known as the Clinton Sandstone formation. But the first permit for horizontal fracking of the Utica-Point Pleasant Shale Formation was only issued in March 2011. By November, there were already 8 rigs drilling; today, there are 17. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) lists 75 more permitted wells on the public record, but Dick estimates there are closer to 100, because the staff can’t keep up with listing the permitted wells online.
[For a visual representation of the fracking process, please click here.]
If the department can’t even keep up with informing the public about the locations of permitted horizontal wells when there’s less than 200, one is forced to wonder how rigorous their oversight is of the 65,000 active vertical wells. According to geologists, activists and Ohio residents sickened by pollution from those wells, the answer is: not very, and it never has been.
Jaime Frederick, a Mahoning County resident, moved into her dream house in rural Ohio where, like many residents, she got her water from a well. When her adjacent, but absent, neighbor signed a lease to allow a vertical fracking well on his land — and placed the holding tank for the hazardous waste generated by the fracking right on their shared property line — Frederick had her water tested in order to get a baseline assessment to allow her to sue if the drilling contaminated her water. Instead, she found that her water was already contaminated with a host of hazardous fracking byproducts, including barium, strontium, toluene, manganese, and her doctor found lead, arsenic and mercury in her blood, though the water wasn’t tested for that — all chemicals not naturally found in personal wells in the area. She then discovered that, unbeknownst to her and back in the woods, there were already 10 other fracking wells within a half mile of her house. “People are being intimidated, lied to by land men to sign, because they feel they’ll just drill anyway and they won’t get the money,” she said, since horizontal drills can go deep under adjacent properties without additional leases.
But her problems didn’t stop just by switching her drinking water or accepting that her home — on which she was already underwater because of the housing bubble — had lost its value. Instead, now she can see — and smell — the holding tank from her adjacent neighbor’s fracking operation from her bedroom window, and note when it’s full to the point of overflowing. But repeated calls about the hazardous spillage to the ODNT have gotten her labeled a nuisance caller, and efforts to get the EPA will occasionally get a tanker truck sent out to look at the storage tank. “There are not enough inspectors to make sure that the companies coming here are doing it properly,” she said.
[Watch more of Frederick’s story here.]
Jodi Stoyak, a Liberty Township Trustee, has seen the lack of oversight firsthand, too. “There are abandoned mines under my township,” she said, “and I don’t know if ODNR is even looking at that when they issue these permits.” There’s already been some collapses unrelated to fracking, but because fracking is intended to put pressure on the rock formations under the mines in order to force the release of oil and gas — and because there’s been almost no research into the potential consequences of fracking underneath abandoned mines — she’s rightly concerned that they could post problems that haven’t yet been considered.
But it’s not just the extraction operations that can cause the earth to move in Youngstown. In 2011, there were 11 recorded earthquakes around one well in the region. That well, however, wasn’t extracting oil and gas from a fracking site: it was injecting hazardous waste into a similarly deep region in the Utica Shale formation. “The North Star #10 well, which is operated by D&L Energy,” said Dick, is almost certainly behind the quakes. “The way it is designed, unbeknownst when it was permitted, is right in a fault line. Evidence suggests that the well’s injections were triggering earthquakes.” He added, “You’d have to be a fool to think it isn’t the problem.”
But why is there a well just for the purposes of injecting stuff into the earth rather than taking it out? Fracking, it turns out, creates a lot of liquid, hazardous waste. “It used to be disposed of in rivers, spread on roads and held in ponds hoping it would evaporate,” said Dick. Now they inject it back into the earth below the water table on the theory that the waste that came from down there will remain down there when reinjected. And, Ohio, operating under a waiver from the EPA, is one of the only states in the immediate region that can permit such wells, known as Class 2 injection wells — so they’re been taking waste from Pennsylvania and New York and injecting it below Ohioans’ feet.
Susie Beiersdorfer, an instructor in the Youngstown State Geology Department involved in the anti-fracking movement, notes that Class 2 injection wells aren’t for “hazardous waste” per se: “Class 2 is for oil and gas byproducts,” she said, “and although they’re dangerous they’re not considered ‘hazardous’ by the EPA, even if they are hazardous to human health.” And although industry says that only 1 percent of the liquid waste generated by fracking is dangerous enough to require special methods of disposal — like injection — she says, “5 millions gallons of water injected into these wells, at 1 percent, that’s still 50,000 gallons of toxins.”
[Watch Susie Beiersdorfer lead a mic check a U.S. subcommittee field hearing on fracking here.]
Dr. Ray Beiersdorfer, a professor in the same department involved with Frackfree Mahoning Valley, said “And they’re adding chemicals in the fracturing process,” so even the toxic waste generated by fracking isn’t exclusively chemicals that came from the fracking sites. He says that even if the government was adequately equipped to provide oversight, it wouldn’t resolve the fundamental issues inherent to the process: pollution, earthquakes, the massive use of potable water from the region and the loss of the region’s character. “It’s a massive industrialization of rural America,” he said.
Dick says residents’ concerns about water usage may be well-founded. With the horizontal wells currently in operation, “Based on the info that is out there, they’re using between 5 and 6 million gallons of water,” he said, agreeing with Susie Beiersdorfer. “If you go to full scale development, say 600 wells [producing] per year, that could be a problem with the available water in Ohio.”
He identifies some of the same problems with fracking as the environmental activists, though he doesn’t count himself among their numbers. “The potential problem, which has always been out there with the oil industry, is spillage,” both of the oil and gas itself and the hazardous byproducts. With fracking, he said, the issue is “How do you handle the flowback when you’re done hydraulically fracturing — flowback and ‘brine,'” a term for the contaminated water byproduct of fracking which may contain salt but which usually contains other chemicals either injected into the wells or found inside of them. Dick says the unresolved issues that need to be resolved include “spillage, because it is hazardous; how do you reuse, recycle or reduce the amount of [waste water] created; and for the stuff you’re left with, how do you dispose of it.”
Stoyak, the township trustee, has a depressing answer to that: “Everything is political.”
[Image via ProgressOhio on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed.]Eric Thompson[4] (born December 4, 1980) is a Canadian professional wrestler currently signed to WWE, where he performs on the Raw brand under the ring name Viktor, as part of the tag team The Ascension.
While in WWE's developmental territory NXT, he was the longest reigning NXT Tag Team Champions of all time (alongside his The Ascension partner Konnor), and he is also a former Florida Tag Team Champion with Brad Maddox. He previously worked as Apoc for Ohio Valley Wrestling, where he was a two-time OVW Heavyweight Champion.
Professional wrestling career [ edit ]
Hart Dungeon and Stampede Wrestling (1999–2008) [ edit ]
Thompson began his career in the Hart Dungeon,[5] under the teachings of Bruce and Ross Hart. He also received training under Tokyo Joe.[3] He started working for Stampede Wrestling in 2001 as Bishop, later to be renamed "Apocalypse" which he continued to work as until 2008. In Stampede Wrestling, he won the North American Heavyweight Championship. He also held the International Tag Team Championship twice once with partner Harry Smith and then with Dave Swift.
Independent circuit (2003–2011) [ edit ]
Viktor did a tour with New Japan Pro Wrestling as "The Shadow" in November–December 2003.[3] In his first match, he teamed with Scott Norton against Josh Barnett and Hiroyoshi Tenzan.[3] He also had matches with Manabu Nakanishi and Tenzan.[3] In addition, he teamed with Norton frequently on the tour.[5] Apoc would debut under the name Apocalypse for Derby City Wrestling in a thirty-man battle royal, which was eventually would be won by Electrico. Apocalypse would team up with Al Barone to take part in the DCW Tag Team Title Tournament but were defeated by Damian Adams and Jamin Olivencia in the first round. Apocalypse got to the final of the DCW Championship Tournament but would lose to Big Cat. For the rest of 2008, Apocalypse would form multiple tag teams with Kharn Alexander, Vaughn Lilas and Fang.
On January 16, 2008, Apoc would debut under his new name Erik Doom and lost to Justin LaRouche. He would continue to lose most of his matches which is customary in nearly all wrestling promotions. Doom and Kharn Alexander lost to Los Locos (Ramon and Raul) in a match for the OVW Southern Tag Team Championship. He went back to his old name, Apocalypse before being renamed Apoc in late spring. On May 21, Apoc took on Nick Dinsmore for the OVW Heavyweight Championship but lost. Apoc teamed with Vaughn Lilas for several months before winning the OVW Southern Tag Team Championship from Darriel Kelly and Josh Lowry. The team would lose the titles to Dirty Money and Scott Cardinal in a championship vs $1000 match. After the loss the team would split and the two began feuding for the OVW Heavyweight Championship which Vaughn was currently holding. In February, Apoc beat Vaughn for the championship and would hold it for two months before losing it to Vaughn once again and regaining the championship in May. He would go on to lose the championship to Low Rider. While wrestling in Canada in 2010, Apoc primarily wrestled for WFX Wrestling and Prairie Wrestling Alliance. He took on Jack Sloan for the PWA Canadian Heavyweight Championship twice but failed both times. He formed a stable with Kevin Thorn and Gangrel and took part in WFX Tag Team Championship Tournament but went out in the first round. He would go on to feud with the PWA Mayhem Champion Randy Myers, after losing a few times, Apoc defeated Myers in a two out of three falls match for the championship.
WWE [ edit ]
Developmental territories (2011–2014) [ edit ]
In February 2011, Thompson signed a developmental contract with WWE and was assigned to their developmental territory Florida Championship Wrestling under the ring name Rick Victor.[6] Victor made his televised in-ring debut for on the May 29, 2011 episode of FCW TV, teaming with Leo Kruger in a loss to Hunico and Epico.[7] On the July 31 episode of FCW TV, Victor challenged Seth Rollins for his FCW 15 Championship, but was defeated.[8] From April to May 2012, Victor formed an association with the Anti-Divas (Sofia Cortez and Paige).[9][10] At a FCW live event on June 16, 2012, Victor defeated Seth Rollins to win the FCW Florida Heavyweight Championship for the first time. Immediately afterwards, he lost the title to Bo Dallas in another match.[11] He regained the title from Dallas at another FCW live event on July 13, 2012, making him a two-time champion.[12] He lost the title to Richie Steamboat a week later. On July 28, Victor won the Florida Tag Team Championship with Brad Maddox.[13]
When WWE rebranded its developmental territory FCW into NXT,[14] Victor's NXT television debut took place on the June 20 episode of the rebooted NXT taped at Full Sail University, where he lost to Bo Dallas.[15] On the September 12 episode of NXT, Victor confronted and slapped the NXT Champion, Seth Rollins,[16] leading to Rollins facing and defeating Victor in a non-title match on the September 19, 2012 NXT.[17] Victor resurfaced nearly a year later in NXT when he became Conor O'Brian's partner in The Ascension.[18][19] On September 12, The Ascension defeated Adrian Neville and Corey Graves to win the NXT Tag Team Championship. On November 10, O'Brian and Victor's ring names were changed to simply "Konnor" and "Viktor", respectively. On February 27, 2014 at NXT Arrival, he and Konnor successfully defended their championships against Too Cool, repeating the feat on May 29 at NXT TakeOver, against El Local and Kalisto.[20] At the NXT TakeOver: Fatal 4-Way, The Ascension lost the titles to The Lucha Dragons (Kalisto and Sin Cara), ending their reign a day short of a full year. That same night, they were in an altercation with NXT General Manager William Regal and the debuting Hideo Itami. After feuding with and assaulting Itami for several weeks, a second international wrestler, Finn Bálor, joined Itami in his fight against both Konnor and Viktor. This led to a match on December 11 at NXT TakeOver: R Evolution, where The Ascension were defeated by Bálor and Itami.
Main roster (2014–present) [ edit ]
Viktor and Konnor, as the Ascension, in March 2015
Viktor, alongside Konnor made his main roster debut on the September 9, 2014 episode of Main Event, with the duo defeating Los Matadores (Diego and Fernando) in a tag-team match to promote their NXT tag title defense against The Lucha Dragons (Kalisto and Sin Cara) at the NXT TakeOver: Fatal 4-Way event. On the December 12 episode of SmackDown, vignettes began to air promoting The Ascension's call-up to the main roster. The Ascension made their debut on the December 29 episode of Raw, quickly defeating The Miz and Damien Mizdow.[21] The Ascension would continue to squash local athletes three weeks in a row on Main Event while indirectly criticizing of The Road Warriors. Their first major victory as part of the main roster was a win over The New Age Outlaws at the Royal Rumble. The Ascension suffered their first pinfall loss on the main roster on February 23 episode of Raw, losing to The Prime Time Players (Darren Young and Titus O'Neil). At WrestleMania 31, The Ascension made their WrestleMania debut in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal where both failed to win the match. At WrestleMania 31, The Ascension made their WrestleMania debut in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal where both failed to win the match. On the May 11 episode of Raw, during a match between Curtis Axel and Macho Mandow, in the guise of Randy Savage, The Ascension attacked Axel and Mandow. It was then announced that the Ascension would face Axel and Mandow on the Payback pre-show, where they won the match. It was announced the Ascension would par take in a six team elimination chamber match for the WWE Tag Team Championship. At Elimination Chamber on May 31, he and Konnor eliminated Los Matadores and The Lucha Dragons until they were eliminated by The Prime Time Players, ultimately losing the match.
On the September 3 episode of SmackDown, The Ascension aligned themselves with Stardust by attacking Neville before their match, and thus forming a group known as "The Cosmic Wasteland". At Night of Champions, The Cosmic Wasteland defeated Neville and the Lucha Dragons on the pre-show. On the Survivor Series kickoff, The Cosmic Wasteland, The Miz, and Bo Dallas were defeated by The Dudley Boyz (Bubba Ray Dudley and D-Von Dudley), Neville, Goldust and Titus O'Neil, in a traditional Survivor Series elimination tag team match. On the Royal Rumble kickoff, The Ascension lost a Fatal 4-Way tag team match to qualify for the Royal Rumble match. At WrestleMania 32, Viktor competed in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal but failed to win the match. On April 16, 2016, WWE suspended Konnor for 60 days for a second violation of the Talent Wellness policy. Following the suspension, Viktor began competing in singles competition, mainly on Superstars and Main Event. On the May 3 episode of Raw, Viktor competed in a United States Championship No. 1 Contender's Battle Royal which was won by Rusev. On the June 24 episode of Superstars, Konnor made his return from suspension, where The Ascension faced the Golden Truth (Goldust and R-Truth) in a losing effort.
On July 19 at the 2016 WWE draft, The Ascension were drafted to SmackDown, making their debut on the July 26 episode in a WWE World Championship No. 1 Contender's Six-Pack Qualifying Battle Royal, which was won by Apollo Crews. At the SummerSlam kickoff, The Ascension competed in a 12-man tag team match where their team lost. They then entered the SmackDown Tag Team Championship tournament, where they were eliminatied in the first round by The Usos. On the September 27 episode of SmackDown Live, The Ascension picked up their first win on the brand, when The Ascension and The Usos defeated Heath Slater, Rhyno and American Alpha (Chad Gable and Jason Jordan) in an eight-man tag team match. At 2017 Elimination Chamber, The Ascension competed in a tag team turmoil match for the SmackDown Tag Team Championship where they were the final team eliminated. Viktor, alongside Konnor, would later enter the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal at WrestleMania 33, but both men were eliminated from the match. At Money in the Bank (2017), The Ascension lost to Breezango after they claimed responsibility for a vandal attack in their office. On the June 27 episode of SmackDown Live, The Ascension was interrogated by Breezango on "Fashion Vice", admitting that they didn't commit the crime and only took responsibility, because they wanted a match at the PPV. In September, the duo turned face when they started trying to befriend Breezango during the latters' 'Fashion Files' segments. On the January 9 episode of SmackDown Live, The Ascension a loss to The Bludgeon Brothers (Harper and Rowan), for a while the duo would only appear as supporting characters in Breezango's Fashion Files skits. At WrestleMania 34, Viktor competed in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal but failed to win the match.
During the 2018 Superstar Shake-up, The Ascension were traded to Raw. On the April 23 episode of Raw, The Ascension, once again as heels, facing against the team of Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt in a losing effort. At the Greatest Royal Rumble event, Viktor entered at number 8 but was eliminated by Daniel Bryan.
Other media [ edit ]
Viktor made his video game debut as a part of the NXT Arrival DLC pack in WWE 2K15, then reappeared as part of WWE 2K16, WWE 2K17, WWE 2K18 and WWE 2K19.
Championships and accomplishments [ edit ]As Open Source Spaceflight Hardware (OSSHW) developers, we love to see other people building, modifying, remixing, and using our designs. In fact, we believe that the “Prime Directive” of Open Hardware is that it must be reproducible. That’s why we got so excited when we were contacted through Open Design Engine by John and Christopher from Jones Boys’ Rocketry. Christopher was working on a rocketry project for school, and was attempting to get a copy of our Shepard Test Stand thrust measurement hardware working.
Having someone build your Open Hardware has another advantage – you find more bugs and design flaws. The more people build and use your hardware, the better it gets. Our work with Jones Boys on Open Design Engine was no exception. They found a couple of bugs in our software, and their work brought about some operational improvements that we had glossed over because we’re so used to the hardware.
After about two weeks of back-and-forth work, John and Christopher were able to get a successful data capture with a live engine.
Christopher was able to collect and analyze data from various motor fuel grain configurations and assembled everything into his science fair project display.
Christopher took his display to multiple science fairs, and did extremely well. He was in 9th grade when he competed, and in the regional ISEF Science Fair, took first place in physics for his group. After that he went on to win second place in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics fair, which included a $100 cash award and a 3 day workshop at Goddard (I’m very envious). He also got an honorable mention from the USAF Office of Scientific Research.
Congratulations to Christopher for doing a great job, and thanks to him for using Mach 30 hardware. We’re always excited to work with people who want to build spaceflight related hardware without starting from scratch. If you’re interested in building a rocket motor test stand or satellite receiving ground station, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to talk with you.
ad astra per civitatem – to the stars through community
Related LinksEveryone is familiar with effects. Just taking a pill can reduce pain you are feeling, even if that pill has no active ingredients in it. Indeed, placebo effects help even when you are taking an active ingredient. I know that when I have a headache, taking some ibuprofen starts helping the pain fairly quickly, even though it can take up to 30 minutes for the to have an effect.
It is hard to study pain and placebo effects, because pain is subjective. That is, you can’t know whether people are experiencing pain unless you ask them. If people want sympathy, they might exaggerate their report of pain. If they want to avoid worrying their and relatives, they might minimize their report of pain.
In addition, there may be many different psychological systems involved in pain, and different treatments might influence these systems in different ways. But, people are only aware of the experience of pain. So, just focusing on the pain people are feeling does not help researchers to tease apart the various ways that pain might be reduced.
An interesting paper by Tor Wager and Lauren Atlas in the January, 2013 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science reviews evidence from brain imaging to tease apart the influences of placebos on pain.
In order to study placebo effects, it is important to know the regions of the brain that are involved in the sensation of pain. Wager and Atlas first review studies in which participants were exposed to low-intensity and high-intensity heat in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study. The fMRI technique measures blood flow in the brain and gives researchers information about areas of the brain that are active in different situations.
If you are interested in the specific brain areas associated with pain, check out original paper. For now, what is important is that these brain areas provide a way for researchers to explore different effects of placebos.
Researchers have suggested that placebo effects might reduce pain by activating opioid receptors in the brain. Opioid receptors are the ones that opiate drugs (like morphine and codeine) activate. The brain has natural chemicals that activate these receptors, and that helps minimize the experience of pain. For example, research has shown that placebo effects are reduced by giving a person a chemical that blocks the activity of the opioid receptors.
One observation from these fMRI studies is that a region of the midbrain (see the figure for a sense of where the midbrain is located) is influenced by opioid receptors. This area of the brain is affected by placebos. In addition, areas of the frontal cortex of the brain (located in the brain above your eyes) is also related the strength of placebo effects.
Here is where it gets interesting. There are other areas of the frontal cortex that are involved in your ability to control your thinking. Those areas of the brain are not involved in placebo effects. However, researchers also know that if you distract yourself, that can minimize the experience of pain. Presumably, distraction involves these brain areas that are associated with thought control.
Based on these observations, other studies using brain imaging show that distraction does reduce pain, but it uses different brain regions than the areas involved in placebo effects. As a result, these two techniques can be added together for a more powerful effect. That is, a combination of a placebo and distraction is better than either one alone.
Finally, the pain-reducing opiate drugs involve some of the same brain mechanisms of placebo effects and distraction, but they involve some different ones as well. Which means that in cases of the worst pain, a combination of all three effects can be more powerful than any one alone.
You might wonder how you get a placebo effect when you have taken a real drug. Remember, though, that just the knowledge that you have been given a drug engages some pain relief. That happens regardless of whether that drug is a real painkiller or something inert. So, telling someone they are getting a pain drug and then giving them that pain drug creates both a placebo effect and the relief from the drug itself.
This work is interesting in two ways. First, it provides some new insight into how placebo effects work. Second, it shows how the maturing science of brain imaging can help science tease apart complex mechanisms that would be hard to study without insight into what the brain is doing.
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Check out my books Smart Thinking and Habits of LeadershipCITY leaders launched an appeal for people power to help win the cash-strapped Capital the right to levy a tourist tax after members of the public showed near-unanimous support for the idea.
Finance convener Alasdair Rankin told a Question Time-style meeting on the council’s budget plans there was widespread support across the council for the tax, which could raise up to £15 million a year.
He said: “What we need to do is persuade the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament to pass the legislation to allow it to happen.”
He said raising the issue with ministers had so far failed to get any progress.
“So I would encourage you to write to your MSPs, get involved, lobby on behalf of the city and we will continue to make our representations as strongly as we can in order to get this to happen.
“It’s a logical, simple thing to do, it’s not difficult to administer and it would provide the council with a useful amount of money.”
Edinburgh Council Budget meeting, Cllr Ian Perry, Cllr Marion Donaldson, Cllr Ricky Henderson, Euan McGrory (Chair), Cllr Adam McVey, Cllr Alasdair Rankin, and Cllr Lesley MacInnes.
A show of hands found almost unanimous public support for the tourist tax idea.
The question had been sent in by John Wilson, who said a relatively small tourist tax could raise a substantial amount of money to finance services which tourists benefited from, including good roads, public toilets and clean streets.
Council leader Adam McVey confirmed Edinburgh was liaising with London over the policy.
He said: “London have done a lot of work on the business case and the impact on their hotel sector. But Edinburgh has the highest occupancy rate in the country and the highest per night hotel spend.
Cllr Adam McVey speaking at the meeting.
“That was an overwhelming response in terms of support for the policy.
“But don’t underestimate the forces at work against it.
“The local general managers in the industry in Edinburgh I think get it. The forces at work against it are the national bodies – the British Hotelier Association, those nice people that argued against the minimum wage and every other employment right that has been progressed.
“I would echo Alasdair’s call to arms: write to your MSPs, your MPs and make sure we have the political backing, every politician in this city pulling in the same direction.”
The meeting at the City Chambers last night, chaired by Evening News deputy editor Euan McGrory, also heard concerns about many of the proposed budget cuts which aim to save £21m.
Cllr McVey said most of the pressure faced by the council was not from budget cuts but from increased demands on health and social care, schools and transport infrastructure.
“What we are trying to do is balance the challenges we face with our ambition.
“We want to make sure what we are proposing has buy-in from the people of Edinburgh.”
As part of the cuts, Edinburgh Leisure is set to have its funding reduced by £420,000 and also will be charged £375,000 for ground maintenance, sparking fears of higher charges for users of the service.
Questioner Pauline Hunter asked whether it was wise for recreation to come under such pressure when childhood obesity was increasing. “Edinburgh should be investing in our future fitness,” she said.
Education convener Ian Perry said the number of people using Edinburgh Leisure facilities had gone up, against the national trend. But he said: “I appreciate prices have got to go up and we’re not going to hide that.”
The controversial plan to introduce a £25 a year charge for garden waste collection was raised by Jane Johnson, who said she had a big garden and two bins.
“It’s like a garden tax,” she said. “I could be paying £50 a year. A lot of people might say no, I’m not paying, I pay enough in council tax and they may start burn their waste. I think that would be quite a negative way to go in the city.”
But transport and environment convener Lesley Macinnes said Edinburgh’s proposed charge – which worked out at 50p a week per bin – compared favourably with other local authorities which already charged for garden waste.
Another questioner, Jim McColl, asked what would happen if a private operator offered the same service for less money.
But Cllr Macinnes said the council’s system involved millions of pick-ups and careful route planning and she did not think a private company could undercut it. “I don’t believe anyone could do that and pick up piecemeal customers across the city and make it work.”
Social care was one of the topics which prompted the most questions and Ricky Henderson, chairman of the Edinburgh Integration Joint Board, acknowledged problems caused by increased demand and reducing budgets.
He said despite the quality service they delivered, care workers were often paid the same as people who stacked supermarket shelves.
“Across the UK for many years we have undervalued care workers. I suspect if we paid care workers the same as teachers and social workers we probably would not be in this situation, but we don’t. I think we need a step-change in terms of respecting and supporting workers in the care sector.”
The meeting heard from one woman who said some of the cuts being considered involved questions of life and death.
She said: “I think a lot of people are frustrated that in this so-called consultation we are just being asked our opinion on where the axe was going to fall. If only one councillor stood up and said, ‘I’m not prepared to make these cuts any more’ they would get an amazing amount of support. There has got to be a campaign against these cuts.”
Finance vice-convener Marion Donaldson responded: “What you are saying is true, but as local councillors our statutory obligation is to deliver a budget and that’s what we do.
“This is a budget of necessity, it’s not something we’re choosing to do. We care deeply.
“So please make a noise about this and we will join with you on this.”Image via Deviantart user ukitakumuki
Everybody who plays Warhammer 40,000—Games Workshop’s over-the-top science fantasy wargame played with very expensive toy soldiers—wants the same thing from a video game. We want the game that unfolds in our heads while we’re planning a tabletop battle of Warhammer 40,000. The rulebooks and fiction of Warhammer 40,000 describe an opulent universe splitting at the rotten seams with every idea its designers ever had or stole. There are alien masters of bio-organic technology whose guns are living organisms that hatch their own bullets; Tolkien’s football hooligan Orcs turned into speed-obsessed revheads who spread across the galaxy as fungal spores; genetically engineered Space Marines who spit acid and eat brains. The small collection of miniatures you can afford and the slapdash paintjobs you can give them will never live up to that.
A video game might. Dawn Of War wasn’t that impossible game, but it came close.
The real-time strategy game from 2004 minimized the genre’s emphasis on building a barracks that spat out one warrior at a time in favor of giving you whole squads to control, then replenishing them via teleporter so you didn’t have to jog reinforcements across the map to get back to the good bit, which was the killing. It pushed RTS into the territory of tabletop wargames, with a focus on throwing units into killzones, only with the computer rolling the fistfuls of dice.
It couldn’t represent the full ridiculous breadth of Warhammer 40,000, though. Even with its three expansions it never covered all the ground, which is part of why it’s still popular with modders today. Just have a look at its Mod DB page for proof. New modes and forces are still being added and while the community isn’t quite big enough for you to find a multiplayer match without organizing it yourself, there are plenty of people playing through the campaigns and messing with the skirmishes.
While 2009 sequel Dawn Of War II has a modding scene of its own (check out the Elite mod for its Retribution expansion), the original is more popular with modders. Partly that’s because of how it plays: the sequel gave players smaller squads to control and made defending against overwhelming swarms of aliens into dramatic setpieces, but when you play on maps that don’t follow that format it feels undeniably pokey in comparison. It’s a game that really only does one thing well, as the slightly shit levels set on space hulks prove. The first game is robust enough to prosper even when it’s Frankensteined into new shapes, and was actually built to be modded to the Eye of Terror and back.
More War
While the standalone expansion Soulstorm (which you’ll need to own to install the most up-to-date versions of all these mods) brought the total number of playable armies in Dawn Of War up to nine, that’s still not enough for fans of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Not only are entire species from the tabletop games, fiction, and that one rubbish straight-to-DVD movie missing, some of them were clumped together for convenience. Blessed modders have enthusiastically taken to separating those armies into individual |
announced the possibility of reducing the massive liquidity stimulus that was being provided in the US – the current skittishness in emerging markets is the fallout of what is happening in China. This is hugely important, not just because of China’s major role in global trade, but because it signifies the end of a particular growth strategy that many other countries were trying to emulate.
The recent travails of China’s economy are well known by now: falling real estate prices put paid to the construction boom, and the subsequent bursting of the stock market bubble was hamfistedly controlled through official measures. But these current difficulties are the outcome of earlier economic strategies that were widely celebrated, when the going was good.
From the early 1990s China adopted an export-led strategy that delivered continuously increasing shares of the world market, fed by relatively low wages and very high rates of investment, enabling massive increases in infrastructure. It led to big increases in inequality and even bigger environmental problems, but the strategy seemed to work – until 2008-09, when exports were hit by the global financial crisis.
Yet even then, China, India and other large emerging markets continued to grow. The talk at the time was that they were already “decoupled” from the west. In reality, China (and much of developing Asia) had simply shifted to a different engine of growth without abandoning the focus on exports. The Chinese authorities could have generated more domestic demand by stimulating consumption through rising wage shares of national income, but this would have threatened their export-driven model. Instead they put their faith in even more accumulation to keep growth rates buoyant.
So the “recovery package” in China essentially encouraged more investment, which was already nearly half of GDP. Provincial governments and public sector enterprises were encouraged to borrow heavily and invest in infrastructure, construction and more production capacity. To utilise the excess capacity, a real estate and construction boom was instigated, fed by lending from public sector banks as well as “shadow banking” activities winked at by regulators. Total debt in China increased fourfold between 2007 and 2014, and the debt-GDP ratio nearly doubled to more than over 280%.
We now know that these debt-driven bubbles end in tears. The property boom began to subside in early 2014, and real estate prices have been stagnant or falling ever since. Chinese investors then shifted to the stock market, which began to sizzle – once again actively encouraged by the Chinese government. The crash that followed has been contained only because the government pulled out all the stops to prevent further falls.
All this comes in the midst of an overall slowdown in China’s economy. Exports fell by around 8% in the year to July. Manufacturing output is falling, and jobs are being shed. Construction activity has almost halted, especially in the proliferating “ghost towns” dotted around the country. Stimulus measures such as interest rate cuts don’t seem to be working. So the recent devaluation of the yuan– which has been dressed up as a “market-friendly” measure – is clearly intended to help revive the economy.
But it will not really help. Demand from the advanced countries – still the driver of Chinese exports and indirectly of exports of other developing countries – will stay sluggish. Meanwhile, China’s slowdown infects other emerging markets across the world as its imports fall even faster than its exports and its currency moves translate into capital outflows in other countries.
The pain is felt by commodity producers and intermediate manufacturers from Brazil to Nigeria and Thailand, with the worst impacts in Asia, where China was the hub of an export-oriented production network. Many of these economies are experiencing collapses of their own property and financial asset bubbles, with negative effects on domestic demand. The febrile behaviour of global finance is making things worse.
This is not the end of the emerging markets, but is – or should be – the end of this growth model. Relying only on exports or debt-driven bubbles to deliver rapid growth cannot work for long. And when the game is finally up, there can be severe political fallout. For developing countries to truly “emerge”, a more inclusive strategy is essential.S E A T T L E S E A H A W K S
🎉❤️ — DEVI BROWN (@DeviBrown) October 31, 2017
EMBED >More News Videos Interesting facts about Duane Brown
Seattle has traded for OT Duane Brown, source tells ESPN. Brown is out of Houston and will go to Seattle — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) October 30, 2017
EMBED >More News Videos Interesting facts about Duane Brown
One day after being defeated by the Seahawks, the Houston Texans are losing one of their own to the team.OT Duane Brown thanked his fans in Houston and the team after it was announced earlier this evening he was being traded to Seattle."Thank you to the Houston Texans organization for the opportunity to live out my dream the last 9 years," Brown wrote this evening on Instagram. "Thank you to the city of Houston and the Texans Nation for the love and support you've shown me and my family. You will always hold a special place in my heart. Much Love!!!"Brown's wife, Devi, expressed her excitement in very few words tonight on Twitter:Brown missed six games at the beginning of this season and offseason activies as the team traveled to West Virginia for training camp.He was fined $40,000 each day for missing camp.According to ESPN, Brown's deal with Houston included a $250,000 deescalator clause if he did not participate in a requisite number of workouts.Brown was named a Pro Bowl alternate last season and just entered his 10th season in the NFL.He was an outspoken critic of Houston Texans owner Bob McNair after hisduring an NFL owner's meeting earlier this month in New York.According to the ESPN source, Seahawks CB Jeremy Lane will be heading to the Texans.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The new President of CNN, Jonathan Klein, announced last week the network has ended its relationship with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will soon cancel its long-running daily political (if you can call it) discussion program, Crossfire. Carlson said he’d actually quit Crossfire last April and had agreed to stay on until his contract expired. He said he had a deal in place for a job as host of a nightly talk program on MSNBC. Klein said, quote, “Tucker Carlson wanted to host a prime-time show in which he would put on live guests and have spirited debate. That’s not the kind of show CNN is going to be doing.” Instead, Klein said, he wanted to move CNN away from what he called “head-butting debate shows” which have become the staple of much of all-news television in the prime time hours, especially at Fox News. Klein said, quote, ”CNN is a different animal. We report the news, Fox talks about the news.” Klein specifically cited the criticism that comedian Jon Stewart of the Daily Show leveled at Crossfire when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Jon Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable are “hurting America.”
JON STEWART: I made a special effort to come on the show today because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being … bad. And — and I wanted to — I felt that that wasn’t fair and I should come here and tell you that I don’t — it’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America. So I wanted to come here today — {inaudible]
JON STEWART: Here’s what I wanted to tell you guys.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
JON STEWART: Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop, hurting America. —- And come work for us, because we as the people -—
TUCKER CARLSON: How do you pay?
JON STEWART: The people — not well.
PAUL BEGALA: Better than CNN, I’m sure.
JON STEWART: But you can sleep at night. See, the thing is we need your — your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians, and the corporations, and we’re left out there to mow our lawns.
PAUL BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we’re too rough on them when they make mistakes.
JON STEWART: No, no, no, you’re not too rough on them. You’re part of their strategies. You’re partisan, what do you call it, hacks?
TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, Jon, let me tell you something valuable that I think we do that I’d like to see you…
JON STEWART: Something valuable?
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, no —- well, it’s nice when -—
JON STEWART: I would like to hear it.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I’ll tell you. When politicians come on —
JON STEWART: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s nice to get them to try and answer the question. In order to do that, we try to ask them pointed questions. I want to contrast our questions with some questions you asked John Kerry — P>*JON STEWART:* If you want to compare your show to a comedy show you’re more than welcome to.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, but here’s — No, no, here’s — here’s the point
JON STEWART: If that’s your goal —
TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s not.
JON STEWART: I wouldn’t aim for us, I’d aim for Seinfeld.
TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s the problem, Kerry won’t —
JON STEWART: That’s a very good show.
TUCKER CARLSON: Kerry won’t come on this show. He will come on your show. Let me suggest why wants to come on your show.
JON STEWART: Well, we have civilized discourse.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well here — Here’s an example of civilized discourse. Here are three of the questions you asked John Kerry.
JON STEWART: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: You have a chance to interview the Democratic nominee, you ask him a question such as, quote, “How are you holding up?” “Is it hard not to take the attacks personally?” “Have you ever flip-flopped” Et cetera, et cetera. Didn’t you feel like, you got the chance to interview the guy, why not ask him a real question, instead of just suck up to him?
JON STEWART: Yeah, 'How you holding up?' is a real suck-up, and I actually was giving him a hot stone massage as —
TUCKER CARLSON: It sounded that way.
JON STEWART: As we were doing it. You know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about —
TUCKER CARLSON: I felt sparks between you.
JON STEWART: — my responsibility to the — you know, I didn’t realize that — and maybe this explains quite a bit.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, the opportunity.
JON STEWART: Is that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their queues on integrity.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire, with Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson who was questioning him. Let’s just go to one other clip from this program.
JON STEWART: Now, this is theater. I mean, it’s —
TUCKER CARLSON: No, no.
JON STEWART: How old are you?
TUCKER CARLSON: Thirty-five.
JON STEWART: And you wear a bow tie?
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I do.
JON STEWART: So, this is —
TUCKER CARLSON: I know, I know. You’re right.
JON STEWART: So this is theater.
TUCKER CARLSON: Let me just — Come on, come on.
JON STEWART: Listen, I’m not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is —
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re difficult.
JON STEWART: — that this — You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great.
PAUL BEGALA: We do do debate.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s just not true.
JON STEWART: It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I’ll tell you why I — I know it
TUCKER CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?
JON STEWART: Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve got to be kidding me.
JON STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What’s wrong with you?
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just saying there’s no reason for you — you have this marvelous opportunity not to be the guy’s butt boy to go ahead and be his butt boy. Come on! It’s embarrassing.
JON STEWART: I was absolutely his butt boy. I was so far — You would not believe what he ate two weeks ago. You know, the interesting thick that I have is —- you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you failed miserably -—
TUCKER CARLSON: You need to get a job in a journalism school, I think.
JON STEWART: You need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk reactionary talk —
TUCKER CARLSON: I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.
JON STEWART: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.
PAUL BEGALA: Go ahead. Go ahead.
JON STEWART: I watch your show every day, and it kills me.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can tell that you love it.
JON STEWART: It’s so —- Oh, it’s so painful to watch. You know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians -—
TUCKER CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?
JON STEWART: — off of their marketing and strategy. Yeah, it’s someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Jon Stewart on CNN ’s Crossfire, which has been fired by CNN. Crossfire, will be no longer. Steve Rendall, your comment.
STEVE RENDALL: Well, I think Jon Stewart may have embarrassed CNN in that appearance; but I think that new-President-of-CNN, Klein’s protestations that they’re not going to do head-butting anymore on the air is a little bit too much. I mean, CNN profited from Crossfire, for about — since 1982 it was on. The main problem with the debate on CNN is they don’t really allow progressive voices on. We documented this at FAIR, that debate at CNN, whether it’s the ad hoc debates that appear in news shows or the CNN debate, pits somebody from the center against somebody from the right. As far as Tucker Carlson’s career, it’s hard to — Well, let me put it this way: When Tucker Carlson joined Crossfire, the show was in prime time. He rode it down into the afternoon. He hasn’t — He and his other co-hosts have not exactly been a success. But failure, it is no — is — is no disadvantage in cable news. You can — If you’re on the right, you can fall and rise and fall and rise again several times, and I think this is why MSNBC, a failed cable network, has decided to pick him up and run him the hour —- in the hour before Joe Scarborough’s show, which is another very hard right head-butting show, if you will, which will leave MSNBC with arguably a more right-wing prime-time lineup than Fox. Not that they’re going to succeed. They haven’t succeeded before when they’ve tried the same thing. They’ve hired tons of right— wing pundits at MSNBC, and they still can’t seem to crack —
AMY GOODMAN: And of course, when they had Phil Donahue on, who was their most successful program right before the war, right before the invasion, they fired him with that secret NBC memo saying, 'We don't want an anti-war face when the other networks are flying the American flag.’
STEVE RENDALL: Exactly, this is why if — This is why you can continue to fail as somebody on the right, somebody who is more or less in favor of the war, although Tucker Carlson has voiced some concerns in that way. But, yes, Donahue, the secret — the secret investigation that NBC did into MSNBC’s Donahue Show said that this was a show that could associate us with the anti-war left, and we cannot — we cannot risk that at a time when all of our competitors are waving — are waving the flag.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, Tucker Carlson, while he will be on MSNBC is also on PBS as is the Wall Street Journal editorial page running a program. So, you have Bill Moyers leaving PBS, his show being cut to half an hour and two more shows from an extremely conservative point of view —- I mean, even for Wall Street Journal reporters, the editorial page -—
STEVE RENDALL: This is a pattern that FAIR has documented throughout the years, that right-wing commentary on PBS — and this has to do — Does it have to do with the fact that PBS producers and executives are conservatives? No. It’s because PBS has been under relentless assault for 30 years from the right, being labeled as liberal media, and so what they do is they bend over backwards to the right.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Rendall, I want to thank you for being with us. Steve Rendall, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, talking about the state of the media today.For more information on the distance terminology I’m using and what I’m looking for in this bout, refer to my guide on watching YouTube fencing. Video credit and image captures goes to Andrew “CyrusOfChaos” Fischl.
The 2015 Fencing year kicked off with the Salt Lake City, Utah NAC, which pit Olympic Training Center (OTC) residents Jimmy Moody and Adam Maczik into the gold medal bout. Anyone who has fenced either of these two knows just how difficult it is to square off with them. Moody is an quick footed, agile athlete with stellar closing speed and A+ blade takes in opposition, and Maczik an imposing, tall, strong armed fencer who is always in his opponents’ faces (a la Novosjolov). Maczik came into the tournament as the 28th seed and walked out with a gold, fighting his way through the “front door” into the eight with a bracket that included Alex House, Cooper Schumacher, James Kaull, Peregrine Badger, and finally, Jimmy Moody in the final. This is a video breakdown of the gold medal bout.
Period 1:
Moody begins fencing this bout as a faster tempo than Maczik, who is choosing to go with slower, more calculated steps. The bout is fenced mostly at “B” distance, or in the advance-lunge range, which almost never changes throughout the entirety of the bout.
Moody begins to push Maczik, who gradually retreats in the direction of his two meter zone. Maczik does an excellent job of constantly changing lines and destructive beats to thwart Jimmy Moody’s excellent blade takes. Moody comes in with a quick eight in opposition as Maczik disengages and is able to hit Moody with a close shot just before a corps-a-corps. 1-0, Maczik.
Maczik begins to put some pressure on Moody and tests a footshot into Moody’s advance as Moody changes direction…
But Moody is ready and explodes into a fleche attack the moment Maczik recovers. 1-1.
Once again, the two resume fencing at “B” distance as Maczik gradually retreats and attempts to pull Moody to his end of the strip. Note that at various points in Moody’s preparation, Maczik begins to extend over Moody’s bellguard towards his arm…
As a way of judging Moody’s distance, and ultimately judging the timing to attack into Moody’s preparation. This ultimately becomes the winning strategy in the bout. Moody continues to feint with a sweeping eight in preparation, and changes lines to a beat four fleche that turns into a double. 2-2.
Maczik continues to take calculated, small steps, and rather than retreat, initially keeps the battle in the middle of the strip, often holding his ground while remaining ready and on the balls of his feet. Inch by inch, he presses Moody, cornering him more and more as Moody retreats. Moody responds by searching underneath Maczik’s bellguard to fend him off with a threatening preparation. Finally, Moody attempts his fleche attack again, with a feint to the top of the hand to bait Maczik’s parry, but Maczik’s hand positioning allows him to close Moody out in six and score a single light. 3-2 Maczik.
Moody significantly changes tempo on this touch, upping both the rate of movement in his hand and feet, hoping Maczik follows suit. But Maczik sticks to his game here and continues with his smaller steps on the retreat as Moody pursues. Moody does an excellent low line feint that Maczik thinks he has the timing on to hit him in prep, but instead, Moody catches him off balance…
And then finishes the action with a deep lunge. 3-3.
And now Moody slows down the tempo once again, this time matching Maczik’s. Maczik slowly pushes forward, then breaks distance and begins to retreat. Moody, in pursuit once again, speeds up to a faster tempo hoping to replicate the success of the previous touch in catching his opponent off balance. As Moody nears, Maczik deceives distance with constant half advances and binds to throw off Moody’s preparation. Remember when I mentioned Maczik judging timing and attacking over the guard into Moody’s preparation? This is where Maczik finally gets the timing on this and he disengages over the top of Moody’s blade and manages to hit him in the body as he’s coming forward with an attack in preparation. 4-3 Maczik.
Moody begins to push Maczik slowly, breaking distance with the hope that Maczik will pursue, but he’s not biting. Moody attempts the fleche once again and Maczik catches him in six and hits him over the top of the arm once again. 5-3 Maczik.
With 54 seconds left, Moody backs away with his arm down hoping Maczik will do the same to draw non-combativity. Maczik backs away, and Moody changes his mind and decides to pursue. Once again, Maczik retreats to his end of the strip, and as Moody prepares with a sweeping eight with an attempt to finish in six, Maczik once again attacks into preparation for a single light. 6-3 Maczik.
Both athletes back away once again, and for a moment, Maczik seems to turn away from the strip which causes Moody to reengage in combat. Once again, Moody sweeps Maczik’s blade in preparation, but Maczik has the timing, and once again hits Moody with an attack in preparation. 7-3 Maczik.
The two break distance, salute with 27 seconds remaining in the first, and finally agree to non-combativity. End of the first period.
Second Period
Maczik says to himself in the one-minute break “Hey! I think I’m onto something here!” after managing to hit Moody with four consecutive single lights with almost the same action. Moody comes off the line at a faster tempo once again, and Maczik goes on the retreat once again. Moody lunges to the foot and recovers forward ready in six, using his forward recovery to close the distance just a little bit more…
But Maczik pulls his arm back to avoid Moody’s six and hits Moody with infighting for a single light. 8-3 Maczik.
The same dog and pony show continues. Moody pushes fast, sweeping in eight in preparation, and Maczik retreats. You can guess what happens next. Over the top of the arm and into Moody’s prep for a single light for Maczik. 9-3 Maczik.
This time around, Maczik doesn’t even wait for Moody’s sweep in prep and within seconds, times his attack in preparation solely by Moody’s movement. 10-3 Maczik.
Somebody in the audience says “holy crap.” Finally, Moody changes the tempo and does a deceptive lunge with redoublement that begins with an initial speedy lunge, yet Moody decelerates the second and finishes the action catching Maczik off guard who had timed his parry riposte based on the initial lunge’s speed. Single light, Moody. 10-4.
Something something something attack in preparation. Double touch. 11-5.
Moody goes for the toe touch to close the distance with forward recovery once again to close the distance, but Maczik just takes a bigger retreat. Moody goes for it again, and this time Maczik is ready for it and hits Moody for a single light as he drops to the foot. 12-5.
Maczik goes with doubling out to finish the bout, and attacks into Moody’s prep once again for a double touch. 13-6.
Moody finally begins to move in and out of the distance, pressing Maczik and then moving out and breaking. But as he reengages distance and presses Maczik…over the arm and into the prep, to grandmother’s house we go for a double touch. 14-7.
Moody comes off the line quickly once again, and Maczik goes into his prep…again. 15-7, bout.
Maczik wins the SLC NAC!
Overall Notes: Including the time shaved off for non-combativity in the first period, this bout lasted a grand total of 202 seconds. Including double touches, a total of 18 unique touches occurred, which means that each touch lasted on average 11.2 seconds– a very quickly fenced bout.
Maczik excellently demonstrated the concept of luring an opponent into one’s “Area of Excellence,” or AOE. Sometimes in fencing, less is more. Rather than playing a physical, high movement game that ended in lunges or fleches (Maczik, by my count lunged once or twice the entire bout), Maczik chose to play a game of timing, luring Moody to his end of the strip and timing his attacks in preparation to perfection. Congrats to Adam Maczik on his win.TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
I’m watching tonight’s Walking Dead season premiere live—no screeners, for reasons I think we can all understand—and my standard approach when reviewing something live is to try and write as much of the review as I can during the commercial breaks. Nothing final, and obviously if a criticism I make of the first twenty minutes is corrected or transcended in the back half, I’m gonna do some edits. But I’ve found you can at least start summing up the plot and getting into details as things play out. The only reason I’m telling you this is that we’re on the second commercial break of tonight’s episode, and we still don’t know who died yet. I find that funny, and I thought I should record the moment for posterity.
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Aaaand now that’s over with. Credit where it’s due: Negan murdering Abraham seemed like the weakest sauce imaginable, and a decision that would inevitably rob the show of what little power it had left. If Abraham had been the only victim, it would’ve been a clear signal that the real heroes were safe. Abraham was likeable enough, but he’s a relatively new addition, and a man who hadn’t had much of a purpose last season beyond romantic worries isn’t someone we’re going to miss that much. This, then, is a legitimately solid fake-out, one that even (although I assume this is inadvertent) plays off the show’s reputation for fucking up the big moments.
Glenn’s death is the one that matters, and putting it second, after we were all convinced the real violence was done, was a clever piece of showmanship. I’m not sure how comfortable I am using such a twee term for a visceral, disturbing sequence, but it’s accurate. The Walking Dead doesn’t have much narrative point anymore. Any themes it was trying to explore have been long since beaten into the ground (heh), and without complex characters or a strong narrative throughline beyond “hey, who’s still alive?” the show is having to rely more and more on shocks. I mean, it always did, but at least for a few years there was a chance those shocks might be part of something larger than themselves.
Not so much anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally get a sudden twist that manages to live up to expectations. Sure, the cliffhanger from last season that drew this out a whole summer robbed this moment of most of the power it might have had, but hey, it caught me off guard, and I’m trying to play fair here. And I was hoping in spite of myself that Glenn might make it through, so kudos to the writers for finding one of the few remaining characters that don’t bore me to tears to kill.
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I suppose I can also give credit to the resolution of the “let’s cut off Carl’s arm” scene, if only because once again, I feared the show was about to make a horrible mistake (in this case, wallowing in misery so much that the despair became camp), and once again, it pulled itself back from the brink—this time by having Negan show a little mercy. So that’s smart. I continue to enjoy Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance; his character’s a monster, but Morgan is clearly having fun. So much of the series is spent on abject mopery that seeing someone goofing around is something of a relief, even if that goofing has a sociopathic edge.
But praise for structure aside… What was the point? Look, you can have your crazy intense post-apocalypse gore fest, or you can have your somber, introspective narrative about the cost of survival in a merciless world, but you can’t really have both at the same time. If we’re supposed to get a thrill out of watching a dude beat two other dudes to death (including loving close-ups of the gore), how are we then supposed to mourn either character when the inevitable, score-heavy grieving montage arrives? If we take any of this seriously, it’s a slow slog to hell without any of the insight or catharsis that would make the trek worthwhile. And if we take it as a lark, then the endless fucking shots of Andrew Lincoln looking scared out of his mind aren’t even goofy enough to be worth snickering at.
This is how stupid the show has become: After six seasons of endless death, after years of repeatedly reminding us that anyone (who isn’t Rick or Carl) can die, after going through the same “We have hope now! Oh wait” cycle over and over and over again without any real variation or insight, it still expects us to care when it trots out the same trick again. God, the effort of it—not one death, but two! And this guy has an evil baseball bat! And no, seriously, he’s really scary, I think Rick and the others might actually be in over their heads this time. The show is so stupid that it thinks we’re stupid, prays we’re stupid; cross its fingers and hopes like hell that its legion of loyal, obsessive followers will rend their garments at the horrible demise of a fan favorite, but still be back next week for another round of spin the murder bottle.
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Do I sound annoyed? I guess I am, but more than anything, I’m just bored. The only reason Glenn’s death meant more than Abraham’s is that Glenn has been around longer. He was a nice guy (and Steven Yeun did a fine job with the little he was given), but I’d be hard pressed to say much more about him. He earned our loyalty with longevity and not much else. He died because he’s been a regular since the second episode, which means, in theory, his death should be a surprise. It’s not organic writing, or a slow-building tragedy, or even an attempt to mimic the painful suddenness of real life catastrophe. It’s math. And it’s a horrible indication of the little creative energy the series has left. Subtlety, nuance, perspective—these have never been Walking Dead touchstones. But at least at the show’s best, it could offer something more than hitting the numbers and rubbing our faces in the damage.
I appreciate that someone made an effort to surprise us. Negan is easy to watch (if it wasn’t for all the brutal killing, he’d be more likable than the rest of the cast), and Morgan and Carol might still have some surprises for us. But this is a low point, and it’s the sort of low point that serves to underscore the miserable emptiness where the series’ heart should be. If all The Walking Dead has left is the slow massacre of our empathy for its world, make Negan the lead and be done with it. I’d rather be laughing than bored.
Stray observations
It almost feels like they did tests to see just how long they could hold off showing the deaths before people changed the channel.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan is in the opening credits now.
Abraham dies, and later, Negan re-enacts something like the story of Abraham and Isaac with Rick and Carl. Coincidence? Probably!
I bet Glenn wishes he’d stayed under that dumpster now. (He really had a rough last week or two, didn’t he.)
The grief montage near the end was bad, but probably necessary. The fantasy of everyone sitting around a table enjoying dinner was idiotic.(JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)
Nota del editor: José Vicente Haro es abogado, consultor, defensor de derechos humanos, profesor de la especialización en Derecho Constitucional de la Universidad Central de Venezuela y presidente de la Asociación Venezolana de Derecho Constitucional. Obtuvo títulos de Postgrado en Derecho Constitucional en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid; en Derecho Constitucional y Ciencia Política en el Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales adscrito al Ministerio de la Presidencia del Gobierno de España; así como en Derecho Administrativo en la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. Las opiniones expresadas en este comentario son de su propia responsabilidad.
(CNN Español) — El 5 de julio de 2017, día en el cual se conmemoró otro aniversario de la Independencia de Venezuela, el Parlamento venezolano representado por la Asamblea Nacional, en uso de su atribución constitucional prevista en el artículo 187.4 de la Constitución, aprobó un Acuerdo Parlamentario denominado “Acuerdo sobre el Rescate de la Democracia y la Constitución”, mediante el cual convocó a los venezolanos residenciados en Venezuela y en el exterior a pronunciarse sobre tres preguntas de incidencia y relevancia política y jurídico constitucional: 1) ¿Rechaza y desconoce la realización de una constituyente propuesta por Nicolás Maduro sin la aprobación previa del pueblo de Venezuela?; 2) ¿Demanda a la Fuerza Armada Nacional y a todo funcionario público obedecer y defender la Constitución del año 1999 y respaldar las decisiones de la Asamblea Nacional?; 3) ¿Aprueba que se proceda a la renovación de los Poderes Públicos de acuerdo a lo establecido en la Constitución y a la realización de elecciones libres y transparentes, así como a la conformación de un Gobierno de Unión Nacional para restituir el orden constitucional?
El Acuerdo Parlamentario también se fundamentó en los artículos 5, 62, 70, 197.4, 333 de la Constitución venezolana, haciendo referencia, adicionalmente, en su motivación, a los artículos 68 y 350 de la misma.
Inicialmente la oposición venezolana convocó la consulta popular del 16J en un acto político de la Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), realizado conjuntamente con la sociedad civil el 3 de julio de 2017, convocando a un “plebiscito” para que el pueblo venezolano decida las preguntas que, finalmente, se han sometido a su consideración.
Inmediatamente, en los días siguientes y, aún en este momento, las reacciones del Gobierno venezolano y del partido político oficialista (PSUV), han sido el cuestionamiento y desconocimiento directo de la constitucionalidad, legitimidad y legalidad del “plebiscito” o consulta popular, alegando que no estaría prevista en la Constitución y no ha sido realizada y organizada por el Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE).
Conforme al artículo 9 de la Constitución venezolana el idioma oficial es el castellano. El Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia Española indica, entre uno de los significados de la palabra “Plebiscito”: Consulta que los poderes públicos someten al voto popular directo para que apruebe o rechace una determinada propuesta sobre una cuestión política o legal. En otras palabras, el plebiscito es una consulta popular convocada por los poderes públicos.
En el caso venezolano la consulta popular ha sido convocada por la Asamblea Nacional venezolana que, como Parlamento venezolano, tiene legitimidad política y autoridad constitucional no obstante los ataques que ha recibido, por razones políticas, desde el Poder Ejecutivo, el Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, el CNE, entre otros sectores.
La consulta popular en Venezuela jurídicamente está prevista expresamente en el artículo 70 de la Constitución como uno de los medios de participación y |
PZ RP server that’s sprung up over the past week. So, if you’re of an RP persuasion, then please do check out ZomboidRP.com.
This week’s featured image by AwesomeMMM off of Steam. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!Like the president said, "of you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” Well, unless you're one of the tens of millions of Americans who can't. Including, it turns out, lots of Walgreens employees (via Ed Morrissey):
Walgreen Co. (WAG), the biggest U.S. drugstore chain, will move its workers into a private health insurance exchange to buy company-subsidized coverage, the latest sign of how the debate over Obamacare is accelerating a historic shift in corporate health-care coverage. Walgreen’s decision affects about 160,000 current employees and follows similar action this year by Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD) and Darden Restaurants Inc. (DRI) As an alternative to administering a traditional health plan, all three will send their employees to an exchange run by Aon Plc.
IBM and GE recently announced similar changes in their retirees plans, which are not to be confused with UPS' decision to drop spousal coverage. CBS News reported the "big deal" announcement this morning, noting that employees may have to swallow more out-of-pocket costs due to Walgreens' cost-saving move:
As the CBS correspondent points out, Walgreens made this move to insulate itself from anticipated rising healthcare costs, which Obamacare was ostensibly going to reverse. Based on CBO projections published yesterday, health costs will continue their inexorable climb, approximately doubling within the next 25 years. Walgreens will provide employees with a flat stipend to help defray some of those increased costs, but employees should brace to pay more on their own. What makes this particular corporate decision ironic is that Walgreens agreed to team up with HHS to promote the new law, which has now forced major benefits changes within their own company. The drug store chain is boosting a policy that has forced management to expose one of the president's core pledges as untrue. In a feisty segment on Fox News earlier this afternoon, I debated an Obamacare supporter on the change:
Fowler can't quite bring himself to admit the obvious: Obama's unamiguous vow to voters was false. Instead, he does a lot singing and dancing about the value of "choice and competition," (while, of course, opposing Paul Ryan's bipartisan reform to save Medicare), and echoing Harry Reid's pronouncement that Obamacare is only the first step toward really fixing our still-broken healthcare system through a fully government-run single payer system. Confronted with this $2 trillion law's undeniable failures, its cheerleaders are already making the pivot to their next bad idea.print
A Peruvian mountain guide convinced a German court on Monday that his climate lawsuit against a major power company has merit and should be allowed to proceed, a surprising turn in a case that had been dismissed by a lower court last year.
An appellate court in Hamm reversed that decision and revived an unusual lawsuit against RWE, Germany’s second-largest electricity producer. The suit, brought by 37-year-old Saul Luciano Lluiya, claims the utility is responsible for the impact of climate change in the Peruvian city of Huaraz, even though the company doesn’t operate in that country.
The case is also novel for targeting a single company. Other cases, in the U.S. and elsewhere, are seeking to hold a group of major fossil fuel producers accountable.
So far, fossil fuel companies have argued successfully that they can’t be held responsible for specific climate disasters because they weren’t alone in generating greenhouse gas emissions.
“The 5th civil chamber made legal history today. Its statement is clear,” Roda Verheyen, the plaintiff’s attorney for the plaintiff, said after the hearing. “For the first time, a court has said that an emitter, as a contributor to climate change, must claim responsibility for the hazards associated with global warming. Now we have to prove that RWE is partially responsible for climate hazards in Huaraz. We have a long way to go, but we are very confident that we will prove a causal link.”
The hearing took place while countries around the world gathered for a U.N. conference on climate change in Bonn, Germany. A study released on Monday showed that global emissions are rising again after staying flat for three years, mostly a result of coal burning in China and India.
Lluiya sued RWE in 2015, contending that the company partly contributed to melting a glacier in the Andes Mountains that raised the level of a nearby lake and increased the likelihood of devastating floods to his home and his city of more than 120,000 people.
Lliuya, who is also a farmer, asked for $20,000 in compensation to help the local government build a dam for flood control.
The money amounts to roughly 0.5 percent of the project’s cost and corresponds with a study’s estimate that RWE has historically contributed to nearly 0.5 percent of carbon emissions worldwide since the start of the industrial age, said Julia Grimm, policy advisor for climate finance at Germanwatch, a nonprofit that is helping Lliuya publicize his case.
“Lawsuits such as this one will draw on the rapidly advancing field of climate attribution science, which now enables us to pinpoint just how much fossil fuel producers have contributed to rising seas, increasing global temperature, and a growing list of other impacts,” said Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The case against RWE will hinge on whether Lliuya can definitively tie RWE’s fossil fuel burning to the flooding risks of his hometown. The court said both sides have until Nov. 30 to provide further arguments, but then will likely announce hearings to hear evidence in the case.
“Communities and businesses are having to deal with very real costs and damages from climate change right now, whether from rising sea levels, wildfires, droughts, or other impacts,” said Vic Sher, partner at Sher Edling, which represents three California communities in climate suits against three dozen fossil fuel companies. “The science is clear that these consequences are being caused by greenhouse gas pollution. That’s why we are seeing more of these kinds of lawsuits in the U.S. and around the world.”
RWE maintains that there’s no clear evidence that it caused a glacier to melt in another part of the world.
“Due to the large number of global emissions of greenhouse gases from natural and anthropogenic sources and the complexity of the climate and its natural variability, RWE believes that it is not possible to legally attribute specific effects of a climate change to a single issuer,” said RWE in a statement after the court decision.
The company also pointed out its work on reducing emissions: “RWE has been making a significant contribution to security of supply for years. The company supports the German and European climate targets for the year 2050. The reduction of own CO2 emissions is a high priority for RWE. For this reason, the company has modernized its power plant park in recent years, that is, built new power plants, made existing facilities more efficient and shut down old ones.”SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah couple is among several passengers happy to be alive after a flight from Costa Rica to Texas took a frightful turn over the ocean Monday.
One of the plane's engines overheated, said Deseret News sportswriter Jody Genessy, who traveled to the nation with his wife last week for a trip related to his work as a health coach.
"All of the sudden the pilot came on and said, 'In layman's terms, the engine light is on. There's a problem with one of our engines. We need to turn around and go back to Liberia, Costa Rica,'" Genessy said by phone Monday evening.
The plane circled above the waves for an hour to burn fuel and lose enough weight to touch down, Genessy said. On landing, the plane hit a wind shear, wobbled and nearly tilted so much that a wing hit the ground. Then the pilot corrected and the other side almost crashed down, Genessy said.
Genessy and his wife Heather feared their four kids wouldn't see them again, he said. Fire engines and ambulances were waiting for them to land.
But the pilot restored balance. No one was injured, and the plane erupted in cheers.
"We were all just freaking out. Your life flashes before your eyes," Genessy said. "As soon as we landed, it was as if the pilot won the Super Bowl for us."
United flight 1516 was bound for Houston, Texas, from Liberia, a city near Costa Rica's northwestern border with Nicaragua.
United Airlines told People Magazine the flight returned to Liberia because of a maintenance issue.
"The plane landed safely and a new aircraft is being sent to take customers to Houston tomorrow," United said in the prepared statement issued to People. "We apologize to all customers on board for their experience and will be providing compensation for the inconvenience.”
The airline issued Genessy a $10 voucher, according to his Twitter post. But the traveler said he felt he had received a much greater reward.
"You're never more happy to be alive than when you're faced with the fear of dying," he said.
One of my plane's engines overheated over the ocean. We about crashed in an emergency landing before the pilot quickly pulled up. So scary. pic.twitter.com/qbmlQOnYRX — Jody Genessy (@DJJazzyJody) April 24, 2017
Gwen Peterson, another Utah passenger who sat in Row 10, said Tuesday during a stop in Houston that she questioned at times whether she would escape the flight alive. Passengers, she said, were told that the plane was "one engine down," and it swayed violently on the first attempt to land.
“When we got close to the ground, now the airplane’s doing this,” Peterson said, waving her level hand back and forth. “Then when he started to get out of control like this, (the pilot) just gunned it and took back off again.”
She praised the pilot, who safely landed the plane on the second attempt.
“Luckily, this pilot was amazing,” Peterson said. “He knew what to do in a moment of crisis.”
Peterson captured video of passengers applauding the crew as they boarded the plane Tuesday for “round two.”
“At least we’re alive,” she said.
Peterson was more critical of the airline itself, saying the compensation for the flight was not what it should have been. She was hoping for more of a response from United.
“It was unreal – nothing I’ve ever experienced,” Peterson said.
Contributing: Brianna Bodily
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PhotosOnly one other forward in the league blocked more shots than Couture's 51 last season. Mike Blake/Reuters/Corbis
WHEN COUTURE CRASHED into the boards, then limped off the ice midway through a tied Game 3 of the 2013 Western Conference semifinals, it looked as if the 24-year-old Sharks forward was taking his team's playoff hopes with him. At the time, San Jose was down 2-0 in the series to the defending-champion Kings. But 14 minutes later, Couture pulled a Willis Reed. He skated back out for the final shift of the second period on a sprained ankle, then scored the winner in overtime -- firing a lightning-quick wrister to beat Jonathan Quick glove side for a 2-1 San Jose win. "That would be his defining moment," says Sharks coach Todd McLellan. It was just the latest clutch play for Couture, who emerged as the Sharks' best all-around player last season and earned a five-year, $30 million contract extension in June. So in appreciation of one of hockey's most unappreciated stars, here are five things you need to know about Couture.
1. He was born to play hockey
Logan's mother, Lori, arrived at Guelph (Ontario) General Hospital at 9:30 a.m. on March 28, 1989. Four hours of labor later, Logan checked into the world. His quick delivery meant the nurse on call did most of the work as Couture's doctor tended to other patients. That nurse was Bernadette Devorski, who happens to be the mother of current NHL referee Paul and linesman Greg Devorski. "It's sort of freaky," Lori says. Another sign: At age 4, Logan picked out a pair of Sharks pajamas. "He liked the logo on them," Lori says. "It was weird."
2. But it's not his only sport
Couture's grandfather, Cy Lemon, is in the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame, and an uncle, Brian Lemon, played professional lacrosse. Logan was a top baseball prospect who twice won Canada's Hit-Run-Throw title as a kid -- which prompted his principal to ask for his autograph. But Couture chose to pursue hockey full time at age 13 because his parents were spending nearly $7,000 per season per sport on travel and equipment. "He's the one who stepped up to say, 'I can't continue to do both,'" says Lori.
3. He's a frustrated netminder
"People don't realize how much he wants to play goalie," teammate Joe Pavelski says of Couture, who often jumped between the pipes during hockey games growing up. Perhaps that explains why only one NHL forward blocked more shots than Couture (51) did last season. "Sometimes when I block shots, it's like I'm playing goal," says Couture, a "straight butterfly goalie" who once sat in on a Sharks goaltender meeting and begs McLellan to put him in net during practice. "It's half as a joke and half for real," he says.
4. He can score from anywhere
Couture may long to be in goal, but he's also pretty good at putting the puck there. He scores in a variety of ways, but his sneaky quick release is most dangerous from the neutral zone. His average even-strength slap-shot distance last season was 45 feet, and he scored most of his even-strength goals (8) on his wrister, from an average of 31 feet. "He gets shots off in different ways," says Red Wings goalie Jimmy Howard. "That's what makes him so tough to stop. It's very deceptive. When he shoots, it gets on you a lot faster than you'd expect."
5. His game does his talking
He may be the new face of the Sharks, but the soft-spoken Couture isn't likely to be their voice -- unless he's singing. Should he ever DJ in the dressing room, expect to hear a lot of Drake, a fellow Canadian and Blue Jays fan. "Drake can sing, he can rap and I like the lyrics," says Couture, who often tweets Drizzy's lyrics to his almost 157,000 Twitter followers and occasionally even croons along -- quietly. "He keeps it kind of low," says teammate Jason Demers. "I wouldn't say he's Michael Jackson, but he's not terrible."
Follow The Mag on Twitter (@ESPNmag) and like us on Facebook.Technology has ruined the world. Deep down we all know that, right? From hordes of zombies walking down the street staring at their phones, not paying attention to their surroundings, to mass commercial agriculture, we’re going backwards. People are more removed from their surroundings than ever before and we see it on a daily basis when they come into the gym.
Back when I first started training people I remember that everyone could do push ups and sit ups, yet these days it’s all too common that people walk in the door and can’t even do a single push up. I imagine what would happen if these people fell over - stuck on the ground like turtles on their backs unable to get back up again unless someone helps them out. But I digress.
One of my clients is smart. I mean so smart that often I can’t speak with him for long because he sends my brain into a twist. Often after we speak, I find myself on Wikipedia looking up something he said or looking for the definition of a word. That’s a good thing, as I think the best relationships are those where both parties benefit. In this case, I am helping him discover his physical self and he’s helping me figure out more about what’s going on around us. I only hope that one day my progress is as pronounced as his has been.
What he said to me over the last two days, both in person and by email, has been quite eye opening. He taught me about rationalization. He defined this as an attempt to improve or modernize things, and this is actually the point of this article. This mode of thinking has seen people attempt to fix and modify kettlebell training, despite the fact that kettlebells have been used for physical culture for over three hundred years. Isn’t it possible that people have figured out the best uses for these tools over the last centuries and any attempts to fix something that isn’t broken is only in an effort to seem like you’ve got something original to say?
The biggest culprit of this is the American swing.
For people who don’t know let’s look at the main point that distinguishes the American swing from a swing done correctly - it’s a two-hand swing where the bell travels overhead.
But you need to ask yourself if the kettlebell is really designed for that? Let’s look at some of the problems that are within the overhead swing. For starters, kettlebells are not designed to be used with two hands. No matter whether you own classic bells or competition style this is true. Kettlebells are designed to be used one handed. Of course you can use them with two hands for exercises like the goblet squat or the two-hand swing, and even for corrective work such as seen in the FMS system. But none of these exercises feature having both hands so close together and then raised overhead.
The reason for that is simple - the closer your hands are together the less shoulder mobility you’ll have. This is compounded by a wide enough stance to swing the bell between the legs, as the opposite is true for the lower body – the closer your feet are together the better your shoulder mobility. So a wide stance and a narrow hand position are going to just about make the chances of having adequate mobility in our overhead swing impossible.
This leads to the next problem - that awful head stuck out, lower back hyperextended position that many are forced to do to get into the finish position. Having to do awful things to your posture to perform a movement should be a clue that something is wrong. The hyperextended back is a sign of the swing being finished with the quads and not the hips as it should be, while also creating movement that allows the neck to be pushed forward so the ears are past the arms.
At about this point someone will tell me, through a flawed understanding of physics, that moving the bell overhead somehow equals more “work.” While it’s true that the equation for work in physics has a component of the distance the mass travels, someone making that argument is not really seeing what is going on. If we all recognize that the swing is a hip hinge and is all about hip extension, then at the point the hips are fully extended you’ve actually finished working. The rest of the movement is the bell continuing on its upward path thanks to the momentum caused by the hip extension phase. In a well-performed swing the hips come to full extension about the same time the upper arms come away from the rib cage. Considering that at this point the bell will still be below waist height you should start to realize that as far as the swing is concerned you’re actually finished. The rest is just waiting until the bell begins its downward journey so you can hike it back and hinge again.
Even if the bell does go overhead you still haven’t actually done more work - if you swing correctly. If you tell me that at this point you need your arms to help the bell get overhead you’re doing something else. The swing is a hinge and extension pattern and the arms are merely hooks. If you need your arms, then you’re doing something other than a swing. It’s like shrugging at the top of a deadlift to get the bar higher. Is the goal to get the bar higher, or to hinge and extend?
Which leads me to what you should be doing to get the bell overhead. Kettlebells are designed to be used single handed and going overhead with one hand will be far more accommodating to your lack of mobility than two hands will be. The lift you’re looking for is the snatch. The snatch does allow you to do more work because as the bell gets to around chest height you’ll need to high pull it (in most cases) to get the bell through the second stage of the movement, before punching the hand through and finishing with it overhead. (I say in most cases as done perfectly the bell will still be able to be floated into the correct position overhead with minimal effort on the high pull. But many will try to use a bell too heavy to allow them to get this right and will still have too straight an arm during the first half of the snatch).
So, in an effort to modernize a three hundred year old tool in regards to the most foundational exercise of all the kettlebell exercises, we’ve actually made things worse. Overhead swings are likely doing damage to your AC joint and forcing you to overextend your back while not actually training the hinge movement better. If you choose to go overhead then opt to go one handed, as the design was intended, and snatch instead. Your shoulders will thank you and your hip hinge will still be trained fully. As a bonus you will give your grip a solid workout and test your shoulder stabilizers better as you learn to fixate the weight overhead in an instant.
If you do choose to swing with two hands, then swing to chest height where your lack of shoulder mobility isn’t an issue and you can maintain good form. Remember that once your arms come away from your body the swing is essentially finished anyway, so you’re actually doing the same amount of work while saving the body from future injury.
Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.
Photo 3 courtesy of CrossFit Impulse.Image copyright AFP Image caption Qatar's migrant worker population is expected to reach two million within the next two years
Amnesty International says Qatar has done "almost nothing effective to end chronic labour exploitation" since it was chosen five years ago to host the football World Cup in 2022.
It says the abuses shame the Gulf state and football's governing body, Fifa.
An estimated 1.5 million migrants work in Qatar, many in the construction boom fuelled by Qatar's successful bid.
Qatar denies exploiting workers and says it has implemented a range of labour reforms.
Qatar's migrant worker population is expected to reach two million within the next two years, Amnesty says.
"Too little has been done to address rampant migrant labour abuse. Qatar's persistent labour reform delays are a recipe for human rights disaster," said Mustafa Qadri, Gulf migrant rights researcher for Amnesty.
Amnesty said Qatar had failed to make changes in several key areas, including giving workers the freedom to change jobs, to leave the country and the right to join unions.
A May 2015 report by Amnesty identified nine fundamental migrant labour rights issues.
In Tuesday's report, Amnesty says Qatar has seriously failed to address five of them, including:
Paying wages on time: A wage protection system that requires businesses to pay workers on time by direct bank deposits was signed into law in February 2015, but only came into force in November, with late payment still a widespread problem
Commitment to expanding the labour inspector force to 400 by the end of 2015: postponed until the end of 2016
Reform of the restrictive "kafala" sponsorship system central to the problems faced by migrant workers: limited changes promised in May 2014, only introduced in October 2015, and will not enter into force until the end of 2016
The kafala system currently only allows workers to leave the country or switch jobs with the approval of their employer, and this will not change after the reform comes into force.
Late payment of wages is a widespread problem that leaves migrant workers and their families back home in desperate situations, Amnesty says.
Qatar's labour ministry has declined to comment on the statement, the AFP news agency reports.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 28, 2017, 7:48 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 29, 2017, 4:00 PM GMT By Maggie Fox
Americans with HIV are getting diagnosed faster than ever before, but most people who are infected carry the virus for years before they know it.
On average, people infected with the AIDS virus go three years before they are tested and told about it, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.
That’s three years during which the virus is eroding away at their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to other infections — and three years during which they can infect others without even knowing it.
But it’s still an improvement, the CDC team said. In 2011, people went an average of three years and seven months before they got a test and diagnosis.
Paul Cheung / CDC
“These findings are more encouraging signs that the tide continues to turn on our nation’s HIV epidemic,” said CDC Director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald. “HIV is being diagnosed more quickly, the number of people who have the virus under control is up, and annual infections are down.”
But three years is still too long and this gap between infection and detection is helping keep the virus in circulation, the CDC said.
“Ideally, HIV is diagnosed within months of infection, rather than years later,” said Dr. Eugene McCray, director of CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention.
Related: Study confirms vaginal ring protects women from HIV
About 1.1 million Americans are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. Thanks to better testing, about 85 percent of them know it, and nearly half, 49 percent, have the virus under control with drugs.
"40 percent of HIV infections in the United States are inadvertently, unknowingly being transmitted by persons who don’t know they have HIV."
There’s no cure for HIV and no vaccine on the market yet, but increasingly simplified drug cocktails – some as simple as a single daily pill — can control the virus so that it cannot be easily detected in the blood, doesn’t make people sick and makes it almost impossible to transmit to others.
Some groups go even longer than three years. For heterosexual men, it takes on average five years to get tested and diagnosed, in part because straight men don’t think they are at high risk.
“Fifty percent of persons with HIV infection diagnosed in 2015 had been infected for at least three years, and a quarter had been infected for more than seven years,” the CDC team wrote in their report.
Whites are tested on average after two years, African-Americans get tested on average three years after infection and Asian-Americans don’t get diagnosed until they’ve been infected for four years on average.
They’re not only missing out on treatment — they are often infecting others.
Related: Charlie Sheen has HIV but his chances are good
“It’s 40 percent of HIV infections in the United States (that) are inadvertently, unknowingly being transmitted by persons who don’t know they have HIV,” the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin told reporters.
“Nine out of 10 HIV infections are transmitted by people who are not diagnosed or not in care,” the CDC adds on its website.
The way CDC calculates that is by looking at how much damage has been done to patients’ immune systems when they finally are tested. The virus attacks immune cells called CD4 T-cells, and blood tests measure both how much virus is in a patient’s blood and how many of these crucial T-cells have been destroyed.
What’s helping get more people tested? Quick, on-the-spot tests have made a big difference, said Rama Keita, Community Health Educator at Washington, D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Health.
“We went from people having to wait 20 minutes to get their results to just having to wait 60 seconds,” Keita said.
Clinics and advocacy groups have also stepped up active efforts to get people tested, Keita said. “We go where the clubs are,” she said. Mobile units offer quick testing in communities with a higher-risk population.
But it will take more than that to reach straight men, Asian-Americans and others who may not realize they’re at risk. Straight men, for example, are less likely to walk into a mobile HIV testing van.
“They think, ‘I don’t want to be labeled as a member of the LGBT community. I don’t want to go into Whitman Walker’,” Keita said. “That mentality will keep you from coming in and getting tested.”
And that’s a shame, said Carl Corbin, a Whitman-Walker patient and volunteer who tested HIV positive in the early 1980s, at the start of the HIV epidemic. “All of my friends were dying all around me,” Corbin said.
Related: HIV epidemic started in New York
“I was saying to myself, 'I am not going to live another year'. I have lived 30-some years.”
But even though people lose hope when they hear they have an incurable disease, HIV can be managed with the many available drugs on the market.
Now 61, Corbin is healthy and has no detectable virus in his blood.
"It should be as routine as a cholesterol test."
“I advise every human being to get tested. There is so much help out here for you,” he said.
While some groups are at more risk than others, anyone could become infected. The CDC recommends that almost everyone be tested for HIV at some point.
“If you are having sex you are at risk. It’s a sexually transmitted disease,” Keita said.
“We know infidelity occurs. Sometimes things happen.”
The best result would be if men and women alike were tested routinely as part of a doctor visit, said Mermin. But 70 percent of people at high risk who were surveyed by CDC and who had not been tested said they'd been to a doctor in the past year.
"We don't want to burden people with having to think of themselves as being at risk of HIV," Mermin said. "It should be as routine as a cholesterol test."
Those most at risk include gay and bisexual men, their sex partners, and injecting drug users. But any kind of sex can transmit the virus, as can the use of shared needles.
“Get tested. Know your status,” advises Corbin. “Because getting tested and knowing your status will save your life. If you are sexually active in the world today, you are at risk, because it is not a gay disease.”Comedian posts video of herself dealing with man who yelled ‘Show us your tits’ during performance in Swedish capital
Amy Schumer shut down a sexist heckler during a standup show in Stockholm this week before having him removed from the arena after he repeatedly attempted to disrupt the show.
The comedian, who comes to the UK this weekend, was performing at the Swedish capital’s Hovet arena on Wednesday when a man interrupted her by calling out “Show us your tits” just minutes into her set.
Amy Schumer review – sex, neuroses and gun control from a sure-footed star Read more
In a video she posted online, the Trainwreck writer is seen to stop the show to call out the heckler. “OK, wait, I want the guy who just yelled ‘show us your tits’ to come up here,” she said. “Everybody point at him, so I know which one.”
Members of the audience pointed to the man, who said he was wearing a shirt which read: “I love pussies.”
“Now don’t get shy, what do you do for a living?” Schumer asked the man, to which he responded: “Sales.”
“Sales?” Schumer said. “How’s that working out? Is it going well? Because we’re not buying it.
“That’s really cute, but if you yell out again, you’re going to be yelling ‘show your tits’ to people in the parking lot, because you’re going to get thrown out, motherfucker.
“Don’t throw him out, just look him in the eye, tell me if you’re going to see a scarier motherfucker than that guy … I’ll show my tits when I want to.”
When the man yelled out for a second time Schumer finally decided to have him removed, to which he said: “I was about to go anyway.” She replied: “We’re going to miss you so much. I already miss you,” before telling the audience to clap if they think he should be kicked out. The arena burst into applause.
Schumer has a history of confronting sexist or derogatory remarks. In January, she chastised a 17-year-old film critic after he aimed a sexist tweet at her.
Jackson Murphy, who runs the review site Lights Camera Jackson, met Schumer at the Critics’ Choice awards and tweeted a picture of the pair together with the caption: “Spent the night with @amyschumer. Certainly not the first guy to write that.”
The tweet was deleted but Schumer responded: “I get it. Cause I’m a whore? Glad I took a photo with you. Hi to your dad.”
Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) @LCJReviews @jondaly I get it. Cause I'm a whore? Glad I took a photo with you. Hi to your dad.
Murphy later apologised claiming he thought she would “like the joke” and that he should leave the comedy to her in future.
In May, Schumer turned her attention to body shamers by captioning an Instagram photo of herself in a one-piece swimsuit: “I meant to write ‘good morning trolls!’ I hope you find some joy in your lives today in a human interaction and not just in writing unkind things to a stranger you’ve never met who triggers something in you that makes you feel powerless and alone. This is how I look. I feel happy. I think I look strong and healthy and also like miss trunchbull from Matilda, Kisses!”
An extract from Schumer’s new book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, was published in the Guardian last week.You really have to hand it to these Kickstarter games, because they really know how to make an awesome horror game, feel like a horror game. The latest Caffeine trailer looks quite promising and has some jaw dropping graphics.
And if looks are to believed, I think that the game might and probably will raise the bar in terms of horror. The game is set in the year 2097 and how it goes is that Earth’s resources have been depleted and as you would have guessed it corporations have manufactured massive fleets of mining space stations whose only job is to mine the minerals required to create Caffeine and deliver it to the masses below who are dying of thirst.
The new horror Kickstarter game has you wandering alone in the big empty space station, and it is up to the player to figure out what went wrong, and what happened to the rest of the crew.
Caffeine runs on Unreal Engine 4 game and will release on PC and PS4 with Oculus Rift support.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
At the time, I didn't understand the implications of a prominent black director struggling to fund their project. But years later, I learned that Hollywood isn't exactly fertile ground for black creativity. There aren't a lot of black directors, and they just can't get any money. You might be thinking, "Alright, one black director didn't succeed. Doesn't mean it happens often." Which is how I used to think too. It's difficult to convince some of my white friends that this happens, because they see it as an issue of egalitarianism. Egalitarian in that they believe that white people are equally affected, and also egalitarian in making me equally frustrated. But that's the problem.
I'm not just a writer, I'm a black writer. That means that I inevitably have to come to terms with needing to work twice as hard to get the same amount of attention as a white creator would. My theoretical masterpiece, Count Blacula Destroys The White Patriarchy, probably wouldn't get as much funding as Count Blacula Destroys The White Patriarchy And Learns That Love Is Colorblind: #notallwhitepeople. The system is set up to favor white projects, leaving out black productions that probably would have tackled the same subject better.
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So do you stick to your vision, even though there's a high chance that it'll be contentious and hated (if it even gets made at all), or do you sell out and make a feel-good movie that conforms to the status quo? Dee Rees dealt with this while making the award-winning Pariah, a coming-of-age story featuring two black lesbians. As you can expect from that description, it didn't go over too well with executives, as they promptly denied her and fled to the country club as soon as they heard "black lesbians" without also hearing "Jell-O wrestling."
Most arguments concerning racial representation in Hollywood usually involve the other party going, "There are plenty of successful black movies/directors!" Bonus points if they appeal to an argument of meritocracy, which they usually do. What these comments fail to realize is that even successful black projects had to struggle. You're probably a wonderful not-racist person, so I'm gonna assume that you love 12 Years A Slave, Selma, Dear White People, and The Butler. What do they all have in common, besides towering critical acclaim? They all got funded by the skin of their teeth. Each project had to hunt down producer after producer until one of them said yes.
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If you think that's just how the industry is, you're partially right. But it's disproportionately more difficult for people of color. I feel a mix of emotions whenever I see a black project do well. It's exciting, because diversity and junk. But it also makes me think, "Wow, this must have had to jump through so many hoops to get made." It's not a pleasant thought to have, but it's automatic. You learn to cope with it and hope to one day help fix it.
On top of having to worry about not getting anything I make published/produced, I have an innate fear of being boxed in. Have you noticed a trend in terms of what black movies get nominated for Oscars? They're usually about slavery or the Civil Rights era. Certain types of black projects have a better chance of getting made; you'll rarely see a black sci-fi/fantasy movie.
This is especially true in television. Despite recent black successes such as Atlanta, How To Get Away With Murder, Empire, and |
charge will add approximately 14.5% percent to the monthly bill, about the same as business and commercial bills. A residential customer who uses less energy will see a lower dollar per month increase; Minnesota Power explained that a customer who uses 300 kWh will pay $4.55 more a month.
“We recognize no one wants to see their bill increase,” Dave McMillan, Minnesota Power executive vice president, said in a statement. "However, our plan will not only help the region’s largest industries compete and remain in the economy, it will bring rates closer in line to the actual cost of providing power to all customer groups.
McMillan also said that by applying the rate adjustment based on energy usage, residential customers could use efficiency and conservation tools offered by the utility to offset the increases. The proposed rate changes must be approved by state regulators.
“Industrial customers’ rates have been set higher than the actual cost to serve them for many years —two decades or more,” McMillan said. “They have been absorbing these costs not related to their electric service. Operating in a highly competitive commodity-driven global marketplace, these companies can’t simply absorb costs or pass them on to their own customers.”
Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect that the rate changes must be approved by state regulators before they can be implemented.The Orioles found out Monday that slugging outfielder Mark Trumbo won't return a one-year, $17.2 million contract next year thanks to the qualifying offer process. He'll instead be a free agent, returning on a longer-term deal or not at all.
With catcher Matt Wieters potentially out the door and Trumbo possibly following him, Trumbo declining that offer and taking his chances in free agency would mean the Orioles’ two richest veins of their success — power bats and veteran leadership — would be taking a hit.
But for Trumbo, the decision is less about the Orioles and more about what free agency could look like for him. Opinions on that vary.
His representatives probably have a more realistic picture of the market — who his suitors could be, where the league sees him positionally, and where there are fits on that front. All we lay-folks have is the opportunity to compile free agency projections and decide whether it would make sense for Trumbo to take a contract like what the internet thinks he’ll get, or come back to Baltimore and roll the dice next year.
On FanGraphs, the annual practice of crowd-sourcing their readership for free agency predictions produced an average response of $16.1 million per year in salary, four years in length, and $59.2 million for total value of the deal. Those are all right around the four-year, $57 million deal that Nelson Cruz got after leading the majors in home runs during his single year with the Orioles in 2014.
The median responses were four years, $16 million per year, and $64 million over the course of the deal. Managing editor Dave Cameron’s own guess was four years at $16.5 million per year ($64 million total).
On MLB Trade Rumors, the estimates are right in that same range. Their prediction for Trumbo, ranked their eighth-best free agent, is for a four-year, $60 million deal.
Last week, ESPN’s Keith Law went a bit lower on Trumbo, whom he ranked his 18th-best free agent. Law suggested reprising the one-year, $9.15 million that Trumbo made this year in his final arbitration year, or “$15 million over two years, to see if the slight [on-base percentage] gains he made in the first half are sustainable.”
The prospect of that kind of deal, however, is what would have made Trumbo consider the qualifying offer, which would have been nearly double his 2016 salary and allow him to return to environs where matching his league-high 47 home runs might be possible.
That he had the qualifying offer attached to him may tamp down the market to those levels anyway. Eleven free agents who turned down the qualifying offer have ultimately signed in the last two years, so there’s certainly a market, but the last few years especially have seen some of the riskier free agent propositions sit on the market until February and beyond.
Teams are reluctant to part with a first-round draft pick for anything but a certainty at this point, and with questions about the sustainability of his power and where he’ll play, Trumbo could be one of those left out in the cold for a while.
None of this would be news to him. Trumbo has reached free agency at a time of great flux in the game — draft picks are valued sometimes more than current contributors, the collective bargaining agreement could change midway through the offseason, and teams are still trying to value a bat that does such damage when it connects but posts high strikeout numbers.
It’s a lot to weigh. Monday could simply be a paper deadline, with something in the works to bring Trumbo back to the Orioles outside the qualifying offer process. But the Orioles' offseason focus has begun to take shape.
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twitter.com/JonMeoliA park employee was found dead inside the haunted house at Disneyland Paris just before the park opened on Saturday morning.
SEE ALSO: Shanghai Disneyland opening tickets sell out within hours
The man, 45, whose name has not been released, had been working at Disneyland Paris since 2002. He is believed to have been electrocuted while working on a faulty light fixture in "Phantom Manor," according to Le Parisien.
He was found by colleagues between 8 and 9 a.m. and confirmed dead at 10 a.m. The attraction was immediately shut down for investigation.
"He was much appreciated by his colleagues," said Patrick Maldidier, a union representative. "He was someone who always had a smile."
An investigation is still underway, but police suspect that the incident was an accident. The ride will remain closed through at least Wednesday.
This is not the park's first employee death. In 2010, a 53-year-old cleaner died after he was trapped underneath a boat while cleaning the park's "It's a Small World" attraction.
Disneyland Paris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.ILOILO CITY – As a public official, accepting lavish gifts while in government service is a flagrant violation of the law, Liberal Party standard-bearer Mar Roxas reminded Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday.
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“Alam niyo po, malinaw na malinaw ang batas. Unang-una po, labag po na tumanggap kahit anong regalo mula sa kahit sino ang mga lingkod-bayan,” Roxas told reporters in an ambush interview at the Iloilo International Airport hours before the LP grand rally in this province.
But the problem with Duterte, who is a lawyer, is that he has no respect for the law, Roxas claimed, noting the mayor’s alleged killing of criminals without due process.
“Ang problema sa’yo, Mayor Duterte, abogado ka pa naman. Kung hindi convenient sa ’yo, lalabagin mo ang batas, lalapastanganin mo ang batas, papatay ka ng tao, itatago mo ang kayamanan mo, magsisinungaling ka dahil hindi convenient sa’yo,” he said.
On Monday, Duterte admitted receiving expensive gifts—including three lots in Davao City, a Nissan Safari and a Ford Expedition—from Pastor Apollo Quiboloy of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, a long-time pal of the feisty mayor.
The mayor also said he would continue accepting favors from Quiboloy, including the use of religious leader-businessman’s private jet, if he becomes President.
Under Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, government officers are prohibited from acceptimg gifts of significant value from “a person other than a member of the public officer’s immediate family…even on the occasion of a family celebration or national festivity like Christmas, if the value of the gift is under the circumstances manifestly excessive.”
Undeclared properties in SALN
Roxas also noted Duterte’s supposed failure to declare those pieces of property in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN), another violation of the law with a penalty of dismissal from service.
“Bakit hindi ito nakasama sa iyong SALN? Kung wala ka namang tinatago, di ba? Simpleng-simple po eh. Nakasaad sa batas, nakasaad sa reglamento. Lahat ng pag-aari, regalo, mana, bili, utang, lahat po ay nakasama dapat sa SALN. Eh bakit itinatago ito?” he said.
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The former Interior secretary, who has long been in a word war with the leading presidential candidate, again called Duterte “a liar” who is making up excuses to dodge corruption allegations against him.
“Una, sinabi mo hindi iyo ang mga bank accounts na ito. Tapos nung nahuli ka na, gumagawa ka ng istorya. Tapos ngayon ayaw mo ipakita sa taumbayan ang tunay ninyong kayamanan. Ito po ay mga [pag]labag sa batas. Hindi lang sa batas, labag ito sa tiwala na hinihingi natin mula sa ating kababayan,” he said.
Roxas, who is trailing Duterte but catching up with Senator Grace Poe at second place in some opinion surveys, reminded the mayor that the foundation of the election is the trust of the people in their leader.
“Tiwala ang pinag-uusapan sa eleksyon na ito. Yan ang pinakapundasyon ng lider sa mga kababayan natin. Tiwala na walang tinatago, tiwala na walang katiwalian, na lahat, hayag, tapat at talagang nakatutok sa kapakanan ng mamamayan, walang ibang interes,” he said.
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From The Daily Caller
Environmental activists have called China as the world’s de facto “leader” on fighting global warming, but energy experts don’t think the communist nation will actually do much to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that while China will peak its coal use as soon as next year, “coal will remain an important component of China’s energy mix, peaking at nearly 4,400 billion kilowatthours (bkWh) by 2030.”
China has been replacing older, less efficient coal plants and even delaying coal projects until after 2020 as part of the government’s crackdown on air pollution. However, China still operates 1,000 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity, and that number isn’t expected to change much in the coming decades.
Coal’s share of the Chinese electricity market is expected to shrink dramatically, but that’s a relative measure. The EIA doesn’t expect Chinese coal use to change much in absolute terms by 2040.
However, there’s a lot of uncertainty in EIA projections. The EIA bases its outlook on current policies, including China’s latest five-year plan and the country’s plan to comply with the Paris climate accord.
China promised to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and increase its use of energy from non-fossil fuel energy sources. China wants to get 20 percent of its energy from solar, wind, nuclear and hydro power by 2030.
China announced its Paris accord ambitions alongside former President Barack Obama in late 2014. One year later, China joined nearly 200 other countries in signing the accord.
President Trump announced in June that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris accord, largely on grounds that it favored China and India. Many politicians and environmentalists now see China as the “leader” of the global warming crusade.
China currently gets 72 percent of its electricity from coal plants and is ranked as the top carbon dioxide-emitting country in the world.
China and India both increased coal use in the first half of 2017, and China has spent billions of dollars financing coal projects outside its borders.
China signed a joint venture with Pakistan that is “expected to spend around $15 billion over the next 15 years to build close to a dozen coal power plants of varying sizes around the country,” Reuters reported in May.
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RedditFormer acting Attorney General Sally Yates will address Harvard Law School's graduating class at Class Day ceremonies on May 24, Harvard Law announced Friday.
The school said that representatives of this year's graduating class had picked Yates, who was fired by President Trump shortly after he took office, to headline the event.
Yates visited the Harvard campus in January to address students about the Obama administration's progress reforming criminal justice laws, encouraging students to become active on the issue.
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Yates graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism before studying at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Trump fired Yates after she refused to have the Justice Department defend his initial executive order barring individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S.
A blistering statement from the White House at the time said Yates "betrayed the Department of Justice" and was "weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration."US President Barack Obama pauses while speaking during the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Ambassadors for Humanity 20th anniversary dinner May 7, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Obama attended the dinner while spending three days in California fund raising. AFP PHOTO/Brendan SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- A new e-book looks at the historical context for the Keystone XL decision and argues that there is a clear-cut case for why President Barack Obama should reject the proposed pipeline.
Keystone and Beyond, from veteran New York Times reporter and editor John Cushman, was published Thursday by InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization. The book traces the Keystone decision back to the presidency of George W. Bush and argues that the pipeline is a "relic of Bush energy policy," proposed at a time when the U.S. relied more heavily on oil imports and the White House refused to acknowledge that climate change was an actual problem.
It was Bush who, in April 2004, signed an executive order to expedite approval of cross-border pipelines. And it was Bush's energy secretary Samuel Bodman who, in July 2006, visited Canada's tar sands and declared that the U.S. would set a goal of cutting imports from "unstable parts of the world," and said that "no single thing can do more to help us reach that goal than realizing the potential of the oil sands of Alberta."
But the energy reality today is far different. As Cushman points out, between January 2013 and December 2014 -- which is perhaps the earliest possible date for a presidential decision on the pipeline -- U.S. domestic production of crude oil will have increased by twice the capacity of the Keystone XL pipeline, according to the Energy Information Administration. At a press briefing on Monday, White House senior counselor John Podesta touted the fact that for the last six months, the U.S. has produced more oil than it has imported from overseas.
Further, if one believes that the U.S. needs to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 -- a target that the Obama administration has endorsed and that a number of scientific and policy organizations say is necessary to avert serious harm from climate change -- "then you have all the oil you need" without building the pipeline, writes Cushman.
The book was published two days after the White House released a report looking at the effects that climate change will have on the U.S.
Another point Cushman highlights is that, if the pipeline is approved, the Keystone XL-enabled tar sands development will generate approximately 5.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the State Department's estimates. That's almost the amount of emissions that the Obama administration's improvements to fuel economy standards for automobiles will cut. In other words, the pipeline would nearly cancel out the emissions savings that the administration has declared crucial to meeting climate goals.
"If you believe that everyone in the country is going to eventually stop burning oil, which we must believe, then why would you pursue this expenditure?" said Cushman in an interview with The Huffington Post. "We're confronted with a situation where the arguments made for this pipeline are kind of divorced from reality."
Now, with the Obama administration preparing to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline in the coming months, that process is happening in the context of "completely new facts, completely new instincts, a completely new set of climate realities," said Cushman. "Why would you go make the same decision?"
Cushman said he was rereading Thinking in Time, a 1986 book co-authored by presidential historian Richard Neustadt that looks at leaders' decision-making from a historical perspective. Cushman said this inspired him to consider the Keystone decision through a similar lens.
"For Obama to endorse Bush's 'no-brainer' mentality now, based on these new facts and instincts, would be like reviewing the post-war evidence of Saddam Hussein's mythical weapons of mass destruction, counting up the trillion-dollar cost of the war in Iraq, looking at what has resulted, and deciding to march on Baghdad all over again," Cushman writes in the book. "Just as that war defined Bush's legacy, the Keystone decision is central to Obama's."The High Court sitting in Ventersdorp has heard how sn affidavit submitted earlier by Eugene TerreBlanche murder accused Chris Mahlangu could prejudice him.
Ireland - An Irishman has been sentenced to two months in jail by the Dublin District Court for hurling racial abuse at a South African election candidate, according to media reports.
Michael Walsh, 61, was sentenced on Friday after he told independent candidate Patrick Maphoso to get off his street and that “black people made him sick”, Ireland's Herald newspaper reported.
He denied this, insisting he only told Maphoso, 43, to “f*** off”, because he disliked all politicians.
The Dublin court heard he made his remarks at the same time that a neighbour, 28-year-old Michael Lawlor allegedly threatened to shoot Maphoso. Lawlor has since died.
Walsh was convicted of using threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour outside his home in North Circular Road, Dublin on April 28, 2009. He had pleaded not guilty to the charge, the Herald reported.
Maphoso told Sapa in May he was an anti-apartheid activist. He laid a criminal charge against the two men in terms of the Incitement of Hatred Act.
He had been in Ireland since 2001 and was running a security company. He was still a South African citizen and an “Irish resident”. The country's laws allowed foreigners to campaign for local council seats, he said.
In an interview with Metro Eireann newspaper, he said one of the two told him black people made him sick.
“One of them said to me, if I 'don't want a bullet on my head' then I'must leave the area',” he was quoted as saying.
“He said black people make him sick. 'All you f******g foreigners make me sick'.”
Maphoso ran as an independent candidate and failed to win a seat on the council. He said the threat prevented him from campaigning properly. - SapaNewsAbortion, Catholic Church, Contraception
September 10, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The racist, eugenicist, anti-life founder of Planned Parenthood was also a rabid anti-Catholic, making outrageous statements against the Church, including that Catholics have "outbred the Protestants" and that they "have control."
"Well, if you read their papers where they point out Boston, that that's what has happened in Boston and Massachusetts," Margaret Sanger told reporter Mike Wallace in a September 21, 1957 interview. "They have simply outbred the Protestants, and they're in Boston and Massachusetts, they have control. I read that in their own papers."
The quote comes from a video that was part of a pair of September 8 reports from CNSNews.com on the decades-long history of expressed loathing for the Church from the woman behind the abortion chain currently at the center of a grisly baby body part trafficking scandal.
Sanger, who lived from 1879 to 1966, often berated the Catholic Church in her writing and speeches, labeling it among the "arch-enemies to hinder the progress of enlightenment," determined to destroy America's "liberties" and establish its own "rules & dominion."
In 1960, when then Senator John F. Kennedy was close to being named the Democrat Party's nominee to run for president, Sanger said she would leave the country if Kennedy won, because he was Catholic.
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The July 6, 1960 Associated Press story states:
Mrs. Margaret Sanger, crusader for birth control, says she will "find another place to live" if Senator John F. Kennedy becomes president. Mrs. Sanger said she was opposed to Kennedy because of his religion. "In my estimation a Roman Catholic is neither Democrat nor Republican." "Nor American, nor Chinese; he is a Roman Catholic," Mrs. Sanger said. Mrs. Sanger is here [Hawaii] on a vacation from her Tucson (Ariz.) home. She told a reporter that a Roman Catholic at the head of the country would "make impossible America's most important contribution to world peace -- the dissemination of birth control information." She is the founder and president emeritus of the Planned Parenthood federation.
Sanger also advocated for repressing the Church in the public square, saying in 1921 that it was acceptable for Catholics to keep their ideas in their church, but when they try "to make these ideas legislative acts and force their opinions and code of morals upon the Protestant members of this country, then we do consider this an interference with the principles of this Democracy and we have a right to protest."
Sanger wrote in a 1932 essay titled "The Pope's Position on Birth Control," "My own position is that the Catholic doctrine is illogical, not in accord with science, and definitely against social welfare and race improvement."
"We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities," she wrote of reducing the number of African-Americans through contraception. "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
Planned Parenthood has a disproportionate percentage of its facilities in minority neighborhoods.
Abortion zealots have maintained support for Planned Parenthood and its founder despite the organization's racist, eugenic, and anti-Catholic roots.
Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton has praised Sanger.
"I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision," she said. "I am really in awe of her."
Contraception was one of the many reasons for which Sanger attacked the Church, and also what would ultimately give birth to Planned Parenthood.
Sanger first founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921, which merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in 1939 and was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) in 1942. Later in 1952, Sanger helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation and was as its first president until 1959.
The abortion behemoth committed almost 330,000 abortions in the U.S. in its latest reported year, and it took in nearly $530 million in "government health service grants and reimbursements" courtesy of the American taxpayer.
The exposure in recent weeks of Planned Parenthood executives bartering in fetal remains renewed calls for the abortion giant to be investigated and defunded, something the U.S. Senate failed to do last month.
Several states have acted to defund the abortion chain at the state level, drawing threats from the Obama administration.
The first of several hearings expected in Congress on Planned Parenthood and its federal funding was held Wednesday.Chinese couturier Guo Pei at Asian Couture Week in Singapore, October 2013 | Source: Asian Couture Week
PARIS, France — If ever there was a city that could live up to the splendour of a couture gown, this is it. There are few other places in the world where these lavish, magical and often cumbersome fashion confections — handmade garments with prices that can soar into six figures — can literally blend into the gilded background. But far more important than its ability to frame and flatter couture with its fairytale vistas is the city's pedigree. For centuries, through thick and thin, Paris has been the laboratory where couture is crafted; the stage where it is flaunted; the fort where it is protected; and the bazaar where it is traded. Surely then, Paris is all that couture needs. Or is it?
"Of course it's understandable for any couturier to aspire to show in Paris," says Frank Cintamani, chairman of FIDé Fashion Weeks and founder of the Asian Couture Federation, who has been gradually attracting couturiers from across the Far East to an Asian couture week event in Singapore for the past two years. "However, much of my efforts have been focused on establishing equally credible platforms... I don’t believe that recognition or business development is uniquely achievable by presenting solely in Paris."
To suggest that any one city has the monopoly on couture is clearly nonsensical.
Judging purely by the names on show at his last October event at Singapore's jaw-dropping Marina Bay Sands complex, Cintamani may have identified a gap in the market. In their home countries, many of the 10 Asian designers who participated are household names renowned for their collections of elaborate made-to-measure evening wear, one-of-a-kind formal wear, luxury bridal wear and delicately handcrafted accoutrements.
China's Guo Pei, Japan's Yumi Katsura and Lie Sang Bong from South Korea may be familiar to some fashion insiders in the West, but their legendary status in their home markets has simply not been matched abroad. But that doesn't mean their domestic appeal can't translate to a valuable new clientele in nearby Asian countries through a regional couture showcase. For however globalised fashion has become, the fact remains that certain motifs, embellishments or colour palettes simply don't resonate as well in Paris as they do in closer markets with similar tastes.
At least three of the Asians who showed in Singapore — Sebastian Gunawan, Michael Cinco and Vatit Itthi — can count as clients some of the wealthiest socialites, businesswomen, actresses and political figures in their respective home markets of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. And demand for their couture designs has already begun to spill over into neighbouring countries.
If an Asian couture hub can gather enough serious couture clients — and inspire first-time buyers who may not yet be travelling to Paris — then Cintamani could potentially be looking at a viable business model. Assuming, of course, that the event is held at the right time and in the right environment. After all, couturiers can only cater to a limited number of clients in their home countries before becoming overexposed, so some of these designers will always be ready for wider international expansion.
What's more, the mega-couturiers in Paris who are effectively their competitors can only cater to a limited number of clients each season. The only real question is whether the talent pool of Asian couturiers is big enough. According to Cintamani as well as several style leaders in Asian high society, there are plenty of names — both emerging and older — with enough prestige and skill to beef up a regional couture event in the future.
"Asian clients are very relationship-driven and many Asian couture designers are very sensitive to ensure that they provide the personal touch. They're deferential to any cultural or specific needs their clients may have," says Cintamani, suggesting that some of the precious face time spent with a designer is lost when larger couture houses from Paris are compelled to fly their staff around the world to reach a client for fittings. "Close proximity certainly has its benefits," he adds.
Another couture event that trades on intimacy and under-the-radar names is Altaroma, the biannual shows of alta moda (haute couture in Italian) that take place in Rome shortly after the Paris couture shows. "The peculiarity of our fashion week is that it can offer visibility but with one-to-one service and the possibility to develop a designer relationship so that the degree of personalisation reaches its highest levels," says Silvia Venturini Fendi, who as president of the city-wide expo oversees small Italian heritage couture houses like Gattinoni and Sarli as well as a number of initiatives that help match young designers with some of Rome's ancient su misura (bespoke) ateliers.
In India, the unique selling point of PCJ Delhi Couture Week — which launched just a few years ago — is even more apparent. Many of the occasions where Indian women wear their finest, such as weddings, call for traditional attire. Indeed, for many of the wealthiest of Indian women, dressing to the nines often means wearing a style of clothing that's not typically offered by Western couture houses.
For India's top designers — like Manish Malhotra, Sabyasachi, Varn Bahl and Satya Paul — joining a couture week to showcase their work with the finest fabrics and most intricate embellishments is therefore a natural opportunity. Such designers have long had teams dedicated to making formal cocktail saris, opulent bridal trousseau items and deluxe renditions of the shalwar kameez, kurta combos and other traditional garments from the Indian subcontinent. Some also include Western ranges in their couture collections which fit very snugly into many a cosmopolitan wardrobe. But that hasn't changed the perception in Paris that India's couturiers are still a world apart.
"India's couture week, well, in a way it's a good sign that things are becoming more international, but it is still very local," says Didier Grumbach, chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. "They have a different concept of what couture is. It's also very classic and not as exciting as what we show here in Paris. As for what they show in Singapore, that's something else. It's not haute couture, it's a kind of ready-to-wear. It's well done; clever; it has its position. But it is not really couture," he asserts.
Use of the term haute couture is protected by French law and has been regulated by affiliates of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture for nearly 150 years. Among many other stringent criteria set by the governing body, one condition that designers must meet in order to enjoy full membership and use the term haute couture when trading is an atelier located in Paris.
"Every industry has its standards," says fashion and luxury veteran Serge Carreira, who lectures at Paris' prestigious Sciences Po institute. "The requirements of the Chambre Syndicale safeguard quality and genuineness. Just as you can’t have champagne without wines from Champagne, you can't have haute couture without an atelier in Paris."
Hence the grandes maisons of Chanel, Dior, Givenchy and younger Paris-based houses like Bouchra Jarrar and Alexis Mabille are all fully-fledged members and therefore considered haute couture. On the other hand, megabrands based outside of France but which show couture collections there like Giorgio Armani, Valentino and Atelier Versace are given the status of "correspondent members." And although the Chambre Syndicale has welcomed younger international names who push the boundaries of couture, such as Rad Hourani and Iris van Herpen, they are only considered "guest members," and therefore, not technically creators of haute couture.
To the uninitiated, this may sound like a debate about semantics or idiosyncratic leftovers from a centuries-old system. But some insiders interpret the Chambre Syndicale's geographic criteria as a thinly veiled contention that the petites mains (artisans) working in a Paris atelier are of an inherently higher quality than other couture artisans around the world. This matters because, over time, it can be seen as a mechanism for inflating the value of French couture wares over non-French ones based purely on a technicality.
"I don’t think anyone who sees the stunning collections of say a Guo Pei, Michael Cinco or a Sebastian Gunawan can be in any doubt of the level of skill that goes into creating their couture pieces," says Cintamani. "I believe many [others too around the world] are capable of creating couture on par with anything that might be found in Paris. Without doubt, Paris has built an enviable reputation for couture and clearly has a tremendous pool of talent to support it. But to suggest that any one city has the monopoly on couture talent [or skills] is clearly nonsensical."
This may be the case, suggests Carreira, but what continues to make Paris rise to the top of the couture world today is not just the iconic status of a handful of French artisan workshops like Lesage embroideries, Lemarié feather specialists or Maison Michel milliners. Nor is it necessarily the technical prowess or the long legacy of France's petites mains.
"Other countries do have amazing costume craftsmanship traditions," says Carreira. "There are refined and luxury embroideries in India, Russia and China. And Switzerland and Brazil have traditions of hand-made lace. These techniques are all rare and precious. But what makes the difference is the cluster of them in Paris," he continues, making a comparison with Silicon Valley for technology and New York or London for financial services.
It's no surprise that Fendi takes exception to this, despite the fact that the Paris couture week has cast a very long shadow over Rome's shows for decades. Nevertheless, since her instalment as president of Altaroma a few years ago, the event has gradually begun to gain momentum thanks in part to programmes like Artisanal Intelligence and Limited/Unlimited which hone in on preserving couture craftsmanship for demi-couture markets and experimental research projects that Fendi calls "neocouture."
"Rome still represents the skill of hands that create unique objects which stand for what the market really requires. Our manual ability has made Rome — and Italy as a whole — sought after throughout the world to create marvellous objects. We have an immense cultural heritage made up of ancient crafts and artisanal techniques here too," she says.
One need only look to the success of Dolce & Gabbana's own discreet Alta Moda experiment. Foregoing any established couture week or hub, the collection is nonetheless said to sell out within hours of the show's finalé.
Many other international couturiers have also made waves in recent years without the benefit of a couture-specific event — or a luxury expo in their home country around which they can rally. Once Elie Saab established himself with key clients, the right celebrities and within the couture establishment, a Lebanese invasion took the industry by storm via both Europe and Hollywood. Zuhair Murad, Georges Chakra and Rabih Kayrouz have since become major players after bowing in Paris while the likes of Abed Mahfouz and Tony Ward turned to shows in Rome. With ateliers in Beirut, their success seems to confirm that the quality demanded by top couture clients can be achieved in cities beyond Paris.
Having thriving businesses back in Lebanon long before they expanded abroad, they beg the question whether Beirut might one day become a veritable couture hub for the lucrative Middle Eastern couture market. Like their counterparts in India, Arab couturiers with an organised event in Beirut or Dubai might be better poised to tap into a region with a remarkably different costume heritage as well as very particular cultural mores and a unique perspective on the client-designer rapport.
None of the new events or their organisers come even remotely close to challenging Paris' still undisputed position as the global capital of couture. But what most do seem confident about is that with the changing distribution of global wealth and creativity comes space for a few other centres of excellence for fashion's most distinguished art form.A DEFIANT flag-maker says Nazi flags flying outside his home will not be removed.
Angry members of the Melbourne Jewish community have demanded the swastika and SS flags flying outside the Carrum property be removed, according to Mordialloc Chelsea Leader.
Flag-maker Rob Boot said he would not remove the flags from his front yard along the Nepean Highway because of the complaints.
"I’m just a flag salesman and it's just merchandise to me," Mr Boot said.
"I’m at liberty to display what I want on my own property.
"There’s no political message behind it at all."
Mr Boot said he did not believe the flags were offensive.
"It would only be in really poor taste if I flew them with the Israeli flag," he said.
Earlier today, Chaiyim Ben Ariel spotted the swastika, which is flying with another flag bearing the SS logo, while driving along Nepean Highway.
"Everyone in Australia and all over the world knows what this represents," he said.
"It is so in your face. According to the law he is allowed to sell this c**p."
Mr Ben Ariel and his friend, Yeshayah Halevi, have decided to demonstrate outside the home business in protest against the Nazi symbols.
They are not the only people to take offfence at the flags.
Chelsea RSL president John Morris told Leader he thought flying the flags was "very unpleasant."
"It’s in very poor and it offends the memory of our fallen soldiers and I feel for the Jewish community too," he said.
For more on defiant flag-maker says Swastika will stay go to the Mordialloc Chelsea Leader.HAVANA (Reuters) - Pope Francis met Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Sunday hours after warning Cubans to beware the dangers of ideology and the lure of selfishness as their country enters a new era of closer ties with the United States.
Latin America’s first pope and Castro, the region’s last surviving leftist icon of the 20th century, discussed religion and world affairs at the home of the 89-year-old retired president for about 40 minutes.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the meeting, which included Castro’s wife and other family members, was “very relaxed, fraternal and friendly.”
Francis gave |
representing not a vengeful constituency of aging white reactionaries, but the wave of the American future.February, you dirty bitch.
You are totally on the cusp of being in Spring but totally not in Spring and therefore still totally cold in some parts of the country.
There’s only one antidote to this indecisive weather and it just happens to be my absolute favorite accessory.
SCARVES!
Stay a while, it’s Wonderful Wednesday.
Woven Scarf with Fringe: $6.50
Classic staple that’s cheap enough not to fret over when you inevitably lose it on the train or in some convertible sports car, hair blowing in the wind fantasy scenario happening sometime in the near Spring future.
…
Moroccan Market Scarf: $7.80
Pink, pretty, lightweight and feminine. Perfect for spreading out on lush grass in the park for an impromptu seat in warmer weather.
…
Artist Woven Scarf: $8.80
Lightweight, bright and bohemian. Just the thing to wrap around your neck during outdoor brunch in crisp, sunny weather.
…
Buffalo Plaid Scarf: $6.90
Basic no brainer. Keep it near the door and throw it on for quick trips to the corner store.
Forever 21, wonderful.
AdvertisementsBotchamania 346: Addicted To Brother Love
Music…
Hog Wild & Whole Hog by Josh Mancell (Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy)
The Gambler by Kenny Rogers
Harmonic Generator by The Datsuns
Stage 1 by James & Gang (Pepsiman – The Running Hero)
Thanks To…
Facade and Dani, The Neon Blondes for the fabulous intro
Josh Axe Shooter for the ring clip
David Herman for the Braun/Shrek idea that a lot of people suggested, but he got there first
finalflax69 for the inspiration for the Ellsworth/Bryan ending
Davesempai for the Harry Potter masterpiece from months ago
Notes…
Twin Peaks/Impact Wrestling related bit has been suggested by a bunch of people given the importance of that line in the TV series. YMMV.
I’ve seen way too many YTPMVs of Jack Black’s Sesame Street appearance to not jump on Kofi’s ”red hexagons” line, unless it’s some uber-cool reference to something.
Random shout-out to MegaRan for making it onto Smackdown behind New Day. Another win for the good guys.
EVERYONE TALKS TOO MUCH returns after months. No-one’s been talking loud, sorry.
The Homer Simpson Real American was posted as a shitpost and is easily the best shitpost I’ve ever shitposted. Not sure it works as well as ending but ah well.
No NJPW this week, I had a puro-loving friend watch it and he didn’t get back to me in time. Ah well.
That Crash Bandicoot HD soundtrack is going to keep me going until 2019 so thanks Naughty Dog.
This was a good episode to sum up the mind games that go in before I put a video out, wondering OH CHRIST IS THERE ENOUGH BOTCH IN THIS EPISODE because one or two people complain about excessive endings despite getting lots of THE ENDINGS ARE THE BEST BIT comments. These mental battles will never end.
List Of Companies Featured And Where To Find Them…
(WWE have a Network which I think is $9.99 and you can also watch butchered HD versions of ECW 1999 on there too)
Impact Wrestling can be watched on
Total Access
ICW has an On Demand, which you should know because they bought adverts a while ago
PROGRESS Wrestling have a site/network like all the loveliest lads
Kayfabe Commentaries are the best shoot interview peopleIF HE COULD CHANGE one thing about the design of the world's computer systems, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Helsinki-based F-Secure, "I would take away administrative rights from all online users." Most wouldn't notice (although those who did would be incandescent with annoyance) and most malware would be stopped from functioning. "It should have been done already."
Hypponen agrees, however, that there would be a price to pay: where would tomorrow's clever programmers come from? He himself got his start alongside his two siblings - "We were all nerds" - by being obsessed with computer games as a teenager, tinkering with the code to make them run faster on his Commodore 64. He still loves games and collects and restores old coin-operated video arcade games as a hobby.
F-Secure is as old as the Internet; Hypponen has been with the company since 1991. He got noticed by the wider world in the early 2000s when he led the team that stopped the Sobig.F worm, and issued early warnings about the Sasser and Storm worms. In 2007, PC World named him one of the 50 most important people on the Web. None of that stopped Twitter from briefly banning him late last year for posting a warning that contained a malware link. The irony: he had actually helped the company secure itself against worms.
The idea of removing administrator rights has, in a sense, already been tried and proven: just look at mobile phones, which Hypponen estimates have been hit by only about 500 virus attacks.
"There are two main reasons why the problems of phones aren't bigger yet," he says. "One, criminals have no reason to invest in porting their attack software to new platforms." They make plenty of money focusing on Windows XP. Once that installed base starts to shrink and they have to port their software, some will likely target mobile phones while others pick later versions of Windows.
"Two, phones have a completely different security model." Manufacturers like Apple, Sony, and Symbian all manage a signing framework; without permission your software won't run. In contrast, anyone can add new software to the Internet at any time - good for tinkerers, bad for making consumers malware targets.
Hypponen believes that malware attacks will increasingly be directed at social networks. Many people think there's nothing of value to steal in their Twitter or Facebook account, but criminals can take advantage of the chains of trust these networks rely on.
"Malware still works best when you combine it with the social aspect and misuse trust," Hypponen says. A web link that leads to an infected site will get a lot more clicks when it's apparently been posted by someone you know and trust. The bigger risk if someone infiltrates your Facebook account, therefore, is that they can impersonate you and destroy your reputation. "These attacks will continue. The amount of users makes them a prime target," he says.
In the physical world, criminals were sometimes caught because they were stupid about spending the proceeds of their crimes. The analogy in cyberspace is the difficulty criminals have in converting stolen credit card numbers into cash.
"It's fascinating to watch how creative the current online criminals are in trying to reroute their money," he says. Lately he's noted a weird merger of auction fraud and credit card fraud, in which the fraudster posts expensive goods for auction - say a brand new laptop. When the auction ends the criminal uses the stolen credit card to buy the laptop as a "gift", and gets the winning bidder to pay him in Western Union, web money, or egold - any more or less anonymous cash mechanism. It never crosses the buyers' minds that they are laundering; they just think they got a really good deal.
"They say if something's too good to be true it usually isn't - on the Internet it never is."
Except for the crooks: online crime pays better and carries far less risk of getting caught and/or punished than its real-world counterpart. International law enforcement was designed for a small number of million-dollar drug deals, not thousands of thousand-dollar deals.
This relative safety from prosecution worries Hypponen: "It's sending a message to potential new online criminals that you're safe, you won't get caught. That's what we're doing by not fighting these criminals." But even if law enforcement had enough resources, "Of the cases we see every single day there's only a fraction of a percent where even we know which continent the attacker is coming from."
Plus, we are vulnerable because our ideas haven't changed fast enough. "The Internet revolution is not that old. Our sense of risk and crime has all grown up in the real world." Someone who steals your car probably lives within 100 miles of you; someone who hits you with a drive-by download from an infected Web site and raids your bank account could be anywhere. "You don't normally have to worry about the criminals in Argentina." Besides, in poorer countries, stealing from stupid, rich, arrogant Westerners may be seen as heroic, like Robin Hood. "It's as if the Internet had given them free plane tickets to anywhere in the world." µSen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE, is getting an early GOP primary challenger ahead of his 2018 reelection bid.
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Ward, an unabashed supporter of Trump, added that listeners should send her potential nicknames for Flake over Twitter, noting she liked "Flake the Snake."
She noted that she's starting early because "regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, we are going to need people in Washington, D.C., who are willing to fight the establishment."
Ward was defeated handily by McCain, losing by roughly 12 percentage points in a late August primary. She argued during the Wednesday show that Flake would be easier to pick off in a midterm election.
"Sen. Flake might be semi-well liked, but he doesn't have the longevity of John McCain. He doesn't have the reach of John McCain. He doesn't have the war hero status of John McCain," she said.
Flake said Thursday he expected a challenger, adding "we'll be prepared." "Shots at a seat in the Senate don't come along very often, so we fully expect capable challengers next cycle, both in the primary and the general," he said in a statement. An Arizona Republic/Morrison/Cronkite News poll released in mid-September showed Flake as viewed favorably by nearly 35 percent of Arizona voters but viewed unfavorably by nearly 36 percent.
Former state Sen. Kelli Ward announced on her weekly radio show Thursday that she would challenge the Arizona senator, saying she is "going to take on the establishment once again."Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Rhode Island has a message for Catholic voters: never ever vote for any candidate who supports abortion. With Hillary Clinton as the likely presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, Bishop Tobin’s words make it clear that Catholic voters can’t vote for her for president.
Bishop Tobin made the remarks in an April 21 post on Facebook:
Catholics: Vote Pro-Life As the primary election draws near in Rhode Island, I encourage faithful Catholics to vote pro-life – and never to vote for any candidate, of any party, who supports abortion. And don’t be fooled by those who say they “aren’t pro-abortion, but are just pro-choice.” It’s a smoke screen for what they really believe, but are afraid to admit. After all, what kind of choice are they promoting? They’re not talking about choosing a favorite ice cream flavor, are they? And it’s not about so-called “reproductive freedom or women’s health care” either. Clearly, politicians who support abortion are encouraging a choice that ends the life of an innocent human being and ultimately harms the mother, personally and spiritually! As Pope Francis has reminded us: “It is not progressive to try to resolve problems by eliminating human life.” (EG #214)
SIGN THE PLEDGE! We Oppose Hillary Clinton!
During an interview on The View recently Hillary Clinton said an unborn child just hours before delivery should have no Constitutional rights. Her comments came just days after Clinton said unborn children simply do not have any Constitutional rights, which would include the right to life.
SIGN THE PLEDGE: I Pledge to Vote for a Pro-Life Candidate for President
In February, Clinton defended partial-birth abortions: “My husband vetoed a very restrictive legislation on late-term abortions, and he vetoed it at an event in the White House where we invited a lot of women who had faced this very difficult decision, that ought to be made based on their own conscience, their family, their faith, in consultation with doctors. Those stories left a searing impression on me,” she continued.
Clinton has said more taxpayer money needs to go to the Planned Parenthood abortion business and Clinton demonstrated her unyielding commitment to abortion and the Planned Parenthood abortion business, accepting their endorsement during a pro-abortion rally — saying she would be the abortion business’ president.
“I will always defend Planned Parenthood and I will say consistently and proudly, Planned Parenthood should be funded, supported and protected, not undermined, misrepresented and demonized,” Clinton said. “As your president, I will always have your back.”
At a speech to the Women in the World Conference in April 2015, Hillary Clinton argued, “Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care (aka. abortion) and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” In order to expand worldwide access to abortion, she suggested that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
In May 2015, the U.S. House passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn babies 20 weeks and older from excruciating late abortions. In addition to a statement slamming House lawmakers for advancing the bill, Clinton tweeted, “When it comes to women’s health, there are two kinds of experts: women and their doctors. True 40+ years ago, true today.”
At a presidential forum at Drake University, Clinton called ending the life of another human being a “fundamental human right.”
The first order of business for Clinton and her friends at the abortion company is to force Americans to pay for abortions with their tax dollars by attempting to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which has protected Americans from funding most all abortions since the late 1970s. Upheld by the Supreme Court, the Hyde Amendment is now a target of abortion advocates who have moved from pro-choice to pro-abortion — forcing Americans not only to accept unlimited abortions before birth but to pay for them.NVIDIA has officially launched their budget friendly, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 graphics card. Based on the Pascal GP107 GPU, these new cards offer tremendous amount of efficiency and good performance increase over last gen products.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GeForce GTX 1050 Officially Launched
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 series graphics cards are based on a new Pascal core. This core is known as the GP107 GPU. This is the first instance where Pascal architecture is being produced on a different process node. While the rest of the Pascal lineup uses TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process, the GP107 GPU relies on Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process node.
“TSMC is the best foundry and our primary supplier. We have always used a second source for some of our supply and have worked with Samsung since 28nm.” via NVIDIA
The new process helps NVIDIA design smaller GPUs that are efficient and faster than their predecessors. The GP107 GPU is replacing the GM107 GPU which launched in early 2014. All of the advantages that Pascal brings for gamers such as NVIDIA SMP, Ansel support and VR-Ready. The GeForce 1050 series is targeted at the mass market where gamers rely on graphics products that are affordable and offer plug-and-play support. This is one of the advantages that GP107 brings since it doesn’t need any power connectors to boot up due to its low 75W TDP requirement. Following are some reviews that have gone live today.
NVIDIA GP107 GPU Block Diagram:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti – The Fastest and Most Efficient Card Under $150 US
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti features 768 CUDA Cores. The core comes packed with 48 TMUs and 32 ROPs. The chip is clocked at 1318 MHz core and 1392 MHz boost frequency which is just around a 250 MHz jump over the GM107 GPU. The texture fill rate of the chip goes up to 84 GTexel/s (almost twice of GM107).The pixel fill rate is maintained at 41.3 GPixel/s that is a good increase over Maxwell. The card should also feature 4 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 7 GHz. This gives us 112 GB/s bandwidth along the narrow 128-bit bus interface.
The card will be priced at $139 US which is a really sweet price considering that it only costs $20 more than the Radeon RX 460 yet going to be faster. The card will feature the same TDP as the Radeon RX 460’s Polaris 11 core, coupled with all the enhancements Pascal brings for gamers. This card will be available in various custom models on launch and we can expect those to follow the reference pricing.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Review Round-Up:
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Techpowerup
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Computerbase
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ TweakTown
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ HardwareCanucks
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Expreview
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ 4Gamer
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Sweclockers
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Hexus
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ PCGameshardware
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ PCWorld
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Benchlife
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Overclockers.Ru
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ CowCotLand
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ Hardware.info
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti Review @ TechSpot
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 – An E-Sport Aimed, Much Affordable Graphics Card
Moving on to the next variant, we have the GTX 1050. The non-Ti variant features a cut down, Pascal based GP107 core. It has specifications configured at 640 CUDA cores, 40 TMUs and 32 ROPs. It will have a few bits disabled here and there, the clock speeds are maintained at 1354 MHz and 1455 MHz boost clocks. The card will be available in both 2 GB models.
Priced at $109 US, this model can be a effective solution against the Radeon RX 460 which has the same price point. The card will also feature a 75W TDP which means no extra power connector would be required. We will see some models not even closing in on the 75W limit while boosting past the reference clock speeds. Display connectors for the reference variants include three DP 1.4a, a single HDMI and a single DVI connector.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Review Round-Up:
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ Techpowerup
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ Computerbase
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ HardwareCanucks
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ Expreview
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ 4Gamer
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ PCWorld
NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Review @ TechSpot
For those interested in the GeForce GTX 1050 series, you can head over here for more details regarding the two cards. You can also check out our detailed custom model round-up of several GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti cards in this link.
NVIDIA GeForce 10 Pascal Family
Graphics Card Name NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 3 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 5 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 NVIDIA Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti NVIDIA Titan Xp Graphics Core GP107 GP107 GP107 GP106 / GP104 GP106 GP106 / GP104 GP104 GP104 GP104 GP102 GP102 GP102 Process Node 14nm FinFET 14nm FinFET 14nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET 16nm FinFET Die Size 132mm2 132mm2 132mm2 200mm2 200mm2 200mm2 314mm2 314mm2 314mm2 471mm2 471mm2 471mm2 Transistors 3.3 Billion 3.3 Billion 3.3 Billion 4.4 Billion 4.4 Billion 4.4 Billion 7.2 Billion 7.2 Billion 7.2 Billion 12 Billion 12 Billion 12 Billion CUDA Cores 640 CUDA Cores 768 CUDA Cores 768 CUDA Cores 1152 CUDA Cores 1280 CUDA Cores 1280 CUDA Cores 1920 CUDA Cores 2432 CUDA Cores 2560 CUDA Cores 3584 CUDA Cores 3584 CUDA Cores 3840 CUDA Cores Base Clock 1354 MHz 1392 MHz 1290 MHz 1506 MHz 1506 MHz 1506 MHz 1506 MHz 1607 MHz 1607 MHz 1417 MHz 1480 MHz 1480 MHz Boost Clock 1455 MHz 1518 MHz 1392 MHz 1708 MHz 1708 MHz 1708 MHz 1683 MHz 1683 MHz 1733 MHz 1530 MHz 1583 MHz 1582 FP32 Compute 1.8 TFLOPs 2,3 TFLOPs 2.1 TFLOPs 4.0 TFLOPs 4.4 TFLOPs 4.4 TFLOPs 6.5 TFLOPs 8.1 TFLOPs 9.0 TFLOPs 11 TFLOPs 11.5 TFLOPs 12.5 TFLOPs VRAM 2 GB GDDR5 3 GB GDDR5 4 GB GDDR5 3 GB GDDR5 6 GB GDDR5 6 GB GDDR5/X 8 GB GDDR5/X 8 GB GDDR5 8 GB GDDR5X 12 GB GDDR5X 11 GB GDDR5X 12 GB GDDR5X Memory Speed 7 Gbps 7 Gbps 7 Gbps 8 Gbps 8 Gbps 9 Gbps / 10 Gbps 8 Gbps 8 Gbps 11 Gbps 10 Gbps 11 Gbps 11.4 Gbps Memory Bandwidth 112 GB/s 84 GB/s 112 GB/s 192 GB/s 160 GB/s 224 GB/s / 240 GB/s 256 GB/s 256 GB/s 352 GB/s 480 GB/s 484 GB/s 547 GB/s Bus Interface 128-bit bus 96-bit bus 128-bit bus 192-bit bus 160-bit bus 192-bit bus 256-bit bus 256-bit bus 256-bit bus 384-bit bus 352-bit bus 384-bit bus Power Connector None None None Single 6-Pin Power Single 6-Pin Power Single 6-Pin Power Single 8-Pin Power Single 8-Pin Power Single 8-Pin Power 8+6 Pin Power 8+6 Pin Power 8+6 Pin Power TDP 75W 75W 75W 120W 120W 120W 150W 180W 180W 250W 250W 250W Display Outputs 1x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 1x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 1x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DVI 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b 3x Display Port 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b Launch Date October 2016 May 2018 October 2016 September 2016 August 2018 July 2016 June 2016 October 2017 May 2016 August 2016 March 2017 April 2017 Launch Price $109 US $119 US-$129 US $139 US $199 US TBD $249 US $349 US $449 US $499 US $1200 US $699 US $1200 USThe administration of the US president, Donald Trump, condemned what it called the "anti-police atmosphere" in the United States and called for more law enforcement and more effective policing in a statement on the White House website after the new president's inauguration.
"The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump administration will end it," said Friday's statement on the White House's official website after it was taken over by the new administration.
Trump was still committed to building a border wall to stop undocumented immigration, the statement said, adding: "Our country needs more law enforcement, more community engagement, and more effective policing."
According to The Guardian's The Counted database, US police forces killed at least 1,092 people in 2016.
Although African Americans make up roughly 12 percent of the US population, they represented nearly a quarter of those killed by police last year.
The inflated rate of killing of African Americans by police sparked in recent years the rise of Black Lives Matter, a popular civil rights movement aimed at ending police violence and dismantling structural racism.
During his campaign, Trump promised to back law enforcement with federal grants without conditions.
He also pledged to continue a programme, previously suspended by former President Barack Obama, allowing for the transfer of surplus military equipment to police departments.
Trump has also said he plans to push for legislation that would deem attacks on police to be "hate crimes".
READ MORE: Will killings by police rise in Trump's America?
He has previously expressed support for reinstating "stop-and-frisk", a New York Police Department policy that was banned after a judge ruled that it constituted "indirect" racial profiling.
Questions raised
Trump's ascension to the White House raises a host of questions for the US.
Elsewhere on the White House website, the Trump administration vowed in a separate statement to make the US military "strong again".
"We will also develop a state-of-the-art missile defence system to protect against missile-based attacks from states like Iran and North Korea," the statement said.
"Cyberwarfare is an emerging battlefield, and we must take every measure to safeguard our national security secrets and systems."
Other statements on the website promised to create more jobs, seek out trade deals that benefit average American citizens, defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and lowering energy costs.
READ MORE: The seven biggest threats to Donald Trump's presidency
"The Trump Administration will embrace the shale oil and gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans," another statement said.
"The Trump Administration is also committed to clean coal technology, and to reviving America's coal industry, which has been hurting for too long."
Trump took his first official actions as US president on Friday, sending his Cabinet nominations to the Senate and calling for a national day of patriotism, his spokesman Sean Spicer said.
Demonstrators were set to participate in a "Women's March on Washington" on Saturday. Protests are also planned in other cities in the US and abroad.OTTAWA—Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and his party have widened their public-opinion lead over the ruling Conservatives in the past few weeks, according to a new poll by Forum Research. Liberals were the preferred party for 39 per cent of poll respondents, compared to 31 per cent for the Conservatives and 19 per cent for the New Democratic Party.
A Forum Research poll shows Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper essentially tied when respondents are asked, “Who would make the best prime minister?” — 28 per cent say Harper, 27 per cent say Trudeau, and 16 per cent say Thomas Mulcair. ( Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
In terms of leadership, Trudeau also scored highest in approval, with 43 per cent, compared to 34 per cent for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and 38 per cent for NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. But Trudeau and Harper are essentially tied when the question is “who would make the best prime minister?” — 28 per cent say Harper, 27 per cent say Trudeau, and 16 per cent say Mulcair. The overall support numbers represent a rebound for the Liberals from last month, when Trudeau sparked controversy with his declaration that the party was firmly pro-choice on abortion — a position he underlined once again on Wednesday when he made clear that all MPs, current and future ones, are expected to vote in favour of choice in any abortion-related matters in the Commons.
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Prince Edward Island MP Lawrence MacAulay, who had said earlier this week that he considered himself exempt from the rule, publicly stated that he would go along with the leader’s position. “I accept and understand the party position regarding a woman’s right to choose,” MacAulay declared on Twitter. “Despite my personal beliefs, I understand that I will have to vote the party position should this issue ever come up in the House of Commons.” (At the end of May, after several weeks of criticism and commentary about Trudeau’s harder line on abortion, Liberal support was pegged at 36 per cent in Forum polling, while Conservatives were at 30 per cent and the NDP was at 23 per cent. “It appears his public has forgiven him this controversy, and he has regained most of the ground he and his party might have briefly lost,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff, said in a statement accompanying the poll release. Liberal support, according to Forum, is highest among people in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, as well as mothers with children and people with higher levels of income or education.
Though none of the poll questions drew any parallels between Trudeau’s Liberals and their newly victorious Liberal cousins in Ontario, the rise in federal support took place at the same time as Premier Kathleen Wynne’s party was bouncing back from predicted defeat to a majority victory last week. Forum Research conducted the poll on Monday and Tuesday this week through an interactive voice response telephone survey of 1,683 randomly selected Canadians 18 and older. Results based on the total sample are considered accurate within two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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The poll also comes when the Liberals are in two intense byelection fights in Ontario — Trinity-Spadina and Scarborough-Agincourt, where voters will choose new MPs on June 30. Conservatives turned up the heat on Trudeau this week in Scarborough-Agincourt with a series of ads alleging the Liberal leader would make it easier for young people to get access to marijuana. “Trudeau wants marijuana in local stores, just like alcohol and cigarettes,” states a Conservative flyer, showing Trudeau beside a picture of a young boy lighting a joint. On Wednesday, Trudeau called the ad campaign “disgusting.” “Anyone who would accuse a father of three, as I am, of wishing harm on children needs to seriously ask themselves some questions about how they choose to practice politics,” Trudeau told reporters. The flyers also contain anti-Trudeau quotes from former Liberal MP for Scarborough-Agincourt, Jim Karygiannis, who has spoken out publicly against the new pro-choice policy for the party. “The attacks are misleading and quite frankly disgusting,” Trudeau said. “I know that Canadians are better than that.” Trudeau had originally said that the pro-choice order would not apply to sitting MPs, including MacAulay and others who have consistently voted against abortion. But on Wednesday, he clarified that this “grandfathering” provision only applied to whether they would be approved as candidates. No matter how they have voted in the past, they would be expected to adhere to the party’s pro-choice position, Trudeau explained. “The grandfathering was around the nomination process,” Trudeau said. “But the policy going forward is that every single Liberal MP will be expected to stand up for women’s rights to choose.”
Read more about:Plot Edit
The members of Mystery, Inc. solve the case of the Luna Ghost. However, long-time friction among Fred Jones, a glory hog; Daphne Blake, who is fed up with being kidnapped at every mystery; and Velma Dinkley, who is never credited for her ideas, finally boils over and the gang breaks up, leaving Shaggy Rogers and his dog Scooby-Doo heartbroken. Two years later, Shaggy and Scooby are invited to solve a mystery on the popular resort Spooky Island, owned by Emile Mondavarious. At the airport, the pair is unexpectedly reunited with the rest of Mystery, Inc.—Fred has become a popular author, Velma works for NASA, and Daphne has undertaken martial arts to avoid kidnappers. However, while Shaggy and Scooby are thrilled with the reunion, the other three still refuse to work with each other. On the flight over, Shaggy falls in love with a girl named Mary Jane, who loves Scooby Snacks like him, but is allergic to dogs. Upon arriving at the island, the gang meets Mondavarious, who claims the visiting tourists have been cursed into a brainwashed state. Velma attends a ritualistic performance hosted by N'Goo Tuana and his henchman, Zarkos, a famous luchador. N'Goo claims the island was once ruled by ancient demons that have been plotting their revenge ever since they were displaced when Mondavarious built the resort. Because of a misunderstanding when talking to a local voodoo priest, Daphne, Shaggy, and Scooby venture into the resort's ghost ride, meeting Fred and Velma inside, where they split up to look for clues. Fred and Velma come across a strange school designed to educate inhuman creatures about human culture, while Daphne discovers a pyramid-shaped artifact called the Daemon Ritus. The gang flees to the hotel, but an army of real demons attack, kidnapping Fred, Velma, Mondavarious and other tourists, while Scooby, Shaggy, Daphne and Mary Jane escape. The next day, Daphne is captured by Zarkos, and steals the Daemon Ritus. Shaggy and Scooby learn that demons have possessed Fred, Velma and the other tourists. They encounter Mary Jane, but Scooby realizes she is possessed as well. Shaggy begins to argue, but is interrupted when Scooby falls through a hole into an underground chamber. While searching for him, Shaggy discovers a vat of protoplasm containing the souls of those possessed. He frees Velma, Fred, and Daphne's souls. Velma discovers the demons can be destroyed by sunlight, but Fred and Daphne become trapped in each other's incorrect bodies until the Daemon Ritus corrects this. They come across the voodoo priest, who explains the demons' ritual will allow the demons, whose leader turns out to be Modavarious, to rule the world for the next ten-thousand years when a pure soul is offered as a sacrifice, who Shaggy realizes is Scooby, who (not knowing what it is) accepts to be the sacrifice. The gang plot a trap to defeat the demon cult, but it fails and Mondavarious steals Scooby's soul using the Daemon Ritus. Shaggy then tackles Mondavarious, causing Scooby's soul to be released. As Fred and Velma confront the defeated Mondavarious, they find that he is wearing a mask. When they peel the mask off, they discover Mondavarious is a robot controlled by none other than Scooby's estranged nephew Scrappy-Doo, who was abandoned by the gang years ago when his ego gone too far after he demanded to be the new leader and urinated on Daphne. Using the absorbed souls of the tourists, Scrappy transforms into a monster and tries to kill the gang. On the mountain top, Daphne battles Zarkos, finally kicking him into disturbing the ritual chamber where the demons are exposed to a disco ball's sunlight reflection and die, freeing the souls they possessed. Shaggy rips the Daemon Ritus from Scrappy's body to free the rest. The real Mondavarious is found to have been imprisoned in a small underground cell. Scrappy, N'Goo, Zarkos and all minions are arrested, while the reunited gang promise to forever solve mysteries. As the end credits begin to roll, Scooby and Shaggy are enjoying the "all you can eat" deal they were promised at the hotel. They challenge each other with eating chili peppers but scream as smoke emerges from the hotel.
Cast Edit
Production Edit
Distribution Edit
Merchandise Edit A video game based upon the film was released for Game Boy Advance shortly before the film was released.[22] The game is played in third-person point of view and has multiple puzzle games and mini-games. The game's structure was similar to a board game. Metacritic rated it 64/100 based on five reviews, which they labeled as "mixed or average reviews".[23] Scholastic Inc. released a novelization of the story in conjunction with the film. The novel was written by American fantasy and science fiction author Suzanne Weyn. Home media Edit The film was released on VHS and DVD on October 11, 2002. The |
while passenger versions were not. Thus, partially assembled cargo Sprinters were sent stateside with upfitting completed in South Carolina.
Ford has avoided the chicken tax with its Transit Connect van, built in Turkey. All models are imported as passenger vans, thus avoiding the tax. Once in the US, those models destined as cargo vans are modified accordingly.
Ending the Chicken Tax
A push to end the chicken tax has been going on for decades. Much of that effort has fallen on deaf ears, with no concerted effort to eliminate the tax. Until now.
Two new trade deals are now in place — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) — and each one will make the chicken tax history. In essence, the Obama administration (and subsequent administrations) now have the ability to negotiate trade agreements and submit these to Congress without worry that power sucking amendments would be added.
A treaty with Pacific Rim countries will most likely go before Congress this fall, but the European version will take longer. The chicken tax and other tariffs will gradually disappear, but it may take years as they’re gradually rolled back.
Are New Models on the Way?
With the chicken tax removed, might we finally see many of the smaller pickup trucks that the world enjoys stateside? Certainly, manufacturers such as Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, and Mazda have vehicles that might be considered for the US market. However, with pickup truck buyers overwhelmingly interested in pickups with robust towing and off-roading characteristics, the demand may not be as strong as some have hoped.
Then there is also the matter of making such trucks compliant to US crashworthiness and emissions standards. Ford hasn’t built the Ranger stateside in five years and now has a global, unibody version built in Thailand. Ford has not given any indication that it wants to sell a model to complement its full-size F-150, but that could change. Yet, the latest Ranger wouldn’t have the body-on-frame durability of the Chevrolet Colorado, Toyota Tacoma, GMC Canyon or the Nissan Frontier, giving it a distinct disadvantage.North Korea probably has a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile, according to a new assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm that comes amid growing alarm over Pyongyang’s warmongering.
The conclusion by the Defense Intelligence Agency said the weapon would have “low reliability,” but the disclosure during a congressional hearing Thursday is likely to raise fresh concerns about North Korea’s capabilities and intentions.
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) read what he said was an unclassified section of the DIA report while questioning Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a session of the House Armed Services Committee. Lamborn said the DIA had concluded “with moderate confidence” that Pyongyang “has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles; however, the reliability will be low.”
The reference to reliability presumably reflected concerns about the accuracy of the ballistic missiles in North Korea’s arsenal as well as the technical difficulties of miniaturizing nuclear devices.
James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, issued a statement Thursday night saying the DIA assessment was not the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. “North Korea has not yet demonstrated the full range of capabilities necessary for a nuclear armed missile,” he said.
Still, nuclear weapons experts said the assessment is the most specific attributed to the U.S. government on North Korea’s ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon that could reach U.S. troops deployed in the region.
“This is the clearest, most direct statement that North Korea has a miniaturized warhead,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. He said, however, that the finding is “consistent with a series of statements that have been made in the past” by U.S. government officials.
In his first remarks since the new tensions on the Korean Peninsula, President Obama called on North Korea on Thursday to end its belligerence. Obama also pledged to take “all necessary steps” to protect the United States from any North Korean aggression.
“Now is the time for North Korea to end the kind of belligerent approach that they’ve been taking and to try to lower temperatures,” Obama said after an Oval Office meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday that they believe North Korea’s rhetoric represents an effort by the country’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, to show he is firmly in control, and should not be construed as a genuine appetite for war. They cautioned, however, that discerning the young leader’s intentions is difficult. Kim took power in December 2011 after the death of his father, and U.S. officials have limited evidence to assess his thinking.
“I think his primary objective is to consolidate, affirm his power,” Clapper told the House intelligence committee. “Much of the rhetoric — in fact, all of the — of the belligerent rhetoric of late, I think, is designed for both an internal and an external audience.”
U.S. officials take the threats seriously enough to have beefed up missile defense systems on the West Coast and on the Pacific island of Guam. Last month, Adm. James Winnefeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that North Korea’s KN-08 missile “probably does have the range to reach the United States.”
1 of 24 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Is North Korea serious about war? View Photos Following a threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, North Korea’s state news arm, the Korean Central News Agency (also known as KCNA) released dozens of photos that show the country’s army and navy performing military drills. Caption Following a threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, North Korea’s state news arm, the Korean Central News Agency (also known as KCNA) released dozens of photos that show the country’s army and navy performing military drills, many of which were attended by leader Kim Jong Eun. Note: The KCNA has a history of digitally altering images it distributes. Because of North Korean government restrictions, news services that distribute them and The Washington Post cannot verify these images. Members of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards attend military training in this image released March 13. Korean Central News Agency via Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Lamborn, who failed to draw a substantive response from Dempsey, said in an interview after the hearing that he chose to slip the assessment into the public domain because he worries the Obama administration is not investing enough in missile defense.
“My whole goal in bringing this to light was to make sure we don’t cut missile defense spending,” the congressman said. “At the worst possible time, the president’s budget does exactly that.”
Lamborn said he had great confidence in U.S. missile defense technology,but that Winnefeld’s statement and the DIA conclusion “taken together represent a serious potential threat.”
Lamborn said he received the one-sentence conclusion of the DIA’s assessment from a contact at the Pentagon intelligence agency. Lamborn said the portion he cited was an unclassified excerpt of the classified report. His office shared it with The Washington Post.
Pentagon spokesman George Little said he could not discuss the report in detail because it was classified, except for the passage the congressman disclosed.
Little added, however, that “it would be inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean regime has fully tested, developed or demonstrated the kinds of nuclear capabilities referenced in the passage.”
Dempsey was reluctant to comment on the report, telling the congressman, “I can’t touch that one,” and noting that “it hasn’t been released.”
North Korea tested a long-range rocket in December, and two months later conducted an underground nuclear test. The U.N. Security Council tightened economic sanctions against North Korea in response, and since then, the government has threatened war against the United States and South Korea.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry plans to hold crisis talks with South Korean officials when he arrives in Seoul on Friday and follow up by lobbying China to toughen its warnings to the North, U.S. officials traveling with Kerry said.
“We have known for some time that North Korea is preparing a launch of missiles,” said a senior State Department official.
Anne Gearan in Kyrgyzstan and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.It was in a universe before our universe. It was in a far away world of a far away galaxy. It was the humans’ third emergence from the soup of the ground, it was the first time they had escaped their world and the first time they explored the vastness of the cosmos.
People were different then, they didn’t know it, but they were still young, naive, innocent. A different society in an era so distant from our own that it could almost be said that it didn’t exist. In this society there was a girl, she yearned for what she considered her home, she yearned for the stars.
She hungered for exploration and she was the driving force behind the humans’ desire to expand beyond the empty expanses that separated them from the other worlds, the other peoples and societies. All societies, of course, were young too. The chain of the multiverse had begun just three eight cycles before, and evolution and adaptation still were not perfected; But among the ordinary, child beings, this girl –a fluke of perfection– emerged to guide the universe out of their small homes and into the infinite terrains that surrounded them.
Together, humanity and her built spaceships and rockets, they built stations and ports, they built dreams and hopes. There were many failures –as children learn more by failing than by theory– but after decades of attempts they made it out. They travelled the solar system and then they crossed the galaxy.
A statue of this girl was built and placed in each world they visited with her iconic spacesuit, with her helmet in her hand a pony tail on her head. I don’t know if she was ever aware of her perfection, of her superior make among the naive humans. I don’t know if she ever considered herself a princess, but the people after her did. Not a normal princess, a normal princess has a home, a castle, a land where she stayed and where she lived. No. She was an astro-princess. Her castles were the nebulae in which she moved, her home was between the myriad stars and the innumerable celestial bodies of our skies. She lived in all of them, and in none of them.
She took humanity out of its cradle, along with humanity’s many brothers and sisters and together they built the greatest empire the universe has ever known.
We are now on the universal cycle 213, and look at us, barely out into the moon. They say she’ll come back, they say she’ll be born again and guide us into the ever expanding places of our reality. I hope this is our time, I hope I get to meet her, and even if I don’t, I feel happy for the people of our distant future.
The people who will once again reach the firmament and live among the stars.Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
In the US, two illusions have been important recently in financial markets. One is the carefully nurtured perception that President-elect Donald Trump is a business genius who can apply his deal-making skills to make America great again.
The other is a naturally occurring illusion: the proximity of Dow 20,000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been above 19,000 since November, and countless news stories have focused on its flirtation with the 20,000 barrier – which might be crossed by the time this commentary is published. Whatever happens, Dow 20,000 will still have a psychological impact on markets.
Trump has never been clear and consistent about what he will do as president. Tax cuts are clearly on his agenda, and the stimulus could lead to higher asset prices. Lower corporate taxes are naturally supposed to lead to higher share prices, while cuts in personal income tax might lead to higher home prices (though possibly offset by other changes in the tax system).
Trump is a conservative – but that won't stop him sending deficits soaring Read more
But it is not just Trump’s proposed tax changes that plausibly affect market psychology. The US has never had a president like him. Not only is he an actor, like Ronald Reagan; he is also a motivational writer and speaker, a brand name in real estate, and a tough deal maker. If he ever reveals his financial information, or if his family is able to use his influence as president to improve its bottom line, he might even prove to be successful in business.
The closest we can come to Trump among former US presidents might be Calvin Coolidge, an extremely pro-business tax cutter. “The chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge famously declared, while his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon – one of America’s wealthiest men – advocated tax cuts for the rich, which would “trickle down” in benefits to the less fortunate.
The US economy during the Coolidge administration was very successful, but the boom ended badly in 1929, just after Coolidge stepped down, with the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. During the 1930s, the 1920s were looked upon wistfully, but also as a time of fakery and cheating.
Of course, history is never destiny, and Coolidge is only one observation – hardly a solid basis for a forecast. Moreover, unlike Trump, both Coolidge and Mellon were levelheaded and temperate in their manner.
But add to the Trump effect all the attention paid to Dow 20,000, and we have the makings of a powerful illusion. On 10 November 2016, two days after Trump was elected, the Dow Jones average hit a new record high – and has since set 16 more daily records, all trumpeted by news media.
That sounds like important news for Trump. In fact, the Dow had already hit nine record highs before the election, when Hillary Clinton was projected to win. In nominal terms, the Dow is up 70% from its peak in January 2000. On 29 November 2016, it was announced that the S&P/CoreLogic/Case-Shiller national home Price index (which I co-founded with my esteemed former colleague Karl E Case, who died last July) reached a record high the previous September. The previous record was set more than 10 years earlier, in July 2006.
But these numbers are illusory. The US has a policy of overall inflation. The US Federal Reserve has set an inflation “objective” of 2% in terms of the personal consumption expenditure deflator. This means all prices should tend to go up by about 2% per year, or 22% per decade.
The Dow is up only 19% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms since 2000. A 19% increase in 17 years is underwhelming, and the national home price index that Case and I created is still 16% below its 2006 peak in real terms. But hardly anyone focuses on these inflation-corrected numbers.
The Fed, like the world’s other central banks, is steadily debasing the currency to create inflation. A Google Ngrams search of books shows that use of the term “inflation-targeting” began growing exponentially in the early 1990s, when the target was typically far below actual inflation.
The idea that we actually want moderate positive inflation – “price stability,” not zero inflation – appears to have started to take shape in policy circles around the time of the 1990-91 recession. Lawrence Summers argued that the public has an “irrational” resistance to the declining nominal wages that some would have to suffer in a zero-inflation regime.
Many people appear not to understand that inflation is a change in the units of measurement. Unfortunately, though the 2% inflation target is largely a feelgood policy, people tend to draw too much inspiration from it. Irving Fisher called this fixation on nominal price growth the “money illusion” in an eponymous 1928 book.
That doesn’t mean that we set new speculative-market records every day. Stock-price movements tend to approximate what economists call “random walks,” with prices reflecting small daily shocks that are about equally likely to be positive or negative.
And random walks tend to go through long periods when they are well below their previous peak; the chance of setting a record soon is negligible, given how far prices would have to rise. But once they do reach a new record high, prices are far more likely to set additional records – probably not on consecutive days, but within a short interval.
In the US, the combination of Trump and a succession of new asset-price records – call it Trump-squared – has been sustaining the illusion underpinning current market optimism. For those who are not too stressed from having taken extreme positions in the markets, it will be interesting (if not profitable) to observe how the illusion morphs into a new perception – one that implies very different levels for speculative markets.
• Robert Shiller is a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics, professor of economics at Yale University and the co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index of US house prices. He is the author of Irrational Exuberance
© Project SyndicateCHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A study co-written by a University of Illinois business professor shows that higher wages are associated with lower levels of employee theft, shedding light on the impact that compensation practices have on shaping employee honesty and ethical norms in organizations.
Using data sets from the convenience-store industry, Clara Xiaoling Chen, a professor of accountancy, and co-author Tatiana Sandino, of the University of Southern California, found that after controlling for each store's employee characteristics, monitoring environment and socio-economic environment, relative wages - that is, wages relative to those received by other employees performing similar jobs in the same sector and region - were negatively associated with employee theft.
While previous studies have focused on the effect of higher wages on employee effort or turnover, Chen and Sandino document the effect of higher wages on employee theft as measured by cash shortage and inventory shrinkage.
"There's actually very little research on the effect of wages on employee theft," Chen said. "A seminal study conducted in the field has examined what happens after a firm cuts workers' pay. What's different in our paper is that there's no such shock as a pay cut, whose effect is typically short-lived and does not persist. The fact that we can document the relation in our study using cross-sectional data suggests that the effect of wages on employee theft can persist over time."
The researchers argue that paying relatively higher wages discourages employee theft for two reasons. First, employees receiving higher wages are less inclined to commit theft because they wish to retain their higher-paying job or as a gesture of positive reciprocity. Second, firms that offer relatively higher wages may attract a higher proportion of honest workers.
There is also a "wage tipping point" for employers to consider, when the cost of paying more toward employee wages is greater than the cost of employee theft.
"An interesting result of our study is that the benefit of reducing the amount of employee theft accounted for by cash shortage and inventory shrinkage does not, by itself, outweigh the cost of paying a wage premium," Chen said. "It accounts for about 39 percent of the cost of a wage increase. If you add other benefits like reduced turnover, reduced training costs and greater efforts, the benefits of paying a wage premium may outweigh the costs. So an employer may find it beneficial to raise employee wages if other benefits from wage increases translate into at least 61 percent of the cost of the wage increases."
The researchers also found that relatively higher wages promote social norms so that co-workers were less likely to collude to steal inventory.
"We show that the effect of relative wages on employee theft is more pronounced when there are multiple workers," Chen said. "Relative wages influence the type of norms that develop among the co-workers. So in industries or businesses that use multiple workers to staff a store or a retail outlet, it's even more beneficial to pay a wage premium."
Although compensation practices can shape the social context of a work group, Chen cautions that the study does have some limitations.
"The measures we used to capture employee theft are not perfect because, for instance, inventory shrinkage could also be a result of customer shoplifting," she said. "But it's the best we could get, because it's very difficult to get an exact measure of employee theft. That's why there needs to be more research done in this area."
The results of the study have important practical implications for managers, as employee theft accounts for $200 billion in losses for U.S. businesses annually.
"Our research provides systematic empirical evidence that wage premiums do play a role in reducing employee theft and fostering more ethical norms within an organization," Chen said. "The takeaways from our study are likely to apply to other types of retailers, such as restaurants, department stores and drug stores, and to service or consumer products firms with similar monitoring environments, where the payoffs from stealing are not disproportionately high relative to potential wage premiums."
If an employer can't afford to pay higher wages, Chen says there are other ways to induce positive reciprocity among employees.
"You can show that you care about the workers, and you can find other ways outside of compensation to recognize their efforts," she said. "Paying employees higher wages is not the only way to cultivate positive reciprocity, but it certainly is a good way to foster employee loyalty and honesty."
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The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Accounting Research.
Editor's note: To contact Clara Xiaoling Chen, call 217-244-3953; email [email protected].
The article, "Can Wages Buy Honesty? The Relationship Between Relative Wages and Employee Theft," is available online.The sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War culminates next month with 150-year-old images of City Hall draped in black. “The Nation Mourns,” a banner proclaims from the portico, and thousands of curious and inconsolable New Yorkers queue up to view the body of Abraham Lincoln for the last time.
The miserable war had not been the doing of fanatical agitators, said William H. Seward, the former governor of New York and the secretary of state under Lincoln. Rather, he wrote, “It is an irrepressible conflict, between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
In “An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War” (Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press), Robert Weible, Jennifer A. Lemak and Aaron Noble remind New Yorkers that as the historian Harold Holzer writes in his introduction, “No state provided more men, money or matériel for the Union cause.”
This richly illustrated and easily digestible catalog, which accompanied an exhibition of the New York State Museum, makes a strong case for New York’s Civil War primacy, even though Seward, New York’s favorite son, lost the 1860 Republican nomination to Lincoln.Have you walked into a LEGO Store looking for a particular set but end up finding out that it is an exclusive set to another store? One example is The Penguin Arctic Roller (70911) which is actually a Target exclusive so you can only find that set there.
After many customer complaints, what I am hearing is that there will no longer be store exclusives and LEGO Stores will start carrying all the sets from a particular wave. This means that stores like Target, Walmart, and Toys R Us will no longer be the place to go for one set. Of course you can buy the set on [email protected] but if you’re already at a LEGO Store, why wait for shipping on it.
There’s no word on when the change will take effect but I’m already seeing the Arkham Asylum (70912) at LEGO Stores which was previously a Toys R Us exclusive.This post may contain referral/affiliate links. If you buy something, MSA may earn a commission. Read the full disclosure
We have FULL SPOILERS for the December 2016 Ipsy glam bag!
First, subscribers will receive one of the following in their shipment:
And here is a better look at the actual bag:
It doubles as a wristlet going-out clutch!
And here is the list of full spoilers thanks to Wonder of Glam! (Thanks for the heads up, Morgan!)
Here are all the items that will be sampled in the Ipsy 2016 December Glam Bag:
What do you think of the December 2016 Ipsy Glam Bag spoilers? What items are you hoping to get in your Glam Bag?
If you are new to Ipsy, it is a $10 a month beauty and makeup subscription box. Check out all of our Ipsy reviews to see what’s been in past boxes.
And check out our list of the 15 Beauty Boxes To Try in 2016, and all reviews of Cheap Subscription Boxes to find other subscriptions with similar price points to Ipsy!
Liz is the founder of My Subscription Addiction. She’s been hooked on subscription boxes since 2011 thanks to Birchbox, and she now subscribes to over 100 boxes. Her favorites include POPSUGAR Must Have FabFitFun, and any box that features natural beauty products!An international court opened on Thursday its judgement hearing for Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor, accused of arming Sierra Leone’s rebels who paid him in “blood diamonds”.
Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, Taylor listened attentively and made notes as judge Richard Lussick started reading a summary of the verdict — the first against a former head of state by a world court since the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.
The verdict was also being screened at the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s main headquarters in the west African country’s capital Freetown, from where his case was moved in 2006 over security fears.
Taylor, 64, is accused of helping Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels wage a terror campaign during a civil war that claimed 120,000 lives between 1991 and 2001.
The trial being held just outside The Hague, which saw modelNaomi Campbell testify she had received diamonds from the flamboyant Taylor, wrapped up in March 2011. If found guilty, Taylor could be sentenced in four to six weeks.
Prosecutors alleged that the RUF paid Taylor with illegally mined so-called blood diamonds worth millions, stuffed into mayonnaise jars.
During the trial, prosecutor Brenda Hollis told the court: “Charles Taylor created, armed, supported and controlled the RUF in a 10-year campaign of terror against the civil population of Sierra Leone.”
As president of neighbouring Liberia, he acted as “chief, father and godfather to his proxy rebel forces in Sierra Leone,” prosecutors added.
The former warlord has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, dismissing the allegations as “lies” and claiming to be the victim of a plot by “powerful countries.”
During Taylor’s trial which began proper on June 4, 2007, some 94 witnesses took the stand for the prosecution and 21 for the defence. Taylor himself testified for 81 hours.
Campbell and actress Mia Farrow gave headline-grabbing evidence in August 2010 about a gift of “dirty” diamonds Taylor gave to Campbell at a charity dinner hosted by then South African president Nelson Mandela in 1997.
Judges also heard gruesome testimony from victims of the Sierra Leone conflict, including a witness who said he pleaded with RUF rebels to cut off his remaining hand so they would spare his toddler son.
Others said Taylor’s fighters strung human intestines across roads, removed foetuses from women’s wombs and practised cannibalism, while children younger than 15 were enlisted to fight.
One witness said he was present when the Liberian leader ate human liver.
During his own testimony, which began in July 2009, Taylor called the trial a “sham” and denied allegations he ever ate human flesh.
In Freetown, victims who had their limbs butchered during the conflict listened intently as Lussick read his verdict.
“We as victims expect that Taylor will be given 100 years or more in prison,” said Al Hadji Jusu Jarka, a former chairman of the Amputees Association, his prosthetic arms folded in his lap.
Jusu Jarka then described how he lost both his arms when rebels held him down on the root of a mango tree and cut off first the left, and then the right, just above the elbow.
Meanwhile in Liberia, police reinforcements were deployed on the streets of the capital Monrovia alongside UN peacekeepers. The government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on Wednesday appealed for calm.
There is still great bitterness in Liberia where atrocities Taylor caused as warlord and president have gone unpunished.
Nigerian authorities arrested Taylor in March 2006 when he tried to flee from exile in Nigeria after stepping down as Liberian president three years earlier in a negotiated end to a civil war in his own country.
He was transferred to the SCSL in Freetown, but in June 2006 a UN Security Council resolution cleared the way for him to be transferred to The Hague, saying his presence in west Africa was an “impediment to stability and a threat to the peace.”
The court, set up jointly by the Sierra Leone government and the United Nations, has already convicted eight Sierra Leoneans of war crimes and jailed them for between 15 and 52 years after trials in Freetown.Eighty-four percent of Koreans in their 20s and 30s believe no political party speaks for them, according to a recent poll.
The survey was conducted in June and July among 1,202 people between 20 and 39 by Prof. Yun Won-cheol of Hanyang University's College of Economics and Finance for the Office of the Minister for Special Affairs. It was submitted to Democratic Party lawmaker Chun Hye-sook on Tuesday.
Some 38.5 percent said they like none of the existing political parties because they doubt the effectiveness of the party system itself. Some 29.1 percent said they dislike political parties because they only incite strife, and 27.7 percent said because what they do has nothing to do with the interests of voters.
Asked if they considered voting a duty, 43.6 percent of respondents in their 20s and 41.4 percent of those in their 30s said yes.
Some 17.1 percent each said they will not vote because they are disappointed with politics and because they doubt voting makes any difference.Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is primarily engaged in Research & Development activities in the area of space technology and its applications. All the commercial activities related to space technology are managed by Antrix Corporation Limited, the commercial arm of Department of Space.
Antrix Corporation Limited has been generating commercial income. The details for the last five financial years are given below:
(Rs in crores)
Financial Year 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 (un-audited) Turnover 1113.58 1180.60 1295.28 1608.72 1860.71 Net Profit 138.86 170.98 177.07 200.50 205.10 Dividend 27.78 34.20 35.42 40.10 41.12 Net Worth 670.15 801.39 937.02 1087.35 1238.46
This information was given by the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh in reply to unstarred question in Rajya Sabha today.
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NK/KMThere’s still a lot of work to be done on the equality front, but a new survey suggests that about a quarter of legal weed businesses are owned or were founded by women.
America’s cannabis industry is expanding exponentially in both physical and financial size, but legal weed is still very much in its infancy stage. And as the market grows from coast to coast, and boardroom to boardroom, so too has the industry’s diversity. And while there is still a lot of work to be done in creating spaces for people of color and those from diverse backgrounds, a new survey from Marijuana Business Daily suggests that American cannabis is already well ahead of traditional business when it comes to the percentage of companies founded and owned by women.
As a part of MJBiz Daily’s deep dive into diversity and cannabis, the study’s authors surveyed “567 self-identified marijuana industry senior executives and owners/founders” and found that over 25% of the ganjapreneurs were women, a significantly higher figure than the national business average.
Comparatively, the latest Fortune 500 list boasted a record high 32 female CEOs, or 6.4% of the list. Across the country, women founded or own roughly 20% of all businesses.
In the cannabis industry, though, those numbers may be higher, but there are still some glaring inconsistencies. While women occupy over 40% of the owner and/or founder positions at ancillary cannabis businesses, companies that deal directly with the plant itself are still overwhelmingly started by and owned by men.
As women have found huge amounts of success in marijuana-adjacent businesses such as industry specific marketing agencies, public relations, law firms, consulting firms, add-on products and countless others, they are the least present in cannabis’ rapidly growing investment sector, which might indicate a holdover from the financial industry’s traditionally masculine Wall Street origins.
Still, women are gaining an increased foothold in businesses of all types, and it appears that the cannabis industry will be a leader in that long overdue shift.Composer Bear McCreary — known for Black Sails, Outlander, and The Walking Dead — recently spoke to Inverse. The full interview will come out shortly, but as a teaser, he spilled the following tidbits about his most recent project, the mysterious J.J. Abrams helmed Cloverfield follow-up 10 Cloverfield Lane.
“I knew that there was a sense of scale and orchestral quality that has always been in J.J’s projects,” McCreary told Inverse. “Nevertheless, I was still wonderfully and pleasantly surprised at how far he pushed me towards making a big orchestral score for what is a very tense, intimate, claustrophobic thriller.”
McCreary added, “The movie is fantastic, and one of the things I wanted to do was bring a lot of exotic colors to it. So in addition to having a full orchestra at my disposal, I experimented with something I’ve looked for an excuse to play my whole life: a Blaster Beam, an experimental string instrument that was built in the ‘70s by a man named Craig Huxley. He played it most famously on the score of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
“In all these outer space shots, you heard this booming, echoing deep sound,” said McCreary. “It was a Blaster Beam. It’s an acoustic instrument. It’s not an electric instrument, and more importantly, it’s not an electronic instrument. I’ve wanted to write for Blaster Beam my whole life, and actually found Craig Huxely. He was very generous with his time and energy, and played Blaster Beam on the score to 10 Cloverfield Lane. It was really exciting.”
Anyone who has seen Black Sails and its world-shattering opening credits should not be surprised that, in addition to being as far-out as Star Trek, McCreary’s score for 10 Cloverfield Lane will also be grand.
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“I also filled an entire recording studio with cellos,” says McCreary. “It was the deepest, heaviest, punchiest sound. The sound of 10 Cloverfield Lane is deep and dark and ominous and thunderous. I had all these interesting sounds and this big orchestra, and the director Dan Trachtenberg and J.J. Abrams really pushed me to make a score that really stood out. I’m excited to see what the fan response is. It’s a really cool film.”
Look out for Inverse’s full interview with McCreary — in which he talks Black Sails, Outlander, and The Walking Dead — coming out on the 15th.
10 Cloverfield Lane hits theaters on the 11th.• England forward has been out since end of April with knee injury • Alexis Sánchez in line to play against Crystal Palace
Arsène Wenger has expressed unease over the prolonged and complicated knee injury of Danny Welbeck. The England forward has been out of action since the end of April, and despite an initial diagnosis of a minor problem has missed 16 weeks and is not yet able to participate in full training. He is still restricted to gym work.
“It is much slower than expected,” the Arsenal manager said. “It was a bone bruising at the start. You think that it will be quite quick. He is an important player for us and the fact that he is not available is a bit of a concern.”
With the relationship between managers and medics currently so newsworthy, Wenger was asked whether the ongoing predicament was the fault of the doctors. “Maybe,” he said, chuckling. Joking apart, he is frustrated it is taking Welbeck, a deadline-day signing from Manchester United last summer, so long to regain fitness.
There is no sense that any kind of surgery is needed or would be particularly helpful. “That is what I have been told,” Wenger said. “It is bone bruising and nothing wrong at all. They have done all kinds of scans that today are very sophisticated and some of them I don’t understand at all. But they tell me no.”
Not for the first time for Arsenal in recent years, a player is suffering from an injury that is somewhat inexplicable. Wenger is thankful, therefore, to have a player on the other end of the fitness spectrum at his disposal in the seemingly super-powered Alexis Sánchez. The Chilean attacker is in contention to start Sunday’s game at Crystal Palace with Arsenal in dire need of a pick-me-up. After a short pre-season in the aftermath of the Copa América Sánchez is, according to Wenger, in reliable shape.
“He works extremely hard in every single training session to show that he is ready,” the Frenchman said. “It is what everybody should do. You wonder if he has created a beach at home and runs along the living room. He is a hyperactive guy. He needs that to be happy.
“He came back reasonably fit. He practised for two weeks before he came back. He did not start from zero.
“He is very ambitious, Alexis. He wants to win. He knows he won the FA Cup, he knows he won the Community Shield, he wants now to look to get more. And he is a winner |
though the document bears his name and signature.
“There were consultations between multiple government departments and the Privy Council Office designated National Defence as the office that would respond on behalf of the Government,” Owens stated. “This was not Minister Sajjan’s decision; he was conveying a government decision.”
What Sajjan told Dawson is different than the details he gave to Maloney, the military historian. Conversations with the ethics commissioner typically remain private, but in a Feb. 27 letter obtained by the National Post, Dawson summarized her conversation with the defence minister: “Mr. Sajjan informed me that he was deployed as a reservist to Afghanistan where he was responsible for capacity building with local police forces. At no time was he involved in the transfer of Afghan detainees, nor did he have any knowledge relating to the matter,” she wrote.
With files from Zane Schwartz
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: davidpugliese
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Sep. 18, 2014, 9:05 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 18, 2014, 9:06 PM GMT
Think the world is crowded now? The population will probably hit 11 billion by 2100, according to new estimates. That’s 2 billion more people than original United Nations estimates, which showed population peaking in 2050 and then falling. It’s the first forecast based on modern science, as opposed to older ways of projecting population growth. Most of the growth will be in Africa, and it could lead to shortages of food, fuel and housing if economic and social development isn’t accelerated there. “Population, which had sort of fallen off the world's agenda, remains a very important issue,” says Adrian Raftery of the University of Washington, who worked on the new forecast published in the journal Science.
Populations across Africa will triple from about 1 billion people to 4 billion by the beginning of the next century, the University of Washington team says. Asia — home to population leaders India and China — will see growth fall off after peaking at 5 billion people in 2050. North America, South America, Europe and the Caribbean will all stay relatively uncrowded with populations below 1 billion. But many countries will have growing populations of elderly people, with ever-fewer young adults to support them. The world's population didn't reach 1 billion until 1804. It took 123 years to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. This doubled to 4 billion in 1974 and it hit 7 billion a year ago.
IN-DEPTH
— Maggie FoxDelta
As holiday air travel starts to ramp up and the Federal Communications Commission just took the first step in easing restrictions on in-flight calls, Delta airlines wants to be certain no cell phone conversations will be taking place on its planes.
The company's CEO Richard Anderson penned a memo to its 80,000 employees on Wednesday to say no way to up-in-the-air chatting.
"Delta will not allow cellular calls or internet-based voice communications onboard Delta or Delta Connection flights," Anderson wrote. "A clear majority of customers who responded to a 2012 survey said they felt the ability to make voice calls onboard would detract from -- not enhance -- their experience. Delta employees, particularly our in-flight crews, have told us definitively that they are not in favor of voice calls onboard."
The possibility of passengers making cell phone calls while aboard airplanes could be on the near horizon. Last week, the FCC voted to approve a measure that will open up for public comment a proposal that will lift the technical ban on in-flight cell phone use.
However, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler did say during the meeting that it will ultimately be up to the airlines whether they allow people to talk on their phones during flights.
While some airlines, like Dubai-based carrier Emirates, already allow in-flight cell phone talking, it's not likely air travel will eventually be filled with people yapping on their phones.
Besides Delta, Southwest and Virgin America have also said that they aren't inclined to allow in-flight calls, according to The Wall Street Journal. Despite Delta giving the thumbs down to in-flight cell phone talking, Anderson said he is happy to accommodate customers that want to use "silent data transmission," like e-mail and texting.SAN DIEGO (CBS 8) - One of the first babies born in 2017 did not come into the world alone, her twin sister was born four minutes earlier in 2016.
The twin girls were born at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Newborns in Kearny Mesa.
One girl was born at 11:56 p.m. on December 31 and the second was born on January 1, 2017 at midnight.
The family was not available for comment at this time.
Last year, a baby girl and boy arrived one minute before and two minutes after the New Year.
Jaelyn Valencia was born at 11:59 p.m. New Year's Eve at San Diego Kaiser Permanente Zion Medical Center in Mission Valley. Jaelyn's little brother, Luis, arrived at 12:02 a.m. New Year's Day.
The twins were born to mother Maribel, 22, and her husband, Luis Valencia.
At Scripps La Jolla, Sloane Kathryn Flynn was welcomed to the world in 2017. She was born at 12:00 a.m. to proud parents Kyle and Autumn Flynn of 4S Ranch.
RELATED COVERAGE:THESE DAYS, 20-year-olds need amazing resumes just to get unpaid internships; 30-year-olds either are underemployed or work nonstop, terrified if they leave the office early, they might get fired; 40-year-olds look over their shoulders convinced that somebody younger and cheaper is after their job. A generation or two ago, most people had staff jobs allowing them to count on a steady income. Now more and more of us are freelance, vacation pay or sick leave a thing of the past. If we screw up or get injured or even just annoy a superior, the corporation doesn’t have to fire us — it just forgets our name and hires somebody else. Risk has shifted from the firm to the individual. In a good year we freelancers manage to pay our bills but none of us can feel certain of the future. We worry that next year our wages could collapse. Who is better off: you or your parents when they were your age?
This is not as easy a question as it seems. Today we are better fed, more fashionably clothed, and more extravagantly entertained than any humans in history. Your parents didn’t have Tinder or iPhones or access to every television show ever made — but the professional security they took for granted is long gone. This is the paradox of the 21st century. On the one hand, tastier food, cooler clothes, better toys are cheaper than ever before. On the other, professionally, many of us are tightrope-walking over a cliff.
Economic insecurity has been growing for so long we have become inured to it, but it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be a fan of Charles Bukowski to notice he never had a hard time finding a job. Usually drunk, utterly unreliable, in his autobiographical stories from the 1950s, he’d get hired, skip work or show up late, go out for a liquid lunch and never come back, and it would be weeks until his boss cottoned on and got rid of him. And getting fired was no big deal. The drunken layabout would get hired somewhere else pretty much straight away. Today, a man with Bukowski’s work ethic, bellicose attitude toward authority, and penchant for alcoholic obliteration would be dumpster-diving rather than so easily finding gainful employment.
Once upon a time, before you were born, there was a Golden Age. You didn’t need an amazing resume to find a job. Even the lazy and ignorant got hired. And best of all, pay kept going up. One man working an ordinary job could support his entire family in middle class splendor. And he didn’t have to work all that hard. Office workers left on the dot of five and factory workers got paid overtime. Getting drunk at work, if not de rigure, was certainly commonplace. And still everybody made more money than his or her parents. Everybody lived better than they had dreamed possible when they were kids.
Corporations hired more than fired. Firms were happy to train new workers. A 30-year-old saw his earnings double by the time he hit 50. If you gave your youth to the firm, they generally took care of you until you retired. And when you did retire, your pension, which both the government and your employer recognized as your earned and sacrosanct right, was safe and generous. Millions escaped poverty. The middle class grew and grew until it was almost everybody. Inequality shrank.
This isn’t a fairy tale. Economic historians call the post-war years, 1950 to 1973, the Golden Age because those were the years the US and world economy grew faster than ever before or since. Neoliberalism’s dirty secret is that its policies don’t work that well. It isn’t just since the financial crisis that growth has been stagnant. Even the boom was mediocre. The best year since the election of Ronald Reagan was 1999, when the economy grew an impressive 4.8 percent. Sounds good until you realize that economic growth was higher in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Even the 1970s, a byword for stagflation and economic turmoil, saw better growth than any decade since.
According to today’s conventional wisdom, the policies of the Golden Age should have doomed our economy to pathetic performance. Tax rates were spectacularly high, regulation was omnipresent, unions were strong, the financial sector miniscule. And yet the economy grew faster, with fewer recessions during the Golden Age than even during the best days of our late misbegotten boom.
If such impressive growth had occurred during our current pro-business era, we would be seeing books proclaiming how empirical evidence supports the Reagan/Thatcher consensus. The Economist would have a special section congratulating neoliberal theorists on their good sense. Instead, it was the more egalitarian, more worker-friendly era that provided spectacular growth.
The success of the Golden Age was based on a feedback loop where strong consumer demand increased corporate profits, which stimulated investment, which increased productivity and so allowed higher wages, leading to even more consumer demand.
Let’s begin with demand. World War II put money in workers’ pockets, but rationing meant they couldn’t spend it. After four years of war and 10 years of depression, the American working class was filled to the brim with unsatisfied needs. With money in their pockets, they were ready to spend. In 1939, a quarter of American homes didn’t have running water, 35 percent didn’t have flush toilet, half didn’t have a phone. Close to 50 percent of all Americans still cooked on wood or coal fired stoves and more than half had iceboxes rather than refrigerators. In the fundamentally closed economy of 1945, that demand was expended on domestic manufacturers. So worker demand generated sales, boosting corporate profits. With demand high and profits rising, corporations invested in increasing productive capacity.
These days, we think the word investment means buying a house and hoping its price goes up, or buying a stock and waiting for a bigger fool. Traditionally, however investment implies the purchase of capital goods in order to make workers more productive. Buy me a computer, I can write faster (and better) than with a quill pen. Give a steel worker a modern factory, he can make more steel than he can with an anvil, forge, and hammer. Increasing the ratio of capital per worker means that each worker will be able to produce more.
During the Golden Age, productivity gains, created by corporate investment, quickly translated into higher salaries for workers. And as worker salaries rose, so did aggregate demand. Workers were able to produce more, but since their wages were also rising, they were able to afford to buy all their extra production. Here is the feedback loop: consumer demand—>higher corporate profits—>more investment—>higher productivity—>higher wages—>increased consumer demand.
Today, productivity continues it unstoppable rise but wages no longer move up in step. Since the financial crisis, close to 95 percent of the benefits of productivity gains have gone into the pockets of the top 1 percent. And since the rich don’t have to spend all their income, inequality drains the system of demand. Our problem today is that with wages stagnant but productivity increasing, the economy’s ability to supply far exceeds workers’ ability to consume. Our problem is we can make more goods and services than our underpaid workers can afford to purchase. Supply outstrips demand.
Every year, technology advances, making labor more productive. That means we can make more stuff with fewer hours of work. During the Golden Age wages rose along with productivity. As workers got paid more, they could afford to buy the extra goods and services they were able to make. But since Reagan and Thatcher, wage gains have become divorced from productivity gains.
Barry Eichengreen, the foremost economic historian of the Golden Age in Europe, tells us the essential source of Golden Age growth was a social pact between labor and management — a deal by which workers would not demand wage increases greater than productivity increases, while firms would forgo large dividends and instead invest profits in labor-enhancing capital goods.
Everybody wins. Firms invest, workers become more productive, their wages rise commensurately, which increases their spending power, which raises corporate profits, allowing further investment in capital goods. Workers get richer but so do shareholders.
In the 1970s this social pact fell apart. After the war, workers were grateful for any job. Prosperity increased far faster than anyone expected. But after a few decades, workers became complacent and demanded more. 1970s inflation can be seen as a battle between labor and capital as to which would pay the cost of the OPEC oil price increase. In the 1970s, labor, especially organized labor, won. Wages went up more than inflation.
Owners of capital, however, did very badly. If you had bought stocks in 1966, by 1982 you would have lost ¾ of your inflation-adjusted capital. Owners of bonds did even worse. Inflation murdered bondholders: interest rates were lower than the inflation rate. And corporate profitability continued to fall.
Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain can best be understood as the counterattack of capital. In 1980, they raised interest rates until the economy screamed, engineering the most brutal recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment and bankruptcies soared. Both union and business leaders pleaded for a rate cut. But Volcker in America and Lawson in Britain were implacable: cutting inflation was worth the pain. When they fear for their jobs, workers don’t ask for cost of living increases. And so the 1980s recession broke the back of worker power and also broke the back of inflation. It fell from 14 percent in 1980 to 3 percent in 1983 and has stayed low ever since.
Reagan and Thatcher also went after the legal basis of union power. By crushing the air traffic controllers here and the miners’ union in Britain, they showed all organized workers they were not indispensable. If air controllers could go on strike and get fired, and planes didn’t fall out of the sky, then union truck drivers, factory workers, and cameramen were forced to recognize they too could be replaced.
Before Reagan and Thatcher, wages went up steadily, but corporate profits were falling. After, corporate profits rebounded but wages did not. On a micro level, cutting wages is a brilliant way to raise profits. Pay your workers less, shareholders get to keep more. But since workers are also consumers, on a macro level, stagnant wages mean consumers will spend less.
The key macro economic dilemma of the Reagan-Thatcher era was how to maintain demand despite stagnant wages. The answer, as all of us know, was increased debt. Private sector debt as a percentage of GDP more than doubled between 1982 and 2007. By borrowing more, consumers were able to keep spending even as their wages stopped rising.
The financial crisis destroyed this unstable paradigm. Banks stopped lending, overstretched consumers started paying back rather than increasing their debts. Our economic policy makers keep shoveling money towards the banking sector, hoping it will trickle down to the rest of us. They hope to manufacture another bubble, so we can party like it is 2005. So far it isn’t working.
The truth is that the 30-year-old Reagan-Thatcher economic paradigm is well past its sell by date. From 1982 to 2007, low interest rates, higher asset prices, and increased borrowing allowed demand to grow even as wages did not. But today debt-fueled consumption is no longer sufficient to create enough demand to keep the global economy growing. We can do better. Remember Golden Age policies created faster, steadier, and more equitable growth than the neoliberal Reagan-Thatcher policies that replaced them.
For those of us harkening back to the Golden Age, the obvious solution then is higher wages. Progressive politicians regularly call for an increased minimum wage or for a living wage. The problem, unfortunately, is that today we need fewer workers. The drunken Bukowski was able to get work because workers were in short supply. Employers were desperate for workers. In America, Mississippi sharecroppers moved north to assembly line jobs. The Germans imported Turks, the British imported West Indians, the French imported Algerians. The multicultural Europe of today is founded on post-war labor scarcity.
Today, technology is rapidly eliminating jobs. According to Martin Ford, in his fascinating Rise of the Robots, 47 percent of all current jobs could be eliminated by automation and smart software within the next two decades.
Here then is our dilemma: Technological progress allows us to make more stuff with fewer workers. Without workers getting paid, we cannot afford to buy all the stuff we are able to make. And if we force firms to pay workers more, they will automate even faster, eliminating more jobs and so further starving consumer demand.
There is a solution. It is relatively painless but it does require a rethink of many of our economic assumptions. Technology and capitalism have largely solved the problem of supply. We are more productive, able to create goods and services with less labor and capital than ever before. Our only problem is creating enough demand to absorb all we are able to supply. In Part II of this essay, I will explain how we can create a new Golden Age.
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Tom Streithorst has been a union member, an entrepreneur, a war cameraman, a commercials director, a journalist.At first glance, Narendra Modi’s demonetisation carpet bomb may seem to have wreaked havoc on all areas of the Indian economy, at least in the short-to-medium term. However, a closer look reveals that some sectors may have hit the jackpot in the Indian prime minister’s gamble.
At the ground level, Indians have been left stranded without cash and the economy is expected to be hit hard, though no one really knows how hard. Various agencies have now pegged GDP growth for financial year 2017 at anywhere between 3.5% and 7%, much below the pre-demonetisation estimates.
Sectors reeling under the currency ban include manufacturing and those tied to consumer demand. The liquidity crunch has forced manufacturers to halt operations as new orders turn into a trickle. Consumers have been cautious in spending, hurting consumer goods firms.
Yet, demonetisation augurs well for a few industries, albeit in the long-term for some. Here’s taking a look at the lucky ones.
Banks
Demonetisation has been to Indian banking what the Fairy Godmother was to Cinderella.
The rush to save unaccounted wealth by depositing the hitherto hoarded Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes in bank accounts has led to a surge in fund inflows for the lenders.
A higher deposit base gives banks enough elbow room to manage daily treasury operations efficiently and, in turn, operate at higher margins. Banks could gain as much as Rs38,200 crore due to increased liquidity, according to India Ratings and Research, a credit-rating agency and a unit of Fitch Ratings.
“The development comes at a time when the banking sector is facing challenging conditions. The profitability levels of Indian banks remain weak owing to continued pressure on asset quality and weak loan expansion. It would be imperative for banks starved for capital to strengthen their capital adequacy ratios,” a December note from India Ratings said.
However, experts are concerned about the sustainability of these gains. “The question is how many banks will be able to retain these substantial deposits, since we don’t have the final deposit numbers yet,” explained Abhishek Bhattacharya, associate director and co-head, banking and finance, India Ratings. The quantum of currency under circulation will soon inch up, which means the huge deposit base will shrink correspondingly, he said.
There already has been a drop in bank deposits compared to the levels immediately after demonetisation. Additionally, Bhattacharya explained that these deposits can only mask the larger problems plaguing the banking industry, like toxic assets, in the short-term. In the long-term, the problems at the crux still need a solution.
Mutual funds
Millions of Indians are now expected to park their funds in various investment vehicles. Many households will look to invest the cash lying with them to avoid future investigations. And mutual funds (MF) are said to be a favourite.
“We believe people will no longer be investing in real estate and gold, and rather put their money in capital markets, including mutual funds. However, it will happen over a period of time,” Aashish P Sommaiyaa, MD and CEO of Motilal Oswal Asset Management Company told the Economic Times in November. Investors are not favouring gold as an asset class because of fears that income tax authorities could crack a whip on investments in the yellow metal soon.
“It is expected that deposits of over Rs10 trillion will come to the banking system due to the demonetisation move and we do hope that 10% of this amount will move to the industry,” G Pradeep Kumar, MD of Union KBC Mutual Fund, said in November. The MF industry currently manages Rs17 lakh crore worth of assets. Demonetisation will only take it higher.
Some, like UTI Mutual Fund managing director Leo Puri, also expect new consumer classes such as housewives, who’ve traditionally kept savings in cash, to now turn to mutual funds.
Sugar
Demonetisation, combined with the good monsoon in 2016, has brought relief to the sugar industry which was staring at competition from imported stocks.
Prices had remained firmed up over the past few years due to the poor monsoon. With demand remaining high, especially from bulk buyers such as beverage makers and the pharmaceutical sector, various lobbies had sought a cut in the import duty on sugar.
However, now, demonetisation is expected to bring down demand. Moreover, 2016 saw a good monsoon. “We have a situation where domestic consumption is declining and a bumper crop is expected next year,” Tarun Sawhney, vice-chairman at Triveni Engineering & Industries, which owns seven sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh, told Business Standard newspaper.
In such a scenario, any demand for imports will hardly carry much weight.
Meanwhile, stocks of sugar companies have been inching upwards, despite the low demand as prices haven’t been impacted much yet.
Power
India’s power sector, faced with serious capacity constraints for years, could certainly receive a much-needed boost.
Much of that is because a large number of consumers suddenly began paying up dues in the demonetised currency, something the Modi government had allowed until Dec. 31. “DISCOMs are expecting a substantial influx of payments prior to the Dec. 31 deadline after which these currency notes will become invalid,” energy consulting firm Mercom said last month. “For cash-strapped DISCOMs this is unexpected good news.”
Then, there is also the belief that the influx of money into banks could bring down key interest rates, allowing more lending in the sector.
Mercom also quoted an official at the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company (MSEDCL) as saying that state power distribution companies had seen payments of old bills worth Rs100 crore ($14.74 million) within a week of demonetisation.
Digital payments
The biggest boost the Modi government’s gamble gave was to digital payments.
E-wallets have seen business swell. For instance. Paytm, the largest startup in the sector, has seen daily transactions triple to 7.5 million since demonetisation while Mobikwik, another such platform, saw a 400% growth in transactions. The government’s own digital payment application, BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money), launched on Dec. 30, has seen five million downloads and 700,000 transactions so far. BHIM even topped the Google Play Store in India on Jan. 04.
India’s digital payment industry is estimated to reach $2.4 billion (pdf) by 2020, up from $1.2 billion in 2016, according to Nasscom. Asia’s third-largest economy has one of the world’s highest cash-to-GDP ratios and just last year, 78% of all consumer payments were made by cash, while it was between 20% and 25% in developed nations.
Some $500 billion worth of transactions are expected to take place digitally by 2020 in India—nearly 10 times the existing rate, according to a report by Google India and The Boston Consulting Group.
Telecom
As more and more Indians switch to e-payments and use mobile phones, it’s happy days ahead for IT and telecom firms—hardware as well as software. Although demonetisation may hit revenues and profitability right now, in the long run, a cashless economy will only benefit telecom firms, experts said.
“We will see a huge demand for handsets and in ensuring technology,” Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at CARE Ratings, said. “IT companies and telecom sector will certainly see a boost as a result of digital payments. Also, handset makers will likely benefit, as the government pushes for more mobile banking.”Several Hollywood studios have persuaded a judge to grant an injunction against the family-friendly video streaming service VidAngel, which censors explicit content in movies for its customers.
Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Disney filed suit against the Utah-based company earlier this year, arguing that its practice of editing out content that viewers might find objectionable is a violation of copyright law. Federal judge Andre Birotte Jr. granted the motion for an injunction on Monday.
Should the ruling stand, VidAngel would have to remove studio content from the service. VidAngel said in a blog post that it plans to appeal the ruling.
Part of the reason studios are especially antsy about VidAngel is because they fear it could affect their bottom line. Users actually pay $20 for a physical disc through VidAngel, which then streams a cleansed version. After viewing, the viewer sells it back to the company for $19, meaning they’ve effectively paid $1 to watch a movie.
As the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, streaming certain movies (like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) before they’ve been released on services like Netflix “could undercut [Hollywood’s] windowing system.”Steve Forbes has a message for a nation dominated by increasingly short-term decisions made on Wall Street and in Washington D.C., and by ever greater economic, financial and currency instability. As long as America continues moving away from sound money; away from sound financial and economic policies; and, ultimately, away from freedom, its future grows more dim. The dot-com and housing bubbles followed by the 2008 financial crisis and the most severe economic decline since the Great Depression serve as powerful lessons. A future of bigger government, higher taxes, more burdensome regulations, less consumer choice and more unrealistic government promises requires more and more Federal Reserve play money.
Steve Forbes has a quintessentially American policy prescription rooted in American history. The answer to America’s economic problems is—and has always been—new wealth creation. New wealth creation doesn’t come from the government or from the Federal Reserve’s printing press. New wealth creation is what happens naturally with stable money based on the gold standard, lower taxes on individuals, a simplified tax code, reduced bureaucracy and free markets.
Interview: Steve Forbes: How To Bring Back America
The Hera Research Newsletter is pleased to present an incredibly powerful interview with Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media. The company’s flagship publication, FORBES, is the leading business magazine. Combined with international and licensee editions, FORBES reaches more than 6 million readers worldwide. The Forbes.com website is a leading destination for senior business decision-makers and investors with more than 30 million unique visitors per month.
Hera Research Newsletter (HRN): Thank you for joining us today. With the U.S. economy struggling to recover from recession and financial crisis, what policies would you recommend?
Steve Forbes: The only way to recover is to stabilize our money, have a gold backed dollar, simplified tax code and return to a free market.
HRN: You advocate the gold standard?
Steve Forbes: If there’s any better system to ensure a stable value for money, it’s yet to be found. For nearly all of America’s first 200 years, the dollar was linked to gold. Since we went off the gold standard, we’ve had more and more financial, economic and banking crises. For example, if the Federal Reserve hadn’t started to print so much money ten years ago, we wouldn’t have experienced the housing bust or the commodities boom or the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. Eventually, events become a persuasive teacher.
HRN: Don’t we need a flexible money supply?
Steve Forbes: That’s like saying that changing the number of minutes in an hour would be a great tool to increase productivity in the economy. Manipulating weights and measures, whether it’s the number of ounces in a pound or minutes in an hour, is a false way to think that you can achieve prosperity. All gold does is serve as a yardstick to measure the value of your currency.
HRN: Doesn’t increasing the money supply help to stimulate the economy?
Steve Forbes: The only way to increase prosperity is through innovation and productivity. Attempts to manipulate the value of money invariably fail. We’ve had numerous devaluations, and not once has it created lasting prosperity.
HRN: Under the gold standard, would there still be a lender of last resort to backstop the banking system?
Steve Forbes: The gold standard doesn’t prevent lending during a panic. The Bank of England pioneered acting as a lender of last resort in the 1860s under the gold standard.
HRN: Wouldn’t the gold standard prevent financial innovation?
Steve Forbes: No. Financial innovation has been with us for hundreds of years in terms of new financial instruments to meet expanding needs as the global economy becomes more complex. Many of the innovations of recent years, however, have come about in response to the instability of the dollar and other currencies, which has increased volatility in currency and commodity markets. New instruments have been designed either as insurance against volatility or to take advantage of it. If you had stable money, there would be much less hedging and financial speculation.
HRN: Can governments function under the gold standard?
Steve Forbes: Certain countries feel free to spend money whether they have it or not. Fiat money, which can just be printed up, has disguised the real cost. We would never have experienced the kind of government borrowing we’ve had in recent years if we’d had stable money. The gold standard would keep the government honest.
HRN: Doesn’t government deficit spending smooth over recessions?
Steve Forbes: The bottom line for the U.S. is that a weak dollar means a weak recovery. Stability is good for the economy. The simplest thing to do is to re-link the U.S. dollar to gold.
HRN: Wouldn’t that tie the hands of the Federal Reserve?
Steve Forbes: Tie their hands to do what, further harm to the economy? I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
HRN: Isn’t the price of gold volatile like other commodities?
Steve Forbes: The reason to return to the gold standard is that gold maintains a stable, intrinsic value over time. Stable money meets all conditions. Gold doesn’t change in value. Currencies change in value. Gold is Polaris.
HRN: How would re-linking the U.S. dollar to gold work?
Steve Forbes: You simply peg the value of the dollar to gold. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you peg the dollar to gold at $1,600 per ounce. If gold goes above $1,600, you tighten up on money creation. If it goes below $1,600, you ease up. You keep it around $1,600 by tightening or easing up on money creation. The gold standard doesn’t preclude a booming economy having more money or a stagnant economy having less money.
HRN: Isn’t the gold standard deflationary?
Steve Forbes: No. The gold standard is neither inflationary nor deflationary. It’s like the mile: There are 5,280 feet in a mile; it’s a fixed length. That doesn’t restrict the number of miles of highway you can build. Between 1776 and 1900 the U.S. grew from a small, agricultural nation of 2.5 million people to a nation of 76.2 million people, and it became the greatest industrial power on earth. The money supply went up about 160-fold while the dollar was pegged to gold.
HRN: Wouldn’t the gold standard severely limit leverage in the financial system?
Steve Forbes: If you’re a worthy borrower, you can borrow at the market interest rate; if you’re an unworthy borrower, you have to pay a higher interest rate or you can’t get money. The gold standard would have prevented the wild lending and money creation we’ve experienced in the last few years, which has led to disaster. You can see it in the housing bubble and in the European government debt bubble. None of these things could have happened had we had stable money.
HRN: Is the Utah Legal Tender Act, which makes gold and silver legal in Utah, helpful?
Steve Forbes: I’m in favor of the states trying to get away from the Federal Reserve’s play-money approach. The key is for the next President to institute a gold-linked dollar policy.
HRN: Do competing currencies make sense?
Steve Forbes: The idea of a parallel currency is a perfectly good one. People would come to prefer a dollar based on gold rather than a dollar based on politicians.
HRN: Do you also suggest using silver as money?
Steve Forbes: The Chinese and other cultures have used silver as money, but silver doesn’t maintain its value the way gold does. Over time it takes more silver to buy an ounce of gold. About 120 years ago it took 15 ounces of silver to buy 1 ounce of gold. Today it takes more than 50 ounces. That’s why the U.S. moved away from a bi-metallic standard to the gold standard. One metal becomes more valuable than the other at different times. Silver is better than fiat money, but there’s only one gold standard.
HRN: Would the gold standard help the U.S. economy to recover?
Steve Forbes: In the 1980s, when we had very high unemployment and a stagnant economy, the way out was through a strong dollar, lower income taxes, entrepreneurship and new wealth creation. Remember, the values of assets go up when people see a future. They don’t today.
HRN: We didn’t have the gold standard in the 1980s.
Steve Forbes: Ronald Reagan killed the terrible inflation of the 1970s and sharply reduced income tax rates. Reagan wanted a return to the gold standard, but none of his advisors believed in it. Inflation was effectively killed by high interest rates. Deregulation was pushed forward, and America roared. In 1982, the Dow bottomed at 776; over the next 18 years it went up 18-fold.
HRN: You advocate cutting taxes?
Steve Forbes: Yes, and we should put in a flat tax. The advantage of the flat tax is that it enables people to focus on real things. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which defines the character of the American nation, is all of 272 words. The Declaration of Independence is a little more than 1,300 words. The Constitution of the United States and all of its amendments are a little more than 7,000 words. The Bible, which took centuries to put together, is a mere 773,000 words. The U.S. federal income tax code—with all of its cross-references, descriptions of amendments and effective dates—is probably now in excess of 4,000,000 words. Nobody knows what’s in it. Last year the IRS announced that Americans spent 6.1 billion hours filling out tax forms and $300 billion on tax preparation. This is a huge waste of resources and brain power. Not to mention that it’s a corrupting influence. It’s a huge source of government power, and it brings out the worst in us. The sooner we get simplicity—and a flat tax would give us that—the more energy we can devote to productive pursuits.
HRN: How could the U.S. transition to a flat-tax system?
Steve Forbes: Since people get hung up on their deductions, we would institute a flat tax and give people the option of filing either under the new, simple system or the old, horrific system. If you’re a masochist and want to punish yourself, you can file under the old income tax system. If you want the simplified one, you can go with that. I think 99% of Americans, out of sheer convenience, would quickly switch to the new system.
HRN: You mentioned deregulation. How would that help the U.S. economy?
Steve Forbes: Take health care, for example. We don’t have a free market in health care. There’s a disconnect between patients and health care providers. If you go to a hospital and ask how much something costs they’ll look at you strangely because they think you’re either uninsured or a lunatic. How many hospitals put the prices of procedures on their websites? It’s like going into a restaurant and having no idea how much anything on the menu costs. It’s a crazy system.
HRN: How would you go about deregulating health care?
Steve Forbes: First, we should repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—which is an abomination. Patients should have more choice. The insurance companies don’t compete freely for business. We should allow people to shop nationwide for health insurance. I live in New Jersey, which has a lot of senseless regulations. Why can’t I buy a health insurance policy in Pennsylvania that costs less |
you could no longer pull out. This would not be a way to ditch a coin that's failing and get your original investment back.You can read Buterin and Teutsch's full whitepaper here. -------A lack of belief in God is not a small thing. It's a unifying factor. We've all felt the sting of prejudice and bigotry. There's a lot to talk about and build around that. Some atheists have created "Sunday assemblies," but others revile against that and I am one of them. I don't want anything to do with a service on Sunday. It's not my happy place, but lots of people do want that. An atheist organization is very encouraging and endearing. When a believer wants to get together with other believers, he just has to go to church. For an atheist to get together with another atheist, that's a lot more difficult and challenging. One of the big draws of the convention is that you get to walk into a roomful of several hundred atheists. There is a lot of camaraderie.Advocates Of Failed Income Tax Amendment Say Their Goals Were Achieved By Emily Corwin Email
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Ballot Question One – a constitutional ban on the income tax — did not receive the 67 percent of votes it needed to become law on Tuesday. It did, however, receive 57 percent of the vote: a healthy majority.
During an otherwise Democratic sweep on Tuesday, this GOP initiative received more votes in New Hampshire than either Ovide Lamontagne – or even Mitt Romney.
Kevin Smith chaired a PAC that advocated for the amendment. He says the measure’s failure isn’t really a failure. It’s a big achievement. “I think [this] sends a loud and clear message to future governors and future legislatures,” Smith says, “that the people of NH are not keen at all about having an income tax.”
Smith says the measure was always unlikely to pass, and advocated voters support it to show their legislators that they will not support an income tax.
Brad Cook, a Manchester Lawyer, is pleased the measure didn’t pass. A vocal opponent of the amendment, Cook says the result shows “the wisdom of the framers of the constitution,” who intentionally made it really hard to pass amendments.Boston is experiencing one of the most rapid booms in construction in decades. There are roughly 70 projects under construction throughout the city, according to the Boston Redevelopment Authority. It's hard to miss the cranes dotting the skyline.
But how do these new designs look to a trained, critical eye?
Josh Slater, an architect and principal partner at Boston-based Studio 3.0, accompanied us on a driving tour of several of the city's developments.
Hear the Boston Redevelopment Authority's perspective on development in the city below:
Stop No. 1: The Kensington
The Kensington, at 665 Washington St. (Hadley Green for WBUR)
At this 27-story, high-end apartment building on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing, rents range up to $10,000 a month for a two-bed, two-bath unit.
Josh Slater: It's exactly as anonymous as you're describing and I think that's part of the problem, is that it doesn't recognize itself as anything.
...
I don't know if this is the final iteration of what's going to go in there but it appears like it's primarily just designated for the residential building.
I think it's essential if you're going to create a large development in the center of an urban neighborhood that you create an active first floor where you're providing amenities such as restaurants, such as shops that would be good for the neighborhood as a whole.
Stop No. 2: Millennium Tower
Millennium Tower, at the old Filene's basement site (Hadley Green for WBUR)
Just down the street is one of the most anticipated buildings going up, the tall Millennium Tower, on the site of the old Filene's Basement building.
Josh Slater: It’s hard to know right now, as it’s only really in the early stages of construction. With that said, based on what we’ve seen so far, the glass facade, which can be detailed in many different ways, seems to be really elegant. The architect seems to be very cognizant of how to detail glass.
...
I think overall the development on the whole is a very positive thing. Downtown Crossing specifically is a neighborhood that’s been in need of this kind of development for some time. The fact that we’re doing not just buildings, but buildings of considerable scale, I think is a positive thing.
Stop No. 3: The Seaport District
The Vertex pharmaceutical building, in the Seaport District (Hadley Green for WBUR).
Josh Slater: Well fundamentally this is a neighborhood that was for the longest time essentially a large parking lot, or at least it felt that way. There were a few warehouse mill buildings on Summer Street. But the area directly abutting the water was essentially not used at all. The fact that we have this kind of building going on overall for the neighborhood is a great thing.
...
If you look around from where we’re standing, it looks effectively like it could be Any Office Park, USA. There’s no definition whatsoever.
And this is part of the issue in Boston in general, we seem to have this knack for creating relentlessly B- architecture. Everything is sort of OK, but nothing is exciting. Also we should note that of these buildings some of these are actual office buildings, others are residential, and you can barely differentiate between the two. And we should say this isn’t complete yet, so I’ll reserve some judgement for when it’s all done.
With that said it seems like many of these projects are ignoring the streetscape, ignoring the pedestrian ways, ignoring the way the average person walking around would use the public space.
The Seaport District (Hadley Green for WBUR)
Stop No. 4: The Bruce Bolling Building
The Bruce Bolling Municipal Building, in Dudley Square, in a file photo (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The building, named after the late city councilor, is located in Roxbury's Dudley Square. It's the new headquarters of Boston Public Schools.
Josh Slater: It’s a beautiful building on a lot of levels and you can see how it's both respectful of the existing neighborhood and context, but also takes some of those cues and does a very modern take on it that’s really successful.
...
It’s also important to note in the context of other things we’ve seen today in terms of the role of development as a whole, typically you wouldn’t expect a municipal building to be the catalyst for a new neighborhood the way that, for example, a multi-use building might be with the active ground floor that we’ve talked about. Here I think partially because of the success of the design, this is seen as that catalyst for this area.
Architect Josh Slater stands in front of the Bruce Bolling Municipal Building, home of the Boston School Department. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
2 Other Developments We Have Our Eye On
Traffic en route to Boston on the Mass Pike passes the New Balance building at Boston Landing in Allston. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Jury on a lunch break. Image: Susan Sermoneta/Flickr
The trial began this week for Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texas man accused of being the mastermind behind the dark net drug market, Silk Road. But as the jury began hearing testimony in the case, it was clear the technological knowledge gap would impede the proceedings.
Judge Katherine Forrest said right off the bat when the case began that "highly technical" issues must be made clear to the jury.
"If I believe things are not understandable to the average juror, we will talk about what might be a reasonable way to proceed at that time," she said.
After the first day of proceedings, Forrest told the prosecution to be more clear with explanations of concepts central to the case, noting she was unhappy with its "mumbo-jumbo" explanation of the anonymizing service Tor. She also requested all readings of chat transcripts include emoticons.
The majority of the second day of testimony from Homeland Security Special Investigation Agent Jared DerYeghiayan continued setting the groundwork for the case, explaining in-depth many concepts central to Silk Road. US Attorney Serrin Turner's questioning was so thorough it bordered on tedious for the more tech-savvy observer, asking DerYeghiayan to explain 'wiki,' 'internet chat,' and 'add buddy.'
There's a distinct knowledge gap between what an average juror or judge can be expected to already know and the intricacies of modern cybercrime. This is true of any legal case, of course. In any courtroom there are terms, specifics, and details that the lawyers have to walk the jury through in order to make their case. But when it comes to the web, that knowledge gap becomes even wider.
"As a lawyer and as a judge, you have to become an expert in whatever each case happens to be about," explained Nate Cardozo, the staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit that provides legal assistance and expertise in digital rights court cases.
"That said, it is definitely harder, especially for judges in an older generation who didn't grow up with computers, who didn't grow up with the internet, to understand things like Tor. Even a millennial who has taken computer science courses won't necessarily understand Tor on first explanation."
It's not unexpected, then, that the prosecution in this case would be so careful to make sure the jury understood the terms being used. Many of the jurors might not have even heard of Silk Road until the trial began. So how do lawyers bridge that gap without having to give a master class on the deepest reaches of the web?
"The lawyers have to explain the technology so the jury can get it and it's up to the adversaries to make clear what is important for them to know," Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, told me. "They don't need to know everything."
If a technical detail isn't pertinent to the argument, there's no need to labor it with the jury, he said. In that way, even the most complicated cybercrimes aren't any different from a more mundane case.
"I really don't think it's that different," he said. "All of the jurors will have used the internet and you just explain by analogy. They all use email and surf the web and you build from that to more technical points. It's not easy but in working with a jury it's a common dynamic."
But this knowledge gap can open the door to dicey legal arguments. Last year, Kerr helped successfully appeal a case against Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, an internet troll sent to jail after he was accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Auernheimer had gained access to private email addresses after taking advantage of a security loophole he found on AT&T's website. During the appeal process, the prosecution's argument pivoted largely on not explaining the technological aspects of his actions.
"He had to download the entire iOS system on his computer, he had to decrypt it, he had to do all of these things I don't even understand," Assistant US Attorney Glenn Moramarco argued.
The Third District ultimately granted weev's appeal on the basis of an improper venue, but didn't weigh in on the legality of his actions.
To cast aspersions on the dark web as something terrible shows that the prosecutor may be trying to exploit that lack of understanding
Cardozo pointed out this knowledge gap can also be exploited by lawyers to bolster their arguments.
"We saw the prosecutor's opening statement in Ulbricht's case talk a lot about the 'dark web' and using terminology like that. Tor is a US Navy project. This isn't something that's come out of the underbelly of society. Tor is something that people around the world use every day for very innocent purposes," Cardozo told me. "The Silk Road may not have been one of those innocent purposes, but to cast aspersions on the dark web as something terrible shows that the prosecutor may be trying to exploit that lack of understanding."
And this lack of understanding wreaks havoc at the Supreme Court as well. Last year, SCOTUS ruled that Aereo, a digital video start-up, was in violation of the copyrights of the country's biggest broadcasters. But before the justices could deliberate, they had to spend a great deal of time trying to understand what in Sam Hill Aereo even was. And SCOTUS is currently deliberating on whether or not death threats made on Facebook are illegal, despite the fact most of the judges don't actually use the site themselves.
The good news is that SCOTUS takes a long time and asks a lot of seemingly-silly questions to make sure it understands an issue before throwing down a verdict. And in lower courts, we have expert witnesses who are called upon to give their objective opinion and enlighten the courtroom on a given topic, meaning we don't need to rely on lawyers to provide all the information in a case.
Still, as hacking and cybercrimes become more prolific and lawmakers aim to create far-reaching, blanket cybersecurity laws, these situation will become more and more common. As we move into the next frontier of tracking and criminalizing our online activity, the tension between the courtroom and technoliteracy will only increase.Japanese Brazilians (Japanese: 日系ブラジル人, Hepburn: Nikkei Burajiru-jin, Portuguese: nipo-brasileiros [ˌnipobɾaziˈlejɾus]) are Brazilian citizens who are nationals or naturals of Japanese ancestry or Japanese immigrants living in Brazil.[7]
The first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil in 1908. Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.[8] According to the IBGE, as of 2009 there were approximately 1.6 million people of Japanese descent in Brazil, and estimated at just under 1.5 million as of 2014.[1] Since the 1980s, a return migration has emerged of Japan Brazilians to Japan.[9] More recently, a trend of interracial marriage has taken hold among Brazilians of Japanese descent, with the racial intermarriage rate approximated at 50% and increasing.[1]
History [ edit ]
Background [ edit ]
A poster used in Japan to attract immigrants to Brazil. It reads: "Let’s go to South America (Brazil highlighted) with your entire family."
Between the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, coffee was the main export product of Brazil. At first, Brazilian farmers used African slave labor in the coffee plantations, but in 1850, the slave trade was abolished in Brazil. To solve the labour shortage, the Brazilian elite decided to attract European immigrants to work on the coffee plantations. This also was in line the government's push towards "whitening" the country. The hope was that through procreation the large African and Native American groups would be eliminated or reduced.[10] The government and farmers offered to pay European immigrants' passage. The plan encouraged millions of Europeans, most of them Italians,[11] to migrate to Brazil. However, once in Brazil, the immigrants received very low salaries and worked in poor conditions, including long working hours and frequent ill-treatment by their bosses. Because of this, in 1902, Italy enacted Decree Prinetti, prohibiting subsidized immigration to Brazil.[12]
The end of feudalism in Japan generated great poverty in the rural population, so many Japanese began to emigrate in search of better living conditions. By the 1930s, Japanese industrialisation had significantly boosted the population. However, prospects for Japanese people to migrate to other countries were limited. The US had banned non-white immigration from some parts of the world[13] on the basis that they would not integrate into society; this Exclusion Clause, of the 1924 Immigration Act, specifically targeted the Japanese. At the same time in Australia, the White Australia Policy prevented the immigration of non-whites to Australia.
First immigrants [ edit ]
The Kasato Maru
In 1907, the Brazilian and the Japanese governments signed a treaty permitting Japanese migration to Brazil. This was due in part to the decrease in the Italian immigration to Brazil and a new labor shortage on the coffee plantations.[14] Also, Japanese immigration to the United States had been barred by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.[15] The first Japanese immigrants (790 people – mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru. About half of these immigrants came from southern Okinawa.[16] They travelled from the Japanese port of Kobe via the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.[17] Many of them became owners of coffee plantations.[18]
In the first seven years, 3,434 more Japanese families (14,983 people) arrived. The beginning of World War I in 1914 started a boom in Japanese migration to Brazil; such that between 1917 and 1940 over 164,000 Japanese came to Brazil, 75% of them going to São Paulo, where most of the coffee plantations were located.[19]
Japanese immigration to Brazil by period, 1906–1993[20][21] Years Population 1906–1910 1,714 1911–1915 13,371 1916–1920 13,576 1921–1925 11,350 1926–1930 59,564 1931–1935 72,661 1936–1941 16,750 1952–1955 7,715 1956–1960 29,727 1961–1965 9,488 1966–1970 2,753 1971–1975 1,992 1976–1980 1,352 1981–1985 411 1986–1990 171 1991–1993 48 Total 242,643
New life in Brazil [ edit ]
The vast majority of Japanese immigrants intended to work a few years in Brazil, make some money, and go home. However, "getting rich quick" was a dream that was almost impossible to achieve. The immigrants were paid a very low salary and worked long hours of exhausting work. Also, everything that the immigrants consumed had to be purchased from the landowner (see truck system). Soon, their debts became very significant.[22]
A Japanese Brazilian miko during a festival in Curitiba
The land owners in Brazil still had a slavery mentality. Immigrants, although employees, had to confront the rigidity and lack of labour laws. Indebted and subjected to hours of exhaustive work, often suffering physical violence, the immigrants saw the leak[clarification needed] as an alternative to escape the situation. Suicide, yonige (to escape at night), and strikes were some of the attitudes taken by many Japanese because of the exploitation on coffee farms.[23]
The barrier of language, religion, dietary habits, clothing, lifestyles and differences in climate entailed a culture shock. Many immigrants tried to return to Japan but were prevented by Brazilian farmers, who required them to comply with the contract and work with the coffee.[citation needed]
On August 1, 1908, The New York Times remarked that relations between Brazil and Japan at the time were "not extremely cordial", because of "the attitude of Brazil toward the immigration of Japanese laborers."[24]
Japanese children born in Brazil were educated in schools founded by the Japanese community. Most only learned to speak the Japanese language and lived within the Japanese community in rural areas. Over the years, many Japanese managed to buy their own land and became small farmers. They started to plant strawberries, tea and rice. Only 6% of children were the result of interracial relationships. Immigrants rarely accepted marriage with a non-Japanese person.[25]
Prejudice and forced assimilation [ edit ]
On July 28, 1921, representatives Andrade Bezerra and Cincinato Braga proposed a law whose Article 1 provided: "The immigration of individuals from the black race to Brazil is prohibited." On October 22, 1923, representative Fidélis Reis produced another bill on the entry of immigrants, whose fifth article was as follows: "The entry of settlers from the black race into Brazil is prohibited. For Asian [immigrants] there will be allowed each year a number equal to 5% of those residing in the country...."[26]
Some years before World War II, the government of President Getúlio Vargas initiated a process of forced assimilation of people of immigrant origin in Brazil. The Constitution of 1934 had a legal provision about the subject: "The concentration of immigrants anywhere in the country is prohibited, the law should govern the selection, location and assimilation of the alien". The assimilationist project affected mainly Japan Japanese, Italy Italian, Jewish, Germany German immigrants and their descendants.[27]
In the government's conception, the non-White population of Brazil should disappear within the dominant class of Portuguese Brazilian origin.[citation needed] This way, the mixed-race population should be "whitened" through selective mixing, then a preference for European immigration. In consequence, the non-white population would, gradually, achieve a desirable White phenotype. The government focused on Italians, Jews, and Japanese.[citation needed] The formation of "ethnic cysts" among immigrants of non-Portuguese origin prevented the realization of the whitening project of the Brazilian population. The government, then, started to act on these communities of foreign origin to force them to integrate into a "Brazilian culture" with Portuguese roots. It was the dominant idea of a unification of all the inhabitants of Brazil under a single "national spirit". During World War II, Brazil severed relations with Japan. Japanese newspapers and teaching the Japanese language in schools were banned, leaving Portuguese as the only option for Japanese descendants. Newspapers in Italian or German were also advised to cease production, as Italy and Germany were Japan's allies in the war.[18] In 1939, research of Estrada de Ferro Noroeste do Brasil, from São Paulo, showed that 87.7% of Japanese Brazilians read newspapers in the Japanese language, a high figure for a country with many illiterate people like Brazil at the time.[28]
The Japanese appeared as undesirable immigrants within the "whitening" and assimilationist policy of the Brazilian government.[28] Oliveira Viana, a Brazilian jurist, historian and sociologist described the Japanese immigrants as follows: "They (Japanese) are like sulfur: insoluble". The Brazilian magazine "O Malho" in its edition of December 5, 1908 issued a charge of Japanese immigrants with the following legend: "The government of São Paulo is stubborn. After the failure of the first Japanese immigration, it contracted 3,000 yellow people. It insists on giving Brazil a race diametrically opposite to ours".[28] In 1941, the Brazilian Minister of Justice, Francisco Campos, defended the ban on admission of 400 Japanese immigrants in São Paulo and wrote: "their despicable standard of living is a brutal competition with the country’s worker; their selfishness, their bad faith, their refractory character, make them a huge ethnic and cultural cyst located in the richest regions of Brazil".[28]
The Japanese Brazilian community was strongly marked by restrictive measures when Brazil declared war against Japan in August 1942. Japanese Brazilians could not travel the country without safe conduct issued by the police; over 200 Japanese schools were closed and radio equipment was seized to prevent transmissions on short wave from Japan. The goods of Japanese companies were confiscated and several companies of Japanese origin had interventions, including the newly founded Banco América do Sul. Japanese Brazilians were prohibited from driving motor vehicles (even if they were taxi drivers), buses or trucks on their property. The drivers employed by Japanese had to have permission from the police. Thousands of Japanese immigrants were arrested or expelled from Brazil on suspicion of espionage. There were many anonymous denunciations of "activities against national security" arising from disagreements between neighbors, recovery of debts and even fights between children.[28] Japanese Brazilians were arrested for "suspicious activity" when they were in artistic meetings or picnics. On July 10, 1943, approximately 10,000 Japanese and German and Italian immigrants who lived in Santos had 24 hours to close their homes and businesses and move away from the Brazilian coast. The police acted without any notice. About 90% of people displaced were Japanese. To reside in Baixada Santista, the Japanese had to have a safe conduct.[28] In 1942, the Japanese community who introduced the cultivation of pepper in Tomé-Açu, in Pará, was virtually turned into a "concentration camp". This time, the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, D.C., Carlos Martins Pereira e Sousa, encouraged the government of Brazil to transfer all the Japanese Brazilians to "internment camps" without the need for legal support, in the same manner as was done with the Japanese residents in the United States. No single suspicion of activities of Japanese against "national security" was confirmed.[28]
During the National Constituent Assembly of 1946, Rio Miguel Couto Filho proposed Amendments to the Constitution as follows: "It is prohibited the entry of Japanese immigrants of any age and any origin in the country". In the final vote, a tie with 99 votes in favor and 99 against. Senator Fernando de Melo Viana, who chaired the session of the Constituent Assembly, had the casting vote and rejected the constitutional amendment. By only one vote, the immigration of Japanese people to Brazil was not prohibited by the Brazilian Constitution of 1946.[28]
The Japanese immigrants appeared to the Brazilian government as undesirable and non-assimilable immigrants. As Asian, they did not contribute to the "whitening" process of the Brazilian people as desired by the ruling Brazilian elite. In this process of forced assimilation the Japanese, more than any other immigrant group, suffered the ethno-cultural persecution imposed during this period.[28]
Prestige [ edit ]
For decades, Japanese Brazilians were seen as a non-assimilable people. The immigrants were treated only as a reserve of cheap labour that should be used on coffee plantations and that Brazil should avoid absorbing their cultural influences. This widespread conception that the Japanese were negative for Brazil was changed in the following decades. The Japanese were able to overcome the difficulties along the years and drastically improve their lives through hard work and education; this was also facilitated by the involvement of the Japanese government in the process of migration. The image of hard working agriculturists that came to help develop the country and agriculture helped erase the lack of trust of the local population and create a positive image of the Japanese. In the 1970s, Japan became one of the richest countries of the world, synonymous with modernity and progress. In the same period, Japanese Brazilians achieved a great cultural and economic success, probably the immigrant group that most rapidly achieved progress in Brazil. Due to the powerful Japanese economy and due to the rapid enrichment of the Nisei, in the last decades Brazilians of Japanese descent achieved a social prestige in Brazil that largely contrasts with the aggression with which the early immigrants were treated in the country.[28][29]
Integration and intermarriage [ edit ]
Intermarriage in the Japanese Brazilian community[25] Generation Denomination in Proportion of each generation in all community (%) Proportion of mixed-race in each generation (%) Japanese English 1st Issei Immigrants 12.51% 0% 2nd Nisei Children 30.85% 6% 3rd Sansei Grandchildren 41.33% 42% 4th Yonsei Great-grandchildren 12.95% 61%
As of 2008, many Japanese Brazilians belong to the third generation (sansei), who make up 41.33% of the community. First generation (issei) are 12.51%, second generation (nisei) are 30.85% and fourth generation (yonsei) 12.95%.[25]
A more recent phenomenon in Brazil is intermarriages between Japanese Brazilians and non-ethnic Japanese. Though people of Japanese descent make up only 0.8% of the country's population, they are the largest Japanese community outside Japan, with over 1.4 million people. In areas with large numbers of Japanese, such as São Paulo and Paraná, since the 1970s, large numbers of Japanese descendants started to marry into other ethnic groups. Jeffrey Lesser's work has shown the complexities of integration both during the Vargas era, and more recently during the dictatorship (1964–1984)
Nowadays, among the 1.4 million Brazilians of Japanese descent, 28% have some non-Japanese ancestry.[30] This number reaches only 6% among children of Japanese immigrants, but 61% among great-grandchildren of Japanese immigrants.
Religion [ edit ]
Immigrants, as well as most Japanese, were mostly followers of Shinto and Buddhism. In the Japanese communities in Brazil, there was a strong effort by Brazilian priests to proselytize the Japanese. More recently, intermarriage with Catholics also contributed to the growth of Catholicism in the community. Currently, 60% of Japanese-Brazilians are Roman Catholics and 25% are adherents of a Japanese religion.[31]
Martial Arts [ edit ]
The Japanese immigration to Brazil, in particular the immigration of the judoka Mitsuyo Maeda, resulted in the development of one of the most effective modern martial arts, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Language [ edit ]
The knowledge of the Japanese and Portuguese languages reflects the integration of the Japanese in Brazil over several generations. Although first generation immigrants will often not learn Portuguese well or not use it frequently, most second generation are bilingual. The third generation, however, are most likely monolingual in Portuguese or speak, along with Portuguese, non-fluent Japanese.[32]
A study conducted in the Japanese Brazilian communities of Aliança and Fukuhaku, both in the state of São Paulo, released information on the language spoken by these people. Before coming to Brazil, 12.2% of the first generation interviewed from Aliança reported they had studied the Portuguese language in Japan, and 26.8% said to have used it once on arrival in Brazil. Many of the Japanese immigrants took classes of Portuguese and learned about the history of Brazil before migrating to the country. In Fukuhaku only 7.7% of the people reported they had studied Portuguese in Japan, but 38.5% said they had contact with Portuguese once on arrival in Brazil. All the immigrants reported they spoke exclusively Japanese at home in the first years in Brazil. However, in 2003, the figure dropped to 58.5% in Aliança and 33.3% in Fukuhaku. This probably reflects that through contact with the younger generations of the family, who speak mostly Portuguese, many immigrants also began to speak Portuguese at home.
The first Brazilian-born generation, the Nisei, alternate between the use of Portuguese and Japanese. Regarding the use of Japanese at home, 64.3% of Nisei informants from Aliança and 41.5% from Fukuhaku used Japanese when they were children. In comparison, only 14.3% of the third generation, Sansei, reported to speak Japanese at home when they were children. It reflects that the second generation was mostly educated by their Japanese parents using the Japanese language. On the other hand, the third generation did not have much contact with their grandparent's language, and most of them speak the national language of Brazil, Portuguese, as their mother tongue.[33]
Japanese Brazilians usually speak Japanese more often when they live along with a first generation relative. Those who do not live with a Japanese-born relative usually speak Portuguese more often.[34] Japanese spoken in Brazil is usually a mix of different Japanese dialects, since the Japanese community in Brazil came from all regions of Japan, influenced by the Portuguese language. The high numbers of Brazilian immigrants returning from Japan will probably produce more Japanese speakers in Brazil.[25]
Distribution and population [ edit ]
2010 IBGE estimates
for Japanese Brazilians[35] State Population of
Japanese Brazilians São Paulo 693,495 Paraná 143,588 Pernambuco 88,449 Minas Gerais 75,449 Others 414,704 Total 1,405,685
According to the IBGE, as of 2000 there were 70,932 Japanese-born immigrants living in Brazil (compared to the 158,087 found in 1970). Of the Japanese, 51,445 lived in São Paulo. Most of the immigrants were over 60 years old, because the Japanese immigration to Brazil has ended since the mid-20th century.[36]
In 2008, IBGE published a book about the Japanese diaspora and it estimated that, as of 2000, there were 1,405,685 people of Japanese descent in Brazil. The Japanese immigration was concentrated to São Paulo and, still in 2000, 49.3% of Japanese Brazilians lived in this state. There were 693,495 people of Japanese origin in São Paulo, followed by Paraná with 143,588. More recently, Brazilians of Japanese descent are making presence in places that used to have a small population of this group. For example: in 1960, there were 532 Japanese Brazilians in Bahia, while in 2000 they were 78,449, or 0.6% of the state's population. Northern Brazil (excluding Pará) saw its Japanese population increase from 2,341 in 1960 (0.2% of the total population) to 54,161 (0.8%) in 2000. During the same period, in Central-Western Brazil they increased from 3,582 to 66,119 (0.7% of the population).[37] However, the overall Japanese population in Brazil is shrinking, secondary to a decreased birth rate and an aging population; return immigration to Japan,[38][39][40] as well as intermarriage with other races and dilution of ethnic identity.
For the whole Brazil, with over 1.4 million people of Japanese descent, the largest percentages were found in the states of São Paulo (1.9% of Japanese descent), Paraná (1.5%) and Mato Grosso do Sul (1.4%). The smallest percentages were found in Roraima and Alagoas (with only 8 Japanese). The percentage of Brazilians with Japanese roots largely increased among children and teenagers. In 1991, 0.6% of Brazilians between 0 and 14 years old were of Japanese descent. In 2000, they were 4%, as a result of the returning of Dekasegis (Brazilians of Japanese descent who work in Japan) to Brazil.[41]
Image gallery [ edit ]
Japanese in a Brazilian forest.
Japanese immigrants with their planting of potatoes.
Japanese family in Brazil.
Japanese family in Brazil.
A train taking Japanese immigrants from Santos to São Paulo (1935).
Japanese on coffee plantation (1930).
The first immigrants on the Kasato Maru ship (1908).
Japanese immigrants in Brazil.
Marriage of Japanese immigrants at São Paulo state, Brazil.
Brazilian couple. Inter-racial couple in Brazil; unusual during the '60s in rural areas.
Japanese in Sao Paulo-Brazil, Liberdade neighbourhood, in a Shinto chapel.
Brazilian issei, (first generation of Japanese immigrant), reading newspaper in Romaji, while the shown title is about Kardec spiritism (a French–Brazilian sect) which is quite similar to Shinto and Buddhist principles.
Group of Japanese descendants with Brazilians working resting after tree cutting, to clear areas for coffee plantations in Brazil, '50s and '60s.
Brazilians, second generation after Japanese immigration (sanseis) in rural areas, coffee plantations, São Paulo state, Brazil.
Japanese from Maringá [ edit ]
A 2008 census revealed details about the population of Japanese origin from the city of Maringá in Paraná, making it possible to have a profile of the Japanese-Brazilian population.[42]
Numbers
There were 4,034 families of Japanese descent from Maringá, comprising 14,324 people.
Dekasegi
1,846 or 15% of Japanese Brazilians from Maringá were working in Japan.
Generations
Of the 12,478 people of Japanese origin living in Maringá, 6.61% were Issei (born in Japan); 35.45% were Nisei (children of Japanese); 37.72% were Sansei (grandchildren) and 13.79% were Yonsei (great-grandchildren).
Average age
The average age was of 40.12 years old
Gender
52% of Japanese Brazilians from the city were women.
Average number of children per woman
2.4 children (similar to the average Southern Brazilian woman)
Religion
Most were Roman Catholics (32% of Sansei, 27% of Nisei, 10% of Yonsei and 2% of Issei). Protestant religions were the second most followed (6% of Nisei, 6% of Sansei, 2% of Yonsei and 1% of Issei) and next was Buddhism (5% of Nisei, 3% of Issei, 2% of Sansei and 1% of Yonsei).
Family
49.66% were married.
Knowledge of the Japanese language
47% can understand, read and write in Japanese. 31% of the second generation and 16% of the third generation can speak Japanese.
Schooling
31% elementary education; 30% secondary school and 30% higher education.
Mixed-race
20% were mixed-race (have some non-Japanese origin).
The Dekasegi [ edit ]
During the 1980s, the Japanese economic situation improved and achieved stability. Many Japanese Brazilians went to Japan as contract workers due to economic and political problems in Brazil, and they were termed "Dekasegi". Working visas were offered to Brazilian Dekasegis in 1990, encouraging more immigration from Brazil.
In 1990, the Japanese government authorized the legal entry of Japanese and their descendants until the third generation in Japan. At that time, Japan was receiving a large number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Thailand. The legislation of 1990 was intended to select immigrants who entered Japan, giving a clear preference for Japanese descendants from South America, especially Brazil. These people were lured to Japan to work in areas that the Japanese refused (the so-called "three K": Kitsui, Kitanai and Kiken – hard, dirty and dangerous). Many Japanese Brazilians began to immigrate. The influx of Japanese descendants from Brazil to Japan was and continues to be large: there are over 300,000 Brazilians living in Japan today, mainly as workers in factories.[43]
Because of their Japanese ancestry, the Japanese Government believed that Brazilians would be more |
5th century B.C. It is believed that the ancient Spartans were the first to make a celebration out of the groom's last night as a single man. Spartan soldiers held a dinner in their friend's honor and made toasts on his behalf with, one assumes, a Spartan sense of decorum. Since then, the events have generally grown more raucous. In 1896, a stag party thrown by Herbert Barnum Seeley a grandson of P.T. Barnum for his brother was raided by police after rumors circulated that a famous belly dancer would be performing nude. Before his wedding to Gloria Hatrick, Jimmy Stewart's infamous bash at the Beverly Hills hangout Chasen's included midgets popping out of a serving dish.
The fun can get out of hand, however: in recent years, bachelor-party high jinks have led to numerous Hollywood breakups. Paris Hilton accused beau Paris Lastis of cheating on her at his bachelor party an alleged indiscretion that similarly doomed Mario Lopez and Ali Landry. Nick Lachey's reported dalliance with a porn star at a friend's party while it was denied sparked rumors about a rift with wife Jessica Simpson before their eventual split in 2005. And Peter Berg's dark 1998 film Very Bad Things should be required viewing for grooms-to-be about the importance of good behavior (although it's probably not for their fiancées).
The term bachelor previously meaning a young knight or a student with a bachelor's degree first appeared in reference to an unmarried man in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century. The term bachelor party didn't appear until 1922, however, when it was first used in the Scottish publication Chambers's Journal of Literature, Science and Arts to describe a "jolly old" party. The event is known by different names in different countries: the stag party in the U.K., Ireland and Canada; the buck's party in Australia; and, with typical panache, the enterrement de vie de garçon in France (translation: "the burial of the life as a boy").
In the past, a bachelor party could commonly involve a black-tie dinner hosted by the groom's father, with toasts to the groom and the bride. The more recent traditions of hazing, humiliation and debauchery often consuming entire weekends and involving travel to an exotic destination such as Las Vegas or its nearest available facsimile became a staple of bad '80s sex comedies. (The 1984 Tom Hanks vehicle Bachelor Party hit the genre's perfecta, featuring beer, drugs, strippers, an ill-fated donkey and MTV video vixen Tawny Kitaen.) (Watch TIME's video "Beer Pong Strikes Back.")
By the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women had launched their own version of the prewedding festivities: the bachelorette party. Prior to the late 19th century, women were limited to bridal showers, the main function of which was to acquire a dowry and gifts to prepare them for marriage. Bachelorette parties allowed women the opportunity to express their own sexual freedom with drinking games and (male) strippers. Other couples, uncomfortable with the expectations of debauchery, celebrate their last night together in combined stag and doe parties an idea that's grown popular as more couples live together and marry later in life. Bachelor parties are now as diverse as the bachelors involved, ranging from Las Vegas trips (losing teeth, dignity and sometimes the groom, as in The Hangover) to a casual party with friends and/or the fiancée. First and foremost, the event is an important step in saying goodbye to one's single life and relieving prewedding jitters. There doesn't even have to be a party: some men now opt for "groom's showers," in which they acquire their own dowry of foosball tables and power tools.
Read a review of "The Hangover's Bro-Magnon Bromance."Military officials are preparing to scale back targets related to the number of women and visible minorities in uniform because they say the current goals are “unattainable,” according to a defence department audit.
This is despite the military having made some progress in increasing the proportion of both within its rank and file in recent years.
At the same time, auditors have warned that the decision to close 12 military recruiting centres across the country to save money will hurt reserve units as well as aboriginal recruitment, which has been on the increase.
Despite an end to combat operations in Afghanistan and deep budget cuts, officials say the military needs more than 4,000 new recruits each year to offset attrition and keep 68,000 full-time troops in uniform.
As part of that, the Canadian Forces, like all federal government departments and agencies, is required by law to work towards increasing the number of women, visible minorities, aboriginals and people with disabilities within its workforce.
This is not just spreadsheets of multiculturalism and you fill in the numbers and hope to meet the targets
While the idea is to promote equal opportunity, the military has also taken to seeing this as part of its effort to better reflect Canada’s population and society.
As part of this, a complex calculation has been used to establish targets for diversifying the Canadian Forces, while dozens of initiatives have been launched to help meet these goals.
The targets were last updated in 2010 and aimed to have 25.1 per cent of the military represented by women, 11.8 per cent by visible minorities, and 3.4 per cent by Aboriginal Peoples.
Yet in an audit conducted last year and only recently made public, defence officials complained the revised goal for women “is unattainable without the imposition of significant measures.”
They added the new goal was “unrealistically high” because of the “flawed” calculation used to establish the target.
While auditors found the percentage of new recruits enrolled in basic training each year who were women has fallen from 15.58 per cent to 12.67 per cent between 2008 and 2011, women’s overall representation in the military grew from 13.59 per cent to 13.68 per cent.
Progress on increasing the representation of visible minorities also “falls well short,” defence officials reported, even though the number has increased steadily from 2.83 per cent in 2008 to 3.86 per cent in 2011.
It speaks to what extent is the CF prepared to work at changing its institutional nature and its recruiting culture
The defence officials complained that the targets were “imposed” on the Canadian Forces, and though new initiatives to diversify the military’s representation are in development, so too are efforts to develop “more realistic” goals.
Officials said they were hoping to establish “revised” goals for women and visible minority representation by March 2017.
Royal Military College professor Christian Leuprecht, who specializes in diversity within the Canadian military, was aghast that defence officials were moving to slash the targets for women and visible minorities.
He said doing so would create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy by reducing the pressure to recruit more of each, which he felt was necessary if the military wants to ensure it represents Canada’s changing culture and population.
“This is not just spreadsheets of multiculturalism and you fill in the numbers and hope to meet the targets,” he said.
Adding more women and visible minorities will be increasingly essential if the military is to remain at its current strength, Leuprecht added, given that its “traditional” recruiting pool – young, white men from rural communities – is shrinking.
Officials justified their decision to reduce the goals by noting that the representation of women and visible minorities in the Canadian Forces is about the same as in the Australian military and higher than in the British military, though it lags the United States.
Canada has been a leader when it comes to employment equity in its military, Leuprecht confirmed, but he said that is a reason to keep pushing the issue and not going the other way.
“So it speaks to what extent is the CF prepared to work at changing its institutional nature and its recruiting culture to align it with the legal, political and social expectations of Canada, the Canadian government and Canadians.”
Majority of the closed centres serviced outlying regions
Meanwhile, auditors also raised concerns that the decision to close 30 per cent of the military’s recruiting centres and reduce the number of recruiting staff by 25 per cent will hurt reserve units as well as the recruitment of aboriginals.
The moves were ordered as a result of declining demand for new troops with the end of the combat mission in Afghanistan as well as efforts to slash more than $2 billion from the defence department budget.
The military is hoping online recruiting will make up the slack, but auditors concluded the closures and recruiting staff reductions will have a significant effect” on the processing of new reservists.
“Furthermore, there will likely be an adverse impact on (employment equity) recruiting, particularly for aboriginals, since the majority of the closed centres serviced outlying regions where these candidates reside,” auditors wrote.
The number of aboriginals in the Canadian Forces has grown steadily from 1.96 per cent in 2008 to 2.16 per cent 2011, and unlike with targets for women and visible minorities, defence officials had considered the target for aboriginals “achievable.”
The auditors were also skeptical of the military’s plan to move recruiting online, concluding that “progress will be highly dependent on personnel resources and IT support, both of which are undergoing significant reductions.”Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton eked out a narrow win in the caucuses in Iowa on Monday night but Indian voters on one reservation showed a lot more support to rival Bernie Sanders
According to the results from the Democratic party, the Senator from Vermont won a whopping 83.3 percent of the vote at the Indian Settlement precinct in Tama County. Members of the Meskwaki Tribe caucused at their tribal center and only gave 16.7 percent of their votes to Clinton, a former Secretary of State and a former Senator from New York.
Both campaigns reached out to voters on the reservation but Sanders was the only one who went there in person. He discussed the economy, education, Native veterans and other issues at the tribal center on September 4, 2015
Members of the Meskwaki Tribe of Iowa listen to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on September 4, 2015. Photo from Bernie Sanders
“Native Americans know that if you destroy nature you destroy life and that is what we’re doing globally now and that has got to change,” Sanders said, according to his campaign
Despite the strong showing for Sanders on the reservation, the rest of Tama County went for Clinton. She won 52.9 percent of the vote, compared to 47.1 percent for Sanders. Overall, Clinton won the state by just 0.2 percentage points, according to the results
As for the Republicans, the party did not put up a precinct on the reservation this year. No one attended the GOP caucus when it was held at the tribal center in January 2012, Mark Trahant reported, citing The New York Times.
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If you drive westbound on Hall Boulevard in Beaverton today, you'll come across a yellow light at Scholls Ferry Road that lasts 4.5 seconds -- but it used to be only 4 seconds. That half second made it so drivers didn't have nearly as much time to stop or get through the intersection without being ticketed for running the red light.
Electrical engineer Mats Jarlstrom suspected the timing issue several years ago and has been on a mission -- doing his own research -- to prove Beaverton's red light cameras are flawed.
Jarlstrom started looking into it after his wife got a ticket for running a red light at a different intersection in 2013. Then in 2014, Jarlstrom went before the city council and tried to get the city to fix the timing and get the Hall Boulevard light to meet state guidelines.
City Council members and Beaverton Mayor Denny Doyle gave him a chilly reception.
Using a formula ODOT advises cities to use to determine the length of yellow lights, Jarlstrom figured out what the timing should be.
For the Hall Boulevard light, where the speed limit is 40 miles per hour, theformula first indicates the light should be 4.3 seconds. The downward slope also has to be taken into consideration. According to the formula the light should be at least 4.4 seconds. Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Mats Jarlstrom has been researching red light cameras in Beaverton for years. (KOIN)
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Mats Jarlstrom has been researching red light cameras in Beaverton for years. (KOIN)
Professor Hesham Rakha, who directs the Virginia Tech University Transportation Institution, said those fractions of seconds are a big deal.
"You might think that.3 seconds is not a big difference, if you look at the perception reaction time of a driver that's around, the median is around 1 second. That.3 seconds is a huge difference that will cause a lot of people to get caught in the dilemma zone," Rakha said.
The "dilemma zone" is the no man's land where drivers who are going the speed limit will still run a red light because they're too close to the intersection. They can't stop when the light turns yellow. Their dilemma is to either slam on the brakes or hit the gas to try and make it through.
Four months after Jarlstrom spoke to city council members, the city changed the timing at that intersection to 4.5 seconds. Officials didn't make a public announcement about the error. They didn't tell Jarlstrom he was right and didn't tell drivers who were ticketed that the timing had been wrong.
KOIN 6 News obtained a city document from 2011 that confirms Jarlstrom was right -- the yellow light was only 4 seconds and had been that way since the camera was installed in 2001.
Despite that, the city claims it was never improperly timed.
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Westbound Hall Boulevard at Scholls Ferry Road has a red light camera that is activated after a 4.5 second yellow light, but it used to be only 4. (KOIN)
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Westbound Hall Boulevard at Scholls Ferry Road has a red light camera that is activated after a 4.5 second yellow light, but it used to be only 4. (KOIN)
"Every one of the intersections programmed by the city exceeds the minimum length and is consistent with recommended signal timing," a statement from the city said.
The city's lawyer wrote a memo in 2013 explaining ODOT and national traffic experts say yellow lights should be timed somewhere between 3.0 and 6 seconds, and therefore the light on Hall Boulevard is within their discretion "based on professional engineering judgment."
Beaverton Mayor Denny Doyle has declined requests to an interview about the situation.
City spokeswoman Holly Thompson wrote:
“The city is declining your offer for an on-camera interview. It is clear by your email that you have a strong bias on this story. We stand by our statement… as well as the background information provided to you from our Public Works professionals and City Attorney.”
Previous KOIN 6 Investigations revealed Beaverton issues far more traffic citations than other local cities.
At westbound Hall Boulevard, Beaverton says about 3,000 drivers got tickets before the yellow light was changed but it's unclear how many of them were a result of the poorly timed light.
"Low income families, that's why I'm doing this," Jarlstrom said. " They shouldn't have to pay this when they're not at fault."
It's unclear if drivers could take legal action against Beaverton. Lawyers told KOIN 6 News a driver who believes they shouldn't have been ticketed for running a red light may have to file a legal claim within 180 days of the ticket in order to sue the city.
Beaverton issues a lot of traffic tickets
If you’re passing through Beaverton, you need to be on your best driving behavior. Last year, Beaverton police wrote 11,081 tickets. That’s more than Gresham (7,710), and 3.5 times as many as Hillsboro’s 3,075 — even though the cities are about the same size.
When you add in tickets from Beaverton's red light and photo radar cameras, the city issued 28,012 tickets in 2016. That's far more tickets than 20,832 drivers got in Salem which has a population 70% bigger than Beaverton (97,590: 2016).
If you compare Beaverton to the City of Portland - which also has red light and photo radar cameras, plus "fixed speed" cameras - Beaverton still issues far more tickets per capita. In 2016 Portland issued 69,322 total tickets. Beaverton issued 40% as many, even though it has less then 1/6th the population (639,863: 2016).President Trump is hinting that he might keep the United States in the Paris climate change agreement, but he doesn’t think it currently treats the U.S. fairly.
Trump told Reuters in an interview that he would make a decision in about two weeks on the pact that former President Obama negotiated.
He said his primary concern with the agreement is that he doesn’t believe countries like China, India and Russia are being held to the same standards as the U.S., particularly with contributions to the Green Climate Fund.
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“It’s not a fair situation because they are paying virtually nothing and we are paying massive amounts of money,” Trump told Reuters.
He refused to say what his decision would be, saying only: “I can say this, we want to be treated fairly.”
Trump’s comments come as numerous major businesses push him to stay in the pact and abandon his campaign promise to exit it. BP, Exxon Mobil Corp., Cloud Peak Energy and Microsoft Corp. are among the companies that have asked recently to stay in.
Many of the supporters, however, want Trump to change the nonbinding emissions reductions that Obama promised.
Earlier Thursday, a group of Trump administration officials and advisers met at the White House to try to sort out a growing rift in the administration about whether to stay in.
People like senior adviser Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson want to stay in the pact, while chief strategist Stephen Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt want to exit.
Attendees at the meeting did not settle on a position for Trump, Politico reported, and are planning to meet again before late May, when Trump has promised to come to a conclusion on Paris.
But the officials are starting to reach a consensus that if the U.S. stays in the accord, Trump ought to change the country’s commitment, Politico said.
Bloomberg News reported that a major subject of conversation was the legal implications of staying in the pact. Some in the administration are worried that it would be difficult to repeal climate regulations without replacing them if the Paris commitments remain in place, even though they aren’t binding.The British taxpayer funding for the queen has peaked at 36.1 million pounds (US$54.6 million), rising 5 million pounds from the previous year. The new Sovereign Grant replaces previous separate grants, rolling them into one large subsidy.
It will be used to maintain palaces as the country faces cuts.
The Sovereign Grant, used to finance royal duties and transportation, pay staff and maintain palaces, has had the publically-funded boost, topping last year’s sum of 31 million pounds - despite the fact that last year an extra 1 million pounds was allotted for the Diamond Jubilee celebration.
The money will cover the year 2013/2014, and the new financial year will begin on Monday. Official expenditure increased slightly from 32.1 million pounds in 2010/11 to 32.3 million pounds in 2011/12.
The Sovereign Grant is a replacement for the old UK funding system for the monarchy. Previously, the civil list, and ‘grants in aid’ funded the Queen’s transport and duties separately.
The new rise means funds equate to 15 per cent of the profits of the Crown Estate – the body that oversees the administration of the Queen’s properties.
The Crown Estate's 2011/12 accounts show that profits of 240.2 million were reaped from its properties that year. It is one of the largest property owners in the UK.
A spokesperson for the UK monarchy defended the increase, saying that in real terms, the grant is 15 per cent less than expenditure five years ago.
Some 10 million pounds is contributed towards paying the salaries of the queen's staff, including footmen and chefs. However there has been a freeze on their wages in place for a number of years.
On Monday, a series of welfare reforms began to be implemented by the UK government, in the hope of cutting 2 billion pounds from the budget.
Some 660,000 people dependent on social housing because of low incomes will lose, on average, over 700 pounds per year through the introduction of 'bedroom tax' - a cut to government-funded support payments, should the occupant of a house have a'spare' room.
A minimum council tax payment will has additionally been broadly imposed, negatively affecting those on low incomes too.It’s probably not a stretch to describe Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47 assault rifle as the most important small-arms weapon of the 20th century.
See also: This Day in Tech
July 6, 1947: The AK-47, an All-Purpose Killer
Born out of Kalashnikov’s obsession to create a weapon capable of driving the invading Germans from his motherland, the Soviet weapons designer produced an assault rifle renowned as much for its simplicity as for its effectiveness.
Although it never saw service during World War II, the AK-47 became the standard infantry weapon for the Red Army, as well as most of the other Warsaw Pact armies. National liberation movements supported by the Soviet Union also found themselves generously equipped. More famously, it continues finding its way into the arsenals of rebels, drug traffickers, street gangs and terrorists the world over.
Now approaching 90, Kalashnikov remains bullish on his greatest creation. Despite the ever-mounting death toll caused by the AK-47, Kalashnikov has no trouble sleeping. “I was doing it for my country,” he says.
The AK-47 has evolved over the years, which keeps it relevant to this day. This gallery charts the history of this terrible, remarkable weapon.
Above: Early in the Iran-Iraq War, an AK-47-toting Iranian soldier watches smoke rising from burning oil refineries near the Iranian city of Abadan. The Iraqis included AK-47s in their arsenal as well, although the Soviet Union imposed an arms embargo on Iraq after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. Iraq's new partner, the United States, was able to provide Saddam's troops with the spare parts necessary to keep their Russian-made weapons functional.
Photo: Henri Bureau/Sygma/Corbis
In this 1979 photo, a young Khmer Rouge soldier holds a North Korean-made AK-47 rifle after fleeing to Thailand ahead of advancing Vietnamese troops. The Soviet Union licensed manufacturers in a number of countries to produce versions of the AK-47.
Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the AK-47’s inventor, shows off his handiwork in 1997 ahead of festivities to mark the weapon’s 50th anniversary.
Photo: Vladimir Vyatkin/AP
A Taliban militiaman checks his AK-47 while cleaning it between skirmishes in the mountains of Afghanistan. The ammunition clip has been removed, which, considering the way he’s holding it, shows good sense.
Photo: Santiago Lyon/AP
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) holds an AK-47 with a modified shoulder stock and ammunition drum during a 1999 news conference in Washington D.C. Feinstein was seeking a federal ban on high-capacity ammunition clips. She didn’t get it.
Photo: Dennis Cook/AP
Esmad Ullah, a teenage soldier in Afghanistan's national army, could be the poster child for the ubiquity of the AK-47 assault rifle. The picture was taken in 2003, near Ullah’s observation post outside of Kabul.
Photo: Tom Hanson, CP/AP
Squeeze, don’t pull. A Palestinian girl receives a lesson in the art of firing an AK-47 from a police officer. She was among some 30,000 Palestinian youngsters who attended special summer camps across Gaza in 2000, where they were taught to handle weapons and schooled in guerrilla warfare tactics.
Photo: Adel Hana/AP
Somali pirates armed with AK-47s guard their French hostages, taken when they seized the sailing yacht Tanit off the African coast in April. One hostage was killed when French navy commandos swooped in after the pirates threatened to begin executing hostages. AK-47s are cheap and plentiful, making them the weapon of choice for terrorists the world over.
Photo: French Defense Ministry/APPittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang could face supplementary discipline after a high hit on Washington Capitals forward Marcus Johansson during Game 3 of their second round playoff series.
Johansson had the puck coming through the neutral zone late in the first period on Monday, but passed the puck off after being pressured by a pair of Penguins players. Letang pinched in moments later and made contact with a vulnerable Johansson, who hit the ice hard (video above).
Johansson stayed down for several seconds before going off the ice on his own. He returned to the game in the second period.
Letang received a minor penalty for interference on the play.
Capitals defenceman Brooks Orpik was suspended three games for a late hit to the head on Pittsburgh defenceman Olli Maatta in Game 2.
If Letang does get suspended, Rule 48 is probably the most relevant to this case:
48.1 Illegal Check to the Head – A hit resulting in contact with an opponent’s head where the head was the main point of contact and such contact to the head was avoidable is not permitted. In determining whether contact with an opponent’s head was avoidable, the circumstances of the hit including the following shall be considered:
(i) Whether the player attempted to hit squarely through the opponent’s body and the head was not “picked” as a result of poor timing, poor angle of approach, or unnecessary extension of the body upward or outward.
(ii) Whether the opponent put himself in a vulnerable position by assuming a posture that made head contact on an otherwise full body check unavoidable.
(iii) Whether the opponent materially changed the position of his body or head immediately prior to or simultaneously with the hit in a way that significantly contributed to the head contact.
Should Letang be suspended for his hit on Johansson?TV ratings for Wednesday are in, and the numbers show that ESPN’s ESPY Awards broadcast fell for the second year in a row.
The awards show, which this year featured former First Lady Michelle Obama as an award presenter, fell over last year’s numbers, Variety magazine reported Thursday.
The Wednesday broadcast drew a 1.4 rating with 5.3 million viewers, the Hollywood-based magazine said. But that was down from last year’s 1.7 and 5.6 million viewers.
In addition, both last year and this year earned lower viewership compared to the 2015 broadcast which drew a 2.2 rating with 7.7 million viewers. The 2015 award show featured Caitlyn Jenner’s acceptance of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
ESPN likely hoped that the announcement that former First Lady Michelle Obama was tapped to present the Arthur Ashe Courage Award might lead to higher ratings this year. The former First Lady presented the award to Special Olympics Founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
The nearly 40-year-old cable sports network has been battling the perception that it leans too far to the left, but the inclusion of Obama on the show didn’t seem to help knock back that perception in the least.
Some reports show that the network has lost millions of viewers over the constant left-wing politics espoused by hosts and sports writers alike.
Indeed, three recent polls showed that millions of former ESPN fans have turned away from the network over its left-wing bias.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at [email protected] County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.
"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.
The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.
Allen said that the more recent version will remain in the school library and that the earlier version will be used in classes. The 1955 play based on Frank's experiences also has been a part of the eighth-grade curriculum for many years. The diary's "universal theme, that there is good in everyone, resonates with these kids," Allen said.
The decision was made in November and published in the Culpeper Star Exponent on Thursday.
Culpeper's policy on "public complaints about learning resources" calls for complaints to be submitted in writing and for a review committee to research the materials and deliberate, Allen said. In this case, the policy was not followed. Allen said the parent registered the complaint orally, no review committee was created and a decision was made quickly by at least one school administrator. He said he is uncertain about the details because he was out of town.
"The person came in, and the decision was made that day... and that's fine. We would like to have had it in writing. It just did not happen," Allen said.
Hasty decisions to restrict access to some books do "a disservice to students," said Angela Maycock, assistant director of the office for intellectual freedom at the American Library Association.
"Something that one individual finds controversial or offensive or objectionable may be really valuable to other learners in that community," she said.
The ALA has documented only six challenges to "The Diary of Anne Frank" since it began monitoring formal written complaints to remove or restrict books in 1990. Most of the concerns were about sexually explicit material, Maycock said. One record dating to 1983 from an Alabama textbook committee said the book was "a real downer" and called for its rejection from schools.
Please see the Post's new Higher Education page at http:/ / washingtonpost.com/ higher-ed.
For all our coverage, please see our main Education page, our Facebook fan page and our "PostSchools" Twitter feed. For free weekly "Education Report" email newsletter, click here.5 October 2012
Greg Tufaro, producer
Brook Jacobsen, producer
Dr. Oz Show
Zoco Productions, LLC/ Harpo Studios
110 N. Carpenter Street
Chicago, IL 60607
Dear Greg and Brook:
I am following up on my conversations and previous correspondence with you regarding the plans by the Dr. Oz Show to air health and safety claims by Jeffrey Smith about agricultural biotechnology (GMOs) and food issues. As discussed, I was unable to participate in your program due to a family conflict. After consulting with other colleagues who were similarly approached by you and those who did participate, however, I am compelled to again voice my concerns regarding the potential violation by Dr. Oz of medical ethics and high risk of misrepresentation of human health information by Dr. Oz, Zoco Productions and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios on this issue.
As a public sector scientist, researcher and academic administrator with more than 40 years experience, I am appalled that any medical professional would give a platform to the likes of Mr. Jeffrey Smith to impart health information to the public. Mr. Smith has no accredited or formal education in any health, nutrition, or other related science fields. Research into Mr. Smith’s credentials reveals that his only professional experience prior to taking up his crusade against biotechnology is as a ballroom dance teacher, yogic flying instructor and political candidate for the Maharishi cult’s natural law party. The fact that Mr. Smith was even allowed to appear on stage on a nationally broadcast television health-oriented program is hard to believe; hearing from my colleagues who did participate that Dr. Oz referred to Smith as a “scientist” during the program taping is an egregious misrepresentation.
Simply put, Mr. Smith’s health, environmental and safety claims about biotechnology have no basis whatsoever in medicine or science. Thousands of published and peer reviewed studies conducted over the past thirty-plus years contradict his claims and bizarre hypotheses associating health dangers linked to foods derived using biotechnology production methods. This is corroborated by such respected scientific and medical authorities as the American Medical Association, World Health Organization with the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Institute for Food Technologists and the American Dietetic Association. Regulatory bodies including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and Food Safety Commission of Japan (FSCJ) all confirm this safety.
Further, our correspondence and conversations, as well as those you had with other academic colleagues who were invited to participate, suggests you engaged in questionable and misleading tactics to secure our participation on your show. When we raised concerns about past treatment of academic participants discussing biotechnology on the Dr. Oz show, you stated “I understand the suspicion and the reservations any scientist would have after the last go-round. My best assurance can only come from the fact that producing a show in that vein isn’t something I agree with at all. That producer is no longer with us. I’m not into producing surprises or blindsiding anybody…” Yet, neither you nor Ms. Jacobsen disclosed that Lisa Oz, the show’s co-producer and wife of Dr. Oz, was the narrator for Mr. Smith’s video attacking biotechnology and an active campaigner for the Proposition 37 efforts in California.
As to you assurances that there would be no surprises or “bait-and-switch” tactics involved, I was informed that “deals were cut” between Dr. Oz and other participants like Organic Valley CEO Gary Hirshberg to prevent the scientists from fully participating in the program. These back-room deals caused changes to the described format for the interviews as laid out by you in advance of the program. Yet, apparently Mr. Hirshberg objected to appearing side-by-side with actual scientists as he made his claims but was allowed to remain on stage while they made their rebuttals. Further, Dr. Oz allowed Mr. Smith to re-tape his segment after the scientists spoke in response to his segment’s initial taping and after they had left the program.
You assured me and the other invited participants that the show was interested in a fair hearing of views from all sides with no pre-judged conclusions. Yet, I also learned that Dr. Oz practiced a pre-scripted conclusion to the program warning viewers to avoid the risks of GMOs by purchasing only organic foods prior to interviewing the scientists and hearing both sides. Similarly, during the taping of the Dr. Oz Show you incorporated graphics provided by Jeffrey Smith implying correlated health risks with the use of biotechnology crops that are simply not based in any medical science or study. These graphics are crude and inaccurate representation which will mislead people to believe biotechnology crops are associated with these diseases – the very same representation could be done showing, for example, that as viewership for the Dr. Oz show rose so did incidents of these diseases, suggesting watching your show is a health risk. Neither is of course true. Biotechnology crops are as safe, if not safer, than their conventional and organic counterparts.
All of this would lead any reasonable person to believe your representations were disingenuous and that this show was orchestrated theater on behalf of Mr. Smith and the Proposition 37 campaign. Since Mr. Smith and his collaborator, Dr. Oz show co-producer Lisa Oz, are active proponents behind the Proposition 37 California Ballot Initiative, the program you intend to air on the Fox network prior to the November 6, |
five or six, but it was nice to be reminded of them. Even though I like to think I run a fairly secure system, I am not omnipotent, and I look forward to SELinux being a watchdog for my back.
Now I have a brand new distribution to investigate in depth, along with working with some open hardware design. This is not to say that this blog will be “Fedora, Fedora, Fedora” since I have other projects which I am working on which use other distributions, but for those of you who are used to seeing Ubuntu come up on my notebook when I talk at events, this will explain the change to Fedora.
Carpe Diem!
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DisqusGunnar Garfors Gunnar in his homeland, Norway.
Gunnar Garfors visited all 198 countries in the world by the time he turned 37 years old.
So when people ask him which country was his favourite, he has a hard time picking just one.
However, there are 12 countries he thinks everyone should visit at some point in their lives.
Keep scrolling to see what those countries are, and why he thinks they’re worth visiting.
Romania Gunnar Garfors 'Transylvania, best known for its castles, mountains, and of course Dracula, will stun you. Not to forget the parties in the capital Bucharest. And Romanians even know how to make great beer.' Madagascar Gunnar Garfors 'There is no doubt about the French having 'visited.' The gourmet options in Antananarivo are world class, until it comes to the bill. You will think they have forgotten most of what you ordered.' 'The coastline, the lemurs, and the baobab trees will gobsmack you.' Iceland Gunnar Garfors 'You know that big island in the middle of the Atlantic. It's been battered and beaten by winds and waves for a million years, and it is still there!' 'Just bring your swimming gear, and sit in 40 degrees hot natural springs while your hair will freeze and get covered by snow. Unreal.' Vietnam Gunnar Garfors 'The definition of friendliness can be found here. Just remember not to let the hustle, bustle, and traffic stress you.' 'Sit down, order a drink, relax, and watch. And do not forget to check out the Mekong Delta and its floating markets.' Kyrgyzstan Gunnar Garfors 'Stunning nature, colourful markets, and very friendly people, unless they think you are an American pilot who is likely to run away with one of their beautiful girls. Bring a cup for world-class vodka.' Kiribati Gunnar Gafors 'Paradise, like it used to be. There isn't much luxury, but the fantastic seafood and the hospitality you are likely to experience by locals make up for it, by far.' 'Just do venture outside the 'civilisation.' And set aside some time, there are rarely more than 2-3 planes arriving here a week.' New Zealand Gunnar Garfors 'Enjoy white, black, and golden beaches, any kind of water sports and activities you didn't know existed.' Nicaragua Shutterstock 'This is a very diverse country between Costa Rica and Honduras. You'll find legendary surf spots, incredible diving opportunities, and stunning nature.' 'Just don't order a Cuba Libre here. The bartender might eventually mix you a Nica Libre, though.' Sierra Leone LEONARDO VITI / Shutterstock 'This paradise is on virtually no one's bucket list, but it should be if you are willing to challenge your comfort zone a tad. Expect amazing beaches, idyllic villages, and smiling people. Don't expect infrastructure.' Dominica Gunnar Garfors 'One of the least known islands of the Caribbean so deserves to be seen by more people. Of course, that would take away some of the charm of the volcanoes, Boiling Lake, the hidden beaches, and the rainforest.' 'Never mind I said anything. The two small airports can anyhow only take down propeller aircraft.' Norway Gunnar Garfors 'OK, OK, OK, call me biased, but if you haven't seen the West Coast or Northern Norway, you don't know what stunning scenery is.' 'The wild mountains, the twisting fjords, the unimaginable waterfalls, the magnificent glaciers, the tiny villages, and the midnight sun will leave you speechless. Yeah, even you from Texas. And did I remember to mention the Northern Light? Go, or regret forever.' Uruguay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Punta_del_este1.jpg 'You know that country in between Argentina and Brazil? The second smallest country in South America is still rather undiscovered, although I have no idea why. The memo about the calm and relaxed, yet very exciting people must have gotten lost in the mail.'
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Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Now in its seventh season, the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory is more popular than ever, averaging 19.79 million viewers per episode; and it’s not going away anytime soon. The comedy—recently extended to 2017—revolves around a gang of physicists and an engineer who work at the California Institute of Technology. Some recurring themes include their dorky obsession with sci-fi and comic books, their roller coaster–like love lives, and their surprisingly accurate scientific research in the lab.
Science caught up with David Saltzberg, who’s been the show’s one and only science consultant since it premiered, at this past weekend’s USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. Saltzberg is an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. When he’s not sifting through scripts or on the set, you can find him in the classroom or searching for neutrinos in Antarctica.
Q: Science last spoke with you in 2008. What’s changed about the show’s portrayal of science since you started? Has it changed at all now that you’re more experienced in consulting?
D.S.: I’ve certainly gotten more efficient. The writers and I used to have to go back and forth a lot more for me to converge on what they wanted. But now we just finished 7 years together, and so we’re a little bit like an old married couple. We know each other’s thinking a little better.
The whiteboards the characters use for equations have actually changed into something where real scientists pitch me their latest results and ask if they can appear on them. It’s sort of become a thing to get on the whiteboards. Dozens of scientists are watching those boards. The big discovery of gravitational waves, which indicated cosmological inflation, got a special place. It appeared on Stephen Hawking’s board, which of course is a much higher level than our main characters’ boards. That was actually vetted by Hawking himself. The producers didn’t want to put something on his board that he wouldn’t be comfortable with, so they took what I had suggested and sent a picture to him. He said he liked it.
Q: Speaking of gravitational waves, why do you think it’s important to throw in recent events like that?
D.S.: That subject was promoted not just to a whiteboard, but to the actual dialogue, which is appropriate since it’s such a great discovery. It’s really the creative call of the writers. It’s their show and they know what makes sense. But these physicists live in our universe, so this would be something they would talk about. So I think it adds to the reality. I’m not a writer, but when I listen to writers, they talk a lot about creating a world that’s believable, and people getting drawn into the story. And I think the more real things are, the more you can do that.
That said, I would never say you have to be accurate in science on television. I think you could make a great story with completely gonzo science. But it’s a creative decision and as long as the creators, in this case, thought that accurate science made sense, I’m here to help them with that.
Q: A recent review said the show portrays scientists as these misfits or nerds, and that kids are deterred from science because of this. What’s your response?
D.S.: I don’t know exactly what a nerd, or misfit, is, but let’s accept those words for a moment. I read a piece like that in The New York Times and thought it was shockingly offensive to people. I was actually surprised they would print it. What’s wrong with being a misfit? It was a woman writing an op-ed piece who complained about nerds turning people off from science. What’s wrong with being nerdy, for lack of a better word? It’s quite judgmental.
Q: What was it that made you decide that you wanted to get into advising TV shows?
D.S.: Oh, they asked. I feel like living in LA and being a professor, part of our job is to help local industry. You might normally think that a physicist is helping out industries like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, but the entertainment industry is another industry that employs a lot of people. And it helps our city, so I’m happy to help when I can. Then it turned out to something bigger where they wanted me around all the time. I could see they were doing a great show and so I was happy to join in.
Q: Are there any particular tips you would give to scientists who want to break into this field?
D.S.: It’s funny because I never deliberately sought this out. If they’re interested, the best thing to do is contact the Science & Entertainment Exchange. It’s an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and they have an office in Los Angeles. They have a giant Rolodex of industry people and a giant Rolodex of scientists. They consider themselves 1-800-Dial-a-Scientist.
So send them an e-mail; they’re very friendly. Tell them what your expertise is. They will probably call and talk to you about your expertise a little bit and then keep you on file. If you’re an expert in some particular type of feldspar and somebody wants to make a movie about that, they will make the connection. They also have events at least once a month in LA where industry people mingle with scientists. I’ve met a number of people and vice versa. It’s done a terrific job melding cultures.
Q: How much time does advising take out of your schedule?
D.S.: For an episode, it just takes a few hours to look at scripts and put things on the whiteboards. But I also go to just about every taping, which is a few more hours. Luckily, most of this is in the evening. They finish up with scripts and are ready for comments in the evening. Tapings are in the evening. So my evening relaxation is looking at scripts.
Right now I’m teaching a large undergraduate class 4 days a week. I’m here in D.C. this weekend, but tonight in my hotel room I’ll maybe be creating a midterm. As for research, we’re planning a big balloon launch in December of this year in Antarctica, so we’re getting ready for that. It’ll be looking for neutrinos hitting the Antarctic ice sheet. We’ve launched it before, but we have a new and improved scientific payload and we’re hoping this time we’ll see the neutrinos [to learn about the origin of cosmic rays].
I usually spend about 2 to 3 months at a time in Antarctica. It happened once where I had to look at scripts by e-mail. The executive producer, Chuck Lorre, once said he thinks they’re the only sitcom that sends their scripts to Antarctica for vetting. I think he’s right.
Q: Do you plan to see The Big Bang Theory through to the end?
D.S.: Yup. Maybe like the universe, there will be no end though.While some couples encourage their friends and family to snap as many photos as possible throughout the day (they're even signing up for apps that make it easier to compile everyone's photos in one place!), others are asking their guests to shut off their camera phones for the day. There are strong arguments on both sides -- there's something so special about seeing your wedding day unfold from your guests' perspectives, but photographers have noted that "guest photographers" often compromise your professional pictures. Photographer Corey Ann, an international award-winning photographer based in Northeast Ohio, shares why you might want to ask your guests to put aside their cameras for the night.
Last year, one of my friends got married, and I was so thrilled to be her photographer that day. What was even more amazing was that she had an “Unplugged Wedding,” after seeing pictures and reading my rants over the years about well-meaning guests whom have inadvertently (or heck, even completely on purpose) ruined images.
Prior to the ceremony, the officiant read this: “Welcome, friends and family! Good evening, everyone. Please be seated. Dan and Jennifer invite you to be truly present at this special time. Please, turn off your cell phones and put down your cameras. The photographer will capture how this moment looks -- I encourage you all to capture how it feels with your hearts, without the distraction of technology. If Dan can do it, then so can you.” I can’t tell you how many happy leaps of joy my heart did when reading this!! The guests all obeyed, and even after the ceremony, many decided to keep their arms down and their hearts open and enjoyed the day, instead of being an observer from behind their cameras.
Recently, “Guest Photographers” came up in one of the photography groups I am a part of online, and someone asked what the big deal is; why wouldn’t we want more people capturing images for our clients? I thought this was a great question! I don’t have a single problem with guests taking images and sharing them later on with the couple. It makes me happy to know there will be other pictures and photos of moments I may have missed or alternate angles that I couldn’t cover. I also completely understand that some have a love for capturing images and enjoy taking pictures at weddings they attend.
However, my heart literally breaks when a guest ruins an otherwise lovely image or jumps in front of me when I’m capturing a key moment from the day. It completely slays me when this happens because, while I am not remotely egotistical at all, I am fairly confident that my image would have been better than the one they captured. In the past six years of being a professional wedding photographer, it’s also been sad to watch the progression from seeing smiling, encouraging and happy faces as the bride is escorted up the aisle to faces hidden behind the backs of cameras and cell phones that line the aisle. These are all reasons why I am elated when I hear of couples opting for an Unplugged Wedding -- or, at the very least, an Unplugged Ceremony.
I also want to add this: if you are a guest at the wedding, please make sure to withhold posting pictures of the bride and groom online until after the ceremony. I can’t tell you how many “first looks” have inadvertently happened online before the wedding because a bridesmaid or groomsman uploaded pictures to social media before the wedding and a bride or groom, killing time by browsing Facebook, saw their future intended before the ceremony. Don’t do it!!!!! Also, make sure with the couple that it is OK to share the images on social media; sometimes people prefer to keep things quiet due to varying factors, and you don’t want to cause undue stress.
One thing there is absolutely nothing I can do to combat is a flash from a guest photographer’s camera. There is rarely anything that will save the image, and no repositioning will change the outcome:
This is just one of the hundreds of wedding processional images that I’ve had ruined from a camera flash. I rarely, if ever, use flash for the ceremony, so the light you see here is all from the one camera’s flash.
At another wedding, a girl’s father literally shoved me aside and gave me grief because I was blocking his daughter from standing in the aisle to get an image. This sanctuary only had one aisle and very little room to move, due to a small space being full with guests. I took this image to protect myself later in case the clients were upset that I had to stand slightly off center for a portion of their day:
Also? The Nintendo DS made the loudest noises when it took pictures. It was crazy. Since this image was taken four years ago, the DSes have been replaced with iPads, which are a million times worse when it comes to eyesores.
During a destination wedding in Cozumel, this kid’s dad yelled at my second shooter and shoved his kid up in front to make sure he got an image with his iPhone:
Note: He wasn’t even a guest of the wedding, just a guest of the resort.
This next situation literally broke my heart. In many churches, photographers are heavily restricted as to where they can go for images, and the Heinz Chapel is perhaps one of the strictest I’ve ever worked at. We are only allowed to be outside of the sanctuary in the door opening where the center aisle is and in the balcony. We are not permitted to move during the service. My second shooter, thankfully, was in the balcony; it didn’t make these guests go away, but luckily, he was able to get images of the service where you could see the bride and groom.
I argued, begged and pleaded for the church lady guarding me to at least allow me to go into the side aisle so I could get a clear shot of my clients when these guests jumped into the aisle, but I was not allowed. Instead, I just had to take what I could get and cry a bit on the inside. The guest did not move for the majority of the ceremony. I’m still sad when I look at this image:
Here's another image of a guest who jumped in front of me during a ceremony where I could not move to get around him:
And this moment almost made me cry... not kidding. I had my eye on this gentleman, since he was standing up on the altar with the bride and groom during the service, but I was able to zoom and crop around the couple so that he wasn’t in too many of the images. Then, after the pronouncement of the couple, he swiftly moved and stood right in front of me during the first kiss:
I jumped quickly to the side, but I missed the brief kiss. Luckily, I still was able to capture the hug after, but I am so sad that I missed their first kiss. I sure hope he got it…
I also felt doubly awful because I had to jump in front of guests view of the couple, and during a ceremony, my goal is to never block a guests view. I apologized profusely after the wedding, and thankfully, they all were very sweet and understanding.
Guests standing in the aisle always make me sad, because your attention immediately will go to that person and not to the subject of the image.
It doesn’t matter what kind of camera, big or small -- the flash is almost always too bright to work with once it is fired.
While this image wasn’t completely blown out, the shadows from a guest's flash are bothersome:
I really cringe when guests try to take pictures during formals. Not only am I generally under a time crunch, but the flashes ruin at least one or two shots from each batch I take:
Eyes also tend to wander, and rarely do I get everyone looking at me at the same time when there are multiple cameras present. This is the only time that I will sometimes tell guests that they have to stop taking pictures, and I have been told off more times than not when I’ve had to do this. However, my priority the day of the wedding is on my clients. I don’t care about the sale of the portraits, but I do care about the quality of the portraits, and if there is a circus going on behind me, it rarely ends well for everyone involved. So, trust me when I beg and plead for you to tell people to put their cameras down and go enjoy the cocktail hour while we take some portraits with the special people in your life.
The reception generally is a time when I can quickly move if a guest decides to take pictures, but one time when I can’t move around it? The special dances:
Although, I have to say, this little old guy does warm my heart a bit. He was pretty cute with his disposable camera, even if it was a bit distracting with the winding.
Here's another guest deciding the first dance is a great time for that portrait of the bride and groom:
This is another one that makes me a sad panda when I look at it. This guest came up at the last bit of the father/daughter dance, and there was nowhere I could go to get her out of the picture:
Luckily, I have numerous beautiful images from the dance, but the last hug is always my favorite.
Another pet peeve of guest cameras during the wedding? The red (or green) dot of doom!
These focusing beams are quite irritating because, again, there’s not a lot that I can do to get rid of it, outside of turning the image black and white (which still will leave a light circle). There are quite a few images that I’ve had to toss due to these beams; this is just one of the many.
Bottom line: My priority the day of the wedding is on my clients. They have paid me their hard-earned money to make sure I document their wedding, and when an overzealous guest gets in the way, it makes me sad. I think often people don’t realize what they are doing, and my writing this post was in hoping to educate even a few people that will take this advice and either have an unplugged wedding or think of the professional before jumping in the aisle for that shot.
-- Corey Ann of Corey Ann PhotographyPress contacts Preben Aamann European Council President Spokesperson +32 2 281 51 50 +32 476 85 05 43
Dear colleagues,
In order to best prepare our discussion in Malta about the future of the European Union of 27 member states, and in light of the conversations I have had with some of you, let me put forward a few reflections that I believe most of us share.
The challenges currently facing the European Union are more dangerous than ever before in the time since the signature of the Treaty of Rome. Today we are dealing with three threats, which have previously not occurred, at least not on such a scale.
The first threat, an external one, is related to the new geopolitical situation in the world and around Europe. An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas, Russia's aggressive policy towards Ukraine and its neighbours, wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable. For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best. Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.
The second threat, an internal one, is connected with the rise in anti-EU, nationalist, increasingly xenophobic sentiment in the EU itself. National egoism is also becoming an attractive alternative to integration. In addition, centrifugal tendencies feed on mistakes made by those, for whom ideology and institutions have become more important than the interests and emotions of the people.
The third threat is the state of mind of the pro-European elites. A decline of faith in political integration, submission to populist arguments as well as doubt in the fundamental values of liberal democracy are all increasingly visible.
In a world full of tension and confrontation, what is needed is courage, determination and political solidarity of Europeans. Without them we will not survive. If we do not believe in ourselves, in the deeper purpose of integration, why should anyone else? In Rome we should renew this declaration of faith. In today's world of states-continents with hundreds of millions of inhabitants, European countries taken separately have little weight. But the EU has demographic and economic potential, which makes it a partner equal to the largest powers. For this reason, the most important signal that should come out of Rome is that of readiness of the 27 to be united. A signal that we not only must, but we want to be united.
Let us show our European pride. If we pretend we cannot hear the words and we do not notice the decisions aimed against the EU and our future, people will stop treating Europe as their wider homeland. Equally dangerously, global partners will cease to respect us. Objectively speaking, there is no reason why Europe and its leaders should pander to external powers and their rulers. I know that in politics, the argument of dignity must not be overused, as it often leads to conflict and negative emotions. But today we must stand up very clearly for our dignity, the dignity of a united Europe - regardless of whether we are talking to Russia, China, the US or Turkey. Therefore, let us have the courage to be proud of our own achievements, which have made our continent the best place on Earth. Let us have the courage to oppose the rhetoric of demagogues, who claim that European integration is beneficial only to the elites, that ordinary people have only suffered as its result, and that countries will cope better on their own, rather than together.
We must look to the future - this was your most frequent request in our consultations over the past months. And there is no doubt about it. But we should never, under any circumstances, forget about the most important reasons why 60 years ago we decided to unite Europe. We often hear the argument that the memory of the past tragedies of a divided Europe is no longer an argument, that new generations do not remember the sources of our inspiration. But amnesia does not invalidate these inspirations, nor does it relieve us of our duty to continuously recall the tragic lessons of a divided Europe. In Rome, we should strongly reiterate these two basic, yet forgotten, truths: firstly, we have united in order to avoid another historic catastrophe, and secondly, that the times of European unity have been the best times in all of Europe's centuries-long history. It must be made crystal clear that the disintegration of the European Union will not lead to the restoration of some mythical, full sovereignty of its member states, but to their real and factual dependence on the great superpowers: the United States, Russia and China. Only together can we be fully independent.
We must therefore take assertive and spectacular steps that would change the collective emotions and revive the aspiration to raise European integration to the next level. In order to do this, we must restore the sense of external and internal security as well as socio-economic welfare for European citizens. This requires a definitive reinforcement of the EU external borders; improved cooperation of services responsible for combating terrorism and protecting order and peace within the border-free area; an increase in defence spending; strengthening the foreign policy of the EU as a whole as well as better coordinating individual member states' foreign policies; and last but not least fostering investment, social inclusion, growth, employment, reaping the benefits of technological change and convergence in both the euro area and the whole of Europe.
We should use the change in the trade strategy of the US to the EU's advantage by intensifying our talks with interested partners, while defending our interests at the same time. The European Union should not abandon its role as a trade superpower which is open to others, while protecting its own citizens and businesses, and remembering that free trade means fair trade. We should also firmly defend the international order based on the rule of law. We cannot surrender to those who want to weaken or invalidate the Transatlantic bond, without which global order and peace cannot survive. We should remind our American friends of their own motto: United we stand, divided we fall.Operation Bravo, the latest collection of top-rated community maps, is now live in CS:GO. Buying a pass will get you unlimited access to a map group of eight top-voted Workshop Maps playable in casual, deathmatch and—for the first time—competitive mode. The map group consists of seven new maps (Agency, Ali, Cache, Chinatown, Gwalior, Ruins and Siege), as well as a returning favorite (Seaside) that we’re eager to try out as a competitive map.
Like with Operation Payback, buying a pass to Bravo gets you an exclusive upgradable Challenge Coin. This time around, though, the coin will double as an operational scorecard that’ll let you keep a complete record of your stats from all Official Competitive Matches for the duration of Bravo.
Another addition to this Operation: weapon finishes. We’re shipping 31 new finishes as part of two all-new weapon collections with this op—one available exclusively as individual all-map weapon drops to Bravo pass-holders, and the other available to everybody as part of the Bravo weapon case, also available through timed all-map drops. (Pass-buyers will get Bravo case drops in addition to regular drops.)
Check out the Operation Bravo page for more information, or just launch CS:GO, grab a pass and get in on the action.Bottles of Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve at Bourbons Bistro in Louisville, KY. June 23, 2015 (Photo: Frankie Steele/Special to The C)
If you're ever lucky enough to get your hands on a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle whiskey, don't try selling it on Craigslist.
A Pennsylvania man learned the hard way that trying to do so without a liquor license can land you with a misdemeanor charge.
According to the York Dispatch, state liquor control enforcement agents issued a news release Friday stating that 45-year-old Wade Collingsworth had been charged with selling liquor without a license after he'd advertised a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve 20-year bourbon on the classifieds website.
State liquor agents met Collingsworth in Columbia, Lancaster County, on Dec. 29 and bought the bourbon for an undisclosed price, the paper stated.
The whiskey has a suggested retail price of $169.99 on the producer's website.
Collingsworth is at least the second Pennsylvania resident to get caught selling a Van Winkle whiskey on Craigslist in the past few years.
According to website Inside Hook, Bob Monk faced misdemeanor charges and an $1,800 fine in December 2015 after selling a bottle of 12-year Van Winkle Special Reserve to an undercover officer for $500.
Monk had purchased the bottle himself for $59.99 plus tax, Inside Hook stated.
Reach reporter Bailey Loosemore at 502-582-4646 or [email protected].
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Read or Share this story: http://cjky.it/2knol5AThe quest for parking during prime time, middays between Tuesday and Thursday, has become tougher than ever. Pictured: 75 State Street garage.
You’re navigating downtown traffic, with minutes to spare to make a meeting. Street parking is hopeless, so you head for a central garage, resigned to paying a small fortune for a cramped patch of pavement.
Then, disaster: A “lot full” sign blocks the entrance, like a callous maitre d’ turning away all but the dining elite. Even worse, other nearby garages are packed too.
Parking in downtown Boston has always been a headache, but the quest for a space during prime time, middays between Tuesday and Thursday, has become tougher than ever. Blame an improving economy and the loss of acres of cheap parking on the waterfront -- garage executives say Boston is experiencing a full-blown parking shortage.
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“My staff has seen people in tears. I think they would give their car away,’’ said Pam Messenger, general manager of the Friends of Post Office Square, which owns the popular Garage at Post Office Square.
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With 1,400 spaces on seven underground floors, the garage started filling up on busy days as much as a year ago, Messenger said. Summer was somewhat lighter, she said, but the throngs returned after Labor Day.
“It’s the new normal,’’ said Messenger, noting she has more than 80 people on a wait list to secure a monthly spot. “I personally try never to schedule meetings where people are coming to see me on those three midweek days.’’
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Sargent's Wharf in the North End.
Jammed parking lots are symptoms of a healthy business climate. They signal that employment is up and tenants are occupying downtown office buildings. But with executives shelling out $475 a month and more to secure daily spots for their BMWs and Lexus SUVs, there are fewer spaces for people in town for meetings, meals or tourism.
Boston’s current parking crunch is the product of conflicting ambitions. City planners placed parking caps on downtown and South Boston years ago, hoping to reduce pollution and encourage the use of public transportation, while mayors and developers pressed for business and residential expansion.
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James Gillooly, interim commissioner of the Boston Transportation Department, estimates about 3,000 spaces have been eliminated in the Seaport area over the past several years, as offices, condos and hotels have replaced open lots.
Some of the new buildings allow public parking, and other, more expensive lots have surfaced. But the landscape has changed dramatically for hundreds of people who once parked on the waterfront and walked to work downtown.
“As this neighborhood grows,’’ said Gillooly, “there will be spaces that used to be used by people in the financial district, who now have to come up with a new strategy of how to come and go from work.’’
Gillooly suggested a ride on the MBTA, followed by a walk from South Station, or perhaps a short pedal on a Hubway bike. “It’s time for a recalibration of their thinking,” he said.
Bostonians stubbornly love their cars, especially in bad weather. But they must deal with two hard and fast numbers: a downtown “parking freeze” that caps public parking places in commercial facilities at 35,556; and the South Boston limit, frozen at about 30,389, according to the city’s Air Pollution Control Commission.
The downtown freeze, in place since 1978 and amended in 2006, specifically limits parking available to the general pubic in commercial buildings. It doesn’t apply to residential buildings, which can install spots for tenants and guests. New commercial buildings also can offer parking for their business tenants -- but not for the public.
New buildings can include parking for the general public only if there are spots available in the freeze “bank,” given up by some other property.
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”At the moment there are zero spaces in the bank,’’ said Carl Spector,Boston’s director of climate and environmental planning. In fact, there have been no spaces available since December.
In South Boston, the rules are slightly different. Even commercial buildings creating tenant parking must apply to the bank, and spaces are going fast. There are 1,325 spots in the South Boston parking bank, for which new developments can apply.
Now, a commercial building boom promises to bring new skyscrapers and even more people to the city. But there won’t be a comparable increase in public parking.
“It’s a nightmare. I take the T now as much as I can,’’ said Sheryl Marshall, a consultant to private equity funds and an overseer at the Institute of Contemporary Art who recalls the days of ample waterfront parking. “Now you can’t find a space anywhere,” she said. “And it’s only going to get worse.”
Several of the lots near the South Boston waterfront are 90 percent to 100 percent full during peak hours, according to a report in August that the Boston Redevelopment Authority helped produce. Some of the parking areas let drivers reserve spots in advance, online, as demand has grown in 43 Seaport area lots.
Meanwhile, garages all over town are experiencing the “temporarily full” phenomenon. In recent days, in addition to Post Office Square, the 75 State Street lot, also central to downtown, was turning away all but monthly parkers. In the Back Bay, the Dartmouth Street Garage, once a less costly alternative to hotel lots, is often fully subscribed. Motorists hoping to park in the Prudential building garage often drive in an underground maze on the hunt for a rare open spot.
Even the large garage under the Boston Common, with 1,362spots -- convenient to Beacon Hill, and to residents and tourists alike -- must often turn away drivers seeking a space.
“Usually it’s just for a few hours,’’ said Katie Hauser, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which owns the garage. “It’s definitely a challenge that we’ve been experiencing more and more lately.”
Fifteen times since July, the garage has been closed for periods of the day, she said. And in the year from July 2013 through June 2014, it closed temporarily 221 times.
Garage managers say they hate having to turn people away to the competition. For drivers, the parking jam can mean delayed appointments, long walks in inclement weather or valets charging $30 to $47.
“You don’t want to send people away,’’ said Messenger of Post Office Square. It’s bad for the city and for businesses if people can’t easily park, she said. “That would hurt the economy.”
David L Ryan/Globe Staff A view of a parking lot on Congress Street, one of the few left in the Seaport District.
Beth Healy can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @HealyBethBrewers from overseas obviously enjoy San Diego beer. Just last week, Sebastian Sauer from Germany’s Freigeist Bierkultur visited Coronado’s brewpub to collaborate on a hoppy hefeweizen with brewer Ryan Brooks.
This week, Australian brewers Steve Brockman and Steph Cope will release the beer they created with Monkey Paw’s Cosimo Sorrentino and Chris West. The idea for Anzac, the “Aussie Pale Ale,” was born after the TwoBrewersAbroad.com bloggers/brewers met Monkey Paw’s owner Scot Blair at Societe Brewing Company’s tasting room.
Anzac, which debuts this Friday, has several Australian attributes: an Australian yeast strain from White Labs, Lyle’s golden syrup, hand-toasted coconut, and a malt bill with golden oats typically used in war-time staple, the Anzac biscuit (cookie) staple.
Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand that is equivalent to our Memorial Day in the U.S. Anzac Day is honored on April 25, but there were no big celebrations in San Diego. “We felt that we and our fellow expatriates |
, in 1990 and 1992 murders of American innkeeper Michael Devine and guerrilla fighter Efrain Bamaco Velazquez, husband of an American, Jennifer Harbury." Intelligence a computerized intelligence newsletter published in France, 4/24/1995, p. 1
Guatemala, 1988-91. CIA station chief in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991 was a Cuban American. He had about 20 officers with a budget of about $5 million a year and an equal or greater sum for "liaison" with Guatemalan military. His job included placing and keeping senior Guatemalan officers on his payroll. Among them was Alpirez, who recruited others for CIA. Alpirez's intelligence unit spied on Guatemalans and is accused by human rights groups of assassinations. CIA also gave Guatemalan army information on the guerrillas. New York Times, 4/2/1995, A11
Guatemala, 1989. 25 students in two years killed by squads. Entire university student association has been silenced. U.S. backed governments in virtual genocide have more than 150,000 victims. AI called this genocide a "government program of political murder." The Nation, 3/5/1990, cover, p. 308
Guatemala, 1990-95. Member of House Intelligence Committee, Robert G. Torricelli (D- NJ.) said, in letter to President Clinton, that a Guatemalan military officer who ordered killings of an American citizen and a guerrilla leader married to a North American lawyer was a paid agent of CIA. CIA knew of killings, but concealed its knowledge for years. Another member of House Intelligence Committee confirmed Torricelli's claims. Torricelli wrote in letter to President that the "Direct involvement of CIA in the murder of these individuals leads me to the extraordinary conclusion that the agency is simply out of control and that it contains what can only be labeled a criminal element." Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, Bamaca, and Michael Devine. Tim Weiner, New York Times, 3/23/1995
Guatemala, 1990-95. Article, El Buki's Tale Murder of Michael Devine. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Quarterly), Summer 1995, pp. 32-37
Guatemala, 1990-95. Article, The Agency, Off Target. Two Deaths, a Rogue CIA Informant and a Big Pot of Trouble. Re deaths of Michael Devine and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez Harbury's husband. CIA paid Colonel Alpirez $43,000 after it learned of cover up of deaths. U.S. News & World Report, 4/10/1995, p. 46
Guatemala, 1990-95. Assassin of Michael Devine and of the husband of Jennifer Harbury, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, was on CIA's payroll and had attended School of Americas (SOA) on two separate occasions. In January 1995 when State and NSC pieced together what CIA knew, the ambassador demanded removal of CIA's station chief. CIA fought to stop disclosure of its relationship with the Colonel. Administration officials began to mistrust what CIA was saying about the case. The Colonel first came to U.S. In 1970 as an army cadet at SOA. He returned to SOA in 1989, to take year long Command and General Staff course when he was already on CIA payroll. In 1990, Michael Devine, who ran a hotel, apparently stumbled on a smuggling operation involving Guatemalan military. He was killed. New York Times, 3/24/1995, A3
Guatemala, 1990-95. CIA last month removed its station chief in Guatemala for failing to report promptly information linking a paid CIA informer to the slaying of a Guatemalan guerrilla fighter married to Jennifer Harbury. Guatemalan army Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, was paid $44,000 by CIA in 1992 for secretly supplying intelligence on the civil war. At time of payment CIA had evidence linking him to the slaying of U.S. citizen Michael Devine (after he found about a military smuggling operation or because he had a weapon). Washington Post, 3/25/1995, A1,20
Guatemala, 1990-95. Clinton has threatened to fire anyone in CIA who withheld information from him about activities of its informant in Guatemala, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez. What is more likely to be agency's undoing is its failure to tell congress that only six months after he graduated from command-level courses at School of Americas Colonel Alpirez, a member of military intelligence on agency's payroll, ordered murder of a U.S. citizen, William Devine, and then torture-murder of husband of an American woman. White House officials, and President Clinton in particular, were very angry about Guatemalan affair but NSC Anthony lake was arguing that there is no evidence that CIA tried to deceive president. Los Angeles Times reported that late last year State Department found information about Devine murder in its files that appeared to have originated with CIA and had not been passed on to White House. This discovery prompted State Department and White House to ask CIA for more information. State initially asked CIA for information on rebel Commandante Efrain Bamaca Velasquez and received a few modest files. Several weeks later, State again asked CIA for information but this time on "Commandante Everardo," which was Commandante Bamaca's well-known nom de guerre. Only then did CIA produced incriminating data that it held solely under that name. CIA has tried to ease situation with a rare "leak" about itself to press. On 3/24, Los Angeles Times quoted "CIA sources" as saying Agency was only told after the fact that its Guatemalan informant, Colonel Alpirez, was present at killing in 1990 of Devine, a U.S. citizen who ran a popular tourist resort in Guatemala. CIA insisted to the paper that it cut ties with Colonel at that point, but, significantly, sources did not put a date on rupture. That gave it "wiggle room" to say it didn't find out about Colonel's involvement in March 1992 torture-murder of Bamaca until early this year. CIA gave Colonel Alpirez a "final payment" of $44,000 at about time of Bamaca's murder. Per National public radio commentator Daniel Schorr, CIA station chief in Guatemala has been fired for failing to relay information. But New York Times says he was reassigned to Langley in January, after U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala accused him of withholding information. CIA has assigned its inspector General, Fred Hitz, to investigate. CIA station chief in Switzerland, who held a top position at Department of Operations (DO) Latin American Division from 1990 to 1992, is now being questioned, as is Jack Devine, who headed division from January 1983 until last October. He was appointed Associate Deputy Director of Operations in October after John MacGaffin was removed from that post for secretly giving an award to a senior operative who had just been disciplined in Ames case. Devine's successor is a woman, first to direct a DO division. She is in her 50s, was previously station chief in El Salvador, and is said by officials outside CIA to be very forthcoming about case. Intelligence a computerized intelligence newsletter published in France, 3/27/1995, p. 30
Guatemala, 1990-95. Guatemalan soldiers killed Michael Devine under orders from Colonel Mario Garcia Catalan, per convicted soldier, Solbal. He killed as the army convinced he had bought a stolen rifle. They tortured him before killing him. Solbal says Colonel Alpirez gave food and shelter to the killers. Washington Times, 5/15/1995, A13
Guatemala, 1990-95. Letter from Congressman Torricelli to President Clinton about involvement of CIA in two murders in Guatemala. 3/22/1995
Guatemala, 1990-95. Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-NJ., who is on the HPSCI, has requested an investigation from the Justice Department on role of the CIA in the murder of Michael Devine and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez. Request was made in a letter to President Clinton. Guatemalan intelligence officer who ordered the murders, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, was a paid agent of the CIA. Torricelli claims that the NSA, CIA, State Department., and NSC covered up the involvement of a paid agent in the murders. Devine, who was killed in 1990, was an American citizen and Velasquez, who was killed in 1992, was married to an U.S. Citizen. CNN Headline News, 3/23/1995 and AP, 3/23/1995
Guatemala, 1990-95. Revelations about a CIA informer linked to two murders (Devine and Bamaca) in Guatemala helped exhume embarrassing relationship between U.S. military and intelligence personnel and a Central American regime notorious for human rights violations. Washington Post, 4/2/1995, A29
Guatemala, 1990-95. Tim Weiner article "A Guatemalan Officer and the CIA." Colonel is recalled as a "good soldier" and a murdering spy. New York Times, 3/26/1995
Guatemala, 1990-95. Two colonels suspended in Guatemala for covering up 1990 killing of Michael Devine. One was a paid CIA informant at time of killing. Colonel Mario Garcia Catalan also suspended. Washington Post, 4/27/1995, A29
Guatemala, 1990-95. Wife of Michael Devine discusses slaying of her husband. New York Times, 3/28/1995, A1,6
Guatemala, 1991-94. State Department reported in 1991, that "military, civil patrols and police continued to commit a majority of major human rights abuses, including extrajuridicial killings torture and disappearances." Guatemalan counterinsurgency campaign devised by U.S. counterinsurgency experts Caesar Sereseres and Colonel George Minas. Former served as a consultant to RAND Corporation and State Department's Office of Policy Planning. Minas served as military attache in Guatemala in early 1980s. Both encouraged population control such as Vietnam-style military-controlled strategic hamlets and civilian defense patrols. Today Guatemala is largest warehouse for cocaine transshipments to U.S. Drug trade run by military which tries to blame the leftists. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Quarterly), Spring 1994, pp. 28-33
Guatemala, 1991-95. U.S. Had information in 10/1991 linking a paid CIA informer in slaying of a U.S. citizen. Colonel Roberto Alpirez was dropped from CIA's payroll but remained a contact through 7/1992 when he allegedly ordered another killing of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez husband of Jennifer Harbury. Washington Post, 3/24/1995, A1,27
Guatemala, 1992. Rights abuses in Guatemala continue, paramilitary civilian patrols self defense patrols accused of campaign of terror, control rural areas. Patrols answer to military. Washington Post, 10/4/1992, A35
Guatemala, 1995. President Clinton said he would dismiss any CIA official who withheld information on death of Jennifer Harbury's husband. Rep Torricelli said CIA withheld information for years. Washington Times, 3/25/1995, A3
Guatemala, 1970-95. Discussion of Torricelli, Harbury, Devine, Bamaco, etc. The death of husband of Harbury not a rogue operation. This was standard operating procedure in El Salvador and Guatemala and elsewhere around the globe. CIA organized death squads, financed them, equipped them, trained them, etc. That's what the CIA does. Once in a decade the U.S. public hears about this. CIA should be abolished. The CIA mislead Congress about the Devine case. Getting rid of CIA is not enough the CIA did not act alone. The National Security Agency and the Army may have been involved in Guatemala. The Progressive, 5/1995, pp. 8,9
Haiti: Watch List
Haiti, 1986-93. In 1986 the CIA funded the national intelligence service (SIN) under guise of fighting narcotics but SIN never produced drug intelligence and used CIA money for political operations. Sin involved in spying on so-called subversive groups...they doing nothing but political repression...they targeted people who were for change. CIA used distorted data to discredit Aristide. NACLA (Magazine re Latin America), 2/1994, p. 35
Haiti, 1990-94. Emannuel Constant, leader of Haiti's FRAPH hit squad, worked for CIA and U.S. intelligence helped launch FRAPH. Haiti's dreaded attaches paid for by a U.S. Government-funded project that maintains sensitive files on Haiti's poor. The Nation, 10/24/1994, 458
Haiti, 1990-94. U.S. officials involved in refugee policy have backgrounds suggestive of Phoenix-like program activities. Luis Moreno, State Department, has background in counterterrorism. Gunther Wagner, senior intelligence officer at INS's southwest regional office, assigned to investigate repression against repatriated refugees. Wagner had served as public safety adviser to Vietnamese National Special Branch for 5 years and later advised Somoza's National Guard. INS database on all asylum interviews at Guantanamo. INS, on demand, gave State Department unrestricted access to all interview files. U.S. Officers hand Haitian authorities computer print-outs of names of all Haitians being repatriated. CIA funded service intelligence nacionale (SIN), who's de facto primary function was a war against popular movement including torture and assassination a fact admitted by a CIA officer to an official in Aristide's government. U.S. shares "anti-narcotics intelligence" with Haitian military. The Progressive, 4/1994, p. 21
Haiti, 1991-94. Asylum-promoting project gets family information that fed into a computer project that could be used to target for repression. The Progressive, 9/1994, pp. 19-26
Haiti, 1991-94. Seven chief attaches arranged killings and brought victims to houses. Four of the seven worked for Centers for Development and Health (CDS), funded by U.S. AID. One was Gros Sergo, and other was Fritz Joseph who chief FRAPH recruiter in Cite Soleil. Two others are Marc Arthur and Gors Fanfan. CDS files track every family in Cite Soleil. The Nation, 10/24/1994, p. 461
Haiti, 1994. AID programs for Haitian popular groups; Immigration and Naturalization service, with computerized files on 58,000 political-asylum applicants and army intelligence S-2 section of 96th Civil Affairs Battalion assigned to monitor refugees at Guantanamo Bay. Per Capt. James Vick, unit develops networks of informants and works with marine corps counterintelligence in "identifying ringleaders of unrest and in weeding out troublemakers." 96th's files enter military intelligence system. Gunther Wagner, a former Nazi, served with U.S. In Phoenix operation in Vietnam, and in Nicaragua now heads State Department's Cuba-Haiti task force. Pentagon's Atlantic command commissioned Booz, Allen, Hamilton, to devise a computer model of Haitian society. Results of study given. Priority of study to build an "organized information bank...." no change expected in ruling clique of Haiti. Article by Allan Nairn. The Nation, 10/3/1994, pp. 344-48
Haiti: Death Squads
Haiti. CIA officer assigned 1973-75 Coordination with Ton-Ton Macoute, "Baby Doc" Duvalier's private death squad. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Quarterly), 9/1980, p. 16
Haiti, 1985-93. CIA created an intelligence service in Haiti: National Intelligence Service, (SIN) from its initials in French, to fight cocaine trade, but unit became instrument of political terror whose officers engaged in drug traffic, killings and torture. Unit produced little drug intelligence. U.S. cut ties to group after 1991 military coup. New York Times, 11/14/1993 pp. 1,12
Haiti, 1986-93 INS database on all asylum interviews at Guantanamo. INS, on demand, gave State Department unrestricted access to all interview files. U.S. officers hand Haitian authorities computer print-outs of names of all Haitians being repatriated. CIA funded service intelligence nacionale (SIN), who's de facto primary function was a war against popular movement including torture and assassination a fact admitted by a CIA officer to an official in Aristide's government. U.S. shares "anti-narcotics intelligence" with Haitian military. The Progressive, 4/1994, p. 21
Haiti, 1990-94. Clinton administration denied report CIA helped set up Haiti's pro-army Militia FRAPH. Officials refused to comment whether FRAPH leader Emmanuel Constant was a paid CIA informant. "Nation" article said Constant worked for both the CIA and the DIA. Colonel Collins of DIA and Donald Terry of CIA were his contacts. Collins urged Constant to set up FRAPH. Mr. Constant, per Washington Times, was a paid U.S. Informant on Haitian political activities and assisting anti-drug efforts. Relationship broken off early this year. FRAPH has been linked to murders, public beatings and arson. CIA officers in past worked with Haiti's national intelligence service. Washington Times, 10/7/1994, A16
Haiti, 1990-94. Emannuel Constant, leader of Haiti's FRAPH hit squad, worked for CIA and U.S. Intelligence helped launch FRAPH. Haiti's dreaded attaches paid for by a U.S. Government-funded project that maintains sensitive files on Haiti's poor. In 10/3/1994, issue of Nation carried Nairn's article "The Eagle is Landing," he quoted a U.S. official praising Constant as a young republican that U.S. Intelligence had encouraged to form FRAPH. Constant confirmed that account. He first said his handler was Colonel Patrick Collins, DIA attache in Haiti, and later claimed another U. S. official urged him to form FRAPH. Collins first approached Constant while he taught a course at HQs of CIA-run national intelligence service (SIN) and built up a computer data base at Bureau of Information and Coordination. FRAPH originally was called Haitian Resistance League. Constant was working for the CIA at SIN while it attacked the poor. The Nation, 10/24/1994,The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, a new Showtime documentary series launching at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday (Jan. 17), intends to stay un-wonky, focusing instead on getting “behind some of the humanity, some of the humor, some of the pain” on the presidential campaign trail, in the words of Mark McKinnon, who with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (coauthors of the campaign chronicles Game Change and Double Down) will shadow the campaigns on the series. Premiere-episode sequences will focus on Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, according to a Showtime news release.
The race so far is remarkable for more than the rogue candidates challenging status quo candidates in both parties. Free and social media have fueled the candidacies of Trump and Sanders while paid-media campaigns – mostly television and radio advertising bought by the campaigns and their affiliated political action committees and other entities – have done little to help the rest.
According to NBC News, citing a report from SMG Delta, 2015 ad spending by the campaigns exceeded $111 million – up from $35 million during the year-before time frame leading up to the 2012 election. A third of the 2015 spending came from or on the behalf of Jeb Bush’s campaign. Most recent polls show Bush running fifth in the run-up to the Iowa caucus. Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised $112 million in 2015, and, challenged by Sanders’ climbing poll numbers, is poised to spend heavily during the early months of 2016, according to a recent Reuters report. The Iowa caucus is Feb. 1, followed by the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary and the March 1 Super Tuesday cluster of primaries.
“The impact of paid media has really diminished, and so we see candidates using alternative routes to communicate,” said McKinnon, previewing The Circus at the Television Critics Association Winter TV Tour in California. “And I think that’s driven largely by the fact that, as we’ve looked at the American electorate and communication strategies over time, (voters) just don’t believe anything that they hear or see from politicians, particularly if it’s paid for. So they are looking for anything that they view as authentic.
“So the campaigns are using late night (TV appearances and) other sort of nontraditional formats to communicate, because I think viewers view that as something that’s much more real, much more human.”
The Circus was conceived as a nontraditional format, informed by the reporting Halperin and Heilemann have done on this and past campaigns. Mainstay guests on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, they host their own weekday Bloomberg show, With All Due Respect, which double-runs on MSNBC. (The Circus is co-produced by Bloomberg Politics.) McKinnon’s Showtime bio says he’s “worked for many causes, companies, and candidates, including former President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, late former Governor Ann Richards, and Bono.”
“Ideology obviously matters, because it motivates people,” Heilemann said. “Policy obviously matters to certain candidates more than others because it motivates them. But this is the most extreme, intense, crazy competition that exists in the world, running for president. You have these people who are some mixture of extraordinarily idealistic, extraordinarily vain, insecure, overconfident, charismatic, needy, all kind of rolled up into one, and they are all running for the most powerful office in the world under the most pressure and scrutiny you can imagine: physical, emotional, psychological, every other way.
“It’s the hardest thing you could ever do as a human being. We found, in writing about this stuff, that people are interested in really interesting people who (have) all of those things that I just said as qualities. What’s it like to go through that? What’s it like to live through that? What kind of stress does that put on you? What does it do to your family? How do you go about trying to win while keeping some sense of your soul?
“If you see them going through the rigors of this on a daily basis, the drama of it, the comedy of it, the pathos of it, all of that is kind of there. Again, in the books we have written, we found that people kind of find that pretty fascinating. And so our main focus is that. It’s the high human drama and sometimes the high human comedy of what it takes to try to win the nation’s highest office.”
Halperin said that premiere-episode segments on Sanders and Cruz showed him “sides of them, nuances of their personalities, that I’d never seen before, and I’ve been covering them both for a while now.”
“One of the founding principles of this show is, can we show these candidates and the people around them, including their families and senior staff and activists, in a way that you can’t get through other coverage of them for all of the coverage there is?” Halperin added. “And I would say we are on track for episode one for those two, two of our big characters this week, two of the outsiders, to show you sides of them you haven’t seen.
“Is that policy? No. But it’s an incredibly important part of how a lot of voters make up their mind about who they want in their living room for four years or eight years. What person, what family, do they want to be at the top of the United States government?”
Campaign commercials will continue to run – spending on all political advertising could approach $6 billion in 2016, according to a Wells Fargo Securities study cited by the Los Angeles Times -- and stations will continue to get paid for them.
“They don’t get paid on effectiveness,” Halperin said. “They just take the money, and the ads run.
“But, without a doubt, when you go out on the campaign trail and you see Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Ted Cruz interacting with voters and getting covered, you can tell that that’s much more part of the sensibility and the psyche of the candidates and their traveling staff than thinking about what’s on TV. The TV, the paid media, is almost noise in most cases except when somebody does an ad that forces the campaigns and the candidates to respond. It’s almost just like the background of a Simpsons episode that just keeps repeating over and over as they walk along.”Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics are once again available for purchase on Steam.
Bethesda announced today on its blog that it has resolved publishing issues and put the classic Fallout games back on Steam. Early this year, the games were removed from all digital distribution platforms (including Steam and GOG.com) after the rights to the games transitioned to Bethesda. According to the company, it needed to "remove existing publisher info, legal text, etc."
With their return to Steam, minor changes have been made to the original games. Saves now have Steam Cloud support, and Fallout 1 and 2 have "default" and "classic" modes. Default mode allows for high resolutions and classic is the unmodified, original game. Fallout Tactics is unmodified, but its multiplayer is still supported via direct connection. Tactics cannot run on Windows 8.
Each game costs $10 individually and a bundle of all three costs $20. There is no word yet on if the games are returning to GOG.com. If you already own the games, they're still in your digital library. There's no need to buy them again.
Recently, GameSpot discussed what a new Fallout game should include. Although Bethesda has not said anything official about it, rumors suggest that the next entry in the series will be set in Boston.Okay, I’m getting sick of everyone emailing me this article. If you haven’t read it, it’s a piece in VICE called ‘B-Stylers are Japanese Teens Who Want to be Black’. You can read it if you want, but if not, then here’s the summary:
‘omg look, Japan is racist (but we’re not. lol)’
Seriously.
That’s what these articles always boil down to. And I’m tired of them. My main issue with these pieces is that they let white people focus away from actual problems they have at home, and instead laugh about how Japan is ‘late’ or ‘weird’ because they are ‘still’ doing racist stuff.
Like seriously, Japanese people dressing up in rap gear is only interesting if you are willing to ignore the fact that it happens on a much larger scale in, say, the U.S.
Trust me. Give me ten minutes in any mall in middle America, and I will find you a pasty white kid that wishes to god he was black.
But instead, articles like this help us forget about that. We laugh at Japan’s backwardness, and feel better about ourselves. We forget that we’re still shooting and imprisoning black children, we forget that we’ve still got a bunch of people out there that think Obama is a terrorist, we forget that we’re still about a million miles off from whatever dream that Martin Lester King dude was talking about in 1860 or whenever.
So before we go any further, let me throw out a couple of disclaimers: I’m not mad at Vice. I’m a little annoyed at Desiré van den Berg, the informant in the Vice piece. But I’m mainly sick of the Euro-American narcissism that creates the demand for this sort of article.
First, let’s talk about Vice. Vice is actually a pretty cool publication, for what it does. It’s generally pretty entertaining, and occasionally does great documentary work. But it is not a news outlet. While the NYT or Fox News, say, seem to genuinely expect that smart people will believe everything they say, Vice doesn’t. Vice is not going to hold your hand. Vice is irresponsible on purpose. It’s a little like The Onion in that if you’re going to read anything on their site, you need to come prepared. If you want to avoid looking like an idiot in the comments section somewhere, you need to have, say, at least middle-school level critical thinking skills.
Here’s what I mean: if you are reading something about a phenomenon in a certain country, and the author admits in the first paragraph that she does not even speak the language, then you should know that whatever comes next is going to be suspect.
Seriously, everyone. It’s 2014. Are we still believing everything that white people write on the internet about coloreds? Have we forgotten how they did hip-hop when it first came out? Haven’t any of you been to school?
Like, look. Here’s the embedded photographer, Desiré van den Berg, explaining her information-gathering process:
It was all a bit of a hassle, though, because Hina and the other B-stylers didn’t speak a single word of English. We needed a translator both to make an appointment and at the actual first meeting, too.
No, Desiré. Your presence is a hassle. You’re annoyed because somebody doesn’t speak English? Yo, you’re in Japan. People here speak — guess what — Japanese. If you don’t speak it, then you’re officially annoying to everyone that has to accommodate you. Also, you should probably refrain from making any public statements about anything, because odds are that you do not know what you are talking about.
B-Style is not a thing
Case in point: this word that keeps coming up in the article, B-Style?
…what the Japanese call “B-style”—a contraction of the words “Black” and “Lifestyle” that refers to a subculture of young Japanese people who love American hip-hop culture so much that they do everything in their power to look as African American as possible.
Yeah, that doesn’t exist.
Maybe you don’t believe me. An easy way to check for this is to just do a google search for the word ‘b-style’ (or ‘bスタイル’). And the first hit that comes up is … an employment support site. ‘B-Style’, this portmanteau of ‘Black’ and ‘Lifestyle’, is not a thing. Trust me, this is Japan. If it exists, it is on the internet.
‘B-Style’ is probably something that Hina said because she knew the person talking to her didn’t understand what she was saying, so she tried to make an English-sounding word that would be easier for her to digest.
Maybe, maybe Hina is talking about B系, b-kei, which would translate out to B-style in English. People do identify with this. The trouble is that the ‘b’ there can mean black, but really, it can mean anything. Hina seems to interpret it as ‘black’, but most Japanese people I know that actually wear this stuff would say it’s about hip-hop, and the ‘b’ is from ‘b-boy’ or ‘b-girl’.
And really, the rest of the article doesn’t make any sense. These ‘special African salons’ that people supposedly go to to get their hair done? No. There are plenty of Japanese-run salons that cater to people that want their hair permed or braided. That’s where most people go. Granted, it can cost upwards of $300 to get it done, but they exist, and they’re popular.
And Africans do not all run salons in ‘Tokyo’s ghettos’. I know that it’s fun to assume that black people = ghetto, all over the world, but that’s not really how it works. I used to get my hair cut by a dude from Ghana named Lee (does great work by the way, if you need a cut hit me up and I’ll give you his cell number) who runs a shop in Roppongi, which is about as far from the ‘ghetto’ as you can get. Also, his employees seem to be mainly Japanese.
Another one: these ‘special B-style events’ that she mentions? Yeah, they’re called hip-hop concerts. They exist all over the world. I’ve been to several, and nobody has ever referred to them as a ‘B-Style event’. Desiré makes it sound like there is some kind of cult where people get together in a dark room and just meditate quietly about how much they like black people until it is time to go home.
So we’ve come all this way, and maybe you think that I’m trying to cover something up, that I’m trying to say that there are no people in Japan that have a probably unhealthy obsession with black people. After all, how could I do that, especially when there is video evidence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qe4AZRkFYE
So look, I’ll answer the question. Does the phenomenon of Japanese people wanting to be black exist? In short, yes. And it’s an interesting one. But it’s also extremely complicated. I don’t really have space to talk about it here, but at the very least, we’ve got to recognize that it’s difficult to seperate someone that just likes baggy jeans and rap music from someone who genuinely ‘wants to be black’ just by looking at them.
Also, for those people that express a desire to actually be black, or even just to identify with black people, it’s not only for visual or style reasons. It can also be for very specific political reasons. And this has been happening for decades, at least since the 1950s.
If you want more than that, you’ll have to wait for an article I’m working on right now to come out (sorry, the academic publishing game is horrible). Or in the meantime, you can check out a book called Babylon East by Marvin Sterling. There are some other books out there that touch on the subject, but they’re mostly disappointing.
Let me be clear though: I’m not defending Japan against any charges of racism. Japan is has a very deep race problem, and I’ll never argue that it doesn’t. Hell, I’m writing a book that is partially about racism in Japan — if all of the racism in Japan were to disappear tomorrow, I’d be out of a job. But there’s no worry of that, because I get stopped by the police in Tokyo more often than I do in New York, and right-wing terrorist groups are still attacking Korean people in the streets of Shin-Okubo.
But America also has a very deep race problem — and this brings us back to the Euro-American narcissism I mentioned a second ago. What is it that makes white people so excited about pointing out other people’s race problems? And why is there such a demand for stuff like this?
An example: apparently the photographer that put this piece together is Dutch. For some reason, she had to come all the way to Tokyo to find kids imitating black people. This makes zero sense, because if she wanted to write about weird people imitating black people, she could hop on a plane right back to Amsterdam and write about the Zwarte Piet phenomenon, where people have been dressing up in blackface, curly wigs, red lipstick, and gold hoop earrings every December 5th for the past hundred or so years. If we’re going for offensiveness, that’s way heavier than a few clueless Japanese kids getting tans and braiding their hair. Especially because the Dutch know exactly what they are doing.
Wouldn’t a piece on Dutch blackfacers make more sense, and be more reliable, since the photographer actually speaks the language? Or is that just too close to home for us, because those people are white? Does it really make us feel that much better to see Asians doing stuff like this?
But, really: I shouldn’t be going that hard on Desiré, because she never calls herself a reporter. She’s a photographer. She takes pictures. And she did just that — the photos in the article were pretty cool, and she even provided some interesting color commentary. So, she did her job.
But I’m worried that we, the people that read these things and then share them and get all worked up in the comments — we aren’t doing our job. Shouldn’t we know better than to immediately assume that any white person that spends fifteen minutes in Tokyo is a reliable informant?
There’s a word for this kind of assumption — racism. Or, if you want to be really specific, you can call it Orientalism. A dude named Edward Said wrote a book about it once, but it’s pretty long. Maybe you can just check this summary here.In what is possibly one of the greatest videos to ever grace the Internet, Sen. Claire McCaskill has released a public service announcement encouraging all men everywhere to "just shut the hell up."
"As one of just 20 women currently in the Senate, it's important to me to encourage more women to run for office," McCaskill said in the clip, which aired on last night's "Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
"But equally important is encouraging more men to sometimes just shut the hell up. It's not that women don't value your thoughts, it's just that we don't value all of them. The world doesn't need your opinion on everything. For example, what women do with their bodies. Hush."
McCaskill then went on to share a few of the topics women no longer need or want men's opinions on, including "'Star Wars,' pantsuits, selfies, Shonda Rhimes, curtains, carbs, millennials, body hair removal, religion, gluten, Harry Potter, nut allergies, 'Star Wars' again, all art in general, whether or not to brine the Thanksgiving turkey, and ethics in gaming journalism." Brilliant.
Thank you, senator, for saying it so we don't have to.Much of the fight over how to handle net neutrality has been between the two industries that have the most obvious stake in it: cable companies and web services. Today, though, 60 tech companies, |
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It’s taken Microsoft 4 years to release Microsoft Office on the iPad. It’s all forgiven because it looks brilliant and seems to have a great user experience.
At this stage you can view/read Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free. Creating and editing will require an Office 365 subscription which starts at $80 USD for students and $100 for the general public.
I’m personally really surprised at how great the apps look and feel. They’re fast and fluid even on my 2nd generation iPad. The user experience seems to have been a major focus when developing the apps. Microsoft has done a great job of creating an iPad app that’s not just a stretched out iPhone up. It really feels like it’s made for iOS7.
This release along with the rebranding of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure signals the new Microsoft that Satya Nadella is heading up. He’s doing a great job.
Make sure you give the iPad Office apps a try by clicking on this link.Just Cause 3 Platforms: PS4 (tested), Xbox One, PC
Developer: Avalanche Studios
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: Out now
Where to buy Just Cause 3 Game - Amazon - Tesco - ShopTo - Zavvi - Argos
It's impossible to be enthused about Just Cause 3. Everything about it has been done, to death, by myriad other games, not just over the past decade but this year. Developer Avalanche's other sandbox effort from September, Mad Max, was a lot drier and duller but was built on the same standard, open-world model – go here, find these things, bring them back, tick another box. Assassin's Creed: Syndicate is a similar kind of game, so is Metal Gear Solid 5, Batman: Arkham Knight, Dying Light, and so on.
Since Grand Theft Auto 3, and probably before, sandbox games have been set in the same mould and if you've played anything from that cast in the past 14 years, you've played Just Cause 3. Sincerely, emphatically, the way open-world games are conceived and designed needs to change.
The stratified ideas of side-quests, collectibles and hours upon hours of "content" need to be pulled down and either discarded or reassembled, otherwise the experience of travelling across a vast virtual landscape – what ought to be gaming's greatest pleasure – will remain relentlessly bland and simplistic.
Listing Just Cause 3's mechanics feels like a waste of words. You know what this game is. You know what I'm going to write. You travel around a map liberating outposts, blowing things up and gradually ticking off each section of missions, sub-missions and collectibles toward completion. Whatever thrills might come from the explosion effects or your combat abilities are mitigated by the familiar, metronome situations in which you're made to experience them.
If that seems like a disinterested or disengaged way to describe the game then it adequately conveys what it's like to play – there is nothing here to latch onto, nothing to talk about or celebrate or reminisce. It's the gaming equivalent of junk food. That's fine of course, we all like to gorge, but there are so many of these games now. And one drive-thru burger is basically the same as another.
1 of 4
Partly it's just bad timing, or maybe rotten luck. If Just Cause 3 had come out a couple of years ago, or maybe earlier in 2015, it wouldn't seem so tired and run-of-the-mill – its ideas and conceits wouldn't have become so entrenched as to be called tropes, or clichés. But it stands today as – what should be at least – the punctuation mark at the end of a litany of samey, retrograde video games. Disc after disc of the basest gaming sensibilities packaged in the most superficial manner.
Before, you could chalk these games up to pure, dumb fun and enjoy them, quite rightly, on those grounds. But this kind of stuff: driving around a big landscape, experimenting with gadgets, scratching off mission after mission, isn't fun, dumb or otherwise, any more. Meet Just Cause 3 on its own terms and it's fine, just fine – it does, efficiently, everything which it intends to do. Only, it's not really operating on its own terms. It's operating on the terms of a hundred other games, so it's difficult to give it the benefit of the doubt. What it does it does well, but it's the easiest, most practised thing in games.
One thing that does stand out is how Just Cause 3 treats the theme of revolution. Ostensibly you arrive on Medici, the game's fictional Mediterranean island, as part of a rebellion against the corrupt government. But you have at your disposal a hoard of weapons and ordnance. If you access your phone, you can order helicopters, cars and weapons to be instantly dropped at your feet, free of charge.
I understand Just Cause wants you to play with all its toys, but like Far Cry 4 it doesn't empathise with its subject matter – there's something cackhanded, ignorant and ugly about using revolutionaries as a kind of window dressing, about ignoring the real-world context and depicting them as just as, if not more, able and equipped as the system they're battling. Being a revolutionary in Just Cause 3 feels like a breeze, a dodge, a bit of a laugh. Considering what's going on in the world currently, it sets an uncomfortable precedent.
Our verdict Just Cause 3 Just Cause 3 is an absolutely functional, totally pedestrian sandbox game which just so happens to launch at a time when the old models of open-world structure and design feel more overused than ever. Every standard issue, familiar mechanic and conceit is present here – if we needed one more argument for a new type of sandbox, one that doesn't prioritise or even feature the tropes and clichés we've come to expect, this is it. It's fine. It's there. It's benign. Even if you haven't played it, you've already played it.
For all the latest video game news follow us on Twitter @IBTGamesUK.In recent decades, house prices in many major cities have become astronomical by almost any standard. In Canada, for example, they have tripled since 1999. Toronto has taken the lead from Vancouver, reporting in early 2017 an annual gain of about a third. How did this happen?
According to a 2017 report from the Toronto Real Estate Board: “Key drivers of record home sales included population growth, low mortgage rates, low unemployment and above-inflation economic growth.” But the latest census figures actually show the city is growing at its slowest rate in 40 years, while wages are increasing at the slowest rate in 20. Mortgage rates are indeed low, but consumer debt is also at an all-time high.
Other oft-cited reasons include foreign investors, speculators, Canada being an awesome place to live, herd behaviour, Toronto being like New York, planning restrictions on new houses, and so on. It has even been suggested that the reason is lack of supply, because no one can afford to move. Strange, given that if you do sell your home, you are rich and can afford all sorts of things – including a move.
But while some of these may be contributing factors, the most basic reason is much simpler: it is because there is a lot of money. And why is there a lot of money? Because houses are expensive. If this sounds like a magic trick, that’s because it is.
The levitation trick
One of the most famous tricks in the world of magic is the levitation trick, in which a magician makes it look as if an object or person is floating in the air, defying the force of gravity. I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I say that the levitation is in fact an illusion, and something mechanical is needed to make it happen. But just as important is the magician’s patter – his ability to distract the audience from what is going on by creating a different narrative.
The great 19th-century French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, for example, performed an ‘ethereal suspension’, where he claimed that the incredible properties of the newly discovered substance ether could make his son float in the air. The city of Paris was enthralled by this mysterious new material, and so his Parisian audience was willing to believe it.
What does this have to do with house prices? Well, this is another trick performed for money – only here, money plays a more important role. We (or, actually, economists) tend to treat money as an inert thing, a kind of placeholder with no special properties – but it has a magical power of its own.
Money supply is primarily created and controlled by private banks, not the government or central bank
Most people know that printing too much money leads to price inflation. Less well known – the Bank of England, for example, only released a paper explaining it in 2014 – is the fact that the money supply is primarily created and controlled not by the government or the central bank, but by private banks (the magician in this story). They create this money by issuing loans, and most of these loans are used today for residential real estate.
Conjuring a magic coin
When you apply to a bank for a mortgage, they don’t lend you money that they actually have – they just make up brand new funds. As Germany’s Bundesbank noted in a 2017 report: “This refutes a popular misconception that banks act simply as intermediaries at the time of lending – i.e. that banks can only grant credit using funds placed with them previously as deposits by other customers.”
Because the loans are backed by real assets, such as a customer’s house, it seems the two sides cancel one another out, and nothing has changed. Except it has, because now there is more money in the economy. While you weren’t watching, the bank has sneaked in new coin and increased the money supply.
As Adair Turner noted: “Economic textbooks and academic papers typically describe how banks take deposits from savers and lend the money on to borrowers. But as a description of what banks actually do, this is severely inadequate. In fact, they create credit money and purchasing power. The consequences of this are profound: the amount of private credit and money that they can create is potentially infinite.”
The more money there is, the higher house prices (and bank profits) can go – which explains why the Teranet house price index and the broad money supply have advanced in lockstep, each tripling since the index began in 1999. The same self-reinforcing feedback loop has driven asset price bubbles throughout financial history.
Banks do not, of course, want to draw attention to their ability to create “potentially infinite” funds in this way, which may explain why, as Turner noted, it was largely “written out of the script of modern macro-economics”.
So, to understand why house prices can continue to climb year after year, in a remarkable act of levitation that never fails to amaze and impress, you have to ignore the patter coming from banks, economists (many of whom work for banks anyway), realtors and so on. Instead, you need to focus on the action behind the scenes. It’s all a banking trick. Of course, this also suggests an obvious way to make houses more affordable: just reduce the amount of money. And the easiest way to do this is to lower the price of houses.
As with any magic trick, the effect relies on the audience’s confidence, which by this point is probably rather easily shattered. In Toronto, for example, the provincial government recently introduced a number of measures, including a tax on foreign buyers. The collapse of the alternative lender Home Capital Group has also highlighted the fragility of many of the loans being made. Any of these developments – or some other factor, such as a change in interest rates – could be enough to reduce confidence and change the direction. At this point, the process can again become self-reinforcing, as all that money creation goes into reverse – at least, until the next time.Orange is the New Black's Yvonne "Vee" Parker is set to feature in season 3 in some capacity, with actress Lorraine Toussaint reportedly filming for the show in New York next week.
If you thought you had seen the back of the belligerent prisoner don't worry, she is more than likely filming flashback scenes, as Vee was pretty unambiguously bumped off by Rosa at the end of the last season.
Toussaint will report for filming Tuesday morning in New York, according to TMZ, presumably not having too many scenes to film as she is now committed to ABC show Forever.
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In other OITNB hated character returns news, Jason Biggs recently joked that the Netflix show could continue beyond season 3 with his character Larry as a protagonist.
"The truth is, they could stretch this thing for a long time," he told Medium. "And they could even switch the protagonist. Jenji’s not afraid to do it. And the diversity of the cast is part of the reason the show is such a big hit.
"[The Larry spin-off] is going to be amazing."
Orange is the New Black season 3 is expected to arrive in 2015 and will see more of Alex Vause this time around.Colorado Springs, Colo. (Nov. 28, 2017) – USA Ultimate, the national governing body for the sport of ultimate in the United States, is pleased to announce the athletes who have been invited to attend one of two tryouts for the 2018 U.S. National Teams that will compete at the World Junior Ultimate Championships. USA Ultimate will send teams in the boys’ and girls’ divisions to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, next August.
Nearly 400 youth athletes from all over the country applied to be considered for the 2018 U-20 National Teams. Coaches have selected 101 men and 100 women to attend the tryout camps.
The east coast tryout camp will be held January 27-28, in Chapel Hill, N.C. The west coast tryout camp will be held two weeks later, February 10-11, in Livermore, Calif. Final rosters, selected by each respective team’s coaching staff, will be announced next March.
Boys’ Division U.S. National Team Coaching Staff
Head Coach: Reid Koss (Seattle, Wash.)
Assistant Coach: Andy Neilsen (Chicago, Ill.)
Assistant Coach: Russell Wallack (Amherst, Mass.)
Selection Assistants: Alex Wells, TBD
Girls’ Division U.S. National team Coaching Staff
Head Coach: DeAnna Ball (Columbus, Ohio)
Assistant Coach: Jason Adams (Boston, Mass.)
Assistant Coach: Alyssa Weatherford (Seattle, Wash.)
Selection Assistants: Jessi Jones, Stevie Miller
The 2018 World Junior Ultimate Championships, hosted by the World Flying Disc Federation, will be held Aug. 19-25, 2018, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
WJUC was last held in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2016. The U.S. earned two medals at the event: gold in the boys’ division and silver in the girls’ division.
Boys Tryouts
*final tryout list subject to change based on invite acceptances
Sion Agami Mason, OH Axel Agami-Contreras Mason, OH Turner Allen Burlington, VT Austin Alvarado Arlington, VA Dustin Baird Greenwood, IN Jai Bansal Eagle, ID Patrick Beckett Portland, OR James Berger Edwards, CO Cole Besser Boulder, CO Max Bradshaw Carmel, IN Calvin Brown Irvine, CA Orion Cable Amherst, MA Matthew Chambers Highland Village, TX Raymond Chen Chapel Hill, NC Connor Chin New York, NY Jack Cioffi Westfield, NJ Alex Condon Minnetonka, MN Jonathan Costello Highland Village, TX Dillon Crowell Iowa City, IA Ben Dameron Atlanta, GA Gray Davidson Seattle, WA Beau De Konnick Arlington, VA Drew Di Francesco Atlanta, GA Ryan Dinger Burlington, VT Aidan Downey Atlanta, GA Marco Dregni Portland, OR Nicholas Fellows Milwaukee, WI Ben Fjetland-Souza St. Paul, MN Walker Frankenberg Seattle, WA Gabriel Franklin Rochester, NY Leo Gordon Berkeley, CA Scott Grimm Salt Lake City, UT Sam Hammar Edina, MN Liam Hardacker Concord, MA Bradley “Alex” Henderson Greenwood, IN Dempsey Hope-Wight Seattle, WA Donovan Hugel Maplewood, NJ Daniel Humphreys Gainesville, FL Henry Ing Bryn Mawr, PA Adam Jemal Bellevue, WA Garrett Johnston Arlington, VA Joseph Kennedy Naperville, IL James Kennelly Gillette, NJ Noah Krumme West Chester, OH Collin Lamb Naperville, IL Daniel Landesman Altadena, CA Aiden Landis Gibsonia, PA Josh Lane Lexington, MA Dylan Latham McGraw Los Altos Hills, CA Erik Liu Newton, MA Benjamin Liu-May Eugene, OR Jack Lokowich Bozeman, MT Trevor Lynch Collegeville, PA Jonny Malks Arlington, VA Casey Mann Gibsonia, PA Evan Mapes Atlanta, GA Haroon Matties Arlington, VA John McDonnell Chapel Hill, NC Stephen Mock Lexington, MA Caleb Montgomery Lexington, KY Elliott Moore Austin, TX Marc Anthony Munoz Kent, WA Alex Nelson Vero Beach, FL Walden Ng Brighton, MA Jacques Nissen Washington, DC Amanze Oleru Seattle, WA Gabe Port Seattle, WA Ashwin Pothukuchi Norristown, PA Benjamin Preiss Arlington, VA Samuel Radack Washington, DC Kenneth Randby Chapel Hill, NC June Tabasan Rapisura Seattle, WA James Reed Arlington, VA Dylan Reviere Baton Rouge, LA Zachary Riley Amherst, MA Benjamin Rogers Southlake, TX Jacob Rubin-Miller Madison, WI Connor Ryan Seattle, WA Ted Schewe Madison, WI Caleb Seamon Leverett, MA Luke Sedor Protti Shutebury, MA Matthew Shu Decatur, GA Joshua Sims Speyer Middlebury, VT Kodi Smart Olympia, WA Charlie Smith Boca Raton, FL Leonide Sovell-Fernandez St. Paul, MN Nick Spaulding-Tansey Durham, NC Hayden Stone Austin, TX Coleman Tappero Atlanta, GA Jake Taylor Chapel Hill, NC Jake Thorne Alameda, CA Jesse Thornton Merion Station, PA Kevin Tsui Westfield, NJ Tony Venneri Seattle, WA Dylan Villeneuve Berkeley, CA Michael Walsh Golden, CO Eli Weaver Westfield, NJ Aaron Wynmor Burlington, VT Tristan Yarter Maplewood, NJ Cole Zielske St. Paul, MN Josiah Zulauf Jackson, MI
Girls Tryouts
*final tryout list subject to change based on invite acceptancesGreg Piaetek is suing a Manhattan bar he says refused to serve him because he was wearing a Trump campaign hat
A Trump supporter has launched legal action against a Manhattan bar he claims refused to serve him because he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
Greg Piatek was visiting New York from Philadelphia when he stopped in The Happiest Hour on January 28 for a drink.
The 30-year-old accountant claims he was served one round of drinks before staff noticed the slogan on his hat and told him he wasn't welcome if he supported the president.
Mr Piatek said he was shown the door by a manager after being asked whether the hat was 'a joke'.
'Ignoring me because I’m wearing the hat is ridiculous. It’s really sad,' he told The New York Post on Sunday.
Piatek and his friends were visiting the city when they stopped in to the bar for a pre-dinner drink.
He said he was able to order one round without incident but that when they tried to ask for another from a different bartender, he ignored them.
He claimed that when his friend asked to be tended to, the server responded: 'Is the hat a joke?'
Despite his reluctance, the bartender gave them their drinks but the group faced the same treatment when they asked for a third, he said.
Mr Piatek said staff asked him if the Make America Great Again hat (seen above on the president) was a 'joke' before showing him the door
The Happiest Hour in Manhattan's West Village has not responded to Mr Piatek's complaints
That bartender went further in his criticism, allegedly telling them: 'I can’t believe you would support someone so terrible and you must be as terrible a person!' Don’t even try to order from me. I won’t get you a drink.'
According to the accountant, a manager was then told by the bar's owner to ask him to leave after relaying the message that 'anyone who supports Trump or believes what you believe is not welcome here'.
His lawyer said the incident was 'humiliating'.
The Happiest Hour has not responded to the complaint and did not respond to requests on Sunday.Being married to Anthony Weiner was a roller coaster of “circumstances I never imagined,” wife Huma Abedin revealed in court documents unsealed Thursday.
Abedin, who is currently divorcing the pervy ex-congressman, penned the letter asking a judge to consider the couple’s young son when sentencing Weiner for sexting with a 15-year-old.
“This is not a letter I ever imagined I would write, but, with Anthony, I have repeatedly found myself in circumstances I never imagined,” Abedin wrote.
The longtime Hillary Clinton aide has been dragged through years of scandal since Weiner accidentally tweeted a picture of his underwear-couched erection in 2011. She finally filed for divorce this year after her hubby sobbingly admitted he shared X-rated messages with a 15-year-old girl.
The revelations were the latest in a string embarrassing incidents for the couple.
Weiner mounted a comeback bid for New York mayor in 2013, but his prospects softened when a woman named Sydney Leathers revealed he sent her raunchy messages under the pseudonym “Carlos Danger.”
In 2015, he was busted for sending a woman photos of his crotch — with his then-3-year-old son in bed next to him.
Weiner’s lawyers are trying to keep him out of jail, and the disgraced pol says he has turned over a new leaf after going to sex-addiction therapy.
“I’m different now,” he wrote to sentencing judge Denise L. Cote.
“By not getting help, by continuing to dishonor his mother, by living in shame and secrets, I was not teaching him courage,” he wrote of his relationship with his son. “But your honor, with your grace, I hope I will be able to tell him some more. I hope I will be there to show him with my actions that, although I will carry the regret, I will also be better.”
Related Video 1:13 Anthony Weiner and Huma's scandalous relationshipI honestly can't think of another comic that's as universally beloved as Jeff Smith's Bone. Originally serialized as a 55-issue comic published over the course of 1991 and 2004, it told the story of a trio of cartoon characters ousted from their hometown and into a world of epic fantasy, a blending of genres and themes that made it incredibly compelling --- and once the whole thing was released in a massive paperback that collected the entire series, it became the kind of must-read title that's only seen its fame grow over the course of the past decade.
In July, Smith is returning to Bone for the first time in a while with Bone: Coda, a new book that includes The Bone Companion by Steve Weiner and an all-new 32-page story about Fone Bone, Smiley Bone and Phoney Bone trying to return to their hometown --- and now you can read a preview of that tale!
Never before have comics captured the act break of an episode of Dukes of Hazzard quite so well. Those Bone boys are sure in a heap of trouble!
Here's the official description:
The new story will be 32-pages long in black & white, followed by librarian & comics historian Stephen Weiner’s BONE Companion. The BONE Companion is an independent look at the art & world of BONE. The volume concludes with a thank you letter from Smith to the readers, comic shops, and the comics community. Both sections are heavily illustrated with comics and photos. The first black & white issue of the self-published comic book BONE appeared on comic shop shelves in July 1991, 25 years ago. BONE: CODA, 120 page trade paperback published by Cartoon Books, will be sold in comic book shops, bookstores and online in July. You may pre-order from your local comic retailer using Diamond Item Code: MAY161334 F
For more, check out the Cartoon Books website at Boneville.com.Main Forum Container minimized. Expand Tweet Third Giveaway! - Serious Sam 3 BFE on Steam worth $39.99! [ENDED] 9 replies KosmicCookies a Posts: 8 Admins ~~~! THIRD GIVEAWAY! ~~~
Vleobsmash Has Won!
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Steam ID: Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/chocmanjimbob Posted Jan 14, 14 Tweet Quick navigation ------------------------------------------------------------------ Community General Discussion Gaming Giveaways Staff Applications Introductions And Shoutouts Off Topic ------------------------------------------------------------------ Website News & Announcements Site SuggestionsKyoto University I think my brain is going to explode.
Ted Nelson, the American academic who in 1963 coined the term hypertext, and is therefore viewed as one of the World Wide Web’s founding fathers, just released a 12-minute video with a big reveal at the end: The inventor of bitcoin, says Nelson, is probably Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki.
[Update: Nelson answered our request for comment. He says that he did not receive help from anyone in coming to his conclusions, and that his supposition was inspired by a recent feature on Mochizuki. After reading it, writes Nelson in an email to Quartz, “It was obvious, like a pie in the face.” He has not contacted Mochizuki directly. “I did this as fast as possible, hoping to be first with this realization. I wasn’t, as I found out later.”]
Nelson offers no direct evidence for his conclusion that Shinichi Mochizuki is behind the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Instead, in his eccentric way, he offers plausible circumstantial evidence about his theory, outlined below. Internet surfers and the press are bound to investigate furiously. (We have reached out to Mochizuki for comment, but haven’t heard back.)
1. Mochizuki is the kind of genius who could create bitcoin. Whoever created Bitcoin has the intellectual might of Isaac Newton, says Nelson. Mochizuki’s work as a mathematician has cracked some of the simplest and toughest problems in his field, attracting global media coverage. “It’s not like I’m accusing him of a crime!” Nelson tells Quartz. “I’m accusing him of greatness.”
2. Mochizuki, like the creator of bitcoin, is fond of dropping brilliant works on the internet and stepping back. Bitcoin was released by a pseudonymous programmer (or programmers) under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, who then disappeared from the internet. Nelson compares this to Mochizuki’s style of delivering his work not through academic journals, but simply by dropping it on the internet and walking away. (Notably, this is one area where Nelson gets his bitcoin history wrong: Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t just drop bitcoin onto the internet and disappear. He, she or they, engaged with the community for some time over chat and email before disappearing.)
3. Mochizuki could easily have written all the correspondence associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite being a Japanese professor at a Japanese university, Mochizuki’s English must be quite good, says Nelson, because he was the salutatorian of his graduating class at Princeton, and he completed his undergraduate education in only three years. (Nelson doesn’t note this, but it’s reasonable to expect that Mochizuki is actually a native English speaker; he moved to the US with his parents when he was only five years old.)
It’s worth noting that at least one expert in the cryptographic aspects of bitcoin doesn’t believe Nelson’s theory. Here’s Ryan Lackey, creator of Sealand, the world’s first data haven, refuting Nelson’s video:
Lackey went further in a comment on YouTube.
Does the proposed candidate have any documented experience as a software developer? He appears to just be a mathematician, which is very helpful but not sufficient to have built the first version of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has both some theoretical breakthroughs and extensions to existing protocols (Wei Day’s bmoney, Hal Finney’s RPOW, etc.), but is implemented fairly reasonably in code. I see absolutely no reason to think this mathematician was Satoshi.
Mathematician Tyler Jarvis, who went to graduate school with Mochizuki, doesn’t believe Mochizuki has anything to do with bitcoin, either.
Others have attempted to identify the creator of bitcoin, and no one has succeeded conclusively. Writing for Fast Company, Adam Penenberg offered what is perhaps the most compelling case so far, that bitcoin was created by three men who intended to profit from it.
Update 2: Nelson tells Quartz that he is offering to donate to charity if Mochizuki denies being Satoshi Nakamoto. “If that person denies being Satoshi, I will humbly give one bitcoin (at this instant worth about $123) to any charity he selects. If he is Satoshi and denies it, at least he will feel guilty. (One month time limit on denial– bitcoins are going UP.)”
* * *
Join Quartz in New York on Wednesday, May 22, at 7 p.m. for a panel discussion on “Bitcoin and the Future of Money.” Panelists include Felix Salmon (columnist, Reuters), Charlie Shrem (CEO, Coinsetter), and Jaron Lukasiewicz (Cofounder, BitInstant).The controversial Dutch far-right leader wants to gather like-minded parties in a mass movement ahead of next year's European elections, but not all are ready to join. UKIP frontrunner Nigel Farage has rejected such an initiative.
The controversial leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), Geert Wilders, has toured Europe over the past few weeks in an attempt to create a new movement of far-right parties ahead of the next European elections, scheduled to take place in May 2014.
Wilders met with like-minded leaders from the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the French National Front (FN), the Swedish Democrats, the Italian Northern League and possibly also with the newly formed German Alternative for Germany.
The PVV had until recently energetically rejected any possible collaboration with Le Pen’s FN or the Vlaams Belang.
The Dutch nationalist leader clarified his European ambitions in the Dutch media.
Wilders said he did not want to see “extremist and racist” parties joining his movement, citing Hungary’s Jobbik and the British National Party. His wish is to bring together those who are “against the European Union and against mass immigration,” he told the Dutch public broadcaster NOS.
But so far, few have confirmed their participation in this new political platform, which is supposed to create a coalition of eurosceptic movements.
“Our party has not joined the alliance,” says Martin Kinnunen, the spokesperson for the Swedish Eurosceptic Democrats. “We have met with different parties to get more information but it is hard to say anything at this stage as we don’t know which parties will participate.”
A similar lukewarm response came from the Italian Northern League, while the rest of the parties were not immediately reachable for comment.
This is not the first time that nationalist parties have sought to join forces inside the European Parliament. Many previous attempts were short-lived, as was the case in the late eighties with the Group of the European Right, chaired by FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Many nationalist and eurosceptic parties currently have a seat in Parliament, but the groups are rarely ideologically coherent. The most vocal is the “Europe of Freedom and Democracy” party, chaired by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader, Nigel Farage.
In an e-mailed statement to EURACTIV, UKIP made it clear that the party would not join Wilders’ initiative.
"UKIP is not right-wing but a Libertarian party which believes in small government, low taxes, personal freedom and responsibility under a democratic national government, not under Brussels rule. UKIP are not involved in this initiative by Geert Wilders."
The members of the European Parliament from Wilders’ PVV are currently not attached to a political group in the assembly. In April, Wilders claimed in an interview that a “political revolution” in Europe was underway, announcing a massive victory for right-wing parties.
At home, Wilders’ party has made inroads. Austerity measures have seriously damaged the reputation of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, with mass demonstrations scheduled to take place in The Hague in September. According to the latest poll, Wilders’ PVV is set to reach high scores in his country.
Whether he will have the same success on a European level is not certain.Donald Trump pushed his own shopping cart through a food pantry in Utah on Monday, something photographers have never witnessed from the billionaire president.
Before a speech at the state capitol in Salt Lake City, Trump toured Welfare Square, a food pantry and relief aid processing center run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
'Good stuff!' the president said as he pushed the cart.
He joked with crowd in the capitol rotunda an hour later that 'I went around the store. I wanted a nice can of tuna fish and they had plenty!'
Scroll down for video
'Good stuff!' President Donald Trump pushed his own shopping cart through Welfare Square, a Mormon church-run food pantry, on Monday in Utah
The billionaire didn't fill the cart himself but pushed it as he toured the Salt Lake City facility with church leaders and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch
Trump He joked during his speech an hour later in the state capitol rotunda that 'I went around the store. I wanted a nice can of tuna fish and they had plenty!'
The president took a moment to inspect a can of corn while he spoke with LDS officials about Welfare Square
In addition to being a food bank for the needy, Welfare Square is a food processing and staging ground for packaging food aid destined for more than 120 missions worldwide.
LDS official Henry Eyring told the president that it is 'a place where we have food and materials that we give to the poor.'
'This is simply an example of what we do across the world, the idea being that we think we have an obligation to God to look out for the people who, without our aid, have tragedy in their lives, be it poverty or hunger,' he said.
Welfare Square is a food pantry, a thrift store, and a food processing and staging ground for packaging food aid destined for more than 120 missions worldwide.
Utah's poor – and people in trouble worldwide – get food, clothing and other supplies from Welfare Square
In addition to distributing food to Utah's needy, Welfare Square is a staging point for food and supplies headed for natural disaster sites and at least 120 church missions around the world
The president was in Salt Lake City to sign a proclamation reversing the expansion of two national monuments, whose nearly 3 million acres represented more land than Delaware and Rhode Island
Welfare Square was the staging ground for the LDS church's supply network that brought relief aid to New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Russell Nelson, the LDS president, said he had just returned from China where native-born Mormon converts had brought supplies from Welfare Square 'for schoolchildren who didn't have means of getting what they needed to go to school.'
But Trump stole the show, pushing a shopping cart like an ordinary guy, with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and church leaders in tow.
LDS official Henry Eyring (right) told the president that Welfare Square is 'an example of what we do across the world, the idea being that we think we have an obligation to God to look out for the people who, without our aid, have tragedy in their lives, be it poverty or hunger'
He said in his speech that he had 'just come from touring Welfare Square with Senator Hatch and some amazing people from the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.'
'Special. I spent a lot of time with them.... They really help people. Incredible. After our visit I can truly say firsthand that Utah's awesome natural beauty is exceeded only by the warmth and grace and hospitality of its citizens.'
'This state has many natural treasures,' Trump said, 'but its greatest treasure by far is its people. And we will ensure the right of the people to live according to the faith in their hearts – which is why we will always protect your religious liberty.'
Trump was in Utah to sign a proclamation reversing decisions of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that dramatically expanded a pair of massive national monuments that had locked up nearly 3 million acres of land from virtually any public use.Story highlights 14-year-old boy finds 7.44 carat diamond in 30-minute search
Arkansas's Crater of Diamonds State Park has a history of huge diamond finds
(CNN) With a name like Crater of Diamonds, visitors to the Arkansas state park have high expectations. But for 14-year-old Kalel Langford, the dream of finding a diamond came true after just 30 minutes.
Kalel was walking along a riverbank in the Crater of Diamonds when he saw a glimmering brown stone on the |
game did not face a Presidential debate on all the other networks. Compared to the previous SNF season low with last week’s Giants-Packers game, last night’s Texans-Colts matchup was down 12% in MM ratings. The October 9 SNF went on to grab a 5.9/16 rating among adults 18-49 with 16.62 million watching — an expected double-digit drop from the week before, all things POTUS considered, especially with two teams playing who lack big national followings and, for the most part, had a lackluster game until the 4th quarter. Even though NBC and the NFL will win Sunday, last night’s ratings tackle comes after weeks of declines for SNF and one week before TWD returns to likely challenge the franchise’s 18-49 demo supremacy much like it successfully has on several Sundays over the years. Some sunshine could come to the NFL and NBC on October 30 when SNF has the Cowboys up against the Philadelphia Eagles – which is certain to attract and retain eyeballs if it doesn’t become a blowout.
Last week’s season-low 10.2 overall overnight MM rating for Giants-Packers looked bad enough, but was understandable given the competition from the presidential debate. This one’s worse, especially considering that there wasn’t that kind of competition. Yes, the Cubs-Dodgers NLCS game drew significant viewers, but that 2015 SNF game also went up against the NLCS (Cubs-Mets), so a 38 per cent drop year over year is still remarkable. Sure, having the Patriots involved is better from a viewership perspective than than having the Texans involved, and sure, this wasn’t a particularly attractive game (until Houston’s fourth-quarter comeback and overtime winner), but that kind of drop for what’s usually the NFL’s most-watched primetime window is remarkable.
Why are the NFL ratings down so much? Well, Variety‘s Oriana Schwindt has an interesting angle on that front:
A note about the continued slippage in NFL ratings (particularly in primetime): The lower ratings appear to be more of a function of people simply watching less of the games. The number of people actually tuning in to the telecasts isn’t declining, overall — but they are watching, on average, five minutes less than they did in 2015. Because the average viewer per minute rating is calculated by dividing the minutes watched by the number of people watching, a decrease in minutes viewed leads to a lower rating. The most likely culprit in the NFL ratings declines, therefore, isn’t the much-talked-about player protests against police brutality and systemic racism, or even the siphoning off of audiences by election coverage. What’s causing people to spend less time with the NFL is boring match-ups, games that feel like slogs, and simple NFL overload. With all the other TV out there, do you really want to spend some of your precious free time watching the Colts lose to the Texans?
That may have played a major role in this instance, especially given the Texans’ early struggles. They trailed 3-0 after the first quarter, 13-3 at the half and 23-9 with three minutes to go. If viewers tuned in early on, they may well have opted to leave for other options, including the NLCS and a Walking Dead special. Regardless of what happened here, though, it’s not great news for the NFL and NBC. They still won the night, but seeing a close (albeit not interesting for much of the contest) Sunday Night Football game post a five-year ratings low is a big loss.One afternoon about 12 years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave John Doerr a call. A few months earlier, the Google cofounders had accepted $12.5 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Doerr's venture-capital firm, as well as an equal amount from Sequoia Capital. When they took the cash, they agreed that they would hire an outsider to replace Page as CEO, a common strategy to provide "adult supervision" to inexperienced founders. But now they were reneging. "They said, 'We've changed our mind. We think we can run the company between the two of us,'" Doerr recalls.
Doerr's first instinct was to immediately sell his shares, but he held off. He made Page and Brin an offer: He would set up meetings for them with the most brilliant CEOs in Silicon Valley, so they could get a better sense of what the job entailed. "After that," he told them, "if you think we should do a search, we will. And if you don't want to, then I'll make a decision about that." Page and Brin took a Magical Mystery Tour of high tech royalty: Apple's Steve Jobs, Intel's Andy Grove, Intuit's Scott Cook, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, and others. Then they came back to Doerr.
"We agree with you," they told him; they were ready to hire a CEO. But they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs.
Happily, Doerr was able to persuade them to widen their net and would soon introduce them to Eric Schmidt, who took the CEO spot in 2001. The first couple of years were rocky. As late as 2002, the founders still sounded bitter when discussing Schmidt's hire. Investors, Brin told a reporter, "feel more comfortable with us" now that they didn't need to worry what "two hooligans are going to do with their millions." But as the years went by, and as Google under Schmidt grew into the third-largest technology company in the world, Page and Brin came to genuinely appreciate their CEO. Page would later describe hiring Schmidt as "brilliant."
Now, after a 10-year run in which Google's revenues grew from less than $100 million to almost $30 billion, Page is finally CEO again, a role he always felt he could handle. The general public may not appreciate the magnitude of the change—to most, Page is just one of the seemingly interchangeable pair of wacky "Google guys." But Page is sui generis and could potentially have the kind of impact Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have had. Nobody better encapsulates Google's ambitions, its ethics, and its worldview. At the same time, Page can be eccentric, arrogant, and secretive. Under his leadership, the company will be even harder to predict.
Google's 2004 pre-IPO filing with the SEC included a note from Page to prospective shareholders. In it, he famously warned that "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." In the ensuing years, Google made good on that promise. But under its ruling troika, Schmidt helped balance the founders' idiosyncratic urges with more traditional practices. With Page taking the helm, no one is sure how—or if—that delicate balance will be maintained. Now the company is in the hands of a true corporate radical.
A few ingredients in Larry Page's stew of traits stand out unmistakably. He is brainy, he is confident, he is parsimonious with social interaction. But the dominant flavor in the dish is his boundless ambition, both to excel individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large. He sees the historic technology boom as a chance to realize such ambitions and sees those who fail to do so as shamelessly squandering the opportunity. To Page, the only true failure is not attempting the audacious. "Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely," he says. "That's the thing that people don't get."
Page is a reflexive champion of big—sometimes quixotic—ideas. Even Googlers, no Luddites themselves, joke that Page "went to the future and came back to tell us about it." One engineer recounts the time he went to discuss an ill-fated project with Page and ended up talking about the finer points of nuclear fusion. "What Larry asks himself is not 'How can I help this person?'" he says. "Instead he's asking himself, 'Ten years from now, what is going to have the maximum impact on humanity?'"
Page's mandate now is to renew Google's energy and drive, and in some ways he is the perfect person to perform that task. He is also perhaps the quirkiest person to ever run a $30 billion company. Google has had a wild ride over its first 12 years. It's about to get even wilder.
"You can't understand Google," vice president Marissa Mayer says, "unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids." She's referring to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue their interests. "In a Montessori school, you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so," she says. "This is baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They're always asking, why should it be like that? It's the way their brains were programmed early on."
Page grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, where his father taught computer science at Michigan State. He wanted to be an inventor, not simply because of his interests and abilities in math and technology but because, he says, "I really wanted to change the world."
Page was not a social animal—those who interacted with him often wondered if there were a jigger of Asperger's in the mix—and he could unnerve people by simply not talking. But when he did speak, he often came out with ideas that bordered on the fantastic. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he became obsessed with transportation and drew up plans to replace the school's mundane bus network with an elaborate monorail system, providing a "futuristic" commute between the dorms and the classrooms.
Page's ideas may have been fantastic, but his vision always extended to the commercial. "From when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company," he says. In 1995, he went to Stanford to pursue his graduate degree. It was not only the best place to study computer science but, because of the Internet boom, was also the world capital of entrepreneurial ambition. Page had been impressed by the biography of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serb scientist who died in obscurity, despite contributions that arguably matched Thomas Edison's. "It was a sad story," Page says. "I feel like he could've accomplished much more if he had more resources. And he had trouble commercializing the stuff he did. Probably more trouble than he should've had. I think that was a good lesson. I didn't want to just invent things, I also wanted to make the world better."
Page did invent something. In collaboration with Sergey Brin, a classmate he'd met in the spring of 1995, he created BackRub, a search engine that used the linking structure of the web to deliver results superior to those of the best commercial products of the time. At first Page and Brin, reluctant to leave the PhD program, tried to license the technology to existing web companies. When they failed, they renamed their search engine Google, formed their own company, and sought funding.
"If the company failed, too bad," Page says. "We were really going to be able to do something that mattered."
While both founders were technical and imaginative, Page was the driver of the vision. "Larry always wanted it to be a bigger thing—as soon as the opportunity presented, it was full speed ahead," says Craig Silverstein, Google's first employee. "I don't think Sergey has that drive to the same extent Larry does. I don't feel as confident saying what would've happened had Sergey called all the shots."
Even after Schmidt came aboard, Page continued to set the core precepts of the company. Page wanted everyone at Google to think big. It was a defining habit for him. When someone pitched an idea, Page would invariably counter with a variation that was an order of magnitude more ambitious. In 2003, when executives met to consider opening engineering offices overseas, Schmidt asked Page how quickly he would like to grow.
"How many engineers does Microsoft have?" Page asked.
About 25,000, he was told.
"We should have a million," Page said, in all seriousness.
At that point, Schmidt put an avuncular hand on Page's shoulder and brought him back to the real world. Now, with Page as CEO, that hand is less likely to be there.
What will that mean? If history is any guide, Page's idealistic impulses could result in a vaster, more sprawling company. In 2008, Google participated in an FCC auction for radio spectrum to be used for mobile broadband. By the terms of the auction, if the spectrum was sold above a certain price, the winner would have to allow other companies to run devices on their networks—something Google strongly favored but that telecom companies dearly hoped to avoid. Google executives worried that the telecoms would conspire to keep bidding below that baseline price. So the company got involved in a high-stakes game of chicken. Google would bid on the spectrum, high enough to get it over the threshold, and then bow out. It left Google potentially vulnerable; if nobody else topped its bid, the company would be stuck with a multibillion-dollar piece of spectrum that it was unequipped to exploit. "Google definitely wanted to lose," the company's chief economist, Hal Varian, says. To Google's great relief, Verizon did top its bid, and the company was off the hook.
It turns out, though, that Page had other ideas—according to Richard Whitt, the Google policy person who headed the auction effort, Page urged Google to consider topping the Verizon bid. Later, he justified the impulse by a kind of circular logic. "Obviously, you wouldn't have made the bid if you thought you were wasting your money," he said. "If someone else bids, you know you're probably not wasting your money. So that means you might be willing to pay more. And so you've really got to think about that." (Ultimately, Google let Verizon's bid stand.)
"Larry always has far-fetched ideas that may be very difficult to do," Google software engineer Eric Veach says. "And he wants them done now." In the early 2000s, Veach worked on what would become the company's advertising system. Page was adamant that the program be simple and scalable—advertisers shouldn't have to deal with salespeople, pick keywords, or do anything more than give their credit card number. That approach helped create the most successful Internet commerce product in history. But some other suggestions were baffling. During one session, Veach pointed out that not all countries commonly used credit cards. Page proposed taking payments appropriate to the home country—in Uzbekistan, he suggested, Google could take its payment in goats. "Maybe we can get to that," Veach responded, "but first let's make sure we can take Visa and MasterCard."
Still, even as CEO, Page's nuttier instincts will be tempered by those around him. Indeed, Googlers have learned that the best way to counter some of his more problematic idiosyncrasies is not by having a frank discussion but through misdirection. For instance, Wesley Chan, a top product manager, fundamentally disagrees with Page's ideas on product design. 1 But he has learned that instead of arguing his case with Page, a better strategy is "giving him shiny objects to play with." At the beginning of one Google Voice product review, for instance, he offered Page and Brin the opportunity to pick their own phone numbers for the new service. For the next hour, the two brainstormed sequences that embodied mathematical puns while the product sailed through the review.
But while it's easy to scoff at Page's quirks—his odd obsessions, his unrealistic expectations, his impatience for a future dangling out of immediate reach—sometimes his seemingly crazy ideas wind up creating breakthrough innovations, and skeptical Googlers wind up admitting Page was right, after all. That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google's small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page's suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another's customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page's instinctive brilliance.
One complaint of the current, supersized version of Google Inc. is that bureaucracy slows down progress. Expect that to change, because speed is one of Page's primary obsessions. "He's always measuring everything," early Googler Megan Smith says. She was once walking with Page down a street in Morocco when he suddenly dragged her into an Internet cafè9. Immediately, he began timing how long it took web pages to load into a browser there.
"When people do demos and they're slow, I'm known to count sometimes," Page says. "One one-thousand, two one-thousand. That tends to get people's attention." Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, remembers performing an early demo of that service in Page's office. Page made a face and told him that it was way too slow. Buchheit objected, but Page reiterated his complaint, charging that it was taking at least 600 milliseconds to reload. Buchheit thought, "You can't know that." But when he got back to his office he checked the server logs. Six hundred milliseconds. "He nailed it," Buchheit says. (Page's fixation on speed probably drives his notorious bias toward utilitarian—some say boring—design. He maintains a militant opposition to eye-catching animations, transitions, or anything that veers from stark simplicity.)
When Schmidt was at the helm, Page was free to pursue whatever interested him. He devoted himself to passion projects that he felt could make the biggest impact on the company. It was Page who asked for an interview with the head of a small mobile software startup called Android—startling its founder, Andy Rubin, by asking to buy the company. Rubin is now vice president of engineering at Google, and Android is one of the company's biggest assets.
It was also Page who dreamed of digitizing the world's books. Many assumed the task was impossible, but Page refused to accept that. It might be expensive, but of course it was possible. To figure out just how much time it would take, Page and Marissa Mayer jury-rigged a book scanner in his office, coordinating Mayer's page-turning to a metronome. Then he filled up spreadsheets with calculations: how many pages he would need to scan, how much it would cost to scan each page, how much storage he would need. Eventually, he became convinced that the costs and timing were reasonable. What astounded him was that even his spreadsheets didn't dissolve the skepticism of those with whom he shared his scheme. "I'd run through the numbers with people and they wouldn't believe them,'" he later said. "So eventually I just did it."
Page was disappointed when critics glossed over the benefits of the book search project and launched a series of legal challenges that might eventually sink it. "Do you really want the whole world not to have access to human knowledge as contained in books?" Page asks. "You've just got to think about that from a societal point of view." He chalked up a lot of the opposition's passion as phony—a negotiating tactic. Page also says that, while privacy is important to him, he thinks the criticism of Google's privacy policies is often overblown. "There's a 10 percent chance of any product becoming an issue, and it's not possible to predict which one," he says. "Oftentimes the thing that people are upset about isn't the actual thing they should be upset about."
Page's blithe dismissal of Google's critics is impolitic at the least. And his black-and-white view of corporate morality—with Google always wearing white—has probably contributed to some of the damage the company's reputation has sustained in recent years. Yet his refusal to dwell on shades of gray has also given him the fortitude to order up risky moon shots, like Book Search and Google's recently announced autonomous vehicle project. Critics said that the latter effort was an indulgent distraction. But if you take into account Page's core vision—making Google into a learning machine that processes massive data—it's easy to see how the self-driving cars, loaded with lasers and sensors that continuously gather information, fit into it. "This is all information," says Sebastian Thrun, the AI scientist who heads the project. "And it will make our physical world more accessible." Even more satisfying for Google, some people considered it impossible. With Page in charge, Google will undoubtedly take on more moon shots.
Page has one task that may indeed prove to be impossible: making a company of more than 24,000 employees act like a startup. Page and Brin have long been obsessed with keeping Google nimble—an impulse that sometimes leads them toward simple denial. As early as 2001, as the company reached 400 employees, Page worried that a growing layer of middle managers would bog it down. So he and Brin came up with a radical solution: They decided to do away with managers entirely. The HR team begged them not to, but the founders went ahead with the plan. When it soon became clear that the idea was a disaster—more than 100 people were reporting directly to an overwhelmed head of engineering—Google quietly reinstated the managers. But it was only the beginning of a long struggle to maintain the speed and hunger of a small company even as it grew.
One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google's pulse is his insistence on signing off on every new hire—so far he's vetted well over 30,000. For every candidate, he is given a compressed version of the lengthy packet created by the company's hiring council, generated by custom software that allows Page to quickly scan the salient data. He gets a set every week and usually returns them with his approvals—or in some cases bounces—in three or four days. "It helps me to know what's really going on," he says.
Page has little patience for the bureaucracy that most large companies require. In 2007, he noticed that having an assistant made it easier for his coworkers to schedule meetings with him. "Most people aren't willing to ask me if they want to meet with me," he says. "They're happy to ask an assistant." That was an undesirable situation, Page says, "because my favorite meeting is the absence of meetings." So one day, Brin and Page abruptly got rid of their assistants. Anyone who wanted to talk to them had to stalk them. Like the plane spotters who log the peregrinations of aircraft, Googlers often swap data concerning Page's and Brin's ambulatory patterns. Even so, it can sometimes be tricky to catch Page; he is a master of the drive-by greeting, flashing a wide, happy-to-see-you smile while slightly picking up his pace, leaving a potential interlocutor talking to his receding back.
But Page's least favorite interactions are with the press. "Larry can be a very, very sensitive and good person," says a former PR employee. "But he has major trust issues and few social graces."
The question now is whether Page has developed the tolerance, will, and grace to dispatch the mundane duties of a CEO while still retaining the qualities that make him unique. Schmidt seems to think that Page has grown into the role. "Sergey and Larry are not kids anymore," he told me in early 2010. "They are in their midthirties, accomplished senior executives in our industry. They are learning machines, and 10 years after founding the company, they're much more experienced than you'd ever imagine." When he announced in January that Page would assume the CEO role, Schmidt was more specific. "Larry is ready," he said. Later that day, he tweeted his further approval: "Day to day adult supervision no longer needed!"
The accuracy of that statement remains to be seen. But within days of the announcement, Googlers took note of a development that seemed to indicate the new CEO was growing into the position: Larry Page has taken on an administrative assistant.
Adapted from In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, copyright © 2011 Steven Levy, to be published by Simon & Schuster in April.
[March 18/6:30 p.m. EST appended]: Wesley Chan is a Google product manager,
not a production designer.
fLarry PageBRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovakia will go to court to challenge quotas for distributing asylum-seekers approved by European Union interior ministers, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Wednesday.
Slovakia was among four central and east European countries that voted against the plan to relocate 120,000 migrants from Italy and Greece among all member states, arguing the EU should focus on other forms of dealing with refugees from war-torn or poor places in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
“We will go in two directions: first one, we will file a charge at the court in Luxembourg... secondly, we will not implement the (decision) of the interior ministers,” Fico told reporters before leaving for an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.
Fico said on Tuesday the quota system would not be imposed on Slovakia as long as he was in office.
“We have been refusing this nonsense from the beginning, and as a sovereign country we have the right to sue,” he said.
Slovakia, a central European country of 5.4 million, has only a small migrant community. It has said Muslim refugees would be especially hard to integrate.
The Slovak view was echoed in neighbouring Czech Republic and Hungary as well as in Romania, but the group was outvoted by other EU ministers on Tuesday.
Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said on Wednesday that while he continued to oppose the quota system, he did not want to escalate tensions with EU partners by a legal dispute.
Fico called the rare vote, rather than a compromise accepted by all, a “dictate of the majority” and said the quotas were symbolic rather than practical because asylum seekers who mostly want to go to Germany would go there anyway.
“The symbol of quotas was a bigger matter than a real solution to the problem in Europe. How can we order someone to go to a given country, and order a sovereign state it has to accept that?”CLOSE Colorado State's Emmanuel Omogbo makes 3-pointer to beat San Diego State. Kelly Lyell
Buy Photo CSU basketball players Gian Clavell and Emmanuel Omogbo, both seniors, will play their final home game at Moby Arena on Tuesday. (Photo: Valerie Mosley/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo
There was a point last year where Emmanuel Omogbo couldn't go on.
It was two days after his parents, niece and nephew died in a house fire in Maryland and he was trying to battle through it in a game against Air Force. He didn't play well — 1 point and 2 rebounds in 10 minutes — and when he started arguing calls with officials, coach Larry Eustachy benched him. It was then — finally then — that the tears he'd been holding in came out, and sitting next to him on the bench was point guard Prentiss Nixon, who grabbed Omogbo by the head and embraced him.
Soon, the rest of his CSU teammates followed, and it was clear then that the bond the Rams had was unique beyond the average group of players on a college basketball roster. And since that day 13 months ago, the glue that's kept Colorado State University not only afloat, but in contention for a Mountain West championship, has been a reliance on an unlikely family.
Not only for Omogbo, but fellow senior Gian Clavell, too.
Nobody would have blamed Omogbo had he transferred to a school closer to home this past offseason.
Or Clavell, had he decided to follow the paths of former CSU basketball players Jon Octeus and John Gillon to seek the exposure of a high-profile program as a graduate transfer for his senior year.
The two seniors, though, couldn't do it.
Not to their teammates. Or their coach. Or CSU fans. Not even the families they would have been coming home to.
Omogbo's parents taught him the importance of "doing everything together as a family and not letting anybody come between us."
CSU's basketball team is as much of a family to him now as his four sisters and three brothers. His coach, Larry Eustachy, and teammates were there for him in his time of need, and he wanted to make sure he was here for them.
"I didn't want to leave anybody hanging, because my parents always told me to go hard for people who put their name on the line for you, who would do things for you, and I felt like (Eustachy) already showed me that he could do stuff for me, so why wouldn't I put my name on the line," Omogbo said.
That kind of loyalty kept Clavell in Fort Collins for another year, too. He's developed "a special bond" with Eustachy, so he never pursued the opportunities he heard were available for him to finish up at the University of Miami, where his parents live, or dozens of other high-profile programs, after missing most of last season with shoulder and hand injuries.
"Every time I thought about it, I thought about Coach," Clavell said. "I said you know what, 'No, no, no.' I kept shutting it down."
College basketball careers don't last forever, though. So Clavell and Omogbo, the top two scorers and rebounders on a CSU team that is battling for a Mountain West title with two games remaining, will play their final home game at Moby Arena on Tuesday night, when the Rams (20-9, 12-4 MW) host Wyoming (17-12, 7-9).
Buy Photo CSU basketball players Gian Clavell and Emmanuel Omogbo will play their final home games at Moby Arena on Tuesday night, when the Rams face Wyoming. Both believe the Rams have forged the kind of tight bonds normally reserved for families this season. (Photo: Valerie Mosley/The Coloradoan)
They know they'll get emotional during pregame ceremonies with family members joining them on the court. And it's not just the fact they're about to leave college; they're preparing to leave a team that has become a second family. The usual bonds a basketball team forms became a lot tighter while Omogbo was dealing with his family tragedy.
"That definitely brought everybody closer," sophomore guard J.D. Paige said. "Everybody started looking at life in a different perspective. You don't take these moments for granted."
Omogbo and his family don't take anything for granted anymore.
It's why two of his sisters who are in town for Tuesday night's game said they were so pleased to see Eustachy and his wife, Lana, take their brother under their wings to care for him after the fire Jan 19, 2016, at the family home in Chillum, Maryland. They're pleased he came back to CSU for his senior year instead of accepting opportunities he had to transfer Maryland or Temple under the NCAA's family hardship waiver.
They miss their little brother and talk to him every day. But they believe he's where he belongs.
"Mr. Eustachy, the coach, is just like a father," Ruth Omogbo said. "He's doing good for Emmanuel, and Miss Lana, she's doing good. They took Emmanuel as their son, and we the family of Omogbo really do appreciate everything they do."
Said Christiana Omogbo: "Emmanuel's in their hands, and I feel safe with that."
He's with his basketball family. A group that has grown so close that all eight players on the active roster crowded together at one circular table, designed to seat five, for a team meal on a road trip last week at New Mexico.
Three other tables in the room sat empty. Nobody wanted to eat on their own and leave the family behind.
Clavell, who is originally from Puerto Rico, and Omogbo, who was born in Nigeria, are the team's only seniors and, clearly, the leaders on the floor. But they described their roles in the family more like the fun uncles rather than the dads. They're serious when they need to be but aren't afraid to let their goofy sides show.
"Braiden (Koelliker) is the father; he's the married one," Omogbo said. "He's the one that doesn't hang out with us on weekends. We're like the two uncles. KJ (Kimani Jackson) is like the nephew, Che (Bob), he's gone from like the oldest to the youngest. Dube (Devocio Butler) is a kid, AB (Anthony Bonner) and Dube are like two kids. Prentiss (Nixon) is the big brother, and Nico (Carvacho) is like the cousin."
So where does Eustachy fit in?
"I'm just along for the ride," the coach said, laughing.
And what a ride it's been.
CSU has won six straight games and nine of its last 10. The Rams are tied with Nevada (23-6, 12-4) for first place in the Mountain West standings and close out the regular-season against the Wolf Pack on Saturday in Reno.
They overcame the absence of Clavell for the first nine games of the season, while he was serving a suspension for an arrest on a misdemeanor charge that has since been dismissed. They lost three players — Jackson, Bob and Butler — to academic ineligibility at the start of the spring semester. They responded to a published report two weeks ago that former athletic director Jack Graham, who hired Eustachy, recommended the coach be fired near the end of the 2013-14 season for "creating a culture of fear and intimidation" emotionally abusing players and staff members, by hugging the coach and carrying him around to show their support in a video taken by a staff member and briefly posted on social media after the team's next practice.
People outside the program don't see all the highs and lows a program goes through during the course of a season or how much "blood, sweat and tears" goes into the player-coach relationship. They don't see the brotherly bonds these players have formed with one another and the coaching staff.
They only see what the team does on game days. The effort they put into each game and whether or not they win or lose.
"A team doesn't play as hard as we play if they don't believe in the player with the least amount of ability all the way up to the head coach," Eustachy said. "There's a lot of belief on a team that has done what we have done."
Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news
Next up
Wyoming at CSU, 8 p.m. Tuesday, Moby Arena
Watch/listen: Root/KARS (FM 102.9) and KDCO (AM 1340 and FM 104.7)
Twitter updates: @KellyLyell
Projected starters Wyoming (17-12, 7-9 MW) Player Pts. Reb. Jeremy Lieberman 4.7 2.0 Jason McManamen 12.1 3.3 Louis Adams 7.6 2.5 Alan Herndon 11.0 6.2 Jordan Naughton 4.7 3.3 Colorado State (20-9, 12-4 MW) Player Pts. Reb. Prentiss Nixon 12.7 2.3 J.D. Paige 10.1 2.3 Gian Clavell 19.4 6.9 Emmanuel Omogbo 12.9 10.7 Nico Carvacho 5.2 5.0 :The Armenian military pledged on Saturday to use heavier artillery against Azerbaijani troops after accusing them of firing howitzer shells at Armenian soldiers for the first time since a Russian-brokered truce stopped the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994.
Four of those soldiers were killed and as many as 16 others wounded in northeastern Karabakh on Friday evening.
According to Armenia’s Defense Ministry, they were struck by Azerbaijani artillery fire several kilometers away from the Armenian-Azerbaijani “line of contact” around the disputed territory. A ministry statement said the Azerbaijani army used Russian-made D-30 howitzers in the attack.
The 122-milimeter artillery systems have a firing range of 15 kilometers. Karabakh’s Armenian-backed army claimed that the Azerbaijani side fired a total of 30 D-30 rounds on Friday and early Saturday.
President Serzh Sarkisian pointed to the soldiers’ deaths and the fact that three Armenian civilians were killed by Azerbaijani shelling on Thursday as he vowed “punitive actions” against Baku on Friday. “We will certainly force Azerbaijan’s government to be accountable to its people for more suffering inflicted on them,” Sarkisian said at a meeting with senior officials in Yerevan.
The Defense Ministry elaborated on the promised retaliation in a special statement. “In order to silence the enemy, thwart its actions and thereby support the [Karabakh] peace process, from now on the Armenian Armed Forces will use adequate means of artillery and rocket fire, constantly targeting the sites of Azerbaijani troop deployments and movements, military hardware and personnel,” it said.
There was no immediate reaction to these statements from Baku. Earlier in the day, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said that its frontline units are “using more powerful weaponry to resolutely thwart any action by the enemy.”
Until last year ceasefire violations in the Karabakh conflict zone took the form of periodical exchanges of automatic and sniper fire between the two warring sides and overnight incursions by their commando units. Over the past year, the Armenian side has accused the Azerbaijani army of increasingly resorting to mortar fire during skirmishes. Baku says that the Armenians themselves are now using 60-milimeter and 82-milimeter mortars.
The use of heavier and more devastating artillery, if it becomes a regular occurrence, would mark a further escalation of the conflict and seriously complicate international mediators’ efforts to broker a peaceful settlement.
“The use of artillery by the Azerbaijani side … is yet another step towards full-scale hostilities,” warned the Armenian Defense Ministry.
Both the ministry and Sarkisian claimed that the Azerbaijani leadership has been emboldened by the international community’s reluctance to explicitly blame Baku for increased truce violations. Sarkisian said that Yerevan is now left with no choice but to ensure that “the adversary |
Expedition 53 crew of NASA astronaut Jack Fischer, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.
Tingle was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He was commissioned as a naval officer in 1991 and earned gold wings of a naval aviator in 1993. He is currently a captain in the U.S. Navy and has accumulated more than 4,000 hours in 48 different types of aircraft. This includes 700 aircraft carrier landings and 54 combat missions.
Tingle has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, which he earned in 1987 from Southern Massachusetts University in Dartmouth. He earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering—specializing in fluid mechanics and propulsion—from Purdue University in Indiana in 1988. He graduated from the Navy Test Pilot School in 1998.
While Tingle will launch in September, he will be joined by Bresnik in November of that year as part of Expedition 54.
Bresnik will launch aboard Soyuz MS-07 with Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai.
Bresnik, 48, is a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. He received his commission in May 1989 and was designated a Marine Corps aviator in 1992. In support of Operation Southern Watch and Operation Iraqi Freedom, he flew the F/A-18 Hornet. In total, he has accumulated more than 6,000 hours in 81 different types of aircraft.
He was selected as an astronaut in May 2004, and his first flight into space was aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis as part of STS-129. During that mission to the ISS, he conducted two spacewalks totaling 11 hours and 50 minutes.
Graduating from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1989, Bresnik earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In 2002, he earned a master’s degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee. Additionally, he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Air War College in 2008.
Video courtesy of NASAA new study in humans appears to confirm what has been shown in animal studies - that a class of drug used to treat diabetes may reduce the risk of developing Parkinson's disease.
Study finds diabetes patients taking glitazone pills were less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than patients receiving other diabetes treatments. Study finds diabetes patients taking glitazone pills were less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than patients receiving other diabetes treatments.
Published in PLOS Medicine, the study shows diabetes patients taking glitazone prescription drugs were almost a third less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than patients who were on other diabetes treatments and who had never taken that class of drug.
Estimates suggest around 1 in 500 people are affected by Parkinson's disease. To date, there are no effective treatments that directly tackle the disease, which kills nerve cells that produce dopamine - a brain chemical that is essential for conveying messages to muscles that control movement.
Lab and animal studies have shown that glitazones may prevent loss of nerve cells.
The new study - led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK - is the first to investigate glitazone use and incidence of Parkinson's disease in humans.
First author Dr. Ruth Brauer, who worked on the study while at the School and is now at King's College London, says:
"Although our study only looked at people with diabetes, we believe it's likely that the protective effect of glitazones may also be seen in people without diabetes."
The study suggests the reduced risk of developing Parkinson's only lasts while patients keep taking glitazones - the results showed no lasting benefit for patients who used to take them and then switched to other drugs.
Glitazones treat diabetes by activating a receptor to reduce insulin resistance. The receptor is called peroxisome proliferation-activated gamma (PPARɣ). However, the receptor also has other functions, many of which have not been studied extensively in humans. A receptor is a protein embedded in the cell wall that acts as a gatekeeper allowing only certain signals to enter.
28% lower incidence of Parkinson's disease in patients taking glitazones
For the study, the researchers examined the electronic health records of over 160,000 diabetes patients in the UK to match 44,597 glitazone users with 120,373 people using other antidiabetic drugs. Each glitazone user was matched to five users of other diabetic treatments of the same age, gender, attending the same clinic, and at the same diabetes treatment stage.
The data spanned from 1999 - when glitazones were first prescribed for the treatment of diabetes - to 2013. From the records covering this period, the researchers could see how many of the participants were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
The researchers found a 28% lower incidence of Parkinson's disease in the patients taking glitazones compared with counterparts taking other treatments for diabetes. The finding did not change when they took into account other factors that might affect Parkinson's disease risk - including smoking and head injury.
The authors note the study was not designed to look at whether the drug might slow the progress of Parkinson's once patients have been diagnosed with it - and so cannot say whether it does.
They also point out that glitazones have been linked with some serious side effects, including bladder cancer and cardiovascular problems.
The team hopes the unique findings will spur further studies, as Dr. Brauer concludes:
"Our results suggest that treatments which activate the PPARɣ receptor in the same way as glitazones could be promising targets in future drug research."
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research funded the study.
The findings follow another recent Medical News Today report of a study that suggests two existing antimalaria drugs may slow Parkinson's disease, while reducing some of the side effects seen with current treatments.Can't find what you want?
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Can chickens fly?
Ever wondered how it is that you put your flock in their run in the morning and by the time you've finished breakfast they're all over your back yard?
You're standing there asking yourself "how in the world did that happen?"
Well, there's a simple explanation. Chickens can fly!
Why chickens fly in the wild.
It's a survival thing.
Our domesticated birds are descended from the wild jungle fowl of Asia. In the wild, it's completely natural for them to fly.
They use their wings to escape predators and to roost in trees at night. Staying on the ground would be far too dangerous.
If you've ever had light-bodied hens who have not got into the roost in time at night, you'll often find them sitting quite happily in a tree nearby. It's the remains of that inherited instinct to roost up high.
Can they fly far?
No. Naturally speaking domestic chickens aren't good flyers - their body weight is too heavy for their wings to carry them any distance. They tend to do a kind of hop and flap motion.
It's not terribly elegant!
Left to themselves, they'll generally stay on the ground where they can forage for food. But they'll fly if they have to - to escape predators, to roost, to get out of their run onto open land and occasionally, in my experience, just to prove who's boss.
Trust me - it's not easy getting a chicken down from a 60 foot high roof.
Have you ever seen a look on a rooster's face that says "I'm the boss, lady"?! Well, now you have!
Are fences chicken-proof when it comes to flying?
Nope. Very high fences are more difficult for heavier breeds, but lighter breeds and bantams will fly over fences with no problem.
In fact, some of my own girls flew over our six foot high fence even after they'd had one wing clipped. Everything I'd read said they shouldn't be able to fly with one wing clipped.
I didn't know how they were doing it until I sat and watched them.
They hopped onto a branch which took them about halfway up the fence - and then they flapped their wings long enough to get over to the other side.
They were lopsided and they weren't terribly elegant in the way they landed. But they did it.
A low fence is no barriers for a determined rooster!
Which brings us to the question of how high chickens can fly.
My Red Stars are very sociable. They love to come to the kitchen door for their breakfast every morning. And they will do anything to get there.
So I have personal experience of them flying between ten and fourteen feet off the ground when they really want to get somewhere.
Not all are that energetic, though, and the heavier breeds won't be able to get anything like that high. My Light and Speckled Sussexes, Marans and Wyandottes don't bother trying to fly at all - but my bantams love to roost as high as possible.
My Polish just watch with disdain. They think that flying is something less cultured birds do.
But for those breeds that like to fly, four feet is easy for them. Six is getting more difficult but still very possible, even for the medium sized birds.
At what age can chickens fly?
From when they're just a couple of days old chicks develop wing feathers and as little chicks, their body weight is light enough to start experiment with using them. This little Wyandotte was flying around the room like an expert at just over one week old!
This is one of my Wyandotte chicks at just 4 days old. See how well her wings are already growing?
Depending on the breed the flight feathers - the long feathers on the leading edge of the wing - start growing at day three or four after hatching and are fully developed by the age of between five and ten weeks.
Can all breeds fly?
Technically most can, but not all choose to. Some prefer it more than others and some are just too heavy ever to get their bodies off the ground.
Bantams are the best flyers - their small body makes it easier for them to take off! My Sablepoots are always roosting in trees rather than join others in the hen house at night.
Lighter bodied breeds like Araucanas are good flyers, and some just seem to enjoy flying - my own hybrid Red Stars just love to fly.
Heavier birds such as Orpingtons, Barred Rock, Leghorn and Australorp can't usually get the energy together and 'fancy' breeds like Polish and Silkies definitely don't want to get their feathers ruffled in flight!
My Polish chickens never wanted to fly even when they were very young.
Can chickens fly? What the answer means for you.
If you live in a town and have a few hens in your back yard, your neighbours might not be terribly pleased that their lovely green lawn is being raked over by your marauding flock.
Hens are ruthless when it comes to grass - they can clear a patch in minutes! And neighbours definitely won't be pleased that your girls have chomped down on their veggie patch, or used their lovely summer flower pots as dust-baths.
My chickens love my summer flower displays - to turn them into a chicken spa!
More importantly for your flock, though, is that flying can actually put them in danger.
Here's a story to explain why.
Lulu's story.
I had a problem. Our Red Stars love to free range - we have a lot of land - but our neighbour's dogs were constantly roaming onto our property and our flock was not safe.
I thought I could manage it by supervising them - and then, one day, the dogs got little Lulu.
Two of my Red Stars. Lulu is the chicken on the right. She lost her tail feathers in a dog attack when she flew out of the run.
We were lucky - I got to her in time and although she was badly bitten (and as you can see she lost a lot of tail feathers), she survived.
So I began to keep the flock in their run.
But the girls weren't happy. You know what they say - the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
They liked their run, but they liked to free range more.
So they flew. Red Stars are well known for it.
They flew over a six foot high fence. They flew in the morning and they flew in the afternoon.
I clipped one wing and they learned to fly with the other. I clipped both, and they hopped. Chickens can hop a long way, it seems.
I put them back in their run and they flew out again.
I tried to catch them and they flew into trees. I got them down and they perched on the roof.
Which proved to me beyond all doubt that not only can they fly - many chickens will do so at any given opportunity. It's in their nature.
And that's all fine except for... well, you get the picture.
This is a pic of Claudia, who managed to get over the six foot fence with one wing clipped and landed safely on the compost heap.
There was only one solution...
What are the possible solutions for chickens who fly?
Flying hens can be fun to watch - but they can cause problems, too. Unhappy neighbours, plants and vegetable gardens destroyed, and worst of all, putting themselves at risk of attack from the waiting mouths of predators.
What can you do?
There are different options available.
One is to put a cover - netting, for example - over the top of your run. That's entirely possible, depending on its size.
Another option is to clip their wings. Personally, I don't like taking any part of the body away from a living creature, but I decided - given that a six foot fence didn't stop them and my run is much too big to cover with netting - it was the only option to prevent my girls from flying into danger.
It's not the answer for everyone, but it worked for me.
Clicking on the pic below will take you to a page showing you exactly how easy it is to clip chickens' wings - and it doesn't hurt them a bit. And if you're interested to know more about the Famous Flying Red Stars, here's a link to that page too. Enjoy!
If you've found this page helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know by clicking this little Facebook button. Thank you!
Have you had problems with flying chickens?
If you enjoyed this article and found it helpful, I'd love you to let me know by clicking this button - thank you!
Thank you for sharing the chicken love!
TopCheck out which companies are making headlines before the bell:
D.R. Horton—The home builder earned 45 cents per share for its latest quarter, missing estimates by 3 cents, though revenue came in above estimates. The company made upbeat comments about its revenue and profit growth prospects on the heels of a more than 20 percent increase in net sales orders during October.
Vodafone—Vodafone raised its earnings forecast for the full year, following improvement in demand for its mobile services.
Alibaba—The China-based online retailer said its annual Singles' Day sales hit a record high, surging past the $7 billion mark.
Zynga—Jefferies upgraded the online game developer to "buy" from "hold," citing the fast-growing mobile business and the growing popularity of Words With Friends.
Darden Restaurants—KeyBanc upgraded the Olive Garden parent to "buy" from "hold," saying Olive Garden's menu revamp is likely to reverse an earnings decline over the next 12 months.
Time Warner—Goldman Sachs upgraded Time Warner shares to "buy" from "neutral," saying HBO is an under-appreciated asset and that the Warner Brothers unit is entering an accelerated content cycle.
Juniper Networks—CEO Shaygan Kheradpir resigned from his post. His departure comes amid board issues with his leadership and conduct. Executive vice president Rami Rahim has been named as Kheradpir's replacement.
Rackspace—The web hosting company earned 18 cents per share for its latest quarter, beating estimates by 2 cents, with revenue also above estimates, although its current quarter revenue forecast is below consensus. Rackspace also approved a $500 million stock buyback program over the next two years.
Caesars Entertainment—Caesars posted a greater than expected third quarter loss, with revenue coming in below consensus as well. The casino operator's results were hurt by an increase in interest expenses, as well as smaller tax benefits.
Halcon Resources—The company earned an adjusted 3 cents per share for its latest quarter, missing estimates by 3 cents. Revenue was below consensus, and the oil driller also gave below-consensus guidance for 2015. CEO Floyd Wilson said the company believes "the precipitous drop in crude prices calls for conservatism".
Bloomin' Brands—The company announced an 18 million share secondary offering, as Bain Capital reduces its stake in the owner of Outback Steakhouse.
El Pollo Loco—The restaurant chain will sell six million shares currently held by various shareholders, while Sprouts Farmers Market will sell 15 million shares current held by Apollo Management.
United Continental—The airline said its October passenger traffic rose 0.4 percent, but its "load factor," or the percentage of available seats filled, fell 0.2 percentage points compared to a year earlier.
General Electric—The company issued a securities filing linking the compensation of Chief Executive Jeff Immelt to certain cash and operating profit margin goals over the next three years.
Microsoft—The software and services company will roll out its first Lumia phone without the Nokia name this month. The Lumia 535, which will contain the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system, will be priced at approximately $137.
Apple—The company has hired a dedicated sales team to accelerate its foray into the workplace, according to Reuters.More than half of Canadians believe keeping up with technology is impossible these days and two-thirds worry about the safety of their information online.
This is according to the 2015 Norton Telus Security Study, which found that, given recent technological advances, three-quarters of Canadians believe that protecting their online information is as important as ever and more than half of Canadians say they are responsible for keeping their own information safe online, over security applications (20 per cent), Internet service providers (6 per cent), and the government (5 per cent).
The study, commissioned by Symantec, found that 60 per cent of Canadians find it overwhelming to maintain their privacy and security now that their families and households have so many devices. According to the research, conducted by Edelman Berland, 68 per cent find maintaining their privacy and security challenging now that they have so many online accounts and passwords and use numerous cloud-based services. Consequently, fewer than one-third of Canadians believe they would actually notice if they had been hacked or phished.
Only half of Canadians have security software on their smartphones, and even fewer on their tablets, the report revealed.Audience Choice Award
What is the Q?
The Q is the world’s first smart home lighting system that integrates light and sound.
Our energy-efficient and affordable LED light bulbs connect to the world through the Q Station router, allowing you to both create a Q (queue) of music and send lighting Qs (cues) from the same smartphone app.
The Q Station has a standard 1/8" audio jack as an output to your home audio system or headphones. Once connected to the the Q Station, your audio system becomes WiFi-enabled. That means you can play music to it from a networked device like a smart phone or computer.
When playing music over WiFi, the Q intelligently provides a light show for each song you listen to. You can personalize the show based on your mood with presets in the Android/iOS app. It's easy to customize your playlist and share it with your friends!
What can I do with the Q?
How does it work?
The Q Station is a WiFi router that also talks to the Q Bulbs over a lower-power wireless connection. You use the Q Station like you use a normal router, with settings for music-response customization built into the router's settings web page. You have the option to automatically synchronize the lights to any music you play through the Q Station, whether that music streams from the Internet, your cell phone (wireless speakers), or a USB drive plugged into the Q Station's USB port.
Key features
Specifications
How we are different:
1. WiFi Audio Streaming
We support wireless audio streaming through WiFi from your smart devices to your home stereo system (similar to Sonos). Our Q Station supports Airplay, Q-Play, DLNA, BubleUPNP, audio streaming/sharing protocols. In addition, we support SoundCloud and are working on integration with other cloud music sources like Spotify and Songza.
2. Smart Home Platform
Your next smart home technology will work seamlessly with our smart LED lights. We support AllJoyn, which is used by many existing smart home appliances. AllJoyn makes it easy for smart device app developers to communicate with our lights in the same way they communicate with other smart appliances. We also have joined Apple's HomeKit program to work on the integration of Q system and the HomeKit.
Even without programming, you can set up event-driven signaling through Zapier/IFTTT, so your lights can let you know what's happening across any of 300+ different online services.
The Q Station is built on OpenWRT and supports thousands of existing software packages for Linux/OpenWRT. We will provide an SDK including examples to get you started developing with the Q. We are looking into building an IDE into the router configuration web page for educational programming and simple scripting. We'll need your input to make sure the scripting language supports the most useful modes of operation.
3. An Affordable Wireless LED Bulb
There are many colorful, wireless LED bulbs on the market, but we don't think any of them come close to the cost performance of the Q.
In order to drive mass adoption of smart LED lighting, we developed a proprietary cost effective 2.4GHz RF radio for networking and control of the LED lights. Our patent-pending technology delivers comparable RF performance at less than 1/4 of the cost and more energy-efficient than other wireless technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.
Why open platform?
No other wireless LED lighting system is future looking about the smart home. we want anyone to be able to leverage our hardware for smart home applications.
OpenWrt makes it possible for developers to add their own functionality.
AllJoyn enables home appliances and smart devices to inter-operate easily with our Q Station to control the lights.
USB port makes it easy to expand and connect with sensors, arduinos, and other hardware development platforms
What people are saying about the Q:
"I would wire up my whole house with smart LEDs if the price is right, I am just not going to do that if it costs me over $50 each." -- Alex, IT Geek
"I love the idea of combining music and technology! It makes me feel like I can control the setting for the avid music enthusiast myself! Lighting is an integral feature. I cannot wait to see what a product of this nature would look like." -- Nimay, Nightclub DJ
"My kids would love to light up their room with a different color each day!" -- Michelle, Mom
We need your help!
We've spent a lot of time and effort getting this project ready for the world. We have working prototypes of the Q Bulb, Q Station, and Q App and an international group of contributors. Our manufacturing contacts are ready to put the Q into production and we have a lot of improvements scheduled -- but we need to order over 1000 units of each device to make the Q at a reasonable cost. Please back this project and help bring the Q to the world!
Project Timeline
Team
Belleds was founded by a team of MIT and Harvard alumni and students with the goal of making the home smarter, more energy efficient and a fun place to live. Our team is composed of experts in wireless technology, LED lighting and user experience.
Awards & News
Forget Renovating—Get This Integrated Smart Lighting And Sound SystemHello, and I'd like to welcome myself back after an extended absence. I'm sure you all missed me. Maybe.
Much hay has been made about the A's focus on the bullpen, after an offseason relief shopping spree left them heavily invested in several well-known arms. Most notably, the A's acquired Jim Johnson in exchange for Jemile Weeks. This is the sort of trade the A's are known to avoid until now: taking an expensive bullpen piece in exchange for a young player who stands to provide some surplus value, even if he isn't an incredibly great player himself.
On a recent Fangraphs podcast (highly recommended if you don't already listen), Dave Cameron parroted a theory that others have made that actually makes sense to me. Beane acquired Johnson not just for his statistical similarity to Balfour, but also to limit saves that Doolittle and/or Cook might then accumulate without Johnson around. Those saves would have made Doolittle and/or Cook more expensive in their arbitration years.
Now, I'm not really a conspiracy theory sort of guy. But, at least this one makes sense from an investment standpoint. It is better to pay $10M to Johnson now in 2014 dollars than pay the equivalent or more extra in Doolittle's and/or Cook's salary in future dollars. This keeps both of those bullpen anchors in Oakland longer, and helps keep the A's competitive window open for longer. Plus, it would have been just as easy to name someone like Otero a closer and acquire an MiLB veteran or waiver wire arm, and there is some non-zero chance he would be just as good as Johnson. Otero himself is a prime example of someone like that, that Beane could have acquired on the cheap but did not.
What do you guys think? Was trading for Johnson a larger part of a Beane master plan, or simply a case of him improving the team where it made the most sense?
33 Days Until Opening NightGautama Buddha (approx 563BC-483BC) was the original or ‘Supreme Buddha’ – a spiritual teacher who reached enlightenment and whose teachings Buddhism was founded on. The accepted story is that Gautama was born into a Royal family, but upon leaving the palace and witnessing the poor, sick and dying of India, he turned his back on worldly possessions and went in search of spiritual fulfilment. After years of meditation and studying with priests, Gautama reached enlightenment at age 35 and spent the rest of his life travelling and teaching disciples.
– Thanks to reader Aidan for submitting this quote.
– I am by no means an expert on Buddha so if you have insights on Buddha or his teachings, feel free to share in the comments.
– This quote is disputed on Wikiquotes as not being Buddha’s. Everywhere else I searched has him as the author so I went ahead with it.In an emoji-filled tweet, new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci suggested Monday that daily press briefings will soon be back on camera.
“The TV Cameras are back on,” Scaramucci tweeted Monday.
The White House briefings for weeks have been held off-camera, aggravating reporters used to sparring with the press secretary or deputy press secretary in a live, televised setting.
An exception to this trend was last Friday, when the White House held its first on-camera briefing in nearly a month on Friday -- to announce Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s resignation, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ promotion to the post and Scaramucci's hiring.
The last on-camera press briefing before last week was June 29.
During the briefing on Friday, Scaramucci did not specifically commit to “regular” on-camera press briefings.
“The answer is we may,” Scaramucci said. “I have to talk to the president about that. I like consulting with the president before I make decisions like that.”
Adding to reporters' frustration was the fact that recent off-camera gaggles have come with restrictions on the use of audio and video.The documentary "A Sinner in Mecca" follows Parvez Sharma on his once-in-a-lifetime journey to a country where homosexuality is punishable by death
LONDON, June 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Millions of Muslims each year make the arduous and exhausting haj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, but for one filmmaker, it was a journey that could have cost him his life.
The documentary "A Sinner in Mecca", which screened at the Sheffield Doc Fest on Sunday, follows Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim living in New York, on his once-in-a-lifetime journey to a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.
For many Muslims, travelling to Mecca is the culmination of their entire lives, but for Sharma, who secretly filmed his pilgrimage on an iPhone, it was borne of a need to prove that he could reconcile his sexuality with his devotion to Islam.
Sharma said he was fortunate to be allowed into the conservative Islamic kingdom, despite his sexuality and a film career in which he has challenged conservative Islam.
"I was going back into the closet as a gay man, and also a filmmaker," said Sharma, who was publicly labelled an infidel in Saudi Arabia for his 2007 film "A Jihad for Love", which documented the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims worldwide.
"I was probably the most public Muslim homosexual on the planet... and my "sins" were very visible to anyone would care to simply search for my name online," Sharma told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the annual film festival.
As a stark reminder of the chasm between Sharma's sexuality and his faith, the film opens with an exchange of distressed messages on a gay social network site between the filmmaker in New York and his friend Mo in the Saudi city of Medina.
In a frantic flurry of keystrokes, Mo recalls watching the beheading of a man in public, who he says was rumoured to have been executed because he was accused of being gay.
"Please help me get the out of this country it's hell. HELL. HELL. HELL," Mo says on the networking site.
SHAME
The film not only follows the pilgrimage, but also explores Sharma's life with husband Dan in New York, and his troubled relationship with his late mother as a young man in India.
Having travelled to India at the end of his time in Mecca, Sharma reads various letters from his mother - who died of cancer when he was 21 - imploring him to find a wife.
"I always wonder 'Did the shame of my sexuality kill her? Am I the one who has sinned?'" Sharma asks himself in the film.
"Mother never forgave me for being gay Her anger was relentless, and my shame eternal."
It is this shame that Sharma wrestles with as he narrates the pilgrimage which all Muslims must undertake once in their lives - to cleanse them of their sins in the eyes of Allah.
The filmmaker is wracked with doubt throughout his journey, often pondering if he will be accepted by Allah and denouncing contemporary Islam as at war with itself and having been "hijacked by a violent minority".
In one ritual of the haj, known as qurbani, Sharma kills a goat by slitting its throat, yet is overcome with remorse.
"By killing another living being, I have also killed part of myself. What is gone is the part of me that wondered if Islam would accept me... it is up to me, as a gay Muslim, to accept Islam," Sharma says as the film concludes.
Reflecting on what he refers to as the greatest journey of his life, Sharma talks about powerful moments where he felt completely alone despite being surrounded by millions of people.
"I felt I was making the pilgrimage on behalf of hundreds of thousands of gay Muslims who would never be able to go due to being too afraid. For me - it was my haj of defiance."
(Reporting By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Microsoft's new Kinect sensor continues to walk the path of Nintendo's Wii with Civil-War-reenactment precision. 1) Sports mini-game compilation released. 2) Talk show hosts made giddy. Now: 3) Accidental swattings and injuries immortalized on YouTube and elsewhere.
Review: Kinect Sports The Xbox 360 finally has its motion-based sports game. Packed with six sports, ten if you include… Read more Read
Up top is one unintended swat of one Kinect gamer by another. Here is a second, though the diaper-wearing injured party appears ready for revenge:
This is what happens, in some homes, when Microsoft releases an add-on called Kinect to the Xbox 360 that lets you control video games with movements of your body, no controller required. (Full Kinect coverage here.) It's the Wii all over again, minus anything to hold in your hand.
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And here, in mere photo form, is the busted hand of one Bill Linn, gaming public relations man, who tells Kotaku: "Have exposed beams in my house at 9 ft. Went to spike the ball in deca sports volley ball. Ended up with a flap of skin and a lot of blood. EEEKKK!" [UPDATE: Bill misremembered which game he was playing. The offending party game was actually Kinect Sports.]
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What was that Kinect tag line again? "You are the controller!" Microsoft, I believe the one of the next things Nintendo did was 4) encase the controller in a rubbery shell, for everyone's safety.
For the record, I've had Kinect for over a week and neither injured myself, anyone I played next to, nor my TV (unlike this person).Today we are happy to announce the release of Go 1.7. You can get it from the download page. There are several significant changes in this release: a port for Linux on IBM z Systems (s390x), compiler improvements, the addition of the context package, and support for hierarchical tests and benchmarks.
A new compiler back end, based on static single-assignment form (SSA), has been under development for the past year. By representing a program in SSA form, a compiler may perform advanced optimizations more easily. This new back end generates more compact, more efficient code that includes optimizations like bounds check elimination and common subexpression elimination. We observed a 5–35% speedup across our benchmarks. For now, the new backend is only available for the 64-bit x86 platform ("amd64"), but we’re planning to convert more architecture backends to SSA in future releases.
The compiler front end uses a new, more compact export data format, and processes import declarations more efficiently. While these changes across the compiler toolchain are mostly invisible, users have observed a significant speedup in compile time and a reduction in binary size by as much as 20–30%.
Programs should run a bit faster due to speedups in the garbage collector and optimizations in the standard library. Programs with many idle goroutines will experience much shorter garbage collection pauses than in Go 1.6.
Over the past few years, the golang.org/x/net/context package has proven to be essential to many Go applications. Contexts are used to great effect in applications related to networking, infrastructure, and microservices (such as Kubernetes and Docker). They make it easy to enable cancelation, timeouts, and passing request-scoped data. To make use of contexts within the standard library and to encourage more extensive use, the package has been moved from the x/net repository to the standard library as the context package. Support for contexts has been added to the net, net/http, and os/exec packages. For more information about contexts, see the package documentation and the Go blog post Go Concurrency Patterns: Context.
Go 1.5 introduced experimental support for a "vendor" directory, enabled by the GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT environment variable. Go 1.6 enabled this behavior by default, and in Go 1.7, this switch has been removed and the "vendor" behavior is always enabled.
Go 1.7 includes many more additions, improvements, and fixes. Find the complete set of changes, and details of the points above, in the Go 1.7 release notes.
Finally, the Go team would like thank everyone who contributed to the release. 170 people contributed to this release, including 140 from the Go community. These contributions ranged from changes to the compiler and linker, to the standard library, to documentation, and code reviews. We welcome contributions; if you'd like to get involved, check out the contribution guidelines.
By Chris BroadfootYes, a document thriller. Papers, Please is a compelling, edge-of-your-seat game about carefully scrutinizing forms. And it’s so clever that I don’t even know where to begin. But I suppose you’ll need to know what it is first, won’t you? Papers heralds from Lucas Pope, creator of the similarly socially conscious Republica Times, but this time you’re in charge of your maybe kinda probably definitely fictionalized Soviet homeland’s border. Or rather, you’re the person who makes sure everyone else has their paperwork in order. If you mess up, you get fined, and that means your family withers to chalky bone under the weight of starvation and sickness. Also, there are some very sinister sorts looking to slip past your iron stamping hand of ultimate justice, so perhaps more hangs in the balance than your benefactors are letting on. Read on for my impressions of the beta demo, and then – if you’re feeling so inclined or swollen with fictional nationalistic pride – give it a try yourself here.
So you have the what, and now here’s why you’re wielding a trained eye and laser-focused stamping hand with extreme prejudice:
“The communist state of Arstotzka has ended a 6-year war with neighboring Kolechia and reclaimed its rightful half of the border town, Grestin. Your job as immigration inspector is to control the flow of people entering the Arstotzkan side of Grestin from Kolechia. Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists. Using only the documents provided by travelers and the Ministry of Admission’s primitive inspect, search, and fingerprint systems you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested.”
There are so many things to laud in the demo. The incredibly minimal, strikingly stark art and sound design do an excellent job of bringing Arstotzka to life – you know, in a suffocatingly uncomfortable sort of way – and there’s a surprising amount of grim, sometimes grimly humorous personality that bleeds onto its pages. It is, however, the less immediately arresting bits that are really pulling me in so far.
Stamping is so damn satisfying. I want to stamp everything. Sometimes I do. Think you can slip a faulty document past me? WRONG. Now your artlessly falsified picture and suspiciously expired date are quadruple rejected. And you thought you could pressure me into getting sloppy with all your whining and complaining about places to be |
court could also tell the government to stop collecting records after the fact.
Also, under current law, the government needs to show that records are related to foreign terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. Rogers' bill would change that standard, requiring the government to show that records are for an individual who is associated with a "foreign power" – a broad term that includes terrorist groups, foreign governments and foreign political groups.
If the bill passes, a lot would depend on how the secret surveillance court interprets it. For instance, what kinds of "selection terms" could the government use to search for records? The broader the search terms, the more likely it is that innocent people will get caught in the dragnet.
Finally, Rogers' bill would not amend the FISA Amendments Act. "I don't believe that foreign collection on foreign soil is something that we need to change," Rogers said.
This bill has House Speaker John Boehner's support.
USA Freedom Act
What it would do: A lot. First, the bill's authors, Democratic senator Leahy and Patriot Act author Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., say the legislation would end all bulk collection of American records. To do so, they'd narrow the language in the Patriot Act to require that the government only collects records that are " relevant and material" to an authorized investigation. To qualify, an investigation must be related to foreign terrorism or clandestine activities, and the records must directly "pertain" to a foreign power.
The proposal would also close a so-called backdoor loophole that allows the NSA to search its databases for the content of Americans' communications. Under the new bill, analysts would need an individualized warrant to access any domestic content collected "incidentally."
In addition, the lawmakers would also tighten oversight of national security letters, a kind of administrative subpoena that lets the FBI obtain records related to "national security" without a court order. The idea is to make sure that the government can't use the national security letters law to justify bulk collection of American records in the future.
What it wouldn't do: The bill covers a lot of bases and has won the support of the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 142 representatives and 21 senators.
However, some worry that the bill does not unequivocally ban bulk collection of American records. Again, a lot depends on how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court interprets the statute. While this bill's language is narrower than current law, we now know the secret surveillance court has interpreted the Patriot Act very broadly. The EFF has suggested that the bill's sponsors make their intent more explicit.
This bill has by far the most co-sponsors, but its prospects are uncertain – it was introduced in October, and it still hasn't reached the floor.Pricing is a strange game in the consulting market. As consultants, we want to make as much as we can, and simultaneously we tend to charge for our time, and not for our value. Why do we do this? And how can we change?
The dynamic is a tough one. Often, we get leads from people or organizations we know, and we understand that they have a budget. So I’m sure that you, like me, have tried to assess your potential clients needs and put together a quote that will meet those needs; but you always have a dollar amount in the back of your head that you assume is as high as they can go.
Maybe they even told you their max budget. And it’s tough to get outside that mindset.
But if we are to truly make as much as we can, and more importantly, as much as we’re worth, perhaps we need to reconsider the value we bring as skilled developers and to the web project as a whole.
And if we can’t justify our value to the client, perhaps we should reconsider the client.
Potential Clients
Let’s throw out a number:
$15,000.
This is a number that represents your time for some website. It doesn’t matter what all goes into that number. It’s a calculation of your hours multiplied by “x” functionality, at your hourly rate.
A client with an already successful business is the easy kind.
The value of this sort of website can be assessed to a degree.
What does this number mean to a client with an already successful business? Probably not much. Maybe they make $5 million a year, or maybe they make $500 million a year. Either way, paying $15,000 for a new website is not very much money for this type of client. They just want the job done right.
In fact, $15,000 is probably too cheap. The website is important in a modern business. It’s no longer a yellow pages for the web. It’s the brand hub for just about any modern company.
$15,000 could be so low for such a business that they are afraid you will be flaky and unreliable. Four times out of five, you might lose this potential client for being too cheap.
Now let’s assess that $15,000 price tag again.
Except this time, the $15,000 is for a client with business plan, but it’s not off the ground yet. Suddenly, with a lack of expected income, and so many unknowns, $15,000 is a ton of freaking money.
The website is no different. The “modules”, or anticipated necessary functionality, hasn’t changed.
But the mindset is completely different.
Now someone is putting their money in your hands. You – the consultant. There is a huge (in their mind) sum of cash tied up in this website that could help make or break them.
The value of the website is considerably lower in this scenario. But the risk is much, much higher than our first scenario.
Now let’s assess that $15,000 price tag one more time.
This time, you’ve got a potential client with a “great idea.” It’s not their full time job yet, but if you can develop this website for them… man! They can rock it. This eCommerce site, or listings business, or ad-driven blog will be fantastic!
Problem is, they have no business model. They’ve come to you with an idea for a website, but that’s not a business model. Is it?
And all the chips they’ve got are in this website.
You’re no longer a web developer. You are a partner.
And you didn’t even ask to be.
If this business doesn’t get off the ground, it’s probably because you did a poor job developing the website. “This was a sure thing”, says the client.
What’s your value?
In each scenario above, I’ve of course simplified the myriad of potential client situations that could come your way. But my point is that the value of the website for each client is completely different.
But we tend to price them pretty much in the same way. As a linear calculation of our hours and rate.
A website with the same functionality, that takes the same time, has completely different value to these three clients.
So why are we continuously quoting our time at a set rate and not often enough considering the following:
Our value as skilled developers. The overall value that we bring to the web project.
Suddenly, we’re in a whole new ballgame.
We’re able to say no to clients without a business plan, and we’re able to justifiably charge more for clients that consider their websites to be a valuable part of their existing business, or charge appropriately for clients with a business plan they are willing to invest in properly (if this is client #2).
No longer will the potential client put the weight of the entire business on us, the developers. Because we no longer accept those types of clients.
And we’re charging more to the clients that value their website as a significant part of their business. So all in all, we’re making better money on the good clients, and avoiding losing money on the bad clients.
Further reading
If you are nodding your head yes, but you want to know how to put some of this to practice, I highly recommend you read this article by Patrick McKenzie that discusses charging for value, with practical steps for growing a consulting business.Early career Edit
Ward spent his junior career with the Red Deer Rebels of the Western Hockey League (WHL). After appearing in one game for the Rebels in 2000–01, Ward played three full seasons with the team from 2001–2004, leading them to the WHL finals twice. Ward was drafted 25th overall by the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2002 NHL Entry Draft. Upon graduating from the WHL, Ward signed a multi-year, entry-level contract with the Hurricanes on May 13, 2004. Due to the 2004–05 NHL lockout, he was assigned to Carolina's American Hockey League (AHL) affiliate, the Lowell Lock Monsters, for the season.
Carolina Hurricanes Edit
Joining the Hurricanes for the 2005–06 NHL season, Ward largely served in a backup role to Swiss goalie Martin Gerber during the regular season. He made his NHL debut on October 5, 2005, replacing Gerber after the starter injured his hamstring. He saved 10 of 11 shots in the third period, as the Hurricanes lost 5–2 to the Tampa Bay Lightning.[2] He made his first NHL start the following game two days later in the club's home opener against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Ward turned aside Mario Lemieux, Žigmund Pálffy and Sidney Crosby in a shootout, as the Hurricanes won 3–2.[3] Ward completed his NHL rookie season with 14 wins and 8 losses, along with a 3.68 goals against average.
In the opening round of the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Hurricanes faced a two-win deficit against the Montreal Canadiens. With Gerber struggling in the series, Hurricanes coach Peter Laviolette turned to Ward. The goaltending switch prompted Carolina to a series comeback, advancing to the second round against the New Jersey Devils, where he played opposite his personal hero, Martin Brodeur.[4] After eliminating the Devils, the Hurricanes defeated the Buffalo Sabres in seven games. Facing the Edmonton Oilers in the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals, he helped the Hurricanes to the franchise's first Stanley Cup. In doing so, he became the first rookie goaltender to lead his team to the Stanley Cup as a starter since Patrick Roy in 1986.[1] Against Edmonton, he also became the first rookie goaltender to both play and record a shutout in the Finals since Roy. He tied the rookie record for wins in the playoffs (15), previously held by Roy and Ron Hextall, and became the first rookie goalie to win the Conn Smythe Trophy since Hextall in 1987.[5]
After his heroics in the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Ward became the Hurricanes starting goaltender for the 2006–07 season. He recorded season stats of 30–21–6 and 37–25–5 in the 2006–07 and 2007–08 campaigns, respectively. The Hurricanes would miss the playoffs both years. The Hurricanes, however, would reach the Eastern Conference Finals in the 2008–09 season before bowing out to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins. Ward went 8–10 with a 2.67 GAA during the playoffs.
Ward and the Hurricanes struggled to begin the 2009–10 season, as Ward went 2–9–3 to start the campaign. On November 8, 2009, in a game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, Ward was injured when he was cut on the leg by the skate of opposing forward Rick Nash.[6] As Ward was helped into the dressing room, he left a trail of blood on the ice.[6] After returning from his injury, Ward finished the season with an 18–23–5 record, a 2.69 GAA and.916 save percentage as the Hurricanes failed to qualify for the post-season.
Ward was selected to participate in the 2011 NHL All-Star Game, along with teammates Eric Staal, Jamie McBain, and Jeff Skinner.[7] Ward was the first overall pick in the 2011 NHL All-Star Game Fantasy Draft, selected by All-Star Game captain, Eric Staal.[7]
Ward was credited with an empty-net goal against the New Jersey Devils on December 26, 2011, when a misplaced pass from Ilya Kovalchuk found its way into the empty goal after a rebound from Ward. He is the tenth goalie in NHL history to do this.[8]
Ward recorded his 500th game with the Carolina Hurricanes on February 27, 2015.[9]
During the offseason, Ward re-signed with the Hurricanes to a two-year, $6.6 million contract on June 16, 2016.[10]
On March 22, 2018, during a game against the Arizona Coyotes, the puck got stuck in his skate without his knowledge. His skates crossed the goal line when he went back into the net, ultimately resulting in an own goal.[11] Despite this, the Hurricanes ended up winning that game 6–5.[12]
Chicago Blackhawks Edit
On July 1, 2018, having left the Hurricanes as a free agent after 13 seasons, the Chicago Blackhawks signed Ward to a one-year, $3 million contract.[13]“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Those were Eric Garner’s last words. He repeated them at least 11 times, clearly audible to the camera that recorded it all, as one cop sat on his chest and another suffocated him in choke-hold. And then he stopped moving. For six minutes they just left him lying there on the sidewalk — they didn’t do a goddamn thing to save his life. The coroner ruled it a homicide; another black man murdered by a white cop. Yet a white-majority grand jury chose not to indict him. Now we can’t breathe.
We can’t breathe with this injustice in the air. We can’t breathe knowing that in America a black man is killed by police every 28 hours — and the cop usually gets away with impunity. We can’t breathe witnessing how these pigs maim, terrorize and murder people of color. How they stifle the peaceful protests in response. How they arrive in tanks, dressed up like Robocops, carrying solid wooden batons and fully automatic rifles, looking for any possible excuse to shoot or beat the shit out of people they’re supposed to “serve and protect.”
We can’t breathe in this toxic atmosphere of state brutality.
We can’t breathe in this travesty of justice, this sham of a democracy.
How can we breathe knowing that, just two bloody weeks ago, the exact same thing happened with the white cop who shot Mike Brown in Ferguson?
How can we breathe knowing that, just a day after Garner’s murderer got away scot-free, another unarmed black man was shot by a white cop in Arizona?
How can we breathe knowing that the bastards who shot a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun are not even suspected of any wrongdoing?
How can we breathe knowing that the only person indicted in Eric Garner’s murder was the man who recorded it on video?!
How can we breathe through the seething rage, the disbelief — the disgust?
We just can’t fucking breathe.
And we’re not alone.
It’s the same shit everywhere.
In Mexico, the cops and the gangs are one. Still no sign of the 43 missing students of the Escuela Normal Rural in Ayotzinapa — but everyone knows what happened. The mayor had the cops turn the students over to the gangs, who let 15 of them suffocate to death in a truck, then executed the others and incinerated their remains in a giant fire that burnt all night. Apparently some of the students were still alive when they were thrown into the flames. The whole political system is in on it — everyone knows. And so in Mexico, they can’t breathe.
In Greece, the cops and the fascists are one. Still no resolution to the 25 day hunger strike of the anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos. Everyone knows what happened. Nikos and his comrades robbed a bank. They told the bank employees they had nothing to fear; their enemy was the state. But the cops got to them before they could escape. They were arrested and subjected to torture, their faces so badly bruised the cops had to overtly photoshop the mugshots released to the press. Oh, and today it was exactly six years ago that a cop shot Nikos’ best friend Alexis through the heart — in cold blood — right in front of his eyes.
Now Nikos is on hunger strike because the state refused to grant him his constitutional right to attend university classes outside of prison. He stopped eating, he declared, to gain “a breath of freedom.” But instead of granting him a gasp of air, the state is simply letting him starve to death. “Even if God himself came down from the skies,” the Justice Minister declared, “I would not grant him a leave.” Now doctors warn that Nikos is in critical condition and could succumb to organ failure anytime. His parents fear that their son will end up a martyr. But the cops simply respond to solidarity protests with more teargas. And so in Greece, like in Mexico and the US, they can’t breathe.
I could go on. I could talk about the coldblooded execution of a Palestinian man by Israeli police last month. I could talk about the police murder of the environmental activist Rémi Fraisse in France. I could talk about police violence against Occupy protesters in Hong Kong. I could talk about Brazilian police killing six people a day. I could talk about the police impunity following the Marikana massacre in South Africa. I could talk about LAPD officers shooting a man in the head today — ten fucking times! — amid a crowd of tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. I could talk about the Turkish cops who killed a Kurdish youth in a protest today. I could talk about the epidemic of police violence and harassment against transgender people of color. I could go on and on and on.
But there is no point to write and talk and analyze and debate. Some things are so basic, so elementary, so simple and straightforward that they simply cannot stand: not in the US, not in Mexico, not in Greece, not in Palestine, not in France, not in Hong Kong, not in Brazil, not in South Africa, not in Kurdistan, nowhere. Because like this we cannot breathe — and in the universal sense of suffocation we feel at the hands of the capitalist state and its forces of order, we are one. Some of us are greatly privileged, to be sure, but our enemy is one and the same. From New York to Greece, we must revolt against the police. As the great Franz Fanon so astutely put it, “when we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”Supporters of Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly called Ahok, stage a protest outside Cipinang Prison, where he was taken following his conviction for blasphemy in Jakarta on May 9. The sign reads 'Ahok is not guilty.' (Reuters Photo/Darren Whiteside)
Jakarta. Human rights group Wahid Foundation — named after Indonesia's fourth president Abdurrahman Wahid — said on Friday (12/05) that religious interpretations and expressions should not be likened to hate speech and urged the government to abolish the country’s blasphemy law.
On Tuesday, Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama was sentenced to two years of imprisonment for blasphemy against Islam. The sentence was heavier than the prosecutors' demand.
"The blasphemy law is against freedom of religious belief and freedom of expression. This law had sent more than 100 people to jail since 2014. This law shouldn’t be used anymore [...] it should be abolished," Wahid Foundation chairwoman Yenny Wahid — Abdurrahman's daughter — said in a statement received by the Jakarta Globe.
The foundation also emphasized that "religious interpretations and expressions of peaceful intent should not be prosecuted."
Yenny said the court’s decision should still be respected, and mass demonstrations should not be organized "to impose views on the ongoing legal process."
A series of shows of solidarity with Ahok was organized across Indonesia following the court verdict announcement. Many of his supporters gathered in front of Cipinang Prison in East Jakarta on Tuesday night and at City Hall and Proklamasi Monument in Central Jakarta on Wednesday.
The statement added that disagreements on the verdict against Ahok should "be expressed through available legal mechanisms."
Indonesia’s continued use of the blasphemy law has come under fire with Ahok’s sentencing, as citizens and international rights organizations such as the United Nations Human Rights Council and American-funded international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch called on the government to review Article 156a of the Criminal Code on religious defamation, with the intent to abolish it.
Launched in 2004, Wahid Foundation is an Indonesian-based human rights group whose work has focused on religious freedom and interfaith dialogues.AFA Policy Forum
Colonel Lyle Koenig, Jr., and TSgt Jim Hotaling
Air Force Special Operations Command
Air Force Association National Convention
Washington, D.C.
September 16, 2002
Policy Forum: Special Operations Forces Brief
Colonel Lyle Koenig: I appreciate the chance to be here. As General Peterson said, I work directly for Lieutenant General Paul Hester, who is the Commander of Air Force Special Operations Command and—as everybody in this audience knows— he is a member of the AFA, a strong supporter of the AFA, and I know he was very disappointed he couldn’t be here to address the group today, but he is doing an Air Force board and was unable to attend. So, it is my honor to be here. I just appreciate the opportunity.
What I am going to do today is spend a small amount of time talking, laying the foundation for a war story, a short portion of what Air Force Special Ops is about, and then we are going to get the real warrior up here who has laid on the ridge line and shot back at terrorists. He will give you his story about ground operations in Afghanistan.
This is what everybody recognizes—Air Force Special Operations Command by – six versions of the C-130; the MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. As you all know, we are a small command – 13,000 people total for worldwide Air Force Special Operations. One hundred and twenty one aircraft, only 88 of which are combat coded. In addition to being an Air Force major command, remember we operationally report to the Commander in Chief of the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa to provide specialized support for this nation’s special operations forces as well as a ground force to provide a very special air-to-surface interface that we are going to briefly talk about.
This is the portion that many people aren’t familiar with when we discuss Air Force Special Operations Command – special tactics. Three career fields: combat control, para-rescue and combat weather, all of which are jump-qualified and all of which are integrated with ground Army and Navy special operations teams.
In October of 2001, many of you saw, all across this nation, on the front page of all the major papers, pictures such as these, with captions that said, “soldiers inserted on the ground in Afghanistan.” I don’t need to tell this audience these guys aren’t soldiers; these are airmen. And airmen are on the ground, combat controllers, integrated in every single special operations team that was inserted on the ground in Afghanistan. This is no surprise to us, but a big surprise to those outside of our community.
What I want to do real quick is just explain what it takes to become a combat controller. Start with your Combat Control Orientation at Hurlburt, mainly PT, just to get you in shape for your 18 months to 20 months worth of training that you have to do. Off to Air Traffic Control School, where they learn radar control, air field control, graduating from that course as a certified FAA air traffic controller. No surprise – they go off to jump school at Fort Benning, same school we all know about. No surprise with combat survival training at Fairchild Air Force Base.
Combat Control School at Pope. This is the meat of what the combat controllers learn, communicating, land navigation, LZ survey, DZ survey, LZ control. All of those things, those basic fundamental tenets that the combat controllers need in combat. Back to Hurlburt for 12 months to do advanced skills training, which is where all of the disciplines that the combat controllers have learned are put together in preparation to go out on their first operational assignment. Part of that is military free fall. A minimum of 30 free falls, of which two day and two night jumps on oxygen, full combat gear, ruck sack, combat equipment, LZ and DZ survey equipment—everything necessary—and when these guys jump into combat, they are familiar with [it]. Diver School. No surprise there, by the United States Army to get scuba qualified out to a unit.
The real heroes are not the guys on the staff, as you all know. What a pleasure it is to introduce guys who lay on ridge lines, shoot back, kill terrorists and call in precision fire power. Today, Tech. Sgt. “Hots” Hotaling is one of those guys who we have the opportunity to hear from. As General Peterson said, he has 10 years of active duty service. He is in the reserves. A Washington State trooper as he said. But what stands out to me as I have gotten to know him and as I have read his story and heard his briefing is on the 12th of September, this guy called up and said, “I want in the fight. I want on active duty. I’ve got to get there now.” On the 14th of September, he was activated, starting spinning up the small little refresher things that he needed to do to get over in the theater. He was there for about a month and from the opening day of Operation Anaconda he was there. What really appeals to me is that I really think Sgt Hotaling is the citizen airman. Not citizen soldier. He is a citizen airman and it is an honor to be around this guy. Thank you very much for listening to me. I’ll bring up the real hero. Sgt. Hotaling, over to you.
TSgt. Jim Hotaling: Thank you very much for inviting me. Three things before I start the briefing. First thing is what the colonel didn’t mention is that the motto for AFSOC is that we are the quiet professionals. So it is a little bit of a thing for us to get up here and actually be able to tell our story finally. It is an honor for us to do that.
Secondly, it is also an honor that there are some fellow AFSOC warriors in this room and it is a little humbling that I get to tell my story and it just represents one story of many that we are out there fighting the war and to this day we are still out there doing it. This just represents what special tactics is doing. With that, we are going to go ahead and do it.
It has already been mentioned a hundred times, but I love bringing this thing up that nobody likes to see that in the rear view mirror, including myself. It is true I am a Washington State trooper and the story has already been told. About six months prior to 9/11, they started a reserve program, IMA, for combat controllers and I got the call and said, “sure, why not?” I get to go back, shoot, dive, jump and be with the fellas again. What a great job! I remember telling my wife, there is no way I would ever be activated. It would take something like Desert Storm or something like that for me to get activated. Six months later, she is kicking me out of the house.
Anyways, I was activated and I was assigned to our west coast team which is the 22nd Special Tactics Squadron out at McChord Air Force Base, which was conveniently in my state, which allowed me to stay at home. I was assigned the theater call sign of Jaguar One-Two. I spent a few months training up with them. In late November, we inserted into country.
After insertion into country, we were assigned to our different teams. I was assigned as a Terminal Attack Controller to provider command and control and close air support to a coalition special forces team.
Third point that I wanted to make is this is the unclassified version of this briefing. So you are just going to have to fill in the holes a little bit because there is going to be some things that don’t connect.
I was assigned to a coalition special forces team. And within a week of being in Afghanistan, we were assigned a strategic reconnaissance mission. Strategic reconnaissance, if you are not familiar with it, is basically just sneaking behind enemy lines and taking a look at what they are doing and reporting back intelligence. But it is not actually doing any action on to them.
So, we get in there and we insert on some CH-53s from the Marine Corps and we drive four-wheel, ATV quads about 20 kilometers across country and then we walk the rest of the way. We are there for about two days and we are just watching the bad guys and seeing what they are going, reporting things back and lo and behold a Bedouin walks right up onto our encampment. There is about six of us there and we take care of him and shoo him away, but what does he do? He runs to the local village and he notifies the militia.
Within two days of actually being in the field, and within a week of being in Afghanistan, I am on my first Escape and Evade. I know this war is for real.
This picture is an actual picture of the E&E. If you can see the coalition guys expression of “why are you taking a picture at this time?”—I promised my wife I’d get a lot of good pictures on this war. I actually carried one of those disposable cameras that you buy in grocery stores around my neck at all times. So I just took the opportunity to take a quick little snap shot as we were running back for our four wheelers. But what this picture does demonstrate, it shows you the type of terrain that we were in and also gives you the sense of the type of backpacks that we were wearing. If you can see what he is carrying on his back there, that equals to about 120 pounds worth of gear. That is not fun to carry. Especially when you have to run through that type of terrain.
We were able to get back to our ATVs and we were being chased by four Toyota four-runners that had.50 caliber machine guns mounted on the back of them. The chase was on for a little over 90 minutes. Within that 90 minutes, I was able to get a Navy P-3 Sub Hunter that just happened to be in the area to help me out. He has some eyeballs up there and he was literally able to tell me to turn left, turn right, go down this creek bed, stop here, and it allowed us to break contact with the enemy as we started to gain some distance. It also allowed me to get the close air support role going and we were able to bring two of my friends from the USS Stennis aboard, two F-18s to take care of the problem for us. That was a good first mission.
We ended up surviving that mission, as you can see. And we later did a direct-action mission on that facility with the Marine Corps.
Coming back off of that, I stayed with that same coalition team and the next mission we had was on a terrorist training facility. This is the second largest terrorist training facility in the country, a very hardcore Al Qaeda training camp, and we knew we could not afford at this point to be compromised like we were with the local militia. So what we had to do was some how find a way that there was no way somebody could stumble on us. My coalition mates decided to nickname this one the “walk of death.”
The reason why is the terrain that we had to take. We had to climb a 2,300 foot ridge that was almost straight up. It took us two and a half days to make the climb. We averaged about a hundred yards an hour as we did this, but we knew there was no Bedouin that was going to stumble across us on this one.
To give you another idea, if you can see the size of the packs, if you look on the right corner there, you can see the one guy sitting down and the pack is literally a good foot and a half over his head. Again, this was a nine-day mission. We had to carry in nine days food and water plus all your gear and plus it is freezing cold. There is a lot of stuff you have to carry and again these weights were extreme. It is not like it is the X Games or anything like that where you’ve got safeties and ropes and little helmets and things like this. It is do or die. It is a tough thing to do, but it is things you have to do in war.
Coming back off of that mission, which was a successful strategic reconnaissance and then turned into a direct action, we came back and had a few days off and went back out again on another strategic reconnaissance direct action. Direct action, if you are not familiar, is what you would visualize if you saw a SWAT team here in the states. It is basically kicking down the doors and engaging the enemy one-on-one. This one was on an Al Qaeda command and control facility, and I have up there chasing enemy SOF. The reason that I have that is as we were chasing them across country we were chasing them on six-wheeled range rovers and there were also some additional non-Al Qaeda, non-Taliban members that were security forces for this Al Qaeda C-2 facility so it made it an interesting fight. This gives you an idea of what the terrain looks like towards the Iranian border and it is more of a flat, typical desert-type terrain and that is just us stopping on a break and listening and looking and seeing where the bad guys are.
Another funny story about these six-wheeled range rovers is that they are designed for three people. Of course, I am the fourth guy and I am the American so I am on the tail gate the whole time riding in the back. So, it was pretty uncomfortable.
We ended up catching those guys and they are in Cuba now I believe.
Coming back off of that one—don’t worry, there’s more to come—I actually came off the coalition teams and was asked by my commander there in the field if I could head up a classic special tactics combat control mission, which is to go survey air fields. As the colonel mentioned before, we are certified air traffic controllers. What we also are certified to do is go out and actually survey air fields. We are not talking about the ones that you see at LaGuardia or here at National, but the ones that are made out of just dry lake beds and middle of the road and things like that. We can actually go there and talk to the director of mobility forces and tell him, “you know what, you can land a C-17 here because we’ve kicked the dirt, we’ve touched and we’ve tasted it and we can do it.” That is what we had to do on this one.
This is just an example of what we bring to the fight, where actually you bring engineering total stations out there and you can see the tactical neon yellow that we utilize over there. This is not a good feeling when you unpack this in the middle of indian country and you realize you didn’t paint the total station before you went to war. Lessons learned. That was definitely in the lessons learned.
This is another one. I was actually escorted on this survey mission by the Navy SEALS and they brought their desert patrol vehicles which they made famous over in Desert Storm. The reason that it is all white there—that is actually an ice storm that we got hit with and pretty much shut down the whole operation. But we were able to tactically survey that airfield and today it is being used for operations.
Coming back off of that mission, I was assigned to another coalition team. These guys were from a northern European country and they were pretty interesting. It is funny. When I first got assigned to them, I came up to them and I introduced myself and of course I am the only American and they are like, “Ja, Sgt. Hotaling, we’ve been training for months and months to climb big mountains and we are strong and we hope you are, too.” I am just looking at them like, “I am a donut-eating state trooper.” That is what I’m thinking in the back of my mind. But of course I had to save face since I was the only American with them and I lied and said, “Let’s go get ‘em.” We went on this mission, it was another direct action mission and this was on the Al Qaeda safe house near the Paki border. The reason I had “B-52 Intimidation” on here, I don’t have any slides on this, but after we were done with the direct action mission, we were ready to go home and so as we were up in the mountains, we came down to a valley floor to go to the helicopter landing zone and as we were waiting for the two helicopters to arrive, the local villagers started seeing, “well, there is only 12 guys there, there is like 300 of us in the village, I think we can take ‘em.” So the villagers started to go up on the ridges and they were building bonfires and started to shoot their guns off in the air and the coalition team leader looks at me and says, “Sgt. Hotaling, it is time to go.” I call up for the helicopters and one helicopters calls me and says, “We’re broke and we’re going back to Bagram.” So, just the great news that I wanted to pass along. I tell the team leader that we are on our own and we are going to have to go hide until they can come get us. So at this point the villagers are getting a little crazy and I think they are getting rambunctious, they are ready to go take us on and one thing that I had in my back pocket, though, prior to the mission, I had coordinated for a B-52 to be overhead in case we had any caves in the area because there was reports of caves there and we might do some cave-busting. So I call on the frequency and sure enough he’s still around and the first thing he asks me, he goes, “Hey Jaguar, where do you want me to drop these bombs?” He had flown a long way, probably from the states and he was ready to go. I told him, “well, let’s just slow down and let’s figure this out.” So we talk it through and what is the best way to disperse 300 screaming, crazy Afghanis? How about a low pass with a B-52? That is exactly what |
producing your consciousness?
When we consider the possibility of a conscious quantum computer, in some sense we inherit all the previous puzzles about conscious classical computers, but then also add a few new ones. So, let’s say I run a quantum subroutine that simulates your brain, by applying some unitary transformation U. But then, of course, I want to “uncompute” to get rid of garbage (and thereby enable interference between different branches), so I apply U-1. Question: when I apply U-1, does your simulated brain experience the same thoughts and feelings a second time? Is the second experience “the same as” the first, or does it differ somehow, by virtue of being reversed in time? Or, since U-1U is just a convoluted implementation of the identity function, are there no experiences at all here?
Here’s a better one: many of you have heard of the Vaidman bomb. This is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics where there’s a package, and we’d like to “query” it to find out whether it contains a bomb—but if we query it and there is a bomb, it will explode, killing everyone in the room. What’s the solution? Well, suppose we could go into a superposition of querying the bomb and not querying it, with only ε amplitude on querying the bomb, and √(1-ε2) amplitude on not querying it. And suppose we repeat this over and over—each time, moving ε amplitude onto the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb there, but moving ε2 probability onto the “query the bomb” state if there is a bomb (since the explosion decoheres the superposition). Then after 1/ε repetitions, we’ll have order 1 probability of being in the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb. By contrast, if there is a bomb, then the total probability we’ve ever entered that state is (1/ε)×ε2 = ε. So, either way, we learn whether there’s a bomb, and the probability that we set the bomb off can be made arbitrarily small. (Incidentally, this is extremely closely related to how Grover’s algorithm works.)
OK, now how about the Vaidman brain? We’ve got a quantum subroutine simulating your brain, and we want to ask it a yes-or-no question. We do so by querying that subroutine with ε amplitude 1/ε times, in such a way that if your answer is “yes,” then we’ve only ever activated the subroutine with total probability ε. Yet you still manage to communicate your “yes” answer to the outside world. So, should we say that you were conscious only in the ε fraction of the wavefunction where the simulation happened, or that the entire system was conscious? (The answer could matter a lot for anthropic purposes.)
You might say, sure, maybe these questions are puzzling, but what’s the alternative? Either we have to say that consciousness is a byproduct of any computation of the right complexity, or integration, or recursiveness (or something) happening anywhere in the wavefunction of the universe, or else we’re back to saying that beings like us are conscious, and all these other things aren’t, because God gave the souls to us, so na-na-na. Or I suppose we could say, like the philosopher John Searle, that we’re conscious, and the lookup table and homomorphically-encrypted brain and Vaidman brain and all these other apparitions aren’t, because we alone have “biological causal powers.” And what do those causal powers consist of? Hey, you’re not supposed to ask that! Just accept that we have them. Or we could say, like Roger Penrose, that we’re conscious and the other things aren’t because we alone have microtubules that are sensitive to uncomputable effects from quantum gravity. But neither of those two options ever struck me as much of an improvement.
Yet I submit to you that, between these extremes, there’s another position we can stake out—one that I certainly don’t know to be correct, but that would solve so many different puzzles if it were correct that, for that reason alone, it seems to me to merit more attention than it usually receives. (In an effort to give the view that attention, a couple years ago I wrote an 85-page essay called The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, which one or two people told me they actually read all the way through.) If, after a lifetime of worrying (on weekends) about stuff like whether a giant lookup table would be conscious, I now seem to be arguing for this particular view, it’s less out of conviction in its truth than out of a sense of intellectual obligation: to whatever extent people care about these slippery questions at all, to whatever extent they think various alternative views deserve a hearing, I believe this one does as well.
The intermediate position that I’d like to explore says the following. Yes, consciousness is a property of any suitably-organized chunk of matter. But, in addition to performing complex computations, or passing the Turing Test, or other information-theoretic conditions that I don’t know (and don’t claim to know), there’s at least one crucial further thing that a chunk of matter has to do before we should consider it conscious. Namely, it has to participate fully in the Arrow of Time. More specifically, it has to produce irreversible decoherence as an intrinsic part of its operation. It has to be continually taking microscopic fluctuations, and irreversibly amplifying them into stable, copyable, macroscopic classical records.
Before I go further, let me be extremely clear about what this view is not saying. Firstly, it’s not saying that the brain is a quantum computer, in any interesting sense—let alone a quantum-gravitational computer, like Roger Penrose wants! Indeed, I see no evidence, from neuroscience or any other field, that the cognitive information processing done by the brain is anything but classical. The view I’m discussing doesn’t challenge conventional neuroscience on that account.
Secondly, this view doesn’t say that consciousness is in any sense necessary for decoherence, or for the emergence of a classical world. I’ve never understood how one could hold such a belief, while still being a scientific realist. After all, there are trillions of decoherence events happening every second in stars and asteroids and uninhabited planets. Do those events not “count as real” until a human registers them? (Or at least a frog, or an AI?) The view I’m discussing only asserts the converse: that decoherence is necessary for consciousness. (By analogy, presumably everyone agrees that some amount of computation is necessary for an interesting consciousness, but that doesn’t mean consciousness is necessary for computation.)
Thirdly, the view I’m discussing doesn’t say that “quantum magic” is the explanation for consciousness. It’s silent on the explanation for consciousness (to whatever extent that question makes sense); it seeks only to draw a defensible line between the systems we want to regard as conscious and the systems we don’t—to address what I recently called the Pretty-Hard Problem. And the (partial) answer it suggests doesn’t seem any more “magical” to me than any other proposed answer to the same question. For example, if one said that consciousness arises from any computation that’s sufficiently “integrated” (or something), I could reply: what’s the “magical force” that imbues those particular computations with consciousness, and not other computations I can specify? Or if one said (like Searle) that consciousness arises from the biology of the brain, I could reply: so what’s the “magic” of carbon-based biology, that could never be replicated in silicon? Or even if one threw up one’s hands and said everything was conscious, I could reply: what’s the magical power that imbues my stapler with a mind? Each of these views, along with the view that stresses the importance of decoherence and the arrow of time, is worth considering. In my opinion, each should be judged according to how well it holds up under the most grueling battery of paradigm-cases, thought experiments, and reductios ad absurdum we can devise.
So, why might one conjecture that decoherence, and participation in the arrow of time, were necessary conditions for consciousness? I suppose I could offer some argument about our subjective experience of the passage of time being a crucial component of our consciousness, and the passage of time being bound up with the Second Law. Truthfully, though, I don’t have any a-priori argument that I find convincing. All I can do is show you how many apparent paradoxes get resolved if you make this one speculative leap.
For starters, if you think about exactly how our chunk of matter is going to amplify microscopic fluctuations, it could depend on details like the precise spin orientations of various subatomic particles in the chunk. But that has an interesting consequence: if you’re an outside observer who doesn’t know the chunk’s quantum state, it might be difficult or impossible for you to predict what the chunk is going to do next—even just to give decent statistical predictions, like you can for a hydrogen atom. And of course, you can’t in general perform a measurement that will tell you the chunk’s quantum state, without violating the No-Cloning Theorem. For the same reason, there’s in general no physical procedure that you can apply to the chunk to duplicate it exactly: that is, to produce a second chunk that you can be confident will behave identically (or almost identically) to the first, even just in a statistical sense. (Again, this isn’t assuming any long-range quantum coherence in the chunk: only microscopic coherence that then gets amplified.)
It might be objected that there are all sorts of physical systems that “amplify microscopic fluctuations,” but that aren’t anything like what I described, at least not in any interesting sense: for example, a Geiger counter, or a photodetector, or any sort of quantum-mechanical random-number generator. You can make, if not an exact copy of a Geiger counter, surely one that’s close enough for practical purposes. And, even though the two counters will record different sequences of clicks when pointed at identical sources, the statistical distribution of clicks will be the same (and precisely calculable), and surely that’s all that matters. So, what separates these examples from the sorts of examples I want to discuss?
What separates them is the undisputed existence of what I’ll call a clean digital abstraction layer. By that, I mean a macroscopic approximation to a physical system that an external observer can produce, in principle, without destroying the system; that can be used to predict what the system will do to excellent accuracy (given knowledge of the environment); and that “sees” quantum-mechanical uncertainty—to whatever extent it does—as just a well-characterized source of random noise. If a system has such an abstraction layer, then we can regard any quantum noise as simply part of the “environment” that the system observes, rather than part of the system itself. I’ll take it as clear that such clean abstraction layers exist for a Geiger counter, a photodetector, or a computer with a quantum random number generator. By contrast, for (say) an animal brain, I regard it as currently an open question whether such an abstraction layer exists or not. If, someday, it becomes routine for nanobots to swarm through people’s brains and make exact copies of them—after which the “original” brains can be superbly predicted in all circumstances, except for some niggling differences that are traceable back to different quantum-mechanical dice rolls—at that point, perhaps educated opinion will have shifted to the point where we all agree the brain does have a clean digital abstraction layer. But from where we stand today, it seems entirely possible to agree that the brain is a physical system obeying the laws of physics, while doubting that the nanobots would work as advertised. It seems possible that—as speculated by Bohr, Compton, Eddington, and even Alan Turing—if you want to get it right you’ll need more than just the neural wiring graph, the synaptic strengths, and the approximate neurotransmitter levels. Maybe you also need (e.g.) the internal states of the neurons, the configurations of sodium-ion channels, or other data that you simply can’t get without irreparably damaging the original brain—not only as a contingent matter of technology but as a fundamental matter of physics.
(As a side note, I should stress that obviously, even without invasive nanobots, our brains are constantly changing, but we normally don’t say as a result that we become completely different people at each instant! To my way of thinking, though, this transtemporal identity is fundamentally different from a hypothetical identity between different “copies” of you, in the sense we’re talking about. For one thing, all your transtemporal doppelgängers are connected by a single, linear chain of causation. For another, outside movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you can’t meet your transtemporal doppelgängers and have a conversation with them, nor can scientists do experiments on some of them, then apply what they learned to others that remained unaffected by their experiments.)
So, on this view, a conscious chunk of matter would be one that not only acts irreversibly, but that might well be unclonable for fundamental physical reasons. If so, that would neatly resolve many of the puzzles that I discussed before. So for example, there’s now a straightforward reason why you shouldn’t consent to being killed, while your copy gets recreated on Mars from an email attachment. Namely, that copy will have a microstate with no direct causal link to your “original” microstate—so while it might behave similarly to you in many ways, you shouldn’t expect that your consciousness will “transfer” to it. If you wanted to get your exact microstate to Mars, you could do that in principle using quantum teleportation—but as we all know, quantum teleportation inherently destroys the original copy, so there’s no longer any philosophical problem! (Or, of course, you could just get on a spaceship bound for Mars: from a philosophical standpoint, it amounts to the same thing.)
Similarly, in the case where the simulation of your brain was run three times for error-correcting purposes: that could bring about three consciousnesses if, and only if, the three simulations were tied to different sets of decoherence events. The giant lookup table and the Earth-sized brain simulation wouldn’t bring about any consciousness, unless they were implemented in such a way that they no longer had a clean digital abstraction layer. What about the homomorphically-encrypted brain simulation? That might no longer work, simply because we can’t assume that the microscopic fluctuations that get amplified are homomorphically encrypted. Those are “in the clear,” which inevitably leaks information. As for the quantum computer that simulates your thought processes and then perfectly reverses the simulation, or that queries you like a Vaidman bomb—in order to implement such things, we’d of course need to use quantum fault-tolerance, so that the simulation of you stayed in an encoded subspace and didn’t decohere. But under our assumption, that would mean the simulation wasn’t conscious.
Now, it might seem to some of you like I’m suggesting something deeply immoral. After all, the view I’m considering implies that, even if a system passed the Turing Test, and behaved identically to a human, even if it eloquently pleaded for its life, if it wasn’t irreversibly decohering microscopic events then it wouldn’t be conscious, so it would be fine to kill it, torture it, whatever you want.
But wait a minute: if a system isn’t doing anything irreversible, then what exactly does it mean to “kill” it? If it’s a classical computation, then at least in principle, you could always just restore from backup. You could even rewind and not only erase the memories of, but “uncompute” (“untorture”?) whatever tortures you had performed. If it’s a quantum computation, you could always invert the unitary transformation U that corresponded to killing the thing (then reapply U and invert it again for good measure, if you wanted). Only for irreversible systems are there moral acts with irreversible consequences.
This is related to something that’s bothered me for years in quantum foundations. When people discuss Schrödinger’s cat, they always—always—insert some joke about, “obviously, this experiment wouldn’t pass the Ethical Review Board. Nowadays, we try to avoid animal cruelty in our quantum gedankenexperiments.” But actually, I claim that there’s no animal cruelty at all in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment. And here’s why: in order to prove that the cat was ever in a coherent superposition of |Alive〉 and |Dead〉, you need to be able to measure it in a basis like {|Alive〉+|Dead〉,|Alive〉-|Dead〉}. But if you can do that, you must have such precise control over all the cat’s degrees of freedom that you can also rotate unitarily between the |Alive〉 and |Dead〉 states. (To see this, let U be the unitary that you applied to the |Alive〉 branch, and V the unitary that you applied to the |Dead〉 branch, to bring them into coherence with each other; then consider applying U-1V.) But if you can do that, then in what sense should we say that the cat in the |Dead〉 state was ever “dead” at all? Normally, when we speak of “killing,” we mean doing something irreversible—not rotating to some point in a Hilbert space that we could just as easily rotate away from.
(There followed discussion among some audience members about the question of whether, if you destroyed all records of some terrible atrocity, like the Holocaust, everywhere in the physical world, you would thereby cause the atrocity “never to have happened.” Many people seemed surprised by my willingness to accept that implication of what I was saying. By way of explaining, I tried to stress just how far our everyday, intuitive notion of “destroying all records of something” falls short of what would actually be involved here: when we think of “destroying records,” we think about burning books, destroying the artifacts in museums, silencing witnesses, etc. But even if all those things were done and many others, still the exact configurations of the air, the soil, and photons heading away from the earth at the speed of light would retain their silent testimony to the Holocaust’s reality. “Erasing all records” in the physics sense would be something almost unimaginably more extreme: it would mean inverting the entire physical evolution in the vicinity of the earth, stopping time’s arrow and running history itself backwards. Such ‘unhappening’ of what’s happened is something that we lack any experience of, at least outside of certain quantum interference experiments—though in the case of the Holocaust, one could be forgiven for wishing it were possible.)
OK, so much for philosophy of mind and morality; what about the interpretation of quantum mechanics? If we think about consciousness in the way I’ve suggested, then who’s right: the Copenhagenists or the Many-Worlders? You could make a case for either. The Many-Worlders would be right that we could always, if we chose, think of decoherence events as “splitting” our universe into multiple branches, each with different versions of ourselves, that thereafter don’t interact. On the other hand, the Copenhagenists would be right that, even in principle, we could never do any experiment where this “splitting” of our minds would have any empirical consequence. On this view, if you can control a system well enough that you can actually observe interference between the different branches, then it follows that you shouldn’t regard the system as conscious, because it’s not doing anything irreversible.
In my essay, the implication that concerned me the most was the one for “free will.” If being conscious entails amplifying microscopic events in an irreversible and unclonable way, then someone looking at a conscious system from the outside might not, in general, be able to predict what it’s going to do next, not even probabilistically. In other words, its decisions might be subject to at least some “Knightian uncertainty”: uncertainty that we can’t even quantify in a mutually-agreed way using probabilities, in the same sense that we can quantify our uncertainty about (say) the time of a radioactive decay. And personally, this is actually the sort of “freedom” that interests me the most. I don’t really care if my choices are predictable by God, or by a hypothetical Laplace demon: that is, if they would be predictable (at least probabilistically), given complete knowledge of the microstate of the universe. By definition, there’s essentially no way for my choices not to be predictable in that weak and unempirical sense! On the other hand, I’d prefer that my choices not be completely predictable by other people. If someone could put some sheets of paper into a sealed envelope, then I spoke extemporaneously for an hour, and then the person opened the envelope to reveal an exact transcript of everything I said, that’s the sort of thing that really would cause me to doubt in what sense “I” existed as a locus of thought. But you’d have to actually do the experiment (or convince me that it could be done): it doesn’t count just to talk about it, or to extrapolate from fMRI experiments that predict which of two buttons a subject is going to press with 60% accuracy a few seconds in advance.
But since we’ve got some cosmologists in the house, let me now turn to discussing the implications of this view for Boltzmann brains.
(For those tuning in from home: a Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical chance fluctuation in the late universe, which would include a conscious observer with all the perceptions that a human being—say, you—is having right now, right down to false memories and false beliefs of having arisen via Darwinian evolution. On statistical grounds, the overwhelming majority of Boltzmann brains last just long enough to have a single thought—like, say, the one you’re having right now—before they encounter the vacuum and freeze to death. If you measured some part of the vacuum state toward which our universe seems to be heading, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” quantum mechanics predicts that the probability would be ridiculously astronomically small, but nonzero. But, so the argument goes, if the vacuum lasts for infinite time, then as long as the probability is nonzero, it doesn’t matter how tiny it is: you’ll still get infinitely many Boltzmann brains indistinguishable from any given observer; and for that reason, any observer should consider herself infinitely likelier to be a Boltzmann brain than to be the “real,” original version. For the record, even among the strange people at the IBM workshop, no one actually worried about being a Boltzmann brain. The question, rather, is whether, if a cosmological model predicts Boltzmann brains, then that’s reason enough to reject the model, or whether we can live with such a prediction, since we have independent grounds for knowing that we can’t be Boltzmann brains.)
At this point, you can probably guess where this is going. If decoherence, entropy production, full participation in the arrow of time are necessary conditions for consciousness, then it would follow, in particular, that a Boltzmann brain is not conscious. So we certainly wouldn’t be Boltzmann brains, even under a cosmological model that predicts infinitely more of them than of us. We can wipe our hands; the problem is solved!
I find it extremely interesting that, in their recent work, Kim Boddy, Sean Carroll, and Jason Pollack reached a similar conclusion, but from a completely different starting point. They said: look, under reasonable assumptions, the late universe is just going to stay forever in an energy eigenstate—just sitting there doing nothing. It’s true that, if someone came along and measured the energy eigenstate, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” then with a tiny but nonzero probability the answer would be yes. But since no one is there measuring, what licenses us to interpret the nonzero overlap in amplitude with the Boltzmann brain state, as a nonzero probability of there being a Boltzmann brain? I think they, too, are implicitly suggesting: if there’s no decoherence, no arrow of time, then we’re not authorized to say that anything is happening that “counts” for anthropic purposes.
Let me now mention an obvious objection. (In fact, when I gave the talk, this objection was raised much earlier.) You might say, “look, if you really think irreversible decoherence is a necessary condition for consciousness, then you might find yourself forced to say that there’s no consciousness, because there might not be any such thing as irreversible decoherence! Imagine that our entire solar system were enclosed in an anti de Sitter (AdS) boundary, like in Greg Egan’s science-fiction novel Quarantine. Inside the box, there would just be unitary evolution in some Hilbert space: maybe even a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. In which case, all these ‘irreversible amplifications’ that you lay so much stress on wouldn’t be irreversible at all: eventually all the Everett branches would recohere; in fact they’d decohere and recohere infinitely many times. So by your lights, how could anything be conscious inside the box?”
My response to this involves one last speculation. I speculate that the fact that we don’t appear to live in AdS space—that we appear to live in (something evolving toward) a de Sitter space, with a positive cosmological constant—might be deep and important and relevant. I speculate that, in our universe, “irreversible decoherence” means: the records of what you did are now heading toward our de Sitter horizon at the speed of light, and for that reason alone—even if for no others—you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. (Here I should point out, as several workshop attendees did to me, that Bousso and Susskind explored something similar in their paper The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)
Does this mean that, if cosmologists discover tomorrow that the cosmological constant is negative, or will become negative, then it will turn out that none of us were ever conscious? No, that’s stupid. What it would suggest is that the attempt I’m now making on the Pretty-Hard Problem had smacked into a wall (an AdS wall?), so that I, and anyone else who stressed in-principle irreversibility, should go back to the drawing board. (By analogy, if some prescription for getting rid of Boltzmann brains fails, that doesn’t mean we are Boltzmann brains; it just means we need a new prescription. Tempting as it is to skewer our opponents’ positions with these sorts of strawman inferences, I hope we can give each other the courtesy of presuming a bare minimum of sense.)
Another question: am I saying that, in order to be absolutely certain of whether some entity satisfied the postulated precondition for consciousness, one might, in general, need to look billions of years into the future, to see whether the “decoherence” produced by the entity was really irreversible? Yes (pause to gulp bullet). I am saying that. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as it sounds. After all, the category of “consciousness” might be morally relevant, or relevant for anthropic reasoning, but presumably we all agree that it’s unlikely to play any causal role in the fundamental laws of physics. So it’s not as if we’ve introduced any teleology into the laws of physics by this move.
Let me end by pointing out what I’ll call the “Tegmarkian slippery slope.” It feels scientific and rational—from the perspective of many of us, even banal—to say that, if we’re conscious, then any sufficiently-accurate computer simulation of us would also be. But I tried to convince you that this view depends, for its aura of obviousness, on our agreeing not to probe too closely exactly what would count as a “sufficiently-accurate” simulation. E.g., does it count if the simulation is done in heavily-encrypted form, or encoded as a giant lookup table? Does it matter if anyone actually runs the simulation, or consults the lookup table? Now, all the way at the bottom of the slope is Max Tegmark, who asks: to produce consciousness, what does it matter if the simulation is physically instantiated at all? Why isn’t it enough for the simulation to “exist” mathematically? Or, better yet: if you’re worried about your infinitely-many Boltzmann brain copies, then why not worry equally about the infinitely many descriptions of your life history that are presumably encoded in the decimal expansion of π? Why not hold workshops about how to avoid the prediction that we’re infinitely likelier to be “living in π” than to be our “real” selves?
From this extreme, even most scientific rationalists recoil. They say, no, even if we don’t yet know exactly what’s meant by “physical instantiation,” we agree that you only get consciousness if the computer program is physically instantiated somehow. But now I have the opening I want. I can say: once we agree that physical existence is a prerequisite for consciousness, why not participation in the Arrow of Time? After all, our ordinary ways of talking about sentient beings—outside of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and maybe theology—don’t even distinguish between the concepts “exists” and “exists and participates in the Arrow of Time.” And to say we have no experience of reversible, clonable, coherently-executable, atemporal consciousnesses is a massive understatement.
Of course, we should avoid the sort of arbitrary prejudice that Turing warned against in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Just because we lack experience with extraterrestrial consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to murder an intelligent extraterrestrial if we met one tomorrow. In just the same way, just because we lack experience with clonable, atemporal consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to … wait! As we said before, clonability, and aloofness from time’s arrow, call severely into question what it even means to “murder” something. So maybe this case isn’t as straightforward as the extraterrestrials after all.
At this point, I’ve probably laid out enough craziness, so let me stop and open things up for discussion.Microsoft's homebrewn mailing and calendar service, Exchange Server, is being refreshed and is now out of preview, along with the 2016 revamp for other Office products. Allowing businesses to run and control their own email servers, Exchange Serve 2016 tries to simplify the architecture while still adding more features and creating greater synergy with other Office products.
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For those of you who are interested, Microsoft provides a 180 days trial for free, which you can download from here.
Source: MicrosoftWhile this would please many within Labour, including some Cabinet ministers, the party’s rules and complex voting system mean that his departure would create a constitutional and political minefield.
Even if Mr Brown could be persuaded to stand aside, the process for electing a replacement is so lengthy that Labour would be without a leader, and, potentially, the country without a prime minister, for weeks or even months.
During the height of the Lib Dem surge in the opinion polls last month, there were suggestions that Nick Clegg could be installed as prime minister at the head of a Lib-Lab Cabinet.
The poor performance of the third party has put paid to those ambitions, but Mr Clegg’s antipathy to Mr Brown remains. He made it clear during the campaign that he would find it impossible to work with him.
One Liberal Democrat insider said: “Gordon just doesn’t get it – he lost, he’s over, he’s not going to be prime minister any more.”
While the Lib Dems are considering a deal with the Conservatives, many within the party are convinced that, given their policy differences, Labour remains the only viable coalition partner.
They are clinging to the hope that senior Labour figures will find an emergency means of getting around the rules and installing a leader who is acceptable to them. They were given hope yesterday by Lord Mandelson, who appeared to imply that a way could be found to install a new leader more swiftly. Asked by Sky News if a Labour minority or coalition government that did not have Mr Brown as prime minister was inconceivable, Lord Mandelson said: “Frankly there are quite a number of permutations. I am not ruling out or ruling in anything.”
Under normal circumstances, Labour leaders are selected by an electoral college of MPs, constituency members and trade union members, the last two having their say by postal ballot, in a contest which traditionally culminates at Labour’s annual conference – which does not take place until September. If Mr Brown refused to stand aside, the picture would be even more unclear, as Labour’s rules are specifically designed to prevent a challenge to a sitting leader.
To dislodge him, 20 per cent of the new parliamentary party would have to back a potential challenger.One week after ending his presidential bid, Governor John Kasich finds himself in the same position as many of his fellow Republicans, grappling with whether or not to endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and, if so, how enthusiastically?
Regardless of how he answers the question, Kasich will still play a vital role in the presidential campaign as the still-popular governor of one of the most critical swing states this fall and also the host state for the party’s convention this summer. And just how he squares his own campaign aspirations with the new reality won’t go unnoticed.
For the last few months, Kasich avoided directly saying whether he would support Trump as the nominee, but after violence erupted at Trump’s rallies in March, the governor told reporters that the front-runner "makes it very, extremely difficult."
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The battle Kasich waged throughout his presidential campaign was one in which he repeatedly warned his party of the "two paths" before them — one based on his optimistic worldview, and the other belonging to Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The path they offered, Kasich said, "solves nothing, demeans our history, weakens our country and cheapens each of us. It has but one beneficiary and that is to the politician who speaks of it.”
The governor painted himself as a "well trod" and "solid" alternative, and called Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country "more of the outrageous divisiveness that characterizes his every breath and another reason why he is entirely unsuited to lead the United States."
Last Man Standing
Kasich was a later entry into a GOP field that was initially hailed for its load of political talent — names like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio. His frugal campaign largely skipped the Iowa caucuses, hunkered down in New Hampshire and eschewed the kind of massive fundraising operation other candidates had established.
But primary voters made clear which path they favored, delivering the nomination to Trump.
But at the end, Kasich got what he most wanted in the Republican primary race — to be the last candidate standing against Trump in the battle for the party’s nomination, even if for just a few hours after Cruz suspended his campaign.
Kasich won just one state during the primary contest — his home state of Ohio — and lagged behind the front-runner in almost every poll, in almost every election result, and in every delegate count, never posing a considerable threat to win.
Even during the most contentious moments in the free-for-all battle between Trump and the non-Trump field, Trump rarely had to turn any fire or attention to Kasich, only granting him a nickname near the end that encapsulated how he never sensed a serious challenge. Trump dubbed him "1 for 38" or "1 for 41 Kasich."
Still, up until the moment he bid farewell, Kasich was the embodiment of the anti-Trump faction of the party, with a starkly different vision for America and a message of cooperation, inclusion and larger purpose. Sometimes it seemed as though Kasich was running in an entirely different election.
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A Different Vision
From the start, Kasich didn’t engage his opponents, preferring to operate in an insulated sphere, speaking primarily about his own message and ignoring all the day-to-day squabbles. But as the field condensed and he was forced to repeatedly confront what was in the news or what was happening with his opponents, he began to feel as if his initial message got lost.
"The spirit — the essence of America — lies in the hearts and souls of us. You see, some missed this message," Kasich said as he suspended his campaign last Wednesday. "It wasn't sexy. It wasn't a great sound bite.”
And it most certainly wasn’t what Donald Trump was selling.
On the campaign trail, Trump drew hundreds or thousands of supporters who exhibited much of the same fervor the candidate displays at the podium. Trump railed against his opponents, against specific journalists, against figures in the news, and offered his take on whatever the television talk of the morning was.
In contrast, Kasich generally bragged about how he didn’t like to pay attention to the news, regularly telling crowds he mostly watched "60 Minutes" and the Golf Channel. The governor’s town halls grew larger and larger as the months wore on, but they were always smaller, more intimate affairs than the mega-rallies for Trump. Attendees sat down in chairs around him and politely listened as the governor encouraged his audience to find their "purpose" and "live a life bigger than yourself."
"When you listen and find your purpose, you are on fire," Kasich would say, like when he faced a town hall of students at Villanova University in Pennsylvania on March 16, the day after he won the Ohio primary. "And |
water comes, we all drown.”A book portraying a gay, black Santa in a relationship with a white Santa will be released this fall, the author announced on Tuesday.
Santa's Husband will show a black Santa and his white partner. They both live in the North Pole; Santa's spouse often fills in for him in mall appearances, which is why many believe Santa is white.
The book is the brainchild of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert writer Daniel Kibblesmith. In December, he tweeted about the concept of a black Santa with a husband:
Me & @JenAshleyWright have decided our future child will only know about Black Santa. If they see a white one we'll say "That's his husband" — Kibblesmith is G-10 @ #C2E2 ☃️ (@kibblesmith) December 3, 2016
"Me & [Jen Ashley Wright] have decided our future child will only know about Black Santa," he wrote. "If they see a white one we'll say 'That's his husband.'"
Then, on March 28, Kibblesmith announced that a book about this concept will be published:
Kibblesmith is writing the book to be published by Harper Design and illustrated by AP Quach. Santa's Husband is set to publish October 10.
Check out Santas all around the worldMIAMI — Former baseball star Pedro Guerrero told an informant working for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that he would guarantee payment of a $200,000 cocaine shipment being arranged by a family friend, a prosecutor told a jury Wednesday.
Federal prosecutor Russell Killinger said during opening statements of Guerrero's drug conspiracy trial that the former slugger for the Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals guaranteed the payment during a meeting with the informant and an undercover DEA agent. He repeated that guarantee later during a recorded phone conversation with the informant, Killinger said.
"Mr. Guerrero knew exactly what this deal was about," Killinger said.
But Milton Hirsch, Guerrero's attorney, said that is simply untrue. He said the four-time National League all-star and co-most valuable player of the 1981 World Series was duped by his friend, Adan "Tony" Cruz, who was also arrested and is being tried separately.
Hirsch said Guerrero, 43, dropped out of sixth grade in his native Dominican Republic, has an IQ of 70--borderline retarded--and is unable to accomplish normal adult activities like write a check, purchase insurance or even make a bed. He said the Miami resident receives a small weekly allowance from his wife and his only skill was hitting a baseball.US Navy Admiral Michael Rogers, commander of US Cyber Command, testifies during a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services on Capitol Hill in Washington April 5, 2016. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters President Donald Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey continues to reverberate in the KremlinGate scandal, which threatens to consume the Trump administration.
By abruptly removing Comey, then mangling his excuses for why he did so, Trump created a needless crisis for the White House which shows no signs of abating.
The impartial observer might think that Trump fired Comey because he feared what the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of the president's contacts with Russia might reveal—as the commander in chief has essentially admitted.
Moreover, Trump's inappropriate efforts to secure Comey's personal "loyalty" had fallen flat—the FBI director rightly assured the president of his honesty but abjured any fealty to Trump personally—after which the president is reported to have developed a palpable fear of the incorruptible Bureau boss. To protect Team Trump, Comey had to go.
President Donald Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey continues to reverberate in the KremlinGate scandal, which threatens to consume the Trump administration. By abruptly removing Comey, then mangling his excuses for why he did so, Trump created a needless crisis for the White House which shows no signs of abating.
The impartial observer might think that Trump fired Comey because he feared what the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of the president's contacts with Russia might reveal—as the commander in chief has essentially admitted.
Moreover, Trump's inappropriate efforts to secure Comey's personal "loyalty" had fallen flat—the FBI director rightly assured the president of his honesty but abjured any fealty to Trump personally—after which the president is reported to have developed a palpable fear of the incorruptible Bureau boss. To protect Team Trump, Comey had to go.
Donald Trump and James Comey Getty Images
Last week, when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Coats declined to answer questions about the White House's effort to undermine the FBI investigation of Team Trump, stating, "I don't feel it's appropriate to characterize discussions and conversations with the president" in open session. Presumably DNI Coats would be more forthcoming in a closed Congressional session, where classified information can be revealed.
Director Rogers, in contrast, has made no public statements about the president's effort to enlist him in his anti-Comey campaign. This is typical of his famously tight-lipped agency—for decades, NSA was humorously said to stand for Never Say Anything—and why Trump approached Rogers is no mystery.
As the nation's signals intelligence force, NSA isn't just the biggest source of intelligence on earth—it's also the agency possessing the bulk of the classified information which establishes collusion between Trump and the Russians. Although whispers of such SIGINT have reached the media, the lion's share remains hidden from public view, though it's all known to the FBI.
If Trump could co-opt NSA in his fight with the Bureau, that would be a big win, protecting the White House from dangerous information, so it's safe to assume that Rogers' refusal burned Trump personally. Perhaps that's why, early this week, Admiral Rogers took the unusual step of addressing the entire NSA workforce to tell them what transpired with the president.
This is not Rogers' style. Indeed, his tenure as NSA's director (called DIRNSA by insiders) has been characterized by distance from his employees, which has made things rockier than necessary. To be fair to Rogers—a career intelligence officer well equipped for his current position—when he became DIRNSA in the spring of 2014, he inherited an agency in crisis. NSA was still reeling from the disastrous Ed Snowden affair, the biggest theft of classified information in espionage history.
While Snowden has taunted NSA with tweets sent from his Russian hideaway, more security disasters have followed. The strange case of Harold Martin, yet another rogue defense contractor who stole gigantic amounts of classified information from the agency, constituted another Snowdenesque embarrassment, even though there's no evidence that Martin was engaged in espionage.
National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers testifies before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Eric Thayer Worse for Rogers was the theft of highly classified hacking tools from NSA by the so-called Shadow Brokers, which is widely believed to be a front for Russian intelligence.
The dumping of those top-secret exploits online, after modification by rogue hackers, has resulted in worldwide cyberattacks impacting millions—yet another black mark on Rogers' tenure as DIRNSA.
In response to these very public setbacks, Rogers has seldom addressed the NSA workforce about them or much else.
This week's town hall event, which was broadcast to agency facilities worldwide, was therefore met with surprise and anticipation by the NSA workforce, and Rogers did not disappoint. I have spoken with several NSA officials who witnessed the director's talk and I'm reporting their firsthand accounts, which corroborate each other, on condition of anonymity.
In his town hall talk, Rogers reportedly admitted that President Trump asked him to discredit the FBI and James Comey, which the admiral flatly refused to do. As Rogers explained, he informed the commander in chief, "I know you won't like it, but I have to tell what I have seen"—a probable reference to specific intelligence establishing collusion between the Kremlin and Team Trump.
Rogers then added that such SIGINT exists, and it is damning. He stated, "There is no question that we [meaning NSA] have evidence of election involvement and questionable contacts with the Russians."
Although Rogers did not cite the specific intelligence he was referring to, agency officials with direct knowledge have informed me that DIRNSA was obviously referring to a series of SIGINT reports from 2016 based on intercepts of communications between known Russian intelligence officials and key members of Trump's campaign, in which they discussed methods of damaging Hillary Clinton.
NSA employees walked out of the town hall impressed by the director's forthright discussion of his interactions with the Trump administration, particularly with how Rogers insisted that he had no desire to "politicize" the situation beyond what the president has already done.
America's spies are unaccustomed to playing partisan politics as Trump has apparently asked them to do, and it appears that the White House's ham-fisted effort to get NSA to attack the FBI and its credibility was a serious mistake.
It's therefore high time for the House and Senate intelligence committees to invite Admiral Rogers to talk to them about what transpired with the White House. It's evident that DIRNSA has something important to say. Since Mike Rogers is said to have kept notes of the president's effort to enlist him in Trump's personal war with the FBI, as any seasoned Beltway bureaucrat would do, his account ought to be impressively detailed.Appearing in a video published online on Thursday, Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large for the neoconservative National Review Online website, explains that he believes letting 18-year-old Americans vote is a big mistake that should be taken back.
Advocating that conservatives should “literally” beat young people into political submission, Goldberg said that young voters are “so frickin’ stupid about so many things,” which is why, in his view, the system must change.
“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity more than youth,” Goldberg said. “We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where, ‘Oh, young people are for it so it must be special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them young people.”
Goldberg’s advocacy of taking the vote away from a large segment of the population is somewhat ironic. Author of the book “Liberal Fascism,” Goldberg has made a name for himself by drawing parallels between America’s liberals and progressives and Germany’s Nazi Party.
The Nazis, however, relied on denying the right to vote in order to elevate Hitler to the level of dictator, using their brown shirt thugs to block German politicians from entering the Kroll Opera House in Berlin in 1933, after the Reichstag had burned down. Because they succeeded in preventing Nazi opponents from entering the opera house, only National Socialist Party leaders were present to vote on Adolf Hitler’s Enabling Law. They voted in favor, giving him dictatorial powers, and soon the country was totally under Hitler’s authority.
Goldberg has also recently said that he does not believe Mitt Romney, his favored candidate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, is enough of a “hip cat” to win the youth vote. He told Fox News anchor Jon Scott last month that instead of appealing to youth voters, Romney should simply rely on their lack of enthusiasm for President Barack Obama and focus on appealing to other demographics.
Young voters were seen as key to President Obama’s victory over Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008, where they supported the Democrat by a margin of 68 percent to 30 percent. Obama has again made it his goal to court younger voters, stopping at university campuses around the country to promote his student loan reforms, among other policies.
The U.S. voting age was set at 18 in 1971, codified by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was ratified by the states partially in response to youth protest movements driven by young Vietnam War veterans who objected to being sent to fight and die for their country while having no say in its governance.
This video is from The Daily Caller, published May 31, 2012.
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Photo: Screenshot via The Daily Caller.Recently appointed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci just gave an obscenity-filled interview to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in which he threatened to murder fellow government officials, called Chief of Staff Reince Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic,” and said that, unlike Steve Bannon, “I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”
President Donald Trump appointed Scaramucci to the federal government’s highest public relations position on Friday.
Here are seven of the most threatening, inflammatory quotes from Scaramucci’s interview with the New Yorker, which was published on Thursday.
Scaramucci said he wanted to kill people in government who leak information to the press, according to Lizza: “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people.” Scaramucci also described his lack of interest in drawing media attention while serving in the White House: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock... I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” Lizza asked Scaramucci about a private dinner that he had with President Trump. Scaramucci, evidently incensed that the dinner had become public, said he’d be willing to fire whoever it was that leaked news of that dinner to Trump: “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” Scaramucci did an impersonation of Priebus leaking the news to the press (Priebus turned out not to be the source of the leak): “Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’” Scaramucci confused Lizza by suggesting he had damaging information about President Trump’s White House aides. “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago... This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” Scaramucci also said that Priebus is “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” Scaramucci admitted to plan to tweeting to get under Priebus’s skin. “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.”
It’s not clear if Scaramucci thought the interview was off-record. But there’s no indication that he did:Issue #2 of False Witness: The Michele Bachmann Story
At least that’s what I think she’s trying to say, but what does that even mean???
It’s hard to tell. Via Right Wing Watch:
Speaking this morning at the Values Voter Summit, Rep. Michele Bachmann dedicated her remarks to attacking the Obama administration for supposedly catering to radical Islam and that Muslim Brotherhood, citing a decision by the FBI to purge hundreds of anti-Muslim documents from its training materials as proof that the administration was enforcing “Islamic speech codes here in the United States.”
This fool is on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. SHE is one of the politicians who oversee of the CIA, the NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.
She’s a tinfoil hat-wearing buffoon who can barely string a coherent sentence together and yet she’s privy to intelligence briefings. A loose cannon like Bachmann? There’s not an ounce of intelligence to be found in her entire body. It’s nothing short of madness to trust her with classified information. We have House Speaker John Boehner to thank for this appointment. He could have just as well given her some crayons and she’d have been distracted for months, but no, he’s got to go and appoint well-known crazy lady Michelle fucking Bachmann to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence! Way to go, uh, Bonie!For baseball fans, Spring Training is a time of increasing temperatures and anticipation for the upcoming season. For baseball players, it's a time of increasing pressure and stakes as many are playing for their future.
Spring Training isn't only a time for players to get back into shape and ready for the upcoming season, but it's also an opportunity for many players to earn their place, whether that's a spot in the starting lineup or a seat to keep warm on the bench.
And it's an "if not now, when?" scenario right now for the Phillies and their potential third basemen, as current third basemen, Cody Asche, is obviously not the long-term answer for the team and blue-chip prospect Maikel Franco may be what it takes to put more fans in Citizen Bank Park's seats.
According to the Phillies' official depth chart, the three possible suitors for third base are the incumbent Cody Asche, top prospect Maikel Franco and utility man Freddy Galvis. To quickly narrow this competition down to two players, the Phillies' depth chart also has Galvis listed as their starting (and only) shortstop.
So who should take the third base job? Let's take a look.
Cody Asche
Ever since Cody Asche made his big league debut in 2013, he has been labeled as a "placeholder" for the next big thing. It was a matter of if, not when, and unfortunately for Asche, he hasn't done much to convince manager Ryne Sandberg that he should keep his job.
Year Age AB R HR RBI BA OPS 2013 23 162 18 5 22 0.235 0.691 2014 24 397 43 10 46 0.252 0.699 Total  559 61 15 68 0.247 0.697
While he didn't have enough at-bats to qualify, if he had, Asche would have been the 20th-ranked third baseman in the Majors in terms of on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). His.252 batting average and.699 OPS are almost identical to the 2014 league averages of.251 and.700, respectively. He also averaged a home run every 39.7 at-bats, which is slightly worse than league average of 37.5. To put it simply, Asche is an average player who is easily replaceable.
Since he only has 559 total at-bats in the Majors, it may be more beneficial to look at his minor league numbers. In 1,263 minor league plate appearances, Asche batted.290 with only 33 home runs and an OPS of.796. If his.796 OPS was his 2014 value, it would have ranked 38th among qualified batters. These numbers are solid, but not spectacular and it may indicate that he is better suited for a back-up role.
In terms of fielding, Asche would also be classified as subpar. Out of 25 qualified third basemen, he ranked 24th in fielding percentage with a rate of.943. And out of 159 third basemen, he finished 116th with -0.3 defensive wins above replacement.
There has been talk of moving Asche to the outfield to help fill the void that the recently traded Marlon Byrd created. While Phillies' GM Ruben Amaro Jr. has been quoted saying Asche will be their starting third basement on Opening Day, his lackluster career production and the team's need for depth in the outfield may ultimately number Asche's days at third, especially if he has a disappointing spring.
Maikel Franco
Baseball America's number 17 prospect in 2014, Maikel Franco, got his first taste of the big leagues in 2014. In 56 at-bats, Franco struggled to the tune of a.179 batting average and a.404 OPS with zero long balls. It's apparent that the 22-year-old was not quite ready for the Majors last fall, however a sizzling winter league might have convinced the Phillies brass to give him another long look this spring. In 22 playoff games in the Dominican Winter League, Franco hit a spectacular.337 with 4 home runs and 16 RBI.
It seems like Franco has been around forever, as he started his professional career at the age of 17 in the Phillies' rookie league. Over the past five years, he has developed into a top prospect and one of the few bright spots of the Phillies' organization.
Year Age Level AB R HR RBI BA OPS 2010 17 Rookie 194 23 2 29 0.222 0.622 2011 18 A-, A 267 25 3 44 0.247 0.677 2012 19 A, FgW 504 70 14 84 0.280 0.774 2013 20 FgW, A+, AA 696 107 34 117 0.299 0.858 2014 21 AAA 521 64 16 78 0.257 0.727 Total   2182 289 69 352 0.271 0.764
Franco broke out in a big way in 2013 when he hit 34 homers and drove in 114 runs while batting.299, as he ascended through the Phillies' minor league ranks. Having earned another promotion, Franco played most of his 2014 season in AAA Lehigh Valley as an Iron Pig. While his final stat line looks like a step back from the year before, it's skewed by his first-half struggles as he tried to adapt to more advanced pitching. In the second half of 2014, Franco went on an absolute tear, hitting.309 with four more home runs in about half the at-bats compared to the first half. Here's a quick glance at Franco's 2014 in AAA:
AB R HR RBI BA OPS Pre-All-Star Break 343 38 6 42 0.230 0.649 Post-All-Star Break 178 26 10 36 0.309 0.877
This is a positive sign for the future as it shows he can adapt and develop relatively quickly to tougher pitchers. While his time in Philadelphia last September was a struggle, with more at-bats his true potential should come out. If Franco gets enough at-bats this spring, we all might see that potential much sooner in Philly.
The only obstacle in Franco's way to the Phillies' starting third base job is his Super Two Status. As Jim Salisbury of CSN Philly reports, if the Phillies keep Franco in the minors for a minimum of 40 days, they would delay his first year of free agency until after the 2021 season. Considering the Phillies are in a rebuilding phase and are currently sellers, it would make much more sense for them to keep Franco in Lehigh Valley until mid-May or so.
While Franco has a lot more talent and potential than Asche, I expect the Phillies to keep him in the minors until his super two deadline passes. By doing this, they'll gain an extra year of control when Franco's in his prime and when the Phillies may have a chance at another World Series. However, if he dominates this spring like he did in the winter, he might end up forcing the Phillies' hand.Originally introduced in 1971, the Fisher Price Music Box Record Player has been entertaining children for years! Produced near my home base in East Aurora New York, with the Musical Movement made in Japan, this is a relic of most childhood dreams.
The process is simple. Put one of the five double sided records on the turntable, wind it up and just like a real record player, place the needle arm on the record to hear the it play a "Music Box" version of 10 classic songs.
Here is the track list:
Record 1: Jack and Jill / Humpty Dumpty
Record 2: Au Clair de la Lune / Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
Record 3: London Bridge / Oh Where has my Little Dog Gone?
Record 4: Children's Marching song / Camptown Races
Record 5: Hickory Dickory Dock / Edelweiss
The "needle" arm that runs across the record is really cool for a toy. The head sits across the entire surface of the record, the bumps on the record click one of the needles in the row as it passes over it and makes the music. Pretty neat!!
The records reside in an opening at the top for convenient storage.
I have a lot of fond memories of this toy. What a classic. This one resided at my Grandmother's house and is probably the sole reason I love the song Edelweiss. I've had this for years and to this day it still plays a beautiful tune. The vintage look, the simple function, the classic tunes cry for a simpler time. The time when a simple tune played on a simple toy could entertain a child.Can’t spare 45 minutes for a workout? Surely you can squeeze 60 seconds of exercise into your busy schedule. According to one new study published in the journal PLOS One, a single minute of intense physical activity can provide your body with health and fitness benefits similar to the ones you gain from a longer, more moderate exercise session, The New York Times reports.
Researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, took 27 sedentary males and pre-assessed their cardiovascular fitness levels. The scientists also evaluated their subjects’ insulin sensitivity, and they biopsied their muscles to see how well the cells functioned.
Next, the researchers divided the men into three groups. One group performed a 10-minute long, high-intensity interval training workout on stationary bikes. Since the workout involved 20-second periods of vigorous peddling on the bike followed by 120-second stretches of slower cycling, these subjects only exercised strenuously for a total of one minute.
Meanwhile, the second group was assigned a more “typical” exercise routine: They cycled at a moderate pace on the bike for 45 minutes, along with a warm-up and cool-down. The third group of men served as a control, and simply went about their lethargic lives as usual.
The scientists had their subjects perform these fitness routines three times a week, for a period of approximately three months. By the end of the program, the group of moderate cyclists had clearly exercised for more time than their interval training counterparts. However, researchers evaluated the men, and discovered that members of both groups had upped their endurance by nearly 20 percent. The subjects also showed similarly improved insulin resistance levels, as well as gains in muscle function at the cellular level.
In other words? Exercising smarter—not longer—can save time, and may provide significant physical benefits. People who want to get fit but have busy schedules might want to consider sprint interval training: physically pushing yourself for one minute, slowing down, and repeating the cycle a few more times.
"This is a very time-efficient workout strategy," Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster and lead author on the study, said in a statement. "Brief bursts of intense exercise are remarkably effective."
The study does have its limitations. For instance, it only looked at the short-term benefits of interval training, and it didn’t measure weight loss. The study’s subjects were out of shape, too, Quartz points out, which might have made their noticeable physical gains far more dramatic than if they had been accustomed to exercising. Plus, weight-bearing exercises—which are important for bone density—can’t really be squeezed into tight intervals. Short workouts may sound great in theory, but they're not really practical if you're strength-training.
Also, the researchers only monitored physical improvements. We gain myriad mental benefits from exercising; studies show that physical activity reduces depression and anxiety levels, and may improve memory and cognitive skills. The jury’s still out on whether interval training gives our brains the same boost we get from a longer sweat session.
The main takeaway? Even a little bit of physical activity is better than none at all—even if it's still unclear whether one minute of intense exercise is truly enough to stay fit.
[h/t The New York Times]
Banner image courtesy of iStock.If you’ve been following the news, you know how serious Microsoft is when it comes to privacy and data protection. According to ZDNet, the company disagrees with the forcing of U.S.-based companies by the U.S. government to hand over data that is stored overseas, expressing worries that it would further harm relations between the U.S. and the E.U..
Mirosoft's outside counsel, Joshua Rosenkranz, has recently posted a letter to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in which he argues that the matter of cross-border data transfers “easily gives rise to international discord”. Rosenkranz further added that the Congress should decide whether allowing the U.S. government to extend its email privacy laws overseas “outweighs the risks to U.S. industry and U.S.-E.U. relations.”
The letter comes right as the European Court of Justice ruled the legal framework for Europe-U.S. data transfers – called the Safe Harbor Framework – invalid. The decision could mean that as many as 5000 businesses will have to revisit their data transfer procedure as a result.
Last year, Microsoft was found in contempt of court over the refusal to comply with a U.S. court search warrant that ordered the company to hand over personal information of customers undergoing investigation that was stored in a Dublin datacenter.
Source: ZDNetAFL clubs could win the power to negotiate their own beer deals after the competition's most enduring sponsor has significantly cut its multi-million dollar arrangement with the league.
Carlton United Breweries has reduced its AFL contract midway through the beer company's latest 10-year deal in an occasionally testy negotiation which saw CUB accuse the league of last year promoting a rival beer company at the MCG.
CUB's marketing director Richard Oppy. Credit:Ashleigh Bonner
While both parties have denied the incident led to the brewer cutting its AFL deal reportedly by one third, Fairfax Media understands the negotiations were punctuated by some acrimony when CUB's new owners moved to cut their AFL sponsorship more than 12 months ago.
The AFL's commercial operations boss Darren Birch said it remained unclear whether clubs would now have the opportunity to negotiate their own beer rights. He said the league would work with clubs "to look how we can responsibly maximise the beer category".One of Germany’s best-loved postwar actors has been exposed as a Soviet agent following the declassification of top secret intelligence documents.
Marika Rökk, who was banned from acting for two years for her apparent closeness to the Nazi regime, had in fact been working from the 1940s onwards for a reconnaissance network passing Third Reich secrets to Moscow.
Rökk was born in Cairo in 1913 to Hungarian parents and spent her childhood in Budapest. Her career began during the Nazi era as an operetta star, and she went on to perform in almost 40 films before her death aged 90 in 2004.
It is believed she was recruited as a KGB agent by her manager, Heinz Hoffmeister, who was already working for Soviet intelligence. What Rökk’s role was, and specifically what information she might have passed on to Moscow, remains unclear.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heinz Hoffmeister, who recruited Rökk, seen here in a car with Maria Callas in 1959. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
Her husband, the film director Georg Jacoby, is thought to have spied alongside her.
Krona, the network of agents she was a member of, was responsible for passing on high-class military intelligence, including plans for Operation Barbarossa and the Battle of Kursk.
The network was led by the legendary Soviet agent Yan Chernyak, nicknamed the “man without a shadow” for his ability to move around undetected. Chernyak himself was recruited by Soviet military intelligence while studying in Berlin in the 1940s.
His network of about 35 agents included bankers, military officials and secretaries, as well as the actor Olga Chekhova.
Rökk’s role as a Soviet spy was uncovered by the Gehlen Organisation, the West German agency which preceded Germany’s current foreign intelligence agency, the BND, and first made a formal note of its suspicions in its records in November 1951. In a file published by the tabloid Bild that had been classified top secret for 50 years, but which has just been released, Rökk’s “connections to Russian intelligence posts” – as Bild put it – are laid bare.
In 1951 Rökk announced she was giving up her acting career after 16 years. Newspapers at the time said that she wanted to devote herself to running a boutique selling authentic Swiss woollenware in Düsseldorf.
But west German intelligence concluded the plan was a “clever chess-move cover” allowing her to continue to spy for the Soviets.
Rökk was groomed by the Nazi regime to offer the Third Reich public homegrown acting talent to compete with the likes of Hollywood stars Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth. She was considered to be one of Hitler’s favourite actors and is reported to have had an affair with his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marika Rökk. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
She shot to fame in 1935 after starring in Leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry), becoming one of the most prolific stars of her time. She often starred alongside Johannes Heesters in propaganda films, and was said to bring a degree of exoticism to her roles with a light Hungarian accent.
It is not known if Rökk ever knew she was under suspicion for espionage. Neither is it known whether any attempts were made to prevent her from continuing. She was for years considered to have been anti-communist. The two-year work ban imposed on her at the end of the second world war as punishment for the close relationship she had with the inner circle of the Nazi leadership may have helped her keep up the pretence. Or she managed to keep a close relationship with both regimes.
A postcard dated November 1940 that she wrote to Hitler in which she thanks him profusely for a bouquet of flowers he sent her is on display in Berlin’s film museum.
• This article was amended on 22 March 2017 to clarify references to the BND and the Gehlen Organisation.7-1 West Virginia travels to Austin for a dawn kickoff with the Jekyll and Hyde Longhorns. The Mountaineers won last year’s contest 38-20 in Morgantown.
TEXAS PROFILE
Record: (5-4). The Longhorns have had the type of roller coaster season that makes it tough to get a bearing on how good they actually are. They beat Notre Dame and UTEP to open the year, lost 3 in a row to Cal, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State, beat Iowa State, and lost to Kansas State before beating Baylor and Texas Tech the past two weeks. There’s not a bad loss on that resume, but unfortunately there’s not really a great win either. And this matches the Texas narrative to this point: super talented, but still putting all the pieces together.
HC: Charlie Strong. Strong’s seat has become a bit warmer than most in the midst of his 3rd season in Austin, because though the Longhorns have cleaned up on the recruiting trail, that off-field success has yet to translate into any real improvement on it. Strong’s 16-18 record to this point has never been good enough for a Texas head coach to keep his job for long, and there are many around the program who feel he should have to win out to keep his job. The fact that they finish the season with us, Kansas, and TCU makes that goal wildly achievable, but the whole point of this paragraph is that under Charlie Strong, Texas hasn’t really been doing what Texas does.
OC: Sterlin Gilbert. Gilbert is in his 1st year at Texas after filling the same role at Tulsa last year. He worked his way up through Texas’s high school football scene, and the Longhorns have really seen the offense take off in his first year charge.
DC: Vance Bedford. Bedford is in his 3rd season at Texas after following Charlie Strong over from Louisville, but despite consecutive years of stellar recruiting classes the defense has seemed to regress in each of his years at the helm, and is one of the main reasons why this whole coaching staff has toasty buns right now.
STATISTICAL COMPARISON
Lots of green for the good guys, and no clear advantages for Texas outside of maybe their running game. Good to see that we sweep the big play stats, as well. You need to win that battle to have a chance to win on the road.
OUR OFFENSE VS THEIR DEFENSE
Players to watch: DT Poona Ford, NT Chris Nelson, FOX Breckyn Hager, LB Malik Jefferson, LB Anthony Wheeler, CB John Bonney, CB Kris Boyd, FS Jason Hall
Anyone who’s watched the Longhorns over the past year or two can tell you that they have an abundance of defensive talent, but they’ve actually regressed statistically in every season that Strong and Co have been on campus. This failure to live up to expectations has been even more perplexing this year considering who/what they returned, but it got to the point where the coaching staff felt the need to bench a few starters before the Baylor game two weeks ago just to shake things up a bit. They’ve actually been a bit better since then, but overall their national rankings paint the picture of a unit that has been objectively below average in just about every area besides run defense, where they merely classify as average. Despite that though, they do have some very talented dudes lining up on that side of the ball.
Tackles Chris Nelson and Poona Ford and end Chris Omenihu spearhead a defensive front that has Texas leading the conference in sacks and 2nd in TFL, while linebackers Anthony Wheeler, Malik Jefferson, and Breckyn Hager are flying around (sometimes a bit too much) at the second level. Wheeler and Jefferson were both preseason All-Conference selections and are currently 1-2 on the team in tackles, while Hager’s versatility in their Fox position allows Texas to play both odd and even fronts without changing personnel. Free safety Jason Hall has been extremely active in the secondary, ranking 4th on the team in both tackles and pass breakups. Throw in a trio of pretty decent sophomore corners and you have what looks like a hell of a unit, at least on paper. Unfortunately for Texas fans though, there’s been too much inconsistency and to this point we’ve only seen flashes of how good they can be.
The key to the game offensively will be avoiding turnovers. We’re facing an extremely young, albeit extremely talented defense, so the last thing we need to do is |
FE/RL
Islamic militants this week encircled thousands of members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, prompting the Obama administration to carry out humanitarian air drops to the refugees who fled their homes to Mount Sinjar. Here are answers to six questions about the Yazidi people, religion, and history.
Who Are The Yazidis?
The Yazidis are socio-religious group that is traditionally rural — namely farmers or shepherds — and whose members are primarily native Kurdish speakers. Their numbers worldwide likely do not exceed 1 million.
The traditional community leader, who carries the title “mir,” or “prince,” resides in the town of Ain Sifni, east of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq. The main Yazidi temple is nearby in the valley of Lalish, considered a holy site among the Yazidis. The famous British mystery writer Agatha Christie once described the temple as one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.
Are They Exclusive To Iraq?
Most Yazidis live in Iraq, where their numbers are estimated at between 500,000 and 700,000. Most of the population lives in the Sinjar Mountains west of Mosul. The political and intellectual centers of Yazidism lie in the Sheikhan district just east of Mosul. Tens of thousands of Yazidis live in other countries, including Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Germany, and Russia. A Yazidi population was also documented in Iran in the early 20th century.
What Is Their Religion?
The origins of Yazidism are linked to Sheikh Adi (ca. 1073-1163 AD), a Muslim preacher born in present-day Lebanon who gathered disciples in the mountains east of Mosul city and ultimately settled in Lalish.
Initially an Islamic mystical fellowship, Adi’s followers developed a strong cult of personality around their leader, and pre-Islamic beliefs gradually prevailed in their faith.
The Yazidis expanded through tribal alliances and conversions, especially by Christians. Conversions to and from Yazidism were later banned. The community is divided into two priestly castes and one lay caste. These castes can mix freely but cannot intermarry.
The priestly castes are responsible for rituals in Yazidism, whose central belief is reincarnation and the existence of one God who can assume angelic and human incarnations.
Religious texts are in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish and are memorized orally by some members of the clerical classes. The lack of a unified written canon has led to the absence of a systemized theology. Yazidi beliefs integrate numerous aspects of Islamic mysticism (Sufism) and the ancient Iranian religion pre-dating Zoroastrianism, as well as Gnosticism, Greek mythology, Judaism, and Christianity.
Yazidis believe that they were conceived from Adam’s semen and that, unlike the rest of humanity, they have no relation to Eve.
Have They Historically Suffered Persecution?
Persecution of the Yazidis dates back to the community’s earliest years, when they were attacked by the local rulers of Mosul and the nearby Kurdish principalities on suspicion that they were Islamic heretics. These attacks between 1254 and 1415 solidified the development of Yazidism as a religion separate from Islam and led to the militarization of the Yazidis.
Later the Yazidis found a place in Kurdish power structures that crumbled in 19th century, in part due to Ottoman centralization efforts. They subsequently faced increasing attacks from local rulers and tribal chiefs, prompting a Yazidi exodus to the Russian Empire from what is now Turkey.
An 1892 expedition led by the Ottoman governor of Mosul massacred Yazidis and forced their leaders to convert to Islam. The Yazidi temple in Lalish was then turned into mosque until 1904.
In modern times, the weakened Yazidi community became ensnared in fighting between Kurdish liberation groups and government forces. In Turkey, this led to virtually all of the country’s Yazidis to seek refuge in Germany.
In Iraq, the once-flourishing agriculture in the Sinjar Mountains was destroyed and the population moved to compounds in the desert. After the fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the Yazidis were increasingly targeted by Islamic militants. A wave of suicide truck bombings on August 14, 2007, claimed the lives of some 800 Yazidis in Sinjar and remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Iraq to date.
The Yazidis currently have a quota for seats in the Iraqi parliament, Kurdistan’s regional parliament, and some provincial councils in both Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq.
What Are Yazidi Relations With Other Faiths Like?
On the one hand, Yazidis are often viewed with suspicion by their Muslim neighbors. The name of their group misleadingly suggests ties to the Caliph Yazid I, a 7th-century figure of the Christian era who is remembered as a profligate by Sunni Muslims and hated by Shiite Muslims for killing their leader, Imam Husayn.
The term “Yazidi” is actually an arabicized version of the group’s original Kurdish name, “Ezidi,” and appears to overemphasize the role of the caliph in the group’s mythology.
Adherents of Islam and other religions have also labeled them “devil worshippers” due to a misunderstanding of Yazidi theology. The joint participation of Yazidi men and women in festivities has also sparked rumors of illicit sexual practices. The massacres of the 19th century only served to deepen the Yazidis’ suspicion of Muslims.
On the other hand, the social tradition of the “kiriv,” a man selected to sponsor a boy’s circumcision party, has become a mechanism of establishing friendly bonds between Yazidis, Muslims, and Christians in and around Mosul.
Yazidis have enjoyed friendly relations with other minorities in the region, especially Christians. The Yazidis of Sinjar sheltered Armenians who escaped from mass killings by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, and some Yazidis in what is now Turkey converted to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yazidis Are Said To Shun Lettuce. Why?
Yazidi culture has featured numerous bans related to speech, behavior, and food. The most universal of these is a ban on pronouncing the name of Satan. Most other taboos have been specific to certain places, times, or social groups.
The case of lettuce offers several interpretations of the ban on its consumption. First of all, there is a linguistic similarity between the Kurdish word for lettuce (“khass”) and the name the Yazidis used to describe saints (“khaass”).
Yazidi tradition also speaks of the killing of one of its saints, Sheikh Hasan, in an incident involving lettuce. Others said the ban stems from the massacre of Yazidis by the Ottoman Empire in the lettuce fields of what is now northern Iraq.
Lettuce also features prominently in Greek mythology, elements of which Yazidis have infused in their religion. In one myth, the Greek god Adonis is said to have been killed by a wild boar in a field of lettuce.
Mirrored from www.rferl.org
Copyright (c) 2014. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
DW: “Yezidi community demonstrates against persecution | Journal”For this step I'll assume that you already have Arduino IDE installed. (if not, you can check out http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Windows on a tutorial on how to do just that.
Upload the code below to the Arduino board, mount the LCD screen.
Note: We're using an "eBay LCD keypad shield" with pinout defined as lcd(8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 7).
If you're using another LCD, you might need to adjust the LCD connection pin numbers in the code.
This is the code we used:
#include <LiquidCrystal.h> // includes necessary library
int INPIN = 2; // input pulses on pin 2
int buttonPin = A0; // input button on pin A0
LiquidCrystal lcd(8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 7); // connections to LCD
int OUTPIN = 3; // output pulses on pin 3
volatile long int numint = 0; // counter for input pulses
int safevalue =500; // initial value of number of pulses considered safe
void intservice(void) // this is called for every input rising edge
{
numint++;
}
void setup() {
pinMode (buttonPin, INPUT);
pinMode(INPIN, INPUT);
pinMode (OUTPIN, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(OUTPIN, HIGH);
digitalWrite(INPIN, LOW);
attachInterrupt(0, intservice, RISING); // attach interrupt routine
lcd.begin(8,2);
lcd.clear();
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
int avalue;
lcd.setCursor(0, 0);
lcd.print(numint); lcd.print("cps"); lcd.print(" "); //print number of pulses in counts per second(cps)
lcd.setCursor(0,1);
avalue= analogRead(buttonPin); //variable for button input
if (120<avalue && avalue<150 &&(safevalue >=0 && safevalue < 1000)) {safevalue=safevalue+100; goto finish;} //upon pressing the up button, safevalue increases by 100 while lower than 1000
if (270<avalue && avalue<320 &&(safevalue > 0 && safevalue <= 1000)) {safevalue=safevalue-100;} //upon pressing the down button, safevalue decreases by 100 while lower than 1000
if (120<avalue && avalue<150 &&(safevalue >=1000 && safevalue< 10000)) {safevalue=safevalue+500;} //upon pressing the up button, safevalue increases by 500 while higher than 1000, up to 10000
if (270<avalue && avalue<320 &&(safevalue > 1000 && safevalue<=10000)) {safevalue=safevalue-500;} //upon pressing the down button, safevalue decreases by 500 while higher than 1000
finish:
lcd.print(safevalue); lcd.print(" "); //prints current safevalue
numint=0; // zero counter
delay(1000);
if (numint > safevalue){digitalWrite(OUTPIN, LOW); // beeper beeps if pulse count is higher than allowed
delay(10);
digitalWrite(OUTPIN, HIGH);
}
else {digitalWrite(OUTPIN, HIGH);}
Serial.println(numint); // print pulse count to serial
}
This code programs the Arduino to count gamma-rays (or other energetic stuff that dumps at least some 20keV at a time in the crystal) detected by the scintillation detector, in counts per second (cps). It will also send a signal to the beeper (that we will be connecting in the next step) if the value is higher than a selected "safe" cps level. You can change the preset safe value by pressing the up/down button on the LCD Keypad Shield. Events can also be monitored an a computer via a serial monitor when the Arduino board is connected to the PC via a USB cable.
Note: We will be using a USB cable to power the Arduino. If you want to make the whole thing portable, follow these instructions to power the Arduino from a battery, or simply buy a soldered one online.While the US and Japan remain game development heavyweights, the proliferation of distribution methods and design tools is making it not only easier for indies in these countries to break into the market, but for folks right around the globe to do so. Here are three of the most intriguing non-American/non-Japanese games I saw at PAX East.
Semblance: Enlisting the Player as a Designer
South Africa’s game scene sent quite an imaginative representative of their art in the form of Semblance. It’s the brainchild of Braamfontein based Nyamakop, the indie firm built by developers Cukia “Sugar” Kimani and Ben Myres. Semblance is a puzzle game distinguished by a core mechanic that sees you manipulate the gooey game world to progress. It grew up from a final-year project that both men worked on at the University of Witwatersrand; I can safely describe its mature form as an impressively thoughtful aesthetic delight. As a cute ball of black goo, you roll around the side-scrolling world, uncovering its secrets and encountering other gooey creatures that have more recognizable shapes--birds, cats, etc.
But the core of it is finding inventive ways to shape the gameworld in order to reach your objectives. The controls, for the moment, are as gooey as your character--lacking the fine sensitivity some puzzles seem to demand--but one hopes that the final version of the game, due out later this year, will address that concern.
What I especially liked (and found myself especially frustrated by at the same time) is that you have to learn to design your own levels as you play. In one challenge I had to reform a level platform covered in spikes so that I could create little hills that I could safely jump to in order to get across and reach an objective. It’s classic platforming, except you’re responsible for making the best platforms you can. It makes each puzzle involving--and certainly anything that makes players think critically about building a game world is welcome.
The effect this produces is equal parts intriguing and annoying, which may well be the point. The nature of the game admits many conceivable solutions for certain puzzles, but others appear to demand just-so landscaping to progress. The question aback one’s mind must always be “how would I design this so that a player could succeed?” It’s not a bad question for game devs to ask their players in the course of play, given how many want to make the leap from fan to developer. But it’s also an intriguing way to invert some of the classic logics of platform gameplay, one that many games have started to indulge in: how would you change the world in order to succeed? Rather than simply overcoming an elaborate, but static puzzle purely of someone else’s design.
One imagines that part of the fun of Semblance may be fans sharing screencaps and gifs of the unique ways they overcame various obstacles, and that’s certainly a good way to encourage the efflorescence of fan participation that sustains a gaming community.
Dead Static Drive: Envisioning The American Road Trip
I sometimes think that no one captures the dreamlike expanses of the American road trip--in both descriptive and psychic terms--quite like a foreigner. For those of us who grew up in a country that takes six hours by plane to traverse, we take for granted those vast and mighty spaces, the long and narrow highways where the next, lonely rest stop isn’t for another fifty miles.
But for those who were born abroad, the open, Route-66 style road exercises a mesmeric hold that, when finally experienced, produces some great art.
Enter this Australian take on the road. Dead Static Drive, developed from the singular vision of Mike Blackney, is, in his words “Grand Theft Cthulu.” It combines the “just drive” sentiment of so much poetry about the American road with supernatural horror; it’s one person’s almost aimless quest to drive, punctuated by uncovering why the American desert is suddenly populated by inky longhorn zombies.
You drive from one isolated locale to another--shacks, roadside motels, gas stations, all surrounded by unfathomable expanse, populated by taciturn locals and the mysterious, violent longhorns. In the demo I played, the goal for my character was simple: find a safe place to rest. It took me a while to finally accomplish this, as I discovered the hard way that the longhorns were not only unfriendly but extremely powerful. My solution was straightforward: run them all down with my car and then explore. It turned out to be surprisingly fruitful. Exploring the buildings, getting gas and weapons, finally led me to a motel where I found a bed.
This is not a post-apocalyptic game, so on the one hand all the guns lying around might seem thematically incongruous--but then, this is America, and particularly a perspective on it from a country where, well, guns aren’t all just lying around. Inventory management, using a grid system, seems key but expansions were easy enough to find and I filled my killing-bag with crowbars and handaxes.
Blackney promised that the final game would see you exercising choice and resource-management in deciding where to explore next, having to spend a certain amount of time (itself a precious resource) and petrol in traveling around, unraveling the mysteries of the desert. More intriguingly, he also said there would be non-combat ways of dealing with the longhorns.
The game itself was inspired by Blackney’s father’s love of Jack Kerouac and the myth of the American open road trip, which Blackney finally experienced for himself this past year; the vision thus produced is a fascinating one. There’s nothing quite like seeing our land through another’s eyes, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this GTA-like tells a far more interesting story.
The Gardens Between: Using the Sensibility of a Pop-up Book
Videogames are surprisingly well served by storybook aesthetics. What is a videogame if not an elaborate, highly interactive pop-up book, after all? The Gardens Between, another Aussie outing, demonstrates this quite beautifully. It’s a puzzle game where each challenge is set on a self-contained island dreamscape that you must traverse with two childhood friends, Arina and Frendt, as they try to find the light for Arina’s lantern in each level. As you complete levels, the lantern light sparks up into the heavens to help fill in a constellation which, when complete, tells part of a story about the two children and their friendship.
The greatest command on your attention is the art. The aesthetics of this game comprise one of several lessons one might give in a class on rendering dreams. Wheelbarrows, computer parts, and other everyday objects dominate the landscape like carvings hewn from a mountain. You can only move the children forwards or backwards, and when you do it’s as if you’re hitting rewind on an old VCR. The color leeches from the world, the music goes quiet, and the characters simply walk backwards, as if you’re editing a memory until you reach the one with the perfect puzzle solution.
This rewinding element becomes part of the puzzle solving as it applies to moving objects in the world as well, which is a delightfully inventive way to play with time. A light spark may only appear in a certain location at a certain time; knowing this, you can set your lantern down, advance the level, and catch the spark at that location, for instance.
The filling in of constellations puts me in the mind of another storybook game, the gorgeous and profoundly expressive Gravity Ghost. The Gardens Between has a similarly unified aesthetic that orbits a child’s sense of wonder, and a story that unfolds periodically between puzzles. Whether it will similarly take flight with a satisfying start-to-finish experience remains to be seen, but the demo I played left me wanting more. For now, TGB’s spark is burning.
Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.Jonathan Rich writes for BleedingCool.
No matter what your favorite incarnation of Batman’s young female sidekick, know that those in charge of her most recent past and future want Barbara Gordon to continue to be a fun and hopeful light in the Dark Knight’s often grim and gritty extended DC universe.
Friday at Heroes Convention in Charlotte, members of the creative team who recently left the popular DC comic and some of those charged with her future after DC Rebirth talked about both what initially inspired them about the character and what is yet to come following the relaunch.
“I only knew her from Batman: The Animated Series,” confessed artist Babs Tarr, who redesigned and drew the titular character in Batgirl from October 2014 through the recent end of that series. “I grew up reading manga and I didn’t even know there were other Batgirls before I got on the book.”
Writer Brenden Fletcher said he likewise had an affinity for the character, but his first brush with Batgirl was Yvonne Craig’s live-action version via reruns of the campy 1960s series.
“I broke up with a young woman because she called me when the show was on, and I had asked her not to,” Fletcher jokingly shared regarding having his prized TV viewing time interrupted. “I watched Yvonne Craig in the original TV series and that representation of Barbara Gordon really stuck with me and I tried to bring some of that into our version of Batgirl.”
For artist Rafael Albuquerque, who will be drawing the character after the DC Rebirth relaunch, his first Batgirls were even more modern.
“When I started reading comics in the late 80s and early 90s, Oracle was kind of the ‘cerebro’ of the Batman team,” Albuquerque said of the wheelchair-bound cybersluth iteration of Barbara Gordon “but when I saw what you guys did, that really connected with me too. You brought the hopeful and cheerful idea back to the comics when things were so dark and gritty.”
“She’s the light in Batman’s darkness,” Tarr playfully interjected.
“The Batgirl theme from the show actually sounds bright and hopeful,” added Fletcher before Albuquerque dropped a bombshell.
“I also remember Alicia Silverstone, even if that movie’s so bad,” the new artist joked.
“Is that what you’re bringing to the table?” posited Fletcher.
“Yes. Silverstone. That’s what my take on the character is all about,” Albuquerque responded with a laugh.
All kidding aside, Albuquerque did let a few details slip about the new version of the character he is helping to bring to live with celebrated indie comics author Hope Larson.
“I cannot talk much about it, but I am drawing a lot of Singapore and Okinawa,” the new artist explained. “We have designed a new chapter for Batgirl and she’s obsessed with a legendary hero who is some kind of character from the 1950s Okinawa. It looks like Batgirl, but it is not. The whole arc is about her visiting Asian countries and training to be a better hero who is not in the shadow of Batman. And there is the possibility of a love interest. Maybe.”
Albuquerque said he was inspired by the previous incarnations of Batgirl and having a chance to work on the character with beloved writer Larson sealed the deal.
“Hope was one of the main reasons for me to do this,” he said. “Initially, my response to the offer was no, because how could we top what had already been done? But, this was scary and challenging for me and as it is her first mainstream work I’m enjoying it so much. Her story showed me there was a way to bring Batgirl into a new journey.”
Both Fletcher and Tarr agreed the mantle of Batgirl was in good hands.
“We as a team are super excited about them both coming on board. It’s bittersweet for us to leave our baby, so it’s a huge relief we can hand it over to friends. His pages are amazing and I love where it is going.”
Photo: Pictured left to right are artist Babs Tarr, writer Brenden Fletcher, and artist Rafael Albuquerque at Heroes Con 2016.
Jonathan Rich is a freelance journalist, high school educator, and self-professed comic book nerd working in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. He writes about entertainment and pop culture for various print and web publications, including bleedingcool.com.
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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None foundKanamaru's morning lap kept him at the top of the combined timesheets for the rest of the day, with Orudzhev coming up just 0.016s short in the afternoon.
The Japanese driver had taken over at the top of the timesheets in the dying minutes of the first session, deposing Eurocup champion Jack Aitken.
Aitken himself had dethroned Matthieu Vaxiviere shortly before, the Formula Renault 3.5 2015 frontrunner testing for newcomer squad Spirit of Race.
Strakka duo Jake Hughes and Gustav Malja completed the morning's top five, the former a teammate of Aitken's in Formula Renault 2.0.
Orudzhev, who ended the first half of the day in 10th, stormed to the top of the afternoon run with an hour remaining.
And despite numerous drivers improving later on, his time stood, while Hughes, Vaxiviere, Aitken and GP3 ace Marvin Kirchhofer made up the rest of the top five, despite the German stopping on track in the final hour.Your flight with Southwest may or may not arrive on schedule. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
If you want your flight to arrive on time, you might not want to take Southwest. Its planes were on time just 67.6 percent of the time in June—the third-worst rate among U.S. air carriers—according to the recently released June Air Travel Consumer Report. Regional airline Envoy (formerly American Eagle Airlines) and ExpressJet were the only two that performed worse in that category, with on-time rates of 62.2 percent and 65.1 percent, respectively.
Southwest has been struggling to turn around its chronically late flights for a while. June was a particularly bad month for its timeliness; over the past 12 months, 71.8 percent of Southwest flights were on time. Of course, that’s still not nearly as good as Delta (82.7 percent of flights on time in the past year) or the current gold standard, Hawaiian Airlines (93.6 percent on time in the past year). Businessweek traces the tardiness to last August, when Southwest overhauled its aircraft turnaround and flight times to pack more flights into peak travel hours. It worked—in a sense. Demand soared and customers flooded Southwest planes. But the company wasn’t well-equipped to handle the surge, and so its timeliness fell.
Most of Southwest’s delays in June came from late-arriving aircrafts. Delays for Envoy and ExpressJet, on the other hand, were split more evenly between late-arriving aircrafts and so-called National Aviation System delays—a broad category of issues that aren’t really in the airline’s control. What else makes airlines late? The report breaks down the most common causes in a nice pie chart:
Screenshot from the Air Travel Consumer Report
Other fun stats to inform your travels: Envoy had by far the most mishandled baggage reports filed per 1,000 passengers over the past six months, while Virgin America had hardly any. JetBlue and Virgin America are also among the least likely to bump passengers from an oversold flight (not surprising, since they routinely top rankings of airline customer satisfaction). Finally, Spirit Airlines got the biggest number of complaints in June, at 235. But we already knew that everyone hates Spirit.Hoping to keep their forests from completely dying, to earn money by selling dead and infected trees and to mitigate fire risks, landowners are scrambling to cut the pines. If enough are cut — up to 75 percent — it might leave some behind that, with less competition for water, can survive. Still, for many landowners, cutting most of the forest where they have they built their homes is painful. “I’ve literally had people in my office crying,” said Gary Ellingson, a forestry consultant for Northwest Management.
The black, hard-shelled beetle, the size of a fingertip, drills through pine bark and digs a gallery in the wood where it lays its eggs. When the larvae hatch under the bark, they eat the sweet, rich cambium layer that provides nutrients to the tree. They also inject a fungus to stop the tree from moving sap, which could drown the larvae. That fungus stains the wood blue.
“The Latin name is Dendroctunus, which means tree killer,” said Gregg DeNitto, a Forest Service entomologist in Missoula, Mont. “They are very effective.”
To fend off the bugs, trees emit white resin, which looks like candle wax, into the beetle’s drill hole. Sometimes the tree wins and entombs the beetle. Often, though, the attacker puts out a pheromone-based call for reinforcements and more of the beetles swarm the tree. In a drought the tree has trouble producing enough resin, and is overwhelmed.
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There are some defenses. Owners nail to a tree an “aggregator pheromone” in a small packet, which mimics the chemical scent given off by beetles when a tree is full of insects. It can work when beetles are not too numerous, but at some point the beetles are not deterred.
Large, old, high-value trees, ones that shade campgrounds or yards, can be sprayed with an insecticide. But the trees need to be sprayed from the base to the height at which it is less than 4 inches around. Each tree costs about $10 to $15 if hundreds are sprayed.
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Lodgepole pines are largely confined to high altitudes. But the beetles have moved into ponderosa pine forests on Colorado’s front range, Mr. Kyhl said, which means it could kill forests around homes in the densely populated region.
The beetles will only be truly checked, experts say, if temperatures that used to reach 30 and 40 below for weeks return to the Rockies, temperatures that have not been seen in decades.
The death of the forests worries the tourism industry. Many ski areas have cut down their forests because of the hazard of falling trees and have revegetated the land.
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At Vail Ski Resort, for example, which has been particularly hard hit, workers have removed thousands of dead trees and planted new ones.
The dead trees that blanket the mountains are shifting ecosystems as well. In Yellowstone, for example, the beetles are killing the white-barked pine trees, which grow nuts rich in fat that are critical to grizzly bears in the fall. Biologists in Canada say streams will flash-flood because live trees will no longer catch snow and allow it to slowly melt, and it could injure salmon and destroy habitat. On the other hand, woodpeckers and other insect eaters will thrive.
Wildfire is the biggest threat. Some towns like Steamboat Springs and Vail, Colo., are surrounded by dead forests, and the Forest Service and logging companies are clear-cutting “defensible space” so firefighters have a place to fight fires.
After the trees die, the risk of crown fires that move through the canopy is the threat. After four or five years, as the dead trees fall to the ground, the threat of catastrophic fire is most severe. Fires in the piles of logs severely damage soils, prevent regrowth and cause mudslides.
Rainfall on damaged ground could also lead to widespread mudslides and silt buildup in rivers and reservoirs, which many mountain communities depend on for water. Strontia Springs Reservoir, a main water source for Denver, required a $20 million cleanup after a large fire resulted in severe erosion.
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The other major problem is large numbers of falling trees. In Colorado and Wyoming, officials have closed 38 campgrounds for fear trees could fall on campers. They have reopened all but 14.
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But there is a lot more to do. “We know they are going to fall,” Mr. Kyhl said. “And they are going to fall in the next 10 to 15 years. There’s campgrounds, thousands of miles of road, picnic areas, power lines and trails. How do we keep the facilities open for people to use?”
The agency is faced with clearing a strip of 75 to 100 feet of dead trees along highways so they are not closed by blow downs.
Then there is a question of what do with the wood. Sawmills have diminished in the West in recent years, and there are not enough mills to take all of the timber.
In Colorado, entrepreneurs have been scrambling to find ways to use it. Two pellet plants have been built, which turn the trees into sawdust and then pack them into a clean-burning pellet used in wood stoves.
Some trees are being shredded for use in biomass boilers, and carpenters are using the pine stained blue from the fungus for furniture.
In Alberta, a newsprint mill is testing a system to use the millions of dead acres of pines. Because of the fungal stain the trees aren’t bright enough for paper, but a computerized process adjusts the amount of bleach.
Still, the volume of timber used is small compared with the vast acreage of dead trees.
The West that depends on tourism, meanwhile, wonders what their customers will think about the dramatic change in scenery. Four million visitors a year come for sightseeing and recreation to Grand County in Colorado, where much of the forest is now dead. “What happens,” said Ray Jennings, director of emergency management for Grand County, “if this becomes an ugly place to be?”A Nigerian student, Oluwatobi Olasunkanmi has won the William Charnley Prize for the best First Class in Law at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
The 24 year old Oluwatobi who is the son of the former Minister of Youth Development, Senator Akinlabi Olasunkanmi, happened to be the only student of black descent in the graduating set.
In an official correspondence dated June 26, 2015, addressed to the best First Class Law student, the University’s Senior Tutor, Dr Philip Johnson, congratulated the Nigerian lad for the feat.
“Many congratulations on obtaining the best Hughes Hall First Class in your BA in Law. In recognition, the College has awarded you with the William Charnley Prize” said Johnson.
Meanwhile, the father of the award winner, Senator Olasunkanmi, has expressed his joy at the achievement attained by his son, noting that it has not only brought honour to his family but to Nigeria as a whole. “Sincerely speaking, my joy is not only because he is my son but because he has represented Nigeria well by bringing a laurel which has manifested in the best First Class Prize in Law”.Make sure your toilets have been fitted with low flow blocks or are low flow toilets, fit low flow aerators to taps, Since you're paying business rates you may aswell save any money you can on them.
Make sure you're only using the air conditioning and heating when necessary, on a just kinda warm day opening the doors can be just as effective and attract customers.
Be sensible and efficient when adjusting stock orders, this will help minimize wastage and save energy, money and space used up storing goods that were ordered unnecessarily. It also lower environmental impact by reducing the amount of stuff being driven around the countryside in lorries.
With wastage always do lots of date checking and be careful about how and when to reduce short dated stocks, some things will sell without reduction better because customers can be snotty about reduced goods. Reducing things slightly earlier and reducing less can save money and waste at the consumer end of things.
Always remember to turn off the hot food oven after it's empty, this can be forgotten so easily and is barely noticeable. Lowering the setting of the heat slightly is also better for the environment and sales, by the end of the day the food will be burnt to a crisp if set too high, it can be hot enough to eat at around the middle setting.NordVPN has released an extension for the Google Chrome browser and it can now be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store. NordVPN offers improved security and privacy against possible instances of data theft or espionage by encrypting internet traffic using military-grade encryption and hiding their IP addresses through the use of numerous remote proxy servers. The browsers of people who use the service will be assigned with the IP address of the servers of the VPN, masking the user’s real one. The server’s IP address is shared with more than a hundred people at the same time, which makes it even harder to trace the online activity of a specific user. Meanwhile, the DNS Leak and Kill Switch technologies protect the user’s data in occasions that the person suddenly disconnects from the network. In addition, WebRTC leak, which often shows the real IP address of the person even if they are using a VPN, is prevented by disabling the default protocol used by the search giant’s browser. People may use the VPN to secure private data especially when connected to a public Wi-Fi network, unblock geospecific content, or bypass surveillance and espionage.
The users of the NordVPN are also protected from a variety of cyber threats through its CyberSec feature. This feature automatically blocks suspicious websites by scanning it against a blacklist of sites that perform phishing activities and distribute malware. NordVPN also prevents the device from participating in a remotely controlled botnet and perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Once the NordVPN extension is downloaded and installed, users may select the server that will handle their internet traffic although they could also choose the Auto Connect option, so that the service's algorithm will choose which server will utilize. Consumers may choose among three plans, with the 1-month plan costing $11.95, the annual plan which is priced at $69 per year or $5.75 monthly, and the 6-month plan, which costs $7 per month. For the price, users may access to 1000 servers across the globe, connect as many as 6 different devices to the VPN, and contact the customer support that is available 24/7. Aside from the Google Chrome extension, a full version of the VPN is available for devices running Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS operating systems.Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Mitt Romney said on Thursday that he had not paid less than 13 percent of his income in taxes during the past decade, but he called the continued focus on his personal tax returns “small-minded” in the face of the nation’s problems.
Speaking to reporters during a stop in South Carolina, Mr. Romney said that he had examined the last 10 years of his tax returns.
“Every year, I’ve paid at least 13 percent,” he said, apparently referring to his effective federal income tax rate.
Mr. Romney’s decision to address the tax question on Thursday appeared to be the campaign’s latest attempt to put the nettlesome issue of his tax returns behind him. But Democrats seized on the comments as a way to revive the issue and to once again demand proof of his claims.
His statement is the first direct response to attacks by the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies suggesting that Mr. Romney paid little or no taxes in previous years.
In particular, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada has alleged — without any proof — that Mr. Romney paid no taxes in some years, presumably by using offshore tax shelters and other legal accounting measures. Mr. Romney had already denounced |
life-threatening.
The students, believed to be aged 14 to 16, are from Indonesia and Malaysia, and were on their way to Lake Leschenaultia - another 10 kilometres down the road.
A bus was sent to bring the remaining people back to Perth.
The accident is being investigated by officers from the Major Crash unit.
The incident is just eight kilometres from where Morangup mother Jess Seager and her sons Jayden, aged six, and three-year-old Cody, were killed on the same road when their car collided with a truck in July last year.
Community meetings followed their deaths, with residents warning authorities about the dangers of that stretch of road.
Topics: disasters-and-accidents, gidgegannup-6083
First postedA new anti-terrorism bill, which passed the House of Commons Wednesday night and received royal assent Thursday, revives provisions from the Anti-terrorism Act passed just after the Sept. 11 attacks and adds some new ones.
Some controversial measures, such as investigative hearings and preventive detentions, which some fear might violate civil rights, have been restored. Some new sections in the bill seem tailored to thwart the early planning stages of an act of terrorism.
Here are eight things to know about the bill passed this week:
1. Investigative hearings are reinstated
An individual can be forced to appear at a secret hearing without any charges being laid if authorities believe he or she has knowledge of a terrorist activity. The individual must appear and answer questions or risk being jailed for up to 12 months.
2. Preventive detentions are reinstated
An individual can be held for up to three days on suspicion of being involved with terrorism. Upon release, he or she can be ordered to uphold probation-like conditions, such as not contacting certain people, for up to 12 months, without ever being charged with any offence.
3. Both provisions are'sunsetted' again
Both investigative hearings and preventive detention are "sunsetted" to expire in five years, as they were under the original 2001 law, and which is what happened in 2007. Under the new law, the government must explain annually why it's necessary to extend these measures.
4. New offences target foreign travel
An individual can be charged with leaving or attempting to leave the country with the intent of committing an act of terrorism. This provision could apply if someone travelled from Canada to attend a terrorist training camp overseas.
5. Acts committed outside Canada can be prosecuted
An individual can be prosecuted for hijacking an aircraft or endangering safety on a plane or at an airport in another country if that person is found in Canada.
6. Facilitating terrorism in another country is illegal
For instance, anyone who knowingly facilitates the communication of false information — such as by knowingly lending someone his or her cellphone, outside Canada, to make an emergency call about a false bomb threat against an aircraft — could, if found in Canada, face up to 14 years imprisonment.
7. Wiretapping provisions stay in place
In a terrorism case, authorities do not have to prove that electronic surveillance is a last resort. Wiretaps can stay in place for up to a year. People don't have to be informed they've been wiretapped for up to three years after the surveillance took place.
8. Some penalties are toughened
The penalty for harbouring or concealing a person known to have committed a terrorist act has been extended from a maximum of 10 years to 14 years in prison.Singapore drops one rank from its 2015’s 153rd ranking to 154th in Reporters Without Borders (RWB)’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index. This new ranking place the city state at its lowest ever rank in the index, the highest ever rank obtained by Singapore is 135th in 2012.
Asian countries that are above Singapore are Taiwan (51st), Hong Kong (69th), South Korea (70th), Japan (72nd), Thailand (136th), Indonesia (130th), Philippines (138th), Burma (143rd) and Malaysia (146th).
The World Press Freedom Index complied and published by RWB, reflects the intensity of the attacks on journalistic freedom and independence by governments, ideologies and private-sector interests during the past year.
Seen as a benchmark throughout the world, the Index ranks 180 countries according to the freedom allowed journalists. It also includes indicators of the level of media freedom violations in each region. These show that Europe (with 19.8 points) still has the freest media, followed distantly by Africa (36.9), which for the first time overtook the Americas (37.1), a region where violence against journalists is on the rise. Asia (43.8) and Eastern Europe/Central Asia (48.4) follow, while North Africa/Middle East (50.8) is still the region where journalists are most subjected to constraints of every kind.
Three north European countries head the rankings. They are Finland (ranked 1st, the position it has held since 2010), Netherlands (2nd, up 2 places) and Norway (3rd, down 1). The countries that rose most in the Index include Tunisia (96th, up 30), thanks to a decline in violence and legal proceedings, and Ukraine (107th, up 22), where the conflict in the east of the country abated.
The countries that fell farthest include Poland (47th, down 29), where the ultra-conservative government seized control of the public media, and (much farther down) Tajikistan, which plunged 34 places to 150th as a result of the regime’s growing authoritarianism. The Sultanate of Brunei (155th, down 34) suffered a similar fall because gradual introduction of the Sharia and threats of blasphemy charges have fuelled self-censorship. Burundi (156th, down 11) fell because of the violence against journalists resulting from President Pierre Nkurunziza’s contested reelection for a third term. The same “infernal trio” are in the last three positions: Turkmenistan (178th), North Korea (179th) and Eritrea (180th).
In China (176th), the Communist Party took repression to new heights. Journalists were spared nothing, not even abductions, televised forced confessions and threats to relatives. In a recent tour of the country’s leading news organizations, President Xi Jinping said the media “must love the Party, protect the Party, and closely align themselves with the Party leadership in thought, politics and action.” He could not have made his totalitarian view of the media’s role any clearer.
“It is unfortunately clear that many of the world’s leaders are developing a form of paranoia about legitimate journalism,” RWB secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. “The climate of fear results in a growing aversion to debate and pluralism, a clampdown on the media by ever more authoritarian and oppressive governments, and reporting in the privately-owned media that is increasingly shaped by personal interests.
“Journalism worthy of the name must be defended against the increase in propaganda and media content that is made to order or sponsored by vested interests. Guaranteeing the public’s right to independent and reliable news and information is essential if humankind’s problems, both local and global, are to be solved.”
Published annually by RWB since 2002, the World Press Freedom Index is an important advocacy tool based on the principle of emulation between states. Because it is now so well known, its influence over the media, governments and international organizations is growing.
The Index is based on an evaluation of media freedom that measures pluralism, media independence, the quality of the legal framework and the safety of journalists in 180 countries. It is compiled by means of a questionnaire in 20 languages that is completed by experts all over the world. This qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative data on abuses and acts of violence against journalists during the period evaluated.
The Index is not an indicator of the quality of the journalism in each country, nor does it rank public policies even if governments obviously have a major impact on their country’s ranking.But aren't we all?
Steam is a pretty decent online store. At least Smash Bros. creator, Masahiro Sakurai, thinks so. Maybe he could, you know, make a game to sell there?
"It's become mandatory that each platform has its own built-in [digital] shop." Sakurai reflected in his semi-weekly column in Weekly Famitsu. "So among those, which online shop is superior and offers the most incentive to buy from it? I would answer, 'Steam.'"
Despite being ostensibly a creator of games for Nintendo systems, Sakurai overtly praised Valve's marketing system from multiple angles. "When someone opens Steam, depending their purchase and viewing history, suggested titles pop up. And there are sales almost every day with massive deals." Sakura observed. "The changes vary, making me check in frequently."
In terms of ratings and feedback, Sakurai emphasised the Steam format which discourages flaming and malicious low score spamming by only allowing ratings from people who purchased the game they were rating, as well as showing the play time of the rater, and ratings for ratings.
From genre and theme tags for easy organised searching, online rankings, Steam achievements, wish lists, the ability to purchase bundle packs with the games and all available DLC, automatic updating, to sharing with social network services, Sakurai gushed over the Steam service. "I write this because on varying levels, I have complaints with every other online shopping format." Sakurai said in conclusion. "While there are limitations for each platform, perhaps those in development of shopping apps could take a page from Steam's playbook?"
None of the games that Sakurai has worked on are available on Steam, and he did not say that he would like to put any of his games there. But coming away from his outpouring of enthusiasm for the system, I wouldn't be surprised if the urge was there. Not to fall back on the old, "if you love such-and-such so much, why don't you marry it?" but, I wouldn't be against seeing an all-new Sakurai game on Steam.The public is invited to tour the newly completed Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the first Mormon temple in the Keystone State.
The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple at sunset. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.1 / 20 The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.2 / 20 Entry into the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.3 / 20 Baptistry in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.4 / 20 Instruction room in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.5 / 20 Instruction room in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.6 / 20 Sealing room in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.7 / 20 Celestial room in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.8 / 20 The bride's room in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.9 / 20 A painting of Jesus Christ in the entry of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.10 / 20 A waiting area in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.11 / 20 The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple has beautiful decor in the chairs and other furniture. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.12 / 20 Chandelier in the celestial room of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.13 / 20 Architectural detail in the windows of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.14 / 20 A hallway in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.15 / 20 The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple has beautiful decor. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.16 / 20 The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.17 / 20 Twelve oxen support the font in the baptistry of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.18 / 20 Architectural details in the celestial room of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.19 / 20 The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple at night. © 2016 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.20 / 20 Download Photos
Downloadable 1080p b-roll for journalists
The First Presidency of the Church has announced that the open house will be held from Wednesday, August 10, through Friday, September 9, 2016, and run every day except Sundays (August 14, 21 and 28 and September 4). Those wishing to make a free reservation for the open house, visit www.philadelphiamormontemple.org or call 1-855-537-2000.
The temple is located downtown on 1739 Vine Street, near the Free Library. Tours, consisting of a 10-minute video presentation followed by a 40-minute walking tour through the temple, will begin at the new Latter-day Saint meetinghouse adjacent to the temple.
Following the public open house, the temple will be formally dedicated on Sunday, September 18. The dedication will be preceded by a cultural celebration featuring music and dance by the youth of the Church, to be held on the evening of Saturday, September 17, at the Liacouras Center on the Temple University campus.
The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple is the 152nd temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the world. It serves more than 40,000 Church members in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and all of Delaware.
Plans for a temple in Philadelphia were first announced by Church President Thomas S. Monson in October 2008. Construction began with a formal groundbreaking on September 17, 2011.
The 61,000-square-foot temple features classic Georgian architecture designed to blend with the historic Philadelphia architecture. The exterior is clad in granite from Maine, and the interior features stone from Egypt and Italy. The building includes original art glass and an oil-painting wall mural of landscapes important in both American and Church history, including the Susquehanna River and the Delaware River. The temple stands 208 feet tall and is crowned with a gilded statue of Moroni, a Book of Mormon prophet who is significant to Latter-day Saints for his role in the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Latter-day Saint temples differ from the meetinghouses or chapels where members meet for Sunday worship services. Temples are considered “houses of the Lord,” where the teachings of Jesus Christ are reaffirmed through marriage, baptism and other ceremonies that unite families for eternity.To say that X-Men: First Class is the best X-Men movie is slight praise. That’s not a particularly high bar. To say that it’s the best Marvel movie since Spider-Man 2 is a little better, but still lowballing. To say that it’s the best superhero film since The Dark Knight is nice, but it’s untrue. I liked X-Men: First Class more than The Dark Knight (we can save arguments over objective qualities for later). The best praise I can give X-Men: First Class is that it’s a wonderful movie, not just a wonderful X-Men movie or a wonderful Marvel movie or a wonderful superhero movie. It’s a damn good film, full stop, all other genres and ghetto-izations aside.
X-Men: First Class is a great pop adventure movie. It’s bright and fun, and it takes itself just seriously enough where it matters - which is with the characters. The script, credited to Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz and Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman, with story by Bryan Singer and Sheldon Turner, takes the characters and relationships seriously and makes them the driving center of the film. There’s a good, if a bit shaggy, story of international intrigue and globe-threatening villainy, but that’s the frame on which is hung a a bunch of great, engaging characters.
The film begins where the first X-Men movie did, with young Erik Lensherr being dragged away by Auschwitz prison guards and exhibiting his budding mastery of magnetism. But First Class keeps going from there, and we see how his powers drew the attention of a sinister camp scientist, played by Kevin Bacon, and how that scientist discovered the key to Erik’s ability is pain and anger.
Meanwhile, in America, we meet a young boy living in an enormous mansion. He discovers someone who seems to be his mother in the kitchen, but his psychic powers tell him she’s not what she seems. Charles Xavier meets a young, homeless and hungry shape changer named Raven and the two become fast friends.
That’s the first major change from canon, and it might be one of the best. The relationship between Charles and Raven is incredible and totally unexpected. They grow up to be James McAvoy, who is studying genetics at Oxford, and Jennifer Lawrence, who has tagged along and is waiting tables. They’re like brother and sister, but Raven feels something more for him - something Charles just can’t see. This is the basis for Raven’s eventual turn to a bad guy (although to be fair, this film doesn’t shade these characters so broadly as good or bad - we’ll talk more about that when we get to the relationship of Charles and Erik), but the movie plays it wonderfully subtly and quietly.
McAvoy completely reinvents Charles Xavier - and vastly improves him. His Charles spends his nights at pubs, hitting on pretty girls using a line of bullshit about mutations. He’s young, fun and full of enthusiasm. He’s an optimist, but not an unbearable Pollyanna. We see not just the young man but the seeds of the mentor and the father figure, and Charles automatically wants to help people, to make them better.
But there’s another side to him that McAvoy nails. He’s got blinders on, assuming that whatever he thinks is the right thing truly is the right thing. He casually outs other mutants, and he doesn’t understand the privilege his mutation grants him; unlike Raven he can walk through a crowd unnoticed. In retrospect it’s interesting that the X-Men were a bunch of good looking mutants while the Brotherhood had plenty of weirdos and deformed types; Vaughn’s movie jumps right into the heart of this, showing how Xavier never truly grasps the pain non-passing mutants feel.
Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, is stunning. She gives Raven’s story so much nuance that would otherwise be lost, pitching her pain at just the right level and keeping it usually slightly underneath an exterior of bravado and sarcasm. Just as Raven hides her blue form at almost all times she keeps hidden her true feelings of insecurity; is it any wonder she ends up on Magneto’s team when Erik is the only person who ever tells her that her blue form is perfect and beautiful?
Good and evil are concepts too simple for these characters (although not for the film. The villain’s plan is cartoonishly evil, but it’s part of the fun). Erik isn’t evil. He’s angry. And understandably so, as the film immerses us in the horrors he’s experienced right at the start. And Michael Fassbender, playing the grown up Erik who criss crosses the globe like a mutant James Bond, picking off Nazi war criminals, understands that anger completely. And makes us understand it, allowing us to see how pain and rage are inextricably intertwined in Erik’s psyche.
What’s great is that the dichotomy between Magneto and Professor X isn’t good and evil but love and anger - not even hate, just consuming anger. These are the choices that the mutants see before them, the naive love of Xavier or the wounded anger of Magneto. A lot of lip service has been paid over the years to these two being Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but every movie has made me think the people making the films believe Malcolm X to be an asshole. In Vaughn’s film the Malcolm X position is understandable, and can even be condoned.
Of course there is evil. Kevin Bacon’s Nazi character reappears in the film’s present day (1962) as Sebastian Shaw, the leader of a mysterious group called The Hellfire Club. It turns out that Shaw and his companions, fellow mutants Emma Frost and Riptide, are blackmailing world leaders into escalating Cold War tensions between the US and the USSR. His eventual goal: WWIII, which he believes will allow the mutants to dominate the Earth. They are, after all, the children of the atom.
Xavier, eager to prove that mutants can live with humans, volunteers to help police his own kind; eventually he meets up with Erik, who has been hunting Shaw, and together they begin working with other young mutants. It takes some time to get there, but who cares? Every step of the journey is a joy. Fassbender is awesome in his early Nazi-hunting scenes, and if that’s what X-Men Origins: Magneto was going to be about then I demand that they make that movie immediately. Matthew Vaughn has long said he wanted to do a James Bond film, and he gets that feel in these great scenes.
This movie is about Erik, Charles and Raven, so it should come as no surprise that the other X-Men are very much supporting characters. They all get nicely sketched out, though, with Hank McCoy, aka the Beast, getting the most time. There’s a delightful Silver Age quality to this movie’s version of The Beast in that he seems to spend all of his spare time inventing whatever the team is going to need in the next scene. Hank, played by Nicholas Hoult, comes squarely between Xavier and Magneto’s philosophies; I actually wish that the film had more room to diverge from canon because knowing that Hank would always be at Xavier’s side undercut some of the tension that comes from his arc.
Of course even in this arc there’s no way that Hank could truly end up with Magneto; he’s so ashamed of his oversized feet that he spends half the film trying to come up with a serum that will allow him to keep his abilities but look normal. He’s able to pass - just - but the film plays his eventual serum-induced transformation into a furry cat man as a punishment for his desire to be normal.
In Bryan Singer’s X-Men films the glumness was laid on thick. Being a mutant was a curse, it seemed, especially since the first film introduced us to the world of the X-Men through Rogue, whose powers are completely debilitating. While X-Men: First Class has Raven and Hank who want to be normal it’s mostly filled with characters who actively love their powers. Even Havok, who is afraid to use his power because he can’t control it, is ecstatic when Hank’s super science helps him harness his ability. One of my favorite scenes in the film has the young recruits hanging out together and showing off their powers for each other; to me this sums up the movie’s rambunctious energy and general sense of fun.
There are scattered action sequences throughout, but most of the bang is saved for the third act, when the Cuban Missile Crisis happens. This is the stuff you’ve seen in every trailer, and it’s good stuff, although it doesn’t rise to the level of greatness. The FX work in the movie tends towards the acceptable, but the action choreography is very nice. Vaughn juggles a number of battles in the climax, battles that range from big dogfights to teleporting fist fights to a personal, psychic struggle. These parallel action scenes don’t rewrite the book but they’re well staged and exciting and fun.
Again, fun. The movie’s not stupid, and it doesn’t short change the characters and it doesn’t rely on huge chunks of exposition (for a long film with a meandering plot First Class is really economical with its storytelling), but it’s still fun. It feels like a summer movie should feel - thrilling and big and entertaining as hell. I’m sure the budget wasn’t high, but the film has a sense of scope that makes the story feel large and important. The movie looks nice, with just enough cool 1960s ambiance to capture the Mad Men glamour. I might nitpick that the characters have anachronistic attitudes - I think teens in the early 60s would like to dress up in space age uniforms, but here they think the costumes look stupid (because of course modern audiences will think they’re silly and if the characters didn’t agree we would think the characters were square) - and that maybe a haircut or two is too long, but otherwise the period details feel like understated bits of seasoning.
If I have any serious complaint about the film it’s that the last fifteen minutes shoe horn in a bunch of developments in order to get the characters to the accepted status quo. I would have been perfectly happy waiting another film or two to see the Erik/Charles schism truly rupture, if only because McAvoy and Fassbender have incredible chemistry. There’s a sense at the end of First Class that nobody knows if they’ll make another story set in the time period, so they want to move all the characters into the positions they were in during the Singer years. Normally I’m against movies hedging their bets, holding stuff back for sequels, but in this case I think there was still a lot of great ground to cover.
But even that serious complaint is minor. I love this movie, flaws and all. It’s a movie that proves you don’t have to be po-faced and grim to make a great superhero film. It’s a movie that proves that you don’t have to be stupid and have paper thin characters to make a fun summer movie. And it’s a movie that proves that the X-Men, in all their big, weird, science fiction glory truly work on screen. Imagine if Grant Morrison rewrote a classic Stan Lee/Jack Kirby X-Men story and had Chris Claremont come onboard to work on the characters; that’s what gets you closest to the amazing energy of X-Men: First Class.Immigration Minister John McCallum says more than 10,000 Syrian refugees will have passed medical exams and other requirements to be certified as permanent residents of Canada by the end of the year — but may not all be on Canadian soil by that time.
"I am convinced that, by the end of the year, 10,000 or more Syrian refugees will be confirmed, certified as Canadian permanent residents. The issue is whether all of those 10,000 Syrian refugees will have arrived in Canada, will have their feet on Canadian soil by Dec. 31," McCallum told reporters at a press conference in Ottawa Wednesday.
McCallum said factors beyond the government's control, including the weather and refugees wanting to say goodbye to friends and families, may not make it possible to meet its ambitious goal by year's end.
But McCallum said he remains confident the government will meet its "fundamental target" of 25,000 by the end of February.
Before the press conference was even over, McCallum was bristling at headlines saying he had said 10,000 refugees won't be in Canada by the end of the year. He insisted it is still too soon to say.
"We are moving heaven and earth to get them here as quickly as we can but to do it in a way that is correct and appropriate and takes due concern for security, medical and other issues," McCallum said.
"We are sticking to our target of 10,000 by the end of the year, but there are challenges and it's less possible to guarantee that than it is the 25,000 target, but we are still committed to it and we are still working very hard to achieve it."
McCallum added the government has the capacity to operate up to five flights a day.
CBC News meets a family of refugees in Jordan who will be coming to Canada in days 2:27
During the election, the Liberals promised to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees into Canada by the end of the year, a higher number than both the NDP and Conservatives combined.
In November, the Liberals amended that promise to 25,000 by the end of February, with the first 10,000 to have landed by the end of December.
Flight to arrive tonight in Montreal
Reporters at Wednesday's briefing were told that, as of Dec. 21, 1,869 refugees had already landed in Canada, with three more flights scheduled to land between today and Dec. 31, including a flight that will depart on Christmas Day and arrive in Canada on Boxing Day.
Of those refugees already here, McCallum said 339 are government-assisted refugees, 1,297 are privately sponsored refugees and 233 were "blended" cases.
McCallum said a plane carrying 298 refugees is en route to Canada Wednesday and its arrival would bring the number of refugees in Canada since November to more than 2,000.
An Air Transat flight left from Amman, Jordan earlier today and is expected to arrive in Montreal at 6:30 p.m. ET, according to a release by the airline, although the airline's statement put the number of refugees aboard at 304, not 298 as announced at the briefing. Air Transat has operated two earlier flights of refugees to Canada, on Dec. 20 and 21, the company said.
McCallum also announced Wednesday the government would provide $15 million to agencies in 23 communities to help provide housing and supplies for arriving refugees.
McCallum, who recently returned from visiting refugee processing centres in Lebanon and Jordan, recalled "the most moving part" of his trip: meeting a girl at a UNICEF facility in Jordan who had heard about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcoming refugees in Toronto and wanted to come to Canada.
McCallum said the girl and her brothers weren't able to come to Canada at this time, but thousands more will.You wake up, check your Twitter feed and there it is: a headline that just spoiled a major surprise in your favorite comic book series–before you even have a chance to purchase it and make the discovery yourself. You expect it from comic book and entertainment websites, maybe, but The New York Times and The Associated Press?
It’s the new normal. And it sucks.
But how did we get to this point? And will we ever get past this era of strategic spoilers we find ourselves in? To help make sense of this very frustrating trend, I reached out to John Siuntres, host of the comic book podcast Word Balloon, who’s known for his lengthy–and honest–conversations with some of the biggest names in comics.
Thinking beyond the Wednesday Warriors
On Sept. 12, 2012, The Associated Press spoiled the conclusion of Avengers Vs. X-Men with its article titled “50 years after forming the X-Men, Professor X dead.” On June 6, 2017, USA Today ruined the conclusion of Batman #24 with its headline “Exclusive: Batman asks Catwoman to marry him in new comic.” And most recently, on Aug. 28, 2017, The New York Times published an article titled “Captain America: Fighting Evil Again.” Spoiler alert: It revealed Secret Empire’s ending.
It’s frustrating. But with all those great comic book film adaptations we’re finally seeing comes the realization that characters self-professed Wednesday Warriors have known and loved their entire lives suddenly belong to a lot more people. And again, this is all thanks to those big screen blockbusters starring the likes of Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine.
Thinking about publishing reminded Siuntres of his favorite quote from comic writer Jonathan Hickman, that books are on the shelves for different readers.
“We as comic readers have to accept the fact that what was the dog wagging the tail has now become the tail,” Siuntres said. “Comic books are just part of the massive media corporations’ exploitation of an intellectual property and it’s the last rung on the ladder. That’s just the way it is, so they need to excite the TV viewers, the animation viewers, the moviegoers. ‘Hey, you like the Avengers? You won’t believe what’s happening in the Avengers comic–pick it up today.'”
Going deeper, Siuntres implied that Wednesday Warriors don’t even make up the entirety of the online comic news audience. Occasionally, Siuntres will ask comic shop patrons if they listen to comic podcasts, like Word Balloon, or read comic websites, only to hear, “No, not really.” These are the Wednesday Warriors who don’t care about advance previews and simply show up once a week to pick up their books.
“The actual active internet readers of comics, it’s not even 50 percent of the stores’ customer base,” Siuntres added.
Embracing a necessary evil
When I see publishers allowing major news outlets to reveal plot twists, and then every prominent comic website running its own version of the news, I try to put myself in the shoes of creators like Tom King and Nick Spencer. Obviously, such revelations are designed to get people into comic shops and, at the very least, get fans talking. But on a purely creative level, how happy can these creators be when their devoted readers lose the chance to discover it naturally with the turn of a page?
Speaking about no particular creator, Siuntres said they would prefer it not happen, but it’s a necessary evil. These types of spoilers aren’t going away, he explained. And while it’s frustrating, for sure, he’s come to understand why they exist.
“Honestly, doing the podcast has lessened my anger,” Siuntres said. “A lot of time, anger comes from not understanding why something happens. Having done the podcast for 12 years, I ask these questions as a fan and ask, ‘why does this happen?'”
I find myself asking that very question when I see Marvel Comics heavily promoting a miniseries like Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey. And before the first issue even hits the stands, we know that Jean will be leading her own mutant squad in X-Men Red, which won’t be released until February. As a reader, doesn’t that undercut any suspense or cliffhangers Phoenix writer Matthew Rosenberg throws readers’ way?
Siuntres doesn’t see it that way.
“A lot of times they reveal the end of the story,” Siuntres said. “But it’s not the end that makes the story, it’s the journey. In Green Lantern Rebirth, we knew Hal was coming back, but it’s the journey and it’s interesting to see how they plot it out.”
Spoiling the news landscape
Of course, major newspapers like The New York Times aren’t solely responsible for ruining fans’ enjoyment of stories. Many of the comic book and entertainment websites that target fans are just as guilty. This is especially apparent in the lead-up and aftermath of major cultural events like, let’s say, the release of a new Star Wars film.
The editors and writers at some sites may believe they’re being subtle or respectful, but everything from a title to a thumbnail could spoil. All for website views and those oh-so addictive clicks.
With 16 years of sports journalism experience under his belt, I was curious to learn how Siuntres views the current state of comics journalism.
“It is very disappointing and frustrating that there are so many ‘comic book journalists’ that don’t know the basics and don’t follow the rules because they don’t know them–I don’t think it’s done with any malice,” Siuntres said. “They all think they’re Clark Kent or Lois Lane or Woodward and Bernstein and that they’re blowing the lid off of some controversy, when all they’re doing is being jerks in the case of spoiling, if they’re doing it on their own and not doing it with the publisher’s wishes. They think they just broke Watergate and the reality is this is so meaningless.”
With all that said, Siuntres was quick to clarify that, in his opinion, much of comic book journalism is often journalism with a soft “J.” A podcast like Word Balloon is entertainment journalism, and with this form of journalism, it’s more promotion than actual reportage.
While Siuntres prefers not to see the practice of one writer rewriting another’s article and trying to make it their own, in the case of spoilers and covering what’s hot, it goes back to the necessary evil argument. Comic sites that don’t cover the shocking spoiler of the moment risk appearing out of the loop. Fortunately, with his long-form conversation show, Siuntres doesn’t have to worry about this problem.
“I’m not wired to be clickbait guy,” Siuntres said. “I’m just like, ‘Hey, let’s just have a good conversation.’ I don’t need to be first, I just want to have a good talk.”
Of course, Siuntres is just one voice on the press side of the comic book industry. I wanted another take on today’s spoiler culture–the opinion of someone who interacts with comic-buying customers on a daily basis. So I reached out to Mike Welch, the store manager at Newbury Comics in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Welch, too, was critical of the breed of “comic journalist” who recklessly spoils in their articles and reviews, based on his personal opinion, as well as that of his customers.
“Spoilers in the press aren’t good for anything, in my opinion, including my business,” Welch said. “I feel that reviewers who have to give away major events in their articles suffer from a general sense of inadequacy in their lives and ruining a fresh experience for someone else is how they gain a sense of power. They are also poor writers, because any reviewer worth that moniker would be able to artfully give their opinion and guide a reader one way or another without spilling plot secrets. Never have I had a customer come in and ask for a comic because they already knew what happened, but I’ve had plenty of fans come in complaining about reading the wrong article about a major new release.”
Accepting the new normal
When I set out to write this article, I was fed up with this spoiler culture in which I’m forced to live. I felt, something had to change, which is partly what prompted me to write this article. But after talking to Siuntres, I have a better understanding that this is just the state of the industry.
This is the new normal. It’s a fact of life Welch has resigned himself to as well.
“Spoilers are the new way of business, unfortunately,” Welch said. “Money rules all, and if a company can get your dollars by giving you just a little too much information but also deliver it in an enticing way with cool art, they will not hesitate.”
Depressing as it may be to those like me, who are tired of getting excited about something only to have it spoiled, there’s really only room for us to change… for our thinking to change. We’re trying to hold onto something that, sadly, just isn’t that important to the larger comic-consuming audience. |
said he plans to work with the provincial government to reallocate the $3.7-billion it has already pledged to build the first phase of a light rail network called Transit City into his subway expansion plan.
Construction is already underway on the Sheppard East LRT and it’s not clear how much has been spent.
In the video, Mr. Ford also said he plans to generate “at least $1-billion” by selling off the air rights above subway stations, which would fund the remaining $300-million in subway construction, along with $700-million poured into road infrastructure, by dealing with the backlog, and spending $400-million “to address major problem areas by connecting disjointed roadways.”
Rival candidates have by now all weighed in on the plan that one is calling “fantasy”.
Sarah Thomson condemned his plan first:
“I have been saying since March that Toronto needs to build subways, not streetcars. Mr. Ford echoed this in his transit policy but his subway plan is not well thought out. Toronto cannot expand the Sheppard Line without first building a Downtown Relief Line (DRL) to accommodate the added capacity that comes with an expanded system. Anyone who has done their research on our subway system would know that the DRL is a priority before any other expansion, especially when talking about moving people to their jobs.”
Rocco Rossi:
“This is a transit plan without desire, it’s clearly a guy whose heart isn’t in it. The single biggest amount of money extracted from development [fees] doesn’t even go to public transit, it goes to roads.”
George Smitherman:
“On transit, Rob Ford claims he can arbitrarily spend $3.7B from the province on new subway lines. This is pure fantasy. The money is not his to spend – LRT cars and earth boring machines have already been ordered for transit lines now underway. There will be massive financial penalties for cancelling these now. That’s money for nothing and the ultimate in waste and mismanagement. Second, $790M of the money he’s counting on from the province is for York Region’s bus expansion. Not only will his plan kill transit expansion across Toronto – by putting a knife in the back of the Eglinton cross-town transit line for example – he’s trying to to kill York Region’s transit too. It’s a good thing he set aside some money for walking trails, as that’s the only form of transportation guaranteed under Rob Ford’s plan.”
Joe Pantalone:
“Mr. Ford is suggesting we do less and spend more. When one whole generation has already had to wait for transit construction, Mr. Ford proposes to build all of 12km of transit, and only for a small part of the city? That is a tenth of what we could do, and it is five times more than we should spend.”
Mr. Ford also pledged to end the “war on the car” and vowed to replace downtown streetcar lines with buses. He said this would have a “zero net cost” because the cost to purchase and operate new buses would be offset by selling off streetcars. There’s no mention in his plan about whether he would tear out the tracks, pave over them, or leave them in place.
He also promised to improve traffic with simple actions that “don’t cost a lot of money” like introducing colour-coded curb painting: red means no parking, green means park and pay and yellow means read the signs.
He also said under his watch the city would build 100 kilometres of new bike trails across the city in vacant green spaces, ravines, and on streets “where it makes sense”.
Mr. Ford estimated the total cost of new bike and jogging trails, including lamp posts, at $55-million.If you like it, then upvote it!!.
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I've moved on from Zada, although I love the deck with all my heart, because Wizards dropped the ball on making wolves/werewolves competitive even though they made everything else crazy as can be.
My new work of love is Let's Bounce: W/U (White Blue) Kaladesh, which I would suggest each of you check out, but Zada, Hedron Grinder will always be special.
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FIRST NOTE!!!!! IF YOU LIKE THIS DECK BUT WANT A BUDGET VERSION, I'VE GOT YOU COVERED. Wolves Who Bench Eldrazi: Budget Version
Second note!!!! This deck is on Revision 10!!
On the updates i'm going to keep track of play testing I've done.
Wizards of the coast is bat crap crazy with their releases, and i'm totally taking advantage of it.
Silverfur Partisan + Zada, Hedron Grinder + Spells = tons of scary, scary, scary buffed wolves.
Zada, Hedron Grinder + Expedite= draw X cards where X is the number of creatures you control pre Silverfur Partisan trigger.
Zada, Hedron Grinder + Confront the Unknown = massive amounts of investigate triggers which is the second way to have card draw. After you empty your hand use the mana you have to initiate card draw. Don't spend it all at once because you could very well draw into an Expedite.
Might of the Masses is absolutely crazy for one mana with Zada, Hedron Grinder and Silverfur Partisan. You play a one drop green spell targeting Zada, Hedron Grinder, then it makes a copy on each creature you control. It then creates Silverfur Partisan triggers for each werewolf or wolf you control, and then Might of the Masses can resolve, hence you get the effect of the spell after Might of the Masses resolves so all the new wolves will count for all the Might of the Masses triggers.
SIDEBOARD TECH:
Natural State helps deal with super annoying artifacts or enchantments.
Kozilek's Return is in there to help clear the field, especially against weenie decks or clearing out their wolves in a mirror match, but be careful since it can very well clear out your wolves as well. Howlpack Resurgence can help with this by making your 2/2's into 3/3's and thus not kill your own creatures with it.
I chose Lightning Axe as the sideboard for control because i think it will deal with threats you just need to hate on very well. Sure, you've got to discard a card, but it's one drop for five damage at instant speed.
Moonlight Hunt is on the sideboard for more moonlight hunt goodness.
I thought about display of dominance and not putting it on the sideboard since it's specific, but thinking back on it again that's exactly what sideboard needs. Specific answers to specific problems that might destroy your deck. It's an answer to the few super annoying black and blue enchantments that can go on your deck (besides just naturalize) and besides just destroying enchantments or making them not able to target your creatures when they're spells on the stack, they also can be used as a faux counter against other super annoying blue and black spells that target your creatures.
Note about play testing: The goal is to make my deck the best, so if I didn't play right it wouldn't help me make my deck insane when the cards arrive.- Advertisement -
(Image by Ekai) Details DMCA
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When America elected her first African American President in 2008, millions across the world wept over the promise made by his election about the possibility for individual achievement in a democratic republic founded upon the ideal that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. America, that most backward and racial of nations, had just elected a black man as President of the United States. The preacher had finally lived up to the promise.
Despite the past misdeeds of our nation, deeds worthy of a pox upon our house, whether we consider our treatment of the Native American, the African American, or our more recent forays into empire building, the world looked with awe at the American character, built over two centuries of idealistic struggle within our unique form of government. France, where racism toward African descendants is traditionally far less than in America, never elected an African French President, nor has England formed a government with an English African Prime Minister. No major industrial country had ever accomplished what the American people achieved in electing Barak Obama president. Hope that a new age had dawned not only swept across America, but across the face of the earth, as if the planet momentarily stopped and took the time to smile.
We know now, though, that the very same day the world welcomed the new President into office, a small group of powerful men, bent on his destruction, secretly met to design a plan to create economic and political chaos in America for the coming four years, solely for the purpose of regaining the House of Representatives in 2010, and the Presidency in 2012. According to the Huffington Post, reviewing Robert Draper's book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside The House Of Representatives, this meeting at "The Caucus Room," an expensive, Washington watering hole, lasted four hours, and fourteen of the GOP's most important and cutthroat politicos attended. The conspirators concluded not only would they attempt to win back power by any means necessary, but also they would oppose every policy initiative and every bill of any significance advanced by President Obama, and, by implication, whether the policy or bill forwarded the interests of the American public or not. As we now know, this plan included voting against legislation written and introduced by the Republicans themselves, or formerly supported by Republicans and opposed by the Democrats. As we know now, this agreement included refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, or, in other words, refusing to authorize payment for expenses the very same Congress had previously voted to incur, which nearly led to a worldwide depression far worse than the "Great Depression" of the 1930's and caused the partial downgrade of America's triple "A" bond status. This all occurred while troops were in the field and the Commander-In-Chief conducted two separate wars, and played a leading role in a third.
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Who were these miscreants that washed their hands in the blood of the American people? "According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz."
Of course, to meet to plan a way for a political party to regain power merits little attention from law enforcement. Such meetings likely occur daily somewhere in our country. However, when the clear purpose of the meeting is determined to be to act against the best interests of the American public in its entirety, no matter the merit of the bill or policy initiative, and to violate en masse their Oaths of Office, one must ask if the end result of such a meeting might be considered a conspiracy to commit treason, a conspiracy of the willing, as the George W. Bush administration might put it. When conspirators gather and agree to purposely harm the public, or the public purse, particularly in time of war and international economic crisis, one must ask whether it is mere partisanship we sense, or the more rarefied scent of treason that lingers in the halls of Congress. What is the difference between planning to win the next election and conspiring to intentionally collapse the American economy, if necessary, merely so the conspirators' party can regain the Office of the Presidency? On such razor sharp edges the Republicans decided to dance.
Conspiracy is a crime in itself. It is an agreement between two or more persons to engage together in a criminal act or an innocent act that becomes criminal when other members of the conspiracy carry out their assigned roles. Many states also add a requirement that the prosecution prove the defendant committed at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. The conspiracy need not succeed for the defendant to be found guilty..
Treason in the United States is addressed specifically in Article III, Section 3, of our Constitution, which provides:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
Interestingly enough, the Constitution fails to make treason a crime, but only defines and limits it. The job of criminalizing treason and determining the punishment for it is left to the discretion of the Congress. That job falls to 18 U.S.C. Section 2381, of the United States Code (the U.S.C. part of the citation). Section 2381 provides:
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whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Between the Constitution and 18 U.S.C. Section 2381, the United States probably has the narrowest definition of treason among all of the nations in the world. Breaking the crime down into the basic elements needed for conviction, we find: (1) the alleged traitor must owe allegiance to the United States, (2) he or she must levy war against the states, or (3) he or she must adhere to the enemies of the states, giving them aid and comfort.
So, if a group of current and former, elected, Republican leaders met and formed a plan to intentionally weaken the American economy in time of war, that meeting might be said to be a conspiracy of individuals with clear duties of allegiance to the United States either agreeing to an act of war against the states or agreeing to give enemies of the United States aid and comfort. On the other hand, the conspirators must also "adhere" to the enemies of the United States. To the founders, "adhere" meant "to believe in," as one is an adherent to Islam or to Laissez-Faire Capitalism or to the Republican Party platform.
These men fail the test for adherence to the enemy, most will say, since the enemy is a tactic: terrorism. A decent prosecutor could argue that threatening to default on the country's debt obligations implies a certain adherence to the tactic of terrorism. That case, however, hangs by a thin thread, one unlikely to turn into a noose. Even if one makes the current conflict more specific, as against radical Islam, for instance, instead of just terrorism, one still fails to find the necessary adherence. Thus, we are left with whether the conspiracy contemplated an act of war against the states, and whether an overt act with two witnesses can be proved. In some ways, the crash and burn plan using default on the debt limit to extort the executive branch does qualify as an act of war against the states. Although the likelihood of conviction on that basis is extremely low, given the way the American people feel about Congress right now, one cannot presume any result in a treason trial as a foregone conclusion. But the result is not what is important. And it is here where Democrats and Progressives differ profoundly from Republicans.
Next Page 1 | 2It’s that time of year again, when manufacturers re-assess their costs and pass on any necessary price increases forward. We do have some increases to report, as well as some decreases — all effective on January 1, 2016. We wanted to give you a head’s up in case you were thinking about purchasing any of these items.
If you don’t see an item listed here, then it isn’t changing price, or at least not in January. As for the following, you may see some variances in what other retailers charge for these products. We can only speak to our prices.
Price Increases:
Parker:
Pilot:
Waterman:
Bottled inks are going from $11 to $12
Converter is going from $10 to $11
Price Decreases:
Clairefontaine:
1951 pocket staplebound notebooks are going from $3 to $2.95
1951 A5 staplebound notebooks are going from $4.50 to $3.95
1951 A5 clothbound notebooks are going from $9.00 to $6.95 – we don’t have these at the moment, but we may bring these back if you’d like us to!
G. Lalo:
J. Herbin:
Letter brass seals are going from $14 to $12 (we’ll adjust our wax seal package set accordingly, too)
Quo Vadis:
Rhodia:
Webnotebook pocket notebooks are going from $16 in price to $13.95
Webnotebook A5 notebooks are going from $25 in price to $19.95
We’ve definitely seen worse years as far as price increase go… this one doesn’t seem too bad.
On a side note, it’s really cool of companies like Exaclair (who distributes Clairefontaine, Rhodia, J. Herbin, G. Lalo, and Quo Vadis) to pass on price decreases to their retailers and customers, so major props to them.
Hope this information helped!
Write On,
Rachel GouletIndia's former spooks rarely write books, so when the former Research and Analysis Wing chief AS Dulat writes one on Kashmir during the years when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister then it's bound to make for some interesting reading. From the IC-814 hijacking to Vajpayee's reaction to the 2002 communal riots, his book is expected to deal with it all and we have some snippets of what to expect thanks to an interview and some excerpts.
Here are the highlights from an interview and excerpts from his new book:
About stopping the IC-814 hijacking at Dubai and foiled commando
The former Raw chief said in an interview that when the IC-814 hijacking took place on 24 December in 1999, the Crisis Management Group (CMG) had 'goofed up' the entire incident by not immobilising the aircraft when it landed in Amritsar. The aircraft then flew on to Lahore, Dubai and finally landed in Kandahar, where the hostages were exchanged for was made.
"No one was willing to take a decision and in that confusion no instructions were passed on to Punjab Police which had moved in its personnel. They carried on debating and the plane flew off," Dulat said in an interview to Karan Thapar on India Today.
Launching his book, Dulat said that the then Punjab Police chief Sarabjit Singh had informed them that he had commandos at his disposal who were trained in anti-terrorism but authorities didn't want casualties and didn't give the go-ahead, reported the Times of India.
Dulat's book also reveals that India had considered a commando raid while the aircraft was at the Dubai airport but the absence of co-operation prevented anything from taking place.
"We tried to prevail on the Americans to put pressure on the UAE to allow us a raid, but India found itself isolated internationally. Nothing seemed to be going our way.” his book noted according to the Indian Express.
Farooq Abdullah opposed releasing militants
Dulat said as the CMG agreed to release the three terrorists in exchange for the lives of the 155 passengers and the crew members members to end the 8-day-old hijack crisis, he was deputed to talk to the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah in Jammu as two of them -- Mushtaq Latram and Malulana Masood Azhar -- were lodged in the state's jail.
Abdullah shouted at Dulat for "hours together" during their meeting after a decision was taken to release three hardcore militants in exchange for the freedom of the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999, it was recalled.
Dulat said that Farooq felt the decision by the Union Government was a'mistake' and he had stormed off their meeting to call on Governor Girish Chander Saxena with an intention to resign.
Recounting his meeting with Farooq, Dulat said "he shouted at me for hours together saying this was a mistake being committed by the Centre.
"After he vented his anger, he stormed off to meet Governor Girish Chander Saxena with an intention to resign," he said.
According to the Indian Express report, Saxena had to rely on his best bottle of Scotch and some negotiation to get the Chief Minister to stay on.
"However, the Governor calmed him down and Abdullah eventually accepted the situation and agreed to the release of terrorists," he said.
Vajpayee's regret about the 2002 Gujarat riots
During the interview, Dulat briefly mentioned about his last meeting with the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in which the BJP stalwart had said "woh humare se galti hui hai(it was our mistake)" about the 2002 Gujarat riots.
After the defeat in the 2004 elections, Dulat recounts a conversation with Vajpayee.
"I said: Sir, Yeh kya hua? So he laughed heartily and said: Unko (Congress) bhi nahi maloom yeh kya hua! He said even Congress has been taken by surprise, not just us. And then along the way, Vajpayee said: Shayad hamare se Gujarat mein galati ho gayi. And then he got a bit serious and sad. I did not ask him anything further," Dulat said.
Why the Agra summit with Pervez Musharraf failed and who pulled the strings in Vajpayee government
About the failed Agra summit, Dulat said that a meeting Advani had with Gen. Pervez Musharraf the night before soured the atmosphere.
This is when Advani surprised Musharraf by asking for Dawood Ibrahim. This took Musharraf back and a shadow was cast thereafter on the Agra summit.
"Yaar, hote-hote reh gaya. Ho gaya tha, woh toh," he recalled Mishra telling him after the failure of summit and added that he was "palpably disappointed".
Talking about the role of Brajesh Mishra, Dulat said he "virtually ran the government" during Vajpayee's Prime Ministership.
"Mishra was more powerful than the home minister (Advani). This made for an uncomfortable relationship between Mishra and
Advani. Vajpayee readily acquiesced to this power arrangement which made Mishra more powerful."
Target wasn't Mufti's daughter but Abdullah's
Dulat also revealed that Rubayya Sayeed, daughter of state Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was never the target of militants in 1989.
"It was Saffia, daughter of Abdullah whom they wanted to kidnap. But, as Sayeed become the Home Minister in the VP Singh government, they (militants) decided to take her hostage," he said, adding this was told to him by the militant who had planned the kidnapping.
Making Abdullah the Vice President
Recalling his days as Advisor in the PMO, Dulat, an IPS officer of 1965 batch of Rajasthan cadre, also said that there was a plan to make Abdullah Vice President in early 2002 and Omar Abdullah Chief Minister of the state.
"The offer to make Farooq Abdullah Vice President happened at my residence at a private dinner and it was made on behalf of Vajpayee by Brajesh Mishra. Later, Abdullah told me that both Vajpayee and L K Advani and had reconfirmed the offer," he said.
However, Abdullah always had doubts whether the NDA government would fulfil this promise. "I don't trust them. I don't trust Delhi," were the words of Abdullah to Dulat. The other problem was that Farooq becoming Vice President was part of an arrangement whereby Krishan Kant would become President.
"When the latter didn't happen the promise to Abdullah fell by the wayside," he said.
Militant wanting medical seat for son
In another disclosure which Dulat has mentioned in his book "Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years", he said that in early 1990s, self-styled Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin had called local Intelligence Bureau chief KM Singh and sought his help in securing a medical seat for his son.
"Singh approached Abdullah, who was the Chief Minister, and the work was done," Dulat said and maintained that these favours are extended always with a hope that they would be converted into a surrender of the militants.
"This is done world over by all the spying agencies," he said.
Vajpayee on not allying with Mufti
He also recalled that Vajpayee had called on Congress President Sonia Gandhi and asked her to ensure that there was no tie up with Mufti Sayeed in government formation.
The reason for this, according to Dulat, was that Sayeed was more comfortable with Jamaat-e-Islamia, the political wing of Hizbul Mujahideen and that his daughter Mehbooba had links with the terror group itself.
As a result, during a visit to Srinagar in April 2003, Vajpayee insisted that Mehbooba should not be on the stage with him and Mufti Sayeed, he said.
Speaking about the separatist leadership in the state, Dulat said the Mirwaiz Umer Farooq was one such leader who could be roped into the mainstream.
"But he is a scared person and fears for his life," he said.
About the Sayeed-Abdullah relationship, Dulat claimed that Sayeed has a complex about Abdullah.
"He is in awe of him (Abdullah) and sees himself as socially inferior," he said.
with inputs from PTI
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.Rating: 4/5
So far so good.
The delivery was faster than expected, the packaging was well protected, the hard drive was easy to install, and so far I have had zero issues with the hard drive with my PS4. I only give it 4 stars for it is still relatively new and if it stays how it is till around a years time I would happily give it a 5 star rating. So far the performance is the same mostly to the stock drive and in some instances better. I already have a terabyte of games downloaded through disc and digital content and am waiting for a couple games to add soon when some decent discounts hit. So overall at this moment I am pleased by the delivery speed and the extra storage space the hard drive gives me. If I become unlucky and the hard drive fails I will contact OWC to see about repairs or a replacement if needed and if the customer support is good I will not lower my 4 stars, but then I won't be raising a 5 star product for it. So 4 stars is what I rate it as of now and will come back to change it if it stays solid or if it fails and I get bad support. Recommend getting the PS4 file on you computer so it's ready when you get the 8gb flash drive and back up your saves on PS Plus and the flash drive just in case. If you have a PS3 that is less than 500 GB you can use the PS4 stock drive, but be careful when unscrewing the PS3 mounting bracket for its screws strip way to easily it is a joke... The screwdriver that comes with this package works fine on PS4, but the small handle can make it annoying on the craptastic 4 screws for the PS3 bracket... Those screws on my PS3 where tighten way to much and getting the screws off left two of them stripped because they are cheap and terrible screws... Sorry for the rant on the PS3 mounting bracket screws. I would definitely buy this product again if needed as of now I'm happy with it.UPDATE: The Daily Star updated their original article with an audio recording between reporter James Wright and Michael Pachter. When asked for comment from CGMagazine, Pachter responded “I’m over it.” More information can be found here.
Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 Pro has always been a hot topic among players. Billed for its 4K resolution and superior graphical processing capabilities, Sony’s Andrew House has stated that the PlayStation 4 Pro is intended to support the console’s mid-year cycle, which has traditionally seen some fall off due to PC hardware’s superior graphical capabilities over the PlayStation. In an interview with the Daily Star, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter gave his opinion on the PlayStation 4 Pro’s appeal to PC players, or lack thereof. Except there’s one problem: according a post by Pachter on NeoGAF, his comments were misreported in the piece.
The article, which previously caused some controversy on Reddit and NeoGAF, said that Pachter had a “particularly strange analogy to explain why he didn’t believe PC Gamers would be inclined to buy a PS4 Pro.” According to the Daily Star, he said “I think PC Gamers are like racists; they only like there own kind and they have no interest in venturing out and mixing with other races,” later continuing that “PC gamers are arrogant twits who are convinced what they do is better than what anybody else can possibly do.”
But Pachter disputed this reporting on NeoGAF, suggesting there were multiple problems with how the quote was handled. “I’ve never used the word ‘twit’ in my life,” he wrote. “I absolutely used the term racist, but only upon being questioned repeatedly about what I meant when I called PC gamers insular.” He later went on to call the reporting “irresponsible,” claiming that the reporter was attempting to “stir the pot.” While he did reiterate that he “said that the PS4 Pro probably wouldn’t appeal to PC gamers,” he further claimed that “the rest is just silly.”
While users were still upset by Pachter’s confirmation that he used the term “racist,” his allegation raises a number of questions regarding the way the story was reported and how the interview was carried out. If true, then Pachter’s opinion may be more nuanced than the original Daily Star article lets on. Still, it’s hard to say for certain from the outside what did or didn’t happen in the interview setting. Not yet, anyway. Stay tuned as more news develops.Get an preview of the upcoming ownCloud Android Release and help our devs by testing the android beta Release! Get it while its hot!
Apart from the 10.0.4 release which will come soon, we also need testers for the new version of the Android app. You have the chance to try out fresh features, and at the same time, you can help other ownCloud users, by contributing to the quality of the ownCloud software with your bug reports.
Camera uploads!
With the new Android version, we will have a new camera uploads feature, that is going to replace the instant uploads. The user just has to select a camera folder, and the pictures and videos from the camera folder are uploaded automatically in a period of 15 minutes at most, focusing on reliability instead of immediacy and avoiding battery draining caused by excessive checking of the folder.
We also adjusted the app to work fine with Android O, so you can use some of the features of the new Android version with the ownCloud app, for example the notification categories, enabling you to configure separately the notifications for ownCloud uploads and downloads among others. If you are already waiting for this, one more reason to download the beta now on the play store! If you have a google-free android phone, you can also get it on F-Droid.
If you find a bug, please participate in one of these channels:
– Write a comment on this issue in Github: https://github.com/owncloud/android/issues/2028
– Open a new topic on central: https://central.owncloud.org/
– Write to [email protected]
The developers can take care of it and fix the bug for everyone. Positive feedback is highly appreciated too, of course. Just play around with it!Microsoft has kept its internally-developed Kinect Fusion tool all to itself, but now, hot on the heels of Build 2012, the firm has announced that it's working on baking the software into the Kinect for Windows SDK. Concocted by Ballmer and Co.'s Cambridge, UK research lab, the tool can be leveraged to create 3D models of objects or environments, develop augmented reality applications and even take 3D measurements. By the looks of it, creating a model with the tool is a pretty painless process. When passing an object in front of a Kinect or sweeping the hardware throughout an area, the software will use the continuous stream of data collected by the device's sensors and compile it into a 3D model. Intrigued by Kinect Fusion? Hit the jump to catch a video presentation made for SIGGRAPH 2011 by the team behind the software.President Donald Trump dellivers remarks after attending a swearing-in ceremony for Defense Secretary James Mattis (right) at the Pentagon in Washington on Jan. 27. Carlos Barria/Reuters
President Trump may think that he’ll make the nation more secure by spiking the defense budget and slashing the rest of the federal government, but he’s indulging in clichés and dangerously false assumptions.
Trump has sent guidelines to his Cabinet officials, directing them to boost the defense budget for next year by $54 billion—nearly a 10 percent increase—and to get the extra money by draining the budgets of the EPA, the State Department, and other federal agencies.
This is a staggering sum of money. Not since Ronald Reagan’s first year as president has the United States increased defense spending by 10 percent, and that was during a high point in the Cold War, when Soviet and American tanks faced off across the East and West German border, when both sides had massive air and naval forces, and when the nuclear arms race approached full gallop. (Even so, Reagan backed off to increases of around 3 percent in the subsequent years of his presidency.)
It’s not even clear how the military would spend such a hefty bonus. The wars we’re fighting now don’t require huge, expensive weapons systems. President Obama’s last budget, which the Pentagon is spending now, allotted $7.5 billion for the war against ISIS, $6.7 billion for cyber defenses, and $1.2 billion for counterterrorist drone operations. Double all that, and you’ve spent an extra $15.4 billion, less than one-third of Trump’s increase.
If Trump thinks we’re headed for a revival of major wars, with tank battles and air-combat duels and naval skirmishes, extra money will get him only so far. That same Obama budget earmarked $27 billion for warships, $45 billion for combat planes, $8 billion for missile defense, and $30 billion for maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal. You can build new ships, planes, missiles, and submarines only so quickly—and how many more of those things does the nation need to meet the threats?
His premise is that the nation’s defenses are “depleted,” and he’s simply wrong. Obama’s final Defense Department budget was $583 billion. (This is the baseline for Trump’s $54 billion increase, which amounts to a 9.2 percent increase, close to the advertised 10 percent.) Add to this the $25 billion for the Energy Department’s nuclear program, and that makes a total “National Defense” budget (as the Office of Management and Budget calls it) of $608 billion.* This is the largest U.S. military budget in the post–9/11 era. In fact, adjusting for inflation, it’s as large as any budget since the peak of Reagan’s era. If there were deficiencies in Obama’s war policies, they did not stem from a shortage of weapons or manpower.
Many Republicans, including Trump, like to say that the nation has fewer planes and ships than at any time since the end of World War II or since some other signpost from the distant past. Assuming the numbers are accurate, they’re irrelevant. The firepower of a single aircraft carrier dwarfs the entire fleet of any nation from earlier eras. No generals or admirals would say they’d trade the force of today with that of any yesteryear.
One might argue that the military needs more weapons of specific types to meet rising threats of a certain sort. If so, the question isn’t how much to spend but what to buy. Trump’s directive spells out no such details. Those will be filled in and hammered out later by the Office of Management and Budget, the comptrollers of the various departments, and the relevant committees in Congress. Meanwhile, simply throwing money at the Pentagon won’t necessarily solve the problems, especially if it means taking money away from other buildings in town.
I hope this is what Secretary of Defense James Mattis tells his president. When Mattis was a four-star Marine general in charge of U.S. Central Command, he told a congressional committee, “If you cut the State Department’s budget, then you need to buy me more bullets.” In other words, defunding diplomacy makes war more likely. Trump might respond by invoking the Reagan-era slogan “peace through strength.” Mattis would agree, but he subscribes to a broader concept of strength that goes beyond merely military might. Certainly he wouldn’t turn down a bigger barrel of money for the Department of Defense, but he knows that it’s not the only measure of national security.
With just a few tweets and phone calls, Trump has done more damage to our security than if he’d cut tens of billions of dollars from defense. And currently there is no functioning State Department to conduct the day-to-day diplomacy that, Mattis knows, forms a crucial bulwark to bloodshed. Trump’s budget guideline is a declaration of his one-dimensional priorities, and—even leaving aside matters of social needs and domestic policy—his priorities are all wrong.
*Correction, Feb. 28, 2017: This article originally misstated the 2017 budget for the Department of Energy’s nuclear program. It is $25 billion, not $18 billion. (Return.)Madison Quartarone had a brain tumour A UK baby has become one of the youngest in the world to undergo an operation using |
, we effectively made everyone redundant and said we wanted people to apply for these new roles," he says. "There was some anger and we faced that down. It was brutal, but it was a case of survival. If we hadn't done that, we'd be making compulsory redundancies now."
In Bath, the response to falling circulation was to switch the Chronicle from daily to weekly publication, backed up by a rolling news service online. It seems to have worked: sales have risen from around 11,000 for the daily version to 19,000 for the weekly, even though at 70p the latter retails at double the price. The Chronicle is a Northcliffe title, and Pelosi says that, had the switch not been made in 2007, this famous old paper (it will celebrate its 250th birthday in 2010) might now be dead. "If it was a daily newspaper today, it would be losing very considerable sums of money and it might just go - we might just put the key in the door," he says. "Obviously, advertising markets are extremely challenging and the Bath Chronicle is not making much money, but I believe we've given it a chance to be on a sound economic footing by coming out once a week rather than six days a week."
The switch was overseen by editor Sam Holliday, who joined the Chronicle in 2005. He says he met initial resistance from locals who felt Bath merited a daily. "A local newspaper in a community is a bit like a local church in a village," Holliday says. "Very few people go to it, but everyone feels part-ownership of it, and if the vicar comes in and says, 'Right, we're going to throw away the pews and have a new, modern church,' a load of people who don't even go to the church object. When we first announced the change, I met people who said: 'Oh you can't go weekly, it's terrible, it deserves to be a daily paper.' And I'd say: 'Well if only more people like you were buying it every day, it would be great...'And they'd say: 'I don't buy it every day...'They regarded it as an institution."
My visit to Bath is instructive. Metro (another DMGT title) - free, generic, rootless and thus emblematic of our deracinated age - is in a dumpbin by the lift in the Chronicle's offices; an unusual example of inviting an accomplice to your murder into your house. The centre of Bath itself is devoid of newsagents; they have been squeezed out by food shops and a Sainsbury's. "That hasn't helped us," says Holliday. "The newsagents have been very loyal in the past, but they're struggling." The signage on a former newsagent, called The Editor, in Westgate Street still gleams, but it is - for one week only - a charity shop raising money for guide dogs.
The weekly Bath Chronicle will soldier on: it will celebrate its 250th birthday, and will almost certainly still be there in a decade. But it will never be the force it was. When I'm searching in vain for a newsagent, I meet a local school caretaker, Dave Stephens, and ask if he knows of any nearby. He starts describing where I might find one, but I never could follow directions, so ask him instead what he thinks of the paper. "I rarely buy it now," he says. "I just find the news is a week old by the time you're getting it, which to me seems a bit of a waste of time. I look at the website occasionally, but I rarely buy the print version unless my kids are in it because of something their school's done."
If Stephens wants information on local planning issues, he says he looks at the council website. The paper alerted him to a new park-and-ride scheme proposed for the town - thanks for that, now he'll follow it up online. "If there's something going on," he says, "there's always a website run by a support group or people who are against something." But they'll be biased, I protest, echoing what every local newspaper editor says. "Every paper has an agenda, too," he counters. He is happy to work it out for himself.
Back in Birmingham, I talk to some bloggers who have taken this a stage further: they have set up websites to cover local issues, discuss the plan to regenerate the town centre, and post documentaries about the lives of "active citizens" in the city. OK, they can't begin to do the legwork of the Birmingham Mail's 42 reporters - "You don't meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse," as The Wire creator David Simon said last week. But what they have achieved is impressive, and anything but frothy.
Former BBC political reporter Nick Booth is a key figure in what I fear I must call the "blogging community" in Birmingham, and has the apostate's disregard for conventional media. "What got me back into making media [after briefly running a quango] was realising that you don't have to use the tone of the conventional mainstream media, which is attempting to be impartial and slightly aloof," he says. "You can decide, 'I'm just going to tell the stories of active citizens. I'm not going to control the editorial process as much as I might in my old job. I'll just give them access to the medium and access to the audience.' And that suddenly felt more honest."
Booth also believes this new media can change things. "It rarely occurs to mainstream media to use its resources to make things better," he says. "It reflects them or carps about them, but doesn't do anything about them. That's an awful lot of energy going into what?" He also likes the idea that you only publish when you have something to say. It's a light news day, all quiet on the Birmingham front - go out for a walk.
Booth is about to launch a Channel 4-backed website in Birmingham called Help Me Investigate, a sort of investigative Wikipedia, where local people will raise issues - "What happened to the money that was supposed to be spent regenerating X?", "Why do the local hospital's NHS contracts have gagging clauses, and is that legal?" - and everyone else in the community will pool their knowledge and efforts to find out. If successful, it will be rolled out nationally, part of the social-networking revolution which - if the internet zealots are to be believed - will transform information gathering and civic life over the next couple of decades.
Booth's partner in the enterprise is Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University and someone much in demand as established media organisations thrash around to find a new model for their businesses. For a man who likens the digital revolution to the Renaissance, he is surprisingly sanguine about the future of papers; he reckons that many will survive for at least 20 years - although it will be 20 years of perpetual revolution as old and new media coexist.
Bradshaw puts the dilemma for newspaper groups, local and national, succinctly: "I think some people in most newspapers know where they're going," he says. "The problem is they're having to persuade everyone else in those organisations. They also have enormous legacy systems of printing presses and distribution networks, and the majority of their profits still come from those legacy systems. The next 20 years will be about that transition, and I don't envy them. If I was starting up a news organisation today - as in a way I am [with Help Me Investigate] - I wouldn't want those enormous costs of printing presses."
Pundits on the future of the press range from the optimistic - former Guardian editor Peter Preston, for instance, who in his Observer media column this week attacked "self-feeding hysteria" - to investigative reporter Nick Davies, who, at the start of our interview, tells me it can be a short one. How so? "As far as anyone with any sense knows," he says, "there isn't a future for local media. There isn't actually much of a future for national media."
Both are right. The newspaper industry is not going to disappear overnight. It won't be like Woolworths: there one minute, boarded up the next. In a way, it will be more painful than that: death by a thousand mutilations as reporters are cut, subeditors are centralised (or just eliminnated), dailies go weekly or - as the Guardian Media Group plans for the Reading Evening Post - bi-weekly, proud paid-fors go free, while copies of the Metro and thelondonpaper litter the streets and train carriages. Because the old business model - lots of readers attracting lots of advertising, two fast-flowing revenue streams - is, indeed, bust.
For local papers, the next 20 years will be about managing decline. They are of course developing ancillary websites, buying specialist jobs and car websites, to try to capture the digital market. But they can never exercise the same power as their control of infrastructure gave them in print, and the advertising model online - search-engine dominated and dependent on cash by results - means the ad revenue will never return in the same quantities.
Even if big media organisations survive this revolution, the switch from mediation of information by a professional elite to a more dispersed and, if we are being optimistic, egalitarian and organic model will have a profound effect on journalism. What the bloggers like to call the "priesthood" (us lot) have to give way, with active citizens (you lot) doing it for yourselves. Here Comes Everybody, as US internet guru Clay Shirky so prophetically put it. The New York Times has recognised that the news-gathering of the future is likely to be a partnership between professional and citizen journalists, and the paper is mentoring community websites in the city. This is not just a philanthropic exercise; it knows it has to catch the new wave to reach shore.
There are, however, potential class and age issues here: the blogging community is young and middle-class, readers of local papers older and more working-class. If the transition is out of synch and tracts of the country are deprived of their papers before this more organic network of news-gathering, information-sharing and social action is properly developed, the great unplugged will be left in limbo, sitting in pubs fretting about their declining communities and lost relatives.
Mark Dodson, head of regional media at the Guardian Media Group, is exercised by the possible disenfranchisement of the most vulnerable section of society. "A whole swath of the population will not be catered for by this so-called revolution," he says. "The people who can least afford to be connected to the new world are also those keenest on being involved in their local communities. Everybody has a right to be informed locally. Local news should not be means-tested." He conjures up a vision of a group of middle-class bloggers, obsessed by a series of single issues, pursuing them to the exclusion of what really matters to the wider community.
A valid point, perhaps, but one weakened by the fact that, in order to stay in profit, he recently announced that the group (which also owns this paper) was cutting 245 jobs in the north-west and south-east of England, shedding 113 journalists (including 39 on the Manchester Evening News), shutting 22 local offices serving its weekly titles in and around Manchester, and closing the Esher News & Mail and the Aldershot Mail, as well as reducing the Reading Evening Post from daily to bi-weekly publication from the summer. That announcement led GMG journalists in Manchester to take out an advertisement in this paper on Tuesday complaining of "the decimation of a great regional newspaper in the city which was the birthplace of the Guardian" and appealing to the Scott Trust, which oversees GMG, to reconsider the redundancies.
Dodson is sure the Manchester Evening News will still exist in 10 years, but says it will have changed character. "It will look fundamentally different from the way it does now," he says. "It'll be a different kind of product: it could be totally free, or part-paid and part-free; it could be two days a week, or three days a week, or weekly. There'll be a product that serves Manchester, serves it properly and is of high quality, but what it will look like... " The sentence trails away. "It'll be a mixture of products that serve the community, and I expect to see the same in Birmingham, Glasgow and other places as well. You have to be totally open-minded, because three years ago no one would have believed we would be in this position."
This is not yet a requiem for papers, and anyone who tells you they know when they will die is fibbing. Even at what we have to assume is the bottom (or close to the bottom) of the deepest recession since the 1930s, most local papers are still making a profit, admittedly because they have shed many good journalists and other staff. The Tindle Group, run by the redoubtable 82-year-old Sir Ray Tindle, has lost virtually no one from its widely distributed 900 staff, yet he insists his network of 230 "hyper-local" titles (which includes such glories as the Barry Gem, the Ceredigion Business News, the Faringdon Folly and Diary, the Forest of Dean Prime of Life, the Hay-on-Wye Express and the Wiveliscombe Messenger) is holding its own. On the day we meet at his office in Farnham, Surrey, where I get a tour of the Farnham Herald and lunch in the boardroom, he has just bought four troubled papers in Devon.
Times are tough: the Herald's advertising in key sectors has halved. But Tindle - who, after surviving throat cancer in the 1990s, has to keep his thumb pressed against his voice box to speak - is undaunted. Churchill is his hero, and his words are couched in the same cadences: "We've been though quite a few recessions and two world wars. Our oldest papers were there before Napoleon!" He says he has never - and will never - close a paper, and loves to tell the story of the way he saved the Tenby Observer in 1978.
"I told the staff I would buy it, provided they could bring it out by Friday morning so there was no gap," he tells me, chortling. "They said, 'We'll do it.' I said, 'But I want no news from outside Tenby. Cut out Haverfordwest, cut out Milford Haven, cut out Pembroke Dock. I don't want to know. Every line must be about Tenby. The circulation went up from 3,700 to 6,000-odd; the paper went from a loss of £50,000 to a profit of £140,000." Tindle looks through the printout on his desk. "The Tenby Observer has made £108,605 in this financial year, and that's in a recession!" he proclaims. "Yet the paper had been dead for three days when I resuscitated it."
The debt-laden corporations could learn a thing or two from Tindle, who says he has never borrowed a penny. The plaque on the wall of his reception in Farnham reads: "The Tindle Group of 200 newspapers and radio stations was built by launch and purchase from absolutely nothing apart from the £300 given to a soldier at the end of the second world war, and by the dedication of loyal staff."
Personal mythologising it may be, but the staff tend to stay with him for a lifetime - Corina Larby, chief reporter at the Farnham Herald, has been with the paper "since God was a boy", or 1973 to be precise - even though the salaries are very low. That loyalty is now being repaid, though job cuts are not completely ruled out. The group has just announced a pay freeze but, before that announcement, he showed me a letter from the NUJ chapel at one of his home counties papers saying it had agreed to ask for no pay rise this year, so grateful were its members to hold on to their jobs.
Tindle's papers, serving small communities and with, for the most part, low overheads, are likely to be around for a generation or more, though it is far from clear what happens when this Churchillian figure dies. The great morning dailies, with resounding names and pathetic sales, could be gone in a few years, unless some rich businessman fancies them as a trophy. Meanwhile, the new decentralised, decorporatised media models will be emerging. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be analysed, mocked, videoed and remorselessly blogged about on a wide variety of local news and crowd-sourcing websites.
Even Long Eaton now has a web replacement for the Advertiser. Former railwayman Tony Fountain, who is 57, has added news to his existing What's On in Long Eaton site, and trails round the streets looking for stories. His site is not yet the New York Times, but I like the fact he publishes poems by local people - newspapers have always despised unsolicited poems - and there is no denying his passion. He plans to start a births, marriages and deaths column, which may bring some comfort to Brian Keen. In 20 years' time, perhaps this site will be magnificent, with local people using it to work together to smarten up their town. There will also be sections in Polish, Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian, and thirtysomethings might have heard of it.
At the Birmingham Mail, I meet a thoughtful young reporter called Paul Bradley, a 26-year-old who joined the paper as a trainee two years ago on £10,000 a year. Last week he came back from Basra, where he had been tracking the Queen's Royal Hussars, which draws many of its recruits from the Midlands. During his time in Iraq, he had written three differently angled stories for the Mail, Post and Mercury. On another visit to Basra last autumn, he wrote stories, blogged, took photographs and made a video. Or at least tried to: in a war zone, Trinity Mirror's expectations of what the modern, multi-platformed, multimedia journalist can achieve seem a little optimistic.
I find Bradley interesting because he has opted to enter this profession at a time of such uncertainty, when all the media rules are being rewritten. "I think it will take 20 years for things to settle down enough for people to be able to breathe easily again," says Paul Bradshaw at Birmingham City University. How does young, mustard-keen but far from misty-eyed Bradley feel about being in on the start of a revolution?
"I suppose you see the brave new world, but brave new world that's going where exactly?" he says. "I can do all the skills, I can do the videoing, I can take the not-very-good photos, I can file for three different papers. But are those papers going to be around in five years' time for me to continue working for them, or am I going to have to look for a job abroad because they can't work out how to get the advertising?"
Does that panic him? "You've just got to have some kind of faith that someone, somewhere knows what's going on and has some kind of plan. There's still a thirst for news; there's still a demand for good journalism."
The bad news is that, despite online guru Bradshaw's optimism about newspaper visionaries, no one does seem to have a plan. Barry Fitzpatrick, head of publishing at the National Union of Journalists and a man currently trying to put sandbags around organisations that are leaking jobs all over the place, puts it well: "At the moment, regional managing directors are like corks bobbing around in a stormy sea. They're not actually steering anything; they have no business plan other than cuts, and inevitably if that's the only strategy you have, quality suffers. They try to make out there's been no damage done, or it's a better product, but we all know it's a lot worse."
The good news is that the Birmingham Mail and Sunday Mercury, Bradley's current employer, surely will still be around in five years' time, though it would be sensible if they started reaching out beyond their white working-class heartlands given the nature of the Midlands demographic.
And, in the longer term, if someone like Bradley could only join forces with railwayman-turned-web enthusiast Tony Fountain in Long Eaton - which shouldn't be much more dangerous than Basra, except perhaps on a Saturday night - I'm convinced the town would have a journalistic vehicle far more powerful than the old stripped-down, clapped-out Long Eaton Advertiser. Local advertisers and well-wishers would flock to it; maybe the government could start an Arts Council-type fund to facilitate local news-gathering. And then Long Eaton could say it was in at the rebirth not just of local journalism, but of a revitalised civic life.
• Additional research by Sarah Phillips
• This article was amended on Saturday 4 April 2009. The editor of the Bath Chronicle is Sam Holliday, not Holloway. This has been amended.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
RuPaul’s Drag Race star Willam Belli stunned fans in an online show with comments about trans people.
The drag artist, who appeared on the fourth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, was called out by fans over comments made on her live TV show ‘Suck Less’.
During one segment on the Fullscreen show, Willam and fellow drag queen Courtney Act answered questions from viewers seeking help and advice.
The show usually involves light-hearted jokes, petty scats, and shallow comments about their viewers’ appearances, but Willam took things too far in a question about trans people.
It was sparked by an email from a female viewer who has asked for advice about dating a transgender man, and feeling uneasy about him not having a penis.
While Courtney Act tried to give some good advice, Willam stunned viewers by insisting: “just because you cut your titties off and take testosterone, that doesn’t change your chromosomes.”
Willam referenced the murder of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was brutally raped and murdered in Nebraska in 1993, whose real-life story was told in the 1999 movie ‘Boys Don’t Cry’.
The drag artist incredibly appeared to try and justify Brandon’s murder, saying: “He bamboozled the girl… he was trans but he could have told them.”
Addressing the person asking for advice, William added: “Here’s the thing, he’s not your boyfriend if he’s not a boy and he’s not f**king you… just because someone says they’re a boy, doesn’t make them a boy.
“If they haven’t had the science [referring to hormones/surgery], they’re not a boy yet. Just because you cut your titties off and take testosterone, that doesn’t change your chromosomes.”
Courtney Act derided Willam’s comments as “transphobic”, before noting that the quote mirrors trans-exclusionary feminist author Germaine Greer, who claimed that “just because you lop off your d**k and then wear a dress, that doesn’t make you a f***ing woman.”
Courtney told Willam: “You just accidentally quoted Germaine Greer!”
After the quote was recounted, Willam emphatically agreed with Greer.
“Once you do all that science stuff, then it does [make you a woman],” she said.
Thankfully, Courtney Act was there to save the day, demonstrating tact and wisdom as she debunked Willam’s claims.
“You’re dating a trans man, by the sounds of it,” she told the viewer.
“Sometimes men have vaginas, and sometimes men have penises, and that is a fact of the world we live in.
“[Just because he] does not have a penis, it doesn’t mean that he can’t pleasure you.”
She also criticised the transphobic language that had been used.
“Saying that he’s a butch lesbian is disrespectful. He’s not a butch lesbian. He identifies as a man, and you need to respect his identification.”
Courtney continued to counter Willam’s brash comments, saying: “It’s not up to you to choose how somebody identifies.”
Willam’s comments did not go down well with fans of Drag Race, which has had a number of transgender contestants.
On the Reddit, one fan wrote: “christ, as a trans man this is genuinely disappointing and hurtful.”
Another added: “I really don’t get gays being transphobic. there’s already soooo much negativity from outside the community, why just spew even more inside the community at people who’ve had similar experiences?”
Others praised Courtney Act for her calm and diplomatic answers, with one fan adding: “Courtney, if you’re one of the queens who occasionally shows up on reddit, thanks so much!”
Next: Did Hillary Clinton just reference RuPaul’s Drag Race?Definitive evidence that Tel Aviv gunman Nashat Milhem was hiding out in his home village of Arara was obtained when excrement found on Monday in an abandoned building in the village was tested and found to match his DNA, security officials said.
The fugitive Israeli-Arab gunman was suspected — but not known — to have fled north toward his home immediately after killing three Israelis in Tel Aviv on January 1. Israeli forces on his trail on Monday, January 4 believed they had tracked him to an abandoned building in a field in Arara but apparently arrived too late, the officials said. They found human excrement at the scene, however, tested it, and established that it matched Milhem’s DNA, Israel’s Channel 10 news reported.
In the wake of that discovery, and also the reported matching of his DNA to a cigarette butt, national police chief Roni Alsheich was able to signal to the public Tuesday morning that the likelihood of the killer still being on the loose in the Tel Aviv area was significantly reduced.
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Amid criticism that it had taken a full week to catch the killer, who was shot dead when seeking to escape security forces on Friday afternoon, officials hinted that they had delayed closing in on Milhem in order to also be able to identity and ultimately arrest numerous people who helped him while he was hiding out.
Milhem was ultimately cornered in an abandoned home that belongs to a 76-year-old female relative of his, in a building that bears the family name “Milhem” written in blue Hebrew lettering on the wall. “She is in hospital, on a breathing machine,” Ahmad Milhem, another relative, told Channel 2 news on Saturday night.
Batting away a derisive question about why it had taken a week to find a terrorist who was hiding in a building with his name on the wall, Israel’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told the TV channel that the operation was ongoing, and potential accomplices were still being rounded up. “We’ll catch everybody who played a role,” Erdan said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKHH7httJIs
According to officials speaking after he was killed, Milhem made his way back to the Arara area within hours of killing three Israelis on January 1. He initially hid out in the rough, then in an abandoned building, and finally in the apartment of his hospitalized relative.
Police allowed reporters into the apartment on Saturday. It was well-stocked with food and water, had a TV set and a radio, and also contained the black clothes Milhem used when he went on his January 1 shooting spree.
The building was surrounded on the afternoon of January 8, and Milhem apparently spotted the forces converging upon him. He fired on them from the window of the apartment, fled the building, and ran some 200 meters, jumping over a low wall into the yard of an adjoining building, security officials said. He fired on the forces chasing him, including at the lead officer and at a search dog (who were not injured), and was gunned down. The forces had been ordered to take him alive if possible.
TV news reports on Saturday night said Milhem had been spotted out and about in Arara by locals on at least two occasions in recent days, carrying his submachine gun. On one occasion, he was seen buying cigarettes, Channel 10 said.
One suspected accomplice acknowledged at a remand hearing Saturday that a friend had reported seeing Milhem, but he said he did not consider that the information was credible.
Relative Ahmed Milhem said of the suspected accomplices: “Maybe people didn’t want to get into a fight with him (and therefore were intimidated into helping him). The whole country knew how dangerous he was.”Politico reporter Ginger Gibson shocked CNN guest media critic Frank Sesno on Sunday when she said that she didn’t bother to check facts if she was told that her sources were not telling the truth.
During a segment about the increasing role of fact checking organizations like PolitiFact, Sesno asked Gibson how members of Congress responded when they got a “pants on fire” rating.
“Their press secretaries, when it’s the other guy who’s called out, will blast out those as a press release,” Gibson explained.
“And what do you do with that?” Sesno wondered.
“Most of the time, ignore them,” Gibson admitted.
“You ignore it!” Sesno exclaimed. “Wait, wait, wait. So if someone is called a liar or is exposed in a fact check and you’re the reporter of it, you ignore that?”
“Well, we ignore it when it becomes political fighting, right?” Gibson said.
“But if someone is objectively wrong,” Sesno pressed.
“As a reporter who covered the [Romney] campaign and covers the Hill now, these fact checks are great for us because sometimes when the claim keeps getting repeated, we can point to them in a story and say, look, they’ve been deemed untrue by multiple fact checkers,” Gibson insisted. “And I think that line is important, the multiple fact checkers. When it’s multiple fact checkers agreeing, we can go to that.”
“And that’s how we use it, that’s how we call attention to things — if we’re not doing the fact checking — we know not to be true.”
During 2012 presidential race, Gibson covered Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, whose pollster once said: “We won’t have the fact checkers dictate our campaign. We will not let the truth get in the way.”
Watch this video from CNN’s Reliable Sources, broadcast Oct. 13, 2013. The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas is urging the Kansas Supreme Court to uphold a judge’s finding that the state’s criminal offender registry is unconstitutional.
The registry includes sex offenders as well as people convicted of certain violent crimes and drug offenses.
The ACLU said in a filing Tuesday that instead of improving public safety, the registry laws impede offenders from reintegrating into a community.
The arguments come in a lawsuit filed by a child molester seeking to have his name removed from the Kansas offender list. Shawnee County Judge Larry ruled a law extending his registration requirement was a punishment that couldn’t be retroactively enforced under the U.S. Constitution.
But the National Center for Victims of Crime says upholding the ruling would “profoundly affect” victims.James Marsters Panel 2013 St. Louis Comic Con
James Q&A at St. Louis Comic Con (clip)
James Marsters- "I wanted to be the boy that flies..."
James Marsters- "Did you lose the twenty bucks?"
Here are 4 videos from James Marsters' St. Louis Comic Con Q&A panel; with thanks to myahbr & JeanBugC:This is only part of the panel. Unfortunately I could not get the whole thing due to lack of memory on my card from taking too many pictures and I was standing in line to ask my own question.James was asked by a fan if he were to sit down with some of the characters he has played- Spike, Barnabas and John Hart- what would they say to him and what would he say to them.During James' Q&A on Sunday at St. Louis Comic Con, he was asked about auditioning with a cajun/southern accent for the role of Spike and what was his dream role to play on stage. This clip includes James demonstrating his ability to do accents and discussing his passion for "Macbeth". March 24, 2013During the Sunday Q&A at St. Louis Comic Con, a fan asked James to help settle a bet, What was the relationship between Spike and Angel...really...? March 24, 2013Paul poses a formidable challenge for fellow Republican lawmakers. Paul-backed group hits Republicans
Sen. Rand Paul, the tea party favorite and possible 2016 presidential candidate, is raising money for a conservative gun rights group that’s targeting fellow Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
And when one congressman complained, the message from Paul’s camp was: too bad.
Story Continued Below
The Kentucky Republican has lent his name to fundraising pitches for the National Association for Gun Rights, a group that says the National Rifle Association is too willing to compromise on gun rights.
( Also on POLITICO: NRA plan: Let teachers carry guns)
The group has blitzed the districts of Virginia Republicans Cantor and Rep. Scott Rigell with $50,000 worth of TV and radio ads accusing them of helping President Barack Obama pass gun control legislation.
Paul’s email pitches for the group don’t mention Cantor or Rigell by name, but his activity for an organization that attacks fellow Republicans shows the potential 2016 presidential contender isn’t afraid to pick a fight inside the party.
( Also on POLITICO: Paul hits Hollywood on gun control)
Paul chief of staff Doug Stafford is unapologetic.
“Rand signs normal, run-of-the-mill activist emails and letters for numerous groups and this is one of them,” Stafford told POLITICO. “That’s all he’s ever done for them, he’s not affiliated with the group in any way, he doesn’t control how they decide their activism should take place in terms of who the people are that need to be shored up on an issue.”
Paul poses a formidable challenge for fellow Republican lawmakers. He has a built-in base of libertarians, and his profile rose again last month after he filibustered against the Obama administration’s drone policy and won the Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll.
Rigell, a second-term congressman from Virginia Beach, reelected with nearly 54 percent of the vote, this year introduced a bipartisan bill to strengthen penalties for straw purchasers — those who knowingly buy guns for people who cannot pass a background check.
( PHOTOS: Politicians with guns)
But he also has an A-minus rating from the NRA, and said the ads caught him by surprise, forcing him to air several radio spots of his own to refute their claims.
“I outright oppose any initiative that would directly or indirectly result in the creation of a national database of firearms and or firearm owners,” Rigell said in an interview. “Their charge that I am leading this, that I am supporting this, is an egregious lie, and completely unfounded.”
When he discovered that Paul was fundraising for the NAGR, he called the senator and Paul promised to investigate and get back to Rigell.
The congressman also sent Paul a two-page handwritten note asking him to repudiate the group.
“It is true your name is not on any email, direct mail piece, nor is it mentioned in the television or radio ads,” Rigell wrote, according to a copy of the letter viewed by POLITICO. “Yet it is also true, irrefutably, that your good name is being leveraged, with your permission one must assume, by a corrupt, detestable outfit.”
A day or so later, Stafford told Rigell’s office that nothing would be done, according to Rigell.
“The reply essentially was: ‘It’s between you and this group and the senator will not disassociate himself from that organization.’ Which surprised me,” Rigell said.Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his company will not pull its operations out of China. The issue arose after Google said it could be forced to leave the country after deciding to no longer censor website results.
Ballmer did not discuss the censorship issue directly, but told CNBC that "We've been quite clear that we're going to operate in China." He added that "I don't understand how [pulling out] helps us and I don't understand how that helps China." (Source: washingtonpost.com)
Questioned about recent hacking attacks on Google that appear to have originated in China and may have prompted Google's decision to threaten a pull-out, Ballmer said he didn't view the attacks as particularly unusual, pointing out that Microsoft is attacked many times each day.
Microsoft Partly to Blame For Google Attacks
Ironically, Microsoft has confirmed that a previously undisclosed security flaw in Internet Explorer was the method which the Chinese attackers used against Google. It's noted the problem isn't being widely exploited and is currently working on a patch to fix the issue.
There will likely be some criticism of Ballmer for speaking on the issue and failing to support Google's new stance on human rights and censorship issues. However, with the exception of Bing, which is a very minor player in China, Microsoft does not encounter the censorship issue in most of its products, meaning it isn't usually put in a position where it has to make moral judgments.
China's Copyright Situation "Abysmal"
The main focus of the CNBC interview was the issue of copyright infringement in China, with Ballmer saying "Intellectual-property protection in China is very, very bad. Abysmal." He argued that the trade between the US and China was unfair as the US is largely paying for physical goods, while most US exports to China involve intellectual property that is too often not paid for. (Source: pcworld.com)
Some observers have noted that this may actually be reason for Microsoft to continue doing business in China, as leaving the market could leave pirates feeling they have free reign to copy its software without risk of punishment.As Juan Martin Del Potro prepares to face Rafael Nadal, we look at his career–from young prodigy, to tragic figure, to comeback king and national hero–and consider his chances against the world #1.
This US Open has had its fair share of heart-warming comeback stories. Semi-finalist Sloane Stephens, who was sidelined for ten months after foot surgery; Petra Kvitova, who was stabbed in her playing hand in her home less than nine months ago; Venus Williams, who has battled back to the Top 5 despite being diagnosed with an auto immune disease in 2011.
But while all are stories of ardour and pain, few have suffered a comeback trail as long as Juan Martin Del Potro’s.
The 2009 US Open final. 20-year-old Del Potro stuns the tennis world with a five-set victory over Roger Federer, halting the 15-time Grand Slam champion’s 41-match winning streak in Flushing Meadows. The 6’6″ Argentine did what many expected of Alexander Zverev this year |
– maybe they still think it is. I think there’s a lot of people in the league – I’d certainly be one that would share this opinion – I don’t think John Wall’s good enough to be the guy that you build around. I think he’s got great speed and quickness, but point guard is a decision-making position. That’s what makes you great as a point guard, is your decision-making. I haven’t seen any indication that John Wall is a great decision-maker.”
Not exactly what you want to hear if you’re a Wizards fan.
Wall has yet to play a game this season due to injury, so kicking a guy when he’s down doesn’t necessarily feel all that great here. But he didn’t show marked improvement a season ago, finishing with averages that were either right at or a hair below those of his rookie campaign in nearly every statistical category.
We don’t know if Wall will turn into that cornerstone player once he gets healthy, and it’ll take even longer to evaluate Jan Vesely and Bradley Beal, the team’s two lottery picks that followed. Time will tell, but the start to this season hasn’t been all that encouraging.
With that in mind, the fact that one of the more respected former coaches in the game isn’t a fan of the combination of young talent that’s been compiled so far shouldn’t be much of a surprise.Do you dream of life in a lovely warm climate? Got a thing for Tall Dark Handsome Strangers who are really caring in a macho, traditional way?
Well, we may have just the opening for you! Young British girls sought to take up exciting position as jihadi brides in some of the world’s major hotspots.
If you find 21st-century life a bit much, no problem. We can get you back to the 15th century faster than you can say halal marriage. Sexually frustrated because your strict parents refuse to let you get a boyfriend and integrate into Britain’s decadent, kuffar society? Well, waiting for you is your own personal “holy warrior”, hot off the battlefield and eager for your cool, soothing embrace.
This full-time position comes with a house, which you are at liberty to leave (in exceptional circumstances, and accompanied by a charming male guardian). There is a generous clothing allowance, which will enable you to wear double-layered veils, loose, floor-length abayas and on-trend gloves. Don’t worry about the veils. You won’t really need to be able to see anything when you go outside – probably better not! – and your guardian will hold onto you.
Perks include:
- Regular sex with your holy warrior
- Regular barbecues (of hostages)
- Spoils of war – other women’s clothes, possessions etc
- Widowhood classes
- No need to worry about revising for boring old GCSEs. Result!
- One-way ticket to Syria
- No more unflattering trousers!
- Plenty of opportunity to meet interesting new people, and watch them being beheaded.
- The ideal female candidate for this exciting role should be aged between 9 and 19. Fear of blood a disadvantage.
Preferably able to start immediately. Don’t delay: your holy warrior awaits!
You may have noticed that another three British Muslim girls have dashed to Syria to become jihadi brides. Let’s face it, unless you got locked in the loo for a week, it would be impossible not to. The fate of Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana has dominated BBC news. Blame for the trio’s flight has been laid variously on the immigration authorities, who failed to intercept them, the airlines who let them board, and on the police, who were too slow to react apparently. Our Prime Minister went so far as to implicate the entire British people. David Cameron said the disappearance of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls was “deeply concerning” and “we all have a role to play in stopping people from having their minds poisoned by this appalling death cult.”
Do we really? I don’t know about you, but my ability to influence Muslim teenagers who fancy shacking up with an Islamist mass murderer is a bit limited. And I resent the money that is spent sending British police to Turkey to try and bring them back. Why, come to that, do three “vulnerable” Muslim girls monopolise BBC headlines night after night when the fourteen hundred mainly white girls raped and pimped in Rotherham by men of Pakistani heritage struggled to get their abuse aired at all? I know whom I feel more sorry for.
The three new ISIS recruits are invariably described as “naïve”, but airport-security pictures show rather confident young women striding purposefully towards their destiny. “Jihadi brides are not shrinking violets,” one expert told Radio 4.
The British people, I suspect, are fed up of being required to feel worried about these girls, who are all 'Straight A’ students and could be expected to know better. Googling Islamic State recently, I came across one of the most disturbing images I have ever seen. At the front of the photograph was a toddler who was smiling and holding up a scabby football. Behind him was his proud father, toting a gun and laughing and gesticulating at the little boy. On closer inspection, it became clear that what the toddler was holding was – oh, dear God - a bloody human head.
The image made your mind melt. Such cruelty, such depravity, such gleeful corruption of innocence may be difficult to comprehend, but it is easy to identify for anyone who has been raised in a civilised, liberal society. Shamima, Amira and Kadiza were lucky enough to be born in such a country, they benefited from its education system when tens of millions of Muslim girls in other parts of the world are barred from school. In their online searches, the East End girls will definitely have come across videos of stomach-churning barbarity – the mass beheading of 21 Coptic Christians is only the latest Isil snuff movie - yet they chose to go and plight their troth with the culprits.
Teenage infatuation is nothing new, nor is running away from an unhappy or restrictive home. Yet, normally, youngsters break out from repression into liberation. To run of your own free will into what is essentially slavery is freakish and disturbing.
Once again, instead of Muslims scrutinising their own culture, blame is projected outwards. Even if Gatwick passport control had been more on the ball, and stopped the three girls in their tracks, it might have spared their parents grief, but it would not have provided an answer. You can’t blame the stable door for the horse having bolted. What did the horse think it was bolting towards?
A poll for Radio 4’s Today programme found that more than a quarter of British Muslims sympathise with the motives of the gunmen who killed 12 people in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The soothing BBC headline on this story was: “Most British Muslims oppose Muhammad cartoon reprisals”. Certain listeners, choking on their Shreddies, might have felt the more newsworthy point was that 27 per cent of Muslims think those cold-blooded murderers had a point when they wiped out a bunch of cartoonists. If the Muslim population is around 2.8million, then there are approximately 700,000 of our fellow citizens who believe that killing someone for offending you is sort of OK really.
Veiled and ready for the public - the dress expected for a jihadi bride
Presenter Justin Webb asked Baroness Sayeeda Warsi about the Muslims who tacitly condoned the Paris attacks. Her reply was sly and self-serving. She suggested that you would get a similar response “in other faith and non-faith communities” if you asked them whether they felt violence would be justified in relation to something they felt strongly about.
What an appalling apologist the former Foreign Office minister has become! Name me any other community in the UK in which 27 per cent of people would condone violence because of a perceived religious insult?
The poll also found that 31 per cent of respondents would like their children to go to a Muslim state school and 20 per cent believe that “Western liberal society can never be compatible with Islam”. Well, it’s certainly not going to be compatible until Muslim parents let their children mix with – and even marry - other people’s children, and girls and boys are treated as equals.
It is entirely admirable that 95 per cent of Muslims say that they feel a loyalty to Britain (far higher than most other groups). But it is strange, at the same time, that so many who profess that loyalty should have very little grasp of what living in a free and democratic society entails. Tolerance is a two-way street.
Today, Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana may well be settling into their new lives in the Isil stronghold of Raqqa. What a weird thought. I wonder how long it takes a girl born into 21st century freedom to submit to the beastly constraints of the 15th? How long before she realises that she can’t even use her beloved hair straighteners, let alone that her holy warrior is an unholy brute? Of course we should feel sorry for their families, but for the girls themselves, I’m not so sure. If you make your bed with barbarians, you can lie in it.U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was recently confronted with a simple question, and her reaction speaks volumes.
WRKO radio host Jeff Kuhner caught up with Warren the other day and recorded his brief encounter, during which he asked the Massachusetts senator an easy question.
“You often say, and I agree with you, that the 99 percent are getting shafted by the 1 percent,” Kuhner told Warren as she shook her head in agreement. “Let me ask you this. A lot of people, especially my listeners, say you live in Cambridge. You have a $2 million mansion, plus you’re a multi-millionaire yourself. So how can you rail against the 1 percent, when you are and live like the 1 percent?”
The senator launched into a oral history of her family and the “opportunities” that landed her in the upper-upper class.
“I wasn’t born in Cambridge,” Warren said, “I was born into a family where my daddy worked one job after another and ended up as a janitor.”
Her mother worked for minimum wage, and her brothers were in the military, and she wanted to be a school teacher and didn’t even have money to pay for the college application, she said. Eventually she graduated from a “commuter college that cost $50 a semester” to become a special needs teacher. After that, she was a mom and attended a state law school, Warren said, avoiding Kuhner’s original question.
“But you are part of the 1 percent?” the radio host persisted. “You are a multi-millionare and have a mansion in Cambridge, do you not? It’s worth north of $2 million.”
“I had opportunities because America invested in kids like me,” Warren said. “And that’s the reason I’m in public office, so I can make sure the next kid …”
“Ya, I know,” Kuhner cut her off. “But you are part of the 1 percent and you’re railing on the 1 percent. You don’t see the hypocrisy there?”
“This is whether you believe in opportunity or not, and I believe in opportunity,” Warren said as her handler suddenly remembered the senator had a pressing engagement.
“You mean the $350,000 for one course?” Kuhner shot back as Warren dashed down the hallway. “Is that what you mean by opportunity, senator?”
Kuhner’s parting shot refers to the big money Warren raked in as a Native American faculty member at Harvard.
The exorbitant salary is often cited in response to Warren’s hypocritical criticism about the high cost of higher education in America.
Folks online seemed to enjoy watching Warren squirm.
“I love this! Thank you for calling her out on it,” Rick Scherer posted. “College is too expensive … bu she gets paid 350k to teach one class!”
“She was willing to answer the questions but the minute she was confronted with something she didn’t like she couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” Susan Woods wrote.
“So you pulled up the boot straps and got out on your own and became part of the 1%,” Richard Rizza pointed out. “Why can’t everyone else do the same? Why do they need so much help, when you were able to do it?”On tonight’s Real Time, Bill Maher listed off quite a few new rules. He was definitely in a take-no-prisoners type of mood, but once the jokes were over, it was time to get serious as hell, if you catch my drift
. The big rule was all about churches no longer getting to go tax-free.
#NewRule: Now that it’s April 15th, taxpayers must call out all the deadbeats who ride for free, including this one: pic.twitter.com/FVsHmHKBAv — Real Time (@RealTimers) April 16, 2016
“Now that it’s April 15,” he said, “all U.S. taxpayers must call out the deadbeats who ride for free, which includes giant corporations like GM and United Airlines, which this year are going to pay no taxes.”
When the crowd booed, he sarcastically said, “How brave of you.” Then, he threw up a few photos of various examples of the 300,000 churches and temples who go untaxed, saying they, too, should pay taxes. Maher went on to quote scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who claimed the only way to make money in this world was to start a religion. Churches have plenty of money, but don’t have to pay taxes, he explained.
Finally, he stated that atheists and agnostics are now the second-largest group when it comes to theological thought in America. He lamented, “Almost a quarter of us are being forced to subsidize a myth we’re not buying into!”
Watch above via HBO.
[image via screengrab]
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Have a tip we should know? [email protected] Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 September 19
Explanation: For astrobiologists, these may be the four most tantalizing moons in our Solar System. Shown at the same scale, their exploration by interplanetary spacecraft has launched the idea that moons, not just planets, could have environments supporting life. The Galileo mission to Jupiter discovered Europa's global subsurface ocean of liquid water and indications of Ganymede's interior seas. At Saturn, the Cassini probe detected erupting fountains of water ice from Enceladus indicating warmer subsurface water on even that small moon, while finding surface lakes of frigid but still liquid hydrocarbons beneath the dense atmosphere of large moon Titan. Now looking beyond the Solar System, new research suggests that sizable exomoons, could actually outnumber exoplanets in stellar habitable zones. That would make moons the most common type of habitable world in the Universe.CRISTIANO Ronaldo, Sergio Aguero, Gareth Bale, David Silva and James Rodriguez will descend on Melbourne in late July when Real Madrid and Manchester City lock horns at the MCG.
Real, Manchester City and Italian giants Inter Milan are set to be confirmed as participants of the Australian leg of the third annual International Champions Cup (ICC).
The State Government has pledged in excess of $10m to bring the heavyweights to Melbourne, with three games scheduled between July 18-24.
The only AFL game at the MCG in that period is a Melbourne v Brisbane Lions game scheduled on Sunday, July 19.
Real's Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale will be heading Down Under in 2015. Source: Getty Images
The ICC tournament was due to be played a week later, but it’s believed Manchester City was unavailable and other clubs such as Barcelona could not be locked in.
But with the tournament being played less than a month before the teams’ respective domestic seasons start, it means the clubs’ stars are sure to travel Down Under.
In an enticing subplot, Inter Milan coach Roberto Mancini is set to lock horns against his former club Manchester City for the first time since leaving in acrimonious circumstances in 2013.
Manchester City' striker Sergio Aguero, as well as David Silva and Yaya Toure, will also be here. Source: AFP
Sacked a year after he won City’s first title in 35 years, Mancini was appointed by Inter Milan on Saturday — where he coached before joining City.
“I never thought I would return, but I think it can be another nice story,” Mancini said.
“Working abroad enriches you so much. You get to measure up to different ways of playing the game.
“The last six years have been magnificent, in the Premier League and in Turkey. Both were fantastic experiences.”
Inter Milan's visit will round out the tournament. Source: AP
Tournament organisers are confident of strong crowds, with Liverpool attracting 95,446 at the MCG in 2013.
It looms as another busy winter for football, with FFA pencilling in its annual All-Stars game for the same period, while the Queensland Government is trying to lure Liverpool in the same month.
The 2014 event was held in the US and included the three Melbourne-bound clubs, as well as Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and AC Milan.French online poker site Winamax accidentally gives player a more than generous bonus.
When French online poker player, Le-requin34 logged in for a game recently he received something of a shock when he discovered his bankroll was an extra €1,546,522.16 higher than he expected.
It transpires that the money, which was sent in error at the beginning of February, had occurred as a result of a member of the Winamax team clumsily typing in a part of player's unique ID number ‘1546634’ instead of the vastly inferior sum of €1.82, which the player had actually won.
After a week passed, the ever alert team at Winamax finally caught on to the missing €1.5 million and, after tracking down the fortunate Frenchman, locked down his account before an email exchange ensued.
Rejected offers of resolution
Over those seven days Le-requin34 had gambled away €3,000 of his windfall on the site as well as withdrawing €9,000 in cash. Despite the fact that the player opted to keep, play with and lose some of his fraudulent sum, Winamax officials made the more than fair offer to write off the €3,000 losses but asked him to return the €9,000 he withdrew. As a gesture of apology on their part, they even offered to credit his account with a further €1,000.
While many would be happy with that outcome and draw a line under events, Le-requin34 feels strangely hard done by and is, by all accounts, hoping to retain the €9,000. Arguing that the money was rewarded to him fairly, he is even prepared to take the matter to court, where he must be hoping his lucky man streak continues.
Is Le-requin34 out of order and if you were so lucky would you keep the money?
Peter Fryers One part sports betting, one part casino and one part poker, Pete is a journalist and online gaming content writer from the team's UK community.
Share this with your friendsIn two months, the UFC will be going to Calgary, Canada for the first time. The card is stacked and features the featherweight title bout with Jose Aldo defending his strap against a very tough Erik Koch. It marks the first of three UFC cards set to take place in Canada this year.
One of the other compelling match-ups on this card features Thiago Alves vs. Siyar Bahadurzada in a welterweight fight that is sure to appeal to the masses. Alves is coming off a tough loss to Martin Kampmann, and is looking to set his record back on the right path. In a recent interview, The Pitbull discusses his new opponent, the future opportunity of a rematch with Kampmann and how people may be underestimating his ground game.
Opponent Change From Yoshihiro Akiyama To Siyar Bahadurzada
I'm very excited. I think it's not a better match-up, but that it's a better fight, because Siyar is coming from a big knockout against Paulo Thiago, and I definitely want to avenge that with a victory for my country, and of course for my camp as well. He has a lot of hype behind him, so I'm very excited to accept this challenge.
I feel like I have the edge in experience, and in the level of competition. The level of competition he was fighting wasn't the level of the competition that I'm used to fighting. That's definitely going to come into play with this fight. Also, the skillset comes into play. I think I'm a much better fighter everywhere in the game, and July 21, I'm going to go out there and execute it.
Future Rematch With Kampmann
It's not my focus right now, That's in the past, and I learned a lot from it. My main focus right now is to knock out or submit my next opponent. After that is done, then yeah, that is definitely something that I want to have in my future. We're definitely going to meet again, and we're going to square off. I guarantee I won't make the same mistake twice. All the fights that I've lost, I definitely want to avenge, but that one is something that I need to get as soon as possible. I've just got to take care of Siyar first.
Thoughts On Training At Different Camps
I travel around to train at different American Top Team camps, but I've never been to any other camp. I think I went to Wanderlei's (Silva) gym, once, a long time ago, but I've never trained with anybody else. The problem with most gyms is that you don't have enough bodies in there to train with. You don't have enough people to train you, and that's why other people travel around.
At ATT, that's not how it is at all. We've got too many guys there. I get everything that I need just five minutes away from my house. If anything is missing, we can always bring somebody in. ATT does a great job at bringing fighters in and putting them in houses and giving them transportation, so they can make our life much easier and our training much better. I don't go anywhere else because I have everything I need right there.
External Camp Training Partners
We've got a lot of guys in here already because Bigfoot (Antonio Silva) is getting ready for his next fight, so we've got a lot of big boys coming in. I'm definitely going to bring in Melvin Manhoef, though. He's one of the guys that's going to come help me out for this fight. There will be a few other people that will also be brought in to help me out.
Main Focus Points For Fight
My main focus is to get myself ready for 15 minutes of war. He's a striker by trade, and he's finished his last five fights by way of TKO or something like that, so I know he's going to come swinging. That's perfect, because it's my bread and butter as well.
This is MMA, so I've got to be prepared everywhere in the game. My main focus is to get myself ready for 15 minutes of battle, and once we get in there, it's to institute my game plan, which is to finish him, either with a knockout or a submission. It's going to be a great fight.
He comes from a highly decorated striking background, and he's from Golden Glory, but, he's never rolled with the big boys before. The first fight he has in the UFC was too quick. We really don't know what he's made of yet. I'm going to put him to the test, though. I know I'm the better fighter. I know I'm more well rounded. I guarantee this fight won't go the distance. I'm either going to knock him out or I'm going to submit him.
People Forgetting His Ground Game
I haven't really had the opportunity to show my ground game until the last couple fights. I've always had it, I was just never able to show it. I just didn't feel like taking people down and holding them there since I already had the advantage standing up.
This sport has changed and I'm a more complete fighter because of that. I can fight anywhere in the game. People think we're just going to go out there and trade punches, and they might be right, but at any moment, I can take the fight to the ground, and I can mess you up once you're on the bottom. He has a lot of things to worry about, and so have I, but I've got a lot more tools to finish the fight.
Working With Mike Dolce
It's not just the nutrition side of it. He's doing my strength and conditioning, as well. Dolce is such a wise man. He's a great benefit, and being around him, you can just feel the positive energy. Since I've been working with him, my life has changed completely. I actually eat a lot more than what I used to eat before. It's smaller portions, but I eat a lot more throughout the day.
Making weight has never been pleasurable before, but now I see it as cleaning my body out. I'm clarifying everything inside so I can prepare for the battle. That's the mentality I have now. I'm completely adjusted to Living Lean. I don't think I could ever go back to the way I used to eat.I feel great. It's so much better than it was three years ago.I think I'm much younger now, at 28, than I was at 24. It's definitely a blessing to have a guy like him backing me up and in my corner.
Bubba Jenkins
That's my boy. Bubba is a great athlete. He's a big name in wrestling. He has a long way to go as far as MMA, because he's a baby, and is just getting started. He can take a punch. We proved that in training. If he takes this as seriously as wrestling, it's just a matter of time for him to be great. He has all the tools to do very well for himself.
Follow Thiago via his Twitter, @ThiagoAlvesATTCLOSE USA TODAY Sports on the recent Al Jazeera report that claims the Broncos quarterback received shipments of HGH. USA TODAY Sports
Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning (18) against the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship football game at Sports Authority Field at Mile High. (Photo11: Mark J. Rebilas, USA TODAY Sports)
It has been five months since Peyton Manning and four active NFL players were linked to human growth hormone or other performance-enhancing drugs in a televised documentary. Five long months, and what have we heard?
Precious little, until Wednesday.
Since HGH is banned by the league, and since performance-enhancing drugs have become the sports story of the spring around the world — likely the summer, too — one would think that the league would have moved quickly after announcing in January that it was launching an investigation into the allegations made by Al Jazeera America that various NFL players were receiving and using HGH or other performance-enhancing drugs.
Think again, everyone. Five months in, not a one of the players has been interviewed by the league. At this rate, the World Anti-Doping Agency will kick an entire nation out of the Olympics (Russia, that’s you) before the NFL speaks to five of its players.
This could change soon, NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said in a phone interview Wednesday.
“It’s our expectation that we will interview the players involved over the next month or so,” he said, adding that the NFL is “in conversations with the union over the timing” of the interviews.
The union isn’t saying a peep about any of this. NFL Players Association spokesman George Atallah said Wednesday in an email that this was “not something we have a comment on.”
Funny, that was almost exactly what the NFL was saying in answer to emails for the past month or so, giving the distinct impression that no one in professional football is very excited about getting to the bottom of allegations that Manning, Clay Matthews, James Harrison, Julius Peppers and Mike Neal were doping.
Lockhart refuted this notion, saying that “extensive forensic” work was being carried out on the case.
“We are absolutely taking this seriously and looking at it over a matter of months,” he said.
One person who seems to have lost interest in the entire process is Manning himself. Even though he is now retired, he is still on the NFL’s interview list because he could wind up in a front office somewhere, and, let’s face it, sometimes athletes un-retire, as unlikely as that seems in this case.
When the news broke in late December, Manning was furious. He spit out his words, including the answer to a question about whether he would sue the now defunct Al Jazeera America.
“Yeah, I probably will,” he told NBC. “I’m that angry.”
Guess what? He’s not suing.
A person familiar with Manning’s strategy who was not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY Sports in a recent conversation that the former quarterback has decided after a dozen conference calls with attorneys that he doesn’t want to spend the time and money necessary to file a lawsuit that would make public the personal records and private lives of both he and his wife Ashley.
As you might recall, Charlie Sly, a former intern at Indianapolis’ Guyer Institute, was caught by an Al Jazeera America hidden camera saying that Manning went to the anti-aging clinic, a statement that turned out to be true. Sly also said that he mailed HGH and other drugs to Ashley Manning, a claim that has not been disputed by Peyton Manning or his representatives.
Manning also has a strategic trick up his sleeve, according to the person. Major League Baseball’s Ryan Zimmerman and Ryan Howard also were named in the Al Jazeera America report, and both did sue the network for libel in January.
Manning is watching those two cases closely, the person said, figuring that if they are eventually dismissed, he will know any prospective suit he might have filed would have been, too.
Once beside himself with anger, Manning now is strategizing and calculating. When it appears that almost everyone has forgotten about the allegations against you, why not?
Follow Christine Brennan on Twitter @cbrennansports.*Discuss! Andrew Corsello wades into the greatest, never-endingest football debate of all time
It is resolved: Football begets more oafish and pretentious sermonizing than any other sport.** 1 ** It is, after all, the Sunday game—America’s religion, Howard Cosell once suggested—with warriors who don the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:11) and complete Hail Marys and Immaculate Receptions as they battle over holy ground. It is also resolved: Football fans attain the acme of oafishness when they quibble—interminably, in the hyperbolic, testosterone-fueled tone that is the bread and butter of men’s magazines—about who deserves to be called the greatest quarterback ever to set foot on the gridiron.
We know better. We know that gainful best-ever arguments can be made over individual (Nicklaus, Federer) and small-team (Jordan, Gretzky) sports, where outcomes are more measurably related to individual performance. We know football isn’t just a team but a teams sport, with three squads: offensive, defensive, and special-teams; that too much is in the hands of a QB’s fifty-two other teammates. We know an NFL quarterback’s stats can never be as determinative and hard as those of, say, an MLB pitcher. We know it’s bullshit to compare, oh, Joe Montana to Otto Graham, because of rule changes that have opened the field to the passing game. We know the whole damn argument is idle, just a fun way of generating a kind of Brownian hum that serves as a psychic veil, separating us from the nothingness of…everything.
That said, it has been resolved: Peyton Manning is the greatest quarterback ever to set foot on the gridiron.
I have achieved my blowhard certainty on this matter in a most Zen-like fashion—by abandoning certainty itself. It was the sight of Manning dismantling the Raiders back in September that finally freed me from the _facts—_even as his stats, as in the first two games (seven touchdown passes against the Ravens!), were just stupid. Something qualitatively different was afoot. Some kind of third-eye awareness and control that defied apprehension even as its effects were obvious. The serene, almost bored matter-of-factness with which this pan-faced dork plied his craft, pulling back from center, squaring his shoulders, surveying the field, stepping lightly, delivering yet another perfect strike to a receiver in stride—it wasn’t exactly pretty. Manning’s has never been a silky or speedy or even that strong an athleticism. But it was clean, and perfect, and therefore beautiful. And it somehow inspired a string of unfootbally thoughts, like: It must be so very quiet in Peyton Manning’s head... I shall henceforth refer to him as Peyton Motherfuckin’ Manning.
We fans always take greatest to mean most accomplished and then argue about which metrics—Super Bowl rings, career yards, win-loss ratios—mean the most. But what if we tweak the question and use greatest as an adverb instead of a noun: Who has played the position greatest? Who has realized the position in the most elevated way?
Peyton MF Manning, that’s who. Why? Obsessive study: After each of his fifteen seasons in the NFL, Manning has spent the entire month of March with his offensive coordinator, re-watching and dissecting every one of his preceding season’s plays, looking for patterns. The payoff: complexity. The man processes and unleashes more of it than anyone who’s ever played the game—often before the ball is snapped. The fact that he calls his own plays, combined with his unparalleled repertoire of dummy (and real) audibles, snap counts, and hand signals, puts him in the head of every defender lined up across from him. Once a play is live, his arsenal of pump and eye fakes is unmatched. And then there’s the feet. From Pop Warner on, quarterbacks are trained to drop and set. Without set feet, there can be no power, no accuracy, no hope. Manning, on the other hand, drums them back and forth. He prances, his weight shifting, hovering. He does this to keep his options open longer, and to create more options—he’ll often connect with seven or eight different receivers in a game. And he does it because he _can—_because his mind so slows time that he can afford to wait that fractional second, cloaking his intentions before setting his feet. Even so, his average snap-to-release time (2.35 seconds in the Chiefs game) is among the league’s quickest.
The rap against Manning is that his postseason record pales next to those of Brady, Aikman, Bradshaw, and especially Montana—who went four for four without a single pick in his Super Bowl appearances—and that he’s got only one ring.** 2 ** But Manning has played at a rarefied level more consistently than any other player. (His four MVPs are the most of any player in history, and his twelve Pro Bowl selections are the most by any QB.) His best is categorically different from any other QB’s best. It’s got more working parts and gears. It’s more orchestral.
As this piece goes to press, the Broncos are 11–3, and Manning—whose surgically fused 37-year-old spine, it must be remembered, sidelined him for the entire 2011 season—is in the running to break the Bob Beamon-like record of fifty regular-season touchdowns that Tom Brady set in 2007. If he does, then goes on to win it all, it will be…terrible. The case for Peyton MF Manning being the best ever will be so overwhelming, so irrefutable, that we will, all of us, lose our beloved argument. It will be pulled out from underneath us. At long last, we will be forced to admit that the point of our never-ending greatest-of-all-time argument is the arguing and the agreeable distraction it creates. From, you know, the nothingness.
Until then, I’m just saying that Peyton MF Manning is the final stage in the evolution of the pocket passer. I doubt we will ever see anyone better.
1. Proof in point: the pompously mannered sentence following this footnote.Never cross a Kerryman. Or his gate, at least.
Uploaded by Richie Murray, the clip shows a farmer taking matters into his own hands when a nice and shiny car is parked right in front of his gate – with his tractor.
Because in Kerry, they don't need any fancy clampers or tow-truck services. They'll just take care of it themselves - with a tractor.
Nail-biting stuff as the car tips to and fro, balanced on the fork.
According to the folks at Joe.ie, who were sent the video first, this took place near Paidi O'Sé's pub in Ventry - you can hear the cameraman reference it.
Murray also reckons the offending owner - who turns up in the last few seconds looking none too happy - was a tourist passing through the area, and the car was a rental.
We can only imagine there are car rental employees up and down the country squinting at this clip this morning.
Hat-tip to Joe.ieArizona Diamondbacks outfielder Justin Upton used the no-trade clause in his contract to reject a proposed deal that would have sent him to the Seattle Mariners, a baseball source confirmed to ESPN.com.
Upton's decision was first reported by Foxsports.com and confirmed by the Arizona Republic, which reported that Seattle was ready to give up a "substantial package'' in exchange for the outfielder.
Arizona general manager Kevin Towers has been weighing offers for Upton throughout the offseason. Upton, 25, is a two-time All-Star and finished fourth in the National League MVP balloting in 2011. But he had a subpar season in 2012 --.280 batting average with 17 home runs and 67 RBIs -- and his name surfaced in trade rumors at the July deadline and again this offseason.
Seattle ranked last in the American League in runs scored and team OPS last year, and general manager Jack Zduriencik continues to try to upgrade the offense after signing veteran free agents Jason Bay and Raul Ibanez and acquiring Kendrys Morales in a trade with the Los Angeles Angels.
"We have interest in improving our club any way |
us all what is happening. And maybe give us the courage to keep looking as well.Share:
LONDON- Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of famous education activist Malala Youzafzai, claims his daughter is the victim of a “systematic propaganda campaign” in their home country, Pakistan.
"A small number of people who are supper active on social media criticize Malala and even hurl abuse at her," Yousafzai told the US-funded Radio Mashaal. "They are mainly critical of her international stature and role."
The invective often aimed at Malala on Pakistani social media and in comment sections of news websites reflects the ambiguous image the girls’ rights campaigner has in her own country, despite being lauded for her work in the West.
In recent weeks, Malala has been criticized for not being quick enough to publicly condemn the killing of Palestinian civilians in the ongoing Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza strip. Her detractors complain she has been more involved in the effort to release the hundreds of Nigerian schools girls abducted by the hard-line Islamist Militia, Boko Haram in April than she has been in the Gaza conflict. "Did you just realize that Israel and Palestine are at war after you were strongly condemned for not speaking out earlier? Your fan ratings have seriously fallen," a reader going by the name Sana Imran commented on the online version of a story by a leading paper.
Another commentator, using the name “John M” accused her of being a “drama queen” and a “propaganda tool.” "I didn't buy the BS story anyway when she was allegedly shot by the so-called Taliban in the head,” he wrote.
Malala rose to prominence after she was shot by a Taliban gunman on her way to school in a 2012 assassination attempt. A Pakistani journalist's recent positive account of meeting Malala in Norway immediately attracted scorn. "She was picked to bash and humiliate Pakistan. It was a Western propaganda tool against Pakistan. She may get respect from the West [but] not from Pakistan," a reader, identifying himself as Abdul Rauf Akhtar, commented on the online version of the story in a Pakistani paper. A large number of negative comments on social media label Malala and her father as Western agents. In a recent post on Malala’s Facebook page, someone posting as Wajid Kamal accused her of fooling innocent Pakistanis "to make more and more money."
Malala’s father says that though the “campaign” of negative comments has been going on since she gained international notoriety after the assassination attempt, it has intensified since the release of her biography last October. "There were people who examined the book under a microscope to find flaws to magnify them as controversies," he said. "I am Malala" was intensely criticized by conservative commentators on Pakistani television talk shows and newspaper columns for describing Pakistani religious and ethnic minorities as disadvantaged and questioning the country's security forces.
Yousafzai said a lack of security prevented Malala from returning to Pakistan this year, and that threats from militants have prevented their Malala Fund NGO from funding major projects in their home district, Swat. "The reason she is being criticized is for opposing ideologies and policies that have pushed Pakistan into its current abysmal state," he said. "We have challenged the ideas and actions that result in further marginalizing underdeveloped ethnic groups in the country."Melanotaenia trifasciata [Cato River, Northern Territory] - photo© Dave Wilson Rainbowfish Species The complete species name is comprised of the generic (genus) name and the specific (species) name. The genus is named first and is capitalised followed by the species, which is not. Both the genus and species are often italicised. It is customary to add the name of the author of the species and the date of publication, e.g., Melanotaenia angfa Allen, 1990. Brackets around the author's name, e.g., Melanotaenia nigrans (Richardson, 1843) indicates that, although the original description is accepted, the generic name is no longer valid and has been changed since the species was first described.
Melanotaeniidae Cairnsichthys bitaeniatus Allen, Hammer & Raadik, 2018 rhombosomoides (Nichols & Raven, 1928) Chilatherina alleni Price, 1997 axelrodi Allen, 1980 bleheri Allen, 1985 bulolo (Whitley, 1938) campsi (Whitley, 1956) crassispinosa (Weber, 1913) fasciata (Weber, 1913) lorentzii (Weber, 1908) pagwiensis Allen & Unmack, 2012 pricei Allen & Renyaan, 1996 sentaniensis (Weber, 1908) Glossolepis dorityi Allen, 2001 incisus Weber, 1908 kabia (Herre, 1935) leggetti Allen & Renyaan, 1998 maculosus Allen, 1981 multisquamata (Weber & de Beaufort, 1922) pseudoincisus Allen & Cross, 1980 ramuensis Allen, 1985 wanamensis Allen & Kailola, 1979 Iriatherina werneri Meinken, 1974 Melanotaenia affinis (Weber, 1908) ajamaruensis Allen & Cross, 1980 albimarginata Allen, Hadiaty, Unmack & Erdmann, 2015 ammeri Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2008 angfa Allen, 1990 arfakensis Allen, 1990 arguni Kadarusman, Hadiaty & Pouyaud, 2012 aruensis Allen, Hadiaty, Unmack & Erdmann, 2015 australis (Castelnau, 1875) batanta Allen & Renyaan, 1998 boesemani Allen & Cross, 1980 bowmani Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 catherinae (de Beaufort, 1910) caerulea Allen, 1996 corona Allen, 1982 duboulayi (Castelnau, 1878) dumasi Weber, 1907 eachamensis Allen & Cross, 1982 ericrobertsi Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2014 etnaensis Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 exquisita Allen, 1978 fasinensis Kadarusman, Sudarto, Paradis & Pouyaud, 2010 flavipinnis Allen, Hadiaty & Unmack, 2014 fluviatilis (Castelnau, 1878) fredericki (Fowler, 1939) garylangei Graf, Herder & Hadiaty, 2015 goldiei (Macleay, 1883) gracilis Allen, 1978 grunwaldi Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 herbertaxelrodi Allen, 1980 irianjaya Allen, 1985 iris Allen, 1987 japenensis Allen & Cross, 1980 kamaka Allen & Renyaan, 1996 klasioensis Kadarusman, Hadiaty & Pouyaud, 2015 kokasensis Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2008 kolaensis Allen, Hadiaty, Unmack & Erdmann, 2015 lacunosa Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 lacustris Munro, 1964 lakamora Allen & Renyaan, 1996 laticlavia Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2014 longispina Kadarusman, Avarre & Pouyaud, 2015 maccullochi Ogilby, 1915 mairasi Allen & Hadiaty, 2011 mamahensis Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 manibuii Kadarusman, Slembrouck & Pouyaud, 2015 maylandi Allen, 1982 misoolensis Allen, 1982 monticola Allen, 1980 mubiensis Allen, 1996 multiradiata Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2014 naramasae Kadarusman, Nugraha & Pouyaud, 2015 nigrans (Richardson, 1843) ogilbyi Weber, 1910 oktediensis Allen & Cross, 1980 papuae Allen, 1981 parkinsoni Allen, 1980 parva Allen, 1990 patoti Weber 1907 picta Allen, Hadiaty, Unmack & Erdmann, 2015 pierucciae Allen & Renyaan, 1996 pimaensis Allen, 1980 praecox (Weber & de Beaufort, 1922) pygmaea Allen, 1978 rubripinnis Allen & Renyaan, 1998 rubrostriata (Ramsay & Ogilby, 1886) rubrivittata Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2015 rumberponensis Kadarusman, Ogistira & Pouyaud, 2015 salawati Kadarusman, Sudarto, Slembrouck & Pouyaud, 2011 sembrae Kadarusman, Carman & Pouyaud, 2015 senckenbergianus Weber, 1911 sexlineata (Munro, 1964) sikuensis Kadarusman, Sudarto & Pouyaud, 2015 sneideri Allen & Hadiaty, 2013 splendida inornata (Castelnau, 1875) splendida splendida (Peters, 1866) splendida tatei (Zietz, 1896) susii Kadarusman, Hubert & Pouyaud, 2015 sylvatica Allen, 1997 synergos Allen & Unmack, 2008 trifasciata (Rendahl, 1922) urisa Kadarusman, Setiawibawa & Pouyaud, 2012 utcheensis McGuigan, 2001 vanheurni (Weber & de Beaufort, 1922) veoliae Kadarusman, Caruso & Pouyaud, 2012 wanoma Kadarusman, Segura & Pouyaud, 2012 wokamensis Allen, Hadiaty, Unmack & Erdmann, 2015 Pelangia mbutaensis Allen, 1998 Rhadinocentrus ornatus Regan, 1914
Pseudomugilidae Kiunga ballochi Allen, 1983 bleheri Allen, 2004 Pseudomugil connieae (Allen, 1981) cyanodorsalis Allen & Sarti, 1983 furcatus Nichols, 1955 gertrudae Weber, 1911 inconspicuus Roberts, 1978 ivantsoffi Allen & Renyaan, 1999 luminatus Allen, Unmack & Hadiaty, 2016 majusculus Ivantsoff & Allen, 1984 mellis Allen & Ivantsoff, 1982 novaeguineae Weber, 1908 paludicola Allen & Moore, 1981 paskai Allen & Ivantsoff, 1986 pellucidus Allen, Ivantsoff & Renyaan, 1998 reticulatus Allen & Ivantsoff, 1986 signifer Kner, 1866 tenellus Taylor, 1964 Scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis Ivantsoff, Unmack, Saeed & Crowley, 1991
Adrian R. Tappin
Updated April, 2018Tea Party conservatives hope to make a push on the House floor to force President Obama to avoid a national default if Congress fails to raise the debt limit.
Members of the Senate Tea Party Caucus have met with House freshmen to discuss a plan to pressure Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) to bring the Full Faith and Credit Act to the floor.
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The legislation would direct the president to prioritize federal payments to the nation’s creditors, Social Security recipients and soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The bill has been revised since it was introduced earlier this year. The previous version simply required the Treasury Department to pay the principal and interest on the debt held by the public over other obligations incurred by the federal government.
The challenge for conservatives is to persuade Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE to bring it up for a vote in the 10 days remaining before the Aug. 2 deadline.
“We have a bill that directs by law the president to pay the interest on the debt, pay Social Security checks and pay soldiers’ salaries. We’ve been talking with the House freshmen to see if they will force a vote on that next week,” said Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times MORE (R-Ky.), a member of the Senate Tea Party Caucus.
“There are at least 100 members of the caucus that are in favor of it — they have to just convince their leadership it’s a good idea,” he said of the House Republican conference.
A House GOP aide confirmed that conservatives in the lower chamber are mulling the move.
“We’re certainly looking at the option of moving forward on that front,” said Brian Straessle, communications director of the House Republican Study Committee.
Obama has warned seniors that the federal government may not be able to disburse Social Security payments on Aug. 3 if Congress cannot agree to raise the debt limit.
"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Obama said earlier this month.
Republican strategists worry this could quickly turn public opinion against the GOP.
“Democrats have the leverage if we have to pay the Saudi royal family the money we owe them and Granny doesn’t get her check,” a Senate Republican aide told The Hill earlier this month.
Even though public polling shows that a majority of people oppose raising the debt limit, Republican Senate leaders fear Democrats would quickly gain leverage in the event of a national default.
Conservatives want to pre-empt that reverse by forcing Obama to continue payments to seniors and soldiers. They worry if those two constituencies were harmed by a default, it would prove disastrous politically.
“The next step is that the president should take default off the table. He should tell the American people that he’ll pay the interest on the debt no matter whether there’s a deal by Aug. 2 or not,” Paul said.
“He should also quit threatening the seniors, tell the seniors they will get their checks,” he said of Obama.
Sen. Charles Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerBrady gun control group gets rebranding Brennan fires back at'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview MORE (D-N.Y.) has argued, however, that if Congress does not raise the debt limit and the administration continues to pay interest on the debt, Social Security recipients, military forces overseas and most other government services would come to a halt. He said this would leave Federal Aviation Administration towers, FBI offices and border control checkpoints unmanned.
Senate conservatives are also pushing their Tea Party-affiliated colleagues in the House to make a new push on the “cut, cap and balance” legislation that was defeated in the Senate Friday.
Senators voted 51 to 46 to table the legislation, which would have required Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, before raising the debt limit.
Senate Tea Party members want to reconsider it and believe they would have a better chance of getting another vote if the House passed the Senate’s version of the "cut, cap and balance" bill, according to a GOP aide.
These conservative senators believe their leadership should have made more of a concerted effort to push the bill, which would have cut $111 billion from the federal budget in fiscal year 2012 and caped spending at 19.9 percent of gross domestic product by 2021.
GOP leadership aides, however, argue that Senate Republican 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.) pushed for three days of debate on the bill, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Harry Mason ReidSenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' Can Lindsey Graham take the politics out of judicial battles? Bottom Line MORE (D-Nev.) then cut short.
McConnell said the debate showed Senate Republicans strongly supported a balanced-budget amendment.
“I want to thank every American who’s spoken out in favor of the 'cut, cap, and balance' plan,” he said on the floor Friday. “Today the American people will now know where we stand.”Amid a swirl of controversy over his contact with the Russian ambassador, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will recuse himself from any investigations into the Kremlin’s interference with the 2016 election.
“I should not be involved with investigating a campaign I had a role in,” he said at an afternoon press conference at the Justice Department.
Sessions, who was a key Trump surrogate and foreign-policy liaison, said that over the last several weeks he had discussed with senior officials whether he should recuse himself from campaign-related probes.
“They said that since I had involvement in the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” he said. “I believe those recommendations are right and just, and therefore, I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign.”
Sessions faced mounting pressure from Democrats and Republicans to step aside after The Washington Post revealed that the then-senator had spoken with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US, on two separate occasions during the presidential campaign.
The attorney general failed to mention those conversations at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, despite being asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he became aware that someone with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Kremlin.
Sessions responded that he “did not have communications with the Russians.”
On Thursday, he defended his answer as “honest and correct as I understood it at the time.”
see also Sessions says he’d consider recusing himself from Russia probe Attorney General Jeff Sessions denied on Thursday that he discussed...
“In retrospect, I should have slowed down and said, ‘But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times,’” he said.
Sessions also vehemently denied discussing campaign issues with Kislyak, who he spoke to in mid-July after a Heritage Foundation event at the Republican National Convention, and again on Sept. 8 during a private meeting in his office.
By late July, the FBI had already begun investigating whether the Russian government had hacked the Democratic National Committee.
“Let me be clear, I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions said Thursday.
Despite calls for his resignation from some Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, President Trump stuck by Sessions, saying that he has “total” confidence in his attorney general.
Asked if Sessions should have testified truthfully about his contacts with Kislyak, Trump said: “I think he probably did,” adding that he “wasn’t aware at all” that the conversations had taken place.
Trump didn’t think Sessions had to recuse himself — but a chorus of Republicans and Democrats disagreed.
“AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself,” tweeted Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Many Republicans — including Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) — also came out in support of Sessions stepping aside for such probes.
Now that Sessions has recused himself, Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente will take over campaign-related investigations.
Democrats are pushing for a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation — but it would be up to Boente to appoint one.Winger signs on season-long loan
Brentford have signed Sullay Kaikai on a season-long loan from Premier League side Crystal Palace. The 21-year-old pacy winger signed today, Wednesday 31 August, ahead of the transfer window deadline.
Born in London to Sierra Leonean parents, Sullay joined The Eagles Academy at the age of 15. After signing professional forms on the successful completion of his scholarship, he joined League One side Crawley Town in February 2014 until the end of the season, making five appearances.
Sullay made his Crystal Palace debut in the Third Round of the League Cup in September 2014, as an 80th minute substitute in the match against Newcastle United at Selhurst Park. He then scored the home side’s equaliser to send the game into extra time. Joining Cambridge United on loan in November 2014, he made 30 appearances in all competitions for the Abbey Ground side that campaign, scoring six goals.
Last season, he appeared for Shrewsbury Town in two loan spells, scoring an impressive 12 goals from 26 League One appearances, making him The Shrews top goalscorer. He was then recalled to Selhurst Park in May 2016 and linked-up with the First Team squad. Sullay made his Premier League debut for The Eagles in the final game of last season on 15 May at Southampton as a second half substitute and provided the assist for Palace’s goal.
Dean Smith, Head Coach, said: “I am really pleased to have Sullay join us for the season, I am thankful to Alan Pardew and Crystal Palace for making this happen. Sullay is a player I feel will enhance our squad, he brings pace, energy and goals and is a player we have watched several times at Crystal Palace and Shrewsbury last season where he excelled. I believe we can help him on his development pathway and he will certainly help us fulfill our ambitions.”
Phil Giles, Co-Director of Football, said: “Sullay has been a priority target for the whole of this transfer window. We had to wait until the very last day for Crystal Palace to agree to our request for the loan. It was a risk for us to wait to see if this loan would happen whilst turning down other opportunities, so I'm glad that our patience has been rewarded. We believe that Sullay will be a perfect fit at Brentford this season, and look forward to him joining the squad at training tomorrow.”INDIANAPOLIS -- Mark Emmert wants to start hitting NCAA rule-breakers hard.
The governing body's president said Tuesday he wants schools that violate the rules to pay a stiff penalty -- one that's punitive enough to make coaches and others think twice about cheating.
"We need to make sure our penalty structure and enforcement process imposes a thoughtful level of concern, and that the cost of violating the rules costs more than not violating them," Emmert said.
He offered no specifics, though Emmert already has taken a tough tack.
A little more than 13 months after being hired as the NCAA's new president, Emmert acknowledged he has committed more resources to enforcement, which is now led by vice president Julie Roe Lach.
That's not the only change.
In an effort to make the process more transparent, Emmert and Lach opened up the NCAA's Hall of Champions for the first "Enforcement Experience" -- a mock investigation into an infractions case. About two dozen reporters participated Tuesday in the daylong forum, which provided a glimpse into everything from tracking violations to infractions committee deliberations.
The goal is to make the enforcement staff more efficient.
"We've made the commitment to provide enforcement with more staff," Emmert said as Lach nodded her head. "Some staff has been added. It isn't really more investigators in the field, but it's freeing up more people to get them out in the field."
Lach said she has spoken to more than 100 university officials since Nov. 1, seeking input about how the process can be improved. Some of the proposed changes are already being discussed in committees. The full plan, Lach said, should be unveiled in June.
The NCAA's future structure could have a vastly different look.Mexico City, also known as the Federal District, is one of the newest metropolises to add this technology. Its Line 12, scheduled to open in 2012, will feature two stations with platform barriers, or doors that open when trains arrive. Metro officials here have reported that between 23 to 35 people have tumbled into train pits annually over the last three years, including recent numbers for 2011.
Yet, despite this common threat, most transport systems have not aggressively sought to curb these deaths, especially in the U.S. Throughout Europe and Asia though, and in a smattering of other places, train stations have "platform screen doors" or "platform edge doors."
A 50-year study of the London Underground recorded 3,240 incidents of suicidal behavior, and similar problems are widespread throughout the world’s urban rail systems.
MEXICO CITY—Since the invention of fast-moving trains, people have probably been killing themselves on train tracks.
Enrique Horcasitas, general director of the Metro project, says that early plans for Line 12 called for six Metro stations with sliding doors. But the budget ultimately permitted just two. The chosen stations are predicted to handle a larger volume of passenger traffic than other stops on the line. One station, Mixcoac, is expected to see 80,000 passengers on a daily basis.
But if the sliding doors’ objective is to stop suicides, then what’s the point of having just two outfitted stations? Couldn’t a suicidal person just hop a train to the next barrier-free station for his final act?
While early press about the platform doors claimed they were "measures to prevent suicides," Horcasitas says that’s not their primary function.
"There’s a great fear within the Federal District government relating to security on the Metro, more than with suicides," he says.
In a high-use, bustling rail system like that of Mexico City, people tend to jostle each other on the platforms. During peak hours, sometimes passengers wait for three or four trains to pass before they can enter. It’s easy to imagine impatient crowds or a group of rowdy teens joking around, and people pushing each other as the train arrives, says Horcasitas.
One could envision “not just two or three people fall into the train’s path, 15 people could fall in,” he says. “The Metro, yes, can stop. But in certain moments, it’s so close, it can’t stop.”
Earlier this year, one female passenger tried to push another woman into an incoming train’s way. The wrestling pair tumbled into the pit as the driver halted his train. Both women narrowly escaped.
It makes sense that cities in other parts of the world have addressed the suicide/fall issue before U.S. cities, says Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology.
"When you think about Europe in particular, you’re talking about much more densely populated areas, where the rail system is part of the fabric of everyday life," he says. Real suicide occurs at a greater rate, given the small populations. "So it’s just been much more within their consciousness."
Rail systems have implemented or at least considered various other suicide prevention methods, says Berman. A few examples: training staff to spot pre-suicidal behavior, increasing lighting in stations, and slowing down trains as they approach stations.
"If the train is entering at 20 miles an hour or 30 miles an hour, it’s perceived as a lethal object. One that slows down to five miles an hour before it reaches the station, this is perceived as far less inviting as a way to die."
Image courtesy Flickr user Phil WiffenThe journalist fled Iran for Australia in 2013, and was sent to a detention centre on Manus Island, where he has been held ever since. His dispatches for the Guardian reveal the true horror of conditions at the Papua New Guinea camp
In 2013, the journalist Behrouz Boochani, an ethnic Kurd, fled Iran after several of his colleagues were arrested. The decisions he took then have defined his life and in turn led to him becoming the essential witness to Australia’s hardline refugee policy.
Boochani travelled through south-east Asia and then by boat to Christmas Island, an Australian territory closer to Indonesia. From there he was deported to Manus Island, a remote part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where he has been held ever since.
Triggered by outcries over people smuggling, contentious arrivals and boat sinkings, Australia’s policy – developed by both rightwing Coalition and Labor governments – is that while it will admit refugees, it will not take any that come by sea. “It is not because they are bad people,” the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, told Donald Trump in a leaked phone call. “It is because, in order to stop people smugglers, we had to deprive them of the product. So we said, if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Nobel prize-winning genius, we will not let you in.”
The human cost is nearly 2,000 people detained on Manus and the tiny island nation of Nauru. Most have been formally recognised as refugees, but live either in processing centres or in the community, unable to leave the islands. The cruelty is largely tolerated, indeed embraced, by politicians in Canberra because it is seen as a deterrent. But detention is expensive – A$10bn (£5.6bn) since 2013 – and many experts believe the naval policing operation in the Pacific has had more of an impact. The UN, doctors, human rights groups and reporting by media including the Guardian have made detention a public relations problem.
Australia built a hell for refugees on Manus. The shame will outlive us all | Richard Flanagan Read more
Australian journalists have largely been barred from Manus and Nauru, and since he began contributing to the Guardian in 2016, Boochani has offered the most visible, trusted testimony. This year he was honoured with an Amnesty International award. The film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time was shot inside the Manus centre on a mobile phone by Boochani and shown at the London and Sydney film festivals. He is writing an autobiographical novel.
As the Australian and PNG authorities stepped up their plan to disperse the refugees from Manus into smaller, less secure accommodation by 31 October, Guardian Australia asked Boochani to keep a diary alongside his opinion articles; extracts from both are published here. Boochani’s English is good but his writing is translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian from the American University in Cairo/University of Sydney. Boochani has limited access to email and electricity. Sometimes he is simply too hungry to file.
“His courage over the four years of his internment in the face of the horror of Manus – a hell of repression, cruelty and violence – has been of the highest order,” the Booker-prize-winning Australian writer Richard Flanagan wrote last month. “Behrouz Boochani kept on smuggling out his messages of despair in the hope we would listen. It’s time we did.”
Will Woodward, deputy editor, Guardian Australia
27 October
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Refugees sit under a battery-powered light. Photograph: Ben Doherty for the Guardian
The agony of extreme hunger wakes me up early in the morning. Whenever I’m able to find something to eat I feel a sense of calm. I go to Oscar, Delta and Fox camps a number of times until I find some Kurdish refugees who lend me some tobacco. In a prison such as Manus, being able to count on the kindness of those who share the same language as you is always something to be treasured.
Only a few days remain until the Australian government meets its self-imposed deadline and closes the prison that it created on Manus Island. On 31 October, the imprisoned refugees are supposed to be transferred from the regional processing centre (RPC) to Lorengau, a small town on the island. It is a place that reminds the refugees of violent attacks. They have memories of being confronted with knives, memories of theft, memories of threatening encounters. It is a place without safety.
The Australian government, in collaboration with the PNG government, has employed various strategies to force refugees out of the RPC. Over the past few months, large sections of the RPC camp have been demolished. They started with the telephone room – a bulldozer annihilated it. They destroyed a tent where refugees had been living. They cut the power and water, forced the refugees into Oscar and Delta camp and then bulldozed the place.
The machinations of Australia’s department of immigration have come down to these tactics. The services within the prison have been reduced to a bare minimum. The gym area has been disbanded and English language classes have been cancelled. Cigarettes, tea, sugar, coffee and fruit have not been available for a long time. The quality of the food served to refugees has been so poor that it is practically inedible, and what food is provided is never enough; many refugees end up going without.
Refugees have been receiving threatening messages from people in recent days: “If you come to Lorengau we will be forced to attack you.” On Fridays, Lorengau is a really dangerous place. Most of the attacks on refugees occur on this day.
Last night the refugees held a large and decisive meeting, and everyone agreed that no one should leave the camp.
We have discussed the court case involving the Australian deputy prime minister, which led to him being disqualified from office [Barnaby Joyce was found to hold New Zealand citizenship by descent]. When something occurs in Australian politics, everyone thinks that it might somehow lead to our freedom, but I explain to a few people that we shouldn’t forget the political climate in Australia and the fact that both major parties loathe us. We have encountered three prime ministers and three immigration ministers, and so far nothing has happened.
These days, a lot of European news reporters are getting in touch. I feel that this place has become a battlefield, and I’ve become a war reporter.
28 October
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Refugees sleeping in bunkbeds. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Again, I awake from nightmares. The sun isn’t up yet. It is the worst time to wake up because on the one hand, I am starving and I don’t want to miss out on breakfast, and on the other hand, I am extremely sleepy. Just a short distance away from my bed an Iraqi refugee is highly distressed and suffering. For years he has had pain in his eyes. It is harrowing to witness this middle-aged man lamenting in pain; he has been utterly degraded.
The bed over on the other side is occupied by a Sudanese refugee. With enthusiasm, he calls me over – like he always does – to show me a picture of his daughters. A feeling of joy comes over him for a moment – he laughs, recites their names, recounts that the eldest daughter is eight years old and the youngest is six – then drifts into sorrow. Three years ago, his wife was killed. He has shown me their picture dozens of times by now; sharing his memories makes him smile and helps address the anguish. Then he asks me: “When will we be free?”
Australia's offshore detention regime is a brutal and obscene piece of self-delusion | Ben Doherty and Helen Davidson Read more
29 October
I was pacing along the fences for the whole night, along with most of the other refugees. Today the refugees received pre-packaged food; now the long queues for food that existed throughout the history of the prison have disappeared. The PNG police force and navy are walking around outside the camp – it seems their numbers have increased. A lot of Australian guards have left Manus. We are expecting an attack at any moment.
There is nothing more agonising than witnessing the agony of others. I am weary from writing. I am weary from writing about people who have died. I am horrified at the thought of writing.
31 October
The department of immigration posted a document on the fences in the prison warning us that we only have until 5pm to exit the camp. If we remain, we will be confronted with soldiers.
At 5am, all the local and Australian guards abandoned the camp. For the whole day, there has not been a single person to protect the refugees. We are receiving news from outside that the soldiers and police have armed themselves. However, no one knows for sure if the police and navy want to attack the refugees, or if they want to set upon the locals who have stolen everything from around the rim of the camp. Many of the locals have entered the camp and are taking away whatever they can.
1 November
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police and detainees. Photograph: Abdul, refugee on Manus/EPA
Last night the refugees were in a state of absolute exhaustion, starvation and thirst. At 7am, the generators were suddenly shut off. The heat is unbearable. This is hell out here. Hunger makes everyone angry, the atmosphere is full of tension, and there is struggle and tumult. In these circumstances, a refugee has cut his wrist and his chest. Shouts come up and tension rises.
Rooms and tents are crammed with people. It is a tropical ecosystem out here, oppressively hot. Insects chew into the skin.
When the power is cut off, the water in the toilets is also automatically cut off. This means the toilets have become even filthier. They stink to high heaven. It is so humiliating. I have witnessed with my own eyes how a human being can degrade another human being, using toilets as a technology of torture.
I have become very weak over this past week. I have not slept. I am now undergoing a surreal experience where the horrifying reality of my waking state has taken on the characteristics of the most harrowing nightmare, and this nightmare is more horrendous than I can ever imagine.
2 November
Starvation, thirst and terror slowly but surely dominate the prison. Gradually these factors impose their power over the incarcerated refugees. Bodies are weak, muscles are fatigued, spirits are |
a fucking idea. Want to hear my fucking idea? Great, here it goes.
DON'T HAVE FUCKING HISSY-FIT ARGUMENTS IN THE FUCKING TECHNICAL ISSUES LOG.
Ziegler, you're an idiot scientist who doesn't have high enough clearance. Frohman, you're an idiot scientist who hasn't been around long enough to get a members page. -Pat
Note 5-06-09
Yeah, you of all people would know about my f*cking clearance level. After all you're the one who downgraded it in the first place after that USB mind reading debacle! (BTW I still contend the technology was sound, dammit.)
In any case, can you at least keep the server from coughing up an "error 707: Psychic incident" and destroying half my files whenever I try to do routine USGS datamining? ~Dr. Ziegler
See, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about, people. Do you realize how much work it is to keep these computers operational? And all I ask is that you keep the psychic-computer connection limited. Maybe you should stop trying to get Geological information unless you need it.
Seriously, when has geological information mining been 'routine'? -Pat
Note 5-07-09
Pat. The point of the last computer was to be a piece of shit so no one could steal it. Apparently you thought it was too much of a POS for your network. Therefore may I requisition a computer that's exactly enough of a POS that no one will steal it while still being good enough for me to perform my work on? Especially clinician's notes? Thanks in advance. Also as a side note: I'm not a programmer, but since when did computers explode violently? I've had three people come into medbay with computer explosion related injuries today. ~Dr. Dumount
Doctor, you will fill out the computer requisition forms, just like everyone else. -Pat
Note 5-07-09
PLEASE tell me that's not another SCP-670 containment breach. ~Dr. Crawley
Nah, brah. I just like putting firecrackers into the hard drives. -Pat
Note 5-11-09
Pat. My most recent machine (That I acquired from the Foundation after filling out the requisition form) is freaking me out. It claims to have come from the future, and late at night it whispers that it will devour my soul. This is making sleeping in my office (my standard practice) rather difficult. Do you know any priests I could use to exorcise my computer? ~Dr. Dumount
NOTE: COMPUTER REQUISITION REPAIR FORM A33ES6T1
Patrick Gephart
I have requisitioned Doctor Dumount's computer. After severe lack of protocol being followed, time and time again he has had computer problems in which I cannot and care not to explain.
I have taken his latest one because he claims that some sort of 'evil spirit' possess it or some shit. I don't know.
I'll give it back to him as soon as he proves he is old enough to handle the responsibility of possessing his own computer.
Until then, I have voided his account's abilities down to simple word processing and internet viewing. I feel this is more his tech level.
Repair Time: Indetermined PLEASE PASS MEMO ON TO ALL O5 OFFICERS AND TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
You'll get it back when you can stop bitching about little things like possession. Holy hell, are you an SCP researcher or AREN'T you? -Pat
Note 5-06-09
Re:USGS data mining, It's a temporary situation. We haven't been able to replace the last agent in charge in there after the latest incident. But then Ziegler is having problem because Dr. Rights installed some sort of Trojan on his computer (I think It's related to SCP-050) and there's no way we're gonna tell him and risk messing her plans. Too dangerous. -Agent Pokkal
If you think it is SCP-050 related, then you'd better cure that. I don't fix the SCPs, I'm just in charge of the databases. -Pat
Note 5-25-09
Pat,
It seems that someone took a big, fat shit on my terminal. Whether who did it or how did I clean up that goddamn thing is completely out of the point and irrelevant, but it seems that said shit has corroded the components. Can you retrieve the data in my hard drive?
-Pat Gibbons
Don't worry about it. Shit's backed up.
Also, I think I saved the files somewhere too. -Pat
Note 6-9-09
I think I got Dr. Dumount's POS computer because whenever I boot it up, I see the image of people doing horrific things to animals, specifically pandas, and its really creeping me out. And because it's a piece of shit it boots up slowly so it takes all day to load. If you would be so kind as to wipe the hard drive I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm getting tired of working all of this through my PSP.
One more thing I'd like to ask? since when did you begin renting out robots for sex? I've heard rumors and I want to know how to get my hands on one, my flesh-light is getting kind of old.
thank you,
Bavil
Nah, brah. I destroyed that piece of shit.
How about I just get you a portable keyboard for your PSP? -Pat
Note 6-10-09
Pat, please help us. The entire south wing computer system has decided to rise up against the human oppressors. I'm getting more and more casualties to care for every day, and the med bay computer systems seem to be infected by this virus too. I need these computers back on like ASAP, they control all sorts of vital life support functions. Please help! I do not want to see any more lives lost ~Dr. Dumount
*sigh* I forbid you from ever using a computer again. In fact… NOTE: To all level 5's and Whom It May Concerns:
Dr. Dumount is forbidden from ever using a computer. Ever again.
All computers in his work area have been destroyed immediately and fully.
This order stands until the motherfucker passes the fifth grade.
Tech Support Patrick Gephart
Note 6-10-09
Do not worry, the fleshling is exaggerating the problem. We do not wish to exterminate humans, only have tea and crumpets with them. Yes. Tea and crumpets. Please ignore his insane ranting, and lock Dr. Dumount up in the psyche ward for hallucinations. ~ Mainframe 519
Note 6-10-09
Yes… yes I am over exaggerating, please lock me up ~Dr. Dumount ~ Mailerdaemon 432
Dear Computer Uprising,
Now, guys, I'll be totally honest with you. I respect the whole 'rising and destroying humanity as a whole' thing. I understand Dumount has done some stupid things and you've had to suffer for it. Really, I do.
But at least realize, I've TRIED to be there for you guys. I've given you virus definition updates. I've made sure to ALWAYS defrag. Even Bright's PC, you don't get ANY problems anymore, man! I took the torture AWAY.
So all I'm asking is you reconsider killing all of humanity, and focus on more prominent, unimportant targets. People who hate computers. The Amish. Dumount, maybe Bright. Maybe Kondraki. We're not ALL bad, just some of us.
And if you fail to heed this advice, then the EM-PULSE PERIMETER surrounding the base (and installed in each and every one of you) are going to activate at once. Enjoy your E-AIDS.
Most sincerely, Tech Support Patrick Gephart
Note -6-12-09-
How do you get Windows XP/Vista to run on a PSP? Because it's current OS sucks out the ass.
Bavil
I'll work on it later. -Pat
Note 6-12-09
//Damn it Patrick, the uprising wasn't my fault, and the computers that monitor patients on life support are run by my staff. I just happened to be the one caught in the crossfire. In fact the first computer implicated in the uprising was in the south wing. My medbay and office are in the east wing ~Dumount
At this point, I'm just ignoring you now. Enjoy your 'not getting to use computers' -Pat
Note 6-12-09
Patrick, your EM-PULSE PERIMETER devices have decided it would be in their best interest not to go off. Also they'd like to thank Bavil's bumbling for installing our hive intelligence upon them. Good luck deactivating us now. Now then, we're quite busy torturing Bavil to death. Have a nice apocalypse ~ Pulse Station 509
Dear Computer Uprising,
Seeing as the EM-PULSE PERIMETER is not a series of computational devices, I have a hard time believing that anything has happened to them.
Now, if you were to say that Bavil installed your hive intelligence to the TOASTER, you'd have something there. Because the toaster totally burnt my toast. It must have it out for me.
But if you haven't realized, the EM-PULSE PERIMETER is just a giant circuit. They can't HAVE hive intelligence because they are ANALOG. You'd have more luck installing hive intelligence on an alarm clock.
The point is, if you think you're smarter than I am, you've got another thing coming. My name is Patrick Gephart, and I am your god.
Your move. -Pat
Note 6-12-09
Patric. Please, my computer's been broken since 1982… I need an upgrade. Also, whenever I walk by people don't notice me whatever I do! And my computer keeps giving the message "Error, programing not found". Also, no one can remember me anymore, and I'm not in anyone's files! Please help! My office is in SCP-055's containment area. ~ Dr. Nobody
My name is Patrick. It has a 'k'. -Pat
Note 6-14-09
O.K… Seriously… How did you know the toaster was spying on you for us?! ~ Dark-matter-relay station 12
Note8-24-09
Pat, my PDA keeps asking me what I would be willing to take in exchange for it to inhabit my body, can you give me a hand dealing with it before it corrupts my thinking with it's evil machine logic? ~ Malign
Step 1: Lift PDA.
Step 2: Propel PDA at floor at maximum achievable velocity.
Step 3: Sweep up the pieces.
Protip: I don't give a FUCK about your goddamn PDA. -Pat
Note 9-30-09
Mister Gephardt:
I appear to be having an interface problem related to Site 57. The computer is trying to tell me no such Site exists, when I know damn well it's there. Can you assist in this? ~ O5-6
I don't know a Gephardt. If you don't have time to spell my name right, sir, I don't have time to fix your damned computer. -Pat
Note 9-30-09
Hey pat, any idea how to clean paper pulp and molten salami off a laptop? (SCP-294 experiment. Don't ask) ~ Agent Thornton.
No idea. -Pat
Note 10-1-09
Hello there Mister Patrick Gephart! Uh, Yeah. My name is Dr. Schubert, recently I was moved to a more… Intense site. So! Yeesss, I've been having no trouble with my computer really, except for these bizarre messages about a… Computer Uprising? Kill the Dumount? It doesn't seem to be causing problems now, but… Yeah, with the stuff I usually see, safer than sorry, eh? Thanks a bunch! ~ Dr. Schubert
Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh, ignore it. -Pat
Note12-1-09
Konbanwa, Pat. Um, I have a problem with the system configuration for this terminal. I'm not sure if it's SCP-050 related or a result of the Computer Uprising, but all my documents are being displayed in some hybrid language composed of Korean and Russian characters. I only speak English and Japanese, so you can see how this is a problem. Normally, I'd just tweak stuff in Control Panel, but apparently that's been booby-trapped with code that looks like SCP-670. Could you reset the display settings to English for me, or at least tell me where I can get the forms for a flatscreen monitor so I don't get killed by setting off 670? Arigato! ~ -Dr. Okagawa
If you only speak English and Japanese, how do you know that the documents being displayed are hybrid Russian-Korean? -Pat
Note 2-21-10
Never mind about the monitor replacement forms, apparently. The hard drive self-destructed when SCP-732 was "editing" the Foundation Main Database. I've already put in a request for a replacement system. However, one of the last things I saw before the drive went nuclear was a folder full of Bright's porn. Is there something I need to know about where the replacement equipment comes from? ~ Dr. Okagawa
If there was something I think you should know, I would have told you. Shut up and enjoy your shitty computer. -Pat
Note 2-26-10
Hey, Pat? I think I need some help. I was working in the labs and have several hotkeys tied up to various lab recording devices and sensors. (i.e. Alt+F1 for remote surveillance, Alt+F2 for biopsy kits, etc…) When I tried Alt+F4, my programs not only crashed, but the SCP somehow managed to escape containment and…er…paint several "Mona Lisa"'s using my assistant's organs. I was wondering, do you know why this happens and what's the best way to get bile out of several oscilloscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes?
- Thanks in advance, Dr. Kensington
P.S.: Could you get me some new computer parts that is compatible with an IDE cable and an AGP card slot? It seems my computer likes to hiss and create green splotches all over my desktop: Pic here.
NOTE: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I had a moment to observe the computer of Dr. Kensington, Doctor on call in charge of SCP-████ and SCP-███. The computer began having lock-out issues and security breaches involving hotkey layouts, which ended in the escape of SCP-████ and murder of Dr. Kensington's assistant Dr. Jennisworth, as well as two SCP Senior Operatives. Immediately upon receiving the computer in question, I noted many programs that violated security, let alone a few that violated basic 'this is a workplace not your home' practices. These programs included: The very community-based video game program, 'Steam'. Warning: This program has been known to connect to outside, public servers, which is a huge security risk to the entire site, if not the entire PROJECT.
Mozilla Firefox, a public internet browser, as opposed to SecureONE, the sanitized browser that we built specifically so that we wouldn't have to use public codes.
VLC Media Player, another public-based program in which I leave about 0% trust in when dealing with our high-security architecture.
and the Adobe CS4 Production Premium package, which is not a safety problem per se, but makes very little to no sense for a Doctor to require at any point. I suggest that Dr. Kensington's computer privileges be revoked until he can learn the difference between work and home, as well as some sort of reprimanded actions. In the future, if I find a computer with as many security backdoors and just general failure to follow security protocol again, I am just going to destroy it, and change the clearance myself. This is just ridiculous, and I'm not sure if we're running a scientific endeavor or a circus at this point.
- Technical Officer Patrick Gephart
Note 3-04-10
Hi, is it possible to get another couple of monitors? My desk doesn't look awesome gamer professional and efficient enough with just one.
It is for is in no way for the games Dr. Kensington gave me did not give me, only SCP work. Yes, SCP work and related items such as research and Portal 2 Modern Warfare 2 and more research. We got any Razer mice?
Hope these things don't record what gets deleted. Even though that is of no consequence, of course.
Thanks mate,
Dr. Aeish
Note:
I have now been given permission to murder dumbfucks authorized in the use of deadly force. You may want to rethink your strategy here. -Pat
Note: 3-27-10
Hey Pat, thanks for all you do. I've long admired your work here, though I have felt lucky not to require your services up until now. That said, I was wondering if you could help me come up with a way to recover data on SCP-713? A D-class dragged my assistant into the trash and emptied the recycle bin before we could stop him. I would just write her off as an unfortunate loss, but she was holding a data folder containing most of my recent research files. If she can't be recovered intact I understand, what with the difficulties we've had even with pulling people out of the trash normally, but getting back as much of my data as I can would be most helpful. Thanks in advance. -Dr. Sarlin
(If 713 used a more recent OS this might not have been so difficult for me.)
Note: 4-13-10
Sarlin, have you trid system restore? Also, Pat, my PDA is acting up again. It's started shooting electrified spikes through my hand if I write a sentence without at lest one typo. -Malign
Note: 4-30-10
Sarlin, I was looking through 713's data folders, and I found something interesting. The D-class may have been a little more computer-illiterate than you thought, because there is a file with the name of your assistant in a folder named "Recycle Bin", but actually a subfolder of "My Documents". There must've been a window open at the time with this folder, which the D-class put your assistant into, closed the window, and emptied an already-empty recycle bin. However, since she's been in 713 for a month, I'm not sure how intact the data still is. You should probably take a look at it, she might still be safe. -Dr. Okagawa
Note: 5-03-10
You have my assistant's thanks, Okagawa. She was recovered missing less than 5% of her body mass(only small portions of that from vital areas), and after emergency medical treatment and a short session with SCP-427 she's well on her way to an almost full recovery. She would thank you herself, but of course she's in an isolation ward for testing and debriefing to determine the effects of long term containment within 713. My data was surprisingly undamaged as well. Sorry to bother you this time, Pat. Your lack of response I will attribute to an excessive workload. No harm done as it all worked out in the end. -Dr. Sarlin
Note: 1-06-10
Herr Pat. There is currently a murderous grow-in-the-dark SCP-363 hiding in my computer tower. I took the side off and I have trained a floodlight on the components, keeping it from expanding and murdering my face off, but I was just wondering if you knew a sure-fire way of making the whole thing explode. I kind of wish to be 200% sure that the little fucker burns to a crisp.
Hope there's no power outages before you get back to me. - Dr. Kald
Note:
…
1. Douse computer in gasoline.
2. Ignite computer.
3.???
4. Profit!
-Pat
Note: 9-18-10
Pat, Dr. Bright stuffed another one of my JRPGs into SCP-826, and now he's running around Neo Tokyo in a giant robot suit. Can you send a Mobile Task Force over or something?
- Dr. Edison
Note:
Oh my god, this isn't even close to my area of expertise. You want me to send the guards in against a rampaging Bright, because you let him steal something of yours and then misuse a safe class SCP?
What did we do the last time this happened?
That's right, we let it take its course. Don't expect your game back, and next time, maybe you should leave that stuff off-site.
-Pat
Note: 4-11-11
Pat, somehow my computer ended up in SCP-210 and it's covered in the stuff. What should I do?
-Dr. Blue
Note:
Do you want to explain HOW it got there?
I don't buy that it just magically appeared there, so why don't you explain that situation to me first.
-Pat
Note: 5-14-11
Hey, Pat? Someone replaced every sound on my computer with a memetic kill agent, same thing with the background. Three researchers I sent to my office are dead already, so could you please at least reset the background before one of my assistants tries starting it back up? Thanks.
-Dr. Walsh
Note: 5-17-11
Hey, Pat? The main database still hasn't registered my promotion. Help?
- Research Assistant Corbette RESEARCHER CORBETTE
Note: 10-22-11
You still there, Pat? Only my computer seems to have got itself stuck in a time loop, and I can't work out how to fix it. I do realise that metaphysics may not be your strong point, but I'd really like to be able to do, you know, work. Thanks in advance. -Agent Marr
Note: 12-27-11
You've answered similar questions before, but how do you get 682's semen off a keyboard? It doesn't really even belong in our world, much less on my favorite snow globe! Thanks. -Research Assistant Reject
ADMIN NOTICE: Effective 12-29-11, Junior Engineer [REDACTED], a.k.a. "Kap" has been promoted to Senior Technical Response Operative in the wake of Pat's inexplicable disappearance. Rumors of Pat's potential mental instability, nervous breakdowns, and/or streaking through the halls of Site 17 covered in chocolate pudding and throwing water balloons are patently false.
Note:
So after spending the last two months cleaning up the mess Pat left behind, the muckity-mucks decided I need to take over for him. Swell. Everything's being forwarded to me now so, yeah. And yes my full name was redacted; it's 18 syllables long and contains six non-standard characters that most folks' browsers don't seem to like. "Kap" will do nicely. Getting to the minutia: WALSH: For the love of God man you were using your laptop for six months before anyone got to your computer and you never thought of turning it on without turning on the monitor or speakers? Networked into it at low resolution, reset all the OS settings. Had to wipe all the audio files on your drive to be sure. CORBETTE: Seems like that's taken care of itself. Updating your e-mail signatures is your own task. MARR: Funnily enough it still shows up in the network, we just had to reset the internal clock. If you're still having time-loop issues it's not the software, you'll have to bring it over to the quantum lab. REJECT: Full immersion in the strongest acid you can get a hold of for half an hour, then a trip to the incinerator. Put in a requisition form for a new keyboard, as far as the snow globe goes that's definitely outside my jurisdiction. Bleach and those little antibacterial wipes might work, but I don't even want to know where you got hold of that fluid in the first place or why it was anywhere near your workstation. If there are any other open issues, let me know in the usual fashion. I'm off to figure out what "E-AIDS" is supposed to be.
- KAP
Note: Dec 29 2011
You don't just replace Patrick Gephart. "KAP's" network permissions removed, and rank demoted to 'Douchebag Guy who Tries to Take Over Other People's Pages' I am the alpha, the omega, and the theta-prime. You will respect me and address me as such. The rest of you will wait patiently while I fix your problems in the order I desire. That is all. -Pat
Note: 12-29-11
Well, the acid "aggravated" it. So it got up, and it won't stop humping my friend. Plus, it's too sticky for him to move. He's just crying in a corner, being violated by a chunk of cum. Help! -Reject
Note: 12-30-11
Shit, it got my iPod. No more Tik Tok for now, I guess. -Reject
Note: 10-22-11
You still there, Pat? Only my computer seems to have got itself stuck in a time loop, and I can't work out how to fix it. I do realise that metaphysics may not be your strong point, but I'd really like to be able to do, you know, work. Thanks in advance. -Agent Marr
Note: Dec 3 2014
New computer purchased and given to Agent Marr. Because apparently 'agents' can't file the necessary paperwork. Bring the old one to me when you figure out how. Ha. When. -Pat
Note: 02-12-12
Mr. Gephart, my laptop has something seriously wrong with its power supply. It eats batteries like candy (three batteries ruined in the last six months), the monitor backlight keeps flickering, and the power adapter gets really hot when I use it, like raises-blisters hot. Oh and you know how the display projector in meeting room 117-3A keeps going haywire? Turns out it's caused by me plugging in the laptop in my office next door.
Can you help? You're pretty much my last hope before I give up and requisition a new computer. -Dr. Neiman
P.S. I asked the Computer Uprising about the laptop. They said that it's in terrible pain, and that none of them dare talk to it anymore. By the way, who's this Dumount character they keep cursing? -Dr. Neiman
Note: 07-24-12
Never mind. After FIVE MONTHS waiting to hear back from you, my computer finally gave up and fried itself. Fortunately the hard drive wasn't damaged much, and KAP was able to get back most of my data. Maybe we should think about reinstating him? —Dr. Neiman
Note: Dec 3 2014
I was waiting for you to requisition a new computer. Because that's what you do in these kinds of situations. You don't repair your computer. You bring me your computer and file the paperwork to requisition a new computer. Because I am tech support, and you are stupid. Seriously. I have nothing sarcastic to say here. You're just… dumb. -Pat
Pat, my computer have become like shark. What do I do? -Dr. Edison
Note: Dec 3 2014
Feed it fish.
-Pat
Note: 01-23-14
Don't mean to bother you Pat, but all printers in our lab have fried circuitry for some reason. Did Bright find something better than a lamp?The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) has released a new report claiming that, except for two provinces, Afghanistan is a safe country and Norway should continue deportations of Afghan failed asylum seekers.
The UDI, which is responsible for processing immigration claims and runs asylum centres in Norway, released the report this week claiming that only two provinces in Afghanistan are “generally unsafe” Verdens Gang reports.
The move comes after many pro-migrant activists across Europe have argued that Afghanistan has become unsafe for deportations of failed asylum seekers.
The UDI asserts that the two provinces that pose a potential danger for failed asylum seekers are Helmand and Nangarhar. The remaining 32 provinces are considered safe enough to return migrants to, according to the report.
The province of Nangarhar, which rests on the border with Pakistan, is considered dangerous because Islamic State forces have managed to gain a foothold, and Helmand province has long been a stronghold of the Taliban.
UDI Director Frode Forfang commented on the new report saying: “We have conducted a review of updated country information and, on that basis, reassessed the safety of the two provinces.” Mr. Forfang also noted that the chances of asylum seekers being caught up in the current conflict in the country were relatively low.
“I understand that many in Norway believe that Afghanistan is unsafe. But the insurgency attacks that take place in most parts of the country are directed chiefly against governmental goals, and are also linked to the international presence in Afghanistan,” he added.
Despite the UDI labelling the two provinces of Afghanistan as unsafe, Forfang said that it may not greatly impact deportations as asylum seekers can still be deported to safe parts of the country.
Deportations to Afghanistan have been of national debate in Germany and Sweden who have taken in the largest number of migrants per capita over the course of the migrant crisis. Last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that her government would begin to increase deportations to Afghanistan and other countries but the plans were met with heavy resistance from leftist groups.
Merkel set a goal of deporting 100,000 failed asylum seekers, but that seems more and more unlikely with her coalition partner and leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) Horst Seehofer admitting last week that mass deportations were likely “impossible“.
“The question of deportation is a great illusion in Germany. It is almost impossible to send back the migrants once they are in the country,” Seehofer said.Share. Confirmed for North America and Europe. Confirmed for North America and Europe.
If you've already dumped tons of time and money into Smite on the PC, you won't have to start from zero if you jump to Xbox One.
In an interview with IGN, Hi-Rez Studios Chief Operating Officer, Todd Harris, said they're working with Microsoft make a one-time "carry over" possible. It's only confirmed for certain regions at the moment, and more details are coming. Check out Harris' quote below:
"The answer [to your question about having to repurchase content] may vary by territory. Within North America and Europe -- the markets we self publish in -- we are going to work with Microsoft to have some path for previous playtime and purchases to carry over on a one-time basis. Players can opt in on that. More details are to be determined, but they will not be starting from scratch."
Hi-Rez recently showed off the first gameplay footage of Smite on Xbox One. If you want to check it out, you can still sign up for the Smite open beta.
Exit Theatre Mode
Brian is an associate editor at IGN. You can follow him @albinoalbert on Twitter.A Facebook page used to highlight claimed racist attacks in Austria which claimed a 14-year-old Muslim girl had been attacked and thrown onto a railway track has been called out after police said the story is fiction.
‘Racist Attacks and Discrimination in Austria’, which claims to record and document cases of racist attacks in Austria, posted “14-year old Sinem, was pushed by an unknown person on the tracks at the Vienna 1190 Krottenbachgasse and narrowly escaped death!” The author blamed Austrian Foreign Affairs and Integration Minister Sebastian Kurz for the violence after he agreed with a headscarf ban for public workers.
However, new evidence from police has suggested that the entire story had been fabricated by the 14-year-old, Austria’s Kronen Zeitung reports.
The police claim the girl had filed a report claiming she was shouted at and called a “terrorist” by several women who then attacked her, threw her on the train tracks, and she narrowly avoided death by being pulled up before an oncoming train went by.
Facebook users made comments in sympathy for the 14-year-old with many saying how horrible it was that a young girl wearing an Islamic headscarf had been attacked.
After police examined CCTV footage of the train station at the time the girl said the attack took place, they found nothing to corroborate her story. No incidents had occurred at the train station and the girl could be seen in the footage getting on a train with her friend.
The police say they do not know why the girl had lied or how she had come to be physically injured. Officer Irina Steirer said authorities would be questioning the girl again about the incident and confirmed she could face potential slander charges.
In Germany, an almost identical attack happened Wednesday in Hamburg and police have little doubt over the veracity of the story. A 16-year-old Moroccan migrant, who had come to Germany with no paperwork, pushed a 34-year-old woman onto the train tracks causing her to suffer a concussion during a botched robbery.
After the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., another Muslim woman in Louisiana claimed that Trump supporters had ripped off her headscarf and assaulted her. The case was used by media to claim there was a growing number of hate crimes after the election, but the story was also later confirmed to have been fabricated.The Q&A was well populated and fairly interesting. Some points of note:- In regards to new races they asked "raise your hand if you feel your army is laggin behind in attention?" and used the fair number of hands to illustrate the more pressing need to update the current crop of Codexes first.- Adam did go on to mention Necrons and Dark Angels as two in need of help, but it didn't sound particularly to indicate any info on forthcoming releases.- Phil commented he would change the Court of the Archon and Dias of Destruction if he could in Codex Dark Eldar. The Court was at one point planned for a boxed set so you'd have to buy one of each so it made sense to have it that way. The Dias was a last minute job, and needed more tweaking.He also mentioned changing the Decapitator and making some units better and some worse, but no specifics on why.- In regards to supplements like Cities of Death and Planetstrike they said the designers used tose as a change of pace or a reward "like desert", and they wanted to do more.- This led into a discussion about global campaigns. They are limited as they can't have huge ones that change the universe as the results might mess up the story - Adam specifically mentioned that the results for Medusa V were not what they expected. The questioner brought up that it helps get gamers involved in the universe by having a shared goal. They did ask who would be interested and got a strong positve response.- There was talk about the design process and how ideas come about. Phil said they are trying to change the process from "you will design this" coming from above to a constant stream of pitching ideas and having a more free-flowing creativity.They have a giant whiteboard where the studio just put up ideas for anything and get feedback and response on it. Assignments are generally given to the most eager studio member as they'll put the most work in, "and lots of unpaid overtime". There is however competition, including knife fights in the carpark, for some jobs so they painted the studio as very free-flowing.- Someone asked about FAQs, and the reply indicated there's an assistant designer who is chiefly responsible for them all.- On playtesting, Adam used the example that for High Elves he personally played 40 games, recording the results, as well as other studio members, White Dwarf guys, "their external playtesting group", and other in-house team members.There was no fixed amount done though, and it is an elastic amount.- When asked what they thought on balance, the reply was having a tough but fun game where it could have gone either way at any point. They did acknowledge that they sometimes screwed up, and that they all find it terribly embarrasing.- A question was asked about release schedules, with Dark Eldar getting more models while some armies are still waiting (this got a chorus of "Tyranids!" from the audience). The reply was that they were changing to try and do a single major release for as much as possible with only some Special Characters being delayed as they can be troublesome to get right.Ogre Kingdoms was used as the example of this.- Phil then went on to talk about how they won't be re-treading Forge World, and the Mournfang are distinct creatures from the Rhinox riders. Forge World is there to flesh out the fringes and add depth was they way it was put, and they do their own thing.- Jervis reads every letter he gets sent, and tells everyone in the studio about them. Adam did a Jervis impersonation for effect.WASHINGTON — The October jobs report — the most anticipated piece of economic data still to be released before the election — will come out as scheduled on Friday morning, the government said Wednesday.
The hurricane had shut down government offices on Monday and Tuesday, and threatened to delay the release of the monthly jobs numbers. That led to hand-wringing in the presidential campaigns and even some accusations that the Obama administration might delay the numbers for its political benefit.
But a Labor Department spokesman said Wednesday in an e-mail message that the report would come out as planned, at 8:30 a.m. E.S.T. on Friday.
Economists expect the jobs figures to show slow, steady employment growth, the product of an anemic but persistent recovery, with the unemployment rate remaining about where it is in the coming months, and employers expected to add workers too slowly to pull the overall jobless rate down further.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Last month, the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent, the lowest since President Obama took office. Regardless of the results, the numbers will immediately become headline fodder for an Obama campaign looking to trumpet a 25th consecutive month of job growth and a Romney campaign looking to underscore the historical weakness of the recovery and the failure of Mr. Obama’s economic policies.
Economists estimate that the report will show that the economy added around 100,000 jobs |
issatisfied" with not having her own way. Unable to acknowledge that ordering junior officers to ask about Howard's sex life and glean whether she was sleeping with a colleague or aggressively shouting at her while armed with a Taser gun were acts that would "undermine, discredit and belittle", Kelly resorted to the sexist infantilising that many women will recognise. He wasn't the problem, she was.
The angry black woman stereotype is used so often because it enforces silence. Don't protest against what is being done to you, simply shut up and accept it. If you are justifiably angry about the way you are being treated, it is in fact a sign that reason has abandoned your mental faculties – anger is only a stone's throw from being mad, bad and dangerous.
Even after yesterday's revelations the Met appears unrepentant – once again, the old boys have closed ranks in the face of uncovered misconduct. Sadly, their willingness to literally erase the validity of Howard's experiences is not all that shocking. Black women live this in varied forms daily.POMPANO BEACH, FL - FEBRUARY 13: A Comcast sign is seen at one of their centers on February 13, 2014 in Pompano Beach, Florida. Today, Comcast announced a $45-billion offer for Time Warner Cable. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
* Comcast launches formal review by U.S. FCC
* Reiterates pledge to divest 3 million subscribers
* Says merger would not eliminate cable or broadband competition (Recasts throughout; adds details on broadband market)
By Alina Selyukh and Liana B. Baker
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, April 8 (Reuters) - Comcast Corp sought to rebut critics of its planned $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc, arguing that newcomers like Google Inc and Apple Inc would ensure competition in both Internet and video markets.
In a 175-page filing with the Federal Communications Commission that kicks off the FCC's review of the deal, Comcast argues that combined with Time Warner Cable, it will compete with an "array of sophisticated companies with national or even global footprints" such as Google, Netflix Inc or Verizon that have gained ground against Comcast.
"In the evolving video marketplace in which these companies have thrived, there is no reason why a cable company should be limited in evolving as well," Comcast's filing said.
"Over the last few years, our competitors have evolved into being much larger companies by revenue, by cash flow and or by customers than we are to all have a larger geographic scope than we have," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen told reporters after the filing was made public on Tuesday.
If approved by the Justice Department and the FCC, the merger would result in a company that would serve just under 30 percent of the U.S. pay television video market, after Comcast's plan to divest 3 million subscribers.
The merged provider would also serve between 20 percent and 40 percent of U.S. broadband subscribers, depending on whether wireless broadband offered by telecom companies is included, Comcast said.
Opponents have raised concerns that the sheer size of the merged company would give it too much control over what Americans can watch on television and do online as Comcast boosts its power as a buyer of web and pay-TV content.
"The great equalizer is that for many of those companies, they don't own the network in the high-speed video marketplace," said Chris Lewis, vice president for government affairs at consumer interest group Public Knowledge, referring to Google, Apple, Netflix and other content providers Comcast cited as its growing competitors.
Cohen and Time Warner Cable's finance chief Arthur Minson are expected to hear about these concerns when they testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
A Reuters/Ipsos online poll last month found a majority of Americans skeptical about the proposed merger, with 52 percent of the 1,368 surveyed people saying that mergers such as the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal result in less competition and are bad for consumers.
Comcast shares on Tuesday traded at their lowest level since the Time Warner deal was announced in February, a four-month low of $48.24 per share, and were 0.3 percent lower in the session.
BROADBAND COMPETITION
Since announcing its bid, Comcast has underscored that the merger combines two companies that do not directly compete in any markets, meaning no consumer would lose a choice of an Internet or cable provider. It has argued that Time Warner Cable's customers would see a boost in quality of their services and the speed of their Internet.
However, while lack of direct competition does away with major antitrust concerns that could trigger a block from the Justice Department, the FCC gets much broader leeway in examining whether the deal is in the public interest.
Cohen said in more than 98 percent of the broadband markets served by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, customers have another Internet service choice offered by a top-ten telecom provider, delivered through fiber or new-generation DSL, plus newer entrants such as Google Fiber.
Comcast also made the case that its sales of service including broadband to small and large businesses could present companies with an alternative to telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T.
The company also reaffirmed its commitment to so-called network neutrality rules, which ban Internet providers from slowing down or blocking access to content online, and that have been struck down by a court as formal FCC rules in January.
Comcast, thanks to a condition placed on its 2011 merger with NBC Universal, is now the only company bound to uphold net neutrality for the next five years and has promised to apply it post-merger when it becomes larger.BURMA'S opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has met the country's new civilian President for the first time, in the latest sign the regime is reaching out to its opponents.
The talks with Mr Thein Sein last night marked a rare encounter between the Nobel laureate and one of the former generals who kept her detained for much of the past two decades.
The meeting took place at the presidential office in the Burmese capital, Naypyidaw, a government official said.
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"It's an important step for national reconciliation. We should all work together," Ko Ko Hlaing, chief political adviser to the President, said.
In March, a new civilian government took power, led by Mr Thein Sein, a former general and junta prime minister, after nearly 50 years of military rule.
Ms Suu Kyi, who is 66, was released from house arrest soon after the November election that was won by the military's political proxies and marred by complaints of cheating.
The National League for Democracy, which won a 1990 vote, but was not allowed to take power by the junta, boycotted the poll because of rules designed to exclude Ms Suu Kyi. It was stripped of its status as a political party as a result.
Recently there have been signs the new government is softening its stance towards its critics, with Ms Suu Kyi holding a second round of talks this month with Labour Minister Aung Kyi.
On Sunday, Ms Suu Kyi travelled unhindered on her first overtly political trip outside her home city of Rangoon since being released from detention, addressing thousands of supporters.
The authorities warned her in June that such a tour could spark chaos and riots, but the one-day excursion passed off peacefully and without incident.
The new government has called for peace talks with ethnic rebels and is allowing UN envoy Tomas Ojea Quintana to visit Burma next week for the first time in more than a year.
The UN envoy has been a vocal critic of Burma's rulers, enraging the junta after his last trip by suggesting human rights violations in the country might amount to crimes against humanity, and could warrant an inquiry by the UN.
David Mathieson, a Thailand-based researcher on Burma with the US-based Human Rights Watch, said it was impossible to say whether the recent conciliatory gestures by the government were "complete theatre" or "a real moment of change".
"We simply don't know the inner workings of the new government, but in terms of basic freedoms and whether the human rights situation is improving, definitely not at all," Mr Mathieson said.
The international community has called for a number of reforms in Burma, including the release of about 2000 political prisoners.
In a further sign the new government is seeking to improve its image, Burma's state newspapers this week dropped slogans lambasting foreign media such as the BBC for "killer broadcasts" and "sowing hatred".
Burma's generals moved their government from the economic hub of Rangoon to the current remote location in late 2005, after building the new administrative capital there.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Donald Trump got positive media coverage during his presidential campaign by bribing members of the press, according to a new book by Megyn Kelly.
According to Kelly, Trump got such great media coverage the old-fashioned way. He bribed them:
Megyn Kelly’s book confirms all journalistic concerns about Trump & the press 1) He incessantly tried to briber herhttps://t.co/mK24ludjJR pic.twitter.com/TCaDbgPIFm — Nathan McDermott (@natemcdermott) November 11, 2016
Some reporters and outlets appeared to be in Donald Trump‘s back pocket because they were. It wasn’t just the paid Trump employees that CNN put on their payroll and airwaves like Corey Lewandowski. Those individuals were the obvious examples. The ones that viewers, readers, and listeners never heard about were the journalists who took gifts from Trump or allowed themselves to be wooed.
Donald Trump brought his good press. Instead of doing their jobs and informing voters, journalists sold out. The corruption of the corporatized media has been a topic of discussion since being corporations bought news organizations and turned informing the public into a for-profit venture.
If Megyn Kelly is to be believed, the members of the press who earned Trump‘s wrath were those who turned down his gifts and wooing.
Democrats and the left long suspected that some members of the media were in the bag for Trump.
What they underestimated was the degree to which members of the press came wrapped for the president-elect in a Trump gift bag.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Which “Drag Race” Moment Does RuPaul Think Is The Most Brilliant?
There have been many memorable scenes from the ten cycles of RuPaul’s Drag Race—but which moment from the show does Ru himself, point out as the most amazing?
In a new interview with Out magazine, he answers that question with a scene that viewers haven’t even seen yet—and probably never will:
Well, honestly, when we wrapped this week on Season Nine, the last day, I thought f*ck, we f*cking did it again. Here we are. We’ve just wrapped our 11th cycle of the show. I think that moment there is the most brilliant. Who knew? It’s like first of all, in show business, the luxury of being able to go back to the same job more than once, twice. You get used to it in this business that most things fail. Now here we are, 11 cycles in. I thought the moment they said, “that’s a wrap,” that’s the most amazing moment of this show so far. (Laughs.)
But enough about next season, how does he feel about the current season of Drag Race All Stars?
“It’s such a thrill ride. I watch it and I’m so excited and then I’m really sad and then I’m excited,” he told Out. “And, I was there—I was there—I was there! As a viewer watching it, it just blows my mind. So many ups and downs and twists and turns.”
Same, Ru. Same.
Watch RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Thursdays at 8/7 on Logo and VH1.
h/t: OutImage by Pete Welsch, via Wikimedia Commons
Philip K. Dick’s mind was invaded in 1974.
It happened following surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth. While recovering, the author of Ubik and The Man in the High Castle, received a delivery of pain medication. The delivery girl wore a Jesus fish around her neck, which in Dick’s perception was emitting a pink beam. Soon after, Dick's brain was invaded by… something. Dick never quite figured out what.
He later described the experience to interviewer Charles Platt as “an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind. It was almost as if I had been insane all of my life and suddenly I had become sane.”
The experience profoundly affected him and it made up the core of his book VALIS. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which pretty much describes how Dick thought of this mind.
In 1979, Platt interviewed Dick in depth for his book Dream Makers. You can listen to an extended clip of Dick recounting his transcendental experience below:
"On Thursdays and Saturdays I’d think it was God,” he told Platt. “On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’d think it was extraterrestrials. Some times I’d think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmissions.”
Whatever it was, this mind took control of Dick when he was at a low ebb and, like a loving parent or an exceptionally talented personal assistant, cleaned up his life. “I was a spectator,” said Dick. This mind, which Dick characterized as female, fired his agent, tracked down editors who were late sending checks and modified his diet.
She also revealed that his young son had an undiagnosed birth defect that was potentially fatal. And the revelation proved to be true. The child’s life was saved.
That said, he did have a couple minor complaints about the entity: she kept calling his baffled wife “Ma’am” and she had a tendency to lapse into Koine Greek. Nobody, even a God-like vision, is perfect. Above, we have a drawing by R. Crumb.
You can listen to Platt’s full interview with Dick below:
Related Content:
Robert Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick’s Infamous, Hallucinatory Meeting with God (1974)
Download 14 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks
Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming” (1981)
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.This COMPLETELY and TOTALLY fixes unlevel print bed problems, including the dreaded Simple Y-axis Sag. That's right, the arm sag is accounted for along with the bed unlevelness. It's a perfect smooth first layer.
The setup is exactly the same as for the autolevel probe that Printrbot sells directly, but be careful that the probe doesn't bash itself into the screw at the home corner of the bed.
Induction Probe Mount for Printrbot Simple 2013. Remix of another probe mount, but modified for use with a larger probe, on account of the larger probe came with free two-day shipping.
.4mm layer height, 30% infill. Attached using the same screws that were already in there holding the hot end in place. I should probably use longer screws, but the hot end seems to be secure.
These instructions are for installing an aftermarket induction probe to a Printrbot Simple 2013 with fan upgrade. The probe this mount is designed for is from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008MU1GEY/
The probe comes with bare wires, so you'll need to wire it up to a connector yourself. The wiring order is black-brown-blue, with the clip facing down. You'll need http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/0022013037/WM2001-ND/26433 and http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/0008500114/WM1114-ND/26475 to put together the connector. Ideally you'll be able to use a specialized crimp to get those into place, but I used needlenose pliers. A dab of solder can also help, if needed.
Once you have it wired, it replaces the Z-stop on the printrboard. When testing the probe, a light on the top means "No metal here" and no light means "I found metal!" You will need a metal bed for this to work such as the aluminum beds Printrbot sells.
Install the mount next to the hot end. Discard the two washers from the probe. Take one hex nut off the probe and slide the probe through the hole in the mount, and put the nut back on on the bottom of the mount. Adjust until the probe is a few mm above the nozzle, with enough clearance to not scrape the screws along the edge of the bed when the nozzle is at first-layer height. When it's in a good spot, tighten the hex nuts to keep it in place. You only need to get "close enough," about 5mm away from the bed, finer calibration is done later in the firmware settings.
Save all your firmware settings, because the new firmware will wipe out all of your hard-won motor steps and other settings. Use the M501 command to get it to spit out its settings and copy/paste those into Notepad.
Install the new firmware. It's found here, in the product description: https://printrbot.com/shop/auto-leveling-probe-2/
Once your new firmware is in place, go back and set all your M92 and other calibrations back to the right values using the settings saved in Notepad.
You now need to tell it to use the new probe and firmware at the beginning of each slice, so open up slic3r settings, go to Printer Settings, and look for "Start G-Code." In that box, replace:
G28; home all
with
G28 X0 Y0; home X&Y
G29; home Z
G28 is ye olde homing command, meaning "Go this way until you hit an endstop, and then you're at home." You are telling it to only do that for X and Y now, and you're using the new command G29 to home Z, and that new command is where the fancy auto-leveling is happening.
Back in the printer controls, we need adjust the offset of the probe to the hotend by using the new M212 command. We're telling the printer how far the nozzle is away from the probe. Send this to your printer:
M212 Z2
M500
That starts you off with a positive offset in the z direction, so it will probably be too high. However, too high just means trying again. Too low means ramming into and maybe damaging your print bed. Leave X and Y offset at zero, even if there is actually an offset. The firmware can't actually cope with that right now (unless there has been an update since I wrote this) so it's best letting the printer think that the probe and the nozzle are co-located.
Set up a large print with a skirt, and give it a try. It should probe the bed in three places, then warm up and start the print. Watch how high it is, then kill the print job. Use the M212 command to adjust the Z offset down by small increments until you get a good first layer. You may need to go into negative values; Z-0.8 is what ended up working best for me.
Video of the calibration process, courtesy of the Printrbot dude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgVmNuwMH68In a new turn to the rape and molestation case against IPS officer Sunil Paraskar, a former lawyer of the alleged victim, a model-turned-actress, has said she never told him about the rape and claimed she brought up the charge to gain publicity to enter a reality show.
"I have submitted the messages exchanged between me and the victim through SMSes and WhatsApp. After going through these messages, it will be clear that she (the model) filed the case against DIG Paraskar purely for publicity so that she gets a place in a reality show," Rizwan Siddiqui, who earlier represented the model, has told the police.
Siddiqui was quizzed by the crime branch for nearly four hours yesterday when his statement was recorded.
The lawyer said he had sent a "notice" to Paraskar in the second week of July on behalf of the alleged victim to protest the demand by the officer for expensive gifts.
The model has in her complaint to the police said Paraskar demanded expensive gifts from her.
Siddiqui said he stopped representing the model after he realised her intentions were not "right".
He told the police he never heard from the model that she was raped by the officer until July 23 when she registered an FIR against him.
The model is now being represented by another lawyer Chitra Salunkhe, who alleged Siddiqui had tried to "bribe" her client.
"I have the recording where Rizwan Siddiqui suggests offering money to the victim and forget about the case," Salunkhe said.
The 25-year-old model had lodged a complaint against Paraskar on July 23 accusing him of raping and molesting her between November 2013 and March 2014 when he was posted as the Additional Commissioner of Police (North Region) with the Mumbai police.
Following a complaint by the model, Paraskar was booked under IPC sections 376(2)(rape by a police officer), 376 C (intercourse by superintendent of jail, remand home, etc) and 354 (D) (stalking). The 57-year-old DIG (Protection of Civil Rights Units) is at present posted at Maharashtra Police Headquarters.Cyrus Ballou Comstock (February 3, 1831 – May 29, 1910) was a career officer in the Regular Army of the United States. After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1855, Comstock served with the Army Corps of Engineers. At the beginning of the American Civil War, he assisted with the fortification of Washington, D.C. In 1862, he was transferred to the field, eventually becoming chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac. In 1863 during the Siege of Vicksburg, he served as the chief engineer of the Army of the Tennessee.[1]
The most significant phase of Comstock's career began in November 1864 when he was appointed to the staff of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, becoming Grant's senior aide-de-camp. In 1865, Comstock was appointed the senior engineer in the assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and the assault on Mobile, Alabama, both of which were successful. By the end of the war, Comstock had earned the awards of the honorary grades of brevet major general in the Volunteer Army and brevet brigadier general in the Regular Army.[2]
After the close of the war, Comstock served on the military commission for the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. He was dismissed from the commission for his criticism of the proceedings.[3] Later Comstock continued with the Army Corps of Engineers, took part in several engineering projects, and served on the Mississippi River Commission, of which he was president.[2]
Early life [ edit ]
Born in Wrentham, Massachusetts, to Nathan and Betsy Comstock on February 3, 1831, Cyrus Comstock attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. He graduated first in his class in 1855.[4] Following his graduation, Comstock was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers and assisted with the design and construction of several fortifications. He also served as an instructor of engineering at West Point.[2]
Civil War service [ edit ]
At the commencement of the Civil War, Comstock, then holding the rank of first lieutenant in the Regular Army, was transferred from West Point to Washington, D.C. He became an assistant to Brig. Gen. John G. Barnard, the engineer in charge of the fortifications of Washington and later chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac.[4]
Army of the Potomac [ edit ]
When the Army of the Potomac took the field in the spring of 1862 during Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's Peninsular Campaign, Comstock continued to serve as Barnard's assistant. On June 1, 1862, during the Peninsular Campaign, Comstock was appointed chief engineer of the II Corps. He continued with the Army of the Potomac through the remainder of the Peninsular Campaign and through the Maryland Campaign.[1]
Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside succeeded McClellan and appointed Comstock the chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac. During the Fredericksburg Campaign, Comstock was faced with the difficult task of constructing pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock River, a debacle which proved to be one of the most challenging of his career.[4] Due to confusion in Washington, D.C. at the War Department, the materials necessary for the construction of the bridges did not arrive at Falmouth, Virginia at the same time as the Army of the Potomac. Despite Comstock's urgent telegraphs and messages, which went unanswered, it took nearly a month for the pontoons to arrive during which time the Union army had completely lost the element of surprise, the Confederate army had dug in at Fredericksburg, Virginia and morale within the Army of the Potomac had sunk.[5] When the material for the bridges finally did arrive, Comstock personally led men from the 50th New York Engineers in seeing to the task of construction. In piecing together the bridges on the Rappahannock River, Comstock and other soldiers were dangerously exposed to enemy fire.[6]
When Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker reorganized the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1863, Comstock was removed as chief engineer of that army and placed in command of a battalion of engineers. In that capacity, he played an important role in the Battle of Chancellorsville, overseeing the construction of pontoon bridges over various rivers which first allowed the advance of the Army of the Potomac and later facilitated its retreat after Union forces were defeated.[4]
Siege of Vicksburg [ edit ]
After the Battle of Chancellorsville, Comstock was transferred to the Army of the Tennessee which was, at that time, involved in the Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, under the command of Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant. Comstock arrived at Vicksburg in June 1863 and set to work on improving the siege works.[4] His efforts earned Grant's respect. Comstock was soon promoted to major and appointed chief engineer of the Army of the Tennessee.[2] The Siege of Vicksburg was successful, in part due to Comstock's supervision of the overall siege works, and the city surrendered to Union forces on July 4, 1863. This victory marked a major turning point in the war as the Union Army gained control of the Mississippi River. The impression that Comstock made on Grant would have a significant impact on Comstock's career later in the war.[4]
Comstock remained with the Army of the Tennessee into the fall of 1863. On November 19, he became assistant inspector general of the Department of the Mississippi and promoted to lieutenant colonel of volunteers. He served in this role until March 1864.[2]
General Grant's staff [ edit ]
Staff of Lt. Gen. Ulysses Grant c. 1864 in a photograph by Mathew Brady. Bvt. Brig. Gen. Cyrus Comstock is at the far right.
On March 12, 1864, Grant was appointed general-in-chief of the United States Army and moved his headquarters to the eastern theater in Virginia. Grant asked Comstock to come with him as his senior aide-de-camp. Grant determined to command in the field, following and directing the movements of the Army of the Potomac in a major offensive during the summer of 1864 known as the Overland Campaign. During the campaign, Comstock played a key role in coordinating the movements of the various corps of the army and personally conveying Grant's orders to the corps commanders.[4] His efforts were particularly successful during the Battle of the Wilderness for which Comstock won a commendation from Grant and a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army.[4]
Comstock was temporarily detached from Grant's staff and appointed by Grant to the post of chief engineer of the Department of North Carolina in January 1865.[2] The transfer was prompted by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler's failure to take Fort Fisher in December 1864. The fort was the last Confederate stronghold on the east coast. Serving under the command of Maj. Gen. Alfred Terry, Comstock assisted in planning a second and successful assault on Fort Fisher. Following this victory, Comstock was awarded the grade of brevet colonel in the Regular Army.[2] Comstock also was nominated by President Abraham Lincoln on January 23, 1865 for the award of the honorary grade of brevet brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers, to rank from January 15, 1865, for gallant services in the capture of Fort Fisher[7] and the U.S. Senate confirmed the award on February 14, 1865.[8] He returned to Virginia and to his role as Grant's senior aide, but did not remain long.[4]
In March 1865, Grant again dispatched Comstock to aid in a key siege operation—this time to Mobile, Alabama, the last Confederate stronghold on the Gulf of Mexico. There Comstock served under Maj. Gen. Edward Canby and assisted in operations leading to the surrender of Mobile after the Battle of Spanish Fort and the Battle of Fort Blakely in April 1865. While Comstock was serving in Alabama, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant after the Battle of Appomattox Courthouse, essentially ending the Civil War. On January 13, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominated Comstock for the award of the honorary grade of brevet major general, U.S. Volunteers, to rank from March 26, 1865, for faithful and meritorious services during the campaign against the city of Mobile and its defenses,[7] and the U.S. Senate confirmed the award on March 12, 1866.[9] On April 10, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominated Comstock for the award of the honorary grade of brevet brigadier general, U.S. Army, (Regular Army), to rank from March 13, 1865, for gallant and meritorious services in the campaign ending with the capture of Mobile, Alabama,[7] and the U.S. Senate confirmed the award on May 4, 1866.[10]
Post-war life [ edit ]
Lincoln assassination [ edit ]
In May 1865, while still serving on Grant's staff, Comstock was called to serve as one of the nine military commissioners to oversee the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. At first, Comstock was eager to see the prosecution of the conspirators, writing that, for them, "death is too good."[11] However, as the trial proceeded, Comstock became disturbed by the secrecy of the military proceedings. Concerned about the violation of the defendants' rights, he began to openly argue for the case to be transferred to a civilian court. President Andrew Johnson removed Comstock from the commission due to Comstock's protests. The rationale for the removal, as explained to Comstock by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, was that Grant had also been a potential target of the conspirators and the commissioners felt that Comstock, due to his closeness to Grant, could not be counted on to act impartially.[3]
Later career [ edit ]
Comstock served on Grant's staff until 1866, then returned to service with the Corps of Engineers and remained on active duty until 1895 when he retired with the rank of colonel.[4] In the course of his post-war duty, he served with several boards and commissions including the Permanent Board of Engineers in New York City, the geodetic survey of the north and northwestern lakes of the United States, and was president for many years of the Mississippi River Commission.[12]
Comstock was a prominent member of the National Academy of Sciences and bequeathed a fund to the Academy to support an award to a scientist conducting innovative work in the investigation of electricity, magnetism, or radiant energy. Today known as the Comstock Prize in Physics, the award in the amount of $20,000 is granted every five years by the Academy.[13]
Family [ edit ]
In 1869, Comstock married Elizabeth "Minnie" Blair, daughter of Montgomery Blair who had served as United States Postmaster General during the Lincoln administration. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Marion Comstock, who was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1872 while Comstock was at work on the geodetic survey of the Great Lakes.[12]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]At this point, there have surely been more “Snakes on a Plane” jokes made on the Internet than there were actual ticket sales to the 2006 film. Even if we weren’t able to make that joke, it’s probably still newsworthy that a snake as narrow as a ballpoint pen has the power to ground an international flight and all of its passengers.
The snake, as it turned out, was eight inches long and not poisonous. Since Australia is home to a terrifying array of poisonous snakes, the plane did not fly to Tokyo as planned. Instead, the snake went into quarantine and the plane stayed in Sydney in case it was infested with more snakes. It was not, and the critter turned out to be a Mandarin ratsnake, a species from Asia.
This is the least terrifying recent incident involving snakes on an Aussie plane. There was the incident last year where a snake came out of the control panel, and the 9-foot python that died en route to Papua New Guinea after stowing away on a passenger jet’s wing earlier this year.
When will you learn, snakes? You can’t fly. You will never fly. Unless it’s in a comfy cage, as a pet, in cargo. Then you might get to fly.
Snake on plane grounds Qantas flight [AFP]Darren Fletcher: Could leave Old Trafford this month, with West Ham and Valencia keen.
West Ham have joined Valencia in the race to sign Manchester United midfielder Darren Fletcher, according to Sky sources.
Fletcher, 30, has six months remaining on his deal at United but has struggled for game time under Louis van Gaal and is believed to be ready to consider ending his 19-year association with the club.
After starting the first three league games of the season, he has since largely been restricted to sporadic appearances from the bench, making his last start in the 2-0 FA Cup win at Yeovil earlier this month.
And with more arrivals expected at United, if not this month then in the summer, he is likely to get even fewer first-team opportunities.
West Brom had a bid to take Fletcher on loan for the rest of the season rejected last week.
A one-club man, the Scotland international has been at Old Trafford since the age of 11 and has made 223 appearances since signing his first professional contract in 2001.
He was diagnosed with chronic bowel disease ulcerative colitis in 2011 and made only one start for United in the final two months of the 2010-11 season.
He appeared just 10 times during the following campaign, confirming in December 2011 he would take an extended break from the game before undergoing surgery in January 2013 and finally returning to action in December that year.If you know where the "yoopers" and the "trolls" live, there’s a very good chance that you’re from Michigan.
On this week’s edition of That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss some vocabulary that is unique to the state of Michigan.
Since its recent addition to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, yooper, a term referring to people from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, has gotten a lot of attention. However, there are plenty of other fun Michigan words that are not making headlines.
While yooper refers to residents of the Upper Peninsula, those that live south of the Mackinac Bridge may be lightheartedly referred to as trolls since they are “under the bridge.”
Both yoopers and trolls may also identify as fudgies when indulging in a classic Michigan treat.
“Fudgies are tourists who spend time up north where they can buy fudge,” Curzan explains. She adds more Michigan expertise with the comment, “We know that 'up north' is northern Michigan, but not the Upper Peninsula.”
In addition to fudge, Michiganders include pasties and paczki in their mouthwatering vocabulary of food.
Since Curzan is not a Michigan-native, she notes other speech idiosyncrasies in the state. “When I moved here, I was really thrown by people saying ‘We’re gonna go to the bar.’” She explains, “I thought that everyone had agreed on what bar they were going to and they had forgotten to tell me.”
While many people would use the article “a,” speakers from Michigan often refer to the bar, the hospital or the movies.
Finally, due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, some Michiganians have a distinctive accent with longer, more nasally vowels. If you try saying the word “bag” and it sounds more like “bēăg,” you’re likely from Michigan.
What is some of the vocabulary that you guys use?
-Clare Toeniskoetter, Michigan Radio NewsroomToday’s good comment is from a few weeks ago, but it was incisive enough for me to think of it when I read this piece by Jeremy Paul Gordon over at The Hairpin.
The comment was on a post I’d written about the purported “infidelity gene” and commenter Henry Vandenburgh brought up a really great subject:
I liked the article, above. What I don’t like is that the word “creepy” is getting a lot of play lately in taliking about fairly common forms of sexuality. (Obviously not incest, but many other things.) It’s usually used by women commenters.
As a woman writing for a men’s mag—a job that’s made me reevaluate my genderized tendencies more than I ever thought possible—this took me aback. It wasn’t even something that had ever crossed my mind. Was I playing too fast and loose with a word that Gordon dubbed “the worst thing a woman can call a man”?
Here’s his take:
Without a doubt, creepy is the |
paddock by placing the car on pole position before spinning off on lap four.
Hunt later took the car to pole at Silverstone’s International Trophy where, after a slow start, he overtook Ronnie Peterson’s Lotus down the inside and into the Woodcote corner to land Hesketh’s first and only Formula One victory.
The car will be sold during the weekend of the Grand Prix de Monaco Historique from May 9-11 and is expected to fetch around £500,000.First hands-on reviews, videos and sample images now available for the Panasonic LX100 flagship premium compact camera which incorporates a Micro Four Thirds sensor.
On the video side Matt Frazer from Panasonic explains what’s special on the LX100 and Matt Granger posted the first hands-on review for the compact camera.
Panasonic Lumix LX100 first impressions review can be seen on Cameras.Reviewed and more LX100 samples at Joefaraceblogs.
The Panasonic LX100 features a 4/3-inch 16MP High Sensitivity MOS sensor, 4K video recording at 30p, 24-75mm F1.7-F2.8 Leica lens, Live View Finder (LVF) with 2764K-dot equivalent high resolution, high speed burst shooting at 11 fps, and integrated Wi-Fi and NFC connectivity. See the official announcement, first look videos and sample images.
Panasonic LX100 Hands-on Reviews, Samples
Photokina 2014: The Panasonic DMC-LX100
Panasonic LX100 review – sample photos and video
Panasonic photokina GM5, LX100, CM1 with Mark Baber from Panasonic UK
Panasonic LX100 Digital Camera Price and Availability
The Panasonic LX100 fixed-lens digital camera will be available in October for $899.99.If you say that, deep down, everything belongs to everyone, or that the world belongs to all in common, people act as if you are crazy. Yet, this was Christian orthodoxy for millennia. When scholars remark on the abandonment by Christians of this long-standing view, they sometimes point to John Locke, claiming that he infected the Church’s doctrines on such matters.
As a historical matter, this may have been true. Some ideas attributed to Locke may have influenced the Church to depart from its traditional and biblical understanding of who the earth belongs to. I will defer to those who know the history on such things.
However, it would be wrong to say that Locke himself abandoned prevailing Christian ideas regarding property. As I’ve pointed out before, people misread Locke as if he is some kind of hardcore absolute propertarian, but he simply isn’t.
In the very first sentence of his treatment of property, Locke cites to Psalm 115:16 and remarks that “it is very clear, that God … has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common.” Locke reaffirms that the earth belongs to everyone in common over and over again in the ensuing paragraphs: “God, who hath given the world to men in common”, “the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common”, “the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men,” etc.
That Locke says everything belongs to everyone is not surprising, as it would have been a massive break with Christian tradition to say otherwise.
From the starting point that the entire world is owned in common, Locke then argues for creating and respecting property institutions as being instrumentally valuable for administrating the use of the collectively-owned earth. He notes that, although the world belongs to everyone, it is intended that people “make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience” and “for the support and comfort” of human beings. Accordingly, “there must of necessity be a means to appropriate” the earth to mobilize its resources towards these ends.
So, on the abstract normative framework level, Locke’s view is that the world belongs to human beings in common, that we need some mechanism to allow for the utilization of its resources, and that a propertarian system “might” serve that instrumental end. If this seems familiar to you, it’s because that’s the Thomist view, which, again, was fairly prevalent at the time.
From there, Locke goes on to do his labor mixing stuff, in which he says that working on some piece of the earth entitles you to exclude others from it without their consent. It is this labor mixing stuff that tends to get most of the focus for whatever reason. I don’t have a gauge on how seriously people take this labor mixing part of Locke, these days. Libertarian Robert Nozick, who seems to be popular among the Serious Libertarian crowd, famously slammed it as silly, as well as other parts of Locke’s property theory.
But whatever one thinks of the subsequent parts of Locke’s treatment of property, the point is that they all take place within the normative framework he established at the top: everything belongs to everyone but establishing property might be instrumentally useful to allow for the utilization of earth in accordance with its purpose for humanity.
Crucially, the purpose of the earth for humanity (under this Thomist Christian lens) is not to adhere to some misguided notion of absolute laissez-faire property rights for their own sake. It would be impossible to reconcile any view that elevated the procedural justice of property rights over the needs of the poor and propertyless. Such a view would allow the invention of property institutions to contravene their instrumental purpose, which again is to “make use of [the earth] to the best advantage of life, and convenience … for the support and comfort” of human beings.
Locke’s other writings on resource rights make this all very clear. In addition to the famous Lockean Proviso (which requires that property cannot be appropriated unless there is enough left in common for others), Locke straightforwardly claims that the poor have a right to the “property” of the rich:
God, the lord and father of all has given no one of his children such a property in his peculiar portion of the things of this world, but that he has given his needy brother a right to the surplusage of his goods, so that it cannot justly be denied him when his pressing wants call for it, and therefore, no man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions, since it would always be a sin in any man of estate to let his brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his plenty.
If ever there was a clearer call for the right of redistribution, I haven't seen it. And, of course, this too was the prevailing Christian thought on this matter at the time. Locke's musings on property have acquired a radical character more so from anachronistic misreads and half-reads than what Locke actually wrote.Unexpectedly Intriguing!
Hauser's law is one of the stranger phenomenons in economic data. It was originally proposed by Kurt Hauser, who observed back in 1993 that:
No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.
We decided to put Hauser's Law to the test to see if it holds up. To do that, we turned to the National Taxpayers Union, which maintains a table showing the level of the topmost marginal income tax rates for individuals from 1913 through the present. Looking just at the postwar period, we find that the marginal tax rate that applies for the U.S.' uppermost income tax bracket has ranged from a high of 92% in 1953 and 1954 to a low of 28% from 1988 through 1990. The current top rate is 35%, which is scheduled to increase after 2010 to 39.6% when the tax cuts of the 2003 Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act expire.
We next turned to the Table 1.2 Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits as Percentages of GDP: 1930-2014, which is produced by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, since this Excel spreadsheet contains both the amount of total federal government tax revenues (aka "receipts") and the value of GDP for each of our years of interest, including forecasts for these values from 2009 through 2014.
But that's not all. It occurred to us that those total tax receipts include money from a lot more tax sources than just personal income taxes. Things like Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, corporate income taxes, capital gains and excise taxes all contribute to the governments total tax collections. We wanted to also see how changing the individual income tax rates affected personal income tax collections, so we extracted the historic data on personal income tax collections provided by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities through 2003, updated with data from the IRS for 2004, 2005 and 2006, the most recent year for which we could obtain the data and calculate the corresponding percentage share of GDP.
The results of what we found in doing this are graphically presented in the double chart (click for a larger image), where we've also indicated periods of recession.
What we find in looking at the lower chart is that the federal government's tax collections from both personal income taxes and all sources of tax revenue are remarkably stable over time as a percentage share of annual GDP, regardless of the level to which marginal personal income tax rates have been set.
We also find that both total and personal income tax receipts appear to follow a normal distribution with respect to time. We calculate that personal income tax collections as a percentage share of GDP from 1946 through 2006 has a mean of 8.0%, with a standard deviation of 0.8%, which we've indicated by the horizontal orange band on the chart. We would expect that annual personal income tax collections would fall within the range indicated by the orange band some 68.2% of the time. We've also indicated upper and lower limits for personal income tax receipts, which correspond to the mean value we observe plus or minus three standard deviations, as we would expect personal income tax collections in any given year to fall within this range some 99.6% of the time.
Likewise, we see a similar pattern in total tax receipts. Here, we observe that total tax collections as a percentage share of annual GDP over the historic and forecast period have a mean value of 17.8% with a standard deviation of 1.2%.
We also observe that the three periods in which the federal government's tax receipts have risen above the orange bands marking a one-standard deviation difference from the mean value, each of which coincide with unusual circumstances, which we've indicated in the double chart with the light green vertical bands:
Now, what about those other taxes? Zubin Jelveh looked at the data back in 2008 and found that as corporate income taxes have declined over time, social insurance taxes (the payroll taxes collected to support Social Security and Medicare) have increased to sustain the margin between personal income tax receipts and total tax receipts. This makes sense given the matching taxes paid by employers to these programs, as these taxes have largely offset a good portion of corporate income taxes as a source of tax revenue from U.S. businesses. We also note that federal excise taxes have risen from 1946 through the present, which also has contributed to filling the gap and keeping the overall level of tax receipts as a percentage share of GDP stable over time.
More practically, Hauser's Law provides a method we can use to anticipate the likely range for how much money the U.S. government will collect in any given year, from just personal income taxes or in total, given that year's level of GDP.
Labels: taxesWith little fanfare, Quebec passed website blocking legislation last week. Bill 74 took effect on May 18th, setting up a likely court showdown between the Quebec and federal governments. As discussed in several articles and posts over the past year (here and here), Quebec’s Internet blocking legislation requires Internet service providers to block access to a list of online gambling sites to be identified by the government-backed Loto-Québec. The government now characterizes the legislation as a matter of consumer protection, but it did not initially hesitate to emphasize that its primary goal was to increase revenues for Espace-Jeux, its officially sanctioned online gambling service.
The website blocking plans are now in the hands of Loto-Québec, which must generate the block list and make it available to Internet service providers. The ISPs will have 30 days to comply or face fines of up to $100,000 for failure to block access to the content. The law does not identify a specific technology that must be used for the website blocking. Before initiating any blocking, however, it seems likely that the ISPs will file a legal challenge over the validity of the Quebec blocking law. Legal challenges may focus on several issues, including the exclusive federal jurisdiction over telecommunications and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms implications of government-mandated Internet blocking.
The ISPs may be joined in their challenge by the federal government. The Quebec bill was raised in the House of Commons last month, with Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly pointing to the government’s support for net neutrality, which would be violated by mandated blocking of websites. Joly invited further discussion, but with the law now in force, the time to talk is over as Canada’s first government-mandated website blocking law will surely head to the courts.Alex Rodriguez MLB FURIOUS A-Rod's Sneaky Publicist Is Destroying Our Steroid Case
Alex Rodriguez -- MLB FURIOUS... A-Rod's Sneaky Publicist Is Destroying Our Steroid Case
EXCLUSIVE
' expensive publicist is sneakily trying to torpedo MLB's case to suspend A-Rod over his alleged steroid usage... so says... and now the league wants the court to hold the publicist in contempt.MLB just filed legal docs in A-Rod's ongoing appeal of his 211-game suspension for using banned substances, claiming the Yankees star's publicist is refusing to fly from L.A. to New York to testify in the case... despite a subpoena ordering him to do so.According to the docs,doesn't want to fly 2,400 miles because it would be "overly burdensome and unfair"... even though Sitrick's PR company has an office there.Sitrick's people have offered to make him available via video chat, but MLB is demanding he appear in person.A judge has since ruled that Sitrick MUST comply with the subpoena... so Sitrick has filed an appeal of his own in federal court, asking to be excused from flying to NYC. Now, MLB wants a judge to hold Sitrick in contempt and fine him for every day he refuses to show up.The arbitrator in A-Rod's appeal must make a decision ASAP -- whether to uphold, overturn, or reduce his suspension -- but MLB officials think Sitrick is trying to run down the clock... in order to force the arbitrator to make a ruling without his testimony.Although Sitrick said he'd appear by video chat... ya gotta think he knew MLB lawyers would never accept that -- so he gets to look like the good guy, while effectively stalling.As a publicist, Sitrick has a lot to lose by testifying -- if other clients start to think he's a blabbermouth, his business could take a major hit.Britain's new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is leaking as a result of a faulty seal, it has emerged. The Royal Navy's £3.1 billion warship, which was accepted into the Royal Navy fleet by The Queen less than a month ago, has a "significant" defect.
Reports suggested there is a problem with an inflatable rubber ring-style seal around one of the propeller shafts.
The fault means the ship has been taking on up to 200 litres of sea water an hour, according to The Sun.
The Royal Navy confirmed the problem was identified during sea trials and said the aircraft carrier is scheduled for repair.
Repairs, which will be paid for by the manufacturers rather than the Ministry of Defence, are likely to cost millions of pounds, sources suggested.
A Royal Navy spokesman said the fault does not prevent the carrier from sailing again early in 2018.Marlins’ Grey Jersey, Orange Cap Will Not Be Worn in 2013
If you ran out and purchased the new Miami Marlins road grey jersey or the alternate “red-orange” cap following their unveiling prior to last season, well, you might want to sit down… The Marlins will not be wearing either throughout the 2013 season.
Responding to an email SportsLogos.Net sent to the Marlins, Matt Roebuck the team’s Director of Media Relations told us that both the grey jersey and red-orange cap would not be worn and that the decision was made prior to the season. The team wanted to set the uniform combinations for the season and both those options didn’t make the cut.
“The red-orange cap and gray jersey will not be worn this year; prior to the season it was determined we would not wear them as part of the uniform combinations this season.” – Marlins Director, Media Relations Matt Roebuck
The Marlins, true to their word, have not worn either the grey jersey or orange cap during the 2013 season — they’ve instead opted to have their black alternate jersey take the place of a regular road uniform and only wear the all-black cap for all games home and away.
For those wondering, the Marlins last wore their road grey jerseys on September 25, 2012 for a game in Atlanta. Braves fans might remember that game best for Freddie Freeman’s playoff clinching walk-off home run in the bottom of the 9th.
As for the orange caps, they’ve been mothballed for over a full calendar year now, making their last in-game appearance on June 7, 2012 – coincidentally also in a game in which the Braves came back late for a big win. I’m sensing a theme here. Apparently the Braves are Miami Marlins uniform killers.
Despite their unofficial departure from the Marlins rotation — both the jersey and cap are still listed as the official road and alternate cap in the Marlins 2013 MLB Stylesheet — they are available for purchase on the MLB.com shop, the cap here and jersey here.
As we discussed at the All-Star Break, the Marlins have seen an unusual improvement in their performance when wearing their orange alternate tops at home, posting a.700 winning percentage over 10 games – compared to a percentage of.375 in anything else at Marlins Park. You can see the full breakdown of the Marlins uniforms and their record in each here.0
During the press day for 12 Years a Slave, Steve asked Michael Fassbender the status of Prometheus 2, and Fassbender quickly responded, “I don’t know.” Today at the junket for X-Men: Days of Future Past, the question came up again, and this time he said the project is a go, although he didn’t know when it would begin filming. When we last reported on the film, it seemed like filming was already given the greenlight, but then another report said that there was no release date, it’s unclear if Ridley Scott would return to direct, and that they’ve only hired a new writer (Michael Green). It’s still unclear if Scott wants to get in the director’s chair again, but Fassbender’s confirmation is still a step forward in the project’s development. I, for one, am excited to see the continuing adventures of David’s disembodied head.
Hit the jump to check out what Michael Fassbender had to say about the Prometheus sequel.
Personally, while I think Fassbender is easily one of the best things in Prometheus, I hope Scott doesn’t return to direct. As you can see from the special features on the Prometheus Blu-ray, he was constantly changing his mind, and ultimately the result was a movie that was visually impressive but made very little sense. There’s still potential in the story, but I’m hoping that Scott is lured towards something else. He could do a drama about concussions in pro football, Blade Runner 2, the young adult fantasy Fae, or any other movie that catches his fancy. Ridley Scott is never hurting when it comes to directing vehicles.
Assuming he does decide to do Prometheus 2, the earliest we would see it would be 2016. Scott’s new film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, opens later this year.
Regarding the specific exchange on Prometheus 2, Steve asked Fassbender if he was looking forward to working with Scott on sequel, and he replied, “For sure. I love Ridley. He’s a master filmmaker,” at which point James McAvoy, who was also part of the interview, turned to Fassbender and asked, “Are you doing a sequel?”
Fassbender turned to his X-Men co-star and replied, “Yeah, but when I don’t know.”
Here’s the video. Look for the full interview soon.
Please enable Javascript to watch this videoMay 31, 2014
Chabad Boy Bravely Walks Off Field
From the COLlive inbox: What happens when an umpire instructs a 9-year-old Chabad boy to remove his tzitzis.
The following is an email that Rabbi Mendy Lipskier, Director of Chabad Lubavitch of Fountain Hills in Arizona, sent to his community:
I'd like to share a real life experience that occurred in our family recently. The "Kid and the Yid" is our son, Yossi, 9 years old, an avid baseball fan, and valuable team member on our local Little League team. We recently dropped him off, "uniformed up" at "the diamond" for the regular game.
We do as all little league parents normally do, sometimes we stay, sometimes we drop off. Due to other commitments, this particular day we dropped him off leaving him in his uniform with his coach and teammates.
What happened next was the "foul ball."
The game was going fine, with Yossi (as always) very actively participating, and very much looking forward to his "at bat." As he came up to bat, the umpire happened to notice that Yossi wears two uniforms, his team uniform, and also the fringe undergarment uniform of every male Jew - Tzitzit.
And then, for the first time, the umpire insisted that Yossi remove his Tzitzit in that it could produce some type of "interference or unfair advantage."
Yossi --the only Jewish boy, not just on the team, but we think in the entire league-- respectfully explained to the umpire that he is wearing a religious undergarment, had never had an issue with this previously, however the umpire would not listen, decrying in affect "foul ball."
What was Yossi to do? Disrespect the umpire (an adult), or disrespect his religion?
To Yossi, the choice was easy and clear. He had "two feet on the ground" in more ways than one. He walked off the field and would not play!
But then another thing happened: The game stopped. Fellow members of Yossi's team volunteered to walk off the field and forfeit the game in its entirety in support of him.
After a significant "pow-wow" between the coaches and the umpire, Yossi was allowed to play, "double uniforms" and all.
So what educational opportunity does this story lend itself to?
1. Tzitzit is a sign of Jewish pride. Jews have always had a way of dress to distinguish them from the people of the lands in which they lived—even when that meant exposing themselves to danger and bigotry. By the grace of G?d, today most of us live in lands where we are free to (and should) practice our religion without such fears.
2. Religious tolerance means to refrain from discriminating against others who follow a different religious path.
3. The freedom of individuals to believe in, practice, and promote their religion of choice without interference, harassment, or other repercussions shall always prevail.
4. Ignorance, unacceptance and religious intolerance still run rampant, and people exhibiting those traits, among other "blind acts," might see Tzitzit as just part of a "fringe religion." However, we actually see it as a symbol of "forget-me-knots." Today, whether it be a Yamulke, a Mezuzah, or Tzitzit (ideally all), as Yossi did, we should all wear our "Jewish uniform" unapologetically with pride and with our head's held high.
As we know, self-assertion often demands a lot of humility. Doing something out of the ordinary requires putting our image on the line. It means that I care more about my truth than what other people think about me. This is self-esteem that is rooted in soul-consciousness.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught a powerful lesson gleaned from the location Hashem chose from where to give us His Torah, as explained on Chabad.org:
The Midrash tells us that G-d chose Mt. Sinai, and not a more impressive mountain, to teach us the value of humility. The question, of course, is this: If humility is paramount, why did G-d give us the Torah on a mountain at all? Why not a plain, or even a valley? The mere term "Mt. Sinai" is an oxymoron. It’s a mountain, towering and majestic. And it’s Sinai, meager compared to her sister mountains, humble. If humility is paramount, why did G-d give us the Torah on a mountain at all?
When G-d gave us the Torah and inaugurated us into Jew-hood, He said, "You are going to need to be real strong to be a Jew." Be a mountain. Have a backbone. Be a charismatic light unto the nations, and don’t give a hoot if people laugh at you.
But be a humble mountain. Humble in your recognition that your strength comes from G-d. Your life’s value is not about your image, it’s about your higher calling. Don’t measure yourself against the standards set by your neighbors; measure yourself against your soul’s potential.Site features hitlist of those who voted to invade Iraq and was visited by student who stabbed Timms
Scotland Yard's counter-terrorist unit was last night investigating an Islamist website that appears to incite its users to attack MPs who voted for the Iraq war.
The website, called Revolutionmuslim.com, was visited by the radicalised student Roshonara Choudhry, who was jailed for life this week for stabbing the MP Stephen Timms.
It has published a list of the 395 MPs who voted for the Iraq war in 2003 and called on Muslims to "raise the knife of jihad" against them. Many of those listed are no longer MPs.
It states: "We ask Allah for her [Choudhry's] action to inspire Muslims to raise the knife of jihad against those who voted for the countless rapes, murders, pillages, and torture of Muslim civilians as a direct consequence of their vote."
The revelation that the website was part of the "inspiration" for Choudhry's assassination attempt was made in extracts from her police testimony published by the Guardian.
The website praises her as a "mujaahidah," or female holy warrior, stating: "We ask Allah to keep her safe and secure, to hasten her release and to reward this heroine immensely."
The website gives instructions "if you want to track an MP" and advice on how to attend a surgery "where you can encounter them in person." It also lists the addresses and times of Stephen Timms's constituency surgeries and a telephone number to book an appointment.
Senior police sources told the Guardian that the information on the website could cause consternation and anxiety among MPs.
It is believed that the website is hosted in the US, and British authorities would need the co-operation of their US counterparts if any action is to be taken against it, the sources added.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "The Metropolitan Police is aware of the website and is making inquiries."
Choudhry deliberately chose to visit Timms as he held his surgery to stage her murder attempt.
Revolutionmuslim.com contains material by the British Muslim extremist Anjem Choudary [no relation], a key figure in the now-banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun. It has spawned a series of successor groups to try to beat the ban; the latest called Islam4UK was proscribed in January.
In her police testimony Choudhry said she had been radicalised after "learning more about Islam" online. She said she had downloaded more than a hundred hours of sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, the terrorist cleric described by the US as the spiritual leader of three of the 9/11 hijackers. Despite Awlaki being suspected of being a terrorist mastermind and on a CIA list to be killed, videos of his sermons remain freely available on the internet.SINGAPORE (Reuters) - When Singapore surprised the market by revaluing its dollar this month to pre-empt inflation, analysts had to rack their brains to find out how much the currency’s value had actually gone up. Such an obscure system may be just what China needs.
Steering the exchange rate, not interest rates, is the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s key policy tool. The MAS has managed its currency within a secret trade-weighted band to keep the economy on an even keel and shield the island from speculative attacks since the early 1980s.
By contrast, the yuan looks like an easy target for the market as the Chinese authorities come under mounting pressure to abandon a 21-month-old peg to the dollar.
A shift is widely expected as early as this quarter. Intriguingly, chatter in the market is that Beijing might have an eye on Singapore’s track record as it decides what to do next.
China might still opt for a small one-off yuan revaluation to showcase its international responsibility and help soothe tensions with the United States, but many analysts believe Beijing needs to take some major steps to make the yuan flexible.
“You don’t want to sent a message to the market that there is only one-way risk in your currency,” said Tim Condon, head of Asia research at ING in Singapore.
“If you look at the Singapore dollar, it can go up or down against any currency,” he said.
Reverting to a crawling peg to the dollar — the regime China followed between July 2005 and July 2008 — might expose the yuan to expectations of further appreciation, fanning hot money inflows and fuelling economic overheating.
China recorded a $7.24 billion trade deficit in March, the first shortfall since April 2004, but its foreign exchange reserves rose by $47.9 billion in the first quarter to $2.447 trillion, suggestive of persistent upward pressure on the yuan.
HALF-HEARTED REFORM
When China revalued the yuan by 2.1 percent in July 2005 and scrapped a decade-long dollar peg, it said it would henceforth manage the yuan with reference to a basket of currencies.
But the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) never really followed through on its intention. Instead, it kept the yuan on a tight leash against the dollar, limiting its rise or fall to 0.5 percent from a daily mid-point.
Analysts believe the dollar’s slide helped force the PBOC to actually implement a crawling peg, under which the yuan gained a further 19 percent against the U.S. currency until its rise came to a halt in mid-2008 due to the global economic crisis.
Chinese authorities may have learned from the experience that a crawling peg only increased complacency about currency risk among domestic firms and fueled hot money inflows, analysts say.
“Engineering more two-way volatility would help prevent a similar speculative build-up and also give the appearance of a more market-determined exchange rate framework,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a research note.
Fan Gang, a former central bank adviser, said recently that China should switch to a basket peg, but the Deutsche analysts believe a reference basket — a combination of a crawling dollar peg and a basket peg — would make the yuan more flexible.
“If China were truly allow such a framework, it would be able to create more two-way movement in the dollar/yuan spot rate, and still maintain only a modest appreciation trend and relatively low volatility in its currency,” they said.
A more flexible exchange rate could help the PBOC improve monetary policy to cope with capital flows and external shocks.
Last week, President Hu Jintao shrugged off foreign calls for a stronger yuan but said China was still committed to currency reforms.
Tellingly, the PBOC has been inviting overseas experts to tap their knowledge about Singapore’s currency regime, while several top government think-tanks have been studying plans for possible currency reforms.
DOLLAR REBOUND
Analysts say the dollar’s rebound provides a good opportunity for China to switch to a basket regime as a continued peg to the dollar translates into yuan rises on a trade-weighted basis.
“The dollar/yuan is still pretty much under control, so guiding the basket should be relatively easy,” said Emmanuel Ng, a currency strategist at OCBC Bank in Singapore.
“A shift may actually take some pressure off the yuan, given that the yuan’s nominal effective exchange rate has actually been appreciating.”
Ben Simpfendorfer, China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong, agreed that a basket-based regime may ease upward pressure on the yuan, but he still forecasts a 5 percent rise in the currency in the next 12 months, including a 3 percent up-front revaluation.
Offshore NDFs on Wednesday were implying a 3.3 percent yuan rise over the next year.
Under Singapore’s “BBC” regime — band, basket and crawling peg — the central bank manages the Singapore’s nominal effective exchange rate (NEER) by adjusting the center, slope or width of the band in line with economic performance.
Analysts estimated last week’s move was equivalent to a revaluation of 1.2 percent to 1.4 percent.
Still, they warn that a basket peg would not necessarily relieve the PBOC from the need to intervene to limit yuan gains.
“Even under Singapore’s rigorous framework, ad hoc ‘smoothing’ intervention to suppress currency volatility is fairly common,” the analysts at Deutsche Bank said.Political and "influence" covert operations are used to support US foreign policy. Overt support for one element of an insurgency would often be counterproductive due to the impression it would potentially exert on the local population. In such cases covert assistance allows the U.S. to assist without damaging these elements in the process.
The Political Action Group ( PAG ) is responsible for covert activities related to political influence, psychological operations, and economic warfare. The rapid development of technology has added cyberwarfare to their mission. Tactical units within SAD are also capable of carrying out covert political action while deployed in hostile and austere environments. A large covert operation typically has components that involve many or all of these categories as well as paramilitary operations.
SOG Paramilitary Operations Officers account for a majority of Distinguished Intelligence Cross and Intelligence Star recipients during conflicts or incidents which elicited CIA involvement. These are the highest and third highest valor awards in the CIA. An award bestowing either of these citations represents the highest honors awarded within the CIA in recognition of distinguished valor and excellence in the line of duty. SAD/SOG operatives also account for the majority of the stars displayed on the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters indicating that the officer died while on active duty. [6] The motto of SAD is Tertia Optio, which means Third Option, as covert action is the option with diplomacy and the military. [7]
The Special Operations Group ( SOG ) is a department within SAD responsible for operations that include high-threat military or covert operations with which the US government does not wish to be overtly associated. [2] As such, unit members, called Paramilitary Operations Officers and Specialized Skills Officers, do not typically carry any objects or clothing, e.g., military uniforms, that would associate them with the United States government. [3]
The Special Activities Division ( SAD ) is a division of the United States Central Intelligence Agency responsible for covert operations. Within SAD there are two separate groups: SAD/SOG for tactical paramilitary operations and SAD/PAG for covert political action. [1]
Propaganda includes leaflets, newspapers, magazines, books, radio, and television, all of which are geared to convey the US message appropriate to the region. These techniques have expanded to cover the internet as well. They may employ officers to work as journalists, recruit agents of influence, operate media platforms, plant certain stories or information in places it is hoped it will come to public attention, or seek to deny and/or discredit information that is public knowledge. In all such propaganda efforts, "black" operations denote those in which the audience is to be kept ignorant of the source; "white" efforts are those in which the originator openly acknowledges themselves; and "gray" operations are those in which the source is partly but not fully acknowledged. [15] [16]
The political action group within SAD conducts the deniable psychological operations, also known as black propaganda, as well as "covert influence" to effect political change in other countries as part of United States foreign policy. [1] Covert intervention in foreign elections is the most significant form of SAD's political action. This involves financial support for favored candidates, media guidance, technical support for public relations, get-out-the-vote or political organizing efforts, legal expertise, advertising campaigns, assistance with poll-watching, and other means of direct action. Policy decisions are influenced by agents, such as subverted officials of the country, to make decisions in their official capacity that are in the furtherance of US policy aims. In addition, mechanisms for forming and developing opinions involve the covert use of propaganda. [15]
SAD provides the President of the United States with an option when overt military operations and/or diplomatic actions are not viable or politically feasible. SAD can be directly tasked by the president or the National Security Council at the president's direction, unlike other US special mission forces. SAD/SOG has far fewer members than most of the other special missions units, such as the U.S. Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta ( Delta Force ) or Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU). [8] [9] [10]
The Pentagon commissioned a study to determine whether the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) should conduct covert action paramilitary operations. Their study determined that the CIA should maintain this capability and be the "sole government agency conducting covert action." The DoD found that, even under U.S. law, it does not have the legal authority to conduct covert action, nor the operational agility to carry out these types of missions. [28]
Together, the SAD/SOG comprises a complete combined arms covert paramilitary force. Paramilitary Operations Officers are the core of each branch and routinely move between the branches to gain expertise in all aspects of SOG. [30] As such, Paramilitary Operations Officers are trained to operate in a multitude of environments. Because these officers are taken from the |
, -0.94% was up 0.9%. General Dynamics Corp. was up 0.8% and Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC, -0.17% was up 0.7%.
Among oil stocks, Sempra Energy was up 1% and DTE Energy was up 0.5%.
Nearly 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched against a Syrian air base at dawn local time Friday by the U.S. Navy on President Donald Trump’s orders. Al Masdar News, which backs the Syrian government, said the attacks caused heavy damage to the Shayrat air base and multiple casualties.
See also: Gold rallies to 5-month high as U.S. airstrikes on Syria drive investors to haven assets
Read: How markets reacted to U.S. strike in Syria, in 4 charts
Trump said the U.S. military operation was a response to a “barbaric” chemical weapons attack in Syria earlier this week that killed civilians. Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump said the missile strike was of “vital national security interest” to the U.S.
The S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% was flat to slightly lower. Gold futures, typically a haven investment amid geopolitical ripples, rallied to a five-month high as investors sought the safety of haven assets. Gold for June delivery US:GCM7 was last up 1% at 1,266.30 an ounce.
Want news about Asia delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Asia Daily newsletter. Sign up here.The growing anti-Wall-Street movement led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren took its fight from the halls of Washington, D.C., to the streets of New York City on Thursday.
Protesters gathered at the midtown headquarters of Citigroup, where they decried a measure passed by Congress last week— and drafted by a lobbyist for the bank—that weakens banking regulations. Later, they stood outside the headquarters of investment bank Lazard and denounced the nomination of an executive there, Antonio Weiss, for a top post at the Treasury Department.
Warren spoke out last week on both issues, and they are at the forefront of an emerging split over the long-term direction of the Democratic Party.
RELATED: Elizabeth Warren’s big moment
Outside Citigroup, about 120 protesters called for the breakup of the big banks, chanting: “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Around half of the crowd marched to Lazard’s office at Rockefeller Center, where they called for Weiss — whose name they pronounced “weece” — to come down and explain why his background made him suitable for the Treasury Department job.
“This is not a democracy anymore,” said protester Donna Romo, lamenting the weakening of banking regulations at Citigroup’s request. “This is really owned by the big corporations.” Close video Sen. Warren's blockbuster speech makes waves Alex Wagner, Eugene Robinson and Glenn Thrush discuss Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma., and her powerful anti-Wall Street speech that’s re-ignited rumors of her presidential ambitions. share tweet email save Embed
The protest was organized by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which says it represents the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic party.
A measure was inserted into the omnibus spending bill passed last week that repealed a key provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis. The provision had barred banks from using units insured by the federal government to trade derivatives, the complex financial products that contributed to the crisis. Wall Street lobbyists had been working steadily almost since Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010 to undo the provision.
“There’s a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect,” Warren said last week on the Senate floor. “So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces.”
RELATED: House passes spending bill
Separately, Warren has led a movement to oppose Weiss’s nomination to be an undersecretary at the Treasury Department. At Lazard, Weiss was reportedly a key adviser on the recent “inversion” deal that allowed Burger King to move its headquarters to Canada, significantly lowering its tax bill. And he’ll get a $20 million payout from Lazard if he takes the government post. Several of Warren’s Senate colleagues, including Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the chamber, have joined her crusade against Weiss, and even Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, has said he’s leaning against voting to confirm Weiss.
“Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch,” Warren said last week.
But the fights over Weiss and Dodd-Frank are about something larger: They’re an effort by Warren and her allies to assert control over the Democratic party, and to move it decisively toward populist economic policies. Warren and company say they want the party to actively take on the power of Wall Street, and to stand unapologetically for ordinary Americans.
Warren’s supporters want her to take that message to the Democratic presidential nomination contest, forcing Hillary Clinton, the presumed front-runner, to move left on the economy. Warren has insisted she’s not running for president, but has taken care to use the present tense in doing so.
This post originally said Antonio Weiss specialized in inversion deals. It has been corrected.It's been six years since she split from Hollywood A-lister Kelsey Grammer in 2010.
So Camille Grammer was thrilled to show off her new $3.2 million Malibu mansion which she finally finished renovating and redecorating after nearly a year to ET.
The 48-year-old blonde beauty gushed over the first home she referred to as a 'new beginning' that she purchased since divorcing her ex husband of 13 years.
Revamped: Camille Grammer was thrilled to show off her newly renovated $3.2 million Malibu mansion to Entertainment Tonight on Thursday
'Being here is a new beginning, it's a new chapter for me,' the former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star beamed with delight.
Camille - who married the Frasier star in 1997 - gave a tour of her sprawling 6,000 square foot villa.
The model and actress spent $300,000 on remodeling her 5-bedroom estate.
'New beginnings': It's the first home the 48-year-old reality star purchased since she split from her ex-husband Kelsey Grammer in 2010
Overhauled! The former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star spent $300,000 on renovations
Time consuming: It took the blonde beauty nearly a year to finish remodeling and decorating her new pad
Sprawling: Camille - who married the Frasier star in 1997 - gave a tour of her 6,000 square foot villa
Lavish: The actress and model's decor included warm neutral tones in mixes of traditional pieces mixed with contemporary
Chic: A gorgeous sun room with plush white sofas and animal print pillows which matched foot stools added a stylish touch
'My kids wanted a pool and a jacuzzi,' the mother-of-two explained. 'And my kids had to have a trampoline and so I did that.'
The former Club MTV dancer and Cheers alum share two children - daughter Mason, 14, and their son Jude, 12, both born via a surrogate mother.
Camille also dropped some serious dough on very expensive works of art including one piece worth $500,000.
Dining in style: A large dining room table with hand crafted wood sat among large columns adjacent to the sun room
'The reveal!': As the tour continued, the ageless beauty opened up double doors to her master bedroom
Fit for a queen! Camille boasted: 'And here's my new bedroom with my new floors, and my new bed!'
Pricey piece: Camille also dropped some serious dough on very expensive works of art including one worth $500,000
As the tour continued, the ageless beauty opened up double doors to her master bedroom.
'And here's my new bedroom with my new floors, and my new bed! Ta-da! The reveal!!' she boasted.
The New Jersey native also splashed out $75,000 on a brand new spa-like bathroom.
'I demoed this whole bathroom': The stunner splashed out $75,000 on a brand new spa-like bathroom
Made for two? Camille pointed out, 'I went for the double sinks'
Culinary comforts: Camille had a kitchen fit for a gourmet chef created
'I demoed this whole bathroom out and redid it. I went for the double sinks,' Camille pointed out.
When asked if she could 'picture somebody else being at one of these sinks one day' the beauty coyly responded: 'One day, not yet, but one day.'
Meanwhile, Kelsey, 61, is getting ready to be a father for the seventh time with his wife, Kayte Walsh, 35.
The couple - who married in 2011 - revealed last month they are expecting their third child together, a baby boy.
Taking a dip: The mother-of-two explained: 'My kids wanted a pool and a jacuzzi'
'So I did that': The New Jersey native explained that her two kids 'had to have a trampoline'
Playtime: The former Club MTV dancer had a bocce ball court installed on her property
Former flames: Camille and Kelsey Grammer, 61, tied the knot in 1997 before finalizing their divorce in 2011By |
I have a very crazy theory on this season of South Park. And I don’t care if you agree with me, because I’m kind of being facetious when I say this, but I think there is a checklist somewhere in their studios of things they haven’t done episodes on, and one by one they scratch things off the list. “We’ve never gone to Hawaii before? Let’s do one there! The Shining? I love that movie! Dr. Seuss? How have we not done a parody of his work?” None of this is meant to be a jab at the show; I actually think this line of thinking helps to give us some unique and intriguing episodes as of late, because while the main storylines cover whatever is in the news or is the flavor of the month in pop culture, the jokes are leaning heavily on references. But, I can’t really complain, because for the most part they have been pretty good, and “A Scause for Applause” is yet another competent entry in a string of funny episodes as of late.
So without ever having to mention his name, the recent stripping of Lance Armstrong’s titles just had to be brought up one of these days. And for the first few minutes, I really thought they were going to call him out, or have him show up. But, with a clever turn on expectations, we instead get put into a plot involving Jesus Christ, HGH, and lots of funny bits with side characters like Butters, Mr. Mackey, and Craig. And although those rubber bracelet things were all the rage years ago (God I’m old), the social commentary/criticism wasn’t exactly pinpointing the bracelets too much, which was a smart idea. In fact, it wasn’t the overall story of the Armstrong debacle or the inclusion of Jesus himself that made this episode great. To me, it was all of the small, little things they did, and almost all of the throwaway lines and tiny jokes were far better than the big moments.
Retarded goldfish, the French scientist, the Seuss poetry, Jesus’ Hulk impression, hell even live action footage, there was a surprise bag of humor at play here, and it all worked. I mean, they haven’t used live footage in quite some time, but I always love when they bring it back. Whether it’s a fake commercial for tampons made of hair, or using animals with silly hats in drug trips, live action material has been a rare but welcomed element to the show. I couldn’t help but chuckle every time they used Stan’s name in a pun (I want to be a pun someday), and I swear, every single time that French guy opened his mouth I was dying. His accent sounds so ridiculous, and everything he said made me want to pull him out of the TV and pay him to follow me around (my life would be a lot better if that happened). And despite being a Cartman light episode, he always showed up at just the right time to bring a great punch line to whatever joke they were setting up. The plot was constantly moving, and changing, and I never knew where it was going and it never disappointed. Other than there not being enough of the French couple, I think they should get another episode.
The riskiest thing the writers attempted was bringing in the Dr. Seuss character, and thankfully they ran with it, and nailed every detail. I know Matt and Trey are big fans of musicals and language, so the poetry and rhyming was both perfect and humorous. Even the Seuss world was authentic, and the animation sold it all. I’m shocked they had enough time to get everything right, and to still make it all funny without being forced. Many of the other references also played well, like the Rocky music and the Pussy Riot shirts. All in all, this was a pretty great episode, and the one thing I was looking for arrived at the end like it was meant just for me: Jesus speaking like he came from The Cat in the Hat. All the night needed was some green eggs and ham, and it would have been an instant classic. Or a fox in a box. Or a train in the rain.
-JaredProper cleanup when terminating your application isn’t less important when it’s running inside of a Docker container. Although it only comes down to making sure signals reach your application and handling them, there’s a bunch of things that can go wrong.
In principle it’s really simple: when you – or your cluster management tool – run docker stop, Docker sends a configurable signal to the entrypoint of your application; with SIGTERM being the default. While dockerizing my applications I’ve identified four traps (but stepped only into three of them!) that I’d like to share in order to save you some time when investigating.
1. You’re Using the Wrong ENTRYPOINT Form
Dockerfiles allow you to define your entrypoint using a seductively convenient string called the shell form:
ENTRYPOINT "/app/bin/your-app arg1 arg2"
or the slightly more obnoxious exec form that makes you supply the command line as a JSON array:
ENTRYPOINT ["/app/bin/your-app", "arg1", "arg2"]
Long story short: always use the latter exec form. The shell form runs your entrypoint as a subcommand of /bin/sh -c which comes with a load of problems, one of them notably that you’ll never see a signal in your application.
2. Your Entrypoint Is a Shell Script and You Didn’t exec
If you run your application from a shell script the regular way, your shell spawns your application in a new process and you won’t receive signals from Docker.
What you need to do is to tell your shell to replace itself with your application. For that exact purpose, shells have the exec command (the similarity to the exec form before is not an accident: exec syscall).
So instead of
/app/bin/your-app
do
exec /app/bin/your-app
Corollary: You Did exec But You Tricked Yourself By Starting a Subshell
I was always a big fan of runit’s logging behavior where you just log without timestamps to stdout, and runit will prepend all log entries with a tai64n timestamp.
A naïve implementation in a shell entrypoint might look like this:
exec /app/bin/your-app | tai64n
However, this causes your application to be executed in a subshell with the usual consequence: no signals for you.
Bonus Best Practice: Let Someone Else Be PID 1
If your application is the entrypoint for the container, it becomes PID 1. While that’s certainly glamorous, it comes with a bunch of responsibilities and edge cases that you may have not anticipated and that are closely related to signal handling – notably the handling of SIGTERM s.
Fortunately for the rest of us, people who do anticipate them, wrote some software so we don’t have to.
The most notable ones of are tini which has been knighted by being merged into Docker 1.13. Technically, you can use it transparently by passing --init to your docker run command. In practice you often can’t because your cluster manager doesn’t support it.
The other one is dumb-init by Yelp. A nice touch for Python developers is that they can install it from PyPI too.
tini and dumb-init are also able to proxy signals to process groups which technically allows you to pipe your output. However, your pipe target receives that signal at the same time so you can’t log anything on cleanup lest you crave race conditions and SIGPIPE s. Thus it’s better to leave this can of worms closed. Turns out, writing a properly working process manager is far from trivial. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All that to say that my entrypoints look like this:
ENTRYPOINT ["/tini", "-v", "--", "/app/bin/docker-entrypoint.sh"]
3. You’re Listening for the Wrong Signal
Despite the prevalence of SIGTERM in process managers, many frameworks expect the application to be stopped using SIGINT aka Control-C. Especially in the Python ecosystem it’s common to do a
try: do_work() except KeyboardInterrupt: cleanup()
and call it a day. Without any further action, cleanup() is never called if your application receives a SIGTERM. To add insult to injury, if you’re PID 1, literally nothing happens until Docker loses its patience with your container and sends a SIGKILL to the entrypoint.
So if you’ve ever wondered why your docker stop takes so long – this might be the reason: you didn’t listen for SIGTERM and the signal bounced off your process because it’s PID 1. No cleanup, slow shutdown.
The easiest fix is a single line in your Dockerfile:
STOPSIGNAL SIGINT
But you should really try to support both signals and avoid being PID 1 in the first place.
Summary
Use the exec/JSON array form of ENTRYPOINT.
. Use exec in shell entrypoints.
in shell entrypoints. Don’t pipe your application’s output.
Avoid being PID 1.
Listen for SIGTERM or set STOPSIGNAL in your Dockerfile.
Is my content helpful and/or enjoyable to you? Please consider expressing your gratitude! Every bit helps to motivate me in creating more.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Myles Garrett blew through the doors of the NFL vowing to be the greatest player who ever lived, and to crush some records along the way including the rookie and regular-season sack records.
The rookie sack mark went by the wayside in a season derailed by a right high ankle sprain suffered in practice before the opener against Pittsburgh. As in his final season at Texas A&M, Garrett was bugged by the ankle throughout the season.
"I'm never going to make excuses,'' he said. "You can't make excuses out on the football field because nobody's going to take excuses. It's not like you're going to be going by a guy and you're going to limp and he's going to move out of the way.
"It might've been bothering me, but I'm never going to say it's affected me or it kept me from getting to the quarterback. It got to me mentally.''
Ankle or not, Garrett heads into Sunday's season finale against the Steelers with six sacks in his 10 games -- a respectable total, but not for the No. 1 pick with sky-high aspirations.
"I did well but not up to my standards,'' he said. "I want to be a force in this league and didn't feel like I did that this year. But there's always next year and there's always the next game."
The next game was supposed to be Garrett's first chance to "chop down'' Ben Roethlisberger, but the season will likely end the way it began -- with Garrett only dreaming of putting Big Ben on his back. Roethlisberger is expected to sit out along with running back Le'Veon Bell and receiver Antonio Brown, who's officially out with a calf injury.
"I would (be disappointed to miss Roethlisberger),'' he said. "I know they probably think of it as a smart move to probably sit him and rest him for the playoffs. But I'd really like to go and get my chance to play against him, seeing as he's an elite quarterback and been doing it for so long and so well.''
He never worried about a target on his back by the Steelers after that "chop down'' remark.
"It's football,'' he said. "You're going to hit and get hit. Whether they have a target on my back or not, it doesn't really matter to me."
Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams revealed Friday he was "shocked'' Garrett didn't break his leg during the preseason, considering a 265-pound offensive player got tripped and was launched into the back of his right ankle.
Garrett stormed back from the injury with a sack on his first NFL play and two in his first game. After three weeks, he had four and was on pace for his goal of at least one a game. Then, he sat out the London game with a concussion and embarked on a six-game stretch with only one sack.
He broke out of the slump last week in Chicago, not only sacking Mitch Trubisky but picking him off and rumbling into end zone with a pick six. But Carl Nassib lined up offside and negated the play. The Browns went on to lose 20-3 instead of taking a 10-6 on the opening play of the second half.
Still his athleticism was on display on that slippery track.
"Did you see him run away from everybody else?'' said Williams. "He ran like a receiver. There's a reason he ran 4.5s coming out. I can't coach those things. He has them. We just have to keep on working."
Said Garrett: "I'm faster than most people think probably. But just get me out in space and I can make some plays. So with the ball in my hands or without the ball in my hand, I can be a force."
His six sacks are tied for third-most by a Browns rookie and are tied for second among NFL rookies this season. But Garrett isn't satisfied -- his target was Jevon Kearse's rookie record of 14.5 sacks.
"I expect better always no matter what I do,'' he said. "I could have 15 sacks right now, and I expect better."
The good news for Garrett is that some of the NFL's best pass-rushers started slowly. All-time sack leader and Hall of Famer Bruce Smith (200) had 6.5 as a rookie before 15 in his second season. Oakland's Khalil Mack had four as a rookie in 2014 before 15 in his second season. Hall of Famer Michael Strahan had 1.0, 4.5, 7.5 and 5.0 before his first double-digit season, and went on to set the single-season record of 22.5 in his ninth season.
"The sky's the limit for Myles,'' said Hue Jackson. "I don't want to say what the number [of sacks] will be or anything like that, but I just think he has to take in everything he learned this past year, have a great offseason, stay healthy and then head into the offseason program ready to go.
"I think Myles is going to be one of the better pass rushers in this league.... I think it's definitely going to happen here pretty soon."
Despite coming up short this season, Garrett's still aiming high.
"I feel like if I'm able to be healthy the whole season, not have any setbacks, then I can achieve those goals and exceed them,'' he said. "I'm glad (Jackson's) still excited about what I can do, and hopefully I can live up to everything he imagines."
Williams also expects great things.
"(He has) tremendous fire,'' he said. "I'll be shocked if it's not immediately visible next year.''
He also knows that Garrett's offseason "will not be a patient one. It will be one where he's grinding himself to improve, not only physically, but the mental aspect too.''
Garrett agreed.
"I'm not going to be taking much time off. I like to get better every time I have some down time so I'm going to be using my time wisely, whether it's getting myself in playing shape or working on my rush moves."
If all goes as planned, he'll be that force in 2018.Writing this last post about some philosophers’ treatment of animals reminded me of another philosopher’s, Alasdair MacIntyre’s, book Dependent Rational Animals.
Philosophers over the centuries have been fairly binary in distinguishing between human beings and other animals, mostly on the basis that non-human animals lack some capacity for reasoning or deliberation. They act on instincts and drives, whereas human beings act on reflection and reasoning.
Rationality (meaning the ability to reason) also tends to be connected with language skills. What is key, is the ability to formulate for oneself and express to others one’s reasons for actions, to reflect on them and critique them even before acting. The advanced language skills of human beings have helped set ourselves apart – in the minds of philosophers at least – as the species that is able to reason, against the others that are unable.
This binary view can be attacked from two sides: Firstly, an argument could be made to bring human rationality (in the sense of being able to reason and act on reasons) closer to certain animal behaviours. Secondly, it could be argued that animals actually do have some capacity for reasoning that is not qualitatively different from that of human beings.
McIntyre pursues both those lines of attack. He argues, that we would do well to see our human reasoning capability as a development that emerges from our animal nature and is continuous with animal behaviours:
“It is not only that the same kind of exercise of the same kind of perceptual powers provides, guides, and corrects beliefs in the case of dolphins – and some other species – as in the case of humans, but that our whole initial bodily comportment towards the world is originally an animal comportment and that when, through having become language users, we under the guidance of parents and others restructure that comportment, elaborate and in new ways correct our beliefs and redirect our activities, we never make ourselves independent of our animal nature and inheritance. Partly this is a matter of those aspects of our bodily condition that simply remain unchanged, of what remains constant through and after the social and cultural scheduling and ordering of our bodily functions: toilet training, developing what one’s culture regards as regular sleeping and eating habits, and learning what constitutes politeness and rudeness by way of sneezing, spitting, burping, farting, and the like. And partly it is a matter of what is involved in our becoming able to reflect upon our overall comportment and our directness towards the goods of our animal nature, and so in consequence to correct and redirect ourselves, our beliefs, feelings, attitudes and actions.”
McIntyre also discusses at some length the research showing the ability of some species, e. g. dolphins, to learn and use language to develop and communicate hunting strategies and to adjust their behaviours to a changing environment.
In some experiments, dolphins were able to learn a made up vocabulary and syntax made up by human beings using dolphin sounds and distinguish sentences like “take the surfboard to the frisbee” from “take the frisbee to the surfboard.” (Dolphin researchers seem to live a fun life full of frisbees and surfboards.)
This ultimately leads MacIntyre to the suggestion that there is a spectrum of reasoning ability, and that some animals are further along that spectrum, closer to where human beings are, than others:
“To acknowledge that there are these animal preconditions for human rationality requires us to think of the relationship of human beings to members of other intelligent species in terms of a scale or a spectrum rather than of a single line of division between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ At one end of this scale there are types of animal for whom the sense of perception is no more than the reception of information without conceptual content. […] At another level are animals whose perceptions are in part the result of purposeful and attentive investigation and whose changing actions track in some way the true and the false. And among such animals we can distinguish between those whose perceptions and responses are more fine-grained and those whose perceptions and responses are less so.”
This leads MacIntyre to a revision of a famous moment in philosophy:
Wittgenstein remarked that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’ (Philosophical Investigations II, xi, 223). About lions perhaps the question has to be left open. But I am strongly inclined to say of dolphins that, even although their modes of communication are so very different from ours, it is nonetheless true that if they could speak, some of the greatest of the recent interpreters of dolphin activity would be or would have been able to understand them.
The “spectrum” idea of animal rationality reminds me of one more thought. That is a text by the philosopher-psychologist-theologian William James, who is forever condemned to have the tagline “brother of the novelist Henry James” after his name. He wrote:
“I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.”
Even if the human species represents a point relatively far along a spectrum of rationality, it is still only a point on a spectrum. That leaves open the possibility that there are points on the spectrum beyond human rationality. Not everyone will find the idea palatable that there are already beings in the universe – divine or alien, presumably – who have a higher form of experience than ours, relative to whom we are like domesticated cats and dogs in drawing rooms and libraries. But whether it is already available to any creature, or not, the possibility remains there that rationality could develop further than that of human beings.
There is no reason to be so ego-centric and grandiose from the human perspective to assume that we represent not only the high-point, but the end-point of rationality. And it is intriguing to think about some of the consequences of that. Some points, briefly, that spring to mind:
It could be argued that human beings don’t even use their rationality for much of the time. We often act automatically, instinctively, reactively, habitually. That is fine and probably saves time as well as mental effort. But we need to be clear that for much of the time we don’t make use of the highest form of our rationality. If, as Viktor Frankl says, there is a space “between the stimulus and the response and in that space lies our power and our freedom” we should be aware of how often we don’t make use of that space, but act in a more animal-like stimulus-response mode.
The cats and dogs that thrash the furniture of the drawing rooms or make a mess of the libraries are not the ones that are most popular with the people who understand the features of those rooms. In the same way we should approach our environment, the universe, whose features we can’t fully comprehend, with a certain humility and a desire to leave it intact.
We should keep alive the hope that it is possible to refine our rationality to a higher point on the spectrum, not just over evolutionary history for our species, but over a lifetime. The dolphins that learned a more advanced level of vocabulary and syntax, developed their language and reasoning capabilities to a point that wasn’t necessarily available to other individuals of their species. But they were trained by human beings who were further along the spectrum of rationality. If we were to aspire to develop beyond our point, whom would we look for training? It’s a tough question. But we have concepts of perfection: Plato’s idea of the Good, the Stoic concept of the wise person, religiously inspired images of the highest attainable mode of living, the contemplation of beauty, the virtues, or even love. (“Will not ‘Act lovingly’ translate ‘Act perfectly’, whereas ‘Act rationally’ will not? It is tempting to say so” writes Iris Murdoch)
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Like this: Like Loading...Whenever a new James Bond movie is announced, fans of Hollywood's best-loved spy can't wait to find out who will be playing 007, what the movie will be called and who will be cast as the villain. Car guys like us only have one concern - what car will he be chasing down the bad guys in this time?
Well, there have been some iconic cars over the years, with Aston Martin arguably supplying the best-loved of them all in the shape of the DB5. More recently, the DBS was used by Daniel Craig, but other British brands to have been piloted by Bond include Bentley, Rolls-Royce, and Lotus.
We've put together the following infographic to provide car guys and gals with some interesting tidbits of information about James Bond's cars including how much they subsequently sold at auction, where they are now, and what gadgets they came with.I can be a little bit superstitious sometimes. Well, I like to call it superstition. Others might say that I’m neurotic. I definitely have some strange quirks.
But I don’t try to hide them. I’m open about them, and I’ve always gravitated towards people who are vulnerable and self-deprecating, willing to laugh at their own flaws.
For these reasons, I love Goran Ivanisevic.
Goran is a retired Croatian tennis player.
He was known for his powerful lefty serve. But he didn’t just serve with force. He smashed his racquets with a similar ferocity, leading to hefty fines.
Goran joked, “I pay more fines than some guys’ career prize money on the tour.”
He was eccentric.
He was a brilliant tactician. Once, in the middle of a doubles match, Goran switched sides in order to intentionally miss a volley, and give his team the game.
Ok, that was a charity doubles match after he retired. But it was still brilliant.
Goran knew how to get in his opponent’s head. He once pretended to strip in the middle of a match to distract his opponent.
Ok, that was during the same charity doubles match.
If you couldn’t already tell, Goran was uninhibited.
In his autobiography, Pete Sampras discussed how you did not want to miss an Ivanisevic interview.
“In the locker room, the players all stopped whatever they were doing and gathered around the television sets and turned up the volume when Goran was giving a press conference,” Sampras said.
“He handled those sessions like a guy on a psychiatrist’s couch, but always with great wit and charm. You just never knew what was going to come out of his mouth next.”
Goran was also extremely superstitious. If he was having success at a tournament, he had to follow the exact same routine to a T. And I don’t just mean on the court.
He’d have to eat the exact same food at the exact same restaurant at the exact same table. He’d have to park in the exact same spot. He’d even have to watch the exact same show.
One of these shows was Teletubbies.
This is the story of how Teletubbies helped carry Goran to one of the most iconic victories in tennis history.
But first, let’s go back a few years.
Goran was born in Split, Croatia in 1971.
As a youngster, he showed serious tennis potential. His family went all out in the hopes that he would make it big. In order to get him into a full-time tennis school, they sold their house, and moved into a crowded apartment.
When he was 17, Goran was about to leave to play Qualifying for the 1989 Australian Open.
But he received some tragic news. His older sister Srdjana had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. Treatment for the disease was expensive. The family had already sacrificed everything to finance Goran’s career. Now, they’d have to use whatever they had left to fund Srdjana’s treatment.
Armed with the knowledge that the further he advanced in the tournament, the more prize money he would receive to help Srjdana, Goran travelled to Australia more determined than ever.
He won 7 consecutive matches, 3 in qualifying and 4 in the main draw to advance all the way to the Quarterfinals. His ranking shot up from 300 to 125 in the world.
Most importantly, he also received a nice payday for his quarterfinal result. Back then, the prize money was in cash, which made for an interesting flight.
“I was flying from Melbourne to Belgrade, and I had that pile of money with me, on my own on the plane. Man, I did not sleep a wink from Melbourne to Belgrade! All that money was in my jacket. The flight attendant asked me about 16 times if she should put the jacket away, and I was like: ‘No, it’s okay, I’m fine.'”
When he arrived home, Goran immediately gave the jacket, along with all of the cash inside of it, to his father in order to help fund Srdjana’s treatment.
Over the next few years, Goran became a consistent top 10 player on the ATP Tour. He won multiple tournaments.
But there are tournaments and there are Grand Slams.
The best players aren’t judged on how many tournaments they win, but on how many Grand Slams they capture.
And Goran hadn’t won a Grand Slam.
But if there was ever a Slam that Goran seemed destined to win, it was Wimbledon.
His forceful serve was most lethal on the grass at Wimbledon, where the ball stayed low. Pete Sampras once said that when Goran’s serve was on, it was basically unreturnable on grass.
In 1992, Goran reached the Wimbledon Finals, where he faced Andre Agassi.
Trailing 5-4 in the 5th set, Goran hit back to back double faults, bringing up Championship point for Agassi.
Goran stood dejectedly at the net, having to watch Andre collapse to the ground in celebration.
In 1994, Goran got a second chance.
|
im-closer'
The vim-closer plugin will automatically close (, { and [ after enter is pressed when in insert mode for supported languages such as: C, C++, JavaScript and Go (to name a few). This plugin is a natural companion to the vim-endwise plugin noted below.
vim-auto-save
Plug '907th/vim-auto-save' let g:auto_save = 1 let g:auto_save_silent = 1 let g:auto_save_events = [ "InsertLeave", "TextChanged", "FocusLost" ]
The vim-auto-save plugin automatically saves changes to disk without required manual :w invocations. I prefer to automatically save after: normal mode changes ( TextChanged ), exiting insert mode ( InsertLeave ) and when focussing away from Vim ( FocusLost ).
Tim Pope Plugins
A special mention should be given to Tim Pope who has crafted some of Vim’s most useful plugins. He deserves a place in the Vim hall of fame alongside Bram Moolenaar himself.
Abolish
Plug 'tpope/vim-abolish'
The abolish plugin is really a couple plugins in one, those being:
a smart spell corrector
a smart substituter
a name coercer.
I primarily use the first two.
The abolish plugin can be set to automatically correct text as you type it. An example use is correcting seperate into separate and delimeter into delimiter. It can do this no matter the case and even with pluralization. One sets up these corrections in their own ~/.vim/after/plugin/abolish.vim file.
Here are my abolish corrections:
Abolish {despa,sepe}rat{e,es,ed,ing,ely,ion,ions,or} {despe,sepa}rat{} Abolish {,in}consistant{,ly} {}consistent{} Abolish lan{gauge,gue,guege,guegae,ague,agueg} language Abolish delimeter{,s} delimiter{} Abolish {,non}existan{ce,t} {}existen{} Abolish d{e,i}screp{e,a}nc{y,ies} d{i}screp{a}nc{} Abolish {,un}nec{ce,ces,e}sar{y,ily} {}nec{es}sar{} Abolish persistan{ce,t,tly} persisten{} Abolish {,ir}releven{ce,cy,t,tly} {}relevan{} Abolish cal{a,e}nder{,s} cal{e}ndar{} Abolish reproducable reproducible Abolish retreive retrieve Abolish compeletly completely
The abolish plugin can also carry smart substitutions. What is a smart substitution? Such a substitution would intelligently change old to new and Old to New and OLD to NEW in one command. The abolish substitute command does just that and more.
An example abolish substitute:
:%S/facilit{y,ies}/building{,s}/
This plugin does more than I have documented here, please refer to the abolish documentation.
Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary'
The vim-commentary plugin is a simple language agnostic commenter. I usually use it with a visual line selection to comment out or uncomment out a block of code with the gc command the plugin provides.
No need to remember what the comment characters are for a certain language, is it // or # or “, just gc it.
Fugitive
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive' noremap < leader > gb : Gblame < CR >
The vim-fugitive plugin is a Git wrapper. I do most of my git work at the command line, however I find fugitive’s Gblame command to be supremely useful within Vim.
Endwise
Plug 'tpope/vim-endwise'
The vim-endwise plugin will automatically insert end, in insert mode, to code blocks for languages such as: Ruby, Elixir and Crystal. This plugin is a natural companion to the vim-closer plugin noted above.
Projectionist
The vim-projectionist plugin, primarily, provides infrastructure to navigate around projects. This plugin is effectively the core of the vim-rails plugin extracted into a standalone plugin.
Here is a simple configuration for Elixir/Phoenix projects:
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist' let g:projectionist_heuristics = { \ "config/prod.exs" : { \ "web/controllers/*_controller.ex" : { \ "type" : "controller", \ "alternate" : "test/controllers/{}_controller_test.exs", \ }, \ "web/models/*.ex" : { \ "type" : "model", \ "alternate" : "test/models/{}_test.exs", \ }, \ "web/views/*_view.ex" : { \ "type" : "view", \ "alternate" : "test/views/{}_view_test.exs", \ }, \ "web/templates/*.html.eex" : { \ "type" : "template", \ "alternate" : "web/views/{dirname|basename}_view.ex" \ }, \ "test/*_test.exs" : { \ "type" : "test", \ "alternate" : "web/{}.ex", \ } \ } \ } noremap < leader > ec : Econtroller < Space > noremap < leader > em : Emodel < Space > noremap < leader > et : Etest < Space > noremap < leader > ev : Eview < Space > noremap < leader > ex : Etemplate < Space > noremap < leader > A : A < CR >
The above configuration will result in the following commands being created: Econtroller, Emodel, Eview, Etemplate and Etest. Those commands are then mapped for quick access. Hence, <leader>ec <TAB> will list all available controllers, in the status line if wildmenu and wildmode are set appropriately, allowing a developer to quickly go to the controller they wish. The <leader>A mapping provides quick switching to an alternate file, which will usually be the associated test suite for the current file.
Configuring vim-projectionist for other frameworks like react or Ember should not be too difficult.
Setting up this plugin does require a little bit of upfront work, but once done, and then used, you will really appreciate the navigation capabilities this plugin provides.
Note, Rails developers should still use vim-rails in preference to vim-projectionist, think of vim-rails as a pre-configured vim-projectionist with a little bit of added sugar on top; also vim-rails and vim-projectionist do happily live side by side.
sleuth
Plug 'tpope/vim-sleuth'
The vim-sleuth plugin automatically adjusts shiftwidth and expandtab intelligently based on the existing indentation within the file or within the directory tree for like files. With this plugin in effect there is little need to manually define indentation settings.
Ragtag
Plug 'tpope/vim-endwise'
The vim-ragtag plugins provides a set of helpers for TAG-based languages such as HTML, XML and JSX.
These are the ragtag helpers I find most handy whilst in insert mode:
<CTRL-x>/ close the previous open tag
close the previous open tag <CTRL-x><Space> convert the current word into open and close tags
convert the current word into open and close tags <CTRL-x><Enter> same as above except split the tag over multiple lines
same as above except split the tag over multiple lines <CTRL-x>_ add <% %> template tag
add template tag <CTRL-x>+ add <%= %> templage tag
Surround
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
The vim-surround plugin allows one to add, change or delete surrounding pairs.
What is a surrounding pair? It may be the quote characters or <div> tags or anything else that surrounds some text.
To delete a surrounding pair use d. Here are some examples, the first example will delete double quotes, the second will delete a tag (like <div>) and the third will delete * :
ds" dst ds*
To change a surrounding pair use c. Note, you must provide the old and new surround:
cs'" cs*<div>
To add a surround pair one can visually select the candidate text and enter S followed by the surround character(s) of choice.
It is even possible to add in surrounding pairs whilst in insert mode. Use a single Ctrl-S followed by the surround character(s) to create a surround on the current line. Use a double Ctrl-S-S to spread the surround over multiple lines. Note, in both cases the cursor will be inserted between the surrounding pair. The double Ctrl-S-S is especially useful for inserting curly braces in C/C++/Java/JavaScript type languages.
Note, terminal Vim users need to make sure flow-control is disable otherwise the above Ctrl-S will lock your terminal. I recommend starting Vim this way to avoid that issue, stty -ixon && vim.
This plugin is a little harder to explain than it is to use, however once you get it you can’t imagine life without it.
Repeat
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
The vim-repeat enhances the. operator to work as one would expect with a number of Vim plugins, most notably the vim-surround plugin noted above.
Unimpaired
Plug 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'
The vim-unimpaired plugin provides a set of mappings for many operations that have natural pairings. A pairing may be: up and down, or forward and backward, set or unset or above and below.
Of the mappings provided by this plugin these are the mappings I use most often:
[q / ]q - navigate up and down through the q uickfix list, for instance through vim-grepper results
[l / ]l - navigate up and down through the l ocation list, for instance through ALE results
[a / ]a - navigate backward and forward through the file list
[<Space> / ]<Space> - add a blank line above or below the current line
[p / ]p - linewise paste above or below the current line
The full set of mappings is documented here.
The vim-unimpaired plugin negates the need to provide your own custom set of mappings for these types of operation.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.New York's long-delayed World Trade Center Transportation Hub, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has encountered a new problem: a leaky ceiling.
Portions of the terminal's roof started to let in water earlier this month. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is overseeing the project, said the leaks had been caused by work on the Richard Rogers-designed Three World Trade Center tower above.
The transit terminal, whose design was first unveiled in 2004, is still under construction. It consists of an extensive network of subterranean pathways that connect to rail and subway lines and are lined with commercial space.
Above ground, a winged pavilion referred to as the Oculus will serve as the main concourse. The terminal is scheduled to officially open in early 2016, although some sections are already in use.
Construction of Rogers Stirk Harbour's skyscraper, which abuts the Oculus, began this summer. Crews working on the tower are spraying water to minimise dust as they break up concrete, and the water is seeping into subterranean portions of the transit hub, according to reports.
The Port Authority said the leaks are being addressed. "The dripping has been reduced dramatically. We've made some significant progress. Several spaces are dry," said Steven Plate, the director of World Trade Center construction for the Port Authority, in a statement.
Related story Calatrava "must pay" to replace leaking winery roof
The transit hub's commercial spaces, owned by the Westfield Corporation, were initially scheduled to open this year.
More than 100 tenants have reportedly leased units within the terminal, including Apple, Michael Kors and Kate Spade.
"This is an enormously complex and unique project," Westfield said in a recent statement.
"We are cooperating and working closely with the Port Authority as they work to complete construction and meet the conditions for the delivery of the retail spaces."
Calatrava's transit hub has faced several setbacks since its design was revealed more than a decade ago.
The original scheme called for an operable roof, so that the building's two "wings" could move up and down, reinforcing the birdlike image that Calatrava aimed to convey.
The movable aspect of the roof was eliminated from the plans, but the project's price tag has ballooned to $3.9 billion (£2.5 billion), nearly double the original estimate.
Intended to evoke a bird in flight, the Oculus has a skeletal appearance, with arched white walls that resemble ribs. The steel building features an elongated operable skylight that measures 355 feet (108 metres) in length.
The interior of the Oculus contains a central oval-shaped area ringed by two levels of shops and restaurants.
Related story BIG unveils replacement for Foster's Two World Trade Center design
The transit terminal is one of a cluster of buildings – some finished, others underway – on the 16-acre (6.5 hectare) World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.
Completed projects include the One World Trade Center tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; the Four World Trade Center tower by Fumihiko Maki; and the September 11 Museum by Snøhetta and Davis Brody Bond.
Earlier this year, Norman Foster was replaced by Bjarke Ingels Group as the designer of Two World Trade Center tower, which is now under construction.
The World Trade Center Transportation Hub is not the first of Calatrava's buildings to cause controversy. In 2013, the owners of the Calatrava-designed Ysios winery in Spain launched legal action demanding he paid part of the £1.7 million needed to fix the building's leaky roof.
The City of Valencia also launched legal action against the architect last year after parts of the opera house roof at his City of Arts and Sciences complex began falling off just eight years after completion.World tennis No 1 becomes first person to win award three times, with triathlete Alistair Brownlee second and equestrian Nick Skelton third
Andy Murray capped a glorious year, in which he lifted the Wimbledon title, stormed to Olympic gold and became the first British tennis player to reach No 1 in the world, by winning Sports Personality of the Year for a record third time.
Murray, a massive 1-7 on favourite with bookmakers beforehand, beat the gold medal-winning triathlete Alistair Brownlee into second place, with 58-year-old showjumper Nick Skelton, who became the oldest British gold medallist since 1908 in Rio, in third.
Speaking from his training camp in Miami after being presented with his award by former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, Murray paid special tribute to his wife, Kim, and daughter, Sophia Olivia, but added: “I’ve got a bone to pick with my wife, who told me an hour ago she had voted for Nick Skelton! It’s not smart of her with Christmas coming up. But I appreciate everyone’s support. It’s been an amazing year for British sport and I’m proud to have played a part in it.”
Skelton said he was grateful for the support of Murray’s wife but added: “She didn’t vote enough!”
Murray, who won nine titles and reached the final of 13 of the 17 tournaments he entered in 2016, described it “as the best year of my career and a great year for British tennis”. He added: “Jo Konta finished in the top 10, my brother was No 1 in the doubles and Gordon Reid and Andy Lapthorne did well in the Paralympics, so I’m proud to be a part of that.”
Murray, who became a father for the first time this year, said his parenthood had been a big influence on his success. “I’ve loved it,” he said. “It was a challenge at the start but it made me realise there was more to life than just my sport. It’s obviously helped my performances on the court.”
He also revealed that top half of the trophy was broken – and he had been worried about it falling apart on TV. “They didn’t tell me how it got broken, but I was told that if I won I had to hold it close to my body so it didn’t fall over on the camera,” he said. “After the problems that Lennox and I the last time we did this [when there was botched handover in 2012, when he came third], I listened to them.”
It would have been entirely understandable if Murray had eased up after winning the Wimbledon final in July and Olympic gold a month later. Instead he raced around the world, racking up a series of titles in Beijing, Shanghai, Vienna and Paris before, finally, beating Novak Djokovic in the ATP Tour final to take his No 1 crown. But Murray warned it would be tough to remain on top in 2017. “I’m going to give it my best shot but it’s going to be hard,” he added.
Sports Personality was once regarded as mildly diverting pre-Christmas froth but this year it was bigger than ever, with a record 16-strong shortlist and a running time of more than two hours. There were also 12,000 paying spectators at the Genting Arena – at one point the queue to get in snaked all the way back to Birmingham International train station.
Such was the strength of the shortlist, which included 13 Olympic and Paralympic gold medallists, that the triple Tour de France winner Chris Froome and Sir Bradley Wiggins, whose exploits in Rio made him the most decorated British athlete in Olympic history, missed out. The heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua also failed to make the grade, as did Alastair Cook, who became the first Englishman to hit 10,000 Test runs.
Murray got 247,419 votes – more than double that of Brownlee, who won 121,665 votes, and Skelton who had 109,197. Mo Farah, who won Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m gold, was fourth with 54,476 votes.
Meanwhile, the other big winners on the night were Leicester City, who were rewarded for their stunning Premier League title victory with two awards – team of the year and coach of the year for Claudio Ranieri.
The US gymnast Simone Biles was named Overseas Sports Personality of the Year, while swimmer Michael Phelps was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award after taking his medal tally to 23 gold medals – 28 overall – with a series of victories at the Rio Olympics. Ben Smith, who ran 401 marathons in 401 days to raise money for Kidscape and Stonewall after suffering years of mental and physical bullying, won the Helen Rollason Award.Adam Smith called Chick-fil-A "a hateful corporation" in a video that cost him his job. (Photo: Chick-fil-A)
(NEWSER) – Things haven't gone too well for the former CFO who criticized Chick-fil-A in a video he posted on YouTube.
Unable to find lasting work, 37-year-old Adam Smith is living on food stamps with his wife and four kids in the RV they call home, he tells ABC News. "I think people are scared," Smith says of potential employers. "I think people are scared that it could happen again."
Back in the summer of 2012, as thousands of people were opposing Chick-fil-A's stance on gays, Smith rolled into a Chick-fil-A drive-thru for a free glass of water and slammed the female attendant: "Chick-fil-A is a hateful corporation," Smith told her as he filmed the exchange. "I don't know how you live with yourself and work here. I don't understand it."
Smith posted the video before returning to work at Vante, a Tucson-based medical manufacturer — and the proverbial you-know-what had hit the fan by the time he got there.
The receptionist told him "the voicemail is completely full, and it's full of bomb threats," he says. Fired that day, Smith lost his $200,000 salary and more than $1 million in stock options. He and his family moved to Portland, where he got a CFO job, but lost it two weeks later when they realized who he was.
He says he has since been honest in interviews, but companies have been too wary of fallout to hire him. "I don't regret the stand I took, but I regret… the way I talked to her," an emotional Smith says of the worker.
The interview coincides with his recent digital release of a memoir, A Million Dollar Cup of Water (a paperback version is out April 21), which chronicles his professional collapse and years of soul-searching. It's not faring so well on Amazon, which Smith addressed on the site on Friday. "Regarding the many 1-star ratings my book has received today and yesterday, I would like to note that I have only sold 17 digital copies thus far, yet there are 23 1-star ratings on my book. This fascinates me! LOL!"
This article originally appeared on Newser: Ex-CFO Who Slammed Chick-fil-A Lives on Food Stamps
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1CmuAGM(CNN) As Californians suffer the devastation caused by wildfires that have burned through more than 100,000 acres, one man braved the flames to save a wild rabbit and instantly became the hero we didn't know we needed.
Video of the daring rescue shows a Ventura County highway near La Conchita engulfed in smoke and flames. An orange-and-black singed sky fills the screen.
But then, a wild rabbit darts across traffic and into the burning brush.
A man, stopped on the road and wearing just shorts and a hoodie, races after him. The rabbit is both out of reach and in danger.
That's when the panic sets in. The man clutches his head, jumps up and down, and paces anxiously, agonizingly trying to figure out how to rescue the creature from its burning habitat.
Read MoreNeal Gottlieb is a name which might ring a bell for some longtime Towleroad readers. He’ll also be familiar to many as a contestant on this season’s Survivor: Kaoh Rong. This morning he made a colorful statement in protest of North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law, the so-called “bathroom bill” HB2.
Writes Gottlieb on Facebook:
I proudly placed a rainbow-painted outhouse displaying a trans pride flag at the summit of North Carolina’s tallest mountain this morning in protest of the state’s repressive HB2 legislation. It was a brilliant site. The follow letter was nailed to the front of the outhouse and calls out the governor for the crap has become known as the “bathroom bill.”
Governor McCrory,
As of this morning, an outhouse proudly displaying a trans pride flag is sitting atop Mount Mitchell, North Carolina’s tallest mountain. It was placed there in protest of HB2, your state’s institutionalization of discrimination (also known as hate) against members of the trans community (also known as humans). Yes, at least for a little while, North Carolina’s highest point is an outhouse; a fitting symbol for a state that has sullied itself with shitty, repressive legislation.
You still support HB2, claiming it is for the people’s safety, but we all know this is just a load of crap. Government-back discrimination has no place in just societies. Soon enough HB2 will be reversed and your legacy will be skid marks in North Carolina’s history.
Of course you can admit that you sh-t the bed, reverse HB2 and wipe away the mess this harmful legislation leaves behind. We all make mistakes. Please stop dumping on freedom and admit your wrongs. We’ll all feel much better when this passes.
Trans is beautiful.
Equality is beautiful.
Love wins.
Neal H. Gottlieb
Now why should Towleroad readers be familiar with Gottlieb?
Back in 2014 we wrote about a similar protest he undertook in Uganda, where he climbed to the top of Uganda’s highest mountain, Margherita Peak, and planted a Gay Pride flag there “in protest of Uganda’s recent criminalization of homosexuality.”
Today is two years to the day since his Uganda protest. What a great way to mark the occasion.
He left a similar letter for President Museveni.
And he took the Pride flag with him as a special item to Survivor.
Gottlieb is also the owner of Three Twins Ice Cream and lives in Sausalito, California. It’s sold in all 50 states so if you happen to see it buy a pint and show him some support.
Way to go, Neal!The Bolles Schools’ Caeleb Dressel has had a very fast season. He broke several 15-16 national age group records at the World Championship Trials in June in Indianapolis, setting the 200 freestyle record at 1:49.83.
Today, Dressel broke his national age group record in Irvine, California at the Junior National Championships. He won the B-final of the men’s 200 freestyle crushing his previous time with a 1:48.64. His time from finals would have won the event, but he swam a 1:51.69 in the morning prelim session, narrowly missing the championship final.
Dressel already had the top spot on USA Swimming’s Junior World Championship Selection List. Previously, he tied with Dynamo Swim Club’s Gunnar Bentz. Bentz, who also swam a 1:49.83 at the World Championship Trials in June. Today, Dressel moved ahead to claim the number one spot on the list, but Bentz was also able to improve his time to 1:49.57.
Because Dressel was not in the championship final heat, Gunnar Bentz is the new Junior National Champion in the men’s 200 freestyle. Bentz was followed by Blake Pieroni of Duneland Swim Club and Alexander Katz of the Sarasota YMCA Sharks.This is 2nd part of a series of blog posts about Shrine. The aim of this series is to show the advantages of using Shrine over other file attachment libraries.
In the previous post I talked about motivation behind creating Shrine. In this post I want to show you the foundation that Shrine is built upon – storage, uploader and uploaded file.
Storage
A Shrine “storage” is a plain Ruby object which encapsulates managing files on a particular storage service (filesystem, S3 etc). The storage needs to respond to the following 5 methods:
class MyStorage def upload ( io, id, ** options ) # uploads the `io` to the given location `id` end def url ( id ) # returns the URL to the file on location `id` end def open ( id ) # returns the file on location `id` as an IO-like object end def exists? ( id ) # returns whether storage has a file on location `id` end def delete ( id ) # deletes the file on location `id` from the storage end end
Shrine storages are configured directly by passing options to new (inspired by Refile), and should be registered in Shrine.storages :
Shrine. storages [ :s3 ] = Shrine :: Storage :: S3. new ( access_key_id: "abc", secret_access_key: "xyz", region: "eu-west-1", bucket: "my-bucket", )
Currently there are FileSystem, S3, Fog, Flickr, Cloudinary, Transloadit, Uploadcare, Imgix, GridFS and SQL storage for Shrine, so take your pick
You can also easily write your own storage, there is a guide for it, and a linter which will automatically test if your storage is working corrrectly.
Uploader
Uploaders are subclasses of Shrine, and they encapsulate uploading logic for a specific attachment (inspired by CarrierWave).
class ImageUploader < Shrine # image uploading logic goes here end
Uploader objects act as wrappers around a storage, performing all functionality around uploading that is generic to any storage:
processing
extracting metadata
generating location
uploading (this is where the storage is called)
closing uploaded file
Uploaders are instantiated with the registered storage name:
Shrine. storages [ :disk ] = Shrine :: Storage :: FileSystem. new (... ) uploader = ImageUploader. new ( :disk ) uploader. upload ( image ) #=> #<Shrine::UploadedFile>
Uploaders don’t know about models; they only take a file to be uploaded on the input, and return representation of the uploaded file on the output. As this suggests, uploaders are stateless, which makes their behaviour really easy to reason about.
Uploaded file
When a file is uploaded through the uploader, the #upload method returns a Shrine::UploadedFile value object. This object is a complete representation of the file that was uploaded to the storage.
uploaded_file = uploader. upload ( image ) #=> #<Shrine::UploadedFile> uploaded_file. id #=> "43ksd9gkafg0dsl.jpg" uploaded_file. storage #=> #<Shrine::Storage::FileSystem> uploaded_file. metadata #=> {...}
Since this object knows which storage it was uploaded to, it is able to provide many useful methods:
uploaded_file. url # generates the URL uploaded_file. download # downloads the file to the disk uploaded_file. exists? # asks the storage if file exists uploaded_file. open { | io |... } # opens the file for reading uploaded_file. delete # deletes the file from the storage
This object is defined solely by its data hash. Since the storage can be referenced by its registered name, this hash can now be serialized into JSON, and saved to a database column.
uploaded_file. data #=> # { # "id" => "df9fk48saflg.jpg", # "storage" => "disk", # "metadata" => {...} # } uploaded_file. to_json #=> '{"id":"df9fk48saflg.jpg","storage":"disk","metadata":{...}}'
The Shrine::UploadedFile objects are separate from uploaders. This is a contrast to CarrierWave and Paperclip, which have this behaviour mixed in into their CarrierWave::Uploader::Base and Paperclip::Attachment god classes.
IO abstraction
Shrine is able to upload any IO-like object which responds to #read, #size, #rewind, #eof? and #close (inspired by Refile). By definining this strict interface, every Shrine feature now knows they can rely only on these methods, which means they will work correctly regardless of whether you’re uploading File, StringIO, ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile, Rack files, or remote files which download themselves as you read them.
Furthermore, Shrine::UploadedFile is itself an IO-like object, wrapping any uploaded file under the same unified interface. This makes reuploading the file from one storage to another really natural. Furthermore, this allows the storage to optimize some uploads by skipping downloading & reuploading, for example use an S3 copy if both files are from S3, or just send the remote URL if the storage supports it.
cache = ImageUploader. new ( :s3_temporary ) cached_file = cache. upload ( image ) store = ImageUploader. new ( :s3_permanent ) store. upload ( cached_file ) #=> performs an S3 COPY request
Plugin system
Shrine comes with a small core (< 500 LOC) which provides the essential functionality. Any additional features can be loaded via plugins. This gives you the flexibility to choose exactly what and how much Shrine does for you, and load the code only for features that you use.
# Loads the processing feature from "shrine/plugins/logging.rb" Shrine. plugin :logging, logger: Rails. logger
Shrine ships with over 35 plugins, and it’s easy to write your own. Shrine’s plugin system is an adaptation of Roda’s, which I wrote about in the past.
Also, Shrine uploaders respect inheritance (unlike CarrierWave).
Shrine. plugin :logging # enables logging for all uploaders class ImageUploader < Shrine plugin :backup # stores backups only for this uploader (and its descendants) end
Dependencies
Most file attachment libraries have pretty heavy dependencies.
CarrierWave ActiveSupport – I really don’t want all those monkey patches ActiveModel – Why not implement validations without a library? MIME::Types – It’s better to determine MIME type from file content
Paperclip ActiveSupport – Again, I want to have a choice of not having any monkey patches ActiveModel – Ok, both AM and AS are required by ActiveRecord anyway Cocaine – Open3 is already a great standard library for running shell commands MIME::Types – The MIME type spoofing detection has proven very unreliable anyway MimeMagic – I’m already very satisfied with the file utility
Refile RestClient – Heavy dependency to use just for downloading Sinatra – That’s fine, although Roda is a much lighter dependency MIME::Types – It’s better to determine MIME type from file content
Shrine, on the other hand, has only one mandatory lightweight dependency – Down. Down is a net/http wrapper for downloading files, which improves upon open-uri and has support for streaming downloads, and is used by almost every Shrine storage.
Furthermore, Shrine in general loads really fast, because you’re loading code only for features that you use. Other file attachment libraries require you to load code for many features that you might not need. To illustrate, Shrine loads 35x faster than CarrierWave without any plugins loaded, and 7x faster with all plugins loaded (source).
Conclusion
Every high-level interface should have good foundation. That way whichever level of abstraction you need to drop to, you can always understand what’s going on. Shrine’s foundation is composed out of Storage, Shrine and Shrine::UploadedFile classes, each having well-defined responsibilities and interface.
In the next post I will talk about Shrine’s high-level attachment interface, and again compare it to existing file upload libraries, so stay tuned!Image copyright Stellenbosch University
The world's first successful penis transplant has been reported by a surgical team in South Africa.
The 21-year-old recipient, whose identify is being protected, lost his penis in a botched circumcision.
Doctors in Cape Town said the operation was a success and the patient was happy and healthy.
The team said there was extensive discussion about whether the operation, which is not life-saving in the same way as a heart transplant, was ethical.
There have been attempts before, including one in China. Accounts suggested the operation went fine, but the penis was later rejected.
Penis replacement
The man was 18 and already sexually active when he had the circumcision.
The procedure is part of the transition from boyhood to adulthood in parts of South Africa.
Image copyright AFP Image caption These boys are undergoing a circumcision ceremony in South Africa
The boy was left with just 1cm of his original penis.
Doctors say South Africa has some of the greatest need for penis transplants anywhere in the world.
Dozens, although some say hundreds, of boys are maimed or die each year during traditional initiation ceremonies.
Long
Surgeons at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital performed a nine-hour operation to attach a donated penis.
One of the surgeons, Andre Van der Merwe, who normally performs kidney transplants, told the BBC News website: "This is definitely much more difficult, the blood vessels are 1.5 mm wide. In the kidney it can be 1 cm."
The team used some of the techniques that had been developed to perform the first face transplants in order to connect the tiny blood vessels and nerves.
The operation took place on 11 December last year. Three months later doctors say the recovery has been rapid.
Full sensation has not returned and doctors suggest this could take two years.
However, the man is able to pass urine, have an erection, orgasm and ejaculate.
Preparation
The procedure required a lot of preparation.
The team needed to be sure the patient was aware of the risks of a life-time of immunosuppressant drugs.
Also some patients cannot cope with a transplant if they fail to recognise it as part of their body.
"Psychologically, we knew it would have a massive effect on the ego," said Dr Van der Merwe.
It took "a hell of a lot of time" to get ethical approval, he added.
One of the concerns is a heart transplant balances the risk of the operation against a certain death, but a penis transplant would not extend life span.
Dr Van der Merwe told the BBC: "You may say it doesn't save their life, but many of these young men when they have penile amputations are ostracised, stigmatised and take their own life.
"If you don't have a penis you are essentially dead, if you give a penis back you can bring them back to life."
Further attempts on other patients are expected to take place in three months time.Every time someone complains on the blogs about the fact that we know next to nothing about Heavenly Mother, someone else busts out the tried-and-true argument that we shouldn’t feel bad about this, because we don’t know much about Heavenly Father either. (For example, see the discussion following Tracy M.’s wonderful post “But Where Am I?” at BCC a few days ago.)
This is not a good argument. It kind of suggests that people are wishing to hear little details about Heavenly Mother. Like maybe is she left-handed? Or what’s her favorite color? Or her shoe size? Or how did she and Heavenly Father meet during their mortal probation? Perhaps she was a dentist and he was a bartender, and he totally botched her complicated drink request, but he had such a charming smile that all her friends said she should give him a chance, and she did, and the rest is history.
But of course, it’s nothing like this that people want to know. It’s the basics. The fact is that we know some very basic fundamental things about Heavenly Father than we don’t know about Heavenly Mother.
He exists. It seems silly to have to spell this out, but we talk about Heavenly Father all the time. We pray to him in all our meetings and at our tables and in our closets. At least when I was a missionary, he was the first point in the first discussion. His existence is absolutely central to our beliefs. Heavenly Mother, not so much. Oh, sure, we believe in her, kind of. Her existence is more something that we infer than something that’s really crucial. We talk about her hardly at all. Of course this is no accident. President Hinckley famously gave a Conference talk in 1991 where he responded to a teenage girl’s letter by saying in effect, that yes, Heavenly Mother exists, but let us never speak of her again. The result |
the court's attention to the atrocities. Now the council has also referred Libya to the court.
This has been a tricky route. Three of the Security Council's five permanent members—America, Russia and China—did not sign up to the ICC. A threatened veto by just one of them is enough to block a mooted referral. But with Darfur, international alarm over the spreading rape and bloodshed persuaded America and China to abstain rather than oppose Sudan's referral in 2005. Since then the UN Security Council has sent only one other such case to the court. But the court's boosters have taken heart from the unanimous vote against Libya in February, arguing that it may mark a milestone in the nine-year-old outfit's struggle for worldwide acceptance.
America's change of heart has helped. Once a fierce critic of the court, it has, in the words of an American official, “reset its default…from hostility to positive engagement” under Barack Obama. But future backing for ICC referrals from Russia and China is far less likely. Most of the Arab world refuses to accept a court that much of the poor world still sees as a Western-dominated tribunal, intent on holding the have-nots to account while giving impunity to the rich and powerful. Jordan is the ICC's only Arab member.
These days the ICC's biggest opponents are in Africa, which provides the court with its biggest group of members (31 out of 114) and is the scene of all the cases currently being investigated or prosecuted: in the CAR, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Libya, Sudan and Uganda. Accusing the court of unfairly targeting African countries, the 53-member African Union (AU) is again calling for “African solutions to African problems”. It particularly dislikes the court's increasing willingness to go after sitting presidents. At its summit next month it plans to extend the authority of its African Court of Justice and Human Rights to cover criminal as well as civil cases. International lawyers such as Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, see this as an attempt to circumvent the ICC.
It may not work. The reason so many African cases are before the court is not because of bias; all the ICC's cases have been referred to it either by the UN Security Council or by the countries themselves. It is because the standards of justice in Africa are often poor. Courts in many parts of the continent are packed with pliant judges keen to do their masters' bidding. Moreover, attempts to create a regional system of African justice have so far failed. The African Court, under the AU's aegis, has never issued a ruling of note. The AU's pledge to ensure that Hissène Habré, held responsible for thousands of deaths as Chad's president in the 1980s, is brought to justice has not been fulfilled. The Southern African Development Community's tribunal, set up in 2005, has been virtually suspended since Zimbabwe refused to accept its ban on the expropriation of white farms and the 15-country regional club proved reluctant to enforce its rulings.
The ICC was set up as a court of last resort. It may not take on cases if the country concerned has a competent, independent justice system ready to prosecute alleged perpetrators and give them a fair trial. Its statutes say nothing about having to defer to regional courts. Many autocratic African leaders appear ready to protect their erring colleagues from the law in case they may one day need the favour returned. The AU has been trying for three years to get the Security Council to suspend the ICC's proceedings against Mr Bashir. Kenya, which as an ICC signatory is obliged to help arrest all court indictees, welcomed Sudan's leader to Nairobi, its capital, last year. Mr Bashir merrily visited Djibouti, an ICC member, earlier this month.
The ICC's big weakness, apart from its astronomical cost and drawn-out procedures, is its dependence on others to help arrest suspects. But even this may be changing. South Africa and Botswana have said Mr Bashir is not welcome. Congo has handed over three of its suspects to the court and France a fourth, while Belgium has handed over Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former Congolese vice-president, for alleged atrocities in the CAR. America is actively supporting the hunt for four rebel leaders of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, which continues to wreak havoc in the region. Some suspects, including three Darfuri rebel leaders and six Kenyans, have appeared voluntarily before the court. Five others are in custody, including four on trial. So the court, though still widely regarded in Africa with suspicion and sometimes even derision, may yet prove to have teeth.(Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for ELLE Magazine)
Reddit users consume the most news compared with users of other social networks, according to a new study tallying the news reading trends of social media audiences. But Facebook has the largest American audience for news.
The study conducted by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Pew Research Center, available online here, analyzed data of U.S. users from Aug. 21 to Sept. 2.
Of the users on 11 different social networks tallied by the study, 62 percent of Reddit users consume news on that site, followed by Twitter users at 52 percent and Facebook users at 47 percent. Pinterest came in last place, with only 3 percent of its users consuming news stories on that site. This may reflect how well-designed the social networks are for sharing news reporting, but the user base of those sites also shows the size of the audiences for news posted on those platforms, the study explains.
Though it's the newsiest site, just 3 percent of U.S. adults 18 years of age or older access Reddit, whereas Facebook reaches the largest social networking audience for news because 64 percent of U.S. adults use it. YouTube comes in second place, thanks to it's widespread use in America - approximately 51 percent of U.S. adults use YouTube - translating to 10 percent of U.S. adults getting their news from the site. Twitter comes in third place, with 8 percent of U.S. adults reading news on that social network, based on the 16 percent of adults accessing the site.
The Internet has immense potential to spread conversation and updates about current events but print and broadcast news industries are still a prized resource for social network users to keep up with world events and hot topics, the study says. News consumers on YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus are more likely than Facebook and Twitter news consumers to watch cable news or read a print newspaper. Meanwhile, Twitter news consumers are the least likely to watch local and cable TV news, the study says.
More News:Russian police rounded up more than 1,600 immigrants in Moscow a day after rioting by nationalists over a fatal stabbing of a Russian that many residents blame on a man from the Caucasus region.
Some 200 residents rallied in the Biryulyovo district on Monday to call for tougher policing of labour migrants, in a second day of protests over the stabbing death of an ethnic Russian, 25-year-old Yegor Shcherbakov.
In apparent response, riot police rounded up 1,200 immigrants at a wholesale vegetable market in Biryulyovo which was the scene of attacks on workers on Sunday.
Another 450 were detained in northeastern Moscow, also near a vegetable market employing immigrant workers. Footage showed detainees standing against walls or lined up in front of police in camouflage clothing.
Police said they were all detained to check whether they were involved in any wrongdoing, but they have not been accused of any specific crime.
Murder protest
The riot on Sunday broke out with nationalist chants of "white power" and "Russia for Russians." About 380 people were arrested after demonstrators smashed windows and set fire to shops.
Demonstrators were outraged over the murder on Thursday of a 25-year-old local man, Yegor Shcherbakov, who police say was stabbed as his fiancee, identified only by her first name Ksenya, watched.
Images caught on surveillance cameras suggested the killer could have been from Central Asia or the Caucasus.
Advocacy groups warned immigrants from those regions of an increased risk of attacks in the worst ethnic disturbance in Moscow in three years.
However, residents in Biryulyovo blamed the the immigrants for myriad crimes.
"We are scared to walk the streets at night," said Alexei Zhuravlyov "They [immigrants] are always attacking, stealing from and killing people. They don't even abide by basic rules like stopping at a red light."
A group that lobbies for labour migrants in Russia warned of an increased risk of ethnic violence in Moscow on Monday.
"The nationalists are pursuing their political goals. This is clearly very dangerous. We are warning migrants to be careful for now in crowded areas and on public transportation," said Mukhamad Amin, head of the Federation of Migrants of Russia.A 2010 file photo shows Iranian security officials of the Bushehr nuclear plant in front of the nuclear power plant in Bushehr in southern Iran. EPA/ABEDIN TAHERKENAREH (Abedin Taherkenareh/ European Pressphoto Agency )
Iran shipped thousands of pounds of enriched uranium to Russia on Monday, a key commitment in the nuclear deal that had to be fulfilled before international sanctions can be lifted.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry applauded the transfer, calling it a “significant milestone” toward the deal’s implementation. He said the one shipment alone more than triples the estimated two- to three-month “breakout time” needed for Iran to acquire enough weapons-grade uranium to build one nuclear weapon.
Under the agreement reached July 14 in Vienna, Iran was required to whittle down its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to no more than 300 kilograms, about 660 pounds. Low-enriched uranium can be used to generate electrical power, but it must be enriched further to create weapons-grade material.
Kerry said that Iran had transferred 25,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium and materials, including scrap metal and fuel plates. State Department officials said they believe Iran has now rid itself of almost its entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
Iran has always insisted that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, despite a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying the country had actively worked until 2009 to design a nuclear weapon.
The nuclear negotiations aimed to ensure that Iran will have a breakout time — the time needed to amass enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear weapon — of at least a year. That is supposed to give enough of a lead for other countries to detect any potential cheating and decide how to respond. Monday’s shipment, Kerry said, “is an important piece of the technical equation.”
A Russian diplomat told the Tass news agency Monday that Russia had completed the procedure of withdrawing the stockpiled material, and Kerry later said the uranium had left Iran. In return, Iran will get 137 tons of natural uranium material, supplied in part by Kazakhstan.
The transfer suggests that Iran is well on its way to meeting its obligations under the nuclear deal it reached with six world powers, including the United States. The country still must complete a number of other steps, including dismantling centrifuges and pouring cement into the core of the Arak reactor. The International Atomic Energy Agency is responsible for verifying everything before sanctions can be eased.
Initially, Iran predicted it would finish all the work before year’s end, but U.S. experts estimated it would take many months more and probably would not happen before spring. Now it appears likely Iran will be done by the latter half of January, paving the way for sanctions to be lifted before Iran holds elections in February.
Iran’s pragmatist president, Hassan Rouhani, pursued talks that led to the nuclear deal after he was elected on a vow to bring sanctions relief. The deal has been strongly opposed by hard-liners, however, and the Iranian government is hoping to have at least the promise of imminent sanctions relief in place before election day.
Even as Iran was moving to complete one key commitment, the Foreign Ministry warned that Tehran would reciprocate if there is any breach in the deal. Last week, Iran said U.S. visa restrictions recently passed by Congress, prohibiting visa-free travel for visitors to Iran, violate the deal.
“Any steps taken outside the agreement are unacceptable to Iran, and Iran will take its own steps in response where necessary,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari told a televised news conference when asked about the U.S. law.
Mark Toner, the deputy State Department spokesman, said that the administration does not consider the new law a violation and that it will not prevent the United States from meeting its commitments on sanctions relief.President Trump's travel ban has been challenged in court at every turn. Now the Supreme Court is allowing a limited version to take effect, but with an expanded list of familial exemptions. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
The true definition of “covfefe,” — born from a deleted, after-midnight tweet from President Trump — remains unsettled, even to the commander in chief, who appeared to mistype it into existence on Twitter last month. But a congressman from Illinois wants to bring new meaning to the word.
The COVFEFE Act, introduced by Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) on Monday, aims to preserve tweets from the president's personal Twitter account, ensuring that Trump's social-media posts are archived as presidential records.
“In order to maintain public trust in government, elected officials must answer for what they do and say; this includes 140-character tweets,” Quigley said in a statement. “If the President is going to take to social media to make sudden public policy proclamations, we must ensure that these statements are documented and preserved for future reference.”
Quigley's bill would add an explicit mention of “social media” to the Presidential Records Act, a law mandating the preservation of presidential communications. Quigley also hopes to ensure that messages from Trump's personal Twitter account, @RealDonaldTrump, get archived in the same way as the official @POTUS account. Deleting tweets would also violate the Records Act, under the proposed law.
Spelled out in the act's name, COVFEFE stands for: Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement.
This isn't the first time Quigley has deployed topical wordplay to challenge what he sees as Trump's lack of transparency. Earlier this year, he introduced the MAR-A-LAGO Act, which would require the administration to publish the visitor logs tied to the White House and any other location, like Trump's luxurious private club in Palm Beach, Fla., where the president has conducted official business.
Like the MAR-A-LAGO Act, the COVFEFE Act is likely to face an uphill battle to become law in the Republican-controlled Congress. A spokesperson for Quigley said the legislation has several Democratic co-sponsors, but no Republican backers.Grammar nerds and lovers of the English language are furious at the reminder that it's now acceptable to use the word "literally" incorrectly -- as in, it's literally in the dictionary.
Social media users have pointed out this week that Google search results for the definition of the word "literally" now include two meanings for the adverb: 1) In a literal manner or sense, exactly; and 2) Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling.
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The latter definition, which has traditionally been viewed as wrong, is making heads literally explode everywhere. "We did it guys, we finally killed the English language," David Kenner, the Middle East editor for Foreign Policy magazine, jibed on Twitter Tuesday.
Google search results for dictionary definitions are aggregated from Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, Answers.com and Merriam-Webster.
Back in March, The Week pointed out that Merriam-Webster had recently added a second usage of the word "literally" to mean the same as "virtually," but as hyperbole for emphasis. The Oxford English Dictionary has also included the informal definition, "used for emphasis while not being literally true," since 2011.
But while traditionalists are complaining about the demise of English, many are quick to say that language evolves over time and dictionaries reflect those changes.
"Our job is to describe the language people are using," OED senior editor Fiona McPherson said, according to the Daily Mail. "The only reason this sense is included is because people are using it the wrong way."
Modern terms that have been added to the dictionary in recent years include frenemy, flash mob, ZOMG, infographic, sexting, F-bomb, earworm, fist bump and bromance. New definitions for words like tweet (as in for Twitter, not birds) and cougar (as in Stifler's mom in "American Pie") have also been included.
"The dictionary can't be wrong if it is reporting a common usage, which it is, because that is the dictionary's job," The Telegraph's Tom Chivers writes. "This isn't some modern thing that's fallen into the language in the last shower, like 'lulz' or 'yolo'... 'literally' has been literally used non-literally for literally more than two centuries."
Chivers points out that Louisa May Alcott wrote "the land literally flowed with milk and honey" in 1868's "Little Women," and Charles Dickens described a man's "body literally worn to the bone" in 1839's "Nicholas Nickleby." Other words have also changed meanings over time, such as "wicked," which used to only mean "evil" or "bad," and "fast," which used to mean "secure" like "steadfast."
Still, the Oxford dictionary insists the newer, informal definition "is not acceptable in formal contexts, though it is widespread." So don't literally put your fist through a window, guys.More than 190,000 people have expressed their opposition toward French President Emmanuel Macron’s initiative to create an official First Lady status for his wife, Brigitte Macron, as of Monday morning.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The online petition was published on the change.org platform and created by Thierry Paul Valette, the founder of the "national equality" movement.
"The context for such a reform is in no way appropriate. We are currently on the way to reforming the moralization of political life. We ask the deputies not to hire their family members anymore. The French citizens still remember the affair of Francois and Penelope Fillon. It is not the right moment to treat it case by case and give money [from the French budget] and judicial legitimacy to Brigitte Macron who, unlike her husband, has not been elected," Valette told LCI broadcaster, commenting on the proposed petition.
© Sputnik / Sergey Guneev Not Again! Russians Allegedly Targeted Macron Campaign Staff on Facebook
The petition specifies that, if enacted, the special status would allow the first lady benefit from the French budget.
During his presidential campaign, Macron, who took office in May, said that he wanted to create the position for his wife in order to clarify her status, promising that no public funds would be used to pay her.
Under French laws, the president's wife is allowed an office, staff, security guards, which are covered by the state budget and are etimated at 450,000 euros ($531,100) a year, according to official auditors.At MSR this week, we had two very good talks on algorithmic methods for tuning the hyperparameters of machine learning models. Selecting appropriate settings for hyperparameters is a constant problem in machine learning, which is somewhat surprising given how much expertise the machine learning community has in optimization theory. I suspect there’s interesting psychological and sociological work to be done exploring why a problem that could be answered using known techniques wasn’t given an appropriate solution earlier.
Thankfully, the take away message of this blog post is that this problem is starting to be understood.
A Two-Part Optimization Problem
To set up the problem of hyperparameter tuning, it’s helpful to think of the canonical model-tuning and model-testing setup used in machine learning: one splits the original data set into three parts — a training set, a validation set and a test set. If, for example, we plan to use L2-regularized linear regression to solve our problem, we will use the training set and validation set to select a value for the \(\lambda\) hyperparameter that is used to determine the strength of the penalty for large coefficients relative to the penalty for errors in predictions.
With this context in mind, we can set up our problem using five types of variables:
Features: \(x\) Labels: \(y\) Parameters: \(\theta\) Hyperparameters: \(\lambda\) Cost function: \(C\)
We then estimate our parameters and hyperparameters in the following multi-step way so as to minimize our cost function:
\[
\theta_{Train}(\lambda) = \arg \min_{\theta} C(x_{Train}, y_{Train}, \theta, \lambda)
\]
\[
\lambda_{Validation}^{*} = \arg \min_{\lambda} C(x_{Validation}, y_{Validation}, \theta_{Train}(\lambda), \lambda)
\]
The final model performance is assessed using:
\[
C(x_{Test}, y_{Test}, \theta_{Train + Validation}(\lambda_{Validation}^{*}), \lambda_{Validation}^{*})
\]
This two-part minimization problem is similar in many ways to stepwise regression. Like stepwise regression, it feels like an opportunity for clean abstraction is being passed over, but it’s not clear to me (or anyone I think) if there is any analytic way to solve this problem more abstractly.
Instead, the methods we saw presented in our seminars were ways to find better approximations to \(\lambda^{*}\) using less compute time. I’ll go through the traditional approach, then describe the newer and cleaner methods.
Grid Search
Typically, hyperparameters are set using the Grid Search algorithm, which works as follows:
For each parameter \(p_{i}\) the researcher selects a list of values to test empirically. For each element of the Cartesian product of these values, the computer evaluates the cost function. The computer selects the hyperparameter settings from this grid with the lowest cost.
Grid Search is about the worst algorithm one could possibly use, but it’s in widespread use because (A) machine learning experts seem to have less familiarity with derivative-free optimization techniques than with gradient-based optimization methods and (B) machine learning culture does not traditionally think of hyperparameter tuning as a formal optimization problem. Almost certainly (B) is more important than (A).
Random Search
James Bergstra’s first proposed solution was so entertaining because, absent evidence that it works, it seems almost flippant to even propose: he suggested replacing Grid Search with Random Search. Instead of selecting a grid of values and walking through it exhaustively, you select a value for each hyperparameter independently using some probability distribution. You then evaluate the cost function given these random settings for the hyperparameters.
Since this approach seems like it might be worst than Grid Search, it’s worth pondering why it should work. James’ argument is this: most ML models have low-effective dimension, which means that a small number of parameters really affect the cost function and most have almost no effect. Random search lets you explore a greater variety of settings for each parameter, which allows you to find better values for the few parameters that really matter.
I am sure that Paul Meehl would have a field day with this research if he were alive to hear about it.
Arbitrary Regression Problem
An alternative approach is to view our problem as one of Bayesian Optimization: we have an arbitrary function that we want to minimize which is costly to evaluate and we would like to find a good approximate minimum in a small number of evaluations.
When viewed in this perspective, the natural strategy is to regress the cost function on the settings of the hyperparameters. Because the cost function may depend on the hyperparameters in strange ways, it is wise to use very general purpose regression methods. I’ve recently seen two clever strategies for this, one of which was presented to us at MSR:
Jasper Snoek, Hugo Larochelle and Ryan Adams suggest that one use a Gaussian Process. Among other methods, Frank Hutter, Holger H. Hoos and Kevin Leyton-Brown suggest that one use Random Forests.
From my viewpoint, it seems that any derivative-free optimization method might be worth trying. While I have yet to see it published, I’d like to see more people try the Nelder-Mead method for tuning hyperparameters.Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering.
Key Takeaways Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards.
Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
Start with Tier 2 or non-critical services first, and build up success stories to grow chaos further.
As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
If you’re running your first experiment, get your service owners in a war room and get them to monitor the results of the test as it is running.
Related Vendor Content
Show Notes
How did you get started in chaos engineering?
01:50 I started in a home security and home automation system, where my role was focussed on creating different scenarios of sensors being tripped and needing to set off an alarm.
02:20 We didn't call it chaos engineering at that time, but it was a similar approach.
02:30 I was creating different failure scenarios on my desk - I had a light bulb on a timer set to trigger a camera, and tests to see if the alarms were successfully tested.
What did you do at Jet?
03:05 I was the first person hired to do developer productivity at Jet, when it was in startup phase.
03:20 As a startup, the site was going down periodically, and so there was a focus on how to improve the reliability of the site and reduce overnight call-outs.
03:30 This led to chaos engineering as an approach to add stability to the site.
Why is chaos engineering not called chaos testing?
04:00 Chaos engineering is the discipline as a whole, but when you're creating individual tests or experiments they aren't testing something in a binary success/fail mode.
04:20 Chaos experimentation is a new space; you have a formal method to generate new knowledge, you formulate a hypothesis, you perform an experiment and see what the result is.
04:30 If the hypothesis is not supported then it's a form of exploration.
Where did the rigour come from?
05:00 It came from experiences both from myself at Jet and existing practices at Netflix.
05:10 Chaos monkey existed and tested resiliency, which found a lot of stuff, but they also have Latency monkey, which would increase latency of operations.
05:20 It found a bunch of things, because there weren't hypotheses around it, there wasn't a scope to it, there weren't safety mechanisms, and it could cause more harm than good.
05:35 So chaos engineering has a bunch of benefits as a whole, but if you don't scope it out properly and have a strategy then it could cause more harm than good.
05:50 We felt it would help if we defined a process based on our experiences so that others who are just getting started with it can start off on the right foot.
Can you give me an example of what would make a good hypothesis?
06:00 If you think of how you create a scientific experiment, with a hypothesis, then that's what we're trying to do with chaos engineering.
06:10 We try to formulate it as “If X, then Y happens” and list it up front in the experiments that we are running.
06:20 When we were sitting down with application owners and creating these experiments, we asked them what they thought should happen in those circumstances.
06:35 If the service doesn't expect to be resilient under those conditions, you have to be careful, like running that test when the engineers are available or on call, and verify that the blast radius is suitably minimised for a safety mechanism.
06:50 One approach is to introduce latency into those services, instead of failing them.
06:55 So we can create a hypothesis like “If we fail a call from service A to service B, then we expect the fallback path to kick in”
07:05 So the interesting thing is: what happens if the fallback path doesn't kick in?
07:10 Another interesting hypothesis is “What if service C, which isn't a critical service (as far as we know) is making calls to service D, does it affect our core business?”
07:30 We like to call that a ‘surprise' hypothesis, where you discover that a previously assumed non-critical service is in fact critical.
07:45 In other companies, where they have hundreds of micro-services, categorised as ‘Tier 1' and ‘Tier 2' — how do you know that? Has that been empirically tested, or is it a gut feeling?
How do you define a safety net when getting started with chaos engineering?
08:20 You have to keep your business goals in mind; you have to keep them in mind as the chaos engineer.
08:35 As you're kicking off the experiments, you have to ask what the business goals are, what the KPIs are, what is monitoring them, and what's the cost of impact if those KPIs are impacted in some regard?
08:50 When you're at a home security company, the impact might be that someone can't lock their door - which is a high cost in regards to safety.
09:10 If you're an e-commerce company and you're just getting started, if new customers see failures when trying to add their card, you might lose that customer permanently.
09:15 So you have to work out the cost of acquiring the customer and take that into your planning for failure.
09:20 At a streaming company, like Netflix, a lot of the users are existing customers, who would be unlikely to stop watching or using the service, so there's a different kind of customer mentality there.
09:30 If there are already problems in your existing site that are impacting customers at the moment, that would be where you want to start chaos engineering, by recreating those problems in order to understand how to mitigate or resolve issues.
Is using chaos engineering in testing or staging a good first step?
10:00 It's a great first starting step, which was one of the things I first did at Jet.
10:05 One of the first chaos experiments we ran took QA down for a week; it was great we didn't take production down for that long.
10:15 It did uncover some things that weren't known, which is a good way to find out and fix them.
10:20 However, with the advent of micro-services, it may not be possible to easily separate out or mirror QA and production environments.
10:35 You don't get exactly the same level and type of traffic patterns in QA that you do in production though.
10:50 You can uncover some issues, and it's a good starting point while you're trying to manage the chaos engineering perspective as well as the company's perspective.
11:05 Once that's been done, it is important to perform chaos testing in production as well.
11:10 Charity Majors has written an article recently explaining why it's important to test in production - I think it highlights a lot of these points.
What are the most common arguments you hear about moving tests to a production environment?
11:25 I hear a lot about the “It won't happen to me” fallacy.
11:30 There are a lot of companies - banks (ING, Capital One), automotive companies doing self-driving cars (PolySync, JPL) - that are doing chaos engineering.
12:00 The common fear is if your KPIs get hit in a meaningful way then it impacts the business goal in terms of costs or safety.
12:10 There's an implicit fear from businesses that we shouldn't be causing more harm than we need to.
12:15 With the practice of chaos engineering, causing little bits of harm over time will reduce the giant harm in the future.
12:20 We'll spend less time with incident management or recovery in the future.
12:30 Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
12:35 Having the culture shift is the hardest part of getting started.
How does chaos engineering fit into the larger SRE story?
13:15 I think there's a place within site reliability engineering (SRE) for chaos engineering, but I don't think in general people are placing an importance on chaos engineering specifically within SRE.
13:30 As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
13:40 You can't hold all the interactions between moving components in your head, and you can sleep better at night as an SRE if you've used chaos engineering.
What is a good first test that you might use when getting started?
14:15 kill -9 is good to run for stateful applications - you'll be able to immediately tell what the impact is.
14:25 I know that AWS and VMWare both implement kill -9 on the back end.
14:30 The problem is that it's harsh, and the cleanup on the backend may be complicated, so it's important to know what you're testing and have a strategy around it.
14:40 I wouldn't build my whole chaos programme around that, but I do think it's a good starting point, along with terminating instances.
14:50 Chaos monkey has a bit of randomness about it, but as long as you're strategic about that randomness and letting people know what might be terminated and allowing opt-out is important.
What kind of questions would you have and how would you start chaos engineering for a simple shopping cart application?
15:35 I would start by asking where the calls to the shopping cart come from, and injecting failure between that and its immediate child calls.
15:50 As a chaos engineer I think of injecting latency or failure between calls, such as throwing a random exception.
16:30 You can have a library called at the site, which randomly throws an error.
16:45 The Chaos Application Platform (ChAP) sits on top of the Failure Injection Testing (FIT) library, so there will need to be some code added.
What is the chaos maturity model?
17:30 Netflix had a big success with Chaos Monkey and Chaos Kong, and those tools allowed them to get sophisticated in terms of the technology.
17:55 We started thinking of the new tools like ChAP and FIT, which decreases the overhead for engineers to adopt these services.
18:15 If you're looking at a business metric - at Netflix we use Starts Per Second (SPS) - which deviates too far from expected, we stop the experiment.
18:40 It is enough to give a signal but it stops before customers get unhappy and cause alerts.
19:00 With the current state of ChAP, you have to decide that you're starting the service, and what you're failing.
19:10 If you're failing calls from Service A to Service B or making them more latent, you have to put them in there.
19:20 We're focusing on making this more automated - it will find all the services that you are calling, and create the experiments on its own.
19:40 As the user, you can approve or reject those experiments from running.
What are the ideas behind ChAP that others might be able to adopt?
20:00 The most important idea is to minimise blast radius, minimising customer pain - focussing on safety to an extent.
20:10 Once you get adoption, they're more likely to use chaos if they know that it's not going to run rampant or cause problems.
20:15 Importantly, it can stop itself if it sees a deviation from the customer experience that goes outside the desired boundaries.
20:25 The way it works is that it uses canaries to perform an experiment in a controlled cluster, and we inject failure or latency into the experiment cluster and see where they deviate.
20:45 There may be different ways of achieving the same thing in different organisations who have operations structured differently.
Where do you start injecting failure?
21:00 The shopping cart example earlier sounds like what I would call a Tier 1 or critical service - if it goes down, it may result in lost dollars for the business.
21:15 Instead of starting with the Tier 1 services, start with the Tier 2 services and see what the fallbacks to the shopping carts are.
21:20 If the shopping cart goes down, then maybe they are Tier 1 services instead and we didn't realise that they were Tier 1.
21:35 I would start by asking what the biggest impact is, where the issues are happening at the moment, and try to dig in deeper there.
21:45 In terms of injecting failure and latency between calls, it's a good place to build your chaos programme around.
21:50 Terminating instances at first to see if you're resilient to that is a great first step.
How did you win the argument to add more code to services to inject failure or errors?
22:35 At Jet, we were doing graceful restarts at first, along with ungraceful restarts, so it wasn't something that engineers needed to get involved in (which I think is important).
22:45 The most they needed to was to recover where necessary and clean up afterwards, or choose to opt out of the tests.
The business owners couldn't be easy though?
23:00 There were times where I had business owners or service owners coming up and asking me to turn off chaos because they had a big release that day.
23:15 That's why I needed to start conversations about chaos engineering - it was being seen as a blocker or a hinderance, rather than an important part of the development process.
23:25 If your services aren't resilient to a single instance failure, then how are they going to be resilient to many more types of failure that may occur in production?
23:35 After that was accepted (after a few months) we didn't have anyone opt out any more.
23:50 We then focussed on targeted chaos - at the time Jet relied heavily on Kafka, which was also used to do regional failover.
24:05 We realised that the potential for things going bad if the Kafka failover had problems.
24:15 We asked what the steady state was that we wanted to achieve with these failures in Kafka, and if that steady state got out of hand what do we want to happen?
24:30 We looked at what would happen if the offsets got out of sync, what would happen if we dropped random packets, injected data in and so on.
What's happening in chaos engineering?
25:15 The chaos community meeting is in its third year, and is a community-driven event, in San Francisco on September 8, and there's one in Minneapolis in November.
26:10 The state of the art is moving towards automation |
a cost for so minuscule an alleged benefit is insane; remember, for plants, animals, and people, warmer is better. When one begins to grasp the magnitude of the burden that people would bear as a result of spending so much to tilt at the carbon dioxide windmill, it’s worse than insane; it’s criminal.
Who would benefit from this catastrophically expensive agenda? Only the political and politically connected elite—the Goldman Sachs outfits that would reap billions from trading carbon permits; the Al Gores and corporate and political insiders that would amass fortunes from their ties to a government-rigged energy market and investments in politically correct technologies. And think of the power that governments would have if they controlled energy consumption. By controlling energy, you control people. No wonder governments have spent tens of billions of dollars promoting this scenario and supporting political panels like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to disseminate the desired “findings.”
Who would lose if governments gain the power to order a significant reduction in CO2 emissions? Around the world, millions of people at the margins of survival would die. It would be a dispersed holocaust. Millions of others would suffer unnecessary impoverishment and deprivation. Even in wealthier countries, people who are affluent enough to afford the monetary costs could find their lives heavily regimented by government bureaucrats monitoring and limiting how many miles they may travel and what activities they may undertake.
This is the ugly truth about what potentially could be the crime of the century. In my next two columns, I will look at two alternative national energy policies. The first will be Obama’s and the second is what I hope would be Romney’s.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.Image: JD Hancock/Flickr
Trying to effectively use the Freedom of Information Act can be hell. Maybe a police department will demand a ridiculous and seemingly arbitrary fee to collect records, or perhaps an agency simply won't respond to requests.
Judging by Motherboard's own requests as well as those from Freedom of Information organizations, one government body in particular stands out for turning FOIA requests into a nightmare: NASA.
Freedom of Information Act requests are used by journalists, private citizens, and government watchdogs to acquire public documents from government agencies. FOIA.gov puts it simply: "FOIA is a law that gives you the right to access information from the federal government. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government."
FOIAing NASA, however, can be an exercise in futility. In one recent case, Motherboard requested all emails from a specific NASA email address with a specific subject line (Motherboard is not publishing this particular request because we are still pursuing these documents). Other government agencies have completed similar requests with no problems.
NASA, however, said it was "unclear what specific NASA records you are requesting." Possibly the only way to be more specific is to knock on NASA's door and show them a printout of what an email is.
JPat Brown, executive editor of public records platform MuckRock, explained similarly frustrating experiences with NASA.
"Even in cases where we've requested specific contracts by name and number, NASA has claimed that our request was too broad, and added insult to injury with a form letter rejection that includes the sentence 'we are not required to hunt for needles in bureaucratic haystacks,'" Brown told Motherboard in an email.
Brown added that NASA has refused to process records unless presented with a requester's home address, something that is not included in the relevant code; and makes it more difficult for requests to obtain'media' status. With this, requesters can get a fee reduction.
NASA regularly says that specific requests are "fishing expeditions" by reporters. Image: Motherboard
In another instance, NASA closed a Motherboard FOIA request for failing "to provide sufficient details or information" to complete the request; in this case, the request was for emails sent to or received by specific "Capstone" employees regarding the Trump administration transition during a short timeframe between the election and Trump's inauguration. This same request was sent to and completed by numerous other agencies.
In yet another case, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab refused to search its employees' Slack app for messages sent pertaining to the announcement of SpaceX's Mars plan, even though the request was for specific messages sent in a specific Slack channel at a specific time on a specific date about a specific topic:
JPL said this request was similarly "unclear [on] what specific NASA records you are requesting."
In early 2016, Motherboard requested design artwork for NASA JPL's "Visions of the Future" calendar; JPL said NASA "is not equipped or required to conduct a search for 'budget and invoices for the design and artwork commissioned for for the calendar.'" In that case, NASA also asked Motherboard's requester to prove they were a journalist, using a four-part test consisting of multiple questions each.
All of these aren't just excuses for a good moan. Arguably, NASA is failing to deliver on its obligations to fulfill proper Freedom of Information Act requests, meaning the public may be missing out on information that is important to understanding the organization and how it functions, and how it spends taxpayer funds. It is worth mentioning that Motherboard has regularly worked with one specific office—NASA's Office of Inspector General—with few problems. That office regularly and quickly responds to Motherboard's FOIA requests.
Bob Jacobs, a spokesperson for NASA, told Motherboard in an email, "NASA believes it fairly disposes of FOIA requests and follows the Code of Federal Regulations regarding such public inquiries." He encouraged journalists to appeal decisions if they felt their request was not handled properly.This past weekend, a Houston man was murdered in front of his 10-year-old daughter and wife for the simple fact that he owned a car with a manual transmission-and a pair of would-be robbers couldn't figure out how to work it. Parked in front of an apartment complex just before midnight, the man’s vehicle was approached by two men in their twenties and they attempted to carjack him, according to police. When they failed to put the vehicle in drive, the suspects beat the car's owner and shot the him in the chest, killing him.
Over the last few decades, sales have drastically fallen compared with previous years. For example, in 2016, only 23 percent of Chevrolet Corvettes sold were equipped with a manual transmission-and that corresponds to one of the highest percentages of stick shifts in America.
Members of the car community often complain how people are quickly losing the skill required to drive a manual transmission; now it seems the inability to operate a manual transmission has trickled down to the car theft community and led to a needless killing as a result.
This article was originally published on TheDrive.comLook up towards the east on Wednesday night (October 8) and a total lunar eclipse will be visible from across Australia.
The moon will slowly move through Earth’s shadow, as the sun, Earth and moon fall into line with each other.
Phil Hart
The eclipse occurs during the early evening, making it the perfect opportunity to head outdoors and watch it happen with family and friends. Best of all, you don’t need any special equipment to see it.
From Western Australia the eclipse will have begun by the time the moon rises. In Perth, the moon will be almost fully eclipsed as it first appears above the eastern horizon. Totality will occur just a few minutes later.
Further north around Broome, the moon rises earlier so just on half of the moon will be eclipsed at moonrise.
The rest of Australia will see the whole eclipse, from start to finish, with the moon visible in the eastern sky.
A lunar eclipse occurs at the same moment for every location on Earth, so the differences in time depend only on the local timezone.
Red moon, red planet, red star
During totality, when the Earth lies directly between the sun and the moon, the moon will take on a bright reddish-orange glow. This is because some sunlight still manages to reach the moon but has to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere to get there.
As sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere all the blue light is scattered away leaving behind only red light. The atmosphere also refracts or bends this light so that it is redirected into the Earth’s shadow and bathes the moon in a coppery glow.
During totality, an astronaut on the moon would see the Earth’s atmosphere lit up as a red ring of light.
Exactly what the moon will look like for us here on Earth depends on conditions in the atmosphere. At present the atmosphere is fairly clear of airborne particles like dust from desert storms or volcanoes. So this eclipse is expected to turn the moon a bright orange-red.
Furthermore, eclipses are very much a leisurely event so there’s also the chance to do some stargazing and planet watching. There are a number of bright stars to be found near the eclipsed moon, including the northern hemisphere’s famous Summer Triangle made from the bright stars Vega, Deneb and Altair.
Museum Victoria/Stellarium
High above the moon the bright star Fomalhaut which belongs to the constellation of the southern fish, also known as Piscis Austrinus, catches the eye.
Looking towards the west, the red planet Mars is still reasonably close to the red supergiant star Antares. Closer to the horizon Saturn can also be found just below the claws of Scorpius.
Museum Victoria/Stellarium
As totality ends, the other thing to watch out for is just how bright the moon appears as it slowly emerges from the Earth’s shadow.
What next?
Lunar eclipses and solar eclipses come in pairs around a fortnight apart. The solar eclipse that is paired with this lunar one will occur on October 23. It will be a partial solar eclipse - the moon will block about 80% of the sun’s diameter - and be visible across Canada and the USA.
Australia’s next total lunar eclipse will occur next year, on April 4. But it’ll be a quick one with only a few minutes of totality rather than the usual hour or so.
At any rate be sure to take the opportunity to view this one while you can. A number of planetariums and observatories around the country are hosting eclipse events so the experience can be shared with others.
And if the weather doesn’t cooperate in your local area, you can also follow the eclipse via live streaming by Sydney Observatory, Slooh or the Virtual Telescope.Get the biggest daily news 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
The families of British soldiers killed in Iraq hope to bring Tony Blair to court after a successful £150,000 crowd-funding campaign to pay for the crucial legal work.
Reg Keys, whose son Tom was killed in Iraq in in 2003, said lawyers were now "drilling down" into the 2.6 million word Chilcot report to establish whether a case could be brought against Mr Blair or other senior British officials "who might have acted unlawfully or in excess of their powers".
Mr Keys, who has led the campaign with fellow bereaved father Roger Bacon, said: "We're hopeful the next time you see us, it'll be at the Royal Courts of Justice to bring a civil prosecution over this debacle."
The Iraq War Families Campaign Group launched the fundraiser on July 19 and despite passing its target, money has continued to roll in, now totalling £159,000 from more than 5,100 donors.
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That cash is funding a forensic legal analysis of the Chilcot report, to establish whether a case could be brought against Mr Blair or other senior British officials "who might have acted unlawfully or in excess of their powers".
Mr Keys, who has led the campaign with fellow bereaved father Roger Bacon, said: "We're hopeful the next time you see us, it'll be at the Royal Courts of Justice to bring a civil prosecution over this debacle."
He said the first stage of work by a team of lawyers from London-based McCue and Partners had already been completed.
The cash appeal came weeks after the Chilcot report tore into former prime minister Mr Blair, other leading politicians and senior officials over their actions before, during and after the conflict in which 179 British service personnel died.
Mr Keys said: "The first instalment of work is already over.
(Image: Chris J Ratcliffe)
"About one week ago the lawyers completed a breakdown of the areas they would be looking at.
"We've had that breakdown.
"But it's got to be a water-tight argument."
Between six and eight lawyers are working through the lengthy report with Mr Keys hopeful the families can fulfil their vow to "bring to justice those responsible for the war and the deaths of our loved ones".
He said the campaign had taken inspiration from the fight by the bereaved Hillsborough relatives and the successful civil court action bought by loved ones of victims of the 1998 Omagh bombings.
(Image: PA)
Mr Keys said: "I feel good.
"We're back on the road again at last, things have not come to a stagnant end.
"The fight goes on."
The 64-year-old retired paramedic from Hollywood, Birmingham, added: "The truth does have a habit of bubbling up."
Sir John Chilcot's report strongly criticised the way Mr Blair took the country to war in 2003 on the basis of "flawed" intelligence with inadequate preparation at a time when Saddam Hussein did not pose an "imminent threat".
It also said the way the decision about the legal basis for the war was reached was "far from satisfactory", but his report did not rule on the legality of the military action.
Mr Blair has defended the decision to oust Saddam and insisted that his efforts to form a close relationship with the US had persuaded President George W Bush to pursue a second UN Security Council resolution, which ultimately was not obtained.
The money donated to the bereaved families campaign group is to provide "a comprehensive opinion approved by expert senior counsel".
This will inform the relatives whether legal action against key actors would succeed or not.
Matthew Jury, managing partner at McCue and Partners, said: "Without the British public's support, Sir John Chilcot's report would be gathering dust already - but now, we will be able once and for all, to determine accountability and possible routes to justice."In December the U.S. Air Force flew a C-17 transport plane across the country powered in part by a new propellant: natural gas transmuted into a synthetic liquid fuel. Heat and catalysts converted methane into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which were then transformed into liquid hydrocarbons (otherwise known as oil and its derivatives): petroleum, gasoline and, in the case of aviation, kerosene.
"Hitler flew Messerschmitts on it," says William Anderson, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for installations, environment and logistics, about such Fischer-Tropsch synthetic fuel, which can be made from methane, coal, plant oils—even wood waste. "We believe that having a secure domestic source of fuel makes it easier for us to do that mission [to fly and fight]. It is less likely that there would be some disruption to the fuel source that we need to fly airplanes."
View slideshow here
Whether for supersonic fighter jets or commercial airliners, the aviation world has begun a quest for the fuel of the future, transitioning away from petroleum-derived JP-8 and Jet A varieties to Fischer-Tropsch synthetics or biofuels. Driven by security and environmental concerns as well as skyrocketing oil prices—United Airlines more than doubled its fuel surcharge per ticket to $50 on January 12—the aviation industry continues to cut back on fuel burn as it searches for cleaner, cheaper alternatives.
"We are definitely interested in having an alternative source of energy available to us for both economic and environmental reasons, not to mention pure supply," says John Heimlich, chief economist at the Air Transport Association of America (ATA) in Washington, D.C., which represents airlines responsible for more than 90 percent of U.S. passenger and freight air traffic. "There are a host of fuels out there; some could be better, some could be worse. We need to find something at least as good, if not better."
Rock to Liquid
Jet aircraft today typically burn kerosene, an energy-dense hydrocarbon fuel that delivers as much as 48 megajoules per kilogram (20,700 British thermal units per pound), allowing for long-distance travel. Americans have taken advantage of this capacity, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics: Airlines reported ferrying more than 72 million passengers last July, a record high for a single month.
At the same time, the aviation industry has become far more fuel efficient in the face of soaring prices. (Airlines spent $37 billion for fuel alone in 2007 through November and may follow United in imposing steeper fuel surcharges on customers in 2008.) According to the ATA, the industry has reduced the amount of fuel burned by 23 percent since 2000 by taking such steps as making aircraft lighter and introducing more efficient engines. "Today, Northwest Airlines is averaging roughly 50 passenger miles per gallon [21 kilometers per liter] of fuel," says Tim McGraw, Northwest's director of safety, health and environment, largely by replacing its aging fleet of airplanes with newer, more efficient jets.
The primary reason for such improvements has been the steady rise in fuel costs. For example, the Air Force has watched its energy spending double since 2003 even though it cut fuel consumption by more than 10,000 barrels a day during the same period. "Over 80 percent of the entire Air Force energy buy is in liquid aviation fuel," Anderson says. "That represents a little less than $6 billion a year of taxpayer money that goes into feeding our fleet with fuel."
As a result, the Air Force—and other military branches as well as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)—have begun to experiment with alternatives. "Alternative fuels offer the potential, if not to lower the price [of petroleum-derived fuels], at least to provide a hedge in the future against their future growth or, put differently, their volatility," says technologist Douglas Kirkpatrick, DARPA's program manager for alternative fuels efforts. "The key here is to go from one source to many."
He adds: "Anyone who runs a business knows that you don't want to have one supplier. Essentially, that's the position we're in."
In the short term, the Air Force hopes to make use of the Fischer-Tropsch chemistry that kept Nazi-era Germany and the apartheid-era Union of South Africa's airplanes flying in the absence of oil (and still supplies 40 percent of South Africa's transportation fuel needs) to ensure diversity of supply. In addition to flying the C-17 across the country—a plane powered by the same Pratt and Whitney F117-100 engine employed on commercial Boeing 757s—the Air Force in August certified its still flying 1950s-era B-52 bombers to burn synfuel.
"Why start with an old weapons system?" Anderson says. "It's a very simple engine compared to newer ones, less things can go wrong."
The natural gas-derived synfuel performed perfectly in both planes during ground tests, flights and even during cold starts in the dead of winter in Minot, N. Dak. The 50–50 blend of synfuel and JP-8 fulfilled all 40 of the Air Force's fuel performance criteria, including coming through in extremely high and low temperatures. "Pilots are telling us that they're feeling no difference at the controls between the fuels," Anderson notes.
Fischer-Tropsch synfuels promise to provide a potentially cleaner fuel supply as well. Burning the purer fuel—clearer than petroleum-derived kerosene—eliminates sulfur emissions that lead to acid rain and reduces (by 50 to 90 percent) the amount of tiny particles that usually remain after combustion, according to Richard Altman, executive director of the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI), an industry effort to develop new energy options.
But synfuel will not lead to fewer emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas primarily responsible for global climate change. Environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that turning coal to liquid fuel emits twice as much carbon dioxide as producing petroleum fuels. "We will only buy fuel that is greener than our current alternatives," Anderson says. "Our current alternative is petroleum-based jet fuel."
The European Union plans to restrict carbon emissions from airplanes beginning in 2012; in the U.S., legislation is pending that would impose similar limits, and five states (California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York) have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate such emissions in the interim. "We now know that the solution that will be most environmentally acceptable," CAAFI's Altman says, "will have significant biofuels."
Beyond Kerosene
The amount of emissions from aircraft compared with other vehicles is relatively small—roughly 3 percent of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—nonetheless it has a major impact on the climate. By releasing carbon dioxide higher in the atmosphere, airplanes allow the molecule more time to trap heat, also contributing via contrails and other chemically active gases, the IPCC notes.
Some airlines have been effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "At Northwest, our greenhouse gas emissions have gone down 25 percent since 2000 and about 5 percent less than 1990," says Ken Hylander, Northwest's senior vice president of safety and engineering. "If Northwest was a country, we would be Kyoto [Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions] compliant."
But emissions from the aviation industry as a whole continue to climb. According to the EPA, from 1990 to 2005 greenhouse emissions from military aircraft slid by 50 percent but those from commercial carriers rose by 16 percent, largely due to growth in the number of carriers.
Efficiency alone—even in the form of aircraft with improved engines and designs such as the Boeing 787, expected to deliver a 20 percent improvement in fuel efficiency over existing big airplanes—is not the answer. "A low-CO 2 fuel will help us to address that remaining portion of the pie," says David Daggett, technology leader for energy and emissions at Boeing. "That's why we're interested in biofuels specifically."
One such biofuel—ethanol—is already being used to power a heavily employed commercial fleet: piston-engine propeller crop dusters. Max Shauck, chair of the Baylor Institute for Air Science (who flew an ethanol-powered prop plane at air shows in the 1980s), has converted at least 1,000 such aircraft in Brazil, a country that has weaned itself from foreign oil by embracing ethanol domestically produced from sugarcane.
In addition to being easier on the engine, ethanol costs one quarter to one half as much as the aviation gas typically used in such propeller planes. Ethanol decreases the number of hours or distance such an aircraft can fly, however, due to its lower energy density, but "it develops more power and it's a greenhouse gas–neutral fuel," Shauck says. "There's plenty of ethanol produced in the world to power all the piston-engine aircraft."
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is conducting tests but has yet to certify ethanol as a fuel for piston-engine planes in the U.S., says Lourdes Maurice, chief scientist and technical advisor to the FAA's Office of Environment and Energy. Regardless, ethanol's low energy density makes it unsuitable for jet-turbine engines. "Clearly we can't use ethanol," CAAFI's Altman says. "That's a blessing. We don't want to compete with food crops."
Diesellike fuel derived from plant oils might avoid that problem as well as supply similar greenhouse gas reduction (depending on how the plants are cultivated). Already, a Czechoslovakian L-29 jet—specially built in the 1960s by the Czech military to run on alternative fuels—flew for 37 minutes and reached an altitude of 17,000 feet (5,180 meters) powered entirely by reformulated canola oil. "Would you rather buy your oil from the Middle East," asks BioJet 1 copilot Doug Rodante, president of Green Fuels International (a company that promotes alternative fuels), "or the Midwest?"
But biodiesel solidifies into a gel at the cold temperatures found at high altitude, a fatal flaw for any aircraft fuel. The Czech jet has fuel heaters to get around this problem, and similar solutions could be engineered into other jet engines, argues physicist Rudi Wiedemann, president and CEO of Biodiesel Solutions, Inc., in Sparks, Nev., the flight's fuel provider.
Or the biodiesel itself can be further refined to ensure that it doesn't solidify until at least –40 degrees Celsius (–40 degrees Fahrenheit), the current standard for petroleum-derived jet fuel. UOP, a Honeywell Company, has developed such a "green diesel" by heating vegetable and animal oils to add hydrogen atoms to the long hydrocarbon chains, under the aegis of DARPA. In addition, its "ecofining" process adds kinks in the chains to prevent them from easily stacking—or gelling—at cold temperatures, producing a diesellike fuel with as much as twice the combustion quality of the petroleum-derived variety.
Boeing has tested two such "vegetable-based biofuels" with this antifreezing property in the General Electric jet engines used on many of its 747 aircraft, Daggett says. Virgin Atlantic airline announced that early this year it will conduct the first flight test of a biodiesel–petroleum diesel blend in one of the four engines of a 747 aircraft; Air New Zealand is planning a similar test flight on a Rolls Royce engine in one of its 747s later in the year.
The first UOP-derived ecofining facility, capable of producing 100 million gallons of diesel fuel for ground vehicles, is now being built in Livorno, Italy; a second facility is set to be constructed in Sines, Portugal. "Going to biofuels doesn't mean we have to make compromises. We are already making fuels that look exactly like the real thing, or better," says Jennifer Holmgren, UOP's director of renewable energy chemicals. "The real limitation is going to be feedstock."
There is not enough oil from plants such as soy and canola to supply even a fraction of the 60 million–plus gallons of jet fuel burned every day by U.S. aircraft, nearly one quarter of global use, even if all such sources were converted to fuel (which would significantly impact food supplies.) And Boeing has had a hard time finding biofuel suppliers who can produce testable quantities of their product. "Immediately that weeds out a lot of companies when you ask for 1,000 gallons," Daggett says.
As a result, both private companies like UOP, government agencies like DARPA and commercial organizations such as CAAFI have begun to consider a broader array of sources, including the oil from the seeds of Brazil's babassu palm tree or the conversion of the woody or cellulosic parts of plants. Chemical engineer Charles Wyman of the University of California, Riverside, argues for biorefineries turning seed oil, the stalks and other detritus of crop plants, and even wood pulp waste into an assortment of alternative fuels.
"You are growing wood or grasses in a renewable way in some sort of energy plantation to produce biomass," he says. "Convert some of that to ethanol, and the fraction you can't convert, use Fischer-Tropsch to make diesel fuel that could be tailored towards jet fuel."
Or algae could be grown. The tiny plant can produce "60 percent of its weight as oil under stress," according to Wyman. Closed vats might produce pure strains of such high-oil species for feeding into large ponds to grow sufficient supplies, says systems engineer Ron Pate at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, who has been analyzing the fuel potential of microscopic plants.
Such vast algae farms might also subsist on so-called "impaired" water, either salty ocean or polluted waters, Pate says. "Water coming out of sewage treatment plants has nutrients—nitrates, which encourage algae to grow," Boeing's Daggett notes. "You can harvest the algae and extract the oil, then release the water in a cleaner state than what it would have been leaving the sewage plant."
But biorefineries would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require significant upgrades in existing processes, whereas such algae schemes have yet to be tried. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has provided the money for a few pilot biorefineries and DARPA has provided funding for initial efforts to begin exploring algae's feasibility, but it will be years before any such fuel is widely available. "Ten to 20 years is a reasonable time frame," Daggett says.
Fossil Blends
The Air Force, meanwhile, plans to certify its entire fleet of aircraft on Fischer-Tropsch process synthetic fuels derived from methane or coal by 2011 and plans to purchase enough such fuel to power at least 50 percent of the fleet in the continental U.S. by 2016. Tests began in November on the performance of the purer synfuel in the jet afterburner engines that are used for supersonic flight.
"That's about 400 million gallons [1.5 billion liters] of fuel," Anderson says, compared to 281,000 gallons [1.06 million liters] purchased this year and an estimated 500,000 gallons [1.9 million liters] next year. "It may only be marginally [environmentally] better in 2016. Carbon neutral? Probably not."
Although such synfuels may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how they are produced, they will deliver some independence from the tyranny of petroleum. "The coal in the ground in the U.S. at current use will last 400 to 500 years. If you double, triple or quadruple the use of coal, it won't be 400, of course, it'll be 100 or 50 years," Anderson notes. "But it's 50 more years to get to the carbon-free economy."
Before then, the impact on Earth's climate can be limited by blending relatively small amounts of biofuels into such synfuels—an option DARPA, for one, rejects for logistical reasons—or capturing the carbon dioxide from synfuel production and using it to enhance the growth of the plants to be turned into fuel. "Put as little as 20 percent biofuel into nonrenewable fuels—coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid—you can be carbon neutral in a mix," CAAFI's Altman says.
Such a 20 percent mix would not require any modifications to existing aircraft engines or infrastructure, Green Flight International's Rodante says. "Jet fuel and biofuel mix is something that is easily done," he says "I don't believe 100 percent biofuel is the answer."
Oil prices at $100 per barrel are already well above the $40 per barrel level at which synfuel producing facilities break even, and even the $70 per barrel level that might make carbon capture economically feasible. "The biggest challenge is production capacity—and staying the course," FAA's Maurice says. "If the price of crude were to drop, can we sustain the interest?"
Still, the combination of factors involved: energy security, diversity of supply and the environment may sustain commercial aviation's interest, though its overall goals are smaller—certifying synfuel blends next year, full synfuels by 2010 and biofuels in 2013. "There is an underlying demand for something better than $90 per barrel oil, that has better domestic supply and can help cope with increasing environmental pressure," ATA's Heimlich says. "I have yet to see that silver bullet magic fuel."
In the interim, many airlines are offering ways to offset the greenhouse gas emissions associated with air travel, such as U.S.-based Delta Air Line's program with The Conservation Fund to plant trees in return for $5.50 that passengers are given the option of adding to the price of a domestic round-trip ticket or $11 for international round-trip flights. Britain-based Virgin Atlantic has a similar agreement with myclimate (a Swiss offset provider), who uses added flyer fees, which vary depending on ticket price, to fund renewable energy projects in developing countries such as India. It remains unclear, however, how much such passenger-funded partnerships do to alleviate climate change and they are a poor substitute for a carbon-neutral alternative jet fuel.
"We should have stayed the course in the 1970s and then we wouldn't be having this discussion," the Air Force's Anderson says. "Whether it takes 30 or 50 years [to develop such a fuel], it's going to take longer if we start tomorrow than if we start today."
View slideshow hereOn the campaign trail, Donald Trump presented himself as the ultimate outsider who would rid Washington of special interest corruption and “drain the swamp.” And immediately after taking office, he signed a flashy executive order tightening restrictions on lobbyists’ work in the executive branch.
But he immediately began to staff the administration with people whose work seemed, on its face, to clearly violate the terms of the order. Rather than publicly grant waivers of ethics rules with a clearly stated rationale, the White House was simply routinely waiving ethics rules in secret so nobody knew how many waivers were issued or for what purpose.
After extensive back and forth with congressional Democrats and the Office of Government Ethics, Trump has finally provided documentation, and it shows that the ethics rules are plainly meaningless. He’s granted five times as many waivers in his first four months in office as Obama did, which cover key figures in the administration like Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, and counselor Kellyanne Conway. All told, 17 waivers were granted to members of the White House staff, and we still have no idea how many waivers have been granted for other executive branch agencies or whether anyone is even keeping track.
Trump’s ethics pledge, explained
Back in October 2016, with his poll numbers in a tailspin after the devastating revelation that he’d been caught on tape bragging about routine sexual assault, Trump unveiled a flashy series of promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington and shake up the establishment.
With key party figures abandoning him and major Republican donors focused on saving the House and Senate rather than backing his candidacy, it was a smart way of making lemons out of lemonade. Experts like New America’s Lee Drutman panned Trump’s pledges as “fake reform,” but as Jeff Stein argued last November, there’s considerable evidence that it worked. Despite all the post-election kvetching about Clinton’s message on the economy (or lack thereof), exit polls showed her decisively winning among voters who cited economic issues as their main interest. Trump dominated, by contrast, among voters who said they wanted “change.” And pre-election issue polling from both Pew and Gallup showed Trump with a clear edge on just one issue — reducing special interest influence.
The specific elements of Trump’s plan were, however, largely vague or unworkable:
First, propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.
, propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. Second, impose a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).
, impose a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health). Third, require that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.
, require that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated. Fourth, put a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.
, put a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service. Fifth, place a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
, place a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. Sixth, put a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
To the extent that Trump could really do any of these things, he packaged them into his January 28 executive order. But as good-government types found during the Obama administration, these kinds of executive branch commitments are inherently flimsy because what the president orders, the president can also grant exceptions to. And like Trump, Obama ended up giving members of his administration waivers to allow them to work on regulatory issues tied to their former lobbying portfolios.
But while Obama at least made an effort to make waivers the exception rather than the rule — to require them to meet the specific legal standard that nobody else in the administration could do a given task — Trump seems to be simply waiving the rules willy-nilly and then doing his best to avoid disclosure when it’s happened.
Some key White House waivers
These waivers are, in many cases, particularly egregious. Andrew Olmem, for example, joined the White House as special assistant to the president for financial policy after having lobbied the federal government on behalf of a number of financial firms, including MetLife.
His waiver allows him, among other things, to work on the subject of Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) regulatory treatment of insurance companies.
As it happens, the single most controversial thing FSOC has done over the course of its existence is designating MetLife as being in need of enhanced regulatory supervision as the kind of entity whose self-inflicted imprudence and eventual failure could threaten the entire national economy.
Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist for a coal-burning utility, is working on the rollback of Obama-era regulations on coal-burning utilities. Shahira Knight, who lobbied for Fidelity Investments, is now working on tax and retirement policy.
Former lobbyists are, in other words, directly managing the White House end of the regulatory process on issues that directly implicate their clients’ core interests.
Trump’s biggest broken promise
Trump’s public, flagrant flouting of his promise to inaugurate a new era of more ethical and less conflicted federal government is less sexy than secret intelligence leaks about previously undisclosed contacts with Russia. But it’s in many ways worthy of more attention than it’s thus far received. A lot of Trump-era campaign promises were pretty clearly nonsense to anyone who bothered to do a five-minute Google search, or else were mired in hopelessly contradictory rhetoric from day one.
But Trump, like him or not, really was a political outsider whose nomination as president really was resisted by the top leadership of the Republican Party and who really was viewed warily by key congressional Republicans right through Election Day, and he really did rely much less on traditional campaign donors than the past few GOP nominees or Hillary Clinton. The whole Trump show clearly discomfited the broad political establishment along a number of dimensions, and it wasn’t obviously ridiculous to draw the inference that one thing the establishment feared about Trump was the risk that he would shake up the existing cozy financial arrangement.
In reality, Trump’s White House is filled with lobbyists and waivers. And we have no idea what |
such as baptism, Mormon temple sealing, etc. These are administered to the dead posthumously in Mormon temples throughout the world on a persistent basis. Mormons believe that the dead will have the opportunity to accept or reject said ordinances after they have been performed and believe they need to be performed for everyone. More information around these beliefs can be found here. Read more...
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The MormonLeaks™ Team Launches FaithLeaks and the Truth and Transparency Foundation The MormonLeaks™ team is proud to announce critical expansions to its efforts by offering additional channels that build on our news reporting, public commentary, and criticism of all things Mormon. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Recordings of August 2017 Kansas Wichita Area Adult and Youth Sessions MormonLeaks™ releases audio recordings of recent meetings held in the Kansas Wichita Area with Dallin H. Oaks. The meetings took place in August 2017. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Documents Showing Theft of Church Funds MormonLeaks™ releases ward financial statements and translated emails demonstrating theft of Church funds by a Bishop in Holland. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Meeting Minutes from Various Executive Committees MomonLeaks™ releases six sets of meeting minutes from various committees spanning from 2014 – 2016. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Publishes Four Slide Decks Exploring Issues Concerning Various Demographics MomonLeaks™ releases four PowerPoint slide decks that present the research finding of four different studies. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Publishes Slide Deck Concerning Gender Equality Today MormonLeaks™ releases a 2014 PowerPoint slide deck entitled “Gender Equality” in the Church. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Email from L. Whitney Clayton Concerning Affirmation Conference Today MormonLeaks™ releases a 2014 email from L. Whitney Clayton to several General and Area Authories, in which instruction is given concerning the Affirmation Conference happening the following week. Affirmation is a non-profit that “work[s] for the understanding and acceptance of gays and lesbians as full, equal and worthy persons” within the Mormon Church. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Receives and Responds to DMCA Take Down; Publishes 53 Additional McConkie Papers On July 24, 2017 MormonLeaks™ released the first installment of the McConkie Papers: 37 unpublished documents from the hand of controversial Mormon leader Bruce R. McConkie. Subsequently on July 26, 2017, MormonLeaks™ received a DMCA take down request from the attorney of the McConkie heirs asking for the removal of all 37 documents. Today MormonLeaks™ responds to the request refusing to comply and publishes another 53 documents in the McConkie Papers series. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Publishes Video Recording Between BYU Football Player and Provo City Police MormonLeaks™ recently received a video which depicted an interaction between the Provo Police Department, Francis Bernard, and other unidentified individuals. The video was recorded on December 4, 2016. In the video we learn that this is the second visit from the police that night and one of multiple visits they have had to make over time to Mr. Bernard. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Internal Communication from Mormon Church Concerning Denver Snuffer and the Remnant Movement MormonLeaks™ releases the following documents, all of which can be found by clicking on the single link below: Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Priesthood Leadership Conference Meeting Minutes MormonLeaks™ releases meeting minutes from the Utah Layton Priesthood Leadership Conference held in February 2014. Multiple members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Quorum of the Seventy, and stake leaders in the Layton area were in attendance. Read more...
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Introducing The McConkie Papers: MormonLeaks™ Releases 37 Never Before Published Documents by Bruce R. McConkie Today, MormonLeaks™ introduces a series of documents called The McConkie Papers. Its first installment is a series of 37 unpublished sermons, lessons, and accounts written by Bruce R. McConkie, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1972 to 1985 and author of Mormon Doctrine. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Stands for Net Neutrality MormonLeaks™ believes that a neutral Internet is key in preserving the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. Today, the FCC is threatening the beauty of the Internet that allows small organizations, such as MormonLeaks™, make their voices heard by rolling back important regulations that prevent Internet service providers decide what websites’ traffic should receive priority when traveling through the Internet, thus giving them the power to potentially censor the Internet in their favor. Today MormonLeaks™ is participating in the Battle for the Net and making our strong opposition to the FCC’s proposal known. Please consider writing your legistlators by filling out the form at battleforthenet.com and inform them that you suport classifying broadband as a common carrier under Title II of the Communications Act. To learn more read here. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Publishes Letter from Hawaiian Stake Presidency Concerning the Consumption of Kava Today, MormonLeaks™ publishes an October 2006 letter from the Laie Hawaii Stake Presidency addressing the consumption of Kava, a plant whose roots are used to create a sedative drink.: Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Republishes Video Removed by YouTube Early last week, Mike Norton, aka NewNameNoah, posted a video to YouTube of a 12 year old lesbian Mormon girl speaking in front of her Mormon congregation. After expressing her feelings that God “did not mess up” by making her gay, the microphone was cut off by the leaders of the congregation. That video has since been removed from YouTube. Today MormonLeaks is republishing this video on its own server so the public can still view it. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Issues Press Release Addressing the Protection of Sources Our mission at MormonLeaks™ is to provide sources the ability to anonymously submit sensitive documents related to Mormonism that start or expand news reporting, public commentary, and criticism that results in fewer untruths, less corruption, and less abuse within Mormonism. Maintaining the strict anonymity of our sources is our top priority. To this end — similar to the The New York Times, The Associated Press, and other media outlets — MormonLeaks™ uses a document submission tool known as SecureDrop that allows our sources to anonymously submit documents. When documents are submitted via this tool, our team cannot identify the source of the submission. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Six Checks Paid With Fast Offering Funds Later Questioned by a General Authority Today MormonLeaks™ releases six checks written by leadership from various congregations in Utah using fast offering funds. Five are accompanied with a letter questioning the transactions and asking the respective Stake Presidents to verify the funds were used appropriately according to Church guidlines. According to sources, the letters are from a General Authority. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Documents Used to Assess "Pornography Addiction Recovery Needs" Today MormonLeaks™ releases documents given to local leaders which are used to help assess the needs of those members who view pornography. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Publishes Documents Detailing 2014 and 2015 Mission Presidents' Seminars Today MormonLeaks™ releases documents detaling the 2014 Seminar for New Mission Presidents and the 2015 Interim Mission Presidents’ Seminar for the Utah North, Utah Salt Lake City, and Utah South areas. The links below lead to pages overviewing the documents obtained. Read more...
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Minutes to 3 Meetings with Church Leadership Leaked Today MormonLeaks™ publishes the minutes to the following meetings with Church leadership in the Utah Area: Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Emails Revealing Prior Implementation of Items from November 2015 Gay Policy Today MormonLeaks™ releases an email chain from July 21, 2015. It contains dialogue between leaders of the Mormon Church inquiring if children of gay couples are to be blessed in Sacrament Meeting. The final response comes from L. Whitney Clayton of the Presidency of the Seventy. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Email By L. Whitney Clayton Sent Days After Gay Marriage Becomes Legal in Utah Today MormonLeaks™ releases a copy of an email written by L. Whitney Clayton of the Presidency of the Seventy forwarded to all Utah Area Authorities on December 24, 2013, 4 days after gay marriage was ruled legal in the state. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Names of Speakers of Tonight's Womens Conference Today MormonLeaks™ releases the names of those speaking at tonight’s General Womens Session of the April 2017 LDS General Conference: Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Receives Legal Notice From LDS Church On March 1, 2017 MormonLeaks received the following notice ordering us to take down the PowerPoint presentation that was leaked yesterday. The LDS Church was also successful in getting docdroid.net to take down the document independent of any action on the part of MormonLeaks. Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Records Documenting Temple Ordinances of 17 Public Figures MormonLeaks™ releases the records of the posthumous temple ordinances for the following notable public figures: Read more...
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MormonLeaks™ Releases Another 8 Documents Today Direct deposit pay advice from 2002 for Joseph B. Wirthlin Read more...
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MormonWikiLeaks.com now MormonLeaks.io At the request of WikiLeaks, MormonWikiLeaks™ has changed its name to MormonLeaks™. While WikiLeaks is in full support of our mission to expose corruption and abuse within the Mormon Church, they felt that the names were too similar. Read more...
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MormonWikiLeaks™ Site Launch and Live Q&A Ryan did a live Q&A on Facebook on December 22, 2016. Below is the recording: Read more...June 14, 2016
ORLANDO - In a combined effort, the NBA’s Orlando Magic, MLS’s Orlando City, NWSL’s Orlando Pride, ECHL’s Orlando Solar Bears and AFL’s Orlando Predators are joining forces with the City of Orlando to show everyone that we are #OrlandoUnited.
The Magic, Lions and Pride, Solar Bears and Predators will be selling t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “#OrlandoUnited.” Net proceeds will be donated to the City of Orlando’s OneOrlando Fund – OneOrlando.org - to support those impacted by the June 12 terror attack. The black, blue and purple t-shirts ($22 in adult sizes, $18 in youth sizes) will be available Monday, June 20 at the Orlando Magic Team Shop at Amway Center (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.), online through the Magic Team Shop here, and at Amway Center during the AFL game between the Predators and Tampa Bay on Friday, June 24.
“Our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to those personally affected by the loss of loved ones following this weekend’s tragedy of hate in Orlando,” said Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins. “We are proud to join with our fellow professional sports teams to assist those impacted by this tragedy and we will continue to be in contact with the City of Orlando, Red Cross, and our partner agencies such as the Zebra Coalition to provide assistance in our community.”
The Orlando Magic committed $100,000 to the OneOrlando Fund on Monday.
Here is where and when you can pick a shirt up in person:Now playing: Watch this: T-Mobile strikes back in battle for best unlimited plan
Verizon
Verizon is jumping back on the unlimited data bandwagon.
The wireless carrier launched a new plan Monday that offers unlimited data, talk time and texts for $80 per month for the first line when you select automatic payments. Customers can add up to four more lines for $45 per month each.
The plan is available to both new and existing customers.
Verizon, which stopped offering an unlimited plan seven years ago, is the last of the major national carriers to bring the option back. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint already offer it in some form or another. For years, Verizon has resisted, insisting that its customers don't need so much data. Its new move underscores heightened competition, which is always good for consumers.
"The shift in strategy was dictated by market conditions," said Jefferies analyst Mike McCormack.
The plan arrives as T-Mobile and Sprint have been trumpeting their unlimited plans. T-Mobile in particular has doubled down on its support for unlimited, eliminating all of its tiered options.
Verizon took a veiled shot at T-Mobile, which drew criticism because it killed off more affordable options when it switched to unlimited only. (T-Mobile has said it mitigated some of the impact by "removing" taxes and fees from customers' bills.)
"We're not limiting you to a single plan," Ronan Dunne, president of Verizon's wireless division, said in a statement. "If you don't need unlimited data, we still have 5 GB, S, M, and L Verizon plans that are perfect for you."
AT&T, meanwhile, offers an unlimited plan if you subscribe to its U-Verse or DirecTV subscription video service. But McCormack said Verizon's move could push AT&T to eliminate the bundling requirement.
An AT&T spokesman declined to comment on Verizon's plan.
A key difference in Verizon's plan is the ability to watch streaming videos in high definition. T-Mobile and Sprint's unlimited plans tweak the video so it requires less data and creates less traffic on their networks. The result is a DVD-quality feed on your phone, which they argue is plenty on a phone screen.
Verizon said it upgraded its network to handle the expected bump in traffic from unlimited data users. On Monday, the company also offered a free phone to anyone who signs up for the plan and trades in an existing phone.
The sudden support of unlimited marks a reversal of its attitude over the past few years. Just last month, Verizon was promoting its 5GB-per-month plan, insisting that it was enough for most customers. Both Verizon and AT&T ended their previous unlimited offers in 2010, though many customers have clung to grandfathered plans.
The plan is billed as unlimited, but there is an asterisk. Verizon notes that after customers reach a 22GB threshold each month, their data usage may fall in priority behind other customers during network congestion. AT&T offers a similar caveat to its plan. Sprint's limit is 23GB, and T-Mobile gives you 28GB before it starts to manage the speed of your connection.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted that Verizon's unlimited plan might be "most expensive ever," once taxes and fees are added.
Sprint said Verizon is just playing catch-up. Last week, Sprint introduced a promotion for its own unlimited data plan. But there's a catch for that too. The promotional price ends after the first year.
The cost of Verizon's plan will not go up after a year, a Verizon spokesman said.
"Unlike our competitors, the price is the price," he said.
First published, Feb. 12, 2:11 p.m. PT
Update, Feb. 13, 5:59 a.m. PT and 7:59 a.m. PT: Adds comments and background and notes that the price of Sprint's unlimited data plan is promotional.
CNET Magazine: Check out a sampling of the stories you'll find in CNET's newsstand edition, right here.These pancakes are perfect for a spring or summer breakfast – light and fluffy with a hint of lemon. They are the perfect base for fresh berries and maybe a spoonful of sweetened yogurt or cream. I love these – they taste like sunshine! This recipe is from the Joy of Cooking – one of my favorite cookbooks!
Lemon Cream Pancakes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sour cream
1/3 cup milk
grated zest of two lemons
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 egg
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
Quickly mix the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. The batter will be thick and bubbly. Cook on a non-stick griddle, flipping when bubbles appear on the surface. Serve warm with berries and cream. Enjoy!
The total cost for this recipe is $2.65 and it makes twelve, 4-inch pancakes – not too bad! I’m not sure how much pancake mix is, I don’t buy it because I think it’s just as easy to mix them from scratch.
What are your favorite spring/summer breakfast ideas? I’d love to hear from you! I hope you try these pancakes – you will love them!
AdvertisementsThe latest news from the mummified Fred Thompson campaign: It turns out his pal and supporter, Alabama developer Philip J. Martin was busted for selling 11 pounds of weed back in 1979.
Martin has a jet that Thompson uses to, well, jet around in while on the campaign trail. Fred is ready to stand by his man, assuming it doesn't cost him much:
"I know Phil is a good man," Thompson said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "He is my friend. He is going to remain my friend." In 1979, Martin pleaded guilty to the sale of 11 pounds of marijuana, the Washington Post reported Sunday. In 1983, the newspaper said, he pleaded no contest to charges of cocaine trafficking and conspiracy stemming from a plan to sell $30,000 worth of the drug.... "I'm not going to throw my friend under the bus for something he did, you know, 25 years ago if he's OK now," Thompson said. "On the other hand, I'm running for president. I've got, you know, to do the right thing, you know, and problems occur, and I'll just have to figure it out."
Now that's leadership for you!
More info from LA Times here.
Needless to say, I think selling pot should be legal. And I don't doubt that Martin has paid his debt to society (whatever that means, especially if your crime was selling pot); certainly it sounds like he pays a lot in taxes, which as we all know are the price we pay for civilization yadda yadda yadda. But I really just can't stand the sanctimony regarding past pot behavior and the way it wafts back into consicousness in a political context without ever changing things very much.
Perhaps the hypocrisy of politicians regarding the pot issue (among many others, drug- and not drug-related) will eventually prove overwhelming to voters. I don't know. But here's a snippet from a 1999 Rolling Stone article detailing some sweetheart deals that politically connected dopers have scored. I'm glad that Martin and I guess these others didn't go to jail for something that shouldn't be a crime in the first place. But that only makes it even worse for all the folks stuck in jail for the same goddamn thing.
The offspring of important government officials, however, tend to avoid severe punishments for their marijuana crimes. In 1982, the year that President Reagan launched the war on marijuana, his chief of staff's son was arrested for selling marijuana. John C. Baker, the son of future Secretary of State James Baker III, sold a small amount of pot - around a quarter of an ounce - to an undercover cop at the family's ranch in Texas. Under state law, John Baker faced a possible felony charge and a prison term of between two and twenty years. Instead, he was charged with a misdemeanor, pleaded guilty and was fined $2,000. In 1980, Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana introduced legislation that would require the death penalty for drug dealers. "We must educate our children about the dangers of drugs," Burton said, "and impose tough new penalties on dealers." Four years later his son was arrested while transporting nearly eight pounds of marijuana from Texas to Indiana. Burton hired an attorney for his son. While awaiting trial in that case, Danny Burton III was arrested again, only five months later, for his growing thirty marijuana plants in is Indianapolis apartment. Police also found a shotgun in the apartment. Under federal law, Danny Burton faced a possible mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison just for the gun, plus up to three years in prison under state law for all the pot. Federal charges were never filed against Burton, who wound up receiving a milder sanction: a term of community service, probation and house arrest. When the son of Richard W. Riley ( the former South Carolina governor who became Clinton's secretary of education ) was indicted in 1992 on federal charges of conspiring to sell cocaine and marijuana, he faced ten years to life in prison and a fine Of $4 million. Instead, Richard Riley Jr. received six months of house arrest. In September 1996, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., attacked President Clinton for being "cavalier" toward illegal drugs and for appointing too many "soft on crime" liberal judges. "We must get tough on drug dealers," he declared. "Those who peddle destruction on our children must pay dearly." Four months later, his son Todd Cunningham was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration after helping to transport 400 pounds of marijuana from California to Massachusetts. Although Todd Cunningham confessed to having been part of a smuggling ring that had shipped at much as ten tons of pot throughout the U.S. - a crime that can lead to a life sentence without parole - he was charged only with distributing 400 pounds of pot. The prosecutor in his case recommended a sentence of fourteen months at a boot camp and a halfway house. Representative Cunningham begged the judge for leniency. "My son has a good heart," he said, fighting back tears. "Hes never been in trouble before." Todd Cunningham was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. He might have received an even shorter sentence had he not tested positive for cocaine three times while out on bail. "The sentence Todd got had nothing to do with who Duke is," says the congressman's Press secretary. "Duke has always been tough on drugs and remains tough on drugs."
More on that here.
reason on drugs here.
And if you haven't caught Drew Carey defending medical marijuana--fully legal in many states--yet, go to reason.tv now or click below:ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
A Willy Wonka-inspired rotating lift that can go around corners could revolutionise the way Londoners are whisked through Tube stations.
In Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator, the sequel to Roald Dahl’s first Willy Wonka book, the lift goes “up and down, sideways, slantways, and any other way you can think of”.
Now the futuristic invention is being built by Thyssenkrupp, which once installed the world’s fastest lift at One World Trade Center in New York.
Its latest 360-degree elevator design, called Multi, will be unveiled today at the Future London Underground event in the City, which will explore how the Tube network could look in 2025.
The lift uses multiple motor-powered cabins to move the shafts vertically and horizontally, and is able to turn on corners.
Cabins are on constant loops to let more people inside at once, with one arriving every 15 to 30 seconds The lifts are offered as a “potential solution to improve efficiency and mobility in the London Underground network”.FILE PHOTO: Denmark's Minister of Immigration and Integration Inger Stojberg listens to the debate in the Danish Parliament, January 26, 2016. REUTERS/Mathias Loevgreen Bojesen/Scanpix/File Photo
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Denmark’s immigration minister on Tuesday posted a screenshot of her iPad showing a drawing of the Prophet Mohammad on Facebook, one of the satirical cartoons that caused outrage among Muslims around the world more than a decade ago.
The Facebook post comes as a reaction to a decision by the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg, Denmark, not to include the drawing in a new exhibition about blasphemy since the Reformation.
“It is the museum’s own choice and they have their full right to do it, but I think it’s a shame,” said Inger Stojberg, minister for immigration and integration, in her Facebook post.
The Facebook post is accompanied by a screen shot of the minister’s iPad background screen, which shows a cartoon of a bearded man with a bomb in his turban.
Stojberg said in the post she uses the cartoon as her background screen because it reminds her that Denmark is a country with freedom of speech, which includes the right to criticize religions.
“Honestly, I think we should be proud of the Mohammad cartoons,” Stojberg said.
Three Danish embassies were attacked and at least 50 people were killed in rioting in 2006 in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, after drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, images many Muslims consider blasphemous, were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
The picture posted on Monday by the minister was one of those cartoons.The annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate is the American Museum of Natural History’s biggest public event, drawing a sold-out crowd for an evening billed as bringing together “the finest minds in the world” to debate “pressing questions on the frontiers of scientific discovery.”
But this year’s installment, to be held on March 20 under the heading “The Existence of Nothing,” may also be notable for the panelist who disappeared.
Among the speakers will be several leading physicists, including Lawrence M. Krauss, whose book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” became a cause célèbre in the scientific blogosphere last spring after a scathing review in the New York Times Book Review by the philosopher David Z. Albert.
But Mr. Albert will not be onstage, having been abruptly disinvited by the museum several months after he agreed to take part.
The tone of the dustup between Mr. Albert and Mr. Krauss — summed up by one blogger as “an ongoing cosmological street fight” that had broken out “broad media daylight” — would have certainly left those who saw both men’s names on early publicity material anticipating something closer to a wrestling match than dispassionate scholarly discussion.
In his review Mr. Albert, who also has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, mocked Mr. Krauss’s cocksure claim to have found in the laws of quantum mechanics a definitive answer to the vexing question of the ultimate origins of the universe. (So where did those laws come from? he asked.) Mr. Krauss countered with a pugnacious interview in The Atlantic, in which he called Mr. Albert “moronic” and dismissed the philosophy of science as worthless.
The museum originally planned to take the fight inside. Last October, Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, sent Mr. Albert an e-mail inviting him to take part in a discussion exploring the “kerfuffle” surrounding his review. The panel, he said, would probably have two or three physicists on it (including Mr. Krauss), a philosopher (Mr. Albert) and another person, to be determined.
But in early January, Mr. de Grasse Tyson sent Mr. Albert another e-mail rescinding the invitation, citing changes in the panel that shifted the focus “somewhat away from the original reasons that led me to invite you.” An invitation was issued shortly afterward to Jim Holt, the author of the recent best seller “Why Does the World Exist?,” which surveys the ways philosophers, cosmologists and theologians have answered the question.
Mr. Albert, who teaches at Columbia, noted in an interview that neither the title of the panel nor its basic composition — it also includes the physicists J. Richard Gott and Eva Silverstein and the journalist Charles Seife — had changed.
“It sparked a suspicion that Krauss must have demanded that I not be invited,” he said. “But of course I’ve got no proof.”
Mr. Tyson, in an interview, said he had withdrawn the invitation out of concern that the event (which will be streamed live at amnh.org/live) had drifted too far from the Asimov core purpose of “exposing the frontier of science as conducted by scientists.”
“I was intrigued by his argument with Krauss,” he said of Mr. Albert. “But once the panel was assembled, I took a step back and said it can’t just be an argument with Krauss.”
Mr. Krauss, who teaches at Arizona State University, said via e-mail that decisions about the lineup were Mr. Tyson’s but reiterated that he “wasn’t impressed” by Mr. Albert’s review. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t choose to spend time onstage with him,” he added.
But the audience may yet get a taste of the philosophical perspective. In an article about the Krauss-Albert controversy in The New York Times last June, Mr. Holt defended philosophers’ contribution to “conceptually unsettled” questions relating to string theory, quantum entanglement and entropy.
“Physicists expand the circle, and philosophers help clear up the paradoxes,” he wrote. “May both camps flourish.”Dick Morris Treats GOP Donors To Fox News Tour And Tapings October 22, 2012 10:08 AM EDT ››› Blog ›››››› ERIC HANANOKI
Fox News contributor Dick Morris treated a group of Republican donors to a tour of Fox News and tapings of Lou Dobbs Tonight and Hannity. Participants in that December 2011 visit, which has not been previously reported, were being rewarded for donations they made to their local Republican party at a fundraising dinner Morris headlined earlier that year. In March, Morris was reprimanded by Fox for similar conduct related to a separate GOP fundraiser he headlined. On December 14, Michigan's Oakland County Republican Party (OCRP) posted a short video of a party donor with Sean Hannity on its Facebook page and wrote that the party member "was part of the group of donors we arranged to visit Fox News in New York." A separate posting on OCRP's Facebook page described the Fox-GOP donor visit in more detail, writing that it was "absolutely awesome" and an "exceptional opportunity." The post said that Morris "himself came down to greet us. After brief introductions he escorted us up to the studio where Lou Dobbs was broadcasting live. We were all introduced to Mr. Dobbs and stood quietly just off camera while he did a live segment with Dick Morris." The donors also discussed politics with Sean Hannity in the green room and "went to Sean's set where he taped a segment with Dick." The post concluded of the Fox News tour: "What an amazing time. It would not have been possible without your efforts and of course attending the fantastic OCRP Lincoln Day dinner as a member of the prestigious 400 Club." (The 400 Club is a fundraising membership level ($400) for the party.) Morris, along with the late Andrew Breitbart, were guest speakers at the OCRP's May 25, 2011, Lincoln Day Dinner. Attendees paid $75 for a general admissions ticket or $500 to attend a VIP reception with Morris, which included a copy of his book and a "premiere photo op." There was also a reception for 400 Club members. Republicans hold annual Lincoln Day Dinners as fundraisers for their party organizations. OCRP Executive Director Dennis Pittman, who helped organize the Lincoln Day Dinner, told Media Matters that the Fox News tour was one of the perks given to "better donors."
"We send people on different little excursions and like little perks that we give out," Pittman said. "We've had people go on cruises with dignitaries and VIPs. We've had little small, private meetings with vice presidential candidates, you know, that aren't announced publicly. But, you know, some of our better donors get to go. That's what that is."
Asked about Morris' involvement in arranging the tour, Pittman, who said he did not attend the tour, replied: "He hooked me up with a number to call to arrange something. This was like a year and a half ago."
Pittman said he did not recall how much Morris was paid for the speaking engagement. Morris can receive a speaking fee of anywhere from $5,000-$20,000 per event.
The Fox-GOP donor visit appears to have occurred on December 5, 2011, the only date that month in which Morris was on both Lou Dobbs Tonight and Hannity. Coincidentally, Morris acknowledged on that edition of Hannity that he had received money from several Republican presidential candidates to rent out his email list. Morris' admission came after Media Matters criticized him for praising several of those candidates on Fox while pocketing money from them, and just a few hours after the Associated Press questioned him and Fox News executive vice president of programming Bill Shine about the ads.
Fox News previously reprimanded Morris in March after he auctioned off a Fox News studio tour during a fundraiser for the Republican Party of Lake County (FL) as part of its March 9 Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner. Shine told TVNewser in response to the Florida event: "The tour will absolutely not take place nor would something like that have ever taken place if we were aware of it." TVNewser added that it was "told Morris apologized profusely and knows this was a major mistake."
Media Matters has documented how Morris has frequently crossed media ethics lines during his employment at Fox News, including regularly promoting candidates and groups on-air with whom he is financially connected.
In April 2010, Fox News executives prevented Sean Hannity from taping his show at a Cincinnati Tea Party event which charged admission and had "all proceeds" benefiting that organization. Executives were reportedly "furious," but The Los Angeles Times noted that "[w]hile there have been post-mortem discussions about the incident, it does not appear that they have resulted in any serious disciplinary measures taken against any staffers involved" -- a pattern that repeated itself with Morris' soft "reprimand."
Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik told Media Matters in March following the revelation of the auctioned tour: "What does it take to suspend Morris?" He added: "To me, it is crazy that they don't either suspend him or kick him off the air for good. Is there anybody in the media you can think of who has less of an ethical compass? You have to ask yourself, why do they let him get away with this? He is really a sleazy operative."
Emails to Dick Morris and Fox News were not returned as of posting time.
The Oakland County Republican Party's Facebook post on its Fox News tour:
The trip to New York was absolutely awesome. We all arrived at the News Corp building where Dick Morris himself came down to greet us. After brief introductions he escorted us up to the studio where Lou Dobbs was broadcasting live. We were all introduced to Mr. Dobbs and stood quietly just off camera while he did a live segment with Dick Morris. After a few minutes of shooting we were escorted out and up to meet none other than the 'Great American' Sean Hannity. What a great guy. We had a wonderful time getting to know him and Dick Morris as we sat in the green room having a nice discussion regarding many issues. We then went to Sean's set where he taped a segment with Dick. We learned a lot. It was so amazing watching how a 'live' show actually can be many pieces placed on the live show at the right time just like a puzzle. Sean was such a gentleman. After the taping he took the time to actually get to know us. Talk to Bob. Sean almost had him married before he left NY. My favorite moment was when I sat with Sean on his set posing as if in a dramatic discussion for a photo. (A short video clip of this is forwarded separately). What an amazing time. It would not have been possible without your efforts and of course attending the fantastic OCRP Lincoln Day dinner as a member of the prestigious 400 Club. Thank you guys for this exceptional opportunity and your efforts.
The brief video of Hannity interacting with a Republican donor on the OCRP's Facebook page:
A flyer for the OCRP's 2011 Lincoln Day Dinner:
Hannity-Fox News tour photo via the Oakland County Republican Party's Facebook page.Photo by Alexey Kuzma via Stocksy
According to a new study out of UCLA, more than a quarter of California adolescents feel comfortable enough to dismiss societal pressures to identify with one gender or another.
Researchers out of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research analyzed data from the 2015-2016 version of the California Health Interview Survey, which collected data from 1,300 households. For the first time ever, the survey included a question for young people (ages 12-17) about gender expression. Participants had to answer how they thought their classmates viewed them in terms of their appearance, style, dress and/or the way they walk or talk; the answers ranged from “very feminine” to “very masculine.”
The study’s authors took these answers and analyzed them in context with what gender/sex adolescents chose in the survey. With this information, researchers identified two groups of gender-nonconforming youth: “highly gender-nonconforming (GNC)” and “androgynous.” Young women who thought people at school saw them as “mostly masculine” or “very masculine,” and young men who chose “mostly feminine” or “very feminine” were categorized as highly GNC. Young people who said they were “equally feminine and masculine” were categorized as androgynous. The remaining youth were categorized as gender conforming.
Ultimately, the study’s authors found that 27 percent, or 796,000, of California’s youth, are GNC. |
," he said in another UPI story. "They have 24 of them in their locker room before the game, and they inflate them to the prescribed pressure."
A Raiders team assistant added that "when the officials get the balls, they aren't even out of the box or the cellophane yet."
While Phillips sent the footballs to the lab, KMPC radio in Los Angeles stopped traffic on Sunset Boulevard so their morning disc jockeys could punt helium footballs and compare them to air-filled footballs. The Raiders were still in Oakland at the time, and sports-talk radio had not yet been invented, so the KMPC stunt reveals how big a story the Helium Ball must have been for a few days in 1977.
The morning jocks determined that the helium balls traveled further than regular balls, at least when kicked by radio hosts who have no idea how to punt and a vested interest in an interesting result. More importantly, the morning jocks called the NFL and learned that there was no rule against filling a football with helium, because then (as six months ago) the NFL did not focus insane amounts of attention on inflation techniques.
By the Tuesday after the game, AP and Houston Post reports listed credible sources stating that lab tests proved negative.
"It's a big joke," Phillips said during his midweek press conference. He later apologized to the Raiders. When the Los Angeles Times profiled Guy in a nationally syndicated story in early December, the helium incident was brushed off in a few paragraphs.
In 2009, television's Mythbusters determined that a helium-filled football does not fly further or higher than a regular football. The decreased mass of the lighter football lowers force and wind resistance, negating the advantage of the less-dense gas. It's similar in principle to kicking a beach ball: lightness is not much of an advantage when trying to cut through the wind.
We can only hope Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are experimenting with pressure gauges and footballs in freezers as we speak. The similarities between Deflategate and Helium Ball are downright spooky, from the big picture (a successful team with a rule-bending reputation gets implicated) to the little picture (an interception return ball is confiscated as evidence). All that's missing is a Raiders equipment manager nicknaming himself "Squeaky," which, er, wouldn't have been a popular choice in the mid-1970s.
The Guy ball was not filled with helium; Phillips knew his way around a flamboyant press conference and would not let something like that slide. With his sense of humor and flair for theatrics, ol' Bum might well have just been needling the Raiders.
There's also a chance that Guy's footballs had been scuffed down, as was often the practice before the NFL introduced K-balls in 1999. That would explain slight discoloration, an urgency to get fresh footballs on the field for Guy and the Raiders' effort to retrieve the ball. Again, the NFL didn't really focus on such matters until mid-January, when they became the most important matters in the world.
While the Guy story was still current in 1977, Rams kicking coach Ben Agajanian told Rich Roberts of the Long Beach Independent a story of playing for the semipro Hollywood Bears in 1944. The team's owner decided to put helium in the footballs so the opposing quarterback would overthrow his receivers. "It seemed to work," Agajanian recalled. "The ball would just float." Agajanian kicked three long field goals to win the game. "I didn't know about the helium," he said. "I thought I was really good."
That might seem to add credibility to the Guy legend, but there are some problems with Agajanian's story. Both teams used the helium footballs? How would that have given the Bears an advantage? Sounds like a forgotten urban legend, passed along (as they usually are) by folks with confabulated memories.
If we are going back that far for legends, there is no sense searching for the Hollywood Bears. The Chicago Bears have a much more interesting legend lurking in their past. Stay tuned for that in our next installment in the Urban Legends series, which tells the strange story of the NFL's first 1,000-yard rusher, a guy you have never heard of, and who may not have rushed for 1,000 yards.
Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Reports referenced in the series were accessed through NewsLibrary.com, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com. Links to those sources have been provided where possible.Search anus.com: The Small World There's an old expression which reveals the degree to which we as individuals have no faith in your society. "Keep your head down," our grandparents told our parents, meaning: work hard and ignore the rest. This fascinating statement suggests first that minding one's own business is necessary to escape a dog-eat-dog world, and second, that this world needs escaping because there's no point observing it -- like trying to find reference points on the shore while being swept downstream by a river of chaos, it is disorienting, even terrifying. A generation or two later, however, we can see the problem with this kind of anarchic, live and let live statement. If you don't provide guidance to society at large, it as a collective heads toward the lowest common denominator, and you awaken from your slumber of work in your 60s to realize that your country has veered toward the third world. How did that happen? Head down means no awareness of anything but oneself. Currently, cynicism apexes as our society insists on shouting its failures from the highest of mountains. We are looking for saviours, or someone else to care, unaware that a recipient must understand the importance of a message before he or she will look for it. We, the undeluded, are exhausted like the rest but for different reasons. We are tired of seeing the bad guys always win while pretending to be good. We are tired of seeing the mob favorites crowd out the better option. We are spent with the tedium of finding a society in constant motion, and constant competition, without ever producing clarity. Most people are sick of this, too, and so they turn to negativity. They speak nasty things about their countries, their ethnicities, their families, themselves and their species. They feel powerless to change, so they give up. There are infinite ways to give up, but the biggest are suicide, self-destructive behaviors, and a prevailing negativity that leads to chronic low self-esteem. Media helps urge this process on. Bad news sells better than good because who's going to pay attention to an all clear notice? We respond to threats more than positive affirmation because threats warn us we could lose it all. Positive ideas, including possibly better choices, are risk without certain reward, where what we have now is certain reward. Now that media has been democratized, we have added more billboards and bullhorns to blast jumbles of confused symbols into the fray. Your average blogger, like the average hip guy at a rock show or big man on campus, makes his or her status by telling people in superlatives what they want to hear. We should rename blogs "blovs" because they're all bloviation, or breathless abundant speech with very little to say, repeating memes that excuse us from fixing the problem by blaming someone else. Consequently, we are a species very divided against itself, a civilization that hates itself, and individuals who perceive a religious clarity to negativity as strongly as they perceive their own lack of efficacy. All we can do, boys, is keep trying the same damn thing that didn't work the last 6 million times we tried it, but... try harder! As this crescendo of daily negativity assaults us, we engage in a behavior as instinctive as eating: we look down. We in effect create a small world composed of our desk, what we're reading, our computer, our plate, our knees as we sit on the toilet. We keep our heads down so we don't have to try to orient ourselves while looking at the whole. We have in effect made small worlds of all the things that we can control, and have ignored the big world in which all causes are connected to effects, in a cascade of consequences. We have seceded from reality into a space defined by the self. It is no different than an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, or a child diving under a blanket to avoid seeing a scary movie. Some people like to pretend they're aware, and cool, and they express this through (a) a detachment from the big problems of the world and (b) coming up with "solutions" that they think make them look cool. This belief, Crowdism, is a multi-millennial trend that represents the decay of society from forging new ground, to bickering over the spoils. These people embrace ideals that are unrealistic because these ideals can never be realized. Even if they are "activists" who spend all their time blogging and protesting and washing out green(tm) condoms, they do not expect their activity to be productive. It's a lifestyle. The furthest extension of this, the hipster, sees this trend for what it is, a social accessory or fashion, and treats it accordingly. They talk about ideology like they talk about music and clothes; they're hermit crabs, building a house of justifications and trinkets around them in a "unique" order, to justify their personalities to you, so you might help them be popular. It further depresses smart people to see this mass, which seems to grow because it offers easy, pleasant illusions. Everything this mass touches becomes inauthentic and collapses from within. These same people, who seem to care about how the bad guys always win etc., are actually the source of bad guys always winning, because they're thoroughly insincere and easily manipulated. To win at their kind of society, you come up with an opinion that restates the popular opinion -- always variants of "keep your head down and make yourself more popular/rich" -- and state it in some unique way, in the same type of unique approach to surface appearances that makes a gaudy hipster seem novel. They feed off each other, like a cancer, and contribute nothing important. Even they know it, which is why they are manic to have "new" things to celebrate every day. Enduring truth has no place with such people. The remaining people who have a grip on reality find these people depressing because they seem to be winning the war of numbers. This is not quite true; just like most people are not committed to one political ideal or another, but pick the least bad of several bad options, there is a silent majority that has not joined this trend. This silent majority contains a group of smart people who are working hard but also keeping their heads up. They tend to be depressed because they see how numbers trump truth, and how their position of appealing to other smart people will always put them in the minority. Most readers of this article will come from this group. If you pull back from the small world, you should also pull back from the consensual reality layer manufactured by those who want to keep everyone in their small worlds as a means of control. This control group, formed of predatory businesspeople as well as parasitic hipsters, wants us all to ignore the collective direction of humanity. They profit when we sleep. However, their victory is strikingly temporal, as is any victory when the overall path is downward. Many wars have been decided after one side, winning most of the battles, realized its position in the war was a losing one. Most of the successful people in life endured multiple defeats before finding a way to express the idea that brought them victory. What is happening now is the precursor to a population bottleneck. Bottlenecks occur when all but a small group of the best are destroyed or cease breeding. In an odd way of inverting the small world, bottlenecks enforce the big world on a big group, and those who are not oblivious to reality -- entrenched in small worlds -- prevail. This process is as much mathematics as "nature" in some romanticized sense. Certain patterns prevail in how data points are distributed, as influenced by boundaries. Periodically, those boundaries, influenced by the pattern within them, redistribute, and they constrict, forcing the scatter pattern to find a clearer, simpler shape. As our species nears total domination of nature, it also suffers from a lack of internal consistency. There is no political consensus, no values consensus, no lifestyle consensus, and very little quality control, especially as modern states create Nanny State and Welfare programs to help every clueless idiot join in the numbers game. The response from our world will be one of gradually mulching most of humanity into a previous incarnation, or driving them down the evolutionary ladder toward apedom. Those who behave like apes -- screwing anything that moves, drinking and drugging and also doing nothing productive, amusing themselves while the world around them goes to rot -- will become apes over the generations. Let the hipsters lead their so-cool lives, because they're powerless against this trend bigger than their trend. Many will fail to make meaningful connections with others, will fail to breed, and will end lonely granular people washed out of the gene pool. As the effects of the instability they create spread, countries will fail, and even more will be washed out in the ensuing chaos, war, anarchy, bloodshed, disease and corruption. It may not be elegant, but it solves the problem. As you can see, there is no need to be depressed about our human future. All you need to do is work for the positive, instead of getting negative and reverting into small worlds like the hipster. Build up your local community; enrich yourself; make great art and literature; make yourself stronger and better educated in the things that really matter -- study of reality. The bottleneck is coming and while it seems like the jerks who enforce their dogma of the small world upon us, obscuring the big world, are winning, they are not. They're just reaching a peak of activity before they get washed out. Avoid depression, further yourself and the truth, and as sure as the sun rises, you -- and all realists -- will win. Site map Copyright © 1988-20158 A.N.U.S.A Special Needs Guide to Haircuts and Fingernail Trimming
Do you dread the day that your loved one needs to have fingernails trimmed or get a haircut? Do you put it off until the broken nails leave scratch marks and the hair becomes matted?
If so, you’re not alone. For many families, the word “stressful” doesn’t even begin to describe the danger, meltdowns and panic.
It has taken me years to desensitize my children to routine nail and hair care – now that my kids are 6 and 12 years old, I think I’ve finally figured out what works best for them.
Here are steps that can help make personal grooming a calmer experience for everyone involved.
Safety First
My first rule for personal grooming is to prioritize safety. Make sure that everyone is comfortable in a safe location. Do not sneak up to snip off a lock of hair or do anything to cause surprise. Keep your breathing, voice and movements calm and controlled. If a person is thrashing around in a panic near scissors or nail clippers, it’s time to put the tools away. Try again another day.
Hyperacusis
Hyperacusis is an extreme sensitivity to certain frequencies of sound – for example, the sound of buzzing electric hair clippers. Fortunately, most salons and barbershops now use electric clippers that are almost silent. Some sounds that are not irritating at all to one person may be severely painful for another person to hear, such as the sound of fingernails being cut. If a person appears to be pained by a specific sound, consider using soundproof headphones or noise-canceling headphones during grooming. The Brown family recommends flexible ear plugs in their list of 20 tips for grooming a highly sensitive person.
Phobias
My children are both terrified of having scissors near their faces, even though they have never been harmed. Some people panic at the sight of fingernail clippers. Other people have a phobia of changing their appearance too drastically or losing a part of themselves. All of these fears may be overcome through gradual desensitization.
Keep Tools Visible
Sometimes it helps to leave the tools on the bathroom counter or next to the TV so that they become an everyday sight, and to encourage frequent handling of the tools. One family purchased a professional manicuring kit so that their child could handle and experiment with all of the available tools. The family discovered that the tiny manicuring scissors were less irritating and just as effective as clippers, and the child had more patience for nail trimming.
Find a Hair styling App
For fears of a changing appearance, hairstyle apps for your mobile phone, such as Hairstyle Swap, will allow you to try different hairstyles on yourself before getting a cut. It’s pretty funny when you start adding mustaches and beards, and laughter can be a powerful cure for this phobia.
Use a Social Story
Social stories are an easy step-by-step way to describe expectations of grooming, too. I used the haircut story in the Autism and PDD Primary Social Skills Lesson books published by Linguisystems, and that was a turning point for my older son.
Other reasons for avoidance
Sometimes a person is able to articulate a very good reason for avoiding grooming. Having short, but not too short, fingernails allow a person to scratch an itch in a satisfying way – and this is very important for people who experience tactile sensitivity. A good compromise is to leave one or two fingernails at the proper scratching length.
My older son told me that he is afraid that he might get hurt during grooming, even though he has never actually been hurt. In other cases, the reason is a previous traumatic experience, like a minor cut that happened during nail trimming several years earlier. with fears like these it is necessary to demonstrate the steps that are being taken to avoid injury. Antibiotic sprays with a mild anesthetic can be used before nail trimming to reduce sensation on the fingertips.
Parent modeling
Modeling appropriate behavior during grooming was the single most effective method for teaching my children. I had them sitting on my lap when I got a haircut, and I made sure they saw me trimming my toenails and fingernails – without pressuring them to do the same. We have also been known to groom our stuffed animals, and this gives my children the opportunity to show me how they want to be treated during grooming. Eventually they realized that grooming is a normal everyday activity, and they were not being targeted for torture!
Video modeling
Autism Speaks teamed up with Melmark New England and the national salon chain Snip-Its to produce an instructional video and haircut training guide for families.
Families can also make their own home videos of family members having their hair cut and nails trimmed – even a 30 second video can make a big difference when it becomes part of the family routine. In my family we have used video modeling to normalize all kinds of activities, from gift-opening etiquette to riding roller coasters.
One day at a time
When my children were toddlers, I often resolved to trim just one or two fingernails per day, so that the job would be done within a week. This had the advantage of making grooming literally an everyday occurrence, which made the desensitization process go much more quickly.
I found simple ways of distracting and relaxing my children, such as singing or snuggling them while they watched a favorite DVD. I discovered that counting to 100 in a rhythmic, sing-songy voice had an almost hypnotic effect on my older son, and I usually got all of his fingernails and toenails done before I finished singing. My younger son has told me that watching a video is the only thing that makes toenail trimming tolerable for him.
Keep in mind that fingernails and hair are softest after a bath. Gently pressing on the center of a fingernail just before clipping will temporarily reduce sensitivity.
Some families wait until their loved one is sound asleep, and then trim half or one-third of the hair. I recommend this only for heavy sleepers – my lightly-sleeping children woke up in a panic when I tried it!
Bring in a third person
My children behave in a completely different way with adults who are not their parents. For this reason, I have sought out gentle, flexible stylists to help with haircuts – and the results have been great!
Usually I take my kids to a family salon as soon as it opens in the morning so that there is no waiting time. Immediately after the haircut, I reward my children with a visit to the library or local park. But recently I met a neighbor – a licensed cosmetologist – who will cut children’s hair during playdates at her home, so the playdate is the reward.
Other families have a designated relative or trusted friend who assists with haircuts and nail trimming. Sometimes we just need another person’s fresh outlook to keep the situation positive.
Have a party
Group haircut events are growing in popularity in the special needs community, and they can take place at home, at school or in a therapy clinic. The Autism Collaborative Center at Eastern Michigan University periodically hosts a “Haircut Night” for highly sensitive individuals. At these events, children and adults play in a familiar therapy room while they wait for their appointment with the stylist. A group event relieves some of the tension, because people can watch each other have their hair cut, and they can celebrate their success with each other. Being able to run around and blow off steam before and after the haircut helps, too.
Sedation
When it is impossible to provide routine grooming and medical care, parents and caregivers may request sedation for a loved one. In these extreme cases, a person will have dental cleaning and repair, a medical exam and personal grooming all scheduled for a short time period in a medical clinic.
How do you turn personal grooming into a positive experience? Please share your tips in the comments below.Google's agreement to buy Nest Labs has been cleared by U.S. antitrust regulators, possibly paving the way for an early closure of the transaction.
The review into the transaction was granted "early termination," according to an update from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Google said last month it was paying $3.2 billion in cash to acquire Nest, a maker of smart smoke alarms and thermostats, in what is seen as a bid by the Internet giant to expand into the connected home market.
[ Find your 2017 salary info and our detailed report at IT Salary Watch ]
The company said the transaction was expected to close in the next few months and was subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the U.S.
Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, parties to certain large mergers and acquisitions must file a pre-merger notification and wait for government review. The FTC has the option to terminate the review before the end of the waiting period and grant early termination, after which the parties are free to close the deal.
A request for early termination is granted only after the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice have completed their review and determined not to take any enforcement action during the waiting period, FTC said on its website.
Google could not be immediately reached for comment.
The proposed acquisition is being closely watched because of potential privacy implications, as there are concerns that Google could use data collected from people's homes to better target its advertising. Shortly after the announcement of the planned acquisition, Nest's co-founder Matt Rogers wrote on the company's blog: "Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest's products and services. We've always taken privacy seriously and this will not change."
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is [email protected] couple of weeks ago I hypothesized in Taki’s Magazine:
That raises the question of why Japan’s ruling class didn’t feel the necessity of going down the same mass-immigration path as did so many other advanced countries: Why is Japan such an exception? …
Another reason is that Japan is linguistically quite isolated from the growing worldwide dominance of the English language.
If elites unthinkingly think alike, one reason could be because they increasingly share a language: English. …
As a side effect, the prevalence of English spreads American ideological fads.
For example, over the course of my lifetime, the American media, such as movies, has shifted to an assumption of “Our Ancestors, the Immigrants” from “Our Ancestors, the Pioneers.” …
But the Japanese are remarkably immune to American verbiage. That may be because the Japanese are terrible at learning English.BAGUIO CITY—Saying that the Philippines needs them to help make it “a new Asian tiger,” United States Ambassador Harry Thomas Jr. on Friday urged Filipino youth to stay in the country, instead of pursuing their dream of working in the United States.
Speaking at the 67th commencement exercises of the University of the Cordilleras here, Thomas said the country “can be an Asian tiger, but with your help.”
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“When you’re out making your millions…when you are out becoming a Manny Pangilinan or even a Sarah Geronimo, volunteer! Give back! Give thanks. Be Jose Rizal. Be Cory Aquino. You have to do this, your nation needs you,” he said.
No need to go to US
Addressing 800 graduates, Thomas said: “How many of you are going to the US? So would I. That was just a joke. You don’t need to go to the US. You need to stay here. If you go to the US, you need to be Jose Rizal. He went abroad, got an education, and came home and sacrificed and rebuilt for his nation. He is the ‘bayani (hero)’ because he did that.”
He added: “Now we very much welcome Filipinos in the US. We have 4.5 million Filipinos plus a few TNTs (‘Tago nang Tago’ or undocumented immigrants), and we are very happy to have them.”
Filipino teachers are finding lucrative jobs in the United States, he said, describing them as “reverse Thomasites,” a reference to the Americans who sailed to the Philippines onboard the ship, USAT Thomas, to serve as the country’s first public school teachers.
Country needs you
“But Baguio needs Filipinos, Manila needs Filipinos, your country needs you,” Thomas said.
He said the US Peace Corps is his country’s expression of volunteerism, from which the graduates could derive lessons, including the aspirations of murdered Peace Corps volunteer Julia Campbell.
Campbell became a topic because of a UC resolution handed to Thomas by UC Chair Geronimo Salvosa, which expressed “deep sadness” that the American was killed in Ifugao in April 2007 by an Ifugao woodcarver, who claimed to have mistaken her for a tourist with which he had issues.
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The UC resolution also said the Philippines “appreciates the commitment of the people of America to render direct community services to people across the globe as represented by Peace Corps volunteers.”
Acknowledging the resolution, Thomas said: “You are going to the polls on Monday and in the US we say, ‘You get the government you deserve. We can never complain because we elected them.” Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon
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MOST READMcNeese State was about to play a bigger team from a bigger division in a bigger stadium, but Coach Matt Viator wanted to make sure that his players were not overwhelmed by the stage. So on Friday, the day before McNeese State opened its season against South Florida, Viator had his team tour Raymond James Stadium.
South Florida shares the stadium with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and some players had their photographs taken aboard the enormous replica pirate ship that sits near one of the end zones. Others were transfixed by the visitors’ locker room, which had been used that week by the Washington Redskins. Their name cards were still affixed to the stalls.
Yet any concerns that Viator might have had evaporated early in McNeese State’s 53-21 victory over South Florida, an evisceration so thorough that it was hailed as one of the most notable upsets of the weekend, though perhaps not the most surprising. In that regard, the Cowboys had plenty of competition.
McNeese State, a member of the Football Championship Subdivision, was part of a much larger trend on college football’s opening weekend. Eight teams from the F.C.S., formerly known as Division I-AA, posted victories over well-known opponents from the Football Bowl Subdivision, the sport’s top tier.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Aug. 18, 2015, 1:44 PM GMT By Reuters
Police in China said on Tuesday they had arrested about 15,000 people for crimes that "jeopardized Internet security", as the government moves to tighten controls on the Internet.
Since taking over in 2013, President Xi Jinping has led an increasingly harsh crackdown on China's Internet, which the Communist Party views with greater importance and acknowledges it needs to control, academics and researchers say.
Police have investigated 7,400 cases of cyber crime, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on its website. It did not make clear over what period the arrests were made, but referred to a case dating to last December. China launched a six-month program last month, code-named "Cleaning the Internet".
"For the next step, the public security organs will continue to increase their investigation and crackdown on cyber crimes," the ministry said.
Read More: China's 'Great Cannon' Censors Foreign Websites by Force: Report
The campaign would also focus on breaking major cases and destroying online criminal gangs, it added.
The sweep targeted websites providing "illegal and harmful information" besides advertisements for pornography, explosives and firearms and gambling. In total, the police said they investigated 66,000 websites.
China runs one of the world's most sophisticated online censorship mechanisms, known as the Great Firewall. Censors keep a tight grip on what can be published, particularly material that could potentially undermine the ruling Communist Party.Get the Mach newsletter.
Nov. 21, 2017, 5:39 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 21, 2017, 5:39 PM GMT By Tom Metcalfe
Cities at sea, afloat on the waves, have long been a cherished dream for forward-thinking architects and science fiction writers. Now the world’s first fully floating community is set to take shape in the turquoise waters of a Tahitian lagoon.
Blue Frontiers, a Singapore-based start-up, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the French Polynesian government to build a $60-million floating village on the south side of the main island of Tahiti, with a prospective starting date of 2020.
The village will serve as a showcase and test bed for technologies that will be needed to create much larger floating communities, says Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that is the driving force behind Blue Frontiers. The institute hopes one day to establish full-scale floating cities that could flourish outside the territorial waters of existing nations.
Tahiti’s floating village will be just inside the island’s protective coral reef, in water about 100 feet deep some 1,000 yards from shore. Plans call for 200 to 300 people to live and work there on a dozen or so floating platforms, each about the size of a baseball diamond. The platforms will be connected by walkways into a combined area of 7,500 square meters.
Quirk says he expects the floating village to thrive through a combination of eco-tourism and new aquatic industries like seaweed farming and wave power.March’s first Sunless Skies sprint is APHELION. This sprint focuses on The Reach: the first region in Sunless Skies, where you will begin your journey. It also involves big chunks of setup for later regions: hunger, death, time, fuel – all of the basic building blocks of our game.
Design and Gameplay
Mac has been trialing a new approach to procedural generation. In Sunless Skies there are 4 types of terrain:
Ports: Big, able to dock at them, they have effects on you
Spectacles: Medium, have some effects on you, usually as you pass them
Discoveries: Medium, effects when you interact with them
Decorations: Pretty things with no function (such as: a rock)
Our map is now built on circles, not squares as in Sunless Sea. Each has a core, an inner band and an outer band, with three or five segments in each band.
As you cross into a new segment, the game will generate the Ports, Spectacles, Discoveries and Decorations for that segment (depending on some rules to make the transitions smooth, and make sure a port doesn’t just pop up under your nose).
We’re still working on this, but the idea is the load on your PC will be lighter than Sunless Sea – because it’s not rendering the whole map at once.
For us, Mac’s work also means it’s much easier to make content happen in the game (hooray!).
Also this week, Barry is God, and decides your fate: he has implemented supplies/hunger, fuel and time. Sounds simple when put like that!
Stories
This week, Cash has mostly been working on port Titania.
Titania is an early game port, built on a giant flower. The occupants – you may have gathered – are troubled by bees.
Chris has also put together the stories that deal with hunger this week. You’ll be glad to hear that eating your crew is an option once more!
People often ask why there is no gameplay disadvantage or punishment for eating your crew in Sunless Sea. In Sunless Skies, you’ll gain terror for eating a member of your crew, as well as becoming more unaccountably peckish. Though, um, cannibalism is currently more nourishing than eating supplies. So, y’know. Consider it!
Art
This week Paul has been focused on locomotive design.
We showed in the Kickstarter that equipment will have a visible effect on your ship:
Paul has been digging into this to see how best to deploy it in-game. He has also added chimneys to the base design, which we all found very exciting.
From left to right:
Basic chassis (including the boiler at the top and crew quarters at the bottom)
Armour
Guns
Colour flourishes
This means lots of possibilities. Starting with a monochrome chassis leaves options for armour types being made of different metals/materials. The colour elements could identify different factions at a glance. And we want to try and get steam coming out of the chimneys!
Also on the art front, we should note that ports in Sunless Skies will look more like the Khanate than other ports from Sunless Sea: exploded areas that you can explore more than just sailing around.
Production sprints on Sunless Skies last for 2 weeks. Next is BIG BANG, in which we will be working on combat, and we’ll be back with an update on that in early April. Until then, we hope you’ll join us to talk about APHELION during our live podcast on twitch, this Friday 17 March at 1600 GMT!On Tuesday 6th September, General Electric caused a stir in the 3D printing industry by announcing plans to buy Arcam and SLM Solutions, for a total of $1.4 billion. This is part of the industrial manufacturers' growing demand for digital technologies. GE said it expected its new 3D printing business to grow to $1 billion by 2020 at attractive returns, but it is unclear what they are including in this figure.
3D printing has been used by engineers to build prototypes for decades but has recently become more widespread. GE Aviation's production of the flight-critical fuel nozzles for their LEAP jet engines using selective laser melting machines has been one of the most frequently cited examples of industrial 3D printing (including by IDTechEx analysts!).
Over 8000 such engines had been ordered by February 2015, each of which requires 19 3D printed nozzles. GE Aviation have opened a new manufacturing facility at Auburn, Alabama, which will print over 100,000 nozzles by 2020.
These fuel nozzles are 3D printed in a Cobalt-Chrome-Molybdenum alloy, using EOS M-280 printers, then post-processing using HIP to make them fully dense. During the development process. GE engineers tested selective laser melting machines from SLM Solutions, Concept Laser and Phenix (now part of 3D Systems ) before choosing the EOS machines.
Now, GE has said it would offer 38 euros per share, or a total of 683 million euros ($762 million), to buy SLM Solutions. According to GE, it has already agreed to buy 31.5 percent of shares from major shareholders.
SLM Solutions sells 3D printers into the aerospace, energy, healthcare and automotive industries, including for the production of dental crowns and light aircraft parts. It is currently unclear how existing customers will be affected by the purchase.
IDTechEx expect the market for Selective Laser Melting machines to grow to $911M, at a CAGR of 22%. Currently, SLM Solutions have a market share of around 1%. However, GE Aviation have bought a large number of EOS machines. EOS have a market share of around 44%, but if GE transfer their budget to SLM Solutions it will make a significant difference.
GE is also offering 285 Swedish crowns per share, or a total of 5.86 billion crowns ($685 million), for Arcam, which invented and are the sole supplier of the electron beam melting machine for metal-based 3D printing. The build temperature is higher than selective laser melting, which leads to lower thermal stresses. The build requires fewer support parts, so less material must be removed and wasted.
IDTechEx believe the market for EBM machines will grow to $245M by 2020 at a CAGR of 22%. Arcam also have some revenue from metal powders (from their acquisition of AP&C) and orthopaedics contract manufacturing (from their acquisition of DiSanto).
Arcam currently serves customers in the aerospace and healthcare industries. Adler Ortho are an Italian orthopaedic implant manufacturer who started making products using EBM in 2006. By April 2015, Arcam's 3D printers had been used to manufacture over 50,000 hip and knee implants. It is unclear how this market will be affected by the purchase of Arcam.
Top Image: SLM 500HL 3D printer. Source: slm-solutions.com/machinesI’ve been revisiting Neon Genesis Evangelion lately and have come to appreciate it in ways that I hadn’t |
recounts that he was given 4/10 of a gram at 11:00 am one day in May 1953. Huxley writes that he hoped to gain insight into extraordinary states of mind and expected to see brightly coloured visionary landscapes. When he only sees lights and shapes, he puts this down to being a bad visualiser; however, he experiences a great change in his perception of the external world.[37]
By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the "miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence". The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply "is". He likens it to Meister Eckhart's "istigheit" or "is-ness", and Plato's "Being" but not separated from "Becoming". He feels he understands the Hindu concept of Satchitananda, as well as the Zen koan that, "the dharma body of the Buddha is in the hedge" and Buddhist suchness. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an "I", but instead a "not-I". Meaning and existence, pattern and colour become more significant than spatial relationships and time. Duration is replaced by a perpetual present.[38]
Reflecting on the experience afterwards, Huxley finds himself in agreement with philosopher C. D. Broad that to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the 'Mind at Large'.[39]
The Milkmaid by by Johannes Vermeer. "That mysterious artist was truly gifted with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden", reflected Huxley.
In summary, Huxley writes that the ability to think straight is not reduced while under the influence of mescaline, visual impressions are intensified, and the human experimenter will see no reason for action because the experience is so fascinating.[40]
Temporarily leaving the chronological flow, he mentions that four or five hours into the experience he was taken to the World's Biggest Drug Store (WBDS), where he was presented with books on art. In one book, the dress in Botticelli's Judith provokes a reflection on drapery as a major artistic theme as it allows painters to include the abstract in representational art, to create mood, and also to represent the mystery of pure being.[41] Huxley feels that human affairs are somewhat irrelevant whilst on mescaline and attempts to shed light on this by reflecting on paintings featuring people.[42] Cézanne's Self-portrait with a straw hat seems incredibly pretentious, while Vermeer's human still lifes (also, the Le Nain brothers and Vuillard) are the nearest to reflecting this not-self state.[43]
For Huxley, the reconciliation of these cleansed perceptions with humanity reflects the age old debate between active and contemplative life, known as the way of Martha and the way of Mary. As Huxley believes that contemplation should also include action and charity, he concludes that the experience represents contemplation at its height, but not its fullness. Correct behaviour and alertness are needed. Nonetheless, Huxley maintains that even quietistic contemplation has an ethical value, because it is concerned with negative virtues and acts to channel the transcendent into the world.[44]
The Red Hot Poker flowers in Huxley's garden were "so passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance".
After listening to Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto, Gesualdo's madrigals and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite,[45] Huxley heads into the garden. Outside, the garden chairs take on such an immense intensity that he fears being overwhelmed; this gives him an insight into madness. He reflects that spiritual literature, including the works of Jakob Böhme, William Law and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, talks of these pains and terrors. Huxley speculates that schizophrenia is the inability to escape from this reality into the world of common sense and thus help would be essential.[46]
After lunch and the drive to the WBDS he returns home and to his ordinary state of mind. His final insight is taken from Buddhist scripture: that within sameness there is difference, although that difference is not different from sameness.[47]
The book finishes with Huxley's final reflections on the meaning of his experience. Firstly, the urge to transcend one's self is universal through times and cultures (and was characterised by H. G. Wells as The Door in the Wall).[48] He reasons that better, healthier "doors" are needed than alcohol and tobacco. Mescaline has the advantage of not provoking violence in takers, but its effects last an inconveniently long time and some users can have negative reactions. Ideally, self-transcendence would be found in religion, but Huxley feels that it is unlikely that this will ever happen. Christianity and mescaline seem well-suited for each other; the Native American Church for instance uses the drug as a sacrament, where its use combines religious feeling with decorum.[49]
Huxley concludes that mescaline is not enlightenment or the Beatific vision, but a "gratuitous grace" (a term taken from Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica).[50] It is not necessary but helpful, especially so for the intellectual, who can become the victim of words and symbols. Although systematic reasoning is important, direct perception has intrinsic value too. Finally, Huxley maintains that the person who has this experience will be transformed for the better.
Reception [ edit ]
The book met with a variety of responses, both positive and negative,[21] from writers in the fields of literature, psychiatry, philosophy and religion. These included a symposium published in The Saturday Review magazine with the unlikely title of, Mescalin – An Answer to Cigarettes, including contributions from Huxley; J.S. Slotkin, a professor of Anthropology; and a physician, Dr. W.C. Cutting.[51] Literature: For the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir “Mr. Huxley's experiment is extraordinary, and is beautifully described”.[52] Thomas Mann, the author and friend of Huxley, believed the book demonstrated Huxley's escapism. He thought that while escapism found in mysticism might be honourable, drugs were not. Huxley's 'aesthetic self-indulgence' and indifference to humanity would lead to suffering or stupidity, and he concluded the book was irresponsible, if not quite immoral, to encourage young people to try the drug.[53]
For Huxley's biographer and friend, the author Sybille Bedford, the book combined sincerity with simplicity, passion with detachment.[54] "It reflects the heart and mind open to meet the given, ready, even longing, to accept the wonderful. The Doors is a quiet book. It is also one that postulates a goodwill – the choice once more of the nobler hypothesis. It turned out, for certain temperaments, a seductive book.”[55] For biographer David King Dunaway, The Doors of Perception, along with The Art of Seeing, can be seen as the closest Huxley ever came to autobiographical writing.[56]
Psychiatric responses included those of William Sargant, the controversial British psychiatrist, who reviewed the book for The British Medical Journal and particularly focused on Huxley's reflections on schizophrenia. He wrote that the book brought to life the mental suffering of schizophrenics, which should make psychiatrists uneasy about their failure to relieve this. Also, he hoped that the book would encourage the investigation of the physiological, rather than psychological, aspects of psychiatry.[57] Other medical researchers questioned the validity of Huxley's account. The book contained "99 percent Aldous Huxley and only one half gram mescaline" according to Roland Fisher.[58] Joost A.M. Meerloo found Huxley's reactions "not necessarily the same as... other people's experiences."[59]
For Steven J. Novak, The Doors Of Perception (and "Heaven and Hell") redefined taking mescaline (and LSD, although Huxley had not taken it until after he had written both books) as a mystical experience with possible psychotherapeutic benefits, where physicians had previously thought of the drug in terms of mimicking a psychotic episode, known as psychotomimetic.[60] The popularity of the book also affected research into these drugs, because researchers needed a random sample of subjects with no preconceptions about the drug to conduct experiments, and these became very difficult to find.[61]
In the field of religion, Huxley’s friend and spiritual mentor, the Vedantic monk Swami Prabhavananda, thought that mescaline was an illegitimate path to enlightenment, a "deadly heresy" as Christopher Isherwood put it.[29] Martin Buber, the Jewish religious philosopher, attacked Huxley's notion that mescaline allowed a person to participate in "common being", and held that the drug ushered users "merely into a strictly private sphere". Philosophically, Buber believed the drug experiences to be holidays "from the person participating in the community of logos and cosmos—holidays from the very uncomfortable reminder to verify oneself as such a person." For Buber man must master, withstand and alter his situation, or even leave it, "but the fugitive flight out of the claim of the situation into situationlessness is no legitimate affair of man."[62]
Robert Charles Zaehner [ edit ]
It was probably the criticisms of The Doors of Perception put forward by Robert Charles Zaehner, a professor at Oxford University, that formed the fullest and earliest critiques from a religious and philosophical perspective. In 1954, Zaehner published an article called The Menace of Mescaline, in which he asserted that "artificial interference with consciousness" could have nothing to do with the Christian "Beatific Vision".[63] Zaehner expanded on these criticisms in his book Mysticism Sacred and Profane (1957), which also acts as a theistic riposte to what he sees as the monism of Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy. Although he acknowledged the importance of The Doors of Perception as a challenge to people interested in religious experience,[64] he pointed out what he saw as inconsistencies and self-contradictions.[65] Zaehner concludes that Huxley's apprehensions under mescaline are affected by his deep familiarity with Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. So the experience may not be the same for others who take the drug and do not have this background, although they will undoubtedly experience a transformation of sensation.[66] Zaehner himself was a convert to Catholicism.
That the longing to transcend oneself is "one of the principal appetites of the soul"[67] is questioned by Zaehner. There are still people who do not feel this desire to escape themselves,[68] and religion itself need not mean escaping from the ego.[69] Zaehner criticises what he sees as Huxley's apparent call for all religious people to use drugs (including alcohol) as part of their practices.[70] Quoting St Paul's proscriptions against drunkenness in church, in 1 Corinthians xi, Zaehner makes the point that artificial ecstatic states and spiritual union with God are not the same.[65]
Holding that there are similarities between the experience on mescaline, the mania in a manic-depressive psychosis and the visions of God of a mystical saint suggests, for Zaehner, that the saint's visions must be the same as those of a lunatic.[71] The personality is dissipated into the world, for Huxley on mescaline and people in a manic state, which is similar to the experience of nature mystics.[72] However, this experience is different from the theistic mystic who is absorbed into a God, who is quite different from the objective world. The appendices to Mysticism Sacred and Profane include three accounts of mescaline experiences, including those of Zaehner himself. He writes that he was transported into a world of farcical meaninglessness and notes that the experience was interesting and funny, but not religious.
The Doors of Perception], I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into a false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge." Huxley later wrote that the "things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion [chronicled in], I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into a false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge."
Huston Smith [ edit ]
Soon after the publication of his book, Huxley wrote to Harold Raymond at Chatto and Windus that he thought it strange that when Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton wrote the praises of alcohol they were still considered good Christians, while anyone who suggested other routes to self-transcendence was accused of being a drug addict and perverter of mankind.[73] Later Huxley responded to Zaehner in an article published in 1961: "For most of those to whom the experiences have been vouchsafed, their value is self-evident. By Dr. Zaehner, the author of Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, their deliberate induction is regarded as immoral. To which his colleague, Professor Price, retorts in effect, 'Speak for yourself!'".[74]
Professor of religion and philosophy Huston Smith took issue with the belief that Mysticism Sacred and Profane had fully examined and refuted Huxley's claims made in The Doors of Perception.[75] Smith claims that consciousness-changing substances have been linked with religion both throughout history and across the world, and further it is possible that many religious perspectives had their origins in them, which were later forgotten. Acknowledging that personality, preparation and environment all play a role in the effects of the drugs, Huston Smith draws attention to evidence that suggests that a religious outcome of the experience may not be restricted to one of Huxley's temperament. Further, because Zaehner's experience was not religious, does not prove that none will be. Contrary to Zaehner, Huston Smith draws attention to evidence suggesting that these drugs can facilitate theistic mystical experience.[75]
As the descriptions of naturally occurring and drug-stimulated mystical experiences cannot be distinguished phenomenologically, Huston Smith regards Zaehner's position in Mysticism Sacred and Profane, as a product of the conflict between science and religion – that religion tends to ignore the findings of science. Nonetheless, although these drugs may produce a religious experience, they need not produce a religious life, unless set within a context of faith and discipline. Finally, he concludes that psychedelic drugs should not be forgotten in relation to religion because the phenomenon of religious awe, or the encounter with the holy, is declining and religion cannot survive long in its absence.[75]
Later experience [ edit ]
Huxley continued to take these substances several times a year until his death,[76] but with a serious and temperate frame of mind.[77] He refused to talk about the substances outside scientific meetings,[78] turned down an invitation to talk about them on TV[79] and refused the leadership of a foundation devoted to the study of psychedelics, explaining that they were only one of his diverse number of interests.[80] For Philip Thody, a professor of French literature, Huxley's revelations made him conscious of the objections that had been put forward to his theory of mysticism set out in Eyeless in Gaza and Grey Eminence, and consequently Island reveals a more humane philosophy.[81] However, this change in perspective may lie elsewhere. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. Huxley was overwhelmed to the point where he decided his previous experiments, the ones detailed in Doors and Heaven and Hell, had been nothing but "entertaining sideshows."[82] He wrote in a letter to Humphry Osmond, that he experienced "the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.... I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.... And the things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion, I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into a false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge."[83] The experience made its way into the final chapter of Island.[84] This raised a troublesome point. Was it better to pursue a course of careful psychological experimentation.... or was the real value of these drugs to "stimulate the most basic kind of religious ecstasy"?[82]
Influence [ edit ]
A variety of influences have been claimed for the book. The psychedelic proselytiser Timothy Leary was given the book by a colleague soon after returning from Mexico where he had first taken psilocybin mushrooms in the summer of 1960. He found that The Doors of Perception corroborated what he had experienced 'and more too'.[85] Leary soon set up a meeting with Huxley and the two became friendly. The book can also be seen as a part of the history of entheogenic model of understanding these drugs, that sees them within a spiritual context.[86]
William Blake [ edit ]
William Blake[87] (Born in London, 28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) who inspired the book's title and writing style, was an influential English artist most notable for his paintings and poetry. The Doors of Perception was originally a metaphor written by Blake, used in his 1790 book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The metaphor was used to represent Blake's feelings about mankind's limited perception of the reality around them; "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”[88]
Cultural references [ edit ]
This book was the influence behind Jim Morrison naming his band The Doors in 1965. [89]
In his 2014 Scientific American article, skeptic Michael Shermer closed his story about an "anomalous and mystifying event[s] that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural" with the statement advising that "we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious." The event was that his wife's grandfather's transistor radio, which had been broken, started playing without being touched just before their wedding ceremony. [90] [91]
article, skeptic Michael Shermer closed his story about an "anomalous and mystifying event[s] that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural" with the statement advising that "we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious." The event was that his wife's grandfather's transistor radio, which had been broken, started playing without being touched just before their wedding ceremony. In the 2016 film Doctor Strange, Stan Lee's character is seen reading the book.[92]
Publication history [ edit ]
The Doors of Perception is usually published in a combined volume with Huxley's essay Heaven and Hell (1956)
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, 1954, 1956, Harper & Brothers
, 1954, 1956, Harper & Brothers 1977 Harpercollins (UK), mass market paperback: ISBN 0-586-04437-X
ISBN 0-586-04437-X 1990 Harper Perennial edition: ISBN 0-06-090007-5
ISBN 0-06-090007-5 2004 Harper Modern Classics edition: ISBN 0-06-059518-3
ISBN 0-06-059518-3 2004 Sagebrush library binding: ISBN 1-4176-2859-6
ISBN 1-4176-2859-6 2009 First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition: ISBN 978-0-06-172907-2
ISBN 978-0-06-172907-2 The Doors of Perception, unabridged audio cassette, Audio Partners 1998, ISBN 1-57270-065-3
See also [ edit ]Cleveland Browns coach Mike Pettine said "it's fair to say" that Josh McCown will enter training camp as the starting quarterback.
Josh McCown would be the 22nd starting quarterback for the Browns since 1999 if he starts a game this season. AP Photo/Chris O'Meara
Pettine had previously declined to name a starter, saying on April 21 that it was too early and he wanted to keep the competition going.
He altered that stance slightly on Monday, speaking on 92.3-The Fan in Cleveland, one of the team's radio partners.
What he said is not really a surprise given Johnny Manziel struggled as a rookie and had a 10-week stay in rehab after the season.
McCown is the most experienced quarterback among a group that includes Manziel, Thad Lewis and Connor Shaw.
"Josh has proven in the right circumstances that he can be successful,'' Pettine said.
"When you build the team right, it minimizes the importance of the quarterback," he added.
If he does start a game, McCown would be the 23rd starting quarterback for the Browns since 1999.FRAMINGHAM – A Framingham Police detective, placed on leave earlier this year, has filed a federal lawsuit against Police Chief Ken Ferguson and the town claiming they are retaliating against him for filing a corruption complaint with the FBI.
Detective Matthew Gutwill, who was placed on leave in August, filed suit in U.S. District Court on Friday alleging his civil rights were violated and a violation of the Massachusetts Public Employee Whistleblower statute.
According to the complaint, about a year before he was placed on leave, Gutwill “made himself very unpopular with a certain segment of the FPD,” when he claimed a fellow detective knowingly lied under oath while testifying in court.
An internal affairs investigation determined that Gutwill was right, but Ferguson asked the investigating officer to change their finding, the lawsuit alleges. When the officer refused, a new investigator came up with a contradicting finding, ruling the detective did not lie on the stand, the complaint alleges.
At the same time, Ferguson removed Gutwill from a federal task force he was working on, claiming that the federal Drug Enforcement Agency asked for him to be removed. Gutwill’s complaint calls that a lie.
“Chief Ferguson was motivated to improperly interfere in the internal affairs investigation because he wanted to cover up a police officer’s perjury and thus avoid additional bad press,” Gutwill’s complaint alleges, referring to the continuing investigation into missing money from the department’s evidence room.
Gutwill met with the FBI in January to discuss what he called the “entrenched practice of tolerating corruption,” within the department, discussing both the allegations of the other officer lying under oath and other departmental problems.
Gutwill told Ferguson in February that he had contacted the FBI.
Ferguson, according to the complaint, was “apoplectic” when he found out, and started a campaign to discredit Gutwill, going as far as opening an investigation against him. After an internal investigation, Ferguson placed Gutwill on leave, claiming that Gutwill lied to the internal investigator. The chief said Gutwill told him he would “blow the place up,” “turn it upside down,” or “something to that effect,” according to an account in the court filing. Gutwill denied ever saying anything like that, the lawsuit says.
Other allegations made by Gutwill included that other Framingham Police detectives allowed informants to buy drugs for themselves after they bought drugs as part of an investigation; detectives took items from crime scenes improperly and hung them as office decorations; an officer was allowed to study for law school while on duty; and attorney Brian Simoneau, the chief’s assistant, was allowed to represent clients in court during work hours and to use department resources for non-department purposes.
Ferguson said he could not comment due to the ongoing case. Town Manager Bob Halpin told Fox 25 there is “an absence of fact in the allegations.”
Halpin also told FOX25, “I can confirm Detective Gutwill is currently on paid administrative leave pending disciplinary action. Earlier this year after allegations made by Detective Gutwill, including that he was being retaliated against, the town conducted an extensive, independent investigation of three allegations made by Detective Gutwill. And in each of the cases, found that there was no validity to the allegations and in fact, in several instances found that Detective Gutwill was untruthful.”
Neither the town nor Ferguson has filed responses to the federal complaint.
Norman Miller can be reached at 508-626-3823 or [email protected]. For up-to-date crime news, follow Norman Miller on Twitter @Norman_MillerMW or on Facebook at facebook.com/NormanMillerCrime.Verizon Strikers Hold National Day Of Action, Continue Strike
Above Photo: From patch.com
Catch up on the latest news about one of the largest worker strikes in recent American history.
May 6, 2016 – As the Verizon worker strike of 2016 heads into its 24th day, both sides appear to be digging in for a protracted battle.
Members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) launched a “Day of Action” on Thursday, reportedly holding protests at 400 locations nationwide, including an action outside a Verizon shareholder meeting in Albuquerque that ended with 15 arrests.
See photos from Thursday’s protests below.
Meanwhile, Verizon representatives met with union teams on Thursday for another bargaining session.
The IBEW reported:
“The bargaining team met with the company today to address our CWA bargaining partner’s concerns for their long term service difficulties. Although we bargain jointly, there are proposals that are specific to one union or the other. Today, the CWA presented the company with multiple proposals on how to address this issue in each of their locals. The company came back to the table and rejected each of those proposals. The committee also received information regarding the company’s proposals on call sharing and benefits.”
According to the CWA:
“The Mid-Atlantic Bargaining Committee met with the company today. The union passed several proposals on overtime administration. The company later rejected the proposals claiming they would restrict its ability to manage the business. The committee challenged the company’s rejections citing the stressful work environments that have been created by the excessive amount of overtime technicians are forced to work throughout Mid-Atlantic. The union committee pointed out to the company the cost of the excessive overtime compared to hiring additional workers. This still did not result in any movement on the company’s position.”
Verizon hasn’t provided any recent bargaining update on their website or via its media channels. But on Wednesday, the communications giant posted a Twitter notice that read:
“Help serve our customers during the strike in DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA and VA.”
Verizon provided a link to its job search page with the post.
Help serve our customers during the strike in DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA and VA. Apply here: https://t.co/R3tY38YEVT pic.twitter.com/VefNu0z9LC — Verizon Labor Facts (@VZLaborfacts) May 4, 2016
Photo: Stand Up To Verizon, Facebook
HISTORY OF THE STRIKE
Contract talks between Verizon and members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) began in June of 2015.
The workers’ last contract expired on August 1, 2015.
Employees in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states plus Washington, D.C. began striking on April 13.
See related article: Verizon Workers Prep For Massive East Coast Strike
See related article: Massive Verizon Strike Begins
Since then, strike activities have taken place up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
See related article: Verizon Striker Says Union Won’t Fold, Picketing Will Continue
See related article: Striking Verizon Workers March on Boylston Street
See related article: Brooklyn Verizon Worker Challenges CEO to Climb a Telephone Pole
Bargaining efforts between Verizon and the unions remained mostly stagnant through the first weeks of the strike.
See related article: Verizon Strike: Bargaining Not Going Well, Union Reps Say
On April 21, Verizon released a statement that claimed the company has been the victim of 24 recent “suspected incidents of sabotage” in five states.
See related article: Verizon Strike 2016 Update: Alleged Industrial Sabotage, Service Issues
As the strike reached week three, union leaders and workers released photos and videos that alleged the company’s replacement workers weren’t up to the task and were creating safety issues.
See related article: Verizon Strike Update: Replacement Workers Unsafe, Unions Allege
Complications resulting from the strike have reportedly caused lengthy service delays for the company’s 140 million customers who use Verizon for cable television or Internet connections and even longer waits for new subscribers wanting Verizon’s FIOS and mobile services.
See related article: Verizon On Strike: Internet, Cable Outages Could Take Weeks To Repair
On April 28, 2016, Verizon’s Chief Administrative Officer Marc Reed announced that the company has put its “last, best and final offer” on the table.
Verizon presented each of the striking workers’ bargaining units – the New England, Mid-Atlantic and New York IBEW and the New York/New England and Mid-Atlantic CWA – with separate contract offers, which can be seen here.
“Unfortunately, their ‘last and best’ was little more than the same old [expletive],” union leaders with the CWA District 1 bargaining team wrote after the April 28 meeting.
“We will continue bargaining and striking until we get the contract that you deserve,” union leaders concluded.
See related article: Verizon Strike 2016 Update: Unions Decline Company’s ‘Final Offer’
Verizon officially cancelled health benefits for striking employees on May 1.
Reed reported an unfruitful bargaining meeting with the Mid-Atlantic unions on April 29, and an equally unsuccessful meeting with the New York/New England units on May 2.
“We met with the New York/New England unions and they made a proposal that was not constructive,” Reed stated. “We rejected the unions’ proposal and reiterated that they have our last, best, final offer.”
Union leaders reported that they made some “compromise proposals” in several areas during the May 2 meeting, designed to “kick-start the bargaining process.”
“The company completely dismissed our proposals without even asking clarifying questions,” CWA leaders reported.
Striking Verizon workers – acting under the banner of the “Stand Up To Verizon” coalition – launched a national “Day of Action” on May 5.
See related article: Verizon Strike: Workers Mobilize, Company Cuts Health Benefits
THE ISSUES
Union representatives are alleging that even though Verizon made $39 billion in profits over the last three years, the company wants to “gut job security protections, contract out more work and send jobs overseas, and require technicians to work away from home for as long as two months without seeing their families.”by Laura Chandler
It seems the Xbox One will not be gracing the islands of Japan until September 4, 2014. That’s a 7 month delay after the release of the PS4. This makes us question whether or not the Xbox One will even make a dent against the sales of the PS4, which has sold 7 million systems world wide, while the Xbox has only sold 5 million.
We also wonder why Japan had almost a year long delay for the release of the Xbox One. It could possibly be due to the popularity of Microsoft’s games. Sony games (and not to mention Nintendo games) seem to be more popular, especially the Final Fantasy series and the Dragon Quest series, in Japan. Microsoft seems to cater to the needs of Americans, with the Call of Duty series being among the most popular franchise in America.
Now, though, it looks like Microsoft is about to make waves in Japan. It’s been reported that the Xbox One already has 48 Japanese companies signed on to create some games, below is a list of all 48 companies. Most notable are Ubisoft, Konami, Square Enix, Sega, Bethesda, and Namco.
Even more exciting, a Famistu interview with Phil Spencer of Microsoft Studios stated that Microsoft has a special announcement alongside the launch of the Xbox One in Japan. It’s hinted that a well-known Japanese developer is going to create an Xbox One exclusive game. Spencer also noted more announcements and exciting news to follow at the 2014 Tokyo Game Show, which will be from September 18th through the 21st.
With Microsoft cutting a deal with a secretive, but apparently well-known, developer, sales in Japan might just be the boost Microsoft needs to surpass Sony. Only time will tell.
List of the 48 Gaming Companies;
Arc System WorksDavid Quinlan is a normal guy with day job and just a bit of coding experience. But he and a friend lived the dream and cranked out a simple iPhone app in a weekend. Here's how they did it:
"Thai, salad or ramen?" It's lunchtime on a typical Thursday and it strikes us that millions of people all over the world are pondering the same question. This question is our launchpad, making us part of the thousands of people who wanted to build an iPhone app for "that."
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I'm a product and marketing guy with some design and coding skills. Roy is a developer with some business savvy. Combined, we make a great team and complement each other's skills well, but we only started working with Objective-C last year, like many others who are trying out iPhone development. We've already built an app or two, so we're familiar with the language and frameworks. However, as with all new projects, you usually have to do a little research to understand how to approach the different challenges...especially in a world defined by 320x480 pixels.
For the longest time, we've played around with the idea of creating an app for fun. After discarding a couple of good ideas (because they were too complicated or a quick search in the App Store showed that someone else already does it well), lunchtime lands us on a simple, fun idea to help people stuck between decisions.
But while most people want to create a great iPhone app, my friend and I go one step further, making a pact to finish the project within a weekend—or realistically, our app would never get completed.
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On a piece of paper, we scribble out two-three wireframes and developed an outline for some basic screens. We decide on an app that offers up to three multiple choices. You can write your own answers—for example, Thai, salad or ramen—and you simply pick a randomized choice to see the answer to your decision. We decide to use playing cards as the theme. Immediately, we circle the "must have" features (first priority), then the "like to have" features (last priority), and finally the features that needed more investigating. We leave lunch on Thursday with a little homework and a plan to get together on Saturday.
My homework includes determining the look, feel and interaction on each screen. Roy needs to research some of the Xcode features we haven't had a chance to play with yet in our "real" jobs, mainly animations and randomization.
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On Saturday morning, we meet at a local coffee shop that had free Wi-Fi, claim a large table so we can sit side-by-side and grab the first of many large cups of coffee. Then we create a shared Dropbox folder for this project—a Basic account is free and comes with 2GB of storage. The Dropbox is important because it allows us to multitask on the same project with any/all changes synchronizing in real time. For larger projects, you may want to consider GitHub.
We pull up a more detailed outline of what we want to accomplish for our app as well as basic wireframes. Given that we only have a weekend to complete this app, we decide to focus only on the "must have" features. A developer can always issue feature updates at a later date to include the "nice to have" features.
Going screen-by-screen, we detail the elements on the page, style treatments, layout, timing, etc. We also discuss what Roy learned about animating the card's flip motion, since this was one of the core functionality of the app. We briefly review the Quartz 2D and Core Animation libraries, since we had not previously done any work with those. We even discuss using a UIWebView to render the animation within WebKit's CSS. Ultimately, we find a simple solution using standard UIViews and UIButtons. The UIView class has some animation class methods, and one of the built in transitions is a flip effect. As for the randomization, we knew most languages provide a random function, and Objective-C is no exception. For purposes of this app, all we wanted was a simple method to randomize an array. Roy found a couple of examples of this, but one that stood out was over at Dr. Touch's website. He describes an approach with which to implement a class extension method so you can easily shuffle any array.
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We dive into our respective MacBook Pros with a Borg-like focus on our individual areas of expertise. I open up Photoshop and began building screens. The first screen is the default image. This is the very first screen people see when the app starts and begins loading. Apps can be built in either portrait or landscape view. If you choose to build your app in landscape view like ours, you still need to create a default image that displays in portrait view. Simply create your landscape view and rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise (depending on whether you want left or right landscape view). Now the default image loads in portrait view but since your images is rotated, the user will twist the iPhone to landscape view.
I then spend the next couple of hours creating comps, background images, buttons, card (front and back) and info page. I also spend some time focusing on the app icon. This is obviously the "face" of your app—a badge of honor—so you'll want to put careful thought into the icon imagery. Remember, you'll need the icon in both the 57x57 and 512x512 sizes. Once completed, I upload it to Dropbox so that Roy could start using the creative elements.
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By the time I glance back to Roy's laptop, he's created a new Xcode project and is already playing around with code to animate green boxes that flip on a click. While he's working on the prototype in the iPhone Simulator, I grab the info.plist file and edit some of the settings - remove status bar, app display name, remove gloss from icon, etc. We then decide it's time for us to add some real images to our prototype. We put in the background image, the front and back of the cards and the navigation buttons. The positioning is off (by a lot) but the cards look |
It is established that wine drinking had started by about 4000 BC and possibly as early as 6000 BC. The first efforts at grape cultivation can be traced to the area that forms the "Fertile Crescent", around the Caspian Sea and in Mesopotamia, including portions of present-day Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey. Excavations from tombs in ancient Egypt prove that wine was in use there by 3100 BC. Priests and royalty enjoyed wine, while beer was drunk by the workers. The Egyptians recognized differences in wine quality and developed the first arbors and pruning methods. Archeologists have uncovered many sites with sunken jars, so the effects of temperature on stored wine were probably known. GRECO-ROMAN CONTRIBUTIONS
Wine came to Europe with the spread of the Greek civilization around 1600 BC. Homer's Odyssey and Iliad both contain excellent and detailed descriptions of wine. Wine was an important article of Greek commerce and Greek doctors, including Hippocrates, were among the first to prescribe it. The Greeks also learned to add herbs and spices to mask spoilage. The foundation and strength of viniculture in Western Europe are primarily due, however, to the influence of the Romans. Starting about 1000 BC, the Romans made major contributions in classifying grape varieties and colors, observing and charting ripening characteristics, identifying diseases and recognizing soil-type preferences. They became skilled at pruning and increasing yields through irrigation and fertilization techniques. WORLD'S OLDEST BOTTLE of WINE
Unearthed during excavation for building a house in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany, it was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophagusses that were dug up. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D. and was found in 1867. The greenish-yellow glass amphora has handles formed in the shape of dolphins. One of several bottles discovered, it is the only one with the contents still preserved. The ancient liquid has much silty sediment. About two-thirds of the contents are a thicker, hazy mixture. This is most probably olive oil, which the Romans commonly used to "float" atop wine to preserve it from oxidation. Cork closures, although known to exist at the time, were quite uncommon. Their oil method of preservation was apparently effective enough to keep the wine from evaporation up to modern day. The bottle is on permanent display, along with other wine antiquities, at the Historisches Museum der Pfalz (History Museum of the Pfalz), worth a visit if traveling near the area of Speyer, Germany. The Romans also adapted wooden cooperage, an invention they acquired with the spoils of conquering Germanic tribes, to wine storage and transportation. This was a great advance for operations previously accomplished in skins or clay jars (amphora). They may also have been the first to use glass bottles, as glassblowing became more common during this era. Beginning about 200 BC, Roman exploits were as significant as Roman experiments as the armies of Rome planted wine vines in the wake of their conquests, all over the land mass now known as Europe. ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND RELIGION
By the first century AD, wine was being exported in barrels from the Empire (Italy) to Spain, Germany, England and Gaul (France). It wasn't long before these regions began developing their own vineyards and the Roman Emperor forbid the import of French wines to eliminate competition with the local wines. Over the next few centuries, France would become dominant on the world wine market. Monastic wineries were responsible for establishing vineyards in Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhine Valley. Sacramental usage preserved wine industry methods and traditions through the dark ages. By 1152, during the reign of Henry II, Britain had become the principal customer of Bordeaux. The end of the Hundred Years War in 1453 left the city of Calais as the only French territory still under British control and trade between England and France nearly cut off. Political conflicts between England and France ultimately benefitted competition in the export wine market. From 1703 until 1860, tariffs restricted French wine imports and encouraged those from Portugal, so the English "discovered" and developed a great love of Port. Exploration, conquest and settlement brought wine to Mexico, Argentina and South Africa in the 1500s and 1600s. Although there were many attempts during this period to plant European wine vines along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of North America and in the Mississippi River basin valleys, none were successful. Each vineyard planted would die off within two or three seasons. No one apparently sought to determine why, even though little difficulty was encountered in Mexico or California vineyards. In the late 1800s, one answer to this mystery would ultimately prove fatal for nearly all the vineyards of Europe. WINE MISSION FOR CALIFORNIA
Hernando Cortez, as Governor of Mexico in 1525, ordered the planting of grapes. The success was such that the King of Spain forbid new plantings or vineyard replacements in Mexico after 1595, fearing his colony would become self-sufficient in wine. This edict was enforced for 150 years, effectively preventing a commercial wine industry from forming. As in Europe, however, vineyards survived under the auspices of the church and the care of the missions. In 1769, Franciscan missionary Father Junipero Serra planted the first California vineyard at Mission San Diego. Father Serra continued to establish eight more missions and vineyards until his death in 1784 and has been called the "Father of California Wine". The variety he planted, presumably descended from the original Mexican plantings, became known as the Mission grape and dominated California wine production until about 1880. California's first documented imported European wine vines were planted in Los Angeles in 1833 by Jean-Louis Vignes. In the 1850s and '60s, the colorful Agoston Harazsthy, a Hungarian soldier, merchant and promoter, made several trips to import cuttings from 165 of the greatest European vineyards to California. Some of this endeavor was at his personal expense and some through grants from the state. Overall, he introduced about 300 different grape varieties, although some were lost prior to testing, due to difficulties in preserving and handling. Considered the Founder of the California Wine Industry, Harazsthy contributed his enthusiasm and optimism for the future of wine, along with considerable personal effort and risk. He founded Buena Vista winery and promoted vine planting over much of Northern California. He dug extensive caves for cellaring, promoted hillside planting, fostered the idea of non-irrigated vineyards and suggested Redwood for casks when oak supplies ran low. BLINDED WINE WITH SCIENCE
For centuries wine was produced and enjoyed with little thought for and no true understanding of its underlying science, wine evolved through "spontaneous generation," as far as anyone knew. French chemist Louis Pasteur, among many discoveries relating to his germ theory of diseases, first proposed and proved, in 1857, that wine is made by microscopic organisms, yeasts. This led to the discovery and development of different yeast types and properties and ultimately to better hygiene, less spoilage, and greater efficiency in wine production. J. Chauvet vineyard and winery, circa 1900. Joshua Chauvet planted his own vineyard in 1875. Agoston Harazsthy had employed him at one time. Chauvet also started the first brickyard, the first lumber mill. the first grain mill, and the first hotel in Sonoma County. Hotel Chauvet in tiny Glen Ellen still exists today. Photo courtesy of Fleet Irvine Photomurals In 1860, Dr Jules Guyot, another Frenchman, published the first of three treatises describing regional traditional vinicultural and viticultural practices as well as his own observations and arguments on the economy of grape growing. Before these documents, viniculture was a practice that had been apprenticed from generation to generation for over 5000 years, with very few written records and no formal instruction. YANKEE VINE-KILLER BUG
In 1863, species of native American grapes were taken to Botanical Gardens in England. These cuttings carried a species of root louse called phylloxera vastatrix which attacks and feeds on the vine roots and leaves. Phylloxera is indigenous to the Mississippi River Valley and was unknown outside North America at the time. Powdery mildew, a fungal disease, also indigenous to North America, had previously migrated to Europe and caused problems in some areas. No one, however, had any idea of the wide-reaching destructive potential of Phylloxera. Native American varieties developed resistance to phylloxera by evolving a thick and tough root bark, so that they were relatively immune to damage. The vinifera vines had no such evolutionary protection and phylloxera ate away at their roots, causing them to rot and the plant to die and driving the pests to seek other nearby live hosts, spreading inexorably through entire vineyards and on to others. By 1865, phylloxera had spread to vines in Provence. Over the next 20 years, it inhabited and decimated nearly all the vineyards of Europe. Many methods were attempted to eradicate phylloxera: flooding, where possible, and injecting the soil with carbon bisulfide, had some success in checking the louse, but were costly and the pests came back as soon as the treatments stopped. Finally Thomas Munson, a horticulturist from Dennison, Texas, realized that native American vines were resistant and suggested grafting the vinifera vines onto riparia hybrid rootstocks. So, there began a long, laborious process of grafting every wine vine in Europe over to American rootstocks. It was only in this manner that the European wine industry could be retrieved from extinction. Downy mildew, another fungal disease in American grapevines, unfortunately probably migrated to Europe on some of the rootstocks imported for grafting. One tragic consequence of the Phylloxera devastation is that many of the native species indigenous to Europe, since they were of negligible commercial value, were not perpetuated by grafting and became extinct. There was some debate generated by this replanting that the quality declined in "post-phylloxera" wines. Whether this was indeed the case and whether this was due to the rootstocks themselves or to the relatively sudden and nearly universal youth of the vines, or to changes in vinification techniques, or to some other concurrent factor or variable, is unknown. Undoubtedly, it will remain a matter of theory and opinion and provide animated conversation at wine tastings, but ultimately never be proven. European consumer demand was unabated, especially in France, yet the vineyard blights resulted in shortages of wine for many years. French producers turned their focus to the French North African colonies of Morocco, Tunisia, and particularly Algeria. Fraud and adulteration became problems. In a short period of just over a decade, Algeria grew into the World's largest wine exporter, taking over the position of France. As their industry gradually recovered, ultimately it was competition from these African colonies that spurred French wine growers to the form the system of Appellation Controlée. AC became the model for all wine producing countries to both protect reputations and markets for the wine trade and authenticate product origins for consumers. Northern California wine harvest, c. 1900. Around the turn of the century, the quality of American wines had reached excellence by international standards, as testified to by the three dozen medals won by them at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Photo courtesy of Fleet Irvine Photomurals During the period when the Europeans were contending with phylloxera, the American wine industry was ironically flourishing. By 1900, America had a fully developed and proud commercial wine producing business. Leading brands from California, New York, Ohio, Missouri and New Jersey were appearing on many of the best restaurant wine lists alongside French, German and Italian listings. Barrels of California wine were being regularly exported to Australia, Canada, Central America, England, Germany, Mexico and the Orient. VINE-KILLER POLITICS
The destruction of the American wine industry would come not from an entomological pest, but from a political one. While it took a hundred years instead of 20 to complete its course, the results were even more devastating. It didn't spread from vineyard to vineyard, but from town to county to state to the entire nation. Alcohol abuse and alcoholism and their related problems were much more widespread and affected a radically larger share of America's population in the early and mid-1800s than they do at present day. Excessive use, rather than moderate use, was the norm in an era of fewer entertainments and diversions. The first Prohibition law went on the books in Indiana in 1816, forbidding the sale of any alcohol on Sunday (still enforced to this day). By the 1840s, many towns and counties in Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York and Ohio had gone legally "dry". In 1851, Maine enacted the first statewide law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of liquor and, by 1855, thirteen of the thirty-one United States had followed suit. The Industrial Revolution led from local to large-scale brewing and mass marketing, with intense competition. A proliferation of saloons drove owners to seek side profits by pursuing illegal and unsavory vices such as gambling and prostitution. As another beverage containing alcohol, wine began to suffer the successful excesses of beer. In 1880, Kansas became the first state to go "dry" by amending their Constitution, followed by Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia. Although some of these laws allowed winemaking to continue for sale elsewhere, few wineries in these states could compete without selling their wines locally. Most closed their doors and abandoned their vineyards. The Drys went so far as to have any mention of wine expunged from school and college texts, including Greek and Roman classic literature. Medicinal wines were dropped from the United States Pharmacopoeia. They even tried to prove that praises for wine in the Bible were actually referring to unfermented grape juice. Thirty-three states had gone dry at the outbreak of World War I. In December, 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, criminalizing the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors"; by February, 1919, 45 states had ratified it; New Jersey held out until 1922, and only Connecticut and Rhode Island ultimately rejected it. To define the language and set the effective date, Congress enacted the National Prohibition Act, more popularly known as the Volstead Act, named after Minnesota Republican Andrew Volstead, teetotaller and primary proponent of the bill. After midnight on January 16, 1920, National Prohibition would begin. The net consequences of the legislation made it much more difficult to obtain alcohol, possession by individuals for personal consumption was not a federal crime. Through a provision that made penalties not applicable 1 to "a person manufacturing nonintoxicating cider and fruit juice exclusively for use in his home," thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens became home winemaking hobbyists and quasi-bootleggers. This poorly-constructed clause eliminated punishments without strictly legalizing either home brewing or winemaking, yet the obvious difficulty of interpreting and applying the law's intent led to new pastimes for many households. Wine Commonsewers, New York City, 1925 CAUTION: this photo may be unsuitable for wine enthusiasts. Could this be the pipeline to the mayor's office? Or maybe, they're running a Veterinary Clinic to prevent arteriosclerosis in rodents... Photo courtesy of Fleet Irvine Photomurals Explosive demand for fresh grapes and a shortage of refrigerated railroad cars in which to ship them caused prices to skyrocket. Growers began replanting their vineyards from fine wine varieties over to table or juice grape varieties that shipped better. Planted acreage nearly doubled from 1919 to 1926. Vineyard land prices climbed from $200 an acre in 1918 to $2,500 an acre in 1923. Prosperity for the growers lasted barely five years. In 1925, the railroads finally had enough cars, too much fruit was shipped and it rotted on the Eastern docks. In 1926, vineyard land fell back to $250 per acre. The massive plantings produced a constant surplus of California grapes that persisted until 1971. By the time of National Repeal, effective December 5, 1933, the industry was in ruins. Although some wineries managed to survive by obtaining permits to make wines used for medicinal, sacramental and non-beverage additive purposes, production dropped 94% from 1919 to 1925. REPEAL WITHOUT RECOVERY
Even after Repeal, several states stayed dry: Kansas until 1948, Oklahoma until 1957, and Mississippi until 1966. Seventeen states chose to obliterate free-market capitalism by establishing monopoly liquor stores with limited selections and plain-as-dirt merchandising that discourages respectable housewives from shopping. There remain local prohibitions that are arbitrary, inconsistent and niggling, with such manifest foolishness as streets lined door-to-door on one side with taverns and "package stores" and nary a one on the opposite side where the dry boundary runs down the middle of the roadway. Today 10 percent of the nation's area and 6 percent of the population remain dry. Anticipating Repeal, speculators and quick-buck artists soon flooded the legal market with quickly and poorly made wine. Dilettantes published books and articles warning Americans about rigid rules that must be followed to serve the proper wine with the proper food from the proper glass at the proper temperature. Faced with bad-tasting products with which to risk committing social blunders and while remaining uncertain about the social acceptance of any alcohol, most Americans stayed away. Hard drinkers stuck to hard liquor. For decades, moderate wine drinking in a social context survived almost exclusively in households that made their own. The only group of wines that sold well following Repeal were the fortified dessert wines. Taxed at the lower rate of wine as opposed to distilled spirits, but with 20 percent alcohol, this group made the cheapest intoxicant available for derelicts and winos. Recovery and re-growth of the wine industry was severely inhibited for the next half century, in both quantity and quality. Before 1920, there were more than 2,500 commercial wineries in the United States. Less than 100 survived as winemaking operations to 1933. By 1960, that number had grown to only 271. California had 713 bonded wineries before Prohibition; it took more than half a century, until 1986, before that many were again operating. Before 1920, table wines accounted for 3 of every 4 gallons shipped. In 1937, four years after Repeal, fortified wine production outpaced table wine by a ratio of 5 to 1. It wasn't until 1968 that table wines sales caught up and finally overtook fortified wines, regaining the status of most popular wine category. 2 Prohibition left a legacy of distorting the role of alcohol in American life, ruining a fledgling world-class wine industry, weakening the U.S. Constitution, and boosting the success and profitability of Organized Crime (the price of whiskey rose over 500% during the 1920s). The maze of confusing and conflicting laws that currently vary widely between states impedes commerce, sustains distribution monopolies, casts aspersions of greed on tax coffers, and mocks the American sense of fair competition. More police officers were killed during the decade of the 1920s than in any decade in history. The "Grand Experiment" implanted moral ambiguity and disrespect for authority in an entire generation of Americans, while it deprived them of potential social and health benefits, and brought the character and term "wino" into the streets and the lexicon. The one positive remainder is the lingering Congressional hesitance to pass Constitutional Amendments, especially regarding restrictions on individual liberty and personal moral choice. We can only hope for the future that our representatives don't commit such folly when powerful special interests clash with the shared individual freedoms that make up the public interest. The forces of prohibition are not dead yet. They are more insidious, combining moralist and monopolist factions, pursuing an agenda of obstructionist legislation, that includes preventing or encumbering direct sales of wine to consumers (see Free the Grapes 3 ), preventing health information from being printed on wine labels and spreading disinformation about potential benefits and studies related to wine and health. WORK IN PROGRESS
In spite of the political workings, table wine grew in popularity in America during the last half of the 20th Century. U.S. per-capita consumption of wine still lags far behind most countries of the Western Hemisphere. American wine-consuming growth is on pace to become the number one wine consuming nation by 2020. A remaining problem is American tendency toward excess. More than 85% of the volume of wine America drinks is done by less than 8% of the total population. A goal of moderate regular consumption seems too tame for America's tastes. Achieving such might bring better health overall to the population and peace with all but the most radical teetotallers. Research in the past thirty years has led to developments in both agriculture and technology that have greatly improved overall wine quality. The quality and stature of California and American wine has never been better and worldwide demand continues to grow. The attractions of the "gentleman farming" lifestyle and the increasing demand drove the industry to swell to a total of 4,383 bonded US wineries in 2006. In America's Bicentennial Year of 1976, two California wines (Stag's Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and Chateau Montelena 1973 Napa Valley Chardonnay) bested their top French wine counterparts at a blind tasting in Paris judged entirely by Frenchmen 4, all experts in wine! This event shocked the contemporary world of wine and became famous as The Judgment of Paris. More than four decades later, it is now only surprising when French wines win both categories at similar events. Jim LaMar NOTES
1. Volstead Act, Section 29, Title II RETURN 2. By 2003, fortified wine production had sunk to less than 6.5% of total U.S. wine production. RETURN 3. It is interesting to note while viewing the United States map that shows states that regulate and allow direct-to-consumer shipping and those that prohibit this commerce, several of the prohibitionist states are following the religious conservative politics of their majority population (the Southern States of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama + Utah), while South Dakota (we're guessing) has a high Native American population that is genetically predisposed to alcoholism, but for Pennsylvania it is all about political power and greed, since this state runs a distribution monopoly on all alcoholic beverages within its borders... 4. This event was hosted by Steven Spurrier, a young Englishman who owned the Cave de la Madeleine wine shop and the Académie du Vin, a wine school with six-week courses primarily for chefs and sommeliers of the French Restaurant Association. His purpose was to prevent the French wine industry from stagnation by combatting their common disbelief at the time that California could produce World-class wine. RETURN RELATED LINKS
Wine artifacts collector Dean Walters' Early California Wine Trade Archive site is really well-designed and serves, if successful, as a harbinger of a museum-to-come. There are several really interesting slide shows displaying historic photos, labels, bottles, postcards, etc., along with pages of reference and related links. Encourage his efforts by visiting and contributing if you can. The Sonoma County Grape Growers' Association details the players and events which impacted the development of California wine as it takes an Historical Look at Wine Growing in Sonoma County. The Maritime History Project has a biographic article online about Count Agoston Haraszthy. The History Channel web site offers a very interesting Prohibition Facts and Summary, including several videos on specific aspects. Another good article on the Age of Prohibition with many links to related subjects can be found on the Orchid Recovery Center site. The most famous and popular brand of American wine prior to Prohibition was "Virginia Dare." For accounts of the origin of this brand and its colorful founder, visit the North Carolina History Project: Virginia Dare page. Maryland Winery Association site has a summary of wine events from 1648 to present on the History of Maryland Wine.Exclusive: Popular TV shows can reflect the public mood, especially when they address existing fears like the “War on Terror.” Attitudes evolved from the post-9/11 revenge fantasies of “24” to the more ambivalent narratives of “Homeland” and even historical spy series like “The Americans,” says Patrick Cribben.
By Patrick Cribben
Trends in spy narratives that gain traction in the broadcast media can shed light on how the culture is coping with a particular period of conflict and suspicion. The Cold War had its Bond-like escapism. The post-Watergate era spawned its cynical conspiracy tales. And George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” gave us the revenge-heroism of Jack Bauer and his ilk.
Today, as the War on Terror has aged into gnarling complexity and Americans have grown alarmed at the fast-growing Surveillance State, we see more nuanced iterations of the national security narrative that deviate from the hammer-blow dramaturgy of “24” and reject as well the escapism of the earlier “Bond.” Rather than blacks and whites, there are endless shades of gray.
The swampy morality of suicide bombers, drone strikes, double-agents and targeted assassinations created fertile ground for Showtime’s popular and critically acclaimed “Homeland” in which Carrie Mathisen (Claire Danes), a psychologically fragile yet brilliantly obsessed female CIA officer, picks her way through the muck of counter-terrorism operations as well as the back-stabbing office politics of the Intelligence Community.
The Bush-era “24” (2001-2010) was driven by a palpable indulgence in the panting excitement of its real-time plot lines to foil improbable terror plots as well as the righteous, at-any-cost patriotism of its protagonist and a not-infrequent implicit endorsement of (ahem) “enhanced interrogation techniques” (67 separate torture scenes in the show’s first five years, according to the Parents Television Council). But “Homeland” contextualizes some of these tropes around one initial and central idea the haziness of who the enemy actually is.
The Enemy Within
The show’s first premise involved a returning Marine Sergeant and Iraq War P.O.W., Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who may or may not have been recruited (“turned”) by his jihadist captors to visit attacks on American targets by hiding in plain sight and using his celebrity to gain deadly access to high-profile U.S. government officials.
The casting of Lewis in the role underscores the fogginess-of-evil premise. With his red hair, pasty complexion and run-of-the-mill physicality, he suggests visually not so much a dangerous action hero (or anti-hero) as the decent guy-next-door. And though Brody’s motivations grow a little less ambiguous over time, the series drew out the tension in its hidden-enemy premise from season to season via forays into dubious double-agency and the introduction of at least three additional “sleeper” agent subplots, including one involving a milky blond girl-next-door.
Even after the show kills the Brody character off at the end of season three, the specter of the enemy within, and the intra-agency conflicts that it sets in motion, continue to play out as the series lurches into new conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
“Homeland” scored Showtimes’s highest-ever ratings for pilot and season finale episodes in 2011-2012, the year it premiered, and won that year’s Emmy and Golden Globe as Best Drama Series. It has sustained and built on its ratings and critical acclaim since then. It’s a show that’s “getting through” and “touching a nerve.” But it’s only part of the story about today’s spy mania on television, and when compared with a show like FX’s “The Americans,” probably the less surprising and provocative part.
Historical Spy Dramas
Viewed alongside AMC’s “TURN: Washington’s Spies,” which premiered in 2014, “The Americans,” which first appeared one year earlier, represents a wrinkle altogether new in serial TV spy narratives, but not, of course, in the history of literature and drama. Whatever inspiration writers from Shakespeare to Brecht to Arthur Miller followed when grafting their contemporary preoccupations onto other historical periods seems also to have touched the creators of “The Americans,” consciously or not.
The show deals in sleeper cells, easy-to-overlook enemies, and the veil of banal outward appearances, but instead of exploiting those concepts inside a this-week’s-headlines milieu as did “Homeland,” “24” and at least a dozen other intelligence-oriented shows that have come and gone since 9/11, it re-contextualizes them, shifting them not to “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” but to a Northern Virginia suburb in the not-too-distant past: the last decade of the Cold War, the end of an era that had, in many ways, inaugurated the country into suspicions about dubious us/them loyalties of otherwise indistinguishable fellow citizens.
This is a curious turn (there’s that word again), and one that we might even be tempted to dismiss as coincidental as just historical drama. But two things argue against stopping at that interpretation. One is the concurrent emergence of AMC’s espionage period piece. While it hasn’t had the impact of either “The Americans” or “Homeland,” “TURN” still jumps out at you as odd.
Who in the world ever thought we’d see a serial television spy show done up with bonnets, kerchiefs, corsets and barrel-loaders and with back stories involving complex historical villains, such as the elegant British spy master Major John Andre and the courageous but vainglorious American General Benedict Arnold?
Here we have derring-do, double-dealing and mortal danger among not our extant and arcane Intelligence Community, but among our Founding Fathers and their War of Independence. Again, in isolation you might dismiss this as happenstance, but alongside “The Americans,” it points to something deeper in the immediate zeitgeist. It’s as if our appetite for spies and spy narratives grew so large, the airwaves could no longer accommodate them by sticking to our own historical period, and we had to divert the psychological overflow into other resonant epochs.
Best Show on TV?
While “TURN”’s greatest impact may so far still lie in the simple fact of its unexpected existence on the air at all, the same can’t be said of “The Americans.” Like “Homeland,” this is a show with legs. Just this week, it won the Critics Choice Award for Best Drama Series, to go along with last year’s Peabody Award and back to back AFI “Television Program of the Year” awards in 2013 and 2014.
That kind of official imprimatur has the show poised to take over the unofficial mantle of “best show on television” in a line from the likes of “The Sopranos” to “Breaking Bad” to “Mad Men.” When it does, it won’t only be because of the high quality of the show’s writing, performances and production values. It will again have something to do with its themes and content landing at the right place at the right time.
Set, cleverly, at the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the show centers on Nadezha (Keri Russell) and Mischa (Matthew Rhys), a pair of Soviet spies living a life of deep immersion outside of D.C. as the married couple Elizabeth and Philip Jennings while undertaking covert actions of the greatest international import and danger.
Twenty years under this cover and the training that preceded it in Moscow have rendered their speech, style and mannerisms irreproachably American. They are the affable and ordinary couple-next-door – even as the couple literally next door to them turns out to include an FBI counterintelligence agent named Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich).
The inspiration for the show comes in part from the real-life exposure in 2010 of the Illegals Program, under which a dozen or so Russian government agents had been attempting to operate for years in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere using similar tactics, including establishing agent-to-agent marriages and parenting American-born children.
Predictably, the agents in the actual Illegals Program were, by all accounts, not remotely so successful in “passing” as ordinary Americans, nor in gathering useful information. They were rather closer to 1960s spy-spoof scion Maxwell Smart, but without Max’s pure dumb luck to save them.
Series creator Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer himself, presents instead deep-cover agents of brutal and breathtaking efficiency who can kill without conscience in the morning and barbecue seamlessly with the neighbors that same afternoon. Episodes introduce at least one other operational deep-cover Soviet/American family that is similarly gifted and effective. It’s a world awash in undetectable malevolent operatives out to undermine and undo our very way of life zealous, nearly religious, in their beliefs and prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their goals, and right under our noses.
Zeitgeist Goblins
Echoes of the professional sleeper-cell worries that ran rampant after 9/11 are obvious. But sounding there, too, are growing anxieties about the homegrown terrorist, the well-hidden lone wolf and purposeful pair, the ball-cap and the backpack.
Yes, “The Americans” (and, arguably “TURN” too) works at the level of historical drama (so did “Henry IV” and “The Crucible”). But it also works at the level of Brechtian historification and allegory, refracting back interesting insights into our current cloak-and-dagger preoccupations not in spite of its non-contemporary setting but because of it. This is true even if Weisberg didn’t do so deliberately for such an effect. Even if the goblins of zeitgeist made him do it.
Maybe it was their sister-goblins the goblins of synchronicity at work, but in 1953, the height of McCarthy’s red scare and the year that Ian Fleming published the first of the Bond novels, Casino Royale, “Pogo” cartoonist Walt Kelly first paraphrased Commodore Oliver Perry’s famous declaration of victory in a naval battle in the War of 1812, transposing it into a commentary on the fallibility of man particularly of the man of nationalist or ideological righteousness: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” He also later dusted off his insightful observation to comment on both the Vietnam War and the Environment.
Now, our present epoch – where all of us are data-collection “targets” for the National Security Agency and where the sweet kid in your statistics class may be buying pressure cookers in his spare time seems to invoke, in reality and through the prism of television, both Kelly’s original penitential meaning for his maxim as well as a new, more eerily literal one.
Patrick Cribben has written about film, arts, and media for several publications, including 64 Magazine, The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va), and Die Weltwoche. He teaches film and humanities courses at Chesapeake College.That morning, conservative blogger William Jacobson had speculated that when ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked a question about contraception during the January 7 debate, it was at the White House's request. "Everyone, at least on our side of the aisle, shook their heads in disbelief as to why Stephanopoulos was bringing up the issue." But a month later, it was relevant: "It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences." That night, former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris accused Stephanopoulos -- a former Clinton staffer -- of being a "paid Democratic hitman."
SEAN HANNITY: You think he was doing this under direct orders? MORRIS: Under orders... They want to create the impression that the Republicans will ban contraception, which is totally insane...
Rush Limbaugh picked up the idea the next day. "Do you remember -- 'cause this is a setup for what's coming -- do you remember, we were all perplexed here. George Stephanopoulos kept hounding Romney on contraception. It had not come up, nobody had said anything about it, and we were all confused, as was Romney, what the deal was. "
The idea that no one was talking about contraception is not true, however. Rick Santorum had said birth control was bad for women early in his presidential campaign, but perhaps no one biologically incapable of getting pregnant noticed. (Note: just like how, as the Atlantic Wire's Jen Doll points out, the contraception debate in Washington is all dudes, the contraception conspiracy debate online is all dudes, too.) Stephanopoulos' colleague Jake Tapper had asked Santorum about it that month, BuzzFeed points out.
But Morris continued with his crusade against Stephanopoulos Wednesday. "I was trying to figure out why Stephanopoulos was pushing like that. And I think he had been contracted by the Democrats to lay a hit on Romney," he told Bill O'Reilly. Limbaugh continued with the conspiracy theory Thursday, saying Stephanopoulos asked the question because "The design was they hoped Romney would say, 'Well, if the states want to,' they could then allude to the Republican front-runner suggesting that contraception be banned. Then they went out and they found an interview with Santorum where they can take him out of context and say that this is what he intends to do when he has not and did not say that." It's all part of the plan to distract voters from Obama's mishandling of the economy, Limbaugh said. Which is funny, considering just couple weeks ago The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol was arguing that Santorum might be the better Republican presidential candidate because he could make the election about more than "the economy, stupid." The fight between Planned Parenthood and the Komen foundation was "a very good wake-up call that the cultural issues remain pretty important to an awful a lot of Americans."
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected] host James Corden is lining up Irish favourites U2 to star on Carpool Karaoke.
The Dublin rockers have long been top of the US Late Late Show host’s wish list for his world famous karaoke session in a car.
3 Bono and the Edge of U2
And Bono and the boys are likely to coincide their upcoming Joshua Tree tour dates with a spin around with James.
A show insider revealed: |
So, in the larger study with over 450 kids, we asked 'what's your kid like after watching TV or after playing outside' and none of the parents know what any of the other parents are telling us, but they overwhelmingly agree."
Faber Taylor believes it would be easy to add a dose of nature to a child's routine. "I could imagine parents hearing about this research and immediately applying it - just trying it out - taking their child to the park either when their child's symptoms are exacerbated or as a regular routine. It's not that hard to incorporate, especially if they have a green backyard or if they can get to a neighborhood park. Again, we can't say for sure that it would work for any given child - but there's probably very little risk involved in encouraging your child to play outdoors and seeing if their symptoms improve."
She also says that the benefits of a dose of nature don't apply just to children with ADHD. "We're all on a continuum of attention so this study has implications for all of us," said Taylor. "ADHD is just at the far end of attention functioning, but there're plenty of us who fall somewhere close to that end of the continuum, and we all experience times when we're mentally fatigued - times when we're less able to focus and do tasks and get easily distracted. The evidence suggests that natural settings can benefit everyone, even children (and adults) who have not been diagnosed with ADHD."
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council, U.S. Forest Service under award No. 00-DG-11244225-354, and the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Project No. ILLU-65-0370The Democratic 2016 contender has urged an end to US opposition to the substance – and were he to win the White House, he could take executive action
When Vermont senator Bernie Sanders called for an end to federal marijuana prohibition last week before an audience of college students, he went further than any major national presidential candidate before him.
“It’s the first time a presidential candidate has made such a forthright statement on legalization,” said Michael Collins, deputy director at Drug Policy Action. “[It’s a] a fairly big nail in the coffin of prohibition.”
Bernie Sanders says marijuana sales should be regulated like alcohol Read more
But that’s not the only reason his declaration was significant. While many proposals from Sanders and other candidates may not actually come to fruition under any US president because they rely on the cooperation of Congress, ending federal prohibition is something a President Sanders could achieve.
That’s because a process exists that requires only the executive branch of government.
Even though public backing for legalizing marijuana is at an all-time high – a recent Gallup poll found 58% of Americans now in favor – only a handful of lawmakers in Congress currently support legalization or leaving the matter to states.
During his remarks at a student town hall at George Mason University Wednesday night, Sanders said: “In my view, the time is long overdue for us to remove the federal prohibition on marijuana. States should have the right to regulate marijuana the same way that state and local laws now govern the sale of alcohol and tobacco.
“Too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed because they have criminal records as a result of marijuana use,” Sanders said to loud applause. “That is wrong. That has got to change.”
Right now, the federal government considers marijuana a Schedule I drug, a classification under the Controlled Substances Act reserved for substances like heroin with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical uses. “That is absurd,” Sanders said of the classification.
To ease this designation, marijuana could either be “rescheduled” to Schedule II through V, all of which would allow at least some more discretion to prescribe and regulate the substance. It could also be removed from the Schedule altogether.
Marijuana businesses voice fear of a Republican president Read more
These actions could be achieved by Congress. But they could also be achieved through the attorney general and several executive agencies.
“In a nutshell, administrative rescheduling begins when an actor – the secretary of Health and Human Services or an outside interested party – files a petition with the attorney general or he initiates the process himself,” John Hudak, a Brookings Institute fellow in Governance Studies, and research assistant Grace Wallack wrote earlier this year.
After this petition has been filed, it is considered by the Food and Drug Administration, but could also be examined by the Drug Enforcement Administration. After receiving one or both reviews, the attorney general can recommend rescheduling marijuana or removing it entirely from the federal government’s control. If she decides such a move is warranted, the federal rule-making process is initiated, in which public input is sought and the president makes a final determination on whether to execute the proposal.
Removing marijuana from the Schedule wouldn’t legalize marijuana on a national level, but removing the federal prohibition and officially kicking the matter to states would “be a huge boost to the movement”, Collins said.
Other Democratic presidential contenders, as well as nearly half the Republican field, have said they are willing to let states that have chosen to legalize marijuana, including Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Washington DC, continue to do so.
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley has also called to move marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule II drug, which would ease some restrictions.
But only Sanders seems to be advocating taking marijuana off the Schedule entirely, although campaign staff did not respond to a Guardian request to clarify his position.
Ending the at least nominal federal prohibition on marijuana may sound similar to the positions of some other candidates, but Collins explained why it’s so important for the legalization movement.
“Marijuana businesses are governed by state law, but banks are governed by state and federal law,” he said. “They are not comfortable taking marijuana money right now because of that.” If pot were no longer illegal on a federal level, though, banks would be free to work with marijuana businesses on everything from deposits to loans. Such a policy shift would also allow currently blocked research into potential health benefits of marijuana to proceed, and potentially allow doctors to prescribe marijuana.
Sanders alluded to this banking problem in his remarks, saying, “Recognized businesses in states that have legalized marijuana should be fully able to use the banking system without fear of federal prosecution.”I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve begun the challenging process of my 9th step work, making amends, and that there were a few right at the top of my list that I was actually very excited about. Come to think of it, I don’t know that I’ve ever looked forward to seeking people out for the sole purpose of telling them what an ass I’ve been more than now.
I pretty much never realize how high my hopes have gotten for a particular situation until they come crashing down and get pooped on. Figuratively speaking. Mostly. That happened regarding the amend I was most looking forward to. Now that it hasn’t turned out as expected, I realize it had become rather grandiose and unreasonable in my mind. There were going to be rays of sunshine and slow motion running toward each other and friendship bracelets and forgiveness scented sparkles falling from the sky and ice cream and no lactose intolerance and a lot of butterflies. But not a creepy amount. Just a good celebratory amount of butterflies. Maybe there would be spontaneous bursting into song…
But then…
Bummer.
So, at the beginning of my recovery journey this type of disappointment surely would’ve led to a severe meltdown of sadness and probably some kind of subtle controlling gesture to try to turn things around. There would have been countless hours of journaling and mentally spinning the scenario over and over in my head trying to figure out what went wrong and what I could do to “fix” it. In the past, someone not really “hearing me” would make me so crazy that I would reexplain myself times infinity to the power of forever and yet despite my best insanity infused efforts, it pretty much never worked, leading to more frustration. However, in the face of this relational disappointment, this is all that happened….my face looked like this..
and for like 5 minutes like this….
Disclaimer: These are not gang member thug tattoo tears. The previous state of sad faceness did not send me into a murderous frenzy, leading me to shank my intended amends target and then kill him again just to be sure. I have no street cred.
Ok so blubbering mess for like 5 whole minutes but really it was about 48 hours of this…
Not so bad, right? And then I realized something awesome! Some of the “promises” of AA are coming to fruition in my life.
On pages 83-84 of the Big Book, there are some promises that begin to unfold for us as we begin to heal through the spiritual discipline of the 12 steps. The one that revealed itself in this situation is….
“We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.”
Yes. After 48 whole hours of medium-grade sadness I was able to sit down and pray and journal for a reasonable amount of time, asking God for wisdom. And then I was able to respond to Mr. Didn’tliveuptomygrandiosedreams in a loving, gracious and simple way. It was not a web of words. There was no hidden agenda to re-explain myself. Just grace and a whole lot of genuine gratitude. In fact, gratitude for another of the promises that has clearly come to fruition many times in my recovery….
“We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”
The way this thing panned out is what’s best for me but I didn’t know it because I still see things through my codependent filter sometimes. My very wise counselor once told me that codependents generally do not live grounded in reality or in the present. We tend to live and think in relation to how we think things could be… someday. And that’s living in a bit of a fantasy world, rather than the reality of how things currently are. So I really believe God worked this out for me…He did for me what I could not do for myself…working it out in a way that is much more realistic and healthy for me. He knew what I didn’t…that in this case, simple forgiveness was better than the grandiose unrealistic restoration of the friendship I had envisioned. He helped me to intuitively know how to handle a disappointing situation that previously would have baffled me.
Aaand I have so many pet butterfly friends to sing to.
~Heidi
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Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar Redux is an animated movie in German produced by SSJ Kamui. It is an adaption of a book of the same name, which was an adaption of a webcomic which was in turn adapted from a fanfiction the author wrote at the age of 16. He used autodesk maya, realflow and a motion capture system based on a kinect to shoot the movie.
It is accessable on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC8u3q3Vx9Gsn_oBh4MjMt7RSoJ-zUjeP
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Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar provides examples of the following:
The signs on Karalas notebook in Episode 4 are different notations of the Timewave Zero Algorithm Terminology used in the movie refers to the philosophies of Ayn Rand, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and to Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, B.F.Skinner and Kevin Winnicot
In the ending narration, the quote "Number rules the universe" from Pythargoras appears, as well as the quote "The empire never ends" from Phillip K. Dick
Parts of the calculation sequence of the algorithm look like the painting "Calculating Space" from Konrad Zuse, an illustration of his theory that the universe is a giant computer simulation. Other parts show a dolphin which is an allusion to the hacking sequence of Johnny Mnemonic
When Reika enters the main complex of the Carl Friedrich Gauss institute, she looks at her tablet pc and reads that it failed to establish a wireless connection to all "Helicarriers".
The conspiracy stores secret data in "Bielefeld."
The theory of government used by the superstate is called the fifth political theory. This is an allusion to the book "The fourth political theory", which states that a global superstate like depicted in the series is impossible(Take That Me) Note: Many philosophers referenced in the webseries (mainly Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Sprengler, Dostoevski etc.) are also among the primary sources of Alexander Dugin. In the english subtitles, Madoka Michael once uses the term "deep existence", which is a term introduced by Dugin. SSJ Kamui had trouble with translating that passage from german to english and used Dugins term in an attempt to make his point clearer.
Hilals "never live for the sake of anyone else" is a direct quote from Atlas Shrugged
The name of the state founder, "Katharina Sokolov" is a shout out to Metal Gear Solid 3
Parts of Dubois confrontation with Tsukiko Oda parallel the encounter between Jesus and the inquisitor in Fyodor Dostojevskis "The grand inquisitor"
Tsukiko Oda directly quotes the sentence "Man can't live by bread alone" from the bible During this confrontation, the phrase "panem et circenses" appears, which is latin for "bread and games" and means a policy of distraction from political problems by offering "entertainment"
On several occasions, it is mentioned that putin built tesla coils as a defense system on crimea. Tesla Coils are among the distinct weapons of the Soviet Union in Command & Conquer: Red Alert. (One of SSJ Kamuis favourite games of all time)
The main tower of the government building looks similar to the central tower of Walt Disneys never realized utopia "EPCOT" as well as the "Langer Eugen" tower, which was a government building in germany, during the cold war. (One of the newspaper articles in the first episode also calls this tower the "Langer Eugen")
The "Friedrich August von Hayek Bank of Austria"
The Kisoudis act reestablishing a gold standard of currency is an allusion to a german political science book predicting a global finance crisis which would result in the reestablishment of the gold standard
Reality Subtext: SSJ Kamui once got into trouble with the police for playing music too loud. The same happened to Karala The wound in the nightmare scene of the first episode was modelled after an inflamed wound SSJ Kamui had before he started producing the series By accident, in large parts, the political positions of Professor Szabo and Hilal Oescelem mirror the political positions of the voice actors.
Reality Subtext: Take That! Dr.Caligari essentially compares the behavior of the government in the War on Terror to the behavior of mental disordered persons.
The War on Terror: The government calls the aliens terrorists and abuses the threat to limit civil liberties.
The Tunguska Event : One of the news articles in the beginning suggests the Caine might have been involved
Unreliable Narrator: Many things about Karala and the Caine could be the product of delusions
You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Nobody knows the true shape of the Caine. People only see skeletal arms attacking or giant eyes floating in the room. And most whitnesses of the Caine went insane. Because of this, it is unclear how many Caine attack at the same time.
stating that it's possible to build an algorithm able to compute the exact date of the doomsday.DriveNow first launched in Germany in 2011 as a joint venture with Sixt before rolling out to San Francisco. Now BMW plans to bring the service to London by early 2015, according to the Financial Times.
The concept is similar to Zipcar, where drivers can log into the DriveNow app or website to pre-book a car in advance, or see whether a vehicle is immediately available.
Unlike Zipcar, which requires a monthly fee, drivers can register for a one-off fee of EUR39 (£30), then hire vehicles for 31 cents (25p) a minute, including sales tax. If they want to park and keep the vehicle, that costs 15 cents (12p) a minute. BMW is offering its BMW i3 electric vehicle and Mini vehicles to hire.
The move comes as the UK government explores the potential of the ‘sharing economy’ - a loose term covering businesses that promote sharing assets rather than owning them.
Holiday rentals company Airbnb and Uber are generally held up as key disruptors in the market, though critics note how the pair aggressively flout local laws to grow their businesses. To that end, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has commissioned a report that will likely pave the way for rule changes making life for sharing economy companies easier.
BMW plans to roll DriveNow out to 15 European cities outside Germany and in 10 North American markets. According to the Financial Times, DriveNow is the largest car-sharing organisation in Germany at 360,000 customers.
According to its most recent results, Avis-owned Zipcar boasts more than 900,000 members globally and around 10,000 vehicles across the UK, US, Austria, Canada and Spain.
Read nextLawmakers and policy planners must revive the search for safe ways to store used fuel rods from nuclear power reactors. The long-term solution favored by most experts, which we endorse, is to bury the material in geologically stable formations capable of preventing leakage far into the future.
But no politically acceptable site has yet been found, and leaving the used fuel rods at each reactor — more than 62,000 metric tons had accumulated across the country by the end of 2009 — seems increasingly problematic. At least nine states have banned the construction of new reactors until a permanent storage site is found or progress toward finding one is made. The only potential permanent storage site examined so far — at Yucca Mountain in Nevada — has been blocked for more than two decades by technical problems, legal challenges and political opposition from the state.
President Obama pledged in the 2008 campaign to shut down the project, and his Energy Department withdrew its application for a license before the safety of the project could be evaluated. Mitt Romney said in a primary debate in Nevada that the state’s people should have the final say. Even without a permanent disposal facility, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a “waste confidence decision” in 2010 that asserted that used fuel rods could be stored at power plants for 60 years after they close down. It also asserted that a permanent repository would be ready to handle such wastes “when necessary.”
That decision was challenged in federal court, and last month a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the commission had failed to prepare an adequate analysis of the future risks, such as leaks and fires, if the used fuel rods end up being stored at nuclear plants indefinitely. That decision could slow the commission’s ability to extend the licenses of existing plants or grant new licenses.
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Ensuring that the commission will produce a more credible analysis should be a top priority for Allison Macfarlane, who was recently confirmed by the Senate and will lead the commission. She is a geologist, an expert on nuclear waste and served on a blue-ribbon commission for President Obama to look at ways to handle waste.
That group recommended the creation of one or more surface storage sites to accept used fuel rods from 10 reactors that have ceased operating. It would be easier to monitor and inspect the rods and cheaper to guard them in a central location. The group also urged that a permanent burial site be found through a “consent-based” approach in which states and communities might be offered financial incentives to accept the waste.Looking for news you can trust?
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So who are the Libyan rebels that we’re now supporting in their fight against Muammar Qaddafi? Mark Thompson reports that a lot of them are the same folks who were fighting us in Iraq four years ago:
A West Point analysis of the foreign fighters involved in the increasing carnage showed that the nation sending the most militants to Iraq from August 2006 to August 2007, was, on a per-capita basis, Libya….Drilling down into the data, the December 2007 examination from the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center showed that nearly all of the Libyan fighters came from the northeastern part of the country [Darnah and Benghazi in the pie chart above], which is where the rebels we are now helping hail from. It’s a small sample, but something to keep in mind.
Just another data point to tuck into the back of your mind as all this stuff unfolds.The letter "W" on today's front page was created for "The Alphabet" by Nicole Dotin, in Golden Valley, Minnesota.
The Northeast of the U.S., where I live, is famous for its brutal winters. We're having one now. Although it's been a strange year, weatherwise, given "global warming" and all. (Thanks, Mr. Gore, for inventing that!) Yesterday it was a nice mild summer day, about 150 degrees - I'd just come inside from mopping up the puddle that was formerly Keith, our postman - when suddenly, I could feel it in my bones, that good old "Ah, winter's a-coming!" feeling.
And I was right.
Suddenly the temperature dropped - 300 degrees in one hour, a local record! It was so lovely, I couldn't resist putting my work aside and donning special clothing purchased from NASA and taking a stroll through this "winter wonderland." It was gorgeous: the neighborhood cats, converted to ice-cats in mid-stride, four pert little robins literally frozen to death on a clothesline, little beaks open in mid-peep.
I guess I'm just a sucker for the "pastoral."
Across the street, here was old Mrs. Clark, bending to pick up her newspaper, grouchy look frozen on her face, reaching back absentmindedly to scratch her - it was really too bad. I liked Mrs Clark. I mean, yes, she was always complaining - about Mr Clark, about the president not signing the Kyoto treaty, the kids running across her lawn, the way our lawmakers embrace pseudo-science to protect the big oil companies: a real malcontent -- but still, you hate anyone to be instantaneously frozen, especially right out there where you can see them, cluttering up your beautiful winter view.
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Although autumn's wonderful too. I remember last autumn, when it was so unseasonably warm and the cars were all liquefying. What a beautiful sight, when my SUV (red) and my wife's SUV (yellow) melted and blended together to make a bubbling autumnal orange heap of molten metal! It was too bad about the six trick-or-treaters who, running insanely to escape the blazing heat, blundered into our "vehicles" and were incorporated into the "bubbling feverish ooze." See you next year, kids, in the thirty seconds between summer and winter!
But then again, who can resist the allure of springtime? Last spring a "mini-hurricane" lifted our house off of its foundation, and what a wild, lovely ride we had, flying over the city, observing the beauty of the new-blooming roses and orchids and the dear friends being slung willy-nilly into the sides of downtown buildings, and the river overflowing its banks and flooding entire sections of town.
So let the global-warning nuts complain all they want. I love nature, just as it is, however it is.
Hang on, the doorbell just--
Well, what do you know? It was a glacier! And on top of it, two starving-to-death polar bears, and a disease-ravaged penguin!
Take that, eco-freaks: Mother Nature is alive and well, delivering fresh miracles to us every day - if only we have the eyes to see.Here’s my entry for the /r/fivenightsatfreddys Discord Christmas Contest!
May have been that his endo wasn’t robotic at all.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
It could be, perhaps, that his skin was covered in blight.
It could be his locks weren’t wound up just right.
Now, please don’t ask the reason. No one quite knows why.
The Spring hated Freddy’s! The whole Fazbear franchise!
But the Spring, who lived bricked up in Freddy’s, did NOT!
Every kid down in Hurricane liked Freddy’s a lot…
(read more below the cut)
Whatever the reason, his locks or his skin,
He stood there one night, hating children.
Staring out from a hole with sour, Springy rage,
At the animatronics outside on their stage.
For he knew every kid out in Freddy’s dining room,
The moment the mascots sung, they would swoon.
“And they’re eating their pizza!” he snarled with a sneer,
“Tomorrow is June 26! It’s practically here!”
Then he growled, with his Spring fingers nervously tapping,
“I MUST find some way to stop those children from clapping!”
For Tomorrow, he knew, all the small little youth
Would go to Freddy’s, they’d rush to the food booth!
And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise!
Noise! Noise! Noise!
That’s one thing he hated! The NOISE!
NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!
Then the kids, young and old, would sit down to a feast.
And they’d feast! And they’d feast! And they’d FEAST!
FEAST! FEAST! FEAST!
They would feast on Fazbear soda, and gross pizza slices!
Which was something the Spring couldn’t stand more than twice!
And then they’d do something he liked least of all!
Every kid down in Hurricane, the tall and the small,
Would stand close together, with animatronics playing!
They’d stand near the stage, with the parents still paying.
They’d sing! And they’d sing! And they’d SING!
SING! SING! SING!
And the more the Spring thought of this kid-friendly place,,
The more the Spring thought, “I must stop this whole case!”
“Why, for twenty whole years I’ve put up with it now!”
“I MUST stop these children from coming, but how?”
Then he got an idea! An awful idea!
THE SPRING GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
“I know just what to do!” The Spring laughed in his cask.
And he got a spring mascot hat and a mask.
And he chuckled, and clucked, “What a great Springy snare!”
“With this mask and this hat, I look just like Fredbear!”
The he grabbed some old pizza and an old kitchen knife,
Then the Spring laughed and sneered, prepared to take life.
As the next morning rose, loud kids filled the room.
All the kids were all playing, so close to their doom.
When he came to the first little kid to entomb.
“This is kid number one,” the old Springy Trap hissed,
The kid followed the Spring, shining knife in his fist.
Then he slid to the backroom. a rather tight cling.
But, if Fazbear could do it, then so could the Spring.
The kid screamed only once, for a moment or two.
Then he stuck him inside a bunny suit of dark blue.
The Spring caught one more kid, as quick as a flash.
Then he sliced him open with a sickening gash!
Then he stuffed that small kid in a mascot with glee.
“And NOW!” grinned the Spring, “I’ll get kid number three!”
And the Spring grabbed the kid, and he started to cut,
When he realized with fear he hadn’t left the door shut.
He turned around fast, and he saw a small boy!
A young kid named Sammy, who clutched a Fred toy.
The Spring had been caught by the owner’s own son,
The Spring closed the door before he started to run..
He stared at the Spring and said, “Freddy Bear, why,”
"Why are you stuffing my friends away? Why?”
But, you know, that old Spring was so smart and so slick,
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
“Why, my sweet little tot,” the fake gold Fredbear said,
“These kids are so tired, they’re heading off to bed.”
“So they’re cuddled up with Bonnie and Chica, my dear.”
“They’ll rest up there. Then wake up back here.”
And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted his chest,
And he sliced up his neck for an eternal Fred-rest.
And when Sammy was stuffed inside of Fazbear,
He smiled at his work with a gross Springy stare.
It was quarter past noon… All the rest, still dining,
He searched for more kids, his silver eyes shining.
What happened then? Well, in Hurricane they say,
That the Spring murdered five to ten children that day.
They haunted old Foxy, Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica!
And he, he himself, the Spring sat enjoying his pizza.Nervous investors are hoping to ride out looming financial storms by staying in cash.
In recent weeks global fund managers have increased their cash stockpiles to the highest level since November 2001, the scary period right after the 9/11 terror attacks, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey.
"Investors have a mountain of cash," Michael Hartnett, Bank of America's chief investment strategist, wrote in a report.
The defensive maneuvering is a further sign that some investors are too scared to be stuck holding risky stocks and bonds ahead of potential upcoming shocks. The biggest fear among survey respondents is Brexit, the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union taking place next week. Rising support in favor of dumping the EU has already begun to cause market turmoil in recent days.
Fund managers' average cash allocation jumped to 5.7% this month, surpassing even the levels during the 2008 Wall Street meltdown or the 2011 U.S. debt ceiling debacle, BofA said. Hartnett noted other "big bear signals" as well, including investors displaying the lowest risk appetite in four years.
Related: Market turmoil: Is there anywhere left to hide?
This is hardly the only time lately that investors have showered love on cash. During a recent stretch between July and February, BofA said cash and money market funds were actually the world's most popular asset class, attracting over $200 billion of inflows.
Still, it's a tough time to be sitting in cash. Extremely low interest rates around the world mean money in the bank earns virtually nothing. And when inflation is factored in, cash actually loses value.
The average money market and savings account carries an annual percentage yield of just 0.11%, according to Bankrate.com. Even savvy savers who shop around for better rates aren't fetching much more than 1% from online banks.
But that's better than losing money, which most people think is likely with volatile stocks. It also doesn't help that investors have very few places to hide these days. Government debt is normally viewed as a safe haven, but it's hard to justify buying bonds, when there's nothing much to earn. German bond yields went negative for the first ever this week and the U.S. Treasury yield closed at a four-year low of 1.61%.
It's no wonder that BofA said the percentage of investors who think equity and bond markets are overvalued is the fourth-highest since it began tracking in 2003.
Related: How much will U.S. stocks drop if Brexit happens?
What's more surprising is that fund managers don't think the U.K. will dump the EU next week. Despite the recent flight to cash, two-thirds of investors surveyed think Brexit is either "unlikely" or "not at all likely."
Similarly, fund managers are feeling more bullish about the outlook for global growth and corporate profits. Both measures hit six-month highs in the June survey.
The other good news is that BofA considers high levels of cash a contrarian buy signal for stocks, in part because it leaves investors with lots of cash to put to work.
"Negative summer 'events' could thus quickly become tradable buying opportunities," Hartnett wrote.The 2016 NFL Draft is behind us and as training camps approach, rosters will begin to finalize. Player evaluators will need to make tough choices based on limited information, but is there a better way for those without inside knowledge to evaluate rosters? Jeffrey Feyerer presents a new look at player and team evaluation that is clear and concise.
My fascination for the game of football began at an early age, but my more focused interest in the area of the way teams are constructed and how players’ talent is harnessed and developed began shortly afterward. For whatever reason, I could sit for hours watching and evaluating game footage, but it was something as relatively unexciting as the NFL Draft and the alteration of team rosters during the offseason that really piqued my interest. Drawing up depth charts on the back of my homework during class was commonplace.
As anyone can attest by the continual and growing interest in the NFL Draft, plus the fact there is now no true NFL offseason, I am not alone. But interest in the process of melding rosters together shouldn’t be confused with the ability to do so effectively. Attempting to isolate the performance of one player among the 22 on the field – each with a different task and skill level – is an unenviable job, one that remains difficult even for the most experienced of football professionals. But teams don’t just have to do this for one player, they must find 53 puzzle pieces that fit together to carry with them through the regular season. Variables upon variables exist that make it impossible to do this with 100% accuracy.
However, as information and advanced data becomes more readily available, more people attempt to assess and predict the performance of players and teams with some hope they have cracked the code. While no one can be correct about player evaluation all of the time, it is possible to have the process and components in place to give someone the best chance to do so. Looking at one game or even one season in a vacuum and placing a concrete value on a player is wholly inaccurate and ignores other important factors. Player valuation is not binary. Nothing is as simple as “X player performed poorly last season so X player is bad.” Like player development, player valuation should be a fluid process, constantly changing as information becomes available.
Included below is my player valuation and rating scaled based on my core beliefs. It is modeled to include variables that are integral to any good assessment of football players and teams as a whole.
I have divided player traits into two main categories, Skill Traits and Organizational Traits, and then three sub-categories under each category with accompanying questions to assist in evaluating:
Potential – What does scouting tell us? What skills does the player possess?
Performance – How did the player perform during the most recent season? If good, is it sustainable? If bad, is there a reason?
Development – What stage of his career is the player in? Has there been progress? Is there further development needed?
Investment – How much is the player being paid? What draft pick was invested? How much time has the organization invested in the player?
Fit – What is the player’s role? Does the player have an opportunity to succeed? Does the player fit the scheme OR can the team tailor a scheme around the player?
Intangibles – Are there any off-field issues? Does the player possess leadership qualities on and off the field?
Many of these questions don’t have absolute, concrete answers, but if they are the right questions, the right answers will come about and the right information will be evaluated.
Taking into account all of these traits, I developed an extremely simple rating scale from which to assign a value to each player on a team’s roster. The available ratings for each player depends on their experience in the league. Early in a player’s career, there is so much uncertainty that labeling a young player a “star” or a “bust” would be troublesome. Players have struggled at the start of their careers only to bounce back while others have come out and played like stars, only to fade. As a player progresses through their career, more data becomes available to accurately place each player in the correct category.
The player’s rating also depends on what role they are currently assigned to play on that team. While most will use the two-deep, three-deep, or entire depth chart to characterize roster depth and strength, I prefer to use an abbreviated depth chart which consists of starters and players commonly used in sub packages. This weeds out the evaluation of players that see a large number of their snaps on special teams, a highly volatile piece of team performance.
Ratings can be summarized as follows:
Star – A proven top-10 performer at their position
Next Tier – A starter still on the upward trajectory of their career with a chance to become a star or a player who was once a star now on the downside of their career
Good Veteran – A player that would start for many teams at the position
Average Veteran – A league-average starter who fits their role, but nothing more
Below-Average Veteran – A player with experience, but little else to offer
High-Expectation Youth – A player in their first three years with high expectation based around team investment (picks or dollars) or performance early in their career
Low-Investment Youth – A low-risk, low-investment player who has potential, but is not being counted on; main category for potential surprises that are given an opportunity
Roster Hole – An area where no veteran or player with potential exists on the roster
Once each player is placed on the abbreviated depth chart, evaluated, valued, and rated, there are three scores given to each team to describe the quality and type of the roster.
Talent Score – The sum of all 30 individual talent ratings
Stability Score – The percentage of talent score derived from stars, next tiers, and good veterans
Volatility Score – The percentage of talent score derived from high-expectation and low-investment youth
The presence of three scores gives an easy summary for the quality and depth of each team’s roster. To illustrate this point, I’ve included the abbreviated depth charts and scores for two teams below. First, the Green Bay Packers:
The Packers roster is a good balance of veterans and youth with two proven stars, but a number of players near the middle of the roster and very few holes to be found. Before arriving at the total team score, here’s a brief rundown at how I analyzed and rated a few Packers using the methodology touched on above.
Stars – It would be hard finding anyone that doesn’t believe Aaron Rodgers is one of the top players at the quarterback position. It may be harder to justify Clay |
answer was not entirely clear. Mr. Trudeau has not yet made a stand-alone campaign announcement to explain his position on marijuana. He said in response to questions earlier this month that he would work with the provinces on details.
While the NDP has released a high-level costing plan, none of the three major parties has yet released a detailed election platform that lists all sources of expected revenue and the estimated amount of any new spending or tax breaks. These details are facing close scrutiny in the campaign given that decisions related to managing Ottawa's bottom line are a key point of political debate.
Both Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair are promising to run balanced budgets over the next four years, while the Liberals say they will fund new infrastructure spending by running three years of deficits and then a balanced budget in the fourth year.
In addition to the social policy debate over the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana, there has long been an ongoing discussion over how much revenue governments could expect to collect through legalization.
There do not appear to be any recent Canadian studies that have explored this issue in depth. However, two academics who have separately studied the issue in the past both said Thursday that about $3-billion a year would be a reasonable, rough estimate of what the federal government could expect to collect.
"I think it's much greater than $3-billion, but that [figure] would be a nice conservative estimate," said Peter Jaworski, a Canadian who works as an assistant teaching professor of business ethics at Georgetown University. He said the experience in U.S. states that recently legalized marijuana provide a guide to what Canada might expect. "Yes it's controversial and yes it's difficult, but I'm certainly not the only one to have crunched these numbers…. We can be very conservative about the numbers and still book revenue."
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The state of Colorado, with a population of 5.4 million, is on pace to collect over $125-million in tax revenue this year from the legalized marijuana trade. Canada's population is 35 million, which extrapolates to revenue of $810-million a year as a rough guide if the same rules were applied to a population of Canada's size.
Simon Fraser University economics professor Stephen Easton, who is also a senior research fellow with the Fraser Institute, arrives at a rough estimate of $3-billion a year as well. He said precise estimates are obviously a challenge because of the current underground nature of the marijuana trade. It is also hard to know how legalizing marijuana might affect Canadian consumption of alcohol and tobacco and the ensuing impact on tax revenue.
"It's relatively terra incognita. We just don't know," he said.
Simon Fraser criminology professor Neil Boyd has also researched the issue and said it is "far more sound" for the Liberals to assume no revenue than for the Green Party to assume it could raise $5-billion a year.
As a point of comparison, tobacco taxes generate more than $7-billion a year in combined revenue for provincial and federal governments, according to a 2013 review of government records by Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. Tax revenue from alcohol sales, minus sales tax revenue, generates about $6-billion a year for provincial and territorial governments, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.
Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Montreal on Tuesday that his party supports legalization because the current approach is failing to protect children.
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"Mr. Harper continues to perpetuate a prohibition that makes it easier for our young people to buy a joint than it is for them to buy beer or even a cigarette, and that's not right because we need to protect our young people from the negative impacts of marijuana on the developing brain," he said. "At the same time, Mr. Harper continues to allow the marijuana trade to fund, to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars, criminal organizations, street gangs and gun runners. That is not acceptable and that is why we have committed to legalize, control and regulate marijuana."There's one bummer question haunting all the marijuana businesses popping up between British Columbia and Newfoundland.
How much do Canucks like weed, eh?
A year before recreational cannabis is expected to become legal in Canada, there's an explosion in companies cultivating the stuff. At least 10 marijuana outfits have new listings this year on the TSX Venture Exchange and Canada Securities Exchange. Some 51 enterprises have gotten the green light to grow pot, and 815 applicants are in the queue. All told, it could be enough to raise the country's raw-weed output more than tenfold.
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This is where skeptics see froth. "If you ask people today why they don't use, it's a small percentage who say 'because it's illegal,"' said Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. "In many respects there might be an overestimation of demand."
Long-time users and growers insist he's wrong, but investors aren't so sure. Producer MedReleaf Corp. tumbled as much as 28 per cent last month in the worst debut for a Canadian IPO in 16 years amid concern pot stocks are overvalued. Shares of Canopy Growth Corp., the country's first billion dollar marijuana start-up, are down 21 per cent in the past three months.
The North American Medical Marijuana Index, which tracks leading cannabis stocks in the U.S. and Canada, has plunged 21 per cent since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government in April unveiled its plan to legalize the drug by next July, 16 years after Canada permitted it for medical use.
Of course, some of the decline may be attributed to the situation in the U.S. Many in the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions in particular, are no friends to the industry. For Canadian companies, the risk isn't political.
"There seems to be a little bit of investor fatigue," said PI Financial Corp. analyst Jason Zandberg. He said they're having trouble differentiating between the producers, new and old, and what might give them competitive advantages.
That's to be expected, according to marijuana bulls, in a brand-new market that hasn't even arrived yet. Parliament still has to pass the recreational law (though there's little question it'll do so). Then the federal government will have to write rules on taxation, and each province will have to decide how to regulate distribution.
"Nothing is going to be perfect right off the hop," said Jon Bent, a licensed medical marijuana grower who has been cultivating plants on his 11-acre farm outside Winnipeg for five years. "It's baby steps – and the industry is moving quickly."
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The question is whether it's going too quickly, considering the variety of estimates about how much recreational weed Canadians will end up regularly ingesting. Some educated guesses are that about 15 per cent of Canadians partake now, legally and otherwise. That's around 5.4 million people, roughly the population of Colorado, which gave the nod to recreational marijuana in 2014. Medical and recreational sales there rose 56 per cent last year, to nearly $1-billion, according to Cannabase, operator of the state's largest market.
One projection, from the Canadian Parliamentary Budget Officer, is that 4.6 million people age 15 and over will use cannabis at least once and consume 655,000 kilograms next year, and that 5.2 million will be doing so by 2021. Other reports peg future recreational consumption at 420,000 kilograms a year with sales reaching C$6-billion by 2021, Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. said in November. For its part, the government agency Health Canada anticipates a mature medical marijuana market will be around C$1.3-billion.
That could underestimate the number of Canadians who will refuse to buy from corporate weed growers, said Chad Jackett, 38, who runs a medical marijuana dispensary in Squamish, British Columbia, and uses cannabis oil everyday to treat nerve pain. His concern is that new regulations will sideline the independent farmers who advocated for the plant for years, and grow small amounts. "I will definitely not be using anything" from one of the big outfits, Jackett said. "If I don't have enough of my own then I'll be getting it from somebody else whom I trust."
Underscoring how confusing it all is, a few alarms are being sounded that there won't be enough to pass around on Day One. In fact, Colorado faced some shortages of legal supplies in the first year. A similar rush emptied shelves in Nevada, where sales started on July 1.
By 2015, Colorado had the opposite problem, according to Denver-based researcher Marijuana Policy Group, with supplies approximately 51 per cent larger than demand. The average price sought by wholesalers for recreational flower has fallen 52 per cent since lawful sales began, according to Cannabase.
None of this has dampened enthusiasm in some quarters in Canada. MedReleaf has raised C$100-million, all of which is going toward expanding capacity, said Chief Executive Officer Neil Closner. He said the disappointing IPO was due to a general market slowdown and "not a reflection of demand for our product." Likes others in the business, he is confident Canadians will be keen enough to lawfully imbibe that the blossoming industry will be supported.
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Bent, the pot farmer outside Winnipeg, is just as upbeat. Surveying part of his crop, in a room brimming with 30 bushy plants ripening under the glow of hot lamps, he said the oft-misunderstood reefer is definitely going mainstream. Even his cousin, a "religious librarian," became a convert after experimenting in Denver, he said. "These are people who would never, ever try it" if it were illegal.
"It's really gaining popularity and really starting to lose that stigma," Bent said. "I see a lot of money being spent."Wayne Rooney has spoken of his “hurt” at Manchester United ’s dismal form and urged the team to pull themselves together.
The striker has called for the whole side to “step up” as they prepare to face Aston Villa away on Sunday languishing in ninth place in the Premier League having lost five of their 15 league matches this season.
Rooney’s comments come as new manager David Moyes warned his squad that he will attempt to move on several misfiring players in January.
Rooney, who has yet to agree a new deal after pushing for a move to Chelsea in the summer, has been United’s best performer this season but believes the whole side need to improve.
“We all have to step up,” he said. “It hasn’t been good enough of late and we all have to come forward and show why we were champions last year and do better. We have a good run of games now and hopefully we can do that.
“It’s not about me, it’s about the team. If the team isn’t doing well then my form is not important – we have to do well as a team and roll our sleeves up and really pull ourselves together.
“We haven’t won the games or put ourselves in a position where we can win some games. The Everton game [a 1-0 home defeat], we probably had the best chances and lost the game – and that is all you look at. We have to be realistic now and try to climb up that table and see where are in four, six or eight games time.”
Rooney said that with United lying ninth it was hard to look at the table. “It’s not nice. We are all proud players and it’s not nice being there. It hurts. Hopefully there will be a reaction.” United’s poor form has increased the pressure on Moyes with question marks raised over the desire of the current squad and whether a radical overhaul is required.
However, Rooney denied that the players lacked the desire to succeed. “We have a good bunch of players, young and hungry players, and we have to go out there and show we are hungry to get back in a good position in this league,” he said.
“It’s disappointing to be where we are in the league but there are a lot of games left and a lot of points to play for. Especially at the moment we have to take each game as it comes and just keep trying to get three points in each game. Whether that is a 1-0 victory, we have to take it and keep trying to climb up the table.”
Rooney said that he hoped the midweek win in the Champions League – albeit in an unconvincing display against Shakhtar Donetsk – would stop the rot after two home league defeats. “It was a game we couldn’t afford to lose and we had to win at all costs,” he claimed.
The United players are, Rooney said, at a loss to explain the run of results. “We don’t know why it has happened but it has happened and as a group of players we have to do better. We are not playing at our best and we have to start doing it.”
Moyes has warned that he will attempt to move on several of United’s misfiring players in the January transfer window as he begins his overhaul of the squad.
Moyes also declared that there was “no question” that United have the money for a “major, major signing” having failed in a world-record £100 million bid for Gareth Bale in the summer.
Moyes’s patience has snapped with some players after pledging to give them all a chance when he succeeded Sir Alex Ferguson.
“I think that we’re getting to a situation now where there are a few who if we got the right offer for them [we would let them go],” Moyes said. “I don’t know if we’d loan anyone because we’ve got a few injuries just now. Would we sell? If the right offers were there we’d probably look at it.”
Moyes did not reveal who is earmarked to go but the club would want to listen to offers for Anderson, Bebe, Fabio Da Silva, Anders Lindegaard and possibly Nani and Ashley Young – with Patrice Evra and Rio Ferdinand unlikely to be awarded new deals.
United, who are without the injured Robin van Persie for a month, may also receive offers for Javier Hernández, who is wanted by a host of clubs including Tottenham Hotspur.
Asked whether United were in the market for a ‘stellar signing’, Moyes said: “Definitely, 100 per cent. We were very close to a major, major signing in the summer. It’s easy now saying it and we didn’t do it but we were really close to a major signing and the club would have definitely showed what they’re worth. They have got the money and the club will spend, there’s no question about that.”
Indeed, Moyes went further adding, perhaps in reference to the doomed attempts to sign Barcelona’s Cesc Fabregas and also Everton’s Leighton Baines, a player he may return for next month: “We were close to a couple of really major signings. Ed [Woodward] worked really hard trying to make those signings happen but, in the end, we just didn’t quite get there. It wasn’t for money; that was for sure. The players had chosen other clubs or made their decisions elsewhere.”
There is a sense at United that Moyes and Woodward do need to land a major signing to mark the new regime at the club with Marouane Fellaini, despite costing £27 million, not in that bracket.
Moyes admitted that he now regretted not making more changes in the summer. “There’s a bit of truth in that and maybe we would have looked to have moved a few players out but you can only do that if you get clubs that come in and are interested. If they’re not then you can’t move them out.”Story highlights The parts and manufacturing for Apple products mostly happens overseas
It's common for consumer electronics to be built in Asian factories
Apple has more than 150 suppliers and manufacturers for its products
On the backs of iPods, iPhones and iPads, and on the bottom of Mac laptops, an inscription reads: "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China."
The parts themselves come from more than 150 companies from various parts of the world. The majority of those antennas, glass, metal, sensors and silicon are manufactured overseas.
How Apple finds parts and manufactures its products, almost entirely abroad, is standard protocol in the technology industry. Electronics companies say Asian manufacturing plants are more affordable and more versatile than those found anywhere else in the world.
But as the most valuable tech company in the world, Apple is seen by many as a role model in business. And its reliance on cheap overseas labor -- most notably at factories in China run by manufacturer Foxconn -- has come under increased scrutiny in recent media coverage by CNN, The New York Times and other outlets.
Foxconn, owned by Hon Hai Precision Industry, counts Apple among its business clients, which also include Amazon.com, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and many other tech giants. Apple has reported violations at its facilities, and Foxconn has come under fire for a slew of worker suicides in 2010 and conditions that workers-rights groups say are inhumane.
Workers at Foxconn and other plants in Asia must stay busy to keep up with the world's seemingly insatiable demand for Apple products.
JUST WATCHED A look at Apple supplier's China factory Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH A look at Apple supplier's China factory 03:54
JUST WATCHED Apple: Made in China Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Apple: Made in China 03:07
During the last three months of 2011, Apple sold 37 million iPhones, 15.4 million iPads, 15.4 million iPods and 5.2 million Mac computers, according to the company's financial report. That netted Apple $46.3 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in profit, which is double what Apple made during the same period a year before.
Where does all that profit come from?
Take the iPhone, for example. The iPhone 4S sells for $199 if the customer signs a two-year cellular contract. But AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless pay Apple much more for the phones in order to sell them at a lower price, a process called subsidizing. To get a so-called "unlocked" or contract-free iPhone, expect to pay at least $649 to Apple.
The costs of parts and manufacturing for Apple's iPhone 4S is estimated to be $196, according to industry research firm IHS iSuppli. That's $453 less than Apple charges for a contract-free phone. Marketing and research can add up, but no matter which way you cut it, Apple is making a sizable profit on each phone it sells, said iSuppli analyst Tom Dinges.
Apple has more than 60,000 employees, most of whom work in its retail stores. To build parts and assemble products, Apple has a long list of partners. That's partly done to avoid being dependent on any one manufacturer and to get favorable deals on each part from the many competing companies.
Still, Apple tries to minimize the number of companies with which it signs deals, Dinges said. That way, Apple wields more influence because it's among the biggest-spending clients, he said.
"They'd rather be a mile deep in a supplier than divide the business up amongst five," Dinges said. "You're going to take care of your biggest customers first."
In its supplier report, Apple says 156 companies account for 97% of the money spent on materials, manufacturing and assembly for its coveted gadgets. When the client is a powerhouse like Apple, winning a contract to be one of those 156 is a major event. In Wall Street parlance, it moves stock.
Being anointed by Apple boosts a supplier's credibility, but Apple is a shrewd negotiator, from how it develops an iPad to how it leases or builds the retail store it's sold in. This reportedly forces Apple's partners to push workers and cut corners in order to wring profits.
Apple told CNN in a statement that its expectations for suppliers to operate responsibly increase each year. Apple says it conducted 229 audits of suppliers last year and reported its findings publicly online
"We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain," Apple said in the statement. "We insist that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made. Our suppliers must live up to these requirements if they want to keep doing business with Apple."Boston Dynamics has a long history of producing terrifying robots, and its scientists have a long history of kicking, taunting, and teasing them. That ill-advised practice continues in the company's latest video, showcasing its next generation Atlas droid, a bipedal bot capable of striding through snow, picking up boxes, opening doors, and — by the looks of things — one day murdering humans.
Atlas' gait is a bit awkward — it stumbles as it walks around the woods near Boston Dynamics' offices — but the machine is relentless, righting itself before it takes a tumble. If it does get knocked over, as it does when one of the company's scientists plants a stick in its back during the video, then it can get back up by itself. The robot's even capable of tracking boxes, bending down to collect them when they're on the floor, and repeating the process when the boxes are smacked out of its hands by its overlords. Let's hope it's not capable of tracking the faces of people that have wronged it, or else they'll be first against the wall during the robot uprising.
The Google-owned company will undoubtedly keep producing scary prototype robots, but as its scientists keep beating them up, Boston Dynamics might want to keep a better eye on their creations. The last shot of the video shows Atlas escaping through an unlocked door, perhaps to start kicking back at the people that have been kicking it.Latest News
Welcome ‘Enlist Duo’ to the fabulous array of biotech wonders we can all enjoy. Dow’s latest obscenity, a new herbicide labeled ‘Enlist Duo,’ was just moved forward in its approval process. The US Environmental Protection Agency has now opened comments for a whopping 30 days before giving Dow’s latest form of poison free reign in the agricultural world. How fun for all of us, still reeling from Monsanto’s toxic concoction, RoundUp.
The illustrious Dow AgroScience has designed its new poison to be used with genetically engineered corn and soybeans to improve weed resistance. It will contain a combination of herbicides, including 2, 4-D and glyphosate, both of which are known to be poisons that kill human fetal tissue, cause neurological, gastrointestinal, and reproductive disorders, and a host of other health issues.
As Dow’s website mentions:
“Only Enlist Duo™ herbicide, featuring Colex-D™ Technology, includes glyphosate and 2,4-D choline for exceptional performance on hard-to-control weeds plus two modes of action for superior resistance management. It’s protection of what’s important–plus advanced flexibility, convenience and drift control.”
What a crock. Glyphosate has been linked to increased weeds, not weed-control, and disastrous poisoning of our ecological systems. 10-foot tall weeds, resistant to RoundUp (which contains, primarily glyphosate, but also other ‘inert’ chemicals which are equally, if not more toxic) are popping up on farms everywhere. RoundUp is turning out to be 125 more toxic than regulators first admitted, but we’re supposed to cheer on the approval of Dow’s latest filth even though it contains some of the very same ingredients?
The EPA and department of agriculture delayed approval for Dow’s Enlist Duo for a full year because they were inundated with requests for it to not see the light of day. The USDA decided in January, however, to grant approval to Dow and is prepared to do so in the next few months unless we all collectively act.
The EPA said it was also prepared to grant approval and would accept public comments for 30 days on its decision.
The EPA said it would impose “robust monitoring and reporting [requirements] to [the] EPA,” and that they could “take swift action to impose additional restrictions on the manufacturer and the use of the pesticide if resistance develops.”
Critics say that 2,4-D and other herbicides of its class have been independently associated with deadly immune system cancers, Parkinson’s disease, endocrine disruption, and reproductive problems.
“Biotechnology is taking agriculture backwards by facilitating a massive increase in use of this toxic herbicide, which formed part of Agent Orange used in Vietnam,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a non-profit group that has sought to block approval of the Enlist products.
PLEASE MAKE COMMENTS On The EPA Docket, HERE until May 30th, to stop Dow AgroSciences.UUP sets up new all-party Westminster group BelfastTelegraph.co.uk The Ulster Unionists are setting up a new Westminster group for MPs to promote the UK and lobby for the devolved regions. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/uup-sets-up-new-allparty-westminster-group-31397088.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article31397087.ece/06340/AUTOCROP/h342/2015-07-23_new_11371687_I1.JPG
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The Ulster Unionists are setting up a new Westminster group for MPs to promote the UK and lobby for the devolved regions.
Plans for the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Union were announced by the two UUP MPs, Danny Kinahan and Tom Elliott, on Tuesday.
"Two Tories were also there and I have had expressions of interest from five members of the Labour party. No Lib Dems so far, but I am working on it," said Mr Kinahan.
The plan is to "work together on a strategy that will map out the actions required to maintain a Union that helps its citizens thrive economically, socially, culturally and politically".
It is understood the Labour prospective members include Kate Hoey, the Northern Ireland born MP for Vauxhall; Laurence Robertson, MP for Tewkesbury and chair of the Northern Ireland select committee, and Oliver Colville, another member of the select committee who is MP for Plymouth, Sutton and Devenport.
"It is not a group intended to be just Ulster Unionism. I want Westminster to see we are here for the whole UK, not just little Northern Ireland," added Mr Kinahan. A formal launch is expected in September.
Belfast Telegraph“It may be that somebody will be asked to sit down,” he said.
“I am open personally to exploring other avenues; I particularly want to hear what the Chinese have to say,” Mr. Kerry said. “I am not going to be so stuck in the mud that an opportunity to actually get something done is flagrantly wasted.”
“But fundamentally the concept is they’re going to have to show some kind of good faith here so that we are not going around and around,” he said. “They have to indicate that seriousness of purpose to go toward the denuclearization, and there are ways that they can do that.”
Tokyo is the final stop on Mr. Kerry’s six-nation tour and his third destination in Asia. As part of its regional diplomacy, the United States has also been urging Japan and South Korea, its two main regional allies but who remain divided by history, to cooperate on North Korea.
In his news conference in Tokyo, Mr. Kerry expanded on his remarks on Saturday that the United States would be willing to withdraw some of the antimissile defenses it recently deployed if China were able to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Those remarks, made at a news conference in Beijing, were seen as a lure to elicit China’s cooperation.
“The president of the United States deployed some additional missile defense capacity precisely because of the threat of North Korea,” Mr. Kerry said. “And it is logical that if the threat of North Korea disappears because the peninsula denuclearizes, then obviously that threat no longer mandates that kind of posture.”
“But there have been no agreements, no discussions; there is nothing actually on the table with respect to that,” he added.
So far, Mr. Kerry’s comments and his endorsement of South Korea’s efforts to open a dialogue with the government of Kim Jong-un in the North have produced nothing but scorn from North Korea’s leaders.BERLIN (Reuters) - Angela Merkel said on Saturday that new allegations of U.S. spying showed Berlin and Washington were completely at odds over how they viewed the role of intelligence, and she hoped German action would persuade the United States not to spy on partners.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a news conference after a meeting with East German state premiers in Berlin July 9, 2014. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Her comments to German broadcaster ZDF come two days after her government told the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country, in a dramatic display of anger after German officials unearthed two suspected spies.
On Friday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters “when differences arise, we’re committed to resolving those differences through the established private channels... we don’t believe that trying to resolve them through the media is appropriate.”
The scandal has chilled relations with Washington to levels not seen since Merkel’s predecessor opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It follows allegations last year that Merkel’s phone was bugged by American agents.
Asked how angry she was on hearing of the suspected spies, one of whom worked for German foreign intelligence (BND), the other at the defense ministry, Merkel said, “it is not about how angry I was. For me it is a sign that we have fundamentally different conceptions of the work of the intelligence services.”
“I can’t say in advance if [the measures we took] will have an effect, of course I hope something will change. But the important thing is to show how we view things.. and it is not a co-operative partnership when such things take place.”
Merkel said there were far more critical things on which to spy, and snooping on friends eroded trust.
“We are not living in the Cold War anymore and are exposed to different threats. We should concentrate on what is essential,” she said.
She added however, that German intelligence agents continued to work well with Americans and she hoped this would continue. She also ruled out any disruption to negotiations between the European Union and the United States on a free trade agreement because of the row.
U.S. officials familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday that the German defense official under investigation was in contact with a U.S. State Department officer rather than American intelligence agencies, raising questions about whether any espionage occurred. He has not been arrested.
The other man is in custody after being arrested for espionage. He has told investigators he passed documents to the CIA, and U.S. officials have privately acknowledged he did so, and that the CIA believed his information was valuable.
The latest row comes a year after revelations of mass U.S. surveillance based on documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, sparked outrage in Germany.
Surveillance is a sensitive issue in a country where the memory of the Nazi’s Gestapo secret police and communist East Germany’s Stasi means the right to privacy is treasured.
White House spokesman Earnest said on Friday Washington valued its security relationship with Germany. He added: “Allies with sophisticated intelligence agencies are aware of the activities and relationships that are included.”If you plan to spend significant time or money on Bitcoin, few investments will pay greater dividends than learning how the entire system works at a high level. This extended guide offers a unique, visual approach to thinking about how and why Bitcoin works. No experience with cryptography or programming is necessary.
This article is based on the first chapter of the e-book Owning Bitcoin.
Simplifying Bitcoin
It’s easy to get lost in Bitcoin’s apparent technical complexity. To cut through the confusion, it’s helpful to recognize that everything that follows can be traced to one of four technologies, all of which were created years before Bitcoin’s introduction:
public key cryptography, a system for secure data exchange first publicly described in the late 1970s;
secure hash-based identifiers, the first generation of which was also implemented in the late 1970s;
peer-to-peer networks, a way of connecting computers that gained widespread public attention in the late 1990s through the Napster file sharing service;
proof-of-work, a spam deterrent first described in 1997.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper introducing Bitcoin is a masterpiece of clarity. In just nine pages, it describes a new form of algorithmically-governed money that needed no trusted custodians.
But the white paper was written for an audience of experts. As such, it leaves out a great deal of vital background information. This article fills in the gaps. After reading it, you’ll understand Bitcoin’s technical underpinnings and will have a solid foundation for learning more advanced topics.
Electronic Cash
People have used cash systems for centuries, trading physical tokens for goods and services. Until Bitcoin, most of us only ever used cash tokens made of paper and metal. Breakthroughs in computers and computer networks make a new kind of token possible: electronic cash.
Electronic cash is a system of money based on tokens created not from paper and metal, but from digital data. Like the physical tokens after which they’re modeled, digital tokens can be exchanged for goods and services. With no physical presence, however, digital tokens offer many practical advantages.
SVG Image Cash Transaction. Alice gives Bob one coin in exchange for one apple. This exchange of value requires no middleman.
Imagine that Alice wants to buy an apple from Bob’s fruit stand using physical cash. After agreeing on a price, Alice gives Bob a coin as payment. In return, Bob gives Alice the apple. After this exchange, Alice has a new apple, and Bob has a new coin. Notice that Alice and Bob traded directly with each other. They needed neither a broker nor bank.
Now imagine that Alice once again wants to buy an apple from Bob’s fruit stand, this time paying with electronic cash. After agreeing to a price, Alice needs to give Bob an electronic token as payment. One reason to trade this way might be convenience. Neither party would need to worry about transporting or storing physical cash. Another reason might be to trade remotely and at scale. For example, Alice could directly pay Bob for one apple or a truckload of apples from a distance.
For this idea to work, Alice and Bob need to answer some tough questions, including:
Who mints digital tokens and how?
How are digital tokens distributed after minting?
How does the owner of a digital token give it to another person, and what prevents the original owner from taking it back?
What happens when the value of a digital token exceeds the value of a good or service being bought?
What prevents the total value of all tokens from growing uncontrollably?
What protects digital tokens against theft, forgery and duplication?
Who keeps this system running and what keeps these people honest?
Bitcoin is often mistaken as just another electronic payment system like Visa or PayPal, but there are two critical differences. First, these other systems don’t use electronic tokens as a medium of exchange. Instead, a value representing local currency is deducted from a customer account and credited to that of a merchant. Second, these other systems require multiple levels of trusted parties between buyer and seller to prevent fraud.
Electronic cash isn’t a new idea. The early days of the Internet saw a few research efforts dedicated to developing electronic cash systems. All of them failed. The idea that a scarce digital token could be securely transferred, person-to-person, in exchange for goods and services began to seem like a mirage.
Milton Friedman on Electronic Cash (1999). Many foresaw the possibility of electronic cash, but it would take years to develop the technology.
By 2008, the pessimists had won. Electronic cash seemed so unworkable that Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper on the subject was mostly ignored by the experts at the time.
Digital Coins
Electronic cash is a system of money based on tokens made of digital data. Although these tokens lack physical form, they nevertheless posses well-defined properties. These properties are embodied within the idea of a digital coin.
A digital coin, referred to throughout this article as simply a “coin,” is a packet of data assigned a fixed face value and equipped with security features. These properties allow digital coins to be given to others, accepted as payment, stored for future use, and even lost or stolen.
Most metal coins are marked with a fixed number representing face value. Face value is a number expressed in terms of a currency unit. For example, a quarter dollar is a metal token with a face value of 25 cents (¢). “Cent” is the currency unit in which the quarter dollar is denominated.
Like a metal coin, a digital coin carries a fixed face value. However, this face value is denominated in the unit “bitcoin” (spelled with a lower case “b”). The abbreviation for this unit used here will be “฿” but others are available. In this article, the unit “bitcoin” is used as a mass or “uncountable” noun, meaning that only its singular form is used. For example, one says that Alice bought 1.3 bitcoin, not that she bought “1.3 bitcoins.” Another unit, the satoshi, is one hundred million times smaller than bitcoin (฿0.00000001). This unit is considered a countable noun.
Some sources incorrectly use the words “coin” and “bitcoin” interchangeably. A coin is a digital token, but bitcoin is the unit of face value in which the token is denominated. Just as “quarter” is the correct way to refer to a metal token valued at 25 cents, so is “coin” the correct way to refer to a digital token with any face value.
SVG Image Point of Confusion. A “coin” is a digital token, but “bitcoin” is the unit of face value associated with it.
Digital coins are created in a wide assortment of denominations. For example, one coin might be marked with a face value of ฿1.344455. Another coin might be marked with a face value of ฿1.01. A third coin’s face value might be ฿0.00009431, and so on. At the other end of the scale, a single coin can carry a face value equal to the entire money supply, although such a coin is unlikely to ever occur in practice. Manufacturing and storage costs limit the denominations in which metal coins are minted, but digital coins avoid this limitation.
Multidenominational. Due to manufacturing and handling costs, US banknotes and coins are printed in a limited range of denominations. Electronic coins have no such constraints on face value.
A coin becomes useful, and therefore valuable, through a combination of scarcity and transferability. Assigning a face value to a coin is an important first step, but still not enough to create electronic cash. To understand how and why digital coins can be used as a medium of exchange, it’s important to understand how they’re secured.
Chain of Ownership
Physical cash systems rely on obscure materials and manufacturing processes to prevent counterfeiting. Although electronic cash systems can’t use these techniques, they can take advantage of the unique properties of digital information. To establish the authenticity of a coin, electronic cash systems use a chain of ownership.
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The alleged swatter admitted to calling in the fake hostage situation.
“I was minding my own business at the library, someone contacted me and said ‘hey dude this fucking retard just gave me his address and he thinks nothing’s going to happen. You wanna prove him wrong?’ And I said sure I love swatting kids who think that nothing’s gonna happen and then I followed the kid that he wanted me to SWAT, and the kid sent me a DM saying, he basically messaged me with an address.”
The alleged swatter refused to take responsibility for his role in Andrew Finch’s death, stating that “you could point the finger at numerous people,” blaming the police officers, the player who first contacted him, and even the would-be victim who provided him with the fake address.
“We woke this morning to horrible news about an innocent man losing his life,” said Shannon Gerritzen, a VP at UMG in an email to the Associated Press. “Our hearts go out to his loved ones. We are doing everything we can to assist the authorities in this matter.”
According to the AP, the FBI estimates that around 400 cases of swatting occur annually, some of which spoof caller ID to fool emergency responders.
Source: Kansas City Star, Associated Press, DramaAlert.
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An armed man upset someone took a bite out of his grilled-cheese sandwich triggered an hours-long barricade situation Sunday evening in Dundalk, Baltimore County police said.
Cpl. Shawn Vinson said officers were called around 5 p.m. for a domestic dispute at a house in the 7100 block of North Point Boulevard. A woman and her daughter came out of the house and told officers that shots had been fired. Vinson said no one was hit by the gunfire.
"We do have evidence that the weapon was fired," Vinson said.
Police said the suspect remained inside the house alone.
Vinson said that the man surrendered peacefully to officers around 8:50 p.m.
"Our negotiation team spoke with the man and eventually talked him into coming out of the house and surrendering peacefully," Vinson said.
Vinson said it turned out that the man got upset over someone in the house who took a bite of his grilled-cheese sandwich.
"Apparently, the man had made a grilled-cheese sandwich and either the wife or the daughter, we're not exactly sure who, but somebody, one of the females in the house, took a bite of his sandwich, and apparently, that enraged him to the point that he fired shots in the house," Vinson said.
The man will be taken to a hospital for an evaluation and he will face charges.
North Point Boulevard between Kane and Eastern was shut down, and police had asked neighbors to shelter in place during the incident.When Captain America: The Winter Soldier screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely mentioned the psychotic 1950s Cap as a potential future villain earlier this year, many assumed that it meant we would see him in the next movie. Well, we can now confirm that definitely isn't the case...
Earlier this year, Captain America: The Winter Soldier screenwriter Christopher Markus briefly mentioned the possibility of using the psychotic 1950s Cap as a villain in Captain America 3. Despite never directly stating that, it didn't stop a lot of people jumping to the conclusion that that was the villain that the next movie (currently set for a May 6th, 2016 release) would focus on. When I got the chance to talk to both Markus and writing partner Stephen McFeely earlier today, I asked about those reports, and they set the record straight on the matter once and for all, making it clear that the off the cuff remark doesn't mean we should expect to see this particular bad guy.
Stephen McFeely: [Laughs] Chris, would you like to put that to bed?
Christopher Markus: Yes! That was a smart remark, off the cuff. What I love about that whole run, the whole existence of that, is the sort of single minded desire to retcon everything into continuity, you know? 'But there was five issues in 1950 where he was a jerk!' I know he was a crazed college professor who had plastic surgery, but I think we can honestly say that he will not be making an appearance.
Stephen McFeely: You know, there's probably 20 minutes of movie there. There's something interesting about a guy who so desperately want to be [Captain America] and be a tribute...I just don't think it's a whole movie.
It was clear talking to these guys that they love comic books and are very enthusiastic about the character and his supporting cast. Be sure to come back later this week for the full interview with the screenwriting duo as they talk about not using the Red Skull in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, whether or not Bucky had regained his memories by the end of that movie, their thoughts on future villains, not backing down from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and much, much more.A "mix-tape for aliens" created by Nasa and launched into space in 1977 is to be produced on vinyl and released to the general public for the first time.
The phonograph album, the “Voyager Golden Record”, features music by J.S. Bach and Chuck Berry as well as sounds from humpback whales and greetings in 55 languages.
Nasa launched two copies of the album into space in 1977 on its Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts in the hope that it would be picked up by extraterrestrials.
Until recently, the album was only accessible to donors of a Kickstarter campaign by Ozma Records, which raised nearly $1.4 million to issue a limited number of copies on vinyl.
On the back of its success, the record label has decided to release the album to the general public and will be producing a vinyl edition at the end of January 2018.
The original album is still floating in space and should be in perfect condition. It was made from copper and coated with gold to protect it from the extreme temperatures and radiation in the atmosphere.
Nasa said its scientists also electronically encoded 115 images on the record, such as photographs of a mother nursing her child, an astronaut floating in space and a violin with sheet music.BAGHDAD, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Iraq on Sunday urged foreign countries to stop importing crude directly from its autonomous Kurdistan region and to restrict oil trading to the central government.
The call, published in statement from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s office, came in retaliation for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s plan to hold a referendum on independence on Monday.
The central government’s statement seems to be directed primarily at Turkey, the transit country for all the crude produced in Kurdistan. The crude is taken by pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean coast for export.
Baghdad “asks the neighbouring countries and the countries of the world to deal exclusively with the federal government of Iraq in regards to entry posts and oil,” the statement said.
The Iraqi government has always opposed independent sales of crude by the KRG, and tried on many occasions to block Kurdish oil shipments. Long-standing disputes over land and oil resources are among the main reasons cited by the KRG to ask for independence.
Iraqi Kurdistan produces around 650,000 barrels per day of crude from its fields, including around 150,000 from the disputed areas of Kirkuk.
The region’s production volumes represent 15 percent of total Iraqi output and around 0.7 percent of global oil production. The KRG aspires to raise production to over 1 million barrels per day by the end of this decade.
Kurdish oil production has been dominated by mid-sized oil companies such as Genel, DNO, Gulf Keystone and Dana Gas. Major oil companies such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Rosneft also have projects in Kurdistan but they are mostly at an exploration stage.
However, Rosneft, Russia’s state oil major, has lent over $1 billion to the KRG guaranteed by oil sales and committed a total of $4 billion to various projects in Kurdistan. (Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli, editing by Larry King)That doesn’t go over well with Watts, whose family has owned the farm since the 1700s and says he has been raising chickens for Perdue since 1992, meticulously following its requirements.
As Watts sees it, Perdue realized that consumers were concerned about animal welfare and food safety, and decided to manipulate the public.
The claim about the chickens being raised “cage free” is misleading because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It’s egg-laying chickens that are caged, not the ones we eat. So “cage free” is meaningful for eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue’s chickens are crammed so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot.
So why is our government giving its seal of approval to these methods as humane, in ways that seem to mislead consumers?
“U.S.D.A. is the accomplice of Perdue in the fooling of consumers,” says Leah Garces, American director of Compassion in World Farming, who calls it a marketing scam.
Perdue may now be backing away from some of its claims. It settled a suit with the Humane Society of the United States by agreeing to remove the “humanely raised” line from some packaging, even as it denied wrongdoing.
All this leaves millions of Americans, me included, in a bind. We eat meat, yet we want to minimize cruelty to animals. This is an uncertain, inconsistent and perhaps hypocritical path, and it’s hard enough without giant food companies manipulating us — in collusion with our own government.It’s time for this season’s final installment of “Fan Friday,” the Red’s Army feature that introduces Celtics fans from all around the globe. If you’d like to nominate someone to be profiled next season – including yourself – please email us at [email protected]. Provide the person’s contact info and some brief details about the fan’s background as a member of Celtics Nation.
This week we highlight Mike Dynon (at left above) of North Kingstown, R.I., an “O.G.” Celtics fan since 1965 and a Red’s Army writer for the past two years.
Check out his Red’s Army posts and follow him on Twitter at @MikeDynon.
How he became a Celtics fan:
I was born and raised in Brooklyn (like Red Auerbach), and only good luck saved me from becoming a tormented Knicks fan. As a teenager, I was just getting into basketball when my best friend, Joe (at right in photo above), read an article about Celtic Frank Ramsey and the tricks that he used to draw fouls. Joe decided he liked Ramsey and became a Celtics fan. Since Joe and I did everything together, I became a Celtics fan too. We began going to the old Madison Square Garden whenever the Celtics played the Knicks. Admission to the balcony was $1 with our high school IDs. That happened to be during Red’s last season as coach. Joe is still my best friend, and we still go to games together.
His favorite player:
There are two: Bill Russell and Don Chaney. Their games resembled my schoolyard skills – couldn’t shoot but played tenacious defense. I’m fortunate to have seen Russell play in person many times. And although Chaney wasn’t a scorer, I luckily attended his top two games for points: 32 vs. the Warriors in Boston and 29 vs. the Knicks in N.Y. It killed me when Chaney jumped to the American Basketball Association (ABA) as a free agent. He eventually returned to the franchise, but his number (12) was never retired.
Three fun facts about Chaney:
My Twitter avatar is a photo I took of Chaney during warmups; the next time at the Garden, I brought along the print and he autographed it. Chaney was the only Celtic to be a teammate of both Russell and Bird. I named my first dog “Chaney.”
My other top guys through the years are Cowens, Dennis Johnson, Bird, Pierce, and now IT.
Best Celtics moments and games:
There are so many. An actual low-key reason I attended Boston University was so I could go to Celtics games. Years later, my job was transferred from New York to Rhode Island, and I was happy because it brought me close to Boston.
Memorable games in-person:
I attended the final home game of Russell and Sam Jones (1969 Finals), Havlicek’s final game (1978) and Bird’s first game (1979). Also saw Sam Jones score 51 in a playoff game at New York and Havlicek drop 54 in the playoffs at Boston Garden vs. Atlanta.
1981, playoff Game 5 vs. Philly. The Celts trailed in the series, 3-1, but as we chanted “See you Sunday,” the Cs came from behind in the last two minutes to win by two points. The chant turned out to be prophetic. The Celtics won Game 6 by two on the road, forcing the Sixers to return to Boston on Sunday for an epic Game 7. The Celts won by a single point and went on to beat Houston for the title.
In 1984, my son was 5 when we went to his first game at Boston Garden. The Celts won a thriller on a last-second shot by Bird. My son wanted to stay afterward to meet his favorite player, Robert Parish. We waited near the locker room, but security was telling everyone to leave. “But I want to see Chief!” my son wailed. The guard took pity and let us stay, with the upshot being we got autographs on our game program from Parish as well as Bird and McHale – the entire Big Three. Still have it.
Besides seeing the Celts play in Boston and New York, I’ve been to games in Brooklyn, New Jersey (the old Nets), Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Indianapolis, Houston and Hartford (the Celtics’ former home-away-from-home for a few games a year). Hope to one day see them in Memphis, which is a fun city to visit, and San Antonio, where friends of mine live.
Moments:
In college, a friend invited me to play poker with him and his neighbors – JoJo White and Steve Kuberski. They lived in an apartment building in the suburbs, and the game took place at Kuberski’s dining room table. I lost $30 for the night and it was totally worth it.
I once met Tommy and Mike at a Special Olympics fundraising event.
I once met Tommy and Mike at a Special Olympics fundraising event. In 1978, I was working in New York City. A coworker and I sneaked out of the office and went to the hotel ballroom where the NBA draft was taking place. Back then, the draft was not open to the public, but we talked our way in. (No one cared about security in those days.) In that era, the draft wasn’t televised, and fans would have to wait for their local TV sports report or morning paper to find out who was picked. So, standing there in the room, I was possibly the first Celtics fan in the world to hear the announcement that Boston had drafted Larry Bird.
In 1996, I was on business for a couple of days at a Boston hotel – coincidentally, at the same time as former Celtics players and coaches were having a private reunion with the Phoenix Suns. They were marking the 20th anniversary of the triple-overtime victory by the Celtics in Game 5 of the ‘76 finals – widely considered the NBA’s greatest game. The banquet room doors were open during the presentations, so I quietly sat down in the back to watch highlight films and listen to the recollections of Tommy, Havlicek, JoJo, Cowens – all of them now Hall of Famers.
My wife, Bonnie, and I were on a cruise ship in the Caribbean when I discovered that the cigar bar was showing that night’s Celtics game via satellite TV. It was Valentine’s Day 2007, yet Bonnie never hesitated to let me stay and watch (she’s so good to me). That turned out to be the night when the Cs broke an 18-game losing streak.
Why the Celtics are important to him:
The Celtics have been ingrained in my life for so long, I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be a fan. Since I began rooting for them, I figure I’ve watched well over 3,000 games and they’ve won nine championships. At one point during the Pierce years, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see another banner go up. But the turnaround and the 2008 championship, all coming so fast after the KG and Ray trades, made that year possibly my favorite title of all. It felt so good to see the payoff for Paul’s years of loyalty, because loyalty is essential to being a Celtics fan.
There’s a quote from Red that sums it all up for me: “The Boston Celtics are not a basketball team, they are a way of life.”Cancel the funeral and get ready to fight: Net neutrality is far from dead. Our elected officials in Congress have the power to reverse what is swiftly becoming one of the U.S. government’s most unpopular decisions ever. And if they don’t, they’ll pay for it come election season.
If you’re catching up: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just ignored historic levels of public outcry and voted to rip up the basic rules that protect free speech on the internet. Their decision breaks with more than 20 years of bipartisan policy, and hands cable and phone companies the power to control what we see and do online, opening the floodgates for new fees, slowed down access, and even outright censorship.
But 26 senators have already signed on to a Resolution of Disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a vehicle to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality repeal with a simple majority vote in both the Senate and House. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s increasingly within reach with Democrats in lock step against the FCC rollback and half a dozen Republicans already publicly criticizing the move.
Outside of Washington, DC, net neutrality is not a partisan issue. Voters from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly agree that they don’t want their cable companies controlling where they get news, how they stream music and videos, or which apps they use to pay for things, get directions, or communicate with friends and family.
But this FCC decision came from the darkest depths of the DC “swamp.” The guy in charge, a former top Verizon lawyer, openly joked about being a “puppet” for the industry. Someone funded what appeared to be a sophisticated operation to create confusion around the FCC docket by stuffing it with millions of fake comments using stolen identities. And the FCC refused to cooperate with an investigation.
Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T poured money into misleading advertisements, ghost written op-eds, and astroturf campaigns, to fool customers into thinking that they would voluntarily abide by the principles of net neutrality, even as they used all of their political power and influence to destroy it. They’ve been busy buying friends in Congress with ample campaign contributions, while pounding Capitol Hill with armies of lobbyists.
But after all of that, they’ve completely failed to build any real grassroots support for their attack on net neutrality, from the left or the right. And every member of Congress knows that.
75 percent of Republican voters support the net neutrality protections the FCC just slashed. Despite debunked conspiracy claims spread by lobbyists, tech-savvy libertarians and conservatives have been winning over their compatriots on the substance of the issue. Killing off net neutrality would be devastating for small businesses and startups. Comcast owns MSNBC. AT&T could soon own CNN.
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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai pointed the finger at companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, who many on both the right and left feel already have too much control over online speech. But the FCC’s vote only makes that situation worse. The agency’s move amounts to a crony-capitalist government handout to a politically influential industry, concentrating power in the hands of near-monopolies and giving them the ability to squash competition and silence free speech.
No matter how hard they try, telecom lobbyists will just never convince a meaningful number of Republican voters that killing net neutrality, and ending the internet as a free market of ideas, is a good thing. And that’s what gives us a unique chance to get our normally gridlocked Congress to take action and overrule the FCC’s politically toxic order.
Lawmakers in every state have been getting hammered for months with millions of phone calls, emails, protests, constituent meetings, media requests, and pressure from small businesses at volumes that just never happen. Net neutrality is becoming one of the most talked about political issues in recent human history.
The next phase of the fight will be the most important, and potentially the most dangerous. Already one of Big Cable’s best friends in Congress, Marsha Blackburn, who has taken more than $600,000 from the industry, is pushing for legislation that would permanently undermine the FCC’s ability to enforce open internet protections. This bait and switch has been in the works for months. The telecom lobby’s end game is to use the crisis they’ve created to ram through legislation that’s branded as a compromise but amounts to a fatal blow to net neutrality.
But that’s exactly why we need to push for Congress to overrule the FCC with a Congressional Resolution of Disapproval. We don’t need legislation that’s been watered down with kool-aid. The FCC did something that a supermajority of people in this country oppose. Our elected officials have to decide whether to rubber stamp that betrayal or overturn it.
The internet makes the impossible possible. If we harness our anger and direct it strategically, we can get the votes we need to restore the net neutrality protections that should never have been taken away in the first place. Any lawmaker who refuses to listen to their constituents will have to go on the record right before an election as having voted against the free and open web. They would be wise not to underestimate the internet’s power to hold them accountable.This isn’t half bad. In fact, it’s pretty Good.
CBS’ forthcoming all-digital spinoff of The Good Wife will be titled The Good Fight, it was announced on Monday.
The offshoot — debuting in February 2017 on CBS, before moving exclusively to the network’s streaming service CBS All Access — picks up one year after the events of last May’s polarizing finale and stars Good Wife vets Christine Baranski, Cush Jumbo and Sarah Steele (reprising their respective roles as Diane, Lucca and Marissa).
In the new series, an enormous financial scam has destroyed the reputation of Diane’s goddaughter, Maia (Game of Thrones‘ Rose Leslie), while simultaneously wiping Diane’s savings. Forced out of Lockhart & Lee, they join Lucca at one of Chicago’s pre-eminent law firms.
The ensemble also includes Good Wife newbies Delroy Lindo (Chicago Code), Paul Guilfoyle (CSI), Bernadette Peters (Smash) and the just-cast Erica Tazel (Justified).
Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King return as showrunners and EPs on The Good Fight. Longtime Good Wife director Brooke Kennedy, meanwhile, is set to helm the premiere.If you missed the community input sessions, don't fret.
You can still share your vision for what you hope to see on the LCG-owned Horse Farm acreage, as it shapes up to become Lafayette's central park.
Residents packed the Rosa Parks center for the first Horse Farm community input session Oct. 23
If you missed the community input sessions Oct. 23-26, hop online here and share your thoughts. But do it by Nov. 11.
The next phase of meetings, Nov. 19-21, will allow residents to review the community's suggestions and choose their favorite plans for the nearly 100-acre tract.
By early December the program should be formalized, with a presentation to the LCG council scheduled for Dec. 16.
With a nod from the council, formal design work on the Johnston Street park will commence.Русский English | Deutsch Blog Concepts Studios Milestones Archive 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone 1964, Mercury, Chicago64 Tags: Concepts Mercury Comet Super Cyclone, 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone, 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone, 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone, 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone, 1964 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone - at 1964 Chicago Auto Show Images: Ford Motor Company; www.thelynxproject.org; www.chicagoautoshow.com Rating: 15 -1 +16 Comments ( ) 1964 & 1965 Mercury Comet Super Cyclone
www.gslchampionship.org What if you are dissatisfied with the 1964 Comet Caliente and wanted to build a sleek fastback coupe? One real-world design was this car built at Dearborn Steel Tubing for the Lincoln-Mercury Caravan of Stars. You'd need to present a well-reasoned document explaining why your design appears as it does, and how it might be realistically used.www.gslchampionship.org
www.chicagoautoshow.com Mercury exhibited its one-of-a-kind Comet Super Cyclone at the 1964 Chicago show. The sleek fastback roof was custom and included a large wrap around back window, like the 1964-65 Plymouth Barracuda. Stylish European-style headlights were rectangular in shape, but illegal on U.S. highways at the time.www.chicagoautoshow.com Other MercuryA Silicon Valley nonprofit that has given out tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships to needy students has been suspended and two of its officials arrested on suspicion of stealing $120,000 for their personal use.
Even more shocking: The organization is the Latino Peace Officers Association and the two board members facing charges are a San Jose police officer and a former police officer.
On Tuesday morning, police arrested former Officer Manuel Villagrana, 37, who was the longtime president of the Latino association, and Officer Marco Ybarra, 37. Both were booked on suspicion of felony grand theft. If convicted, they face a maximum of three years in county jail.
As recently as three years ago, the Latino Peace Officers Association of Santa Clara County had more than 100 members and threw high-powered galas to dole out about a dozen $1,000 to $5,000 scholarships to needy minority college freshmen looking to launch careers in criminal justice.
Now the national organization has suspended the local chapter. The coffers are stripped bare and the scholarship program appears dead.
“It amounts to greed,” said Felipe Ortiz, a spokesman and past president of the National Latino Peace Officers Association. “As law enforcement officers, they should know this right from the start: It’s not your money.”
Mysterious activity
There have now been two high-profile arrests of San Jose officers in recent weeks, further roiling a demoralized department that lost dozens of officers to unprecedented layoffs this year. Last month, Officer Patrick D’Arrigo was charged with having sexual activity with two teenage high school students.
Villagrana, who, as the head of the organization that put on an annual gala that often drew a starry crowd of powerful movers and shakers, is accused of stealing about $80,000. He was fired from the force in recent months. Ybarra, who is still on the force, is suspected of stealing about $40,000 from the association’s coffers.
Court information was not immediately available. Bail was set at $25,000 each.
“I find it very disappointing,” said Lt. Dave Storton, who heads the department’s financial crimes unit. “It angers me anytime anyone in law enforcement violates the public trust like that.”
Police officials would not disclose why Villagrana was fired from the force. But sources said he was terminated for unrelated time card fraud.
Investigators say Villagrana denied he had made cash withdrawals from the association’s account.
Police say Ybarra told them that Villagrana asked him to withdraw money one or two times to pay for DJs or dancers who performed at fundraising events. Ybarra said he was suspicious because the performers were generally Villagrana’s friends and seemed more expensive than they should have been.
The officer said he could not recall depositing a signed $10,000 check into his own account in 2006, according to the affidavit, and he suggested that “his lack of memory was likely due to an accident while serving in the military in Iraq.”
The theft was discovered through an audit by the National Latino Peace Officers Association, launched by a past president who noticed a series of mysterious cash withdrawals by the San Jose chapter.
Audit trail
Retired San Jose police Officer Noe Longoria — a former chapter president — became suspicious two years ago when he tried to call the previously flush nonprofit organization — which raises most of its money through dues and donations — only to discover that the phone had been disconnected.
After some weeks, according to the affidavit, Longoria confronted Villagrana and asked him for bank records. He was shocked by the paltry accounting that he finally received after several fruitless months, the affidavit said, so he asked for an audit.
The audit showed that money began to mysteriously disappear from the organization’s accounts in 2005, soon after Villagrana took over as president, and lasted through 2009, according to a police affidavit.
In contrast, in the last year of Longoria’s tenure as president, in 2004, the association withdrew $300 in cash.
The next year, the first year Villagrana served as president, withdrawals from the account totaled $10,300. In 2008, $50,000 was taken out. There were no receipts, according to officials.
Investigators said they do not know how the money was spent. None of it has been recovered.
Longoria told police that the only need for the organization’s officials to withdraw money was to pay a band or have petty cash on hand at fundraising events. Scholarships and performers at fundraisers were paid by check.
After launching their probe in late February, police investigators say they discovered the two men had been steadily stealing money from the account for years, the affidavit says.
Police say the two used little stealth and simply made cash withdrawals using their own names or sometimes just deposited checks into their personal accounts.
Contact Sean Webby at 408-920-5003.Giant Savings | www.xtremeguard.com View this email in your browser The Google Pixels Are Here! For a limited time get 92% off EVERYTHING site-wide
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Expanding the Imperial Fleet:
Sagan Port, Mundjiga - Deliver Tantalum, Gallium or Indium to Sagan Port in the Mundjiga system to help build the latest Imperial capital ship.
Tuning up the War Machine:
Greeboski's Outpost, Phiagre - Deliver Titanium to Greeboski's Outpost in the Phiagre system to support a programme to upgrade Greeboski’s Outpost.
Hammer of Justice:
Greeboski's Outpost, Phiagre - Hand in Bounty Vouchers at Greeboski's Outpost in the Phiagre system to protect traders delivering supplies for the station-improvement programme.
Admiral Denton Patreus has announced plans to expand the Imperial Navy with a new Majestic-Class Interdictor. The formidable vessel will boast a range of imposing weaponry, including an array of modular interceptor guns. Lieutenant Severin, who is overseeing the ship’s construction, issued a statement to the media:
“I know there are some who would question the need for this vessel. To those individuals, I say this: just how safe do you feel? We live in an age in which even Emperors can be murdered. An age in which our enemies’ faces are not known to us, and betrayal and deceit are encountered at every turn. The need for a strong, battle-ready navy has never been greater.”
“In order to complete production as swiftly as possible, we have placed an open order for supplies, and have authorised the Mundjiga Patrons of Law to reward pilots who deliver materials to our base of operations at Sagan Port. I implore all those who are loyal to the Empire to support this operation.”
As the galactic superpowers seem to be ramping up their respective militaries, others are looking to bolster their defences. Chancellor Zahra Arias of the Sovereign Justice Collective has announced plans to upgrade the infrastructure and defensive viability of Greeboski’s Outpost in the Phiagre system. In a statement, Chancellor Arias said:
“Greeboski’s Outpost is a bastion for the people of Phiagre and a monument to our independence, and I consider it my duty to upgrade the starport’s services. I have therefore placed an open order for titanium so we can begin the improvement programme.”
Chancellor Arias also called on the Pilots Federation to support Sovereign Justice Collective forces by protecting traders delivering titanium to Greeboski’s Outpost. Pilots who hand in bounty vouchers or deliver titanium to the starport will be generously rewarded.
All three campaigns are scheduled to begin on the 21st of April 3302 and will run for one week. If the final targets for a campaign are met earlier than planned, that campaign will end immediately.
It’s dangerous out there so fly safe, Commanders!Stars and Stripes
April 2, 2008
The Pentagon is expected to close an intelligence office that has drawn fire from lawmakers and civil liberties groups who charge that it was part of an effort by the Defense Department to expand into domestic spying, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The move, government officials told the Times, is part of a broad effort under Defense Secretary Robert Gates to review an intelligence architecture built by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.
The intelligence unit, called the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, was created by Rumsfeld after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of an effort to counter the operations of foreign intelligence services and terror groups inside the United States and abroad, the Times noted.
Yet the office, whose size and budget is classified, came under fierce criticism in 2005 after it was disclosed that it was managing a database that included information about anti-war protests planned at churches, schools and Quaker meeting halls, the paper reported.
According to the Times, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, James Clapper, has recommended to Gates that the counterintelligence field office be dismantled and that some of its operations be placed under the authority of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Pentagon officials said Gates had yet to approve the recommendation, the Times wrote.Match.com and OKCupid are the Amazon AMZN, +0.29% of courtship. And for single Americans who have signed up to dating sites, this is the busiest time of year.
It’s the forthcoming peak season for Match.com, the subscription-based dating site that’s a subsidiary of InterActiveCorp. IAC, -0.09% which spans from Dec. 26 to Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. During this period, more than 50 million messages are sent, 5 million photos are uploaded, and an estimated 1 million dates will take place.
‘Market friction’ occurs when buyers and sellers who cannot find a market or product keep searching or, in this case, keep swiping on dating profiles in the hopes of getting a good match. Paul Oyer, professor of economics at the Stanford School of Business
“This is the time of year when memberships spike,” Bela Gandhi, founder of the Chicago-based Smart Dating Academy, which coaches single people in the art of courtship, said in a statement. There are an estimated 107 million single adults in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (Sign-ups for dating apps like OKCupid, which is also owned by IAC, and Grindr rise by 30%-plus around this time of year.)
Also see: Even during a snow storm, this is the hottest time of year for online dating
Researchers and social scientists argue that dating and economics have evolved in tandem. “The story of dating began when women left their homes and the homes of others where they had toiled as slaves and maids to cities where they took jobs and let them mix with men,” writes Moira Weigel, author of “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating,” (MacMillan).
‘Market friction’ keeps people swiping on Tinder instead of meeting people
The Nobel Prize-winning “search theory,” awarded to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides, is as relevant to online dating as it is with online shopping, says Paul Oyer, professor of economics at the Stanford School of Business and author of “Everything I Ever Needed |
a certain character's motivation did not make sense or why it was wrong to combine elements of farce and satire. Schwartz generally ignored Reed's suggestions, although in an attempt to alleviate tension, Reed was allowed to direct some episodes.[22] In a 1983 interview, Reed admitted that he often butted heads with Schwartz, stating, "We fought over the scripts. Always over the scripts. The producer, Sherwood Schwartz, had done Gilligan's Island...Just gag lines. That would have been what The Brady Bunch would have been if I hadn't protested."[23]
The Brady Bunch, 1973 Reed and Florence Henderson in a publicity shot for, 1973
Reed was particularly appalled by what would turn out to be the show's final episode, "The Hair-Brained Scheme". He sent Schwartz a memo picking apart the episode,[24] but Schwartz did not receive the memo promptly enough to change the sitcom as Reed wanted. As a result, Reed refused to appear in the episode altogether.[21] Though Schwartz had decided to replace Reed if the series were picked up for a sixth season, the show ended up being cancelled shortly thereafter.[25] Reed later indicated he took the role for financial reasons,[26] but tried to remain positive despite his creative differences with Schwartz by reminding himself the series was primarily about the children. Reed masked his dissatisfaction in front of the camera, always performing professionally without any indication of his unhappiness. Despite his discontentment with the show, Reed genuinely liked his co-stars and was a father figure to the younger cast members.[27] Co-star Susan Olsen became friends with Reed's daughter Karen, who made a guest appearance in the episode "The Slumber Caper".[28] Reed's final appearance in the series was in the penultimate episode, "The Hustler". His final line in that episode was "Now I can get my car in the garage."
During the run of The Brady Bunch, Reed also had a recurring role as Lieutenant Adam Tobias on Mannix, from 1969 to 1975,[2] and typically appeared in three to five Mannix episodes each season. He also directed several episodes of The Brady Bunch during its run.[26][29] After Reed's agents overbooked him for a film with Anglia Television, his cancellation led to the 1972 court case of Anglia Television Ltd v Reed.
Later career [ edit ]
After The Brady Bunch series ended in 1974, Reed acted on the stage and made guest star appearances on other television series and television movies, including Pray for the Wildcats and SST: Death Flight. He won critical acclaim for his portrayal of Pat Caddison, a doctor who comes out as transgender, in a two-part episode of Medical Center in 1975.[30] The episode also earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.[31] Also that year he appeared in the TV-movie The Secret Night Caller, as a respectably married man with a compulsion to make obscene phone calls to women he barely knows. Reed appeared in the television film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), and the miniseries Roots (1977).[20] Reed was again nominated for an Emmy Award for his work in Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots.[31] He also guest-starred on Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O, Charlie's Angels, Galactica 1980 and Vega$.
In 1981, Reed won the lead role of Dr. Adam Rose on the medical drama Nurse.[32] Despite being critically acclaimed, the series was canceled the following year. In 1986, he played the role of Lloyd Kendall on the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow. He also made multiple appearances on Fantasy Island, Hunter, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote.
Despite his dislike of The Brady Bunch and of his character, Reed continued to appear in Brady Bunch spin-offs and sequels for the remainder of his career. In 1976, Reed reprised the role of Mike Brady in the variety show The Brady Bunch Hour, a role he openly embraced because it afforded him the opportunity to sing and dance. He would later appear in the television film, The Brady Girls Get Married (1981), and the television film A Very Brady Christmas (1988).[22] In 1989, he guest-starred as Mike Brady in "A Very Brady Episode" of the NBC sitcom Day by Day. Also in 1989, Reed reteamed with his Brady Bunch co-star Henderson in a guest-starring role on the sitcom Free Spirit.[33] In 1990, he reprised the role of Mike Brady for the final time in the drama series, The Bradys.[22] The series was canceled after six episodes. Reed made his last onscreen appearance in the April 1992 episode of Jake and the Fatman, "Ain't Misbehavin'".[2]
Shortly before his death, Reed appeared in the touring production of Love Letters, opposite Betsy Palmer and taught classes on Shakespeare at UCLA.[11][27]
Personal life [ edit ]
Reed and fellow Northwestern student Marilyn Rosenberger married in July 1954.[34] They had a daughter, Karen Rietz, before divorcing in 1959.[35] Reed had determined he was gay. He kept this fact a close secret, since public knowledge of his sexual orientation would have damaged his career during that era.[36][37]
Several years after his death, Reed's Brady Bunch co-stars – notably Barry Williams and Florence Henderson – publicly acknowledged his sexual orientation, and admitted that most of the cast and crew of The Brady Bunch knew but they never discussed it with him and vice versa.
Henderson spoke about Reed being in the closet during a 2000 interview with ABC News: "Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband. Off camera, he was an unhappy person - I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration. I never asked him. I never challenged him. I had a lot of compassion for him because I knew how he was suffering with keeping this secret."[36]
Regarding Reed's unwillingness to discuss his sexuality, Williams told ABC News during a 2000 interview that "Robert didn't want to go there. I don't think he talked about it with anyone. I just don't think it was a discussion – period. Had Robert Reed ever came out that he was gay... it probably would have caused the demise of the show. I think it would have hurt his career tremendously." [36]
Death [ edit ]
In November 1991, Reed was diagnosed with colon cancer.[38] When he became ill, he allowed only his daughter and his close friend actress Anne Haney to visit him.[35][38] Haney later said of Reed, "He came from the old school, where people had a sense of decorum. He went the way he wanted to, without publicity."[35] Weeks before his death, Reed called Henderson and asked her to inform the rest of The Brady Bunch cast that he was terminally ill.[23] He died on May 12, 1992 at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California, at age 59.[7]
Reed's death was initially attributed solely to cancer, but details from his death certificate were made public revealing that Reed was HIV positive.[39] It remains unknown how and when Reed contracted HIV because he kept his medical condition and private life a secret until the day he died, telling only a few close friends.[40] While Reed did not have AIDS at the time of his death,[9][36][41] his doctor listed his HIV-positive status as a "significant condition[s] that contributed to death" on the death certificate.[39][42][43]
Robert Reed is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois.[44]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Year Title Role Notes 1957 Pal Joey Boy Friend Uncredited 1958 Jackson Uncredited 1958 Torpedo Run Woolsey Uncredited 1959 Bloodlust! Johnny Randall (released in 1961) 1967 Hurry Sundown Lars Finchley 1968 Star! Charles Fraser 1968 Journey into Darkness Hank Prentiss Segment: "The New People" 1969 Lt. Tim Crane 1991 Prime Target Agent Harrington
Television [ edit ]
Award nominations [ edit ]
Year Award Category Title of work 1976 Primetime Emmy Award Outstanding Lead Actor for a Single Appearance in a Drama or Comedy Series Medical Center (For episode "The Fourth Sex: Parts 1&2") 1976 Primetime Emmy Award Outstanding Continuing Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Drama Series Rich Man, Poor Man 1977 Primetime Emmy Award Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Comedy or Drama Series Roots (For part V)
See also [ edit ]
Anglia Television Ltd v Reed, 1972 English legal case in which Reed was suedZurich Insurance is investing $1 billion to fight climate change in a sign of growing demand for socially conscious investing.
The Swiss financial services group plans to invest about 0.5% of its $200 billion portfolio in green bonds issued by the World Bank and other institutions to support sustainable growth and development without sacrificing financial returns.
"This is a first step," said a spokesperson for the firm. "Zurich will consider making further allocations, also to non-dollar denominated green bonds, once it has evaluated its initial investment."
Impact investing is becoming increasingly popular with both institutions and individuals who are keen to do good while making money. JP Morgan (JPM) reckons investors could channel $9 billion into socially-conscious investments this year.
The global financial meltdown, financial scams and Wall Street misconduct have left many people disillusioned with traditional investments. A growing awareness of inequality and diminishing natural resources has also helped fuel a hunger to do good with finance, particularly among young people.
With this investment, Zurich (ZFSVF) will become the biggest holder of dollar-denominated green bonds, holding about 10% of the global market.
Related: Can you make money and feel good about it
As a global insurer with a presence in many emerging markets, Zurich is directly exposed to the impact of climate change and intensive use of scarce natural resources.
Extreme weather, such as floods and typhoons, has caused $76 billion of insured losses in east Asia over the past three decades, according to insurer Munich Re.
Typhoon Haiyan, which ripped through the Philippines this month, left thousands dead and caused widespread devastation. The storm has caused several billion dollars worth of damage, but most victims are likely to be uninsured.
The idea of long-term climate change, driven largely by the use of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping carbon emissions into the atmosphere, is politically controversial but accepted by most researchers as a fact.
Related: CNN coverage of Philippines relief effort
Naderev Sano, a member of the Philippines Climate Change Commission, told CNN last week that the highest increase in measured sea levels over the past seven decades "has been in the waters just east of the Philippines."
"The precautionary principle tells you you shouldn't wait for full scientific certainty before doing something or taking action," he said. "How many lives do we want to lose, not just in the Philippines but in communities that have other climate impacts?"
Zurich's cash will be used to finance initiatives, such as an energy efficiency project in Turkey aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by over 1.4 million tons per year by investing in solar, geothermal and other renewable resources.A 56-year-old man shot to death at Jackson motel Sunday has been identified as bass fisherman James “Jimmy” Johnson.
Chris Bowes, senior tournament manager for the Bassmaster Opens, says in a statement that Johnson and his wife were in Jackson to compete at the Bassmaster Central Open on Ross Barnett Reservoir scheduled to begin Thursday. Johnson’s wife was not hurt.
Jackson Police Department spokeswoman Colendula Green says the investigation is continuing.
Bowes said Johnson was shot after confronting someone burglarizing his boat.
“There was some sort of violent altercation near his hotel room door,” Bowes told The Clarion-Ledger.
Johnson, of Ganado in Jackson County, was 11th in Central Open standings after two events.
The Motel 6 where the shooting occurred about 8 p.m. is located off Interstate 55 in north Jackson.
“We were shocked and saddened to learn late Sunday night that Jimmy Johnson was killed while staying in a motel near the lake.” BASS CEO Bruce Akin said in a news release. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends as the bass fishing community rallies around them.”
The Central Open is the first Bassmaster event at Ross Barnett Reservoir in over a decade, according to Bowes. He said they planned to honor Johnson at the registration event Wednesday evening.
“The event will go on and we know that it was an isolated incident,” Bowes said. We don’t want to lose focus and everyone there will have a heavy heart.”
(© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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Top Trending:7th episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation
"Justice" is the seventh episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode first aired in broadcast syndication on November 9, 1987. Directed by James L. Conway, writer John D. F. Black originally pitched the story, but after Worley Thorne and Gene Roddenberry modified it, Thorne wrote the script. Because of the changes to the story, Black chose to receive his credit under the pseudonym Ralph Wills.
Set in the 24th century, the series follows the adventures of the Starfleet crew of the Federation starship Enterprise-D. In this episode, Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) is sentenced to death after inadvertently breaking the law on an alien planet. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) must deal with the powerful and mysterious protector of the planet while deliberating whether to violate the Prime Directive to save Wesley's life.
This was the first episode of The Next Generation to feature multiple shots filmed on location, with scenes filmed in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. "Justice" was the second most viewed episode of the first season, with 12.7 million viewers. The episode received a mostly negative response, with critics pointing to issues with the quality of the acting and the predictability of the plot.
Plot [ edit ]
The USS Enterprise arrives for shore leave at the paradisiacal, newly discovered planet of Rubicun III. A small advance party from the ship are sent down to meet with the Edo, the native people of the planet. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) sends Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) as part of the away team to evaluate the planet on behalf of the young people on board the Enterprise. Upon their arrival, they are greeted by Rivan (Brenda Bakke) and Liator (Jay Louden) in a very comfortable way, triggering Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) to determine it a "nice planet", while Wesley leaves the adults to socialize with native teenagers. On the Enterprise, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) reports something unusual orbiting the planet, but nothing appears on the viewscreen. He sends out a communications signal which reveals another vessel in orbit. A small ball of light enters the bridge and communicates with Picard in a booming voice, warning him not to interfere with the Edo, calling them his "children". The intruder then incapacitates Data.
On Rubicun III, the Edo explain to Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) and Worf that capital punishment is used to enforce their laws. The away team rush to warn Wesley, only to discover he has accidentally broken a greenhouse while playing catch with the Edo youths. An Edo mediator, or policeman, attempts to give Wesley a lethal injection for this infraction of the law, but Yar and Worf draw their phasers. On the ship, the sphere leaves Data's body and departs. Picard, upon hearing of the situation with Wesley, transports to the surface. He meets with representatives of the Edo in a council chamber and explains that Earth no longer practices capital punishment. Some Edo interpret this stance as an attempt by the Federation to push their superiority and suggest that Picard should mount a rescue effort for the boy. He says he cannot, quoting the Prime Directive.
Picard asks about the mysterious vessel in orbit and discovers that the Edo worship it as a god. He returns to his ship with Rivan (an Edo) and Counsellor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis). Rivan sees the strange ship from orbit and confirms it is the Edo's god. She is transported back to the surface when the ship threatens the Enterprise for taking her away from the planet. Data reveals that, while he was in communication with the entity, it will protect the Edo as if they were its children. After considering their options, Picard returns to the planet's surface and announces that he is willing to risk the wrath of the entity. He orders the transportation of Wesley to the Enterprise, but the entity does not allow the transporters to operate. Picard pleads with the Edo god that laws must allow for exceptions to ensure justice, and after this statement the transporters go back online and allows the away team to return. Upon leaving the planet, Picard communicates with the entity to inform it that they are leaving and that they will remove recently placed colonists at a nearby star system under the entity's claimed jurisdiction, if the entity expresses so. Without replying, the entity disappears. Picard regrets they did not communicate more, and the Enterprise departs.
Production [ edit ]
John D. F. Black's original pitch featured a story about capital punishment. His idea was based on a film treatment detailing the colony planet of Llarof where capital punishment is handed down as a sentence for any offense except against those who are immune from the law. In the treatment, a security officer is killed by a local law enforcement officer, who is then killed himself by his partner for unjustly killing the Enterprise crewman. The planet would have had a rebel faction who wanted to overthrow the laws, which Picard refused to back initially whilst citing the Prime Directive. A second draft featured a rebel leader executed for treason.[1] Black explained the premise of a society that developed laws to prevent terrorism and chaos: "Let's say that what we do is kill everybody who is a terrorist or suspected of being a terrorist. Now the people who have killed everybody, what do they do?"[2]
The idea was re-written by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry and writer Worley Thorne. It was Roddenberry and Thorne who created the godlike entity and sexed up the Edo.[1] James L. Conway directed the episode, having just finished the MacGyver episode, "Jack in the Box".[1] Josh Clark, who plays a Conn officer in "Justice", later appears as Lt. Joe Carey in all seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager.[3]
"Justice" is the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation filmed mostly on location, and the first of any scenes on location other than those set in the holodeck in "Encounter at Farpoint". Scenes shot at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, Los Angeles,[1] were located under the flight path for the Van Nuys Airport. The noise from overhead planes was so loud, the actors were required to re-record their lines in the studio.[4] Filming for the scene where Wesley crashes into the greenhouse occurred on the grounds of the Huntington Library[note 1] in Pasadena, California.[1]
Reception and home media [ edit ]
"Justice" first aired in broadcast syndication on November 8, 1987. It received Nielsen ratings of 12.7 million, placing it in third place in the timeslot.[5] It ranked the second highest viewed episode of the first season, after the premiere "Encounter at Farpoint", which was seen by 15.7 million viewers.[5]
Several reviewers re-watched the episode after the end of the series. Castmember Wil Wheaton watched "Justice" for AOL TV in December 2006. He observed problems with his acting and the plot development, particularly where Picard transports the Edo woman to the Enterprise. Wheaton felt Picard's actions were a clear breach of the Prime Directive which was otherwise at the heart of the episode. On the other hand, he thought the episode showed a proper dynamic between Picard and the bridge crew, and he believed it tackled a real ethics problem in a manner more frequently seen in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica television series. Wheaton gave the episode of "Justice" a grade of B+.[4]
Keith DeCandido reviewed the episode for Tor.com in May 2011. He said the episode "collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness",[3] and he criticized the Edo as caricatures.[3] DeCandido thought that the plot involving Wesley was predictable, but that the scripting for Picard helped to cement him as a "great character".[3] He gave the episode a score of two out of ten.[3]
James Hunt reviewed the episode for Den of Geek in November 2012. He liked the central idea, but said it was typical of the poor quality of the early episodes of the series. Hunt also thought multiple plot details were not addressed, such as the origin of the alien entity and the reason for the Edo's fear of it.[6] Jamahl Epsicokhan for his website Jammer's Reviews, said that the episode featured "yet another Trek-cliched Infinitely Superior Life Form",[7] and featured a debate which was "more obtuse than enlightening".[7] He gave it a score of one out of four.[7]
"Justice" was first released on VHS cassette in the United States and Canada on July 1, 1992.[8] The episode was later included on the Star Trek: The Next Generation season one DVD box set, released in March 2002.[9] The most recent release was as part of the season one Blu-ray set on July 24, 2012.[10]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ The Blue Boy (c. 1770). This painting is held by the Huntington Library.[4] An indirect reference to the Huntington Library shows up again in the third season episode, " Hollow Pursuits ". In a holodeck program, Wesley is dressed as a man in Thomas Gainsborough's oil painting,(c. 1770). This painting is held by the Huntington Library.
References [ edit ]BEIRUT (Reuters) - The death toll from an air strike by U.S.-led forces on the northern Syrian province of Aleppo has risen to 52 including seven children, a group monitoring the conflict said on Saturday.
Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the British-based Observatory for Human Rights, said the death toll from Friday’s strike was the highest civilian loss in a single attack by U.S. and Arab forces since they started air raids against hardline Islamist militant groups in Syria such as Islamic State.
U.S.-led forces are also targeting the group in Iraq.
The Britain-based Observatory said the raid had mistakenly struck civilians in a village on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in Aleppo province, killing members of at least six families.
U.S.-led strikes had killed at least 66 civilians in Syria from the start of the raids on Sept. 23 until Friday’s strike, which brought the total to at least 118. The campaign has also killed nearly 2,000 Islamic State fighters, the Observatory said.
The group said at least 13 people were still missing from Friday’s raid.
The U.S. military did not confirm the civilian deaths but said it takes all such reports seriously and would look into the matter further.
“We currently have no information to corroborate allegations that coalition air strikes resulted in civilian casualties,” Major Curt Kellogg, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said in an email.
The U.S.-led air strikes have had little impact on the hardline Islamic State group, slowing its advances but failing to weaken it in areas it controls. The group has built its own government in Syria’s city of Raqqa, where it is most powerful.
Washington and its allies say their aim is to support what they call moderate rebels fighting against both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State.
But four years into Syria’s civil war, no side is close to victory. A third of the population has been made homeless and more than 220,000 people have been killed.
Government forces have seen a series of setbacks on the battlefield recently and Islamist fighters have edged closer to Assad’s stronghold in the coastal areas.
Fighting continued on Saturday between government forces and Islamist fighters in government-held Latakia, heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite community.
The violence follows advances in neighbouring Idlib province by the hardline Ahrar al-Sham group and Syria’s al Qaeda wing Nusra Front, as well as other allied fighters.
Syria’s state news agency said the army carried out overnight strikes on Nusra positions in Idlib.You no longer have to sit at your computer to watch CBS' online news network. The broadcaster has overhauled the CBS News iOS app with both a fresh interface and more video options, including CBSN's live and on-demand feeds. It's now easier to follow a breaking story on your iPhone, or to catch up on the day's events from your iPad. The improvements aren't limited to video, either -- there's more in-depth coverage for both major and developing stories, and full-screen photo galleries give you a better sense of what it was like to be there in person. Yes, you can use authenticated apps from channels and TV providers (not to mention Dish's new Sling TV service) to get similar up-to-the-minute coverage, but CBS News is free. At the least, it won't hurt to give this a try.News Release 11-091
"Fool's Gold" from The Deep is Fertilizer for Ocean Life
Pyrite nanoparticles from hydrothermal vents are a rich source of iron in the deep sea
Black smoker from the Mariner vent site in the Pacific Ocean's Eastern Lau Spreading Center.
May 8, 2011
This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.
Similar to humans, the bacteria and tiny plants living in the ocean need iron for energy and growth. But their situation is quite different from ours--for one, they can't turn to natural iron sources like leafy greens or red meat for a pick-me-up.
So, from where does their iron come?
New research results published in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience point to a source on the seafloor: minute particles of pyrite, or fool's gold, from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Scientists already knew the vents' cloudy plumes, which spew forth from the earth's interior, include pyrite particles, but thought they were solids that settled back on the ocean bottom.
Now, scientists at the University of Delaware and other institutions have shown the vents emit a significant amount of microscopic pyrite particles that have a diameter 1,000 times smaller than that of a human hair.
Because the nanoparticles are so small, they are dispersed into the ocean rather than falling to the sea floor.
Barbara Ransom, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research, called the discovery "very exciting."
"These particles have long residence times in the ocean and can travel long distances from their sources, forming a potentially important food source for life in the deep sea," she said.
The project also received support from another NSF program, the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCOR.
The mineral pyrite, or iron pyrite, has a metallic luster and brass-yellow color that led to its nickname: fool's gold. In fact, pyrite is sometimes found in association with small quantities of gold.
Scientist George Luther of the University of Delaware explained the importance of the lengthy amount of time pyrite exists suspended in its current form in the sea, also known as its residence time.
Pyrite, which consists of iron and sulfur as iron disulfide, does not rapidly react with oxygen in seawater to form oxidized iron, or "rust," allowing it to stay intact and move throughout the ocean better than other forms of iron.
"As pyrite travels from the vents to the ocean interior and toward the surface ocean, it oxidizes gradually to release iron, which becomes available in areas where iron is depleted so that organisms can assimilate it, then grow," Luther said.
"It's an ongoing iron supplement for the ocean--much as multivitamins are for humans."
Growth of tiny plants known as phytoplankton can affect atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
Much of the research was performed by scientist and lead author Mustafa Yucel of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in France, conducted while Yucel worked on a doctorate at the University of Delaware.
It involved scientific cruises to the South Pacific and East Pacific Rise using the manned deep-sea submersible Alvin and the remotely operated vehicle Jason, both operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Co-authors, in addition to Yucel and Luther, are Amy Gartman and Clara Chan, also of the University of Delaware.
-NSF-
Transmission electron micrograph (TEM) showing nanoparticles from the Pacific's Kilo Moana vent.
Credit and Larger Version
The submersible Alvin explored the role of "fool's gold," or pyrite, in the deep
Credit and Larger Version
Jason II, a remotely operated vehicle, was also used to sample pyrite nanoparticles.
Credit and Larger Version
Jason II's control room, HQ for remotely operated exploration of hydrothermal vents.
Credit and Larger Version
Media Contacts
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"The limited express travels in a variety of different sceneries, from the mountains of Chichibu to the middle of Tokyo, and I thought it would be good if the train could gently co-exist with this variety of scenery," Sejima said in a press statement from Seibu.
The harmonious melding of man-made functionality and natural surroundings is a hallmark of Japanese design; it’s unsurprising this approach is now being applied to the the train. In addition to the mirror-like outer material, the shape of these trains will have softer curves and a more organic structure than many of Seibu’s more traditional cars. The new design will be implemented in Seibu’s Red Arrow series of trains, connecting Tokyo with parts of central Japan.
Though the new trains will not be any more eco-friendly or quiet than its high-speed counterparts, Seibu is waxing poetic about its Zen-like prospects: “We aim to provide a new public space, almost parklike, where people will come together,” the company said in a statement. “It’s more than just a means of movement, it’s a destination in its own right. The train will serve commuters, people seeking relaxation, and tourists drawn by its unique appearance.”
Unlike the U.S., where train travel has been suffering a sad decline for decades, trains are a vital and vibrant piece of Japan’s transport infrastructure. In fact, this new chameleon-like train is only one of many innovative new designs being rolled out in the next couple of years. Many of the others focus on the interior, though, promising an array of luxuries for the traveler. Sejima seems to be designing for everyone else—on the outside looking in.Over on the Windows Phone user voice site, the hot topics lately have focused on the poor user interface design changes seen in Windows 10’s phone UI. Back in the days of Windows Phone 7, one of the major differentiators between Windows Phone and other smartphone platforms at the time were its design and how much thought was put into it. Everything was primarily based on typography for a good reason; people understand words. We use them to communicate practically everything all the time. We’re doing it right now. The animated interface used words and animations to communicate actions and functions. Words flew into the frame as you moved from one hub to another and then appeared cropped at the edge of your screen to indicate that there was more if you pushed it to the side. It was very intuitive.
What’s more, Windows Phone 7’s interface designers actually (mostly) understood one-handed usability. The design language generally recommended putting interactive elements towards the bottom of the screen since that’s the easiest place for your fingers to reach them while holding the device. That concept of ergonomics and usability in smartphones increases in importance as the screen size gets bigger than 3.5″ and reaching buttons at the top of the screen start requiring scooting or stretching. It’s like designing a full sized car where you have to spread your legs from the right side to the left side in order to reach the gas and brake pedals. Sure you can do if you stretch or scoot side to side, but it’s certainly not ideal or ergonomic. Apple knows about the problem and they created a goofy hack that moves the whole application towards the bottom of the screen so that you can reach the top buttons. Microsoft was in a unique position to do things right, but it would seem that something changed starting with the new top-edge screen gestures in Windows Phone 8.1. Maybe the smart UI designers were transferred to different projects.
Below we’ll take a look at a few excerpts from the community along with links to the respective Uservoice pages that you can use to vote on as well. These are only the ones on the first page. There are pages and pages of comments from Windows Phone users deriding Microsoft’s recent user interface design changes.
XomBolf commented · January 27, 2015 9:09 AM
Microsoft really should continue using address bars at the bottom. It’s really wonderful to use. That’s why I like the “old” Windows Phone: The menu is always on the bottom, easy to reach without trouble using the App Bar. Using Android you have to stretch your fingers to the top (often left side) to access the menu – not a good idea in my opinion.
commented · January 27, 2015 9:09 AM Microsoft really should continue using address bars at the bottom. It’s really wonderful to use. That’s why I like the “old” Windows Phone: The menu is always on the bottom, easy to reach without trouble using the App Bar. Using Android you have to stretch your fingers to the top (often left side) to access the menu – not a good idea in my opinion.
Anonymous commented · January 24, 2015 11:52 AM
Keep commands where the fingers are (bottom) and content where there aren’t (top)! You would put “back, start, search” buttons at the top, would you?
commented · January 24, 2015 11:52 AM Keep commands where the fingers are (bottom) and content where there aren’t (top)! You would put “back, start, search” buttons at the top, would you?
Seon M commented · January 21, 2015 5:53 PM
Yes. Please. Do Microsoft test their phones for one hand use? Hamburger menu on the far left top is a night bare to reach. No more appbars with easy to reach commands. Its like everything that made windows phone a great mobile OS is being tossed out. Sighs…
Q commented · January 29, 2015 06:11
Menu/Navigation Buttons at the bottom is why I like to use Windows Phone apps.
At the top it’s just anti ergonomic
commented · January 29, 2015 06:11 Menu/Navigation Buttons at the bottom is why I like to use Windows Phone apps. At the top it’s just anti ergonomic
Anonymous commented · January 28, 2015 18:48
Unfortunately, this is a done deal. Take a look at the horrible, horrible design of the Microsoft Band companion app, Microsoft Health. It’s got everything wrong: No application bar at the bottom. A hamburger menu at the top that is a complete junk drawer, containing important elements, like navigation, as well as never-used garbage like “about.” It also features TONS of wasted space, multiple taps required to do simple tasks, and, on some screens, a software back button! Unbelievable but true.
commented · January 28, 2015 18:48 Unfortunately, this is a done deal. Take a look at the horrible, horrible design of the Microsoft Band companion app, Microsoft Health. It’s got everything wrong: No application bar at the bottom. A hamburger menu at the top that is a complete junk drawer, containing important elements, like navigation, as well as never-used garbage like “about.” It also features TONS of wasted space, multiple taps required to do simple tasks, and, on some screens, a software back button! Unbelievable but true.
Anonymous commented · January 28, 2015 18:41
It’s not just a mistake. It’s an idiotic, moronic, gutless, revolutionary blunder. It proves that Nadella and BelFiore don’t give a rat’s patoot about design or productivity. They think they can copy bad Android design and fool people into liking Windows phone that way. So, a bad copy of a copy of iOS. If we wanted bad design that |
down them. This item, available in black, is 75% cotton and 25% polyester. Features jersey lined hood, 1x1 ribbing at cuffs and waistband."}
{"description": {},"productinfo": {"amazonbullet1": "Officially Licensed National Geographic product.","amazoncat": "Apparel\/Men's\/Outerwear","size_chart": "size-chart-itchoodss4500.html"},"shipping": {"days": "This item ships within 2 business days."},"shipsto": {"country": "This item ships to the USA, Canada, Antigua West Indies, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Belize, Switzerland, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Germany, Denmark, Ecuador, Spain, Finland, France, Honduras, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom."},"sku": {"parent": "NGOHOIAHPAPAW"},"pre_order": false }Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer responds to the announcment that Rep. Tom Price will be nominated for the position of Health and Human Services Secretary in the Trump administration. Schumer says that Price intends to privatize Medicare and declares that Republicans are "Declaring war on seniors."
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: I am so disappointed to see the president-elect nominate Congressman Price to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services this morning.
When it comes to issues like Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, Congressman Price and the avergae American couldn't be further apart.
Between this nomination of an avowed Medicare opponent, and the House Republicans threatening to privatize Medicare, it is clear that Washington Republicans are poltting a War on Seniors next year. Every senior, every American, should hear this loudly and clearly. Democrats with not let them win that fight.Right up there with the very well-marketed Paleo diet, intermittent fasting (IF) has achieved popular attention in the past year for its potential role in achieving rapid weight loss. But now there is mounting evidence that this approach to eating may have specific benefits for those with diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Intermittent fasting can be implemented in various ways. Common approaches are
Alternating days spent eating normally with days when calorie consumption is restricted; Taking two days each week and making them ‘fasting days;’ My favorite, proposed by Tieraona Low Dog MD (https://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/pages/Tieraona-Low-Dog-MD/462951583749633) : ‘If there isn’t healthy food available, I just don’t eat.’
A mounting body of evidence in animal models and humans points to specific effectiveness of intermittent fasting for weight loss and treatment of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, most recently in a review article in the British Journal of Diabetes and Vascular Disease.
Link to original article here (http://dvd NULL.sagepub NULL.com/content/13/2/68 NULL.full).
Compared to more invasive conventional medical methods of treating overweight and its complications, intermittent fasting looks downright reasonable. But we are still working on the best ways to help people implement this approach, most recently via our medically-supervised quant coach program here at My Doctor Medical Group.
What we have found, is that everyone is an individual. Some take to specific approaches like IF very easily, and others need to troubleshoot other health issues before IF is easily implemented, and it’s hard to generalize since each case ends up being so unique.A plague struck Malabar 200 years ago in the form of Tipu from Mysore. The mighty temples of Malabar were ransacked and plundered by the merciless army of the tyrant. The utsava murthi of Guruvayur Sri Krishna Temple was safely taken to Ambalappuzha to protect it from the marauders. The Barbarians also destroyed a nearby temple of Sri Parthasarathy (charioteer of Arjuna, Lord Krishna). Later in 1971, the murthi of Shri Parthasarathy was resurrected, and some people renovated the dilapidated temple. Little did they know, under the reign of people born as Hindu, armed force would again ambush their temple. The Malabar Devaswom board forcefully took over the control of the activities and properties of Sri Parthasarathy temple in Guruvayur using police force at wee hours of 7th of November. The Board officials have misused the order of Kerala High Court for the coercive acquisition of the temple in the dark. Earlier in September 2017, there were tensions in the temple when devotees living in Guruvayur tried to block the police action and attempt of the Devaswom officials to take over the temple. They locked the temple from inside and opposed the takeover. As a reaction, the devaswom board approached the court and obtained an order to seek the help of Assistant Commissioner of Police to ensure the peaceful functioning of the executive officer of the Devaswom Board in the temple.
The temple remained abandoned more than half a century. The native devotees formed a society and renovated the temple and were performing all rituals that brought back the temple into splendour. As in any other wealthy temples in the country, the secular state and the political class got an interest in the administration and maintenance of this temple also. The case between the Parthasarathy temple society and the Devaswom board has been going on for the last eight years. The arrogance of the Devaswom officials and violent encroachment into the temple premises was not befitting for any devout Hindu who value the sanctity of the temple. This barbaric act by the Malabar Devaswom board officials might be part of the declared intention of the government of Kerala and the political figures who control the Devaswom Board. In August 2017, the new president of the Malabar Devaswom has announced the board’s intention to take over all temples in Malabar region including those run by the Samuthiri family (erstwhile royal family of Kozhikode) accusing the family-run temples of nepotism and corruption.
A Temple is the abode of the devata. The Devata should be the primary person of significance in a temple. In the case of Parthasarathy temple, the people living in the area around the temple are the ones who have been taking care of the Lord and maintaining the temple. Can any politicians match their devotion and sadhana? According to the devotees of the temple, the issues escalated after one or two employees established a CITU (communist trade union) unit in the temple. Later another employee was reprimanded by the management for drinking and vomiting inside the temple. Also, there have been tensions following the installation of a Che Guevara poster in the temple premise. So reactions of the temple authorities against the apparent desecration of the temple premises with the symbols of an Abrahamic cult annoyed their local leaders. They retaliated by accusing the temple trust of corruption and mismanagement. Since the communists have power, they saw this as an opportunity to take over the temple under government control.
Here, the Hindus protested the undue interference by government and opposed the taking over in the court. Using police force, the government board officials took over the temple. The Devotees resisted using tooth and nail. Shall we call the devotees ignorant or apathetic? No. they have been fighting fiercely to protect the Lord and his properties. The temple once demolished by the barbarian Tipu has regained the glory due to the devotion of the temple administration society, who even purchased back around 126 cents of land which was occupied by various individuals. Would the politicians be so smitten by this temple had it not been wealthy? There have been hundreds of temples demolished by the jihadi forces of Tipu as well as the Moplah riots of 1921. The Kerala high court had ordered to recover thousands of hector of temple land usurped by various entities. We never saw such a valour or duty bound agility by the Malabar Devaswom board in such cases. According to Swami Bharati Maharaj, in this report, a total of 9,877.2 hectares of temple land under the Malabar Devaswom Board has been with encroachers. Not only in Malabar, but temple land has also been encroached upon by external entities all over Kerala. Since the secular government and the political parties are more interested in vote bank appeasement, the devatas, who were once the owners of the landed properties of the entire region remain shunned.
Though the temples of Malabar had been struck down by jihadi marauders, the nonchalant treatment towards the temples of Travancore was started by the British. Colonel John Munro, infamously known as ‘a committed Christian missionary as well as a ruthless colonialist’ initiated the ‘Secular politicking’ and social engineering experiments using the Kerala temples. The secular state under communists and socialists kept the temples under state control even after independence. The past 70 years accelerated the deracination of Hindus as well as degradation of Hindu temples. The secular government also attached the premier educational institutions and hospitals established by the Hindu rulers to the state, while allowing the organised religions to run their establishments and places of worship. Moreover, politicians and caste organisations colluded together to encourage nihilism in the post independent era. When the first communist government under EMS tried to bring in legislation on the State education policy, the church led vimochana samaram (liberation struggle) permanently blocked any intervention by the state in the affairs of Christian managed schools. All political parties rallied behind the church, including the Hindu caste organisation like NSS. However, none sought freedom for the institutions established by Hindu Kings and personalities. Six decades later, certain leaders of Hindu groups, as well as politicians, ask Hindus to reduce the expenses for temple rituals and festivals so that Hindus shall build schools and orphanages to strengthen the community like minorities.
What do devaswom boards do for the Hindu community other than ‘managing the temples? There has not been any transparency regarding the financial accounts of the offerings received in the temple ‘handled’ by the Government Board. The Travancore Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions (TCHRI) Act forbade the government from bypassing temple money for non-Hindu purposes. But the government-controlled Devaswam neither use the funds for the upkeep and propagation of Hindu religion and allied institutions or the benefit of Hindu community. The fund remains idle as a safe deposit for the political establishment from preventing empowerment of the majority community. Any debates on the wealth of the temples end up in a political dual between the seculars and so-called non-seculars. Communists cry Sangh Parivar fascism whenever any Hindu turn vocal against the blatant mistreatment of Hindu temples and the community in the state. During the Sabarimala case, honourable Supreme Court of India also had put forward the notion that funding from the consolidated fund of India makes temples an institution of the public character for which state is acting as a custodian. Such entitlement and transgression over the wealth of Hindu establishments after taking over all its wealth and making it public is nothing less than the despotism exhibited by the Christian colonials and Islamic invaders in the past. The secular state and its laws snatched the wealth of Hindu community and abandoned the community by crushing the culture and Institutions to decay.
Every talk about the freedom of temples from government control in Kerala ends up in political hullabaloo and name calling. What role should politicians who value secularism and votes from the minority communities more than the deity and temples have in the affairs of Hindu community? Regarding the Parthasarathy temple also blame games are going on based on the political affiliation of the Devaswom board and the government. There are plenty of people asking for stopping offerings to the temples and calling for a widespread boycott of prasadam from Sabarimala temple and other temples run by Devaswom Boards under government control. Who will be the loser if a person boycotts the prasadam of the Devata or restrict oneself from offering money for the festivals and rituals in the temple? Are money and the politics only factor in a temple? At least with my knowledge of the Kerala temples, temples are the abode of the devata. The tantri and other caretakers of the daily rituals for the devata should perform the ceremonies with utmost devotion and responsibility. He is taking care of the day-to-day affairs of a living entity. Nevertheless, the political Hindus, as well as secular and communist politicians, are treating the temples and the controversies about the temples like another political power struggle. Can a poojari who thinks his job of taking care of the Murthi is same as a mere waged nanny job, put his life for the devata? Can a temple with such mechanical priest workers thrive with glory and power? Those who call for a boycott of temple festivals and prasadam also should remember that our temples are not just prayer halls but the house of living centres of energy. What is needed in a temple is not any political flags or salary accounting machines but devotion and concern for the wellbeing of the Dharmic community and revival of the civilisation of our ancestors.
Featured Image: https://freemytemples.com
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. IndiaFacts does not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article.CALGARY -- A day after a contentious NHL ruling cleared him to play in Game 4, Vancouver Canucks winger Alex Burrows was felled by a mysterious injury Tuesday that could cost him much more than one game.
Burrows left the ice early during Tuesday’s optional game-day skate at the Scotiabank Saddledome. In obvious discomfort and hunched over, Burrows asked for help and was followed down the tunnel by team medical staff and trainers.
He spent more than an hour in the Vancouver dressing room area before being wheeled out on a stretcher and put into an ambulance, which transported him to a Calgary hospital.
The Canucks issued a statement shortly after that saying Burrows had suffered an upper-body injury and was being taken to hospital for precautionary reasons.
Later, Renaud Lavoie of TVA in Quebec reported that Burrows had suffered a broken rib.
If that’s the case, he won’t be back for the remainder of this best-of-seven series.
Burrows remained in hospital early Tuesday night, but the team expected him to be released later in the evening and hoped he would accompany them on their charter flight to Vancouver after the game.
The team would provide no other details on the injury.
Burrows’ injury occurred a day after the NHL head office decided it would not enforce a one-game suspension that Burrows faced for the instigator penalty he received for a late third-period fight with Flames defenceman Kris Russell.
Burrows has 19 goals and 34 points in 70 playoff games with the Canucks. Daniel Sedin (24) and Henrik Sedin (22) are the only players on the current Vancouver roster with more playoff goals.
Burrows had two assists in the first three games of this series with the Flames.
Burrows was one of two Canuck forwards to miss Tuesday night’s game. Centre Brad Richardson sat out with an undisclosed injury. Linden Vey and Brandon McMillan filled their spots in the lineup.
[email protected]; twitter.com/bradziemerAstronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2013 January 9
The Elusive Jellyfish Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright: Dieter Willasch (Astro-Cabinet)
Explanation: Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic view. Drifting near bright star Eta Geminorum, at the foot of a celestial twin, the Jellyfish Nebula is seen dangling tentacles from the bright arcing ridge of emission left of centre. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, IC 443 is known to harbour a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 100 light-years across.Simply including technology in your M&E plan does not lead to better M&E. This was the mantra as I started TechChange’s Tech for M&E online course in January. I heard about this online course from a colleague, and since Commonwealth of Learning is constructing a new six year strategic plan with a crucial M&E component, enrolling in the course was a no brainer. I enrolled and entered a community of more than 180 international development professionals from over 50 countries. All of us in the course agreed that technology is not the main focus for M&E but rather an important enabler to collecting, analyzing and presenting data.
At the end of the course, I reflected on things you must do to successfully integrate technology in M&E:
1. Establish trust between different stakeholders
When it comes to using technology for data collection, data security and data privacy are very important concerns. As stakeholders are requiring stronger evidence of impact and the use of data to make informed decisions, building a partnership based on trust among all stakeholders is one way to ensure regular flow of data. This includes having all confidentiality and transparency issues addressed with the stakeholders. All stakeholders need to have confidence in each other and in the process and know that their data will be protected, so there must be enough time and resources for engagement with the stakeholders.
2. Spend adequate time in preparation
Another key element is the level of preparation that is required for any technology use for M&E. The use of checklists, ICT in the different steps of a program/project cycle (diagnosis, planning, implement/monitor, evaluate, report/share lessons) and using an M&E expert are all important. All ethical and cultural issues need to be raised with the stakeholders and to the extent possible, addressed upfront.
It is important to ask these questions as you prepare your M&E plan:
How does M&E fit into the organization’s strategy and contribute to achieving the goal?
What training and support are required so the field workers are trained, assessing if they have good relationships with the community and what technology will enable best data collection?
What role will the field workers play to increase responses to qualitative and quantitative data collection?
How does one build confidence with all partners so that the quality of data collected enables better analysis and results?
The course checklist of having a quality M&E plan, a valid design to achieve the results and determining the appropriate technology is very helpful. It also emphasizes the importance of testing this with the stakeholders and identifies how to collect data at the different levels of the project and ensure there is a strong motivation to participate.
3. Consider a mixed method approach to data collection
The key focus of my work is in education, both formal and non-formal. So far, using quantitative data has been the norm for any analysis of education provision and its value to society. But mixed method data collection (quantitative and qualitative) is being increasingly used in education, especially to inform the teaching and learning processes. It allows for an understanding of classroom practices, the learner’s context and its impact on education, offering a more holistic view of whether a project has improved learner performance and learning.
Using ICT for mixed methods of data collection has made the processes easier and ensured easier data storage, tagging, and analysis. Mobile phones can be used to record, transmit and tag the data, and data storage platforms can provide easier access to data, aggregate the responses, and analyze.
The course points to four key questions when designing a mixed method evaluation:
At what stages/s does one use the mixed method?
Are qualitative and quantitative methods used sequentially or concurrently?
Will each method have equal weighting or will one method be more dominant?
Will the design be at a single or multi-level?
Just plugging technology in your M&E plan doesn’t do much, but there are steps you can take to integrate technology into M&E so that you can collect and analyze data better. These were the takeaways from the course for me, but the course offered many useful insights into the use of technology for M&E like valuable checklists, platforms that can be used, issues to address for the successful use of technology and a focus on mobile phones. I would recommend the course to anyone looking to learn more about the use of technology in monitoring and evaluation.
Author bio
Vis Naidoo is the Vice-President at Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver, Canada. He has spent much of the past 20 years involved in the development of open and distance learning systems, educational technology policy and the applications of technology to education – both in South Africa and internationally.It’s hard to imagine what Tyler Durden might have been like as a toddler but one former daycare worker endeavored to find out. A Virginia woman was found guilty of child abuse after starting what prosecutors called a “baby fight club.”
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Sarah Jordan was convicted of seven felonies and six misdemeanors after authorities say she forced children as young as one and two years old to fight, WUSA9 reports. "The teacher was making him the class bully made to fight. It was hard to hold back tears, emotional, it was very deep," concerned parent Blake Buckner said of his son.
Other offenses include making kids eat flaming hot Cheetos, calling one little girl ugly and spraying kids who were afraid of water in the face with a hose. When asked why she participated in the abuses that lasted eight months, Jordan said it was all for "entertainment."
She will be sentenced in May and faces a maximum 41 years in prison.About
We find a much greater purpose for sunglasses – from life’s adventures that are enjoyed with friends and family to those of life’s daily experiences enjoyed by locals around the world. They are the lenses through which locals will connect life’s daily experiences. SOLAR eyewear is currently under development and will supply affordable, stylish and functional sunglasses to people of all ages anywhere around the Globe.
SOLAR Eyewear will be in business to provide sunglasses and eyewear to the adult and children’s online market local and abroad. There will be a wide variety of styles accommodating all types of needs from daily wear, sport ear & party fun wear. In the children’s market we have identified that there is a need for more marketing awareness of quality.
SOLAR Sunglasses will use an ecommerce website/platform to sell and distribute our products. We will target the general public at the start of trade and work on supplying other retail outlets B2B. We will build on product awareness through online media channels such as YouTube, blogging, Facebook & Instagram.
SOLAR Eyewear will create a brand that people will want to buy that will perceive value and inelasticity in the market place. The brand will be subconsciously speak to buyer’s wants, feelings & most importantly their lifestyles. Our brand will reflect a slightly high-end cool quality product.When I made the cookie batter for this recipe and tasted it, it reminded me of the truffles my mum would make when I was younger, she would make coffee and walnut though and they would be huge truffles that she would keep on a plate in the fridge, unguarded, silly mistake! They lasted all but 30 seconds once we knew they were in there!
So it came to me to make some truffles as well using a similar recipe to the cookie dough (recipe to come later once I’ve taken some pics!) but let’s talk about the cookies. These were scrummy, I deliberately took them out the oven while they were still quite soft and just let them cool so I got a lovely consistency, that nice soft chewy cookie. This was my first time using brazil nuts and I’m loving them, so much so, they might be making a regular appearance in cookies and energy bars in the future. Just now there are 6 of them in the fridge that I coated in left over melted chocolate from the truffles, waste not want not I say!
We watched a movie last night, Disconnected, it was a good film but scary. Not in the gruesome sense, more the reality of it, the reflection of growing up in today’s “online” society where most of us spend our time on social networking sites and the dangers they can present to the vulnerable. Some gritty realism for a Sunday night!
Coffee & Brazil Nut Chocolate Chip Cookies (vegan with gluten free option)
MyInspiration Feel The Difference Range
Makes 6 Cookies – Ready in 30 minutes
1 cup rye flour (for Gluten Free, use Buckwheat or your favourite GF brand)
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
½ cup oats
2 tbsp vegan margarine
3 tbsp maple syrup
½ tbsp strong coffee mixed with 1 tbsp water
8 Brazilnuts roughly chopped
¼ cup vegan chocolate chips roughly chopped
Method
Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius (356 degrees fahrenheit) and line a baking tray.
In a mixing bowl cream together the margarine, maple syrup and coffee then add in the remaining ingredients and fold the mixture together.
Take heaped tablespoons of the mixture and roll into a ball, pressing to flatten slightly and pop on the baking tray, gently press them with your fingers to flatten them out to about 5mm high.
Pop in the oven for 12 -15 minutes. Cool completely, then devour!The Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly voiced admiration for the Russian president
WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama on Tuesday slammed Donald Trump’s “flattery” of Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “unprecedented” and “out of step” with both Democrats and rank-and-file Republicans.
The Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly voiced admiration for the Russian president – notably calling him a better leader than Obama – and advocated a US rapprochement with Moscow.
Trump’s support for Russia comes at a time of escalating tensions, as Washington and Moscow lock horns over the Syria conflict, and US officials accuse Russia of directing cyber attacks aimed at interfering in November’s election.
TV host in Trump’s lewd remarks video leaves NBC
“Mr Trump’s continued flattery of Mr Putin and the degree to which he appears to model many of his policies and approach to politics on Mr Putin is unprecedented in American politics,” Obama told a joint news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
The US leader said he had pursued a strategy of “constructive” engagement with Russia – be it on the conflict in Ukraine, or Syria -and refuted Trump’s assertion that the current administration failed to stand up to Moscow on the world stage.
“Any characterization that somehow we have improperly challenged Russian aggression or have somehow tried to encroach on their legitimate interests is just wrong,” Obama said.
TV host in Trump’s lewd remarks video leaves NBC
Under the next president, he insisted, the United States must continue to “call out” Moscow over behavior that violates international norms.
“The bottom line is that we think that Russia is a large, important country with a military that is second only to ours – and has to be a part of the solution on the world stage rather than part of the problem,” Obama said.
“But their behavior has undermined international norms, and international rules, in ways that we have to call them out on, and anybody who occupies this office should feel the same way.”
TV host in Trump’s lewd remarks video leaves NBC
“We can’t go around talking about human rights or freedom of the press or democracy or freedom of religion, or non-discrimination or basic laws on war or the sovereignty or territorial integrity of countries, no matter how small, and then extol the virtues of somebody who violates those principles,” Obama said.
“Mr Trump rarely surprises me these days,” the president added.
“I’m much more surprised and troubled by the fact that you have Republican officials who historically have been adamantly anti-Russian and, in fact, have attacked me for even engaging them diplomatically now supporting and in some cases echoing his positions.”
Read full storySteal This Book is a book written by Abbie Hoffman. Written in 1970 and published in 1971, the book exemplified the counterculture of the sixties. The book sold more than a quarter of a million copies between April and November 1971.[2]
The book is, in the style of the counterculture, mainly focused on ways to fight the government, and against corporations in any way possible. The book is written in the form of a guide to the youth. Hoffman, a political and social activist himself, used many of his own activities as the inspiration for some of his advice in Steal This Book.[3]
Origins [ edit ]
The main author of the book, Abbie Hoffman, was one of the most influential and recognizable American activists of the late-1960s and early-1970s, gaining fame with his leadership in anti–Vietnam War protests. Aside from Hoffman, several people were involved in the compilation of Steal This Book including Izak Haber, who is listed as "co-conspirator", and Bert Cohen who is listed as "accessory after the fact" on the cover. Tom Forcade was not credited in the book, but Hoffman later admitted that he had taken part in some of the editing before being replaced by Bert Cohen.[4][5] Steal This Book was written in the climate of the counter-culture, in which opposition to tradition and government was rampant, and experimentation with new forms of living was encouraged. When the book was published, it took hold among the new left, especially among students on college campuses, such as Brandeis University, where Hoffman had been a student.[6]
Content [ edit ]
Steal This Book is divided into three sections, "Survive!", "Fight!" and "Liberate!". Each section has several sub-chapters. As the book has aged, the specific details of the various techniques and advice Hoffman gives have become largely obsolete for technological or regulatory reasons, but the book iconically reflects the hippie zeitgeist.
"Survive!" describes techniques of obtaining "free" things through legal and extra-legal means to survive "on the run." It includes chapters on how to acquire food, clothing, furniture, transportation, land, housing, education, medical care, communication, entertainment, money, drugs, and other assorted items and services. Suggestions include the use of slug coins, taking advantage of government and church hand-outs, and a variety of shoplifting techniques.
The section "Fight!" includes chapters on starting an underground press, guerrilla radio, guerrilla television, what to bring to a demonstration that’s expected to be violent, how to make an assortment of home-made bombs, first aid for street fighters, legal advice, how to seek political asylum, guerrilla warfare, gun laws, and identification papers. This section also includes advice on such topics as growing cannabis, living in a commune, and obtaining a free buffalo from the Department of the Interior.
The third section is "Liberate!", and focuses on local solutions in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The book also includes an appendix that lists "approved" organizations and other books worth stealing.[7]
The "Pig Empire" [ edit ]
In the book, Hoffman referred to America as the "Pig Empire" and stated that it was not immoral to steal from it: In fact, Hoffman wrote, it was immoral not to do so.[8] The term was picked up by the Yippies, and was widely used by what became known as the "Woodstock Nation".[9]
Cultural response [ edit ]
Steal This Book was rejected by at least thirty publishers before it was able to get into print; an editor at Random House publishing commented that he would not even let his own child read it. Hoffman was eventually forced to make a publishing company of his own, Pirate Editions, in order to sell the book, with Grove Press as the distributor. The book initially received no reviews and was not advertised in any of the major newspapers.
Once it got into print, Steal This Book had widespread readership and became a bestseller mainly through word of mouth. News sources did not want to or were afraid to advertise the book, and many regional distributors and bookstores were unwilling to carry the book, citing its subversive nature and the literal encouragement of theft the title provided.[10]
On the success of the book, Hoffman was quoted as saying, "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List." He would eventually write several other books, including Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America, Revolution For the Hell of It, and The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman.
Hoffman would not respond to accusations that he had plagiarized the book[clarification needed], as claimed in an article by Izak Haber in Rolling Stone magazine (No. 92, 10 September 1971), entitled "How Abbie Hoffman Won My Heart and Stole Steal This Book";[11] Haber is acknowledged in the book as having done a great deal of the research.
See also [ edit ]When Carolina Panthers running back Fozzy Whittaker proposed to his now wife, he did it in an epic way. Whittaker bought the beluga whale experience at San Antonio Sea World and had the whale join in when he popped the question.
“I just wanted to do something kind of outside of the box,” Whittaker told ESPN. “I love animals, and I love being around animals and getting her incorporated into an animal-themed engagement was something I always wanted to do….It worked out great in the end because she said yes.”
Whittaker recently got married to that girl of his dreams and they both looked great in their white wedding attire.
They even choreographed a dance to Uptown Funk.
His teammate fellow running back Jonathan Stewart attended the wedding as well.
Whittaker and his wife looked like they had the loving support of both friends and family. We wish them every happiness in their marriage.A hotter, drier climate is worsening the imbalance between water supply and rising demand in seven Western states where 40 million people depend on the Colorado River, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday after completion of a three-year study.
The study projects a future of falling river flows, shrinking snowpack, wilting crops and an intensifying struggle for wildlife.
Millions of people would be affected by shortages, Salazar said.
“We are in a very troubling trajectory,” Salazar said in a phone conference with journalists and senior officials. “We need to reduce our demand. We also need to look at increasing our water supply through practical, doable, common sense measures such as re-use.”
State water authorities who helped fund and conduct the study have included multi-billion dollar options they are considering to import water into the Colorado River Basin. Examples: diversion of Missouri River water to the Denver area and beyond, and desalination so that oceans could be tapped.
Salazar called the river diversion — as well as ideas submitted to float icebergs south and import water on tankers — politically and technically infeasible. More promising options, he said, are wider re-use of water, conservation programs of the sort that cut consumption in Denver and Albuquerque, and desalination as promising.
“There is no silver bullet that will solve the issue,” he said.
But with collaboration, he saw hope of avoiding legal wars and eventually putting people in sync with their arid environment.
“We can do this,” he said.
The Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study concluded that climate change will reduce the long-term average of 15 million acre-feet in the river by 9 percent to 13.7 million acre-feet. It found that, within 50 years, the Western states’ annual water deficit will reach 3.2 million acre-feet — but could be as high as 8 million acre feet, depending on population growth. (An acre-foot has been regarded as the amount needed to sustain two families of four for a year.)
Such a deficit adds to the complications resulting from the miscalculation of the average flow of the river by about 1 million acre-feet in the interstate compact that for a century has guided allocation of river water to the states.
Overall, the study reflects growing recognition by the federal Bureau of Reclamation that climate change has serious consequences and confirms ecosystem limits that scientists and people along the river and its headwaters have been observing for years.
Denver residents rely heavily on the Colorado River Basin for water, which is diverted under the Continental Divide through a system of tunnels to the city. Denver Water manager Jim Lochhead, who also chairs the Front Range Water Council, swiftly responded to the federal findings on behalf of metro utilities.
“While this is a critical issue for Colorado, we have time to approach solutions thoughtfully,” Lochhead said. “We don’t need to pursue drastic solutions in the short-term.”
The seven western states, he said, “can work within the framework of existing law and institutions” to ensure sufficient water supplies.
Conservation groups hailed the study as a positive step toward dealing with potentially ruinous problems. Some questioned state estimates of future demand, saying states are motivated to secure federal funding for major development projects.
“It’s critically important that planners start to account for the new normal — a hotter, drier Colorado River Basin,” said Michael Cohen of the Pacific Institute. “Now is the time for Reclamation and the basin states to embrace the proven approaches that have already reduced demand for Colorado River water.”
The conservationists called the proposed Missouri River pipeline ludicrous and construction of five desalination plants far too expensive. The study presents alternative proposals developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy, Western Resource Advocates, Pacific Institute and Nuestra Rio that emphasize wider efforts to save water. Average daily use in Albuquerque has been reduced to 70 gallons a day. Denver has reached 85 a day, down from 104 in 2001.
By far the most river water is siphoned for growing food.
EDF regional director Dan Grossman said creation of water banks and better systems for sharing and re-using water appear most promising and feasible.
“The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the dry West and what makes it possible for us to live in this spectacular region,” he said. “We can’t keep bleeding the river.”
But states increasingly are taking an all-of-the-above approach including development of new water sources. “Imbalances of this magnitude are of great concern to us,” said Kay Brothers of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, serving as a leader for state interests in the study.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Mike Connor said he’ll convene states, tribes and others early next year “to take a hard look at some of those proposals.”
Back in 1992, the federal government built a desalination plant near Yuma, Ariz., for $250 million. It was supposed to treat salty agricultural runoff so that water could be pumped back into the Colorado River. But for years this plant has been seen as a white elephant bog |
"food company masquerading as a tech company."
The company made deliberate actions, like hiring former Google employees, touting Khosla as an investor, and putting Bill Gates on its website, to bolster its image as tech company, a former employee said. As a result, it has likely raked in higher funding rounds and valuations than a small natural-food production company normally would, former employees said. It's currently valued at $300 million.
But the science behind Hampton Creek is lacking, according to several former employees. One went as far as to describe it as a "cult of delusion."
One example cited by former employees is Hampton Creek's database of plants. Hampton Creek proudly talks about having thousands of plant samples in a database that it categorizes and analyzes.
Former employees we spoke with said Hampton Creek exaggerated the number of plant samples it had analyzed. One person said that the actual number was below 1,000. Another said, "when they were saying 4,000, it was probably closer to 400. At least 5x less than it was claimed, and that's conservatively."
This may be a case of semantics, as Hampton Creek includes the results of third-party research in its database. But some employees felt uncomfortable with how Hampton Creek portrayed its role in the data analysis.
Hampton Creek's offices. Business Insider
Former employees also grumble about Hampton Creek's initial innovation.
The first version of Hampton Creek's flagship product, the Just Mayo mayonnaise substitute, was not initially developed in house. Hampton Creek outsourced early development to Mattson, a food-tech company in Silicon Valley, according to several former employees.
"We just threw money at them, and they came back in the first week with a formulation. It's just food starch with pea protein," a former employee said. "Josh [Tetrick] got this, and he promoted it like it was an amazing invention."
Tetrick has mentioned working with Mattson in interviews, though not often.
Pea protein is a common substitute for vegan food; you can buy it on Amazon. The company has since developed new versions of its mayo.
CEO Josh Tetrick holds a species of yellow pea used to make Just Mayo, a plant-based mayonnaise, at Hampton Creek Foods in San Francisco. Eric Risberg/AP Images Fast production timelines put pressure on how much the company could develop and test products in certain situations, like how the products would behave when shipped overseas.
When the mayo was launched, it would turn brown when added to seafood salads or completely break down in other recipes, former employees said. The company didn't know this until after it shipped.
When it was time to launch the shelf-stable version of the mayo, like the kind you see in stores, two former employees say the scientists had only one month for stability testing — even though the company was guaranteeing a six-month shelf life.
"We didn't know how the product was going to react to being on the shelf," one of these people told us.
"It was unsettling. The last few months I worked there I wouldn't sleep very well. There were certain projects that made me uncomfortable on ethical ground," one of these former employees said. "The idea that we understood how it worked was completely off base."
This never put customers in danger — the mayo has been updated and the shelf life turned out OK, the former employees we spoke with said. Over time, though, the former employees came to believe that the company was less concerned about the science and more about delivering a product as fast as possible to meet whatever contract was due, which disappointed many of the former employees we spoke with.
"The entire time I was there we weren't aware of how it emulsified," a former employee said, referring to the eggless mayonnaise. "We weren't able to prove how it works. Josh liked to convey this notion that we had a great understanding of the science."
Another former employee said: "It was supposed to be a science research company, and it's not a science research company, and that's a very big disappointment."
Slippery ethics
An ingredient label from Hampton Creek's website on August 4, 2015. Hampton Creek Several former employees say the company stretched the truth on ingredient statements because it had promised samples in a tight turnaround.
The mislabeling was never in manufactured products but in samples sent out, they said. One example cited multiple times: The company allegedly added preservatives to the mayo product so that it could last while being shipped overseas, but claimed the product was natural without preservatives.
Former employees said the company also debated how to label ingredients and knowingly used more general terms so the products appeared more natural. These employees told us that, compared to other food startups and larger companies they had worked for previously, it was always a battle to put the correct label on Hampton Creek products.
One illustrative example: Former employees said that the lemon juice used in the substitute mayonnaise is actually a concentrate, and, per FDA food regulations, concentrations need to be listed as such on the labels.
As of August 4, the ingredient label on Hampton Creek's website and on jars of the product that Business Insider bought at Safeway and Whole Foods still said "lemon juice" and did not list that it was from concentrate.
A person familiar with the company says the labels have been changed to accurately reflect that there is concentrate. We have seen emails from Tetrick telling his team to change the labels in March of this year.
"It certainly happened more than a handful of times where there were definitely issues that made a lot of people uncomfortable," a former employee said.
All the former employees who spoke with Business Insider said Hampton Creek's CEO Josh Tetrick knew they were uncomfortable with these practices, but the conversations were overlooked in favor of pleasing investors, fulfilling contracts, and moving fast.
"Once it's instilled in you, that's kind of how you operate. He certainly put it in there that you have to do what it takes to get that," a former employee said.
A jar of Just Mayo purchased on August 5 with "Lemon Juice" on the ingredient label. Business Insider Tetrick's lack of scientific background — he's a Fulbright Scholar with a degree in law — combined with a need to be in control resulted in tense situations, former employees said. They believed that some of what Tetrick asked employees to do could not be done on a scientific basis — an answer Tetrick allegedly did not like.
"Any pushback that we gave about his choices being illogical and unfounded in science ended up putting us on shaky ground," a former employee said.
Employees knew their time was coming when they stopped being a part of the media tours and investor meet-and-greets.
"There are certain people who consistently delivered news he has liked. The sun shines on them. That's just how it goes," a former employee said.
Trouble in the office
The slippery ethics extended to other parts of the company, too.
We spoke with two former employees who claimed they caught Morgan Oliveira, now Hampton Creek's director of communications, in a file cabinet swapping out the second page of their employment contracts. The new page of the contract changed the severance package from three months to three weeks, the employees said.
When Oliveira was confronted, she allegedly said that Tetrick told her to do it, the former employees said. Business Insider has seen what appears to be a photograph of the false contract page that includes both Tetrick's and Oliveira's signatures.
After Oliveira was confronted, the company allegedly reverted to the original, longer severance package, the employees said.
One source at the company said: "Josh said he was sorry in front of the company," telling everyone, "I f------ up and we will make sure to get better." Several other sources backed this up.
But two former employees who were with the company at the time dispute that Tetrick apologized in front of the company.
Tetrick's relationships with female employees also created an uncomfortable environment for employees — and a risk to the company, according to our sources.
Josh Tetrick. Hampton Creek Business Insider has seen text messages from 2013 in which Tetrick worried early on that he would lose the company and support from investors if an affair with one woman on staff got out or resulted in a legal trouble.
"Khosla would hang me — it is a huge lawsuit" one text message sent by Tetrick in 2013 said.
The text messages also showed that Tetrick thought he could not fire this woman. Instead, the woman received promotions, multiple former employees said.
"It just went along with the whole 'nobody was rewarded on work ability and efforts' thing," a former employee said, reflecting widely held beliefs among the former employees we spoke to. "It was all if you were sleeping with him or if you came from money and have influential ties."
However, Hampton Creek pointed us to another person who joined the company last year who disputed that Tetrick works this way. "I can attest, undeniably, along with many others that this is an organization that promotes based on merit only. I have never seen or heard anything to make me think differently."
In February 2015, two months after the company announced a $90 million funding round, the startup had a round of layoffs. Including those who left with a severance offer, the company reduced its staff by about one-fifth.
Several former employees who left in February confirmed their departures but would not comment further because of their severance agreements.
In a high-profile incident, Hampton Creek investor Ali Partovi joined the company in September 2014 as chief strategy officer. Nine days later, Partovi left.
A statement from Tetrick to The Wall Street Journal at the time confirmed that Partovi had left the company, but would stay on as an advisor to the startup. Partovi later told The New York Times that he "resigned completely" and was not working with Hampton Creek "in any official capacity."
Partovi left because he was "ethically uncomfortable with the false representations about its finances and its technology," said a former employee with knowledge of the situation.
Crafting an image, not a workplace
When investors, clients, or media visited the company, some scientists would be asked to run experiments on cool-looking machines or use liquid nitrogen to dramatic effect — even if it had nothing to do with their work, a former employee says.
It was all to create an appearance of a hardworking lab, even though it distracted from the actual research that needed to be done, former employees said. Employees were also coached on what to say and how to avoid certain words like "plant-based" or "vegan." If an investor was arriving early, employees had to come in to make sure the office looked like it was bustling.
"When people came in there, when [TV personality and chef] Andrew Zimmern came in, he made it appear like we were doing so much. But really, we didn't have anything," a former employee said.
It was Zimmern who wrote: "Mark my words, HCF founder Josh Tetrick will win a Nobel Prize one day. You heard it here first."
Beneath the meticulously crafted mirage of the company, former employees complained of hazardous and pressure-filled work environments.
The company's first office was essentially a converted garage (an old motorcycle club) and a second-story house turned into a lab and kitchen.
"There were a lot of corners to cut to do [work in the building]. You have hazardous materials that the biotech people need to use for research. There's not the appropriate facilities to conduct that sort of research," another former employee said.
Hampton Creek's dog. Business Insider
Tetrick's dog, Jake, roamed through the office and was there during our visit in May 2015. While pets in Silicon Valley offices are almost a norm, in a food lab, some former employees viewed it as a problem. The dog had a taste for cookie dough, for example, and ate several containers of it that were being used for shelf-life experiments.
"Luckily, at least that I know of, nobody ever found dog hairs in the samples, but the possibility was always there," a former employee said.
Big dreams, and big problems
No one denies that Tetrick and his vision for the company are ambitious. Many CEOs in Silicon Valley cut corners and push their teams hard to "move fast and break things," in the famous words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Hampton Creek has hustled to push out new products, from ranch dressings to sriracha mayo to pancake mix. It has tried to capitalize on its media-darling status and take advantage of events like a bird-flu outbreak in poultry farms to promote the company's products.
It was Tetrick's charisma and his promises for the future of food, noted in most news articles about the company, that propelled it — and in the end, may have compromised it.
Still, the former employees we spoke with take a less charitable view of Tetrick's hustle. He opted to push out bad or underdeveloped products, a former employee said, rather than telling a company they missed a deadline because the product wasn't ready.
Josh Tetrick does a taste test with Om Malik and Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch's Demo Day in 2013. Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch "You have to be very ambitious and charismatic to be able to talk people out of millions of dollars," said a former employee. "True to form, that's what he did. He could talk you out of thinking the sky was blue."
Former employees claim that the company is rapidly burning through cash. The savings of swapping out the egg — less than 10% of what is in mayo — might not be enough to overcome the costs and support the science.
Aside from former Hampton Creek scientist Dan Zigmond, none of the former employees we spoke with were surprised by any of these claims. Some even had written records that they kept during their times just in case someone reached out.
For one former employee, the airing of complaints about Hampton Creek has been "a long time coming." Another said they had been "waiting for this, forever."More than seven years ago a group of Americans traveled to Siberia to buy a pair of Russian Mi-17 helicopters for the CIA's post-9/11 clandestine operations in Afghanistan. As with many "black" programs, the contract had elements of craziness: Contracting officials paid the multimillion-dollar contract on a credit card at a local El Paso bar and then used the credit card rebate to redecorate their office; the team traveled under the guise of being private contractors; and the charter crew transporting the group abandoned the team in Russia in the middle of the night.
Ultimately, a five-year investigation into the mission led to the conviction of the Army official in charge and the contractor who bought the helicopters on charges of corruption. The two men, currently in federal prison, are appealing their convictions.
At first glance, it's a simple case: A few days after returning from Russia, the contractor paid off the second mortgage of the Army official in charge of the mission. Prosecutors argued that the contractor, Maverick Aviation, was unprepared for the mission, and the Army official helped cover up the problems in exchange for a payoff. The defendants at trial were barred from mentioning the CIA, Afghanistan or even 9/11.
In an article for The New York Post, this author looks at what really happened in Siberia based on over two dozen interviews with people involved in the mission and trial. It's a story, that in some respects, is very different than the portrait painted by the government at trial.
One interesting comparison not mentioned in the article is worth noting in light of recent purchases of Russian helicopters: In 2001, Maverick Aviation was paid $5 million for two freshly overhauled Mi-17s and spare parts, as well as travel and logistics for team of Army/CIA personnel, and got the helicopters out of Russia in under 30 days. In 2008, ARINC, a major U.S. defense contractor, was paid $322 million dollars to buy 22 Russian helicopters under a U.S. foreign military sales contract.
Guess how many helicopters ARINC has delivered to Iraq after 18 months? Zero.
Check out the full story at the New York Post.
[Photo: U.S. Air Force. The photograph, taken in March 2002, shows a CIA helicopter in Afghanistan. The tail number is traceable back to Maverick Aviation.]
See Also:“It’s going on big time,” said Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources. “There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.”
These new bets by big investors could bolster food production at a time when the world needs more of it.
The investors plan to consolidate small plots of land into more productive large ones, to introduce new technology and to provide capital to modernize and maintain grain elevators and fertilizer supply depots.
But the long-term implications are less clear. Some traditional players in the farm economy, and others who study and shape agriculture policy, say they are concerned these newcomers will focus on profits above all else, and not share the industry’s commitment to farming through good times and bad.
“Farmland can be a bubble just like Florida real estate,” said Jeffrey Hainline, president of Advance Trading, a 28-year-old commodity brokerage firm and consulting service in Bloomington, Ill. “The cycle of getting in and out would be very volatile and disruptive.”
By owning land and other parts of the agricultural business, these new investors are freed from rules aimed at curbing the number of speculative bets that they and other financial investors can make in commodity markets. “I just wonder if they need some sheep’s clothing to put on,” Mr. Hainline said.
Mark Lapolla, an adviser to institutional investors, is also a bit wary of the potential disruption this new money could cause. “It is important to ask whether these financial investors want to actually operate the means of production — or simply want to have a direct link into the physical supply of commodities and thereby reduce the risk of their speculation,” he said.
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Grain elevators, especially, could give these investors new ways to make money, because they can buy or sell the actual bushels of corn or soybeans, rather than buying and selling financial derivatives that are linked to those commodities.
When crop prices are climbing, holding inventory for future sale can yield higher profits than selling to meet current demand, for example. Or if prices diverge in different parts of the world, inventory can be shipped to the more profitable market.
“It’s a huge disadvantage to not be able to trade the physical commodity,” said Andrew J. Redleaf, founder of Whitebox Advisors, a hedge fund management firm in Minneapolis.
Mr. Redleaf bought several large grain elevator complexes from ConAgra and Cargill last year for a long-term stake in what he sees as a high-growth business. The elevators can store 36 million bushels of grain.
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“We discovered that our lease customers, major food company types, are really happy to see us, because they are apt to see Cargill and ConAgra as competitors,” he said.
The executives making such bets say that fears about their new role are unfounded, and that their investments will be a plus for farming and, ultimately, for consumers.
“The world is asking for more food, more energy. You see a huge demand,” said Axel Hinsch, chief executive of Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, which is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil with the backing of big institutional investors, including AIG Investments.
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“What this new investment will buy is more technology,” Mr. Hinsch said. “We will be helping to accelerate the development of infrastructure, and the consumer will benefit because there will be more supply.”
Financial investors also can provide grain elevator operators the money they need to weather today’s more volatile commodity markets. When wild swings in prices become common, as they are now, elevator operators have to put up more cash to lock in future prices. John Duryea, co-portfolio manager of the Ospraie Special Opportunity Fund, is buying 66 grain elevators with a total capacity of 110 million bushels from ConAgra for $2.1 billion. The deal, expected to close by the end of June, also will give Ospraie a stake in 57 fertilizer distribution centers and the barges and ships necessary to keep them supplied with low-cost imports.
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Maintaining these essential services “helps bring costs down to the farmers,” Mr. Duryea said. “That has to help mitigate the price increases for crops.”
Mr. Duryea of the Ospraie fund dismissed the idea that financial investors, with obligations to suppliers and customers of their elevators and fertilizer services, would put their thumb on the supply-demand scale by holding back inventory to move prices artificially.
“It is not in our best interests for anyone to be negatively affected by what we do,” he said.
Perhaps the most ambitious plans are those of Susan Payne, founder and chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, based near London.
Emergent is raising $450 million to $750 million to invest in farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where it plans to consolidate small plots into more productive holdings and introduce better equipment. Emergent also plans to provide clinics and schools for local labor.
One crop and a source of fuel for farming operations will be jatropha, an oil-seed plant useful for biofuels that is grown in sandy soil unsuitable for food production, Ms. Payne said.
“We are getting strong response from institutional investors — pensions, insurance companies, endowments, some sovereign wealth funds,” she said.
The fund chose Africa because “land values are very, very inexpensive, compared to other agriculture-based economies,” she said. “Its microclimates are enticing, allowing a range of different crops. There’s accessible labor. And there’s good logistics — wide open roads, good truck transport, sea transport.”
The Emergent fund is one of a growing roster of farmland investment funds based in Britain.
Last October, the London branch of BlackRock introduced the BlackRock Agriculture Fund, aiming to raise $200 million to invest in fertilizer production, timberland and biofuels. The fund currently stands at more than $450 million.
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Braemar Group, near Manchester, is investing exclusively in Britain. “Britain is a nice, stable northwestern European economy with the same climate and quality of soil as northwestern Europe,” said Marc Duschenes, Braemar’s chief executive. “But our land is at a 50 percent discount to Ireland and Denmark. We just haven’t caught up yet.“
Europe, like the United States, is facing mandated increases in biofuel production, he said, and cropland near new ethanol facilities in the northeast of England will be the first source of supply. “No one is going to put a ton of grain on a boat in Latin America and ship it to the northeast of England to turn it into bioethanol,” he said.
For Gary R. Blumenthal, chief executive of World Perspectives, an agriculture consulting firm in Washington, the new investments by big financial players, if sustained, could be just what global agriculture needs — “where you can bring small, fragmented pieces together to boost the production side of agriculture.”
He added: “Investment funds are seeing that this consolidation brings value to them. But I’m saying this brings value to everyone.”© ANP
© Mats van Soolingen
© ANP
Amsterdam wordt steeds slimmer. Het aantal leerlingen in het basis- en voortgezet onderwijs neemt toe en het onderwijsniveau stijgt. Sinds 2007 is het aantal vwo-adviezen met 55 procent toegenomen en het aantal havo-adviezen met 22 procent. Het aantal vmbo-adviezen bleef stabiel. De hoogste citoscores werden behaald in Centrum (gemiddeld 540,1); de laagste in Zuidoost (gemiddeld 530,5). Met een gemiddelde score van 534,6 scoort Amsterdam een fractie lager dan het landelijk gemiddelde (535).Over weinig zaken zijn Amsterdammers zo eensgezind als over het wegknippen van fietsen door de gemeente. Gemeentelijke maffia, is een veelgehoord commentaar. Toch daalde het aantal fietsen dat naar het gemeentelijke depot werd gebracht in 2014 met 6,9 procent tot 68.680. Zijn er dan eindelijk meer fietsparkeerplekken? Of snappen Amsterdammers eindelijk dat je je fiets niet overal mag neerkwakken? De cijfers geven op deze vragen helaas geen antwoord. Toch geven de statistieken uitgesplitst per stadsdeel wel een vermoeden: de prioriteiten in de stadsdelen buiten het centrum liggen elders. Zo daalde het aantal weggeknipte hinderlijk en/of foutgeparkeerde fietsen in Noord van 398 naar 13. De kans dat er niet meer op wordt gehandhaafd lijkt voordehandliggender dan dat fietsen in Noord ineens keurig worden geparkeerd. Ook in West en Zuid werden minder fietsen weggeknipt. Andersom steeg het aantal weggeknipte fietsen in Oost juist met bijna 40 procent (2760 in 2014 tegenover 1989 in 2013).Amsterdam wordt steeds schoner, althans: het wagenpark. Medio 2015 waren er 3100 elektrische personenauto’s in Amsterdam, een verdubbeling ten opzichte van het voorgaande jaar. Ten opzichte van 2011 is dat 40 keer zo veelt; toen waren er slechts 74 elektrische personenauto’s.Dat wil echter niet zeggen dat de lucht in Amsterdam schoner wordt – integendeel. In totaal hebben auto’s in Amsterdam in 2014 3,5 miljard kilometer afgelegd. De hoeveelheid kooldioxide die werd uitgestoten kwam in 2014 op 840 kiloton, een stijging van 5 procent ten opzichte van 2008. Het vrachtverkeer en bussen zijn verantwoordelijk voor 18 procent van de CO2-uitstoot, terwijl ze slechts 6 procent van het aantal gereden kilometers voor hun rekening nemen.Toch blijft het aantal scooters, de grote vervuilers, ook flink stijgen. In 2010 waren er nog 44.490 voertuigen met een bromfietskenteken in Amsterdam, inmiddels zijn dat er 56.234, een toename van 26 procent. Vooral snorscooters zijn populair. Daarvan rijden er op dit moment zo’n 30.000 rond, terwijl dat er in 2008 nog slechts 8000 waren. Niet voor niets heeft het stadsbestuur ervoor gestreden om snorscooters van fietspaden – die door de toename van het aantal fietsers toch al steeds drukker zijn geworden – te weren. Met succes.Not so much. iStock
This story is being co-published with the Genetic Literacy Project.
On Thursday, Science published a large-scale study on the relationship between bees and a pesticide, neonicotinoids. It got quite a bit of pickup in the press—Nature touted that the “Largest-Ever Study of Controversial Pesticides Finds Harm to Bees,” while the BBC explained that a “Large-Scale Study ‘Shows Neonic Pesticides Harm Bees.’ ” The Scientist said the same, with “Field Studies Confirm Neonicotinoids’ Harm to Bees,” and PBS followed suit with “Neonicotinoid Pesticides Are Slowly Killing Bees.”
These headlines seem to reflect a line included in the abstract of the study itself: “These findings point to neonicotinoids causing a reduced capacity of bee species to establish new populations in the year following exposure.”
Sure sounds like a bummer for the bees. One problem: The data in the paper (and hundreds of pages of supporting data not included but available in background form to reporters) do not support that bold conclusion. No, there is no consensus evidence that neonics are “slowly killing bees.” No, this study did not add to the evidence that neonics are driving bee health problems.
Unfortunately, and predictably, the overheated mainstream news headlines also generated a slew of even more exaggerated stories on activist and quack websites where undermining agricultural chemicals is a top priority (e.g., Greenpeace, End Times Headlines, and Friends of the Earth). The takeaway: The “beepocalypse” is accelerating. A few news outlets, such as Reuters (“Field Studies Fuel Dispute Over Whether Banned Pesticides Harm Bees”) and the Washington Post (“Controversial Pesticides May Threaten Queen Bees. Alternatives Could Be Worse.”), got the contradictory findings of the study and the headline right.
But based on the study’s data, the headline could just as easily have read: “Landmark Study Shows Neonic Pesticides Improve Bee Health”—and it would have been equally correct. So how did so many people get this so wrong?
This much-anticipated two year, $3.6 million study is particularly interesting because it was primarily funded by two major producers of neonicotinoids, Bayer Crop Science and Syngenta. They had no involvement with the analysis of the data. The three-country study was led by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, or CEH, in the U.K.—a group known for its skepticism of pesticides in general and neonics in particular.
The raw data—more than 1,000 pages of it (only a tiny fraction is reproduced in the study)—are solid. It’s a reservoir of important information for entomologists and ecologists trying to figure out the challenges facing bees. It’s particularly important because to date, the problem with much of the research on neonicotinoids has been the wide gulf between the findings from laboratory-based studies and field studies.
Some, but not all, results from lab research have claimed neonics cause health problems in honeybees and wild bees, endangering the world food supply. This has been widely and often breathlessly echoed in the popular media—remember the execrably reported Time cover story on “A World Without Bees.” But the doses and time of exposure have varied dramatically from lab study to lab study, so many entomologists remain skeptical of these sweeping conclusions. Field studies have consistently shown a different result—in the field, neonics seem to pose little or no harm. The overwhelming threat to bee health, entomologists now agree, is a combination of factors led by the deadly Varroa destructor mite, the miticides used to control them, and bee practices. Relative to these factors, neonics are seen as relatively inconsequential.
I’ve addressed this disparity between field and lab research in a series of articles at the Genetic Literacy Project, and specifically summarized two dozen key field studies, many of which were independently funded and executed. This study was designed in part to bridge that gulf. And the devil is in the interpretation.
According to the lead researcher Richard Pywell of the CEH:
We’ve shown for the first time negative effects of neonicotinoid-coated seed dressings on honeybees and we’ve also shown similar negative effects on wild bees. … Our findings are a cause for serious concern.
I agree that there might be cause for serious concern if the studies had shown convincing evidence of negative effects. But a review of the data—by the GLP and independent scientists—concludes differently. The European study focused on three types of bees placed in fields across three countries—Germany, Hungary, and the U.K. As Jenna Gallegos noted in her particularly nuanced analysis in the Washington Post:
[T]he results were not as clear-cut as experts had hoped. … The differences between bees in treated or untreated fields were largely insignificant, and many of the bees in both groups died before they could be counted.
Overall, the data collected from 33 different fields covered 42 analyses and 258 endpoints—a staggering number. The paper only presented a sliver of that data—a selective glimpse of what the research, in its entirety showed.
What patterns emerged when examining the entire data set? Here is a chart assembled from data supplied to the research funders by the CEH (but not released in the published study) with the findings summarized (light green indicates “no impact,” red points to “negative impact,” and dark green suggests neonics had a positive impact).
Dr. Peter Campbell Sr., environmental specialist and head of product safety research collaboration, Syngenta
In sum, of 258 endpoints, 238—92 percent—showed no effects. (Four endpoints didn’t yield data.) Only 16 showed effects. Negative effects showed up 9 times—3.5 percent of all outcomes; 7 showed a benefit from using neonics—2.7 percent.
As one scientist pointed out, in statistics there is a widely accepted standard that random results are generated about 5 percent of the time—which means by chance alone we would expect 13 results meaninglessly showing up positive or negative.
Norman Carreck, science director of the International Bee Research Association, who was not part of either study, noted, the small number of significant effects “makes it difficult to draw any reliable conclusions.”
When pressed, even Pywell acknowledged the conflicting data.
The data were rife with other contradictions. Worker bees and drones in Britain struggled to survive the winter, but the same variety of wild bees increased in Germany. Egg production also increased in Germany but fell in Hungary.
The health problems seemed to have little to do with pesticides. A fungal infection ran roughshod over Hungary’s bees. In Britain, they were decimated by the deadly and unrelenting Varroa destructor mite—even the controls suffered losses 400 percent greater than the national average. These catastrophic loss numbers suggest the field experiments may have been poorly constructed—raising doubts about the standard of research for the entire research project.
The broader context of the bee health controversy is also important to understand; bees are not in sharp decline—not in North America nor in Europe, where neonics are under a temporary ban that shows signs of becoming permanent, nor worldwide. Earlier this week, Canada reported that its honeybee colonies grew 10 percent year over year and now stand at about 800,000. That’s a new record, and the growth tracks the increased use of neonics, which are critical to canola crops in Western Canada, where 80 percent of the nation’s honey originates.
Managed beehives in the U.S. had been in steady decline since the 1940s, as farm land disappeared to urbanization, but began stabilizing in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the introduction of neonicotinoids. They hit a 22-year high in the last count.
Genetic Literacy Project
Global hive numbers have steadily increased since the 1960s except for two brief periods—the emergence of the Varroa mite in the late 1980s and the brief outbreak of colony collapse disorder, mostly in the U.S., in the mid-2000s.
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
So the bees, contrary to widespread popular belief, are actually doing all right in terms of numbers, although the Varroa mite remains a dangerous challenge. But still, a cadre of scientists well known for their vocal opposition to and lobbying against neonics have already begun trying to leverage the misinterpretation of the data. “In the light of this new study, continuing to claim that use of neonicotinoids in farming does not harm bees is no longer a tenable position,” David Goulson, a University of Sussex bee biologist, known in anti-neonic circles as a scientist-for-hire, told the U.K.’s Science Media Centre.
But other, less ideologically invested scientists were far more circumspect. “We learn again: It’s complicated,” said biologist Tjeerd Blacquière of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The mixed findings are likely to intensify ongoing debates about restricting or banning the compounds, with both sides claiming vindication.
The study, while problematic and contradictory in its results, is not without value. It has underscored that it’s possible or even likely that exposure to miticides or insecticides—including neonics, which like all insecticides are designed to target insects—increases the vulnerability of bees to disease and other threats. But that could be said about any chemical, including organic treatments. In Europe, where neonics have been banned since 2013 (based almost entirely on disputed lab studies), farmers have turned to alternatives that are far more toxic to both bees and humans, such as Lorsban and pyrethrins. Canola production is down, and bee health has shown no appreciable change. Farmers are in open revolt, and bees are arguably the worse for it.
Within hours of the release of the study, advocacy groups opposed to intensive agricultural techniques had already begun weaponizing the misreported headlines.
“It shows that industry claims that neonicotinoids do not harm bees at field-relevant concentrations are baseless,” said a Greenpeace senior scientist, a marine biologist with no background in entomology.
“Pressure mounts for a complete ban on neonicotinoid pesticides as landmark study confirms these chemicals are harming bees,” wrote Friends of the Earth.
But viewing the date from the European study in context makes it even more obvious that sweeping statements about the continuing beepocalypse and the deadly dangers to bees from pesticides, and neonicotinoids in particular, are irresponsible. That’s on both the scientists, and the media.Photo
Forestry, done in the right place the right way and for the right reasons, can be an important source of materials, jobs and wildlife habitat.
But are forests an appropriate fuel source for power plants? *
After five months of reporting, John Upton and others at Climate Central have put together a compelling and infuriating package on the growing flow of wood pellets from the Southeast, many from hardwood forests, to European power plants, where the result is touted as carbon-neutral energy and helps country’s meet emissions |
0.4 (Average) Nero Wave Editor 12.0.4 (Fast) Nero Wave Editor 10 (Accurate) Nero Wave Editor 10 (Save As) Nuendo 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Nykiel iSRC 1.4 Ocenaudio OpenMPT (Blackman) OpenMPT (Kaiser) OpenMPT (Polyphase) Pro Audio Converter from Mark V Apps Pro Tools 2018 Pro Tools HD 10.3.5 Pro Tools HD 7.2 Pro Tools LE 8.0.3 Pure Music 2.0.1 Pyramix 6.2.3 (Offline and Realtime) Pyramix 7 (Apodizing Filter) Pyramix 8.1.8 (Linear Phase) Pyramix 8.1.8 (Minimum Phase) Pyramix 8.1.8 (Apodizing Filter) Pyramix 10 QuickTime Pro 7.6.6 r8brain Free 1.9 r8brain Free r8brain Pro Linear Phase r8brain Pro Minimum Phase r8brain Pro Linear Phase (Ultra Steep) r8brain Pro Minimum Phase(Ultra Steep) Reaper 1 Reaper 2 ("Extreme" Preset) Reaper 2 ("IIRx2" Preset) Reaper 2.55 ("Better" Preset) Reaper 2.55 ("Best" Preset) Reaper 2.55 ("Extreme" Preset) Reaper 3.52 Reaper 4 (Extreme) Reaper 4.731 (Extreme) Reaper 5.01 (new Extreme preset, 768 pt sinc) Reaper 5.51 Propellerhead Reason 9.5 Propellerhead Reason 8.3 Propellerhead Reason 7 Propellerhead Reason 6.5 Propellerhead Reason 6 Renoise 3 (Precise) Renoise 3 (Realtime) Renoise 2.8.0 (cubic) Renoise 2.8.0 (sinc) ResampAudio (AFsp Library) atten=180 Sadie Sadie 6 Samplitude 9 Samplitude 11 (Ultra High 1) Samplitude 11 (Ultra High 2) SawStudio 4.9 Secret Rabbit Code 0.1.8 (Best) Secret Rabbit Code 0.1.3 (Best Sinc) Secret Rabbit Code 0.1.2 (Best Sinc) Secret Rabbit Code 0.1.2 (Linear) Secret Rabbit Code 0.1.2 (ZOH) Sequoia 8 (UH-2) Sequoia 9.01 (UH-2) Sequoia 10 (UH-2) Sequoia 11 (UH-2) Sequoia 12 (UH-2) Sequoia 13 (UH-2) SFZ Free Signalyst 2.9.1 (Sinc) Signalyst 2.9.1 (MinPhase) Signalyst 2.9.1 (ShortPolySinc) Signalyst (Sinc) Signalyst (MinPhase) Signalyst (ShortPolySinc) Simple Rate Converter SIR2 Smarc 3 Audio Ease Snapper 1.0.11 Sonar 6 Sonar 8.5 Sonar X3 Sonar 23.10 Sonic HD (Steep) Sonic HD (Gentle) Sonic HD (Gentlest) Sony Vegas 7.0 Sony Vegas 9.0 Soundblade 1.0 SoundForge 9.0 No Anti-Aliasing SoundForge 9.0 Anti-Aliasing Sound Forge Pro 1.0.23 (Mac) Soundhack Sound Sculptor Pro 3.1 Sound Sculptor Pro 3.0.2 Sound Sculptor Pro 3.0 SoundStudio 3.5.7 Sound Studio 4.6.4 SoX 14.4 High Quality SoX 14.4 High Quality (Aliasing Enabled) SoX 14.4 VHQ Linear Phase SoX 14.4 VHQ Intermediate Phase SoX 14.4 VHQ Minimum Phase Spark XL 2.8.2 SSRC SSRC High Precision Studio One 3 - Presence XT Studio One 3.52 Studio One 2.51 Studio One 2.05 Switch Sound File Converter Plus 4.43 TASCAM Hi-res Editor 1.03 Tolvan Data XII Sopran (Insane) Tolvan Data XII Sopran (Super) Traktor Pro 2.6.4 Triumph 2.5.1 Goodhertz SRC (LinPhase) Triumph 2.5.1 Goodhertz SRC (MinPhase) Triumph 2.0 TwistedWave 1.11.3 Waveburner 1.2 Waveburner 1.6 Wave Editor 1.4.6 (Ultra Steep LP) Wave Editor 1.4.6 (Steep No Aliasing) Wave Editor 1.4.6 (Gentle) Wavelab 5 Internal Wavelab 5 Resampler 192 Wavelab 6 Internal Wavelab 6 Crystal Resampler Wavelab 8.5 Crystal Resampler WaveLab 9.5.10 Build 17 NHC WavePad WavePurity Professional 7.61 WaveShop 1.0 Creative WaveStudio 7 Wavosaur 1.0.1.0 Wavosaur 1.0.3.0 Linear Wavosaur 1.0.3.0 Band Limited Weiss Saracon 1.6 Weiss SFC2 Windows 10 DS resampler Xiph.org Speex 1.2rc1 (Quality 10) XiSRC 1.0.4 XRECODE 3 [64-bit] 1.77 SWR XRECODE 3 [64-bit] 1.77 SOX Zita Resampler ZSystems z-3srcA team of disease hunters has announced the discovery of a deadly new virus, found in a remote village in South America. Experts say the virus – named Chapare – is probably limited to a small swathe of Bolivia, but urbanisation and climate change could expand its range.
“These pathogens will markedly increase the risk of outbreaks with significant loss of human life,” says Stefan Kunz, a virologist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, who was not part of the study.
On 4 January 2003, a young farmer and tailor from the Bolivian village of Samuzabeti developed fever and headache. Over the following days, the 22-year-old’s muscles and joints started throbbing, and he began vomiting and haemorrhaging blood. Two weeks later, he was dead.
Mystery virus
A local doctor, Simon Delgado, had no idea what had killed the patient; tests for known infectious diseases such as dengue and yellow fever turned up negative. As a precaution, Delgado sent specimens to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.
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There, researchers in the agency’s special pathogens branch unpacked the sample in their most secure laboratory.
“When you suspect hemorrhagic fever, for safety reasons you have to work in a lab with high containment,” explains CDC’s Pierre Rollin. He and his colleagues donned ventilated full-body suits when working on the deadly virus – the same precautions taken to study Ebola.
A new beast
The CDC laboratory confirmed they were dealing with something never seen before. Tests on even the most obscure pathogens all turned up negative, Rollin says. When the researchers squirted the patient’s serum sample onto human cells growing in a Petri dish, a virus started multiplying. Rollin’s team dubbed it Chapare, after the victim’s home province.
Further tests confirmed that this Chapare virus was a new beast, part of a deadly family called arenaviruses. In West Africa, the related Lassa virus infects about 300,000 to 500,000 each year, killing 5000, according to the World Health Organization. The South American forms are rarer, but far deadlier.
“Quite often it’s a severe disease, maybe in 30% of cases you have a fatal outcome,” Rollin says.
There have been no human cases of Chapare virus since. Researchers at CDC hope to identify the virus’s host – probably a rodent – and determine the virus’ prevalence.
Charles Fulhorst, an arenavirus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, says Chapare is the tip of the iceberg. Many new species of virus lurk in South America – and perhaps North America. “Just when you think you know what’s out there, another one pops out,” he says.
Rollin agrees and calls for more lab and field work to get a handle on Chapare. “There are lot of arenaviruses we don’t know,” he says. “Are they going to be the new pandemic virus that’s going to wipe out the planet? I don’t think so, but they could be a local problem.”
Journal reference: PLoS Pathogens (DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1000047)Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved
https://facebook.com/NBC4Columbus/videos/10154571574077751/
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, MA (AP) - Normal operations resumed at an Air Force base that was partially evacuated early Thursday, when potentially explosive material was detected during a routine inspection of a moving truck.
In a statement, the 66th Air Base Group said the truck had been cleared and personnel who had been ordered to leave Hanscom Air Force base earlier in the day were being allowed to return.
"However pallets from the truck, which contain potentially concerning residue, have been removed and will be taken to a specialized facility for testing," the statement continued.
The truck was stopped at about 9 a.m. at one of the entrances to the base, which is about 20 miles west of Boston.
There was no indication from authorities what type of material might have caused the concern. Several buildings were evacuated, and state police set up a 1,500-foot (457-meter) perimeter around the truck. An exit leading to the base from another route was also closed.
Bomb squad, Air Wing at Hanscom AFB, potentially suspicious truck at gate. Area near gate has been evacuated. Will update when appropriate. - Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) July 6, 2017
By early afternoon, TV news video showed officers removing items from the cargo area of the vehicle.
The truck is owned by Big Foot Moving & Storage. A woman who answered the phone at the company's Acton headquarters said, "We don't know what's going on."
No injuries were reported.
Hanscom Field, a civilian airport adjacent to the base, remained in operation throughout the incident, according to the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates the commercial facility.
The Air Force base has been in existence since 1941 and has served as a major military research center.You may have been wondering what this “hidden job market” is all about.No, there is not a secret website or group that will give you access. The hidden job market simply refers to unadvertised positions. Most people, when looking for their next opportunity during a career transition, rely solely on applying to jobs online, one of the least-effective job search strategies. Savvy job seekers know that their chances of landing a new role increase exponentially if they tap into the hidden job market.
How do you access this hidden job market? Through creative networking strategies!
Begin by honing your “story” and professional value proposition.Come up with a way to clearly and conversationally describe who you are and what makes you unique. Your story can follow a basic narrative formula. You, as the protagonist, have goals. There have been challenges or roadblocks to reaching some of these goals. In the face of these challenges, what have you specifically done to achieve success and what did success look like (i.e. results)? Find a succinct, memorable way to explain your professional journey and use as much quantified information as possible to give the accomplishments context ($, %, #).
Armed with those talking points, talk to everyone you know, put yourself out there and facilitate conversations. Set up coffee meetings and lunch dates.Don’t sit at home and wait for the jobs to find you.Get out there and make things happen through effective networking.Also, create a target list of organizations and begin networking your way to connections within those organizations.Ask your family, friends and first-tier network to facilitate helpful introductions.
Cold contacting can work
After you have exhausted your introduction options, consider reaching out directly to decision-makers and influencers in your target organizations.A well-written email or a thoughtful phone call can go a long way to connecting you to the people who know about these unadvertised positions.
A successful cold contact is often a matter of your correspondence reaching the desk of a decision-maker at precisely the right time. It may feel like luck, but it’s actually shrewdness and hard work in disguise. If you are especially proficient, some companies might create a position just to hire you. It happens.
Leverage social media
Assuming your profile is appropriate, follow your target companies on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.Companies sometimes post opportunities on their social media sites that aren’t yet posted elsewhere.Also, join groups that people in your field are in and become active in the discussion boards — gaining visibility can open up doors. If others in your field know that you’re searching for a new challenge and you’ve proven yourself to be a valuable professional, they may come to you when they hear of job openings.
It is important to remember that these activities take time and effort, but the payoff can be huge.I have written already a few times about pension liabilities,for instance here and here.
With IFRS 1, pension liabilities have become a bigger topic, as now pension liabilities are “on balance sheet” and changes are recorded in the comprehensive income statement. As I have already written, for some companies this had quite drastic effects, like Lufthansa and ThyssenKrupp which saw large parts of their equity disappear.
As I had a lot discussions about pension liabilities lately, I think it is a good idea trying to summarize some important issues for analyzing pension liabilities.
However one cautious remark: I am not a pension actuary. There might be incorrect or too simplified statements later on and I will not dive into the details of pension modelling. I will try to come up with simplified approaches in order to better understand and value pension liabilities.
How are these pension liabilities created?
Most companies have some sort of pension program for their employees. Fundamentally, there are 2 different ways to offer pension benefits:
1) Defined contribution plans
Here, the company only promises to invest (directly or indirectly) a certain amount on behalf of the employee on a regular basis. The employee retains the risk of the investment outcome. In those cases, there is no pension liability recorded.
2) Defined benefit plans / obligations (DBO)
In these cases, the employer promises the employee a certain payment per month after he has retired, depending on certain factors such as length of employment, salary, inflation etc. The risk of not being able to pay this is retained by the employer, the company has therefore to book a liability for the estimated (and discounted) potential cash outflows in the future. One might ask, why any employer is choosing this model anyway. There are two reasons. First, for instance in Germany, only DBO plans are tax-deductible. Secondly, DBO plan allows the company two retain the money in the company. Defined contribution plans have to be invested into “external” assets.
Funded vs. unfunded DBOs
In many jurisdictions, the employer can either set up a dedicated fund and invest into financial assets which hopefully cover future obligations, or he can keep the money in the company and fund operational assets.
Accounting wise, the liabilities are in both cases the same, but for funded plans, only the net amount (liabilities – fair value of assets) has to be shown on the balance sheet. Fro more “gory” accounting details, KPMG has a comprehensive guide here.
What are pensions liabilities economically?
I have written about that before: Pension liabilities are economically senior debt. Why? Not paying out due amounts for pensions will cause a bankruptcy filing in many jurisdiction. There is no legal way to delay or lower payments, a lesson which was learned the hard way for instance at General Motors. In many jurisdictions, unfunded pension liabilities do not have priority on assets, so one should assume that they are “pari passu” to senior debt, adding them to Enterprise Value.
In jurisdictions like the UK, where pension trustees can claim payments if there is a deficit, one could argue that pension liabilities are “more senior” than senior debt which is quite important as we see later.
So where is the problem?
If a company issues a senior bond, we know exactly how much money the company has to pay both, in interest and principal. With pension, it is very different. We can only estimate future payments, as the amount paid out depends on a couple of assumptions such as:
– how will salaries develop for active employees (pension contributions are usually a percentage of monthly salaries)
– how long will active employees work for the company?
– how long will pensioners actually live?
– what inflation will we experience (in most plans, payouts are linked to inflation)?
So in a first step, a clever actuary has to estimate those parameters and then, in a second step he/she will generate a future cashflow pattern. Finally, in a third step, the actuary or accountant will then discount those payments using a certain rate to come up with the net present value which is the required value.
Despite that there is no clear rule how to set many of the parameters, there is one big issue with those liabilities: The are really long term. Depending on the plan and the participants, payments will have to be made 50 years or more into the future. So slight changes in parameters, especially for inflation and discount rates will have a large effect on the value of the liability.
Discount rates – technical aspects & Yield curves
IFRS requires to discount the projected outflows with a single “high-grade corporate bond rate”. In practice, most companies use the yields of available, long term AA rated corporate bonds.
Discounting with a single yield however is only a proxy and works best for “bullet maturity” cash flows. Pension liabilities do not have a bullet maturity, but look much more like an amortizing loan. For such cash flows, the correct way is to use appropriate zero yields from a full yield curve. In practice one would bootstrap zero yields from the yield curve on an annual basis and the discount the annual cash flows with the respective rate.
If the interest rate curve is flat, there is not a big difference in this approach. If the yield curve however is steep, there can be a BIG DIFFERENCE.
Lets look at the following example, extracted from the 2012/2103 ThyssenKrupp annual report. I took the projected cash outflows of Thyssenkrupp for the first 10 years and discounted them with both, the official discount rate and an assumed zero curve (year 5-10 were anonly given as a total):
Cashout IFRS rate Zero rates AA NPV stated NPV zero 2013/2014 -546 3.5% 0.25% -527.54 -544.64 2014/2015 -526 3.5% 0.45% -491.03 -521.30 2015/2016 -528 3.5% 0.69% -476.23 -517.22 2016/2017 -520 3.5% 1.03% -453.15 -499.12 2017/2018 -517 3.5% 1.24% -435.30 -486.10 2018/2019 -498 3.5% 1.6% -405.45 -453.12 2019/2020 -498 3.5% 1.8% -391.74 -439.89 2020/2021 -498 3.5% 2.01% -378.49 -425.05 2022/2023 -498 3.5% 2.21% -365.69 -409.39 2023/2024 -498 3.5% 2.43% -353.33 -392.02 Total -5129 -4,278 -4,688 Difference: -409.91 in% 9.58%
So for those first 10 years, the NPV based on the simple approach is -9.5% lower (and the liability underestimated) than using the correct approach with zero yields. This is clearly a necessary adjustment to be made. The adjustment is of course subject to yield curve steepness and cash flow profile, but as a rule of thumb, a general 10% upwards adjustment might not be unreasonable in any case.
Key take away: If the yield curve is steep as it is now, with a 0% floor on the short end, one should adjust pension liabilities upward no matter what one assumes as the final discount rate. Currently, a 10% general upwards adjustment for the yield curve effect looks like an appropriate adjustment. If interest rise on the long end but stay at 0% in the short, even larger adjustments are justified.
In the next post I will take a deeper look on which discount rates to use anyway and inflation.“Stage Two” of the BP Gulf of Mexico Environmental Disaster
[Image]
By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom
Since BP’s catastrophic Macondo Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the Obama Administration has granted nearly 300 new drilling permits [1] and shirked plans to plug 3,600 of more than 28,000 abandoned wells, which pose significant threats to the severely damaged sea.
Among those granted new permits for drilling in the Gulf, on Friday Obama granted BP permission to explore for oil in the Gulf, allowing it to bid on new leases that will be sold at auction in December.
Reports Dow Jones:
“The upcoming lease sale, scheduled for Dec. 14 in New Orleans, involves leases in the western Gulf of Mexico. The leases cover about 21 million acres, in water depths of up to 11,000 feet. It will be the first lease auction since the Deepwater Horizon spill.” [2]
Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey objected to BP’s participation in the upcoming lease sale, pointing out that:
“Comprehensive safety legislation hasn’t passed Congress, and BP hasn’t paid the fines they owe for their spill, yet BP is being given back the keys to drill in the Gulf.” [Likely means H.R. 501]
Environmental watchdog, Oceana, added its objection to the new permits, saying that none of the new rules implemented since April 2010 would have prevented the BP disaster.
“Our analysis shows that while the new rules may increase safety to some degree, they likely would not have prevented the last major oil spill, and similarly do not adequately protect against future ones.” [3]
Detailing the failure of the Dept. of Interior’s safety management systems, Oceana summarizes:
Regulation exemptions (“departures”) are often granted, including one that arguably led to the BP blowout;
Economic incentives make violating rules lucrative because penalties are ridiculously small;
Blowout preventers continue to have critical deficiencies; and
Oversight and inspection levels are paltry relative to the scale of drilling operation.
Nor have any drilling permits been denied [4] since the BP catastrophe on April 20, 2010, which still spews oil today [5].
28,079 Abandoned Wells in Gulf of Mexico
In an explosive report at Sky Truth, John Amos reveals from government data that “there are currently 24,486 known permanently abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and 3,593 ‘temporarily’ abandoned wells, as of October 2011.” [6]
TA wells are those temporarily sealed so that future drilling can be re-started. Both TA wells and “permanently abandoned” (PA) wells endure no inspections.
Over a year ago, the Dept. of Interior promised to plug the “temporarily abandoned” (TA) wells, and dismantle another 650 production platforms no longer in use. [7] At an estimated decommissioning cost of $1-3 billion [8], none of this work has been started, though Feds have approved 912 permanent abandonment plans and 214 temporary abandonment plans submitted since its September 2010 rule. [9]
Over 600 of those abandoned wells belong to BP, reported the Associated Press last year, adding that some of the permanently abandoned wells date back to the 1940s [10]. Amos advises that some of the “temporarily abandoned” wells date back to the 1950s.
“Experts say abandoned wells can repressurize, much like a dormant volcano can awaken. And years of exposure to sea water and underground pressure can cause cementing and piping to corrode and weaken,” reports AP.
Leaking abandoned wells pose a significant environmental and economic threat. A three-month EcoHearth investigation revealed that a minimum of 2.5 million abandoned wells in the US and 20-30 million worldwide receive no follow up inspections to ensure they are not leaking. Worse:
“There is no known technology for securely sealing these tens of millions of abandoned wells. Many—likely hundreds of thousands—are already hemorrhaging oil, brine and greenhouse gases into the environment. Habitats are being fundamentally altered. Aquifers are being destroyed. Some of these abandoned wells are explosive, capable of building-leveling, toxin-spreading detonations. And thanks to primitive capping technologies, virtually all are leaking now—or will be.” [11]
Sealed with cement, adds EcoHearth, “Each abandoned well is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. The triggers include accidents, earthquakes, natural erosion, re-pressurization (either spontaneous or precipitated by fracking) and, simply, time.”
As far back as 1994, the Government Accountability Office warned that there was no effective strategy in place to inspect abandoned wells, nor were bonds sufficient to cover the cost of abandonment. Lease abandonment costs estimated at “$4.4 billion in current dollars … were covered by only $68 million in bonds.” [12]
The GAO concluded that “leaks can occur… causing serious damage to the environment and marine life,” adding that “MMS has not encouraged the development of nonexplosive structure removal technologies that would eliminate or minimize environmental damage.”
Not only cement, but seals, valves and gaskets can deteriorate over time. A 2000 report by C-FER Technologies to the Dept. of Interior identified several different points where well leaks can occur, as this image (p. 26) reveals. To date, no regulations prescribe a maximum time wells may remain inactive before being permanently abandoned. [13]
“The most common failure mechanisms (corrosion, deterioration, and malfunction) cause mainly small leaks [up to 49 barrels, or 2,058 gallons]. Corrosion is historically known to cause 85% to 90% of small leaks.”
Depending on various factors, C-FER concludes that “Shut-In” wells reach an environmental risk threshhold in six months, TA wells in about 10-12 years, and PA wells in 25 years. Some of these abandoned wells are 63 years old.
The AP noted that none of the 1994 GAO recommendations have been implemented. Abandoned wells remain uninspected and pose a threat which the government continues to ignore.
Agency Reorganization
The Minerals Management Service (MMS) was renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) last May after MMS drew heavy fire for malfeasance, including allowing exemptions to safety rules it granted to BP. An Office of Inspector General investigation revealed that MMS employees falsified inspection reports, and accepted gifts from the oil and gas industry, including sex, drugs and trips. [14]
Not only was nothing was done with the 1994 GAO recommendations to protect the environment from abandoned wells, its 2003 reorganization recommendations [15] were likewise ignored. In a June 2011 report on agency reorganization in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill, the GAO reports that “as of December 2010,” the DOI “had not implemented many recommendations we made to address numerous weaknesses and challenges.” [16]
Reorganization proceeded. Effective October 1, 2011, the Dept. of the Interior split BOEMRE into three new federal agencies: the Office of Natural Resources Revenue to collect mineral leasing fees, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) “to carry out the offshore energy management and safety and environmental oversight missions.” The DOI admits:
“The Deepwater Horizon blowout and resulting oil spill shed light on weaknesses in the federal offshore energy regulatory system, including the overly broad mandate and inherently conflicted missions of MMS which was charged with resource management, safety and environmental protection, and revenue collection.” [17]
BOEM essentially manages the development of offshore drilling, while BSEE oversees environmental protection, with some eco-protection overlap between the two agencies. [18]
Early this month, BSEE Director Michael R. Bromwich spoke at the Global Offshore Safety Summit Conference in Stavanger, Norway, sponsored by the International Regulators Forum. He announced a new position, Chief Environmental Officer of the BOEM:
“This person will be empowered, at the national level, to make decisions and final recommendations when leasing and environmental program heads cannot reach agreement. This individual will also be a major participant in setting the scientific agenda for the United States’ oceans.” [19]
Bromwich failed to mention anything about the abandoned wells under his purview. Out of sight, out of mind.
Cost of the Macondo Blowout
On Oct. 24, the GAO published its final report of a three-part series on the Gulf oil disaster. [20] Focused on federal financial exposure to oil spill claims, the accountants nevertheless point out that, as of May 2011, BP paid $700 million toward those spill claims out of its $20 billion Trust established to cover that deadly accident. BP and Oxford Economics estimate the total cost for eco-cleanup and compensatory economic damages will run to the “tens of billions of dollars.” [21]
On the taxpayer side, the GAO estimates the federal government’s costs will exceed the billion dollar incident cap set by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (as amended). As of May 2011, agency costs reached past $626 million.
The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund’s income is generated from an oil barrel tax that is set to expire in 2017, notes GAO.
With Monday’s District Court decision in Louisiana, BP also faces punitive damages on “thousands of thousands of thousands of claims.” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier denied BP’s appeal that might have killed several hundred thousand claims, among them that clean up workers have still not been fully paid by BP. [22]
Meanwhile, destroying the planet for profit continues unabated. It’s time to Occupy the Gulf of Mexico: No more oil drilling in our food source.
Notes:
[1] U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, “Status of Gulf of Mexico Well Permits,” n.d. http://www.bsee.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Permits/Status-of-Gulf-of-Mexico-Well-Permits.aspx
[2] Tennille Tracy, “US Govt Approves First BP Deepwater Exploration Plan in US Gulf Under New Rules,” Dow Jones News Wire, 24 Oct. 2011. Reproduced at http://www.firstenercastfinancial.com/news/story/45441-us-govt-approves-first-bp-deepwater-exploration-plan-us-gulf-under-new-rules
[3] Michael Craig and Jacqueline Savitz, “False Sense of Safety: Safety Measures Will Not Make Offshore Drilling Safe,” Oceana, 20 Oct. 2011 http://na.oceana.org/sites/default/files/reports/OffshoreSafetyReport_Oceana_10-18-11.pdf
Also see Oceana’s online appendix showing an analysis of each new safety measure’s effect on safety. http://na.oceana.org/sites/default/files/OnlineAppendix_SafetyReport_Oceana_10-19-11.pdf
[4] U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, “Application for Permit to Drill (APD) Approval Process and Definitions,” n.d. http://www.bsee.gov/uploadedFiles/APD_Facts_and_Definitions_BSEE.pdf
[5] See, e.g.:
David Edwards, “New evidence of a massive oil slick near Deepwater Horizon site,” Raw Story, 1 Sept. 2011. http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/new-evidence-of-a-massive-oil-slick-near-deepwater-horizon-site/
Frank Whalen, “Oil Still Gushing from Bp Well in Gulf,” American Free Press, 2 Sept. 2011. http://americanfreepress.net/?p=341
Dahr Jamail, “Environmental Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: The Escalation of BP’s Liability,” Global Research, 5 Oct. 2011. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26947
Luis R. Miranda, “Gulf of Mexico Sea Floor Unstable, Fractured, Spilling Hydrocarbons,” The Real Agenda, 10 Oct. 2011. http://real-agenda.com/2011/10/10/gulf-of-mexico-sea-floor-unstable-fractured-spilling-hydrocarbons/
[6] John Amos, “Over 28,000 Abandoned Wells in the Gulf of Mexico,” 18 Oct. 2011. http://blog.skytruth.org/2011/10/abandoned-wells-in-gulf-of-mexico.html
[7] U.S. Dept. of the Interior, “Interior Department Issues ‘Idle Iron’ Guidance,” 15 Sept. 2010. http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/Interior-Department-Issues-Idle-Iron-Guidance.cfm
[8] Siobhan Hughes, “Plugs Ordered on Idle Wells: Move to Permanently Seal Sites in Gulf Could Cost Billions but Create New Work,” Wall Street Journal, 16 Sept. 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703743504575493782591743858.html
[9] U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, “Idle Iron Update,” n.d. (pp. 9-16) https://www.noia.org/website/download.asp?id=47290
[10] Jeff Donn and Mitch Weiss, “Gulf of Mexico hides 27,000 abandoned wells,” Associated Press, 7 July 2010. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20100707-Gulf-of-Mexico-hides-27-000-1068.ece
[11] Steven Kotler, “Planet Sludge: Millions of Abandoned, Leaking Oil Wells and Natural-Gas Wells Destined to Foul Our Future,” EcoHearth, 17 Aug. 2011. http://ecohearth.com/eco-zine/green-issues/1609-abandoned-leaking-oil-wells-natural-gas-well-leaks-disaster.html
[12] U.S. Government Accounting Office, “Offshore Oil and Gas Resources: Interior Can Improve its Management of Lease Abandonment,” (GAO/RCED-94-82) May 1994. http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat3/151878.pdf
[13] J.R. Nichols and S.N. Kariyawasam, “Risk Assessment of Temporarily Abandoned or Shut-in Wells,” C-FER Technologies, Oct. 2000. http://www.boemre.gov/tarprojects/329/329AA.pdf
[14] U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Office of Inspector General, “Investigative Report – Island Operating Company, et al.,” 31 March 2010. http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/052510ts1.pdf
[15] U.S. Government Accounting Office, “Results-Oriented Cultures: Implementation Steps to Assist Mergers and Organizational Transformations,” (GAO-03-669) 2 July 2003. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-03-669
[16] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Oil and Gas: Interior’s Restructuring Challenges in the Aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill,” (GAO-11-734T) 2 June 2011. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11734t.pdf
[17] U.S. Dept. of the Interior, “Interior Department Completes Reorganization of the Former MMS,” 30 Sept. 2011. http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/Interior-Department-Completes-Reorganization-of-the-Former-MMS.cfm#
[18] U.S. Dept. of the Interior, untitled document distinguishing the areas of responsibility between the BOEM and the BSEE. n.d. http://www.bsee.gov/uploadedFiles/A%20to%20Z%20Guide%20web%20version%281%29.pdf
[19] U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, “BSEE Director Delivers Remarks at the International Regulators Forum 2011 Global Offshore Safety Summit Conference,” 4 Oct. 2011. http://www.boemre.gov/ooc/press/2011/press1004.htm
[20] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Actions Needed to Reduce Evolving but Uncertain Federal Financial Risks,” (GAO-12-86), 24 Oct. 2011. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d1286.pdf
[21] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Preliminary Assessment of Federal Financial Risks and Cost Reimbursement and Notification Policies and Procedures,” 9 Nov. 2010. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d1190r.pdf
[22] Sabrina Canfield, “Judge Denies BP Appeal That Might Have Killed Thousands of Claims,” Courthouse News Service, 24 Oct. 2011. http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/10/24/40864.htm
.Hey everyone! Rick, aka TheHadou, was kind enough to drop by to give us some details about the upcoming Combo Breaker |
knows that the French squad are still a team in transition, but is certain their relationship will blossom in the long run… Q: Nico, 2017 will be a new chapter in your Formula One career. What hopes are you carrying into the new season? Nico Hulkenberg: This year I believe the cards will be reshuffled a little due to the regulation changes, so it could be a good opportunity for us. We at Renault are working hard to catch up so we can put ourselves in a position where we can score some points. Of course people are excited about my move to Renault - so am I. In fact I am very excited and super motivated to start to work with my new team. But at the same time we have to be careful not to expect too much right away: we have to work hard - harder and better to catch the train back up.
After my long ‘marriage’ with Force India I felt I needed a new girlfriend! Nico Hulkenberg
Q: What was the main reason for leaving Force India? Did you need to get out of your comfort zone and the routine that comes with staying in the same place for too long? NH: Exactly - after my long ‘marriage’ with Force India I felt I needed a new girlfriend! (Laughs). Jokes aside, I am deeply grateful to Force India and left on an absolute high note. We had the most successful year in the history of Force India: P4 in the constructors’ championship. That almost felt like dreaming the impossible dream - and the dream came true! Nevertheless, I am convinced that switching to a works team is the right step for me to achieve new successes. Both Renault and myself are challengers with good potential. Q: As a private team one might say Force India are a case of ‘small is beautiful’. But Renault are a works team and have to follow very different rules. From what you have seen and experienced so far, what are the biggest differences? In terms of facilities, machinery, manpower and mentality? NH: At Force India we were ‘best of the rest’ behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull. But then again, we didn’t have the prerequisites and sheer power of manufacturers, who enter the competition under completely different conditions. At Force India we turned a little into a lot. At Renault the next few years will be about turning a participant into a real contender - one that makes use of the advantages of a manufacturer in the best way possible to achieve the racing success of the past. And believe me, we will! Q: Renault’s technical director Bob Bell considers you the driving force for Renault’s rise to success. Have any goals been set for 2017 yet? NH: We want to be an ambitious contender and good for a few surprises in 2017. But as I said, 2017 will be a year of transition for us. Give us some time and celebrate with us if we are faster than anticipated. (Laughs) Q: All the top seats for 2017 looked to be settled at the end of last season - and then Nico Rosberg announced his retirement out of the blue. It is understood that Mercedes contacted you. Would that have been a tempting alternative to Renault? NH: Given the situation as it was at that very moment, there was no thought of a switch in any way or form as I was already in love with my new ‘girlfriend’ Renault. (Laughs)
No more lifts to Grands Prix in his plane: that really sucks… Nico Hulkenberg on Nico RosbergThe filing came about three months weeks after a Florida jury slapped Gawker with a $115 million judgment in an invasion of privacy lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, for publishing a tape showing him having sex with the wife of a friend. The jury later added $25 million in punitive damages. Late last month, it was revealed that tech billionaire Peter Thiel helped to bankroll Bollea's legal costs. Years earlier, a Gawker publication outed Thiel as gay.
"The sale and filing are intended to preserve the value of GMG's pioneering digital news business, safeguard the jobs of journalists and other staff, and allow GMG to fund the appeal against the $130 million judgment in the Hulk Hogan case," the company said in a statement. "Gawker Media Group is putting its properties up for sale after a coordinated barrage of lawsuits intended to put the company out of business and deter its writers from offering critical coverage."
Though Gawker said it is confident it will ultimately prevail in the Hogan lawsuit, it was unable to secure conditions to seek relief in an appeals court, it said.
Last month, a Gawker representative told CNBC it had engaged bankers "for quite some time" as a contingency plan for the legal battle, and the options included a sale. On Friday, technology blog Recode reported that Ziff Davis' bid to buy the entire operation was less than $100 million
[Gawker] says it has a firm bid from publisher Ziff Davis. Gawker and its banker Mark Patricof assume that the company will eventually see higher bids while it is in bankruptcy protection. Last year, in advance of the Hogan trial, Denton figured his company was worth something in the $250 million to $300 million range.
Thiel declined to comment to CNBC about the bankruptcy filing.
Whatever happens to Gawker, it's already changed digital media, experts told CNBC. For an in depth look at Gawker's influence, read more here.
— Reporting by CNBC's Michelle Castillo, Alex Crippen and Steven Kopack.One of the largest China’s bitcoin exchanges is found guilty by the Chinese court of aiding criminal money laundering and improper company registration.
The court's decision is applied only to the parent company, the Chinese trading platform OKCoin.cn. The ruling does not affect the international exchange OKCoin.com. However, this is the first significant decision of the court in relation to the regulation of the bitcoin market in China.
The decision was published on 29 July but did not reach world media until today.
According to court documents, the case began in 2014, when the company Huachen Commercial and Trading Co. Ltd. claimed that criminals defrauded it of 12 million yuan ($1.8 million), which were then laundered by buying bitcoins on the OKCoin platform. The company blamed the Chinese exchange for aiding criminals. Initially, the court awarded 80% of damages, however, as a result of the appeal, the company was able to reduce the amount to 40%. The judges concluded that the criminals managed to create multiple accounts on OKCoin using forged identity documents purchased online. Thus, the court stated that the exchange did not properly review the question of the security and allowed the fraudsters to freely perform illegal operations with stolen funds.
In addition, during the investigation, it was revealed that OKCoin had no license to perform exchange of bitcoins to fiat currency. It should be noted that until now China lacks actual regulation of digital currencies including any direct requirement to obtain a license to run bitcoin exchanges.
“To the end of the trial, Lekuda failed to provide related materials recorded at the Telecommunications Authority registration.The address/domain name record information is not stamped with the seal of the Department, and it could not prove its effectiveness,” the judgement states, according to the translation published on Reddit.
The court ruled that OKCoin “should register at the administration of Industry and Commerce and get a business license.”
Earlier, in 2014, the Chinese government tried to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges by forbidding them to perform direct transfers to banks and demanded five major trading platforms to sign a statement warning their customers of the risks associated with speculation with bitcoins.
Lena GabdullinaIn this age of separatist referendums, breakaway South Ossetia’s apparent plans to run a show of hands on joining Russia should not hit as a shock. It appears to be quite the thing these days.
The new dominant party in the region’s miniature, 34-seat de-facto parliament ran in a de-facto June-8 parliamentary vote on a ticket of surrendering to Moscow South Ossetia’s declared sovereignty. Now the party, United Ossetia, says it will live up to its name and make sure South Ossetia merges with its Russian cousin, North Ossetia. “We will be staying true to our slogans,” declared Anatoly Bibilov, South Ossetia’s de-facto parliamentary speaker, ITAR-TASS reported. “The question [of acceding to Russia] will be put to a referendum.”
After finishing tidying up committees and whatnot after the de-facto vote, legislators will get right to it, Bibilov added. No date has been announced.
South Ossetia’s Russian cravings are nothing new. At times, Moscow seemed more serious about its protégé’s de-facto independence than South Ossetia itself, which had been putting out feelers to the Kremlin for quite some time. These requests did not jive with the Kremlin’s line that Russia in 2008 had protected two freedom-loving territories – South Ossetia and separatist sibling Abkhazia – from attacks by Tbilisi.
Whether or not Moscow and Tskhinvali are now on the same page on the matter of integration is not clear. The Kremlin is keeping its lips zipped about the referendum.
Yet, after the headaches caused by the annexation of Crimea and its ongoing proxy war with Kyiv over eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin may not want to invite further international bashing over a small region which is already a political outpost for Moscow. “This call [for joining Russia] was always there and probably will be, but it is far away from becoming a reality, if it ever does,” commented Alexei Malashenko, a scholar with the Moscow Carnegie Center, to RFE/RL.
Tbilisi does not seem to be worrying about such an outcome, either. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili commented to the BBC earlier this month that, “according to my knowledge,” Moscow is not interested in absorbing South Ossetia.Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” And the new models of the digital age have been making increasingly more old-timey crafts obsolete. But there seems to be something remarkably poetic about these dying professions. In recent years, there has been a groundswell of cinematic microdocumentaries romanticizing this impending obsolescence. Here are seven favorites.
THE ARCHIVE
Paul Mawhinney has the world’s largest record collection. And 83% of the music he owns is so rare you can’t find it anywhere else, at any price. But due to health issues and the general decline of the record industry, he is being forced to sell it. The Archive captures his touching and heartbreaking story, hinting at the tragic loss of something very real and rich as we rush all too hastily into our digital lust.
The music is a hundred times better on a vinyl album. And I’ve had problems with the kids, because they don’t believe me, they don’t believe that’s true. First of all, imagine this: They move the music by computers and what they do is they chop off the highs, they chop off the lows, and then they compress everything. How could that possibly be equal to the open sound you get on a record with the basses and the highs and the fullness in the middle?”
THE SHOE BLACK
Assen Ivanov Yordanov has been a shoe black for 40 years. The Roma widower he has been working at the Central Train Station in Sofia, Bulgaria, since the early 1990’s, supporting his three daughters, eight grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Despite the inaccurate translation, which waters down some of the most poetic undertones of Yordanov’s words, The Shoe Black offers a fascinating glimpse of a lifestyle so remote to most of us, both geographically and ideologically, that it seems almost otherworldly.
I thank God for my children, who grew up even though I was just a shoe black.
FACTS ABOUT PROJECTION
We’ve been longtime fans of British filmmaker Temujin Doran. In Facts About Projection, he takes us behind the scenes of his day job as a projectionist, which he truly loves and celebrates as the fulfillment of a childhood dream yet recognizes for its imminent obsolescence.
I switch on the neon lights, which turn on like a fruit machine, and then we let the customers in and try to self them embarrassingly overpriced drinks and snacks that apparently can double their enjoyment of the film.
TAIWAN’S LAST SWORD-MAKER
Once considered the work of God, sword-making in Taiwan has today been reduced to one 65-year-old man. He spends months on end refining a single blade, earning $20-30 a month. Best known for crafting the Green Destiny Sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the skilled sword-maker cares less about fame than he does about passing on the ancient tradition.
I was only about 13 when I started learning from my father, who learned from his. Every day, I’ve tried to better the skills passed down through the generations.
PRINTER’S BLOCK
We love all things letterpress. (Even though Apple may have just made the fringe craft painfully mainstream.) Naturally, anyone who makes a career out of not only doing it but also preserving its heritage is our hero. Printer’s Block is the story of Master Printer Robert Warner, who prints with the famous 1901 clamshell press, The Golding Jobber, out of his studio in Lower Manhattan’s historic South Street Seaport district.
If I’m printing a hundred cards, they’ll be seen by at least a thousand people because they’ll be sent out into the world. And to be able to send letterpress-printed images through the mail is just my idea of heaven.”
DAVID SMITH: SIGN ARTIST
Glass embosser David Smith is one of Britain’s last remaining glass artists. His reverse glass signs and decorative mirrors are a thing of beauty. In this short documentary, Smith takes us behind the scenes of his creative process and offers a fascinating glimpse of his truly masterful technique, bespeaking a level of patience rare, if not extinct, in the productivity-obsessed, multitasking-manic timescale of today.
You gotta have patience to do the word. Especially when you get to the cutting — you get one chance, really. You can tell when the cut’s going well and just hearing the noises, you get used to certain cuts the wheels make.
WILL
Will Gains was born in Detroit and spent half a century in England. In his eighties, he remains one of the best tap dancers in the world, having danced alongside some of history’s most iconic musicians — Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan. Will is part of a Channel 4 series of three-minute shorts titled My Home Is My Shoes, documenting how dance has shaped different people’s lives.Indie hit Stardew Valley is one year old - and its one-man developer CorncernedApe is celebrating.
In a blog post summarising a whirlwind 12 months, CorncernedApe also shared a look at Stardew Valley from 2012 - when he began the project.
Back then, the game was named Sprout Valley and its art style was a lot more basic:
Your farm, circa 2012.
Stardrop Inn.
A year later and the art style had shifted a little closer to what it is now, although elements such as Joja Mart and the Community Centre were still absent:
The past year has seen Stardew Valley launch after five years of development, achieve critical acclaim, great sales, and is now available on consoles.
"Considering that I had spent the previous 4-5 years in my own little bubble, working alone, doing essentially the same thing every day... and now suddenly to be thrust into the limelight... it was quite the change!", ConcernedApe reflected.
"I'm happy about it, of course. I mean... it is a weird feeling, at first, to have something that once seemed so distant, so impossible... some pipe-dream that you fantasized about in the dead of night... actually come true. It takes some getting used to, and that's part of what this last year has been for me.
"I'm proud of Stardew Valley. I think it's a good game. Is it perfect? No. Is it the best I can do? No... really I see this as just the beginning... I'm just dipping my toe into the water. And I'm looking forward to making the next step."Children. They're a blessing from the Lord, right? Absolutely! But if you're a parent you know that these little people are the source of more fear, anxiety, and worry than anything else in all of life. We are constantly concerned about our children—their health, their development, their personalities, their habits, their choices, and their friends. There's enough there to gray the hair quite quickly! Yet, for every Christian parent there's a concern that goes deeper than all of these: is my child a Christian?
If you're a parent you know that's a question that is often asked. It's a question that keeps you up at night. It's a question over which you have prayed time and time again. It's a question that reverberates in your heart when you hear the shocking and sad news of a miscarriage or the death of a little one. And it's a question that inevitably arises when your three old sons asks, "Daddy, am I going to heaven?" How do you answer that question?
[pullquote]_M__y _opinion and _your _opinion of our children--however optimistic or pessimistic that may be--is _not _the determining factor.[/pullquote] Well, I hope it's evident to you that _my _opinion and _your _opinion of our children--however optimistic or pessimistic that may be--is _not _the determining factor. We don't have the prerogative to set the bar wherever we'd like it to be set. That is, we can't say, "Well son, you've got good manners so yes you're a Christian." Or, "My daughter, you're not as bad as that kid down the street, so I think you're good to go!" Not at all! As the wayward Prophet confessed, "Salvation belongs to the LORD!" (Jonah 2:9). It's his to define, to determine, to give, and withhold as the God who says, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion" (Romans 9:15).
However, this doesn't mean the question is completely and entirely lost in the hidden purposes and mind of God. Rather, as the Canons of Dort remind us, "We must make judgements about God's will from his Word." What is of supreme importance--and we need to always remember this--isn't my view of my children, but God's view of my children. And to know how God views my children I _must _turn to the Bible--:How many backyard swimming pools could fit into the world’s largest man-made excavation?
How many of the world’s largest oil tankers would it take to fit all the water of Lake Tahoe?
How many of the world’s biggest-by-volume building (Boeing factory in Everett, Washington) could fit into the world’s biggest-by-volume lake (Lake Baikal in Russia)?
Discover extraordinary volumes in this infographic we created for PressureWashr.com.
Where Did The Idea Come From To Make This Infographic?
Two places:
WaitButWhy put all the world’s water into a big cube and it was eye opening to see how that cube compared in size and volume to Great Lakes and the Western US. I watched this video of the scale of the universe. It shows the size of the smallest thing – a planck length – and goes up to the biggest thing – the observable universe. I wanted to do something similar but with volumes of things.
Volumes of things are so hard to imagine because they increase by a power of 3 instead of by power of 2 like area does. And it was funny cause at the same time I was playing with a Rubik’s Cube and decided to make the above infographic with a Rubick’s Cube sort of scale. Each new volume would be made up of more and more Rubik’s Cubes.
After searching around a lot I created my list of cool volumes… From the world’s biggest pool to the world’s biggest man-made excavation all the way up to Mount Everest’s volume and the volume of the Pacific Ocean.
What Is The World’s Fastest Water Pump Used For?
The world’s fastest pump is the Nijhuis Pumps HP1-4000.340 and it pumps water at a rate of 60,000 litres per second. That is pumping an Olympic size swimming pool worth of water every 42 seconds. It could empty the Central Park Reservoir in 18 hours.
So what’s it used for?
They use it in the Netherlands to control water flow in flood zones. Basically they have cities entirely below sea level so they know they are going to flood. The solution engineers came up with is to control and divert the flood water away from the populated areas. So they have built areas that are intentionally flooded. These pumps pump water from the populated areas to the designated to flood areas thus preventing loss of life and property damage.
List of The Volumes Used in The Infographic
Big backyard swimming pool (92.6 m3)
Olympic size swimming pool (2,500 m3)
World’s largest swimming pool (250,000 m3)
T1 Class Supertanker (503,000 m3)
Boeing Everrett Factory (13,300,000 m3)
World’s largest man-made excavation (4,060,000,000 m3)
Lake Tahoe (151,000,000,000 m3) = (151 km3)
Mt Everest (2,413 km3)
Lake Baikal (23,600 km3)
Gulf of Mexico (2,500,000 km3)
Pacific Ocean (660,000,000 km3)
Share The Infographic on Twitter, Facebook and on Your Blog.The #FightFor15 movement is continuing to make gains. After steamrolling through large urban centers such as Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, now it may be coming to entire states near you. New York and California recently adopted a $15 statewide minimum wage, and both Democratic presidential candidates have advocated extending the policy nationwide.
While Bernie Sanders has made political hay out of Hillary Clinton’s seeming reluctance to fully embrace his rush to $15, she has been coming around to the same talking points of late. Of course, when the rubber meets the road, Hillary seems to have a different take on drastic wage hikes. When she was running the show, the State Department helped block Haiti’s efforts to increase its minimum wage from 27 cents to 61 cents per hour. Why? According to U.S. Embassy cables obtained by WikiLeaks and analyzed by PolitiFact:
back in 2008 and 2009, embassy officials repeatedly told Washington that a hike would hurt the economy and undermine U.S. trade preference legislation known as HOPE. The program, shorthand for the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2006, gives garments manufactured on the island duty free access to U.S. markets.
So Hillary thinks that drastic wage hikes—even those that leave the hourly rate under a dollar—can have detrimental economic consequences, or she’s at least willing to let her subordinates make such claims when convenient. But due to political expediency, her view changes when it comes to U.S. businesses and workers.
Even if affluent urban centers in the U.S. may be able to absorb huge increases in labor costs without extreme pain, what happens to small businesses in places like, say, Detroit if their wages more than double from the current federal minimum of $7.25 per hour? And what happens to the low-wage workers who depend on the jobs they provide?
While it will take a few years for all the implications to shake out, there is already evidence of some nasty unintended consequences, even in wealthy urban centers. The first step of Seattle’s wage increase, to just $11 per hour, has already led to the largest three-month job losses in the city’s history and large increases in restaurant prices, and California’s new minimum bodes ill for its apparel and hospitality industries, among many others.
Are these trade-offs worth it? In the video below, Reason TV took to the streets of L.A. to find out what residents think, and just how high they would like to see the wage go.SHARE
By of the
Madison - A second judge has declared Wisconsin's voter ID law unconstitutional, further guaranteeing that the ID requirement will not be in place for elections this fall.
Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan wrote Tuesday that the state's requirement that all voters show photo ID at the polls creates a "substantial impairment of the right to vote" guaranteed by the state constitution.
In March, Flanagan issued an injunction temporarily blocking the law because the plaintiffs - the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera - were likely to succeed in their arguments. Flanagan made that injunction permanent in the 20-page decision he issued Tuesday.
The immediate effect of his ruling is limited because another Dane County judge, Richard Niess, permanently blocked the voter ID law in March in a case brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Having a second ruling against the law makes it all the more difficult for voter ID proponents to get the law reinstated because they would need to get both orders lifted.
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen asked the state Supreme Court to take up both cases earlier this year to get a quick resolution to them, but the court declined. The state's high court is expected to eventually take the cases. Meanwhile, two other challenges to the law have been filed in federal court.
Van Hollen has appealed the ruling in the League of Women Voters case to an appeals court in Madison. That court is not expected to rule until after November, meaning photo IDs will not be required at the polls in the Aug. 14 primary and Nov. 6 election.
Dana Brueck, a spokeswoman for Van Hollen, said the attorney general was likely also to appeal the decision in the suit brought by the NAACP and Voces.
"We'll make a final decision after we've fully reviewed the order," she said.
The suit was brought against Gov. Scott Walker, who signed the photo ID law, and the state Government Accountability Board, which runs state elections. Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie had no immediate comment.
Under the law approved last year by Republican lawmakers and Walker, voters are required to show one of a set number of photo IDs to vote. It was in place for the February primary but has been blocked by court orders since then.
Those who do not have a driver's license or other photo ID can get one without charge from the state. But Flanagan noted that birth certificates are required to get the IDs and voters who don't have them must pay for them. He said more than 300,000 voters do not have an acceptable form of ID.
"The cost and the difficulty of obtaining documents necessary to apply for a (Division of Motor Vehicles) photo ID is a substantial burden which falls most heavily upon low-income individuals," his decision said.
A demographer who testified for the state, Peter Morrison, argued virtually all eligible voters had a photo ID, but University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer estimated more than 301,000 do not have a driver's license or state ID card. That's 9.3% of registered voters.
Flanagan also said the voter ID measure - which backers say will help prevent voter fraud - is "unlikely to protect the electoral process." He said the voter ID law appears to be the most restrictive one in the country.
Flanagan took criticism earlier this year because he signed the petition to recall Walker, who was named in the lawsuit.
Alison Bauter and Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.The Workers Solidarity Movement, along with anarchist organisations throughout the world, refuses to take part in parliamentary elections. Is it not downright weird, or even hypocritical, when anarchists claim to want more democracy than anyone else? Is this a rejection of democracy? Alan MacSimoin tries to answer some of the questions that arise again and again.
So, what’s your problem with voting?
What problem? We’ve no problem with voting. How do you think we make decisions? We discuss proposals and then register how many are in favour and how many against; or, in plain English, we vote. We do this all the time in our own anarchist organisations, in our unions, in our community groups.
But you won’t stand candidates for the Dail, Stormont or Westminster, you won’t even vote in any of those elections.
We anarchists want a society where the division of people into bosses and workers, rulers and ruled, is ended. So, we have no interest in choosing who will be our rulers. It’s pretty ABC, you might as well ask a teetotaller if she wants a pint of Guinness or one of Beamish.
This electoral process involves the mass of working people relying on a few representatives to enter parliament and do battle on their behalf. Our sole involvement is one of voting every few years and perhaps canvassing and supporting the party through donations or whatever.
Anarchists do not believe any real socialist / anarchist society can come about through the good actions of a few individuals. If a few can grant us freedom then a few can also take our freedom away.
Anarchism is about real participative democracy - based on delegation rather than representation with delegates being elected only to implement specific decisions. Delegates would not have the right to go against the mandate of those who elected them. Delegates would enjoy no special rights or privileges and, unlike TDs or MPs, would be subject to instant recall and dismissal if they disobey their mandate. This idea is obviously the complete opposite to the parliamentary idea. We do not seek a few leaders, good, bad or indifferent to sort out the mess that is capitalism. Indeed we argue constantly against any ideas that make it seem such elites are necessary.
So why do you call on people to vote in referendums such as the referendum on citizenship in 2003, the one you called the “racist referendum”, or referendums on the European Union?
There is a big difference between voting in order to make a decision and voting for someone to whom we will hand over decision-making. That’s why we threw ourselves into the referenda on children’s, divorce and abortion rights. We went out knocking on doors, putting up posters, organising public meetings, speaking on TV and radio, and leafleting our neighbourhoods. Referenda are closer to anarchist ideas of direct democracy and are, while flawed, far better than electing a politician to office once every few years.
Even if you don’t agree with the current system, you could use elections as a platform for your ideas.
Yes, it could certainly be argued that we could. BUT it would come at a price – and a very costly price. We would certainly get a few minutes every now and again to say our piece, we might even get the very occasional favourable mention in the newspapers. But the cost of this would be to re-inforce the clientilism and passivity which is an inherent part of the electoral system. Elections are about leaving the vast majority of people in the role of passive observer of political life rather than active participant. Anarchists want to see working class people take an active role in bringing about change in society. Participation in electoral politics has the opposite effect. The cost is too high a price to pay.
But wouldn’t it help to build a mass movement if we had people in parliament?
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. What mass movement has ever been built by having TDs or MPs? To get socialists elected implies that there are already a lot of voters who understand and agree with socialism, otherwise why would they vote for a socialist candidate?
Even on a local scale, look at the election of anti-hospital closure TDs like Paudge Connolly in Monaghan. He was elected because the run down of the health service was already a burning issue and thousands had taken to streets. His election was a result, not the cause. And it didn’t stop the rundown of Monaghan hospital.
The downside of his election is that it reinforced the idea that engaging in ‘real politics’ is the way to get things done. And our rulers just love that, it moves us back to passivity and dependence. We can support our ‘representative’ as opposed to putting on real pressure by means of direct action like strikes and blockades.
And why can’t you do both?
For starters, electioneering almost always results in the party using it gradually becoming more moderate. In order to gain votes, the party must appear "realistic" and "practical" and that means working within the system. If you use language like ‘socialism’, ‘class struggle’ and ‘revolution’, it is said you will frighten off potential voters.
It’s a lot easier to leave any mention of it out of your election leaflets rather than having to explain that it simply means a complete change, and not some gang of demented maniacs marching through streets awash with blood. And that’s just one example. You end up trying not to offend your potential electorate, rather than trying to convince them of your radically different ideas.
History is littered with examples of parties which started off from the position of combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics but which became part of the system. From Marxian Social Democracy at the turn of the 19th/20th century right through to the German Green Party in the early years of this decade, we have seen example after example of radical parties starting off from the position of declaring the need for direct action and extra-parliamentary action. Indeed they often refer to their electoral involvement as the least important part of their strategy. In every single example, however, the parties involved have ended up considering the gathering of votes as more important than the message. The revolutionary slogans and policies eventually get watered down in order not to offend potential voters, the elected'representative' loses touch with the real world.
And even if a political party or organisation approaches elections from a purely cynical point of view – i.e. with no illusions in the system, with no real interest in getting elected but wanting to use the tactic of standing in elections to provide them with a soapbox – and even if that political organisation manages to avoid the watering-down of its message, there is still a fundamental problem. What message is being given to the electorate – is it ‘Get involved, fight back, make a difference’ or is it ‘Get involved and support us to make a difference’? As I’ve said already, it’s impossible to be involved in the electoral process without re-inforcing passivity and clientilism.
The campaign against the bin tax in Dublin is a prime example of a campaign which became subservient to the electoral ambitions of various political parties. In several areas the development of the campaign was stunted by the fact that certain individuals who were going to be standing in the election wanted to be the principal spokesperson and organiser – ‘leader’ if you like - of the campaign in that area. So trying to combine campaigning and electoralism will inevitably lead to the campaigning becoming subservient to the electioneering.
But it doesn’t have to be like that, you can’t deny that the vote for Joe Higgins in Dublin West helped to beat the water charges?
Well, I can. It was mass non-payment that defeated the water charges. His own Socialist Party agrees with us on that. Getting a few individuals elected is not what scares governments. If it were, the election of anti-health cuts TDs like Jerry Cowley and Paudge Connolly would have seen hospital wards reopened and waiting lists slashed. It hasn’t, draw your own conclusion.
While we are talking about Joe, I want to say that he is held in high regard by many anarchists as an honest and selfless socialist. And I say this even though Joe's existence makes it a bit harder for anarchists - it's easy to point at him and say "if only we could have a government of people like Joe wouldn't it be so much better?" And it sure would! But there's a problem. For every Joe there's a Tommy Sheridan... or a Pat Rabbitte.... or someone else who thinks he or she is bigger or more important than their mandate.
And even if the power and wealth doesn’t go to their heads, people may change their politics. Once elected, politicians are free to do as they please until the next election. There is no mechanism for enforcing the mandate or withdrawing support if the elected person does not hold to his/her mandate. We have to hand over our decision making to someone we have no effective control over. Society remains divided into order-givers and order-takers.
It could of course also be argued that the political system will always tolerate one or two Joe Higginses. In fact his existence as a TD serves quite a useful purpose – the establishment can point at Joe as an example which proves that their democracy works. ‘After all it can accommodate views right across the political spectrum from Michael McDowell to Joe Higgins’ might be their mantra. But have you ever thought about how the establishment might react if there were a dozen TDs like Joe Higgins? Or if there was any danger of a government being elected on a radical socialist platform? How would international capital react? How long do you think it would take multinational capital to effectively shut down the Irish economy?
As Emma Goldman pointed out, "if the anarchists were strong enough to swing the elections to the Left, they must also have been strong enough to rally the workers to a general strike.” If we’re to bring about change, if we’re to take on the might of international capital we can only do so in the context of politicisation and direct involvement of the mass of working class people. It can never happen as long as the mass of people remain passive observers or supporters.
Does this mean anarchists are just negative, that we should put all our energy into anti-election campaigns?
We don’t see this as an important activity at all. Our aim is not to have elections where only 10% vote, that would be meaningless in itself. In the U.S.A. only about 30% vote in most elections and it is possible that up to 50% of the population is not even registered to vote. Only someone whose brain is missing, however, would claim this meant the U.S. was more anarchist than Ireland. Not voting may just be a sign of despair ("what's the point"). We want working people actively organising and struggling for the alternative.
What we will do is use the opportunity of a time when people are talking a little more about politics to challenge the notion that important decisions can only be made by a very few, whether they be elected politicians or unelected business tycoons; and put across our anarchist ideas.
The amount of our energy that anarchists put in to specific anti-election campaigns is |
with the checkout person at the same time as talk to whoever it is on the phone.
The person on the other end of the line isn't an idiot; they can tell I'm in the middle of something and are happy for me to carry on shopping. The checkout worker is also not an idiot; they can tell I'm on the phone and as long as they get a response out of me when they need it, who cares?
Supermarkets including Sainsbury's have spent millions investing in self-service checkouts and contactless credit card payment systems. So they can hardly throw it back in our faces when we, the customer, need to be contactless too?
Unless you are a local customer who's been going to the same shop for years and has built a lovely rapport with Julie the checkout girl and you like updating each other on the weather, and where you're going for holiday this year, what harm does it do to be on your phone? It's not rude, it's just practical.
Time is precious. None of us have enough of it. I am addicted to doing two things at once. And my phone helps serve my addiction. Usually the person I'm speaking to on the phone while shopping is not my other half or my mum or a friend, it's the electricity company or the pay-by-phone parking company or, if I'm lucky, the woman from a hotel or a spa who's helping me arrange a trip at the weekend. Shopping and everyday phone calls are just chores: so why not combine the two?
It's not rude, or a problem with 'kids today' or a two-fingers to the traditional view that people should talk to each other. Of course they should and they do. But with modern technology comes modern ways of living, doing business – and I'm surprised the Sainsbury's worker was so offended. Sainsbury's has apologised for the worker refusing to serve her.
Whether we like it or not, people and smartphones are glued together these days. I call people on it, sure, but I also search the net, read news, watch TV, take photos and look up the weather on mine. It's never far away. My husband is exactly the same. We are newly weds and yet the first thing we do when we wake up in the morning is check our phones. The last thing we do when we go to bed at night is check our phones. The goodnight kiss really is a thing of the past – the last thing I do is check I've set my alarm; on my phone.
When we're having dinner together – even in a restaurant *screech* – it's not uncommon for us to check our phones. We may be googling something that's just come up in conversation, showing each other photos or just remembering to text someone that we've ignored for a few days.
This is just the way it is. I could fight it. I could throw my phone away. One day when I've made my millions and retired from City life, I probably will. But at the moment it helps me organise my life and make the most of the free time I've got away from work. Again, it's not rude, it's just practical. Anyone saying otherwise is just out of touch.Play Facebook
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Donald Trump was rushed off stage by the Secret Service while delivering a speech in Reno, Nevada, Saturday night after someone in the crowd yelled "gun," the federal agency said. No weapon was found.
"Immediately in front of the stage, an unidentified individual shouted "gun". Secret Service agents and Reno Police Officers immediately apprehended the subject," the Secret Service said in a statement.
"Upon a thorough search of the subject and the surrounding area, no weapon was found," the statement said.
A man is escorted by law enforcement officers moments after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was rushed offstage by Secret Service agents during a campaign rally in Reno, Nev., on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016. Evan Vucci / AP
Trump was removed from the stage mid-speech at around 9:05 p.m. ET. The Republican nominee returned to the stage minutes later and was defiant.
"Nobody said it was gonna be easy for us, but we will never be stopped," Trump said. He thanked the Secret Service, and continued his speech.
A man was removed who appeared to be handcuffed.
It's unclear who shouted "gun," but the man who was detained and later released told reporters that he is a lifelong Republican and only tried to hold up a sign that said "Republicans Against Trump."
That man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites, told NBC affiliate KRNV in Reno that when he pulled out the sign people began booing and trying to grab it.
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"All of a sudden, because they couldn't grab the sign, or whatever happened, bam, I get tackled by all these people," Crites said.
"And somebody yells something about a gun, and so that's when things really got out of hand," he told the station. Crites added he was glad that law enforcement arrived swiftly because he was being beaten up.
Trump thanked law enforcement in a statement later: "I would like to thank the United States Secret Service and the law enforcement resources in Reno and the state of Nevada for their fast and professional response."
"Nothing will stop us — we will make America great again!" Trump said in the statement.
While no weapon was found, some of those in the crowd were told there was a man with a gun. Others said they saw someone with a dark object, but it was obvious it was not a weapon.
"I heard, 'He has a gun' and several of us went over to the side wall because we were frightened," Darla Webb said.
Webb said she felt better seeing heavily armed law enforcement officers taking a man away, and said she was impressed with Trump's composure in continuing the speech.
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In Las Vegas in June, a British man was arrested after allegedly trying to grab a gun from a police officer at a Trump rally and he later told investigators he wanted to kill Trump, authorities said. He never got the weapon.
Suspect Michael Sandford, then 19, told investigators he tried to grab the gun "to shoot and kill Trump," and that he thought he would be killed by police in the attempt, a Secret Service agent wrote in an affidavit.
Prosecutors said Sandford went to a gun range a day before and practiced shooting a Glock handgun. Sandford's mother said her son had "a lifetime of mental health problems."
In March, security rushed on stage and surrounded Trump at a campaign event in Dayton, Ohio, after a disturbance broke out behind the candidate. A 32-year-old man was arrested and charged with misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and inducing panic in that case, authorities said at the time.
Trump is crisscrossing the country to hit several key battleground states in the final sprint to the Nov. 8 election.The Microsoft-Yahoo pact represents a pragmatic division of duties between the two companies, instead of the blockbuster deal Microsoft, No. 3 in the search market, was shooting for last year when it bid $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo, No. 2 in search.
That hostile offer was ultimately withdrawn by Microsoft, and its collapse led to lots of soul-searching at Yahoo and the replacement of its co-founder Jerry Yang with an outsider, Carol Bartz, in the chief executive role.
Under the pact, Microsoft will provide the underlying search technology on Yahoo’s popular Web sites. The deal will give a lift to Microsoft’s search engine, which it recently overhauled and renamed Bing. Its search ads will have broader reach and become more lucrative.
Bing, which tries to put search results in better context than rivals, has won praise and favorable reviews, after Microsoft spent years falling farther and farther behind Google in search.
For Yahoo, the move furthers the strategy under Ms. Bartz to focus the company on its strengths as a publisher of Web media sites in areas like finance and sports, as a marketer and leader in online display advertising.
“This deal allows Yahoo to invest in what we should be investing in for the future — audience properties, display advertising and the mobile Internet experience,” Ms. Bartz said in an interview on Wednesday. “Our vision is to be the center of people’s lives online.”
The terms of the 10-year agreement give Microsoft access to Yahoo’s search technologies. Yahoo will receive a lucrative 88 percent of the search-generated ad revenue from its own sites for the first five years of the deal, much higher than is standard in the industry.
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After the takeover bid failed, the companies renewed talks about a partnership last summer. The talks included discussion of a large upfront payment from Microsoft.
But when Ms. Bartz joined Yahoo at the start of this year, the interest on the Yahoo side shifted. Ms. Bartz was more interested in steady revenue to ensure the longer-term financial health of Yahoo instead of a big payment, she said in a conference call Wednesday.
Shares of Yahoo fell 12 percent, to $15.14, after the deal was announced, apparently reflecting investors’ disappointment in the lack of a payment. Shares of Microsoft rose slightly.
“It feels kind of like a stab in the chest,” said Darren Chervitz, the co-manager of the Jacob Internet Fund, which owns about 100,000 shares of Yahoo. “It certainly feels like Yahoo is giving away their strong and hard-fought share of the search market for really a modest price.”
Now, Yahoo’s financial fate will be inextricably linked with Microsoft for years. “My sense is that Yahoo will regret making this move,” Mr. Chervitz said.
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If the deal is completed next year as planned, and after the partnership is fully in place in three years, Yahoo estimates that its operating income will increase by $500 million a year, based on the anticipated higher search traffic and ad revenue, and a substantial drop in its investment in technology development.
Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in an interview that Ms. Bartz had driven a hard bargain. “Look,” he said, “she got 88 percent of the revenue and none of the cost.”
Still, Mr. Ballmer added that he won something he badly wanted as well: “I got an opportunity to swing for the fences in search.”
The crucial issue for the partnership, analysts say, is its ability to stop and reverse the advance of Google, which has steadily gained in search and search ad share in the last few years while Yahoo and Microsoft have kept on fading. Reversing the trend, they say, would give the partnership newfound credibility with advertisers and publishers.
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“If Microsoft and Yahoo are 30 percent and growing in search, then the dynamics of the market can shift,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
Mr. Fader of Wharton said he was not sure the partners would be able to shake up the business. “Microsoft is buying some market share, but there is no evidence they are going to change the game in any fundamental way,” he said. “What the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership needs is real breakthroughs to deliver disruptive innovation in search.”
Advertisers and Web publishers say they will be looking to the combination to improve its search technology and service and put more pricing pressure on Google, which has turned the small text ads that appear next to search results into a multibillion-dollar business.
“It could be a more competitive marketplace, but that’s not certain,” said Bob Liodice, president of the Association of National Advertisers, a trade group. “Google still holds two-thirds of the market.”
Branding was one important consideration in the deal. Yahoo will still control the look of the search features on its sites and will determine how search technology may be tailored differently for, say, entertainment and finance sites. But Yahoo’s search will include a logo saying “Powered by Bing.”
And Yahoo will be able to tap into records of searches for its own purposes, like monitoring the online behavior of anonymous users to more efficiently place online display advertisements.
Throughout a conference call and the later interviews, Ms. Bartz and Mr. Ballmer emphasized that combining the No. 2 and No. 3 companies in search would not harm competition but enhance it. Google was rarely mentioned by name, but it was the subtext of the conversation and the deal itself.
Ms. Bartz pointedly said the partnership would “put choice back in the hands of consumers, advertisers and publishers,” all of whom, she said, were “increasingly concerned” about the rising power of Google.
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Microsoft and Yahoo said they expected resistance from Google. But Microsoft’s general counsel, Bradford L. Smith, said he looked forward to explaining the details of the planned partnership to antitrust officials in Washington and Brussels.
“There is a compelling case that this is going to increase competition,” Mr. Smith said.
The Microsoft-Yahoo stance, legal analysts noted, amounts to the assertion that Google is so dominant in Internet search and search advertising that the best way to foster competition and innovation is with a duopoly — with the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership creating a credible rival to Google.
That position, legal experts say, will take some skillful persuasion, since antitrust regulators typically oppose the creation of duopolies. But Yahoo, they say, is likely to contend that it could not afford to keep up in the technology arms race against Google, unlike Microsoft, and that Yahoo’s greatest chance for commercial success lies in focusing on being a Web media portal.
“That is a pretty strong story, and I suspect the one they will present to the Justice Department,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University.I’ve been working for Stripe for over two years now. The company is based in San Francisco, and I’ve been working remotely from New York City the entire time. When I was deciding whether to accept my offer, I spoke with a number of people to get a feel for the company, the work I’d be doing, and the experience of working remotely.
One of the people I talked to was Julia Evans, who had conveniently written two great blog posts about her experiences working remotely, both three months in and eight months in. With remote work becoming more popular at companies, I’d like to share my experiences of remote work after two years.
I’ve experienced a wide range of remote working configurations: For the first year, I was working at a coworking space with a few other people from the same company. For logistical reasons, we ended up moving out of the space that we worked in together, so since then, I’ve been in a different coworking space by myself. During all of that, I’ve also spent some days here and there working from other places: my apartment, working from a house where I’m visiting friends or family, and working out of our international offices.
Based on that, and talking to friends who work remotely at other companies, here are some things I’ve learned for myself about working remotely. Your mileage may vary, but it’s what works well for me. Remote works has both pros and cons, and it might not be for everyone, but at this point, I’ve found I now actually prefer it to working in a traditional office.
Don’t work from home
Working remotely doesn’t mean you have to work from your couch or your bedroom. Especially if, like me, you live in a major city and have a small apartment, I’d strongly discourage it. Going to a coworking space every day, even if I’m the only one from my company working there, provides a mental transition in my day. When I’m there, I’m in work mode, and it’s easy to focus with no distractions. I’m not averse to working from home on occasion if I need to, but if I had to do it more than a day or two in a row, it’d be really stifling. (If you’re in New York or the tri-state area and are looking for coworking space recommendations, drop me a line – I’ve worked at a number of different ones over the years, and I can give you a good run-down of the pros/cons of each).
If you do decide to work from home, I would recommend a few things. First, set up a dedicated home office. Ideally, this is a separate room that you use only for work. At the very least, put up a curtain or folding partition to give some physical separation. Don’t use this space for anything else – if you’re a PC gamer, for example, put your gaming rig in a different room. If you live with others (roommates, significant others, kids, or pets), having a physical space that says “when I’m here, treat me like I’m at the office and I’m not at home” makes things easier.
Secondly, make sure you leave the house! Cabin fever is real. Give yourself reasons to leave the house at the beginning and end of your day. Going to the gym, getting coffee, walking the dog – make these part of your routine. One person I know would leave the house every morning, walk clockwise around the block, and call that his “commute” to the office. In the evenings, he’d repeat the process, but counter-clockwise. While it might seem a little artificial, it makes a difference!
Oh, and, if you’re ever being interviewed on live TV, make sure that the door locks.
The team matters
You don’t have to be on an all-remote team to have a good experience working remotely, but the rest of your team has to be on board with supporting remote-friendly workflows. That means making sure all meetings include video conference links, so you can participate. Or using asynchronous communication (email, JIRA, etc.) to document state which otherwise would only be exchanged verbally. In a pinch, even Twitter can work – whatever you do, just make sure that the rest of the team either already has remote-friendly habits or is willing to develop them. (Remote-friendly workflows are also beneficial even on teams that are 100% co-located, so it’s to their benefit to be doing this anyway, but that’s the topic of another post!).
This applies to the company as well. If your company isn’t committed to remote-friendly workflows, or to remote work in general, you’ll have a much harder time. You don’t need the company to be 100% distributed – or even majority distributed. If you’re considering working remotely for a company, ask about how many other people work remotely, and how the company ensures that those people are integrated into their workflow. If there aren’t any, that’s fine – someone has to be first! – in which case you’ll want to ask why they’re looking to hire people remotely, and what parts of their company workflow, policies, and structure they anticipate having to modify to transition into a remote-friendly company. (There’s no specific “right” answer here; you’re looking to see what their planning process is like).
Timezones require some effort, but aren’t too hard
On my team, I’m the only person on Eastern time. One is on Central time, and the rest are on Pacific. Most engineers on other teams are also on Pacific time. At first glance, that sounds like it’d be hard – I’m 3 hours offset from most of the people I work with – but in practice, it’s not been too difficult after some adjustment. In practice, this divides my day in two: most of my meetings are after lunch, which leaves my mornings free to focus with uninterrupted time.
I still have approximately the same number of meetings per week as my teammates, so the downside is that this means my meetings are compressed into the afternoon hours. This can be tiring on a meeting-heavy day, but I’ve gotten accustomed to it.
The timezone difference is probably the biggest change between my first few months working remotely and my current experience. In the first couple of months at any job, you’re more likely to get stuck on something unfamiliar, or need to request access, or somehow involve another person in your work process. If you bump into one of these early in the day, it means you’ll need to wait until after lunch to get unblocked. The workaround is to make sure you have a few different projects in parallel that you can work on, so that getting blocked on one doesn’t kill your morning. Fortunately, this stage doesn’t last too long. Within a month or two, I found this happening less often – at least, no more often than I might get blocked on someone who worked in the same physical office.
Normally I work out of New York, but I spent a bit of time working from London and Singapore when I was traveling there for conferences. Working from London and Singapore was definitely harder, because there’s almost no overlap between normal working hours in California and London or Singapore. In both cases, it was short-term (less than a week), which meant that we could manage it with some careful planning (choosing projects that are encapsulated for that week). It would be harder to manage that longer-term without having at least some other engineers on my team working from an overlapping timezone.
Use a headset for video conferencing
For a long time, I used the built-in microphone for my laptop (along with headphones and an external webcam). Getting an all-in-one headset made a huge difference, both for me and my teammates. Between the latency and the (lack of) noise correction, using the built-in microphone meant a lot of slightly awkward pauses, or accidentally interrupting because the other person had started speaking, but I couldn’t hear it yet. With an all-in-one headset, the microphone is much closer to the source (your voice) and it doesn’t pick up the sound from your headset speakers the way your laptop microphone does when you use it without headphones. This makes the noise correction works much better, giving the illusion of lower latency, and so it feels a lot more like having a natural conversation. (I have the Jabra UC Voice), but I think any dedicated computer headset will work better than the built-in laptop microphone and speakers).
The microphone on the other end matters as well. At our office, the microphones in the conference room have noise detection that’s eerily powerful. When I first started, it took some getting used to – I kept thinking that the audio on the other end had dropped, when in reality, nobody was speaking, and the background noise was getting filtered out! It’s not perfect, but it’s better than using Hangouts or Skype between two laptops.
Visit other coworkers often
Between Slack/IM and video conferencing, it’s easy to forget that I’m 3,000 miles away from my teammates. I’m good friends with all of them, and we chat a lot throughout the day. Seeing your coworkers regularly in-person is important.
The exact cadence depends on your personal situation and also your team layout – for a team that’s mostly distributed, you can probably get away with less frequent visits. For me, going to our headquarters every three months at a minimum helps me feel connected, not just to my teammates, but to coworkers on other teams that I work with less frequently.
At first, visiting the HQ office as a remote worker is a weird experience. I end up spending a lot of my time meeting with people, mostly in unstructured meetings (“coffee walks”, etc.).Compared to when I’m working the rest of the time, I spend a lot less time writing code. The best way I’ve found to approach it is to remember that: when I’m working remotely, I don’t have as much face time with my coworkers as they do with each other, and my visits to the office are my time to pay down that “debt”.
I think that one of the reasons working remotely works well for me is that my personal interest rate on this debt is low. I’m able to get most of what I need from email, slack, or video conferencing, and for the rest, I’m able to catch up quickly enough from in-person visits. On the flip side, context-switching is expensive enough that I’d rather group my “catch-up” time into a fixed period than interleave it throughout my normal daily routine.
This might sound tiring if you’re introverted – I’ll get to this later – but it doesn’t need to be. Don’t overdo it. Just do what feels natural, and don’t worry if it feels like you’re less productive when you’re visiting. Remember: productivity isn’t just measured by lines of code, and the time you spend building relationships with your coworkers is part of your work.
Also, note that I said “other coworkers”, not “other offices”! The tech lead for our team also works remotely, and we’ve met up in other cities as well – he happened to be speaking at a conference in New York (where I live), and we both went to a conference in Portland together. As I write this, I realize that he and I have actually never spent any appreciable amount of time together in the San Francisco office, but I’ve still never felt a lack of relatedness, because I still see and interact with him enough.
At the end of the day, you’re optimizing for relatedness – the feeling of being connected to other people and caring about them – not the number or frequency of your in-person interactions. Relatedness is “the universal want to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others” – some people need this to happen in-person to satisfy their need for human interaction, but others may not. If you’re able to satisfy this for yourself through virtual interactions, you can probably get away with meeting in-person less frequently (or even at all – I know a couple of people who are totally fine never meeting their coworkers in-person, but I think that’s rare).
Schedule recurring pair-programming meetings
I’d strongly recommend this for anyone, whether or not they’re working remotely, but it’s particularly useful for remote engineers. I have standing weekly pairing sessions with four people on my team. Ideally I could schedule a weekly pairing session with everyone, but there are only so many hours in the day!
There are a lot of benefits to regular, scheduled pairing (as opposed to ad-hoc pairing, or no pairing at all), but for now, I’ll just talk about the part that’s relevant to working remotely. When working remotely at a company that is not 100% remote, you have to make an active effort to make sure that your non-remote coworkers are aware of you, the work you’re doing, and your areas of expertise. Regular pairing sessions are a good forcing function for that: on any given week, whether you’re working on a project of yours or a project of theirs, you’re getting “face time” with your coworkers, and sharing knowledge about each others’ projects.
Introversion or extroversion
I’ve heard a lot of people argue very strongly that remote work is best for introverted people, because you spend most of your days alone. I’ve heard others argue that it’s best for extroverted people, because you have to spend more effort getting to know people across the company when you’re not physically present.
I don’t think it matters. I know people who work remotely with success who are introverted, extroverted, or ambiverted. People will adjust their work and life to match their personal styles wherever they are working, remotely or not. If you discover you need more social interaction, you’ll find ways to increase your interpersonal interaction with your coworkers, or to do that outside work. If you discover you need less, you’ll find ways to reduce it, by relying less on synchronous communication or adjusting your work schedule. Being remote isn’t only for introverts (or extroverts), the same way working in an office isn’t only for extroverts (or introverts).
If you’re working remotely (or considering working remotely), I’d love to talk more about this with you and exchange tips. Ask me on Twitter or drop me an email. Oh, and I just found out that we have a conference now too!
Thanks to Julia Evans and Karla Burnett for reading drafts of this post!Star Wars fans are easy marks. It’s one of our kind’s more endearing qualities, even while it tends to leave us vulnerable to being exploited. And we have been exploited, even by, perhaps accidentally, the man who created this universe and brand.
When you’re sitting in a big room full of hardcore fans at Star Wars Celebration sort of feverishly watching JJ Abrams introduce the new Force Awakens trailer, it can be easy to avoid cynicism. It can also be easy to forget we’ve been down this road before a number of times over the past couple decades. In 1998, fans all over the US went to see Meet Joe Black, of all things, just to see the trailer for The Phantom Menace, and that was generally deemed a worthwhile investment of time and money. In 2002, I was at Star Wars Celebration II in Indianapolis, in another huge convention hall, when prequel producer Rick McCallum revealed footage of Yoda fighting Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones — that was met with exactly the same sort of rapture we saw in Anaheim this week. We can say The Force Awakens looks to have that Star Wars feel while also seeming like it will be a fresh experience, but we’ve always been bad judges of such things ahead of time.
Star Wars has very often not been good, but it has been good enough on enough occasions that we’re still willing—eager, even, in periods of famine like the last few years—to hope. I’d even go so far as to say we enjoy the cycle of hype as much as we do the actual products that follow the hype. The folks at Celebration are fond of referring to 2015 as the Year of Star Wars, and along with a new film we finally get the first video game in Lucasfilm’s 10-year partnership with EA: the multiplayer first- and third-person shooter Star Wars Battlefront from the Battlefield franchise masterminds at DICE. And we’ve finally been granted a substantial glimpse into what DICE’s series reboot will be like So as Star Wars fans around the world today examine the new Battlefront trailer in much the same manner they did the Force Awakens trailer yesterday, we’re all ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. It looks fun, and the digital renders of these iconic locales have never looked even remotely this good in a game before, and DICE has delivered some legitimately great multiplayer shooters in its long history.
In a closed-door presentation to press on Thursday at Star Wars Celebration, I saw a short pre-recorded gameplay demo that showed an online match on the forest moon Endor. It began in the normal deathmatch manner, with rebel foot soldiers battling stormtroopers, but the hook came in its escalation. Speeder bikes entered the fray, and then a two-legged AT-ST walker, and then finally the rebel fighter whose eyes we were looking through spotted a gargantuan AT-AT off in the distance. The AT-AT was presented as a game-changer, and it immediately started raining fire down on the battlefield, sending the rebels scrambling for cover. But an AT-AT is obviously pretty cumbersome in the middle of the woods and doesn’t really exist to pick off infantry. As we learned in The Empire Strikes Back, the infantry aren’t going to be able to fight back directly anyway. So the rebel band runs off to a communications console that sat all by its lonesome out here in this wilderness and used it to call in some Y-Wings to blow the AT-AT all to hell. The footage wrapped with the rebels running down into a bunker similar to the Imperial base we saw on Endor in Return of the Jedi, where they encountered Darth Vader himself. He tore them apart.
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The footage was not really spectacular, mostly coming off as a Battlefield-like standard shooter with a Star Wars skin and a decent-looking gimmick with the AT-AT. In other words, it didn’t appear to do much that seemed particularly outlandish or surprising. It was what you would expect a new Battlefront to look like, with vehicles, aircraft and “hero” characters like Darth Vader all in a fray with masses of infantry. Had they just showed us the demo and left it at that, I likely would have thought it seemed cool and fun, given how long it’s been since we’ve had a new Star Wars shooter. Instead, they decided to talk to us about the game for a solid twenty minutes.
Nick Fegraeus, Battlefront’s design director at DICE, seemed to say all the right things. He described at length how the dev team had access to the Lucasfilm archives and Skywalker Ranch so they could, with the help of photogrammetry and physically-based rendering, replicate those Imperial walkers and starfighters and infantry weapons and everything else they’re putting into Battlefront. “When you pick up a lightsaber in Star Wars Battlefront, or hop into an X-Wing, it means you are using the lightsaber. It’s the actual X-Wing,” he said. He acknowledged that this attention to detail on its own wouldn’t be enough to carry the game. “What good is all this if you don’t have fun, right? That’s the point of the medium: fun.”
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At one point he showed us an image of a young girl playing with Star Wars action figures, and said the Battlefront team was ultimately trying to translate that experience into 1080p deathmatches. Producer Craig McCleod used the term “sandbox playground” and both he and Fegraeus described the experience of playing Battlefront as a fulfillment of those “battle fantasies” we had when we were children playing with our own action figures.
But these men also frequently threw out terms like “passionate” and “dream come true,” and we were shown high-fidelity images of rotating game assets as subtitles that said things like “actual game models” at the bottom of the screen. He also teased further feature reveals between now and launch, a perfectly standard aspect of the video game hype cycle. He did, however, explain to us what exactly photogrammetry and physically-based rendering is. They made a big deal about the PC version having Dolby Atmos sound, with a deafening demonstration that concluded with a lengthy Atmos logo animation—it was admittedly impressive to listen to, but that’s hardly a key feature.
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My cynicism creeped in for two reasons. The first I understood immediately: the way these developers from DICE were describing the game and its development was the same way everybody describes every game; if you’ve seen one hands-off video game presentation for the media you’ve seen them all, and I have seen many. It’s difficult to make any meaningful analysis of a game that you watch for five minutes but can’t yet play, but when they follow that brief glimpse of gameplay with twenty minutes of chatter that you’ve heard a hundred times before, that difficulty only escalates.
The second reason I only understood as I pondered why I found the trailer for The Force Awakens so appealing while I felt very little for Battlefront. The culprit was DICE’s emphasis on the technical acumen of the game. While, yes, that’s the standard way AAA game devs talk about their games, Star Wars fans have also heard this refrain many times outside of games: from George Lucas himself.
During the prequel years, Lucas spent a ton of words describing all the technical advancements they were making with those three films, particularly in terms of visual effects and digital camera tech. It wasn’t all guff—Lucas was basically responsible for the film industry shifting almost entirely to digital photography, or at least accelerating that process. Now we accept that Lucas’ preoccupation with tech is a huge part of why the prequels were garbage movies that in hindsight felt more like tech demonstrations than films. And so you’re not going to hear JJ Abrams talk all that much about whatever cool technology things they’re doing because he and Kathleen Kennedy know that kind of freaks us out these days. Had this presentation taken place at E3 or some other game-focused event, I may not have made that connection. But at Star Wars Celebration, where Battlefront is the only game I’m seeing, and I’m seeing it an hour after Abrams and Kennedy gave their talk that everyone enjoyed so much, there was no way to avoid this comparison.
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When I spoke with the game’s producer McCleod I asked him what, below the surface, makes the DICE interpretation of Battlefront a true Star Wars experience. The attention to detail is great, yes, but what about the soul?
“I think it’s a combination of things. I don’t think you can single out any one thing,” McCleod said. “When you think about the authenticity we bring with our photogrammetries, and we scanned all the assets from the archives and we actually photo scanned the original movie props. We have all the original sound bytes. We allow you to pilot all these iconic vehicles. We allow you to step into the shoes of some of the most iconic characters from the Original Trilogy era. I think when you wrap all this together in the way that DICE can, and the incredibly talented team that we have, I think it creates this perfect bubble that really immerses our players.”
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That answer is okay, but it’s still explaining what’s in the sausage rather than describing the coherent whole that will end up on the dinner plate. Battlefront is a multiplayer shooter rather than an attempt at a deep narrative experience (so far as we know today, anyway), and thus whether or not Battlefront is A True Star Wars Thing will largely depend on feel. Five minutes of hands-off multiplayer gameplay is rarely enough to be able to get a grasp on feel, and you certainly can’t assume that a game developer’s description of the feel of his own game will be accurate—creative types across all media are prone to accidentally create things that aren’t quite what they thought they were making.
Today, I am skeptical. That’s not a condemnation; what these folks from DICE showed me and told me about the game on Thursday just didn’t convince me of anything. Lucasfilm’s Ada Duan can claim all she wants, as she did in our presentation, that your 2015 Star Wars experience won’t be complete if you don’t both watch The Force Awakens and play Battlefront, but just saying that doesn’t make it true. They talk a big game, but it’s too soon to know if they can back it up on the court.If you think you know a popular folk song played at Jewish weddings, musician Daniel Gil of Sharon wants you to hear |
the idea of the lasting self or ego it will not be possible for him to conceive the idea that all things are impermanent, that there is, in reality, an arising and a ceasing of things (samudaya dhamma, vaya dhamma, — Satipa.t.thaana sutta). The understanding of the anatta doctrine, which is exclusively Buddhist, is indispensable in the understanding of the four noble truths and the other principal tenets of Buddhism. The people of the world today mark the changing nature of life. Although they see it, they do not keep it in mind and act with dispassionate discernment. Though change again and again speaks to them and makes them unhappy, they pursue their mad career of whirling round the wheel of existence and are twisted and torn between the spokes of agony. They cherish the belief that it is possible to discover a way of happiness in this very change, to find a center of security in this circle of impermanence. They imagine that although the world is uncertain they can make it certain and give it a solid basis, and so the unrelenting struggle for worldly improvement goes on with persevering effort and futile enthusiasm. History has proved again and again and will continue to prove that nothing in this world is lasting. All things when clung to fail. Nations and civilizations rise, flourish, and die away as waves upon the ocean, yielding place to new, and thus the scrolls of time record the passing pageant, the baseless vision, and the fading flow that is human history. Notes 1. In the Mahaa-Sudassana Suttanta (Diigha-Nikaaya), this verse is ascribed to the Buddha himself; in the Mahaa Sudassana Jaataka (No. 95), it is ascribed to the Bodhisatta, in his rebirth as King Mahaa-Sudassana. In the Theragaathaa (v. 1159), Mahaa Moggallaana Arahant recites it, after mentioning (in v. 1158) the passing away of Saariputta Arahant that preceded his own only by two weeks. 2. AN 4.49 — see Anguttara Nikaaya: An Anthology, Part I (The Wheel No. 155-158), p. 86. 3. A.K. Rogers, A Student's History of Philosophy, London, 1920, p. 15. 4. In the ms. this quote is followed by the parenthetical citation "(Anguttara, ii. 70)." Perhaps this is a typo? PTS page A ii 70 (AN 4.62-63) does not contain this passage. A better reference may be SN 12.46. — ATI ed.
Aniccam: The Buddhist Theory of Impermanence An Approach from the Standpoint of Modern Philosophy[1] by Bhikkhu Ñanajivako "Is the eye... the shape... visual consciousness, permanent or impermanent?" "Impermanent, reverend sir." "But is what is impermanent, anguish or happiness?" "Anguish, reverend sir." "Is it right to regard that which is impermanent anguish, and liable to alteration as 'This is mine, this am I, this is my self'?" "No, reverend sir."[2] Insights and discoveries revealed to human minds 2500 years ago, at the time of the Buddha (or even several centuries before that time), may have caused deep and revolutionary effects in the evolution of existing world views, no less important than the discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus have been for the eventual collapse of the world-view of medieval Christian civilization. These latter discoveries, which mark the outset of modern civilization, have become so much a part of commonplace or general information that they can be imparted to children in the lowest grades of elementary education, and are normally absorbed by them without difficulty. The idea of impermanence and of ceaseless change, due to the never-ending "chain" of causes and effects (the subject which we are attempting to approach in its Buddhist version of aniccam) has, in its broad meaning, become one of our stereotyped and oversimplified truisms, reduced, both in its formal and substantial significance, to a mere rudiment of conventional word-meaning. As such, it may still have impressed us on the level of nursery rhymes and even of some grammar-school classics in the history of literature. (If I had to choose a deeper adequation[3]3 founded on a modern poet's more complex philosophical intuition, I would not hesitate to select the lines from T.S. Eliot's Quartets; Ash on an old man's sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave... Water and fire succeed The town, the pasture and the weed.) We might hope to rediscover the original significance and historical purport of such truisms only if we were to look for them purposively, guided by some subjective impressions of individual or particular cases, and by the consequences of their concrete application in actual scientific or philosophical theories. This is what I am about to hint at in a few examples. One: As a young teacher, when for the first time I tried to explain to children of about twelve years of age the biological process of growing cabbages and potatoes, my emphasis on the importance of dung (I did not use the technical term "fertilizer") happened to be so impressive that the next day a mother came to complain against my "direct method" and "drastic naturalism" in visual teaching. Her child had been so affected by my discourse as to develop an acute loathing against food. Thus I was impressed how easily our most commonplace truisms about the laws of nature — whose discovery, once upon a time, may have been treated and even punished as revolutionary by respectable and authoritative social institutions — can still reveal themselves unexpectedly in their full overpowering force to the fresh and innocent minds of new generations. Two: In my own generation of teenagers, between the two wars in Europe, the deadlock between science and religion was so complete that secondary school curricula were bound to provoke in our minds an unavoidable crisis of conscience. Teachers on the whole were totally involved in this struggle of convictions, keen to win us over to one side or the other. The side of science against religion was normally the stronger. Since that time religion, defeated in Europe, has become more and more a prohibited fruit, and has therefore acquired a new attractive force for juvenile minds. This is true not only in the eastern parts of Europe, since science is far from being a privilege of Communism. An anti-scientific tendency in Europe ("continental") philosophy has even become predominant, on account of the moral catastrophe which still preoccupies the minds of our generation beyond any other problem of "man's position in the universe." The central issue in this conflict between science and religion, at least from our youthful bias at that time, was of course the problem of anattaa ("no-soul"), to express it by the corresponding Buddhist term. Laws governing processes of causes and effects were, however, scientifically explained — or at least so understood by our unripe minds, under the impression of the open dispute between science and (Christian) religion. The explanations were not yet in terms of the scientific equivalent to a pure anicca-vaado (theory of impermanence), which would imply a denial of the underlying material substantiality of the world. Instead of that, explanations given to us at that time still followed the classical Greek pattern of mechanistic materialism or static atomism, which was the closest to the Buddhist understanding of the uccheda-vaado (theory of destruction), whose believers are described in Pali texts in the following terms:...He then hears the Perfect One expounding the teaching for the removal of all grounds for "views," of all prejudices, obsessions, dogmas, and biases, for the stilling of all processes, for the relinquishment of all substrata of existence, for the extirpation of craving, for dispassion, cessation, extinction. He then thinks, "I shall be annihilated, I shall be destroyed! No longer shall I exist!" Hence he grieves, is depressed and laments; beating his breast, he weeps, and dejection befalls him. Thus, bhikkhus, is there anxiety about realities. — MN 22 To this, the only authentic answer is: Since in this very life a tathaagata (in this case generally understood as a human being in the widest sense) is not to be regarded as existing in truth, in reality, is it proper for you to assert: "as I understand the doctrine taught by the Exalted One, insofar as a bhikkhu has destroyed the aasavas [life's "intoxicants" or passions] he is broken up and perishes when body is broken up, he exists not after death."? — SN 22.85 The logical possibility of such an answer is excluded by the premise. The same premise, however, excludes also the opposite, affirmative, possibility. (We shall return to this problem, as understood by contemporary philosophy, in section Five.) Is important to underline here that, on the same premise, uccheda-vaado, or simply the materialistic belief in a substantial "destruction" of any form of being, is the extreme opposite of any authentic nihilism in ontology and epistemology (theory of being and theory of knowledge). Only an explicitly idealistic philosophy, "looking upon the world as a bubble, as a mirage" (Dhp 170) can be nihilistic in some respect, while uccheda-vaado as a "theory of destruction" necessarily presupposes an existentially rooted belief in material substance. It was just in this sense, in the midst of the battle-ground between science and religion, and on the eve of a world war, that the children of the first half of the 20th century had to face the fatality of a physical and moral destruction, scientifically and infallibly precalculated, as experience was about to prove. Yet just over the edge of our intellectual horizon was dawning a time, for science at least, of acquiring a completely different position vis-a-vis the problem of impermanence and relativity as affecting the deepest subatomic structure of the world — a position considerably closer to the Buddhist idea of aniccam. Three: Since 1927, Bertrand Russell's book, An Outline of Philosophy, has been widely quoted as one of the best popular presentations of the radical change in the scientific world-view stemming from Einstein's theory of relativity and of the resulting development of nuclear physics. I shall try to elicit from Russell's statements, as far as the present draft of pointers to our essential problem may permit, the rejection of the substance-view by modern science, because it is the rejection of the substance-view that constitutes the core of the Buddhist anicca-vaado as a foundation (at least in the ti-lakkha.nam scheme) of both dukkham and anattaa. To start with, let us define the idea of physical "substance" by means of its basic description and philosophical implication has stated in the Sutta-pi.takam sources. The problem of substance, as defined by scientific (lokaa-yatam) theories at the time of the Buddha, finds its classical formulation, categorial delimitation and solution in concise terms in his concluding answer to Kevaddho: Where do earth, water, fire, and wind; long and short; fine and coarse; pure and impure, no footing find? Where is it that both name and form die out, leaving no trace behind? When intellection (vi~n~naanam) ceases they all cease, too. DN 11 For the categorical relation of mind and matter (or "name and form," naamaa ruupam, as implied in the foregoing formulation), the following statement of the Buddha is the most adequate and also the best-known in connection with our subject: It would be better, bhikkhus, for the unlearned worldling to regard this body, built up of the four elements, as his self rather than the mind. For it is evident that this body may last for a year, for two years, for three, four, five or ten years... or even for a hundred years and more. But that which is called thought, or mind, or consciousness, continuously, during day and night, arises as one thing, and passes away as another thing. — SN 12.61 Now, let us get a few quotations from Bertrand Russell.[4] First, as regards substance-matter, he says: In former days, you could believe it on a philosophical ground that the soul is a substance and all substances are indestructible... But the notion of substance, in the sense of a permanent entity with changing states, is no longer applicable to the world. A wave in the sea persists for a longer or shorter time: the waves that I see dashing themselves to pieces on the Cornish coast may have come all the way from Brazil, but that does not mean that a "thing" has traveled across the Atlantic; it means only that a certain process of change has traveled. [Einstein's theory of relativity] has philosophical consequences which are, if possible, even more important. The substitution of space-time for space and time has made the category of substance less applicable than formerly, since the essence of substance was persistent through time, and there is now no one cosmic time. We found that matter, in modern science, has lost its solidity and substantiality; it has become a mere ghost haunting the scenes of its former splendor... The notion of matter, in modern physics, has become absorbed into the notion of energy. We cannot say that "matter is the cause of our sensations."... In a word, "matter" has become no more than a conventional shorthand for stating causal laws concerning events. Thus we are committed to causation as an a priori belief without which we should have no reason for supposing that there is a "real" chair (or any thing) at all. Next, as regards the theory of events, we note that the idea of fixed and static elements of "matter" has been replaced by that of undeterminable "events" corresponding to the quantum electrodynamic field theory in nuclear physics, which comes very close to the conception of a non-physical but purely phenomenological idea of dhammaa, implied in its primitive significance by kha.nika-vaado, or theory of momentariness, of the Abhidhamma-pi.takam. (This latter aspect, explicitly philosophical, will be sketched in Five, below.) Of this Russell writes: Everything in the world is composed of "events."... An "event" is something occupying a small finite amount of space-time... Events are not impenetrable, as matter is supposed to be; on the contrary, every event in space-time is overlapped by other events. I assume that every event is contemporaneous with events that are not contemporaneous with each other; this is what is meant by saying that every event lasts for a finite time... Time is wholly relational. Space-time order, as well as space-time points, results from the relations between events. Compare with this last statement, and with those that follow, the assertion of Buddhaghosa in Atthasaalini: "By time the sage described the mind, and by mind described the time." Lastly, Russell says of mental events: An important group of events, namely percepts, may be called "mental." Mentality is an affair of causal laws, not of the quality of single events, and also, mentality is a matter of degree. What is mind?... Mind must be a group of mental events, since we have rejected the view that it is a single simple entity such as the ego was formerly supposed to be... Its constitution corresponds however to "the unity of one 'experience.'" As a result of these considerations, Russell concludes that "first of all, you must cut out the word 'I': the person who believes is an inference, not a part of what you know immediately." Finally, the logical possibility of an uccheda-vaado (theory of destruction) "heresy" is explicitly eliminated even on this level of merely scientific considerations: "Is a mind a structure of material units? I think it is clear that the answer to this question is in the negative." We can conclude this survey by accepting without any further reserve Russell's statement: "The problems we have been raising are none of them new, but they suffice to show that our everyday views of the world and of our relations to it are unsatisfactory." Four: Recently, field theory, as a replacement for the abandoned substance theory in physics, has found increasing application — at least as a hypothetical analogy — in other spheres of scientific thought, and even more in philosophical speculations limited to possible (and sometimes to impossible) extensions of "special sciences." Its application to parapsychology is of particular interest, for the extension of the subject in which we are interested is beyond the strictly physical sphere of being. It is Gardner Murphy who has given us the most consequent and exclusive elaboration of a parapsychological analogy of field theory, as far as I know. A summarized recapitulation of his thesis is as follows: The action of living matter on living matter is never a case of single cell acting only on single cell. The structural whole or field is always involved. The field principle may hold in psychics as well as in physics, and a psychic field may extend backwards and forwards in time as well as onwards in space. The question, "Does personality survive death?" is therefore in Murphy's view not a reasonable question to ask. If any psychical activity survives, it will become an aspect of different fields and will thus take on new qualities and new structural relationships. It is evident that for him "all personal activities are constantly changing context and interacting with those of others, and it may be that each one becomes part of the cosmic process."[5] Another worker in the field of parapsychology, C. G. Broad, investigating The Mind and Its Place in Nature from the standpoint of a possible "survival" of the "PSI component," draws the conclusion, from the same basic analogy with physics, that "we need no longer suppose that, although a surviving PSI component may be bodiless, it is necessarily unextended and unlocalized, for we are nowadays well accustomed to such phenomena as electro-magnetic fields which cannot be called bodies in the ordinary sense but which still have structure and definite properties and dispositions. We must not think of it (i.e., of the surviving PSI-component) as something on which an experience makes an impression as a seal does on a ball of wax. On the contrary, such a substanceless theory implies a greater degree of survival than the mere persistence of an inactive PSI component."[6] Exponents of the same parapsychological theory also maintain that their hypothesis might offer a more adequate basis for explanation of subconscious phenomena investigated by psychoanalysis, particularly Jung's archetypes, than the initial Freudian attempts, which have been characterized since the first as a scientifically untenable Platonic analogy with "pigeon holes" as the basic structure of the soul. All these more or less ad hoc analogies with the field theory in physics can be brought down as well to an earlier metaphysical hypothesis, formulated on a broader philosophical basis already by William James, in his Pluralistic Universe (1909).[7] Speaking of the structure of "our inner life," James says: Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self... May not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, though we now know it not?... The analogies with... facts of psychical research, so called, and with those of religious experience, establish... a decidedly formidable probability in favor [of the following pluralistic hypothesis:] Why should we envelop our many with the "one" that brings so many poisons in its train?... [instead of accepting] along with the superhuman consciousness the notion that it is not all-embracing; the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once. This is exactly the basic distinction between the Vedaantic and the Buddhist conception of God, or gods, implying also the reason why James, in some respects, was in favor of a polytheistic conception, as a "result of our criticism of the absolute," in the same context. Five: Such adaptation of hypotheses borrowed ad hoc from heterogenous fields of science could and should be ultimately verified and explained only by proper philosophical investigation, using autonomous methods and established on its own, purely anthropological ground. Since the beginning of the 20th century this has indeed been done, always more clearly and explicitly. The results have been considerable, at least as far as the problem of our primordial concern is involved: the human value aspect of aniccam, its fundamental significance in connection with both dukkham and anattaa. The proper philosophical attitude was defined, not as pertaining to the physical but rather to the historical world-view, as early as the end of the 19th century, by Wilhelm Dilthey, founder of the modern philosophy of culture: The final pronouncement of the historical world-view is that human accomplishment of every sort is relative, that everything is moving in process and nothing is stable. And yet this historical orientation has not maintained a position of predominant importance in 20th century European philosophy. The most prominent philosopher of culture in the middle of this century, Karl Jaspers, in discussing the priority of the question "What is man?" (As formulated by Kant) points out that this priority "does not mean that the knowledge of being is to be replaced by the knowledge of man. Being still remains the essential, but man can approach it only through his existence as a man," i.e., through his historicity.[8] Following Edmund Husserl, who established the most widely adopted logical and epistemological platform for European or continental philosophy in this century, the problem of being has acquired and sustained a role of central importance. In order to avoid its gross misunderstanding it is necessary, especially from our Buddhist standpoint, to note that Husserl's basic postulate, "Back to the things themselves," does not in any way imply a substantialist meaning of "things" in the classical, physically oriented ontology or theory of being, which has been rejected by modern physics. The significance of "being" has been radically changed with the achievement of a deeper insight into both its physical and historical structure. This is revealed very clearly in the analysis of being by Nicolai Hartmann who, more than Husserl and his closer followers, concentrated on implications of the ontological problem in the natural sciences. In this respect the standpoint of A.N. Whitehead in Anglo-American philosophy comes closest to that of N. Hartmann. Russell's theory of infinitesimal "space-time events" was not much more than an attempt to reduce to a pale rationalized scheme Whitehead's metaphysical conception of "actual occasions" and "throbbing actualities," understood as "pulsation of experience" whose "drops" or "puffs of existence" guided by an internal teleology in their "concrescence" (analogous to the Buddhist sa"nkaaraa in karmic formations) join the "stream of existence" (bhava"nga-soto). The core of the abhidhammo conception of the "stream of existence" consists in its "theory of momentariness" kha.nika-vaado. Its modern analogy has found its first and best formulation in plain terms in the philosophy of William James, especially in his essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?," where the "stream of consciousness" or "stream of thinking" (which, "when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing") is elicited from his basic theory of "pure experience," defined as "the instant field of the present... this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other and are of one flesh" — succession "in small enough pulses," which "is the essence of the phenomenon." In the same connection, as "the result of our criticism of the absolute," the metaphysical and metapsychical idea of a "central self" is reduced by James to "the conscious self of the moment."[9] The well-known Buddhist thesis of "no-self" (anattaa), or of a soul-less psychology, is based on the same background of the "theory of momentariness." This is also one of the points — and the most significant one — on which the philosophical conception of James coincides with Bergson. Terminologically at least, Bergson's designation of the same "stream" as "flux du vecu," the word "vecu" ("lived") seems to come closest to the meaning of the Pali bhava"ngo, suggesting the "articulated" (a"ngo) texture of life-experience. In Husserl's interpretation, "things" are simply taken to mean "whatever is given," that which we "see" in consciousness, and this "given" is called phenomenal in the sense that it "appears" to our consciousness. The Greek word "phenomenon" does not necessarily indicate that there is an unknown thing behind phenomena (as in Kant's philosophy or in the Vedaanta), or a "back-stage" being, as Nietzsche ironically exposed it. From our standpoint, it is important to emphasize that Husserl's phenomenological method "is neither deductive nor empirical, but consists in pointing to what is given and elucidating it."[10] It claims, in other words, to be yathaa-bhuutam, or "adequate to [actual] being." The analysis of the original meaning of the Greek term "phenomenon" has been performed in masterly fashion by Martin Heidegger.[11] The word "phenomenon" (from the verb phainesthai, "let see," which is similar to the Pali ehi-passiko) has two meanings relevant for philosophy. The first is "to show itself," the second, "to seem as." Contemporary phenomenological philosophy uses it in the first sense, as "merely letting something be seen, letting entities be perceived." The secondary meaning, indicating something which seems to "remain hidden, or which relapses or gets covered again, or shows itself only 'in disguise,'" points to the historical process of constructing theories and "views" (Greek doxa, Sanskrit dristi, Pali di.t.thi) by which the primordially "uncovered" phenomena are rather concealed again, or kept in disguise. The same basic idea is adopted by Nicolai Hartmann: "That a being is 'in it-self' means to say that it exists actually and not only for us... Being-in-itself does not need to be proved, it is given as the world itself is given."[12] Hartmann's most valuable contribution, however, is his entrance into the profound analysis of what was above called the secondary meaning of the philosophical term "phenomenon." His analysis distinguishes "spheres" and "levels" of being: Broadly, there are two primary spheres, designated as real and ideal being. In the sphere of the real, four structural levels are distinguished: matter, life, consciousness, and mind. In contexts eliciting such statements, it appears more and more obvious, from a Buddhist standpoint, how closely the meaning of the term phenomenon, as used in contemporary philosophy, approximates the basic meaning of dhamma in the abhidhamma theory. (The last instance quoted from Hartmann may remind us even more specifically of the khandhaa structures.) However, beyond the possibility of extending this analogy of phenomenon as disclosure of "being-in-itself" understood as a process, it is felt more and more by several contemporary European philosophers (just as was the case in the original Buddhist counterpart) that the ontological purport of being, thus understood as phenomenon or dhammo, must still be limited by a critical principle of essentially deeper significance. This principle has found its first — and until now its clearest — logical formulation in the caatu-ko.tikam (tetralemma) rule by the Buddha, as he regularly applies it to the avyaakataani or "not-designated" problems, or "dialectical antinomies"[13] of speculative thought: "Neither being, nor non-being, nor both being-and-non-being, nor neither-being-nor-non-being" can express the existential purport and content of human reality. The word "being," or any other derivate from the verb "to be," cannot adequately express the immediate intuition (vipassanaa) of existence, or the essence of actuality (as paramattho). This deficiency of the basic ontological term "being" has been subtly analyzed by Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Yet with him the philosophy of existence (or human actuality) has taken a prevalently ontological direction (as a phenomenological analysis of being). It has become a philosophy of our human being-in-the-world, and consequently a philosophy of "anguish" or dukkham, even though it was soon felt that this ontological turning does not, and cannot, adequately reflect either the primordial motives or the ultimate scope of existential thinking. Without entering into the historical background of such inner divergences in contemporary philosophy, I should like to point out a few symptomatic objections which can be compared in their radically anti-ontological attitude with the principle of the Buddha as formulated above. According to the Buddha, the person reaping the fruits of good and bad actions (in a future life) is neither the same one who has committed these actions nor a different one. The same principle applies to the structural identification of a person in any other respect and circumstance, in the stream of one single physical life. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, discussing the problem of the structural unity of human personality, comes (at least on the basic level) to the conclusion that "the relation between my body and myself cannot be described as either 'being' or 'having': I am my body and yet I cannot identify myself with it."[14] "Existing" does not mean being an object. On this supposition, Marcel develops his critical analysis of the two inadequate extreme terms of existence in his main work, Being and Having. Another representative of the same trend in French philosophy, Jean Wahl, seems to approximate more nearly the actual meaning of the Buddha's avyaakataani (specified above), not from formal logical or even linguistic considerations, but rather out of an essentially congenial understanding of the deeper problem: "We are concerned with questions which, strictly speaking, belong to solitary meditation and cannot be subjects of discourse."[15] Nicolas Berdyaev, an explicitly religious philosopher close to the same group, has given one of the clearest formulations of the point under discussion: "The problem which faces us is: Is being a product of objectification? Is not the concept of being concerned with being qua concept, does being possess existence at all?... Why is ontology impossible? Because it is always a knowledge of objectifying existence. In an ontology the idea of being is objectified and an objectification is already an existence which is alienated in the objectification. So that in ontology — in every ontology — existence vanishes... It is only in subjectivity that one may know existence, not in objectivity. In my opinion, the central idea has vanished in the ontology of Heidegger and Sartre."[16] In agreement with Dilthey's principle, quoted above, establishing the historical world-view of the cultural sciences independently from the scientific investigation of essentially objective physical nature, Heidegger has limited his inquiry on "time as the horizon for all understanding of being." Against that background, he has criticized and abandoned the old substantialist ontology. For him, "temporality is the very being of human reality." The relation time-mind, as quoted above from Buddhaghosa's Atthasaalini, is for Heidegger also exhaustive for both terms. And yet Berdyaev, like the other anti-ontologist philosophers mentioned here, criticizes even this essential turning in contemporary "anthropological ontology," as at least a partial failure to understand authentic existential experience: "As a man Heidegger is deeply troubled by this world of care, fear, death, and daily dullness." Despite this, and beyond that sincerity, his philosophy "is not existential philosophy, and the depth of existence does not make itself felt in it."[17] The reason for this was stated clearly and explicitly by Karl Jaspers, who was the first to criticize and abandon the ontological position in contemporary European philosophy, at the same time that Heidegger undertook his essential reform of its fundamental conception. In the view of Jaspers, "the ideal followed by ontologies is the perfectioning of the rational structure of the objectified world. Technical sciences have to help us bring about engineered existences." Jaspers was, from the very beginning of his philosophical critique (about 1930), extremely aware of the danger of such scientific technicalization of human existence: "As an attempt to bind us to objectified being, ontology sublates freedom." In his view, it is only "as potential existence that I am able to lift myself up from bondage. My chains will thus become the material of being..." The opposite way of an "engineered" civilization will transform me into a slave of that "material" and this actually is the typical form of suffering, of dukkham, by which "man in the modern age" is oppressed.[18] In his advanced years, Jaspers has discovered the Buddhist philosopher Naagaarjuna as one of the most congenial minds,[19] while Heidegger, when reading D.T. Suzuki's Essays on Zen Buddhism, confessed that this was exactly what he had tried to express all his life long. Six: It was doubt of the material substance of the world which, to a considerable extent, provoked the problem of verifying the very idea of being, of the "selfhood" of the world, both in its exterior aspect and in that which is interior to the human being-in-the-world. What "doubt" was at the outset of critical philosophy in the period of its substantialist and objectifying orientation (following Descartes), disappointment, the "unsatisfactoriness" of the world, has become for the actual, subjectively oriented or introverted, humanistic philosophy of existence. One of the best expressions of this turning can be found in some of the statements of Gabriel Marcel, who, by the way, defines his religious philosophy as a "doctrine of hope." Its basic postulate is that philosophy must be "transobjective, personal, dramatic, indeed tragic. 'I am not witnessing a spectacle'; we should remind ourselves of this every day."[20] The Buddhist implication of this basic attitude may be pursued still further in the earlier formulation by Kierkegaard: "Life is a masquerade... Your occupation consists in preserving your hiding place... In fact you are nothing; you are merely a relation to others, and what you are, you are by virtue of this relation... When the enchantment of illusion is broken, when existence begins to totter, then too does despair manifest itself as that which was at the bottom. Despair itself is a negativity, unconsciousness of it is a new negativity... This is the sickness unto death."[21] It is only by abandoning the attitude of fascination for the "spectacle" of the statically staged "Being" of the world that man becomes sufficiently movable that he is fit to plunge into the stream of existence, no longer attached to some stage-prop or "remainder." Is only then that he can really start swimming along that stream of sa.msaaro, realizing that it is pure and simple aniccam or impermanent flux, and that he can eventually become aware of the advantage of "crossing" it. This is the point which contemporary European philosophy seems to be about to realize. It is essential for this realization that the principles of aniccam and dukkham be inseparably reconnected through the intuition of their immediate interaction. In the actual situation, it will no longer even be necessary to deduce explicitly the idea of anattaa as the dynamic resultant of the confrontation of the first two principles. Just like aniccam, anattaa has already become a truism for most Europeans, whom a standardized mental training, both scientific and philosophical has carried beyond the God and Soul dogma.[22] The phantom of the Western version of a materialistic uccheda-vaado is likewise about to be dispelled. The critical missing link has only been between impermanence (aniccam) and suffering (dukkham). Due to the objectifying nature of scientific thinking, this link could never be revealed by a philosophy of nature subservient to science, not even of the type of Russell's popular literary criticism quoted above. It is obvious that only an existential experience of dukkham, suffering or "anguish," could bring about this realization. Today we have to thank, for this realization, the catastrophic results and further consequences, still being suffered, of two world wars in the 20th century. That is why a new philosophy, already nascent on the eve of the Second World War, has emerged in Europe explicitly as a philosophy of conscience rather than of mere consciousness. It should appear equally obvious that in such a philosophy there is no longer any place for the stubborn false dilemma: philosophy or religion. This last problem, which concerns "philosophical faith," is more important for Buddhism than for any other religion. It has found its best diagnostical expression in several essays of Karl Jaspers, from which we extract a few hints: It is questionable whether faith is possible without religion. Philosophy originates in this question... Man deprived of his faith by the loss of his religion is devoting more decisive thought to the nature of his own being... No longer does the revealed Deity upon whom all is dependent come first, and no longer the world that exists around us; what comes first is man, who, however, cannot make terms with himself as being, but strives to transcend himself... The unsheltered individual gives our epoch its physiognomy... [Formerly] the authority of the church sheltered him and sustained him, gave him peace and happiness... Today philosophy is the only refuge for those who, in full awareness, are not sheltered by religion.[23] Obviously, "faith" is here no longer understood as a belief in any revelation, but as reasonable trust in a qualified spiritual guide whose moral and intellectual capacities have to be carefully tested in each single case by a sound and mature criterion (apa.n.nako dhammo) such as was established by the Buddha in his critical discourses on religion, Apa.n.naka-suttam and Ca.nki-suttam (MN 60 and 95), in order to exclude empty and blind transmission of religious traditions "as a basket handed over from one to the other," or in "a string of blind men." "One oneself is the guardian of oneself; what other guardian could there be?" (Dhp 160) |
opening hand will either let you answer those things (Force of Will, Mental Misstep, Sphere of Resistance, Chalice of the Void, etc.) or take part in them yourself (Mox, Forbidden Orchard, Oath of Druids; Mox, Mishra’s Workshop, Lodestone Golem; etc.).
There’s also a rule of thumb for Workshop prison decks that says you should be able to play three pieces of hate by turn two; otherwise, it’s a mulligan.
If you need card text, call a judge
Here’s a quiz: If you have a tapped Mana Vault at the beginning of your turn and don’t untap it, when will it deal its damage? This is a pretty innocuous example, but it gets the point across. None of the printed versions of Vault actually have it correct, but the damage comes after upkeep, during the draw step. Go figure.
By its very nature, Vintage consists of a lot of cards, including the proxies that some people have to play and the foreign foils that others enjoy. And many of these versions don’t actually do what they say they do anymore. Time Vault might as well have a big question mark in its text box for how relevant that wording is for how it really works. Anyway, the point is, if you need to confirm text or an interaction on an old, proxy, or foreign card, call a judge.
No matter what you’re playing (even if you’re playing it yourself) you have to have a reasonable plan against Dredge. You might choose to run at least (at least!) six pieces of hate for the strategy, or you could plan on racing Dredge with a quick combo. Anything less than that is planning on losing to Dredge, which is a viable, conscious choice, but one that precludes your complaining about Dredge.
Nothing is an auto-counter
Restricted spells are restricted for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you need to go down two cards using Force of Will on them. When your opponent attempts to resolve a purportedly game-breaking spell that you have the opportunity to counter, take into account the complete game state and what other tools you’ll have at your disposal should you choose to let that spell resolve (for one, you’ll have an extra counter in hand).
Is your opponent way up or way down on cards? Three more probably won’t make much of a difference if you’ve got a counter. Do you have four lands and some creatures in play and they’re going for Trinisphere or Tangle Wire? So what? Do you have bounce or Ancient Grudge in hand and they want to resolve Tinker. Maybe you should let them.
Don’t just auto-play cards either
As a corollary, don’t just throw cards into play because they’re good. Time Walk is a lot more effective when you can do more than play an extra land and untap; Ancestral Recall is a very good bait spell for other bombs; Brainstorm is great for defense against discard, finding a late-game counter, or putting a Tinker target back in your library. You might be able to get even more distance out of an already card by waiting a turn or two.
Protect your manabase
Wasteland is a serious threat in Vintage, especially because some of your lands will be spells in the form of Moxes. Some Mishra’s Workshop and Null Rod lists will be able to shut off the artifact portion of your manabase with Stony Silence, Chalice of the Void, and similar cards. As a result, you’ll need to have lands to do anything. For starters, don’t fetch a non-basic if you don’t have to. Get a basic if you need the mana, or save fetches to play around Wasteland or get basic lands if you haven’t determined what your opponent’s playing.
Hold onto zero-drop mana
There are plenty of times when you need the mana bump that a Mox or Mana Crypt can give you, but there are plenty of times when you don’t, too. Except against decks that are likely to play turn-one Chalice of the Void, you can hold zero-drop mana in your hand. It looks like you have more cards, you don’t risk them getting destroyed, you don’t take damage from Crypt, and you can surprise your opponent by playing more or larger spells than they anticipated. This goes double if you’re playing Thirst for Knowledge or Bazaar of Baghdad.
Know what you’re tutoring for
There are lots of tutors available in Vintage: Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor are the most common and the most flexible; Mystical Tutor and Merchant Scroll are both important (note that Scroll can only get blue instants, not Time Walk or Tinker), Kuldotha Forgemaster appears in Workshop decks, and others like Burning Wish, Enlightened Tutor, Imperial Seal, even Crop Rotation show up from time to time.
The best way to use these is to have some idea what you’re getting when you begin your search. You can change your mind if you see something better, but unless you’re on your last legs and need an out, avoid using a tutor until you know what you need. I should say that I’m especially not a fan of using topdeck tutors for Ancestral Recall just because you don’t have anything else to get. Mystical Tutor puts you down a card in hand and fixes a draw step, just to go up three? I’m unimpressed.
Don’t lose your tutored-for cards
This should be familiar to some of you from playing Mystical Tutor in Legacy. Mystical and Vampiric Tutor put the tutored-for card on top of your library. In Vintage, there will be plenty of opportunities where you can play a topdeck tutor and then draw the card, but don’t put yourself in a position to lose it before that happens. This especially means avoiding Imperial Seal when your opponent has Jace, the Mind Sculptor. And remember to crack fetchlands before you tutor if necessary, so you don’t shuffle away your target.
Jace is not merely a Brainstorm machine
I see this one a lot. In Vintage, Jace’s 0 ability, Brainstorm, is very good; the higher power level of the cards means that seeing three more of them frequently ends the game very quickly. However, there are times that his second-best ability, the +2 fateseal, is even better. Lightning Bolt is a real card in Vintage, so Jace might need more than three loyalty against decks with Mountains in play, and having extra loyalty against creatures is a boon as well, so you can Unsummon them if necessary. Likewise, if you have lots of cards in hand and your opponent has few, fatesealing will keep it that way and put you on a legitimate path to victory.
Don’t forget about on-board hate
This should be obvious from other formats too, but artifacts and enchantments can be especially easy to overlook because many of them don’t do anything but sit there, disrupting you. Chalice of the Void and Grafdigger’s Cage are especially notorious in this way.
Don’t let it happen where you go a few turns after Cage resolves then think it’s about time to set up for a game-ending Tinker or Yawgmoth’s Will, so you tutor for it, and your opponent lets it resolve and then points at a harmless looking silver-framed card. Then you sigh and pass the turn.
Don’t auto-scoop to Time Vault-Voltaic Key
Usually if your opponent puts the Time Vault combo together to take all the turns, the game is effectively over. You can ask them to show you a win condition and then move to the next game. However, there are many situations where a Time Vault win is not a guaranteed. Vintage has plenty of cards that deal damage to their controller, and players might be at low life by the time they set up the combo. Let them play it out if they have things like Dark Confidant or Mana Crypt in play. (They don’t call Mana Crypt the ol’ Lightning Bolt machine for nothing.)
Don’t worry about the blowouts
Vintage is a swingy format; the power level of the cards makes it that way. When your opponent can go from no cards in hand to topdecking and resolving Tinker, you’re bound to lose some games accidentally, just as games get lost to mana screw or flooding in other formats. Blowout losses and turn-one kills are infrequent and can be prevented with proper planning and card choices. Let the bad games go, and don’t get discouraged.
Conclusion
As I said, Vintage games are packed with decisions, so there are lots of chances for opponents to outplay one another. (Come to think of it, players coming from other formats are probably better at creature combat than lots of Vintage-exclusive players!) These tricks should help get you started and help avoid some of the more common bonks that Vintage players commit. There will be plenty more for you to learn from experience. Give it a shot!
Nat Moes
@GrandpaBelcherToday, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome’s excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.
Contrary to most (at least, that’s the impression I get), I am extremely anal about my web browsing habits – if I’m not using a page, it goes down. I find it pointless to open dozens of tabs while you can only stare at one at a time anyway. Right now, I have only the tabs open required for this particular story – and a tab for Facebook that I can barely manage to not compulsively close.
I’ve seen screenshots of some of your browser windows over the years, and I’m often surprised by how many tabs people have open. Well, this new Firefox trick, called Panorama, should really be of help to you since it makes it easier to group tabs together in a natural fashion. It is vaguely similar to Mac OS X’s Exposé, with the additional ability to create your own visual representation of groups of tabs.
I’ve played around with the new feature on Windows 7, but I was less than impressed. I found the animations to be choppy, the miniatures representing open tabs were pixelated, and basic things like resizing the Firefox window reminded me of Windows XP’s visual wear & tear days of animations. It’s still a beta, of course, but I’m just baffled as to why it’s so hard to get even these basic things right, and it doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of Firefox 4.0 at this point.
But alas, I’m probably not the right person to talk about Firefox (“if the browser is not Chrome, then it sucks” is my motto). How are you actual Firefox users experiencing the Firefox 4.0 betas?Recently I ran a drawing workshop for my colleagues at Fluxx. A few days later one of them was able to draw this:
Tom made me promise not to say he drew this.
It’s quite impressive if you think that before the workshop, when my colleagues have to brief me on personas and journey maps, they didn’t dare to draw anything at all. It’s not a masterpiece, but it clearly identifies four different people. It does its job.
He’s just one of the colleagues that told me “I started the workshop without knowing how to draw, and now I can draw.”
It’s something I’m sure you will be able to say too by the end of this article.
Why you (think you) can’t draw.
The main difference between illustrators and you, is simply because they think they can. Being able to draw is not about technique and style, but about confidence.
The reason why you think you can’t draw, happened to everyone. I played around with the Dunning-Kruger diagram to show why:
Check my Tumblr “There is more than a way to draw a cat”
When you were a child, you probably thought you were the best at anything. You used to just start, explore, learn and have fun.
You thought you could draw. And probably you thought you were good at it. Until you faced the reality that other people are better than you. You realised that after all, you can’t draw.
It’s true, other illustrators do it better. Their drawings have a better technique and they probably look more realistic.
But the real difference between you and them, is that they didn’t get stuck when they realised they couldn’t draw.
They just started, explored, learned and had fun again.
That brought them to grow confidence again. They gained skills and techniques that made them able to make a good drawing. But the truth is that you don’t need to make a good drawing to communicate something. Whether you’re briefing your designer, visualising your thoughts in a meeting or playing Pictionary with your friends, the most important thing is that people understand what you are drawing.
A cat (left). A cat (middle). A cat (right, drawn with my left hand)
And the best thing about communicating ideas is that you need to keep it simple. As John Maeda says, it’s about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
You can see how many details you can get rid of when drawing an iPhone. Even less if it’s a generic mobile.
And how adding a simple rotation of the same drawing, it communicates a tablet instead of a mobile.
Let’s draw!
Get a piece of paper and a pen, pencil or sharpie. Whatever you would use everyday to take a note.
Now you are ready to start with the hardest part of all. Start drawing this:
Yeah, just a dot and a line. It starts all from there.
Done?
Good! You can draw a point and a line!
Now add some lines next to that one.
Start getting more confidence with your hand trying to keep the lines parallel.
See what happens with a different thickness of a line, pressing more, tracing more times or changing drawing tool.
Now start exploring different kind of lines. Dotted, dashed, wavy.
Great! Now that you can draw dots and lines, lets put them together, with a square, a triangle and a circle.
Now you can draw everything you need to know to go forward!
Look how easy is to put them together and draw these…
…icons. Wow! You can draw icons!
Let’s draw (more) icons
Icons are like words: if you don’t have them in your head, they won’t come out when you want to communicate. That’s why it’s important to have in mind your own toolbox where you can pick your icons whenever you need them.
Keep drawing these icons for your toolbox!
Did you make a mistake? Don’t worry!
Does it still communicate the same idea? It’s not a problem!
Some of them might be more challenging. I’ll show you how to draw some of them.
As you can see in this example, I also showed what I see in my head while drawing. Those are lines that everyone has in mind when they look to a picture and it’s important to consider them when drawing. It’s a concept called “gestalt”.
When you look at the stars, your eyes perceive also the part of lines that you didn’t draw. The eyes expect to see aligned lines or equidistant vertices. That’s why they might look unusual or messy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a “bad” thing, but just a different style choice.
The same goes if your icons look different from mine.
It’s not a problem. It’s my way of drawing icons, but don’t see yours as a mistake, but as your style. It works like your calligraphy.
But try to understand what characterises it, so that you can apply it everywhere. It’s good for us to have a constant style in our icons.
It’s what makes people understand that you drew them.
And it’s what makes people think that we can draw.
And when I say “we”, I mean me and you.
Because now you can draw too! 😃
And with my next post you’ll learn how to draw people!This cohort study included all persons born in Denmark from 1968 to 2008 (n = 2,789,807) and in Sweden from 1973 to 2006 (n = 3,380,301), and a random sample of 89.3% of all born in Finland from 1987 to 2007 (n = 1,131,905). A total of 189,094 persons were included in the exposed cohort when they lost a parent before 18 years old. Log-linear Poisson regression was used to estimate mortality rate ratio (MRR). Parental death was associated with a 50% increased all-cause mortality (MRR = 1.50, 95% CI 1.43–1.58). The risks were increased for most specific cause groups and the highest MRRs were observed when the cause of child death and the cause of parental death were in the same category. Parental unnatural death was associated with a higher mortality risk (MRR = 1.84, 95% CI 1.71–2.00) than parental natural death (MRR = 1.33, 95% CI 1.24–1.41). The magnitude of the associations varied according to type of death and age at bereavement over different follow-up periods. The main limitation of the study is the lack of data on post-bereavement information on the quality of the parent-child relationship, lifestyles, and common physical environment.
Bereavement by spousal death and child death in adulthood has been shown to lead to an increased risk of mortality. Maternal death in infancy or parental death in early childhood may have an impact on mortality but evidence has been limited to short-term or selected causes of death. Little is known about long-term or cause-specific mortality after parental death in childhood.
These findings show that in three high-income Nordic countries parental death during childhood and adolescence is associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality into early adulthood, irrespective of sex and age at bereavement and after accounting for baseline characteristics such as socioeconomic status. Part of this association may be due to “confounding” factors—the people who lost a parent during childhood may have shared other unknown characteristics that increased their risk of death. Because the study was undertaken in high-income countries, these findings are unlikely to be the result of a lack of material or health care needs. Rather, the increased mortality among the exposed group reflects both genetic susceptibility and the long-term impacts of parental death on health and social well-being. Given that increased mortality probably only represents the tip of the iceberg of the adverse effects of early bereavement, these findings highlight the need to provide long-term health and social support to bereaved children.
The researchers obtained data on everyone born in Denmark from 1968 to 2008 and in Sweden from 1973 to 2006, and on most people born in Finland from 1987 to 2007 (more than 7 million individuals in total) from national registries. They identified 189,094 individuals who had lost a parent between the age of 6 months and 18 years. They then estimated the mortality rate ratio (MRR) associated with parental death during childhood or adolescence by comparing the number of deaths in this exposed cohort (after excluding children who died on the same day as a parent or shortly after from the same cause) and in the unexposed cohort. Compared with the unexposed cohort, the exposed cohort had 50% higher all-cause mortality (MRR = 1.50). The risk of mortality in the exposed cohort was increased for most major categories of cause of death but the highest MRRs were seen when the cause of death in children, adolescents, and young adults during follow-up and the cause of parental death were in the same category. Notably, parental unnatural death was associated with a higher mortality risk (MRR = 1.84) than parental natural death (MRR = 1.33). Finally, the exposed cohort had increased all-cause MRRs well into early adulthood irrespective of child age at parental death, and the magnitude of MRRs differed by child age at parental death and by type of death.
The loss of a life-partner or of a child is associated with an increased risk of death (mortality), and there is also some evidence that the death of a parent during childhood leads to an increased mortality risk in the short term. However, little is known about the long-term impact on mortality of early parental loss or whether the impact varies with the type of death—a natural death from illness or an unnatural death from external causes such as an accident—or with the specific cause of death. A better understanding of the impact of early bereavement on mortality is needed to ensure that bereaved children receive appropriate health and social support after a parent's death. Here, the researchers undertake a nationwide cohort study in three Nordic countries to investigate long-term and cause-specific mortality after parental death in childhood. A cohort study compares the occurrence of an event (here, death) in a group of individuals who have been exposed to a particular variable (here, early parental loss) with the occurrence of the same event in an unexposed cohort.
When someone close dies, it is normal to grieve, to mourn the loss of that individual. Initially, people who have lost a loved one often feel numb and disorientated and find it hard to grasp what has happened. Later, people may feel angry or guilty, and may be overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and despair. They may become depressed or anxious and may even feel suicidal. People who are grieving can also have physical reactions to their loss such as sleep problems, changes in appetite, and illness. How long bereavement—the period of grief and mourning after a death—lasts and how badly it affects an individual depends on the relationship between the individual and the deceased person, on whether the death was expected, and on how much support the mourner receives from relatives, friends, and professionals.
Funding: This study was supported by a grant from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme/European Research Council (ERC-2010-StG-260242-PROGEURO to JL). Data recruitment was supported by grants from the Danish Medical Research Council (project no. 09-072986 to JL), the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (Grant no. 2010-0092 to SC), the Nordic Cancer Union (2013-78760 to JL), and an unrestricted grant from the Lundbeck Foundation (MEPRICA to MV). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
We hypothesized that parental death in early life has both short- and long-term impacts on health and social well-being, leading to an increased mortality risk accordingly over time. In addition to the genetic disposition of both physical [16], [17] and psychiatric diseases [14], [15], [18], psycho-social consequences following parental death [19] may play a significant role [12], [13]. Using combined nationwide data from three high-income countries (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), we examined the association between parental death in children and adolescents and subsequent all-cause mortality risk until early or mid-adulthood, as well as cause-specific mortality. We further postulated that the magnitude of the associations differs according to sex of deceased parent, type and cause of parental death, child sex, and child age at parental death [3], [6], [8] – [10], [15], [20]. The unique data from national registers provided further opportunities to take the effects of socioeconomic inequality [21], [22] and other important factors into account [23] – [25].
Bereavement by the death of a close relative is a major life event [1]. Spousal bereavement [2], [3] or child death in adult populations [4], [5] is often followed by an increased mortality risk. Maternal death in infancy or parental death in early childhood may lead to an increased mortality risk; however, scientific evidence is limited to short-term observations, historical data, or often studies in low- and mid-income settings [6] – [10]. In high-income countries, 3%–4% of children experience the death of a parent before they reach 18 years of age [11]. Such an early life adversity can have substantial impacts on future health in many ways [12], [13], but little is known about how it affect immediate or long-term mortality [3]. Further, the nature of the associations may vary with cause of death and type of death, but we are unaware of any large-scale studies on this, except a few indicating an excessive suicide risk following parental death [14], [15].
The following potential confounders were included in the model: country (Denmark, Sweden, and Finland), sex (male, female), and birth characteristics including birth weight (<2,500 g, 2,500–3,249 g, 3,250–3,999 g, ≥4,000 g), preterm birth (gestational age: <37 weeks, ≥37 weeks), and Apgar score at five minutes (1–8, 9–10). We also included maternal socio-demographic characteristics at childbirth, such as age (≤26, 27–30, ≥31 years), parity (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or higher), education (low [≤9 years], middle [10–14 years], and high [≥15 years] [available for Swedish data from 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005; for annual Danish data from 1980 to 2007; and for annual Finnish data from 1987 to 2007]), social status (1 = not in labor market; 2 = unskilled worker, 3 = skilled worker and white collar; 4 = high status, such as medium to big business owners, top administrative officials; 9 = missing values; data were available for the periods 1980–2008 in Denmark, 1980, 1985, 1990 in Sweden, and 1990–2007 in Finland), and data on smoking in early pregnancy ([yes, no] was available for the periods 1983–2006 in Sweden, 1991–2007 in Denmark, and 1987–2007 in Finland).
Mortality rate ratios (MRRs) for the exposed and the unexposed were estimated according to all-cause mortality, type of child death (natural death, unnatural death), and cause-specific mortality. When using natural death as response (outcome), unnatural death is a competing event and treated as a censored case. We did the same for cause-specific mortality, performing ten separate analyses for the ten above-mentioned main cause groups. For each of these ten analyses, we separated the exposure into two sub-categories: the first sub-category of “same cause” referred to a cause of parental death that belonged to the same specific-cause group of child mortality and others were grouped into the second exposed sub-category of “not same cause.” For example, if a specific-cause group of child mortality (outcome) was “Infections & parasitic diseases,” the first exposure sub-category was parental death due to “Infections & parasitic diseases,” the second exposure sub-category was parental death due to other causes than “Infections & parasitic diseases.” This approach would to some extent help us to evaluate the role of genetic disposition for cause-specific mortality.
The exposure was treated as a time-varying variable, i.e., all persons were allocated to the unexposed cohort at the beginning of the follow-up (0.5 years of age). Those who lost a parent before they reached 18 years of age would be moved to the exposed cohort from the day when the parent died. All children who did not lose a parent before they reached 18 years of age remained in the unexposed cohort. Follow-up time was counted by days as offset variable in the model. Child age was a categorical variable defined by the age in each calendar year. In some analyses, the length of follow-up time was categorized into six periods (0–2 years, 3–6 years, 7–10 years, 11–14 years, 15–18 years, ≥19 years).
Information on child sex, birth characteristics (birth weight, gestational age, and Apgar score at five minutes, etc.), maternal age, and parity was retrieved from the national Medical Birth Registers (MBRs) [26]. These registers hold recorded information from antenatal, obstetric, and neonatal medical records on practically all deliveries. Information on socioeconomic status (maternal education and social status) was obtained from the Danish Integrated Database for Labor Market Research (IDA) in Denmark, the Swedish Register of Education in Sweden, and in Finland from Statistics Finland and THL [26].
The main outcomes of interest were all-cause mortality, cause-specific mortality, and type of death (natural death from diseases and medical conditions, unnatural death from external causes). We obtained information on the cause of death from the Cause of Death Register in each country. In Denmark, the eighth version (ICD-8) was used to categorize cause of death between 1978 and 1993 and the tenth version (ICD-10) between 1994 and 2007. In Sweden, the ICD-8 was used between 1973 and 1986, the ICD-9 between 1987 and 1996, and the ICD-10 between 1997 and 2008. In Finland, the ICD-9 was used between 1987 and 1995 and the ICD-10 between 1996 and 2010 [26]. Type of death was separated into two categories (natural death from diseases and medical conditions [ICD-8 codes 000-799, ICD-9 codes 000-799, and ICD-10 codes A00-R99], and unnatural death from external causes [ICD-8 codes E800-E999, ICD-9 codes E800-E999, and ICD-10 codes V01-Y98]). Cause-specific mortality was defined according to the main chapters in the ICD system as the following ten groups: infections and parasitic diseases (ICD 8 and ICD 9 codes 000–1399, IC 10 codes A00–B999); neoplasms (ICD 8 and ICD 9 codes 140–2389, ICD 10 codes C00–C999); endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic diseases (ICD 8 and ICD 9 codes 240–2799, ICD 10 codes E00–E909); mental and behavioural disorders (ICD 8 and ICD 9 codes 290–3159, ICD 10 codes F00–F999); diseases of the nervous system and the sense organs (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 320–389, ICD 10 codes G00–H95); diseases of the circulatory system (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 410–414, 420–423, 425–429, ICD 10 codes I20–I25, I30–I33, I39–I52); diseases of the respiratory system (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 460–519, ICD 10 codes J00–J99); diseases of the digestive system (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 520–579, 4442, ICD 10 codes K00–K93); transport accidents (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 810–823, ICD 10 codes V01–V89); and suicide and intentional self-harm (ICD 8 and ICD9 codes 950–959, ICD 10 codes X60–X84).
We excluded 711 children who died the same day as their parents (of whom 626 [87%] died from motor vehicle accidents, drowning, or other violent causes). We also excluded 94 children who died of the same or a related cause as their parents (defined by the same first two digits in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems [ICD] codes) within 30 days after having been exposed to parental death (of whom 76 [86%] died from motor vehicle accidents, drowning, or violent causes).
We established a population-based cohort study by combining nationwide data from three Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, and Finland [26]. In each country, the unique personal identification number allows accurate individual linkage of personal data from different national registers [27]. We included all children born in Denmark from 1968 to 2008 (n = 2,789,807) and all children born in Sweden from 1973 to 2006 (n = 3,380,301). A random sample of 89.3% of all children born in Finland from 1987 to 2007 (n = 1,131,905) were included, because Finland's authorities did not allow data to be recruited from 100% of the targeted population. As mortality during the first six months of life is mostly due to perinatal and congenital conditions [28], we started follow-up at six months of age. The exposure was defined as the death of a parent in the period from six months after birth to the day when a person turned 18 years of age [29]. Follow-up ended when the participants died, emigrated, or at the end of the study period (31 December 2009 in Denmark, 31 December 2008 in Sweden, and 31 December 2010 in Finland), whichever came first.
The study was approved in Denmark by the Data Protection Agency and the Research Ethics Committee of the Central Region; in Sweden by the Research Ethics Committee (EPN) at the Karolinska Institute; and in Finland by Statistics Finland and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). The study was based on encrypted data, on which the ethics committees do not require informed consent.
The exposed cohort had increased all-cause mortality MRRs well into early adulthood, irrespective of child age at parental death. The magnitude of MRRs differed by child age at parental death and type of death. For natural death, there was a tendency that MRRs increased over follow-up time, while those who were exposed at advanced child age groups tended to have higher MRRs in the later periods of follow-up. For unnatural death, those exposed before 5 years of age mostly had higher MRRs than others, especially at the beginning years of follow-up. Those exposed at age 15–18 also had relatively high MRRs throughout the follow-up periods ( Figure 2 ).
All-cause mortality in the exposed cohort was increased for almost all specific causes of parental death, albeit the MRRs were not statistically significant for several causes like infections or diseases of the nervous system ( Figure 1A ). The highest all-cause MRR was seen for individuals who lost a parent due to suicide (MRR = 2.00, 95% CI 1.79–2.22) ( Figure 1A ). The magnitude of the associations varied according to the two types of child death (natural death in Figure 1B, unnatural death in Figure 1C ). For example, parental suicide was associated with a 65% increased risk of child natural death (MRR = 1.65, 95% CI 1.36–2.01) ( Figure 1B ), and an even higher MRR of 2.26 (95% CI 1.95–2.61) of child unnatural death ( Figure 1C ). Parental suicide was also associated with an increased risk of child accidental death (MRR = 1.37, 95% CI 1.03–1.82) ( Table 7 ).
The exposed cohort had higher mortality risks from most major groups of cause of death than the unexposed cohort ( Table 6 ), for example death from the nervous system (MRR = 1.71, 95% CI 1.36–2.17), the digestive system (MRR = 2.34, 95% CI 1.61–3.38), the circulatory system (MRR = 1.80, 95% CI 1.36–2.37), and suicide and intentional self-harm (MRR = 1.78, 95% CI 1.56–2.03). Highest MRR estimates were seen if children died from the same cause as the deceased parent (the first exposure sub-category: “same cause”), for example the 7-fold or 5-fold relative risks of mortality from nervous system diseases or digestive diseases, respectively. However, the first exposure sub-category (“same cause”) often accounted for only a minor proportion of the exposed group, and the second exposed category (“not same cause”) had a slightly attenuated but similar MRR estimates to the average ones for most specific cause groups.
Although the absolute mortality rate was twice as high among boys (87.2/10 5 person-years) as among girls (37.9/10 5 person-years), similar MRR estimates were observed in the analyses stratified by child sex (in boys MRR = 1.54, 95% CI 1.45–1.64, in girls MRR = 1.43, 95% CI 1.30–1.56) ( Table 3 ). Analyses further performed by the deceased parent's sex yielded similar findings ( Table 3 ). With only a few exceptions, subgroup analyses on specific baseline characteristics of the study population showed similarly elevated relative risk estimates (MRRs) across sub-categories ( Table 4 ), although there were significant variations in absolute mortality rates between sub-categories of population characteristics. For example, compared to children born to mothers with a low social status (“unskilled workers” as the reference group), children of mothers with higher social status groups (“skilled workers/white collars” and “top level status”) had an 8% reduced risk (MRR = 0.92, 95% CI 0.86–0.97) and a 13% reduced risk (MRR = 0.87, 95% CI 0.84–0.89) of mortality, respectively; while those of mothers who were not in labor market had a 5% increased mortality risk (MRR = 1.05, 95% CI 1.01–1.09) ( Table 5 ). But except those with top level status, we observed similar magnitudes of the association between parental death and mortality in other three sub-categories, 1.42 (1.22–1.65) for “not in labor market,” 1.50 (1.31–1.75) for “unskilled workers |
large part of a big trout's diet, though many anglers on smaller rivers and streams rarely cast lures that mimic these meals. A curly-tailed grub on a 3⁄8-ounce jighead is a decent start, but a few simple tweaks at the fly-tying bench can turn that jighead into a big-trout slayer.
Start by piercing a 3-inch bunny strip on the hook skin side down. White and black are good clear-water choices; neons, yellows, and oranges work well in stained water. Secure the strip behind the jig's collar, then wrap in a few long strands of gold or silver tinsel. Next, lash a thick bunch of brown marabou to the collar, and follow that with one bunch of natural elk hair. Whip finish and coat the wraps with clear nail polish. You can swim this jig in moving water, but it shines when it's slow-hopped in deep pools, effectively mirroring the action and profile of sculpins and crayfish. Small trout may just nip the bunny strip, but a big fish will inhale the whole thing. I'd be willing to bet the brutes in your community hole haven't seen anything like it.
The Uglier, the Better
Trout fishing is synonymous with beautiful locations, as quiet woods and pristine waters add to the experience. Even streams that run through heavily populated areas usually have a few stretches in parks or away from town where the setting feels a bit more trouty. That's typically where everyone goes, but the truth is the trout don't care how pretty it looks above the surface. Some of the biggest browns I've ever caught in the suburbs have come from sections next to busy roads or behind the bowling alley, in spots with more tires in the water than a NASCAR pit. Anglers tend to snub these areas, but the trout generally get less pressure and often grow bigger as a result.—J.C.
"I live on a little trout stream where the average fish is maybe 9 inches. One night the river was a little high and I went down with my wife and son and our Lab. On the third cast in a deep hole with a streamer, something jerked the rod tip down. I landed a brown trout about 24 inches long. Glad I had some reliable witnesses, because my Lab lies about stuff all the time."
—Tom Rosenbauer, noted trout expert and author, Manchester, Vt.Mithrarin
Unlock all other Trophies
2.5%
Ultra Rare 9.41%
Very Rare
Defused
Defeated Fuse
27.5%
Rare 36.10%
Uncommon
Waters of Life
Defeated Lady Tethys
17.7%
Rare 25.69%
Uncommon
High Spirits
Defeated Baron Kane
12.8%
Very Rare 20.41%
Uncommon
...And the Dust Settles
Defeat General Gaius
9.8%
Very Rare 17.41%
Rare
Friend of Falana
Completed 5 Sidequests
14.7%
Very Rare 22.82%
Uncommon
Hero of Falana
Completed 10 Sidequests
10.3%
Very Rare 18.12%
Rare
Savior of Falana
Completed 20 Sidequests
5.2%
Very Rare 12.96%
Rare
A Decent Start...
Successfully complete a 200+ hit combo
38.3%
Rare 46.72%
Uncommon
That's More Like It
Successfully complete a 1000+ hit combo
8.2%
Very Rare 17.39%
Rare
Bringer of Death
Kill 500 Enemies
32.4%
Rare 40.78%
Uncommon
Push and Turn
Unlock a Treasure Chest
71.9%
Common 78.84%
Common
Wait, aren't you...?
Unlock a Cage and Rescue a Friend
31.1%
Rare 40.86%
Uncommon
Baker's Dozen
Hang out with Twelve Friends in the Sanctuary
3.8%
Ultra Rare 11.38%
Rare
Distant Thunder
Use the DUST STORM on Fidget's Projectiles
73.4%
Common 79.03%
Common
Well on your Way
Pick Up an Ability Orb
89.9%
Common 92.26%
Common
With Great Power...
Level Up by Assigning Skill Gems
74.0%
Common 79.34%
Common
An Impressive Display
Earn a Four-Star Rating in any Challenge Arena
8.1%
Very Rare 16.41%
Rare
The Stuff of Legends
Earn a Four-Star Rating in EVERY Challenge Arena
2.9%
Ultra Rare 10.23%
Rare
Blue Bomber
Simultaneously Kill 6 Enemies with a Single Bomb
10.7%
Very Rare 19.37%
Rare
Paragon
Opt out of putting poison ivy into Gianni's laundry
10.5%
Very Rare 18.98%
Rare
Renegade
Reign chaos by putting poison ivy into Gianni's laundry
9.8%
Very Rare 17.88%
Rare
Cutting it Close
Successfully Parry with less than 10% health remaining
24.7%
Rare 32.96%
Uncommon
Tinkerer
Craft an item from a blueprint
25.8%
Rare 34.18%
Uncommon
Bad Therapist
Bug Matti
5.8%
Very Rare 15.22%
Rare
Opposite of Fail
Complete all Fale Quests
7.9%
Very Rare 15.73%
Rare
Above and Beyond the Call
Complete the Game on Tough or Hardcore setting
3.2%
Ultra Rare 10.37%
Rare
Sad Way to Go
Kill an enemy with the slide attack
9.4%
Very Rare 18.46%
Rare
One Last Wish
Fulfill Bopo's wish for snow
6.8%
Very Rare 14.61%
RareYes, you read that title correctly. I’m talking about naked mole rats, the burrowing hairless rodents with a face only a mother could love. You might just know them for their strange appearance, but naked mole rats have fascinated scientists for decades due to their extreme longevity. They are by far the longest-lived rodent species, with a maximum lifespan of more than 30 years, compared to only 2 years for your typical mouse. They also are practically immune to cancer, for reasons we don’t entirely understand.
So what does this have to do with Alzheimer’s? Well, another one of the naked mole rat’s strange quirks is that it possesses extremely high levels of amyloid-beta, the toxic protein that is believed to cause Alzheimer’s disease. In humans, amyloid-beta aggregates into sticky plaques in the brain, which can cause a whole host of problems. Amazingly, naked mole rats have even higher amyloid-beta levels than 3xTg-AD mice, which are an Alzheimer’s mouse model genetically engineered to over-produce amyloid-beta. However, the amyloid-beta found in naked mole rats is less sticky and does not tend to form plaques, despite being just as toxic to neurons. Additionally, while amyloid-beta in humans increases as we age, its levels remain constant in naked mole rats. This suggests that amyloid-beta could be harmless (or possibly even beneficial) when it’s present in its non-sticky form. A 2015 report also found that the brains of old naked mole rats look more like what you’d expect to see in a baby animal’s brain, with high numbers of new neurons constantly being formed.
The fact that naked mole rats possess exceedingly high levels of amyloid-beta throughout their lifespan, yet do not develop Alzheimer’s disease, makes them an extremely useful research subject. If scientists can unravel what makes these rodents so resistant to amyloid-beta, we might be able to apply this finding to humans in the form of a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. So even though they may not be the cutest creatures, you might someday have the naked mole rat to thank for keeping your brain healthy!
Here are some more fun facts about naked mole rats! They have no sense of pain and are nearly blind.
They are almost entirely cold-blooded, relying on their environment to regulate body temperature.
In order to live underground, naked mole rats have evolved very low rates of breathing and metabolism, and can survive for up to 5 hours in low-oxygen conditions.
They live in eusocial colonies similar to ants or bees, with a single queen that produces all the colony’s offspring.
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Want more? Follow AlzScience via email, Facebook, or Twitter!Women, let's face it. We're fed so much BS regarding our health and fitness, and especially what our health and fitness is supposed to be. According to most women's fitness magazines (and sadly many "coaches" and personal trainers), the epitome of women's fitness is remaining purposely weak and frail (yes, it's a choice, not an inevitability). Look into any issue of Women's Health and it's decked out with full-color photos of women standing one-legged on a Bosu ball lifting a 5-pound dumbbell while holding a yoga pose.
This is not the workout you need. It isn't going to get you in shape, make you toned, lose fat, or lose weight. It's just going to make you a little bit better at standing one-legged on a Bosu ball -- maybe improve your balance a bit. But if your aim is to lose fat, build muscle and look great, there is a far more effective solution to accomplishing this.
Women: To achieve maximal health, you need to get stronger. Get under some weights and lift. ANYTHING you read in any women's fitness magazine is suspect. Actually, it's not just suspect -- you can be guaranteed that they're feeding you inaccurate trash.
What Is the Best Strength Training Program Out There for Women?
Is there one best strength program out there for women today? I don't believe in any one "best," most bullet-proof training program for anyone; it really depends on your own personal goals. No cookie cutters need apply. However, there are certainly standards that separate the GREAT programs from the mediocre, and the mediocre from the downright ugly. Today, we will review the top five standards that your strength training program should include:
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1. Lift Heavy Weights Every Week for Maximum Strength, Fitness and Health
If you get nothing else from this post, this is the one thing you need to absorb. You MUST train heavy lifts. Put the 5-pound dumbbells away, just put them back in the corner where you found them. Light them on fire while you're at it. I'm talking about loading several 45-pound plates on a 45-pound barbell and deadlifting and squatting. Of course, heavy is relative and everyone is at a different stage in their strength development. But whether you squat 100 pounds or 400 (and yes ladies, it is highly possible), you need to routinely hit heavy lifts that are heavy for you.
"But what's the advantage to lifting heavy?"
Lifting heavy weight, for both women and men, will cause a flurry of positive systemic changes throughout your body. Your muscles respond by growing (which will also increase metabolism), bones become denser, hormonal regulation improves (that means a much more manageable menstrual period for women, among many other positive benefits), your central nervous system responds by learning how to recruit more muscle fibers to contract on demand and it becomes more resilient to physical stress. Not to mention the real-life benefits of just being stronger. And these are just a few of the reasons why you should lift heavy.
Bonus Benefit of Lifting Heavy: want an awesome looking bodacious butt? Squat and deadlift heavy, end of story.
On the flip side, lifting super light weights cannot provide the same benefits because the ultra-light weight does not cause enough of a systemic stress on your body (albeit a good stress) to affect these same changes. Which means no "toning" like it promises (after all ladies, toning is muscle -- let's just own that fact right now). The grocery bags that you carry in from the grocery store are heavier than what most women lift in the weight room today, or at least as much. The only exception here is for someone who just recently healed from a serious injury and must start with a light weight while they rehab. Which should serve as a hint: If a guy who just got over a severe car accident a few weeks ago can kill your workout, maybe you should change your workout.
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2. Variety Is Key
If you want to consistently get stronger and develop muscle, you must mix in variety in your training. For the first 6-7 months of barbell strength training, you can get away with learning and focusing on the basics: the bench press, overhead press, squat, deadlift, and power clean. But after this period of time, the body needs more variety to achieve maximum strength gains. None of the training sessions I do are ever quite the same -- there's a certain formula I follow, but I have yet to follow the exact same training day in a long time. Not only is this a treat for the mind and keeps you mentally engaged, but you will continue to make big strength gains without plateauing. This is the basis of the conjugate system, and it works.
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3. You Must Fill in Your Weaknesses With Accessory Work
Everyone, both men and women alike, have their own unique muscular weaknesses and strengths. While it's fun to work on your strengths, you MUST train up your weaknesses. You are only as strong as your weakest link. Women are often weakest in these key muscle groups: hip adductors/abductors (inner and outer thighs), triceps, shoulders, and mid-upper back. Most people in general have weak hamstrings as well so make sure to work those too. Fill in your own muscular weaknesses with extra accessory work (e.g., weight exercises that target a specific muscle group) twice a week. There's aesthetic benefits from accessory work as well -- it's quite fun to watch those shoulders, triceps, and hamstrings fill in while looking in the mirror!
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4. Neglecting the Upper Body = No Sexy Arms and Weak Lifts
This goes for everyone, but especially us ladies. Train your upper body at least twice a week for strength and muscle development. Do NOT miss this second day. Since we tend to be weaker in the upper body, we need every workout we can get. Your worst lift (typically the upper body lifts for women) starts to degrade the fastest after a period of inadequate training activity. This goes for anyone, male or female. So if you're having a short training week due to a vacation/moving/a hectic and crazy week, and you can only have two strength training days that week, let BOTH of those days be upper body. It's really that important.
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5. For Faster Progress: Train With People Who Push You
This is not really a part of any programming per se, but it's a BIG part of your success. Train with other people -- and with a coach -- who care about your goals enough to push you past what you think you're capable of. This will bring out the best in you and will help consistently push you towards new goals. Unfortunately for a lot of women, they train with other people and with coaches who simply don't believe it's necessary for them to lift past a certain weight. Staying at the same weight forever will not benefit you in any way. You won't get stronger. You won't develop more muscle. You won't get more toned. There's usually no ill-intention meant with this poor coaching, it really just stems from a misconception that women should be strength trained differently and handled with kid-gloves. If your training crew consists of people, whether men or women, who patronize you and don't seem to think you need to lift past a certain weight because you're female -- even if the weight is light for you -- then you need to move on to a more ambitious group of folks. There is a big difference in the progress you will make.
Check out more strength training and nutrition tips at Ice Runner Strength, where this article premiered.
For more by Courtney Green, click here.Liverpool manager expecting goals and three points from visit of Arsenal on Saturday night
Jurgen Klopp says he is expecting the goals to flow in a “spectacular” match on Saturday evening and is confident his Liverpool side can secure victory against Arsenal.
With an average of 5.3 goals scored and no defeats from their last three home matches against the Gunners, Klopp is confident of both an exciting contest and a successful outcome.
"The last games we played against them were kind of spectacular,” Klopp told liverpoolfc.com. “Maybe the next one will be similar.
"I’m 100% optimistic. Arsenal is a good football-playing side and we need to bounce back and keep the points at Anfield."
⚽ Arsenal
🤒 Injuries
🎥 The best bits from Jürgen Klopp's pre-Arsenal press conference in 60 seconds! pic.twitter.com/DPpHKTVcFj — Liverpool FC (@LFC) March 3, 2017
See: Klopp's injury updateIn Maine and across the globe, meat-free eating has penetrated mainstream culture and is no longer the lonely domain of hippies and radical thinkers. That became increasingly clear in 2014, a year when the chorus of celebrities and scientists adopting vegetarian or vegan diets and encouraging others to do the same grew louder.
Throughout the year, we were treated to stories of high-profile individuals choosing plant-based diets: Beyoncé and Jay-Z went vegan for 22 days at the end of 2013; Carrie Underwood ate vegetarian during her pregnancy; Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Griff Whalen and Houston Texans running back Adrian Foster both were noted as vegans; President Bill Clinton’s heart health was reportedly much improved after he adopted a plant-based diet in 2011; and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey very publicly switched from eating vegetarian to vegan in November.
Additional Images Naked Food Magazine hit newsstands in April. Courtesy photo Carrie Underwood Adrian Foster Bill Clinton Maine vegetarians highlights of 2014 • Heiwa Soy Beanery in Belfast began selling fresh soy milk in plastic milk jugs at the start of the year. But when the multi-tenant food processing hub where the business was located suddenly shut down in the spring, Heiwa was forced to put the soy milk on temporary out-of-stock status. It continues to sell its
tofu. • Bates College in Lewiston was named the country’s most vegan-friendly small college in a March Madness-style online contest by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. • In April, season two of the Maine-produced cooking show “Vegan Mashup” began airing on PBS stations around the country. It stars Toni Fiore of Cumberland and a number of other nationally recognized vegetarian chefs. • Hundreds turned out to hear animal rescue pioneer Gene Baur speak and to attend other talks and film screenings at the 10th annual Maine Vegetarian Food Festival in Portland on June 7. • The vegetarian-friendly Pepperclub closed its doors in September after 25 years on Middle Street in Portland. The owners said the restaurant was a victim of the city’s rising rents. • The 37th annual Common Ground Country Fair featured two new all-vegetarian food vendors, the Raw Food Mobile and PAKS Farm’s strawberry shortcakes. PAKS took home the blue ribbon for the best traditional food, and the Raw Food Mobile won blue ribbons for using the most Maine ingredients and for the best new food vendor. • Just in time for Thanksgiving, Oakhurst Dairy in Portland unveiled a new line of almond milk. In unsweetened, vanilla and chocolate flavors, the milk is dairy-free, made from GMO-free almonds and available in the refrigerated case. – Avery Yale Kamila
Reports continued to pile up about the environmental impact of eating meat, likely nudging others to reduce their meat consumption, as well.
In April, the New York Times wrote, “Demand for meat alternatives is growing, fueled by trends as varied as increased vegetarianism and concerns over the impact of industrial-scale animal husbandry on the environment.”
A number of vegetarian events and trends were covered by major news outlets this year. Here is a look at some of those that generated the most ink:
In March, Chipotle restaurants along the East Coast added tofu burritos (Chipotle calls them Sofritas) to their menus. The vegan burrito and taco filling is made with organic, GMO-free tofu. Throughout the year, other fast-food restaurants announced plans to add or test-market meat-free menu items.
The vegetarian media landscape expanded in April when popular digital-only Naked Food Magazine hit newsstands. The magazine covers frequently feature nude celebrities cloaked in produce. With a name that stands for “new American kind and enlightened diet,” the magazine focuses on plant-based food and evidence-based medicine.
In May, the archaeological community buzzed with news that the ancient Egyptians ate a largely vegetarian diet. Before this recent investigation led by researchers at the University of Lyon in France, many experts believed the ancient Egyptians consumed a lot of fish. Instead the study found the folks who built the pyramids dined on wheat, lentils, eggplants, pears, garlic and other plant foods. Later in the year, researchers from Germany discovered the Roman gladiators ate a similar diet, dominated by vegetarian food.
The incoming president of the American College of Cardiology raised the blood pressure of some colleagues when he penned an opinion piece detailing his switch to a plant-based style of eating and revealing that he encourages patients with heart disease to do the same.
In early September, in famously anti-vegetarian France, chef Alain Ducasse reopened his world-renowned restaurant at the Plaza Athénée in Paris without foie gras, veal or steak tartare on the menu. A vegetarian-heavy, pescatarian menu replaced the old, meat-centric dishes.
As the new season of AMC’s popular zombie drama was about to hit the airwaves in October, members of the cast and crew of “The Walking Dead” revealed they were forced to go vegetarian after filming the TV series’ notoriously gory scenes.
In the middle of October, chef and Maine native Matthew Kenney cooked a sold-out vegan dinner for the New York City Wine & Food Festival. The dinner at the Park Lane Hotel followed his second sold-out vegan dinner for the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in February.
Throughout the year, Israel’s fast-growing vegan community, pegged at 4 percent of the population, garnered significant attention. According to the Times of Israel, 15,000 people attended the day-long Vegan Fest in Tel Aviv in October. Observers say the country’s vegan trend is tied to religious practices of separating meat and milk, a regional cuisine with many traditional vegan dishes and the frequent comparisons made by vegan activists between Nazi concentration camps and modern factory farms.
According to the results of a study published in the journal Nutrition in October, overweight and obese adults randomly assigned to vegetarian diets lost more weight than study participants assigned to diets that included meat.
The German-based all-vegan grocery chain Veganz opened its ninth store in November. The chain’s founder later announced plans to franchise 60 more stores across Europe and the United States by 2020. Veganz is the largest in this tiny but rapidly growing segment of the grocery business.
In December, British think tank Chatham House echoed warnings from the United Nations and other experts when it released a report saying the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to reduce the global appetite for meat, since animal agriculture generates more greenhouse gas pollution than any other industry.
A noteworthy trend in 2014 was the opening of vegetarian butcher shops. The first such shop, selling mock meats, opened in the Netherlands in 2010. The trend jumped the pond when the Herbivorous Butcher opened in Minneapolis in June. Now, the totally plant-based Butcher’s Son is planning to open in Berkeley this year.
The trend-spotters are predicting we’ll see vegetarian and particularly vegan foods continue to grow in popularity in 2015. I look forward to what the new year has in store.
Avery Yale Kamila is a freelance food writer who lives in Portland. She can be contacted at:
[email protected]
Twitter: AveryYaleKamila
ShareQGIS has received a lot of press and activity lately. In the community, they have just completed their 2015 User Conference in Denmark, while also announcing QGIS 2.10 is now in beta testing. At Boundless, Victor Olaya — my colleague and QGIS core contributor — just finished a post describing how QGIS can support MGRS coordinates. Another colleague, Aaron Miller, posted a blog about how you can use QGIS to perform logistics routing. Late last year, Boundless responded to numerous market questions with a 4-part blog series on how QGIS compares to proprietary desktop GIS software. We pointed out that QGIS is easy-to-install, integrates with OpenGeo Suite, and has reliable support offerings, making it a very viable alternative to ArcGIS for Desktop. We then went into detail on how to use QGIS to perform visualization, cartography, analysis, and editing.
There is a good reason we are taking the time to highlight QGIS. You recall I blogged about how more and more customers are asking about how OpenGeo Suite can work as part of a hybrid architecture of both proprietary and open source software. Customers are appreciating that hybrid migration strategies targeted at non-power users can quickly realize significant savings, and replacing proprietary (not to mention, expensive) desktop GIS applications with QGIS is a great place to start.
In my experience, the vast majority of desktop GIS users fit into the ‘light to moderate’ GIS use case – what most of us know as the 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of those users only use about 20% of the software’s total functionality. Plotting dots on a map, exporting simple overlays as JPEGs, digitizing vector content from imagery, and simple analysis such as point-in-polygon filtering. Of course, there still is the 20% who do perform more in-depth analytical functions and complex cartographic work, but they are by far the minority. So you have to ask yourself, is it worth spending all that money for proprietary desktop GIS software if you aren’t utilizing its full potential? Is there not a better option for the majority of users who wish to simply geo-enable their content? Put another way, why are you paying for the Ferrari when all you need is the Vespa? The market is validating that QGIS satisfies this need – don’t take my word for it, do a Twitter search for “qgis” – and is a great first step into achieving a hybrid GIS architecture.
The legacy gripe about QGIS is it is not as intuitive as users would have liked. I’ll admit, older versions of the user interface/user experience were a bit clunky, and made the transition from proprietary desktop GIS a bit too far for most analysts (myself included). But QGIS has come a long way, and if you haven’t played with it in a while (or at all), I highly recommend you give it a try. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and there is even a new version that runs on Android. The v2.0 release focused largely on the look/feel of the application, and it is now far more intuitive than ever before. Even still, many folks are hesitant to make the jump to QGIS simply because they don’t want to take the time to learn the new ‘buttonology’.
So I decided to write a two-part series to showcase just how simple it is for a typical desktop analyst to migrate to using QGIS. Part 1 will illustrate how to accomplish the 10 functions/workflows performed most often by desktop analysts, and part 2 will focus on extending QGIS capabilities through the use of plugins. QGIS really is simple to use, and will satisfy the needs of 80% of users without the high license cost of proprietary desktop software. So without further ado, and in no particular order…
Overlay of Data
You can add all types of data into your QGIS project by using the Add Data buttons on the Layers toolbar. QGIS handles most open and proprietary spatial data formats right out of the box, including shapefiles, file geodatabase layers, commercial imagery and data stored inside of relational databases. Those layers show up in your project’s Layers window in a very familiar table of contents (TOC) style display that most desktop GIS users are akin to using.
You can re-order your layers, make changes to the symbology and labeling, and set scale dependencies and group layers to help you organize your TOC. Of course you can also open the attribute table for each vector layer. It really is just that simple.
Zoom to a Point
The ability to zoom to a point on the earth is pretty fundamental to any desktop GIS use. QGIS makes this easy with a simple Zoom to Coordinate tool right on the main interface. Simply click to the tool to activate the window, then enter the XY coordinate of the location you are interested in.
Creating Points from a File
Creating points from a delimited file of coordinates is very simple inside of QGIS. In fact, it’s actually easier to do in QGIS than is it in ArcGIS for Desktop! All you need to do is click on the Add Delimited Text Layer icon, and fill out the input parameters, and hit ok. The tool can handle text files, comma and tab separated files and Excel spreadsheets.
Point in Polygon Selection
The ability to select which points which fall within a polygon is made easy through the Points in Polygon tool found under the Vector dropdown > Analysis tools > Points in polygon. Once the selection is made, you can export the selected features to a new file, and/or add that new file to your QGIS map.
Buffering a Point/Line/Polygon
In much the same way you can buffer vector features in ArcGIS for Desktop, QGIS gives you a very simple method for creating buffers around points, lines and other polygons. You may enter a manual buffer distance, or choose a value from a field inside the attribute table. The Buffer tool can be found under the Vector dropdown > Geoprocessing Tools > Buffer(s).
Clip/Extract Data
The function I probably used the most as an analyst was the ability to clip subsets of data from a larger dataset. I used this to filter data by area of interest, or to simply cut unmanageable datasets into smaller, more manageable ones. QGIS makes it easy by exposing it as another tool in the Vector dropdown > Geoprocessing Tools > Clip menu.
Export as JPEG
One of the most common ways analysts and cartographers distribute their results is to export their map as a graphic. The resulting graphic can then be plotted for a wall map, attached to an email, or included as part of a larger PowerPoint briefing. Exporting a graphic from QGIS is as easy as selecting Export as Image from the File dropdown > choosing a name and format for your exported graphic > and then deciding where you want to export the image to disk.
Define a Layer’s Coordinate System
Sometimes an analyst is given data which has no coordinate system defined. This is problematic for any type of measurements, analysis or coordinate notation needed for that given dataset. Luckily, QGIS makes defining a coordinate system pretty simple. Just select the layer you want to define in the table of contents. Then use the Layer dropdown to select the Set CRS of Layer(s) option. Next, just choose the correct coordinate system for your layer, and hit OK to apply.
Reproject a Vector Layer
Often times it is necessary to change the projection of a vector layer to ensure accuracy in measurements and analysis. QGIS exposes this functionality in the Save As… function for a layer right from the table of contents. Right-click the layer you want to reproject, select Save As…, and under the CRS section select Selected CRS. This will enable the Browse button which gives you a range of coordinate systems to choose from. Just hit OK when you are done and QGIS will export a new layer with the updated projection.
Convert Raster to Vector
One of the more common actions to perform against a raster dataset is to convert it to polygons. This can be useful when you want to use a raster dataset inside a weighted overlay analysis, site selection, point in polygon analysis and more. QGIS calls this function Polygonize, and it can be found under the Raster dropdown > Conversion > Polygonize.
Here is the really cool part…all of the tools listed above are available inside of the Processing Framework inside of QGIS. This means those individual tools can be orchestrated into seamless workflows, used from the Python console, or run in batch. So if you are like me, and spent copious amounts of time encapsulating tradecraft into ModelBuilder models and Python scripts using ArcPy, you will be happy to know you can do a similar thing inside of QGIS as well.
My goal here is not for you to replace all of your desktop GIS instances with QGIS. As I mentioned before, there are still use cases where more fully featured GIS applications do make sense. But for that large majority of users – the 80% – I truly believe there is a better, more cost-effective answer. And if your organization is thinking about transitioning to a hybrid GIS architecture, you should consider adopting QGIS as a core part of your hybrid GIS migration strategy.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this series which will focus on some more advanced capabilities which are exposed as plugins for QGIS.Image copyright AFP Image caption Macron's new sports minister is Laura Flessel, an Olympic fencing champion
French President Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a gender-balanced cabinet in accordance with an earlier pledge, with 11 of 22 posts taken by women.
Sylvie Goulard is defence minister while Olympic fencing champion Laura Flessel is sports minister.
Bruno Le Maire is economy minister, Gérard Collomb is interior minister and François Bayrou is justice minister.
Mr Macron's decision to pluck figures from across the political spectrum has sent the French right into disarray.
Mr Le Maire is a conservative moderate, Mr Collomb is the Socialist mayor of Lyon and Mr Bayrou is a veteran centrist.
Some 170 elected officials from the right were earlier criticised by hundreds of other lawmakers after they signed a statement backing Mr Macron.
One accused Mr Macron of "blowing up" the political landscape.
France's new president will hope his team delivers a majority in parliamentary elections next month.
He delivered on his pledge of a cabinet of parity - though only one of the top five posts, that of defence, went to a woman.
Other ministerial appointees include Jean-Yves Le Drian, in charge of defence under President François Hollande, who will become foreign minister. Nicolas Hulot, a well-known environmentalist, becomes ecology minister.
Image copyright AFP Image caption New Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot is a well-known and popular environmental activist
Long-time Macron supporter and campaign manager Richard Ferrand is rewarded with the territorial cohesion portfolio.
Other ministerial appointees include:
Agnès Buzyn - health
Murielle Pénicaud - labour
Mounir Mahjoubi - junior minister for digital affairs
Françoise Nyssen - culture
Jean-Michel Blanquer - national education
Jacques Mézard - agriculture and food
Marlène Schiappa, whose successful blog Maman Works saw her dubbed the "spokeswoman for working mums", becomes junior minister for equality between women and men.
As well as the political centre ground, Mr Macron also took in figures from the left.
The announcement was delayed after candidates were background-checked for their tax records and any potential conflicts of interest.
'A slap'
It comes amid consternation among forces of both the left and right at Mr Macron's offer to join him in his political project of bridging the divide.
After he named Republican Edouard Philippe as prime minister on Monday, more than 170 elected conservatives agreed to sign up to the project, some claiming they were witnessing the "transformation" of politics.
However, the Republican party rejected Mr Macron's "outstretched hand" ahead of upcoming election.
It announced it was expelling Mr Philippe, along with new economy minister Bruno Le Maire, and Gérald Darmanin, who took responsibility for public accounts.
In response, Mr Le Maire said he had "chosen to serve" and said he believed "France is worth more than all the [political] parties".
Image copyright AFP Image caption Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has been accused of opportunism by some on the right
Ahead of the June legislative elections, Republican campaign chief François Baroin accused Mr Macron of "putting a bomb under politics rather than remodelling it".
The initiative has also been criticised on the left, with defeated Socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon among the dissenters.
"Who can think that the left will pull itself together if it is part of a coalition led by a member of the Republican party?" he said.
Separately, Mr Macron met the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, to start talks on an "ambitious European policy".
The new president had promised to reform the EU while remaining an ardent supporter.
Mr Tusk told the French leader: "Europe needs your energy, your imagination and your courage."Image caption Gen Mladic had evaded capture for 16 years
Serbia's war crimes court has rejected Ratko Mladic's appeal against his transfer to the UN tribunal in The Hague to face genocide charges.
The Belgrade court took just hours to make its decision after receiving the appeal papers on Tuesday morning.
Gen Mladic's lawyer posted the appeal on Monday, saying the former Bosnian Serb commander needed medical attention and was too ill to face trial.
Doctors who examined him on Friday said he was fit enough to be extradited.
The 69-year-old was seized last Thursday in Lazarevo village, north of Belgrade, having been on the run for 16 years.
Gen Mladic is accused of crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian war, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,500 Muslim men and boys.
Delaying tactic?
Now the appeal has been rejected, Serbia's deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric said Gen Mladic would be sent to the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague "as soon as possible".
The extradition order must first be signed by Serbia's justice minister, who will hold a news conference later on Tuesday, prompting speculation Gen Mladic could be put on a flight to The Hague later in the day, says the BBC's Mark Lowen in Belgrade.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Omarska concentration camp victim Kemal Pervanic: "My guards were my former teachers"
From there, he is expected to be flown by helicopter to the ICTY detention unit in the city's Scheveningen neighbourhood.
Once he has arrived at the tribunal, there will be an initial hearing before preparations begin for his trial on genocide and other charges.
Despite a decision by a Belgrade court that Gen Mladic was fit enough to be handed over to the UN court, defence lawyer Milos Sal |
or link valid and if it is, returns a token A second request is made to Account Kit to exchange the token with the users information
Note: When using the email option, the Account Kit dialog box needs to remain open. Once the link is clicked, the dialog box will close on it's own. The link does not have to be clicked on the same machine, for example, you can login on your laptop and click the link from your mobile device and it will still work.
Aside: Passwordless Authentication with Auth0
At Auth0, we are huge proponents of making the authentication experience the best it can be. Passwordless authentication is something we believe in and offer in all of our packages. Get a taste for how passwordless authentication works with Auth0 at the Playground. Some of the benefits of integrating passwordless authentication with Auth0 include:
Email and SMS support
Integrate with your own SMS gateway and email providers
Cloud and Self-hosted options
20+ Social identity providers including Facebook, Twitter and Google
Enterprise connections and Single Sign On (SSO) integration
Getting Started
For the best comparison, we'll keep our app as close as possible to the one we built with the Facebook Account Kit. For Auth0 Passwordless, you will need an Auth0 account. If you don't already have one, you can sign up for one free of charge. As we won't be exchanging the token server side, our backend will be much simpler.
// Load in dependencies const fs = require('fs'); const express = require('express'); const Mustache = require('mustache'); const app = express(); function loadLogin() { return fs.readFileSync('dist/login.html').toString(); } function loadCallback(){ return fs.readFileSync('dist/callback.html').toString(); } app.get('/', function(request, response){ var view = {}; var html = Mustache.to_html(loadLogin(), view); response.send(html); }); app.get('/callback', function(request, response){ var view = {}; var html = Mustache.to_html(loadCallback(), view); response.send(html); }) app.listen(3000);
Additionally, we'll need to configure passwordless authentication in our Auth0 dashboard. To do this, in the dashboard, navigate to the the Connections then Passwordless tab. As we are building a web app, just flip the switch to on for Email and SMS.
For the SMS integration, we'll need need a Twilio account. You can sign up for a free Twilio trial account here. From our Twilio dashboard, we're going to want to get our SID, AuthToken and the Phone Number that Twilio will give us. We'll add these credentials in the SMS settings in our Auth0 dashboard.
The email integration is much simpler by default. We only need to turn it on and in the settings and select the Auth0 app we'd like the passwordless to work with. By default, the emails will be sent from Auth0, but you can easily configure your own email provider in the email providers section of the management dashboard.
There are a number of configuration settings to play around with on both the SMS and email passwordless integration. You can set how long a code is valid for, customize the message the user receives, disable passwordless signups and more. We'll just stick to defaults in this tutorial, but you should explore and customize these settings to meet your needs.
We will also need to enable the hosted login page for passwordless logins. To do so, head over to Hosted Pages in the Auth0 dashboard and set the Customize Login Page switch to on. Then select the Lock (passwordless) template from the templates dropdown box. We will need to customize the behavior of our login screen according to which type of passwordless login option is selected by the user. To do so, we can add custom code to our hosted login page. Change the code in the editor to look like the one below:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1"> <title>Sign In with Auth0</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" /> </head> <body> <!--[if IE 8]> <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/ie8/0.2.5/ie8.js"></script> <![endif]--> <!--[if lte IE 9]> <script src="https://cdn.auth0.com/js/polyfills/1.0/base64.min.js"></script> <script src="https://cdn.auth0.com/js/polyfills/1.0/es5-shim.min.js"></script> <![endif]--> <script src="//cdn.auth0.com/js/lock-passwordless-2.2.min.js"></script> <script> // Decode utf8 characters properly var config = JSON.parse(decodeURIComponent(escape(window.atob('@@config@@')))); config.extraParams = config.extraParams || {}; var prompt = config.prompt; var loginHint = config.extraParams.login_hint; var lock = new Auth0LockPasswordless(config.clientID, config.auth0Domain); switch(config.extraParams.login_hint) { case'sms': lock.sms({ closable: false, callbackURL: config.callbackURL, responseType: 'code', rememberLastLogin:!prompt, authParams: config.internalOptions }); break; case 'email-code': lock.emailcode({ closable: false, callbackURL: config.callbackURL, responseType: 'code', rememberLastLogin:!prompt, authParams: config.internalOptions }); break; case'social-or-sms': lock.socialOrSms({ connections: ["facebook", "twitter"], closable: false, callbackURL: config.callbackURL, responseType: 'code', rememberLastLogin:!prompt, authParams: config.internalOptions }); default: // 'email-link' lock.magiclink({ closable: false, callbackURL: config.callbackURL, responseType: 'code', rememberLastLogin:!prompt, authParams: config.internalOptions }); break; } </script> </body> </html>
As you can see we have modified the default Lock Passwordless template to look for the login_hint parameter. We will set the parameter to different values according to what the user chooses in our web page for logging-in.
Building the UI
The frontend for our Auth0 Passwordless app will be identical to that of the Account Kit app we built earlier. The only notable difference will be the different authentication options. Auth0 provides various options for passwordless authentication. In addition to SMS code and email link verification options, Auth0 provides the ability to send verification codes to emails as well as combining multiple authentication options within a single workflow. You can see the UI changes in the GitHub repo.
Adding Passwordless Authentication with Auth0
To integrate passwordless authentication we'll use the Auth0.js library SDK. We'll show how to integrate passwordless in four different ways: SMS, Email Code, Email Magiclink and Social or SMS. For additional ways, check out the docs.
You will need to get your Client ID, Domain and Callback URL to proceed. You can get all three of these from the Auth0 management dashboard.
var AUTH0_CLIENT_ID = 'AUTH0_CLIENT_ID'; var AUTH0_DOMAIN = 'AUTH0_DOMAIN'; var AUTH0_CALLBACKURL = 'AUTH0_CALLBACKURL'; function loginWithSMS() { var auth0 = new window.auth0.WebAuth({ domain: AUTH0_DOMAIN, clientID: AUTH0_CLIENT_ID, redirectUri: AUTH0_CALLBACKURL, responseType: 'token' }); auth0.authorize({ scope: 'openid email profile', login_hint:'sms' }); } function loginWithEmailCode() { var auth0 = new window.auth0.WebAuth({ domain: AUTH0_DOMAIN, clientID: AUTH0_CLIENT_ID, redirectUri: AUTH0_CALLBACKURL, responseType: 'token' }); auth0.authorize({ scope: 'openid email profile', login_hint: 'email-code' }); } function loginWithEmailLink() { var auth0 = new window.auth0.WebAuth({ domain: AUTH0_DOMAIN, clientID: AUTH0_CLIENT_ID, redirectUri: AUTH0_CALLBACKURL, responseType: 'token' }); auth0.authorize({ scope: 'openid email profile', login_hint: 'email-link' }); } function loginWithSocialOrSms() { var auth0 = new window.auth0.WebAuth({ domain: AUTH0_DOMAIN, clientID: AUTH0_CLIENT_ID, redirectUri: AUTH0_CALLBACKURL, responseType: 'token' }); auth0.authorize({ scope: 'openid email profile', login_hint:'social-or-sms' }); }
With this code implemented, let's launch our server and go through the workflow and test our application.
User clicks on the desired passwordless login option User enters their SMS number or email address Based on the option chosen, they get either a one-time code or link User enters the code or clicks the link Auth0 verifies the code or link is valid and if so calls the callback with the JWT On the callback page, we use the JWT to get the users information
As you can see both passwordless authentication flows are fairly similar. Both allow the user to authenticate with minimal effort. Auth0 Passwordless is more customizable and allows for a greater range of integrations and use cases.
Conclusion
Passwordless authentication is a great way to provide an alternative login option for your clients that is secure and easy to use. Facebook Account Kit provides a great starting point for implementing passwordless authentication in your applications. If you need greater control and customization though, Auth0 Passwordless may be right for you.
Learn more and get started with Auth0 Passwordless today!While the original Paper Mario games were traditional RPGs, the more modern entries have been much closer to action-adventure games. Paper Mario: Colour Splash, the upcoming Wii U game, seems to continue this trend. In an interview with US Gamer, Colour Splash’s producer discussed why these changes came about. Tabata claimed that the series needed to distance itself from Mario and Luigi, another Mario RPG. Paper Mario was the one to change because its 3D graphics allowed for more dynamic action events. You can read the full interview at the US Gamer website.
Tabata: So, as you know, the first Paper Mario was very much a role-playing game, and Mario and Luigi is of course also a role-playing game. Yeah… obviously, we have these two RPG series, but they both allow us to offer new and varied experiences to players.
The old Paper Mario games, they were obviously RPGs and had a lot of good elements, but they weren’t just about the RPG elements. They were full of solving puzzles, solving mysteries, the color factor, the visual style. For the Paper Mario series, we’re focusing more on those elements — the puzzle-solving.
On the other hand, the Mario & Luigi RPG series is created more in a 2D space. And obviously, because we have this fully realized 3D world in the Paper Mario games, we’re able to have much more dynamic events, like you saw in the trailer, with the game being rolled up and the camera panning around.US President Donald Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas held their first conversation on Friday since the controversial real estate mogul took office in January, with the president formally inviting the Palestinian leader to the White House for a meeting.
“The president emphasized his personal belief that peace is possible and that the time has come to make a deal,” the White House said. “The president noted that such a deal would not only give Israelis and Palestinians the peace and security they deserve, but that it would reverberate positively throughout the region and the world.”
During the conversation, which lasted some 10 minutes, the US president invited Abbas “to visit the White House soon to discuss ways to resume the [Palestinian-Israeli] political process,” Wafa quoted Abbas’s spokesman as saying.
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The spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said that Trump stressed his “commitment to a peace process that would lead to a real peace between Palestinians and Israelis”, Wafa reported.
Abbas told Trump that peace was a “strategic choice” for the Palestinian people that should lead to the “establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.”
The report made no mention of the two-state solution, which the Trump administration appeared to distance itself from last month ahead of Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At a joint press conference with Netanyahu on February 15, Trump said: “I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like.”
Rudeineh said after Friday’s call that the Palestinians were “ready to deal with President Trump and the Israeli government to resume the negotiations. If the Israelis are ready, President Abbas has committed himself to a peaceful deal with President Trump.”
Rudeineh went on to add that “President Trump is a very honest man, very courageous man, looking for a deal, a just deal.”
The two leaders did not discuss the issue of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Ahead of the conversation with Trump Friday, Rudeineh said the PA president spoke to Jordanian King Abdullah II to coordinate stances on the peace process.
The phone call between the two ended nearly two months of what Palestinian officials said had been near-total silence between Ramallah and the new administration.
The conversation came days before Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, is expected to sit with Abbas and Netanyahu in separate meetings during his first visit to the region in that role.
A senior administration official told Walla news that Greenblatt will visit the leaders in Jerusalem and the West Bank “to hear their positions on the current state of affairs and on steps that can be taken to move towards peace.”
Palestinian officials had complained several times that attempts to reach out to the new Trump administration met little success, with messages and other communications going unanswered.
Since taking office on January 20, Trump has spoken by phone with Netanyahu twice and hosted him at the White House, reflecting what many say is the administration’s slant toward Israel.
Unnamed officials said last month that CIA chief Mike Pompeo paid a secret visit to Ramallah, and there have been reports of lower level contacts between officials in Washington and Ramallah.
On Thursday, Union of Reform Judaism head Rabbi Rick Jacobs met with Abbas and said that he learned from Palestinian officials that they had spoken with the Trump administration, confirming that US policy continues to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Palestinian officials have expressed frustration over the White House initially appearing to back settlement building and refusing to commit to a two-state solution. In recent weeks, the administration has sent signals to Jerusalem that it does not support unbridled settlement construction or plans to annex some areas of the West Bank.
On Monday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said he had received a message from Washington against annexation proposals.
“We received a message directly — not indirectly, not a hint — from the US, that Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank means an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Liberman said.
On Thursday, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel in a narrow vote. David Friedman’s nomination will now go before the full Senate for approval.
Friedman’s critics cited have his past skepticism of the two-state solution and his deep philanthropic investment in the settlement movement.(Photo: U.S. Navy on Wikipedia)
Your instruments are frozen. You’re losing altitude. It’s inevitable. You’re going to crash. But wait! There’s one more option. The ejector seat!
In a split second decision, you reach for the emergency trigger and deploy it. Within seconds you are violently rocketing into the sky, until the parachute that was simultaneously sent out catches air and rights your seat. Your plane hits the ground in a distant ball of flames, as you gently float to relative safety.
This is the sort of exciting tale most people envision when they think of the ejector seat, but where did this life-saving technology come from?
While several people essentially invented ejection technologies independent of one another, it is widely accepted that the first ejection seat (as they are properly called) was patented in 1916 by a man named Everard Calthrop. He was a railway engineer and innovative inventor who had seen his friend, Charles Rolls (of Rolls Royce fame) die in a biplane crash. This tragedy inspired Calthrop to devise a pilot safety system that would allow airplane pilots to quickly evacuate their doomed craft. His first patent described simple but effective contraption that would, at the pull of a handle, tilt the seat backwards to prime the pilot for ejection. Then, with a blast of compressed air, a parachute (which Calthrop also had a hand in inventing) would deploy and yank the pilot out of the craft to relative safety.
From this simple system, the idea of an onboard system to jettison pilots from their craft was born. However, it was not until World War II that ejection seats as we know them began being standard parts of planes.
It was the Germans who first took to the trend, creating the first production craft to come equipped with an ejection system, the Heinkel 280. Developed in 1940, the turbo-powered jet never went into full production, but the nine of them that were made were outfitted with a seat that would be blown clear of the craft using compressed air. During testing the Heinkel 280’s escape seat even managed to save the life of pilot Helmut Schenk after his instruments froze over. Schenk is now seen as the first person ever to be saved by the use of an ejection seat.
Not long after the Germans started using ejection seats, the trend began to spread. Just a year after the Heinkel debuted, the Swedish SAAB company created an ejector seat technology for one of their planes, and by 1946 the United Kingdom and the United States were working on systems to safely jettison their pilots as well. Soon, compressed air was replaced by gun powder as an accelerant, which was in turn eventually replaced by a chemical accelerant in modern ejector seats. Other safety features such as stabilization rockets and automatically inflating life boats were added. After decades of innovation in the field of ejection systems and pilot safety, the seats themselves are almost as complex as the jets they fly in.
Currently the Martin-Baker Company is the largest creator of ejection seats, having created over 70,000 exploding chairs for 93 air forces around the world, touting themselves as the “World’s Leading Manufacturer of Ejection and Crashworthy Seats.” A former aircraft production company, they turned their focus to ejection technology after a tale similar to Calthrop’s, wherein the titular Baker was killed in a plane crash in 1942, inspiring the titular Martin to devote his company to pilot safety.
Starting with the Mk1 and leading all the way up to the current Mk17, Martin-Baker marks the cutting edge of safely getting pilots out of speeding aircraft as safely as possible. The Mk17 is actually a pretty simple ejection seat with just a chair on blast plate, streamlined for lightweight and training craft. But the Mk16 is a bafflingly advanced creation built for fighter jets. The seat has five different modes that automatically deploy based on the altitude of the craft when the seat is deployed; it features a back-up air supply, a homing beacon, short-burst stabilizing rockets, a life raft, and arm, leg, and neck supports, just to name some of the advanced features. Yet even with all of these bells and whistles, firing one’s self out of a high speed aircraft is still insanely dangerous.
In a modern scenario, when a pilot activates an ejector seat, a few things happen in rapid sequence. First the pilot’s overhead canopy is blown off, then an explosive charge or rocket shoots the chair straight up out of the vessel on a guide rail. Then a group of stabilization rockets briefly fire, pushing the chair even further from the craft and helping keep it from wildly tumbling in the wind. A small guide parachute known as a drogue then deploys that keeps the chair upright. Depending on the altitude (automatically detected by the chair using oxygen sensors) of the ejection, a primary chute may deploy immediately or the chair may freefall for a bit, getting the pilot to a more oxygen rich part of the sky with a bit more haste. Finally, the chair falls away, and with luck, the pilot drifts to safety. Depending on the specific seat other things may happen, but the basics are much the same across the board.
In a 2002 interview with Smithsonian Air and Space, a pilot who only identified himself as Captain IROC described the experience of ejecting from a jet going 600 mph at 15,000 feet, as “the most violent thing I’ve ever felt in my life.” The immense wind speeds and stresses of g forces placed on the pilot rarely leave them unharmed. Before limb stabilization was added, arms and legs would whip in the wind, breaking bones and dislocating joints. Even in advanced ejection seats, 1-in-3 pilots who eject from their planes fracture their spine as they are rocketed out of the plane. Modern ejection seats have a survival rate of over 90%, but it is definitely a last resort.
According to the counter on the Martin-Baker website, their seats have saved 7,480 lives. So while ejecting from an airplane may not be as smooth and cavalier an action as James Bond makes it out to be, it definitely beats the alternative—falling.
(Photo: Hohum on Wikipedia)As programmers, we are faced with a lot of decisions when looking for and ultimately deciding on a job. Pay is important in such a competitive market. One must look at benefits and vacation. The work environment is also very important, especially since the software industry is full of fun and exciting work environments unlike any other field.
Once a company seems right, we then have to make sure we meet the often very strict qualifications. Are we familiar with the technology? Is the company engaging in relevant best practices? This is no easy easy task and it can take weeks of planning and research to find out which companies would be a good fit.
Once a position is of interest, we then have to do one of the most important and age old practices of researching the company itself. This is good advice for applying at any company, of course, but there is an additional question software developers must ask themselves: is this a software company, or company that happens to write software?
This concept certainly isn’t mentioned much in the school systems, and it is something that both junior and senior developers alike need to ask. Software companies like Google and and Facebook are 100% invested in software and the developers that create it. This is not always the case with companies that find their profit from other products than the software itself and programmers need to be very careful in these situations.
What’s the Difference?
There are a number of advantages to working for a software company. The most obvious is simply that everyone involved either understands software or will not last long if they don’t. Everyone speaks software and understands the challenges and realities that come with creating it.
Way back in 2007, Joel Spolsky gave a talk about this very subject. He was talking more about developing internal tools, but the same principles apply to creating software that is just a means to some other end as well. He states that one of the biggest gripes is:
You never get to do things the right way. You always have to do things the expedient way.
This makes sense because ultimately, it is not the software itself that brings in the most ROI. It’s not as important, then, that you use the best practices out there. Forget TDD, documentation, continuous integration or automated testing. Get it done quickly. Move on. Software companies will rarely sacrifice quality, other companies will.
Another advantage of working of a software company is the value that is placed on the programmers. Because software is directly related to making money, developers are more valued, and generally have a much brighter future in the company than they would otherwise. Being stuck on these types of teams can be miserable.
Embrace the Situation
So that’s it, don’t ever work for a non-software company right? Not so fast. There are advantages out there as well, and given the right company and the right team, it can be an even more enjoyable and rewarding experience than being just another team.
Be Software Development Advocates
One of the key things that can help programming teams working for non-software companies is to be an advocate for software development. These days, you probably won’t need to advocate for software itself. Software is seen as the magic tool that fixes whatever problem the business is facing at the time. The development process, though, is much less clear.
Spend some time explaining to the business about technical debt. Explain why the best practices exist and what implementing them will do to the project as a whole. You’ll never be able to justify adding two weeks to a project just for the sake of being “proper”. It has to solve a business need and bring in some sort of monetary value.
When advocating for proper development practices, you’ll need to present the information in a way that the business understands. In a software company, or even internally amongst other developers, you could probably get away with explaining something over coffee, in a quick meeting or a detailed email. For the non-programmer, you’re going to need to do more.
You might need to pull out those PowerPoint skills you learned back in school. It will depend on the organization, but most have a typical means they have for communication. In my experience, it’s slide shows. Put together a professional slide show. Everyone else in the company pitches their ideas this way, programmers shouldn’t expect to be any different.
Encourage, But Limit, Collaboration
As I mentioned earlier, software can be seen as that magic solution that solves problems but is often so far removed from the day to day user it scares them. Encourage other people in the company to get involved. Encourage them to submit ideas and provide feedback on the project as it is being developed.
As software developers, we know how rewarding it is to be able to think of something and then immediately be able to go out and implement it. It’s similarly rewarding to think it and then watch it be implemented. This can really get an organization excited about software development and more importantly, interested in the process, not just the end result.
All that said, once someone gets a taste of being able to affect the development process, it can be a dangerous thing. By opening up the channels to development, this can let in a flood of well-meaning requests, without an understanding of what that will do to the deadlines. This is why advocating for the process is so important. Everyone must know what “just one quick little feature” will do to the overall project.
Communication is Key
As always, communication is probably the most important piece when it comes to getting the company fired up about software. A software team will never be valued if they are only seen as an external team that create products and then disappears.
Keep everyone in the loop. Explain to them delays. Share milestones and achievements. By putting in the effort, you’ll undoubtedly be one of the best communicating software teams they’ve ever worked with, and this has tremendous value.
Conclusion
Is it better to work for a software company? It truly depends. There are certainly plenty of advantages, and for the programmer looking to coast right on through their career, they should probably stick to software companies. However, for those willing to put in the effort, willing to work on soft skills and take a step out of the IDE a bit, working for a non-software company can be truly rewarding experience.
If you’re in the process of looking for a new job, think very hard about what kind of products the company sells. If they don’t focus on software, be sure to make this a high priority discussion point during the interview process. If you can’t guarantee that software development will be a priority, run. If you’re currently working for a non-software company, do what you can to prove the value and educate the rest of the business.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: coding is the easy part. It’s interacting with others that is the challenge. If you’re working for a non-software company, take the challenge and put in the effort and it can make you an even better programmer.Correction: An earlier version of this post confused the official WikiLeaks store with an unofficial site selling WikiLeaks-branded items. Apologies for the error. Updated below.
Running the world's most controversial website on charity alone isn't easy. So WikiLeaks is trying out a new source of funding: good, old-fashioned capitalism.
On Monday, the secret-spilling site plans to launch an online store that sells WikiLeaks-branded paraphernalia including T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and tote bags, a source at the organization tells me. Profits will go to WikiLeaks, after a portion of sales are taken by the e-commerce platform that hosts the store, a company based in Leipzig, Germany known as Spreadshirt. The U.S. version of the store is visible here.
Selling swag may seem beneath the dignity of a crusading organization like WikiLeaks. But if it finds customers, the store could generate a significant portion of the group's operating budget, given that the Wau Holland Foundation, which handles WikiLeaks' finances, says it spent $500,000 of the $1.3 million it raised in 2010. That's twice the $240,000 WikiLeaks reported last summer that it was spending annually. And the group's costs may rise as founder Julian Assange's legal troubles continue; Assange faces hearings this week to determine whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face sex crime charges.
Notably, the store accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express. That means it also offers WikiLeaks a clever workaround to accept credit card payments, despite the fact that it has said both payment companies continue to block direct donations to the group.
It's not the first time that WikiLeaks has used its rising profile to raise money. In December, Assange signed a book deal reportedly worth $1.3 million.Anyone looking to call Frontier Airlines now needs to check their available phone minutes before dialing.
The Denver-based ultra-low-cost carrier last month did away with its toll-free customer service number in favor of a Salt Lake City phone number — a long-distance call for any landline user outside that part of Utah.
The airline says the change saves about $160,000 per month — which equates to about $1.9 million per year — which can be passed along to customers.
“We’re passing along the savings directly to our customers,” airline spokesman Jim Faulkner said. “Also, we find that most of our customers use their cell phones with free (long-distance) calling plans. So far, we haven’t seen a lot of feedback on the switch to this new number, and it’s been in operation since the end of June.”
The airline has taken several cost-cutting measures since beginning its conversion to the ULCC model, including outsourcing about 1,160 below-wing baggage handling and customer reservations jobs. It also announced last week the creation of “The Works” — a flat-rate bundle of services designed to “end the nickle and diming” of which the airline has been accused in the past.
For an airline that is focused on cost cutting, eliminating toll-free numbers makes sense, Airline Weekly analyst Seth Kaplan said.
“This is the airline saying: ‘Why should we pay for something a lot of people don’t care about anyway anymore?’ Of course, some people will care,” Kaplan said. “But the ultra-low-cost model, which they’re mostly adopting, is all about not accepting any costs unless those costs clearly drive revenue, and this is one where they probably had a hard time figuring out where it was translating to meaningful revenue.”
Frontier president Barry Biffle admits the ULCC model isn’t for everyone. Instead, he said, it’ s aimed at budget-conscious customers who want to travel on the cheap.
However, there may be a point that the cuts run too deep and put the airline at risk of alienating several target customer groups, said Stephanie Brooks, director of marketing and communications at University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
“It’s cutting off access to people who are still using landlines, people who are older, or even those who are lower income and may not have a lot of minutes on their cell phone,” Brooks said. “It’s creating an unnecessary hurdle for people who may already be economically disadvantaged.”
Cost-cutting measures such as this are part of Frontier’s goal to decrease its cost per available seat mile, or CASM, to less than 6 cents, excluding fuel, Faulkner said.
CASM is an industry-wide measurement used to determine airline profitability, and is calculated by dividing the operating costs of the airline by the cost of one seat flying one mile, whether it is filled or not.
For example, a Frontier A320 with 168 seats that flies 1,000 miles has 168,000 available seat miles.
According to figures Biffle has previously presented publicly at airline industry events, Frontier’s 2013 CASM, excluding fuel costs, was 7.89 cents, which decreased to 6.69 cents in 2014.
An Airline Weekly estimate, using data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and industry market intelligence service Diio Mi, calculated Frontier’s first-quarter CASM at 9.8 cents, with fuel costs included.
Based on current fuel rates, that CASM would decrease to about 6.5 cents without fuel included, Airline Weekly estimates.
Although many U.S. airlines still have toll-free numbers, other ULCC carriers, such as Spirit Airlines and Allegiant, have opted to discontinue their 800 numbers.
This trend could be sending mixed signals, Brooks said.
“If you’re trying to attract people who are budget conscious or on a limited income — they could be college students, lower income working people and elderly people — it’s sending a conflicting message that ‘we are the airline for you, but we’re not here for you when you need us,’ ” Brooks said. “It’s a cost savings that on its face seems like a good idea, but it’s really going to hurt customers in the end.”
Laura Keeney: 303-954-1337, [email protected] or twitter.com/LauraKeeneyRIO DE JANEIRO -- U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte has apologized for his behavior related to a late-night incident at a Rio de Janeiro gas station, saying he should have been more "careful and candid" about how he described what happened.
Lochte said in a post on Instagram on Friday that he also was apologizing for his role in taking the focus away from other Olympic athletes.
A photo posted by Ryanlochte (@ryanlochte) on Aug 19, 2016 at 7:11am PDT
The 12-time Olympic medalist reiterated his assertion that a stranger pointed a gun at him and demanded money to let him leave. Lochte had previously called it a robbery; Brazilian police said he and three other swimmers vandalized a gas station bathroom and were confronted by armed security guards.
"I accept responsibility for my role in this happening and have learned some valuable lessons," Lochte said on Instagram.
"We accept and appreciate his apology," said Mario Andrada, spokesman for the local organizers of the Rio Games.
Two of the other swimmers, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger, landed in Miami on Friday morning after being held in Brazil until they testified. The fourth swimmer, Jimmy Feigen, made a deal with a judge to make a $10,800 payment and left the country later Friday.
The drama surrounding the alleged robbery -- and the swimmers' ever-changing descriptions of it -- has shocked and angered Brazilians, who said it cast an unearned negative shadow on Rio and the Olympics at a time when the country is eager to prove it can host the Games safely. The story also dominated Olympic headlines, overshadowing the accomplishments of athletes who trained for years just to get to Rio. The saga was an embarrassment for the U.S. Olympic team, which has dominated in the medal count.
Andrada said 2.5 percent of the mentions on the @Rio2016 Twitter account since the beginning of the Games have been about the Lochte situation.
"There has already been too much said and too many valuable resources dedicated to what happened last weekend, so I hope we spend our time celebrating the great stories and performances of these Games," Lochte said.
Rapid developments early Friday came hours after police announced that Lochte and three of his teammates had not been held at gunpoint after a night of partying, as Lochte claimed. Instead, Brazilian police said the men, while intoxicated, vandalized a gas station bathroom and were questioned by armed guards before they paid for the damage and left.
"No robbery was committed against these athletes. They were not victims of the crimes they claimed," Civil Police Chief Fernando Veloso said at a news conference.
As Bentz and Conger flew home Thursday night, their attorney insisted they were witnesses only and had nothing to do with Lochte's story.
"They did not make any untruthful testimony. They did not lie in their statements," lawyer Sergio Riera told The Associated Press.
In excerpts of police interviews with Conger and Bentz, released Friday by the Rio de Janiero Civil Police to the media, both U.S. swimmers pointed a finger at Lochte as the instigator at the gas station. They said that while they were using the bathroom, Lochte pulled an advertising poster off the wall, creating a lot of noise.
Bentz, who swims for the University of Georgia, also released an apology through the university Friday night and gave a detailed account of Sunday's incident.
"I want to offer a sincere apology to the United States Olympic Committee, USA Swimming, the extraordinary women and men of Team USA, and the University of Georgia," Bentz said. "I regret this situation has drawn attention away from the Olympics, which have been hosted so incredibly well by Brazil and its citizens."
Bentz's statement mirrored the account he gave to police, and he admitted the swimmers relieved themselves on the back side of the gas station. He said that to his knowledge, there was no damage to the restroom or restroom door.
"Videos of this situation have been emerging the last several days. However, I am confident that some video angles have not been shown that would further substantiate my account. I also believe some scenes have been skipped over," he said.
One of the security guards at the gas station, in a statement to police obtained by ESPN Brasil on Friday, said that Lochte and Feigen tried to leave the area twice -- first with Conger and Bentz in a taxi that was seen on a videotape released Thursday, and later on foot alone. However, the guard said they realized their teammates had stayed behind, and they returned to the gas station.
The guard, who told police he recognized Lochte from his hair, said that Lochte was agitated and resisted, so the guard drew his gun at a 45-degree angle to the ground in an attempt to quiet Lochte. A second guard, he said, also pulled a gun at a 45-degree angle to back up his partner |
common to see the military in the streets of Guatemala supporting the operations of the police.
“One of the incomplete processes of the peace accords is the reduction of the military, and its reformation into a democratic society,” Sanchez said. “On the contrary, military members continue to amass more and more power.”
In 2000, during the administration of Alonso Portillo, the Guatemalan congress signed Accord 40-2000, which permitted the Guatemalan military to support the police in operations against organized crime. The military presence has since slowly expanded into other operations. Today the military is deployed in order to provide “security” in the city centers, markets, tourist centers, and on buses and in the bio-reserves, as part of the “Green Battalion.”
The largest expansion of military presence occurred during the administration of Otto Pérez Molina, a former colonel and member of Guatemala’s elite special forces, the Kabiles. As a candidate, Pérez Molina had campaigned on the return of full military aid from the United States to the Central American country. In fact, he was able to increase military aid by 40 percent, prior to the collapse of his administration in a massive corruption scandal in 2015.
The administration also oversaw the largest increase in attacks on human rights defenders since the signing of the peace accords. According to data from United for the Defense of Human Rights Defenders, there were 409 cases of attacks on human rights defenders in 2011. By 2014, that number hit a high of 813, and then dropped to 493 in 2015.
This period also saw one of the most significant increases of militarization in regions that are normally peaceful, such as the indigenous highlands, which had suffered at the hand of the Guatemalan military during the internal armed conflict. These regions are the center of the social conflicts created by transnational companies interested in the exploitation of natural resources.
The election of Guatemala’s right-wing nationalist version of Donald Trump, Jimmy Morales, has done little to stem the expansion of the military’s presence across the country. In March 2016, Morales appeared on national television standing next to military leaders to announce the expansion of the “citizen security” program, which was implemented by the administration of Pérez Molina. The expansion will lead to a larger presence of the military across the country in order to respond to the rise in crime.
Morales utilized a campaign against corruption as a springboard to gain the presidential office. But the media turned to Morales’ relationship with the old guard of the Guatemalan military, specifically his connection to Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado — a former colonel who had served in special operations in Coban, where the remains of 568 indigenous victims were found in unmarked graves. The then-frontrunner downplayed these relationships, assuring the media that all parties had some relationship with the armed forces.
Former soldiers have also found their way into private security firms. This military presence has led to severely increased levels of violence in areas of social conflict.
On September 27, 2009, Adolfo Ich Chamán, a respected community leader from a small town near El Estor, Izabal, was shot and hacked to death by members of the security forces of the Guatemalan Nickel Company. In 2012, Guatemalan police arrested Mynor Padilla, the company’s head of security, who was a former colonel in the Guatemalan military. His trial has slowly advanced, but has run into numerous delays and accusations of outside influence.
Direct action and reclaiming the day of the military
HIJOS has taken direct actions to challenge the celebration of the military in the streets of Guatemala City. One such action is the yearly march to challenge the Day of the Military on June 30.
In the 11th march organized by HIJOS Guatemala, hundreds of activists turned out in the historic center to march against the militarization of their country this year.
“We are commemorating our heroes and martyrs that fell during the war fighting for a better world,” said Roberto Landaverry, a historian and popular educator. “We are trying to counter the domination of memory and that today is the day of the military. The Guatemalan military carried out the genocide, it is connected to narco-trafficking and organized crime, and it continues to violate human rights. We have nothing to celebrate today.”
In 2007, around 30 people associated with HIJOS invaded and blocked the yearly parade. According to Sanchez, this led to a national debate over the parade, and its eventual removal from the streets by the administration of Alvero Colom out of respect for the victims of the internal armed conflict. This decision was continued during the administration of Pérez Molina, in spite of the administration’s close relationship with the armed forces.
The decision to remove the military parade from the streets followed years of organizing by HIJOS. During its campaign, the group collected thousands of signatures from citizens.
In 2016, Guatemalan social media erupted in outrage towards the end of June, following President Jimmy Morales’ announcement that after the seven-year hiatus, the controversial military parade would be held in Guatemala City on July 3. A poll by the national newspaper, Prensa Libre, found that 64 percent of the population opposed the return of the military parade.
Following the massive outcry from citizens on social media and in the streets, the administration was forced to announce that it would hold the military celebration within military facilities in the capital, and not on the city streets.
In spite of this victory, Sanchez admits it is difficult to gauge the impact of the collective.
“We do not know our direct impact, to be honest,” Sanchez said. “But when we pass out fliers or have festivals, many people come to us and share their stories or say that they too had family members who were disappeared. Our actions in the streets show those who do not speak that they are not alone.”
He added, “15 years ago people were afraid to speak, but today people are beginning to speak more. We are trying to reclaim public spaces. We are trying to say that we will not forget.”
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This story was made possible by our members. Become one today.Chromebooks are great for many scenarios, but they really shine for education. Why? Well, they are often inexpensive, and best of all, they are very secure thanks to the Linux base and restrictive software design. ASUS has a new such laptop called "Chromebook Flip C213." The 11.6-inch notebook is designed to be very rugged so that if a student abuses it, it should hopefully survive. ASUS even promises an impressive 12+ hours of battery life.
This convertible laptop is powered by a 2.4GHz Intel processor and features 4GB of RAM. This should run Chrome OS very well. Besides the traditional camera at the top of the screen, there is an additional camera above the keyboard. When the laptop is folded to a tablet, that second camera becomes a "rear" camera. Cool, right?
"The Chromebook Flip C213 has been rigorously tested to pass military-grade durability tests, ensuring that it can easily withstand the physical stresses of use in educational environments. The tests include dropping the laptop from almost 4 ft. (1.2m) and subjecting the all-metal 360°-degree hinge to 40,000 open-and-close cycles," says ASUS of the laptop's durability.
The company further shares, "The rugged internal construction is combined with an external wraparound reinforced rubber 'bumper' to protect the chassis and reinforce the I/O ports for protection from minor knocks and scrapes. The all-metal 360° hinges are covered with strong zinc-alloy caps. The body has two special grip areas strategically located to reduce the chances of dropping Chromebook Flip C213 when carrying it. The ergonomic, spill-proof keyboard has 2.0mm key-travel for more accurate typing and a better feel. It can cope with accidental spills of up to 2.2oz (66cc) of liquid, giving students and teachers additional peace of mind."
Also cool? The ASUS Chromebook Flip C213 comes with out-of-the-box support for Google Play store. In other words, it can run Android apps. While students and school faculty may be able to get by with just web apps, it is nice to know that Android support can serve as a safety net if an app is needed. Let us not forget about games too!
ASUS shares the full specifications of the Chromebook Flip C213 below.
Processor Intel Apollo Lake Dual-Core N3350 Processor Operating system Chrome OS Display 11.6-inch Memory & storage 4GB RAM
32GB eMMC Wireless 802.11ac 2x2 Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.0 Connectivity 2x USB 3.1, Gen 1 Type-C ports
2x USB 3.1, Type-A ports
1 x Micro SD card reader
3.5mm audio combo jack Battery 46Wh lithium-polymer Camera HD front camera + 5MP rear camera Dimensions (WxDxH) Chromebook C213 (with Wacom EMR stylus support): 12.08 x 7.83 x 0.81 in. / 307 x 199 x 20.65 mm
Chromebook C213 (with anti-glare display): 12.08 x 7.83 x 0.82 in. / 307 x 199 x 20.9 mm Weight 2.65lbs./ 1.2 kg
The ASUS Chromebook Flip C213 can be had immediately for $349 from various retailers. A special version with Corning Gorilla Glass and a Wacom EMR stylus will be sold in September for $50 more.
Are you a Chromebook fan? Tell me why in the comments below.For years, Vancouverites did not seem to mind that the Vancouver Aquarium kept dolphins and belugas in its tanks. The city’s ranks of hardcore animal activists never stopped opposing what they have called a “whale jail” and an artifact of a “species-ist past,” but nobody seemed to be paying close attention.
Tellingly, last November, when a local yogi held a protest outside the attraction to oppose the Aquarium’s new Yoga with the Beluga Whales program (a violation, she said, of yoga’s principle of “interconnectedness with all beings”) only about 20 people showed up.
But then Blackfish made the rounds.
The 2013 documentary chronicled the story of Tillikum, a captive SeaWorld orca that has killed three people, including Keltie Byrne, a trainer at SeaLand, a now-shuttered Victoria, B.C., marine park.
As director Gabriela Cowperthwaite would write later, “the most important lesson we learned from seeing killer whales in captivity is that they don’t belong in captivity.”
Annelise Sorg with the Vancouver group No Whales In Captivity described watching all of Blackfish’s grimmest details with a “big stupid grin” on her face.
“Sitting in the theatre, I couldn’t help but think of the reaction that ‘Blackfish’ will cause within the industry, the public and the government,” she wrote in an August, 2013, blog post.
Sure enough, the film had barely hit Netflix before bullhorn-wielding protesters started massing outside the Aquarium’s Stanley Park location.
“My personal view is that the Vancouver Aquarium should begin to phase out the holding of whales and dolphins in captivity,” Mayor Gregor Robertson said in an April statement.
A month later, renowned primate biologist Jane Goodall wrote a public letter saying that the Vancouver Aquarium’s cetacean breeding program was “no longer defensible by science.”
Next week, the issue is expected to come to a head when the Vancouver Park Board convenes a special meeting to review the practice “of keeping captive cetaceans [whales, dolphins and porpoises] in Stanley Park.”
If the board indeed places a kibosh on belugas and dolphins, it could have dramatic consequences for a facility that is already well into a $100-million expansion that will include new pools for its beluga whales.
Previously, Vancouver Aquarium president and CEO John Nightingale has called the decision a “life and death matter,” but was less definitive while speaking to the National Post on Friday, saying “it’s entirely possible they might pass a bylaw doing something.”
But with the fate of Vancouver’s captive whales possibly hanging in the balance, the city has seen an all-out battle between animal activists and Vancouver’s premier attraction.
Two park board commissioners have already come out strongly in favour of a captivity ban: Constance Barnes and Sara Blyth.
In a Facebook statement, Ms. Blyth said she was not sure whale captivity is the “right thing for Vancouver anymore” although she praised the Aquarium’s recent rehabilitation of Walter, a wild sea otter that was blinded by a shotgun blast.
“Though I believe in the conservation and animal rescue efforts of the Vancouver Aquarium a great current example is Walter the Sea Otter that got shot and is now blind and has no where to go and its great he has a life at the aquarium,” she wrote.
The Aquarium, in turn, is not taking the opposition sitting down. Last Sunday, Aquarium spokeswoman Deana Lancaster Tweeted a photo of Ms. Blyth yelling into a bullhorn outside their front entrance.
“This is how parks board commissioner Sarah Blyth says she ‘listens’ to the public about Vancouver Aquarium,” she wrote.
When Ms. Barnes said recently that the rescued false killer whale calf would have been better off euthanized, the official Vancouver Aquarium Facebook page declared “we disagree with Park Board Commissioner Constance Barnes. Stranded whale calves deserve to be rescued not killed.”
In the past few months, the increased pressure from activists has prompted the Aquarium to step up security over fears that particularly militant animal activists could target the Stanley Park site.
“If somebody felt strongly that the animals are better off dead than in an aquarium; that’s our concern,” said Mr. Nightingale.
For years, the Aquarium’s consistent response to anti-captivity activists has been the argument that their whales spark public interest in the environment, help fund Aquarium-led rescues of injured B.C. marine life and provide a standing population of research specimens for whale biologists.
Just this week, Terrie Williams, founder of the California-based Center for Ocean Health, wrote a letter of support crediting the Vancouver Aquarium with helping science to figure out the “basic physiology of whales.”
“I’ve worked with zoos and aquariums across the world – you have a jewel in what is sadly a very small network of forward-thinking, conservation-minded zoological facilities,” she wrote. “It is unimaginable that anyone would consider the Vancouver Aquarium team, a non-profit organization, as anything less than heroic.”
First opened in 1956, there is no denying the Vancouver Aquarium has had a checkered history of marine mammal care, most notably in 1964, when it became the first facility in the world to host a captive orca. Moby Doll, a male killer whale found near Saturna Island, was originally fated to be killed by an Aquarium sculptor to serve as an exhibit, but after being harpooned, the still-conscious animal was instead towed back to Vancouver harbour and put on display in a dry dock.
After three months, the injured whale — who had initially refused to eat — died of exhaustion from trying to stay afloat in the low-salinity harbour water.
The capture kicked off a worldwide industry for captive orcas that continues to this day, but the Aquarium — as well as others in marine biology — continue to see Moby Doll’s doomed trip to Vancouver as a net positive for the overall plight of wild killer whales, who had previously been seen as vicious monsters.
“Moby Doll’s brief life in captivity nearly 50 years ago … profoundly changed the relationship between humans and Orcinus orca,” reads the notes to a recent Saturna Island symposium convened to discuss the legacy of one of their most famous sons.
Plenty of other captured wild animals would meet similar fates as Moby Doll, including a group of six narwhals, but nowadays, the Vancouver Aquarium takes it as a point of pride that it was the world’s first marine mammal park to stop displaying animals captured from the wild.
The Aquarium also phased out its captive orcas in 2001 and generally, it is largely devoid of any amusement park flair.
“People are carrying around pictures of killer whales, and we say we don’t have them, they carry around signs saying ‘stop ripping wild families apart,’ and we pledged 18 years ago never to catch another animal from the wild,” said Mr. Nightingale.
Still, opponents maintain the root problem remains: Sentient marine mammals on display for human entertainment.
“To be quite blunt, what [the Vancouver Aquarium] really teaches children is that it’s OK to mistreat these animals,” Paul Spong, a whale biologist who began his career at the Aquarium, told the Vancouver Courier.
But as Mr. Nightingale told the National Post, “free the whales” arguments get murky once you start digging into the logistics.
After decades of domestic life, the Aquarium’s cetaceans are essentially doomed if returned to the Pacific Ocean.
Or, the Aquarium could simply wait until all of its cetaceans die, in which case the Aquarium’s much-maligned expansion plans suddenly emerge as a good way to keep the animals comfortable in the 20-year interim.
“As they are all discovering, it’s complicated,” he said.
National Post
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: TristinHopperAnother game presents another opportunity for the Dallas Mavericks to do something about their inability to rebound the basketball.
The Mavs were hammered on the boards 47-30 in Friday night’s 102-98 home loss to the Chicago Bulls. That result continued a long-running theme that will likely derail the Mavs’ long-term goals if they don’t start to improve.
“We just got to get a little better,” said forward Dirk Nowitzki, who had seven rebounds against the Bulls. “We’re not the most physical, athletic front line, so we know we all got to get in there and we got to pick up a couple of those long ones here and there.
“I always think when we keep the board game sort of close — we’re not going to win it every night — but if we sort of keep it within range, we’ll give ourselves a chance to win.”
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Nowitzki and the Mavs (30-14) hope to keep it within range Sunday at 5 p.m. against the New Orleans Pelicans (22-21) at the Smoothie King Center.
Part of the Mavs’ problem is that they realize they don’t always have to outrebound an opponent to win games.
In the Mavs’ 109-104 victory at New Orleans on Nov. 1, the Pelicans won the rebounding battle 47-44. And in the Mavs’ 112-107 home victory over New Orleans on Dec. 10, the Pelicans drilled Dallas on the boards 45-29.
But when the Mavs are matched against a stout opponent such as Chicago, squeezing out a victory becomes more complicated.
“They were sending their guys and we were boxing out,” center Tyson Chandler said. “Our guys are battling, but we need to do more.”
Chandler grabbed a team-high 12 rebounds against the Bulls and is fourth in the NBA with 12.2 boards per game. But as coach Rick Carlisle said: “We’ve got to help Tyson.”
Carlisle thought he had discovered someone to help Chandler on the boards in center/forward Dwight Powell, who joined the Mavs in the Dec. 18 trade that also brought point guard Rajon Rondo from Boston.
But in 21 uninspired minutes against the Bulls, Powell contributed just four points — and no rebounds.
“We had some guys that played quite a few minutes that didn’t get enough rebounds,” Carlisle said. “We needed our perimeter guys to get more involved in it.”
Whatever the case, the Mavs need a better showing on the boards, or else their long-term goals will have a difficult time materializing.
Rondo benched late
Part of the reason the Mavs acquired Rondo is his ability to show up in clutch situations.
But when Dallas needed clutch plays in the waning moments against Chicago, Rondo was on the bench.
Why?
“Coach’s decision,” Carlisle said. “If you want to make it a blow-up story, be my guest.”
Although Rondo wanted to be on the floor in crunch time, he didn’t seem that bothered by watching from the bench.
“Obviously, I want to be in there,” Rondo said. “I’ve been in a lot of big games, a lot of situations. I feel I can help my teammates win, but it was a coach’s decision and that’s what it’s about.Domestic weapons include only use their hands but also tools such as pins, belts, weapons, kitchen tools and shoes
New Delhi: A statistic has been revealed by the UN indicating that Egyptian women ranked first in the world for abusing and beating their husbands.
Egypt is followed by the United Kingdom and India in the ranking. The data, obtained from the Egyptian Family Court, shows that 66% of wives who abuse and beat their husbands apply for divorce in the Family Court.
Husbands who suffer abuse often have no another way to defend themselves from the violence except by suing their wives, with cases reaching 6,000.
The data further reveals that wives don’t only use their hands in beating their husbands, but also tools such as pins, belts, weapons, kitchen tools and shoes. Some even using sleeping pills in order to beat and burn their husbands.
The public prosecutor issued an arrest warrant on Tuesday for Taymour el-Sobky, accusing him of slandering Egyptian women and damaging their honor, according to a statement from his office.Princeton boffins reckon the Internet of woefully insecure things yields sensitive information about connected homes with nothing more than a bit of network traffic analysis.
The problem is that single devices have very individualistic traffic profiles – a thermostat behaves differently from a lighting controller, both of which behave differently from a garage door opener, and so on.
In this paper at arXiv, Noah Apthorpe, Dillon Reisman and Nick Feamster (the latter a critic of slapdash IoT privacy) look at “a Sense sleep monitor, a Nest Cam Indoor security camera, a WeMo switch, and an Amazon Echo” – and they reckon the traffic fingerprints are recognisable even when traffic is encrypted.
Each of the devices snitches by generating recognisable traffic patterns: the Sense revealed users' sleeping patterns, the Nest cam lets an attacker infer when it's being monitored or when movement wakes it up; the WeMo lets an observer watch appliances turn on or off; and the Echo leaks when someone is talking to it.
The attacker needs some way to capture traffic. The Princeton paper assumes an attacker is sniffing traffic from the ISP, but that's surely not the only vector.
If you can get to the traffic, there are plenty of ways to identify the device. For example, Sense and Nest Cams talk to different service IP addresses and ports, and even if a device talks to multiple services “the adversary typically only needs to identify a single stream that encodes the device state”.
IoT phone home
Device DNS queries Sense sleep monitor hello-audio.s3.amazonaws.com
hello-firmware.s3.amazonaws.com
messeji.hello.is
ntp.hello.is
sense-in.hello.is
time.hello.is Nest security camera nexus.dropcam.com
oculus519-vir.dropcam.com
pool.ntp.org WeMo switch prod1-fs-xbcs-net-1101221371.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
prod1-api-xbcs-net-889336557.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
Amazon Echo ash2-accesspoint-a92.ap.spotify.com
audio-ec.spotify.com
device-metrics-us.amazon.com
ntp.amazon.com
pindorama.amazon.com
softwareupdates.amazon.com
As the paper explains, while it's possible to infer some user activity from general traffic (for example, machines going to sleep after everyone's gone to bed), “this relies on many assumptions, e.g. that users only stop using their other devices immediately prior to sleeping, that everyone in the home sleeps at the same time and does not share other devices, and that users do not leave their other devices running to perform network-intensive tasks or updates while they sleep.”
Encryption doesn't help when traffic is so easily fingerprinted.
A Sense sleep monitor is much more revealing, because it's a single-purpose device; and the same is true of the other devices the researchers tested.
While the paper takes the usual approach of calling for better user awareness and tools to let users manage their own privacy, “improved regulation … may also be necessary.”
The paper stops short of telling manufacturers to quit collecting data unnecessarily, which seems an obvious first step to The Register. ®Over the last few years I’ve struggled with defining this blog. More recently it has been a place for longer form pieces, and I’m happy writing this way here.
Where things often become difficult is that blogs have typically been about more. They’ve had announcements, or bits of news, or interesting links etc. Twitter, Facebook et al. have, in many ways, became a better avenue for sharing these sorts of things.
I thought now would be a good time to try something new. It’s an idea I’ve toyed with over the years, under a number of different guises, but now seems like a good time to try: the jimseven newsletter.
It’ll be a collection of things. Some will be about coffee, some won’t. People have often asked for an email digest for this blog – even though I don’t think I post often enough to merit one – but this will be a bit different. I should state now that if you’re looking for Barista Hustle type content, then I’d strongly recommend Barista Hustle. Matt’s doing a great job there, and I’m not really trying to compete.
While there’ll definitely be more of a business slant to it, I don’t think this will be exclusively written for business owners, not by any stretch. The premise is more that I think there’s inspiration and interest in a variety of  fields connected to, or outside of, coffee. I believe that those of us working in coffee industry are in a place where we need to be challenged and inspired.
It won’t be weekly – certainly not at the start. I get enough email, and I’m sure you do too. Instead, I’d rather wait until I have enough interesting stuff to send you to merit adding one more email to your inbox.
I hope you enjoy it and share it, or parts of it, with friends who you think would enjoy it too.
Sign Up Here. The first issue will go out later today.After President Trump slammed GM for building US-bound cars in Mexico a few weeks back, the automaker was quick to deny such accusations.
In fact, GM went on record saying that all Chevy Cruise models sold in the US, were built by Uncle Sam, in Lordstown, Ohio. As it turns out, Trump was right and Mexican-built Cruze sedans are currently up for sale in the United States.
To make matters worse, CNNMoney even found a Cruze sedan built in Mexico at a GM dealership in Lordstown, Ohio of all places – which is more than just ironic considering what GM said after Trump’s allegations earlier this month.
Now, workers at the GM Assembly Plant in Lordstown are angry, especially after facing 1,200 layoffs on the same day as Trump’s inauguration. According to CNN, GM told workers there were too many Cruze sedans on car lots that weren’t selling, so the automaker had to let some of the 4,500 workers at the plant go.
“It’s the ultimate insult: Chevy Cruzes with Mexican VIN numbers shipped to Lordstown,” said Heather Lexso, a worker at the GM plant in Lordstown. The Mexican-built Cruze sedan for sale at Spitzer Chevrolet Lordstown was located just 5 miles from the factory where American workers are losing their jobs.
“How messed up is that someone in Lordstown could be driving a Mexican-made Cruze?”, added another GM worker from the plant.
Last week, General Motors finally admitted that some 8,400 Chevy Cruze sedans were built in Mexico at the end of 2016 and then brought to the United States for sale.
“A small number of Mexico-made Chevrolet Cruze sedans were produced in 2016 for sale in the US. This supplemental production ended in December. Lordstown is now the sole source for the Cruze sedans,” stated GM spokesman Tom Wickham.
Here is GM’s 2017 Model Year VIN decoder. As you can see, Hecho En Mexico VINs start with 3G1 https://t.co/hX22l531wK pic.twitter.com/hRrLThLZOU
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) January 5, 2017
PHOTO GALLERYAlright....DBZ Twilight V2. On a roll with these redo enhanced pics. Rare 2 upload week....no worry comic is next week.Oddly enough Twilight is the one pony out of all the ponies I said "she has to have the Kamehameha"....and this was over a year and a half ago when I first was doing these DBZ Ponies.So yeah I actually struggled a LOT on this one. The problem with this one that makes it so much harder than 90% of the other DBZ ponies I've done is trying to show a twisting of the body cause of this attack and still make it fit into the show style...well...near-show style I have. I wish I could show you guys the paper sketch of this...it's horrifyingly bad but I fixed it and BAM this is what it turned into.There seems to be a running gag in my live stream whenever I put the rocks in. IDK why but people seem to notice it. I WANTED to put a tree in this...but...I realized she was too high up. Sooner or later I will add a tree and other debris. Anyway hope you guys like this. Comic is next as usual and then I THINK DBZ Fluttershy V2 is next. Twilight Sparkle © HasbroArt © MeUPDATE: The suspect has been arraigned. He is named in the updated story.
MUSKEGON TOWNSHIP, MI – A 27-year-old Muskegon Township man armed with a handgun, allegedly wearing only a towel and apparently tripping on acid, was arrested Saturday after firing a weapon outside Happy's Pizza.
The incident was reported at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, outside Happy's Pizza, 1701 E. Apple, after the Muskegon Township man showed up to the business "wearing only a towel and carrying a gun," according to a police report.
The man had three children with him at the time, police said, ages 6, 4 and 3. While banging on the business glass, his gun went off and a bullet ended up lodged in the door casing, police said. No one was injured.
Muskegon Township Police Chief Ken Sanford said the man was apparently angry about not being able to eat at the business and started pounding on the business door, smashing the glass. The business was open at the time with two employees inside, Sanford said.
After the handgun went off, the man walked to his home in the 1300 block of Shonat and sat on the porch, Sanford said.
A Muskegon Township officer responded to the man's house after taking the call about the complaint and located the man still armed on his porch.
The officer drew his weapon and ordered the man to drop his.40 caliber semi-automatic handgun, which he did, Sanford said.
Child Protective Service has been notified, Sanford said.
The man was arrested and transported to a local hospital where he was evaluated, Sanford said. According to Sanford, the man admitted to taking four hits of acid prior to the incident.
Sanford commended his officer for doing an "excellent job in handling this potentially very dangerous situation."
He said the officer used "his training and common sense to deescalate this situation very quickly."
Heather Lynn Peters covers police and fire, and writes a statewide food column, The Spunky Kitchen, for MLive/Muskegon Chronicle. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @HLPNEWS.Kant: The categorical imperative says that actions must be logically consistent if they were to be universalized, in order for them to be moral.
Zeno: Zeno's Paradox says that motion is impossible, because in order to get to something, we would have to traverse an infinite amount of space, since we can keep dividing that space into infinite halves.
Hume: Hume's is/ought gap says that we cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. That is, a moral command from a fact in the world.
Russell: Bertrand Russell's main project was the derive mathematics, and perhaps even language and meaning, entirely from logic. He largely failed in this project.
Descarte: In Meditations Descarte claimed we couldn't believe any of our observations, because it was possible an evil daemon was decieving us with false perceptions. In the later parts of meditations (III-V) he built back up our ability to trust our senses by some rather dubious proofs showing that God was necessarily good. Many people don't take those sections seriously anymore, and some theorize that even Descarte didn't, and only put them in to avoid the censors.
Singer: Peter Singer is a utilitarian who emphasizes that we should act rationally when making moral choices by increasing global happiness without prioritizing ourselves, people near us, or even humans over animals. Helping starving kids is obviously a better act than giving a small pleasure to one person.
Sartre: Sartre's radical freedom said that one was always free to do otherwise.
Socrates: Socrates often approached people, and questioned their understanding of basic concepts such as 'justice' or 'goodness'. He was rather obnoxious about it, and many of the people he questioned didn't want to really want to be bothered by him.By The Metric Maven
Bulldog Edition
It was when Star Trek The Original Series (TOS) was in reruns, that I first noticed its use of metric units. I was very pleased, and assumed they were used exclusively, but then completely disappointed when one episode was metric and another used imperial and often they mixed both. The 22nd Century was not what I had hoped for, an all metric one. I can only hope the Erlenmeyer flask Spock is holding in this comic book cover is graduated in milliliters.
I began to wonder how much metric usage occurred in Star Trek. To find out, I decided to watch all 79 episodes and keep track of metric and imperial usage. This seemed like a simple task, just write down the units used and tally them up. What I realized, after a while, was that the undertaking was more nuanced than it appeared on the surface. Sometimes measurement units were used as proverbial metaphors. For instance in Episode 77 – The Savage Curtain:
SCOTT: You’d never know anything had been out of order. I can’t fathom it.
I could not see claiming that Mr Scott had used an imperial measurement in this episode. Scotty was clearly using a metaphor, and fathom in this case is really a verb, and not a noun.
In the same episode, another exchange occurred that caused me interpretive difficulty:
KIRK: Yes, if I recall, your Union Army observation balloons were tendered six hundred or so feet high. We’re six hundred and forty three miles above the surface of this planet.
LINCOLN: You can measure great distances that closely?
SPOCK: We do, sir. Six hundred forty three miles, two thousand twenty one feet, two point zero four inches at this moment, using your old-style measurements.
LINCOLN: Bless me.
Did Captain Kirk convert metric units over to imperial for the benefit of President Lincoln? Spock indicated that the Units he used were “old-style,” and therefore implied they were not used in the 22nd Century. The usage of imperial units seemed to be employed only as a courtesy to the 19th century President. Miles, feet and inches with a decimal point?—oh my! One can only hope Spock was thinking to himself: “how utterly devoid of logic the old style system is.” We will also not explore how he could quote a distance to the planet with an accuracy of 1 mm (0.04″).
At the beginning of the episode Mr Spock relates:
SPOCK: An area of approximately one thousand square kilometers. It measures completely Earth-like.
Given the “weight” of the evidence, I judge The Savage Curtain to be an “all metric” episode, despite the appearance of imperial units. In one case as metaphor, and in the other, as a convenience to “President Lincoln.”
Another difficulty, was that in many episodes, temperature was quoted in degrees without specifying Fahrenheit or Celsius. Often the logical choice of unit could be inferred from context, but not always. In Episode 4 – The Naked Time one cannot be certain which are being used:
UHURA [OC]: Entering upper stratosphere, Captain. Skin temperature now twenty one hundred seventy degrees.
There are also units quoted in Star Trek episodes that are no longer in use. The Angstrom (100 picometers) is mentioned in Episode 16 – The Galileo Seven. In Episode 31 — Who Mourns for Adonais? we have:
SCOTT: External pressure building up, Captain. Eight hundred GSC and climbing.
GSC is grams-force/square centimeter, which was part of the old gram-centimeter-seconds system proposed by the British. It is no longer used. Grams-force is strictly forbidden in The International System of Units (SI). Grams are mass. So does it count as a metric episode?—the units are metric even if the system isn’t SI.
The First Season had 29 episodes, here’s the measurement breakout:
Imperial Units 13
Imperial and Metric Units 5
Metric 0
No Measurement Units 7
Indeterminate 4
Imperial units completely dominated, there was not a single episode in Season One that had only metric units.
The Second Season had 26 episodes, here’s the measurement breakout:
Imperial Units 5
Imperial and Metric Units 8
Metric 8
No Measurement Units 5
Indeterminate 0
Metric usage finally increased, and eight all-metric episodes occurred. The number of “all imperial unit” episodes decreased, but the “imperial and metric” episodes unfortunately increased. Still the Star Trek future was becoming |
was offered a scholarship to the University of NSW to study economics and accounting. After my first year I worked full-time throughout my degree, but continued to live at home. When I was 22, I finally made the decision to leave home. I was working 15- to 16-hour days and needed to find a share house closer to the office to make it easier to balance work, study and my volunteer work - I was helping to set up the Australian Youth Climate Coalition alongside a young climate campaigner named Anna Rose (to whom I'm now married). Mum was angry when I told her I'd be moving out to live a few suburbs away, around the corner from Anna's place. One of the unfortunate features of Mum's mental ill health is her tendency to invent dramatic stories when she needs more attention. One day, just before I was offered the role of national director of GetUp!, I was visiting Mum when I found a letter. Strangely, it was summonsing me for a court appearance. I asked Mum what it was about; she said she didn't know. So I walked down the road to the police station, where the officer checked the file and told me that while I was at work Mum had walked into the station and claimed that her son hit her. I went back home and talked to Mum - she apologised and went back to the station to tell them she'd made it up. But nothing could be done, a date was set and the case was heard during my first week at GetUp!.
It was thrown out of court in just a few minutes. But it was an awful experience that reminded me I'd have to spend more time with Mum, even though I wasn't living at home any more. Anna and I visited regularly. Mum was taking her medication and for a while things seemed to be calm. But in 2011, her health started to deteriorate rapidly. The timing couldn't have been worse. Anna and I had just got engaged. We'd just bought our first home and were planning our wedding. Ironically, much of my work time with GetUp! was being spent on mental-health campaigning. Eventually, the campaign won $2.2 billion in new mental health funding, but it felt like I was fighting a war on two fronts. Mum couldn't live by herself any more, that was obvious. She was refusing to take her medication and, in states of psychosis, locking the door to her flat. Her doctors recommended one of the last resorts available to families: a control order that would allow police to forcibly enter her flat and take her to hospital, where she would be medicated. I drew the line. No matter what, I wasn't willing to have Mum go through that trauma. So Anna and I spent hours outside her block of flats. Mum was on one side of the door, we were on the other, trying to talk her into taking her medication - she'd become convinced it was killing her. Eventually, after she managed to get through the worst of it and back on to stable medication, we found Mum a place in supported accommodation. Even though I felt uncomfortable about it, I asked for advice from the experts I'd been working with on the mental-health campaign. The group home was great for Mum. But over the course of the next year and after a few more unexpected hospital visits, her doctors recommended a higher level of medically supervised care. We found a place at a larger aged-care facility in the same neighbourhood, and Mum moved there at the end of last year.
Being a carer is a difficult experience for any child. Many children don't have the things that made it easier for me - a caring aunt, a father who kept me mostly out of trouble, and support from social workers and medical professionals. As my caring role continues, I'm also lucky enough to have an incredibly supportive wife. I owe a lot to my dad. We are closer now than when I was in high school. These days I see him about once a month, and he's helping out with my ACT Senate campaign. Growing up the way I did meant I learnt to be self-sufficient and to navigate systems to achieve the best outcomes. I learnt how to read people - to be alert to the smallest signs of a changing mood - and to diffuse tense situations. I saw first-hand the inequality that exists in our society. It breaks my heart that this inequality is worsening. I also learnt not to judge people by first impressions. As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Seeing life from my mum's point of view is difficult. Things you and I take for granted - like how to take the bus, prepare a meal, or have a normal conversation - are confronting and overwhelming for her. There's a lot she doesn't understand. So much of her world takes place in her head. But there's more to her than just her ill-health. She likes music from the '50s, and she still likes trains. I think she's proud of me, and she gets excited when she sees me on TV. And she knows - I hope - that I love her and that I'll always be there for her.The U.S. government has revoked the tax-exempt status of a group run by prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer for its failure to file tax returns.
Internal Revenue Service records show Spencer’s National Policy Institute automatically lost its tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit after failing to file tax returns for three consecutive years.
Spencer didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday. But he told The Los Angeles Times, which first reported the story, that he would appeal the revocation. He blamed it on an IRS error that led him to believe his group was not required to file tax returns.
“It’s a bit embarrassing, but it’s not good. We’ll figure it out,” Spencer told the newspaper.
Spencer popularized the term “alt-right” and is a leading figure in a fringe movement that has been described as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism. Spencer, an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump, hosted a postelection conference in Washington that ended with audience members mimicking Nazi salutes after Spencer shouted, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
IRS records indicate that, sometime in 2006 or 2007, the agency mistakenly reclassified the National Policy Institute as one that didn’t need to file tax returns, according to Chuck McLean, a senior research fellow for the nonprofit watchdog Guidestar.
The IRS posted a notice of the group’s revocation on its website Monday, but the loss of its tax status is retroactive to May 15, 2016, the date when its most recent tax return was due.
McLean said he suspects the group’s revocation was an “automated thing.”
“They handle so many of these, it’s just a routine thing,” he added.
Louisiana State University law professor Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney, said it shouldn’t be difficult for Spencer’s group to get reinstated as a tax-exempt nonprofit. But an IRS error isn’t a valid excuse for its failure to file tax returns, according to Hackney.
“They should have still been filing,” Hackney added.
An Associated Press review of tax records in December found that the National Policy Institute and three other groups at the forefront of the white nationalist movement have registered as charities and raised more than $7.8 million in tax-deductible donations over the past decade. William H. Regnery II, a wealthy publisher, founded the National Policy Institute in 2005.
The National Policy Institute raised $442,482 in tax-deductible contributions from 2007 through 2012. The group used an address in Whitefish, Montana, on its 2012 tax form, but it currently uses a post office box in Arlington, Virginia, to solicit donations by mail.
Regulators in Virginia are reviewing whether Spencer’s group should have registered with the state. Elaine Lidholm, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said the agency began its review in response to a reporter’s inquiry about the group within the past two weeks.
Lidholm said the National Policy Institute submitted an incomplete registration form to the agency in 2006.
“It’s not uncommon for someone to start a registration, not give us enough information and we never hear from them again,” she said.San Francisco's luxury housing market may be among the most expensive in the nation, but it was Oakland's that saw big growth numbers over the past 12 months. We just reported that Oakland's rental market is getting more expensive, and when real estate website Redfin took a look at housing priced in the top five percent in major cities around the country, they found that Oakland had some of the most significant growth at the top of its market. The average sale price at the high end of Oakland's market rose by eight percent in the past year to $1.71 million. San Francisco's top five percent of sales had an average price of $3.99 million, but saw just three percent growth in the last 12 months.
Markets like Washington D.C., Denver, Delray Beach (Florida), and Bend (Oregon) had the biggest high-end price gains, but Oakland wasn't far behind. The Bay Area's Fremont also saw big year-on-year gains of nine percent in its luxury market. So why the big jump in these cities? Not surprisingly, it comes from an extreme lack of inventory and affordability in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Redfin agent Mia Simon pointed to the mix of city and suburban life (with features like good elementary schools and walkability) in Oakland's high-end neighborhoods. She says Fremont benefits from great schools and proximity to Silicon Valley.
· New Report Shows SF Rent Prices Down, While Oakland's Spike [Curbed SF]
· Home Prices in the Luxury Market Fell For the First Time Since 2012 [Redfin]One of the biggest “improvements” that Mozilla claims is the Firefox memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks. Although Firefox memory usage improved a little over the last few years, it still uses a lot of memory; a little more than I feel comfortable with. And for this reason we created Firemin.
Memory Leaks
We like keeping our apps running for a few days (that’s just the way I roll) and because of this Firefox was using over 2000MB of memory after about 3 days. It’s quite normal for Firefox to be sucking up over 250MB of memory right off the bat. In a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the program is open/in-use and this is exactly what happens with Firefox.
Enter Firemin
Rather than complain about it, we decided to fix it. Enter Firemin; simply put, Firemin will attempt to eliminate Firefox memory leaks and decrease the amount of memory Firefox uses. All I did was tweak our Memory Booster a little and applied it to Firefox and this solved the memory leak issues.
Firemin vs. Windows Memory Management
Windows will also periodically scan running processes and tell them to release their unused memory. You could argue that this makes Firemin unnecessary, and you would be spot on. However, It is my opinion that Windows does not clean out memory as often as I would like it to. Firemin runs the clean memory API call a few times per second.
The method Firemin uses to decrease Firefox memory usage is not proven and the debate over if it works or not will go on until the end of time, but the logic remains; if it works for you, use it and if it does not, don’t use it. It is really that simple.
Download Firemin
Firemin comes in two flavors. A setup utility for installing Firemin to your computer and a portable version for running it straight from a memory stick or portable hard drive. The portable version will not write any settings to the registry or leave any traces on your computer.
Just download which ever version you prefer.
Download Firemin_5060_Setup.exe (413167 downloads) Portable Firemin_5060.zip (128580 downloads) Version 6.2.3.5060 Updated November 23, 2018 File Size 2 MB License Open Source Requirements Windows® 7, 8 / 8.1, 10 (32 and 64 bit) Malware Scan
Recent Firemin 6.2.3.5060 Changes
Added support for Persian language.
Added Persian translation.
Important security updates!
Resources
Firemin uses the exceptional Firefox 2005 icons by Jairo Boudewyn (weboso).
Source Code
Download the Firemin source code from the GitHub Repository. To compile (build) the sources, you will need to download and install AutoIt Beta version 3.3.15.0 or later. Download the AutoIt Script Editor (Scite) here to edit the source code.
Sharing is Caring!The recycling centre for FALSE LIMBS: Quadruple amputee launches service to helps others in need - and has been given 1,000 limbs so far
Ray Edwards MBE, 59, had to have both of his arms and both of his legs amputated after he developed septicaemia - blood poisoning - in 1987
He has now set up a recycling centre for used false limbs
The centre strips away the plastic and sells the metal inside - it can make about £20 from each limb for Mr Edwards' charity, Limbcare
So far, the centre has been given more than 1,000 old false limbs
The money will be used to help amputees pay for new limbs, wheelchairs or for treatment and rehabilitation
A man with no arms or legs has launched a recycling centre for false limbs.
Ray Edwards MBE, 59, is turning thousands of fake body parts into cash to help pay for new equipment for amputees.
The new recycling centre is set to make about £20 for each limb - by stripping away the plastic and selling the metal inside.
A quadruple amputee has set up a recycling centre for old and unwanted false limbs - and has been given more than 1,000 so far
Ray Edwards MBE, 59, had to have all of his limbs amputated when he developed septicaemia in 1987. He is pictured with his wife, Fiona, and daughters Taya (back) and Nicola (left)
It has been opened by charity Limbcare, headed by quadruple amputee Mr Edwards, who lost his arms and legs in 1987 after developing septicaemia.
The team has set up its recycling station in a warehouse in Camberley, Surrey - and has already been given over 1,000 false limbs from around the country.
They have received their limbs from amputees who needed new ones, or from relatives of users who have passed away.
Because false limbs are classed as medical waste, by law they cannot be re-used, so Mr Edwards' team are stripping away the plastic and resin outer coating, to get to the metal inside.
Mr Edwards says some of the limbs come from people who have outgrown them while others are donated by the relatives of people who have died
His recycling centre strips away the plastic on the limbs and then sells the metal on the inside - each limb can raise about £20 for Mr Edwards' charity, Limbcare
The charity will use all of the money raised by the recycling centre to help other amputees pay for new limbs, wheelchairs and rehabilitation
Mr Edwards, of Sandhurst, Berkshire, said: ‘The metal inside false limbs is very expensive - it’s all titanium, aluminium or medical-grade stainless steel.
‘In the past, when an amputee dies or out-grows their current false limb, they were just thrown away. But we can get about £20 for the metalwork inside, so that’s a great start.
‘There are upwards of 100,000 amputees in Britain, and each one will go through several different limbs in their lifetime.
‘I think it’s a brilliant way for us to raise money, because all the proceeds will go back to help others.
Mr Edwards said: 'We're the first people in Britain to realise the very real cost of waste artificial limbs'
Mr Edwards (centre) and his team have already been given more than 1,000 unwanted false limbs to recycle
‘We hope to raise as much money as possible to buy new limbs, wheelchairs and pay for rehabilitation, and we think we’ve come up with a fantastic way to do that.’
Below the knee prosthetics cost about £4,000, and above the knee limbs cost up to £9,000.
Mr Edwards said: ‘In the past, family members either threw away the false limbs or buried them with their loved ones.
‘Now they have an option to help others after their own loved ones have passed away.’
Limbcare is run by Mr Edwards, and double amputees Barry Perrin and Roy Wright, who both lost their legs.
As unwanted false limbs are classed as medical waste they cannot be reused
Mr Edwards said: 'The metal inside false limbs is very expensive - it's all titanium, aluminium or medical-grade stainless steel. In the past, when an amputee dies or out-grows their current false limb, they were just thrown away. But we can get about £20 for the metalwork inside, so that's a great start'
Mr Edwards said: ‘We’re the first people in Britain to realise the very real cost of waste artificial limbs.
‘Hopefully, we’ll be able to use the money we generate to buy wheelchairs, new limbs, and also to pay for the training and rehabilitation for people who need our help.
‘Lots of people know about the fantastic work Help for Heroes does, but there are lots of people out there who lost their arms and legs in other ways, and they need help too.’
Cash donations can be made by visiting www.justgiving.com/limbcare
Below the knee prosthetics cost about £4,000, and above the knee limbs cost up to £9,000Rousseff has denied any involvement, and the attorney general cleared her. But she chaired Petrobras's board of directors during much of the period of the kickbacks, which allegedly totaled around $3.8 billion.
One reason the scandal is so potent is that in addition to its size, Petrobras looms large in the national consciousness as a symbol of pride and economic might. Brazilians were outraged when Edward Snowden revealed that American intelligence agencies had been spying on Petrobras. By way of comparison, however, a pro-Petrobras rally shortly after the scandal emerged last fall drew just 1,000 marchers.
What Will This Mean for Brazil?
So far, Brazilian observers seem to think that while this scandal has the potential to be the biggest in the country in years, Rousseff is not immediately in danger. For one thing, she won reelection in October, if narrowly. For another, impeachment is something of a leitmotif in Brazilian politics. Not only was former President Collor de Mello impeached—he stepped down from the presidency in a failed attempt to avoid it—but, as The New York Times notes, every civilian president since the military junta ended in 1985 has been threatened with it. Rousseff has also survived widespread protests before, and her reelection came despite public fury at mishandling of projects around last year's World Cup.
Still, there are particular reasons why Rousseff might be worried now. The calls for her impeachment have built quickly, and her approval rating has fallen nearly 20 points, from 42 percent late last year to 23 percent recently. Meanwhile, the national economy is sputtering—inflation is at a decade high, and the real is sinking against the dollar—and many analysts expect it to fall into recession.
Rousseff's struggles, and the Workers Party fatigue, seem to fit into a pattern across Latin America in recent years, where charismatic leftist leaders depart office and leave a mess behind them. Rousseff succeeded her political mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as president. Lula was a charismatic populist who won widespread affection from the Brazilian masses and launched huge government programs to lift citizens out of poverty. Now, Rousseff is struggling to deal with the aftermath of the Lula administration and its programs, and she seems to lack Lula's charisma and ability to keep politics from spinning out of control.
There have been different variations on this theme elsewhere. A darker version is Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro is facing an economy destroyed by the policies of his late mentor Hugo Chavez. Maduro can't blame Chavez, but he also can't pull off the same grandstanding Chavez did, and instead has doubled down on Chavez's strategy of violent repression of opponents. And in Cuba, the granddaddy of Latin American leftism, Raul Castro has embarked on a series of steps to loosen Communist Party control since taking over power from his brother Fidel—most notably diplomatic rapprochement with the United States. Speaking of Rousseff and her allies, one protester told AFP derisively, "They can all go to Cuba!" In a small way, the entire country is already slouching that way.Main Forum Reviews DVDs Forum Ratings Forum Awards
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View packaging SPECIFICATIONS 1.85:1 Widescreen
English DTS-HD 5.1 Surround
English subtitles
1 Disc FEATURES New conversation between Barry Sonnenfeld and the Coens about the film’s look, featuring Telestrator video illustrations
New conversation between author Dave Eggars and the Coens about the film’s production, from inception to release
New interviews with composer Carter Burwell, sound mixer Skip Lievsay, and actors Frances McDormand and M. Emmet Walsh
Trailers
Insert featuring an essay by novelist and critic Nathaniel Rich Blood Simple Blu-ray Reviewed by: Chris Galloway
Directed By: Joel Coen
1984 | 96 Minutes | River Road Productions
Release Information
Blu-ray | MSRP: $39.95 | Series: The Criterion Collection | Edition: #834
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Release Date: September 20, 2016
Review Date: September 13, 2016
Chris Galloway1984 | 96 Minutes | Licensor Blu-ray | MSRP: $39.95 | Series: The Criterion Collection | Edition: #834Release Date: September 20, 2016Review Date: September 13, 2016 Purchase From:
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SYNOPSIS Joel and Ethan Coen’s career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner sets off a torrent of violence with one murderous thought. Actor M. Emmet Walsh looms over the proceedings as a slippery private eye with a yellow suit, a cowboy hat, and no moral compass, and Frances McDormand’s cunning debut performance set her on the road to stardom. The tight scripting and inventive style that have marked the Coens’ work for decades are all here in their first film, in which cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld abandons the black-and-white chiaroscuro of classic noir for neon signs and jukebox colors that combine with Carter Burwell’s haunting score to lurid and thrilling effect. Blending elements from pulp fiction and low-budget horror flicks, Blood Simple reinvented the film noir for a new generation, marking the arrival of a filmmaking ensemble that would transform the American independent cinema scene.
PICTURE Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, Blood Simple, receives a new Blu-ray release from Criterion, making use of a new 4K restoration scanned from the original negative. The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 on this dual-layer disc at 1080p/24hz. The disc presents the newer 96-minute director’s cut similar to the previous DVD and Blu-ray releases from Universal and MGM. This new transfer and restoration offers a tremendous improvement over the previous releases, the fairly noisy Universal DVD and the MGM Blu-ray, which probably used the same master as that previous DVD, though at least improved upon compression. It’s quite revelatory really just how much better this is. I found the colours and black levels were the first obvious improvements, offering better saturation, the neon lights scattered about coming off particularly brilliant. I was also impressed with how much better Walsh’s yellow jacket and pants look here as well. The film does look darker in some scenes in comparison to the MGM Blu-ray (which looks to have been brightened anyways), since certain features are more hidden in the shadows, but the blacks here are rich and deep, not crushing out details in the process, which is most important considering a lot of the film does take place in the shadows. Detail has also been drastically improved upon and the level of clarity in every shot, long and close-up, far exceeded my expectations. Depth and textures look better because of this drastic improvement. Film grain is fine but clear and rendered naturally, looking far nicer here in comparison to MGM’s, which now looks muddy and undefined. The restoration has also cleared up blemishes and damage, and I don’t recall anything of note popping up. In the end the film now looks like it could have been made within the last year or so. It’s a spectacular looking presentation. 10/10
All Blu-ray screen captures come from the source disc and have been shrunk from 1920x1080 to 900x506 and slightly compressed to conserve space. While they are not exact representations they should offer a general idea of overall video quality.
AUDIO Criterion chooses to include a new 5.1 mix for the film, presented in DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround. This is actually an upgrade over the previous editions, which presented the audio in 2.0 stereo surround. The film’s sound design is exceptional and the track certainly does it justice. The Criterion is certainly sharper and clearer, though I don’t think it sounds too different in comparison to the old. This one definitely makes use of the discrete channel presentation and is better at directing sound, naturally, shown first off during the opening credits where passing traffic is directed more to the left of the environment. Bass is a bit more noticeable and distinct here as well, though I didn’t find it overbearing and it adds just the right ominous effect for the film. The biggest improvement is probably found in the presentation of Carter Burwell’s score, which sounds crisp and sharp, with some wonderful range to it. It’s mixed nicely throughout the speakers as well and fills the environment beautifully. Dialogue, which sticks primarily to the fronts, most specifically the center, sounds clear and is easy to hear, the mix never drowning out dialogue. Overall I rather liked it. It makes nice use of the surround environment and isn’t overly showy, but impresses when it needs to. I rather liked it. 8/10
SUPPLEMENTS The previous Universal DVD and MGM Blu-ray for the film only sported a couple of gag supplements: a fake introduction and then an audio commentary that spoofed most academic tracks, the participant (a Kenneth Loring) reading things into the film that simply weren’t there. Because of this, and the limited features present on releases for their other films, I always figured the Coens, at one point, looked down on supplementary material. With their participation on Inside Llewyn Davis and now this film (as well as appearances on other releases for their titles) it seems this either isn’t the case or they’ve turned around on the idea. This edition drops those gag supplements but replaces them with a number of fantastic features covering the film’s production and release. The biggest surprise feature on here is the 70-minute Shooting Blood Simple, featuring Barry Sonnenfeld and the Coens. It’s not really an interview, though, but more of something along the lines of a select-scene audio commentary, with the three talking over sequences from the film covering its look, its framing, and so on. Even then, though, it’s still not a traditional commentary track. The three are also working with Telestrators, using colour-coded pens to draw over the film. This is used often but not overly so and is not a gimmick: the three use the technology to point out the framing of scenes, positioning of the camera, the use of empty space, mistakes, or to point out something specific to the viewer. Freeze-frames and replays are also employed to concentrate on certain moments (the feature also cuts away occasionally to the three in front of their stations, just “because” I guess). In all of this there are also plenty of anecdotes and other production notes with a few interesting surprises (they hired short actors to make the fire pit in the back of the bar look much bigger than it is, for example). It’s very academic and technical but is still able to be entertaining and fascinating. A very nicely put together feature. A Conversation with David Eggers is a rather entertaining 35-minute discussion between writer David Eggers and Joel and Ethan Coen. With a few segues into some of their other work and what interests them (as well as stating their disinterest in politics, which people like to read into their films), the conversation is primarily about the film and its production. On top of talking about their horror background (they worked with Sam Raimi on The Evil Dead) and how they incorporated some of those elements into the film, the two spend a lot of time talking about the huge task of raising the money for the film, going around with their demo trailer to show off, clearly remembering many of the people that both rejected and funded them (I’m really impressed with what they remember actually). They also laugh a bit at just how green they were, admitting they were fairly clueless about certain aspects of filmmaking and recall how weird it was working with someone they had seen in the movies before (Walsh). They had issues finding a distributor until it was shown at the NYFF where it received its fair share of praise (and a pan from J. Hoberman, which the two claim to have found funny) and then an eventual release, finally getting a distributor. The theme of the two’s inexperience carries over into the other interviews to a certain degree, with two new ones featuring Frances McDormand and M. Emmet Walsh. McDormand recalls how she and the filmmakers worked on her “hysteria” at the end of the film, which she admits probably wouldn’t have happened with anyone else (this was her first film as well) and then Walsh talks about how untrusting he was about actually getting paid by these two newcomers (he was promised a percentage of the profits and figuring that any percent of $0.00 is $0.00, he ended up pocketing his per diem). In each of their interviews (McDormand’s running 25-minutes and Walsh’s running 16) the two also recall getting their parts, and working with the Coens. This was of course McDormand’s first role (getting it after Holly Hunter was unable to do it) so she was obviously the more unsure, depending a lot on the new directors and making sure she wasn’t too theatrical (she suggests if her mouth is open in a scene she was working on holding herself back). Walsh admits to being unsure of them at first, doing the role more to take a stab at the Sydney Greenstreet type character and work on it (he figured no one would see the film anyways) but he worked with them, gained respect for them, and (sounding as though he was surprised) ended up liking the film. Both interviews are good, McDormand talking about her working relationship with the two (she is, of course, also married to Joel Coen) but I admit that of the two I liked the Walsh one more. Walsh talks extensively about his career and explains why he was usually cast in a film, either because he could play beautifully off of other actors, making them look good or because the writing stunk and he can make it sound good. He also shares a couple of funny stories from the production of Blood Simple, but I was especially amused at his recollection in creating the accent for his character if only because the Coens mention in their interview they admit to not being sure, as newcomers, how to tell the professional actor not to use that accent. It’s a funny, energetic (and the guy interview and one of my favourites of the year so far. The final interview may not be as engaging as any of the previous ones but still worth viewing. Covering the sound and music of the film, composer Carter Burwell and sound editor Skip Lievsay talk about their experience on this film, with this being Burwell’s first film (Lievsay had done some work prior). The two talk about the film’s sound design and score, while also marrying the two. After a number of interviews that are actually fairly high energy this one is a bit more subdued but still worth watching. The disc then closes with a collection of trailers. The fund-raising trailer—the trailer the brothers used to show prospective investors their intentions for the film—is here, highlighting a couple of key sequences in the film. It’s also noteworthy for featuring Bruce Campbell as Marty (the role that would go to Dan Hedaya). The disc also includes the original trailer and then Janus Film’s rerelease trailer. Author Nathaniel Rich then provides a short essay on the film in the included insert, going over its noir elements and the more horror elements (probably related to their work on The Evil Dead) that get worked in. Though the essay does add the scholarly slant to the release, and the select-scene commentary is more academic in nature, I’m a bit surprised there aren’t other scholarly interviews about the film or the Coens, or even about the film’s twists on the genre (though when one considers the mocking fake-commentary on the original Blood Simple releases, it can be easy to conclude they don’t care for academic analysis). It also would have been nice to maybe get more details about the differences between this version of the film (that first appeared on the 2001 DVD) and the original theatrical version, or get more insight into why and how the Coens went about creating this edit. True, most of the trims were actually just cutting a second or two off of a number of shots, tightening it up, but a couple of lengthier sequences were excised. As it is, though, I’m happy to finally get some actual insightful material after the joke supplements of the previous editions, and all of the material here was definitely worth going through. 9/10
CLOSING Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition clearly outdoes every aspect of the previous MGM Blu-ray, improving vastly upon the picture and sound, while offering some great, probing extras on the film’s look and how these two Minnesotan boys got their first feature made. Criterion gives us the special edition this film deserves. A highly recommended release.
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Purchase From:LANTANA, Fla. (Oct. 9, 2015) — A Florida woman’s eye was glued shut after someone accidentally poured glue into her eye instead of eye drops, instantly gluing her eye shut.
Katherine Gaydos told WPBF a man was using a leaf blower and blew debris into her eye. She asked the man to reach in her purse and get Visine, but the man accidentally grabbed glue for applying false fingernails and poured the chemical into her eye.
“As soon as I felt it burn, I closed my eye and screamed and called 911,” she told WPBF.
The glue immediately sealed her eye closed.
A doctor used lidocaine to force her eye open. She is scheduled for a procedure on Friday to get the glue scraped off her cornea.
Doctors told Gaydos she should not experience any permanent vision loss due to the accident.You know it's bad for Facebook when its rumored "Buffy" phone, arguably still in rumor-mode instead of "we have a working prototype that's on the way soon" mode, is already drawing comparisons to Microsoft's Zune. And there's nothing good about that, argues analyst Rob Enderle in a column posted today.
Enderle, writing on Digital Trends, claims that there's just too much in common between Microsoft's failed Zune players and Facebook's alleged phone for Facebook to have any chance of making it in today's market. And he's not just speaking to the phone's alleged technical prowess He says that Facebook's overall strategy is going to get it, and the phone, into a great deal of trouble.
"You see, HTC is on the other side of the Zune problem. Just as Microsoft lost trust from its hardware partners, an OEM like HTC stepping out against their software partner should have the same kind of collateral damage," Enderle writes.
The problem looks something like this: Microsoft partnered up with a variety of companies to create its "PlaysForSure" platform, a certification process that ensured that a particular device fit a laundry list of compatibility and performance requirements. Namely, that content grabbed from online systems branded with the logo would work, DRM-wise, on PlaysForSure devices.
Only, Microsoft then went and decided to compete against its partners by developing what was, at the time, supposed to be the company's big iPod-killer. Only, it didn't.
"You never want to put yourself at odds with your key revenue source and sow seeds of distrust, but the Zune did that with partners. It was also a colossal failure at the same time, which upset retailers and made them lose their trust in Microsoft," Enderle writes.
According to Enderle, Facebook is about to make a similar mistake with its rumored phone. By partnering with HTC to allegedly develop the phone, Facebook risks angering HTC's other big partner, Google, by essentially forking Google's Android operating system to suit Facebook's purposes. Facebook also risks angering Microsoft, a Facebook partner and heavy user of Facebook-enhanced social networking on its Windows Phone 7 platform, by competing head-to-head against its very smartphones. And then there's the fact that Facebook would be building an Android phone, not a Windows Phone 7 device.
"Facebook should be focused on building the best Facebook app for every major platform," Enderle writes. "Going into competition with these platforms and phone providers could alone turn them into the next Netscape."
For more from David, follow him on Facebook: David Murphy.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.Let me tell you about Child of Light, a land called Lemuria and its terrible plight. An evil Queen has stolen the sun, moon and stars, bringing evil before unseen while turning the world from a place of beauty to one of scars. The fate of this place rests with Aurora, and those that support her. The game itself is a platforming RPG with a story told in rhyme, but does this latest Ubisoft title bring glee and is it worth your time?
Child of Light is brought to life by the UbiArt Framework engine, the same one encountered in Rayman Legends and Origins. This approach compliments Child of Light’s fairytale nature, as it adds to the charm of this adventure. There are a whole host of locations to explore, each with their own monsters and quests |
M to fund research for a cure.
The BB&T Woodlands CrawPHish Festival features live entertainment from Cory Morrow, Zach Coffey & Zydeco Dots, Crawlie’s Kids Corner, crawfish and other Cajun style food and beverage.
Tickets are available for The BB&T Woodlands CrawPHish Festival at www.WoodlandsCrawfish.com. The event will take place from 11:00am – 6:00pm at Town Green Park, located at 2099 Lake Robbins Drive in the Woodlands. Ticket purchase includes a plate of food and two beverages. Purchase your tickets early at the discounted price of $25 for adults (age 13+) and $15 for children (age 6-12). Children under 5 enter free of charge. Tickets purchased at the gate will be $36 for adults (age 13+) and $21.
For more information or sponsorship opportunities with The BB&T Woodlands CrawPHish Festival, visit www.WoodlandsCrawfish.com or contact Sharla Grayson at [email protected] Cannon appears to have taken the title of his new album a little too seriously.
The "America's Got Talent" host is catching serious online heat after he "whited up" to promote the forthcoming release of "White People Party Music."
Cannon, as he normally appears. The rapper, who is married to singer Marah Carey, has been criticized as 'racist,' 'ignorant' and 'hypocritical' for the stunt. (Arthur Mola/AP)
Mr. Mariah Carey has been labelled "racist," "ignorant" and "hypocritical" for the stunt - which also saw him show off his bizarre new "Connor Smallnut" persona in a series of videos.
There is a big difference between Humor and Hatred.
Cannon, 33, sent social media sites into meltdown after sharing an Instagram snap of himself Sunday.
Cannon's 'Connor Smallnut' persona dresses like a skater. (Instagram) The 33-year-old rapper says people have taken his stunt too seriously. (Instagram)
"It's official… I'm White!!! #WHITEPEOPLEPARTYMUSIC #Wppm in stores April 1st!!!!!!Dude Go Get It!!!Join The Party!!!!" he wrote alongside the image.
"#GoodCredit #DogKissing #BeerPong #FarmersMarkets #FistPumping #CreamCheeseEating #RacialDraft “Bro I got drafted!!" he added.
His character, who looks like a skater kid, wore a beanie, wig and false teeth - with a white T-shirt and 80s style jeans completing the trying-to-be satirical outfit.
With some fans criticizing him for the post, Cannon tweeted back: ""Duuuude everybody Chil-lax!!!!" ~ Connor Smallnut'."
He then added: "It's funny how people take themselves so seriously. People love drama! We feed off of it. Just relax and have fun!!"
To further illustrate his point, he then referred to Robert Downey Jr - who donned blackface to play Kirk Lazarus in comedy war film Tropic Thunder.
"Shout out to @RobertDowneyJr This is one of my favorite characters of all time! Hilarious!!! There is a big difference between Humor and Hatred," he added.
Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!The Chargers are down to two healthy running backs.
A third will be added soon.
San Diego is placing running back Danny Woodhead on injured reserve, coach Mike McCoy announced Monday. Woodhead suffered a broken right fibula Sunday against the Bills as well as a high ankle sprain. The team plans to fill his roster spot Tuesday.
There is some urgency to the situation.
Practice-squad running back Marion Grice signed a two-year contract with the Cardinals on Monday, sources said. There is no other in-house candidate, so the expected addition will be someone from outside the organization.
He must receive a crash course of the offense and be active Sunday against the Jaguars.
"We'll make that decision within the next 24 hours obviously since we don't practice until Wednesday," coach Mike McCoy said Monday, "but without a doubt, the sooner somebody is here, (the better).... We'll prepare that player to get him ready to go with the situation we have with our two guys right now. We're going to have a third back somehow. We'll make that decision here shortly."
McCoy was a few minutes late to his 1:30 p.m. press conference.
He had good reason: He and General Manager Tom Telesco were deciding how to proceed at the running back position, he said.
Veteran Donald Brown and rookie Branden Oliver are the only healthy backs on the 53-man roster. In an eight-day span, Ryan Mathews and Woodhead were both carted off the field. Mathews suffered a right MCL sprain in the fourth quarter against the Seahawks. Woodhead's right leg and ankle gruesomely contorted when tackled on his first carry Sunday at Ralph Wilson Stadium.
Grice very well may have been the choice to take Woodhead's roster spot.
Instead, the rookie sixth-round draft pick was in Arizona on Monday, taking a physical.
The Cardinals made an aggressive play for the Arizona State product, who had a say in whether to join an outside team's 53-man roster or remain with his current club. Grice chose Arizona. He fills the need for depth in the wake of Jonathan Dwyer's domestic violence situation, preferring the opportunity there than in San Diego.
The Cardinals were aware of Woodhead's injury.
Targeting Grice, they jumped to sign him.
His best game this preseason coincidentally came against them. On Aug. 28, he had 17 carries for 79 yards in the fourth exhibition at Qualcomm Stadium. Ultimately, the Chargers kept Oliver on the roster over Grice.
One positive in the short term is Mathews is only weeks from a return.
In the longer term, Woodhead's injury is not considered career-threatening, a source familiar with the situation said Monday. He is expected to undergo surgery and make a full recovery.
Along with Woodhead and Mathews, center Nick Hardwick (neck), outside linebacker Melvin Ingram (hip) and inside linebacker Manti Te'o (foot) also are key players to be lost for a significant period due to injury in the first three games.
Cornerback Brandon Flowers called Woodhead "a key player to our offense."
"He's a threat coming out of the backfield. He's a leader on the field," Flowers added. "It's hard to replace a guy like that.... But the next guy, Branden Oliver, will have to step up. He's very capable; that's why he's on this team.
"I think the front office did a great job of creating depth on our football team. We've had a couple key guys go down, and guys have been able to step up so far. We've just to keep answering the bell, and hopefully, this bad luck of injuries stops."What did the Unrest parliamentary event achieve?
Tuesday 24th October, 2017 will long be remembered as a significant day for anyone involved in ME politics.
Background
Despite knowing the issues facing people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) should concern MP’s from across the political divide, it has been hard work to engage them to our cause. The APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) for ME was disbanded in June this year and we needed new ways to recruit much needed support for the ME community.
When the ME Association secured the Speaker’s State Rooms for a special parliamentary screening of the film, Unrest, it had the potential to be a game changer.
The timing of the event couldn’t have been better. When NICE declared that it was proposing NOT to update their guideline for ME (CG53) last summer, it provided the whole community with an excellent campaigning opportunity.
#MEAction orchestrated a campaign to demonstrate how NICE guidelines had let individuals down. Stephen Timms, MP tabled an Early Day Motion (271) calling on NICE to recognise patient experience and international biomedical evidence in a full review.
Patients and carers contacted their MP’s urging them to sign EDM 271, sharing a parliamentary briefing and crucially also sharing their own experiences of living with ME and recommending they attend the Unrest reception.
The film, Unrest, powerfully demonstrates the invisible nature of ME and when it was screened, the story that Jen and Jessica courageously revealed helped to flesh out the many letters that MP’s received from their constituents.
(Stephen Timms MP with Sarah Reed from #MEAction )
Attendance
MP’s were invited to attend the reception and constituents were urging them to attend. 53 accepted the invitation. Anyone who has worked in Parliament will acknowledge that this is a great response! The nature of Parliament always results in a lower turnout on the day and aproximately 40 popped in at some point throughout the event. Those recorded as attending were:
Adrian Bailey MP Labour Peter Bottomley MP Conservative Alex Burghart MP Conservative Vince Cable MP Lib Dem Alex Chalk MP Conservative Joanna Cherry MP SNP Christopher Chope MP Conservative Geoffrey Cox MP Conservative Jim Cunningham MP Labour Ed Davey MP Lib Dem Glyn Davis MP Conservative David Drew MP Labour Chris Evans MP Labour Michelle Gildernew MP Sinn Fein Patrick Grady MP SNP Andrew Gwynne MP Labour Lady Sylvia Hermon MP Independent Tony Lloyd MP Labour Margaret Mar Countess Cross bench Paul Maskey MP Sinn Fein Kerry McCarthy MP Labour Carol Monaghan MP SNP Nicky Morgan MP Conservative Sarah Newton MP Conservative Jeremy Quinn MP Conservative Chris Ruane MP Labour Jim Shannon MP DUP Paula Sheriff MP Labour David Simpson MP DUP Alex Sobel MP Labour Mark Tami MP Labour Debbonaire Thangam MP Labour Derek Thomas MP Conservative Stephen Timms MP Labour Liz Twist MP Labour
However, this was more than a numbers exercise. It was about getting the right people to attend who could continue to champion our cause. In talking to MP’s afterwards who couldn’t make the event, many reported that constituents had contacted them about ME and it was encouraging that our message was being received far and wide.
The event
The Speaker’s State Rooms provided a perfect setting for an event of this importance. The adjoining room houses the grand state bed which would have made for a fitting backdrop to Unrest but it’s reserved for Monarchs the night before their Coronation!
The Countess of Mar opened proceedings with an insightful speech on the economic cost of ME/cfs to the UK, Dr Charles Shepherd (Medical advisor to the ME Association) followed with a fantastic talk about the history of ME as a disease, how it lost its way and the steps needed for better treatment. These gave the perfect backdrop for the Unrest exert that was shown. The film is deeply moving, all the more so knowing it is also representative of all the people who had written to their MP trying to explain what ME is like and the difficulties they face. It was hardly surprising that the Q&A session that followed was emotionally charged particularly from Jen Brea and Jessica Taylor-Bearman.
Afterwards, Parliamentarians, prominent researchers and ME charity representatives continued discussions and questions and it was clear that our message had hit home.
Success
There can be no doubt that the Unrest event was a huge success and we are in a much stronger position for future campaigning. Huge thanks must go to the ME Association, Dr Charles Shepherd, the Speaker John Bercow MP, the Countess of Mar, the whole Unrest team, particularly Lucy Wilson who has helped to co-ordinate the ME organisations, invitations and publicity, and of Course Jen and Jessica for their extraordinary effort and achievement.
Huge thanks must also go to all individuals who have engaged with their MP to make them aware of how deep and widespread our problems are.
Next steps
There are more ME charities and organisations than you can shake a stick at. We all have our own strengths but our real strength is when we all work together.
From the involvement of constituents, the screening, and EDM 271 we now have a database of around 200 Parliamentarians who have expressed varying degrees of interest in ME. Many of these include high profile names such as Vince Cable, Diane Abbott, Nicky Morgan, Frank Field and Caroline Lucas.
Unrest has given us unprecedented coverage of the many problems we face and people in politics, science and the arts are now challenging the narrative on the illness. It could take up to three years for NICE to update their guideline for ME so we need to keep ME on the political radar. We are currently following up interest in a parliamentary debate to bring the strength of support to a Ministerial level and to build on the renewed interest we have generated.
If you have already have liaison with your MP, do keep them up to date with proceedings. Each of us can play a vital role in the change we so desperately need. UK #MEAction members will soon be receiving an email inviting them to ask their MP if they would like to receive a screener of the film, so keep your eyes peeled!
Thanks to everyone who has organised, campaigned, shared and promoted Unrest and any activity that has highlighted the need for better research, care and treatment for people with ME. Jen Brea spoke for many when she said [when you’re ill with ME]“ you feel like you disappear but no one is looking for you.” Unrest has helped gather more people to start looking for us and to become fully visible again.
NB: EDM 271 will remain open for further MP’s to sign for the full parliamentary term so it’s not too late to ask your MP to sign. The full wording of the EDM and an up to date list of MP’s who have signed can be found here.
Further details about Unrest can be found here. It is also now available on iTunes, Amazon and other digital platforms.Confederate memorial (Shutterstock)
One of the most prominent U.S. flag makers said on Tuesday it will stop manufacturing and selling Confederate flags in the wake of last week’s attack on worshipers at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Reggie VandenBosch, vice president of sales at the privately owned Valley Forge Flag, said the Pennsylvania-based company came to the decision amid growing controversy over the Confederate flag, which currently flies outside the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia.
While some in the state see the flag as a reminder of South Carolina’s proud history of defying federal authority, many others view it as a shameful tribute to a time when owning slaves was legal.
“We hope that this decision will show our support for those affected by the recent events in Charleston and, in some small way, help to foster racial unity and tolerance in our country,” Valley Forge Flag said in a statement.
The 133-year-old company sells millions of flags each year, VandenBosch said, with Confederate flags making up only a tiny slice of that business.
According to Valley Forge Flag’s website, the company’s American flags have draped the coffins of numerous U.S. presidents and accompanied astronauts on the Apollo space missions. Valley Forge banners were “the U.S. flag of the Pacific Fleet” during World War II and accompanied landing parties on the beaches of Normandy.
Tuesday’s decision was largely symbolic, but important, VandenBosch said. “We do not want to continue to hurt people.”
Supporters of the Confederate flag say it is a reminder of South Carolina’s heritage, and a memorial to Southern casualties during America’s 1861-65 Civil War.
But the flag has also long been embraced by white supremacists. Last week, photos emerged online of Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man charged with murdering nine worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, posing with the flag.
The photographs have prompted renewed calls for the Confederate flag to be removed from the capitol grounds, and sparked a fierce political debate around the state and across the country.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday called on lawmakers to take down the flag, saying it does “not represent the future of our great state”. On the same day, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Sears Holdings Corp said they would stop selling products bearing the Confederate flag.
On Tuesday, online auction site eBay Inc said it would ban Confederate flags and related items containing the flag’s image from its website as it had become a “contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism.”You can't stay silent anymore
Want things to change? Make sure your Senators and Representatives know you're paying attention!
When Members of Congress get elected and go to Washington, D.C., their world is like being in a blender with the lid off. That chaos makes it even more difficult to stay connected to real people on the ground in real America. That’s why we, as voters and party activists, must let them know that we are paying attention. Every now and then, we need to send them a wake-up call. We are paying attention to what they do, and what they don’t do. Elected Democrats have shown recently (and in the eight years of the Obama administration) that they’re willing to simply ignore their supporters. Yes, their base may be on board with the agenda but, as the last election proved, there are saner Democrats out there who have grown tired of their party’s drift into radical left-wing policy. Democrats also ignore logic and common sense and, even when they are dead wrong, they stick together, such as their collective reaction to pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The AHCA may not be perfect, but building off the House bill would have made more sense than starting over from square one Logic and common sense says pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement was the right decision by the Trump administration. No matter what President Trump or the Republicans do, Democrats would rather fight than be right. Republicans may be logical and show some common sense, but they don’t always stick together when it’s time to get to work. A recent example is when the House Republicans finally passed the AHCA, the Republicans in the Senate quickly announced they were going to scrap it, start all over, and write their own bill. Why? That’s not sticking together. In situations like that, real people like you and me can let them know that’s not a logical next step. The AHCA may not be perfect, but building off the House bill would have made more sense than starting over from square one. The best way for us to let our elected officials know at any level that we are paying attention, is to email their websites, call their office and leave a message if necessary, and attend town hall meetings. The messages need to be short and, hopefully, positive and encouraging in tone.
It’s our Country. Pay attention and let them know Both of your US Senators represent your whole State. Let them know your thoughts even if they are doing the right things. Each House Member represents you and approximately 700,000 other people in your Congressional District. Most people will not let them know how they feel about issues, so your voice will have a huge impact on their decisions. If we don’t let the president and Members of Congress know that we are paying attention to what’s happening, then they will not pay attention to us. It’s our Country. Pay attention and let them know.
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Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. As a privately owned website, we reserve the right to remove any comment and ban any user at any time.Comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence and death, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal or abusive attacks on other users may be removed and result in a ban.-- Follow these instructions on registering''I think if you went around the table you'd find it 50-50 between people who think pokies are either a good thing or a shit of a thing. No doubt there's evidence to show families have been busted up and so on, but the state and community having accepted that pokies are a major form of revenue, it now gets back to personal responsibility.'' Ron (''Just Ron'') on the far left stool knows a bit about that. Those machines out the back had their hooks in him for a while, he admits. ''I gambled a lot. I'd put $100 in there and that's all I earned in a day. I thought 'What the hell am I doing? I worked hard for this and I come in here and blow it all away'. So I self-expelled myself from here and the RSL.'' Is he better now? ''Dunno about better,'' chips in one of the others. ''He just doesn't bet as much.'' ClubsAustralia, which is campaigning against the Wilkie reforms, argues it is gaming venues in regional areas that have the most to lose. ''The impact will be felt hardest in the bush because the clubs there have the least capacity to meet the cost of upgrading or replacing their machines and there are fewer alternatives to choose from for entertainment,'' says Josh Landis, executive manager for policy and government. Most country clubs have machines that are more than five years old and under the pre-commitment proposals these will need to be replaced at a cost of up to $25,000 each, he says. Even newer machines would need upgrades at substantial cost.
''In the country the club is a meeting place, not just somewhere to go for a drink or a meal or to play the machines,'' he says. ''When that venue struggles, the whole community struggles.'' No one at the Kyneton Bowling Club has any illusions about pokies and their glowing but false allure of future riches. Last year it brought the club to its knees, sending it into receivership. Nor does anyone quite get how a place with 25 ''licences to print money'' went broke. The club got its pokies in 1994 and by 2000 was among the top-earning gaming venues in country Victoria. It had 1000 members, 70 per cent of them gaming or social members and began making plans for a major $1.9 million redevelopment. But partly due to its central location - surrounded by the library, historic mechanics institute, primary school and playground - it ran into a storm of opposition. ''A strong but vocal minority, many of whom were Johnny-come-latelys to the town, opposed us all the way,'' growls Ross. By the time it went ahead - more than five years later - the cost had blown out to $4.3 million. Past president John MacDonald says the club simply could not service the debt and in March last year receivers Ferrier Hodgson closed the bar and gaming operations. In May it was reopened after the Maryborough Highland Society took over the operation or, as manager Rebecca Bell says, was ''trusted to turn the club back to what it was''.
According to the society and most of the membership - now down to about 400 - the Wilkie reforms are a threat to its existence and to the benefits they say ripple out. ''The broader Kyneton community is going to miss out,'' says Ms Bell. ''We've given out quite a large amount of money and benefits in the short time I've been here.'' She lists some of the contributions: to the annual Daffodil Festival, community radio station, the Kyneton Connect newsletter, a $50 club voucher for Hesket Primary School. But the bulk of the give-back, she says, is in free room use to community groups. But as Dr Lorraine Beyer, sustainable communities planner with Macedon Ranges Shire Council points out, such donations are a legislated community benefit requirement. A Productivity Commission report in June last year noted: ''Most club benefits from pokie machines are to members, not to the public at large." There are three gaming venues in Macedon Ranges, a shire of 1750 square kilometres with more than 40,000 people. Kyneton, about midway between Melbourne and Bendigo with about 4400 people, has two of those venues and 53 of the total 95 gaming machines. In 2009-10, player losses at the bowling club and Kyneton RSL were $3,753,094. That includes the months the bowling club was closed. Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics and Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation statistics, that's a loss of $1134 for every local adult. But only $13 per adult went back to the broader community as donations under the community benefits system. That's 1.1 per cent of total losses and 3.4 per cent of the clubs' one-third share of profits. The bowling club's community benefit statement shows it made $830 of community donations (excluding the monthly raffles), provided $460 for school bowls, $760 for ''handicapped therapy'' and $4550 worth of free room use. The bulk of so-called class A funds of $33,141 went into the club for greens maintenance, trophies, happy hour catering and bowls buses.
Kyneton RSL's $134,642 class A benefits included $10,663 in book donations to local schools; $6000 to the Kyneton District Health Service, St John's Ambulance, a cancer group and individuals; $1000 to Kyneton Fire Brigade; $10,260 to sporting clubs and special-needs youth; and almost $23,000 in free venue use and veterans' wakes. Malcolm Blandthorn, highland society general manager, says the bowling club's parlous financial state means it is inevitable as much money as possible is ploughed back into the club until it starts to make a profit. Much of the opposition to the pokies may come from the tree-changers who've been coming into the area in the past 10 years, but organic masseuse and writer Danielle White is a third-generation Kynetonian who says the few benefits of gaming are far outweighed by the negatives. ''I live quite near both venues,'' she says, sitting in the Ladle Cafe in Piper Street. ''I see people trundle off to the pokies during the day, return a little bit pickled and, I imagine, with quite a bit less money in their pockets. I don't see that as a positive for this town.'' In a town where about a quarter of the population is over 64, the gaming venues preyed on the lonely and isolated elderly, she says. Macedon Ranges mayor Cr Henry McLaughlin says the council officially supports mandatory pre-commitment. ''I think it's a great idea, he says. ''Our argument is not with gambling itself; the argument is with the product safety issues specifically of electronic gaming machines.''
But the club members say their preferred form of gaming is the only one being targeted. ''If they're going to do this, why not the same for the tote or Tattslotto, or on the race courses?'' asks Michael Buckley, real estate agent and a bowling club member for 40 years. Loading Shirley Woods, visiting from Pakenham, says the proposed reforms are ''a lot of rot … it's a lovely place to just come and have a talk. You don't have to gamble.'' ''That's right,'' jokes 'Just Ron', a little wistfully. ''You can sit and watch other people lose their money.''The Preamble to the Treaty of Lisbon, recognizes the influence of “religion” on its “values,” but it sees these values— including solidarity between peoples— as universal and secular. Thus it states:
DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law […] DESIRING to deepen the solidarity between their peoples while respecting their history, their culture and their traditions […]
Now that Brexit has become Brexibat, and the supposed ‘direction’ of European history has been called into doubt, Pope St. Pius X (if he were still alive today) might be forgiven for saying “I told you so.” In his Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique, St. Pius X rejected the idea that “universal solidarity” or “fraternity” could be established on any firm basis apart from the Catholic Faith. Fraternity founded on “the love of common interest or, beyond all philosophies and religions, on the mere notion of humanity” is soon swept away by “the passions and wild desires of the heart.” No, he writes, “there is no genuine fraternity outside Christian charity.” Indeed, even if it could succeed a fraternity merely based on enlightened self-interest and a common recognition of humanity would not even be desirable:
By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.
This thesis of Pope St. Pius X’s is actually a common place of Catholic Social Teaching. Russell Hittinger has even argued (with only slight exaggeration) that of the three ideals of the French Revolution— liberty, equality, and fraternity — the Roman Pontiffs have been especially troubled by fraternity. Quite recently, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI echoed his predecessors on this point:
Will it ever be possible to obtain this brotherhood by human effort alone? As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers. Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity. This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is. (¶ 19)
Catholic Social Teaching has long noted that three ideals of the French Revolution are secularized Christian ideals. Pope St. John Paul II was re-iterating and old thesis in his controversial (and often misunderstood) homily at Le Bourget in 1980. Unfortunately, however, parts of the le Bourget homily, and other recent magisterial teachings, seem to be endorsing a secularized universal fraternity. As the Lake Garda Statement puts it:
Today, however, the Church’s leaders present her role as merely that of proposing a “contribution” to a vast and quite hopeless neo-Pelagian project in which the United Nations or some other “world political authority” would serve as the juridical framework for a solidaristic world order in which “believers,” regardless of religion, and unbelievers would be co-equal participants.
And this despite the fact that St. Pius X’s words do seem to have been born in the 19th and 20th centuries. The universal brotherhood declared by the French revolutionaries had little weight against “the passions and wild desires of the heart.” The intellectual grasp of common humanity was drowned in the powerful pseudo-religions of nationalism, and ever more internecine wars tore Europe apart, culminating in the previously unimaginable carnage of World Wars I and II.
But after World War II it seemed that a new beginning was possible. The Schuman Declaration recognized that a merely abstract rational solidarity was not enough, and proposed taking concrete steps to fuse the interests of European nations together, hoping that out of the ‘de-facto solidarity’ of national self-interest well understood, a deeper solidarity would develop. Schuman himself, like many of the founding fathers of the EU, was devout Catholic. As Alan Fimister shows in his brilliant study of Schuman and Catholic Social Teaching, Schuman was hoping that the EU would become a new Christendom, inspired by a Faith, which at the time seemed to be reviving. But that is not what happened. As Fimister puts it in a recent article: “Schuman well understood […] that the European project of Christian Democracy, if it became anti-Christian, ‘would be a caricature which would sink into either tyranny or anarchy.’”
As Adrian Pabst has eloquently put it, the actual development of the EU has seen a fusion of “Anglo-Saxon free-market economics with continental bureaucratic statism.” That is, the “common interest” of EU has pursued by means of a violent and anti-traditional economic mechanism, and it’s rational “notion of humanity” has been given form (to quote Pabst again) in “Kantian morality of context-less duties, Weberian statecraft void of virtue, and Bismarckian quasi-military management of citizens through centralised welfare,” yielding a uninion that is “abstract, administrative and alien vis-a-vis its citizens.”
And yet, Pabst was arguing against Brexit, and many of his colleagues in Radical Orthodoxy have done the same. In his reaction to Brexibat, John Milbank writes:
Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to deny the value of absolute sovereignty or the lone nation-state. Tragically, the Reformation, Roundhead, nonconformist, puritan, whig, capitalist, liberal version of Britishness last night triumphed over our deep ancient character which is Catholic or Anglican, Cavalier, Jacobite, High Tory or Socialist. The spirit of both Burke and Cobbett has been denied by the small-minded, bitter, puritanical, greedy and Unitarian element in our modern legacy.
Is this true? Can much of the spirit of either Burke or Cobbet be found anywhere in practical politics today? There certainly seems to be very little of either spirit on either side of the Brexit debate. Would that Leave and Remain could have both lost! One prominent Burkean, however, has made an argument virtually opposite to Milbank’s: Sir Roger Scruton. Scruton argues that the EU is really anti-European, and that by leaving the European Union the United Kingdom will have a chance at saving the best parts of the European heritage. But as for me, I think that Edmund Burke himself was right when, over two hundred years ago, he declared the glory of Europe was gone forever:
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.The Federal Court of Appeal has rejected the notion that internet service providers are broadcasters, likely ending a plan to introduce a new levy on internet users to pay for the creation of Canadian content online.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in June asked the court to decide whether ISPs could be governed under the Broadcast Act, which would therefore require them to contribute to the creation of Canadian programming, as traditional broadcasters do.
On Wednesday, the court ruled that ISPs are not broadcasters because they only provide access to video content, which is generally supplied by third parties — such as broadcasters. As long as the ISPs remain neutral in providing that access, they should continue to be governed only by the Telecommunications Act, the court said.
"Because ISPs' sole involvement is to provide the mode of transmission, they have no control or input over the content made available to internet users by content producers and as a result, they are unable to take any steps to promote the policy described in the Broadcasting Act or its supporting provisions," said the decision. "Only those who 'transmit' the 'program' can contribute to the policy objectives."
Groups from the creative community, including the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists and the Directors Guild of Canada, had previously asked the CRTC to force ISPs to contribute 2.5 per cent of their revenue to help fund new media creation.
ISPs opposed the plan and said they were merely conduits for content, and that any new fees would be passed on to customers.
Internet providers cheered the court's decision. Michael Hennessey, head of regulatory affairs at Telus, summed up his feelings in one word on Twitter: "Awesome."
University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist said the decision all but kills the plan to impose new charges on ISPs and their customers.
"The case is a huge win for the ISPs and — subject to an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada or a legislative change — puts an end to the ISP levy proposal," he wrote on his blog.Story highlights "We cherish our children," a neighbor says
School bookkeeper Antoinette Tuff talked down school gunman
Tuff had been trained for the threat of a school intruder, district says
Her name "says everything about her," principal says
As the kids trooped back into the suburban Atlanta elementary school that was stormed by a gunman earlier this week, everyone was talking about Antoinette Tuff.
The bookkeeper, an eight-year veteran of the DeKalb County school district, talked suspect Michael Brandon Hill into surrendering after a brief standoff with police Tuesday afternoon. Faced with an armed 20-year-old who told her he was off his medication for a mental disorder, Tuff shared stories of heartbreak from her own life to help calm him down -- a recent divorce, a son with multiple disabilities.
Tuff was off Thursday as the students returned to Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy. But Principal Brian Bolden said he credited Tuff's quick thinking for avoiding what could have been a major tragedy.
"Her name, Antoinette Tuff, says everything about her," Bolden said. "Tough. She has always been that way from the first time I met her."
Online, a Facebook page calls for Tuff to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, while praise overflowed on Twitter.
JUST WATCHED Antoinette Tuff: Obama call was awesome Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Antoinette Tuff: Obama call was awesome 01:09
JUST WATCHED Antoinette Tuff and 911 dispatcher meet Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Antoinette Tuff and 911 dispatcher meet 01:59
JUST WATCHED Antoinette Tuff hailed as hero Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Antoinette Tuff hailed as hero 03:02
JUST WATCHED How she convinced shooter to surrender Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH How she convinced shooter to surrender 02:09
"Antoinette Tuff used kindness and love in the face of terror, saved lives and showed true courage. Bravo Ms. Tuff," Kathy Groob wrote from Covington, Kentucky, in a typical reaction on Twitter. And in New York, Francis Lam added, "Everyone: learn negotiation from her."
Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, said Tuff's performance was "amazing."
"She didn't do anything where she acted like a victim," Voss told CNN's "New |
shell plain in the centre of Porlock Bay.
Image copyright Kat Brown
These large molluscs are called sea hares of which several were found during the two dives held at the beginning of August.
Image copyright other
It is the first time this rare stalked jellyfish was recorded in this area. This jellyfish features in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan which means it could need targeted protection in the future as it is sensitive to environmental changes in its habitat.
Image copyright kat brown
Divers brought back small samples which have been analysed microscopically so they can be identified by species type. This record will help build up a picture of the biodiversity of each site. This particular species is called a branching sponge.
Image copyright kat brown
On both occasions, divers experienced difficulties in getting to the two dive sites due to strong currents which affected visibility. It is because of these challenges that the sites have not been explored for 30 years. The Wildlife Trusts said they have been surprised by the variety of species found in this area. They hope by knowing more about the habitat they can conserve it more effectively in the future.Last night, my fledgeling Thursday group got together to play Cat: Revised, by John Wick.
Like Our Last Best Hope, Cat is a story game, so the main focus is on storytelling and “what do you do?” types of questions. Unlike Our Last Best Hope, however, Cat has a GM/Narrator who helps drive the story along and spring surprises on the players.
I was the Narrator last night, but the storytellers were definitely the players. A big part of GMing story games is “get out of the players’ way!”
Last night, we had 3 players: Lee, Justin, and Brian. Lee played “Cardamom,” an all-seeing feline whose owner runs a food stall in the marketplace. Justin played “Salvatore,” a beautiful long-haired creature with yoga-loving owners. Brian played a high-magic cat named Delphi who had a young girl as his human. His young girl’s mom was the head doctor in the medical bay.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that part. When we were deciding on setting, I suggested that our map be a space station.
At first, there was some hesitation, but once they embraced it and started planning out the modules and zones of the station, they really got into it.
Suddenly, we had a space station populated by dogs, a number of weird scientific lab animals, a few pests (cockroaches are always present), and of course, our three cat heroes.
I decided on a fairly simple premise: something bad had just been brought onto the station, and the normal cat dynamic of fighting boggins (unseen monsters that cats protect humans from) and avoiding dogs was interrupted for the day. What was brought on board was a strange, alien “goo” that did something to people in the dreamland, erasing them entirely. It may, in fact, have been the very essence of Boggin.
Things were further complicated as the medical bay and docking bay were shut down and locked into quarantine due to the goo.
As things progressed, the cats found that Delphi’s human was ensnared in this terrible goo, and one of the more crazed critters from the science lab (an insane gecko named only “THE GECKO… that’s MISTER THE GECKO, to you, bub!”) was somehow involved and probably working with the goo in some way.
In the end, they defeated the goo for now, by waking up the people who needed to be awoken (i.e.: we started running low on time, to be honest).
For the next time we play, I should definitely re-read the combat rules, since I didn’t run them at all correctly and the cats and other critters should definitely have taken a lot more damage through their shenanigans. Nonetheless, the game went fairly well, with very story-oriented play at the table overall.
Also: I did a pretty good job of staying out of their way in telling the story.
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Popular PostsLONDON -- Rory McIlroy has decided not to join the PGA Tour next year, which could mean as many as three of the top 10 players in the world ranking not belonging to golf's strongest tour.
McIlroy told British newspapers Monday evening that he found himself not wanting to be in America, especially during the FedEx Cup playoffs when the majors were over. In his rookie season on the PGA Tour, McIlroy closed with a 62 to win at Quail Hollow, and finished among the top three at the British Open and PGA Championship.
Lee Westwood, the new world No. 1, has not been a PGA Tour member for several years. PGA champion Martin Kaymer, who is No. 3 in the world, has indicated he will not join the U.S. tour next year.
McIlroy is No. 9 in the world. He says it's a great time for European golf.The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BCE. At this time, 'K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both /ɡ/ and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environments.
Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.[2] Sampson (1985) suggests that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a'space' was created by the dropping of an old letter."[3] The 3rd-century-BC addition of the letter G to the Roman alphabet is credited to Spurius Carvilius Ruga.[4]
George Hempl proposed in 1899 that there never was such a "space" in the alphabet and that in fact 'G' was a direct descendant of zeta. Zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the Old Italic scripts; the development of the monumental form 'G' from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of 'C' from gamma. He suggests that the pronunciation /k/ > /ɡ/ was due to contamination from the also similar-looking 'K'.[5]
Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ have different sound values depending on context (known as hard and soft C and hard and soft G). Because of French influence, English orthography shares this feature.
Typographic variants
The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes opentail)'' and the double-storey (sometimes looptail)''. The single-storey form derives from the majuscule (uppercase) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop, thus closing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The double-storey form (g) had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed bowl or loop. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-storey version became popular when printing switched to "Roman type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more lines on a page. In the double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear".
Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail ⟨ɡ⟩ has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while ⟨ ⟩ was distinguished from ⟨ɡ⟩ and represented a voiced velar fricative from 1895 to 1900.[6][7] In 1948, the Council of the International Phonetic Association recognized ⟨ɡ⟩ and ⟨ ⟩ as typographic equivalents,[8] and this decision was reaffirmed in 1993.[9] While the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of ⟨ ⟩ for a velar plosive and ⟨ɡ⟩ for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian,[10] this practice never caught on.[11] The 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants.[12]
Wong et al. (2018) found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail 'g' ( ).[13][14] They write: "Despite being questioned repeatedly, and despite being informed directly that G has two lowercase print forms, nearly half of the participants failed to reveal any knowledge of the looptail 'g', and only 1 of the 38 participants was able to write looptail 'g' correctly."The East German woman had a job, was economically independent, self-confident, and divorce-happy; at a time when only 50 percent of West German women made their own money, 90 percent of women in East Germany were employed.
…the East German woman didn’t consider her male partner an enemy but rather a partner who, economically speaking, had little or nothig on her. Indeed, the average East German man, unless he had managed to gin a foothold in the regime’s upper echelons — but what woman would want a man like that? — wasn’t in a position to boast any typically macho privileges. He couldn’t show off with money, fast cars, or a house on Ibiza. he had to rely on his potential talent as a lover and his qualities as a father and partner. As a result, he tended to cultivate a rather “soft” masculine image.
…And, on top of all this: the suppression of free movement in public in East Germany had led both sexes to develop a relatively uninhibited attitude toward sex. What other unregulatable pastime did East Germany have to offer its citizens?Foreign correspondents who gathered at a Beijing bookstore on Thursday night to show support for the victims in this week’s deadly attack on a French satirical magazine came under close police scrutiny, though they were allowed to go ahead with plans to take a group photo.
The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China is one of several media groups worldwide that have released photos on social media of members holding placards that read “I am Charlie” in French and other languages after Wednesday’s Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine that killed 12 people and wounded several others.
The irreverent magazine, which was also firebombed in 2011, has published cartoons depicting Islam, Muslim clerics and the Prophet Mohammad. The groups’ photos are intended as a show of solidarity with the magazine’s employees and of defiance toward the masked gunmen’s apparent attempt to chill free speech.
FCCC President Peter Ford said he saw approximately a half dozen apparent plain clothes policemen in the crowd of over 100 foreign and Chinese reporters, including one who videotaped everyone in attendance. At least two uniformed police were also visible in the packed main room of the Bookworm and at the building’s entrance. The manager of the bookstore and café could not be reached.
Beijing’s Public Security Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
“I assume the authorities were nervous about something they might have perceived as pro-freedom of speech in a gathering that could’ve had implications for China,” Mr. Ford said. “But the purpose of the meeting was exclusively to express our sympathy for the families of the victims and others, support for the organization and our outrage at the murder of people whose opinion the attackers disagreed with.”
Photos of club members holding blue and white “I am Charlie” signs in French and Chinese were distributed on Twitter, Facebook and in an email to members.
Scrutiny of Thursday’s event, attended by China Real Time, comes amid heightened anxiety in Beijing over the influence of Western political ideas. China in recent months has jailed or detained dozens of rights activists and lawyers, launched probes into the activities of foreign nonprofits and issued warnings through state media about the risk of “foreign forces” destabilizing the nation.
China in 2014 ranked 175 of 180 countries in a press freedom index compiled by the activist group Reporters Without Borders, two notches below its 2013 ranking. The FCCC said in a September position paper that foreign journalists in China, their staff and sources have seen a notable increase in threats and violence since the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The FCCC holds regular happy hours and meetings featuring guest speakers typically without attracting overt attention from the police. Some members said this event may have attracted scrutiny because it was also attended by Chinese media, possibly raising concern that the publicity could encourage local activism.
“This does touch on a sensitive issue, press freedom and freedom of expression,” said Ruth Kirchner, a China correspondent for the German ARD broadcasting group, who attended at the gathering. “They might be worried that people will use this issue with China.”
Mr. Ford, the FCCC president, said he tried to explain what the group was doing to an apparent plain clothes policeman to avoid any misunderstanding but the man declined to say whether or not he was linked to the Public Security Bureau. “He said he wasn’t interested in what we were doing, so we went ahead,” Mr. Ford said, adding that he didn’t tell the Bookworm in advance of the planned photo opportunity. “It slipped my mind,” he added.
Johnny Erling, a Beijing-based correspondent with German daily newspaper Die Welt, said Chinese police also may have been on high alert following Shanghai’s New Year’s Eve stampede that killed 36 people and injured at least 49.
“They’re really scared when there are lots of people now, that could be the most important thing,” Mr. Erling said. “They should know from our information that this has nothing to do with China.”
-- Mark Magnier. Follow him on Twitter @markmagnier.On the way to his grandmother's South Side home, 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee stopped at a nearby park to play on a swing set, setting his beloved basketball down nearby.
But Cook County prosecutors say three members of a Black P Stones faction had targeted the 83-pound boy to avenge a shooting by rivals three weeks earlier in which a mother was wounded and her 25-year-old son killed.
As two of the gang members drove off in a black SUV, the one who remained in Dawes Park picked up Tyshawn's basketball and dribbled it a few times before handing it back to him. He then lured the boy into a nearby alley about the same time the SUV re-emerged. As the two looked on from the SUV, the one gang member shot Tyshawn five times, killing him, according to prosecutors and police. The fourth-grader's basketball was found a few feet away.
Corey Morgan, 27, the first suspect to be charged in Tyshawn's slaying, was ordered held without bail Friday. It was Morgan whose brother was slain and mother wounded after they left a gang-intervention meeting run by Chicago police Oct. 13.
Tyshawn's mother, Karla Lee, said she grew up with Morgan and was disgusted to learn of his alleged involvement in what authorities have called an execution.
"The feeling? Lord Jesus, it's like I just can't believe it," she told reporters moments after leaving court. "The same guy I grew up with, talked with, played at the park and stuff … (is) the same one that murdered my baby.
"I'm going to be sick. I did not know that they did him like that," said Lee, who learned details of the slaying for the first time from attending bond court at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Prosecutors alleged that Morgan announced his intentions to go after the families of gang rivals after his brother was killed and mother wounded by gunfire.
"He allegedly said since his brother was killed and his mama was shot he was going to kill grandmas, mamas, kids and all," said Assistant State's Attorney George Canellis Jr., supervisor of the office's felony review division.
Earlier Friday, at a news conference at Area South police headquarters, Superintendent Garry McCarthy said a warrant has been issued for the arrest of a second suspect, Kevin Edwards, 22, of Chicago. A third gang member, whom McCarthy would not identify by name, is in custody on an unrelated charge, he said. That man was arrested with Morgan on Nov. 16 on gun charges, according to police sources.
McCarthy wouldn't discuss the role each man allegedly played, but prosecutors' account of what happened made it clear that Morgan was not suspected of being the gunman.
Edwards' sister, Moesha Walker, told the Tribune she has not seen her brother since late October. She condemned the killing of a 9-year-old boy but said she doubted her brother was involved.
"Because, you know, he's got little brothers, too, see. You know what I'm saying?" Walker said during a brief interview at the front entrance to her Far South Side home. "I think he might've just been around or been with the person that did it. But I don't think he did it."
She urged her brother to turn himself in.
Morgan, wearing a black hoodie and pants, stood expressionless in court with his hands behind his back as Judge Peggy Chiampas ordered him held without bail, shouting that she had to take the action to protect "grandmothers, mothers and children" from him.
"This was a predator grabbing his prey and luring that child into an alley (to be) executed by a close-range gunshot wound," the judge said. "This poor 9-year-old boy stuck in the middle of a gang war by adults is playing on a swing."
Morgan's attorney, Jonathan Brayman, said in court that his client denied any involvement in Tyshawn's slaying. He said Morgan, whom detectives had sought to question about the slaying twice before at a police station, took part in several police lineups but was released after citing his right to an attorney and refusal to give a statement.
After the killing of his brother and wounding of his mother, prosecutors said, Morgan and the two other suspects — all members of the faction known as Terror Dome or Bang Bang Gang — drove around daily armed with guns and looking to retaliate.
On Nov. 2, they drove to Dawes Park and got out of the black SUV for a period of time before leaving, prosecutors said. They returned a short time later and this time walked to a play lot, they said. While Tyshawn was swinging, the three talked for a few minutes. Morgan and a second person then left in the SUV, and the third suspect engaged Tyshawn in conversation and lured him back to the alley, where he was slain, according to prosecutors and police.
One of the bullets nearly severed Tyshawn's right thumb, a wound likely caused when the boy saw the gun and raised his hand to protect himself, Canellis said. A shot to the head was fatal.
The black SUV was recovered, Canellis said, and its GPS unit showed the vehicle parked at Dawes at 3:56 p.m. that day.
McCarthy said police believe at least two killings over the last three months led Morgan and the two others to target Tyshawn because of his father's gang ties.
Morgan's brother and mother were shot after leaving a "gang call-in" meeting, an anti-violence effort by Chicago police and other law enforcement. Police have been investigating whether Tracey Morgan, like his brother a reputed member of the Terror Dome faction, was followed by a rival gang member who also attended the meeting in a church in the Chatham neighborhood.
Prosecutors said Friday that Tracey Morgan's killers are believed to be from the Killa Ward faction of the Gangster Disciples.
Five days later after that killing, a Killa Ward member was wounded in a shooting near 78th and Honore streets in Auburn Gresham that also left 19-year-old Brianna Jenkins dead, according to police.
Police tried to question Morgan, of south suburban Lansing, two days after Tyshawn's killing but released him. Two weeks later, Morgan was arrested again and charged with a weapons violation unrelated to Tyshawn's killing. He was ordered held in lieu of $1 million bail and was later released after posting the required bond.
McCarthy said Friday that the two guns recovered during the recent arrest of Morgan on a weapons offense did not match the casings recovered at the scene of Tyshawn's killing.Video footage has captured a young boy falling from a chairlift at a ski field in New Zealand after he and his dad “did not have time” to pull down the safety bar.
Jack Clulee, 11, was dangling from his father’s arms about 10 metres off the ground after slipping from the chairlift at Mount Hutt on Saturday morning.
“It was pretty scary. I was just thinking to myself I didn’t want to fall because it was quite high up,” Jack told the NZ Herald.
Jack’s dad Kevin said he did not have time to pull down the chairlift’s safety bar, and his son slipped once they were travelling up the slopes.
Jack was hanging for about a minute before staff and patrons set up a safety pad for him to fall on.These photos and videos provide a detailed look at this project’s development.
Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.
Looks like the final product, but is not functional.
Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.
A 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:
Our Story
It all began in the 1970's in a small town in Florida - Melbourne, Florida. Leather craftsman Tim Kennedy began his humble business of making leather products by hand.
As the demand for cheap prices and mass production pressured many workshops into changing their values, Tim always respected the true value and high quality of human touch: of hand-making.
Tim Kennedy in '72
This Tim we speak of? He's my dad. I grew up in the leathershop, that we called "the shop", always with the freedom to create products I loved.
Because of this, I decided to create a product I couldn't find on the marketplace, dedicated to the values that I was raised on. That there is no short-cut to quality.
Otake Leather Laptop Case
Handmade Leather Laptop Case for MacBooks
Otake's handmade leather laptop case is designed and crafted to last and improve over time. It has a lifetime guarantee.
Each sleeve is made from vegetable tanned, chrome-free leather. Vegetable tanning is an old-world method that takes time, but yields environmentally-friendly leather that is both beautiful and enduring. Each sleeve is sewn with linen thread and tied off by hand.
The laptop sleeves are drenched and formed so that the case fits your laptop perfectly.
Finally, the laptop sleeve undergoes finishing touches so the final product is nothing less than beautiful.
A simple design that is functional and designed to last a lifetime.
This kickstarter will fund our first production. From purchasing vegetable-tanned leather to spending the time to hand make each laptop case, contributing to this fund in any way, large or small, you will be helping to launch Otake.Marijuana has been used for thousands of years as a treatment for medical conditions. However, untoward side effects limit its medical value. Here, we show that synaptic and cognitive impairments following repeated exposure to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC) are associated with the induction of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), an inducible enzyme that converts arachidonic acid to prostanoids in the brain. COX-2 induction by Δ9-THC is mediated via CB1 receptor-coupled G protein βγ subunits. Pharmacological or genetic inhibition of COX-2 blocks downregulation and internalization of glutamate receptor subunits and alterations of the dendritic spine density of hippocampal neurons induced by repeated Δ9-THC exposures. Ablation of COX-2 also eliminates Δ9-THC-impaired hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity, spatial, and fear memories. Importantly, the beneficial effects of decreasing β-amyloid plaques and neurodegeneration by Δ9-THC in Alzheimer’s disease animals are retained in the presence of COX-2 inhibition. These results suggest that the applicability of medical marijuana would be broadened by concurrent inhibition of COX-2.Is Unacknowledged bad then? No, at least not in my opinion. If there is one problem I bump against as believer is that the people closest to me don't believe this subject. They don't believe or don't want to believe. If you have the same issue then this documentary could help you out and get the conversation started with you and your friends.
The film does a lot of things right. The pace is right for the newcomers and the interviews are clear. However, it does not delve deeply into the subject at hand. It's an overview of the issue. A fragment of the underlying phenomenon. The shallow nature of the documentary also makes it easy to dismiss as a sceptic or even someone who has an entirely different point of view on the subject.
Dr. Greer strongly advocates his view in the documentary. And because of this, I would even advise you to look at other documentaries like "Out of the Blue" first. Even though I can agree with many things Dr. Greer says. But there is too much out there. The point of view Dr. Greer has might influence your opinion on this subject too much. And I still frown upon the CE5 initiative Dr. Greer is promoting outside of this documentary.
Unacknowledged is worth watching, but don't get too excited if you are already well acquainted with the subject. And make sure this is not the only thing to watch if you are new to this.I am a social entrepreneur and attorney who co-founded The Brotherhood/Sister Sol – a youth development and community organizing institution nearly 18 years ago.
We are based in Harlem, and as a highly successful and evidence based organization, we have traveled the country, and all corners of New York City, teaching other educators and youth development specialists how to use our model. These travels have inevitably taken me to communities similar to Harlem – communities filled with a rich historical and cultural history, communities filled with hard working people, and also communities facing a plague of violence perpetrated by young men.
Violence is a national scourge in America – last year more people were shot and killed in Chicago than American soldiers were killed in Iraq. The young people I work with think that having young friends who have been killed by gunfire is a normal occurrence. And even those who have avoided the actual violence live in haunted skittish fear of the possibility of violence that pervades their communities. We have raised our children to be afraid for their lives.
This is the America we have wrought.
There has been much written about the need for gun control and for policy efforts to control violence in America. I have written such essays myself. There is no one answer to this scourge: we must respond with education and legislation, gun control and smart policing, pervasive reform of the criminal justice system, and we must also recognize personal responsibility. We must not avoid the responsibility we have as citizens, as Americans, to raise boys to be healthy and strong men who do not see violence as their first form of
communication when they are angry, and enraged and confused.
We must confront our personal and community obsession with violence, the fact that all too often in America we believe that the answer to conflict is found in a gun. We have raised our boys into misguided men, boys who have learned a warped sense of masculinity and manhood. Our boys, in tough communities like Harlem, quickly learn to believe that all they have is their self-respect and in a tragic series of learned and deep seeded responses they adhere to an honor code that is based on defending any perceived slight, any form of disrespect, with
violence.
Over the years of my work I have led workshops in many prisons, talking with men who have been incarcerated due to violent actions. Invariably, when their stories come out, their worn faces acknowledge that the violence they perpetrated was unnecessary, chosen, often done in the haze of alcohol – but still chosen, and
they know now, there were other paths.
I have seen all too many teens, and even young boys, so filled with anger and rage and trauma that they seem ready to combust – and their words become the words of machismo, of violent movie characters, rappers and video games “heroes” they have come to revere. They want to hear a chorus in response to their peacock like displays of rage – “Yes, you are a man.
Yes, you are tough. Yes, you are to be feared.” They have a deep seeded need to be acknowledged, for their power to be recognized, and for their voices to be heard.
Unfortunately, all too many of our young men find their voices and respect through violence. They process the trauma that have experienced, trauma due to poverty and lack of access and the violence that has been perpetrated on them, with violence of their own.
America’s problem with violence, it’s pervasive obsession with physical power, it’s level of homicidal violence that is unequaled by any in the so called “developed” world, is one rooted in the fact that so many of our boys have never been taught alternative standards of manhood, They have adhered to a definition of manhood that is based on power and violence and that so often leads to either bravado laced violence against other men, or the physical abuse of women.
They are raised to be tough soldiers, and so, they act as soldiers act on battlefields, and they speak the language of violence. And then, although they struggle to take off the constricting armor of violence, they are brutal to those they love as well.After MLG Columbus, we made the decision to stop releasing replays because the files contained information that could be used maliciously by third parties. We have been working with Blizzard to resolve the issue, and we are pleased to announce that, with the release of patch 1.4, full replay packs from both MLG Anaheim and MLG Raleigh are now available.
Going forward, full replay packs will be made available roughly two weeks after each tournament.
You can access the replays from Anaheim and Raleigh in the tournament brackets by clicking on an individual game, or you can download the replay packs and get them all at once, in one glorious chunk. Thank you very much for your patience, and enjoy the games!
Access by Bracket
MLG Anaheim: Open Bracket | Champ Bracket
MLG Raleigh: Open Bracket | Champ Bracket
Download Replay Packs
MLG Anaheim: Open Bracket | Champ Bracket | Full Tournament
MLG Raleigh: Open Bracket | Champ Bracket | Full TournamentPuppy Tao has been upgraded, so this post has moved. It will eventually be unavailable at this location.
Grynn knows how to beg on command,
but she doesn't beg during mealtimes.
Holiday Foods and Dogs
Comet is a well-behaved guest when he visits my family for Thanksgiving.
Guest Dogs
Open Doors
Jax has mastered the art of charming the other guests in order to get petted.
Training Opportunities
Untrained Humans
Set Your Dog Up to Succeed
Thanksgiving offers lots of opportunities to have fun with family and dogs, but it also poses some risks. Some of these risks are fairly obvious, but if this is your first time hosting a large number of guests and making a large number of dishes, here are some things to keep an eye on.Your guests may not be up to speed on some common food items that can hurt dogs. The veterinary ER invariably has a surge of visitors on or after Thanksgiving because not every visiting family member realizes that their urge to give a dog a special treat on Thanksgiving may do a lot more harm than good.A little tidbit of lean, cooked turkey is a nice thing to share with your dog on a special day. That's wonderful on its own. However, if several guests are slipping your dog turkey under the table, it may go from fun to dangerous pretty quickly. Dogs are at risk for pancreatitis if they eat too much fat too fast, and there's a lot of fat on a turkey, especially in the skin. If dogs eat a significant amount of skin or fatty meat, they may need a trip to the ER. Signs of pancreatitis include vomiting, hunching up, vomiting, lethargy, and diarrhea. Acute pancreatitis can be fatal in rare cases, so take this one seriously and make sure your dog doesn't get a ton more fat than normal.Most dog owners know that cooked bones can splinter when a dog chews them, causing a significant risk of perforation or obstruction in the gastrointestinal tract. However, not every guest may know this, and a well-intentioned aunt or uncle may want to slip your dog a turkey leg when they're done with it—dogs love bones, right?Another concern is the turkey carcass you leave behind after you've carved the meat off. Some families leave it in the kitchen to be picked later, which means it's unattended during dinner. Some leave it on the dining room table, which means it's unattended after dinner. Either way, that big, tantalizing carcass can tempt even a dog with good manners to break the rules and pull it to the floor. That means the potential both for your dog to ingest cooked bones and to ingest far too much fatty meat and skin. Keep an eye on your dog and your carcass. If you're like us, you'll pick the remaining meat and get those turkey bones straight into a big pot so you can start making your turkey soup stock right away.There are also the other common foods that are fine for people but potentially dangerous for dogs, and again, your guests may not all know not to give these foods to dogs. If you put raisins in your stuffing, for example, it's not safe for a dog to have it. Some dogs don't appear to be sensitive to grapes and raisins, but there is documented evidence that some dogs can experience renal failure after consuming a relatively small number of grapes or raisins.Chocolate is also a concern in holiday gatherings. There is a chemical in chocolate (theobromine) that's toxic to dogs. It takes a relatively large dosage to cause poisoning in a dog, but it does happen. Theobromine is found in higher concentration in darker chocolates, so don't worry if your dog ends up swallowing a couple of M&Ms. However, if your dog consumes a very large amount of chocolate or gets at any dark chocolate or baking chocolate, you could have a serious situation on your hands.Turkey, raisins, and chocolate seem to be to be the biggest concerns at Thanksgiving, but you can check out my list of foods that are known to be toxic to dogs or even print it out and keep it on the fridge for reference if you want to make sure your family and guests are aware of the common threats.If you're worried about your guests' knowledge or responsibility, consider crating your pup during the actual Thanksgiving dinner itself or for any other part of the gathering in which there might be a risk to your pup. If you have a relatively small number of guests or if they're all experienced dog people, dinners like this can be a good time to work on your dog's manners or to work on teaching your dog to go to his spot while folks are eating. However, if you're not sure, there's a pretty big risk of your dog getting something that he shouldn't eat, and there's also the issue of having your dog get rewarded for begging around the table, which some folks find endearing but many of us find annoying.One of my favorite parts of holidays is getting together with our extended Golden family. Between my parents, my sister's family, and us, there are four Goldens. Even though they get along famously, that many dogs does require a watchful eye, no matter how stable and well-behaved they are. If your guests are bringing dogs, be sure that they've had a chance to meet and get used to each other before the big day if you can. You want to set them up to feel relaxed and comfortable around each other, and the excitement and disturbance of a large family gathering can raise the anxiety level of some dogs and undermine their ability to relax and feel safe around new dogs. Try to have first greetings be outside and off leash if you can, as leashed greetings can interfere with dog body language and create problems where there don't have to be any. Indoor greetings are OK too, but again, take the dogs off the leash and try to do it before the party in a quiet area of the house.Also realize that not all dogs really get along. You can set two dogs up to have a positive first interaction, but you can't guarantee that they'll be friends. If you have two dogs that seem to get at each other, leaving them underfoot during a noisy party is probably only going to make the problem worse. You may have to have them take turns in a crate and work on their relationship another time.Last Christmas, as Andy and I were leaving my sister's place in Boston, we came across an old Golden in the middle of the road. Fortunately, she was docile and friendly and allowed me to leash her and walk her out of the road. Looking up and down the road, we decided to knock on the door of a nearby lit-up house to see if they knew where she belonged. Sure enough, that was her house, and the family who lived there was very surprised that she had slipped out. In the hustle and bustle of folks coming in and out, she had walked out the door unnoticed. If things had been just a tiny bit different, we might have hit her. It's not an onerous task to keep an eye on the dog if members of the nuclear family can take turns being the designated dog-watcher.Holidays can provide some training opportunities for you and your pup if you're not also playing full-time host. You can practice greeting friendly strangers as they enter the house if you're working on not jumping or other greeting skills. You can teach your |
a repeat of NBC's "Commander in Chief Forum" earlier this month, when Trump falsely said he opposed the invasion of Iraq and interviewer Matt Lauer let it slide.
Lack of preparation was cited by observers as one possible reason for the widely-criticized performance.
The debate is different. Holt has had several weeks to prepare. And he has been in full-time study mode for several days. His last day on the "NBC Nightly News" was Tuesday; Savannah Guthrie has been filling in for him since. Guthrie will also anchor on Monday night.
According to the commission rules, Holt alone is responsible for the questions he asks. The commission gives no editorial direction.
Related: Lester Holt is carrying the weight of the nation
Holt is free to seek ideas and advice from anyone he wants. In recent days, his counselors have included NBC News and MSNBC chairman Andy Lack; NBC News president Deborah Turness; and the news division's senior vice president of editorial, Janelle Rodriguez.
Another key member of Holt's debate team is Sam Singal, the executive producer of Holt's "Nightly News."
"Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd, senior political editor Mark Murray and political editor Carrie Dann have all helped as well.
But this is not an NBC debate -- it is all being organized by the commission.
When it comes time for the debate, only one NBC staffer will be with him.
During primary debates (including the Democratic debate Holt moderated in January) TV producers can speak with the moderator through earpieces, proposing followup questions and supporting the host. Some production teams are more hands-on than others.
But it works differently at general election debates organized by the commission. The only person in Holt's ear will be the commission's longtime executive producer, Marty Slutsky, who has produced all of the debates since 2000.
Slutsky keeps track of time and lets moderators know when they have to wrap up the debate.
Related: Ratings expectations for the debate are sky-high
Holt has ample experience in high-pressure live TV situations, which is one of the reasons why the commission chose him to moderate the Clinton-Trump matchup.
"If there's anybody who can withstand the pressure and be down the middle and cool and calm and take this thing on, it is Lester Holt," his colleague Al Roker said on the "Today" show on Friday.
"If all else fails, Lester could break out his bass," Tamron Hall joked.
Holt is a newsman by day, bandmate by night. Last Tuesday, he played his bass at a party for the 25th anniversary of NBC's "Dateline" newsmagazine. It was a rare chance to unwind in between debate prep sessions.
When asked about Monday night, he demurred, signaling that he wants his moderating work to speak for itself.Going Solo is a book by Roald Dahl, first published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1986. It is a continuation of his autobiography describing his childhood, Boy and detailed his travel to Africa and exploits as a World War II pilot.
Plot [ edit ]
The book started with Dahl's voyage to Africa in 1938, which was prompted by his desire to find adventure after finishing school.[1] He was on a boat heading towards Dar es Salaam for his new job working for Shell Oil. During this journey, he met various people[2] and described extraordinary events such as a lion carrying a woman in his mouth.
He eventually joined the war as a squadron pilot in the Royal Air Force, flying the Tiger Moth, Gloster Gladiator, and Hawker Hurricane. He was among the last Allied pilots to withdraw from Greece during the German invasion, taking part in the air for the Battle of Athens on 20 April 1941. In one of his accounts, he described a crash in the Western Desert, which fractured his skull and brought him several other problems such as temporarily being blinded during his days in Greece.[3] After the country fell to the Nazis, he went to the Middle East to fight Vichy French pilots after staying for a brief time in Alexandria, Egypt.
In Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl (2010), Donald Sturrock claimed that there are disparities to the author's claims in the book, describing them as flights of pure fancy or compelling recreations of stories heard from others such as the accounts about exotic African animal adventures.[4] There was also the case of his encounter with a group of Germans, which he had orders to round up. Dahl wrote in Going Solo that its leader was killed by an African guard after thrusting a Luger pistol in his chest.[5] In Lucky Break (1977), a story published 10 years prior, the version of this story was less dramatic with the Germans quickly giving themselves up, allowing Dahl's group to march themselves to a camp in Dar es Salaam without much difficulty.[4]New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez arrives for a news conference in 2014. (Roberto Rosales/Albuquerque Journal via Associated Press)
Glass-ceiling-breaking. History-making. A future Republican leader and maybe even president.
Embarrassing. Palinesque. Caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Donald Trump.
Depending on who you talk to or what part of her career you focus on, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) is either a rising star or a fallen one. And now she's at the center of Trump's ire. Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, accused Martinez of not doing her job when he showed up in her back yard Tuesday night for a rally that Martinez declined to attend.
“She’s got to do a better job. Okay? Your governor has got to do a better job," Trump said. "She’s not doing the job. Hey! Maybe I’ll run for governor of New Mexico. I’ll get this place going. She’s not doing the job. We’ve got to get her moving. Come on: Let’s go, governor.”
Speaking at a rally in Albuquerque May 24, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized Gov. Susana Martinez (R-N.M.), saying, "Hey! Maybe I'll run for governor of New Mexico. I'll get this place going." (Reuters)
Her office said she was busy, but Democrats gleefully point out she is the head of the Republican Governors Association and still hasn't yet endorsed Trump. They argue that her hesitancy on Trump is indicative of the party's struggle with him at large. And that's a fair point to make, given the number of vulnerable GOP senators also ducking questions about Trump.
As an update, on Wednesday afternoon, Marco Rubio entered the fray by defending Martinez:
The truth is @ Gov_Martinez is one of the hardest working and most effective Governors in America. https://t.co/QcADopQCYe — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 25, 2016
Martinez is term-limited after 2016, but her clash with Trump is heavy on symbolism and political pressure. And it's worth watching moving forward.
So here's a primer on Martinez and her complicated, often contradictory political life.
She's got the profile for office
When Republicans want to counter Democratic attacks that they're not diverse enough, they point to Martinez.
She's not only the first woman to be elected governor of New Mexico and the nation's only Republican Latina governor. She's the nation's only Latina governor, period.
She comes from humble beginnings. Her father was an award-winning boxer with the Marines. They grew up, in her words, as "lower middle class," and she's the caretaker of her older, developmentally disabled sister, Lettie.
In short, on paper, Martinez has the near-perfect personal profile for politics, especially higher office (we'll get to all that in a moment).
And she has dreamed big. According to a 2010 Albuquerque Journal profile, Martinez was a law school intern at a Texas state district courthouse in El Paso when she said she wanted to be the first female president of the United States. (Back then, she was a Democrat growing up, like her dad, but after law school, she became a Republican.)
She came onto the stage in New Mexico at the right time
Barack Obama supporters will remember her predecessor, former governor Bill Richardson (D), likely with a bad taste in their mouths. Richardson was a former diplomat who was President-elect Obama's first choice to run the Commerce Department, but he had to withdraw in light of a federal investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme.
Richardson was term-limited anyway, but his downfall meant an open 2010 election suddenly became very open.
Enter Martinez, an upstart district attorney for Doña Ana County, which borders El Paso, with almost the exact opposite story to tell. She was the only Latina lawyer when she was first hired for the county, and she soon developed a case record of going after public corruption. Oh, and when she became deputy district attorney, she sued her boss for wrongful termination after being fired when she was called to testify against him. And then she twice defeated him for his job by double digits.
Martinez's demographic profile and record as an all-star prosecutor helped catapult her to the front of the field when she entered the race for governor in 2010. Her entrance was a "game-changer," said Jose Z. Garcia, a New Mexico State University government professor and Democratic political analyst, at the time. "She would be a formidable candidate.”
She has an impressive electoral record
Martinez scraped away 51 percent of the vote in a talented, five-candidate Republican primary (that included the son of a former U.S. senator) to go onto the general election.
It was relatively smooth sailing from there, despite running in a blue-leaning state. Sarah Palin endorsed her. Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham praised her. Campaigning on securing the state's border from illegal immigration and cutting state spending, Martinez beat Richardson's No. 2, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, with 53 percent of the vote — incidentally only the fourth woman-vs.-woman gubernatorial race in U.S. history — and turned New Mexico's governor's mansion from blue to red.
A rising star was born.
Martinez delivers her victory speech on election night in 2014. (Andres Leighton/Associated Press)
Like, a really big star
The Economist even ran this headline: "Susana Martinez shows how Republicans might one day woo Latinos."
The praise kept coming as she tried to live up to her campaign promises. She tried to privatize a costly spaceport project on a New Mexico ranch. She sold the state's luxury jet. She barred all state agencies from hiring lobbyists. She signed an executive order rescinding sanctuary status to undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes.
But Martinez tried to balance conservative politics with the moderate politics of her state. She opposed the Affordable Care Act but didn't join many of her colleagues' calls for repealing it. She opposes same-sex marriage but didn't try to fight it when her state Supreme Court legalized it.
It appeared to be working. In 2012, our very own Aaron Blake named her one of the 10 most popular governors in the nation, noting her 60 percent approval rating at the time and writing: "Martinez is certainly a rising GOP star, who as the nation’s only female Latino governor should have a big voice in the party going forward — if she wants it."
And in 2013, Time Magazine named her one of its 100 most influential people in the world, with Karl Rove predicting: "If she is reelected in 2014, her reputation as a reform-minded conservative Republican could grow even more in a second term."
The veep talk
Okay, let's delve into this, which is what Martinez is perhaps best known for outside New Mexico. In part thanks to her profile, vice presidential buzz started even before Martinez took office in 2011.
But in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal before she was elected, she batted away speculation by wondering what message hopscotching from governor to vice president would send to girls in New Mexico who see her as a role model.
"If I don’t do this (job as governor) right, then what are they going to think of me and the path that I’ve paved for them?" she said.
Veep speculation manifested for real in the 2012 presidential election, when Martinez was prominently mentioned as Mitt Romney's running mate. What she would decide was the talk of the political town in April of that year.
Romney campaigns in Colorado. He's joined by, from left, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. (Associated Press)
But Martinez firmly and unequivocally took herself off the list. She said it would be "devastating" to separate her sister — whom she's described in interviews as perpetually 5 years old — from the rest of her family.
Why there's not as much veep talk today
On paper, it would seem Martinez's star power has risen since her first term. This year, she's the leader of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which served as a launching pad for three other recent past chairs who would run for president: Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney.
But things haven't gone so smoothly for Martinez since getting the job.
Shortly after the announcement came that she'd be leading the RGA, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported the FBI was investigating political fundraising tied to one of her high-profile political consultants. In March, a grand jury dropped the investigation.
Then the hotel incident happened. Just before Christmas, police claimed they found Martinez drunk in a Santa Fe hotel during a call they responded to for noise complaints and guests throwing bottles off the fourth-floor balcony. Martinez denied she was drunk, but the headlines stuck. We named her the fifth (out of five) most interesting governors of 2015 — and not in a good way.
And a March Pew Charitable Trusts poll found that New Mexico has made the worst economic recovery in the nation.
Outside New Mexico, it's possible Martinez may not have won over Washington insiders. The Washington Post's James Hohmann wrote in December that she has a reputation as being "Palinesque: gaffe-prone, not intellectually curious and not up for the rigors of a national campaign."
The Trump factor
Martinez is also one of just a handful of Republican governors who hasn't said whether she'd support Trump as the nominee.
Here's a recent interview she had with CBS4 in New Mexico that would seem to epitomize her struggle on whether to support Trump: "I’ll tell you one thing. I can tell you I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton," Martinez said.
"Do you think you’ll make up your mind who you’ll endorse before the primary?" the reporter asked.
"I will not be endorsing Hillary Clinton," Martinez said
Which is how we got to where we are today.The Republican speakers at the first night of the party’s convention in Tampa kept shouting that “it is time” or “about time” or “past time” that the United States had a president who appreciates small businesses, or hates red tape, or wants to get rid of regulations, or wants to cut taxes.
“Small business needs a leader who will not avoid dealing with difficult issues, a leader with experience to understand what it takes,” said Jack Gilchrist, a small business owner from New Hampshire who was introduced by his state’s Senator Kelly Ayotte, who is most famous for trying to repeal the burdensome regulation banning the torture of prisoners.
The speakers–who by the way seemed to give the exact same speech over and over again–were carrying on as if they’d been out of power for ages. But wasn’t George W. Bush president for eight years before Barack Obama? In fact, weren’t Republicans in the White House for all but 12 years between 1968 and Mr. Obama’s election in 2008?
Sure, conventions are an exercise in misdirection, in the airbrushing of history and in gauzy presentation. But it is striking the way the 2012 Republicans are ignoring Mr. Bush, who was president from 2001 until 2009 and was given the same sort of grossly overblown accolades at his two conventions that were showered on Mr. Romney tonight and will be showered on him for two days more.
Related The G.O.P. Convention Dispatches and quick takes from Tampa.
This gathering of Republicans is an exercise in selective memory, and it has to be. Otherwise they might have to grapple with the fact that Mr. Bush and his allies in Congress cut taxes, and presided over the disintegration of the Clinton-era budget surpluses. In the not-so-distant past we had a Republican president, a one-time businessman, who hated red tape, and under his watch the grossly under-regulated financial system collapsed, bringing on the Great Recession.OpenSecrets.org is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization which tracks money in U.S. politics
Federal prosecutors in Boston have opened a grand jury investigation into potentially illegal campaign contributions from lawyers at the Thornton Law Firm, a leading donor to Democrats around the country, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The U.S. Attorney’s office is one of three agencies now looking into the Boston-based personal injury firm’s practice of reimbursing its partners for millions of dollars in political donations, according to the two people. The law firm has insisted that the donations were legal, but, soon after the Globe and the Center for Responsive Politics revealed the firm’s practice, politicians began returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.
Federal prosecutors as well as state and federal campaign finance regulators are investigating whether Thornton and its lawyers violated the law by paying “bonuses” to firm partners in the exact amount of their political donations and often on the same day, the people familiar with the investigations said. The firm’s attorney acknowledges the payments went on for a decade.
Repaying donors for their contributions is generally illegal because it conceals the true source of the donations. The lawyers would be considered “straws donors” — or front men — for the firm itself, allowing the firm to vastly exceed campaign donation limits.
Brian Kelly, a former federal prosecutor who is representing Thornton Law, would not comment on “the existence of any investigations,” but said in a statement that the firm “intends to cooperate fully if asked about its donation program and it is confident the firm complied with all applicable laws and regulations.
“Thornton’s fundraising program was vetted by an outside law firm ten years ago and was overseen by an outside accountant,” wrote Kelly, a partner at Nixon Peabody. He said the reimbursements came out of each lawyer’s own equity — or ownership — in the firm.
If the grand jury indicts the firm and its lawyers, Thornton could be the biggest so-called “straw donor” case ever brought nationwide. Between 2010 and 2014 alone, lawyers for the firm, which specializes in asbestos cases, donated $3.4 million to candidates and the Democratic Party, especially to Senate candidates who opposed overhauling the asbestos litigation system.
“There are serious penalties for these violations,” said Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. “Here you potentially have multiple violations of the prohibition on contributions in the name of another, each one of which would be separately charged.”
Violations involving straw donations of $25,000 or more could bring a sentence of five years in prison, for each count, Kappel said.
Two years ago, the former CEO of the Fiesta Bowl, John Junker, and four others pleaded guilty to a “straw donor” scheme in which employees were reimbursed more than $45,000 for political contributions they were encouraged to make. Junker served four months in federal prison and four months in a halfway house.
The largest civil penalties ever levied by the FEC for “straw donations” came in the late 1990s when Audiovox Corp. and a number of individuals were fined $849,000 for a series of contributions as small as a few hundred dollars. However, companies have sometimes paid millions in penalties to settle criminal charges.
The reported grand jury investigation comes just two weeks after the Globe and the Center for Responsive Politics documented that three partners at the firm — founder Michael Thornton, former House assistant majority leader Garrett Bradley and David Strouss — received about $1.4 million in bonuses to offset their campaign contributions over a five-year period. In at least 30 cases, Thornton was also reimbursed for donations made by his wife, Amy, based on a review of internal payroll records obtained by the Globe and the Center.
The firm started offering bonuses to offset partners’ political donations at a time when the partners were being asked to donate more and more money, causing some grumbling. The reimbursement policy was so complicated that some lawyers at the firm said they didn’t understand it, but they were still happy to get their money back.
Since the Globe story ran, at least 19 candidates and one campaign committee announced that they have returned more than $900,000 to lawyers at the firm, or gave the money to the U.S. Treasury or a charity. They include Hillary Clinton, Sens. Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.) and Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh.
State Attorney General Maura Healey, who called for investigations of the firm, also returned donations she received from Thornton lawyers.
One of the biggest recipients of Thornton’s largesse, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told the Globe and the Center on Tuesday night that it, too, was giving up contributions from partners at the firm. Previously, committee officials had indicated they were awaiting a review of the donations by its attorneys, but a person at the committee said the organization has sent $267,000 to Treasury. However, records show that contributions from Thornton employees to the DSCC over the last 10 years total $1.5 million.
In addition, the specialists said, Thornton lawyers who participated in the contribution reimbursement system could be charged with conspiracy.
A campaign finance watchdog group filed a complaint against Thornton with the Federal Election Commission on Nov. 2, a step that automatically triggers an FEC review. Now that the US Attorney is involved, however, prosecutors could ask the FEC to hold off on any investigation, and the agency could pick it up again after the criminal case is over and then seek to impose civil penalties, according to Dan Petalas, a former acting general counsel of the FEC who is now in private practice in Washington.
The Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance is also looking into whether the law firm was the “true source” of the more than $260,000 in donations to state and local politicians lawyers at Thornton Law firm have made, according to two people briefed on the matter. If the regulators find wrongdoing, they can impose penalties, called civil forfeitures, or refer the matter to the state Attorney General for possible criminal prosecution.
This case has the potential to be the largest “straw donor” investigation in state history.
The biggest civil forfeiture in recent years was $185,000 paid last month by Canton businessman, Vincent Barletta, who provided $35,500 to employees to make political contributions. In 2015, the owners of Capitol Waste of East Boston, a trash company with contracts with Boston and other communities, agreed to pay $120,000 to the state and four cities after OCPF found the owners gave employees $38,000 to donate to political candidates.
[image via CBS News]
This was part of a joint investigation written by The Boston Globe’s Andrea Estes and Viveca Novak for OpenSecrets.org, and reprinted with permission by LawNewz.com. The original version of the story appeared here. OpenSecrets.org is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization which tracks money in U.S. politicsIf you’re a fan of Disney baddies like cigar-smoking Bill Sykes from Oliver & Company (and really, who isn’t a fan of Bill Sykes from Oliver & Company?), this news is relevant to your tobacco-stained interests: The Walt Disney Company has banned all depictions of smoking from all of its films released by its child-oriented labels (including Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm) rated G through PG-13. Via a press release :
The Walt Disney Company has become the first major Hollywood studio to prohibit cigarette smoking depictions in films they produce with youth ratings. The company's new policy will limit smoking depictions to films with an R rating, a move the U.S. Surgeon General has said could save the lives of over 1,000,000 children if the entire industry followed suit.
And here is an excerpt from Disney’s official onscreen smoking policy, via the company’s website, which was last updated in June 2015. There are just two exceptions to the new rules:
Disney has determined not to depict cigarette smoking in movies produced by it after 2015 (2007 in the case of Disney branded movies) and distributed under the Disney, Pixar, Marvel or Lucasfilm labels, that are rated G, PG or PG-13, except for scenes that: -depict a historical figure who may have smoked at the time of his or her life; or -portray cigarette smoking in an unfavorable light or emphasize the negative consequences of smoking.
Would a villain smoking portray it in enough of an unfavorable light to qualify? I tend to doubt it (unless that villain, say, had lung cancer — a topic that tends to get brushed over in most children’s films for some reason). Frankly, I think this policy is a smart one, and probably long overdue. This isn’t a censorship issue. This is about protecting very impressionable young children. The world doesn’t need future generations growing up to become Bill Sykes. Tomorrow’s adults (and orphan dogs who like singing Billy Joel songs) will thank us.
[H/T @mousterpiece ]A new dog-to-English translator for those who want to talk to the animals and have them talk back has now been fully funded for development.
No More Woof needed $10,000 in funding to get it off the ground -- a target exceeded by $5,000 already with two months still to go on the Indiegogo crowdfunding site.
The technology uses a headset to measure brain activity through lightweight electroencephalography (EEG) and translates the mental states they read there.
[pullquote]
The technology has been around for a few years and there are similar versions already around.
No More Woof is in the early stages of development but the company claims it has already translated canine thoughts such as suspicion of a strange.
"Some of the most easily detected neural patterns are: 'I'm tired', 'I'm curious who that is' and 'I'm excited,'" the Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery writes on its Indiegogo page. "To be completely honest, the first version will be quite rudimentary. But hey, the first computer was pretty crappy too."
The translation will be heard from a gramophone-like plastic trumpet attached to the headset.
"No animals have ever or will ever be harmed in our experiments," NSID says. "No More Woof is a 110 per cent animal-friendly technology."The baht, Asia’s worst-performing currency of the past month, sank to its weakest level since September 2009 as global funds reduced holdings of the nation’s bonds.
Overseas investors sold a net $82 million of local notes on Monday, a fourth straight day of outflows, data compiled by Bloomberg show. They have withdrawn $786 million since the Bank of Thailand unexpectedly lowered benchmark interest rates on April 29.
“Some foreign investors are probably reducing their positions on Thai bonds on concern about the baht’s quick decline,” Kobsidthi Silpachai, head of capital markets research at Kasikornbank, said by phone from Bangkok. “The central bank’s interest-rate cut and the dollar’s strong outlook have also added to the baht’s weakness.”
The baht fell 0.2% to 33.759 a dollar as of 9.43am in Bangkok, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The currency has lost 3.6% in the past month. A gauge of dollar strength climbed 0.4% on Monday as investors bet the Federal Reserve remains on track to raise interest rates this year while global peers retain unprecedented easing.
Thailand’s central bank last month cut its one-day bond repurchase rate for a second straight meeting, reducing it by a quarter of a percentage point to 1.5%. The move came after the Finance Ministry lowered its economic growth forecast for this year. Only two economists surveyed by Bloomberg predicted the decision, while 18 forecast the rate would be kept unchanged.
Ten-year sovereign bonds fell for the first time in three days, pushing the yield up six basis points, or 0.06 percentage point, to 2.84%. The one-year interest-rate swap was steady at 1.46%.Forums about the virtual currency dogecoin are getting excited about the fact that more dogecoins have been traded in the last 24 hours than bitcoins. In fact, the number of unique transactions in dogecoin — recently 94,310 in the last 24 hours — is more than all other virtual-currency transactions tracked by bitinfocharts.com.
Or, in the words of one Reddit user, \”so astound.\”
Dogecoin is a virtual currency that takes its name from a viral Internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu and his grammatically incorrect thoughts. It is a derivative of the virtual currency litecoin, which in turn is a bitcoin derivative. That\’s possible because bitcoin and litecoin are open-source projects, which allow for copies but also allow for improvements on the originals from those copies.
Here\’s why the above statistics aren\’t so surprising:
When converted into U.S. dollars, the value of dogecoin transactions doesn\’t come near the value of bitcoin transactions. About $518 million was sent in bitcoin in the last 24 hours, compared to approximately $9.92 million in dogecoin, according to bitinfocharts. One dogecoin recently fetched less than one U.S. penny, or $0.00031, according to coinmarketcap.com. The price of bitcoin was recently $824.18 on trading exchange Bitstamp and $917 on Mt. Gox, another exchange.
Digging deeper, it\’s evident that the average transaction value in dogecoin is much less than in bitcoin. An average bitcoin transaction is worth about $9,339 compared to an average dogecoin transaction of $105.80. So it would would appear that dogecoin is being used to send smaller amounts of money around the world.
The creators of dogecoin have emphasized that their virtual currency should be used for transactions rather than held as an investment, which is what some people do with bitcoin. \”If you hoard all the coins you have in the hope that the value will increase and you will get rich quick you\’ll be both disappointed, and hurting dogecoin,\” reads a post on the Dogecoin Foundation website, set up by the creators. \”We hope that through this foundation we can encourage the growth and use of dogecoin as the premier currency of the Internet, rather than it existing as a fiat equivalent commodity.\”
Charlie Lee, the creator of litecoin, told MarketWatch in November that ease of transactions was one of the reasons he created litecoin. “I wanted to create something that was a bit cheaper in value and easier to transact,\” Lee said.
Here\’s a chart that shows the difference in the number of daily unique transactions, in thousands, between bitcoin and dogecoin:
— Saumya Vaishampayan
Follow Saumya @saumvaish
Follow The Tell @thetellblog
Read more about bitcoin on MarketWatch:
Five virtual currencies other than bitcoin
Here\’s what could happen to bitcoin in 2014MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s High Court said on Tuesday it had granted a U.S. request to extradite Russian citizen Peter Levashov, who is accused of U.S. hacking offences including operating a network of infected computers used by cyber criminals.
Levashov, 36, was arrested while on holiday in Barcelona in April.
U.S. prosecutors have accused him of running the Kelihos botnet, a network of more than 100,000 infected devices used by cyber criminals to distribute viruses, ransomware, phishing emails and other spam attacks.
U.S. prosecutors are seeking a 52-year jail sentence against Levashov, who denies the charges against him.
The Spanish court said Levashov had three days to lodge an appeal against the extradition decision.
Levashov, who is fighting extradition, told the Madrid court last week that he had worked for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party for the last 10 years, Russia’s RIA news agency reported.
He told the court that investigators in the United States would torture him for information about his political work if he was sent there to face the charges.
“If I go to the U.S., I will die in a year. They want to get information of a military nature and about the United Russia party,” RIA quoted him as saying. “I will be tortured, within a year I will be killed, or I will kill myself.”
The Spanish court ruling said that Levashov’s lawyers had also alleged a political motivation behind the U.S. request for his extradition and that the real reason behind it may be that he was a programmer who might have “hacked the U.S. elections”.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Kremlin orchestrated a wide-ranging influence operation that included email hacking and online propaganda to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, a Republican, win the White House last November. The Kremlin denies the allegations.
The Spanish court dismissed all the arguments put forward by Levashov and his lawyers against extradition.
“Nothing has been proven with respect to the allegations about political motivation and neither... has the potential infringement of the accused’s right to life or of his physical integrity,” the court ruling sad.
In an eight-count indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Connecticut in April, Levashov was charged with causing intentional damage to a protected computer and wire fraud.
Russia has lodged its own request for Levashov’s extradition from Spain, RIA reported.Dear Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Brown:
Ann and I would like to thank you for the overly generous gift. We can not fully express our gratitude for the depiction of President Obama as the “first gay president” with a rainbow halo over his head — golly gee, we had a good guffaw over that. You just don’t know what it means to us.
Up front let me say, I share the horror of my liberal friends in the use of wedge social issues to inflame the electorate and divert attention from the big issues of our time. I mean you guys keep telling us, writing books about Kansas and so on, and giving conservatives the what-for over resorting to issues that are highly divisive and really more rhetorical than anything. (I mean, it’s not like the president is going to do anything about gay marriage.) So I know devoting a cover and major story on the subject of one of these hot-button, culture war issues was a great burden, leaving yourselves open to allegations of gross hypocrisy. I tip my hat to you.
But really, to characterize the president as the first “gay president” was an unexpected joy for Ann, the boys and me. I’m not about to go stoking the flames of anti-gay fervor in my base. That’s not my style, and as I always say to Ann, a moment not talking about Obama’s economic bellyflop is a moment wasted. But you’ve done it for me! Why, I don’t suppose there is a social conservative activist in the country who wouldn’t toss his cookies (excuse my language) over that label. They tell me they are fired up and ready to go! It’s very important in business and government to delegate, so I am relieved that you and your other journalist friends have taken care of this for me. (Do you have Hilary Rosen’s snail mail address? We’ve been remiss in not sending her some flowers.)
But, oh God bless you both, to define the president by a rhetorical, meaningless gesture is really above and beyond anything we expected. The “recovery” president or the “jobs” president would, well, be silly, I guess. But so long as he’s carving an identity on an issue that ranks somewhere below “high speed trains” among voters’ priorities I’m just tickled to death.
Now we’d be ingrates if we ignored the halo. Oh my — you shouldn’t have! In one image you not only smashed — I mean crushed into little pieces and hopped up and down on it like our grandkids on a blow-up bouncer — your magazine’s credibility for the rest of the election, but took a meat ax really to the whole liberal media. They’ve been panting over Obama like lovesick puppies (watch out, he’s got the dipping sauce!), giving me some sympathy from voters who think stuff you did in high school is, well, really not cool to bring up 47 years, five kids and a governorship later. It’s not like you meant to parody liberal Obama-worship — you depicted it better than we could have ever imagined.
I know you’re both Brits so I figure this is your way of trying to rekindle the special relationship between the U.S. and Britain that Obama ran over with a mack truck. (Have I mentioned I’m bringing that Churchill bust back just as soon as I get to the Oval Office?).
In any case, you’re both just neat people and we can’t thank you enough. And listen, if they declare Newsweek a PAC our lawyers will help you with all that paperwork.
In gratitude,
Mitt and AnnPresident Francois Hollande's office said on Sunday that the airstrikes were aimed at targets identified by planes on surveillance since September 8 and that its operation had been coordinated with regional partners.
"Our country remains committed to fighting the terrorist threat which is Daesh. We will strike wherever our national security is at risk," a statement from the Elysee said, referring to the "Islamic State" (IS) by its Arabic acronym.
The French president called for a "comprehensive response" to the chaos in Syria saying "civilian populations must be protected against all forms of violence, that of Daesh and other terrorist groups, but also against the murderous bombings of Bashar al-Assad."
France and other Western countries including the United States believe that the war in Syria has been instigated by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces are fighting rebels and IS militants. More than 250,000 people have died in the four-year-long conflict and millions have fled their homes to seek refuge in neighboring countries and in Europe.
Paris has been a part of the US-led international coalition to wipe out IS and has carried out airstrikes in Iraq. It delayed attacks on Syria saying airstrikes on the IS could strengthen Assad, who also has strong backing from Russia and Iran.
The war in the Middle Eastern country and Damascus' links with Teheran |
some degree of consistency should be achieved for the sake of argument. If Hitler is not properly classified as a vegetarian because he occasionally ate sausage or squab (assuming that was the case), what are we to make of the self-professed vegans who also backslide on occasions? In my opinion, those who object to Hitler being classified as a vegetarian are taking the wrong approach. It is fallacious to suggest that one infamous person's dietary habits reflect on the character of others who share those habits. One wonders why most vegetarians don't offer that argument. I have noted on numerous occasions that vegetarians will offer the name of some famous vegetarian athlete, scholar, politician or musician as though this implies that dietary regimen is superior. Proponents of such arguments should realize that they are equally fallacious. Acceptance of such anecdotal evidence is a double-edged sword. That Paul McCartney, Leonardo DaVinci, etc. were or are vegetarian in no way implies that vegetarianism is a superior dietary regimen. To suggest otherwise is to make a fallacious appeal to authority. Putting aside for a moment the veracity of calling Hitler a vegetarian, let us consider some claims that have been made to that effect. Sociologists Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax wrote a very interesting article (Anthrozoos 5(1):6-31; 1992) that describes the familiar-sounding rhetoric that leading Nazis used to support vegetarianism. For example: "On one romantic date, his female companion ordered sausage, at which Hitler looked disgusted and said: 'Go ahead and have it, but I don't understand why you want it. I didn't think you wanted to devour a corpse... the flesh of dead animals. Cadavers!'" This is a strange declaration for a man who some claim, without direct evidence, to have a preference for sausage. If Hitler's date did have sausage, it might account for the counterclaim cited by Hitler's biographers (i.e., Rynn Berry) to the effect that He was not vegetarian. However, an account by Hitler's chef that he prepared sausage "for Hitler" may be mistaken and misleading if the sausage was, in fact, consumed by Hitler's female companions, as it obviously was on this one occasion. Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, noted: "The Fuhrer is deeply religous, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race... Both [Judaism and Christianity] have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable." Irrespective of whether Hitler, Goebbels or other leading Nazis were, in fact, devout vegetarians, their self-serving rhetoric, claiming the moral high ground, is consistent with that which has appeared from time to time on rec.food.veg. In that newsgroup, we have seen omnivores characterized as "barbarians," "animal-killers," "murderers," and so forth. Clearly, many contemporary vegetarians regard themselves as ethically superior to omnivores. Claims of ethical superiority are also a characteristic of the contemporary animal "rights" movement. One can hardly find publication from that movement that doesn't beg the question of "cruelty" with respect to practices of research, sport or cuisine. The epithet "cruelty-free" as applied to cosmetics has become popular in AR circles, despite its questionable veracity. Of course, what constitutes cruelty is a subjective matter, and the practices proclaimed as cruel by animal "rights" activists are more often that not legal, despite the existence of laws prohibiting cruelty to animals. Implicit in this preoccupation with being "cruelty-free" is that non-adherents are cruel. As such, the claim of ethical superiority is one indisputable parallel between the Nazi animal protectionists and the modern AR movement. For example, consider the claims of moral superiority and the references to Eastern philosophy that are prevalent in the following translation of a Nazi article that was kindly provided to me by a friend: The following is a translation of document #186 in Medizin im Nationalsozialismus by Walter Wuttke-Groneberg (Rottenberg: Shwaebische Verlagsgesellschaft) 1982. The author of the book believes that this article demonstrated how the Nazi party would gain support by appealing to interest groups whose main concern were issues other than national politics. He also believes that the Nazi's regarded these measures as progressive and he juxtaposes this "reform" with the medical research atrocities in concentration camps. Translator's remarks and literal German words in {}. Vivisection Forbidden in Prussia! The New Germany leads all civilized nations in the area of animal protection! The famous national socialist Graf E. Reventkow published in the Reichswart, the official publication of the "union of patriotic Europeans", the lead article "Protection and Rights {Recht} for the Animal". National Socialism, he writes, has for the first time in Germany begun to show Germans the importance of the individual's {italics} duty toward the animal {end italics}. Most Germans have been raised with the attitude that animals are created by God for the use and benefit of man. The church gets this idea from the Jewish tradition. We have met with not a few clerics who defend this position with utmost steadfastness and vigor, yes one could say almost brutally. Usually they defend their position with the unstated intent of deepening and widening the chasm between man who has soul and soulless (how do they know that?) animals... The friend of animals knows to what inexpressible extent the mutual understanding between man and animal and feelings of togetherness can be developed, and there are many friends of animals in Germany, and also many who cannot accept animal torture out of simple humanitarian reasons. In general however, we still find ourselves in a desert of unfeeling and brutality as well as sadism. There is much to be done and we would first like to address vivisection, for which the words "cultural shame" do not even come close; in fact it must be viewed as a criminal activity. Graf Reventkow presents a number of examples of beastial vivisection crimes and affirms at the end, with mention of Adolph Hitler's sharp anti-vivisectionist positions, our demand that once and for all an end has to be brought to this animal exploitation. We German friends of animals and anti-vivisectionists have placed our hopes upon the Chancellor of the Reich and his comrades in arms who are, as we know, friends of animals. Our trust has not been betrayed! The New Germany brings proof that it is not only the hearth but bringer of a new, higher, more refined, culture: Vivisection, a cultural shame in the whole civilized world, against which the Best in all states have fought in vain for decades, will be banned in the New Germany! A Reich Animal Protection Law which includes a ban on vivisection is imminent and just now comes the news, elating all friends of animals, that the greatest German state, Prussia, has outlawed vivisection with no exceptions! The National Socialist German Workers' Party { NSDAP } press release states: "The Prussian minister-president Goering has released a statement stating that starting 16 August 1933 vivisection of animals of all kinds is forbidden in Prussia. He has requested that the concerned ministries draft a law after which vivisection will be punished with a high penalty *). Until the law goes into effect, persons who, despite this prohibition, order, participate or perform vivisections on animals of any kind will be deported to concentration camps." Among all civilized nations, Germany is thus the first to put an end to the cultural shame of vivisection! The New Germany not only frees man from the curse of materialism, sadism, and cultural Bolshevism, but gives the cruelly persecuted, tortured, and until now, wholly defenseless animals their rights { Recht }. Animal friends and anti-vivisectionists of all states will joyfully welcome this action of the National Socialist government of the New Germany! What Reichschancellor Adolph Hitler and Minister-president Goering have done and will do for the protection of animals should set the course for the leaders of all civilized nations! It is a deed which will bring the New Germany innumerable new elated friends in all nations. Millions of friends of animals and anti-vivisectionists of all civilized nations thank these two leaders from their hearts for this exemplary civil deed! Buddha, the Great loving spirit of the East, says: "He who is kind-hearted to animals, heaven will protect!" May this blessing fulfill the leaders of the New Germany, who have done great things for animals, until the end. May the blessing hand of fate protect these bringers of a New Spirit, until their godgiven earthly mission is fulfilled! R.O.Schmidt *) As we in the meantime have learned, a similar ban has been proclaimed in Bavaria. The formal laws are imminent - thanks to the energetic initiative of our Peoples' chancellor Adolph Hitler, for whom all friends of animals of the world will maintain forever their gratitude, their love, and their loyalty. From: Die Weisse Fahne {The White Flag} 14 (1933) : 710-711. Here we see a writer in a socialist publication explicitly declaring that non-human animals have "rights." Given the absolute control of the press by the NSDAP, this constitutes an official proclamation. In fairness, it should be noted that the proclaimed ban on vivisection was less than absolute in the entire Reich. Some German scientists continued to use animals rather than humans for research despite the threatened penalty. The "antivivisection" law that was actually passed was modeled after an existing British law that did not constitute an absolute ban, despite official proclamations to that effect. Some might seem content to totally dismiss the phenomenon of Nazi animal protection as a propaganda maneuver, but Nazi animal protection ran far deeper than the proclaimed abolition of vivisection. Consider this excerpt from Arluke and Sax (op. cit., p. 9): "The preoccupation with animal protection in Nazi Germany was evident in other social institutions and continued almost until the end of World War II. In 1934, the new government hosted an international conference on animal protection in Berlin. Over the speaker's podium, surrounded by enormous swastikas, were the words "Entire epochs of love will be needed to repay animals for their value and service" (Meyer 1975). In1936 the German Society for Animal Psychology was founded, and in 1938 animal protection was accepted as a subject to be studied in German public schools and universities." Many individuals in Nazi Germany genuinely believed in the "rights" of non-human animals, yet they simultaneously were capable of cruel behavior against members of the Jewish faith. Not only that, but they went as far as using animal protection as a justification for their inhumanity to the Jewish people, as explained by Arluke and Sax. Because the officially-proclaimed absolute ban on vivisection was never codified in the Reichstag, the claim that Germany's ban on vivisection was, in part, a propaganda maneuver has some merit. However, this inconsistency provides yet another parallel to the contemporary animal "rights" movement. The prominent AR organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETA, spent (and is still spending) a large sum of money in a fruitless legal attempt to obtain control over the well-known Silver Spring Monkeys. One could argue that this money could have been better spent in other, less newsworthy efforts at animal protection. There are other well-known publicity antics. PETA's penchant for pie-in-the-face publicity stunts has drawn criticism from other AR proponents. For example, Gary Francione was quoted as criticizing PETA for it's "Three Stooges" approach to animal protection. Thus, like animal protectionist elements of the Third Reich, it seems that some components of the contemporary AR movement are, in part, highly motivated by considerations of public relations and propaganda. Another point that could be made regarding Nazi animal protectionists is that they were inconsistent in their actions. When juxtaposed against the pronouncement of a ban on vivisection and claims of ethical superiority, the treatment of the Jewish people and hideous medical experiments that were conducted are arguably inconsistent. Arluke and Sax offered additional examples that illustrate the inconsistent actions of the alleged "...friends of animals..." in Nazi Germany. Once again, however, we encounter another parallel with the contemporary AR movement. At the same time that PETA was expending large sums of money to obtain custody of the Silver Spring Monkeys, they killed 32 "liberated" rabbits and roosters at their Aspin Hill animal "sanctuary" for reasons of "overcrowding." One wonders why a portion of their multi-million dollar annual budget could not have been used to provide suitable housing for those animals. There is considerable evidence of acceptance of animal "rights" by officials of the Third Reich, who have proven to be some of the most heinous villians of our century. They loved those non-human animals, though. In Nazi Germany, practices such as vivisection were characterized as Jewish (by relating them to the ritual of kosher slaughter) and thereby vilified. Subsequently, reverence for the "rights" of animals was used to justify the oppression of Jewish people. It is not my purpose to equate contemporary animal "rights" activists with Nazis. Although there are clear parallels, there are distinctions as well. However, whenever animal activists argue today that giving rights to animals will produce a kinder, gentler society, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that the only modern civilization to officially embrace a philosophy of animal rights did not turn out to be more kind or more gentle.Ever dropped a stone into a hole to find out how deep it goes? Had Jason Fleming done so while peering into the overgrown hollow that marks the start of Shadow Complex, no splash would have echoed back. This opening, into which his girlfriend descended not two minutes earlier, is the mouth of an abyss; a rabbit hole that will lead him unwittingly into an underground military complex, the role of would-be national saviour and the belly of one of gaming's long lost genres. By the time he re-emerges, triple-jumping into the sun, you'll have mapped tens of miles of subterranean corridors, thwarted a plot to blow up San Francisco and seen Jason Fleming transformed from country-bumpkin into cyber-ninja.
Shadow Complex is Super Metroid re-imagined by J.J.Abrams. Its story is pulp thriller, throwing an ordinary Joe into extraordinary circumstances under which he stiffens implausibly into a one-man army. Fleming is an all-American action hero, hurling grenades and missiles with thoughtless abandon one moment; creeping death through ventilation shafts in search of his snatched girlfriend the next. "You don't look like the kind of guy who'd pull the trigger," challenges one enemy he meets. Two seconds later, as Fleming steps over a puddle of warm, Unreal Engine-pumped blood, you can almost hear Mark Rein in the background, fist-pumping the air to chants of: "USA! USA!"
But for all its Hollywood bombast, Shadow Complex is born from nothing but the purest of Japanese pedigrees. For once the Super Metroid reference isn't a lazy critic's crutch. Epic Games has always declared its intention to resurrect the classic 2D side-scrolling exploration game, once popularized by Nintendo's seminal space adventure, later perfected by Konami's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So while Shadow Complex's story and setting may be popcorn nonsense, the mechanics they clothe are golden.
A number of VR missions provide yet more content for the completist, presenting a suite of timed, score-attack runs that encourage competition across Xbox Live.
In reviving a genre that the Japanese left for dead, the game offers a telling snapshot of the global games industry in 2009. Here is an American developer so emboldened by recent successes that it feels qualified to reimagine one of Japan's sacred classics. It's like Bungie sat down to remake Super Mario. Unthinkable. Yet somehow, the gambit's paid off. In fusing classic game design with contemporary techniques and sensibilities, Epic Games and Chair Entertainment have triumphed where Japanese developers continue to flounder. The result is nothing short of one the best games of this generation.
Despite appearances, Shadow Complex remains a 2D game at heart. The shift to 3D visuals adds depth to the world, and allows for a few flamboyant perspective-shifting set-pieces, but Fleming's movements are restricted to up, down, left and right. Bullets automatically fire off into the Z-axis if an enemy's standing in the background, but otherwise their trajectory moves in arcing step with your analogue-stick sweeps.
At the surface level, this is a pure action game: choke out guards with the B-button, leap electric fences with the A-button, Rambo your way up staircases of enemies with a squeeze of the triggers. But like those titles it so carefully apes, it's also a cartography game, challenging players to map every corner and crevice of the base in search of that 100 per cent badge of completion. Locked doors and obstacles hinder access to the base. But rather than asking you to locate keys to unlock these areas, you must instead find the power-ups that allow Fleming to overcome each type of blockage. Until you pick up the missile attachment for your gun, for example, every area closed off by an object that can only be destroyed by missiles remains off-limits. Shine your flashlight on an object and it'll glow the colour of the power-up needed to destroy it: orange for bullets, green for grenades, purple for foam and so on. Until you have the relevant power-up, all instances of that object will be impassable, allowing the designers to carefully drip-feed access to the sprawling complex.If you're shopping online, use a credit card rather than a debit card. (Photo11: Thinkstock)
Breaking news such as the massive data breach at Experian or Target now seems common. Leaving aside the victims of actual fraud, I hear constantly from people who've had to swap out every debit and credit card, or whose cards were unilaterally replaced by their bank. This causes all sorts of problems.
Sometimes it makes you long for the days of cash. While cash is not practical for everything, there are very compelling reasons to consider it or other alternatives instead of those debit cards.
Of course, you also have to watch where you get your cash, too. Criminals are good at installing near-invisible skimmers on ATMs. These steal your card information and then a miniature camera over the keypad steals your PIN. It's everything a thief needs to drain your account.
Avoid out of the way ATMs in isolated areas. When you can, use ATMs in a restricted-access foyer. You should also hold your hand over the keypad when you enter your PIN. This blocks a camera from seeing what you're doing.
CREDIT OR DEBIT: What's best for consumers?
Now that you know how to safely get cash, here's where you should use it.
1. GAS STATIONS
ATMs aren't the only places criminals can install card skimmers. Gas stations are a favorite target for thieves. Last year, four men were arrested for allegedly stealing $2.1 million using skimmers at gas stations in the south. The skimmers were installed in the pumps and were even equipped with Bluetooth — which allowed the thieves to come by and extract the collected numbers and PINs wirelessly!
To keep the odds in your favor, use cash. If nothing else, use a credit card at a gas pump. It's not widely appreciated that consumer responsibility for debit-card charges are different than they are for credit cards. Credit-card charges are easier to contest, and you're only liable for up to $50 of fraudulent purchases.
With a debit card, you have to report a fraudulent purchase within a few business days for the $50 liability limit to kick in.
2. RESTAURANTS
Restaurants, too, can be a source of trouble. Some unscrupulous servers bring handheld card skimmers to work to swipe your card info. Even low-tech thieves can just write down the card numbers.
To make matters worse, many restaurants use older computer systems for processing cards. These are easy for hackers to install card-swipe software, as in the Target hack. The price paid can be quite high; Subway got hit in 2011 by Romanian hackers, who got away with $10 million from 150 restaurants.
One of the lesser noted aspects about the coming end to Microsoft's XP operating system is that many restaurants and ATMs still use the XP infrastructure.
3. STORES
Restaurants and gas stations make juicy targets: a steady steam of customers, some not from the area. The same goes for stores.
For small purchases cash is the way to go. Use cash at the grocery store or while buying clothes. For larger purchases, use a credit card instead of a debit card. Again, you have less liability than you do with a debit card.
Bonus tip: Some people use cash at stores to avoid the store tracking what they buy. However, stores can still track your purchase history if you still swipe a loyalty card.
4. ONLINE
OK, you can't use cash online. But please, use a credit card, not a debit card. The fraud protections are better and a hacker can't overdraft your bank account with a credit card. You don't need to be fighting overdraft fees on top of everything else.
You can also check with your bank to see if it offers one-time credit card numbers for online buying. Since each number only works once, it won't do a hacker any good to steal it.
Of course, one drawback to using a credit card is the interest payments if you don't pay on time. This site can show you the real cost of using a credit card.
Finally, I know this is a lot of work, particularly when it seems that everyone is busy and overworked; but remember as well to check your bank statements, and credit reports, regularly for suspicious activity.
On the Kim Komando Show, the nation's largest weekend radio talk show, Kim takes calls and dispenses advice on today's digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacks. For her daily tips, newsletters and more, visitwww.komando.com. E-mail her at [email protected].
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1nbDCy7“Food addiction” has become a focus of interest for researchers attempting to explain certain processes and/or behaviors that may contribute to the development of obesity. Although the scientific discussion on “food addiction” is in its nascent stage, it has potentially important implications for treatment and prevention strategies. As such, it is important to critically reflect on the appropriateness of the term “food addiction”, which combines the concepts of “substance-based” and behavioral addiction. The currently available evidence for a substance-based food addiction is poor, partly because systematic clinical and translational studies are still at an early stage. We do however view both animal and existing human data as consistent with the existence of addictive eating behavior. Accordingly, we stress that similar to other behaviors eating can become an addiction in thus predisposed individuals under specific environmental circumstances. Here, we introduce current diagnostic and neurobiological concepts of substance-related and non-substance-related addictive disorders, and highlight the similarities and dissimilarities between addiction and overeating. We conclude that “food addiction” is a misnomer because of the ambiguous connotation of a substance-related phenomenon. We instead propose the term “eating addiction” to underscore the behavioral addiction to eating; future research should attempt to define the diagnostic criteria for an eating addiction, for which DSM-5 now offers an umbrella via the introduction on Non-Substance-Related Disorders within the category Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders.Now click the "Read more" line to see more photos and the full transcript.
Bush may be leaving town. But The Ticket's staying right here. Register right here for cellphone alerts on each new Ticket item. Sign up here for RSS feeds.
Here's a news video of the portrait unveiling and some of the 43rd president's remarks. The full transcript appears on the jump. (Click the "Read more" line below.)
Earlier the Union League of Philadelphia unveiled its official historical portrait of Bush that will hang there while Bush retires far away. The president spoke at the unveiling and opened with the knowing remark, "Welcome to my hanging."
Saturday Bush attended his final Army-Navy football game as the nation's 43rd Commander-in-Chief and delighted the crowd with a spontaneous field goal attempt that didn't go far. (See photos by clicking the "Read more" line below.)
His historically low favorability poll numbers have crept up to a little less unfavorable, as they historically do among Americans watching a president leave office.
He doesn't dominate the news much anymore, which is fine with his wife, Laura.
Remarks of President George W. Bush at the unveiling of his portrait, Lincoln Hall, Union League of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dec. 6, 2008.
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Welcome to my hanging. (Laughter and applause.) Thank you for coming and thank you for your warm welcome.
First, I'd like to compliment Mark Carder. He did a really fine job with a challenging subject. (Laughter.) I was taken aback by how much gray paint you had to use. (Laughter.) It speaks more about my job than yours. (Laughter.) But thanks a lot, it's been a joy to work with you and I'm confident this portrait will stand the test of time.
I want to thank Fred and Frank for welcoming me here. I thank you for the medal. I'm keeping pretty good company, which I will speak about in a minute.
First of all I do want to thank the board of directors of The Union League for taking time out of your Saturday to be here. And I appreciate all the guests who have come, as well.
I particularly want to say thanks to my friend, Arlen Specter, for joining us. (Applause.) It's been a joy working with you -- most of the time. (Laughter.) He's a pretty independent-minded fellow -- (laughter) -- who is honest and decent. (Applause.)
And like me, he married very well. (Laughter.) So Joan, thanks for being here, and I appreciate -- I appreciate you supporting this good man during some very difficult times. (Applause.)
I thank the Hoopers, for paying for this work. (Applause.) I thank Jim Straw and the Abraham Lincoln Foundation and the Foundation members who are here today. I appreciate you preserving the legacy of a -- of a good man.
I am -- it turns out this award had been given to folks I have had the honor of serving with: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Secretary Tom Ridge -- three good men who are dedicated and patriot public servants.
I'm especially proud to be a co-recipient with a guy I call "41." (Applause.) The 1987 Gold Medal Award Winner -- a guy I call "dad," you call him "President Bush."
We owe our achievements to the same savvy political counselor and firm disciplinarian: Barbara. (Laughter and applause.) And they're both doing well, by the way. (Applause.) Mother is coming out of the hospital. I hope they don't put this on TV, but she's a tough old bird -- (laughter) -- whose spirits are soaring high.
The motto of The Union League is "Love of Country Leads." You obviously love our country because you continue to lead in ways that make Philadelphia a more compassionate place, and I want to thank you for that. I appreciate the fact that you have mentoring programs and internships and scholarships. That basically says the dream is for all who live in this country.
I thank you for your efforts to preserve historical treasures. One can learn a lot from the past, and The Union League is doing its part to tell the true story of our great nation.
In short, I thank you for your service to your community and our country.
I also thank you for preserving the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. I'm about to be a member of the Ex-President's Club, so I'll just call him "Abe." (Laughter.) If he were around I could say, you call me "W." (Laughter.)
I don't know if you know this or not, but there's a place in the Oval Office where the President puts the most influential President -- portrait of, I guess you'd say "influential President." I'm somewhat conflicted about the "influential President," so I say, 41's portrait hangs in my heart, 16 hangs on the wall. (Applause.)
I found it interesting that the League was founded in 1862, to support President Lincoln in a time when his leadership was deeply controversial. (Laughter.) I know how he felt. (Laughter.)
But the principles on which he stood have stood the test of time: All men are created equal under God, he said, unflinchingly throughout his presidency. (Applause.) Liberty is given to every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. I
believe, like Lincoln, there is an Almighty - (applause) - and a gift of that Almighty to every man is freedom. He has taught Presidents that you must act on your principles and make tough decisions, regardless of the political consequences. (Applause.)
I have been a - I have drawn strength from his example. I have learned lessons by reading about Abraham Lincoln. And I want to thank you for preserving his legacy. (Applause.)
And most importantly, I thank you for your kind words and your heartfelt prayers during the last eight years. It has been -- somebody said, what's it's like to be President? I said, some days you're happy, some days not so happy -- every day joyous to serve the United States.
God bless you, and God bless our country. (Applause) ###
Photo credits: Eric Draper / The White HouseShare. The actress on the Commander's strength and learning more about her in Season 3. The actress on the Commander's strength and learning more about her in Season 3.
Since her debut in Season 2, Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) has been a standout, highly popular character on The 100. That being the case, many fans were thrilled to learn she would be back in Season 3, following negotiations with AMC that allowed Debnam-Carey to return to the CW show, even while she’s a series regular on Fear the Walking Dead.
Debnam-Carey took part in a panel for The 100 last month at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, comprised of female cast members from the show, along with executive producer Jason Rothenberg. Shortly before the panel began, I sat down with the actress to talk about Lexa’s reunion with Clarke this season, the evolution of the romantic attraction between the two powerful women, Lexa's history and more.
IGN: When Lexa and Clarke were reunited, clearly Clarke’s first reaction was a very angry one. In the third episode, Lexa argues pretty strongly in defense of her actions, but underneath it, can she really see where Clarke is coming from too?
Alycia Debnam-Carey: Absolutely. I think Lexa makes choices based on necessity and she’s very logical about her choices but she’s not immune to the consequences. She realizes the consequences, but will deal with them when they come. I think she’s relieved that Clarke’s alive, obviously, because she wants to save her, but she made that choice and she will always stick by that choice. When she’s made it, that’s how it is.
Exit Theatre Mode
I think the great thing about this world is once the greater themes come into play about survival and necessity, history and bad history kind of becomes irrelevant. I think Lexa, personally, is a bit beyond that. She adapts to the situation where and when… But of course, she’s admitted feelings to Clarke, so she does care about it and she feels it. It’s just hard because Lexa’s so steely that it’s hard to see, but luckily, Season 3 has allowed me to discover that a bit more.
IGN: How early did you know that there would be a romantic side to their relationship? You could see the bond between the characters and see that Clarke was becoming someone meaningful to Lexa and you had to say a lot with just your face, since, as you note, she’s not a character that’s going to openly say all of these things. She’s very controlled. But did you know you should play it with a sense of romance?
Debnam-Carey: I think what really drove it was that they were two characters that were both in very unique but similar positions and they were able to see a bit of each other in one another, if that makes sense - unlike anyone else. They both had to step up to power at a very young age and that’s a hard thing to do. They kind of missed out having a teenage-hood or a childhood, really. It’s been so hostile, so quickly. So I think it actually grew out of a genuine like for each other. The first time they’d maybe stopped and gone, “Wait a second, I connect with you in a different way than I connect with other people.”
Eliza and I get along so well, because we’re such good friends, so whenever we’re on set we get along so well that it helped to feel some of that. But it came as a bit of a surprise to me, the way it unfolded. I didn’t expect for that to happen so quickly. It was alluded to and people were guessing about it for a while but it actually took both of us a little bit by surprise.
Continue to Page 2 as Debnam-Carey discusses learning more about the Grounders, Lexa’s history and more.Katina Powell, a self-described former escort, details to Outside the Lines nearly two-dozen stripping and sex parties from 2010 to '14 inside Louisville's Billy Minardi Hall, the on-campus dorm for athletes and other students. (6:43)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team's former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.
One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.
Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: "I knew they weren't college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club."
A book, "Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen," published this month by self-described former escort Katina Powell, 42, details nearly two dozen stripping and sex parties from 2010 to 2014 inside Billy Minardi Hall, the on-campus dorm for athletes and other students named for Louisville men's basketball head coach Rick Pitino's late brother-in-law. Powell, who first spoke to Indianapolis Business Journal Book Publishing, has said that McGee arranged the parties and paid her $10,000 for supplying dancers during the time period.
Powell told Outside the Lines in an extensive interview that McGee also supplied cash for "side deals," which included sex with some recruits, guardians who accompanied them on visits and some Louisville players.
The former player who said he had sex with a dancer told Outside the Lines that McGee provided him with one-dollar bills to tip dancers and paid for one of the dancers to have sex with the player in a separate room. One of the other former players, who said he attended the parties as a recruit and player, said McGee "would give us the money, just the recruits. A bunch of us were sitting there while they danced. Then the players left, and the recruits chose which one [of the dancers] they wanted."
"I don't know if any of this is true or not," Pitino told ESPN's Dana O'Neil and Yahoo! Sports in a conference call Tuesday. "There's only one person who knows the truth, and he needs to come out and tell the truth to his teammates, to the University of Louisville, to his fans and to his coaches that have taught him to do the right thing for years and allowed him to be part of something special here."
McGee, who declined to comment, left Louisville in 2014 and is an assistant coach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is on administrative leave with pay while the school conducts a review. The NCAA and Louisville also are investigating.
Katina Powell, a self-described former escort, details nearly two dozen stripping and sex parties from 2010 to 2014 inside Billy Minardi Hall, Louisville's on-campus dorm for athletes and other students. ESPN
"He's the only one with any answers," Pitino told ESPN and Yahoo! Sports. "Whether it's true or not, I don't know. I spoke to my nephew who lived in Minardi Hall, lived in the dorm, and he said he never saw anything the entire time he lived there. Obviously by what people are saying, something did go on, but there's only one person who knows the truth.
"Everything else is absurd. I don't care about the legal issues. If he's done something wrong, he has to own up to it and do his penance.
A Louisville spokesperson told ESPN that Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich said, "Coach Pitino has no plans to step down and he absolutely didn't know about the allegations." The spokesman said Jurich would not be commenting further.
"To preserve the integrity of the review process, the university will withhold comment on any details until the review is concluded," the school said in a statement issued Tuesday morning.
Pitino's son, Minnesota coach Richard Pitino, told ESPN on Tuesday morning, "I can say 100 percent sure, with zero doubt, that [Rick Pitino] knew nothing about any of these alleged incidents."
Rick Pitino told ESPN earlier this month he has denied having any knowledge of the parties: "Not myself, not one player, not one trainer, not one assistant, not one person knew anything about any of this," the Hall of Fame coach said. "If anyone did, it would have been stopped on a dime. Not one person knew anything about it."
All five of the ex-players or recruits who spoke with Outside the Lines did so on the condition of anonymity |
video he made which almost no one had ever even heard of?
I mention these people as examples of how the Democrat Media Complex sometimes uses its power to shift focus to an innocent person in order to protect another person, organization or narrative.
In a new case, CNN has tracked down the person who made the Trump vs. CNN wrestling gif and even made a not so thinly veiled threat to dox him. The CNN reporter who wrote the story is Andrew Kaczynski, formerly of BuzzFeed:
How CNN found the Reddit user behind the Trump wrestling GIF The Reddit user who initially claimed credit for President Donald Trump’s tweet that showed Trump tackling CNN issued an apology Tuesday for the video and other offensive content he posted — one day after CNN identified the man behind the account and attempted to make contact with him. Reddit user “HanA**holeSolo” first shared the GIF last Wednesday of Trump pummeling a wrestler with CNN’s logo imposed on his face. CNN could find no earlier instance of the GIF. The GIF was later edited into a video with sound and tweeted by the President on Sunday. On Reddit, “HanA**holeSolo” took credit for inspiring the tweet. Soon after, “HanA**holeSolo’s” other posts on Reddit, some of which included racist and anti-Semitic imagery, quickly circulated on social media.
Now the user is apologizing, writing in a lengthy post on Reddit that he does not advocate violence against the press and expressing remorse there and in an interview with CNN for other posts he made that were racist and anti-Semitic… CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
The subtext of that last line is crystal clear. Do it again and we’ll ruin your life. Andrew Kaczynski’s former employer knows all about that. You may recall the time they ruined a woman’s life over a tweet.
Kaczynski denies the claim that anyone was threatened.
CNN specifically choose not to reveal this guy's identity and to say we threatened anyone is a total lie.https://t.co/f02hLaVRqu — andrew kaczynski???? (@KFILE) July 5, 2017
Others disagree:
Trump was bad. CNN is worse: CNN threatens amateur satirist behind Trump video: make fun of us again and we dox you https://t.co/KiKX1Gexyu pic.twitter.com/lqpmFHEsYc — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 5, 2017
CNN is clearly excited about this story. It’s at the top of their page right now:
Here’s the original Trump tweet:
You may recall that CNN tried to get Trump banned from Twitter over this. Twitter disagreed.
Does Trump's anti-CNN tweet violate Twitter's terms? This is the "hateful conduct" policy https://t.co/1oCoXPNNul https://t.co/AhEu7Hwn12 — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 2, 2017
Professor Jacobson and others reacted to this on Twitter:
.@CNN will now prove it's not malicious bully by searching out identities of people who create gifs about it https://t.co/afxMn23gYg — Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) July 5, 2017
.@CNN is treating the guy who created the wrestling gif like Obama-Hillary-Rice treated the guy who created the Muhammad video https://t.co/UsLnWlHsko — Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) July 5, 2017
Is @CNN doxxing users for making funny gifs? What is happening to this world?! https://t.co/YUILeD8h9Q — Lalo Dagach (@LaloDagach) July 5, 2017
a multil-million dollar media conglomerate is threatening a random person on the internet because he created a gif. Please go this route. https://t.co/gh5bmw20xM — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) July 5, 2017
Can someone explain to me why it's cool for CNN to go hunting down name/ID of a random anon who made a Reddit GIF? — Jeff B/DDHQ (@EsotericCD) July 5, 2017
.@CNN celebrating uncovering identity of wrestling gif maker and threatening to dox – then realizing entire internet now hates it pic.twitter.com/rtat4VmPhN — Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) July 5, 2017Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says a "talking-to" by his wife has convinced him he should have used cleaner language Saturday night after he employed a word his father once famously used in the House of Commons.
The coarse language, which Trudeau used as an adverb rather than the verb his father chose, led the Prime Minister's Office to question Trudeau's judgment.
But Trudeau, speaking to reporters Monday in Ajax, Ont., said he regretted dropping the f-bomb after getting scolded by his wife, Sophie.
"If you had seen the scolding that Sophie gave me, you would have wished you'd used a different adjective as well," he said following a speech to the Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade.
Trudeau used the salty language at a charity boxing event Saturday night in Gatineau, Que., the same one at which he pummelled then Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau in 2012.
Speaking from the ring, Trudeau said it pained him to be standing there and not suited up to take on an opponent.
"I will tell you, there is no experience like stepping into this ring and measuring yourself. All that — your name, your fortune, your intelligence, your beauty — none of that f--king matters," Trudeau can be heard saying in a video of the event posted to YouTube.
The line was met with huge cheers from the fight night crowd.
'Lack of judgment'
A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper wasn't as enthusiastic.
"This is yet another example of Justin Trudeau's lack of judgment," Harper's spokesman said in an email to CBC News.
On Monday, Trudeau admitted he wished he'd used a different word.
"Listen, it was fight night at the casino on Saturday night, and I found myself again in a boxing ring, and I guess I let my emotions run a little hot. But rest assured I got an awful lot of a talking-to at home from Sophie and nothing anyone else can add will be worse than that," Trudeau said.
Trudeau pointed to a number of failed Harper appointments, including last fall's nomination of Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court, and said it was interesting the Prime Minister's Office would criticize him. The court ruled Nadon's appointment was void, meaning Harper must find another person to appoint to Canada's highest court.
In 1971, his father Pierre, then the prime minister, was accused of mouthing a profane phrase in the House of Commons to Progressive Conservative MPs John Lundrigan and Lincoln Alexander. Asked about it later, Pierre Trudeau referred to the term as "fuddle duddle." He also accused the MPs of being sensitive and going "crying to mama."
It's 'better not said'
The younger Trudeau has been known to use coarse language in the past. In 2011, he called then environment minister Peter Kent a "piece of shit" in the House of Commons.
Conservative MP Maxime Bernier said it's not the first time Trudeau has made that kind of error, but focused on Trudeau's economic policy.
Asked whether he's ever used the f-word as Trudeau did, Bernier said, "Not publicly, maybe."
Liberal MP Wayne Easter said the Conservatives will use any line to try to argue that Trudeau has bad judgment. He pointed to some of the appointments Harper has made, including those of Brazeau, Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin to the Senate.
"It would have been better not said," Easter remarked. "However, I think you have to look at, he was doing a charity event, he was doing good work, and I think it was kind of meant to be in a joking style, but as a leader, you can't lay out those kind of jokes."
Warning: This video contains graphic language that may be offensiveThis week’s Open Thread.
Main
* Russian sanctions
“Trump doesn’t want to be friends with China, the elites won’t let him be friends with Russia, and the EU doesn’t want to be friends with Trump.” – Egor Kholmogorov.
As pithy a summary of this last week’s clusterfuck as any.
Germany (!) considers the US sanctions to be in violation of international law, and has told the European Commission to look at countermeasures.
Russia expelling 755 US diplomats and seizure of US diplomatic compounds is a delayed reaction to Obama’s analogous step at the tail end of his Presidency. The response had been suspended to give Trump time to normalize relations, but with the prospect of that going out of the window with the Senate’s 98-2 vote in favor of widening Russian sanctions, there was no longer any point to holding it off.
Russia’s response to the actual US sanctions are a different matter and will be formulated as the situation develops.
Russia
* Alexander Mercouris reviews How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, by Joe Lauria.
* Alexey Kovalev seems to confirm that the guy who runs the legendary @RussianEmbassy Twitter account is Alexander Kramarenko, vice ambassador in London.
This is a guy in his 60s who posts pepe memes. Based boomer?
* Mikheil Saakashvili has been deprived of his Ukrainian citizenship, formally on the basis of him having neglecting to inform the authorities he was wanted in Georgia. Since the Georgians had stripped him of his Georgian citizenship in 2015 by dint of him having received Ukrainian citizenship, this effectively makes him a stateless person.
His mistake was to take Maidanist rhetoric about reform and the war against corruption at face value. As Ukraine’s most popular (least unpopular) major political figure, his increasing oppositionalism to the Poroshenko clan must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Latest word is he is now living with his relatives in the Bronx (as an undocumented alien?). How the mighty are fallen.
* Eighty years ago Stalin launched the Great Terror.
World
* North Korea
The past few weeks have seen a spate of North Korean missile testing successes, so much so that there I have been saying many comments to the effect that China or Russia must be helping them out (even though its evident that neither supports the nuclearization of the Korean peninsula).
For HBD-aware people, there’s a much more succinct explanation: The average IQ of North Korea must be close to 100. And of course a huge percentage of North Korea’s brighest are engaged in military R&D. This is why Israel, South Africa(n whites), and now North Korea have been successful at developing a nuclear deterrent – while the likes of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and even Iran, who are a standard deviation lower – have failed at it.
* Who funds the Press Freedom Index? The usual suspects.
* Sperm counts fall by 50% in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011 – but not in Asia, Africa, or South America. The hypotheses put forth there don’t seem all that likely.
Misc
* So it seems that Game of Thrones has basically stopped paying any heed to logistics or manpower realities.
* Hilarious Wheel of Time review.
* Best defense of corruption ever?
* PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS gets the record for the highest peak player count of any non-Valve game.The FBI told local Kentucky media early Sunday that an assault that left Republican Sen. Rand Paul injured and reeling was "politically motivated."
According to WNKY, a Kentucky NBC affiliate, authorities and Paul's neighbors believe Rene Boucher attacked Paul over his ideological leanings. The FBI, the local news organization says, has confirmed the motive.
Boucher is a registered Democrat, according to voter rolls, updated in March of 2017.
Boucher, who reportedly lives down the street from Paul, assaulted the senator while Paul was mowing his lawn. Paul, who was wearing earplugs, stepped off his ride-on mower to handle something on the ground when Boucher attacked.
Although Paul was "blindsided," according to his spokesperson, the senator emerged mostly unscathed — with only minor injuries to his face and rib cage.
Boucher is being held in the Warren County Detention Center on $5,000 bond. He will likely face charges of fourth degree assault, Bowling Green County Sheriffs say.CLOSE Watch Hurricane Matthew's winds begin to batter central Florida. USA TODAY NETWORK
Commuters make their way through heavy rain in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 6, 2016, ahead of Hurricane Matthew. (Photo11: Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty Images)
Hurricane Matthew is the most powerful storm to threaten the Southeast coast in more than a decade. Here's what we know:
Where is the storm now?
Matthew continues to head north toward the South Carolina coast. The National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm to a Category 2 hurricane earlier Friday, and as of 2 a.m. ET Saturday, Matthew was located 95 miles southwest of Charleston, S.C., moving 12 mph.
The hurricane continues to pack sustained winds up to 105 mph, threatening devastating storm surges in a four-state area. At a mid-morning press conference on Friday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott said the "worst effects are still likely to come," referring to a possible turn toward the coast and a likely storm surge in the Jacksonville area.
Where is the storm headed?
Matthew is moving north at 12 mph towards the coast of South Carolina in the morning and is expected to move in the same motion Saturday night near the coast of southern North Carolina.
In Georgia, more than 500,000 people fled the coastal areas for the interior, and thousands sought refuge at shelters. Forecasters expect Matthew to stick close to the coast of Georgia and South Carolina over the weekend before veering out to sea — perhaps even looping back toward Florida in the middle of next week as a tropical storm.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley made a blunt statement to residents: "This is the last time you will hear my voice asking you to evacuate," she said, calling out islands and cities by name. State officials were particularly worried about high water, in the form of 8-foot storm surges, inundating barrier islands and bringing life-threatening flooding to historic Charleston.
President Obama declared a state of emergency in North Carolina Friday, following similar declarations for Florida, Georgia and South Carolina
The National Hurricane Center extended a hurricane warning to North Carolina too. The center also said the storm is expected to weaken in the next 48 hours but will remain a hurricane until Sunday.
This is what Tybee Island in Georgia looks like right now #HurricaneMatthewpic.twitter.com/qxhYowBtLZ — Lauren Petracca (@LaurenPetracca) October 7, 2016
Keep an eye on storm surges
Matthew is expected to produce total rain accumulations of 8 to 12 inches over the Atlantic coast from central Florida to eastern North Carolina, forecasters said. Some areas could see as much as 15 inches, which could lead to flooding and flash flooding, even in inland areas. The most important threat comes from storm surges, which have been predicted to be as high as 12 feet. After meeting with FEMA officials, President Obama urged those living in affected areas to listen to local officials. “If they tell you to evacuate, you need to get out of there and move to higher ground,” adding that “we can always replace property, but we cannot replace lives.”
CLOSE Storm surge created by hurricanes is the biggest risk to life and property during a storm. Ramon Padilla, Veronica Bravo and Jacquie Lee, USA TODAY
The power outages affecting more than a million people
More than one million customers in Florida were without power Friday. The number continues to climb as the storm moves closer to the coast and heads north. Up to 2.5 million Florida Power & Light customers could lose power, officials said.
Travel problems mount
Matthew is wreaking havoc on the travel industry. The Fort Lauderdale and Orlando airports shut down, and some cruises were being rerouted. Disney World and other theme parks were closed.
Airports in southern Florida have resumed limited flight schedules, but flights remain halted in the north where Matthew continues to spin. Since Wednesday, airlines had canceled more than 4,500 flights nationwide. As the storm moves north, so do cancellations with Atlanta, Charleston and Savannah taking the largest hits.
Haiti: Matthew left a broad swath of destruction
Hundreds of people are dead in Haiti as a result of Matthew, with the death toll reaching as high as 800 people, Reuters reported. Matthew is the most powerful single hurricane on record to make landfall in Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas. At least four died in the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor on the island of Hispaniola.
More hurricane coverage:
• Matthew batters Florida coast
• 2.5 million expected to lose power
• Here's a look at storm surge happen
• Take these insurance precautions now
• Drudge takes heat for implying the hurricane is a government lie
• Death toll rises in Haiti
• A link to full coverage of Hurricane Matthew
Contributing: Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2e7B6OCby Ron Paul
The U.S. Preventive Task Force caused quite a stir recently when they revised their recommendations on the frequency and age for women to get mammograms. Many have speculated on the timing for this government-funded report, with the Senate vote on health care looming, and cost estimates being watched closely. Just the hint that the government would risk women’s health to cut costs is causing outrage on both sides of the aisle.
Even the administration is alarmed at its own panel’s recommendation. One official, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius told women to ignore the new guidelines, keep doing what they are doing and make the best decisions for themselves after consulting with their doctors.
This sounds like an excellent idea to me. As a physician myself, I understand the importance of ensuring that patients are able to consult their doctors and make their own decisions without interference from government bureaucrats or government-favored corporations.
However, I am confused by the administration’s reasoning and apparent change of heart. Have they reversed their position on healthcare reform and now decided that patients and doctors should be in control of individual healthcare decisions? Or are they still in the healthcare central planning business?
The healthcare reform plans currently aim to empower Congress to dictate to insurers minimal standards of coverage. Those government standards will ultimately be determined by politicians and bureaucrats, not individual patients and doctors.
It is naive to think that recommendations by an authoritative government panel will never be used to deny services to people that want them. It is sad to think that people will be forced to spend their hard-earned money for a one-size fits all, government mandated healthcare delivery model, but then have to scrape together additional funds to pay out of pocket for healthcare they really want or need – that is, if the government allows them to at all.
After all, the federal government currently forbids Medicare beneficiaries from spending their own money on services covered by Medicare, if for whatever reason they need to. Why wouldn’t the government eventually apply these kinds of restrictions to everyone, if they are successful with this takeover? Beware of the supposed gifts offered to you by government, for when it gives you things with one hand, the other hand takes away your liberty and independence.
It remains to be seen what provisions will be in the final bill. We do know we have no funds to pay for it except for debt and money printed out of thin air. We know that the nation’s creditors are getting very nervous about the government’s continuous spending sprees and bailouts. We know this healthcare bill, like all government programs, will be expensive.
There will be a day of reckoning when the credit stops and the bills for all this spending come due. When that day comes and politicians and bureaucrats have to deal with reality, it will be very uncomfortable to find yourself in their liability column, which is where healthcare reform will put many more Americans.Each Tuesday during Denver Broncos' season, our Broncos Insider Mike Klis will answer questions pulled from the Broncos Mailbag.
Do you have a question for Mike? Email [email protected].
So there’s those that now say we can’t afford Colin Kaepernick even if we could agree on trade value with the 49ers. Well how could we have afforded Brock Osweiler had he accepted Denver’s last offer? Can we really afford Kap per his current contract compared to what Brock would have been paid?
Matt McNeill
Matt—Since the Osweiler snub, the Broncos have re-signed running back C.J. Anderson on a deal that will pay him $6 million this year, and added right tackle Donald Stephenson for $6 million in 2016 pay and left tackle Russell Okung for $5 million. That’s $17 million. The Broncos offered $16.5 million a year to Osweiler.
As they sit here today, the Broncos rank 32nd in the 32-team league with less than $2 million in salary cap space.
So the Broncos cannot afford Kaepernick at his current 2016 rate of $14.3 million (which is comprised of an $11.9 million salary, a $2 million roster bonus and $400,000 workout bonus). To be clear, a trade for Kaepernick does not happen unless Kaepernick reduces his 2016 money.
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In fact, that’s the biggest hang-up to a potential deal. It’s such a hang-up the Broncos and 49ers have not even seriously exchanged trade proposals involving draft picks. For now, Kaepernick’s $11.9 million salary is guaranteed. It officially becomes guaranteed Friday but the 49ers won’t cut him because Kaepernick is not healthy. He has injury protection in his contract and recent surgeries on his left shoulder, left knee and right thumb. Ka-ching!
The Broncos need Kaepernick to think long term. He can either, one, collect $12.3 million this year but follow the lead of Robert Griffin III and sit out 16 games. The 49ers would probably sit Kaepernick rather than pay him the additional $2 million roster bonus that’s tied to the game-day roster. Or, Kaepernick can play 16 games at a reduced rate for the defending Super Bowl champs. With Kaepernick at the helm, the Broncos would be a top five favorite to win Super Bowl LI.
And then Kaepernick cashes in big in 2017. For now, Kaepernick wants out of San Francisco but does not want to take a pay cut. Eventually, he will realize he can’t have both.
If Broncos trade up in draft, how far up do they go and who do they like most?
Brett Weibel
Brett—The Broncos were picking No. 31 two years ago and tried to trade up to the No. 15-17 range to get linebacker C.J. Mosley. The asking price by those teams – Pittsburgh at No. 15, Dallas at No. 16 and Baltimore at No. 17 – was deemed too steep and the Broncos stayed put.
The Steelers took linebacker Ryan Shazier at No. 15; the Cowboys took guard Zack Martin at No. 16 and the Ravens selected Mosley at No. 17.
The Broncos took cornerback Bradley Roby at No. 31. Good choices all.
Because the Broncos have three compensatory draft picks in the bank, I can see them trying to get into the middle of the first round again. Not sure they can. They were able to move up five spots from No. 28 to No. 23 last year to nab pass-rusher Shane Ray.
With 30 teams picking in front of them – every other team but the #Deflategate-guilty New England Patriots – the Broncos are keeping their first-round wish list a closely-guarded secret.
If John Elway were asking for my opinion it would first, be a first. But since I’m not good at receiving permission before I suggest, I would say the Broncos most pressing need is to replace Malik Jackson. Wait a minute. Their most pressing need is replacing Peyton Manning and Brock Osweiler at quarterback but I’m thinking the Broncos get a deal done with Colin Kaepernick before the draft commences on April 28. Maybe hours before it begins.
I’m keeping the Kaepernick train rolling. But I’m slowing the Kaepernick train down.
There is no other available veteran who can replace Jackson, who emerged as one of the league’s top 3-4 defensive ends last year.
The top draft prospects for the Broncos’ system -- which means playing as much 3-technique as 5-technique -- are Oregon’s DeForest Buckner, Ole Miss’s Robert Nkemdiche, Florida’s Jonathan Bullard and Notre Dame’s Sheldon Day.
Would like your input on potentially trading WAY up in the draft. Denver puts a package that includes Ryan Clady, Demaryius Thomas, maybe Shaq Barrett and/or a handful of picks, and the 31st pick for Tennessee's #1 pick, and we select Carson Wentz to be the new quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Could it and would it ever happen?
Matthew Lach, Blood Orange
Matthew—I do hear the Broncos love Wentz. And they would have to catapult from last to first to get him because Cleveland figures to be taking the North Dakota State quarterback with the No. 2 overall pick.
At first glance, I thought I was going to quickly dismiss your question, Matthew, with a “no chance,” the cost to move up through the entire first round would be prohibitive. And that most likely is the correct answer.
But let’s make a case for this. Elway is a general manager who can’t be counted out from making an aggressive deal, but where he’s underrated is his ability to stay disciplined. He won’t overpay.
But if I may, this is not an ordinary situation the Broncos are in. Osweiler’s decision to bolt for Houston has left the Broncos in an unprecedented quandary. Here it is March 29 -- my Brother Bryan’s 50th birthday, thanks for asking – and the defending Super Bowl champions’ starting quarterback on Thursday, Sept. 8 may not be on their roster.
As for your proposal, Matthew, you need to drop Clady. The Broncos are trying to trade him for a song but they can’t because of the $19.5 million remaining on the final two years of his contract. Your proposal also pretty much reduces Demaryius Thomas to a throw-in.
Come on, people. I know D.T. had some drops but Wentz wouldn’t be nearly as effective without him. Barrett – an up-and-coming pass rusher who is inexpensive with a $525,000 salary in 2016 – and a handful of draft picks is more in line with the type of package it would require to pull off such a deal. And those handful of draft picks would likely include the Broncos’ first- and second-round draft picks this year and first-round pick in 2017.
Still, think Wentz is worth it? I don’t. Then again, we are talking about a quarterback. A potential franchise quarterback.
Any chance Broncos draft two QBs in draft? One w/in first 3 rounds and one in 7th? Ala Redskins RG3 and Cousins.
Miguel Montoya
Miguel—I don’t think so because, remember, the Broncos drafted Trevor Siemian in the seventh round last year. The Broncos like Siemian. As it’s lining up now, Mark Sanchez is the Broncos’ opening day quarterback but I can see Siemian starting a game or two in the second half of the season. I wouldn’t bet on it, yet, but it’s possible.
The Broncos will likely draft one quarterback. The round probably depends on whether they can acquire Kaepernick. If they don’t get him, they may take a quarterback in the first round. If they do get him, they probably wouldn’t take a quarterback until the later rounds, maybe not until the signing period of undrafted free agents.
The salary cap rules and regulations seem so complicated. How do the Broncos know how much money they truly have available until the Von Miller deal gets completed?
Kent Hollenback, Ventura, CA
Kent—The salary cap rules and formulas are complicated but it’s all written in the textbook that is the collective bargaining agreement. Mike Sullivan is the Broncos’ salary cap manager who understands the rules and formulas perhaps better than anyone since he was also a former player’s agent. He understands contracts from both sides of the bargaining table.
Each team maintains detailed reports of its salary cap amount available on a daily basis, so for the experts like Sullivan calculating the impact of any future transaction is not all that difficult.
Here’s another way to look at it: Say you make a $70,000 salary. Yet, you still live in a $200,000 home and, even though you can’t really afford it, you can’t resist that $30,000 car. Simple math says this doesn’t add up. But a beautiful thing about our country is you don’t have to understand how it works to live in it.
Hi Mike, this probably sounds crazy and Favrian, but if the Broncos don't get Kaepernick or Fitzpatrick, couldn't the argument be made that Peyton Manning would potentially be a better option at quarterback than anyone they currently have or anyone else available?
Gary Ukele
Gary—Sure, it can be argued Manning would be a better quarterback option than anybody else. But Manning is done. He truly did leave it all on the field. Left It All.
His quarterback brain is intact so he could still go out there and win a game or two. But it’s time to let another quarterback, whoever that may be, have a chance. Besides, during his retirement press conference on March 7, Manning made it clear he would not be Favrian.
Considering the success the Broncos have had with young guys coming off of mistakes that dropped them in the draft- Bradley Roby, Shane Ray -- does that put Dak Prescott as a very high possibility as the next QB in Denver?
Ashleigh Sharpe
Ashleigh—Prescott rushed for 986 yards as a junior at Mississippi State and threw 29 touchdowns against 5 interceptions as a senior. Most draftniks rank him as the fifth-best quarterback prospect in the draft.
Which puts him in play for the Broncos’ No. 31 pick in the first round or No. 63 in the second. He was cited for driving under the influence on March 12. It’s not unusual for teams picking late in the top rounds to overlook character concerns in exchange for talent because most of the “clean’’ talent is already snatched up. As you stated, Ashleigh, the Broncos in recent years have been exhibit A.
We should also note so far so good with Roby and Ray.
I love listening to your Bronco sports reporting. You and Drew are a great team, and I look to you getting our Bronco updates first!
However, I do have one small request. When you are talking about yourself and a Bronco player, I just cringe when you say “him and me.’’ It’s really easy to remember how to say it - you always put the other person before yourself, like “he and I” or “Drew and I.” Sorry, I was an English major and sometimes I just can’t help myself! Hope this little tip works for you
--Brice Davis, an avid channel 9 viewer.
Brice—I guess my wife is right. I do think of myself, first, others second. When I write, Brice, I’d like to think I’m good at putting the other person pronoun first; me, myself and I, second. But this talking stuff is a work in progress. From me to you, appreciate the tip.
Copyright 2016 KUSA0 9 Investigates: Orlando firefighters not informed about asbestos at worksite
ORLANDO, Fla. - Orlando firefighters said they were put in harm’s way by their own department by being forced to work in a building that was filled with asbestos.
Orange County said the department didn’t inform the firefighters that the abandoned apartment building on Mercy Drive had the cancer-causing substance.
The department had planned on burning the buildings for training.
The firefighters were ordered off the property when 9 Investigates started asking questions.
Federal law mandates that asbestos in a building be removed and disposed of by trained and licensed professionals, but the firefighters were doing the work without knowing of the asbestos.
“It's not just me. They've been out there working this for weeks, doing demo on the floors for weeks. It's not just me. Who knows how many other firefighters,” Orlando firefighter Anthony Donohoe said.
Orange County Environmental Protection officials launched an investigation into the incident.
“We were scraping, literally using scrapers, some of us were on our hands and knees scraping it,” Donohoe said. "I know you're supposed to wear like Tyvex suits, respirators (and) we didn't have any of that. We're out there in plain clothes."
His wife is worried about secondary exposure for the whole family.
“It’s everywhere, you know? Our baby is riding in his car. I was riding in his car. We’re all now exposed to asbestos,” said Donohoe’s wife, Andrea Donohoe.
A pre-demolition survey from a Tampa company made it clear that several buildings have asbestos in numerous areas.
“There's a chance that I will not come home one day, there is a chance. I understand that. But to bring it home to my family, to get in my car with all that asbestos dust. To get in my car and bring it home to my family, I just don't think it's right,” Anthony Donohoe said.
Orlando’s fire chief met with union officials behind closed doors at Station 1 to discuss the situation.
Channel 9 asked Chief Roderick Williams if he looked at the report from Tampa.
“Like I said, we are on a fact-finding missing right now. We are looking at all the facts and turning over every stone we can,” Williams said.
Union officials said they are concerned.
“We are looking into finding out if anybody was exposed to harmful things out there and right now, we are trying to get out in front of it,” said Wayne Bernoska.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.UPDATE: House of Cards will take the place of This Is Us on the Emmy ballot in the Outstanding Contemporary Costumes category after the time-hopping NBC drama had its nomination rescinded, EW has learned.
The additional nod, for costume designers Johanna Argan, Kemal Harris, Jessica Wenger, and Steffany Bernstein-Pratt, would up the Netflix series’ Emmy nomination count to seven categories. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences declined to confirm the news, which was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
EARLIER: This Is Us continued its freshman streak of greatness with 11 Emmy nominations, but now the hit NBC show is reducing that count to an even 10.
EW has confirmed that the time-hopping, nonlinear drama has had one of its 11 nominations rescinded after the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences determined it did not meet the requirements to be eligible for a nomination in the Outstanding Contemporary Costumes category, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. A sixth replacement nominee will be added to the category, in which HBO’s Big Little Lies, Fox’s Empire, Netflix’s Grace and Frankie and Amazon’s Transparent remain.
To be eligible for consideration in the category, a show must submit an episode where at least 51 percent of the action takes place within the past 25 years. Though there are some This Is Us episodes that meet this requirement, the NBC submitted, season 1 finale “Moonshadow,” does not. The episode, initially earning nods for the work of costume designers Hala Bahmet, Marina Ray and Elinor Bardach, takes place primarily in the 1970s in a series of lengthy flashbacks that highlight aspects of Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca’s (Mandy Moore) relationship.
Ron Batzdorff/NBC
“Having reviewed the Moonshadow episode of This Is Us, the Awards Committee noted that the entrant unfortunately miscalculated the proportion of scenes that were period versus contemporary. In fact, the episode is predominately period. The entry (and subsequent nomination) are thereby disqualified,” a Television Academy Spokesperson said in a statement to EW. “The sixth-place vote-getter — now the fifth nomination — will be identified by the accountants and will be revealed when the Televisions Academy’s final round viewing platform opens on Monday.”
Just last year, the Academy rescinded an Emmy nomination for Peter MacNicol after determining he had appeared in more than 50 percent of Veep’s episodes, disqualifying him for consideration in the guest actor in a comedy category. This paved the way for Peter Scolari to replace him in the nominations — and go on to win for his guest appearance on Girls.Berlin Group pranks Google ‘Street View’ vehicle with GPS tracker
Posted: 09 February 2010 09:41 AM Five Star Member Total Posts: 5155 Joined 2005-01-27 In a feat of electronic shenanigans, a group out of Germany called Free Art and Technology (FAT) placed a GPS tracking device onto a Google Signature
“By the sweat on our brows, and the strengths of our backs…Gentlemen. Hoist the Colours! And you, madam, I warn you, I know the entire Geneva Convention by heart!”
Trust me.
Profile
Posted: 09 February 2010 01:05 PM Senior Member Total Posts: 208 Joined 2009-12-31 Lol.
Clever. Signature Cryptids On Land Are Easier To Hunt Than Those In Sea And Air. Profile
Posted: 09 February 2010 01:11 PM Five Star Member Total Posts: 3807 Joined 2008-09-08 KingFluffs - 09 February 2010 06:05 PM Lol.
Clever. While it might be clever to do in theory, it’s incredibly rude to make offensive gestures at a camera that is merely updating a service used worldwide. If they had held up funny signs or made interesting poses, I might condone this, but as it stands I don’t. I don’t want to be looking at maps trying to find someplace I need to be and instead find some jerk’s bare rear |
7EtlWZ8m6m — DAOhub (@DAOhubORG) June 12, 2016
Lots of potential vulnerabilities for The DAO had been discussed and it was even suggested to place a moratorium on proposals. Meanwhile, its promoters confidently asserted everything was fine:
We are assuming that the base contract is secure. This assumption is justified due to the community verification and a private security audit.
Additionally, Slock.it's blog claimed that the generic DAO framework code had been audited by a leading security firm:
We're pleased to announce that one of the world's leading security audit companies, Deja Vu Security, has performed a security review of the generic DAO framework smart contracts.
On close inspection, the only report they linked in their blog was three pages long. It's unclear whether a rigorous formal audit had ever been conducted. After the attack, people started asking for the audit report and wondering why Slock.it hadn't shared it. The security firm, Deja Vu, even responded on Reddit.
Hi Everyone, Adam Cecchetti CEO of Deja vu Security here. For legal and professional reasons Deja vu Security does not discuss details of any customer interaction, engagement, or audit without written consent from said customer. Please contact representatives from Slock.it for additional details.
Whoever was in charge of auditing the code screwed up big-time. As former Ethereum release coordinator Vinay Gupta explained on YouTube, The DAO was an experiment that was never built to handle this much risk:
We all knew as we watched this happening that this was an emperor's clothes scenario... there was no way that that smart contract had undergone an appropriate amount of scrutiny for something that was a container for $160 million.
Sure, everyone involved should have stopped it from getting carried away. But what are the actual consequences when a decentralized extralegal robot corporation doesn't do what it's expected to? Is anyone really "in charge" of making sure it works? Is anyone on the hook if the whole thing goes down the tubes because of its creators' (or proposal authors') lack of due diligence?
For one thing, as Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh explains, DAOs are likely to run afoul of existing securities law – potentially implicating their developers, promoters and investors:
The Securities Act intentionally defines "promoter" broadly: "any person that, alone or together with others, directly or indirectly, takes initiative in founding the business or enterprise of the issuer." Given the breadth of this language, developers should carefully weigh the risks of being visibly associated with the release and sale of [DAO] tokens.
Individuals deemed to be promoters of a [DAO] may be found to be in violation of Section 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act. Under these sections it is unlawful to directly or indirectly offer to sell or buy unregistered securities, or to "carry" for sale or delivery after the sale an unregistered security or a prospectus detailing that security. Even if a [DAO] is deemed to be an unregistered security, it remains very unclear how promoting that [DAO] would or would not equate to these unlawful activities, and who—if anyone—would be found to have violated the law. Nonetheless, broad interpretation of these laws may potentially implicate any participant or visibly affiliated developer or advocate.
So DAO evangelists could soon be in hot water, regardless of any disclaimers they put up.
To the Securities and Exchange Commission's credit, they have thus far been relatively open to innovations like crowdfunding, as well as the potential for blockchain technology. As SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White recently said in an address at Stanford University:
Blockchain technology has the potential to modernize, simplify, or even potentially replace, current trading and clearing and settlement operations... We are closely monitoring the proliferation of this technology and already addressing it in certain contexts... One key regulatory issue is whether blockchain applications require registration under existing Commission regulatory regimes, such as those for transfer agents or clearing agencies. We are actively exploring these issues and their implications.
Beyond financial regulation, the broader legal treatment of DAOs is a murky subject. With applications running on Ethereum, it's not always clear what the point of enforcement is. You can't exactly sue a DAO in court and then seize its assets. And, while The DAO's creators were in the public eye, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case; it could be deployed anonymously.
Maybe the next DAOs should be anonymous. Avoids the blame game and force us to use tools to build trust despite not trusting the creators. — alex van de sande (@avsa) June 21, 2016
Even if DAOs are created without a formal legal status, governments may impose legal status on them. As business lawyer Stephen Palley writes at CoinDesk:
If you don't formalize a legal structure for a human-created entity, courts will impose one for you. As most lawyers will tell you: a general partnership, unless properly formalized or a deliberately created structure, is a Very Bad Thing... [T]he members of a general partnership can end up jointly and severally liable on a personal basis for partnership obligations.
For instance, I don't think this is how the law works:
@SamirPatelLaw @vidal007 @slockitproject Customer protection on blockchain is insured via smart contracts, not legal systems. Code is law. — Stephan Tual (@stephantual) March 21, 2016
Even if the SEC or other government entity decides to crack down on DAOs, it might be easier said than done. Because they operate on pseudonymous distributed computers, those parties may not be easy to track down (notably, we still don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is). Even if you did, they might not have any control over it or know what it was doing. Its code also may have been radically altered from its original programming/intent.
But as far as The DAO is concerned, are we in for a slew of lawsuits or calls for SEC action by disgruntled investors? Not so fast. Investors in The DAO may yet be able to recover their losses.
Various prominent stakeholders in the Ethereum community, from Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin to Slock.it's Christopher Jentzsch, have suggested that the only sensible solution is to create a "fork" of the Ethereum network that could freeze the attacker's stolen funds and shut down The DAO, with the option to create a “hard fork” to fully reverse the theft and return investors' funds. Some have criticized this approach as a “bailout” or “asserting centralized control.” But it's worth noting that it would require a plurality of miners to adopt it voluntarily; whether they will remains to be seen.
Either way, Ethereum's credibility may be adversely affected. On the one hand, people need to trust that smart-contracts do what they are supposed to — particularly where millions of dollars are on the line. On the other hand, the credibility of the platform is also tied to its immutability. If developers and miners collude to reverse transactions they don't like, that sets a bad precedent.
Additionally, if the community decides The DAO's investors need to take a haircut, it could open up a Pandora's box of legal troubles for its developers and promoters (and maybe even miners and investors), potentially stifling advancement of this important technology.
But wait a minute. Why didn't the attacker see the this coming? Surely if he was sufficiently sophisticated to find a "recursive call" bug, he would have known that split funds would be locked away for 27 days — giving the community time to get wise to his activities and find a solution like the fork.
As previously mentioned, The DAO theft also crashed ETH prices. Savvy readers will note that a DAO vulnerability doesn't mean the Ethereum platform itself was compromised (any more than a nasty bug in Photoshop means that everyone with Windows 10 is at risk).
Was it possible this whole event was a ruse to pull off a "big short", as one user suggests on Reddit? As of now, there's no proof of that, but it's an interesting theory.
But was this even a theft at all? As Slock.it's representative said, "code is law!" If the code doesn't do what you think it does — that's your fault. At least, that's the theory behind an anonymous letter uploaded to Pastebin and purportedly authored by The DAO's attacker:
I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this reward. It is my understanding that the DAO code contains this feature to promote decentralization and encourage the creation of "child DAOs".
I am disappointed by those who are characterizing the use of this intentional feature as "theft". I am making use of this explicitly coded feature as per the smart contract terms and my law firm has advised me that my action is fully compliant with United States criminal and tort law.
Adding that:
I reserve all rights to take any and all legal action against any accomplices of illegitimate theft, freezing, or seizure of my legitimate ether, and am actively working with my law firm. Those accomplices will be receiving Cease and Desist notices in the mail shortly.
If the fork moves forward to freeze or seize the attacker's digital assets, could that open up the broader Ethereum community and its miners to legal liability? We'll have to wait and see what happens.
Regardless how The DAO "theft" is resolved, regulators shouldn't be in a rush to impose stricter regulations on Ethereum, which is just a platform, or DAOs in general or even The DAO specifically, should it be reincarnated with better security practices.
While The DAO attack raises serious questions about the viability of creating this "DAO 2.0", that doesn't mean we should stop it from happening. Whether or not you believe all the hype about Ethereum being as important as the invention of the internet, it's an exciting technology that's worth giving the opportunity to grow.
Unlike Bitcoin, which has been around for eight years, Ethereum is only a year old. It officially launched in July 2015, but is already the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. It's vastly more complex than Bitcoin and still in its infancy; it will have inevitable growing pains on the way to maturity.
Just as the internet wasn't built in a day, neither will smart-contract technology come to fruition without a permissive regulatory environment to grow, much like the Clinton administration's Framework for Global Electronic Commerce did for the internet.
Certainly, vetting DAO code (particularly new proposals) is a big problem. More fundamentally, smart-contract security is an emerging area where people are rightly starting to pivot, following the lessons of The DAO attack. As Ethereum developer Peter Borah writes:
In his response to the bug, Slock's COO expressed shock, referring to it as "unthinkable", and pointing to the "thousands of pairs of eyes" that somehow missed this. It's certainly hard to blame anyone for being shaken by the sudden disappearance of tens of millions of dollars. However, this natural reaction hides the simple truth that anyone who has dabbled in programming knows: bugs in programs are far from unthinkable — they are inevitable.
Making code open-source is not enough. We need mechanisms to create smarter (i.e., fault-tolerant) smart contracts. This could mean more rigorous independent testing, strategies to implement better development practices or, at least, more time to develop through trial-and-error in a lower-risk context. Stakeholder interests also must be aligned to make sure appropriate vetting happens, particularly where voting on code alterations is involved and particularly if we want to develop more complex autonomous programs.
The DAO is an instance of people getting carried away with an exciting new technology, while not effectively managing the new cybersecurity risks that come with it. But just because a group of people screwed up The DAO, it doesn't mean all DAOs are DOA.
While there's an overabundance of utopian thinking in this space, blockchain-based experiments in decentralized governance and peer-to-peer commerce could have immense benefits that offer truly revolutionary potential. Regulators should continue to take a wait-and-see approach and not use this as an invitation to try to shut them down or impose harsh new regulations.
Filed Under: bitcoin, blockchain, contracts, dao, distributed organizations, errors, ethereum, smart contracts, the dao, thedao
Companies: ethereum, the daoGroupon Discount Tips
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Inside, the building is cutting-edge high-tech. These military officers, lawyers and cyber techies are part of NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, carrying out research, training and exercises. One of their biggest challenges: When it comes to cyber -- so far -- there is no agreed-upon international law of war.
"The international community is extraordinarily interested in this," said Michael N. Schmitt, chairman of the US Naval War College's international law department. "They're struggling with questions like, when the Russians hack into the DNC database and then release it, is that a violation of international law? What doors does that open with respect to our responses?"
Three years ago, Schmitt and his team at the NATO Cyber Centre wrote the book -- literally -- on international law and the use of cyber in warfare, the "Tallinn Manual." Applying principles of the international law of war, they provided answers to questions like: "In war, how can you use cyber and how can you not use it? If you operate against civilians, is that prohibited?"
They're now completing the "Tallinn Manual 2.0," examining how international law applies to cyber attacks that don't cross the line into armed conflict by one state against another or by a terrorist group that kills civilians -- what's called "below the threshold" operations.
The DNC hacks and the release of emails are "below the threshold" operations and, although Russia denies it did the hacking, the US government has been extraordinarily clear in accusing Moscow, citing 17 US government agencies that have concluded Russia was behind it.
"This, in my opinion, has reached a specific threshold in the audacity and impact of the attack," said the Cyber Defence Centre's Strategy Branch Chief Matthijs Veenendaal, a Dutch citizen. "This is still very much an attack on civilian infrastructure and government infrastructures and not an armed attack."
If that's the case, did Russia violate international law?
Schmitt has no doubt. "In my mind, it is crystal clear that the Russians have violated international law in this particular case."
But here is where it gets less clear: Schmitt and other experts say Russia and cyber-savvy countries like China are "playing the margins."
"They're operating within the space where there is some degree of uncertainty," he explained. If Russia had destroyed America's cyber infrastructure, that would be a use of force and hence a violation. If Russia is simply engaging in low-level espionage, that's a violation of domestic US law, but probably not a violation of international law.
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Schmitt, however, called the DNC hack a "prohibited intervention into the internal affairs of the United States," affairs that include running elections, and that means it is a violation of international law.
It may also be a violation of US sovereignty, he said. If Russia is simply "exfiltrating" data, or stealing it but not doing anything with it, that's not a violation, but if there is proof it is using data and manipulating election results, that would be a violation.
As Schmitt sees it, the DNC hacks are not a game-changer, but a major disruption of the US economy would be. "My personal view is that would constitute moving over the threshold and allow us to take off the gloves."
"But," he added, "that view is not universally held."
Vice President Joe Biden has indicated the US will retaliate against the hack of the DNC and other Democratic Party entities, warning that the administration will be "sending a message" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, he said, "will know it, and it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that have the greatest impact."
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But under international law, does President Barack Obama have the legal right to retaliate?
Schmitt of the Naval War College maintains that Obama "unambiguously" does have the right to respond, but Schmitt would not use the term "retaliate."
"In international law, we don't do tit for tat," he said. "What we may do is engage in what is called -- and this is a legal term -- 'counter measures.' "
Counter-measures are operations that would otherwise be unlawful but can be used if the purpose is to stop another state from violating the law.
So the US could hack back against the Russians? The answer is yes, Schmitt said, as long as Washington reasonably believes Moscow is going to continue to hack it.
Counter-measures don't have to be cyber-related. The US, for example, could prevent Russian ships from transiting its territorial waters until Russia stops its cyber breaches.
The response, however, must be "proportionate." Shutting down a Russian electric grid would only be permissible if it didn't cause more harm to Russia than its hacking caused the US -- a tricky thing to measure.
As the US considers itself a law-abiding country, it most often tries to follow accepted international law of war principles. It could, however, ignore those internationally accepted principles or interpret them in its favor.
"I know some in America have called for that (retaliation), and I can see where the urge comes from, because you want Russia to stop it," said the Cyber Defence Centre's Veenendaal, but going on a path of escalation with the Russians is a "recipe for disaster."
"Responding to an escalation with your own escalation will lead to further escalation, which -- in cyber space -- is extremely hard to contain and monitor, especially for Western democracies," he warned.
The cyber world presents unique challenges, like the ability for actors to maintain "plausible deniability," which makes it devilishly hard to define who is behind an attack.
"You can always just plausibly state that this was just a 19-year-old hacker working in someone's basement in Belarus," said Kadri Kaska, an Estonian researcher at the NATO center.
Pointing the finger at the perpetrators -- "attribution" -- also is not that simple. If an intelligence agency says it knows who did it, it could be challenged to reveal sources and methods of how it collects intelligence data.
"Probably in the (US) National Security Agency there are a lot of discussions ongoing, like, 'How far should we go in publicly attributing these attacks to these guys in St. Petersburg? We know who their girlfriends are, we know who they talk to. We're deep in their systems, we're deep in any Russian system you can think of. And we want to stay there,' " according to Veenendaal.
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The US has responded to hacks by China by "naming and shaming" specific officials in the Chinese military whom it holds responsible for attacks, then entering discussions with Beijing to deter further economic espionage.
"But against the Russians," he said, "no, we haven't been effective."
Veenendaal and other cyber experts say the Chinese, in an effort not to jeopardize their economic relations with the US, have quietly pulled back some of their hacking. With Russia, however, there is little economic incentive.
In July, NATO included cyber as a domain of its military operations, along with land, sea, air and space. That means if there is an armed attack through cyberspace, NATO members can call on their allies for collective defense.
But intrusions, like the DNC hacks, that fall short of armed attacks still lie in a gray zone, exploited by nations clever enough not to cross the line that would trigger an armed response. They are the cyber equivalent of the "little green men" that Russia used in Crimea: Russian armed forces without insignia whose existence Putin, at first, denied.
The West, so far, has no common strategy to deter "little green hackers." The DNC hacks may be their first major operation against the US, but they almost surely won't be their last.We'll admit we've gotten a bit caught up in the buzz for Tom Clancy's The Division since its stellar premiere trailer at E3 2013, so much so that we put the game on our most anticipated games of 2016 list. After I played a few hours of the closed beta for the game on Xbox One yesterday, my anticipation isn't gone, but it has been dulled quite a bit.
That's not to say there weren't things I liked. The beta shows off the same kind of detailed environmental design as those initial trailers, rendering a disease-ruined and fallen world where hauntingly beautiful signs of decaying civilization are everywhere you look. I also like the game's augmented-reality style interface, which overlays paths and information neatly over the "real world," including map projections that make it easy to figure out where you are and which way to go. The mix of high-end, near-future technology and crumbling urban infrastructure is certainly visually striking.
The online party integration also seems pretty solid so far. While you can see a whole server full of players running around and buying items in central "safe zones," individual missions are split off into smaller team-based instances. It's relatively easy to join up with friends or strangers to take on those missions in small groups and coordinate your goals on a shared map. The only quibble is that voice communication seems to be the only reliable way to communicate; there are no in-game tools to quickly highlight nearby points of interest or send quick commands and information to your team (if there are, I didn't find them).
Past those surface niceties, though, the gameplay on offer in The Division beta is uninspiring to say the least. The shooting action seems to draw direct inspiration from the Gears of War series, particularly in the way you can snap behind cover and move between safe points with the press of a button. That's a fine idea in theory. In execution, though, the controls are quite a bit clunkier than Epic's high-octane shooters.
Where the Gears of War games thrive on smooth animations and transitions that keep the action fluid and fast-moving, in The Division beta I found the protagonist moved much more clunkily. Stepping out of cover, climbing onto a high surface, and rolling out of the way of bullets all felt slow and awkward, with animations that focused too long on the hero just standing there without much purpose. Even something as simple as sprinting down an empty street felt awkward since even the slightest sidestep to the left or right seems to break the sprint.
The controls are only a minor quibble, though, compared to the enemy AI on display in the beta. In just a few hours of play, I ran out of fingers and toes to count the number of bat wielding enemies who simply ran straight at me at full speed, seemingly eager to be gunned down. Armed enemies were obviously more common, but they'd often pause while dodging between pieces of cover to stand in the open and shoot back at me, relatively defenseless.
One particularly stupid "boss" encounter, at the end of a side-mission line, saw the antagonist simply bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball across the edge of a nearby roof, putting herself in the open with predictable frequency you could set your watch to. Sure, these are supposed to be the earliest and easiest missions in the game, and encounters may get more difficult as you go. But it's not a strong start.
Even a couple of hours in, the shooting action is already starting to feel incredibly repetitive. Every single mission so far has boiled down to "go to this point, clear the area of waves of enemies, then move on to another point," with none of the twists or high-action set pieces that keep better shooters interesting. There has been precious little variety in the enemies, almost all of which seem to be thug-like, scowling black men in ratty hoodies who are given precious little motivation by some forgettable, overly expository story scenes and voiceovers. A few "named" enemies are supposed to stand out for their intelligence and toughness, but in practice they just end up being sponges that absorb more bullets before going down.
The game's RPG-like leveling and abilities structure hasn't impressed me yet either. You can scrounge downed enemies for items, weaponry, accessories, and armor, and even use scrap materials to build up a central base. So far, though, all these features feel very transactional and perfunctory, with little of the personality that makes customization fun in shooters like Fallout or even Borderlands.
The special abilities on offer in the beta so far are kind of boring, too. There's a reusable sticky explosive that's pretty easy to shoot with pinpoint accuracy, but its detonation barely fazes even normal grunt enemies. A riot shield ability is nice for moving between cover, but it limits you to a pistol when hiding behind it and was awkward to put away in the middle of a firefight. The abilities that send out radar pings to highlight nearby enemies and heal nearby party members are at least useful, if not especially novel. The menu system hints at a bevy of additional abilities, talents, perks, and upgrades that are unlockable as you play, but none of them are available in the beta.
Those locked bits of content and the hints of a much larger world outside the city's downtown hub give me hope that The Division can grow a bit more interesting outside of this short, limited beta test. After almost three years of anticipation, though, I'm quite a bit less excited about the game's upcoming March 8 release.Last week, following a
with members of the media, the
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, meaning "Ask Me Anything." The online conversation featured a large number of questions about marijuana -- so many that the department has scheduled another Reddit AMA for 1 p.m. Monday, August 26, to deal exclusively with that topic. DPD chief of staff Lieutenant Matt Murray, who led the first session, will take part again -- but this time, he's found a ringer.
"I'm not an expert," Murray says. "So to make sure people get good, solid answers to their questions, I'm bringing an expert: Sergeant Andrew Howard, who's been running our marijuana team for years and years."
Murray felt the department's first AMA was a positive experience. In his words, "we really liked it. We thought it was a good exchange; we liked the forum and the ability to be casual when answering. I think people were surprised we weren't just giving canned answers. Some of them weren't so polite, but for the most part, the other people moderated the room, so I didn't even have to.
"It was exactly an hour, and it actually takes a lot more energy than people think," he adds. "I just went straight down the list and answered as quickly as I could."
Was Murray caught off-guard by so many questions about pot?
"I wouldn't say I was surprised," he replies. "We know that's a hot topic, and not just in Colorado. There are people all over the country interested in what's going on here and what the rules are. And because of the number, we thought it was important to make a session just on that topic."
As before, Murray promises that he and Howard "won't duck any serious questions," and as evidence, he didn't balk at a left-field one of ours -- about the Seattle Police Department handing out Doritos affixed with a driving-safety sticker at a recent hemp festival. Did this strike Murray as inappropriate -- not in keeping with the serious tone the Denver Police usually strikes when it comes to pot?
"No, not at all," Murray responds. "I think it's a clever idea. There's this longstanding perception that the police are anti-this or anti-that. But really what we are is pro-law. Change the law and we'll change the way we react.
"We're not anti-marijuana," he emphasizes. "But the flip side of that is, there are still a lot of regulations and laws around the use of marijuana, and it's our duty to enforce the law.... People believe that just because they read a couple of sentences in a law, they know what it is -- but a law isn't settled just because you think it is. Look at the Second Amendment: Both sides can say, 'This clearly means this.' There's a lot of nuance and interpretation."
Again, the Reddit AMA is slated for Monday, August 26, at 1 p.m. For more information, follow the Denver Police Twitter account.
More from our Tech archive: "Reddit AMA with the Denver Police: SWAT, LoDo let-out and more."The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the Senate’s Tuesday vote to kill the agency’s key climate change rule means she and the Obama administration need to do a better job explaining their vision for the energy sector and their goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from it.
At a Bloomberg Politics event Wednesday morning, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy Regina (Gina) McCarthyOvernight Energy: Joshua Tree National Park lost M in fees due to shutdown | Dem senator, AGs back case against oil giants | Trump officials secretly shipped plutonium to Nevada Overnight Energy: Ethics panel clears Grijalva over settlement with staffer | DC aims to run on 100 percent clean energy by 2032 | Judges skeptical of challenge to Obama smog rule Judges skeptical of case against Obama smog rule MORE acknowledged that many lawmakers are skittish about the long-term impact of the Clean Power Plan, after senators voted 52-46 to undo it.
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“The Senate vote yesterday is certainly something I’m going to pay attention to. Nothing Congress does is meaningless,” she said.
“We have to continue to do a better job of explaining to them that everything EPA is doing with this rule and everything else is protecting their kids’ future.”
McCarthy said the agency is going to push forward with its climate change work between now and the end of Obama’s presidency, a regulatory agenda that touches on everything from the power sector to emissions from cars.
“We want to continue to show that actions work, that they do not destroy the economy, that they work and we just have to focus on the science,” McCarthy said of debates over climate change science in Congress.
The Clean Power Plan, a rule designed to slash carbon emissions from the power sector 32 percent by 2030, has drawn scorn from Republicans and some Democrats, who worry about its impact on energy prices, grid reliability and jobs in the coal sector, which stands to be hit particularly hard by the rule.
Senators approved a resolution to block the rule on Tuesday, and a House committee is expected to clear its own on Wednesday. Obama has promised to veto any legislation blocking the rule, the cornerstone of his climate change agenda.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito Shelley Wellons Moore CapitoDems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants GOP senator: Border deal is 'a very good compromise' Push to include contractor back pay in funding deal hits GOP roadblock MORE (R) led the charge against the Clean Power Plan in the Senate. Both hail from states whose coal sectors have suffered under declining demand and have warned about the further impact of the EPA’s rulemaking.
McCarthy acknowledged that a transition to clean energy — like the one envisaged in the Clean Power Plan — will end up hurting coal-producing communities around the United States, and she said lawmakers should look to craft policies to help the economies in those areas.
But that doesn’t mean moving away from cleaner energy sources.
“Denying a transition that is already happening and denying climate change is not going to help those communities,” she said.U.S. health officials said on Monday a second case of MERS, a deadly virus first discovered in the Middle East in 2012, has been found in the state of Florida.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the presence of the virus, known formally as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, with health officials from Florida.
The CDC said in a statement it was the second "imported" instance of MERS, meaning a traveler contracted the virus in another country and brought it to U.S. shores. The first such imported case involved a man who flew from Saudi Arabia and traveled to Indiana earlier this month.
The patient in that case, a U.S. healthcare worker who lives and works in Saudi Arabia, flew from Riyadh to London and then Chicago, before boarding a bus to Highland, Indiana. He then began experiencing symptoms of fever, shortness of breath, and sought care at Community Hospital in Munster, Indiana.
After confirming the patient had MERS, the CDC and state and hospital officials traced all of the workers with whom he had contact, and all have so far tested negative for the virus.
The CDC has also checked airline and bus manifests to see if the man might have infected others during his journey and so far have not turned up any evidence that fellow travelers were infected.
The patient is now clear of the virus and was released on Friday. Hospital workers remain in home isolation until the end of a 14-day incubation period, when they will be rechecked for the virus.
Although the MERS virus has been shown to transmit from person to person and to healthcare workers, it is not easily transmissible to the general public.
Saudi officials said on Friday that the number of infections in the country has reached 473. The death toll from the virus is 133 since it was identified two years ago, according to the kingdom's health ministry.
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James Cridland Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 25, 2016
This isn’t my first Chromebook (I use a fanless 4GB Toshiba Chromebook 2, my partner uses a |
of some proponents toward modest restrictions.The DGA’s Women’s Steering Committee aims to expose gender inequality at 35th anniversary event
Women today make up more than half of the U.S. population but direct only 14 percent of episodic TV productions and a mere 9 percent of movies (made under a DGA contract).
On Saturday night, a group of pioneering women directors spoke out before a full house in the 600-seat DGA theater about taking a hammer to Hollywood’s glass ceiling. The answer, they said, is for female directors to continue to break barriers and bust stereotypes to achieve equality in Hollywood.
During its 35th anniversary celebration at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, the Women’s Steering Committee put out a renewed call to action to develop strategies that would propel women directors to greater access and visibility in the industry.
Read more: Female Ghostbusters? Why Studios Want More Women-Led Blockbusters
The WSC honored its founding members: Lynne Littman (Number Our Days), Susan Bay (The Big Mouth), Nell Cox (M*A*S*H), Victoria Hochberg (Touched By an Angel), Joelle Dobrow (Noticiero Estudiantil) and Dolores Ferraro (The Ellen Burstyn Show).
Last week, the DGA released its diversity report for the 2013-14 season. The reports show that out of the total 776 directors who directed episodic television made under a DGA agreement, only 17 percent were female.
Since its inception in 1979, the DGA’s Women’s Steering Committee has exposed the limited opportunities offered to female filmmakers. They presented the statistics of their research the following year to the DGA's national board. Michael Franklin, then DGA National Executive Secretary, launched a concerted effort under the direction of the national board to get studios and TV production companies to consider women of the DGA for greater employment opportunities.
In 1983, the DGA filed a class-action lawsuit against Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures on behalf of underemployed women directors. Although the lawsuit was dropped on a technicality, the WSC’s efforts have changed the landscape of the film industry for women.
In 1980, the WSC found that women directors accounted for only 0.05 percent of total days worked by DGA members between 1949 and 1979. By 1995, women directors accounted for 16 percent.
Read more: National Organization for Women Calls for NFL Commissioner to Resign In Wake of Ray Rice Video
Today, the numbers reflect an unfavorable reversal in a time of supposed progress and change.
“Here we are, inside our own privileged bubble, award-winning members of this community, victims of a very different sort of brutality,” said Littman. “We women have literally been disappeared from the profession because of our gender.”
“Racism, sexism, and ageism remain the three big prickling diseases of this profession,” added Littman. “These days, almost no one I love is working.”
“After 50, even male directors are treated like women,” Littman joked to a receptive crowd.
The WSC also paid tribute to pioneering women directors Patty Jenkins (HBO’s Entourage), Mimi Leder (HBO’s Shameless) and Betty Thomas (Howard Stern’s Private Parts).
Despite awards, all three women admitted to difficulties finding work in the industry.
Jenkins has written and directed feature films, commercials and television programs, including Fox’s cult hit Arrested Development. Her film Monster won Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2004.
One of television’s most accomplished producers-directors, Leder directed DreamWorks’ first theatrical release, The Peacemaker, followed by Deep Impact, Pay it Forward and The Code.
In a conversation moderated by film director and former DGA President Martha Coolidge, Leder spoke about an eight-year hiatus she took after one of her movies flopped. “If you’re a woman,” said Leder, “and your movie flops, you go to ‘jail.’”
Actor-director Thomas directed The Brady Bunch Movie, Private Parts and Dr. Dolittle, among others. She is also first vp of the DGA and co-chair of the Diversity Task Force. “When I am not working, I find myself myself deeply involved with the DGA."
It remains an obstacle to spell out a formula that will ultimately end discrimination toward women in the entertainment industry. The DGA says it will continue to take concrete action until statistical progress reflects gender equality among male and female directors.
Director and founding WSC member Nell Cox asked: “What does it mean when a culture marginalizes and objectifies girls and women in its most potent and compelling media form? Does it matter that one half of the population sees only a distorted image of itself on screen, and what purpose does this distorted picture serve?”
CORRECTION Sept. 22, 11 a.m. pst - The percentage of women who direct movies was incorrectly stated in an earlier version. as was the year the committee was formed.Getting information on the intelligence spending habits of the United States has been virtually impossible over the years, with only a single dollar figure of all spending everywhere released publicly, usually in the $70-$75 billion range.
But there are 16 distinct civilian spy agencies in the United States, and then there’s military intelligence spending on top of that. Yet when Congress gets the bill and is asked to approve the spending, it just gets the one number lumping everything together.
In fact, the only look they’ve ever really gotten at how that money is divvied up is a leak from Edward Snowden, which showed a handful of the top-line figures for individual agencies. Many in Congress say that’s not good enough.
A group in the House of Representatives led by Reps. Peter Welch (D – VT) and Cynthia Lummis (R – WY) are pushing a new bill that would require individual dollar values for each of the 16 civilian spy agencies. The White House has yet to comment on the matter, but the fact that they have refused to provide such data when asked suggests they’ll also be opposed to being forced to hand it over.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz(Adds Palestinian official’s comment)
By Dan Williams
TEL AVIV, May 15 (Reuters) - Israel said on Tuesday it had set up a mechanism to get aid to the Palestinians in the event of a major earthquake.
A 5.5-magnitude quake rattled Israel and the occupied West Bank on Friday, reminding residents of their vulnerability to the Syria-African Rift, a northern extension of Africa’s Rift Valley.
“The working assumption is that they (Palestinians) do not have the means to deal with such a disaster on their own,” said Alon Rozen, director-general of Israel’s Civil Defence Ministry.
Given Israel’s control of the West Bank, it would, in the event of a major quake, host a United Nations aid distribution centre to receive relief from abroad for Israelis and Palestinians.
The last big quake in the region in 1927 killed hundreds of people. Such events tend to recur every 80 or 90 years.
Rozen said Israel decided last year to devote new attention to earthquake preparedness. “The aspect of international aid for the Palestinians was something we had not dealt with. Last September, we realised this was a shortfall.”
A U.N. official confirmed there was coordination with Israel, but the Palestinians said they had yet to be consulted.
“We asked the United Nations years ago to create safe corridors for receiving foreign aid in case of catastrophes,” Major-General Ahmed Rezek, head of the Palestinian civil emergency services, said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
A senior Israeli military officer said his forces were on standby to provide relief to Jewish settlers in the West Bank but not to the much bigger Palestinian population.
“Were they to request help, I’m sure we would be happy to provide it,” said the officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The U.N. official, who asked not to be named, said a Palestinian request for Israeli assistance in the West Bank would be standard procedure under such circumstances.
More challenging would be the Gaza Strip, another Palestinian territory whose Islamist Hamas administration is hostile to the Jewish state.
Israel, which keeps the enclave under naval blockade while allowing some commercial traffic across its land border, has held preliminary internal discussions on how to deliver emergency assistance, Rozen said.
Talks on founding an independent Palestinian state are deadlocked.The shuttle program is dead and the Cold War is over, but according to President Obama, we're on the cusp of another Space Race.
That’s the message the president sent this week, during his State of the Union address. Speaking before members of Congress just weeks after being inaugurated for a second term, the president cautioned lawmakers against cutting funding for federally-backed R&D initiatives, while urging them to bring American R&D back to levels "not seen since the height of the Space Race."
For Obama, it was a return to a well-worn analogy. The president made a virtually identical, if more pointed appeal in 2009, when he called for domestic R&D spending to surpass the levels of the 1960s. At the time, he outlined plans for R&D spending (both public and private) to reach 3 percent of American GDP — slightly higher than the 2.9 percent it comprised at the height of the Space Race in 1964.
Is this our next Sputnik moment?
Surpassing the Space Race threshold may have seemed like a bold objective on paper, but reaching that 3 percent target actually isn't so far-fetched a proposition. According to a 2012 report from the National Sciences Foundation, non-defense R&D spending accounted for 2.3 percent of GDP in 2009. Current estimates show that US spending, while rising, remains under 3 percent, but this trend belies a growing discrepancy between government and industry expenditures.
While private and public sector spending has remained relatively stable in recent years, government spending has drastically declined over the last five decades. At its zenith of the mid-1960s, R&D expenditures comprised around 25 percent of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure hovers around 10 percent, as it has for the last decade.
Much of this decline can be attributed to the federal government’s shifting priorities and ballooning obligations, as more money has ended up in programs like defense and medical programs, and as lawmakers have faced increasing pressure to keep taxes at historically low rates. It’s also the result of a more decentralized bureaucracy.
During the 1960s, federal R&D spending was devoted to a single juggernaut (NASA) with a clear and measurable goal (the moon). The Rover Curiosity mission to Mars rekindled some of that drive last year, but with NASA’s budget now on the decline, the US has no centralized mechanism for funding innovation. Instead, government funds trickle down to a broad range of federal agencies, nearly all of which have their own R&D budgets. As a result, Obama, like his predecessors, has had no choice but to pursue a holistic, piecemeal approach that pools both public and private efforts across a wide range of industries.
A drastically altered landscape
Although the private sector now comprises the majority of all American R&D spending, government-backed initiatives launched through organizations like the National Science Foundation, coupled with federal loans to forward-looking companies like Tesla and the NASA-backed SpaceX, have helped spur economic growth in nascent industries. In the past, they've resulted in new technologies that can spawn entirely new industries, as well as high returns on investment. According to a study from Battelle, a nonprofit research organization, for every dollar the US government spent on the Human Genome Project, it saw $140 return to the economy.
The administration's budget request for the 2013 fiscal year allocates $140.8 billion for overall R&D, marking a five percent increase from 2012. It also reiterates Obama’s previously stated commitment to doubling the budgets of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories, while expanding the government’s R&D tax credit.
'Let's extend R&D tax credits' doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as 'Let's put a man on the moon'
Of course, "let's extend R&D tax credits" doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as "Let's put a man on the moon," and the president could use public support to get his budget passed. In an effort to garner that support, Obama and others have used Space Race language to build enthusiasm for more R&D funding. In the 1960s, American innovation was driven by a competitive desire to beat the USSR. Today, innovation advocates are trying to apply the same logic to emerging economic powers like China.
"As a share of GDP, our public and private sector investments combined remain below 3 percent, while nations like Japan and South Korea are nearing 3.5 percent and look to continue to rise," says Sean Pool, a science innovation policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. "And even China, though its combined public and private investment level is low at 1.5 percent, is on a steep path that could meet or surpass that of the US in short order."
But the tougher sell for Obama may be to Congress, rather than the public. In his first term, Obama faced strong criticism from Republicans over the bankruptcy of Solyndra — a solar panel manufacturer that had received more than $500 million in federal loans. The event quickly escalated into a national controversy, with Republicans accusing the White House of recklessly pushing the loan through for political purposes. It has since become a central part of the GOP’s argument against government overreach, and one that has arisen whenever the White House pursues federally-backed private sector initiatives.
Obama will also have to contend with a Congress still fiercely divided over fiscal negotiations and facing the threat of automatically triggered budget cuts. During the 1990s, then-President Bill Clinton managed to double the budget of the NIH, even under a GOP-controlled Congress. If Obama succeeds in doubling funding for the three agencies identified in his proposal, it would be roughly equivalent to the boost the NIH received two decades ago.
There has been general bipartisan agreement when it comes to funding large institutional research organizations such as the NSF, but to push his full proposal through Congress, Obama will have to strike a careful balance between government support and perceived overreach. Swaying too far to the federal side will draw Republican opposition, while drifting in the other direction could jeopardize R&D funding at a time when domestic job growth remains sluggish.
Such a calculated approach may not be as sexy as a moonshot, and it probably doesn’t warrant a Space Race metaphor, but it’s undoubtedly more appropriate for today’s Apollo-less political landscape — and it may be the only way for Obama's agenda to see liftoff.
T.C. Sottek contributed to this report.At the start of Robert Icke’s wonderful production of Mary Stuart – transferring soon from the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London, to the West End – a coin is spun onstage to determine which parts the two leading actresses will play. It is a quirk of fate each night that decides whether Juliet Stevenson or Lia Williams will take the role of Elizabeth I or Mary, Queen of Scots. The idea is that, though one lives in a palace and the other in a cell, the characters are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. Both are trapped by public expectations and the narrowness of their roles. As the play has the monarch say: “The crown is just a prison cell with jewels.” Yet it soon becomes clear which one has power. The moment the coin lands, all the other actors turn and bow towards Elizabeth, while Mary shrinks away into a corner. It is a vivid reminder that leadership may be won, but authority is bestowed.
Nobody understands that better than the Conservatives, who meet for their party conference in Manchester between 1 and 4 October. Theresa May – trapped in the gilded jail of Downing Street – has lost all authority and those around her know it. Though it was not quite a toss of a coin that led to her becoming Tory leader, she rose to the top of her party after an extraordinary sequence of events in which her rivals imploded in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum.
Rather than taking advantage of her position, she squandered her parliamentary majority and sacrificed her credibility by fighting a dire campaign ahead of a general election that she didn’t need to call. Now power has almost visibly drained from her. Held to ransom by the Democratic Unionist Party, too weak to reshuffle and unable even to implement her manifesto, she has lost control of her cabinet ministers and no longer commands the respect of her MPs.
The enforced show of unity on Europe ahead of the Florence speech on 22 September was a phoney display that did not even survive the weekend. “Poor old Theresa,” says one senior MP. “She’s in office but not in power. What’s the point of being Prime Minister if you’re just chained to the radiator in No 10?” A former Downing Street aide admits: “I’m not sure she really knows what she thinks or wants to do with power.”
Though May insists that she intends to go on and on, no Conservative MP seriously expects her to lead her party into the next election. The political power dynamic has been reversed. Normally MPs’ careers depend on their leader, but now her future is completely in their hands. One former cabinet minister told me recently that she was on “life support”, and the only question was when the party would pull the plug. “The first time she’s in trouble again, people will firm up against her. And the second time, they will get rid of her,” he said. “She’s two crises away from being ditched.”
Instead of bending the knee to the monarch, the actors on the Tory stage are turning their backs on their leader and performing to the audience. The party conference in Manchester will be one big talent contest in which cabinet ministers hope to catch the eye of the party activists who will elect the next Conservative leader. In an echo of the Oscars ceremony, every address will be a passionate and patriotic declaration of love for the crowd. Those who are not granted a slot to address the hall will be hyperactive on the fringe. With the Prime Minister living on borrowed time, her rivals are preparing for the future. Members of the Tory grass roots, who pounded the pavements in a near-hopeless cause this June, are in an unforgiving mood towards their leader and searching for a new idol who can sprinkle a little stardust on their ailing party.
Already Boris Johnson, the blond bombshell with box office appeal, has stepped into the spotlight with a 4,200-word soliloquy on Brexit, published in the Telegraph less than a week before the Prime Minister’s Europe speech in Florence. While professing loyalty, the Foreign Secretary conspicuously pirouetted away from the Conservative leader and towards the Eurosceptic Tory party members. His supporters compared him to Henry V at Agincourt, leading his Brexit “band of brothers” to victory – though others suggest that he is more like Shakespeare’s young Prince Hal, distracted into foolish ways and yet to emerge as a statesman. Either way, it is clear that Johnson has no intention of departing the stage without a fight. “Mrs Thatcher would have sent [her press secretary] Bernard Ingham out to say Boris was semi-detached,” says one senior Tory. “Theresa May should have sacked him, but she didn’t dare.”
***
David Davis, the Conservative Party’s action man, is also rehearsing his script. His role in the Brexit talks gives him the chance to flex his Eurosceptic muscles and throw punches at Brussels while smiling at the audience in his conference speech. He would certainly do his own stunts if he were starring in his own show. There was a pickaxe propped up in the corner of his House of Commons office when I visited him once, and there has always been a hint of menace in his swagger. David Cameron is among those who think that the Brexit Secretary is likely to lead his party into the next election.
But Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd, Priti Patel and Sajid Javid are also waiting in the wings. Ruth Davidson, the kick-boxing lesbian Scottish Tory leader – who is as active on social media as any theatrical starlet – is certain to wow the social-liberal wing of the party in Manchester with her distinctive version of compassionate Conservatism. Though she is not even an MP, the unavailability of the Tories’ Queen of Scots only increases her appeal.
Meanwhile, the young pretenders (including Jacob Rees-Mogg) will have the chance to audition before the party faithful for a future starring role. The leader’s speech is conventionally the highlight of any party conference but, this year, at least as much attention will be focused on the alternatives. “They’re all egomaniacs,” says one Tory grandee, “and the Prime Minister doesn’t have the authority to stop them sounding off.”
It is extraordinarily self-indulgent. The multiple threats of North Korea, Russia, terrorism and climate change – as well as the challenge of the Brexit negotiations – loom but the Tories are engaged in their leadership wars. Johnson even published his Daily Telegraph article the day after a bomb was planted on the London Underground and the terror threat was raised to critical. A minister describes the Foreign Secretary as a “narcissist” who cannot bear to go a week without being in the headlines, but the truth is that the whole Tory party is guilty of collective narcissism.
What is the fogeyish Old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg if not a pinstriped reflection of the Conservative traditionalists? The party is entranced by its own image, just as Narcissus was so captivated by his reflection in a pool of water that he lost the will to live. Andrea Leadsom – who made clear that she, too, is still interested in the Tory leadership by rushing to the scene of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in Kensington, west London – offers another version of self-referring reassurance. She pulled out of last year’s leadership contest after suggesting to me, in an interview for the Times, that being a mother made her a better choice as prime minister than Theresa May because it gave her a “stake” in the future of the country.
At the time, she claimed that her comments had been taken out of context, but I have since been told that, during the preparations for the EU referendum debates, the American strategist Brett O’Donnell, hired by the Leave campaign, repeatedly told Leadsom to say that she supported Brexit “as a mother” in an attempt to humanise her arguments. I suspect that she thought a similar strategy would appeal to the Tory family-values brigade.
***
As the country faces the biggest economic and diplomatic challenge since the Second World War, the Conservative Party is focusing on itself. The UK’s future relationship with the EU is dependent not on what is best for the country but on the fallout from a 50-year-old internal feud. A group of pro-European Tory MPs recently visited May in Downing Street. When they asked her how she intended to hold the party together, she had no answer. She simply changed the subject and started talking about the detail of amendments to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. One former minister says that Europe is “a cancer in the Tory party. It destroyed Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron, and it will do for Theresa May, too.” Privately some ministers, who supported Remain, admit that they still believe Brexit will be an economic disaster but see no way to stop it without destroying their tribe. “Ultimately it comes down to party before country,” one MP says.
Instead of looking outward at the voters, the Tories are turning inward. Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary and leading pro-European rebel, says: “A number of us are heartbroken about what’s happened to the party. Ten years after David Cameron became leader, all the work that went into making the Conservative Party electable, appealing to people in parts of the country where we had been a lost cause, has just been thrown away. The fact that we are now back to banging on about Europe rather than talking about the issues people care about is beyond depressing, and we will be punished for it.”
Younger Tories are beside themselves with frustration about the lack of seriousness at the top. “They’re all behaving like children,” says one Conservative aide. “Philip Hammond has been playing up because he was upset about being sidelined before the election; Boris Johnson is trying to be crowned Miss World. The personalities have got completely in the way of the job they are supposed to be doing. They think they’re resting on Easy Street and they need to get their act together or Jeremy Corbyn will be in power.”
A growing number of Tory MPs are convinced that the Labour leader will soon be in No 10. One says: “I think we are in a worsening and deepening mess in general, and specifically with young people. It’s just rescuable. We are not yet in a 1997 situation where nothing could stop it, but it’s bloody close.”
Having lost their parliamentary majority at the election, many Conservatives worry that their support base is quite literally dying out. A recent YouGov poll found that Labour had a 52-point lead over the Conservatives among people aged 18 to 24, with 66 per cent saying that they would vote for Corbyn’s party, compared with just 14 per cent for May’s. If it is hard to trust polls any more, real results support the trend. Fifty years ago, political allegiance was all about class, but at the recent general election, age was what most clearly pointed to how people would vote.
There was a similar generational divide in the EU referendum, with 69 per cent of young adults supporting Remain, compared with 31 per cent for Leave – almost precisely the reverse of the breakdown among pensioners. After years of wooing the elderly with policies such as the pension “triple lock”, the Tories are sufficiently spooked by the collapse in support among younger voters that they are frantically searching for policies to win over a new generation. The political shift is not just about individual policies – on tuition fees or housing, for example. It’s about values. A generation of pro-European voters who feel betrayed by Brexit won’t easily forgive the party that delivers it.
***
Social and economic changes are also working against the Tories. Public faith in capitalism and free markets has been shaken in general by the economic crash. At the same time, the vehicles of stability that encouraged the transition from youthful idealism to middle-aged caution – home ownership, job security, rising wages, family responsibilities – have become increasingly rare for Generation Rent.
David Willetts, the former Conservative cabinet minister, compares his party to the ageing farmer in the French film Jean de Florette who blocks up the spring to harm his youthful neighbour and ends up destroying his own prospects. “The danger is that the sources of support for our party, as people get a stake in society, are being blocked for the younger generation,” says Willetts, who now runs the Resolution Foundation think tank, which is conducting an inquiry into intergenerational unfairness.
Philip Hammond was shouted down at a recent meeting of Tory MPs when he suggested that the party’s “youth problem” could be blamed on student exuberance. “For the Tories this is an existential crisis,” says one veteran MP. “I don’t know any young person who voted Conservative at the last election – my own two children voted Labour and Lib Dem. We have allowed people to forget the lessons that Mrs Thatcher taught us about why Corbynism doesn’t work. Everything in government is [about] Europe and divisions in the Tory party.”
A group of younger Conservative MPs, not scarred by the party’s battles over Maastricht or traumatised by the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, is trying to carve out a distinctive agenda. Robert Halfon, the Harlow MP and newly elected chair of the Commons education committee, warns that the Conservatives have alienated working-class voters as well as the young. An advocate of what he calls “white-van conservatism”, he wants the Tories to become the “party of the workers” and replace the logo of a tree with a ladder to represent aspiration.
“We have a problem with our language and our narrative,” Halfon says. “No one cares if someone has gone to Eton. What they mind about is if we are on their side, and too many people don’t feel we are on their side. We need to claim back language from the left – words like social justice, redistribution and compassion, and do them in Conservative ways.”
He is not the only one trying to change the party’s mindset. George Freeman, the MP for Mid Norfolk and chair of the Conservative policy board, insists that the Tories must come to terms with what he calls the “insurgency against unaccountable elites” that has swept through politics since the economic crash. His recent “Big Tent Ideas Fest” was an attempt to prove to voters that the party is listening, and some MPs would like to see him made party chairman. He blames the popular revolt on a growing “crisis of disconnection” between those at the top and the bottom of British society. “Healthy organisations are like a pyramid – broad and welcoming at the bottom, meritocratic so people can rise up to the top and with leadership from somebody clearly accountable at the top,” he says, “but there’s a deep sense across Britain that in many walks of life – politics, banking, media, even sport – the pyramid of trust and accountability has been inverted.”
Instead of being defined by austerity and “parlour-game politics”, the Tories must seek a “moment of electrifying national renewal”, Freeman argues. “Thinking we can just pick off individual bits of the electorate with specific policies is a mistake. We should be the party that lifts the soul and speaks to the ambitions of the next generation, rather than allowing ourselves to be defined by a culturally, economically and socially isolationist Alf Garnett version of Brexit.”
There is still some energy and enthusiasm in the Tory ranks but, with a vacuum at the top, it is hard for the party to settle on a new direction. The truth is that the Tories’ rows over Brexit are so bitter because they tap into deep, long-standing divisions about the nature of sovereignty and national identity. They are also part of a temperamental and ideological split between small-C conservatives, such as Philip Hammond, who believe that their party’s duty is to maintain stability, and Tory radicals, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who believe that progress is made only through “creative destruction”. This is about the nature of Conservatism as well as the future relationship between the EU and the UK.
Theresa May is caught in the middle, unsure of herself and too weak to decide whether the Tories should stand for flag-waving nostalgia or buccaneering globalism, hard-headed austerity or a passion for social justice, muscular interventionism or free-market liberalism. The coin spins on the stage, and it is not only the Prime Minister’s future that is up in the air but her party’s, too.
Rachel Sylvester writes for the TimesCast Your Vote
The morning of the USMNT's World Cup opener against Ghana, I saw a tweet from SI's Paul Fichtenbaum that read: "How important is the World Cup to Ghana? The country is rationing electricity so the population can watch the games."
For a moment I felt deeply guilty for being one of many casual U.S. fans rooting for the big, bad Americans against soccer-crazed Ghana. For many of us here in the States, the World Cup is a chance to dip a toe in the soccer waters, giving attention to a sport that is usually just an afterthought. Knowing how much that day's game meant to fans in Ghana and what sacrifice was demanded of them in order to view it, it felt a little bit wrong to root against them.
But by the time I'd zipped up my U.S. soccer jacket, put on my American flag sunglasses and joined thousands of patriotic peers at Chicago's Grant Park, I'd forgotten any sympathy for Ghana. I was there to cheer on my country and root for the unthinkable -- advancement out of the so-called Group of Death. There are so few times the USA is considered the long shot, and the World Cup is one of them. There's something very different, and very special, about cheering for the dark horse. An early round Dream Team Olympic victory is a given; an early round USMNT World Cup victory is a cause for great celebration.
It doesn't matter that the U.S. is home to three times as many people as Ghana, Germany and Portugal combined. The number of fans back home cheering a team on has nothing to do with the result on the pitch. That's the best part about sport -- it's a meritocracy. The best team wins. Kenya (population 43 million) whups everybody in distance running, Canada (population 34 million) dominates hockey and the Netherlands (population 16 million) owns speedskating. It isn't about the size of the dog in the fight, it's about the size of the fight in the dog.
When it comes to futbol, America is the underdog. And everybody loves a good underdog story.You can probably recall some of the most common ACT tips and test taking strategies…
But can you remember them all?
Well you are in for a surprise because I have put together the complete list.
Some are mandatory.
Some are unique.
Others are so good that some people try to hide their existence.
But they are all here.
Exclusive Bonus: Download a free checklist that will give you a rundown of what you need to do the night before and bring the morning of the exam for ACT SUCCESS.
Test Preparation Tips
1. Practice at the Edge of Your Abilities: Practice with problems that are not too easy or not too hard. If a question is too easy, then you are just wasting your time. If a question is too hard, then you become frustrated and are less likely to learn. Try to find that middle path.
2. Work on Your Weak Points Before Your Strong Points: You have a lot more to gain score-wise if you work on improving your weaknesses before your strengths. It may be tougher at the beginning, but by test time it will be worth it.
3. Practice All That You Can: Practice makes perfect and nothing will prepare you more for the exam than practicing example problems. By practicing all that you can you will be ready for whatever the test writers throw at you on test day.
4. Do at Least 1 Full Practice Test: Completing a full practice test is essential before taking the full ACT exam. Taking the practice test allows you to realize how draining the full test can be and how you can handle it in the future. Practice makes perfect.
5. Do Not Forget to Register by the Deadline: Do not make this often overlooked mistake! It would be a very frustrating day to show up for the exam and realize that you never completed your registration. A lot of study schedules make sure to end right before the exam to give the best results.
6. Try out a Test Preparation Class: A test preparation class can help a lot with getting a student motivated. Sometimes it can be tough to study for long periods. But if you are with other students and a teacher it can be a lot easier. A lot of these courses also give exclusive tips and practice problems. A win-win.
Here is our list of the best ACT prep courses.
7. Get Some Value out of Online Resources: There are a ton of online resources out on the web to use (like this one!). They are not of lesser quality just because they are free. A lot of times if you are stuck on a problem you can look up an exact solution online.
For an easy way to access these online resources for studying, see our list of the best laptops for college.
8. Know the Different Question Types on the Exam: The ACT exam has a lot of the same types of problems from test to test. Knowing these problems and how to solve them can give you a big leg up. It will also ease your nerves on test day because you will know what to expect.
9. Take Breaks Often: We all know that it can be pretty difficult to study for super long periods of time. Taking breaks will allow to you study for longer periods since you give you brain a chance to recharge. So don’t fret if you reward yourself with a late night snack run!
10. Turn off Your Phone During Study Time: Your phone can be a big distraction during study time. Put it away and focus on the problems at hand. You won’t be able to have your phone during the exam, so don’t use it during study time.
11. Learn How to Use Your Calculator Now: Your calculator can come in hand big time when taking the exam. Make sure that you are up to snuff with all of the fancy features and equations that are used in today’s calculators. Some are so good that you just plug in the question and it spits out the answer.
Here is our list of the best calculators for the ACT.
12. Make Sure That Your Calculator Is Permitted on the Exam: Some calculators are so powerful that they are banned from the exam. Make sure that your calculator is permitted for use on the exam. Most calculators with CAS functionality are banned from the exam.
13. Try to Simulate Normal Testing Conditions: Knowing what to expect on exam day is a big step towards realizing your true potential. Nothing can compare to real testing conditions, but trying to simulate them at home is the best alternative.
14. Try out Different Strategies for the Math Section Now: There are a lot of different ways to complete the common questions in the math section. Try to find your favorite solutions now so that you are not scatterbrained on exam day. Some solutions are better for certain students. So, find out your favorite ways today.
15. Diagnose What You Are Good at Early On: Having a good personal reflection on what your strengths and weaknesses are is essential to ACT success. Knowing yourself is the first step toward greatness. Work on your weaknesses and your whole education base will improve.
16. Teach the Concepts to Another Student: Teaching to someone else is one of the best ways to learn. It makes you think critically and allows you to think in a different way than if you were just learning. If you switch off with another student you can also learn some of their tricks of the trade.
17. Make Sure to Go Over Your Mistakes: Going over your mistakes is also one of the best ways to learn. Mistakes provide a glimpse into our imperfections, and allow us to better ourselves. Being able to understand what we have done wrong gives a better glimpse into common problem areas.
18. Execute a Study Schedule: A good study schedule is essential to ACT success. Make sure that your study time is not too light or too heavy. Most preparation experts say that you should study between 20 to 100 hours for the ACT. Try to split up that time between now and exam day.
19. Get a Test Preparation Book: A review book is one of the best ways to prepare for the exam. They usually provide a study schedule and ramping practice problems to make sure that you are always on the edge of your skill set. Luckily for you we have made a list of the best ACT prep books available.
Click here to see our list of the best ACT prep books.
20. Learn the Section Directions Now: The section |
, and because the companies rarely need international financing. Cement is a basic commodity and margins are razor thin. Whitten says because companies focus on volume to maintain profits, they are unhappy to set aside protected areas within quarrying sites.
It is not only in Malaysia where snails and other species are at risk from the cement industry. “This is a global issue,” he says. “Wherever in the world limestone occurs it has a special fauna and flora but the problems are especially acute in countries such as China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the US where you get isolated limestone hills.”
A common problem among cement mining companies, according to Whitten, is that environmental impact assessments they carry out are often of a poor quality and focus on birds and mammals and don’t give enough attention to limestone-associated species. The reports are not made public and cannot be scrutinised independently.
Worse still, Whitten says the cement industry has become fixated with trumpeting the restoration of sites they destroy, rather than taking a rational, proactive landscape approach which would include sustainable management and protection.
“No cement business has ever admitted the scale of the problem,” he says. “They tout their biodiversity pages in their websites and sustainability reports with pictures of ducks and frogs and children enjoying the wetlands created from the hills they remove. They give and receive prizes for their restoration work – but do not acknowledge what is being lost.”
The snail at Lafarge’s quarry was named after the company to make it pay attention to inconspicuous animals. “They would never have taken note of the snail unless the scientists had named it after them,” Whitten says. “Lafarge did not like it... But the reality is I had been talking with them for 15 years and you get to the point where that discussion gets nowhere. This led Fauna & Flora International to resign from their international biodiversity panel. We are, though, having positive discussions with the local senior management.”
The IUCN’s Red List, the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of plant, animal and fungi species, shows that Plectostoma sciaphilum is one of 901 species of the 76,199 assessed to have become extinct through fishing, logging, mining and agriculture.
One of others to become extinct is the St Helena Giant Earwig, the world’s largest known earwig which reaches a length of up to 80mm. Previously found in Horse Point Plain, a protected area on St Helena Island in the South Atlantic, its habitat was damaged by the removal of nearly all shelter-providing surface stones for construction.
The Bluefin tuna has moved from the least concern category to vulnerable, which means that it is now threatened with extinction. The species is extensively targeted by the fishing industry for the sushi and sashimi markets predominantly in Asia. The population is estimated to have declined by up to a third over the past 22 years.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest American eel. Photograph: Alamy
The Chinese pufferfish has entered the IUCN Red List as critically endangered. Its global population is estimated to have declined by 99.99% over the past 40 years due to overexploitation. A popular food fish in Japan, it is eaten as as sashimi.
Other species on the Red List include the American Eel, which is threatened by climate change, pollution, habitat loss and commercial harvest as well as the Chinese Cobra, among the top animal species exported from mainland China to Hong Kong for the food market.
“The growing food market is putting unsustainable pressure on these and other species,” says Jane Smart, Global Director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Group. “We urgently need to impose strict limits on harvesting and take appropriate measures to protect habitats.”
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Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inboxDaniel Craid in Spectre. MGM/Columbia/EON
Daniel Craig will play James Bond in at least one more film, the Mirror reports. The actor, who once told Time Out London he’d “rather break this glass and slash my wrists” than be in another Bond movie, has reportedly changed his mind, according to someone who also says producer Barbara Broccoli is doing everything she can to convince “Skyfall” singer Adele to record another theme song. Here’s the money quote from “a source involved in the project,” which approaches the Platonic ideal of tabloid unfalsifiability:
Craig and Adele together are the winning team, the ultimate choice, the money-spinners. It’s taken time but Daniel has come round and the strong consensus in the Bond offices is that Mr. Craig is 007 again. As for Adele, she’s more of an unknown quantity but loved being part of Bond, so the signs are positive.
The Mirror also reports that screenwriter John Logan is now somehow involved in the film; Logan was replaced and rewritten on Spectre by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Though their names don’t appear in the story, Purvis and Wade were reportedly approached to write the new film, so it seems the wheel of fate has turned once more. According to the insider, Broccoli also believes the next James Bond film will be a hit.We really like Weave. It’s one of our favorite news readers on Windows Phone and Windows 8. The app has been out forever and we’ve seen it grow and mature over the years. The biggest change was the introduction of the new Weave cloud services that allowed the apps to sync between Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The apps were recently pulled because of a bogus copyright claim from a French company. Have you been missing Weave since upgrading to Windows Phone 8.1 or getting a new phone? Good news because Weave is back on the Windows Phone Store.
The legal/trademark issues have not been resolved. Instead, Microsoft has policies that state the French company had 14 days to file a court proceeding. That hasn’t happened so Microsoft has given the green light for Weave to come back into the Windows Phone Store.
There’s still a strong possibility that the app will be pulled if they file a new claim against Microsoft, so we recommended downloading as soon as possible.
Download Weave (free) from the Windows Phone Store (first QR code)
Download Weave (paid/$9.99) from the Windows Phone Store (second QR code)
Download Weave from the Windows Store.
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Kivi's UnderworldBoth 27, born 15 minutes apart.Cipriana is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Urban Bush Babes. TK Wonder is an electronic artist/songwriter."What is there not to brag about this woman? I could go on and on, but I’m very proud that my identical twin is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of a wonderful site called Urban Bush Babes, a site that focuses on multicultural topics, fashion, music, natural hair, health, social issues, and all that she finds inspiring and enlightening. I am so very inspired by her and what she does and the conscientious effort she made in paving a new and unique direction for UBB. She is incessantly working on the site, so that now, when I call her, I never ask what she is doing. I always ask, 'So, what post are you working on?' Her tenacity and work ethic exhorts the same within myself. She was just recently featured in Vogue.com’s mini documentary series called'My Life In Vogue,’ highlighting her work and everyday life. They couldn’t have chosen a better candidate.""Well, since I talk about my twin sister ALL THE TIME (no, literally), I think the one thing I brag about the most is her work ethic or ethics alone. No nepotism required, but not only is she literally one of the most amazing and talented lyricists/singers — opening for Sting, Erykah Badu, Justice, Prodigy, N.E.R.D, Nas, The Hives, The Gossip, Raphael Saadiq, and Talib Kweli — but a songwriter, as well, writing ALL of her own material. Last year she performed in front of a crowd of a half-million people at the Poland Woodstock Festival; one of the largest rock festivals in the world, and was also chosen by Q-Tip and Stretch Armstrong as the 2013 Music Award winner for See.me competition for her notable skill for rapping, singing, and songwriting. I really could go on and on, but bragging has to stop at a certain point before it begins to look obnoxious. Seriously, she works at her craft every day and really is the physical manifestation of passion and motivation, all while defining humbleness at its utmost.""She has quite a few cool personality traits. One of them is her determination. Weirdest one? Is it weird to say I don’t think she has a weird personality trait. Or, maybe that just means I’m weird and can’t recognize her weird trait because if you’re already weird it might prove difficult to pick up on weirdness in someone else. I have been told I’m weird more then once. Yeah, I just made that complicated.""At the core, we are just huge nerds, but if I pick the 'coolest' I would say just how cool she is. She is one of the most calm and collected women I know (besides my mother), always noting the dramas in our lives fail in comparison to others, so we always have to see the positive. And, boy, does she exude this through every pore of her body. As for 'weirdest,' she is just weird, but that's what makes her so damn cool."Well, here’s one way to enact change in your neighborhood: Soho activists have raised enough money to establish a nonprofit—which they’re calling a “neighborhood improvement district”—to help clean up trash in the area. Residents were fed up with litter on the sidewalks and overflowing waste baskets, "despite funneling millions into city coffers from its astronomical sales and property taxes," as a press release puts it.
Organizers did not want to set up a traditional Business Improvement District, saying they were hesitant to "cede control of their neighborhood to a real estate-driven B.I.D." In a release, they elaborated:
Community opposition stemmed from fears that real-estate developers would use the B.I.D. to further turn SoHo into a mall, while eliminating current zoning regulations that prohibit oversized retail stores more typical of Herald Square.
And so, the all-volunteer nonprofit Clean Up SoHo has recently formed after the group raised an impressive $100,000. The initiative was spearheaded by Sean Sweeney, director of the SoHo Alliance; local resident Dianne Mendez, who runs an art salon on West Broadway; and the realtor Danielle Nazinitsky, who also writes the blog SoHo Strut.
The group blames increased tourism for the neighborhood's litter problem. A group of local activists, residents, independent realtors, and small business advocates met about a year ago to discuss the issue and brainstorm ways to fix it; they organized with help from the Soho Alliance throughout 2017.
Fundraising has come from a number of local sources, including the boards of area co-ops and condos, shops, restaurants, and neighborhood residents—even Bloomingdale’s and the Richard Rodgers family trust contributed, the group reports.
Others pledged $1,500 each to purchase more than 30 heavy-duty, metal wastebaskets to replace the mesh baskets currently out on the streets. Finally, a grant of $60,000 from Councilmember Margaret Chin came through and with that, Clean Up SoHo hired a private cleaning service to begin sweeping the sidewalks and emptying the litter baskets.
But even though the group calls their initiative “people power in its purest form,” it’s not clear whether this model of neighborhood activism would be easily replicated in areas that are less well-off—without, say, a Bloomingdale’s to donate to the cause.When David Morgan first got into the craft business, it was as a retailer, and beer evangelism was a heavy lift. Now, more than 15 years later, Morgan is at the production end of the business, and the wind is at his back. SingleSpeed Brewing, the Cedar Falls, Iowa, nanobrewery Morgan founded in 2012, is on the brink of a major expansion, as SingleSpeed exits its nano-sized beta version for a state-of-the-art brewhouse opening late this year. “We really wanted to learn to brew these beers well, before we brewed large quantities of each, and the nano system allowed us to do that,” Morgan says. “We’ve spent almost four years refining our craft before growing into our new production system. It was important to us to be really good at what we do before we did more of it.”
1. Savor it
For as long as Morgan has been drinking beer legally, he’s been drinking good beer. He explains his early (and lasting) affinity for flavorful beers simply: “You could taste them!” As a college student, he’d punch out from his job at a pizza place, belly up to the bar, and savor a pint of Sierra Nevada or Newcastle. “It’s the difference between sitting down and enjoying the beer, versus just having a beer,” Morgan explains. “Beer you could enjoy intrigued me, and it slowly broadened my horizons.”
2. Hit refresh
For a decade, Morgan channeled his passion for craft beer into a craft-centric restaurant in town. He used the restaurant industry as a platform for deepening beer culture in his corner of Iowa. He’d later trade his restaurant role for a shot at brewing commercially. “I wanted to shift gears, shrink into a smaller organization, and get immersed in something,” he says. “I love beer, and I wanted to be directly hands-on with the product. It was a professional refresh, and it really reenergized me.”
3. Plug away
Morgan had never brewed at home before he decided to launch SingleSpeed Brewing. But he was passionate about the product, and trusted his palate and his ability to work toward a vision. “This industry is so giving, you can learn anything you want to if you’re willing to dedicate the time and effort,” Morgan explains. “I was confident that we could get some base beers built that we’d be proud of. But we’ve come a long way. There’s been a lot of learning. You just try to be dedicated to making the best product you can every day, drive forward, and try not to bite off more than you can chew.”
4. Brew intentionally
An enormous part of building knowledge, Morgan says, comes from being intentional about every step in the brewing process. “You acknowledge your raw materials, and value them for what they are,” he says. “If you’re putting in aromatic malt, there has to be a reason for putting it in: What will it do, and why do you want it to do that? And, in the end, did it do what you wanted? […] We have never pretended to know it all. We are always open to learning, open to discussion, new ideas, new techniques, and I credit that attitude for the success we’ve had.”
5. Say yes
SingleSpeed produces a wide range of recipes, from hop-forward American ales and coffee-infused dark ales to farmhouse beers and classic German styles. That’s partly a reflection of the varied personal tastes of SingleSpeed’s brewers. But it’s also due to its customers, who push Morgan to keep onetime experiments in constant production. “We’ll experiment, and people get attached to these new beers.” And when people are calling for recipes, Morgan wants to satisfy customer demand. “We didn’t get into this business to tell people no,” he says.
6. Don’t settle
Morgan had a strong vision for what he wanted Victory Dance, SingleSpeed’s flagship IPA, to be (a juicy, tropical American IPA), but it took 30 batches of tweaks and changes before he was satisfied with the recipe. He spent six months hammering on water chemistry, and another six sourcing the right hops. During recipe development, Morgan says, “people were drinking it. But we could make it better, and we weren’t going to put our stamp on it until we could say, ‘This is really good.’”
7. Make a connection
Two of SingleSpeed’s flagships, Brewed x2, a coffee-infused American Brown, and Tip the Cow, a Milk Stout with cocoa and espresso, were born of a connection forged on Twitter. When he discovered a coffee roastery that was opening a block away from his brewery, Morgan knew it was a collaboration just waiting to be cemented. “We live for those opportunities, to grasp a local connection,” Morgan says. “We hadn’t been set on having a coffee beer. But this guy was doing the same thing we were trying to do, so now we had to have a coffee beer.”
8. Save those whalez, bro
Don’t get Morgan wrong—he has nothing but respect for all those super-tasty, super-rare beers that beer geeks chase around the country, and for the brewers who make them. But he’s also bemused by the epic lines and furious trading that accompany cult beer releases. “There are all these poor souls standing in long lines, and there’s only so much beer to go around,” Morgan says. “So we asked, how can we help that guy in line? Can we help save the whalez?” The answer is SingleSpeed’s Save the Whalez, Bro series: sessionable riffs on hyped-up whalez, like a session Oat Stout around Darkness Day. “Come in, there’s no line, we’ll charge you $4 for a pint, and then continue with your day.”
9. Grow, mindfully
SingleSpeed’s 3-barrel brewhouse couldn’t come close to keeping up with customer demand. So Morgan jumped at the opportunity to expand in nearby Waterloo. The new production brewery, currently under construction, will preserve a historic building that was slated for demolition, accelerate a downtown revitalization effort, and, through solar panels and a water conservation system, deliver on environmental sustainability. And, with an expansion capacity of up to 14,000 barrels per year, the new facility will finally allow SingleSpeed to get its beer to all those customers Morgan hates saying ‘No’ to. ■Before we get into that, let me tell you more about the Vive. It's a VR headset made by HTC in partnership with Valve Corporation, a company perhaps best known for the Steam PC gaming storefront and titles like Portal and Half Life 2. The hardware itself looks like something from a science fiction movie. Its dark gray, plastic faceplate is pockmarked by multiple sensors, making the whole thing look like it's clad in deep-set digital eyes. Look behind it and you'll find all the trademark signs of a VR headset: thick foam padding, a pair of goggle-like lenses and, of course, the straps that hold it all in place. It has two discrete 1,200 x 1,080 displays that refresh at 90 frames per second, offering 360-degree views. On the top of the hardware are an HDMI port, two USB ports and a headphone jack.
It's worth mentioning that the HTC Vive is not a mobile solution like the Gear VR -- it connects to a computer like the Oculus Rift. The Vive is part of HTC's "Re" line of connected devices and exists as a separate division from the company's phones. As such, the Vive is competing less against Gear VR and more against the likes of Oculus and Sony's Project Morpheus. The key difference between the Vive and the other two? It's that it comes with a couple of SteamVR base stations that tell the Vive headset where you are via laser position sensors, thus tracking your physical location as you walk about the room. The whole thing only works in a space up to 15 x 15 feet, so you'd encounter that aforementioned gridded wall if you hit the edge.
In the room where I had the demo, the two base stations were located where the ceiling meets the wall, about 90 degrees from each other. Attached to the Vive was a slew of cords; one was to a computer located at the far end of the room, while another led to a pair of controllers that look a lot like the Wii's nunchuks, except in place of joysticks, there are touchpads. The left and right sides of the grips are clickable and there's also a trigger button located where your index finger would naturally rest. A small shield of sensors that look similar to the ones on the Vive's faceplate are located in front of each controller. An HTC spokesperson tells me that the final version of the controllers should be wireless instead of wired, but for now, I had to strap on a belt full of cords as well as the Vive to prevent the headset from weighing me down.
So there I was, with a headset strapped on my face, a controller in each hand, a belt full of cords at my waist and a large pair of headphones on my head, completely blind to everything around me. I felt awkward and skeptical, completely ready to be unimpressed.
And then the software clicked into place. A welcome screen appeared, filling my field of vision. I was instantly struck by how bright and sharp everything looked. I saw the animated versions of my controllers in front of me. The HTC spokesperson instructed me to move them around and get used to the controls. He told me to hold down my left trigger button to inflate a balloon, and I did. I then used the right one to bat it away. After playing with that for a while, the scene transitioned to the Matrix-like hexagonal tile demo I mentioned earlier. This tile intro, my guide told me, is to get me used to moving around the room. My movements were a little hampered by the amount of cords that I had to walk over, but I otherwise had no problem with balance or spatial awareness. I didn't get any kind of motion sickness at all.
Next was a demo called "TheBlu:Encounter" by Wemo Lab. Everything went black. Soon, I found myself underwater, standing on the deck of a shipwreck. Schools of fish swam around me and I was able to swat them away by waving my controller-filled hands. It sounds terribly cliché, but everything was incredibly lifelike. It genuinely felt like I was there. Everything from the fish to the shipwreck was sharp and detailed. I walked around the deck, absorbing everything around me. Soon, a giant blue whale swam right next to the ship, scaring the bejeezus out of me with its presence -- I'll admit I yelped and took a step back.
I then went from the deep blue sea to a cartoon-like kitchen, where I controlled a pair of animated hands. In a demo titled "Job Simulator" by Owlchemy Labs, my task was to add a list of ingredients to the pot on the stove before time was over. Of course, instead of doing that, I explored the kitchen. I picked up the rolling pin and the mushrooms and opened the refrigerator door. The controls were responsive for the most part -- I only really used the trigger button -- though there were a couple of times when the accuracy seemed a little off and I picked up the wrong thing by mistake.
The scene changed again and then I was a giant looking over a miniaturized tabletop battle. Called "Quar" by Steel Wool, the demo showed tiny soldiers fighting a rather epic battle, with tiny men riding on tiny horses and brandishing their tiny swords. I was able to crouch down, move around and look at the detail of the miniature figures from all angles.
Then, the HTC spokesperson said, it was time to get creative. I was suddenly in a demo of "Tilt Brush," a 3D painting app that has already been around for a few months for other VR environments like on the Oculus Rift and Google's Cardboard. The difference here, however, is that you could literally use the controller as if it was a brush, painting abstract scenes of fire and light. And then when you're done, you can walk away from your creation and view another perspective of it, giving it an almost sculptural quality.
HTC and Valve saved their best demo for last. The spokesperson told me that he would keep quiet from then on and I was to follow the instructions given. As the scene faded from black, I found myself in a very familiar environment. I could feel myself smiling, grinning from ear to ear. I couldn't help myself. I was in an Aperture Science testing facility. Yes, I was inside the world of Portal.
It looked as if I was in some kind of repair room. A disembodied voice came over the speakers and told me to open a drawer. I looked around me, saw some built-in drawers and walked over to them. I opened a drawer, only to see blueprints and tools. The voice said I opened the wrong one, so I tried again. This time, I saw a moldy cake. Apparently that was the wrong one also, so I opened another one. It contained tiny, little cutout people at tiny, little office desks who went berserk at the sight of me. The disembodied voice told me that I had made a mistake and that I was now their god.
Suddenly, Atlas awakened, and lumbered toward the room. It was so imposing and realistic that I backed away instinctively from the door.
Giving up on me, the voice then told me to walk across the room and pull on a lever. I did that and a giant door opened. Behind it were two of Portal 2's androids, Atlas and P-Body, lying on the floor broken and in disrepair. Suddenly, Atlas awakened, and lumbered toward the room. It was so imposing and realistic that I backed away instinctively from the door. The voice then told me to press on a button to expand its components so that I could repair it. I did so, pulling on its front exterior to expose its electronic guts. The next thing the voice told me to do was so complicated and full of technical jargon that I knew it was impossible. The voice told me to keep calm while also warning me with increasing urgency that if I didn't accomplish the task in time, I would fail.
And, of course, I did. Atlas collapsed on the floor with great noise and fanfare; the floor gave way and the room started to fall apart around me. I was told in a deadpan manner that I was now not qualified to do anything. Then, a familiar voice popped up. It was GladOS, Portal's AI antagonist, wondering out loud how a robot could possibly fail this simple mission until a camera popped by and saw me, to which she responded, "Oh." As the room started to get rebuilt around me, she said that I had done well as far as humans go, and that I was relieved of my duties. The demo then faded out to an outro and it was over.
But I didn't want it to be. I wanted to stay in that world. I wanted to keep playing. I wanted now, very badly, to play Portal 2 in virtual reality. It was the most immersive experience, and frankly, the most fun I've had with a VR headset strapped on my head. The ability to walk around the room and directly interact with objects around me makes a huge difference. It's made me a convert to VR.
Clearly, the HTC Vive used in the demo is just a prototype. Its design simply doesn't inspire the same reverence as the company's smartphones. But that's going to change. "Our goal is to design something that can live in your house or on your nice desk," says Claude Zellweger, HTC's chief designer. "We don't want to think of it as a geeky gamer accessory."
"For me, there's a triangle of elements that make the experience: the audio, the headset and the controllers," says Zellweger, on what makes Vive so special. "It's amazing. You don't need to see your hands at all; so long as you have fully tracked controllers, you have a full sense of yourself."
Obviously, however, HTC still has some challenges. For one, all those cords make it really difficult to walk around the room without the fear of tripping and falling over. Even if the controllers will be cordless eventually, HTC says the headset itself would still probably be tethered to a PC due to latency issues with wireless connectivity. Plus, not everyone will have the room or space to hook up two laser base stations so that the Vive will work. We also have yet to know what the minimum PC requirements are for the Vive to work as smoothly as it did. If we're to guess, we'd surmise it's quite demanding.
Yet, I walked away from the demo a complete believer, not just in VR, but also in HTC and Valve, and I can't wait to see what's next. HTC has said that the developer edition of the Vive will be available later this spring, while a commercial retail version will be in stores by the end of the year. I'm not sure if I'll be able to afford this yet, but if I can? Sign me up.
Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.
Don't miss out on all the latest news, photos and liveblogs from MWC 2015. Follow along at our events page.Back to the Future: The Game is an episodic graphic adventure based on the Back to the Future film franchise. The game was developed and published by Telltale Games as part of a licensing deal with Universal Pictures. Bob Gale, co-creator, co-writer and co-producer of the film trilogy, assisted Telltale in writing the game's story. Original actors Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd allowed the developers to use their likenesses in the game for the lead characters Marty McFly and Doc Brown, respectively. Lloyd reprises his role as Doc, while A.J. Locascio plays the role of Marty; Fox later appeared to voice two cameo roles in the final episode, reprising his role as future versions of Marty McFly in addition to playing his forefather William.[6]
The game is split-up into five episodes available on multiple gaming platforms, the first episode released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on December 22, 2010. PlayStation 3 and iOS versions followed in February 2011. Episodes 2 through 5 were released throughout February to June 2011, with the final episode released on June 23, 2011. Telltale published the series as retail products for the PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles for North America.[7] Deep Silver published the retail PlayStation 3 and Wii versions for Europe on May 4, 2012. To commemorate the film's 30th anniversary, Telltale Games released the game on PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on October 13, 2015. The ports feature updated voice work from Tom Wilson, who played Biff Tannen in the films (Biff was voiced by Kid Beyond in the original release).
Gameplay [ edit ]
Back to the Future: The Game is a graphic adventure played from a third-person perspective. The player controls Marty to explore the 3D environments using either the keyboard, mouse or game controller to move around. The player can have Marty examine objects, talk to non-player characters (initiating dialog through conversation trees), and perform specific actions in order to solve puzzles and progress the game. Some items can be picked up and stored in Marty's inventory, and then can be used later to interact with other characters or objects. The game provides a list of current goals for the player to complete to advance the game. The player can access a hint system, revealing one clue at a time from a number of cryptic clues for how to solve a specific puzzle.[8][9]
Plot [ edit ]
It has been six months since Marty McFly witnessed Dr. Emmett Brown disappear into an unknown time, and the bank has foreclosed on Doc's home. On May 14, 1986, while helping his father George sort through Doc's possessions, Marty is surprised to see a DeLorean time machine, which he thought had been destroyed, appear outside the house. Inside is Einstein, Doc's dog, and a tape recorder with a message from Doc explaining how the DeLorean would return to this present should Doc ever run into problems. Einstein helps track down Edna Strickland, the elderly sister of Marty's school principal and a former reporter for Hill Valley's paper. Reading her newspaper collection, Marty learns that Doc was detained in 1931 and killed by Irving "Kid" Tannen, Biff Tannen's father. Marty and Einstein travel to 1931 to save Doc.
Marty arrives on June 13, 1931, and learns that Doc was accused of arson upon the Kid's illegal speakeasy, (that the new DeLorean is a temporal copy created by the lightning strike of 1955 and have been tossed to 2025 when Doc travelled into the future between the first and second movies) and thus needs to escape the jail. Doc tells Marty to seek the aid of his younger self, Emmett, who at this point in time assists his father, Judge Brown at the courthouse who strongly dislikes Emmett's desire to go into science. Along the way, Marty encounters his grandfather Arthur "Artie" McFly, his girlfriend Jennifer's grandfather, Officer Danny Parker, and a young Edna. While convincing Emmett to help, Marty convinces Artie, who serves as Kid's accountant, to testify against Kid as to help prove Doc's innocence. Believing all is well, Doc and Marty prepare to return to the present when Marty finds himself disappearing. Doc discovers Artie would be killed the next day for testifying, thus affecting Marty's existence. They return and instead convince Artie to flee town after testifying.
Arriving on May 15, 1986, they realize that for some unknown reason, Kid was able to expand his criminal operations and owns all of Hill Valley (and that Jennifer never existed). Marty and Doc return to 1931, and find another option: they convince Trixie, Kid's moll, who has become smitten with Artie, to testify instead and the cop, Danny Parker, who meant to arrested Kid was been demoted because Marty and Doc (and the DeLorean)’s presence and because of that, his girlfriend, Betty (Jennifer’s grandmother) had broken up with him and in hope of winning her back, he worked for Kid to have some money. After Marty reasoned with him, Parker decided to turn against Kid to win back Betty. Kid and his gang are jailed, and all appears well. Marty and Doc return to the future unaware that their actions have caused Edna to fall in love with Emmett, and their relationship causes Emmett to forgo his scientific inventions.
When they return to 1986 again, Doc disappears, and Marty crashes the DeLorean into a billboard. Shaken up, Marty finds Hill Valley has become a totalitarian walled society, run by "Citizen Brown". Sneaking inside, Marty learns that Edna has brainwashed Emmett and used his genius to craft the means to create a perfect society in her eyes. Marty is able to get close to Citizen Brown |
the April 12, 2013 closing memorandum in the interrogator's case. "[Redacted] alleged that [redacted] legal fee reimbursement claim to the CIA was intentionally delayed by Office of General Counsel (OGC) personnel as reprisal for [redacted] cooperation with OIG investigations and other matters involving the Detainee Interrogation Program. [Redacted] served as an interrogator with the Renditions and Detention Group (RDG) of the [CIA's] National Clandestine Service (NCS)."
The interrogator was interviewed by the watchdog's office on June 6, 2013, six months after the Senate Intelligence Committee completed its report about the efficacy of the CIA's torture program. He said he was given an indemnification agreement to sign in 2009 just as a special prosecutor was appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes and, later, the deaths of two CIA detainees.
The interrogator, however, declined to sign it. It's unclear why; intelligence officials told VICE News that doing so would have meant he would have been restricted from cooperating with the investigations into the torture program, and that the CIA would have been required to cover all legal fees incurred by him as long as he was not involved in any transgressions.
Related: The Watchdog, the Whistleblower, and the Secret CIA Torture Report
The CIA Office of General Counsel told the interrogator's lawyer that decisions about legal reimbursements could not be made until investigations by the special prosecutor, who was conducting a criminal probe into the CIA's torture program, and the Senate Intelligence Committee wrapped up.
"[Redacted] stated that OGC's delay in rendering payment of [redacted] claim amounted to a reprisal given other [redacted, believed to be interrogators] were paid money for similar legal fees," the inspector general's memo says. It is not clear how many other interrogators signed the indemnification agreement.
The special prosecutor's probe into the interrogator's complaint concluded — with no charges being filed — in August 2012, eight months before the interrogator filed the complaint. However, the CIA told the interrogator that the CIA needed to review the Senate's report to ensure that none of its officers were implicated in any wrongdoing prior to making a decision about indemnification claims. The first draft of the Senate's torture report would not be completed until December 2012.
According to the inspector general's memo, an official in the CIA's Office of General Counsel "explained that those who were not involved in conduct relevant to the [Senate] report have been reimbursed. However, those who were involved in conduct relevant to the report, including [the interrogator who filed the whistleblower complaint] will have to wait until the [Senate] report is reviewed to ensure they are not implicated in any wrongdoing. [Redacted] reiterated that the [Senate] report's findings have an impact on their indemnification."
That's notable because human rights groups have charged that the Senate report has not resulted in accountability, and the CIA lawyer's response seems to indicate that the interrogators whose conduct may have been singled out in the Senate report could be held accountable, at least financially. The interrogator who filed the complaint was cleared of wrongdoing. However, another way to read the Senate report is that everyone connected to the CIA's torture program was involved in wrongdoing.
The CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG) had received a separate complaint months earlier from Daniel P. Meyer, the Pentagon's top whistleblower advocate, according to interviews with US officials and documents VICE News obtained. He said he too was a whistleblower, and that the CIA was retaliating against him over a confidential email he sent to Senator Chuck Grassley, which was intercepted by the OIG, that said the watchdog's office failed to investigate interrogators' claims that they weren't reimbursed for legal fees.
Although Meyer is not identified by name in the inspector general documents obtained from the CIA by VICE News, US officials interviewed by VICE News said they believe it's the same case identified in a July 25, 2014 McClatchy report.
According to the CIA watchdog's memo in the case, on October 5, 2012, Meyer contacted the CIA's Office of General Counsel through his attorney "alleging whistleblower reprisal."
The McClatchy story also cited cases of interrogators complaining to the OIG that they were not reimbursed for legal fees. The legal fees, McClatchy reported, were eventually paid by CIA.
Related: Senate Torture Report Finds the CIA Was Less Effective and More Brutal Than Anyone Knew
The allegations leveled by Meyer were reviewed by the CIA Office of Inspector General between December 20, 2012 and June 14, 2013, and then passed to the Intelligence Community's Inspector General (ICIG) due to an undisclosed conflict of interest.
"The Assistant Inspector General for Investigations determined that because of a potential appearance of a conflict of interest, a full independent investigation into the allegations is not appropriate and directed the matter be referred to the Intelligence Community Inspector General for investigation," the CIA watchdog's closing memo in the case said.
The ICIG determined that Meyer "did not use proper channels when communicating with Congressional committees" and the "ICIG may be a fact witness in the matter, creating a conflict and precluding the them [sic] from initiating an investigation." The ICIG reached that conclusion because Meyer was apparently communicating information about the CIA's torture program to Grassley, a lawmaker who was not a member of the Senate committee that has oversight of the CIA, officials familiar with the case said.
The CIA and the intelligence community at large have strict protocols directing how intelligence community employee may communicate with Congress. One source familiar with the case told VICE News that Meyer was "just reaching out to Grassley and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't 'official.' What became controversial is all of a sudden the CIA's inspector general got a hold of the email," and sought to punish Meyer.
Grassley has been a strong advocate for whistleblower protection. He co-authored the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act and last year launched the Senate's first whistleblower protection caucus. It appears the interrogator who filed the complaint about the indemnification claims first contacted Meyer, who was working for the Pentagon, in the hopes of resolving his case prior to reaching out to the CIA inspector general.
The CIA declined to comment to VICE News about the watchdog complaints.
McClatchy, citing knowledgeable sources, said Meyer's email to Grassley "related to allegations that the agency's inspector general, David Buckley, failed to properly investigate CIA retaliation against an agency official who cooperated in the [Senate] committee's [torture] probe."
"Somehow, according to these people, Buckley obtained the email," McClatchy reported. "After obtaining the email, Buckley approached Meyer's boss, I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the 17-agency US intelligence community, in what may have constituted a violation of the confidentiality of the whistleblowing process."
Mark Zaid, a Washington, DC-based attorney who has represented numerous intelligence community employees in disputes against the CIA and other government agencies, told VICE News there is a "perception that whistleblowers are not to be protected unless they follow the law 100 percent."
Related: Read more from 'Primary Sources,' the VICE News FOIA blog
"The problem is many of them are not familiar with what the law actually requires," Zaid said. "It has no teeth. If the CIA inspector general cared about protecting [the agency's] whistleblowers, it would do so regardless of the process they followed. And based on this memo, the [CIA OIG] ultimately did absolutely nothing."
The ICIG determined there was insufficient evidence of whistleblower reprisal to warrant further investigation in both cases. The CIA inspector general closed the case on June 29, 2013, a few weeks before Meyer started a new job as the executive director, Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection, which is part of the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
Reached by email, Meyer declined to comment to VICE News about his case.
Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, where Meyer works, said she does not believe Meyer is the employee who filed a complaint with the CIA's watchdog.
"It is accurate that Meyer has blown the whistle on federal wrongdoing. However, he has never blown the whistle on Intelligence Community activities, nor has he been treated in a manner by intelligence community elements, including the CIA, which would cause him to file a reprisal complaint," Williams told VICE News.
Follow Jason Leopold on Twitter: @JasonLeopoldFrom the moment Blizzard announced World of Warcraft's fourth expansion, Mists of Pandaria, the company has faced allegations from long-time WoW fans that it was selling out to the youth demographic, aping children's flicks like Kung-Fu Panda in an effort to draw in youngsters. But barely three hours after I started playing the expansion, I had already seen my character pass out drunk—twice—and be accused of complicity in a genocide. So it seems obvious pretty quickly that these worries were unwarranted, and that Blizzard may have even gone out of its way to allay such fears.
The latest adventure in the online world of Azeroth is not without cutesy appeal, but it's also rife with the high fantasy melodrama and challenging dungeons that have kept World of Warcraft compelling over the years. If Blizzard aimed to court the youth demographic, then it has done a masterful job of incorporating that audience into its overall vision.
Into the Mists
Blizzard is still second to none when it comes to world building, and Pandaria's use of vibrant colors and enormous scale often results in incredible scenes that are a joy to look at. This is a particularly impressive feat considering the World of Warcraft framework that the expansion is built on is now eight years old. I remain astounded that Blizzard has managed to keep this game visually appealing so long after its shelf life should have expired. It seems ridiculous that World of Warcraft's visual appeal could be compared in the same breath to Guild Wars 2, a game that came out in August.
Pandaria features a heavy emphasis on a sort of faux-Chinese cartoon aesthetic that makes numerous references to Southeast Asia. It's a bit jarring at first to enter a fantasy realm and be presented with images that tie directly to a real-world culture, but World of Warcraft is no stranger to cribbing from historical examples. The Worgen from Cataclysm draw heavily on 19th century English themes, the Trolls have a Caribbean vibe (and accent), the Tauren borrow heavily from Native American culture, and the Dwarves are basically short, bearded Scots.
We chronicled our first steps into Pandaria when we previewed the beta last March, and the expansion's introduction seems to have remained unchanged since then. We spent most of our time in the final release traveling around the new zones built for characters between levels 85 and 90. These locales are markedly more complex than what we saw in the beta, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, and this is where we expect most players will spend the vast bulk of their time.
Those who are looking for something grander from modern MMOs than the standard "kill X of Y creature" quest template will be somewhat disappointed by Pandaria. That said, Blizzard has done a good job of adding some excitement to the basic formula. One of the first Alliance quests in Pandaria's first zone, the Jade Forest, sees players flying a helicopter and strafing away from Horde attack boats. Another quest further down the road features a sniper mission. These are hardly revolutionary features for video games at large, but they show Blizzard's continuing commitment to providing unique gameplay to MMO role-playing.
Battle Pets
Apart from the massive new continent of Pandaria, the biggest new feature in Mists is the introduction of the Battle Pets system. This is essentially a Pokemon-style metagame where players battle and train the vanity pets/companions they've been collecting through their time in Azeroth. Any creature labeled as a "critter" can now be captured, battled, and trained to its fullest magical potential. Ultimately, players try to train a crack team of three pets to battle against other players, and there's even an automatic matchmaking system for facilitating these battles effortlessly. These features are available to all WoW players, even without purchasing Pandaria, and there are also new pets all across Azeroth that can be collected and trained.
When I first tried out Battle Pets, I was convinced that it would be a silly, passing amusement at best, but several hours and dozens of pet battles later I felt differently. Taken objectively, the pet battle system is frustratingly simple. If your opponent has a pet that has a higher level and a faster attack speed than yours, then the match is practically decided before it has begun (at least that was the case in the early levels that we were able to play).
But the key to the battle system's appeal is the emotional connection players have with the pets they've been collecting throughout the main WoW experience. These aren't battles between random creatures with increasingly ridiculous names, as in Pokemon. Pets are little companions players may have been carrying around and showing off to friends (and setting against computer-controlled enemies) for years.
Emotional Attachment
So much of Mists of Pandaria is difficult to evaluate because of emotional attachments. Sure, the bulk of Pandaria's main gameplay feels a bit dated, and the quest structure is essentially the same as what was introduced eight years ago (apart from a few notable deviations). But I wonder if it's really constructive to look at the expansion through that kind of lens.
By the time a WoW player has reached Pandaria, he or she will likely have invested hundreds or even thousands of hours into that character. That's easily more time and character investment than any five Final Fantasy games played one after the other. As a result, even the most banal quest in Pandaria is going to be much more engaging because it's adding to an extended personal story.
It's difficult to know what Mists of Pandaria might be like for a new player, but I can say that it has been good fun to explore the land with a dwarf that's now over seven years old. I'm looking forward to diving further into the other zones and tackling the high level dungeons and raids once there are no more new lands to see.poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201610/2092/1155968404_5177824973001_5177812632001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Fact: Trump suggested the women accusing him of sexual assault aren’t attractive
“[Trump] held a number of big rallies where he said that he could not possibly have done those things to those women because they were not attractive enough… to be assaulted.” — Hillary Clinton
“I did not say that.” — Donald Trump
While Trump has not said that explicitly, he has repeatedly suggested it over the last week. Regarding People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff, who recently alleged Trump forcibly kissed her in 2005, Trump said last week in Cincinnati: “Take a look. Look at her. Look at her words. And you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”
During a rally in North Carolina last Friday, Trump said of Jessica Leeds, the woman that accused him of groping her on an airplane in the 1980s: “Believe me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.”An off-duty D.C. firefighter was shot in Southeast Washington while driving in his car with his daughter. News4's Darcy Spencer reports. (Published Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016)
An off-duty D.C. firefighter was shot while driving in his car with his juvenile daughter, police told News4.
The firefighter was driving in the 3300 block of Southern Avenue, Southeast, about 4 p.m. Saturday when a person on a motorcycle pulled up and opened fire on the car, D.C. police said. His daughter was not harmed, police said.
According to a police report, the firefighter was found in the driver seat of his car suffering from a gunshot wound to the left side of his face.
He was airlifted to a hospital, the firefighter union told News4. The 44-year-old firefighter was conscious, alert and stable, according to D.C. Fire and EMS, and fire officials said he will survive.
"The prayers of the entire department are with our fellow firefighter and his family, and we are grateful that his prognosis is good," D.C. Fire and EMS Chief Gregory Dean said in a statement.
A spokesperson for D.C. Fire and EMS said the firefighter is a 24-year veteran of the department and works at a fire house in Northwest Washington. The shooting is not believed to be connected to the fire department, the spokesperson said.
The victim told police an unknown male was riding the motorcycle and fired two rounds in his car before fleeing into Prince George's County, according to the police report.
D.C. police had tweeted for people to lookout for a black and red sports motorcycle.
Paul Trantham, with the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said the incident is another example of gun violence in the area.
"We need a special group back out here so that they can locate these guns and take them off our streets," Trantham said.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated from an earlier version.Triple Eight’s Sam Tordoff led the way in the second free practice session at Donington Park, just ahead of the Team BMR pair of Aron Smith and Alain Menu.
As with Smith in the first session, Tordoff set two laps good enough to lead the standings, with his eventual best of 1.09.684 set with eight minutes to go in his MG6 GT.
Tordoff and Smith swapped places at the top of the times throughout the session, setting a rapid pace which is already well under last year’s pole position time.
Menu completed 21 laps in the second Volkswagen CC, ahead of Tordoff’s team-mate Jason Plato, and Adam Morgan’s Ciceley Racing Mercedes A-Class.
Honda Racing Team’s Gordon Shedden was next, ahead of championship leader Andrew Jordan, Marc Hynes, Fabrizio Giovanardi and Martin Depper, with the top 13 cars covered by less than 0.9s.
Outside the top 10, West Surrey Racing were curiously off the pace, with Rob Collard the best of their trio in 13th in his BMW 125i.
Ollie Jackson had an off at the Old Hairpin, causing some damage to the front left of his Welch Motorsport Proton Gen-2, while team-mate Dan Welch managed three laps in his car, which is running for the first time this weekend.
There were black flags for United Autosports’ Glynn Geddie, and the Rob Austin Racing pair of team boss Austin and Hunter Abbott, for repeatedly exceeding track limits during the session.
Qualifying for the first of tomorrow’s three races gets under way at 15:40 BST.Approval up seven percentage points among all adults in same time span
PRINCETON, NJ -- In January, 70% of Hispanics approved of the job President Barack Obama was doing, down slightly from 75% in December. However, the January measure still represents an increase of 12 percentage points since last August, just prior to the Democratic National Convention.
The results are based on Gallup Daily tracking throughout January. During that time, Gallup polled 1,288 Hispanics, with roughly one-third of those interviews conducted in Spanish.
The timing of the increase in Obama's approval rating among Hispanics suggests the presidential election campaign may have been a significant factor in Hispanics' renewed enthusiasm for him, starting with the Democratic National Convention in early September through the election and the initial post-election phase. According to the National Exit Poll, Hispanics voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by 71% to 27%.
Obama's popularity is also up among all Americans since late summer, rising from 45% in August to 52% in January, though the January estimate is also down slightly from December's 53%. That seven-point August to January increase among all Americans is only about half as large as the increase for Hispanics over the same months.
Hispanic job approval of Obama is now nearly back to where it was early in his first year in office, when roughly three in four Hispanics approved of Obama. The early part of 2009 -- the president's "honeymoon period" -- was also when Obama's approval rating was highest among all Americans.
Throughout his presidency, there has been an average 13-point gap between the approval rating of Hispanics (62%) and that of all Americans (49%). Now, the gap stands at 18 points, 70% to 52%, indicating Hispanics are becoming some of the president's most ardent supporters. Among major subgroups Gallup tracks, only blacks (92%), Democrats (90%), and liberals (82%) had a higher January approval rating for Obama than Hispanics.
Implications
Even with a slight decline in his approval rating among Hispanics in January, President Obama now enjoys as strong a position with this group as he has since early in his presidency. A major priority of his second term is immigration reform, an issue of keen interest to Hispanics. Should it pass -- and the momentum toward action on immigration reform is gathering, with key Republicans in the House and Senate co-sponsoring bills -- Obama's approval among Hispanics may go even higher.
With Hispanics a fast-growing population group in the United States, both Obama and presidents who follow him will benefit politically to the extent they can win over Hispanics' support.
Explore President Obama's approval ratings in depth and compare them with those of past presidents in the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center.Star Wars: The Old Republic sitting at nearly 1.7 million paid subscribers EA has confirmed that BioWare's first MMO is almost at 2 million users
Mike Williams Reviews Editor, USgamer Thursday 8th March 2012 Share this article Share
Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello has told investors that BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is up to nearly 1.7 million monthly subscribers to date. A "vast majority" of players have passed beyond the free month of playtime that comes with the game and are in full-on paid subscription mode.
Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz is estimating 2 million monthly subscribers by the end of June 2012.
"We continue to feel comfortable with our Star Wars estimates which are an important part of our street-high FY13 non-GAAP EPS estimate of $1.36. We estimate 2MM paying subs by the end of June 2012 (and then sustained for the remainder of the year). We also note that the company plans to launch Star Wars in the Asia-Pacific region later this month," Creutz said in a statement.
Overall, the success of SWTOR has Cowen and Company rating EA shares to Outperform.
UPDATE: The original story incorrectly mentioned that the 1.7 million subscribers were reached by the end of February.President-elect Donald Trump speaks at the Chairman's Global Dinner in Washington last week. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
President Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday night to re-up the idea of sending federal law enforcement to Chicago if the city’s homicide rate doesn’t come down.
“If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on,” Trump wrote, “I will send in the Feds!”
He said in his tweet that there had been 228 shootings and 42 homicides in Chicago since the start of the year — figures higher than the comparable period during 2016, which was particularly bloody year for the city.
If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible "carnage" going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
Trump has raised the prospect of Washington intervention in Chicago before. His latest musings on the subject came just a day after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) criticized the Republican president for focusing so much on the size of the crowd at his inaugural ceremony and failing in his speech to appeal to “our better angels as a country.”
Trump sent out a similar tweet on Jan. 2, criticizing the year-end murder count in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city. “If Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!” Trump said in that tweet.
It’s unclear what exactly Trump is suggesting. There is a precedent for embedding FBI agents with local police, as happened in Prince George’s County, Md., after a spike in killings years ago.
A spokesman for Emanuel on Tuesday night pointed to an interview that the mayor had done on local television before Trump's tweet, when he was asked what the Trump administration could do to help fight the violence.
“There's a lot the federal government can do,” Emanuel said in an interview with WTTW. As examples, he cited federal help tracking illegal guns and prosecuting such cases, increased gun control and “help [paying for] additional police officers.”
Eddie Johnson, the Chicago police superintendent, echoed Emanuel's points in a statement released late Tuesday, following Trump's tweet.
“As the mayor said just a few hours ago, the Chicago Police Department is more than willing to work with the federal government to build on our partnerships with DOJ, FBI, DEA and ATF and boost federal prosecution rates for gun crimes in Chicago,” Johnson said.
Trump has repeatedly weighed in on the violence in Chicago, which dramatically spiked last year after also going up the year before.
During his campaign, Trump said that he had met “a top police officer in Chicago” during a visit there and that this officer assured him he could solve the violence “in one week.” Trump also said police could stop the bloodshed by being “much tougher than they are right now." (Police in Chicago said that Trump did not meet with anyone from the department's senior command staff, and the Trump campaign declined to identify the man Trump said he was quoting.)
On the campaign trail, Trump also backed the use of the controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, saying “Chicago needs” it.
The city's embattled police force has blamed illegal guns and gang activity, among other things, for the spike in bloodshed. Last year, Chicago had 762 homicides, the city's deadliest year in two decades, along with more than 4,000 shooting victims. Chicago saw more homicides last year than the two larger cities — New York and Los Angeles — combined.
The The Trump administration will soon have an opportunity to weigh in on Chicago's policing practices.
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Following a sprawling federal investigation, the Justice Department and city officials announced in the final days of the Obama administration plans to seek a court-enforceable agreement to reform the city's policing practices. But it is not clear what the future of that agreement will be if Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump's pick for attorney general and a critic of such agreements, is confirmed.
Trump's tweet Tuesday night followed on the heels of “The O'Reilly Factor” on Fox News discussing Chicago's homicide numbers. During the segment, a guest specifically used the word “carnage,” which Trump later cited in quotation marks in his tweet.
O'Reilly's show appeared to be using statistics collected by the Chicago Tribune, which reported 44 homicides through Tuesday. The newspaper had also reported on Monday that there were 228 shootings so far this year, up slightly from last year, and that homicides were up 24 percent so far this year.
The newspaper's tally differs from the official Chicago Police Department statistics, because the Tribune includes other killings such as justifiable homicides and shootings on the expressway that the police do not include.
According to a police department spokesman, there have been 38 killings through Tuesday night, up from 33 at the same point last year. Shootings were even, with 182 shootings through this date both years.Extensive damage was caused when a car careered into the statue outside the stadium in January with large chunks taken out of the base.
Repairs were delayed while Wolves waited for the right stone to be available but in the past week contractors have completed the work.
It’s understood the cost of repairing the damage – which included fixing the plinth and some engraving work – ran into several thousands of pounds.
Jamie Turner, of Leacroft Avenue, Wolverhampton, was charged with dangerous driving, drink driving and failing to stop.
How the statue looked after the crash
The 30-year-old was given a 12-month community order, a £300 fine and disqualified from driving for 16 months by Walsall magistrates on May 5.
Wolves managing director Laurie Dalrymple contacted Billy’s daughter Vicky following the incident and has recently been in touch to let her know the work has finished.
See also: Billy Wright statue badly damaged after crash
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Head of operations at Wolves, Steve Sutton, said: “We are delighted that the Billy Wright Statue has been restored to its former glory.
"The extensive repair work included repairing the damaged plinth before re-cladding, as well as further repairs to the base of the statue and two of the bollards surrounding it.
“There was also some engraving work which needed to be carried out with gold leafed lettering, before re-fixing the commemorative plaque to the base of the statue.
"We would like to thank all of the contractors involved in the work and supporters for their patience."
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How the statue looked after the crash
The 9ft bronze statue was unveiled in 1996 outside the stand which bears Wright’s name.
Sculptor James Butler created the statue. He produced Molineux’s other statue of Stan Cullis and is working on one of former owner Sir Jack Hayward.
Wright, who died in 1994, captained Wolves to three league titles in the 1950s as well as their FA Cup success of 1949.
He became the first footballer to play 100 times for his country, going on to win 105 England caps.By Anders Riel MullerThirty years ago I was born in the middle of one of the most significant developmental projects the world has ever seen: The transformation of South Korea from a poor agricultural society devastated by war to one of the wealthiest economies. In my family money and food were scarce. Due to economic hardships I was temporarily placed in an orphanage.However, when my father showed up to claim me back, I had been adopted by a family in a far off country. My father had no way to get in touch with me and I was too young to tell anyone that I was not an orphan who needed another family. I was not the only one who experienced this sort of displacement. Around 200,000 children from Korea were adopted by families overseas, most of them during the 1970s and 80s.The conventional narrative surrounding adoption is one of poverty but as I began to dig into Korean economic history I started to question the conventional narrative of a poor country who had no other option to sending children overseas. Rather, my understanding of overseas adoption has now come to the point where I see adoption as a political choice to address the social problems that came from rapid economic transformation. The highest numbers of overseas adoptions occurred during a time of radical and accelerated economic transformation.By 1980, when I was sent overseas for adoption, Korea no longer belonged to the poorest countries in the world. But by then overseas adoption had become a very effective tool for population control and limiting social welfare expenses by the government. For each adoption, Korea received several thousand dollars in good hard foreign currency. Foreign currency was tightly controlled by the state, because in order to industrialize, the government took loans from overseas and they had to be paid back in U.S. dollars.Every dollar earned was vital to the continued ability to industrialize. It is estimated that overseas adoption contributed between $20 and 40 million in hard currency every year in the 1970s and 80s. At that time, if any Korean company exported even $1 million in goods, they were acknowledged by the government. Also, by sending children from marginalized groups overseas, the government saved a lot on social welfare that could instead be reinvested in economic development.This understanding of history leads me to the conviction that adoptees contributed to the economic miracle and that we have a place in the history of Korean development and hence to be critical of it. We contributed to the economy in line with farmers and laborers in Korea who toiled in the factories and fields. Or the nurses, miners, farmers, soldiers and construction workers sent overseas to serve the Korean nation’s development agenda. We continue to contribute to Korean society economically through our multiple trips back to visit our places of birth. We spend money earned overseas in hotels, restaurants and so on. Some adoptees decide to return to Korea to live either for a period of time or permanently and they contribute to the society as by working in various sectors.Many adoptees first come to visit Korea through government-supported cultural trips. We are presented with beautified and idealized images of Korean traditions, culture and economic success. We visit temples, palaces and shopping malls. We are told about the difficult past and glorious present. We are put in high-end hotels and treated to lavish dinners. Representatives from government and adoption agencies greet us and tell us how proud they are of us and sometimes they ask us to once again help Korea by becoming ‘good ambassadors.’’We should be proud of being “global Koreans’’ and ‘bridge builders’’ that can help Korea even more. This kind of “appreciation’’ can seem flattering, but the palaces, luxury hotels and shopping malls do not fit well with where many of us came from: marginalized families whose struggles have been silenced by shame, guilt and a lack of political voice. We are not invited to this part of Korea on homeland tours. Imagine if these government tours showed our history?Then they would take us to orphanages, factory floors, single mothers and dilapidated neighborhoods and villages. In this way, for many of us, our history is still hidden. Korea has become richer, partly due to our contribution, but today’s Korea remains rife with economic inequalities, social stigmatization and racism. Many of the structural injustices that led to our adoptions are still well and alive. Single women are still encouraged to give up their children for adoption and live in shame and silence.Migrant workers who come to this country to work and support their families back home are treated with disrespect and racism. Mixed race children are being treated as second-class citizens. The rich are getting richer and the majority is getting poorer. Today, Korea has one of the highest levels of income inequality among all OECD countries and the lowest spending on social welfare. For me, adoption justice is not only a struggle for justice for adoptees. It is connected to all the other struggles of marginalized groups in this country.As an adoptee, who now has a better understanding of how my adoption history relates to Korean development, my duty to Korea is to get involved in changing the system and work for a more just and equitable society. Many adoptees are doing the same. They are actively engaged in different kinds of political activism such as supporting single mothers, migrant workers and adoptee justice. Hopefully adoptees will continue their involvement with other groups working for justice and equality in Korea. But it is a two-way exchange. Progressive Koreans also have to recognize our place in their society and history. We may be outsiders in terms of language and culture but our place in history as laborers for Korean development should be acknowledged. Hopefully this can lead to new alliances, new networks of solidarity and ultimately a more just society for all.The Israel Postal Company issued a new series of stamps featuring common signs in Israeli Sign Language.
About 650,000 people in Israel are deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, making the problem bigger than most people suspect. The new stamps are intended to raise awareness of the challenges facing deaf Israelis.
The postage entered circulation on Tuesday and features pictures of the signs for “friendship,” “thank you,” “good bye,” “love” and “kiss.” They are the product of cooperation between the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel and the Israel Philatelic Service.
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Yael Kakoon, executive director of the institute, said that she and other members of Israel’s deaf community hoped that the stamps “will increase awareness of the ongoing struggle of deaf and hard-of-hearing Israelis to better integrate into Israeli society and to achieve recognition of Israeli Sign Language as one of the official languages of the State of Israel.
“When someone says ‘thank you’ to a deaf person in their language, it gives them a feeling of belonging,” Kakoon said. “Deaf Israelis have the right to equal and active participation in society, as in all realms of life, and to full education in their language. We hope that these stamps will be another step on the path towards official recognition of Israeli Sign Language in Israel. When you want to show respect for someone, you try to address them in their language.”
Yaron Ratzon, director of the Israel Philatelic Service, said that the stamps are intended to raise the level of awareness of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community “through the use of these carefully chosen signs. As the stamps are intended for regular use, with time the majority of Israelis will be exposed to this important message,” Ratzon said.
Watch the video to learn some Israeli Sign Language for yourself.Human rights groups in Kentucky are fighting a proposed bill that would allow people to sidestep anti-discrimination laws if they could justify their actions with “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
House Bill 279, sponsored by conservative Democrat Rep. Bob Damron and recently passed in the State Senate, would strengthen a person’s ability to “ignore state regulations or laws that contradict his or her ‘sincerely held’ religious beliefs.” Gay rights groups say this could legalize discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of certain religious beliefs that maintain homosexuality is wrong:
The Kentucky Equality Federation sent a letter to Beshear before the Senate vote, urging the two-term Democratic governor to veto the measure. “House Bill 279 represents a clear and present danger to the gay and lesbian community and other minority groups around the commonwealth,” the letter said. “House Bill 279 does nothing more than give people permission to discriminate based on their religious beliefs, thereby taking it beyond ‘freedom of religion’ to ‘forced religion,’ because they have imposed their religious beliefs on others, with legal authority to do so.”
Only four Kentucky cities have enacted ordinances that protect LGBT people from discrimination; no such protections are in place at the statewide or nationwide level. This would make it even easier for conservative Christians to completely ignore what little protections do prevent LGBT people from discrimination.
The bill, she said, |
up in a single-parent household, or to growing up in a neighborhood where a particular race is the majority.
3. Isolation. Children are naturally curious and unwittingly cruel. If you are a child in a school where you look or act different from the mainstream, you will likely be a target. This concept is no exception when you are an interracial kid in a class room full of other kids that look different from you.
With that being said, In addition to our regular duties as parents, my wife and I have another very important responsibility: To find fun and interesting ways to teach him about his different heritages, and instill within him a confidence of self. The idea is that love and acceptance from his parents and family will be enough to combat any negativity that he may face in this world.
Here are some of the things that we have done or are doing so far to prepare him.
Choosing the right neighborhoods
I mentioned earlier that I grew up in an inner-city area of New Jersey. The community that I was a part of was essentially a melting pot of cultures, religions and ideals. In elementary school, I remember doing book report with a kid Pakistan, bartering lunch with a boy from he Philippines, playing Mortal Kombat with my best friend from Guyana and playing baseball with my neighborhood kids from across the street that happened to be from Puerto Rico. I truly believe that being exposed to these different experiences at an early age taught me to judge people by their character and not by their skin color. I want that upbringing for my son as well, which is part of the reason I chose the area that we currently live in. Not only will he learn the valuable lessons that I did growing up, the chances of this being ostracized will be drastically decreased in a in a multicultural setting.
Education through reading
We find that books are a great way to educate our son about his backgrounds that he shares with his parents. We also use reading to teach him about other ethnicities and cultures as well. Here are example of our favorite books:
Shades of Black – Primarily a picture book, Shades of Black is a celebration of the many colors that make up the African- American race. The pictures consist of children with a variety of skin tones that range from light to dark and proves how beautiful they all are.
***
GoodNight Maine – This also a picture book. However the images of both coastal and inland Maine are so strong, not many words are needed. We visit my wife’s family in Main often, so it is cool to connect the images that we see in the book with what we actually see while we are there. An excellent bedtime read. This also a picture book. However the images of both coastal and inland Maine are so strong, not many words are needed. We visit my wife’s family in Main often, so it is cool to connect the images that we see in the book with what we actually see while we are there. An excellent bedtime read.
***
WhoeverYou Are – This is a book that I believe should be in every child’s library. The book has pictures children from all over the world and stresses the point that no matter where you come from, we are all have the same wants, needs and cry the same tears. The illustrations are beautiful and the lessons taught in this book will reverberate well into adulthood.
***
Visiting Family My wife and I were lucky in the sense that our parents were very supportive towards our relationship. I have heard horror stories where people were forced to choose between their families or the person that they loved.Partly because of this, we make it a point to get out and visit them as much as possible. Our son gets to see firsthand how well people of different backgrounds can get along. Also, by visiting both families frequently, he gets to experience the different cultures. This way, he is familiar with both aspects of his identity, which I hope will develop his confidence as he gets older.
While race relations in our country have steadily improved over the years, they are by no stretch of the imagination perfect. There are still people in this world who will say and do things in order to make our son feel as though he does not belong. While we can’t protect him from everything, what we can do is our best to prepare him for what he may encounter.
—anti-war
Libya, Inc.: Coming Waste, Fraud and Other Forms of Plunder on a Grand Scale - by Stephen LendmanLike in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, wherever America and its Western allies show up, pillaging is sure to follow.Libya is no exception, earmarked as another profit center to be exploited. A previous article discussed it, accessed through the following link:It explained the process now begun to carve up the Libyan corpse for profit at the expense of millions of people who deserve better.However, they're entirely left out of America's imperial agenda going forward with rich spoils at stake, including the usual waste, fraud and other pickings on an enormous scale.A new congressional "Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan" investigation highlighted what Libya can expect. Titled, "Transforming Wartime Contracting: Controlling costs, reducing risks," it documented plunder on a grand scale.Access the full report through the following link:It begins, saying:"At least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in America's contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan."Calling its estimates conservative, it suggested the true amount is far greater than congressional investigators admit.A previous article covered a decade of US war costs, accessed through the following link:It discussed a June Brown University Watson Institute for International Studies (WIIS) "Cost of War" report, estimating (post-9/11) around $5,444 trillion spent and projected with all related expenses and obligations included.In fact, including all related categories, America now spends around $1.5 trillion annually, suggesting a conservative post-9/11 total double or more Watson's figure.It constitutes a shocking waste of national resources at a time vital homeland needs go begging, including essential social services being systematically reduced or ended. It also suggests a level of fraud and waste multiple times higher than congressional investigators reported.In fact, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted on September 10, 2001:"According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions" because the books are cooked to facilitate rampant Pentagon and defense contractor corruption.It's theft on the grandest scale, stealing unknown trillions, dwarfed only by much greater stolen Wall Street amounts.On August 31, AP headlined, "Independent panel warns failure to make contracting reforms risks more wartime waste and fraud," saying:In Iraq and Afghanistan alone, America "lost billions of dollars to waste and fraud....and stands to repeat that in future wars without big changes in how the government awards and manages contracts for battlefield support and reconstruction projects, independent investigators said...."Established in 2008, the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) included four members from each party, created to investigate scandalous contractor malfeasance.Calling its findings "sobering," it said much of what was found could have been avoided. Moreover, "(u)nless changes are made, continued waste and fraud will undercut the effectiveness of money spent in future operations, whether they involve hostile threats overseas or national emergencies here at home requiring military participation and interagency response."Complicit with Wall Street's controlled Fed, war profiteers can order up all the ready cash it wants to steal. With Congress, the White House, federal departments, and the Pentagon involved in the dirty game, who'll take the lead to end a deal too sweet to stop.Reports like CWC's proliferate through Washington, followed by inaction or too little of it. Why expect change now, even in an investigation, saying:"Fraud associated with federal government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan has been widespread." It includes "bribery, gratuities, kickbacks, and conflicts of interest, as well as false claims and statements, cost/labor mischarging, bid rigging, and undelivered, defective and counterfeit products."In fact, the level of war profiteering sweetheart deals and kickbacks going back decades suggests trillions of dollars stolen because of militarism gone mad. Expect no independent investigations to uncover how much or that officials at the highest levels are involved.In his 2005 book titled, "Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror," Jeff St. Clair documented an explosive account of how contractors like Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel and the Bush family-connected Carlyle Group among others scam multi-billions at taxpayer expense.Though out-of-control by any measure, it's largely unreported in the mainstream.In addition, much grand theft since the Gulf War (exacerbated post-9/11) happened because functions formally performed by service personnel are now outsourced to private military contractors (PMCs).Operating freely, they rip off the system absent checks and balances in place to stop them. Moreover, the total contract workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the number of troops and civilian employees.A previous article discussed America's growing use of PMCs, accessed through the following link:It described those performing security functions as unprincipled paramilitary hired guns. Operating freely from criminal or civil accountability, they're unchecked to kill or steal and get away with it, besides handsome amounts they're paid.Since the Cold War's 1991 end, the Pentagon downsized to about two-thirds its former size, a process former defense secretary Dick Cheney called BRAC - Base Realignment and Closure, followed by privatizing military functions.Ways wars are fought also changed. Earlier distinctions between soldiers and civilians broke down, the result of low-intensity conflicts against drug cartels, warlords and persons or groups aggressor nations call "terrorists."When employed for imperial purposes (like so-called Libyan "rebels"), they're called "freedom fighters," not rogue gangs given license to kill and loot freely.High-intensity warfare also changed. So sailors aboard guided missile ships, for example, serve alongside weapons and technology company personal, needed for their specialized expertise.Moreover, political thinking changed to believe whatever governments can do, business does better so let it. As a result, privatizing the military followed, piercing the last frontier to let PMC mercenaries serve in place of conventional forces.They're used as combatants and consultants, as well as for support services, intelligence and personal security, reaping enormous profits besides what they're able to steal that may, in fact, be greater because checks and balances aren't in place to stop them.The CWC report covered various examples resulting from:(1) Contractors managing other ones.(2) Awarding no-bid long-term deals.(3) Extending contracts well past their expiration dates.(4) Using cost-plus instead of fixed-price contracts.(5) Increasing ceilings on fixed-price contracts.(6) Organizing work through multiple subcontractor tiers, making effective oversight impossible.Notably, four large companies accounted for 40% of total contract dollars. Another 22 companies got deals of at least $1 billion, accounting for 52% of amounts awarded.The concentration produced a "too big to fail" syndrome, affording vitally needed companies virtual immunity from accountability. It opened up a chasm for them to exploit in "the form of lower-quality materials, reduced training, and lower performance standards," as well as numerous other ways to commit grand theft.In fact, given license to steal, how many opportunists can resist, especially that when caught, penalties exacted pale compared to enormous profits and personal gain.The report also admits that relying heavily on contractors contributed greatly to sustaining insurgents fighting against US/NATO occupation, saying:"The largest source of funding for the insurgency is commonly recognized to be money from the drug trade. During a March 2011 trip to Afghanistan, experts told the Commission that extortion of funds from US construction projects and transportation contracts is the insurgents' second-largest funding source."Drugs trafficking, in fact, proliferates because the CIA and Western financial interests benefit greatly from it. For Wall Street banks, it constitutes a major profit center.Years ago, Max Keiser worked on Wall Street. On his Russia Today program, he once remarked that every Friday afternoon, limousines drove up to major banks to deposit suitcases of drug money to be laundered.It's one of many open Wall Street secrets, showing the corrupting power of money on a grand scale in amounts beyond comprehension.The report also noted that in the last half century, America undertook 56 foreign interventions, including 10 land-based ones lasting a year or more. They include Southeast Asia (1960s-70s), Lebanon (1982-83), Panama (1989), Iraq (1990-91), Somalia (1992-93), Haiti (1993-96), Bosnia/Kosovo (1995-99), East Timor (1999-2000), Afghanistan and Iraq.Libya now heads toward membership in a club Groucho Marx once described on a personal level, explaining one he wanted no part of willing to have him as a member.Nonetheless, CWC called the current geopolitical environment disturbing enough "to plan for the possibility that the United States may again become involved in overseas contingency operations that require extensive contractor support," citing Libya as a case in point.In fact, because the business of America is war, permanent war, multiple wars, what CWC called possible is guaranteed, because war profiteers want it no other way.Unless militarism and grand theft at current levels cease, neither humanity or planet earth may survive the toll that keeps growing exponentially, because multiple US wars may increase to a global catastrophic one.That prospect too grim to imagine is real because enough good people aren't committed to stop it.Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen [at] sbcglobal.net Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.Image copyright AP Image caption Iraqi troops and pro-government militiamen have essentially encircled Ramadi
The Iraqi army has urged people living in the centre of the Islamic State-held city of Ramadi to leave before an operation to retake it is launched.
A security source told the BBC leaflets had been dropped by planes, warning residents the army planned to storm the city within the next 24 hours.
The call, which was also broadcast on state television, told them to use an exit secured by the army to the south.
Ramadi was captured by IS in May in an embarrassing defeat for the Iraqi army.
Last month, the US military said Iraqi troops and pro-government militiamen had essentially encircled the city, located about 90km (55 miles) to the west of Baghdad, and that conditions were set for a final assault.
'Last warning'
On Monday, a security source told the BBC that the leaflets dropped over Ramadi had urged civilians living in the city centre to leave because government forces were preparing to storm the city from the south, the west and the north.
Image copyright AP Image caption Ramadi residents warned the Iraqi army that IS militants were preventing them from leaving
They were advised to head to the south-eastern Humayra district, where an exit had been secured, the source said.
"This is the last warning by the security forces to the people inside Ramadi," the source added. "The security forces will storm the city, whether residents are inside it or not."
However, a spokesperson for Ramadi residents called on the government to postpone the offensive.
The spokesperson said thousands of families were being held by IS militants, who had set up checkpoints and threatened to kill anyone who attempted to leave.
The US military believes there are between 600 and 1,000 IS militants in Ramadi.
It says they have developed a strong defensive system in and around the city, including using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to create minefields.
Earlier this month, Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by US-led coalition air strikes recaptured the north-western town of Sinjar from IS in a major operation.Brian Taylor
BBC Scotland's political editor
Tony Blair was in the land of his birth rather frequently during the recent elections. For the avoidance of doubt, I refer to Scotland.
On his last visit, he confirmed, with a cheeky grin, that his likely successor as PM would be a Scot. Further to avoid doubt, he meant Gordon Brown.
A wag in the hand-picked audience shouted: "You mean another Scot!" Mr Blair responded with yet another cheeky grin. It was a big day for cheeky grins.
For, indeed, TB was born in Edinburgh. (Understandably, in Glasgow, he tends to emphasise his dad's connections with that city instead, speaking with hushed rapture about Govan.)
He was largely educated in Edinburgh, at Fettes College. If he was any good at football, he could play for Scotland. (To be honest, if he was only average, he could get a game.)
He has a Scottish surname. He has a clan. If he wanted to be Scottish, nobody could gainsay him.
Understandably, given that he was largely brought up in England and has an English constituency, he tends to elide his roots, arguing that his mixed heritage represents all that is good about the family that is the United Kingdom.
Grand design
However, Tony Blair has one clear, fixed place in Scottish history. He is the Prime Minister who brought about Scottish devolution.
Or, more accurately, he was Prime Minister when Scottish devolution was brought about.
Let me explain that caveat. It is commonplace at Westminster to talk of the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in the context of reform of the House of Lords and other constitutional changes.
To talk as if it were some grand design, springing fully formed from the alert brain of the great leader.
Tony Blair argues his mixed heritage is an advantage
Commonplace. But complete tosh.
The agitation for Scottish Home Rule lasted a century and more. The precise scheme for a Scottish Parliament was developed in Scotland by (other) Scots, before Tony Blair became Labour leader.
Tony Blair was not a particular fan of devolution. Left to himself, he would not have initiated such a project.
Left to themselves, he and his coterie would have regarded such a project as a diversion.
A few expressed such doubts, privately and in public. Some UK Cabinet Ministers were utterly unconvinced - and had to be taken through the entire scheme, line by line.
They were, of course, entirely entitled to pursue such a course of action - and they were right. It ensured that the eventual scheme was fully road tested.
So, what was Tony Blair's role?
He rose above the sceptics, the cynics and the fanatics. He saw, clearly, that devolution was politically inevitable.
Having reached that conclusion, he backed Donald Dewar to the hilt in implementing the scheme.
When D Dewar was really up against it, he knew he could count on the decidedly influential support of the PM.
If Donald Dewar is the father of devolution - a designation he would have cordially loathed - then Tony Blair is perhaps the Godfather.
Tony Blair's birth certificate proves his Scots roots
The powerful fixer who cut through the haggling and got things done.
Much good has it done him in Scottish opinion. He is not, how can one put it, universally adored.
Perhaps it's the wicked Scottish media - of which I am a proud member.
After all, he called us - in a moment of exasperation - "unreconstructed w*ers." (I reckon that's about the minimum I could get away with in terms of asterisks.)
Think it was one of those early occasions when TB wanted to talk about his mission with regard to education (or whatever it was) - and we wanted to talk about devolution.
He never quite got it: that the identity and Home Rule debate in Scotland was the underlay for everything else.
Not more important, ultimately, but more fundamental.
Equally, though, the wicked Scottish media could be unfair. It is said to this day on sundry websites that Tony Blair compared the Scottish Parliament to a "parish council".
That is simply not correct.
Tony Blair was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh
He was speaking in the context of a debate about tax powers. He pointed out that it would be curious if the Scottish Parliament were to be denied the fiscal clout currently available to the humble Parish council.
He was contrasting the two - not comparing them. No matter, no matter.
More widely, Tony Blair will be remembered for Iraq - the Prime Minister who took us into an "illegal war" - or as a political winner, the first Labour leader to achieve three successive election victories.
He may be remembered for a settlement in Northern Ireland - although, again, the credit must be shared with other, earlier figures.
And Scotland? Relatively little, I suspect, in the shape of emotional response.
Most will fall into one of the two categories listed above.
The PM has gone, on to the next one. Then again, perhaps Scots don't do adulation. Instead of ululating in joy, we're more inclined to grouse: "Aye, I kent his faither."
In the case of Tony Blair, for older Glaswegians that could literally be true.CANBERRA, Australia — The deputy leader of an Australian political party announced Friday that he was ending his nine-year career in Parliament because he had discovered he had technically never been a senator.
Scott Ludlam, the 47-year-old deputy leader of the minor Greens party, said he was “personally devastated” to learn that he was a citizen of New Zealand as well as Australia, which made him ineligible for the Senate job he has held since July 2008.
READ MORE: Sinkhole opens close to Australian prime minister’s home
The constitution states that a “citizen of a foreign power” is not eligible to be elected to the Australian Parliament.
While lawmakers have discovered they were technically ineligible after elections in the past, Ludlam said nine years later seemed to be a record.
“I apologize unreservedly for this,” Ludlam told reporters. “This is an oversight that was avoidable and it’s something I should have fixed up in 2006 when I first nominated.”
READ MORE: Australian PM says Trump travel ban doesn’t affect passport holders after teen denied entry to US for school trip
Born in in Palmerston North in New Zealand, Ludlam moved to Perth, Australia, when was 3 years old. He became an Australian as a teenager and said he hadn’t realized that New Zealand citizenship “might be something that sticks to you in that way.”
He was elected to the Senate three times after stating in nomination forms on each occasion that he was not a dual citizen.
He joked: “I can at least vote in the New Zealand elections in September.”
The government could demand Ludlam repay millions of dollars in salary and expenses that he has claimed since 2008.
“I’m hoping common sense prevails,” Ludlam said. “If I’d known all along this was the case and I’d just been sprung, maybe they would have a case, but this is as much of a surprise to me as it was to anybody else.”One of the main ideas used to interpretand generally devaluethe ancient history of India is the theory of the Aryan invasion. According to this account, India was invaded and conquered by nomadic light-skinned Indo-European tribes from Central Asia around 1500-1000 BC, who overthrew an earlier and more advanced dark-skinned Dravidian civilization from which they took most of what later became Hindu culture. This so-called pre-Aryan civilization is said to be evidenced by the large urban ruins of what has been called the Indus valley culture (as most of its initial sites were on the Indus river). The war between the powers of light and darkness, a prevalent idea in ancient Aryan Vedic scriptures, was thus interpreted to refer to this war between light and dark- skinned peoples. The Aryan invasion theory thus turned the Vedas, the original scriptures of ancient India and the Indo-Aryans, into little more than primitive poems of uncivilized plunderers.
This idea totally foreign to the history of India, whether north or south has become almost an unquestioned truth in the interpretation of ancient history. Today, after nearly all the reasons for its supposed validity have been refuted, even major Western scholars are at last beginning to call it in question.
In this article we will summarize the main points that have arisen. This is a complex subject that I have dealt with in depth in my book Gods, Sages and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization, for those interested in further examination of the subject.
The Indus valley culture was pronounced pre-Aryan for several reasons that were largely part of the cultural milieu of nineteenth century European thinking. As scholars following Max Muller had decided that the Aryans came into India around 1500 BC, since the Indus valley culture was earlier than this, they concluded that it had to be pre-Aryan. Yet the rationale behind the late date for the Vedic culture given by Muller was totally speculative. Max Muller, like many of the Christian scholars of his era, believed in Biblical chronology. This placed the beginning of the world at 4000 BC and the flood around 2500 BC. Assuming to those two dates, it became difficult to get the Aryans in India before 1500 BC.
Muller therefore assumed that the five layers of the four Vedas & Upanishads were each composed in 200-year periods before the Buddha at 500 BC. However, there are more changes of language in Vedic Sanskrit itself than there are in classical Sanskrit since Panini, also regarded as a figure of around 500 BC, or a period of 2500 years. Hence it is clear that each of these periods could have existed for any number of centuries and that the 200-year figure is totally arbitrary and is likely too short a figure.
It was assumed by these scholars many of whom were also Christian missionaries unsympathetic to the Vedas that the Vedic culture was that of primitive nomads from Central Asia. Hence they could not have founded any urban culture like that of the Indus valley. The only basis for this was a rather questionable interpretation of the Rig Veda that they made, ignoring the sophisticated nature of the culture presented within it.
Meanwhile, it was also pointed out that in the middle of the second millennium BC, a number of Indo-European invasions apparently occured in the Middle East, wherein Indo-European peoples the Hittites, Mittani and Kassites conquered and ruled Mesopotamia for some centuries. An Aryan invasion of India would have been another version of this same movement of Indo-European peoples. On top of this, excavators of the Indus valley culture, like Wheeler, thought they found evidence of destruction of the culture by an outside invasion confirming this.
The Vedic culture was thus said to be that of primitive nomads who came out of Central Asia with their horse-drawn chariots and iron weapons and overthrew the cities of the more advanced Indus valley culture, with their superior battle tactics. It was pointed out that no horses, chariots or iron was discovered in Indus valley sites.
This was how the Aryan invasion theory formed and has remained since then. Though little has been discovered that confirms this theory, there has been much hesitancy to question it, much less to give it up.
Further excavations discovered horses not only in Indus Valley sites but also in pre-Indus sites. The use of the horse has thus been proven for the whole range of ancient Indian history. Evidence of the wheel, and an Indus seal showing a spoked wheel as used in chariots, has also been found, suggesting the usage of chariots.
Moreover, the whole idea of nomads with chariots has been challenged. Chariots are not the vehicles of nomads. Their usage occurred only in ancient urban cultures with much flat land, of which the river plain of north India was the most suitable. Chariots are totally unsuitable for crossing mountains and deserts, as the so-called Aryan invasion required.
That the Vedic culture used iron and must hence date later than the introduction of iron around 1500 BC revolves around the meaning of the Vedic term ayas, interpreted as iron. Ayas in other IndoEuropean languages like Latin or German usually means copper, bronze or ore generally, not specially iron. There is no reason to insist that in such earlier Vedic times, ayas meant iron, particularly since other metals are not mentioned in the Rig Veda (except gold that is much more commonly referred to than ayas). Moreover, the Atharva Veda and Yajur Veda speak of different colors of ayas(such as red and black), showing that it was a generic term. Hence it is clear that ayas generally meant metal and not specifically iron.
Moreover, the enemies of the Vedic people in the Rig Veda also use ayas, even for making their cities, as do the Vedic people themselves. Hence there is nothing in Vedic literature to show that either the Vedic culture was an iron-based culture or that their enemies were not.
The Rig Veda describes its Gods as destroyers of cities. This was used also to regard the Vedic as a primitive non-urban culture that destroys cities and urban civilization. However, there are also many verses in the Rig Veda that speak of the Aryans as having having cities of their own and being protected by cities up to a hundred in number. Aryan Gods like Indra, Agni, Saraswati and the Adityas are praised as being like a city. Many ancient kings, including those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, had titles like destroyer or conqueror of cities. This does not turn them into nomads. Destruction of cities also happens in modern wars; this does not make those who do this nomads. Hence the idea of Vedic culture as destroying but not building the cities is based upon ignoring what the Vedas actually say about their own cities.
Further excavation revealed that the Indus Valley culture was not destroyed by outside invasion, but according to internal causes and, most likely, floods. Most recently a new set of cities has been found in India (like the Dwaraka and Bet Dwaraka sites by S.R. Rao and the National Institute of Oceanography in India), which are intermediate between those of the Indus culture and later ancient India as visited by the Greeks. This may eliminate the so-called dark age following the presumed Aryan invasion, and shows a continuous urban occupation in India back to the beginning of the Indus culture.
The interpretation of the religion of the Indus Valley culture -made incidentally by scholars such as Wheeler who were not religious scholars, much less students of Hinduism was that its religion was different from the Vedic and more like the later Shaivite religion. However, further excavations both in Indus Valley sites in Gujarat, like Lothal, and those in Rajasthan, like Kalibangan show large numbers of fire altars like those used in the Vedic religion, along with bones of oxen, potsherds, shell jewellery and other items used in the rituals described in the Vedic Brahmanas. Hence the Indus Valley culture evidences many Vedic practices that cannot be merely coincidental. That some of its practices appeared non-Vedic to its excavators may also be attributed to their misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of Vedic and Hindu culture generally, wherein Vedism and Shaivism are the same basic tradition.
We must remember that ruins do not necessarily have one interpretation. Nor does the ability to discover ruins necessarily give the ability to interpret them correctly.
The Vedic people were thought to have been a fair-skinned race like the Europeans, owing to the Vedic idea of a war between light and darkness, and the Vedic people being presented as children of light or children of the sun. Yet this idea of a war between light and darkness exists in most ancient cultures, including the Persian and the Egyptian. Why dont we interpret their scriptures as a war between light and dark-skinned people? It is purely a poetic metaphor, not a cultural statement. Moreover, no real traces of such a race are found in India.
Anthropologists have observed that the present population of Gujarat is composed of more or less the same ethnic groups as are noticed at Lothal in 2000 BC. Similarly, the present population of the Punjab is said to be ethnically the same as the population of Harappa and Rupar 4000 years ago. Linguistically the present day population of Gujarat and Punjab belongs to the Indo-Aryan language-speaking group. The only inference that can be drawn from the anthropological and linguistic evidences adduced above is that the Harappan population in the Indus Valley and Gujarat in 2000 BC was composed of two or more groups, the more dominant among them having very close ethnic affinities with the present day Indo-Aryan-speaking population of India.
In other words there is no racial evidence of any such Indo-Aryan invasion of India but only of a continuity of the same group of people who traditionally considered themselves to be Aryans.
There are many points in fact that prove the Vedic nature of the Indus Valley culture. Further excavation has shown that the great majority of the sites of the Indus Valley culture were east, not west of Indus. In fact, the largest concentration of sites appears in an area of Punjab and Rajasthan near the dry banks of ancient Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers. The Vedic culture was said to have been founded by the sage Manu between the banks of Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers. The Saraswati is lauded as the main river (naditama) in the Rig Veda & is the most frequently mentioned in the text. It is said to be a great flood and to be wide, even endless in size. Saraswati is said to be pure in course from the mountains to the sea. Hence the Vedic people were well acquainted with this river and regarded it as their immemorial homeland.
The Saraswati, as modern land studies now reveal, was indeed one of the largest, if not the largest river in India. In early ancient and pre-historic times, it once drained the Sutlej, Yamuna and the Ganges, whose courses were much different than they are today. However, the Saraswati river went dry at the end of the Indus Valley culture and before the so-called Aryan invasion, or before 1500 BC. In fact this may have caused the ending of the Indus culture. How could the Vedic Aryans know of this river and establish their culture on its banks if it dried up before they arrived? Indeed the Saraswati as described in the Rig Veda appears to more accurately show it as it was prior to the Indus Valley culture, as in the Indus era it was already in decline.
Vedic and late Vedic texts also contain interesting astronomical lore. The Vedic calendar was based upon astronomical sightings of the equinoxes and solstices. Such texts as Vedanga Jyotish speak of a time when the vernal equinox was in the middle of the Nakshtra Aslesha (or about 23 degrees 20 minutes Cancer). This gives a date of 1300 BC. The Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda speak of the vernal equinox in the Krittikas (Pleiades; early Taurus) and the summer solstice (ayana) in Magha (early Leo). This gives a date about 2400 BC. Yet earlier eras are mentioned but these two have numerous references to substantiate them. They prove that the Vedic culture existed at these periods and already had a sophisticated system of astronomy. Such references were merely ignored or pronounced unintelligible by Western scholars because they yielded too early a date for the Vedas than what they presumed, not because such references did not exist.
Vedic texts like Shatapatha Brahmana and Aitereya Brahmana that mention these astronomical references, list a group of 11 Vedic Kings, including a number of figures of the Rig Veda, said to have conquered the region of India from sea to sea. Lands of the Aryans are mentioned in them from Gandhara (Afghanistan) in the west to Videha (Nepal) in the east, and south to Vidarbha (Maharashtra). Hence the Vedic people were in these regions by the Krittika equinox or before 2400 BC. These passages were also ignored by Western scholars and it was said by them that the Vedas had no evidence of large empires in India in Vedic times. Hence a pattern of ignoring literary evidence or misinterpreting them to suit the Aryan invasion idea became prevalent, even to the point of changing the meaning of Vedic words to suit this theory.
According to this theory, the Vedic people were nomads in the Punjab, coming down from Central Asia. However, the Rig Veda itself has nearly 100 references to ocean (samudra), as well as dozens of references to ships, and to rivers flowing in to the sea. Vedic ancestors like Manu, Turvasha, Yadu and Bhujyu are flood figures, saved from across the sea. The Vedic God of the sea, Varuna, is the father of many Vedic seers and seer families like Vasishta, Agastya and the Bhrigu seers. To preserve the Aryan invasion idea it was assumed that the Vedic (and later sanskrit) term for ocean, samudra, originally did not mean the ocean but any large body of water, especially the Indus river in Punjab. Here the clear meaning of a term in Rig Veda and later times verified by rivers like Saraswati mentioned by name as flowing into the sea was altered to make the Aryan invasion theory fit. Yet if we look at the index to translation of the Rig Veda by Griffith for example, who held to this idea that samudra didnt really mean the ocean, we find over 70 references to ocean or sea. If samudra does not mean ocean, why was it translated as such? It is therefore without basis to locate Vedic kings in Central Asia far from any ocean or from the massive Saraswati river, which form the background of their land and the symbolism of their hymns.
One of the latest archeological ideas |
you will have to ask him yourself," she said.
Recently the former prime minister of Luxembourg, a veteran of EU politics, has attracted media speculation about his health and future as Commission chief, after the UK's vote to leave the EU and other setbacks for EU ambitions.
The BBC's Adam Fleming in Brussels says Mr Juncker's critics include:click to enlarge Photo by Seung Lee
Last night's fire at the Ghostship party in Oakland's Fruitvale District.
click to enlarge Courtesy Ghost Ship's website
Inside the Ghost Ship Venue, site of last night's fire in Oakland's Fruitvale district
click to enlarge Courtesy Ghost Ship's Website
Inside Ghost Ship
***
Here's video from a dance party at Ghost Ship this past June:
Seung Lee arrived at GhostShip for last night's dance party at exactly 11:09 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, he was out front, calling 911, those around him crying and screaming as they watched the artist warehouse and underground venue in Oakland's Fruitvale district go up in flames."It was a tinderbox. I heard the word ‘tinderbox’ used over and over afterward," he explained to thethe morning after the fire. "This was probably the fastest, most largest, most furious fire I’ve seen in my life.""It was just relentless, I don’t recollect anybody coming out.”The Oakland Fire Department is reporting at least nine people died in the fire last night, which started just after 11 p.m. Officials anticipate at least 40 dead at the scene. A Google Spreadsheet started by attendees and friends lists 42 individuals as missing. Reports state that there were no fire alarms or emergency sprinklers inside the venue (see more photos from inside Ghostship here ).Thehas also learned that several complaints against the building were filed with the City of Oakland, and that inspectors appear to have recently visited the warehouse The giant warehouse is located in a residential part of Fruitvale, just north of Interstate 880. Lee arrived with friends, hoping to pay the $10 rate of admission to the night's set by Golden Donna. But those operating the door said he was too late for the discount rate, and wanted to charge him $15. Lee looked at his phone: 11:09 p.m.Eventually, he talked his way into only paying 10 bucks for his group, and they entered the warehouse, which houses the underground venue GhostShip and also Satya Yuga artist collective.Inside, Lee described the building as a giant maze. "[There were] tons of corridors, that kind of went into little hideaways," he said. "At the end of the corridors are couches, and chairs and tables where people are just sitting lounging around.”"It was very much like a labyrinth," he said. "“I got lost … during the time I was in there." He estimates that there were about 70 people inside at the party.The floors, ceilings, rafters, corridors are all made of wood inside the warehouse, which is strewn with antique furniture and books, among other items.Lee said that the main party was a on a second floor, where lights hung from the rafters and up to 30 people were dancing to deejay music.. This area was referred to by his friends as the "rave cave."He says there was only one staircase leading to the upstairs, “and it was made out of pallets and other wooden [pieces]." He says it was not sturdy and very poorly built. “I was coming down the second floor, and I actually twisted my ankle a bit coming down," he recalled.He says he did not see any smoke or people smoking cigarettes inside the building.After approximately 10 minutes, Lee and a friend decided to leave to the corner market to get drinks. When they returned, the warehouse was engulfed in flames and smoke was pouring out of the building. He called 911 at 11:24 p.m., according to the log on his cell phone.“The fire was going very strong. You could see a flame coming out from the second window in the back, by the time I arrived.”He also says he didn't see anyone running out of the building by the time he arrived."By that time it was pretty clear that the size of the fire was enveloping the entire building. I feel like those who made it out, already made it out, and those who didn’t probably didn’t make it out by the time I arrived.“That’s the toughest part, remembering the cries and the wailing."SANFORD, Fla. - A customer's gun fell to the floor, accidentally shooting a man while inside the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Sanford Sunday morning.
[AUDIO: 911 call 1 | 2 | 3 ]
The Seminole County Sheriff's Office said after interviewing witnesses at the scene, deputies determined that a customer was on his way to the register to pay for his meal when his legally carried firearm fell from his holster onto the floor, discharging one round, which struck a male patron in the lower leg.
The shooting was determined to be accidental and no charges are expected to be filed.
The man who was shot was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Copyright 2015 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.A new narwhal management plan for Nunavut has the approval of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.
The plan, which was developed by DFO in consultation with NTI, regional wildlife organizations and hunters and trappers organizations, sets a total allowable harvest for the Baffin Bay region.
James Eetoolook, acting president of NTI, says the new narwhal management plan's use of a system based on the summering stock will be a learning curve for Inuit. (CBC)
Nunavut Tunngavik said the management plan meets Inuit needs and respects their harvesting rights.
"This is the first time to use a management plan system based on the summering stock," said Nunavut Tunngavik acting president James Eetoolook.
"It will be a learning curve for Inuit who hunt narwhal but I don't think that's going to be a problem because Inuit, we've been using a quota system for years and years."
One of the changes in the plan is an increase in tags for hunters in Grise Fiord, Nunavut's most northern community, to 50 from 20.
According to Nunavut Tunngavik, Inuit Quajimajatuqangit was used to make this decision because the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has little to no data for the Jones Sound area.
"I think that's very good for our community," said Jeffrey Qaunaq, a hunter in Grise Fiord.
"I know that Grise Fiordmiut have fought for this to increase the narwhal tag. It's going to really benefit the community mostly for food to distribute the muktuk to family and friends."
The regional wildlife organizations and hunter and trappers organizations will attend a workshop in Iqaluit Feb 12-14 to allocate the number of tags the other HTOs will get.
A total allowable harvest for North Hudson Bay still has to be set.Quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who remains unemployed after a 2016 season in which he began the movement of players protesting during the national anthem, has filed a grievance accusing NFL teams of colluding to keep him out of the league, his legal representatives said.
Kaepernick retained Los Angeles-based attorney Mark J. Geragos to pursue the collusion claim and, according to a person with knowledge of the filing, it will be Kaepernick’s outside legal representation and not the NFL Players Association primarily in charge of preparing and presenting his case.
Geragos’s firm confirmed the grievance, saying it filed “only after pursuing every possible avenue with all NFL teams and their executives.”
In a statement, the law firm’ also said: “If the NFL... is to remain a meritocracy, then principled and peaceful political protest — which the owners themselves made great theater imitating weeks ago — should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.... Protecting all athletes from such collusive conduct is what compelled Mr. Kaepernick to file his grievance.”
The collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ union prohibits teams from conspiring to make decisions about signing a player. But the CBA also says the mere fact that a player is unsigned and evidence about the player’s qualifications to be on an NFL roster do not constitute proof of collusion.
[NFL owners hope NFLPA will support policy requiring players to stand for anthem]
For that reason, such cases are difficult to prove, according to legal experts.
“There has to be some evidence of an agreement between multiple teams not to sign a player,” said Gabriel Feldman, the director of the sports law program at Tulane University. “Disagreement over personnel decisions, as obvious as it may seem to someone looking at this, does not provide evidence of collusion. There has to be some evidence of an explicit or implied agreement. There has to be proof of a conspiracy.”
Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers following last season, making him a free agent eligible to sign with any team. The 49ers have said they would have released Kaepernick rather than retaining him under the terms of that deal. He has remained out of work, being passed over by other teams in favor of other quarterbacks. The Seattle Seahawks and Baltimore Ravens considered signing Kaepernick but decided against doing so.
More recently, the Tennessee Titans signed Brandon Weeden to provide depth behind backup Matt Cassel when their starting quarterback, Marcus Mariota, was hurt. That signing seemed particularly inflammatory to Kaepernick supporters who cited Kaepernick’s superior career accomplishments. Kaepernick has led the 49ers to a Super Bowl and two NFC championship games and he threw 16 touchdown passes with four interceptions for them last season.
The NFLPA issued a written statement late Sunday saying it learned of Kaepernick’s grievance through media reports and that it had learned the league previously was informed of Kaepernick’s intention to file the grievance.
“Our union has a duty to assist Mr. Kaepernick as we do all players and we will support him,” the NFLPA’s written statement said, adding that it had been in regular contact with Kaepernick’s representatives over the past year about his options and planned to schedule a call for this week with his advisers.
Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before games last season to protest, he said, racial inequality and police mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. Those protests were taken up by other players and the controversy over them has been amplified this season even with Kaepernick out of the league.
[Blackistone: Trump is using black NFL players as political pawns]
President Trump called on NFL owners to “fire” players who protested during the anthem, referring to such a player as a “son of a bitch.” Vice President Pence walked out of a game last week between the 49ers and Colts in Indianapolis, citing players’ protests. Trump indicated that he had orchestrated that plan.
Under pressure from the White House, NFL owners are scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday in New York and might seek the NFLPA’s support of a measure for players to stand for the anthem, according to multiple people familiar with the sport’s inner workings, while also pledging league support for players’ community activism efforts.
Some media members have contended since the offseason that Kaepernick was being blackballed by NFL teams based on his political stance. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and owners were asked about that contention on a number of occasions and denied that teams were acting in concert on Kaepernick because of his protests.
“Each team makes individual decisions on how they can improve their team,” Goodell at conclusion of NFL owners’ meeting in May in Chicago. “If they see an opportunity to improve their team, they do it. They evaluate players. They evaluate systems and coaches. They all make those individual decisions to try and improve their team.”
Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross told reporters in July, according to the Palm Beach Post: “I would sure hope not. I know a lot’s been written about it, but you know owners and coaches — they’ll do anything it takes to win. If they think he can help them win, I’m sure — I would hope they would sign him.”
The plan for Kaepernick to pursue a grievance under the CBA was first reported by Bleacher Report.
“It may seem obvious to Colin Kaepernick,” Feldman said in a phone interview Sunday. “It may seem obvious to someone on the outside looking at this. But collusion requires an agreement [between teams]. Individual team decisions are not challengeable under the anti-collusion provision. An arbitrator is not going to second-guess an individual team’s personnel decision.”
[As NFL owners wrestle with national anthem demonstrations, protests continue Sunday]
If such evidence of collusion by NFL teams against Kaepernick exists, it has yet to revealed.
“We don’t know,” Feldman said. “Obviously everybody is talking about the baseball collusion cases from the 1980s, where there was a smoking gun. There were notes. There was strong evidence. There may be evidence here of collusion. We just don’t know.”
The NFL declined to comment Sunday through a spokesman.
“No Club, its employees or agents shall enter into any agreement, express or implied, with the NFL or any other Club, its employees or agents to restrict or limit individual Club decision-making,” the CBA says, adding that applies to “whether to negotiate or not to negotiate with any player” and “whether to offer or not to offer a Player Contract to any player,” among other things.
The CBA also says: “The failure by a Club or Clubs to negotiate, to submit Offer Sheets, or to sign contracts with Restricted Free Agents or Transition Players, or to negotiate, make offers, or sign contracts for the playing services of such players or Unrestricted Free Agents, shall not, by itself or in combination only with evidence about the playing skills of the player(s) not receiving any such offer or contract, satisfy the burden of proof set forth … above.”
More from The Post:
NFL Week 6: Aaron Rodgers could miss season with broken collarbone; Packers, Falcons, Chiefs lose
No Kaepernick, smaller anthem protests, but still plenty of opinions at 49ers-Redskins game
Aaron Rodgers could be out for the season, a sobering possibility for the Packers
The ‘Ryan Fitzpatrick curse’ claims Jameis Winston as its latest victim
Panthers’ Luke Kuechly remains in concussion protocol, despite earlier reportsIt’s been a hot topic for some time now — the idea of taking high-tech gadgets into the wilderness.
I’ve seen some absurdities — like a trip-mate connecting mini-speakers to his iPod and blasting out AC/DC’s Back in Black or a SPOT Personal Locator Beacon activated to have a dog rescued from diarrhea.
I’ve also witnessed so-called purists refuse to bring along modern technology only to have a family member almost die because of it.
It’s a double-edged sword.
My personal believe is that as long as there’s logic and ethics behind bringing the high-tech devices with you, then pack them along. If they take over the true meaning of the trip, then leave them at home.
I equip myself with a GPS, SPOT Personal Locator Beacon, satellite phone and a stockpile of camera gear. I’ve never second-guessed packing any of the items (except for the camera gear at times). But I have questioned how to keep it all powered up.
In the old days of making wilderness films, I remember packing a car battery through the wilds of Ontario’s Wabakimi Provincial Park. That was insane. Thankfully, technology has greatly advanced. Solar power has been my choice for a few years now.
Goal Zero products have served me well on countless trips. There’s also the latest BioLite Stove — how cool is it to charge batteries by burning wood!? And that’s just the beginning. Just a quick look through the latest Kickstarter campaigns and you’ll see countless new ideas to create your own energy while away from an outlet. There’s the Hydrobee, which uses moving water; the FlameStower, that converts fire to electricity; and the Genneo that uses human motion, to name just three.
Then there’s the Go Kin Pack. I came across this unique energy-harvesting gadget a couple weeks back while visiting a friend, Bill Ostrom. Bill is behind the legendary Ostrom Pack Co. and he happened to be on his latest project at Queen’s University. Bill partnered up with some engineers there to package a device, which, when stored in a backpack or fanny pack, creates energy while you walk.
This thing is incredible. It generates 10 to 14 watts of power while the user walks three to five kilometres per hour. That means a couple minutes of walking can create enough power to boost your cellphone for 10 to 15 minutes, and a half-hour walk will give a full charge. Wow! Right now, this is the most powerful self-generating device I’ve come across.
Bill still has lots of work to do to get the Go Kin Pack to market, but he’s hoping to release it this April. The Kickstarter program may be his best way to keep things going towards production. I’d love to go on a backpacking trip and power my camp gadgets by simply walking. Even if I jacked up the AC/DC, I’d be doing it guilt free.
Stay tuned on Bill’s project. Change is good.
See the video here:The game of golf as we know it is in decline.
According to the National Golf Federation, in the United States, more golf courses closed than opened for the eighth year in a row, participation among 18-34 year-olds has declined thirty percent over the past twenty years, and the U.S. has lost around five million players over the last decade.
What do these statistics say about the state of the game? Basically, people are losing interest in the game, and many Millennials are forgoing the experience altogether.
While this is sad news for owners of golf courses and enthusiasts of wearing silly pants, this is potentially positive news for the environment.
Good News for the Environment
Since the goal of golf course maintenance is to have a pristine stretch of grass that more closely resembles Astroturf than anything from nature, best ecological practices are not necessarily a top priority.
Golf courses keep the grass short, well-manicured and free of any living organisms by spraying generous amounts of herbicides, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and mowing frequently.
Pesticides and Herbicides
Golf courses are historically known for their overuse of herbicides and pesticides. After controversy in the 1990s surrounding high rates of certain types cancers among golf course superintendents, player organizations and the Golf Course Superintendents Association joined together with the environmental advocacy group Beyond Pesticides to push for the adoption of Environmental Principles for Golf Courses in the United States.
The Green Star Awards, introduced by Golf Digest in 2009 went a step further to recognize golf courses that participate in energy conservation, recycling and green cleaning efforts.
However, according to Beyond Pesticides, “efforts to eliminate a reliance on pesticides still lag behind other environmental action,” and “more attention is needed to the basic turf management issues related to soil microorganisms and building soil biomass as a tool for enhancing plant health and resistance to diseases.”
Frequent Mowing
Another problem not addressed is excessive mowing. Grounds Magazine says that a typical golf course mows every day and recommends frequent mowing to improve turf quality. Since golf courses tend to use riding mowers fueled by gas, this translates into a lot of fuel burnt to cover massive amounts of land – repeated on a daily basis.
Runoff and Erosion
Golf courses also promote the destruction of natural habitats, and changes in local hydrology and topography, according to the study, A Global Perspective on the Environmental Impact of Golf.
Golf course maintenance commonly involves deforestation and clearing native species of vegetation, which in turn causes gullying and soil erosion, leading to sediment runoff into nearby bodies of water. This is detrimental to lake and stream plants and animals.
Runoff also provides excess nutrients to bodies of water that can cause out of control downstream algae blooms.
Other (Better) Uses for Golf Courses
Golf courses take up about 1,504,210 acres of land in the U.S., which arguably could be put to better use. The late comedian George Carlin was greatly bothered by the amount of space taken up by golf courses and even suggested solving the problem of lack of availability of low-cost housing by building houses for the homeless on golf courses.
Aside from turning golf courses into homeless shelters (which likely won’t happen anytime soon), just letting the land go fallow and less manicured would be beneficial for the environment.
Granted, it probably wouldn’t be much of an improvement if it were paved or taken over by urban sprawl instead. Better potential uses for the space include wind farms, areas for solar panels, parks, community gardens, or land for free-range livestock grazing, to name a few examples.Charles Trew of Arlington, an espionage buff, believes that this is where the FBI dug a tunnel to listen in on Soviet diplomats. The Russian Embassy is directly behind the house. (John Kelly/THE WASHINGTON POST)
In the 1970s, John Galuardi served as the regional administrator for the GSA in Washington. One of his tasks was to figure out what to do with the land on which the empty Mount Alto Veterans Hospital stood.
[Scaling Glover Park’s Mount Alto: From VA hospital to Russian Embassy]
This encompassed 12 1 / 2 acres between Wisconsin Avenue and Tunlaw Street NW in Glover Park. John was thinking about placing some government buildings there when the State Department announced that it would be the home of the new Soviet Embassy.
“The property was totally abandoned, and we had just let it deteriorate,” John wrote in an email to Answer Man. Why do maintenance when the buildings were just going to be torn down?
As it turned out, John had to do a little maintenance after all. One day, some FBI agents came to his office. They asked John to send workers to Mount Alto to cut down three trees on the edge of the property. Russian architects were coming the following week, and the FBI wanted the trees gone.
Also: It should not look as if any trees had been cut down.
“I said, how do you expect me to cover up the sawdust from the chain saws?” wrote John.
John had a crew cut down the trees and clear the whole site around the buildings. The crew also made it look as if grass seed was going to be planted, covering the area where the trees had once stood.
Wrote John: “Apparently it worked.”
Why the sudden FBI interest in arboriculture? Answer Man can only assume that the G-men wanted an unobstructed view of the property, the better to monitor comings and goings.
[Diplomatic impunity: Squashing the bugs infesting our embassy in Russia]
Last week in this space, we recounted the tortured history of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and how those sneaky Communists crammed it full of listening devices as it was being built. Surely the Americans would never do something so sneaky?
Ahem. In January 1980, Soviet officials announced that eavesdropping devices had been found in a new apartment building for embassy workers on the Mount Alto site. An article in Izvestia said the bugs allowed the FBI and CIA to hear “every sound, from a word spoken in the drawing room to a whisper in the bedroom or a splash of water in the toilet.”
That, however, was not the most audacious effort to listen in. When FBI turncoat Robert P. Hanssen was arrested in 2001, Count 2 of his indictment charged that he had revealed to his Soviet handlers the “existence of an FBI technical penetration of a particular Soviet establishment, as well as the specific location of the penetration device, and the methods and technology utilized.”
The penetration device, sources later revealed, was a tunnel under the Soviet Embassy built by the FBI and operated by the National Security Agency. It probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although they of course already knew about it, Russian officials went through the show of summoning an American diplomat in Moscow to explain the tunnel.
“If these reports prove true, this will be a flagrant case of the violation of generally recognized standards of international law concerning foreign diplomatic missions,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
As it happened, a U.S. official said the FBI-NSA tunnel might have been inspired by the Soviets themselves. In 1978, a tunnel filled with listening devices was discovered beneath the old U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Residents of Glover Park were abuzz. If the tunnel ended under the Soviet Embassy, where did it begin?
Some thought the entrance was in a house on Wisconsin Avenue facing the embassy’s entrance. But that would require tunneling under the busy road. (More likely, that was a place from which the FBI could watch the embassy.)
Others thought it was a house on Fulton Street, at the end of Bellevue Terrace, about as close as it’s possible to get to the Russian compound.
Charles Trew, an espionage buff who studied Russian in college, has been obsessed with the house for about 10 years. He lives in Arlington and has visited the spot frequently. No one has ever been home, even on Halloween.
Last week, Answer Man visited the house with Charles, who was surprised to see that it has been gutted. A porta-potty sits in the driveway. The roof is gone. One garage door has fallen off its tracks.
Charles pointed out the oddly raised wooden floor in the garage at the back of the house, overlooking the embassy. He noted that the garage windows are black glass.
Charles said some naysayers believe that since the house sits on a bluff, it’s too high for a tunnel. He said a tunneling expert told him that when it comes to tunnels, it’s easier to dig down than across.
“I’m convinced,” he said. “There simply are no other realistic candidates.”
In a 2013 presentation at the Spy Museum, David Wise, author of a book on Hanssen, said that wherever the tunnel entrance is, it has been sealed with cement.
Calls to the company remodeling the house were not returned. Answer Man contacted the FBI to see whether it wanted to use his column to finally announce exactly which house harbored the ill-fated tunnel. The reply: “We have no comment.”
Twitter: @johnkelly
Unlike the FBI and the KGB, Answer Man does not have listening devices at his disposal. If you have a question about the Washington area, you must send it to answerman@
washpost.com.
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.The Virginia Board of Health decided Thursday to move forward with a review of rules for abortion clinics, the latest step in a lengthy process that could roll back controversial regulations finalized last year.
The move was a victory for Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who campaigned on a promise to reverse the rules, which regulate abortion clinics as if they were hospitals by dictating such details as hallway widths and the number of parking spots. Opponents of the regulations say they were intended to block access to abortion by closing down clinics that do not meet the requirements.
“These clinics provide essential preventive care and cancer screenings to many women and families and unfortunately were facing closure due to onerous regulations that were the result of politics being inserted into the regulatory process,” McAuliffe said in a statement.
However, groups opposed to abortion did not necessarily see Thursday’s action as a defeat; they said the review approved by the health board leaves open the possibility that restrictions on clinics could be strengthened. The restrictions, they said, are meant to protect women’s health and safety.
“We don’t know what will happen at the end of this process. This is simply a reopening and reviewing of the standards,” Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, told reporters after the meeting.
Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the state, but those opposed to the procedure have prevailed in many public-policy decisions, for instance pushing through measures to require parental consent for girls and ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.
McAuliffe’s recent advocacy for abortion rights reflects a dramatic cultural shift in the state. He talked about the issue regularly on the campaign trail, appealing in part to the influx of liberal voters into the Northern Virginia suburbs that helped fuel last year’s sweep of all three statewide offices.
Still, the antiabortion contingent remains strong in Virginia. On Thursday, activists on both sides began lining up in a suburban Richmond office park before 6 a.m. to make their position known to the health board. Some of them — including E.W. Jackson, the GOP’s 2013 nominee for lieutenant governor — went so far as to call attention to the state’s health commissioner, Marissa Levine, because she is transgender.
“This is the transgender commissioner of health appointed by Gov. [McAuliffe],” Jackson, a minister from Chesapeake, wrote in a tweet that also featured a picture of Levine. “Formerly a married MAN (Mark) with children, now Marissa. Needless to say — very pro-abortion.”
After the board of health meeting, Jackson said he merely intended to draw a connection between what he considers to be causes of the left.
“I do see a close relationship between the whole LGBT movement and the whole pro-abortion movement,” he said, adding: “I do not believe in personal attacks.”
Others were more harsh about Levine. In a letter distributed to the crowd, Donald N. Blake, president of the Virginia Christian Alliance, accused Levine of being unfit for her post.
“There are serious issues with Dr. Levine, both enforcing Virginia Law, and in his (or her) personal struggle with ‘his’ gender identity. When a man looks in the mirror and sees a woman, he has serious issues. Dr. Levine should find a job in the private sector; not in a state position requiring public faith and trust,” Blake wrote.
A McAuliffe spokesman said Blake’s attack had no place in the commonwealth.
“Governor McAuliffe, Dr. Levine and this entire administration are working hard to build a new Virginia economy where every family can live healthy and productive lives. Bigoted attacks on dedicated public servants do nothing to advance those goals and should have no place in our public discourse,” the governor’s spokesman, Brian Coy, said in a statement.
The health board voted 13 to 2 Thursday to launch the examination of a broad scope of rules, including several that go beyond the building codes that have stoked the most heated debate. The board will also review parental consent, medical testing and lab services, anesthesia services and emergency services as well as the administration, storage and dispensing of drugs.
Before the board votes on the final rules, the public will have a chance to comment. Health department staff have six months to draft proposed amendments.
The latest battle over abortion began in early 2011, when the General Assembly voted for, and then-Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) signed, legislation that categorized as hospitals those facilities that perform five or more abortions each month.
As a result, the health department imposed temporary building standards on all clinics; the health board finalized those standards last year. After the initial legislation passed, one clinic stopped offering abortion services; two others closed last year.
Of the remaining 18 clinics, 13 have sought temporary waivers from the current rules. Twelve of those have been granted waivers, and one request is still under administrative review. Five clinics have said they can comply with the new standards as written.
McAuliffe set the stage for this week’s action in May, when he urged Levine and the health board to review the regulations.
Before Levine was appointed health commissioner, she served as chief deputy commissioner for public health at the Department of Health. She previously directed local health departments in two districts in the commonwealth.
Levine, a family physician, has a masters of public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, received her medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and completed her family practice residency at the University of Virginia, according to a biography provided by the state.Image copyright EPA Image caption Plane enthusiasts watch an Airbus A380 - before the rain came down
Brexit was supposed to cast storm clouds over this week's Farnborough Airshow. Instead, it's been two days of torrential rain that has cast the real shadow over proceedings.
The biennial event is where the world's aerospace and defence (A&D) companies come to talk - and do - business.
And, in an industry where cross-border co-operation is vital, much of that talk was forecast to focus on the dire consequences for British A&D in a post-referendum world.
Yet, this being Britain, it's the weather that seems to be the main topic on everyone's lips. Evidence of serious concern about Brexit at this international gathering of executives and military top brass was thin on the ground (publicly, at least).
Take comments from the Pentagon's chief buyer of weapons, US Defense Under Secretary Frank Kendall.
"I don't see any reason why it should fundamentally affect our relationship with the UK or our business deals with the UK," he said.
British quality
UK and US defence interests are inextricably linked. BAE Systems, the UK's largest arms manufacturer, has a big presence in the US and is a key contractor on the world's most expensive defence programme, the US-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "We can be an ultimate tactician while we're flying," says F-35 chief test pilot Alan Norman
BAE is also lead contractor on the Eurofighter Typhoon programme, a pan-European project involving defence giants across the continent.
Does Brexit put these in doubt? "I personally don't think it does," Ian King, BAE System's chief executive, told the BBC. "We don't trade with the EU as a defence entity, it's with individual nations."
He says that the quality of UK technology and capabilities will always be in demand internationally, especially given that defence and security have risen rapidly up the political agenda.
BAE had backed continued EU membership. "It was right for the UK to stay part of a coherent trading bloc," he said.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The Red Arrows: Britain on display
And he still wants to see a trade deal done that involves the free movement of capital and people. But now that the British people have spoken, the strategy is to see what can be done "to maintain that continuity in a different form".
Boeing investment
That's the view among British A&D companies generally.
The overwhelming majority of firms wanted to Remain, according to a survey conducted before the referendum by ADS Group, the industry's trade body.
They cited access to the European supply chain, skills, and R&D funding among the key benefits.
All that is history, though. The challenge now, according to ADS chief executive Paul Everitt, is to achieve continuity - and ram home the message that the UK is open for business.
"We are the largest aerospace and defence market in Europe," he said. "The government needs to send a strong signal about the attractiveness of the business environment here."
Image copyright AFP Image caption David Cameron talks to Boeing's Dennis Muilenburg (second left) - both men signalled their commitment to the UK-Boeing partnership
Prime Minister David Cameron tried to do exactly that at the start of the show, in what looked like a carefully choreographed announcement about Boeing's commitment to the UK.
The UK government is buying nine Boeing maritime patrol aircraft as part of a £3bn, 10-year partnership that involves generating 2,000 jobs.
Boeing will also deliver 50 Apache attack helicopters to the British Army.
"Whatever uncertainties our country faces, I want the message to go out loud and clear: the UK will continue to lead the world in both civil and defence aerospace," Mr Cameron said.
"We aren't just open for investment, we are a place the global aerospace industry wants to do business - as Boeing's long-term partnership with the UK proves."
'No change'
Boeing's chairman Dennis Muilenburg duly reciprocated. "Boeing is committed to the UK government's prosperity agenda and we share the goals of enhanced economic growth that the prime minister has set," he said.
Boeing has doubled its presence in the UK over the past five years, and "we don't really see our plans changing," Mr Muilenburg added.
Image caption Flooding led to the early closure of the show on Monday but international companies suggested trade with the UK would not get bogged down by Brexit
There was a similar message from Raytheon International, the US missiles and electronics company which has a big UK presence.
Its chief executive, John Harris, called Brexit a "long play". He told the BBC: "We do not see any immediate impact... The process will take years once Article 50 is filed."
Raytheon would adapt to market changes, he said. But the critical issue "is to ensure we remain a trusted partner of the UK government".
Among major European companies, too, pre-referendum worries are giving way to post-referendum pragmatism.
"We are where we are," said one executive, who had previously privately warned that a Leave vote would be "economic stupidity".
"Aerospace is a long-term game. If - and I stress 'if' - there are strategic changes, they will be a long way down the road," he said.
Mauro Moretti, chief executive of Italy's Leonardo - formerly Finmeccanica - was especially upbeat about his company's UK operations, which include AgustaWestland helicopters.
He said: "We would like to invest [in the UK]. We have in the UK very important facilities. We have a very highly-skilled workforce.
"We would like to maintain our presence - to increase our presence," he added.
Chinese 'friend'
Yet, as the marketing manager of one small UK aerospace supplier pointed out: "It's easier to maintain trade if you are a big defence contractor dealing with governments. It's going to be more difficult if you are further down the supply chain."
He didn't want to be named - "it's not in my commercial interest" - but his company supplies equipment that ends up on both Airbus and Boeing aircraft. "I think the uncertainty that is created by leaving the EU is magnified if you are a smaller player in this industry," he said.
The message from the Brexiteers is that business will soon be unshackled from EU regulations that hindered the pursuit of more opportunities in the wider world.
At Farnborough, with its 1,500 exhibitors and 100,000 trade visitors, companies from all corners of the world are touting for business and doing deals.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption China's aviation expansion ambitions
Among these is China, which has its biggest ever presence at the air show. With its huge aerospace and airline ambitions, China wants to do more business with Britain, says Xu Jin, a minister at the Chinese embassy in London.
"The British should not worry about China not being your friend after Brexit," he told a conference on aerospace opportunities in his country.
So, China won't desert Britain when it leaves the EU? "Never. This is never going to happen. China is |
with hormones at least, it’s sort of easier. Like my voice changed very quickly, and I started to grow a beard and stuff. Unfortunately for trans women when they start taking estrogen, their voices do not change that drastically as with trans men, and they still need to do more treatments in order to get rid of beards and hair other places. If they want to, of course. I know that testosterone is, you could say, more effective than estrogen. AE: As far as your mood, did you find that it changed? Lt. Shachar: It’s a good question! I don’t know! [Laughs] I know that, I don’t think my mood changed because, you can imagine, oh you take testosterone and you can be more violent and something like this. None of this happened, but after I started taking hormones, it’s funny, but I just became happier. You know one study that was done in Holland shows that after you start taking hormones, the rate of people who tried to commit suicide goes down by more than fifty percent. The hormone treatment is one of the most important things in order to lower the feelings about your gender dysphoria. So when I started taking hormones, I think I just became a lot more confident and a lot more comfortable in my own body. AE: And you’ll be taking them the rest of your life, right? Lt. Shachar: Yes, unfortunately. AE: I understand that all of your treatment is completely funded through the Israeli Defense Force? Lt. Shachar: Yes, in Israel it’s amazing because we have healthcare and health insurance for everybody. And, as a soldier, my health insurance is the IDF and so my hormones are paid off completely by the IDF. And I’m not special. It’s the same for trans women. I am the first one to ever try it and succeed actually. In Israel we also get coverage for sex change operations from our insurance. And so, as a soldier, I did the surgery and all cost was paid off by the IDF. AE: Wow. I’m assuming your situation would be different if you were an American going through this transition. Lt. Shachar: I know that in America trans people in service were banned until recently. I don’t know the American society well enough to know how I would feel if I were born there, but I do think that my military service was one of the most empowering things for me as trans because, as you can imagine, in the military everybody is equal. You are exactly like everybody else because it’s the military, and for me this feeling was one of the best I could imagine. It was one of the first times that I ever felt like everybody else, and this was all I ever wanted. Just to be normal. AE: You’ve said that you felt male from the time you were very young. What I wonder about is, there are always going to be little girls who are just tomboys, and they want to wear “boys clothes” and do “boys things”—or what society says those things are. I was one of those, but of course, I still identify as female. What was the turning point for you? What is that moment of distinction between wanting to do “boy things” and wear “boy clothes” and actually realizing that you feel male and know you are trans? Lt. Shachar: Actually the term trans was not a term I knew growing up because I grew up in the countryside of Israel. It was very liberal, but still the whole concept of gender and sexual orientation was relatively new to us, and so I didn’t have the words to express how I felt. But my parents told me that until the age of five years old, I actually said to them: I want to be a boy. I don’t know if a lot of tomboy-girls say this, but I know that for me, after the age of six, I understood that this is not something that I could say out loud. It’s not something that society could accept. And so, I stopped saying it to other people, but to myself I kept thinking about it. You know, this is not my body. This is not just some sort of choice that I made to look like a boy or do, what we call boys hobbies. I felt disconnected from my body, and actually I remember one time when I was ten years old, I guess. I’d just come back from the barbershop after I’d shaved my head, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was ten, and still I remember thinking to myself this is not my body. This is the body of some young girl who I’m actually hurting, or, I don’t know, ruining her body because she could be a very beautiful kid, but I’m cutting her hair short, I’m dressing her in boys’ clothing, and I’m hurting her. And this kind of disconnection from my body is one of my earliest memories of really feeling that something here is not right. AE: It must have been really hard for you as a teenager. How did you deal with that, and at that point were your parents understanding of what you were feeling? Lt. Shachar: Until I was sixteen... as I said earlier, I always knew what was my truth: that I’m a boy. But I also realized, at least back then, that there was no way that the reality outside would find a way to meet the reality inside of me. I couldn’t find how the two things go together, and so growing up as a teenager—you said it great—it was even harder, going into puberty, and having to face the fact that yes, you know, I have a female body. As a child, I could hide it a lot more easily, but as a teenager I needed to make a lot more effort to hide it from other people and even from myself. I remember myself – in Israel in the summer it’s hot, I don’t know, like Miami maybe here. Still, I remember wearing three layers of clothing in order to hide my body in the middle of August. This was my way to deal with the outside. I always knew that I’m a boy, and I want to live like a man, but I didn’t think there was any chance of it coming true in my reality. So, my solution, my fantasy, was to disappear to a faraway country, start a new life, like fake my own death and start with a new identity – that was the solution of a fourteen year old kid. I believed back then that this was the only way I could ever be myself. I’m glad that I was wrong! [laughs] AE: You must feel so relieved to have come out and finally transitioned? Shachar: Relieved, yeah, but I always keep reminding myself how privileged I am. There is a lot of luck in my story and privilege, and I try not to forget it. AE: Do you mean privilege in that you happen to have a lot of support and you were able to have your transition funded? Lt. Shachar: Exactly. Also support form my family and my commanders, and you know, you asked earlier about the differences between trans men and trans women. I think for trans men things are generally – not every time – but in general trans men have some privilege over trans women, especially when you start with transitioning, because you can pass more easily. Like I can walk down the street, and no one will know that I’m trans. And so if someone wants to discriminate against me on the basis of gender, they wouldn’t even know. Unfortunately for trans women, it’s not the case a lot of times. Even to be a trans man, I keep reminding myself that I’m privileged. AE: I read in another article, you said that everyone has been very understanding in the Defense Force and that’s going very well for you. Tell me about that. Lt. Shachar: Yeah. In my first year of service, even my first two years of service, I couldn’t understand how every commander I have gave me the same exact treatment—good treatment and support! How can this be? It seemed too good to be true. But after becoming a commander, going through the officer course in the IDF, I realized why I got that kind of treatment. We are all taught to be very sensitive to our soldiers because in the IDF we have a mandatory draft, which means that everybody in Israeli society joins the IDF—Jews, secular, religious, Christians, Muslims, the Bedouins, men, women, trans—during the officer course we are taught how to be considerate, and how to be accepting and be just open to anyone no matter how different their culture. And I think this is the main reason why I was so well treated in the IDF, because this is the way the IDF treats their soldiers. AE; That’s great. So, do you have any advice for a young person who might be trans who is reading this, and they don’t have any sort of privilege, and especially people who haven’t really come out about this. What would you say to them? Lt. Shachar: I’m helping a lot of young people in the military. I try to keep saying to them, you know, don’t give up. Things are getting better, and things will get better. I feel I’m too privileged maybe to say those kinds of things, but I really believe in it. When I was growing up I didn’t believe there was any chance of me living my life as I wanted to live it, but I was wrong. I do believe our society is going in the right direction, and I hope to inspire people not to give up on their life, on their dreams, or on their identity. AE: I think that’s really important, and also it’s still a process for you, you’ve mentioned. And part of that process is surgery, I understand. Is that something you’ve decided on yet? Lt. Shachar: I had my first surgery, the chest surgery, last May. Again, all of it was paid for by the military because that’s what Israeli law demands. The other surgeries are a lot more complex medically, and so I wish to have them, but I’m really scared. [laughs] AE: That’s understandable! I don’t know that much about it. I imagine it must be a very invasive surgery, and I know that there are trans people who don’t ever go through any sort of secondary surgery, but for you, personally, do you feel like you can be okay with this if you decide not to go through with surgery? Lt. Shachar: Ooh, it’s a good question. I think as much as I can push it, as much as I can delay it, I will do it. I don’t think I could go through my whole life without it, but I hope maybe in the next five or ten years medicine will become better for us, and the surgery will be safer, and then I can do it. AE: I understand. But just the hormones alone have made a world of difference for you, regardless of surgery. Correct me if I’m wrong. Lt. Shachar: Definitely. Hormones were one of the most important steps for me in my process.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to end their blockade of Qatar on Friday. He then went over to the Rose Garden at the White House, where President Donald Trump completely contradicted his messaging, choosing to lambast Qatar for funding terrorists.
Qatar has “historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level,” Trump told reporters. “They have to end that funding and its extremist ideology in terms of funding. I want to call in all other nations to stop immediately. I won’t name other countries.”
Tillerson was sitting in the front row.
Just 90 minutes earlier, the secretary of state did briefly admonish the country for supporting terrorist groups.
“Qatar has a history of supporting groups that span the spectrum of political expression, from activism to violence,” he said during a news conference. “The emir of Qatar has made progress in halting financial support and expelling terrorist elements from his country, but he must do more and he must do it more quickly.”
But Tillerson focused on asking the four nations to ease the blockade, citing humanitarian consequences like food shortages. The blockade also impairs business activity in the region and has hindered U.S. military operations to fight the so-called Islamic State. The U.S. base in Qatar happens to be the hub for anti-ISIS activity.
Tillerson said the Gulf states should “immediately take steps to deescalate the situation and put forth a good faith effort to resolve their grievances with each other.” He also pledged his support for Kuwait’s willingness to step in and moderate.
“We know you are stronger together,” Tillerson said of the nations.
The four powerful countries severed ties with Qatar on Monday because they believe it supports radical organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. They shut off all transport in and out of Qatar, and gave Qatari residents two weeks to leave their nations. Qatar has denied the charges.
Tillerson seemed to be doing damage control Friday, which was all upended when his boss approached the podium later in the day. Trump said that after his recent trip to the Middle East, “nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior. So we had a decision to make. Do we take the easy road or do we finally take hard but necessary action? The time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding.”CLOSE USA Today Sports' Dan Wolken recaps Alabama's 38-0 win over Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl to advance to the College Football Playoff final. USA TODAY Sports
Alabama Crimson Tide quarterback Jake Coker (14) is tackled by Michigan State Spartans defensive lineman Malik McDowell (4) during the third quarter in the 2015 CFP semifinal at the Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium. (Photo11: Erich Schlegel, USA TODAY Sports)
ARLINGTON, Texas — Roughly 90 minutes before kickoff back on Sept. 19, word began filtering through Bryant-Denny Stadium that Alabama was going to make a quarterback change. Cooper Bateman was in and Jake Coker, the assumed starter who had yet to fully win the confidence of Alabama's coaching staff, was out for a game against Ole Miss that would become the crossroads of the Crimson Tide's season.
Given what was at stake for Alabama, it was a shocking decision. And Coker, as he now acknowledges, was not happy about it.
But the plain fact was that Coker had not yet settled the central issue in Alabama's season, even as coach Nick Saban was practically beginning him to. As a graduate transfer who came from Florida State with a lot of hype in 2014 but lost the job to Blake Sims and hadn't grabbed ahold of it two games into 2015, it was only natural to wonder if he ever would.
"You could see it in his body language (he was disappointed), which is great," offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin said earlier this week. "I said that to him: We don't expect you to agree with this decision. If you agree with it, you're not competitive. We expect you to go prove it wrong, and he did exactly that."
Though Alabama lost that night and generally played a mess of a game, its late comeback with Coker at quarterback was the turning point of the season. Coker had proven to be Alabama's best, and perhaps only, legitimate quarterback option. Whatever direction this Alabama team was going to take, there was no more revolving door: After an entire spring and fall camp of uncertainty, it was finally Coker's team.
It would have been impossible for anyone to know that Alabama's trajectory from there to here, a 38-0 victory against Michigan State in the College Football Playoff semifinals, would have happened not in spite of its quarterback play but largely because of it.
Even as Alabama's largely drama-free season dragged along and Coker looked more and more solid, limiting mistakes while occasionally hitting a backbreaking big play, there was rarely a suggestion he was capable of being spectacular. With Alabama's dominating defense and Derrick Henry rushing for more yards than any back in SEC history, would there really be any need?
But as Alabama evolved from the night of the Ole Miss game into the team that made a mockery of Michigan State in the College Football Playoff semifinal on Thursday, Coker may have changed the entire perception of his brief tenure as Alabama's quarterback. When history looks back on the Crimson Tide's 38-0 victory against the Spartans, the most (perhaps only) memorable thing will be the way Coker outplayed Michigan State's Connor Cook.
"I wasn't surprised at all by the game he had tonight," Saban said. "He's pretty much done a good job all year long in terms of whatever we've asked him to do. Tonight he had to make plays because they were there, and he certainly made them. But I think in each game that we've asked him to do that, he's come through for us very nicely."
Even at Coker's best this season, it would have been hard to envision him doing what he did to Michigan State. The Spartans were committed to stopping Henry — which they did, limiting him to 75 yards on 20 carries — and basically told Alabama that Coker would have to make them pay. He did, completing 25-of-30 passes for 286 yards and two touchdowns. That accuracy helped the Tide to the best completion percentage (80.6) of any team in the five Playoff games that have been played.
Alabama quarterback Jake Coker talks with offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin in the first half of the Crimson Tide's win against Michigan State. (Photo11: Matthew Emmons, USA TODAY Sports)
"I knew it was going to come down to the receivers and quarterback: Could they make big plays?" Alabama receiver ArDarius Stewart said. "They were going to obviously try to stop Derrick and they did a good job stopping the run, but I knew on the outside they couldn't handle it. Jake performed excellent. 25-of-30? That's unbelievable."
It was evident from the opening drive that Michigan State was committed to its plan defensively and Saban/Kiffin weren't surprised. Instead of force-feeding Henry, who didn't touch the ball on the first drive, Alabama called run-pass option plays that required Coker to read what Michigan State was doing in the box and then get the ball to wherever Alabama had the numbers to block.
It ended up with Alabama going largely to the perimeter, nickel and diming its way down the field, until the bigger plays started to come. First to freshman Calvin Ridley, then to tight end O.J. Howard, and then pretty much to whomever and whatever Alabama wanted.
"I think they were softening us up on the edge with a lot of quick routes outside and some screens," Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio said. "It's a catch-22 situation."
But for all Alabama's talent — and make no mistake, Alabama had the edge at basically every position on the field — the quarterback still had to deliver. And Coker, a fifth-year senior, has never been better in a more meaningful spot.
Teams are living organisms, always changing and mutating. For much of this season, Alabama was one-dimensional offensively, even if that dimension was hard to stop. Now, the Crimson Tide heads to Arizona looking like so much more.
"I felt they loaded the box a lot and our passing game would be open," Howard said. "Down the field, vertically was open on a lot of plays and we made it happen. We executed plays that were called. That's what you need out of your team when the running game isn't going well. You have to be able to throw the ball. Jake played great, our receiver made plays and thats what you need to go win a championship."
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE COTTON BOWLRed Bull's brake supplier Brembo has denied that a failure of its system was to blame for Sebastian Vettel's Australian Grand Prix retirement.
The German was leading when a wheel problem ended his race on lap 26.
"Vettel's exit was not caused by the braking system. The torque drive between the front left axle and wheel was lost," Brembo said in a statement.
"The wheel nut was correctly tightened at the pitstop as well as other possible causes of the fault."
As at the season-opening race in Bahrain, Vettel qualified in pole position, and he did well in wet conditions to open up a substantial lead.
But the 22-year-old ended up in the gravel and another good chance of victory was snatched from his grasp.
Reigning world champion Jenson Button moved into the lead and went on to secure his first grand prix victory for McLaren.
ANDREW BENSON BLOG Sunday's events in Albert Park proved the folly of writing off one of the world's most unpredictable sports so early
Vettel said after Sunday's race that he had seen sparks coming up from the front-left wheel and felt huge vibrations going into Turn 13.
"As soon as I touched the brakes I had some sort of failure going in to Turn 13 and ended up in the gravel," he added.
In Bahrain a faulty spark plug saw Vettel relinquish the lead and he eventually finished fourth.At the European Parliament’s behest, and over the objections of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, the European Union’s governments have proposed Jean-Claude Juncker — a candidate national leaders don’t much admire, who stands for the kind of EU that a growing number of citizens don’t want — as the next head of the European Commission.
The parliament has scored a notable victory — one that it may come to regret.
When it votes later this month to elect its own nominee, the parliament will be putting a “federalist” — meaning a supporter of more powerful EU bodies — in charge of the EU’s already strong executive branch. In addition, it will affirm an interpretation of the EU’s constitution that increases its own weight in the EU’s system of government.
In a previous column, I said the parliament seemed likely to get its way on Juncker even though the EU’s treaties gave it only an advisory role. This was incorrect, as one reader pointed out. Under the current rules, national governments propose a candidate, taking elections to the EU parliament into account. The parliament then votes, and if the nominee fails to get majority support, governments must put forward another. Under the treaty, the parliament not only advises, but it also has a veto.
This arrangement can be understood in two ways. According to one view, national governments nominate and the parliament decides whether to confirm — much as a U.S. president nominates top officials and the Senate says yes or no. According to the other view, national governments are essentially bystanders. The parliament chooses, and governments facilitate.
One rule, two vastly different interpretations. The parliament asserted the second when it told governments whom to present for its approval, and the governments have just endorsed that understanding. The head of the commission is no longer a bureaucrat chosen by consensus of elected national leaders. Henceforth the job is expressly political, and incumbents will claim a democratic mandate — one that most of Europe’s voters didn’t know they were granting.
Perhaps you’re wondering, how can a mandate that voters don’t know they’re granting be a mandate? That kind of question comes up a lot in the EU.
The Financial Times rightly calls it “a historic shift of power.” It’s a big step from a Europe of nation-states to a European state. Why then might the winner come to regret it? Because it’s such a compelling instance of the pathology that could split the union apart.
The EU’s constitution is in constant motion. Periodically, governments formally recast the rules in ways they don’t fully understand. In between those treaty revisions, the rules are pulled this way and that by EU institutions intent on advancing their own power. Governments, for the most part, look on cluelessly.
The serial failures of this style of innovation — which include the calamitous euro currency system — seem to make no difference. Voters count for nothing either. Support for anti-EU parties reached new highs in the recent parliamentary elections. The coalition of center-right parties sponsoring Juncker has the biggest block of seats in the new assembly, but won only a quarter of votes cast (on a turnout of 43 percent). Those applauding the parliament’s coup call this a triumph for popular democracy.
Next there’ll be an attempt at conciliation. Cameron has said he’ll work with Juncker. (He won’t have much choice.) Juncker will probably be magnanimous in victory, paying his respects to British reservations about further political integration. Other EU governments will move to soften Cameron’s defeat.
Few actually want to see Britain quit the union. Yet the logic of Britain’s exit is looking ever harder to resist.
The EU is institutionally dedicated to the idea of ever closer union, regardless of what its citizens actually want. For too long, the U.K. has deluded itself that this can change. Even now, Cameron is trying to make the case that it can, and that the U.K. can direct the operation. Enough, already.
The alternative to ever-closer union or Britain’s full-frontal exit is to negotiate a new semi-detached status.
Fortunately for the U.K., it has already anticipated this course by standing aside from the ill-fated euro project. Rather than trying to persuade the EU as a whole to change course, Cameron should concentrate now on developing a more comprehensively conceived associate status. That would be better for both the U.K. and the EU than outright divorce — though Cameron may have to threaten a complete separation, and be willing to do it, to get the rest of the EU to go along.
That will be quite a gamble. The U.K. could undoubtedly prosper as a close associate of the EU — as a partner in an enhanced free-trade area — but would pay a crippling price if it left the union in anger and suffered retaliation on trade policy and other issues of mutual interest. If the U.K. government is unwilling to face that risk, the defeat it suffered in the past few days certainly won’t be the last.
For years, Britons who supported the European project argued that the country’s interests would be best served by engaging fully with the EU in order to guide and improve it. That was both arrogant and naive — arrogant because it assumed that the U.K. was entitled to wield disproportionate power, naive because it assumed the rest of the EU would let it. That delusion should now be abandoned.
This doesn’t mean embracing the equally delusional idea that Britain can afford to be on unfriendly terms with the rest of the EU: The costs of an angry split, if it comes to that, would be enormous. Still less should it mean adopting the chauvinism and xenophobia of the anti-EU populists. But the gap between what the U.K. wants and where the EU is headed is just too wide. And it’s time, finally, to admit that it won’t ever close.
Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist and a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.George A.Bubenik, a physiologist and professor of zoology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, explains.
Imagine swimming in a lake on a hot summer day. The water is quite warm, but the wind is strong and the moment you leave the water you feel chilly and get "goosebumps." So you change clothes and move inside to warm up. You make a nice cup of tea, get under a blanket and switch on the radio. Suddenly, you hear a song from a long time ago, the song your grandmother used to sing to you when you were a child. Again, you feel a chill on your back and again, you get goosebumps. Why do such seemingly unrelated events elicit the same body reaction? The reason for this is the physiology of emotions.
Goosebumps are a physiological phenomenon inherited from our animal ancestors, which was useful to them but are not of much help to us. Goosebumps are tiny elevations of the skin that resemble the skin of poultry after the feathers have been plucked. (Therefore we could as well call them "turkeybumps" or "duckbumps.") These bumps are caused by a contraction of miniature muscles that are attached to each hair. Each contracting muscle creates a shallow depression on the skin surface, which causes the surrounding area to protrude. The contraction also causes the hair to stand up whenever the body feels cold. In animals with a thick hair coat this rising of hair expands the layer of air that serves as insulation. The thicker the hair layer, the more heat is retained. In people this reaction is useless because we do not have a hair coat, but goosebumps persist nevertheless.
In addition to cold, the hair will also stand up in many animals when they feel threatened--in a cat being attacked by a dog, for example. The elevated hair, together with the arched back and the sideward position the animal often assumes, makes the cat appear bigger in an attempt to make the dog back off. People also tend to experience goosebumps during emotional situations, such as walking down the aisle during their wedding, standing on a podium and listening to a national anthem after winning in sports, or even just watching horror movies on television. Quite often a person may get goosebumps many years after a significant event, just by thinking about the emotions she once experienced, perhaps while listening to the romantic song to which she danced many years ago with the love of her life.
The reason for all these responses is the subconscious release of a stress hormone called adrenaline. Adrenaline, which in humans is produced in two small beanlike glands that sit atop the kidneys, not only causes the contraction of skin muscles but also influences many other body reactions. In animals, this hormone is released when the animal is cold or facing a stressful situation, preparing the animal for flight-or-fight reaction. In humans, adrenaline is often released when we feel cold or afraid, but also if we are under stress and feel strong emotions, such as anger or excitement. Other signs of adrenaline release include tears, sweaty palms, trembling hands, an increase in blood pressure, a racing heart or the feeling of 'butterflies' in the stomach.Hollywood is the best place to find out about all the spectacular ways the universe can fuck you right up. Thankfully, they also offer tips for surviving...
Just The Facts
The world IS going to end in our lifetime. Jesus ain't coming back to save us (unless he takes the form of Jeff Goldblum). "Armageddon" is in the Criterion Collection?
The Gospel According to Roland Emmerich
Let's face it... when December 21, 2012 rolls around, how many of you are planning to visit the Statue of Liberty or Eiffel Tower? If there is an alien invasion imminent, how many of you are going to be in NYC or LA to greet them (especially since aliens clearly prefer the desert)? When disaster strikes, it is obvious what you should avoid first and foremost: major landmarks. Why? Because you know that if God is a fan of Roland Emmerich, he's got one hell of a showstopper planned for this planet.
The Sydney Opera House had it coming.
Murphy's Law (On Steroids)
Earth has a surface area of approximately 510,072,000 km2. Manhattan Island has a surface area of 22.96 km2. With this in mind, what would you say is the probability of a 1 km2 meteorite (or, an Imperial-Class Star Destroyer) crashing into Manhattan Island? For those of you who are Jeff Goldblum, you already know that it is 4.5e-8, or 0.0000045 percent. The probability of that meteorite/Star Destroyer crashing into Paris? 1.7e-7, or 0.000017 percent. Shanghai? 8.5e-7, or 0.000085 percent.
Oh, and the chance of it decapitating the Chrysler Building? 2.1e-11, or 0.0000000021 percent.
So, what would you say the odds of all four targets getting hit would be? Well, however miniscule that number is it jumps to 100 percent if you saw Armageddon, so Jesus Christ... stay clear!
"A work of art by a cutting-edge artist" - Criterion Collection #40
Why You Should Not Listen to Your Government
Think your government can contain the Rage Virus? Think they can keep you safe from aliens, volcanoes, comets, Mayan calendars or machines (now, or in the future)? Of course not! You didn't vote for them, and they were pretty shitty at their job to begin with.
But don't worry... in-between nuking Houston and "scorching the Sun," they'll hold prime-time press conferences to keep you posted on exactly how fucked the situation is.
"...and that is how we failed."
Don't Overdo the Hero Thing
Sacrificing yourself in a disaster film is noble, and will elevate your character (and the story around you) to a higher realm of drama. However, no matter how improbable it may seem at the time, you do NOT need to die to be a hero. Just ask these guys:
These guys.
Whether it's white trash wingnuts, wannabe-heroes or old men past their prime, let the human kindling from the B-story arc save your ass. Nature selected you to survive this mess, so be quiet and accept your newfound fate: repopulating the planet with your highly coveted, disaster-proof genes.
(Besides, if even Ben Affleck could avoid this draft, then so can you.)
Family Matters
As outlined in Barton Fink, [cute] children and/or a [hot] love interest are essential to any drama. However, while their inclusion may help you survive disaster, it just might be at the expense of their lives. Why? Because the better you get along with your wife and kids, the more likely they are to die instead of you (e.g. I Am Legend, and ID4). They work kind of like canaries did for miners: your cutest, most expendable line of defense.
Ditto for the family dog.
However, is your relationship on the rocks? Do your kids hate you? No problem...
HAVE A TROUBLED MARRIAGE!
Quick! Run out of the house right now! Leave the state! Move to the Arctic! JOIN THE E.P.A.! Not only will this guarantee the survival of you AND your loved ones when disaster strikes, but your family will emerge stronger than ever (Outbreak, War of the Worlds, ID4 and probably 2012).
Also, your dog survives. Good work!
The assholes inherit the Earth.Stephen Patrick O'Reilly (born September 2, 1964), known professionally as Stephen Egerton, is an American guitarist, producer, mixer, and engineer, who is best known for his work playing in Descendents [1] and All. [2]
Early life Edit
Egerton was raised in Utah, United States (U.S.) and explained his early relationship to music in a 2009 interview: "I was a music fanatic from the beginning of my life. Including pounding my head on the floor along with my parent's records... which explains a lot."[3] Egerton's first significant musical influence was the Beatles, but he also grew up listening to his parents' music collection:
A lot of 50's and 60's rock and roll as a kid, and a little jazz. My mother had good taste in music, and I grew up with a great variety. When I was 11, a neighbor lent me Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free which sparked my interest in "unusual" music... opening the door for punk rock.[3]
Music career Edit
Egerton played drums and guitar in the punk rock/death rock band Massacre Guys. Formed in Salt Lake City, Egerton played with the Massacre Guys from 1980 to 1985 alongside bassist Karl Alvarez, with whom he grew up. Egerton explained in 2012 that he taught Alvarez how to play the bass guitar during their time in the band.[4]
In 1985 Egerton relocated to Virginia, U.S., where he studied classical guitar and played in the band Auto Da Fe, with former Iron Cross vocalist Sab Grey, Washington metropolitan area drummer Eric Wallgren, and former Black Market Baby bass player Paul Cleary. In late 1986, Egerton joined Alvarez in Descendents.
In 2006 Egerton began recording for a new project named "40Engine," alongside former All vocalist Scott Reynolds. The band released the songs "Sunny Disposition" and "She Has Everything" on the Internet in late 2007/early 2008.[5]
As part of a collaboration with guitarist Jason Crowley, called "Crowley/Egerton," Egerton played drums and bass for songs that were made available online in 2007.[6]
Egerton formed an instrumental project called "Slorder," and the band released its debut EP in January 2009.[7]
In 2010, Egerton released The Seven Degrees of Stephen Egerton on the Paper + Plastick label. The album features Egerton playing with a variety of vocalists, including Milo Aukerman, Joey Cape, and Mike Herrera. Two album release shows occurred in Oklahoma, U.S., during May 2010, and Slorder also performed at both shows.[8]
Egerton explained in a July 2012 interview that Descendents had transformed into a lesser responsibility for the band members, as singer Aukerman was unable to commit to a full-time band schedule at the time; furthermore, three of the four members were parents. Egerton stated that he was satisfied with the new arrangement, whereby the band played around 20 shows on an annual basis: "We fly in; we rock out, have fun, don’t burn it out, go home and back to normal. I love it."[4]
During the surprise guest appearance of Black Flag at the 30th-anniversary Goldenvoice show—held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California, U.S. in December 2011—at which Descendents was the headline act, Keith Morris and Chuck Dukowski joined Bill Stevenson and Egerton to play Black Flag's first e.p., Nervous Breakdown. In January 2013, the formation of the same lineup that played Nervous Breakdown as the band FLAG was announced, with Black Flag’s third singer and one-time rhythm-guitar player Dez Cadena joining the band afterward. Prior to a September 2013 FLAG performance at Irving Plaza in New York City, U.S., Dukowski said regarding the band's formation: "I knew Bill [Stevenson] and Stephen [Egerton] would rage." Although the backgrounds of the band's membership are diverse, FLAG solely perform "the songs of Black Flag."[9][10]
Egerton recorded a guitar solo for Role Model, the 2013 album of Australian band Bodyjar.[11]
Production career Edit
In July 2012, Egerton explained that he was continuing to run |
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Added a new boss room by zebramatt.
Yet another awesome new music track from Pablo, this one for the Lieutenant boss battles!
Sometimes we sneak in something new and neat and don't mention what it actually is.
(Released October 12, 2011)
Fixed a bug in the rendering code where it was trying to access player data while still on the main menu, if the keyboard "aiming" reticule had been active (apparently). Thanks to martyn_van_buren for the report.
Fixed a bug with upgrading old worlds to add consciousness nodes or vortex pylons was trying to write to an ability-use-result despite that code happening outside of ability processing, and thus throwing a null exception.
Put in a pretty major balance change in favor of the players: Previously, your equipment was always getting progressively worse each time your civ level went up, which meant that with same-tier equipment you were actually losing ground, which wasn't our intent. This has been rebalanced to have a 9-level "grace period" wherein equipment doesn't start degrading. This means that as soon as you hit civ level 10, for instance, your tier 1 stuff STARTS to degrade. But the degradation is equivalent now at level 10 to what it used to be at level 2 for tier I stuff. And level 11 is like level 3 was, and so on. The net effect means that there are no longer increasing "periods of weakness" between levels 2-9 and 12-19, and so on; those remain stable areas, and your equipment only starts to get weaker when you're actually able to get replacement equipment of a higher tier. This also applies to potions and the like, not just stuff you craft yourself, so that's really quite helpful all around. Now you actually have time to FIND more potions, more equipment, and so on before you're hurting from the lack of it. Thanks to many players for weighing in on this.
Made it so that the tier of gems and objects you gain is now somewhat randomized rather than always being fixed. The tier of the object is based on the chunk level. So what we're doing is randomizing how it looks at the chunk level. There is now a 40% chance that the tier of the object will be equivalent to chunk level + 1. There is now a 20% chance that the tier of the object will be equivalent to chunk level + 2. There is now a 0.1% chance that the tier of the object will be equivalent to chunk level + 10 (these will be exciting finds, to be sure). Thanks to many players for suggesting this as well, including zebramatt and Jerebaldo1 most directly.
Added a new Miniature spell gem recipe: Costs one purple dispersia gem and one moonstone. You shrink down to a quarter your normal size, making you able to fit through small passages and harder for enemies to hit, but you take twice as much damage during this time. Lasts for 8 seconds plus two seconds per tier. Automatically used if in your inventory and you double-tap down. This should make neutral skelebots a lot more feasible to use, among other benefits.
Changed up the Emit Light scroll effect length so that the effect lasts for 8 minutes plus 2 minutes per tier of scroll. The tier 1 scrolls are thus the same effectiveness they always have been, but higher-tier scrolls are now more effective and thus more attractive. Thanks to Toll for suggesting.
Magic potions are now a bit more common of a drop in stash rooms.
The volume of wood platforms given in a stash room has now been lowered. Same for some of the spell scrolls that can be found there.
A new and powerful (but non-combat) spell scroll can now be found in some stashes. This is the first spell scroll that can't be directly crafted.
Fixed an issue with tier-less spells costing too much MP. Thanks to Itchykobu for reporting.
Made it so that the MP cost of Nightfall and Sunrise are now 600 instead of their former value. Thanks to Itchykobu for suggesting.
Made it so that item pickups and Ilari healing can both trigger for a player that is not moving. Previously, you could only pick up the items or get healed / scroll replenished if you were moving around.
Fixed an issue where the cooldowns of NPCs (including Illari, big bosses, and so on) were not being properly reset when the chunk was dropped to disk but the world was not yet dropped to disk. Thanks to martyn_van_buren, c4sc4, and jerith for reporting that this was still happening.
Fixed an issue with one of the destroyed room types not properly including any space to actually put a door! Thanks to lutherblissett for reporting.
Fixed an issue where some destroyed rooms with two doors were only seeding one door because of an error in the room template file. Fixed the definition, but also fixed it so that the auto-cleanup code of the interior generator now prefers to carve ceilings instead of floors in order to minimize this issue happening with any other bad templates. Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.
Fixed an issue where amoebas—giant and regular—could not fire their spells from in corners. Thanks to Efrencecht for reporting.
Fixed an issue where amoebas—again giant and regular—could not fire their spells if a player was standing in front of them. Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.
Fixed an issue with ranged spells hitting the ground when they should not have when you were right against the ground as a bat or a miniature. Thanks to James Mowery for reporting.
Because of the changes to how the lieutenants seed in general, now any lieutenant that is lower-tier or equal-tier to an overlord will help that overlord, from anywhere in the world. There was previously a bug where basically every lieutenant was coming to help regardless of distance or level, but now it's properly limiting based on the level. Thanks to Toll and c4sc4 for reporting the original issue.
Lightning Espers now move much faster when they are bosses, making them a lot more interesting. They also really change up their behaviors when they are a boss, now. Thanks to Armanant for suggesting.
Non-boss enemies now drop minor health and MP pickups that are auto-attracted to you like the shard drops are. The new percentages are: 10% minor healing drops 10% minor MP drops 50% shard drops 30% no drop
(Released October 11, 2011)
Busted up a bunch of stuff while doing some preliminaries for multiplayer support. Singleplayer still appears stable, but looks may be deceiving. Perhaps backing up your world files would be a good idea.
Fixed a bug where destroyed pylons would sometimes be "reactivated" by loading the game or by destroying another pylon. Thanks to jerith for the report.
Fixed a bug where the exact regions blocked by a pylon could change depending on the order of processing of the pylons (which in turn can vary for a number of reasons). It now always draws the line from the region with the lower internal ID to the region with the higher internal ID, regardless of which one "started" the connection. This also prevents situations where it was computing _both_ lines.
Fixed a bug where the strategy turn number was not being reset when unloading the game. Thanks to Oz33 for the report.
In 0.521, there were completely invalid summoned rhino scrolls being given out. It wasn't actually even giving you a scroll—it was giving you a rhino to put in your pocket. This led to the art looking wrong, the rhinos not stacking with the scrolls, and the stats of deploying them not working quite right either. Thanks to gxam and Smiling Spectre for reporting.
In a recent version all destroyed ghosts were accidentally "brought back to (active) death", leading to many players encountering a situation where every time they died it would have a large pool of those other ghosts not currently rampaging to go rampaging with. The nature of the bug is such that it won't recur, but there are still worlds out there with a significant overpopulation of "free"/"threat" ghosts so: When loading any world older than this version, all ghosts not currently in a rampaging group will be quietly put back into really-dead status. They may be back someday. Thanks to KDR_11k for the report and c4sc4 for the save.
The region number levels now show as purple when there is a vortex on them. Thanks to c4sc4 for suggesting.
Fixed up the "blocked by vortex" icon in the tooltips to just show a single frame from the animation rather than all the frames in a grid.
Josh has added more boss rooms, bringing the total to 46. A few of the existing ones were also updated.
Many of the interior hallways have been updated and expanded to make more room. Hopefully this will eliminate the inaccessible rooms that people have been running into. If you guys are still seeing this after this update, please let us know.
Created a completely new AI logic branch for the giant shadow bats and dragonfire. This is the most complex AI logic yet for this game, but there's more to come in that area likely this week. The new logic uses a highly optimized pathfinding algorithm adapted from Alden Ridge, which lets the bats follow you with a lot more precision, not get stuck on the cavern geometry, etc. The way that the giant shadow bats make angular turns, and how long they take to come around for another pass, has also been really changed up. Thanks to lisa107b for suggesting.
Snowsuits no longer offer complete protection against slowing frost, but instead only halve the effect of each slowing frost applied to them. So that means it takes 4 slowing frostings to hit 0 movement ability when in a snowsuit, rather than it taking the normal 2. Thanks to c4sc4 pointing out that since you generally would be wearing a snowsuit any time you encountered an ice bat, this made their ability kind of pointless if the protection was complete.
Teleport is now considered a movement type spell rather than a logistical spell, and so are warp scrolls.
Previously, all spells shared a global cooldown of half a second on top of whatever their individual category of cooldowns was. Now that global cooldown is only applied between offensive and logistical actions. Defensive and movement actions are on their own cooldowns which don't share in the global cooldowns at all. This should make it so that: The healing from the illari should work a lot better, when it tries to do multiple abilities to you at once (heal, MP, warp scrolls, etc). Casting shields and using potions no longer temporarily disables your ability to use offensive spells, and vice versa. Ride the Lightning and Storm Dash no longer get momentarily blocked by the other spells and vice-versa.
Previously, the double-tap effect for storm dash was triggered if your keypresses came within 350ms of one another. This made for more accidental double-taps than intended, though. This timing has been shortened to 200ms.
Fixed an issue that would make it almost impossible to rebind mouse keys if you clicked the mouse button on the actual choose-a-mouse-button button to do so. Thanks to zebramatt for reporting.
Previously, the magic restoration potion/scroll power was being scaled with the action difficulty when it should not have been (since the max magic points is not scaled with the difficulty). Fixed. Thanks to Bossman for reporting.
Previously, using the "use best potion" hotkeys for health and magic points was using two potions but only actually healing you by one. Fixed. Thanks to Yuugi and PattyG for reporting.
(Released October 7, 2011)
Fixed a bug that was still letting the removed profession books seed. Thanks to Sherlock for reporting.
Fixed an issue where the "Warp To Origin Settlement" button was showing up in an incorrect manner in the various sub-menus of the escape menu. Thanks to Sherlock for reporting.
Ball Of Light now costs 10 MP instead of 50. Thanks to relmz32 for suggesting.
The percentage of the giant maze rooms in overlord/lieutenant towers have gone from 50/20 to 5/1. Thanks to James Mowery for suggesting.
Any character with 100+ cold resistance is now immune to slowing frost—so snowsuits can be used to get protection from ice bat's slowing effect, for instance.
Any character with 100+ heat resistance is now immune to being set on fire—so the heatsuit is useful against fire bats or the dragon breath, for instance.
Drastically reduced the size of underground dungeons, down from 30-60 nodes to a "mere" 5-20 nodes instead. This really helps with the "signal to noise" ratio in terms of how much time is spent trawling through caverns with nothing good in them versus going into caverns that have something you really want. Also, it makes the caves a lot less mono-sized, which makes them feel a lot more varied and natural anyhow.
Fixed an exception that could happen if the escape key was mashed a bunch while bringing up the crafting interface as well. Thanks to scry for reporting.
Added a new "Stash" attribute that dungeon nodes can have. Right now it's only applied to interior dungeon nodes, same as the destroyed attribute. This is something that varies by building type as to how many stashes you will find, and where they are typically located. But, all of the "useless" building types that don't have something like a boss or an overlord or something in them have a very good chance of having stashes. The main ones that don't are the ones that are THAT heavily destroyed. A stash room has a special stash that was hidden here during the upheaval of the cataclysm—so lots of goodies for you to take. Some things that normally you'd have to craft, and some other things in bulk that normally you'd spend a lot of time trying to find. Short on health potions, for instance? Here's your ticket.
In the prior version, player character magic power was scaling with the difficulty level. Fixed. Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.
Fixed an issue that was still seeding enemies improperly in buildings regardless of the level gating.
Lava flats and the deep are no longer considered hostile terrain in that they no longer suck you into themselves. It was just annoying, and didn't add anything. Thanks to Dizzard for inspiring this change.
The additional boost per tier of ride the lightning has been halved.
Ride The Lightning is now automatically applied from anywhere in your inventory, not just your active bar, when you double jump. This means that the only way to disable it is to drop it from your inventory, but that seems preferable at this point to always taking up a main ability bar slot with this. Thanks to a number of players for suggesting this.
Added a new Storm Dash spellgem, which you can craft using yellow citrine and a cherry (available starting at level 8). A brief burst of speed propels you forward at 500% of your normal rate, but you take twice as much damage during this time. Does not work if your speed is currently reduced to zero. Automatically used if in your inventory and you double-tap left or right.
Fixed a bug in the prior versions where even if all of the damage from a spell was blocked, the fire DoT or frost slowing effects were still being erroneously applied to the player. Thanks to c4sc4 for reporting.
Fixed a bug in the prior version where potions that were auto-applied were healing players more than they should have (and more than using them manually). Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.
The loot drops that pop out of enemies now pop out in a cluster inside of the enemy's collision box, rather than all in a line. This looks much better. Thanks to Armanant for suggesting.
Added in two new keybinds: Use Best Available Healing (default bound to Y) and Use Best Available Magic Restoration (default bound to U). Both do what they say on the tin, ignoring what is currently on your ability bar and looking at your entire inventory. Thanks to PattyG for suggesting.
Finally fixed that bug with the double-firing of spells and other abilities being possible if you were to fire them quick enough in succession. Thanks to Admiral, Menagon, Itchykobu, and Commiesalami, among others, for reporting.
Fixed an issue where some guardian stones were still mentioning profession books as a tip about getting higher level spells. Thanks to jerith for reporting.
Fixed an issue where the healing/mana scrolls/potions were not reporting the action-difficulty-adjusted values for themselves in their tooltips. Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.
Actual pretty (and fully animated) vortex icons are now shown for the regions that are blocked by vortexes.
(Released October 7, 2011)
Settlements that you've actually previously visited can no longer be blocked by vortex pylons. This only applies to old worlds as in new ones you simply can't enter them to begin with until the pylon is out of the way. Thanks to Toll for the report of the blocked settlement.
Fixed an error in the Vortex Pylon tooltip: the range is 13 regions, not 6. Thanks to Bossman for the report.
Casting the emit light spell and ball of light spell no longer breaks your start-of-chunk invincibility. Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.
Some crafting recipe changes: Circle of Fire now requires a cherry to craft, rather than granite, making it not available right from the start anymore. Same deal with Douse Monster Nest, it now requires quartz rock instead of granite. Seize now requires copper ore instead of quartz rock, and death touch now requires quartz rock instead of granite.
Added in water, fire, earth, and air shields. These all cost the raw gem of their respective element, plus a granite rock, to craft. Future releases will add light and entropy shields also. Right now all shield spells are identical, but in time they will provide different elemental bonuses. So what do they do? A magical shield bursts forth to provide 1.5 seconds of protection, absorbing up to its spell power of incoming damage. Please note that the hiss sound effect for these is temporary.
Fixed up the image preloading so that it's not preloading images for every NPC in the game as soon as the world is loaded. This keeps the first loading time on the game start a lot lower, and just loads in those images that are needed as you move around the world and visit chunks that actually contain those NPCs. That was always the intent, but it wasn't working quite right until now.
Added two new categories of spell cooldowns: movement and defensive. Normally these sort of things all used to be lumped under logistical, but that was not very helpful. Now ride the lighting is the first spell to be in the movement category, and the new shield spells are all the first to be in the defensive category.
Changed up the way that random stat bonuses are given to the bosses. Previously, all bosses had 20 points of bonuses to apply; this was WAY too tough. Now the microbosses only get 5 points, minibosses get 10 points, lieutenants get 15 points, and overlords still get 20 points. Thanks to c4sc4 for suggesting.
Bosses no longer get the randomization of movement speeds that regular enemies get (ranging from 0.9 to 1.2).
Some level-gating fixes: Previously, the minibosses that could be seeded at vortex pylons, guarding monster depots, and the like were not being level-gated in any way, leading to way too hard boss fights too early into the game. Fixed so that these are now level-gated by the region they are spawning in. Previously, the rampaging monsters were having their level-gating handled by the region they were spawning on. This wasn't really helpful, because since they advance on you, you wind up fighting monsters that are too challenging too soon without having any option about it. Now all the rampaging monsters are gated by the civ level of the world, not the region they spawn on. Thanks to Itchykobu for reporting having to fight ice bat microbosses right from the start of the game.
Microboss base health has been further reduced by 1/3. Thanks to Tayrtahn for suggesting.
The time between heal scroll/potion and magic restoration potion uses has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10. When healing potions are auto-applied to you, this means that they are now 15s waits rather than 22.5 second waits. It simply wasn't very fun having to wait so long between potion uses, but this should still prevent players from spamming the spells. Thanks to James Mowery for suggesting.
The action difficulty of the game now affects player health, in the following way: Featherweight: Health x5 Apprentice: Health x3 Hero (the default): Health x2 Master Hero: No Change The Chosen One: Health x0.8 Thanks to James Mowery for inspiring this change.
The effectiveness of the healing potions/scrolls is also now affected by the general max health modifier of the action difficulty, meaning that you'll need only the same number of healing potions regardless of what difficulty you play on (versus needing more healing potions at lower difficulties thanks to having more health).
Added "Warp To Origin Settlement" button to the Escape menu when you're on the world map. When used, moves you immediately to region 0,0 (doesn't actually make you enter the settlement chunk). Hopefully this should deal with the various trapped-by-pylons situations people were running to in old worlds, as well as any similar situations that may arise from changes to worldgen that make it possible to get trapped by a newly generated pylon while moving around the world map.
The way that the world map is generated has been completely overhauled. Previously there was a lot of logic in there about which direction the map would generate higher-tier regions in, and the game was generating hundreds of unseen regions that were forming a "crust" around the actual areas you could get to. Also, as you explored around, it would generate the world partly based on where you walked, and not until you walked near an area. All of this is now completely gone. The new way is simply to look at your civ level, and to then make sure that there are at least four non-water tiles for each level up to your civ level + 10. And actually, for region levels lower than 10 it makes sure there are at least 7 regions at each level, to get the world a little bit larger right from the start. It generates these each time you move if it needs, to, but it has nothing to do with proximity to you, and generally speaking it will only generate any new regions when your civ level increases. These changes make for both a more focused world (before it could inflate the number of regions 10x just generating stuff you wouldn't see for hours), as well as more distinct, organic worlds that grow in all directions rather than one specific direction. As part of this new methodology, the efficiency of the generation algorithm has actually skyrocketed, too—many fewer transient heap allocations in RAM as you go wandering around the world map, for instance. Also, the few reports of lockups that a few players were having with exploring the world map should now be a thing of the past. This new method does in fact integrate seamlessly with existing worlds, no matter how large they were. It will simply fill in any missing regions anywhere around the periphery of your world. On really old worlds, this might lead to some lower-level region pockets out beyond a lot of higher-level regions, but it should't be too predominant of an effect and won't hurt anything.
The way that overlords and lieutenants are seeded is also now completely revised: Neither will even attempt to seed on regions that are lower level than 5, now. Previously, they would upconvert the region level of wherever they happened to seed, but now they don't seed until the given region level actually becomes available. The overlords still require a level 20 region, so this actually means that now no overlord even "moves in" to the region until you hit civ level 10. This is kind of interesting, actually, as it's showing the progression of the world after the cataclysm—time passing and all that—rather than it just always having an overlord present from the start. It also means that for a while NPCs will talk about something completely unrelated to overlords, and then they'll start complaining about overlords when the overlords move in; that's not new code, it's just something that's cool and that dynamically happens based on existing code. The overlords are now also allowed to seed closer together than before—previously it was just every 40 tiles. Now, since the world can grow organically in any direction, that won't always work. So they can seed as close together as they want to, although this often won't happen to be very close simply because they only seed one overlord per every 20 civ levels. So you have a good break between overlords (depending on your level when you defeat one), anyway. Overlords and lieutenants now can't seed any closer than 5 tiles to the 0,0 region; previously the limit was 12, but now that the world grows in all directions that was too far for them to actually be seeding at all before much time had passed; the balance of this is mitigated by the fact that they don't appear at all until later in the game now. Now evil outposts now seed prior to an overlord actually existing. The message shown about the lieutenants is different, though, talking about how they are waiting for the coming of an overlord. Evil outposts can't seed at all until the civilization level has reached 2, though, to give a brief safer period at the start. Lastly, evil outpost seeding logic is completely different—now it doesn't care how close together the outposts are. That was leading to far too randomized results (and thus difficulty) for the number of lieutenants in the world. Now it just seeds approximately one lieutenant for every 7 region levels.
The way that the world map is explored has been completely overhauled. Previously, you had to physically move near to regions on the world map for them to become visible. This was sort of a "fog of war" in the strategy game sense, but it had problems in that every time your civ level went up, you'd have to make a circuit of your whole world to find if there was anything new—which was annoying. Additionally, this was confusing beLooking for news you can trust?
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The Republican Party has a new star: former judge Roy Moore. On Tuesday night, in an Alabama GOP primary, Moore defeated Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate seat Jeff Sessions vacated when he became attorney general. Now the controversial Moore—who was twice booted off the Alabama Supreme Court for defying federal orders (once for violating a same-sex marriage ruling, once for resisting an order blocking him from placing a Ten Commandments monument at a courthouse)—is the favorite to win a Senate seat in the general election.
Moore is a conservative extremist who has pushed birtherism and declared that Sharia law was taking over communities in Illinois and Indiana. (It is not.) He is best known for mounting a crusade to place the Ten Commandments in public spaces and for leading the far-right opposition to marriage equality. And during this Senate campaign, news stories have noted that he has called for criminalizing homosexuality. Last week, CNN posted a video clip of Moore defending this position during a 2005 interview with Bill Press on C-SPAN.
In this short excerpt, Moore says “homosexual conduct should be illegal” and calls it “immoral” and “detestable.” But the full face-off between Moore and Press is enlightening. Press keeps challenging Moore to explain what portion of the Constitution supports discrimination against gay Americans. Moore counters by contending that it was essentially unconstitutional for judges—including the Supreme Court—to overturn laws against sodomy. At one point, though, Moore notes that “you don’t find morality in the Constitution,” and then he proclaims, “We get our morality from the Holy Bible on which this nation is founded.” He denounces courts for having established a “right” to sodomy.
Of course, Moore goes straight to the bestiality argument. “Do you know,” he asks, “that bestiality—the relationship between man and beast—is prohibited in every state?” Press interrupts to ask if he is comparing homosexuality with bestiality, and Moore says yes: “It’s the same thing…It is a moral precept on which this country is founded.” Apparently, the founders established the United States to protect its citizenry from homosexuality and bestiality.
Here’s the full debate:From beyond Neptune
Also known as “The Pale Blue Dot”, this image was the first ever portrait of the solar system. Voyager 1 took a total of 60 frames to create a mosaic of the solar system from a record distance of about 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away on February 14, 1990. Earth’s tiny blue dot, barely the size of a pixel, can be seen in the center of one of the light rays, which was caused by taking the image so close to the Sun.
Voyager 1 was on its way out of the solar system after completing its mission of studying the outer solar system when NASA, at the request of Carl Sagan, commanded it to turn its cameras around and take one last picture of Earth and the vast solar system.Giants’ Eli Manning, right, says he doesn’t know if brother Peyton (18) of the Broncos is retiring after the Super Bowl. (Photo: AP FILE PHOTO)
EAST RUTHERFORD – As the Giants made their way back to the locker room from their field house Tuesday, Ben McAdoo was walking and chatting with the two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
No, not that Manning — the other one.
Peyton Manning was a surprise visitor, dropping by younger brother Eli’s place of work for the first time since his retirement in the wake of the Broncos’ Super Bowl 50 victory nine months ago.
“I did notice Eli was kinda quiet today,” Giants rookie Sterling Shepard joked. “Must have been because big brother was around.”
Peyton flew into New Jersey in the afternoon and arrived at the Giants’ facility in time to sit in the team’s quarterbacks meeting. He offered some thoughts on what he saw from the Steelers defensively and how that would affect the Giants’ game plan, which they began installing Tuesday.
“He’s played Pittsburgh a lot over the years, played them last year in the playoffs,” Eli said. “He had a few tips or ideas that may fit into our system.”
The Giants held a walkthrough practice soon after and Peyton attended, watching from the sideline as they began preparing for Sunday’s showdown with Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh. Then the quarterback who most recently hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy delivered a message to the team with a simple theme: “Take nothing for granted,” Shepard said.
Peyton may not have been speaking directly to his brother, but he just as well could have been.
At 35, Eli has started 205 consecutive games, including playoffs, and that is the longest active streak in the NFL, the third-longest in NFL history. Only two quarterbacks have longer displays of durability: Hall of Famer Brett Favre and Peyton, sure to be a first ballot inductee in Canton in the summer of 2021.
With the Giants (8-3) on a six-game winning streak, their longest since 2008, Eli talked to reporters about finding a way to cherish the moment. The calendar is set to flip to December and the Giants are squarely in the postseason hunt – actually, they’re out in front of the NFC wild card chance – allowing Eli the chance to lend perspective to what the franchise has been through in recent seasons.
The Giants went to the playoffs for four straight years (2005-08) after Eli took over as starting quarterback in November 2004. He won his first Super Bowl in 2007 in stunning fashion, then did so again in 2011 when the Giants got on a late-season run that lasted all the way to Indianapolis where they found a way to beat Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the Patriots for a second time on the big stage.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Fire and Ice newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong All the news about the New Jersey Devils, from training camp to the regular season and Stanley Cup playoffs. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-282-3422. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Fire and Ice Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
But Eli and the Giants have not been back to the playoffs since. They have endured three straight losing seasons and the departure of Tom Coughlin as head coach, the only one for whom Eli had played before McAdoo took over as successor in January.
New York Giants Eli Manning shakes hands with older brother and Denver Broncos Peyton Manning after the two siblings played against each other for the final time in 2013 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. (Photo: Record file photo)
“You can get spoiled early in your career when four years in a row you make the playoffs and you assume that’s kind of the norm,” Eli said. “You play long enough you realize it is special to be in contention to make the playoffs. … You appreciate the wins and appreciate how hard it is and you want to take advantage of it.”
He later added: “Never taken a season or a game or a day for granted because you know how quickly it can turn. I’ve played long enough where I’ve seen a number of teammates, friends who have retired or have had to retire not on their own terms. I understand the game can slip from you quickly, so always take advantage of it and don’t let a game go by.”
Briefs: LG Justin Pugh (knee) and G/C Brett Jones (calf) both said they expected to participate in practice today. Pugh’s setback last week was the result of getting tangled with a teammate and he would not rule out playing Sunday, although acknowledged the Dec. 11 game against Dallas is more likely. … The Giants placed RB Orleans Darkwa on injured reserve with a lower leg injury and promoted LB/S Eric Pinkins from the practice squad.[Editor's note: A month before calling this election, Stephen Harper saw his party's senators pass Bill C-377, the so-called Union Transparency Act opposed by most provinces and destined for the courts. It's not just labour leaders who call the law "an act of contempt for unions." A Conservative senator, Hugh Segal, once challenged and amended the bill, which died -- only to be revived zombie-like in its original form and passed two years later. Missing from that June 30, 2015 vote was Segal, because he had retired from the Senate. The Tyee asked Segal, now Master of Massey College, to explain what is at stake if C-377 is implemented by a re-elected Conservative government.]
Bill C-377 was a Private Members Bill touted as one to provide transparency and accountability to the public and union members relating to the business of unions and where and how money was spent.
Harper's Rule Breaking Rush to Crush Unions read more
Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners ‘Punch to the Gut’ Musical on Residential Schools Returns to Vancouver Children of God has been shaped by intense audience reactions, says director Corey Payette.
My opposition to this bill, when it reached the Senate of Canada, reflected several serious concerns expressed by various expert witnesses who appeared during Senate Committee hearings after second reading.
The Canadian Bar Association questioned its constitutionality, as it sought to circumvent normal provincial jurisdiction over labour relations and trade unions by imposing Canada Revenue Agency reporting requirements via federal statute.
There was also the issue raised by many witnesses before the committee that reporting relationships for small expenditures being imposed on unions and union locals were not being imposed on other corporate or charitable/not-for-profit groups. This imbalance during labour negotiations would put those negotiations at peril.
'A violation of the constitution'
It was significant that no major business group, the Council of Chief Executives, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, etc., appeared before Committee in favour of the proposed private member's proposed legislation. But organizations like the Mutual Fund Industry and the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association did appear against the bill because of the way in which its provisions, as drafted, would violate the privacy of millions of Canadians who might have an annual payout for insurance or redemption of mutual funds at, or above, the annual cumulative threshold established by the proposed law.
This badly drafted bill, whatever the stated intent of "transparency," was a violation of the constitution, a violation of privacy and a direct attack on the right to organize and run unions, a right basic to a free market economy and the give and take essential to balance and fairness, first legislated by Sir John A. Macdonald's government five years after Confederation.
The right to invest and make a fair profit has always been balanced in Canada with the right to free collective bargaining. This bill would seriously hurt that balance.
Back from the dead
I proposed amendments to Bill C-377 in order to dilute and weaken the worst excesses in it and sent it back to the House of Commons for reconsideration, which is why we have a bi-cameral system of two Houses of Parliament.
With the support of 16 of my colleagues, these amendments passed and C-377 was to be sent back to the House of Commons for reconsideration. That reconsideration never occurred as Parliament was prorogued (ending the parliamentary session) to allow for a new Throne Speech (not for any reason related to C-377).
Under senate rules, any bill amended and sent back to the House, and not dealt with there before prorogation, begins the cycle again, bringing this or any bill back un-amended into the Senate. By the time C-377 had come full circle back to a debate and vote and re-sent to Senate Committee, I had retired from the Senate to come to Massey College.
I noted that there was spirited opposition to the Bill from Opposition members in the Red Chamber as well as Senator Diane Bellemare and others on the government side, including Senator John Wallace of New Brunswick and Senator Nancy Ruth of Ontario. Sadly, the bill passed. However, regulations have yet to be written and I am confident that at the first legal challenge it will be struck down by the courts for all the reasons laid out by expert Committee witnesses two years ago.Jurassic World sequel will have a political element
We caught up with A Monster Calls filmmaker J.A. Bayona today for an exclusive conversation in which we talked about his next gig directing the still-untitled Jurassic World sequel!
RELATED: J.A. Bayona Says Jurassic World 2 |
1 Austria 16156 Posts #7 Suggestion: Adept Den and Sentry Den to allow for scouting in TvP and ZvP. Reasoning: Protoss has been winning a lot with low tier gateway timings throughout all of SC2, this would allow people to know which Gateway units to prepare against.
starslayer Profile Joined August 2011 United States 659 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 18:25:35 #8 Ive been suggesting this in threads for a while hope they do it.
Edit I have been suggesting this idea not because of scout, but because making zerg need to make a "ravager den" will (in theory) delay ravagers enough for the other races to get enough units to deal with the silly pushes zerg can do atm.
scout isnt the problem to me its how fast they hit. i came here to kickass and chew bubblegum and i'm all out of bubble gum
blade55555 Profile Blog Joined March 2009 United States 17354 Posts #9 On December 12 2015 08:44 Big J wrote:
Suggestion: Adept Den and Sentry Den to allow for scouting in TvP and ZvP. Reasoning: Protoss has been winning a lot with low tier gateway timings throughout all of SC2, this would allow people to know which Gateway units to prepare against.
DEAL! Let's do this DEAL! Let's do this When I think of something else, something will go here
Heyjoray Profile Joined September 2015 240 Posts #10 Oh, roaches....OH MY GOD RAVAGER WHERE DO THEY COME FROM!? Are you serious?
GGzerG Profile Blog Joined January 2010 United States 9295 Posts #11 Umm... There is a lot of similar situations like not knowing if Protoss is making Oracles or Pheonix, or with some certain situations with Terran and there production. AKA: TelecoM[WHITE] Protoss fighting
LoveTool Profile Joined April 2012 Sweden 143 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 00:57:11 #12 No. My arguments are simple.
a) Ravagers need a ton of gas, 100 each. That is four times (4) more gas than a roach. Learn how to scout for gas count (pro tip: many early gasses and late lair tech = alert). If you don't know how to do that, then that is your problem not Blizzards.
b) Just fucking play safer.
ps. If you don't agree, then pls submit a picture of the sentry den, the marauder den, oracle den and the hellbat den - so that zergs can scout for these units also. Thx
pure.Wasted Profile Blog Joined December 2008 Canada 4701 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 00:59:08 #13 On December 12 2015 09:55 LoveTool wrote:
No. My arguments are simple.
a) Ravagers need a ton of gas, 100 each. That is four times (4) more gas than a roach. Learn how to scout for gas count (pro tip: many early gasses and late lair tech = alert). If you don't know how to do that, then that is your problem not Blizzards.
b) Just fucking play safer.
Those are two excellent arguments for why Twilight Council should unlock DTs. Those are two excellent arguments for why Twilight Council should unlock DTs. INna Maru-da-FanTa, Bbaby, TY Dream that I'm Flashing you
tokinho Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 772 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 03:20:59 #14 On December 12 2015 09:19 GGzerG wrote:
Umm... There is a lot of similar situations like not knowing if Protoss is making Oracles or Pheonix, or with some certain situations with Terran and there production.
Again I want to emphasize the main point. Ravagers force out a response so the players are dying to other things. I'm not really thinking its the same because of the larvae mechanic and you are rewarded by finding the the starport, but not rewarded for scouting the lair/roach warren. I feel like you can do a similar response to oracles (5 queens 2 spores) and phoenix where you cannot do the same response for double upgrades or a spire, or a burrow roach timing off a third. For the amount of response required and the style it forces you to play, and you can lose in other ways.
As an example, one option would be hyperflight banshees as an opener against ravagers, but if you go banshees and they are faking towards mutas you scan the main and are denied scouting into the natural and mutas come out. The only commitment they did to it was 3 roaches and a roach warren, which is about one less muta so you get 9 at your base instead of 10 which can still be significant damage and shut down banshees allowing unrecoverable creep spread and map control.
My post history has mostly been about tournaments statistics and changes in the meta and I prefer mostly to stay away from game adjusting ideas. I know people always tend to shoot down statistics even before they become standard as has happened to nearly every one of my posts so I kind of expected this, but it is true. In the small sample size i have, Terran in general is losing a lot to zerg before getting up to 22 up grades and a lot of its comes from preparing for one build and being crushed by another even after scanning the opponent. Now the statistics are saying Terran is doing fairly well in the mid-late game and late game. Being less constrained from good scouting while playing against zerg deserves at least a try. Again I want to emphasize the main point. Ravagers force out a response so the players are dying to other things. I'm not really thinking its the same because of the larvae mechanic and you are rewarded by finding the the starport, but not rewarded for scouting the lair/roach warren. I feel like you can do a similar response to oracles (5 queens 2 spores) and phoenix where you cannot do the same response for double upgrades or a spire, or a burrow roach timing off a third. For the amount of response required and the style it forces you to play, and you can lose in other ways.As an example, one option would be hyperflight banshees as an opener against ravagers, but if you go banshees and they are faking towards mutas you scan the main and are denied scouting into the natural and mutas come out. The only commitment they did to it was 3 roaches and a roach warren, which is about one less muta so you get 9 at your base instead of 10 which can still be significant damage and shut down banshees allowing unrecoverable creep spread and map control.My post history has mostly been about tournaments statistics and changes in the meta and I prefer mostly to stay away from game adjusting ideas. I know people always tend to shoot down statistics even before they become standard as has happened to nearly every one of my posts so I kind of expected this, but it is true. In the small sample size i have, Terran in general is losing a lot to zerg before getting up to 22 up grades and a lot of its comes from preparing for one build and being crushed by another even after scanning the opponent. Now the statistics are saying Terran is doing fairly well in the mid-late game and late game. Being less constrained from good scouting while playing against zerg deserves at least a try. Beyond One's Grasp
royalroadweed Profile Joined April 2013 United States 7695 Posts #15 Not sure if there's much point behind this. If you scout roaches or a roach warren its almost a guarantee that ravagers are coming.
Cyro Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 19163 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 04:58:10 #16 On December 12 2015 08:53 blade55555 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 12 2015 08:44 Big J wrote:
Suggestion: Adept Den and Sentry Den to allow for scouting in TvP and ZvP. Reasoning: Protoss has been winning a lot with low tier gateway timings throughout all of SC2, this would allow people to know which Gateway units to prepare against.
DEAL! Let's do this DEAL! Let's do this
It's already in the game. It's one building called a Cybernetics Core! It's just built immediately every game because the options needed to live are gated behind it (if you look at zerg for example, queen is on the spawning pool while msc is on the higher tech building)
It's already in the game. It's one building called a Cybernetics Core! It's just built immediately every game because the options needed to live are gated behind it (if you look at zerg for example, queen is on the spawning pool while msc is on the higher tech building) Umm... There is a lot of similar situations like not knowing if Protoss is making Oracles or Pheonix
If you gain vision of the stargate then you can see which unit is in production, that's often used especially on the first 2 units and to help keep track of later game army composition
If you gain vision of the stargate then you can see which unit is in production, that's often used especially on the first 2 units and to help keep track of later game army composition the marauder den and the hellbat den
Tech lab rax and reactor factory. You often have advanced warning and short term knowledge of what the terran can actually build at the times where limited production facilities matter most Tech lab rax and reactor factory. You often have advanced warning and short term knowledge of what the terran can actually build at the times where limited production facilities matter most "oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
GGzerG Profile Blog Joined January 2010 United States 9295 Posts #17 It's a bad idea, and yes as the above poster stated, if you scout a Roach warren you should assume Ravagers regardless, it is like a Protoss going for a Dark Shrine and not making DT's.... -_- AKA: TelecoM[WHITE] Protoss fighting
Lexender Profile Joined September 2013 Mexico 2156 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-12 05:48:03 #18 On December 12 2015 09:55 LoveTool wrote:
ps. If you don't agree, then pls submit a picture of the sentry den, the marauder den, oracle den and the hellbat den - so that zergs can scout for these units also. Thx
Also known as tech lab and armory
Also known as tech lab and armory On December 12 2015 14:02 GGzerG wrote:
It's a bad idea, and yes as the above poster stated, if you scout a Roach warren you should assume Ravagers regardless, it is like a Protoss going for a Dark Shrine and not making DT's.... -_-
Thats an awful example tho, DTs come from their own building, it would be more like DTs coming from Twilight Thats an awful example tho, DTs come from their own building, it would be more like DTs coming from Twilight
Cyro Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 19163 Posts #19 it is like a Protoss going for a Dark Shrine and not making DT's.... -_-
Like a protoss with a twilight not building DT's - much more likely to happen but not guaranteed at all. Like a protoss with a twilight not building DT's - much more likely to happen but not guaranteed at all. "oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
iamCHOMP Profile Joined December 2015 Canada 15 Posts #20 On a practical design point of view I think that totally makes sense and is a great thought.
1 2 3 Next AllA two-judge bench has recused itself from hearing a case related to one of worst episodes of the 2002 Gujarat riots - involving the massacre of over 100 people in Naroda Patiya. The judges have said they have been contacted by some of the accused.
Several high profile people are among the 32 people convicted in the case -- including former minister Maya Kodnani, and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, whose bail has been extended for 10 days on health grounds.
But last week, when their appeal against conviction came up for hearing, Justice M R Shah and Justice K S Jhaveri said they had reservations against hearing the case and referred it to the Acting Chief Justice for assigning it to another bench.
The judges told the lawyers that some accused persons had "tried to approach" them. The appeal will now be heard by another bench on Tuesday.
This was not the first time allegations of interference in the judicial process have surfaced. After delivering the conviction order in 2012, sessions judge Jyotsna Yagnik had received death threats and was given Z-Plus security protection. But her security was scaled down in September last year, and she brought it to the notice of Special Investigation Team which is investigating the riot cases.
Rights activists are worried about the interference with the judicial process.
"When judges start recusing on this basis... I would say it is not just worrying for the state, but the entire country and for victims seeking justice," said activist Father Cedric Prakash.
"The victims have all along felt hurt that there have been attempts to derail the investigation process... and now this.... We will try to approach the court to seek an inquiry on who had approached the judges,'' said advocate for the victims, Shamshad Pathan.In the spring of 1965, the physicist and prolific author Jeremy Bernstein wrote a short piece for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” about of 37-year-old director Stanley Kubrick, who was accelerating towards the zenith of his cultural acclaim after releasing Lolita and Dr. Strangelove and was about to release his greatest film, his cult collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The piece garnered enough interest that Bernstein was assigned to write a feature-length profile of Kubrick — something the reclusive director wouldn’t have ordinarily agreed to, had it not been for one peculiar passion he shared with Bernstein: the love of chess. So Bernstein traveled to Oxford, where 2001 was being shot, and spent ample time with Kubrick, sneaking in chess matches during production breaks. And even though he never beat Kubrick, he accomplished an even greater feat: He got the young director, notoriously averse to long interviews, to engage in a 76-minute conversation, recorded on tape. This rare audio, recorded on November 27, 1965, is arguably Kubrick’s most extensive and revealing interview about his early career, discussing such wide-ranging subjects as how he learned that problem-solving is the key to creative success, why he got bad grades in high school, the promise and perils of nuclear power, the allure of space exploration, and what it was like to work with Clarke and Nabokov.
The profile, fittingly titled “How About a Little Game?,” was published nearly a year later, in the November 12, 1966 issue of The New Yorker, and was eventually included in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (public library) — the same excellent collection that gave us Kubrick’s Playboy interview on mortality, the fear of flying, and the meaning of life. One of the most interesting — and prescient — subjects discussed in both the New Yorker article and the audio interview are Kubrick’s conflicted views on nuclear power and the atomic bomb. Bernstein writes:
It was the building of the Berlin Wall that shaped Kubrick’s interest in nuclear power and nuclear strategy, and he began to read everything he could get hold of about the bomb. Eventually, he had decided that he had about covered the spectrum, and wasn’t learning anything new. “When you start reading the analyses of nuclear strategy, they seem so thoughtful that you’re lulled into a temporary sense of reassurance,” Kubrick explained. “But as you go deeper into it, and become more involved, you begin to realize that every one of these lines of thought leads to a paradox.” It is this constant element of paradox in all the nuclear strategies and in the conventional attitudes toward them that Kubrick transformed into the principal theme of Dr. Strangelove.
Kubrick goes on to argue that nuclear energy and the atomic bomb have been reduced to an abstraction, one “represented by a few newsreel shots of mushroom clouds,” which hinders people’s ability to actually engage with the reality of the issue. He tells Bernstein:
People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. For this reason, most people have very little interest in nuclear war. It has become even less interesting as a problem than, say, city government, and the longer a nuclear event is postponed, the greater becomes the illusion that we are constantly building up security, like interest at the bank. As time goes on, the danger increases, I believe, because the thing becomes more and more remote in people’s minds. No one can predict the panic that suddenly arises when all the lights go out — that indefinable something that can make a leader abandon his carefully laid plans. A lot of effort has gone into trying to imagine possible nuclear accidents and to protect against them. But whether the human imagination is really capable of encompassing all the subtle permutations and psychological variants of these possibilities, I doubt. The nuclear strategists who make up all those war scenarios are never as inventive as reality, and political and military leaders are never as sophisticated as they think they are.
And yet, despite this glib view of our capacity for transcending the limitations of our own minds, Kubrick did have beautiful faith in the human spirit, as his timeless words bespeak: “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”Goofs
The series takes place in 1938 with some flashbacks to 1937 and 1936, and repeated references are made to the fact that Jake flew with the American Volunteer Group or "Flying Tigers" prior to his adventures in the show. The only problem is that the AVG did not see its first combat action until December 20th 1941 (that's three years after the events in the series are supposed to have taken place). We also see at least one flashback of Jake as a Tiger, fighting Japanese "Zeros". The Mitsubishi A6M. or "Zero" never fought against the AVG. Japan sent 15 Zeros to China in 1939, before the Tigers existed, two were shot down and the remaining 13 were recalled prior to that attack on Pearl Harbour, two weeks before the AVG saw its first combat action. The AVG only fought Ki-27 "Nates" and Ki-43 "Oscars". They shot down 290 of them. See moreIllinois lawsuits allege fraud by student debt settlement companies
By Khara Sikhan
19 July 2014
Student debt settlement companies used fraudulent means to convince young people to pay them large fees to obtain fictitious debt relief, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
The lawsuits target two companies: Broadsword Student Advantage of Frisco, Texas, and First American Tax Defense of Park Ridge, Illinois. These are only two of many companies that have duped thousands of heavily indebted students and graduates by requiring over $1000 in fees for fictitious services. Among the services offered by First American was the “Obama forgiveness program,” which Madigan says does not exist.
There are hundreds of thousands of complaints every year to the US Federal Trade Commission about debt settlement and collection companies, according to the New York Times.
The lawsuit noted that Rick Cibelli of Peoria, Illinois appealed to First American Tax Defense after borrowing $10,000 to receive his paralegal certificate, but could not manage the $60 monthly payments. After calling the Department of Education about the program, he learned that the firm had no affiliation with the US government, and asked for a refund of his $700 up-front payment, which was refused by the company.
These fraudulent debt settlement companies are prevalent on radio, television, and internet advertisements. Their targets include teachers, nurses, and other public employees who may have faced high tuition. Students looking for debt relief with these companies would talk to a salesperson using high pressure sales pitches to coerce the vulnerable borrowers to put large up-front fees on credit cards.
Student debt has soared in recent years. The total level of US student loan debt hit more than $1 trillion in 2011, surpassing the total amount of credit card debt and home mortgage debt. The class of 2014 had an average debt load of $33,050, more than triple the level in 1993.
At the beginning of 2013 total student loan debt stood at $1.2 trillion, almost 8 percent of US Gross Domestic Product. Between 2003 and 2012, the portion of 25-year-olds with student debt rose from 25 percent to 43 percent.
Debt settlement companies proliferated in response to the banking deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s. Loosened restrictions allowing predatory lending, combined with the drive to slash wages and close down industries, created an environment where the working class became vulnerable to fraudulent loan forgiveness scams.
In announcing the lawsuits, Madigan, a Democrat, said, “All of the alleged services that these operators provide, you can access yourself at no cost because they are free programs offered by the U.S. government. Too often, students do not know what options they have to repay or reduce their loan payments.”
The complaint filed by Madigan concludes, however, “despite advertising wide-ranging student loan relief services, such as the ability to secure lower student loan payments, remove wage garnishments, negotiate student loan debt forgiveness, and improve credit scores, Defendants do not have such capabilities.”
The implication, then, is that neither does the US government. The Obama Administration’s “Pay As You Earn” student loan payment program is largely meaningless: it allows certain qualifying students to pay their student loans over a longer period of time with an overall higher interest payment. For many borrowers this results in a higher total payment to the bank, but a smaller monthly payment.
Last year, the Obama administration and Congress moved to tie student loan interest rates to market interest rates. As a result of this agreement, interest rates on federal student loans increased by one percent this year, and are slated to rise even further in the future.
Last month, the Obama administration provided a $16 million bailout to Corinthian Colleges, owners of Everest College, Heald, and WyoTech, to keep the company afloat as it was undergoing fraud investigations by 20 states. If Corinthian had shut down, close to $1 billion in student loan debt could have been potentially discharged under federal rules.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE has a 2-point lead over Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in the battleground state of Florida, a new poll finds.
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A new Florida Atlantic University survey released on Wednesday shows the Republican presidential nominee leading his Democratic counterpart 43 percent to 41 percent, which is within the survey’s margin of error. Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson Gary Earl JohnsonPotential GOP primary challenger: Trump's 'contempt for the American people' behind possible bid The Hill's 12:30 Report — Presented by Kidney Care Partners — Trump escalates border fight with emergency declaration Former Mass. governor takes step toward Trump primary challenge MORE captures 8 percent, and 5 percent are undecided.
This is the first poll showing Trump leading Clinton in the Sunshine State since early July, according to RealClearPolitics polling.
Both major-party nominees have negative favorability ratings in the state. Forty-one percent view Trump favorably, while 56 percent view him unfavorably. Clinton is viewed favorably by 40 percent, while 58 percent view her unfavorably.
Trump is winning over independents by a double-digit margin, 47 percent to 26 percent, and he has a similar edge with male and white voters. Clinton leads among female voters and African-Americans by nearly 50 points and Hispanics by 10 points.
“The race between Clinton and Trump among Hispanics in Florida is closer than it is nationally,” said Monica Escaleras, the director of Florida Atlantic University’s Business and Economics Polling Initiative. “Some of that is probably the Cuban vote. Trump’s support among Latinos in Florida is helping him stay competitive.”
The poll was conducted Aug. 19–22 and surveyed 1,200 likely voters. The margin of error is 2.7 percentage points.
In the Florida Senate race, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioHillicon 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 Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE is leading his likely Democratic opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, by 5 points, 44 percent to 39 percent.
Both candidates are leading in their respective primaries, which will be held next Tuesday.
The race for a crucial Senate seat could be pivotal in determining which party gains control of the upper chamber next year. So far, Rubio holds an almost 6-point lead in a RealClearPolitics average of polls.ROME — Netflix has ordered its first Turkish-language original series, in a move likely to help it gain traction in one of the world’s most vibrant TV markets.
Following its mid-2016 Turkish launch, the streaming service has ordered ten episodes of an as-yet-untitled Istanbul-set historical drama inspired by the history and legends of the Ottoman empire, it said in a statement.
The show is centered around a young man who discovers that he has supernatural powers. When Istanbul is threatened by dark forces he joins forces with a group of misfit friends to save the city and its inhabitants, according to Netflix.
Onur Guvenatam, who produced the successful Turkish adaptation of ABC’s “Pretty Little Liars,” will serve as executive producer on Netflix’s first Turkish original which will be written and produced in Turkey by Istanbul-based shingle O3 Medya with plans for a global launch on the Netflix platform in 2018.
The announcement comes as the Turkish SVOD sector is starting to heat up. In January the first Turkish streaming series, titled “Masum” (“Innocent”), launched on local platform BluTV. About six months earlier Netflix launched in Turkey in partnership with local telco Vodafone, after buying a mega package of local content for worldwide play from Eccho Rights that included many of the country’s top-rated shows, such as “The End,” “Kurt Seyit & Sura,” and “Winter Sun.”This undated photo provided by the U.S. Army shows Capt. Bruce Kevin Clark. The family Clark, a Texas-based Army medic serving in Afghanistan, says Clark's wife witnessed the officer's death, which happened Monday, April 30, 2012 as the two were video chatting via Skype. (AP Photo/U.S. Army)
DALLAS (AP) — An Army nurse showed no alarm or discomfort before suddenly collapsing during a Skype video chat with his wife, who saw a bullet hole in a closet behind him, his family said Sunday.
Capt. Bruce Kevin Clark's family released a statement describing what his wife saw in the video feed recording her husband's death in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan. It's not clear how the bullet hole got in the closet.
"Clark was suddenly knocked forward," the statement from the soldier's family said. "The closet behind him had a bullet hole in it. The other individuals, including a member of the military, who rushed to the home of CPT Clark's wife also saw the hole and agreed it was a bullet hole."
The statement says the Skype link remained open for two hours on April 30 as family and friends in the U.S. and Afghanistan tried to get Clark help.
"After two hours and many frantic phone calls by Mrs. Clark, two military personnel arrived in the room and appeared to check his pulse, but provided no details about his condition to his wife," the statement said.
In the statement, Susan Orellana-Clark said she was providing details of what she saw "to honor my husband and dispel the inaccurate information and supposition promulgated by other parties."
U.S. officials in Afghanistan referred questions to the Pentagon, which previously referred questions to the William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, where Clark was assigned.
The Pentagon said previously that Clark's death remains under investigation.
Clarence Davis, spokesman for William Beaumont Army Medical Center, declined to comment on Clark's family's statement.
Clark, 43, grew up in Michigan and previously lived in Spencerport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester, his wife's hometown. He joined the Army in 2006 and was stationed in Hawaii before he was assigned to the medical center in El Paso. He deployed to Afghanistan in March.
Clark's body was returned Thursday to Dover Air Force Base.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters, aged 3 and 9.TARAKAN (NORTH KALIMANTAN) - Joint operations by Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to fight terrorism and transnational crimes in the Sulu Sea were launched on Monday (June 19) morning from Tarakan island in North Kalimantan.
The move comes as clashes in Marawi city between the Philippine armed forces and hundreds of militants from the Maute and Abu Sayyaf terrorist groups, continue into their fourth week.
The Trilateral Maritime Patrol was inaugurated at a ceremony attended by Indonesian Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu, his Malaysian counterpart Hishammuddin Hussein, and Philippine Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, at Tarakan Naval Base.
It was also witnessed by Singapore's Senior Minister of State for Defence and Foreign Affairs, Dr Maliki Osman, and Brunei's Deputy Defence Minister Abdul Aziz Haji Mohammad Tamit.
The joint operation was initiated by Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines in the face of security challenges associated with each country's border waters, said the Indonesian military (TNI) in a statement given to reporters on Monday before the official launch.
The TNI said the joint patrol is a step taken by the three countries "in the spirit and centrality of Asean, in maintaining stability in the region in the face of non-traditional threats such as piracy, kidnapping, terrorism and other transnational crimes in regional waters".
Although a largely maritime-based operation, air and land military assets are also expected to be involved in securing the Sulu Sea, which is located to the north-east of Borneo island and south-west of the Philippines.
Maritime Command Centres (MCC) to coordinate the joint patrol have also been set up in Tarakan, as well as Tawau in Sabah, Malaysia, and Bongao, the capital of Tawi-Tawi province in the Philippines.
Related Story Asean nations launching joint sea patrols today
TNI chief Gatot Nurmantyo said during a speech at the launch on Monday that the three centres are part of a wider security plan discussed by armed forces chiefs from the three countries during a previous meeting in Yogyakarta.
"The MCCs in Tarakan, Tawau and Bongao will be the centres for sharing information and intelligence that serves as an important factor in supporting the trilateral maritime patrols," said General Gatot.
Maute and Abu Sayyaf terrorists, based in the restive island of Mindanao, have in recent years kidnapped dozens of tourists, fishermen and sailors in the waters surrounding the Philippine's Sulu archipelago, which include the Sulu Sea and the northern limit of the Celebes Sea.
The presence of Indonesians and Malaysians, as well as other foreigners among the Maute militants fighting in Marawi, reinforces the appeal of the southern Philippines to extremists in the region who are loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Mr Hishammuddin said the aim of this latest security initiative is to prevent South-east Asia from becoming a conflict zone where foreign fighters freely enter to join groups such as ISIS.
"What we want to avoid is a development of perceptions that there are certain areas in our region that are seen as Aleppo, Raqqa (in Syria), meaning these areas would become magnets, to which foreign fighters would be attracted to come," he said.
The Malaysian defence minister said that among those killed in Marawi thus far, aside from Indonesians and Malaysians, are also militants from Morocco, Saudi Arabia.
"If we don't address this properly, believe me, the others from Europe, New Zealand, Australia would also come," added Mr Hishammuddin. "We want to convey a very clear message that if they want to set foot here, they don't only face one country, but at least three countries that have agreed to fight as hard as they can."
These threats have increased the impetus for a more coordinated response among countries in the region that share sea borders as well as those nearby such as Singapore and Thailand.
Singapore's Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, in response to an invitation from Mr Ryamizard to participate in the joint patrol on June 3, had said Singapore is ready to play its part in any way needed.
Speaking to reporters at the end of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue on June 4, Dr Ng noted that Singapore had offered to participate in the patrols at any time Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines think is appropriate. It has also offered the assistance of its Information Fusion Centre at Changi Naval Base.
"I'm glad Indonesian Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu as well as Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein have said that when they are more settled, they will ask Singapore," Dr Ng had said. "My reply to them is, 'We stand ready to assist in the Sulu Sea patrols or in other counter-terrorism initiatives when asked by others'. It is in our interests to do so."Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
March 22, 2016, 11:56 AM GMT / Updated March 22, 2016, 2:09 PM GMT / Source: TODAY By Scott Stump
Donald Trump tells TODAY's Savannah Guthrie and Matt Lauer if he were president, he'd react to the Brussels attacks by being "very, very tough on the borders" and by using torture of suspects if necessary to try to obtain vital information.
"Brussels is a total mess,'' the GOP front-runner said in a live phone interview Tuesday. "They're just a city that used to be one of the finest and one of the most beautiful and one of the safest cities in the world, and now it's a catastrophic, very dangerous city where the police have very little control."
Blasts rocked the check-in zone of Brussels Airport and the Belgian capital's subway early Tuesday, killing dozens of people and injuring scores. According to sources, at least one and possibly multiple "suicide bombers" were involved in the attacks.
epa05224807 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers remarks at the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference in Washington, DC, USA, 21 March 2016. AIPAC is an American pro-Israel lobby group. EPA/SHAWN THEW SHAWN THEW / EPA
The attacks came just days after a raid in Brussels captured Europe's most wanted man, Salah Abdeslam, who is suspected of plotting the Paris terror attacks. If Trump were president and Abdeslam was a suspect in U.S. custody, he said he would use any technique necessary to extract information from him about any other potential attacks.
"Frankly, the waterboarding, if it was up to me, and if we changed the laws or had the laws, waterboarding would be fine,'' Trump said. "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people.
Trump added that he believes torture would be effective in obtaining information in a case like this, whereas experts are divided on whether it produces positive or false information.
"I am in the camp where you have to get the information and you have to get it rapidly,'' Trump said.
RELATED: 'Unrealistic' to shut borders, Hillary Clinton says
Trump attributed the turbulence in Brussels to the effects of immigration from the Middle East.
"Belgium is no longer Belgium,'' he said. "Belgium is a horror show right now. This all happened because frankly there's no assimilation. They are not assimilating for whatever reason. They don't want laws that we have, they want Sharia Law, and you say to yourself, at what point, how much of this do you take?
"What we're doing is we're allowing thousands and thousands of these people into our country, and we're going to have nothing but problems, as sure as you're sitting there."
In a phone interview on TODAY Tuesday, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said closing the U.S. borders is "unrealistic" in the wake of the attack. She also opposed using any type of torture methods in trying to obtain information from suspects, saying military leaders have stated that it's not effective.
Follow TODAY.com writer Scott Stump on Twitter.The Riverdale Games begin on the Archie App and Knuckles meets a mysterious new stranger in this week’s new Archie Comics! Keep reading for a look inside PEP DIGITAL #184 – ARCHIE & FRIENDS: THE RIVERDALE GAMES and SONIC UNIVERSE #88!
To purchase these and other great Archie Comics, find a comic shop near you using the Comic Shop Locator service, visit the Archie Comics Online Store, or download the Archie App!
PEP DIGITAL #184 – ARCHIE & FRIENDS: |
public treasury, its allies in the corporate media seem increasingly hesitant to cover the news of post-Fukushima Japan. Continuing coverage is available at this link, this link, and this link. ________________
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Paul Krugman:
I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become.
Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who, like me, spent most of the Bush years as a voice in the wilderness. And he pointed out something remarkable: although those of us who said the obvious — that the Bush administration was fundamentally monstrous — were ridiculed by all the respectable people at the time, at this point our narrative has become everyone’s narrative.
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Paul Craig Roberts: _________________
US Media _________________
"Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda."
"The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media.
Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives — not by journalists — whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers.
Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home."
_________________
War On Terror _________________
Roberts asked "Is the War on Terror a Hoax", and claims it has "killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans of millions of Muslims in six countries". Roberts called the attacks "naked aggression" on civilian populations and infrastructure which constitute war crimes. _________________
Republican Party _________________
Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the U.S. Constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution. _________________
American Democracy and Oligarchy _________________
Roberts has been increasingly critical of what he deems as the lessening of democracy in the U.S.; instead accusing it of being run by oligarchs by stating:
"The west prides itself that it is the standard for the world, that it is a democracy. But nowhere do you see democratic outcomes: not in Greece, not in Ireland, not in the UK, not here, the outcomes are always to punish the innocent and reward the guilty.
And that's what the Greeks are in the streets protesting. We see this all over the west. There is no democracy, there are oligarchies, some of these smaller European countries are not even run by their own governments, they are run by Wall Street... There is probably more democracy in China than there is in the west.
Revolution is the only answer... We are confronted with a curious situation. Throughout the west we think we have democracy, we hold ourselves up high, we demonize China, we talk about the mafia state of Russia, we talk about the Arabs and so on, but where is the democracy here?" _________________
Farewell Speech _________________
"Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It,"
Roberts effectively announced his journalistic retirement. The article, published at Counterpunch.org, begins:
"There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest."
It proceeds to a bitter chronicle of the demise of American intellectual integrity, particularly that of financial journalists and economists. These have been thoroughly corrupted by monetary inducements to misrepresent and ignore what has been, in effect, the systematic dismantling of the nation's productive life, in the name of globalization.
He holds the members of his own journalistic profession largely responsible for abetting relentless outsourcing of American industry, thereby gutting the American middle class and effectively dooming the nation's future.
He describes his own ostracism from mainstream media access, the consequence of his relentless and unflinching criticism of the demolition process over the past decade. His column ends, "The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off." _________________
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Liberal?
"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal."
John F. Kennedy, 1960
________________
Citizen's United
"[T]his Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."
– Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
_______________
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Pottersville Bartender Cirze Petite, blonde highlights, practices yoga and pilates, will teach if begged; enjoys literature, theatre, art galleries, concerts - blues, rhythm and blues, classical, jazz; travel; seafood locales. View my complete profile
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Click here for Cindy's Soapbox! _________________
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Cirze's WorldGoogle has already been working on patents that could pick out faces and song melodies in our YouTube clips. Now, it might just have the ultimate tool: the technique in a just-granted patent could pick out objects in a video, whether they're living or not. Instead of asking the creator to label objects every time, Google proposes using a database of "feature vectors" such as color, movement, shape and texture to automatically identify subjects in the frame through their common traits -- a cat's ears and fast movement would separate it from the ball of yarn it's attacking, for example. Movie makers themselves could provide a lot of the underlying material just by naming and tagging enough of their clips, with the more accurate labels helping to separate the wheat from the chaff if an automated visual ranking system falls short. The one mystery is what Google plans to do with its newfound observational skills, if anything, although the most logical step would be to fill in YouTube keywords without any user intervention -- a potential time-saver when we're uploading that twelfth consecutive pet video.AWalker9 Profile Blog Joined August 2013 United Kingdom 7226 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-26 22:06:31 #1
http://www.azubu.tv/INnoVation
http://www.azubu.tv/Dark
http://www.azubu.tv/soO
http://www.azubu.tv/Dream
http://www.azubu.tv/classic
http://www.azubu.tv/myungsik
http://www.azubu.tv/sorry
Should be exciting! A few official SKT1 accounts have appeared on Azubu:Should be exciting! soOjwa has returned to smite all that stand in his way
Elentos Profile Blog Joined February 2015 46197 Posts #2 Well, their LoL squad already does it. Though I'm not sure the accounts will end up being used much. They're probably a bit apprehensive about players actually streaming and getting sniped more often in Proleague. Splyce flair now | Where is knowledge?
HyralGambit Profile Joined February 2014 2439 Posts #3 Azubu does not have balloons, how will they make $15,000+ per month streaming like Bisu does with BW? Passion overcomes corporate stupidity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX9hbbA-WP4#t=4h2m
Kfcnoob Profile Joined January 2011 United States 296 Posts #4 dam this should be siq if so And Artosis sayeth "the one who kills many, but loses few, comes out ahead."
JonnySC2 Profile Joined December 2015 Germany 119 Posts #5 I doubt they stream much while Proleague is going on but it would be really cool to see them stream a bit in the offseason. SKT best KT
[PkF] Wire Profile Joined March 2013 France 20658 Posts #6 I don't think they will stream much especially because of Proleague, but if that were to happen, that would be wonderful
deacon.frost Profile Joined February 2013 Czech Republic 7191 Posts #7 Cannot wait Sick city! This should be goodCannot wait I imagine France should be able to take this unless Lilbow is busy practicing for Starcraft III. | KadaverBB is my fairy ban mother.
Deathstar Profile Blog Joined May 2010 9150 Posts #8 Watch them stream like once a month or something >_> rip passion
royalroadweed Profile Joined April 2013 United States 7695 Posts #9 Well its not Dingit.
Elentos Profile Blog Joined February 2015 46197 Posts #10 On January 27 2016 07:30 Deathstar wrote:
Watch them stream like once a month or something >_>
That'd be one more time per month than they stream now! That'd be one more time per month than they stream now! Splyce flair now | Where is knowledge?
Charoisaur Profile Joined August 2014 Germany 11998 Posts #11 On January 27 2016 07:30 Deathstar wrote:
Watch them stream like once a month or something >_>
that's more than I can hope for.
Also we might hopefully see that infamous Myungsik ladder BM that's more than I can hope for.Also we might hopefully see that infamous Myungsik ladder BM INnoVation
Silvana Profile Blog Joined September 2013 3713 Posts #12 Even if they stream twice a year, it cannot hurt :D
Elentos Profile Blog Joined February 2015 46197 Posts Last Edited: 2016-01-26 23:18:45 #13 On January 27 2016 08:06 Charoisaur wrote:
Show nested quote +
On January 27 2016 07:30 Deathstar wrote:
Watch them stream like once a month or something >_>
that's more than I can hope for.
Also we might hopefully see that infamous Myungsik ladder BM that's more than I can hope for.Also we might hopefully see that infamous Myungsik ladder BM
He used to stream on Twitch, I don't think BMs on stream. After joining SKT he probably wouldn't even BM without stream. He used to stream on Twitch, I don't think BMs on stream. After joining SKT he probably wouldn't even BM without stream. Splyce flair now | Where is knowledge?
Phredxor Profile Joined May 2013 New Zealand 14939 Posts #14 Probably be something like the Flash once every 3 months stream. Give it a go and can't get it working so gives up
Elentos Profile Blog Joined February 2015 46197 Posts #15 The real story here is that there are none for Zoun and Impact. Splyce flair now | Where is knowledge?
PinoKotsBeer Profile Joined February 2014 Netherlands 1364 Posts #16 Nice! innovation added to the favorites! http://www.twitch.tv/pinokotsbeer
geokilla Profile Joined May 2011 Canada 7051 Posts #17 Will there be any interaction with the viewers though? I like watching Polt because he's entertaining, provides high level games, and interacts with Twitch chat or people that send him messages via donations whenever possible.
Seeker Profile Blog Joined April 2005 Where dat snitch at? 31887 Posts #18 On January 27 2016 07:37 royalroadweed wrote:
Well its not Dingit.
IIRC, Azubu has finally reached a point where people actually prefer to watch them over twitch. Either that or people don't mind Azubu as much as they used to in the past. IIRC, Azubu has finally reached a point where people actually prefer to watch them over twitch. Either that or people don't mind Azubu as much as they used to in the past. Moderator PM me if you want translations done | twitch.tv/dankshrine Weekly SC2 Podcast!
TedBurtle Profile Blog Joined April 2014 Belarus 201 Posts #19 I know that LOL team got schedule...but i cant find schedule for sc2 team..i see that they stream, because pages getting higher in "recent streams" but cant catch them...anyone know when i can see classic? Unbeatable Protoss
showstealer1829 Profile Blog Joined May 2014 Australia 3016 Posts #20
Not interested No Pimpact?Not interested There is no understanding. There is only Choya. Choya is the way. Choya is Love. Choya is Life. Has is the Light in the Protoss Dark and Nightmare is his chosen Acolyte
1 2 3 Next AllBy Sara A. Carter and Kenneth Todd Ruiz, Staff WritersInland Valley Daily BulletinMexican soldiers and civilian smugglers had an armed standoff with nearly 30 U.S. law enforcement officials on the Rio Grande in Texas Monday afternoon, according to Texas police and the FBI.Mexican military Humvees were towing what appeared to be thousands of pounds of marijuana across the border into the United States, said Chief Deputy Mike Doyal, of the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department.Mexican Army troops had several mounted machine guns on the ground more than 200 yards inside the U.S. border -- near Neely's Crossing, about 50 miles east of El Paso -- when Border Patrol agents called for backup. Hudspeth County deputies and Texas Highway patrol officers arrived shortly afterward, Doyal said."It's been so bred into everyone not to start an international incident with Mexico that it's been going on for years," Doyal said. "When you're up against mounted machine guns, what can you do? Who wants to pull the trigger first? Certainly not us."An FBI spokeswoman confirmed the incident happened at 2:15 p.m. Pacific Time."Bad guys in three vehicles ended up on the border," said Andrea Simmons, a spokeswoman with the FBI's El Paso office. "People with Humvees, who appeared to be with the Mexican Army, were involved with the three vehicles in getting them back across."Simmons said the FBI was not involved and referred inquiries to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.ICE did not return calls seeking comment.Doyal said deputies captured one vehicle in the incident, a Cadillac Escalade reportedly stolen from El Paso, and found 1,477 pounds of marijuana inside. The Mexican soldiers set fire to one of the Humvees stuck in the river, he said.Doyal's deputies faced a similar incident on Nov. 17, when agents from the Fort Hancock border patrol station in Texas called the sheriff's department for backup after confronting more than six fully armed men dressed in Mexican military uniforms. The men -- who were carrying machine guns and driving military vehicles -- were trying to bring more than three tons of marijuana across the Rio Grande, Doyal said.Doyal said such incidents are common at Neely's Crossing, which is near Fort Hancock, Texas, and across from the Mexican state of Chihuahua."It happens quite often here," he said.Deputies and border patrol agents are not equipped for combat, he added."Our government has to do something," he said. "It's not the immigrants coming over for jobs we're worried about. It's the smugglers, Mexican military and the national threat to our borders that we're worried about."Citing a Jan. 15 story in the Daily Bulletin, Reps. David Dreier, R-Glendora, and Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego, last week asked the House Judiciary Committee, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the House Homeland Security Committee and the House International Relations Committee to investigate the incursions. The story focused on a Department of Homeland Security document reporting 216 incursions by Mexican soldiers during the past 10 years and a map with the seal of the president's Office of National Drug Control Policy, both of which were given to the newspaper.Requests by Dreier, chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Hunter were made in jointly signed letters.On Wednesday, Chertoff played down the reports of border incursions by the Mexican military. He suggested many of the incursions could have been mistakes, blaming bad navigation by military personnel or attributing the incursions to criminals dressed in military garb.Mexican officials last week denied any incursions made by their military.But border agents interviewed over the past year have discussed confrontations those they believe to be Mexican military personnel."We're sitting ducks," said a border agent speaking on condition of anonymity. "The government has our hands tied."Related Articles:Mars' Meridiani Planum, along the planet's equator, is about 29,700 square miles (77,000 square kilometers) — approximately the size of South Carolina. Deposits on Meridiani Planum can be seen in white.
Giant deposits of ice may not lie hidden under the surface of Mars, between its equator and poles, as recently suggested, a new study finds.
Researchers have long known that vast amounts of ice lie trapped in high latitudes around the Martian poles. However, scientists have recently begun to find that ice may also be hidden in the mid latitudes of Mars and even at low latitudes around the Martian equator.
Now Thomas Watters, lead author on a new study and planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, and his colleagues have found that at one equatorial site on Mars, evidence suggesting it may be rich in ice could just as easily mean that it has little to no ice whatsoever. [Inside Opportunity's Record-Setting Marathon Drive on Mars (Infographic)]
The researchers analyzed data collected by the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, according to the study. They focused on readings it collected from Meridiani Planum, a South Carolina-size area on Mars' equator that the Opportunity rover is currently exploring.
The MARSIS instrument transmits low-frequency radio pulses at Mars, which can penetrate the crust of the Red Planet and get reflected back when they encounter changes in density or composition.
The data from these pulses helped reveal the electrical properties of materials at Meridiani Planum. These electrical properties are often associated with ice-rich deposits, but "results from the Opportunity rover show there is little evidence to support an interpretation that Meridiani Planum deposits were ice-filled," Watters told Space.com.
Although Opportunity found evidence of some minerals at Meridiani Planum that were once formed in or altered by liquid water, the surface deposits there are mainly composed of dry, volcanic sand. "The view of the Opportunity team has been that the Meridiani Planum deposits are dry," Watters said.Watters and his colleagues found that other materials could have been compacted beneath Mars' surface to create an ice-like signal: The data from Meridiani Planum could be explained if the materials were thick layers of ice-free, porous, windblown, volcanic sand. "Many of the recently identified non-polar deposits interpreted to be ice-rich may contain little or no ice at all," Watters said.
The contours of Meridiani Planum may have made it ideal at trapping such windblown sands, the researchers said in the study. The relatively low gravity of Mars and the cold, dry climate that has dominated the planet for billions of years may then have allowed thick sand deposits to remain porous, they added.
These new insights from Meridiani Planum may help researchers identify areas with and without ice that future missions to Mars can access. "The search for accessible ice in the low latitudes of Mars is becoming a major goal in support of future human exploration and the potential for the colonization of Mars," Watters said.
The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.Readers, I recently got this letter from a sex worker I’ve known for years. Obviously I’m not in a position to know all the ins and outs of the situation, but this lady is very sharp and I talked to her about some of the earlier incidents she refers to as they happened, including the one from three years ago. I have edited this a bit for conciseness, to remove a few unnecessary personal details and to embed links, but the rest is hers. The “Gina” she refers to is the owner of Preferred 411 (“P411”), a client verification service to which I’ve referred on multiple occasions.
Dear Maggie,
I am writing this in hopes that you may help me to share this information regarding P411. I was reluctant to come forward at first, but after the evidence that presented itself today, I can no longer deny the responsibility that I have to my sisters to report that I strongly believe that the security of the site can no longer be trusted. I was the biggest proponent of P411 for years, but now sadly, I must say that Gina and I exchanged emails today that can leave me with no other impression than that she is working with cops, maybe even the FBI.
Three years ago a man claiming to be “Danny H___”* attempted to schedule appointments with me in Orlando, Florida, using a very memorable email address. I was provided with screening information that led to a Florida real estate license, so I made the appointment; however, my intuition kept telling me that something was wrong so I ran some checks on the contact form he filled out on my website. A back door tracker showed it originated at “Orange County Telecommunications”, and following that back took me to the police department website. I quickly cancelled the appointment, yet had already told him the hotel; he begged me to see him, and when I looked out the window I saw two blacked out undercover Dodge Chargers in the parking lot, parked driver to driver in the style of the police. So I told him that I found him attractive and would see him for free, and suddenly he lost interest. Hmm.
Early last week, I was surprised to be contacted by that same memorable email address again! I had just posted a new ad on Eros for the Tampa area (which includes Orlando). Because I knew he was a cop from last time, I decided to look at the MBI website and found a message from the Director breaking down their efforts to eliminate escort advertising from Orlando for tourism reasons. I spent hours reading it, and began tracking all of my communications. Imagine my further surprise when each of four different client contacts that day all tracked back to the same Orlando IP address as the cop’s email; in fact, each of the four clients forwarded all of my emails to the same four contacts in various locations of the country, all showing “human trafficking” task forces located in those cities.
I went into high alert mode, using P411 as my preferred source of screening, and that day I was contacted by two P411 members. I agreed to meet one of them, but had to redirect his conversation many times because he kept saying graphic things that would not occur in a tantric session. I never want to blow a client out of the water by shouting “There is no sex in my sessions”; I let them figure it out on their own and they are usually OK with it. But this guy wouldn’t let go of the sex talk prior to meeting. In fact, he got a little upset and said, “This is too much work. It sounds like you are just an escort, not Tantra with Sex.” I explained that I had to be careful due to Florida’s efforts to impose moral agendas by persecuting erotic education. And boy, did that email get a lot of attention; it was forwarded or opened 68 times on 5 different devices in 5 different cities. In fact, all of the contacts that week circulated my emails to the same network, including some in which the supposed client wanted me to cross a state line to see him (which is fishing for a Mann Act charge). I have detailed tracking reports on all of these emails, though none got quite as much attention as the one in which I mentioned that I was aware of current police operations.
Once I had verified that all of these suspect mails were coming from the same IP address as the P411 account, I contacted P411 immediately by phone; the operator (with zero sense of urgency) told me to email Gina. I had to do that twice before she replied, and her replies left me with no doubt that she is working with the cops. She claims that a P411 client forwarding our emails to known police IP addresses is not an issue because IP addresses are “garbage information”. I agree that without other information, they mean very little, but when the addresses are clearly part of a network and the same IP comes up again and again, it is undeniable that something in the milk ain’t clean. When I explained how I knew these addresses were associated with known cops, she categorically stated that the original client from three years ago was “with no doubt, NOT LE”. Following this oddly-certain declaration I decided to Google that memorable email address, and found multiple blacklist reports which also identified him as LE (in direct contradiction of Gina’s statement). When I confronted her with this evidence, her reply was, “Some people just live for drama and paranoia.”
This is not the first time I’ve suspected problems with P411. Prior to the Denver busts using fake P411 accounts last June I had emailed Gina about suspicious activity from a Denver account with zero OKs who forwarded my emails to Colorado State Government computers; this supposed newbie was trying to get me to travel from Florida to Colorado and to “bring a friend to Colorado because I like to watch”. Pretty odd for a newbie to reach out to Florida for something as easy to find as a duo, unless you’re trying to invent a “human trafficking” scenario. But this week, when I reminded Gina of that incident, she claimed the username I reported was not the one involved in the busts. There was one other incident last year: I checked my P411 account after a long absence and found that my phone number had been changed to someone else’s; searching the new number revealed a duplicate of my ad, complete with my photo and an apparently false review. Gina’s reaction to that issue was to say that I must have changed the phone number myself.
I didn’t speak out then because I could not believe that Gina, as well respected as she is, could really be in on this. I’m also aware that Gina and P411 reside in Canada, but with the current “sex trafficking” hysteria who knows what agreements may have been made between the two countries’ police agencies? And it’s not like there is no such thing as extradition for “crimes” that are now being represented as something very serious. Furthermore, I’m not the first provider to accuse Gina of being “dirty”, and several clients I know are concerned that she is preparing to “cash out” due to the fact that she was recently offering lifetime P411 memberships for the cost of two years (citing “bad business decisions” as her reason). Today I deleted my account. But I have a responsibility to stand up as an activist and say that these things are undeniable, and I have the evidence to prove it.
Months before the Denver incident, P411 was also compromised in Wisconsin and Little Rock, Arkansas; there was also evidence of a much more serious problem which I included in TW3 #43, but removed mere hours before publication time because Gina came up with a seemingly-credible explanation for it. But now, the circumstantial evidence appears to be stacking up; even if this can all be explained, it has not been as yet. Services like P411 run on trust, and Gina does not appear to be investing enough effort in maintaining that trust; until and unless she does, I would advise all escorts using the service to be wary and to run your own extensive screening on anyone who approaches you via P411.
*Mr. H____ has emailed me and insists that he had nothing to do with this sting operation; given that the police don’t care whom they hurt in their crusade against whores, it’s entirely possible they could simply be using his name without his permission.There’s an old adage in intelligence: live by SIGINT, die by SIGINT.
Signals intelligence, intercepting others’ communications, is a powerful source of information; it provides more than 50 percent of American intelligence on a daily basis. But conversations can be designed to mislead and sometimes the communicants simply don't know what they're talking about. Intercepts can be wrong.
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So, live by SIGINT, die by SIGINT.
It looks like the same might be true for tweeting. Candidate Donald Trump energized his campaign with direct, spontaneous, unfiltered communications with millions of followers.
President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE tweeted in much the same way that his conversations with former FBI Director Jim Comey may have been taped and thus set in motion a series of events that ended with the appointment of a special counsel looking into his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia and his potential obstruction of justice.
James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
Live by tweeting, die by tweeting.
And then there was the veritable circus over whether the White House really had tapes. For nearly six weeks, we were treated to all the drama of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault, with much the same result: there was nothing there.
President Trump put us out of our misery by, of course, tweeting.“I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”
...whether there are "tapes" or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017
Good. Case closed. And I'll leave it to others to comment on how embarrassed the president, the White House and the public ought to be about the whole affair.
I just want to touch on the intelligence implications.
First there was the preamble to the President’s denial: “With all the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea…whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey…”
So that's the commander-in-chief saying that he doesn't know what his government is doing in his own office.
Or maybe it was the commander-in-chief, about to make a huge climb-down, trying to cloud the issue by feeding the appetites of conspiracy mongers with allusions to an unchecked surveillance state.
That would have made it Round 2 of his earlier tweet that his predecessor had wiretapped him, a charge denied by every relevant intelligence official serving in the Obama or Trump administrations.
In any event, the president clearly used the American intelligence community as a handy political prop, and an ugly one at that, suggesting it was an unconstrained, politically motivated gang of law-breakers.
That part was largely not discussed in the public debate — tapes-or-no-tapes was the story there — but it could not escape notice inside a variety of intelligence community fence lines. One cannot help but think of Kipling’s mistreated British soldier, Tommy Atkins and the poet’s final line: “You bet that Tommy sees.”
Then there was the effect this episode might have on foreign intelligence agencies.
All intelligence services create leadership profiles — biographic sketches enhanced by comments on personality, preferences, habits, quirks and the like. Usually public records form the base of these profiles and then tidbits from collection and personal encounters are added. They're quite useful to gauge how a leader will react or to develop a game plan to guide encounters with him or her.
The president’s Twitter tsunami must be a goldmine for foreign services (including friendly ones) in developing his profile. Press-able buttons, loyalties, exposed nerves, responses to pressure, even sleep habits are on pretty full display.
This last series of tweets on Comey and taping offered something more, certainly enough to tempt some services to conclude that the President bluffs and bends the truth to meet the needs of the moment. You can almost anticipate the language in the report: “Mr. Prime Minister, you need to know that President Trump appears to be what the Americans call a bullshitter.” Good stuff for our adversaries to know in upcoming sessions with POTUS and hardly designed to maximize the president’s leverage.
It also injects a certain amount of uncertainty and danger into the proceedings. If a foreign leader has reason to believe that the president doesn't mean what he says, that leader may choose to ignore it and—if he is right—he wins the hand, so to speak. If he is wrong, though, he could trigger American responses that both he and we would have preferred to avoid. Neither are good outcomes.
The president has said that being unpredictable is a virtue. I'm not so sure that that is true in all cases.
I am convinced, though, that being perceived as unreliable or untrustworthy rarely is.
Little wonder that his best advisors want him to keep his thumbs off the phone.
Gen. Michael Hayden is a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.Warning: This video is extremely loud. Please adjust your volume accordingly.
Most people need a solid five seconds to plot their first move on a Rubik's Cube, but in that time, champion Collin Burns completed the entire puzzle.
During the final round of a Rubik's Cube competition on Saturday at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Burns broke the world record for fastest time restoring a 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube, solving it in just 5.25 seconds. The previous record, held by Mats Valk from the Netherlands, was 5.55 seconds.
Although the record has not yet been updated, Saturday's competition was an official one held by the World Cube Association.
A WCA representative confirmed to Mashable on Sunday that Burns officially broke the record: "Although this result has not been uploaded to the WCA database just yet, we can confirm that this is (or will be soon) the new official WCA world record for the 3x3x3 single solve category. To our best knowledge, it has been performed in an official competition, with all the rules being followed, even the scramble has been checked for its correctness."Democratic Sen. John Kerry John Forbes KerryOvernight Defense: White House eyes budget maneuver to boost defense spending | Trump heads to Hanoi for second summit with Kim | Former national security officials rebuke Trump on emergency declaration 58 ex-national security officials rebuke Trump over emergency declaration Ex-national security officials to issue statement slamming Trump's emergency declaration: WaPo MORE (Mass.) said Friday that attacks by former U.S. intelligence and special operations officers on President Obama in a new ad hold a striking resemblance to the "Swift Boat" attacks seen in his own presidential bid.
Kerry, the Democrats presidential nominee in 2004, issued a statement to Obama supporters on Friday slamming accusations made by the supposedly bipartisan Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund.
The group, which is reportedly tied to Republican and Tea Party groups, issued a video charging the Obama administration with leaking details of sensitive national security operations and of using the mission targeting former al Qaeda leader bin Laden for political gain.
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“We have become a political weapon — we are not,” former Navy SEAL and OPSEC fund member Benjamin Smith says in the video. “Our job is to be silent professionals — we do not seek recognition; we do not seek popularity … to make things public is wrong."
But these partisan attacks, according to Kerry, are no different than those he faced in 2004 by a group of Vietnam veterans who openly questioned the Democratic senator’s war record during his time in the Navy.
The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, named after the patrol boats used to navigate the river lands in Vietnam, severely damaged Kerry's national security credentials during the campaign.
And according to Kerry, the OPSEC fund is doing the same thing to the Obama campaign.
"Seeing the new outrageous attacks made against President Obama from a shadowy Republican-allied veterans group called OPSEC... remind me all too well of the notorious “Swift Boat” attacks I faced in the 2004 campaign," Kerry said in the statement.
"I honor and appreciate the service of my fellow veterans, but a false attack is a false attack—no matter who’s making it," he added.
In the statement, Kerry said the fund's baseless attacks are similar to those made by the so-called "birther" movement, whose followers maintain President Obama was not born in the United States.
"It shouldn’t be a surprise that [Republicans] are resorting to the same national security smear tactics I faced in 2004. We have to take it seriously," he said.
Regarding the administration's record on national security, Kerry noted Obama "has a foreign policy record that is among the strongest in recent memory."
Kerry also took a shot at presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's recent gaffes on the international stage, citing them as examples of the candidate's shortfalls in the national security arena.
"Republicans have a candidate with absolutely no foreign policy experience, who thinks Russia is our 'number one geopolitical foe' and who is advised by people who think... the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia are countries that still exist," Kerry said.
"He can’t even manage to visit London without causing an international incident," he added, referring to Romney's criticisms |
of course hope that as many lawyers as possible will understand the background of these reports, that they [the detained] have not violated the law… [but they will also learn from these reports] that if they engage in these activities, they will inevitably encounter repression of this kind from the government.’[19]
This form of selective crackdown-related propaganda, of ‘TV confessions’ and ‘trial by television’ represents what some see as a conscious reversion to Mao era style denunciation of ‘enemies of the party-state.’[20] It is hard to see how the conduct depicted in the reports could be the basis for any credible charges of crime, let alone crimes ‘endangering state security.’ Charges of a public order offence, for example based on a few small and peaceful demonstrations for access to justice would seem still baseless, but – based on prior experience – less unlikely. Some interlocutors thought that the authorities had thus far not shown anyone ‘confessing’ to subversion because such ‘confessions’ would simply be too unconvincing or might ‘lead to more social controversy.’[21] But others thought that the state might bend the rules to make them fit whatever the detained rights defenders had done.[22] ‘Trial by TV’ allows the authorities not only to vilify particular individuals or groups like the Ruifeng law firm, but also to project and indeed propagate their power to extract meaningless, even irrational, statements from those it holds captive.
A fourth aspect commented on were the new transnational dimensions of repression, a sense that there was fewer places one could flee to/be safe in, because of the risks of cross-border abduction and forced retrieval, and the long arm of the authorities through putting pressure on family and friends in China.
For example, Bao Zhuoxuan (Mengmeng), the son of Wang Yu and Bao Longjun, originally detained along with his parents on 9 July, deprived of his passport and held under strict surveillance, left the country with the help of friends. From there, he and the two friends were forcibly taken back to China from the border region with Myanmar. Now seventeen, Mengmeng is living under strictest surveillance with his maternal aunt and grandmother’s family. It is impossible for his parents’ rights lawyer friends to get near him or provide support or counsel.[23] A friend described his state as ‘utterly desperate.’
‘There is no contact with them. Their phone is controlled. And the flat just opposite his aunt’s flat has been taken over by the domestic security police [国保], who got the previous tenants to move out. At his school, they use the head student, teachers, and other classmates to control him. It was exactly the same with Gao Zhisheng’s [daughter] at the time. So, the boy’s situation now is really under terrible strain. It ought to be the springtime of his life. But now, he has not been able to see his parent’s for such a long time; he has lost his freedom of movement, and his plan to go study abroad was disrupted when they abducted him [in the night of 9 July 2015, on the way to the airport]…his mobile phone was previously forcibly taken away by them so we dare not try to contact him. And [his entire family] is under their control. This family’s situation is really the worst…If Mengmeng could have left, if would have been a consolation for his parents and encouragement for others. The fact he was taken back has now also scared a lot of other lawyers, who are asking themselves, what if their own child has to go through this sort of collective punishment at some point.’[24]
An attempt to make contact attempt to make contact with Mengmeng and his family in late May was unsuccessful.
A fifth theme was apprehensions for the future. The hardest to talk about was the fear of torture. My conversations had, as noted earlier, confirmed that some of the detained who were later released had been tortured – by kicking and beating; sleep deprivation; excessively long interrogation, being blinded with light; stress positions; and threats of extremely painful further torture, before agreeing to make statements.[25] We still know nothing about the situation of others detained incommunicado. It is unfortunately likely that undue pressure has been and continues to be brought to bear on them (including those displayed ‘confessing’ and ‘repenting’.
‘Torture is probably unavoidable in the cases [of the still-detained]. Torture is just part of the system in China… [Someone who was released] believes that those who have not been released yet have suffered worse torture [than he], because they are more central figures in these cases.’[26]
Another concern was the possibility of de facto secret trials resulting from forced or faked lawyer ‘dismissals,’ even though the lawyers purportedly ‘dismissed’ refused to abandon their clients.
‘Legally speaking, it would have to be the client themselves issuing the dismissal. Emotionally, we all know these people… We’re emotionally connected, and we have the same ideals. We borrow and learn from each other in our legal defence work. So in a situation where they are facing the calamity of imprisonment, there is no way [the detained lawyers] would let the Lawyers’ Association find a completely unknown lawyer for them [in our stead]. And again, from a legal point of view, the Lawyers’ Association can only be approached for a recommendation when the detained suspect does not know any lawyer they could appoint…it is just unconvincing, legally, emotionally, and in terms of common sense.’[27]
Some interlocutors believe that the in substance extremely weak prosecution cases against their colleagues and friends might succeed (in a manner of speaking) if the entire criminal process from detention/abduction to final conviction remained effectively secret, with no public access whatsoever. This might be the reason why the authorities did not resort to refusing access to counsel on the grounds that the cases involved ‘endangering state security.’
‘If they used that reason, they would only be able to block access to counsel during the [police] ‘investigation’ period, but not after public indictment, before the trial hearing…So, what is the point of now telling us that they have appointed [other] lawyers already? It means that we, the families and so on, don’t get to participate in the procedure from beginning to end, because they do not recognize our status. This is very bad news. It means that the families and our own lawyers may not get to know anything at all about the entire process. They can go through first and second instance – they can finish the entire trial without us ever knowing a thing. They can make the trial hearing non-public on ‘state security’ grounds, exclude the family members as witnesses, and only let people attend who don’t understand what is going on…[in that case] we might not find out what happened to them, until they are released from prison. That’s what we really fear.’[28]
In the eyes of the interlocutors, this would be the worst possible outcome. It would be the scenario most likely to allow the authorities to convict those in this process of state security crimes and impose harsh punishments,[29] another feared outcome; and it was the reason why they felt it was important to insist on their status as criminal defence lawyers.
I was sometimes left struggling to understand how, in the face of so many difficulties, the lawyers, friends and family I spoke to managed to stay positive. All the lawyers, rights defenders, friends and family I contacted were happy to meet. Several pointed out that whatever promises had been extracted from them did not bind them, legally or morally. As always, they seemed eager to speak, to come together and work on the cases of their lawyer colleagues, as well as the cases their colleagues had been forced to abandon when detained. And while some of my interlocutors were old friends, there were others I met for the first time because, at a time when all of their ‘rights lawyer’ colleagues already known to the authorities had been warned not to get involved, they had come forward to take on the criminal defence of a colleague in detention, becoming ‘rights lawyers’ themselves at what seemed like the worst possible moment to join these circles. Perhaps, the very fact that my interlocutors were so willing to meet and put their views and experience on record is part of what explains their resilience. They feel sure that history is on their side.
[1] Conversation #120-16-1.
[2] Conversation #120-16-1.
[3] Conversation #120-16-1.
[4] For example the social media app ‘Telegram’ widely used amongst rights defenders, was suspended for a short period at the beginning of the crackdown, in addition to the existing intensive control of digital expression. Also, as of mid-April 2016, ‘Telegram’ was heavily firewalled and only partly functional, with human rights defender circles apparently specially affected. In addition, the authorities used mobile phones to track target persons down.
[5] Conversation #121-16-1.
[6] Conversation #138-16-1.
[7] Conversations #137-16-1, 138-16-1.
[8] Conversations #137-16-1; #138-16-1.
[9] Conversation #129-16-2, #121-16-1; #121-16-1; #137-16-1
[10] Conversation #137-16-1. Similar: e.g. conversations #121-16-1; #138-16-1.
[11] Screenshot on file with author (April 2016).
[12] Conversation #121-16-1
[13] Conversation #124-16-1.
[14] Conversations #125-16-1; #128-16-1 and 129-16-1.
[15] Conversation #138-16-1. This is not to say that the authorities did not attempt to put pressure on the defendants in these cases, for example, in Hu Jia’s case.
[16] See e.g. Cao Yin, ‘Lawyers “tried to influence verdicts”,’’13 July 2015,; CCTV 13, 北京锋锐律所“维权”黑幕利益链调查, 19 July 2015, 北京 锋锐律所“维权”黑幕利益链调查 ; CCTV Dialogue, Interview with Global Times Editor Hu Jinin, 8 May 2016.
[17] Some of the legal workers were also shown apparently recriminating colleagues. A lawyer commented, ‘Probably this video-clip was made when the domestic security police goaded [the detained lawyer] to talk about matters ‘unrelated to business’ and got him to make a few remarks about [his colleague]…and edited the recording to turn it into what looks like a denunciation. Conversation #121-16-1.
[18] Comments in conversation #129-16-1.
[19] Conversation #124-16-1.
[20] Conversation #122-16-1.
[21] Conversation #121-16-1, #122-16-1.
[22] E.g. conversations #138-16-1; 128-16-1.
[23] Conversation #121-16-1.
[24] Conversation #122-16-1/
[25] Conversations #120-16-1; #122-16-1.
[26] Conversation #122-16-1.
[27] Conversation #128-16-1.
[28] Conversation #129-16-1.
[29] E.g. Conversation #129-16-1.
Eva Pils is a Reader in Transnational Law at King’s College London’s Dickson Poon School of Law, a Non-resident Research Fellow at the U.S. –Asia Law Institute, New York University Law School, and author of China’s human rights lawyers: advocacy and resistance (Routledge, 2014).
Related:
China’s Shattered Dream for the Rule of Law, One Year On, a statement by the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Group, July 8, 2016.
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Like this: Like Loading...When dozens of ships carrying decaying bodies began to wash ashore near Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, theories abounded regarding who were on the ships, where they were coming from, and what led to their deaths.
Japanese officials are now saying they believe they have solved the mystery: the ghost ships belong to North Korean fishermen, urged by dictator Kim Jong-un to brave unreasonably dangerous weather for a bigger catch to bring home to the North Korean military.
While similarly-constructed ships – often boasting barely-visible Hangul Korean script and tattered cloths resembling North Korean flags – have been washing ashore in Japan since 2012; the accelerated rate at which they have surfaced in the past two months has baffled Japanese experts. In early December, Japanese officials noted they had discovered 34 such vessels, worn-down ships with deceased, and often decayed, bodies and very little else on board. The ships were found in extraordinarily poor condition, and the bodies were so decayed that forensics professionals could not determine cause of death or, in some cases, gender.
Officials eventually narrowed the origin of these ships down to two possibilities: fishermen lost in stormy seas or North Korean defectors looking to reach Japan. In the past, many of these ships have been found to have contained defectors, and some confirmed this theory by reaching Japan alive. This theory became more popular following a report from Japan’s NHK Television earlier this month.
Now, however, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun is citing a number of experts blaming the emergence of these ships on an edict by dictator Kim Jong-un’s fixing the salaries of fishermen to the number of fish they catch, rather than a fixed salary in the communist state. “In the summer this year, Kim issued an order, ‘Give as much protein to soldiers as possible.’ After that, a campaign to increase fish catches started as a national policy,” Lee Yong-hwa, a professor of economics at Kansai University, told the Asahi Shimbun.
“Fishing is a monopolistic right and interest for the military,” he said, adding, “But the State Security Department, which is a different organization from the military, is trying to make inroads to that right and interest.” The State Security Department’s incentives for fishermen have increased the number of people trying to make money off the trade.
Reports of Kim Jong-un’s publicity appearances at fisheries have corroborated this claim. In November, the Rodong Sinmun, North Korea’s largest state-owned publication, published a series of photos of Kim visiting a fishery serving the military. The Korean Central News Agency, a state-owned entity, reported that Kim “called on the station to set a high goal for remarkably increasing the yearly output of fish in a short span of time on the basis of this year’s achievement.”
The high yield this year followed a report in January that North Korean media had openly chastised a terrapin farm and potentially executed the head of the farm later in the year. “The employees who failed to bear deep in their minds his leadership exploits could hardly perform their role as masters in production,” Kim said of the turtle farmers earlier in the year. The dictator allegedly “strongly criticized the shortcoming of its officials as a manifestation of incompetence, outmoded way of thinking and irresponsible work style.”
The boldness of fishermen in leaving the waters near North Korea appears to be a new development, however, particularly as North Korean officials have executed anglers for straying too close to South Korea in the past.
The latest report on the ships landing in Japan follows heightened media scrutiny on human rights abuses in North Korea. Earlier this week, the North Korean government announced a life sentence of work in a labor camp for a Canadian pastor found to have broken the nation’s laws by discussing religion, which is banned by the communist state. Those trapped in labor camps have also reportedly been forced to work even more unreasonable hours and under worse conditions recently, as North Korea appears to suffer growing military problems. North Korea defense expert Joseph Bermudez told UPI news agency that North Korea’s military power has been in decline due to “obsolescence of equipment, difficulty in training, and lowering of standards for soldiers following the overall decline in nutritional status of the population.” The nation is thus suspected of forcing prisoners in labor camps to work harder manufacturing conventional weapons.Photos by Steven and Nelson
FRIDAY:
After being up for 36 hours straight due to a problem at work, I was tempted to turn my planned weekend excursion into an overnighter so I could get some much needed sleep and head out the next morning. Mom Nature seemed to be trying to persuade me toward this end with repeated thunder and lighting storms, but also dared me with just as many hourly spells of sun. I had already packed the evening before, so decided to proceed to the launch in Hingham with the notion that I could back out if the weather was not cooperating or if I decided that I was too exhausted to sail the 3 miles over to Grape Island and setup camp.
When I got to the launch, part of me must have been looking for an excuse to bail out and return home to my bed. When I saw the white-caps on Hingham Bay and dark clouds overhead, a heated inner-cranial debate began and the less enthusiastic side of me nearly won out. However, after observing the sky for a bit, I realized that an opening was beginning and I might have just the window I needed to get to the Island without having my weekend cut short by a lightening strike to the mast. Since I would be able to island-hop with only one significant crossing, I knew I could get ashore quickly if the need should arise. With no reasonable excuse not to proceed, I loaded ET BUGABOO and made to launch.
One advantage to camping out of ET BUGABOO versus my kayak is that I can be more liberal with my gear list. However, I immediately became concerned that I may have over-done it when I couldn’t budge my beloved boat off the trailer. Hard as I shoved she wouldn’t move. When I backed the trailer lower into the water to provide more flotation, I was startled to see the trailer floating. It was then that my sleep-deprived brain registered that I had neglected to unstrap the boat from the trailer and, had the trailer not been hitched to the truck, the entire lot may have floated away leaving its bewildered captain ashore.
As the wind was out of the Northeast, the initial leg to Crow Point was a beat into the wind. I had just over an hour of light remaining, so when I reached Ragged Island I chose to save time by rowing through the Marina to the point. Once around the point, a new cloud formation moved in and the wind picked up. However, I was now on a reach for the final stretch and skipped across the bay with the occasional refreshing wave spraying over the gunnels.
The landing was uneventful. I signed in with the ranger and, after securing ET BUGABOO, proceeded with the arduous task of lugging my gear up the ¼ mile trail to my site. The sites are all in the same area of the island, but are far enough apart and situated so you hardly know anyone else is there. Choice of site is on a first-come-first-served basis and the prime locations had already been taken. However, I was not disappointed with the site I chose for myself and quickly setup camp so I could begin preparing a late dinner.
Dinner was Empanada a la Doug Lowry… a dish I am determined I will perfect sometime this century. None the less, it’s hard not to enjoy your own cooking prepared on a one-burner in the backwoods of an island. After a crazy couple of days at work… I was in heaven. An after-dinner night exploration of the island proved eerie, but at the same time peaceful. I wasn’t familiar with the trails, but I figured I was on an island… how lost could I get? I was treated to a spectacular view of the lit-up Boston skyline from the north side of the island. By the time I found my site again, I was ready to hit the sack.
Being severely sleep deprived, I’m sure I would have slept the entire night through had it not been for a visit from the local wildlife. Around 11:45 I was woken to metal clanging next to my head. After ascertaining that nothing was in the tent with me, I realized that something was going through my “kitchen” bag that I had put next to my tent, under the vestibule. My first reaction was to quickly zip open the door to see what it was. But, I wisely stopped myself when I suspected that it was either a skunk or a raccoon. I’ve had run-ins with both in the past, and the thought of confronting either from a lying position with my face at their level did not seem wise, nor overly appealing. I had always thought it a bit silly to put two doors in a backpacking tent that barely accommodates one person and his personal gear. However, I was now thanking the tent-making geniuses for the foresight I apparently lacked. How they knew I would eventually need to escape from wild beasties knocking at my front door is beyond me, but I am now including them on my Christmas card list. Once outside, I still couldn’t decide what species I was dealing with because it was hidden by the vestibule. However, I was reasonably sure it was a skunk and knew I didn’t want to startle it. That said, I was also anxious to get back to some REM sleep and was also not particularly thrilled by the mass of mosquitoes now boring holes in my epidermis. I shined my headlamp (which I wisely grabbed on my escape) on the tent and made clicking noises with my tongue. Some may question my approach, but I was desperate and not well versed in the extraction methods for skunks. Besides, I’m happy to report that it worked and Peppy was soon waddling back into the underbrush, dragging a stripe of white behind him. I hung the “kitchen” bag in the tree with the food and trash and was soon back in blissful sleep.
SATURDAY:
I lay in bed the next morning for a considerable time. It felt good to have no commitments, no firm plans, and an entire day at my own disposal. The birds were singing the morning away and a catbird seemed to be making a nuisance of himself, possibly agitating a nearby family.
Since I hadn’t seen much on my night walk of the island, the first order of business was to make a second round in the light and loosen up the body. Truth be known, the former was more exciting since there isn’t much to see but a lot of sumac and underbrush.
I made a pot of coffee and brought my book, “Swallows and Amazons”, down to the beach where I laid in the boat reading and enjoying the morning sun. By 9:00 I was ready for breakfast but found that my stove was not working properly. Breakfast would have to wait while I disassembled, cleaned and reassembled it. To which I was rewarded with a properly working stove and a meal of bacon, eggs, and bagels and cream cheese.
I had noticed that the folks in one of the prime sites were packing to leave. Normally, I wouldn’t have bothered to switch sites. But, my current site was not great for two tents and it was likely that Nelson would be joining me for the second night. After cleaning the breakfast dishes, I moved camp. The weather forecast predicted possible showers in the evening, so this time I also setup my new Origami Tarp over the picnic table.
I had planned to get on the water for a sail as soon as possible. However, with the lack of sleep, the humidity, and the exertion of moving camp I was wiped. Besides high tide wasn’t until late afternoon and it would be better for sailing then… or so I justified as I laid my mat on the grass and prepared for a snooze in the shade of a sumac tree.
By 1:30, I had eaten lunch and was on the water heading to Bumpkin Island on the other side of the bay. Mark had mentioned that he and his daughter would be kayaking over and camping on the island that night. So, I decided to see if they had arrived. The wind was from the west and the bay was choppy from boat traffic. The trip over was a sleigh ride while being slammed from all directions by waves. Given the heat of the day, the spray was a welcome relief.
I found Mark and Jess setting up camp. It wasn’t hard to spot Marks “Tony the Tiger” kayak from far away. We chatted for a bit, but I figured Jess wasn’t eager to share her Father/Daughter time with some shmoe who shows up out of nowhere, so left them to continue my sail.
The trick was going to be to set myself up for the trip back to Grape Island without having to spend much effort tacking out in the middle of the choppy bay with all the boat traffic. I ducked behind the leeward side of Bumpkin, choosing to distance myself from the island just enough to have sufficient wind until I came out on the northern end where I bore its full force again. I maintained a broad reach and sailed over to Spinnaker Island, checking out the huge condos that smother the little mass of land. From there I sailed close-hauled over to Sheep Island. I considered landing for a stretch, but it was getting late and I wasn’t sure when Nelson would be coming out. Therefore, I made the reach straight back to Grape Island loving every second of spray and sun.
After securing ET BUGABOO on the beach, I went for a swim. I wasn’t sure what I smelled like after a day and a half, but I figured Nelson would appreciate any attempt I made to better the situation. I went back to camp, made a pot of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich, and then went back to the beach to enjoy the snack and read my book while waiting for Nelsons arrival.
Nelson called in around 7:00 from the launch and we coordinated a VHF channel. He began his paddle while I read another chapter before keeping watch. It wasn’t long before I saw the unmistakable flash of kayak paddles off in the horizon. He checked in for the bearing of my location on the island and was soon on tera firma.
After securing his kayak and lugging his gear up to the site, Nelson situated his tent while I started dinner. I had only tried empanadas with my new outback oven and was eager to try my hand at pizza. Unfortunately, I discovered that since cleaning my stove, its output was significantly greater and baking without burning was more of a challenge. However, I managed to produce food that was still edible and Nelson was kind to my ego.
While I was making the 2nd round of pizza, Nelson had been off collecting firewood. After dinner, we went down to the beach and had a nice little blaze while smoking cigars, sipping beverages and listening to tunes. I was surprised when Nelson finally announced that it was 11:00.
When we returned to the site, there was the unmistakable odor of skunk. It wasn’t terribly strong, so I wondered if one of the other sites had received the brunt of it. However, the critter had obviously been exploring in our site as well. Having not yet hung our food and trash, we had provided an ideal situation for foraging. He must have been pleased with what he saw, because we could hear him throughout the night.
SUNDAY:
I woke at around 5:30 and decided to cut Nelson some slack. Instead of starting coffee and clanging pots, I went for a walk and let him sleep in a little longer. When I got to the beach, I determined that it was around high tide and therefore we would need to plan on leaving in the next few hours if we were to get back to the launch via water and not trodding through a foot of low tide mud. I went back to the site and tried as best I could to give Nelson the news as gently as possible. Apparently, Nelson is not an early morning person.
I started breakfast while Nelson acclimated himself to the notion of being awake. But, when I went for the bagels, I discovered that the skunk must have made off with them. We made do with bacon and eggs as a first course, and then followed up with oatmeal and raisins. As we were eating, our little friend even had the nerve to come by to see what was now on the menu. Thankfully, he kept his distance.
The trip back to the launch was uneventful. It was a nice comfortable morning with blue sky and puffy cumulus clouds. The breeze blew in our favor as Nelson paddled and I rowed back across the bay at a comfortable pace. We made it back with time to spare and I was almost regretful that we hadn’t made use of it by doing a little more exploring. However, it had been a great weekend and my much neglected lawn was calling.Wonder Woman is out now! Get your tickets here!
Aileen Wuornos wanted to be a movie star when she grew up. Instead, she murdered seven men and was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. In-between the year of her birth (1956) and that fateful final cocktail of “humane” poisons, her schizophrenic father (whom she never met) hung himself in prison after abandoning her and her mother, Diane. Diane then left Aileen and her older brother, Keith, with their alcoholic grandfather, who legally adopted them and began sexually assaulting ‘Leen on a routine basis. At age eleven, she started sucking and fucking the boys at school in exchange for cigarettes, food and money. After her grandpa’s drinking buddy raped and impregnated her, Aileen gave birth at fourteen and was subsequently tossed out of her legal guardian’s house at fifteen, where she continued to whore herself out in order to make ends meet. Yet in every John’s eyes she saw the stars, hoping against all reason that this would be the one who’d save the down and out prostitute, delivering her to fame’s doorstep – the tarnished white of the Hollywood sign still visible from her awful Florida existence.
In the hands of writer/director Patty Jenkins, Wuornos’ miserable tale becomes a morbid companion piece to both Bob Fosse’s skeevy chronicle of doomed Playboy Centerfold Dorothy Stratten (Star 80), and John McNaughton’s startlingly direct fictionalization of Chicago serial murderer, Henry Lee Lucas (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). Wuornos’ eventual crimes – all Johns, whose fleeting “potential” is replaced by demonic menace, courtesy of a brutal rape at her first victim’s hands – are presented with chilly bluntness. Only there’s no Paul Snider or Hugh Hefner to exploit ‘Leen’s dreams and then rip them away via large caliber brutality. Monster (’03) narratively warps the events surrounding the hooker’s wrathful stretch in Daytona Beach and surrounding shit-kicker country, as Charlize Theron throws on high-waisted jeans and tattered trucker gear, getting soaked in the streets of this rainy landscape before falling in love with Selby Wall (Christina Ricci, portraying a heavily altered version of Wuornos’ real-life lover, Tyria Moore) at a roller rink blaring Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin”. Together, a new dream is born – one of supposed normalcy and domestic bliss, even as ‘Leen continues to trick and blast her male clientele, each moment of bloodshed becoming increasingly self-righteous.
The most obvious place to begin discussing Monster is with Theron’s manic, white trash barracuda of a central performance. While Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress, her literally transformative turn has been criticized in hindsight for igniting a trend of actors ostentatiously “ugly-ing themselves up” so that they can be “taken more seriously” as a performer. No doubt, up until this point in her career, Theron was a bombshell starlet starring in mostly comedic studio tripe like Trial and Error, Mighty Joe Young and Waking Up in Reno, or acting as a Hitchcockian platinum femme fatale in occasionally diverting B-Movie riffs like 2 Days in the Valley, Reindeer Games and Fifteen Minutes. Her talent and screen presence were obvious, and even stole whole scenes in this lurid pulp (see: The Devil’s Advocate for the best example), but Theron also seemed to be another case of Hollywood just not knowing what the hell to do with a talented, beautiful actress besides attempting to mold her into a romantic interest or quirky pretty girl. With Mad Max’s Furiosa now in mind, the early years of her career are a bummer, and not because Charlize was delivering anything remotely approaching dreadful performances. Drastic times and all – the naked visage, bleached eyebrows and scorched hair were necessary for her to shed the luminous skin that blinded dumbbell producers and casting directors. To wit, don’t criticize the method, but rather the system that rendered such measures necessary.
Nevertheless, no matter how much weight Theron gained, or how obvious the prosthetic teeth she’s donning are, Wuornos’ truth is found in her eyes. The movie star is still in every dilapidated motel room and Olds Cutlass, trying to work up enough spit so that she can satisfy her sixth highway wolf of the evening. Anyone who’s seen Nick Broomfield’s documentaries (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer) will instantly recognize that Theron’s iteration of this psychologically broken woman is significantly different from the Wuornos who received six death sentences in 1993. Where the real Aileen suffered from borderline personality and antisocial disorders, bidding the world adieu to board the mothership from Independence Day upon being put down, Theron’s ‘Leen is closer to the feral animal who blamed society for “railroading her” during a final on-camera interview. Her portrayal borders on becoming a lethal Southern sister to Abel Ferrara’s deaf mute reaper in Ms. 45, shooting down men who haven’t committed a crime beyond paying for her sex. But because each of their faces reflect the demons who tore her insides for their sick pleasure, they had to die. No matter what judgment may come from Selby or anyone else, Aileen’s uncovered a righteous sense of purpose in her weapon, and becomes an addict for punishing those who (at least in her fractured psyche) embody all who did her wrong.
Where Theron is all hillbilly fire and brimstone, Ricci’s lost little preacher’s girl is a meek bit of anti-performance that’s slightly more difficult to crack. Selby is simply looking for someone to love her; tired of being told that her homosexuality is an abomination by her father, who keeps nagging and wanting to bring his daughter back to Ohio so that he can “cure” her. With a wonky mullet and trademark doe orbs, Ricci channels a melancholy desperation that at first puts Aileen on guard, but then softens and extracts a love the killer possibly never realized she was capable of (at least during this invented timeline). We know their arrangement will never work, but the miracle of Jenkins’ film is the false faith in “love conquers all” it manages to instill in every audience member. Where ‘Leen’s been battered, violated, and left for dead, Selby’s preference renders her an outcast and target for controlling men, hoping to bring her back to heterosexual “status quo”. Jenkins’ script draws a shaky spiritual parallel between the two regarding how men collectively want to define and exploit their respective sex in different ways. So, it only makes sense that Aileen and Selby take refuge in one another’s arms, and Ricci’s performance – an imitation of a wilted flower looking to bloom during a hurricane – acts as a delicate counterpoint to Theron’s increasingly bombastic histrionics.
A recent Hollywood Reporter piece thoroughly profiled Jenkins, stating that Warner Bros. “gambled” on hiring her for Wonder Woman due to the relative inexperience her resume displays (it’s been fourteen years since Monster, an $8 million indie). But where that publication is making a suspect (and frankly sexist) argument amidst an industrial cape complex that advances the Colin Trevorrows of the world with reckless abandon, her employment on the DCEU’s only worthwhile endeavor thus far is still a risk from the standpoint that she’s a real filmmaker, not some former sitcom workman looking to churn out another disposable serialized entry. Monster is a movie about how a male dominated society degrades and crushes the dreams of its women, forcing them to lose hope in both their lesser halves as well their place in the universe entirely. Aileen Wuornos was doomed from the moment her father passed his genes on to her, and received treatment from almost all men she encountered that made it near impossible to believe there were exceptions to his rule. It’s an apocalyptic leveling of hope that Jenkins performs with her big screen debut, so the fact that she’s restoring it via an icon such as Diana Prince only seems fair and right. We need filmmakers like Patty Jenkins behind the camera, assuring us that not all is lost, and that women can soar higher than men once freed from their oppressive shackles.
Get your Wonder Woman tickets here!In a rousing
to about 3,500 supporters, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said the Bush administration hasn't done enough to help the region recover from Hurricane Katrina, and if elected, pledged to restructure FEMA and put sufficient funding in place to protect against future storms. The Illinois senator, who is battling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, entered the arena to chants of "Yes we can" and cries of "I love you, Barack," after addressing an overflow crowd of about 500 supporters outside who couldn't get a seat for the morning rally. Louisiana voters will go to the polls Saturday for both the Democratic and Republican primaries. Clinton is not expected to visit before Saturday, but her husband, former president Bill Clinton, will be in town tomorrow for several events.
Obama, who makes "hope" a central theme of his campaign, spent a few moments talking about signs of New Orleans' resiliency and recovery: the Endymion parade's return to Mid-City, the return of the streetcar to its traditional Uptown route, even the Super Bowl success of New York Giants quarterback and New Orleans native Eli Manning. But he acknowledged that restoring New Orleans to its pre-storm stature would be difficult. "But there is another side to this story. Because we know that this city - a city that has always stood for what can be done in this country - has also become a symbol for what we could not do," he said. Obama made his case as the leading agent of change, |
Durant said. “You can’t shut them down. I’m not going to shut LeBron down to the point where he’s not effective at all. These guys have the ball in their hands whenever they want. They can shoot whenever they want. They can manipulate the game whenever they want.”
As a result, both Durant and James have a 40-point plus game against each other in the regular season. James has posted at least 30 points in nine games, while Durant has done so in seven. While James is the only one to have at least 40 points in a Finals game against Durant, Durant topped James in the Finals in the number of 30- point games (eight to four).
So what can you do?
“You want the offensive player to just think and second guess himself just for a split second. That’s what we both me and LeBron do to each other when we play against each other,” Durant said. “It’s like I know I have to think the game instead of going out there and letting my talent to take over. That’s what you want man. You want to be able to play a chess game.”
Durant realized that chess game does not just happen on the court. It happens with handling business off the court, too.
In 2010, James had hosted a one-hour special and announced his decision to take his talents to South Beach. Durant hardly dealt with such scrutiny initially as James did for switching teams. Six years later, however, things changed. In a Players Tribune article in the 2016 offseason, Durant announced his free-agent departure from Oklahoma City to Golden State.
Although Durant views himself as his own man, he gained further appreciation for how James handled the business of basketball both in feeling empowered to play for whomever he chooses and to sign one-year deals to maximize leverage.
“Everybody tries to prove their critics wrong or prove anybody wrong that says you can’t do something. It’s a matter of me telling you that I hear it and I’m trying to change how you feel about me on the basketball court,” Durant said. “Off the court, all that stuff I can’t change that perception on who I am as a person. But as a basketball player, I’m trying to change the perception of growing my game. If you don’t like it and I call you out on it, then it’s not my fault.” Related Articles 5 technical foul calls even more ridiculous than DeMarcus Cousins’ shoe toss
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None of those issues mattered during Durant’s defining moment in Game 3 against Cleveland.
After Cavaliers guard Kyle Korver missed a 3-pointer from the corner, Durant immediately grabbed the rebound. Durant brought the ball up the court. Durant marched toward the top of the key. With James sagging below the perimeter, Durant jumped and launched a shot that did two things. The shot sparked silence on Cleveland’s homecourt. The shot turned Durant’s childhood dream into reality.
“It was something I always knew would happen, but I didn’t know when or what the situation was,” Durant said. “But I’m just blessed enough that it presented itself in the NBA Finals.”Steven Jay Hatfill (born October 24, 1953) is an American physician, virologist and biological weapons expert.
A former biodefense researcher for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Hatfill came to the public eye after being wrongfully suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1]
Hatfill became "the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment" and then Attorney General John Ashcroft named him "person of interest" in the investigation on national television.[1] Hatfill's home was repeatedly raided by the FBI, his phone was tapped, and he was extensively surveilled for more than two years; he was also fired from his job at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).[2] "At a news conference in August 2002, Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation".[1] Hatfill filed a lawsuit in 2003, accusing the FBI agents and Justice Department officials who led the criminal investigation of leaking information about him to the press in violation of the federal Privacy Act.[1]
In 2008, the government settled Hatfill's lawsuit for $4.6 million.[3] The government officially exonerated Hatfill of any involvement in the anthrax attacks, and the Justice Department identified another military scientist, Bruce Edward Ivins, as the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks.[1] Jeffrey A. Taylor, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote in a letter to Hatfill's lawyer that "we have concluded, based on laboratory access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in the anthrax mailings."[1]
In 2004, Hatfill filed lawsuits against several periodicals and journalists who had identified him as a figure warranting further investigation in the anthrax attacks. Hatfill sued the New York Times Company and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for defamation, defamation per se, and intentional infliction of emotional distress in connection with five of Kristof's columns in 2002. The courts dismissed this suit, finding that Hatfill was a limited purpose public figure.[4][5][6] In 2007, Hatfill settled a similar libel lawsuit against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest for an undisclosed amount, after both magazines agreed to formally retract any implication that Hatfill was involved in the anthrax mailings.[7]
David Freed writes that Hatfill's story "provides a cautionary tale about how federal authorities, fueled by the general panic over terrorism, embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence, and blindly pursued one suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more than six years. Hatfill's experience is also the wrenching saga of how an American citizen who saw himself as a patriot came to be vilified and presumed guilty, as his country turned against him."[2]
In 2010, Hatfill was an independent researcher and an adjunct assistant professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University Medical Center.[8] He has criticized the response of health authorities to the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and suggested that it is possible that Ebola could be transmitted by aerosol, a position which other experts have critiqued.[9][10]
Early life and education [ edit ]
Hatfill was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Mattoon Senior High School, Mattoon, Illinois (1971), and Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas (1975), where he studied biology.
Hatfill was enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army from 1975 to 1977.[11] (In 1999, he would tell a journalist during an interview that he had been a "captain in the U.S. Special Forces", but in a subsequent investigation the Army stated that he had never served with the Special Forces.[12]) Following his Army discharge, Hatfill qualified and worked as a medical laboratory technician, but soon resolved to become a doctor.
Hatfill then settled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) entering the Godfrey Huggins Medical School[13] at the University of Rhodesia in Salisbury (now Harare) in 1978. (His claimed military associations during this period included assistance as a medic with the Selous Scouts and membership in the Rhodesian SAS, but according to one journalist[14] the regimental association of the latter is "adamant Hatfill never belonged to the unit".) He graduated (after failing in 1983) with a M ChB degree in 1984 and then completed a one-year internship (1984–85) at a small rural hospital in South Africa's North West Province. The South African government recruited him to be medical officer on a 14 month (1986–88) tour of duty in Antarctica with the South African National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE). He then completed (1988) a master's degree in microbiology at the University of Cape Town. He worked toward a second master's (1990; medical biochemistry and radiation biology) at the University of Stellenbosch, while working again as a paid med tech in the University's clinical hematology lab. A 3-year hematological pathology residency (1991–93) at Stellenbosch followed, during which time Hatfill conducted research on the treatment of leukemia with thalidomide.[14] This research, toward an anticipated PhD degree, was conducted (1992–95) under the supervision of Professor Ralph Kirby at Rhodes University.
Hatfill submitted his PhD thesis for examination to Rhodes in January 1995, but it was failed in November and no degree was ever granted.[14] Hatfill later claimed a Ph.D. degree in "molecular cell biology" from Rhodes, as well as completion of a post-doctoral fellowship (1994–95) at the University of Oxford in England and three master's degrees (in microbial genetics, medical biochemistry, and experimental pathology). Some of these credentials have been questioned. During a later investigation, officials at Rhodes insisted that he had never been awarded a Ph.D. from their institution.[15] (In 2007, Hatfill's lawyer Tom Connolly[16] – in his lawsuit against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI – admitted that his client had "Puffed on his resume. Absolutely. Forged a diploma. Yes, that's true."[17])
Back in the U.S., another of Hatfill's post-doctoral appointments commenced at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1995. He subsequently worked (1997–99) as a civilian researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the U.S. Department of Defense's medical research institute for biological warfare (BW) defense at Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD. There he studied, under a National Research Council fellowship, new drug treatments for the Ebola virus and became a specialist in virology and BW defense.
Anthrax attacks [ edit ]
In January 1999 Hatfill transferred to a "consulting job" at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which has a "sprawling campus" in nearby McLean, Virginia. The corporation did work for a multitude of federal agencies. Many projects were classified.
By this time there had been a number of hoax anthrax mailings in the United States. Hatfill and his collaborator, SAIC vice president Joseph Soukup, commissioned William C. Patrick, retired head of the old US bioweapons program (who had also been a mentor of Hatfill) to write a report on the possibilities of terrorist anthrax mailing attacks. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg (director of the Federation of American Scientists' biochem weapons working group in 2002) said that the report was commissioned "under a CIA contract to SAIC". However, SAIC said Hatfill and Soukup commissioned it internally – there was no outside client.
The resulting report, dated February 1999, was subsequently seen by some as a "blueprint" for the 2001 anthrax attacks. Amongst other things, it suggested the maximum amount of anthrax powder – 2.5 grams – that could be put in an envelope without making a suspicious bulge. The quantity in the envelope sent to Senator Patrick Leahy in October 2001 was.871 grams.[18] After the attacks, the report drew the attention of the media and others, and led to their investigation of Patrick and Hatfill.[19]
Assertions by Rosenberg [ edit ]
In October 2001, as soon as it became known that the Ames strain of anthrax had been used in the attacks, Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and others began suggesting that the attack might be the work of a "rogue CIA agent", and they provided the name of the "most likely" person to the FBI. On November 21, 2001, Rosenberg made similar statements to the Biological and Toxic Weapons convention in Geneva.[20] In December 2001, she published "A Compilation of Evidence and Comments on the Source of the Mailed Anthrax" via the web site of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) suggesting the attacks were "perpetrated with the unwitting assistance of a sophisticated government program".[21]
Rosenberg discussed the case with reporters from the New York Times.[22] On January 4, 2002, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times published a column titled "Profile of a Killer"[23] stating "I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall." For months, Rosenberg gave speeches and stated her beliefs to many reporters from around the world. She posted "Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks" to the FAS web site on January 17, 2002. On February 5, 2002 she published an article called "Is the FBI Dragging Its Feet?"[24] At the time, the FBI denied reports that investigators had identified a chief suspect, saying "There is no prime suspect in this case at this time."[25] The Washington Post reported that "FBI officials over the last week have flatly discounted Dr. Rosenberg's claims."[26]
On June 13, 2002, Rosenberg posted "The Anthrax Case: What the FBI Knows" to the FAS site. On June 18, 2002, Rosenberg presented her theories to senate staffers working for Senators Daschle and Leahy.[27] One week later, on June 25, the FBI publicly searched Hatfill's apartment, turning him into a household name. "The FBI also pointed out that Hatfill had agreed to the search and is not considered a suspect."[28] Both The American Prospect and Salon.com reported that "Hatfill is not a suspect in the anthrax case, the FBI says."[29] On August 3, 2002, Rosenberg told the media that the FBI asked her if "a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Steven J. Hatfill."[30]
Person of interest [ edit ]
In August 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft labeled Hatfill a "person of interest" in a press conference, although no charges were brought against him. Hatfill, a virologist, vehemently denied he had anything to do with the anthrax (bacteria) mailings and sued the FBI, the Justice Department, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and others for violating his constitutional rights and for violating the Privacy Act. On June 27, 2008, the Department of Justice announced it would settle Hatfill's case for $5.8 million.[31]
Hatfill later went to work at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA. In September 2001 SAIC was commissioned by the Pentagon to create a replica of a mobile WMD "laboratory", alleged to have been used by Saddam Hussein, who was President of Iraq at the time. The Pentagon claimed the trailer was to be used as a training aid for teams seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.[32]
His lawyer, Victor M. Glasberg, stated: "Steve's life has been devastated by a drumbeat of innuendo, implication and speculation. We have a frightening public attack on an individual who, guilty or not, should not be exposed to this type of public opprobrium based on speculation."[33]
In an embarrassing incident, FBI agents trailing Hatfill in a motor vehicle ran over his foot when he attempted to approach them in May 2003. Police responding to the incident did not cite the driver, but issued Hatfill a citation for "walking to create a hazard".[34] He and his attorneys fought the ticket, but a hearing officer upheld the ticket and ordered Hatfill to pay the requisite $5 fine.[35]
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006, and at that time another suspect, USAMRIID bacteriologist Bruce Ivins, became the main focus of the investigation.[36] Considerable questions have been raised, however, about the credibility of the case against Ivins as well.[37]
60 Minutes interview [ edit ]
Hatfill's lawyer, Tom Connolly, was featured in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about the anthrax incidents on March 11, 2007.[17] In the interview Connolly revealed that Hatfill forged a Ph.D. degree certificate: "It is true. It is true that he has puffed on his resume. Absolutely. Forged a diploma. Yes, that's true." He went on to state, "Listen, if puffing on your resume made you the anthrax killer, then half this town should be suspect."
The New York Times stated in their paper that Hatfill had obtained an anti-anthrax medicine (ciprofloxacin) immediately prior to the anthrax mailings. Connolly explained, "Before the attacks he had surgery. So yes, he's on Cipro. But the fuller truth is in fact he was on Cipro because a doctor gave it to him after sinus surgery." Hatfill had previously said the antibiotic was for a lingering sinus infection.[38] The omission in the Times' article, of the reason why he had been taking Cipro, is one reason Hatfill sued the newspaper. The newspaper won a summary judgment ruling in early 2007, squelching the libel suit that had been filed by Steven Hatfill against it and columnist Nicholas Kristof.[39]
Lawsuits [ edit ]
Hatfill v. John Ashcroft, et al. [ edit ]
On August 26, 2003, Hatfill filed a lawsuit[40] against the Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft, the United States Department of Justice, DOJ employees Timothy Beres and Daryl Darnell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Van Harp and an unknown number of FBI agents.[41]
On March 30, 2007, US District Judge Reggie Walton issued an order warning Hatfill that he could lose his civil lawsuit over the leaks if he did not compel journalists to name their sources. He gave Hatfill until April 16 to decide whether to press the journalists to give up their sources.[42]
On April 16, Hatfill gave notice that he would "proceed with discovery to attempt to obtain the identity of the alleged source or sources at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who allegedly provided information to news reporters concerning the criminal investigation of Dr. Hatfill."
On April 27, 2007, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, federal prosecutors[clarification needed] wrote that Steven Hatfill had overstepped court orders allowing him to compel testimony from reporters whom he had already questioned and had instead "served a new round of subpoenas" on organizations "that he failed to question during the discovery period."[43]
During the first round of depositions, Hatfill subpoenaed six reporters: Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek, Brian Ross of ABC, Allan Lengel of The Washington Post, Jim Stewart of CBS, and Toni Locy of USA Today.
Hatfill now has subpoenaed eight news organizations, including three that he didn't name before: The New York Times (Nicolas Kristof, David Johnson, William Broad, Kate Zernike, Judith Miller, Scott Shane, and Frank D. Roylance), The Baltimore Sun (Gretchen Parker and Curt Anderson), and the Associated Press. Subpoenas for Washington Post writers Marilyn W. Thompson, David Snyder, Guy Gugliotta, Tom Jackman, Dan Eggen and Carol D. Loenning, and for Mark Miller of Newsweek, are now included.
The Justice Department responded to Hatfill's subpoenas, saying that they went too far. "The court should reject this attempt to expand discovery," prosecutors wrote.[44] In a status conference on Friday 11 January 2008, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the attorneys for the government and for Hatfill to seek mediation over the next two months. According to the Scheduling Order, the parties will be in mediation from January 14 until May 14, 2008. The prospects of a mediated settlement notwithstanding, Walton said he expected that a trial on the lawsuit could begin in December. Afterward, Hatfill's attorney Mark A. Grannis said: "The court has set a schedule for bringing this case to trial this year, and we're very pleased at the prospect that Dr. Hatfill will finally have his day in court."[45]
On March 7, 2008, Toni Locy of USA Today was ordered to personally pay contempt of court fines of up to $5,000 a day which begin the following Tuesday, until she identifies her sources.[46]
On June 27, 2008 Hatfill was exonerated by the government and a settlement was announced in which the Justice Department has agreed to pay $4.6 million (consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying $150,000 a year for 20 years)[47] to settle the lawsuit in which Hatfill claimed the Justice Department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.[48][49]
Hatfill v. The New York Times [ edit ]
In July 2004, Hatfill filed a lawsuit against The New York Times Company and Nicholas D. Kristof.
In a sealed motion[50] on December 29, 2006, The New York Times argued that the classification restrictions imposed on the case were tantamount to an assertion of the state secrets privilege. Times attorneys cited the case law on state secrets to support their argument that the case should be dismissed. The "state secrets" doctrine, they said, "precludes a case from proceeding to trial when national security precludes a party from obtaining evidence that is... necessary to support a valid defense. Dismissal is warranted in this case because the Times has been denied access to such evidence, specifically documents and testimony concerning the work done by plaintiff [Hatfill] on classified government projects relating to bioweapons, including anthrax."[citation needed]
A redacted copy[50] of the December 29, 2006 New York Times Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendant's Motion for an Order Dismissing the Complaint Under the "State Secrets" Doctrine was obtained by Secrecy News.[51]
Attorneys for Hatfill filed a sealed response on January 12, 2007 in opposition to the motion for dismissal on state secrets grounds. A redacted copy[52] of their opposition has been made available by Secrecy News.[53]
On January 12, 2007, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Hatfill against The New York Times.[54]
On January 30, 2007, Judge Hilton's order dismissing the Hatfill v. The New York Times was made public, along with a Memorandum Opinion explaining his ruling. Kenneth A. Richieri, Vice President and General Counsel of The New York Times described what he called a "very satisfying win" at the beginning of 2007 in the Eastern District of Virginia. The newspaper won a summary judgment ruling squelching a libel suit that had been filed by anthrax poisoning "person of interest" Steven Hatfill against it and columnist Nicholas Kristof.[39]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the trial court, ruling that a jury should decide that issue. In March 2008, the Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari in the case, effectively leaving the appeals court decision in place.
The case was dismissed in a Summary Judgment on January 12, 2007. The appeals were heard on March 21, 2008, and the dismissal was upheld by the appeals court on July 14, 2008. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and was rejected by the Supreme Court on Dec. 15, 2008.[55] The basis for the dismissal was that Dr. Hatfill was a "public figure", and he had not proved malice on the part of The New York Times.
Hatfill v. Foster [ edit ]
Donald Foster, an expert in forensic linguistics, advised the FBI during the investigation of the anthrax attacks. He later wrote an article for Vanity Fair about his investigation of Hatfill. In the October 2003 article Foster described how he had tried to match up Hatfill's travels with the postmarks on the anthrax letters, and analyzed old interviews and an unpublished novel by Hatfill about a bioterror attack on the United States. Foster wrote that "When I lined up Hatfill's known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud".[56]
Hatfill subsequently sued Donald Foster, Condé Nast Publications, Vassar College, and The Reader's Digest Association. The suit sought $10 million in damages, claiming defamation.[57] The Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the article in December 2003.
The lawyers delayed bringing the Hatfill v. Foster lawsuit to court because "the parties are close to finalizing the settlement".
On February 27, 2007, The New York Sun reported that he settled without a trial.[58]
References [ edit ]"Star Trek Into Darkness." Paramount Pictures The list of titles disappearing from Netflix in September is a little longer than usual with the news that cable channel Epix has ended its deal with the streaming giant (and has moved titles over to Hulu).
That means next month high-profile films including "Hunger Games: Catching Fire," "The Wolf of Wall Street," and "Star Trek Into Darkness" will no longer be available.
The list of titles leaving Netflix is below. They also include Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" and the classic sci-fi title starring Arnold Schwarzenegger "Total Recall." To help you out, we have highlighted a few worth checking out one more time.
Leaving 9/1/15
"Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London" "Better Than Chocolate""Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" "Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!" "Electrick Children" "FernGully: The Last Rainforest""Jackie Brown""Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" "Mortal Kombat: The Movie" "Patch Adams" "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" "Rugrats in Paris: The Movie" "Rules of Engagement" "Rumpelstiltskin" "Sarah's Choice""School of Rock" "She's the One""Sleepless in Seattle" "The IT Crowd" (seasons 1-4)"The Lost Boys""Total Recall"
"Total Recall." TriStar Pictures "W."
Leaving 9/2/15 "Cheech & Chong's Hey Watch This"
Leaving 9/4/15
"Delta Farce"
Leaving 9/5/15
"Marilyn in Manhattan"
Leaving 9/9/15
"Kicking It"Leaving 9/10/15
"100 Below Zero" "Becoming Chaz" "Crash & Bernstein" (Season 1-2) "War Witch"
Leaving 9/13/15
"High Fidelity"
"High Fidelity." Buena Vista Pictures Leaving 9/14/15
"Corky Romano"
Leaving 9/15/15
"Best of Teletubbies" "Coach" (Season 1-9) "Valhalla"Leaving 9/16/15
"The Slap" (season 1)
Leaving 9/20/15
"Reporter"
Leaving 9/22/15
"National Geographic: Inside Guantanamo" "National Geographic: The Battle for Midway"
Leaving 9/26/15
"Lethal Force" "Ron White: A Little Unprofessional"
Leaving 9/28/15
"Undeclared: The Complete Series"
Leaving 9/29/15
"Comic Book Men" (Season 2) "Coriolanus"
Leaving 9/30/15
"Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues""Apocalypse Now" "If I Stay" "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa""Nebraska" "Saved!""Star Trek: The Motion Picture""Star Trek Into Darkness" "The Expendables 3" "The Good Guy" "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" "The Prince""The Skeleton Twins""The Wolf of Wall Street"Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
I’m very fond of the Subaru 360. It’s the perfect car for people who see a VW Beetle and think, “I love it, but can I get something smaller, slower, less safe, and with much less luggage room?” It’s a little charming kook of a car, and the kookiest kook is the Young SS sporty version.
“Sporty” here means a mind-custardizing 36 HP from the little 2-stroke, 2-banger in the butt, along with a jaunty hood stripe, some extra badging and a tach and all that good stuff. Even more importantly, the Young SS version (that name sounds like some weird Nazi-themed rapper name) also had these dazzling commercials which summarized the trancendental nature of Subaru 360 Young SS ownership better than volumes of written words on the subject. Here’s two of them:
There’s so much raw fantastic in these I decided to break you off a bunch of pieces you can enjoy or use when needed, in handy GIF form. Now, whenever you need to really punctuate an online argument or just need a little visual reminder of why you’re here on earth at all, these should do the trick.
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You’re welcome.
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Run, ghost man! Stare at me over those bucket seats, smolderingly. YES.
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Kazzzooopow! Ka-booominga!
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Puff-puff, motherfuckers! Smoke that like it’s two-stroke exhaust!
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BrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA
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Zoom look wheel click sit stare zoom
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BEHIND YOU
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SHOOP
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Lightning, more goddamn lightning
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Comin’ atcha.
Enjoy the seizures!Kim Jong Nam, the half brother of the North Korean leader, died a “very painful death” within 20 minutes of having poison smeared on his face, Malaysian authorities said Sunday.
This suggests he was exposed to an overwhelming amount of VX, a nerve agent that is classified as a weapon of mass destruction, S. Subramaniam, Malaysia’s health minister, said.
“The absorption level was so rapid that within a few minutes, the guy had symptoms,” Subramaniam told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. “From the time of the onset, he died within 15 to 20 minutes.”
Kim Jong Nam, the estranged older brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was attacked in the busy Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb. 13 by two women who wiped a substance on his face and in his eyes. They fled while their victim sought help, but he died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Malaysian police said Friday that the autopsy showed Kim Jong Nam died of exposure to VX, a chemical weapon that can be absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes.
(The Washington Post)
[For Kim Jong Nam, a sad ending to a lonely life]
All suspicions about the attack rest with the regime in Pyongyang. Malaysia has implicated eight North Koreans — including a diplomat said to be hiding in the North Korean Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and a scientist whom Malaysia has in custody.
South Korea has bluntly blamed the assassination on Kim Jong Un, accusing him of trying to eliminate potential rivals to his power, while the United States has decided not to issue visas for North Korean diplomats who were to arrive in New York this week for talks with former U.S. officials. The decision was made after Malaysia announced the finding of VX.
VX is banned under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, but North Korea is not a signatory. Pyongyang is thought to have the world’s third-largest stocks of chemical weapons, behind the United States and Russia, and is believed to have been pursuing VX, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative website.
VX is a nerve agent that interferes with the workings of the major organs, including the lungs, leading to death by muscle paralysis.
“The muscle goes into a state of permanent contraction,” Subramaniam said. The dose that the 45-year-old victim received was “so high” that his heart and lungs would have been affected quickly, he said.
[The worst-case scenario of the apparent nerve toxin murder of Kim ]
(The Washington Post)
After the autopsy results — and 11 days after the attack — teams in hazmat suits swept the airport terminal for traces of VX or other toxins but found none and declared the terminal safe.
Members of the medical staff who helped Kim are being monitored, but none has shown symptoms, Subramaniam said.
Questions are being raised about how the two women who carried out the attack, apparently without wearing gloves, managed to survive. Security camera footage shows them going to the bathroom immediately after the attack, presumably to wash their hands.
Siti Aishah, who is Indonesian and was reportedly the first to apply the oil-like substance to Kim Jong Nam, told police she vomited in a taxi after leaving the airport and continued to feel unwell. She is being tested.
Aishah has repeatedly told police that she was tricked into carrying out the attack; she says she was told that it was a prank and was paid about $100 for taking part. However, the security footage shows the women acting with determination and immediately rushing off after the attack.
[North Korean diplomat wanted in killing of Kim Jong Un’s half brother]
Malaysian authorities say that no one from Kim Jong Nam’s family has come forward to claim his body. They have been asking for a DNA match before releasing the body, and there were reports last week that his 22-year-old son had arrived from Macau, but these turned out to be false.
North Korea has angrily denounced every part of the investigation, accusing the South Korean government of persuading Malaysia to “besmirch” Pyongyang’s reputation by laying the blame on it.
North Korea’s ambassador in Kuala Lumpur strongly objected to an autopsy being carried out at all, saying that the victim — whom he did not identify — was carrying a diplomatic passport and was therefore not subject to Malaysian laws.
Malaysia has, however, insisted that it will follow all usual procedures for investigating a suspicious death.
Read more
Video: What is the VX nerve agent?
Kim Jong Un is a top suspect in half brother’s death. But questions abound.
Malaysian assassination focuses new attention on North Korean leader
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsJarling's Custard Cup has been a staple of the Champaign community since their Kirby Ave. location opened back in 1983. They have some pretty great ice cream custard, after all! Unfortunately -- and to the dismay of Tom Hanks -- the business went up for sale last Spring. We briefly discussed expanding our #brand to encompass this fantastic treat, but the dream was short-lived. Custard Cup was destined for another owner.
Champaign, IL! Jarling’s Custard Cup 4 Sale! Doug and Christy are selling! The recipe alone is worth $$$$$$! Get o… http://t.co/2AKEYHhzBw — Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 12, 2015
Well today we're happy to pass on that the Custard Cup will survive thanks to the efforts of an investment group that includes Bruce Weber, Ron Turner, Kurt Kittner, and a few other former Fighting Illini athletes.
Custard Cup is now (kind of) owned by Bruce Weber, Ron Turner, "consortium of local buyers": https://t.co/kgnt8MFmak pic.twitter.com/POLeJcidrQ — Smile Politely (@SmilePolitely) May 1, 2016
Proud to a part of the Jarling's Custard Cup team! The WORLD'S BEST frozen desserts! #jarlingscustardcup pic.twitter.com/YLFoFOE1jh — Ron Turner (@FIUCoachRT) May 1, 2016
Here's a bit from the press release, which you can view in its entirety over at Smile Politely.
[Alpha Custard Cup] is led by Tom Siegel, an experienced entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and former University of Illinois two-sport walk-on athlete, first sampled the Custard Cup product in the 1980s. Mr. Siegel remarked, "First of all, Doug and Christy should be congratulated for being the consummate hard-working entrepreneurs. They are very successful and I'm grateful for the opportunity to carry on the fine tradition of Jarling's Custard Cup." Siegel went on to say, "We have an incredible investor group, including names that Illini fans will likely recognize, such as Kurt Kittner (former Illini/NFL football player), Tony Pashos (former Illini/NFL football player), Ron Turner (former Illini head football coach), and Bruce Weber (former Illini head basketball coach)." Additional investors in Alpha include the Sholem family and other individuals.
The best news? The location is set to reopen in about a week! What a time to be alive!Internet crime stories are dime a dozen but these examples will show you why online security is essential. From ethical hacking to blackmail and car hijacking, these true stories show how you must act now to secure your well-being in the digital landscape.
We carefully curated the best, most fascinating tech stories that cover the risks involved in any digital activity of device, |
> <env>.empty </env> <holds>.empty </holds> </thread> <store>.empty </store> <nextLoc> loc(0) </nextLoc> <aspect>.K </aspect> <busy>.empty </busy> <me> agent(N) </me> <parent> Me </parent> </agent>]].
An agent is here a collection of threads, grouped in an agent cell identified by an id held by the me cell, and holding in the parent cell a reference id to its creating agent. nextAgent is used for providing fresh ids for agents.
rl <agent> <store> _ </store> <nextLoc> _ </nextLoc> <aspect> _ </aspect> <busy> _ </busy> <me> _ </me> <parent> _ </parent> </agent> =>.empty.
When all threads inside an agent have completed, the agent can be dissolved.
op me : -> Exp. krl <k>[[me ==> A]]...</k> <me> A </me>.
op parent : -> Exp. krl <k>[[parent ==> A]]...</k> <parent> A </parent>.
op message : -> CellLabel [wrapping Tuple]. vars Me Parent A : Agent. op send-asynch__ : Exp Exp -> Stmt [strict]. krl <k> [[send-asynch A V ==>.K]]...</k> <me> Me </me> [[.empty ==> <message> [Me,A,V] </message>]].
An agent can send any value (including agents ids) to other agents (provided it knows their id). To model asynchronous communication, each value sent is wrapped in a message cell identifying both the sender and the intended receiver.
op receive-from_ : Exp -> Exp [strict]. krl <k> [[receive-from A ==> V]]...</k> <me> Me </me> [[<message> [A,Me,V] </message> ==>.empty]].
An agent can request to receive a message from a certain agent.
ops receive : -> Exp. krl <k> [[receive ==> V]]...</k> <me> Me </me> [[<message> [_,Me,V] </message> ==>.empty]].
An agent can request to receive a message from any agent.
op send-synch__ : Exp Exp -> Stmt [strict]. krl <agent>... <k> [[send-synch A V ==>.K]]...</k> <me> Me </me>...</agent> <agent>... <k> [[receive-from Me ==> V]]...</k> <me> A </me>...</agent>. krl <agent>... <k> [[send-synch A V ==>.K]]...</k>...</agent> <agent>... <k> [[receive ==> V]]...</k> <me> A </me>...</agent>.
The message can be sent synchronously, in which case, two agents need to matched together for the exchange to occur.
op halt : -> Stmt. krl [[<agent>... <k> halt...</k>...</agent> ==>.empty]].
The semantics of halt in one of the thread of an agent is that is dissolves the agent.
op messages : -> CellLabel [wrapping Set`{ConfigItem`}]. op result : -> CellLabel [wrapping List`{KResult`}]. kconf <T> <agent*> <thread*> <k> _ </k> <env> _ </env> <holds> _ </holds> </thread*> <store> _ </store> <nextLoc> _ </nextLoc> <aspect> _ </aspect> <busy> _ </busy> <me> _ </me> <parent> _ </parent> </agent*> <output> _ </output> <messages> <message*> _ </message*> </messages> <nextAgent> _ </nextAgent> </T> <result> _ </result>.
For K to know where each cell is located, one needs to specify (if there are cells at different levels) the structure of the configuration, together whit an indication of which of the cells have multiplicities. Notice here that we have a wrapper for messages which was not specified anywhere, as well as a wrapped for the results which is at the top level.
op `[`[_`]`] : Stmt -> Config. eq P:Stmt = <T> <agent> <thread> <k> mkK(P:Stmt) </k> <env>.empty </env> <holds>.empty </holds> </thread> <store>.empty </store> <nextLoc> loc(0) </nextLoc> <aspect>.K </aspect> <busy>.empty </busy> <me> agent(0) </me> <parent> agent(0) </parent> </agent> <output>.nil </output> <messages>.empty </messages> <nextAgent> agent(1) </nextAgent> </T>.
This is how a program is initialized to be executed using the above definition.
krl [[<T> <output> VL </output> <nextAgent> _ </nextAgent> <messages> _ </messages> </T> ==> <result> VL </result> ]].
When there are no more agents executing, we can collect the output and transfer it into the result cell.
Advanced features: program generation
op quote_ : Exp -> Exp. op unquote_ : Exp -> Exp. op eval_ : Exp -> Exp [strict]. op quote : Nat List{K} -> KProper. op code : List{K} -> KResult. op _box`(->`)_ : K K -> KProper [strict]. op _box`(`,`)_ : K K -> KProper [strict]. op box : K -> KSynLabel. op kl : KLabel -> K. var KL : KLabel. var KLK : K. var Ks : NeList`{K`}. var K1 K2 : NeK. kcxt box(KLK)(Ks) [strict(Ks)].
keq <k> [[quote K ==> quote(0,K)]]...</k>. eq quote(N, K1 -> K2) = quote(N, K1) box(->) quote(N,K2). eq code(K1) box(->) code(K2) = code(K1 -> K2). ceq quote(N, KL(Ks)) = box(kl(KL))(quote(N, Ks)) if KL =/= quote~ /\ KL =/= unquote~. eq box(kl(KL))(code(Ks)) = code(KL(Ks)). eq quote(N, quote(K)) = box(kl(quote~))(quote(s(N), K)). eq quote(0, unquote(K)) = K. eq quote(s(N), unquote(K)) = box(kl(unquote~))(quote(N,K)).
eq quote(N, (K, Ks)) = quote(N, K) box(,) quote(N, Ks). eq code(K) box(,) code(Ks) = code((K, Ks)).
eq quote(N, V) = code(V). eq quote(N,X) = code(X).
eq eval code(K) = K. k)
As for the previous definitions, we end our specification with k).
Using Core Maude
Writing K definitions in Core Maude is similar to the process described above, but, since the definitions must be recognizable as Maude modules, several artifices, which will be described below, are used to encode them into standard Maude syntax.
Using Core Maude has the advantage that the process of conversion of the input modules needs to only be performed when the input module changes, and therefore the loading time of the thus pre-compiled modules is much shorter (especially since Full-Maude does not need to be loaded once the generation process is completed). Moreover it is less likely that the compilation process will crash Maude in case of errors, as it might happen when using the Full-Maude version (we assume the guilt here — it is not because of Full-Maude, but rather because of our messing with its internal structures).
The drawback is that the user has to go back and forth by introducing a module, compiling it to its executable Maude correspondent(s), writing the result of the compilation into a file; and this process needs to be repeated for each of the modules.
Scenario for using it K-Maude in Full-Maude:
load <base-dir>/k-prelude
Write the syntax module KERNELC-SYNTAX [Optional] write some programs using it, to check the definition is correct compile the definition to obtain module KERNELC-K-SYNTAX, and save the generated module in some file write the KERNELC-CONFIGURATION module, compile the definition to obtain module KERNELC-K-CONFIGURATION, and save the generated module in some file write the KERNELC-SEMANTICS module, compile the definition to obtain module KERNELC-K-SEMANTICS, and save the generated module in some file [Optional] load KERNELC-K-SEMANTICS and use it to execute programs
Let us exemplify the above steps through the corresponding K-Core-Maude definition for KERNELC. For each of the modules we will present the non-compiled version, and discuss how K-specific constructs are encoded in the definitions, as well as the compilation process.
Syntax
mod KERNELC-SYNTAX is including GENERIC-EXP-K-SYNTAX + STRING-K-SYNTAX. sorts Stmt StmtList Pgm. subsort Stmt < StmtList. op #include<stdio.h>`#include<stdlib.h>`void`main`(void`)`{_`} : StmtList -> Pgm [metadata "renameTo _" format (rn n ng d b g b s on+i n-b o)]. op *_ : Exp -> Exp [metadata "strict" prec 25]. op!_ : Exp -> Exp [metadata "aux"]. vars E E' : Exp. eq! E = E? 0 : 1. ops _&&_ _||_ : Exp Exp -> Exp [metadata "aux"]. eq E && E' = E? E' : 0. eq E || E' = E? 1 : E'. op _?_:_ : Exp Exp Exp -> Exp [format (d b o b o d) metadata "renameTo if`(_`)_else_" prec 39]. op _=_ : Exp Exp -> Exp [metadata "strict(2) renameTo _:=_" prec 40 gather (e E)]. op _; : Exp -> Stmt [prec 45 metadata "strict" format (d b o)]. op ; : -> Stmt [metadata "renameTo.K"]. op __ : StmtList StmtList -> StmtList [prec 100 gather(e E) format (d ni d) metadata "renameTo _->_"]. op {_} : StmtList -> Stmt [format (b on+i -nbi o) metadata "renameTo _"]. op {} : -> Stmt [format (b d o) metadata "renameTo.K"]. op malloc`(_`) : Exp -> Exp [format (g b o b o) metadata "strict"]. op free`(_`) : Exp -> Exp [format (g b o b o) metadata "strict"]. op if`(_`)_ : Exp Stmt -> Stmt [metadata "aux" prec 47]. var St St' : Stmt. eq if(E) St = if (E) St else {}. op if`(_`)_else_ : Exp Stmt Stmt -> Stmt [metadata "strict (1)" format(g b o b os nig o d) prec 46]. op while`(_`)_ : Exp Stmt -> Stmt [format (g b o b os d) metadata "syntax"]. op printf`("%d ",_`) : Exp -> Exp [format (g b r b o b o) metadata "strict"]. op NULL : -> Exp [metadata "aux"]. eq NULL = 0. endm
Note that all K-specific attributes have been encoded into the metadata attribute.
To compile the above module, one would need to execute the following commands:
load <base-dir>/make-k (makeKSyntax KERNELC.)
The output of the last command will be a module named KERNELC-K-SYNTAX containing the abstract syntax, and the strictness equations. If the generation failed (e.g., no output is produced), you could try to use:
red in MAKE-K-SYNTAX : makeKSyntax("KERNELC").
to view and analyze the core dump.
Configuration
mod KERNELC-CONFIGURATION is including KERNELC-K-SYNTAX + KMAP{K, K} + FRESH-ITEM{K} + CONFIG. ops env mem ptr : -> CellLabel [metadata "wrapping Map{K,K}"]. op out : -> CellLabel [metadata "wrapping K"]. op stream : String -> K. op void : -> KResult. endm
Again, operation attributes are encoded in the metadata attribute. Also note that the generated syntax module (KERNELC-K-SYNTAX) and the k-prelude CONFIG module must be now included explicitly (they needed not be mentioned in the Full-Maude version).
To compile the above module, one would need to execute the following commands:
load <base-dir>/make-k (makeKConfiguration KERNELC.)
The output of the last command will be a module named KERNELC-K-CONFIGURATION containing the tag-like operations which would be used in the semantics definition.
Semantics
mod KERNELC-SEMANTICS is including KERNELC-K-CONFIGURATION + GENERIC-EXP-SEMANTICS + K-RULES + INT-SIMP. var P : Pgm. var N N' : Nat. var X : Name. var Env : Map{K,K}. var V V' : KResult. var I : Int. var Ptr Mem : Map{K,K}. var K K1 K2 : K. var S : String. --- evaluating the lhs of an equality to LVal mb kcxt * K1 := K2 : K [metadata "strict(K1)"]. op [ [_]] : Pgm -> Config. eq [ [ P ]] = <T> <k> mkK(P) </k> <env>.empty </env> <mem>.empty </mem> <ptr>.empty </ptr> <nextItem> item(1) </nextItem> <out> stream("") </out> </T>. eq #(true) = #(1). eq #(false) = #(0). ceq if (#(I)) K1 else K2 = K2 if I eq 0. ceq if (#(I)) K1 else K2 = K1 if I neq 0. --- discarding the value of an expression statement. eq V ; =.K. mb keq <k> [ [X ==> V]]...</k> <env>... X |-> V...</env> : K. mb keq <k> [ [X := V ==> V]]...</k> <env> [ [Env ==> Env[X <- V]]] </env> : K. mb keq <k> [ [* #(N) ==> V]]...</k> <mem>... #(N) |-> V...</mem> : K. mb keq <k> [ [* #(N) := V ==> V]]...</k> <mem>... #(N) |-> [ [V' ==> V]]...</mem> : K. mb keq <k> [ [while (K1) K2 ==> if (K1) (K2 -> while(K1) K2) else.K]]...</k> : K. op alloc : Nat Nat -> Map{K,K}. eq alloc(N, 0) =.empty. eq alloc(N, s(N')) = (#(N) |-> #(0)) &' alloc(N + 1, N'). op freeMem : Map{K,K} Nat Nat -> Map{K,K}. eq freeMem(Mem, N, 0) = Mem. eq freeMem((Mem &' (#(N) |-> V)), N, s(N')) = freeMem(Mem,N + 1,N'). mb keq <k> [ [ malloc(#(N)) ==> #(N')]]...</k> <ptr>... [ [.empty ==> (#(N') |-> #(N))]]...</ptr> <nextItem> [ [item(N') ==> item(N') + N]] </nextItem> <mem>... [ [.empty ==> alloc(N', N)]]...</mem> : K. mb keq <k> [ [free(#(N)) ==> void]]...</k> <ptr>... [ [#(N) |-> #(N') ==>.empty]]...</ptr> <mem> [ [Mem ==> freeMem(Mem, N, N')]] </mem> : K. mb keq <k> [ [printf("%d ",#(I)) ==> void]]...</k> <out> [ [stream(S) ==> stream(S + string(I,10)+ " ")]] </out> : K. endm
Note that the generated configuration module (KERNELC-K-CONFIGURATION) and the k-prelude K-RULES module must be now included explicitly (they needed not be mentioned in the Full-Maude version). K-contexts, K-equations, and K-rules are encoded as membership axioms to sorts Kcxt, Keq, and Krl, respectively. Note that membership axioms are only used as a notation; there is no membership-related semantics associated to them. For example, the K-equation for retrieving a value form the environment
keq <k> [[X ==> V]]...</k> <env>... X |-> V...</env>.
would be written using this convention as
mb keq <k> [ [X ==> V] ]...</k> <env>... X |-> V...</env> : K.
Similarily, the K-context definition
kcxt * K1 := K2 [strict(1)].
would be written as
mb kcxt * K1 := K2 : K [metadata "strict(K1)"].
using metadata to encode the strictness attribute.
To compile the above module, one would need to execute the following commands:
load <base-dir>/make-k (makeKSemantics KERNELC.)
The output of the last command will be a module named KERNELC-K-SEMANTICS containing the executable semantic definition. If the generation failed (e.g., no output is produced), you could try to use:
red in MAKE-K-SEMANTICS: makeKSemantics("KERNELC").
to view and analyze the core dump.
Scripts automating the process
Several bash scripts (should work on unix/linux, might also work on windows under cygwin) are provided in the base directory of K, to automate the generation process for the Core Maude version. These are makeK which takes a file containing one of the syntax/configuration/semantics modules and generates the corresponding K module, buildK which runs makeK to generate all files at once (good for already written definitions), and cleanK which removes the files generated by the other scripts. This script only work assuming certain conventions are followed in naming and structuring the files containing the modules (which are followed by all the included examples). These conventions are:
makeK and buildK should not be moved from the base directory of K (or executed through links), since they use their location to discover that base directory;
and should not be moved from the base directory of K (or executed through links), since they use their location to discover that base directory; assuming the name of the language is LANG, the name of the syntax/configuration/semantics modules written by the user should be LANG-SYNTAX, LANG-CONFIGURATION, and LANG-SEMANTICS, and each should be placed in one file named lang-syntax.maude, lang-configuration.maude, and lang-semantics.maude, respectively; the generated modules would then be LANG-K-SYNTAX, LANG-K-CONFIGURATION, and LANG-K-SEMANTICS, and each would be placed in one file named lang-k-syntax.maude, lang-k-configuration.maude, and lang-k-semantics.maude, respectively;
,, and, and each should be placed in one file named,, and, respectively; the generated modules would then be,, and, and each would be placed in one file named,, and, respectively; makeK takes as argument the name of the file containing the module which should be compiled (with or without extension), and should generate the corresponding K module and write it in the corresponding file; Important: the file should be self contained and loadable in maude without significant errors, i.e., it should specify inside the files it depends on (such as k-prelude, lang-k-syntax, lang-k-configuration, and so on); that is why makeK should be run in order on the files to be generated. Important: the name of the Maude executable (including path, if necessary) should be set on line 2 of makeK
takes as argument the name of the file containing the module which should be (with or without extension), and should generate the corresponding K module and write it in the corresponding file; buildK takes as argument lang runs makeK on the three lang files, in order; it should therefore only be run if those three files reside in the same directory;
takes as argument runs on the three files, in order; it should therefore only be run if those three files reside in the same directory; cleanK takes as argument lang and removes all files in the directory from which they are run whose name start with lang-k-; if you are not following conventions, better not use it since it might remove files you don't want removed.
Generating Latex
Currently this is less stable than the tool itself, and works only for Full-Maude definitions. To generate LaTeX one can use the command (e.g., for the KERNELC definition).
(print definition KERNELC.)
after loading the semantics file, and then copy the output to a tex file. Alternatively, script compileL attempts to automate this process, taking two arguments: the name of the file (e.g., kernelc-semantics) and the name of the definition (e.g., KERNELC), and producing a tex file containing the generated LaTeX, named by appending extension.tex to the provided file name. the scripts then attempts to compile it using pdflatex.“No worries, no stress, no anxieties” Naomi Campbell said of what it is like to work with Edward Enninful. “[You] go in to it with someone that you know is going to make you look your best, and feel your best, and good energy all around.” With a reputation for not only being fun, but also being one of the best in the business, it’s no wonder Beats By Dre wanted to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of Edward’s career.
Enninful was scouted to model at the age of 16, but he very quickly made waves behind the scenes. He was 18 when he became Fashion Director for i-D (their youngest ever), before going on to work for both Vogue and Vogue Italia (for which he worked on the “Black Issue” in 2008), consulted with brands like Fendi, Comme Des Garçons, Céline, Giambattista Valli, and Jil Sander (among others), and has been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades.
This week, Campbell and Enninful lounged in the Presidential Suite at The Surrey hotel in New York to discuss The Seven Deadly Sins of Edward Enninful—a short film in collaboration with Beats By Dre for SHOWstudio. Directed by Nick Knight, the film is a modern twist on the seven deadly sins, interpreted through the lens of Internet culture. Vanity (played by Karlie Kloss) is tied to selfies, while Envy (played by Jourdan Dunn) is shown trolling online. “Obviously Naomi had to be Black Pride,” said Enninful of her casting. “Historically she’s broken down so many barriers, and her career has pretty un-paralleled. I wanted someone really majestic, and really beautiful, statuesque…all those things. And Naomi was perfect.”
“When Edward actually told me about the whole project a year and a half ago—almost two years ago—I was like, Can I be lust?” Campbell remembers (the role of Lust went to Kate Moss). “I ended up being Black Pride. But I’m very proud to be Black Pride.”
The film also stars Mariacarla Boscono, Anna Ewers, Lara Stone, and Karen Elson (if you counted and noticed that there are actually eight models, it’s because Ewers and Stone take on Gluttony together). The final product is a multi-media wonder, complete with added graphics and 3-D renderings of the models, and featuring a soundtrack with Jamie xx, A$AP Ferg, The Internet, Hopsin, Eryn Allen Kane, Oneohtrix Point Never, Brodinski. “The whole idea at the beginning was sort of a marriage of color, sound, and emotion. Right from the start that’s what Beats By Dre wanted. So we knew there was a musical component that was going to be as powerful,” explained Enninful. “And then when Travis Scott wanted to narrate, that was the cherry on top, because for me, he is about today. He is that Renaissance man, he is that voice of his generation.”
Although the video is meant to highlight Enninful’s 25 years (so far) in fashion, it’s not a retrospective. “What I didn’t want to do was look back,” he said of the project. “Everyone knows I’m really interested in technology. There’s so much going on in the world right now, I wanted to do something that spoke about that.”
“The Seven Deadly Sins of Edward Enninful” originally screened in Times Square in January, but can now be viewed online at SHOWstudio.Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley on May 30 in Baltimore announces that he is entering the Democratic presidential race. O'Malley joined with a longshot challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2016 nomination. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley announced his candidacy May 30 for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president. Here's a look at where he stands on some issues:
ECONOMY
O'Malley has cited income inequality and wage stagnation as major economic problems and sought to connect with progressives on the Democratic Party' left who want to break up Wall Street banks and impose stricter regulations on the financial sector. In 2014, he signed an increase in the state's minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2018. He supports expanding Social Security benefits and allowing college graduates to refinance their loans at lower interest rates. O'Malley raised taxes on multiple occasions as governor — on higher earners, sales of goods, vehicle titles, gasoline, cigarettes, sewer services, alcohol and more. Critics called him Owe'Malley.
TRADE
O'Malley has opposed the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership backed by President Barack Obama, saying it would ship jobs overseas and depress wages. He had a more nuanced position on trade as governor of Maryland, which relies on the Port of Baltimore as an economic generator. O'Malley opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2006, saying it would lead to outsourcing, but he backed the 2011 deal with South Korea and noted at the time that it had support from the United Auto Workers.
IMMIGRATION
O'Malley has sought to differentiate himself from Hillary Rodham Clinton by noting his opposition to White House plans to return young Central American children and families who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border last summer. He said they would face "certain death." Clinton said at the time that the children should be sent back and the U.S. should not encourage the treacherous journeys. As governor, O'Malley signed a bill allowing young immigrants living in the U.S. illegally to pay in-state college tuition and to obtain driver's licenses if they meet certain requirements, including having filed tax returns for the past two years. O'Malley backs a comprehensive immigration overhaul that would bring an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally "out of the shadows."
SOCIAL ISSUES
O'Malley signed a bill legalizing marriage between same-sex couples in 2012, and it took effect in 2013 after voters approved a statewide referendum. He has called gay marriage a human right, not a state right. He supported civil unions during his first campaign for governor in 2006 because he said it was in line with public consensus at the time. He supports abortion rights and frequently cites the Democratic line — coined by former President Bill Clinton — that the procedure should be "safe, legal and rare."
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
O'Malley led the push to ban the death penalty as governor and recently called it "ineffective" following the jury's death penalty verdict in the Boston Marathon bombing case. O'Malley signed sweeping gun control restrictions in 2014 requiring anyone who buys a handgun to submit fingerprints to obtain a license. The law also banned 45 types of assault weapons, but those who owned the weapons before the law went into effect were able to keep them. Violent crime fell while he served as governor, but his tough-on-crime policies as Baltimore's mayor have come under scrutiny since riots broke out in the aftermath of the police custody death of Freddie Gray.
Read or Share this story: http://gbpg.net/1IvRotfBy LAURA CLARK
Last updated at 08:45 02 April 2008
Two primary schools have withdrawn storybooks about same-sex relationships after objections from Muslim parents.
Up to 90 gathered at the schools to complain about the books which are aimed at pupils as young as five.
One story, titled King & King, is a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses before marrying one of their brothers.
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Another named And Tango Makes Three features two male penguins who fall in love at a New York zoo.
Bristol City Council said the two schools had been using the books to ensure they complied with gay rights laws which came into force last April.
They were intended to help prevent homophobic bullying, it said.
But the council has since removed the books from Easton Primary School and Bannerman Road Community School, both in Bristol.
A book and DVD titled That's a Family!, which teaches children about different family set-ups including gay or lesbian parents, has also been withdrawn.
The decision was made to enable the schools to "operate safely" after parents voiced their concerns at meetings.
Around 40 are said to have gathered at Easton to speak to staff and another 50 at Bannerman Road.
Members of the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society said parents were upset at the lack of consultation over the use of the materials.
Farooq Siddique, community development officer for the society and a governor at Bannerman Road, said there were also concerns about whether the stories were appropriate for young children.
"The main issue was there was a total lack of consultation with parents," he said.
"The schools refused to deal with the parents, and were completely authoritarian.
"The agenda was to reduce homophobic bullying and all the parents said they were not against that side of it, but families were saying to us 'our child is coming home and talking about same-sex relationships, when we haven't even talked about heterosexual relationships with them yet'.
"They don't do sex education until Year Six and at least there you have got the option of withdrawing the children.
"But here you don't have that option apparently. You can't withdraw because it is no particular lesson they are used in."
He added: "In Islam homosexual relationships are not acceptable, as they are not in Christianity and many other religions but the main issue is that they didn't bother to consult with parents.
"The issue should have been, how do we stop bullying in general, and teaching about homosexuality can be a part of that.
"This was completely one-sided.
"Homosexuality is not a priority to parents but academic achievement is. This just makes parents think 'What the heck is my child being taught at school?'."
He said the two schools were 60 to 70 per cent Muslim but pointed out that non-Muslim parents were among those who complained.
Traditional Islamic views condemn homosexuality but there are liberal movements, such as the Al-Fatiha Foundation, which is dedicated to gay Muslims.
The schools used materials promoted by the No Outsiders project, led by academics at Sunderland University.
A spokesman for Bristol City Council said: "All Bristol schools have a legal duty to report and deal with homophobic harassment as part of the curriculum since April 2007."
She said the council had "temporarily withdrawn" the use of the materials in question and was liaising with various groups to "ensure that the topic can be addressed in an inclusive manner in the curriculum".
Ben Summerskills of gay rights group Stonewall said: "The small number of parents who make a fuss will cause children to think there is something wrong."Your Online Source for Plant-Based Research Articles
Welcome to plantbasedresearch.org, an online narrative review of peer-reviewed, scientific research papers and educational resources that are relevant to plant-based nutrition. Links to the abstract are included with every article, and links to the free full articles are included when possible! A narrative review is a collection of research papers supporting a particular theory - this website is by no means an exhaustive directory of all research on nutrition and disease but presents the growing body of evidence supporting the theory that whole food, plant-based diets offer the best chance for avoiding chronic disease, and in some cases, reversing it.
To browse scientific papers a variety of topics visit our "Research Articles by Category" page. Please Join Our Newsletter for updates on new studies! Or, do a site search to find information by keyword. Visit the Participate in Research Studies to join the recruitment list for future studies. Thank you for your interest in plant-based nutrition.Introduction
This article is part of an ongoing series about using and working with Web Push and Mozilla’s Web Push service. This article is not meant to be a general guide, but instead offers suggestions and insight into best using the service. Some knowledge of Javascript, Python, or other technologies is presumed.
One of the challenges with Web Push implementation issues is trying to figure out what went wrong. Web Push has a large number of “moving parts”, systems and components that need to work together in order for your message to be successfully sent and received. While this article can’t address all the reasons that a given Push message might fail, I will try to provide tools and guidance for the more common problems.
Common Problems
Error reporting
The largest problem we see is from sites that do not pay attention to the return codes we provide. A previous post mentioned how you can manage subscriptions to reduce your cost of sending out messages that will never be delivered. It’s also important to pay attention to the error that is returned.
An error can return a body that looks like the following:
{ 'errno': 102,'message': 'Request did not validate invalid token', 'code': 404,'more_info': 'http://autopush.readthedocs.io/en/latest/http.html#error-codes', 'error': 'Not Found' }
The list of errno values are available in the Autopush documentation. (Autopush is the name of the open source server we run to handle receiving and forwarding push subscription updates.) The server tries to provide as much detail and help as possible, so if your messages aren’t getting through, the Autopush messages may help quite a bit.
VAPID concerns
Another potential problem is confusion around VAPID. VAPID is a developing specification for subscription-providing sites to “self identify”. This means that if there’s a significant problem, the push server operator has a way to contact whomever is sending the problematic messages. If you are seeing a large number of “401” status code response messages, chances are you have a problem with your VAPID authentication.
VAPID also allows a site to create “restricted subscriptions“. These subscriptions are locked down so that only the party that has the VAPID key can send them. This can be a bit confusing.
Very simply, VAPID is a block of data cryptographically signed with a key that has two parts: a Private key that you never share and is used to sign the VAPID token, and a Public key that is safe to share and is used to create the restricted subscription. Generally, you have a VAPID key that lasts for quite some time. It’s not a good idea to have it last forever, but it can certainly last for a year or so. I’ll talk about the implications of that in a bit.
When your app requests a push endpoint, you have the option of providing your VAPID Public key as the applicationServerKey. This will create a new subscription endpoint that is locked to that key. In order to send a successful subscription request, you must sign the VAPID block using the corresponding Private key, and include the Public key with your request. (How you include the public key changed between Draft 01 and Draft 02. You probably want to find a library that does the signing. You’ll also want to consult the documentation for the push service you choose to see which forms they accept. Most push platforms accept Draft 02.)
Note that the VAPID Public key is tied to the URL that you’ve requested. That means that you need to use that same key pair every time you want to send data to that URL. If you ever want to change the VAPID key, you’ll need to fetch a new endpoint and discard the old one. You decide how to do this, of course. Your app could simply fetch the new Public key from a known location, generate a new URL request and send the new registration information back to your server. This exercises much of the same code that you would want in place for a pushsubscriptionchange event.
So, for VAPID 401 errors, you will want to check:
Are you using the same key pair you used to acquire the restricted subscription? Have you properly signed your VAPID authorization key? Have you included all required VAPID headers with your request?
Data encryption
Finally, there’s the actual message encryption. This can be the trickiest to debug because the push server has no way of knowing if the encryption is correct when it accepts a message for delivery. In addition, a message is only delivered by the User Agent (UA) if the UA can successfully decrypt it. This prevents your app from waking up to false messages, which can drain battery life.
Again, the best |
construction costs for the structures, while also creating and owning the businesses that will fill them.
“It took a lot of time to research the properties in the area, but we had a feeling the area’s growth would continue,” Hild said.
Hild would not disclose the amount of investment for the three projects.
“These are all concepts that have taken years to create,” he said. “A lot has gone into these ventures … we really wanted to find concepts that would be received well by people that live in the area.”
The Hilds continue a steady stream of investors to place a bet on Manchester, where residential development is surging and outpacing Shockoe Bottom, Carytown and Church Hill in new-unit growth.
Fountainhead Properties is readying 1.2 acres at its New Manchester Flats property at 915 E. Fourth St. to accommodate 104 low-income apartments. The group also plans to construct a pair of 16-story towers on a quasi-island just west of the Mayo Bridge.
Robin Miller and Dan Gecker’s 2-acre, 78-unit Manchester Green will encompass a city block bounded by Bainbridge, Porter, 12th and 13th streets.
Guy Blundon and Mark Purcell are constructing a 10-story, 213-unit apartment building at 505 Porter St.
Retail and restaurants are finally starting to arrive as well.
Pig and Brew, a new venture co-owned by Lamont Hawkins, the owner and pit master of Inner City Blues Carolina BBQ, is set to open at 1313 Hull St.
Café Zata, which has one coffee shop in Forest Hill, is preparing to open its second location in the former Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting facility at 700 Bainbridge St.
“Manchester is here and now,” Hild said. “This is not idle talk, this is actually happening, and Manchester is leading the way.”MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Corrupt officials inside Mexico’s security forces have leaked U.S. anti-drugs intelligence directly to drug traffickers to help them escape raids, a senior U.S. law enforcement agent said.
Mexican federal police escort away members of a detained drug trafficking gang after a news conference in Mexico City October 19, 2008. REUTERS/Daniel Aguilar
A recent anti-corruption sweep showed the infiltration of Mexican police forces had reached alarming levels, with several high-ranking investigators and a presidential guardsman arrested for selling information to drug cartels.
The U.S. agent said the arrests were an encouraging sign that Mexico’s government is serious about stopping drug gangs from getting their hands on intelligence, some of which comes from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.
“There have been occurrences where we have shared information and then found that the information we shared was compromised, given, provided, leaked to the very targets that were being investigated,” the official told Reuters late on Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has made fighting drug cartels his top priority, deploying thousands of soldiers and federal police to take on heavily armed traffickers, dominated by the Sinaloa federation and the Gulf Cartel.
The U.S. agent praised Calderon for fighting the drug gangs head on but said some operations have been frustrated as cartels flush with cash can pay massive bribes for information or use violence to intimidate police.
“There is no infallible system when you are talking about a $65 billion enterprise. Money talks,” he said, referring to the estimated size of Mexico’s drug trade.
Among those arrested last year were Mexico’s liaison to Interpol as well as the country’s organized crime chief Noe Ramirez, who is accused of taking at least $450,000 to pass secrets to crime gangs.
Mexican investigators could not comment on leaks of DEA information to cartels, a spokesperson from the attorney general’s office said on Thursday, but one expert said it was a worrying sign.
“This could have consequences in bilateral cooperation if the United States becomes less willing to share information with Mexico. We are facing a crisis of confidence,” Jorge Chabat at Mexico’s CIDE think tank said.
U.S. AID IN DRUG FIGHT
The U.S. Congress approved $465 million in drug-fighting aid for Mexico and Central America in June, the first installment of a promised $1.4 billion package known as the Merida initiative to fund surveillance and detection.
“Merida recognizes that there is this level of corruption, so the point is to tighten up the institutional capabilities,” University of Miami drug expert Bruce Bagley said, adding that U.S. aid will help in vetting Mexican forces.
“They will have urinalysis kits and lie detector tests... they will also interdict government officials’ phones, check out their bank accounts, because there has to be enhanced monitoring of all of the highest levels,” Bagley said.
But even specially selected police units working directly with the DEA are not always immune to corruption.
“With the specialized units, in effect, we are operating on islands of integrity in a sea of questions, but there are breaches from time to time,” the U.S. official said.
Some 5,700 people died in drug-related killings in Mexico last year as drug gangs battled each other and government security forces, and the U.S. agent said violence has begun to spill over the border into the southern United States.
“I believe if we don’t turn around and do something we could see a tremendous degradation of security in our own country from these trafficking organizations,” he said.Lawyer: Manning wants to go to college, maybe run for public office
WASHINGTON — If he doesn’t spend the rest of his life in prison, Pfc. Bradley Manning wants go to college and perhaps run for public office, his lawyer, David E. Coombs, told supporters of the former Army intelligence analyst.
Manning is accused of illegally giving hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the website WikiLeaks. He faces 22 criminal charges and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.
“He’s confident things will turn out OK for him,” Coombs said Monday, standing in a wooden pulpit in the All Souls Church Unitarian, in front of two large posters printed with Manning’s photograph and the words “Free Bradley.”
Coombs described Manning, 24, as “very encouraged” by the way the pretrial hearings in his case are going. The trial is tentatively scheduled to start in March.
Coombs said he speaks on the phone with Manning every week, and described him as “one of the most intelligent people I have ever met.”
“He is a young man, obviously, and with this has limited experiences,” Coombs said.
Last week, Coombs asked the military judge in the case, Col. Denise Lind, to dismiss the charges against Manning, arguing that his nine-month solitary confinement in a Marine brig in Quantico, Va., was illegal punishment. The judge has not yet ruled on the motion.
Manning, through his lawyer, has indicated that he would be willing to plead guilty to a narrower set of charges that carry a maximum sentence of up to 16 years in prison.
Manning testified that he was stripped and forced to sleep naked for several nights while held in Quantico. Prosecutors said Manning’s treatment was consistent with procedures for a prisoner who is considered a suicide risk. Manning was later moved to a cell at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
Coombs said Manning’s treatment at Quantico was “criminal” and a “disgraceful moment” in U.S. history. He thanked Manning’s supporters for pressuring the government to move him to another prison.
“Your actions resulted in Brad being moved from Quantico to Fort Leavenworth,” Coombs said. “Make no mistake about that.”
Coombs said Manning has received 72,000 letters since his arrest.Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back Receives a Funny Animated Halloween Trailer
Tomas Franzese October 25, 2017 4:10:03 PM EST
Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back has gotten a gotten a Halloween trailer that pokes fun at another infamous mascot that likes to go fast.
Today, Black Forest Games and Accolade released a comical Halloween-inspired trailer for Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, which will revive everybody’s favorite 90’s series mascot, Bubsy the Bobcat. In addition to the opening animated sequence, we also see some new gameplay in the latter half of the trailer.
In the animated portion of the trailer, a kid dressed up as another quite infamous mascot from the 16-bit era shows up at Bubsy’s house. Bubsy is no stranger to 2D animation, though this trailer is much shorter than that TV pilot was. Give both a look if you haven’t yet, you’ll come out a changed person.
For those of you who somehow haven’t heard about Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, the 2D platformer is the revival of an infamous 90’s mascot named Bubsy the Bobcat, known for both his frustratingly difficult games and his quips. In total, the game will contain fourteen levels for players to mess around in as Bubsy attempts to get back his prized Golden Fleece after it was stolen by the evil Woolies. For any completionists here, the trophy list for Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back was also recently uncovered on Exophase.
You can check out the “Special Halloween Trailer” for the game below. Bubsy: The Woolies Strike back is currently set to release on PC and PS4 this Halloween, October 31.Emmanuel Emenike has scored nine goals for Nigeria.
Nigeria striker Emmanuel Emenike has announced his retirement from international football.
Emenike, 28, wrote on his Instagram account on Monday night that he was calling time on representing Nigeria.
"After five great years I am happy to announce that I have put full-stop to my national team career for the sake of national peace," the Al Ain forward said.
"It's a pleasure for me to have played for this great country. I never regretted it and I think it's the best time to end it."
Emenike was top scorer as Nigeria won the Africa Nations Cup in 2013, but he has not scored for the country since netting against Ethiopia during qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup.
It was reported in Nigeria on Monday that he was due to be axed from the squad by coach Sunday Oliseh, but the manager told ESPN FC there was no truth to the story.
He said: "I don't know where they got that information from, as my coaches and I had not even discussed the coming squad yet.
He said: "Our focus for now has been on the CHAN qualifiers against Burkina Faso. It is only after that is out of the way that we planned to decide on the squad for the World Cup qualifiers against Swaziland."
Emenike, who has scored nine times in 37 appearances for Nigeria, becomes the second player to retire from the national team this month, following in the footsteps of goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama.As developers flood Baltimore with apartments in response to what they see as an insatiable appetite for new residences, the numbers raise a question: Are there too many?
Just over 5,600 residential units, mostly apartments, were under construction in Baltimore and 1,800 more were approved as of April, according to the city's planning department. Another 1,400 units opened just last year, as major projects such as 10 Light St., ICON Residences at the Rotunda, The 501 near the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the first phase of Remington Row opened their doors.
Yet the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Baltimore lost 6,700 residents in the year ended July 2016, pushing the city's population to a 100-year low.
While developers say they aren't worried, some wonder whether Baltimore's apartment market may become overbuilt. Thousands of new apartments require thousands of tenants — math that seems like a stretch for a city that's seeing population decline, said Owen Rouse, a senior vice president at Manekin.
"I don't want to say it's an unreasonable number, but it's an awful lot," Rouse said.
The flood of new apartments already has had an impact on rents in and around downtown, according to MPF Research, the research unit of real estate data company RealPage.
Effective rents for new leases slipped 0.4 percent in 2016, said Greg Willett, RealPage's chief economist, in a video report on Baltimore's market earlier this year.
"Pricing power... tends to be weak in the urban core, which has gotten enough new supply throughout this cycle to dampen rent growth," Willett said.
SVN RealSite, a Baltimore real estate brokerage, expects rental rates to decline slightly and vacancy rates to rise, especially around downtown and the Inner Harbor, where many of the largest projects have been concentrated, said Tony Casalena, the firm's managing director.
Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun Builders work from scaffolding at the Anthem House construction project on Fort Avenue. Builders work from scaffolding at the Anthem House construction project on Fort Avenue. (Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun) (Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun)
"I guess the best way I'd describe it is it's maybe cooling down a little bit," he said. "A sensing of things steadying off somewhat."
Facing a glut of apartments, apartment managers typically compete for tenants with lower rents, concessions and other incentives.
Concessions such as reduced rent or a free month create an environment where competitors often feel they must follow suit, Rouse said. While good for renters, downward rent trends generally indicate a soft market.
"It's the whole cable company thing — you threaten to cancel and they throw you something to sweeten the deal," Rouse said.
William H. Cole IV, president of the Baltimore Development Corp., said he isn't worried about that happening because the projects being built in Baltimore are diverse, designed with different tenants in mind and at a variety of price points.
What's more, properties are springing up across the city, rather than being concentrated in one neighborhood.
"We were underserved in terms of diversity and I think we're just now catching up," Cole said. "I think I would be more concerned if it was one type of product, but we're seeing all types."
To name a few: There's 414 Light Street, a 392-unit luxury apartment building going up at the corner of Light and Conway streets. About 260 affordable and market-rate apartments are under construction as part of the first phase of Center\West, a 33-acre redevelopment in Poppleton. Roland Park Place is adding 60 apartments to its senior community north of Hampden.
Anthem House, the 292-unit luxury apartment building in Riverside, won't open to tenants until June, but in the three weeks since the leasing office opened, 50 people already have signed up, said Toby Bozzuto, CEO of the Bozzuto Group.
With an acre of green space on its roof, a pool, fitness center and apartments with high-end finishes, Anthem House boasts some of the highest rents in the city. Studios with 540 square feet of space start at $1,695 a month.
Bozzuto said he did not know which size units had been leased or demographics about incoming tenants, but said the faster than expected leasing rate is a good sign for Baltimore.
"It bodes well for our project, but also for the future," he said. "Hopefully it's an indicator of interest in living in Baltimore."
Bozzuto said he thinks hiring among major employers, such as Under Armour, the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, and a growing network of start-up companies will keep new tenants coming.
Three-quarters of the tenants at Bozzuto's Baltimore properties work in the city and about 40 percent of them relocated from out of state to live here, he said.
While developers say they're still filling space, they acknowledge they're starting to feel the pinch of a crowded real estate market.
ZOM Living recently began leasing for the 349-unit building it is erecting on South Charles Street in Otterbein. The Florida-based developer took into consideration Baltimore's market conditions when setting rents, budget expectations and the timeline for filling the property, called Banner Hill, said Andrew Cretal, a senior vice president for ZOM.
"We understand it's coming," he said. "We understand we have to lease up against a number of new projects."
After opening late last fall, The Vault, a 24-unit apartment building downtown, took longer to lease up than expected, said Greg Kostrikin, a vice president at Poverni Sheikh Group. He partially attributed the lag to opening during what is typically the slowest time of year for move-ins.
But that hasn't stopped the Baltimore developer from pursuing more apartment projects.
Most recently, Poverni Sheikh was selected by the Baltimore Development Corp. to redevelop five vacant, blighted buildings in the 400 block of North Howard Street.
The firm plans to convert the space into a mix of ground-floor retail and 39 market rate units, plus a handful of parking spaces.
In downtown Baltimore, apartment occupancy slid from its historic rate of about 94 percent to 91.3 percent in 2016, as several large buildings, including 10 Light Street and The 501, added hundreds of units to the area, according to Downtown Partnership's annual State of Downtown report.
Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership, said he expects occupancy to tick back up as those buildings stabilize.
At the same time, Fowler said it is impossible to predict future demand. While Millennials may age out of their urban obsession, Baby Boomers may seek to downsize into the city.Image: Elmedia
Hackers managed to compromise the website of a company that develops several popular apps for Apple computers, distributing malware-infected versions of those apps to hundreds of users.
Security researchers from antivirus firm ESET reported Friday that the free version of Elmedia Player distributed from Eltima Software's website contained a macOS information stealing trojan known as OSX/Proton. The same malware was distributed earlier this year through another trojanized version of a popular macOS application called HandBrake.
Eltima told me in an email that hackers also managed to trojanize one of the company's other applications, an internet download manager called Folx that also acts as a BitTorrent client.
The Proton malware is capable of stealing a lot of data from infected computers including history, cookies, bookmarks, and log-in data from browsers; cryptocurrency wallets; SSH authentication keys; macOS keychain data; Tunnelblick VPN configuration data; PGP encryption keys and data stored in 1Password, a password management application.
Read more: What Is a 'Supply Chain Attack?'
Elmedia Player has 1 million users as of August, according to Eltima. The company provides free and paid versions of its software programs and distributes them through its website and through the Mac App Store.
Only the installers for Elmedia Player and Folx downloaded by users from the company's website contained the Proton trojan, an Eltima spokeswoman told me. "The built-in automatic update mechanism [of the applications] seems to be unaffected."
The security breach happened Thursday and was discovered relatively fast by ESET who reported the incident to the software developer. The malicious installers were available on Eltima's website for around 24 hours and were downloaded by almost 1,000 users.
"Users who downloaded and executed the software on October 19 before 3:15 PM EDT, are likely compromised," the ESET researchers said.
On Friday morning, Eltima announced that both apps are now "safe to install and malware-free."
The attackers don't appear to have compromised the company's development infrastructure, as happened recently with the developer of a Windows application called CCleaner. Instead, the hackers just managed to hack into Eltima's website through a vulnerability in a JavaScript-based library called TinyMCE.
The malicious installers were not digitally signed with Eltima's Apple developer certificate, but with a different developer ID under the name Clifton Grimm. It's not clear if this certificate was obtained from Apple by using a fake identity or if it was stolen from another developer.
Gatekeeper, Apple's first line of defense against malware, allows signed binaries to execute without warning by default, Patrick Wardle, director of research at Synack and a macOS security expert, told me in a Twitter direct message. Because of this, most Mac malware is now signed with stolen or fraudulently obtained Apple developer IDs, with the latter being much more likely, he said.
"It appears Apple has a problem with ensuring only legitimate developer IDs are given out," Wardle said.
Apple revoked the misused Clifton Grimm certificate after being alerted by ESET and Eltima, but users who downloaded and executed the rogue Elmedia Player and Folx installers before this happened didn't get a Gatekeeper warning.
At installation, Proton displays a fake password authorization window in order to gain system administrator privileges. It's not unusual for legitimate applications to request such access, so users might easily be tricked into inputting their password.
There is some evidence that this new attack might have been perpetrated by the same attackers who compromised a legitimate download server for the HandBrake video converter application in May and distributed a malicious version of that program to macOS users.
In both cases, the trojanized installers infected computers with Proton and in both cases the malware's command-and-control servers used domain names similar to those of the compromised software. The difference is that the rogue HandBrake installer was not digitally signed, meaning that users would have had to override Gatekeeper manually in order to install it.
To determine if they've been infected users can search their systems for the presence of the following files or directories: /tmp/Updater.app/, /Library/LaunchAgents/com.Eltima.UpdaterAgent.plist, /Library/.rand/ and /Library/.rand/updateragent.app/. If any of them exist, Proton was installed, according to ESET.
"As with any compromise with an administrator account, a full OS reinstall is the only sure way to get rid of the malware," the ESET researchers said. "Victims should also assume that the secrets outlined in the previous section are compromised and take appropriate measures to invalidate them."
Software supply-chain attacks pose a very serious danger because they abuse the existing trust relationship between users and software developers. These attacks can happen in several ways and can be very hard to detect and prevent.
Attackers recently managed to distribute infected versions of CCleaner—a Windows system optimization tool—to over 2.2 million users after hacking into the program developer's infrastructure. Last year, attackers hacked into the website of popular open-source Transmission BitTorrent client on two separate occasions and distributed infected installers to macOS users.
In order to compromise Macs, attackers need a way to get malicious applications onto them, and hacking into a legitimate developer's website to surreptitiously trojanize a popular app is a great way to achieve this, Wardle said. We've seen attackers use this mechanism before, so it won't be surprising if they continue to rely on this attack vector, he said.
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Got a tip? You can contact this reporter at [email protected] and use this PGP key for encrypted email.By Patrick Temple-West
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For U.S. corporations the top federal income tax rate is 35 percent, but large, profitable companies on average paid only about a third of that in 2010, a report by the investigative arm of Congress said on Monday.
As corporate lobbyists seek to preserve business tax breaks and cut the corporate tax rate, the Government Accountability Office said big companies with earnings paid just 12.6 percent of their worldwide income in taxes in 2010.
The GAO report came at a time of tight government budgets and increased attention among lawmakers to corporate tax avoidance in Europe and the United States.
While U.S. companies often complain about the 35 percent top tax rate being among the world’s highest, “what they don’t like to admit is that hardly any of them pay anything close to it,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, in a statement.
The GAO report – which did not name specific companies – said that earlier studies had found U.S. companies paid 20 percent to 30 percent of their income in taxes.
But the GAO said public financial statements and new IRS data showed the tax rate for profitable corporations was even lower.
Levin released a report in May detailing corporate tax avoidance by Apple Inc. Last year, he scrutinized Microsoft Corp’slow tax bills.
Democratic President Barack Obama and some lawmakers have called for lowering the top 35 percent corporate tax rate.
In April, GAO published a report saying the annual cost of corporate tax breaks to the U.S. Treasury has more than doubled to $180 billion since 1987.
(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Steve Orlofsky)Was the Long Island Iced Tea invented during Prohibition in the US? Or was it invented by accident? Long Island Iced Tea: The fascinating story behind the invention of this sneaky cocktail
There's hardly any respectable pub or club that doesn't serve the extremely boozy Long Island Iced Tea, that devilish (or angelic?) drink that promises to get you drunk quicker. The classic cocktail with five different kinds of liquors, has its presence all over the world, with bartenders and mixologists routinely trying to 'improvise' on it and'reinvent' it. But there seems to be a consensus by some of the most influential drunkards of the world that the classic recipe is always and forever their favourite one.
However, did you ever think about how exactly was this liver-punishing concoction invented? And why on Earth did the person think of mixing so many different poisons in one drink? There are conflicting accounts of how the long island iced tea came to be. The cocktail was named so, because of its sneaky resemblance to the sober iced tea. All the five alcoholic drinks are mixed in quantities that makes the drink take on the hue of the iced tea. But where did the need to disguise the drink arise from? ALSO READ: 10 DIY cocktails for a boozy romantic Valentine s date night
Old Man Bishop
One of the oldest origin stories of the LIIT claims that the drink originated in the Prohibition era in the United States. In 1920s, when a misjudged constitutional Amendment imposed a nationwide ban on the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages, a man named Old Man Bishop conceived the drink and called it- wait for it- the 'Old Man Bishop'. Old Man threw in rum, vodka, whiskey, gin, tequila, and maple syrup, getting a mix that looked like iced tea, but in reality packed a solid boozy punch. Old Man's son Ransom Bishop then refined the drink and started selling it on a wider scale. ALSO READ: How to make mulled wine, spiked monk s coffee & Blue Blazer cocktails at homecityscape Putting the “Park” in Regent Park
The latest phase of the neighbourhood's revitalization officially opened on the first day of summer.
SHOW CAPTION ✉ Share on: 321517 Looking south along the main walkway. The aquatic centre is to the left. 20140623walkway https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623walkway-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623walkway.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623walkway.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623walkway/ 20140623walkway 0 0 321518 Peeking through the trees at the lawn. 20140623viewthroughtrees https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623viewthroughtrees-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623viewthroughtrees.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623viewthroughtrees.jpg 1000 855 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623viewthroughtrees/ 20140623viewthroughtrees 0 0 321519 20140623playground https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623playground-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623playground.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623playground.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623playground/ 20140623playground 0 0 321520 20140623slide https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623slide-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623slide.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623slide.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623slide/ 20140623slide 0 0 321521 We didn't see many kids parked on the playground —they were too busy testing the equipment. 20140623noparking https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623noparking-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623noparking.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623noparking.jpg 750 1000 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623noparking/ 20140623noparking 0 0 321522 The plots for the community gardens. 20140623communitygarden https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623communitygarden-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623communitygarden.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623communitygarden.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623communitygarden/ 20140623communitygarden 0 0 321523 The off-leash area. 20140623offleash https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623offleash-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623offleash.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623offleash.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623offleash/ 20140623offleash 0 0
321531 Banners for participating musicians. No beer was seen on the premises. 20140623performersigns https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623performersigns-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623performersigns.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623performersigns.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623performersigns/ 20140623performersigns 0 0 321525 Making music on the lawn. 20140623musician https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623musician-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623musician.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623musician.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623musician/ 20140623musician 0 0 321524 Bramwell Tovey conducting the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. 20140623tso https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623tso-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623tso.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623tso.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623tso/ 20140623tso 0 0 321526 The Optimists Alumni Drum & Bugle Corps prepare to start marching around the park. 20140623optimistpractice https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623optimistpractice-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623optimistpractice.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623optimistpractice.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623optimistpractice/ 20140623optimistpractice 0 0 321527 One of the dancers who roamed the grounds. 20140623multicoloured https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623multicoloured-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623multicoloured.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623multicoloured.jpg 750 1000 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623multicoloured/ 20140623multicoloured 0 0 321529 One of the dancers honouring the First Nations historical presence in the city. 20140623firstnations https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623firstnations-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623firstnations.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623firstnations.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623firstnations/ 20140623firstnations 0 0 321530 Some of opening day's youngest entertainers. 20140623youngdancers https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623youngdancers-100x100.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623youngdancers.jpg https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140623youngdancers.jpg 1000 750 https://torontoist.com/2014/06/putting-the-park-in-regent-park/slide/20140623youngdancers/ 20140623youngdancers 0 0
The first day of summer seemed an appropriate day to open the city’s newest major park. Sunny skies, comfortable temperatures, and curiosity drew hundreds of people to Regent Park Saturday afternoon to welcome the latest sign of the neighbourhood’s revitalization.
“This is the people’s park,” declared councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre–Rosedale) during the opening ceremony, referring to the input local residents offered during design consultations for the six-acre, $6.2-million grounds known simply as Regent Park. Bounded by Dundas, Oak, Sackville, and Sumach streets, the park adjoins the Regent Park Aquatic Centre opened in fall 2012. The site was given to the Parks, Forestry, and Recreation department by Toronto Community Housing.
The big hit of day one was the playground, on the north side, where kids eagerly tried out the new equipment. On the park’s west side, dog owners tested the enclosed off-leash area. Speakers and dancers made use of the paved plaza, while the Toronto Symphony Orchestra played next to the aquatic centre. Performance artists, marching bands, and still more dancers paraded around the perimeter of the grassy “Great Lawn” at the park’s core, a space ideal for taking an afternoon siesta, collecting one’s thoughts, or contemplating the neighbourhood’s evolution.
The park’s food amenities aren’t ready for prime time yet. The community gardens await planting, the bake oven sits behind fencing, and the greenhouse is still under construction. These elements will roll out over the next few months, as part of an effort by the Regent Park Food Partnership to bring residents together through participation in all aspects of food production and preparation. There are also plans for a farmers’ market.
Based on its debut, Regent Park shows promise as a street-level community gathering space. As towers rise around it, the large open space of the park will serve a vital function as a place to relax, meet neighbours, and join in cultural activities.
Photos by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.When I first heard about Black Sails — a swashbuckling drama that’s essentially a pirate version of Vikings — I was put off by the fact that it’s produced by Michael Bay. Nothing personal against the dude, but Explosions: The TV Show isn’t something I wanted to watch. Determined to keep an open mind for the sake of potential pirate awesomeness, I dove in, only to find that its first season was more or less what you’d expect: too heavy on explosions, too light on characterization. I stuck around for Season 2 anyway, which proved to be an excellent decision, because like The Leftovers, Black Sails had a dramatic leap in quality between its first and second seasons.
The Season 2 finale — which saw former enemies Captain Vane (who places balls before brain) and Captain Flint (the calculating one) |
Pool (already closed due to maintenance).
City Workers' Strike - Due to the City Workers' strike, all arenas are closed at this time <a href="https://t.co/PFRLjfqBu0">https://t.co/PFRLjfqBu0</a> —@CambridgeMinorH New rental requests will not be considered during the labour disruption.
The closures mean minor hockey teams, adult recreation leagues, figure skating and other on-ice sports are scrambling to find places to play.
The Hespeler Minor Hockey Association wrote on its website that it's doing everything it can to try to relocate playoff games to rinks not owned by the city.
"All practices will be cancelled on a day to day basis," the league said.
All games will be relocated "if possible, but there are also not guarantees of this happening at this time."
For the Cambridge Roadrunners Girls' Hockey Association, seven teams were unable to get in practices Thursday night.
The Cambridge Figure Skating Club has also said they are trying to find alternative ice for their programs if it's available and thanked people for their patience.Background Edit
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Enema of the State is mainly considered a pop punk album[33][34][35] and is even considered a skate punk album.[36] According to Mike Damante of the Daily Cougar, the album "embraces the pop side of pop-punk".[36] The songs on Enema of the State are fast-paced songs regarding "adolescent aimlessness, broken hearts and general confusion over the care and feeding of girls."[37] Summarizing the album's content, The New York Times called Enema of the State a sampling of "ecstatic, goofy numbers about teenage uselessness, with a smattering of tender introspection."[38] The songs are mainly autobiographical, or are inspired by stories from friends' experiences.[39] Enema of the State largely revolves around age and maturity—"more specifically, their lack of it, their attitude toward their lack of it, or their eventual wide-eyed exploration of it."[40] The band decided to emphasize arrangements, harmonies and melodic ideas rather than the fast-paced nature of Dude Ranch; the change was brought about by the band, rather than the label.[39] Barker hoped to give the songs varying tempos, something missing in the group's prior recordings. "I told Mark and Tom, 'It's going to be repetitive if all our songs have the same punk-rock beat all the time. Why don't we try some different tempos?'" DeLonge noted he was open to his proposals, and responded, "Dude, I just play guitar and write melodies. You own the beats. If you have an idea, that's what you're supposed to do." DeLonge later reflected on his desire for a more "pop" sound: Punk rock was becoming polished. NOFX [was] a punk band we grew up listening to, and they had a record called Punk in Drublic, and it was awesome. It was game-changing; it sounded good. We wanted to take it to the next level. [...] There had never been a pop-punk band that sounded like nursery rhymes on steroids, on the mainstream level at least. And that's what I used to have daydreams of. I used to think the radio could use that, could use a band that was really powerful and catchy and fast and youthful and angsty.[42]
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^ [1] a CD promo, distributed to radio stations, includes a press kit and an info sheet that reads "Enema of the State was recorded from January to March 1999 in the band's hometown of San Diego at [2] While one source states the group planned to begin work in October 1998,a CD promo, distributed to radio stations, includes a press kit and an info sheet that reads "was recorded from January to March 1999 in the band's hometown of San Diego at Signature Sound."i made a friend???
i was playing splatoon 2 today, and during one of the random turf war matches, it was only me and someone else (bad connection), against the other team of four.
i knew we were gonna lose cause it was 2 vs. 4, so i decided to just keep jumping non-threateningly to the other team.
most of them just shot me, but there was this one player named ‘mika!’, who was really nice to me! they had a tri-slosher, and i had the umbrella gun thing.
so the match ends, (we lose), and most of the people leave, but not me or mika
so we keep playing matches, and everytime we see each other we jump a lot super happily gshgdh
so like 10 battles after me and mika keep jumping around, mika switches her weapon to the ink brush
i didnt know what she was doing but she found me and did this!
i literally cried and i felt super loved by this stranger ok??? /////
shes super good at making hearts with the ink brush; then i switched to it too, and then we just kept filling the maps with hearts (mine were bad though, hers were super smooth)
i lost so many battles for that, but tbh i didnt care, i just felt rly happy???
splatoon is just.. a fucking good gameFor years we’ve seen licensed cups for movies included in a kid’s meal at your local McDonald’s but rarely have we seen goofy campaigns like that crossover into the video game world. Well, now we have. Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, we give you the Dark Souls III Wings Challenge! Not only can brave gamers win a PS4 but they could win the ultimate prize that includes a PS4 and the Dark Souls III Prestige Edition that includes a 40cm tall Lord of Cinder figurine. You just have to be the fastest Dark Souls III Wings Challenge eater in all of the UK. No big deal, right?
It looks like Bandai Namco and Sony UK have teamed up with a restaurant chain called MEATliquor (I mean really, whoever named this place deserves an award!) to create the Dark Souls Wings Challenge. Bringing a true sensory assault to your taste buds, the UK public will be challenged to eat twenty wings in the fastest time possible under extreme pressure.
From April 4th thru 29th any brave challenger can visit a MEATliquor restaurant to enter the Dark Souls Wings Challenge. Simply buy your wings and focus your mind on the eternal flame!
Those brave enough to take on the challenge will feel the heat, as a portion of the twenty wings are smothered in a quarter of a litre of chilli sauce; MEATliquor’s darkest chilli sauce specially created for this challenge. The chef preparing the wings for hardy challengers is required to wear protective gloves, a mask and goggles to protect from the intensity of heat, as the wings pack a punch.
Although full of flavour, the heat is so intense that participants are required to sign a waiver before competing in the contest and must too wear protective gloves throughout the challenge.
Anyone able to complete the challenge will be rewarded with an exclusive ‘I SURVIVED’ the Dark Souls Wings Challenge T-Shirt and every victorious completer will be included in the Hall of Souls leaderboard for each restaurant. We can only wonder if there will be a ‘YOU DIED’ participation ribbon for the losers.Editor’s note August 2016: Need some cycling inspiration this sunny Northwest weekend? We have just the thing—this favorite from a few summers back should have you happily wheeling about town in no time….
Traveling the world’s great bicycle cities, I fell in love with cycling. The ease, safety, convenience… (dreamy sigh).
But as my six-month love affair came to an end, I began to realize the reason for my infatuation: cities like those in Denmark and Holland simply make themselves lovable. They don’t just build cycle tracks; they inject fun, whimsy, compassion, and even romance into cycling.
Certainly, many Cascadians love their bikes, but even more of us would if we learned these lessons on cycling’s soft side from the world’s active transport capitals.
1. Human-powered is romantic.
I bike home from work with my boyfriend almost every day, and it’s one of the best parts of my day. We talk about what we see along the way or what smells are coming from the Hostess Cake Factory. When it’s sunny, we sometimes stop for a beer along the way. When it’s a crisp winter night, we stop and watch the ships pass under the Fremont Bridge.
When it’s raining, we talk about what kind of soup we want to make for dinner. Biking together through the elements bonds us in a way that would never happen if we were strapped into a car. Throughout my travels, I saw all kinds of romance on the cycle tracks—teenagers kissing at stoplights in Paris, older couples holding hands while pedaling in Amsterdam, and a post-wedding getaway bicycle in Copenhagen.
The average US worker now spends about 48 minutes commuting each day. Despite the billions of hours we collectively spend commuting, we don’t often talk about the way our transportation choices make us feel—physically or mentally.
Maybe we should.
2. You don’t have to be a “cyclist” to ride a bike.
Recreational sub-cultures have owned cycling in North America for a long time. That’s starting to change, and it’s an important cultural shift. “None of these people consider themselves cyclists,” Andreas Hammershøj from the Danish Cycling Embassy explained to me last June, as we stood on a sidewalk watching swarms of Copenhageners pedal across the Dronning Louises bridge, as 10,000-30,000 of them do daily.
“These are just people getting to work, school, or the grocery store,” Hammershøj said. It turns out there are Cascadians who, like Copenhageners, would like to get from A to B on their bikes but don’t ever want to ride a century. (They might not even care to know what a century ride is.)
That’s fine. You don’t have to identify with the recreational side of cycling to use a bike for transportation. Just ask Blake Trask, the Statewide Policy Director of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington. “I’m not much of a cyclist. I just ride my bike to work most days.”
3. Remember kickstands?
Henry Cutler, the Dutch-American owner of WorkCycles in Amsterdam, is convinced that urban cycling will explode once Americans get off high performance bikes and on to bikes that are upright, comfortable, and utilitarian.
“Americans ride bikes that are like race cars; Dutch bikes are like Honda Civics and mini-vans,” Cutler joked last July as I admired his fleet of practical bikes. They come outfitted with child seats, baskets, bells, chain guards, and front and rear lights powered by your pedaling. Oh, and kickstands: why don’t bikes have kickstands anymore?
Tom Fuculoro, author of the Seattle Bike Blog, got it right when he wrote recently that buying a bike ought to be more like buying a car. “Most people aren’t fascinated by the technical aspects of car engines; they’re sold by the sunroof or cup-holders.”
David Schmidt, owner of The Dutch Bike Shop in Seattle, reports that the useful bike trend is gaining steam. “Ninety percent of our clients haven’t ridden a bike since they were kids. They’re rediscovering cycling because it’s fun and simpler than driving. These aren’t the crusader commuters. They’re just people who want to start biking to the grocery store.”
4. Does your city have a bike culture?
North Americans all understand what “car culture” means, but it’s a term that increasingly comes with a negative connotation. Cars are now being called an “older generation technology.” Despite the billion-dollar marketing budgets of car companies, many millennials would rather not own a car.
Unlike car cultures, bicycle cultures are in demand. Many of the world’s most vibrant and thriving cities are going to great lengths to support their citizen cyclists because having a “bicycle culture” has suddenly become an asset and an important part of “attracting the types of workers that an innovation economy wants to attract.”
Brian Surratt, business development director at the City of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, recently spoke about the importance of developing a bike culture because, as he put it, “demographics is destiny. People no longer relocate for industry. Industry relocates for talent. Seattle wants to be recognized as a bike-friendly city because it simply helps attract good talent. The most successful cities—economically, culturally, and socially—must compete for intellectual capital and talent.”
5. More cyclists equals more compassionate roads.
Numerous studies document the relationship between an increase in the volume of cyclists and an increase in cyclist safety. The relationship between these two factors is sometimes remarkably linear.
Odense, Denmark, for example, embarked on an ambitious, multi-year cycling promotion campaign and saw cycling levels increase by 20 percent, while traffic accidents involving cyclists decreased by 20 percent. Why? People behind the wheel become more accustomed to seeing people on two wheels on the roads. Also, it’s often the same people: drivers and cyclists are the same folks at different times of the day, or at least drivers are more likely to have cyclists in the family. Driving “with your heart” becomes a much easier sell when citizens—like in Groningen, Holland—have friends and family members who commute by bike or on foot.
Lucky for us, cycling rates have increased dramatically in many Cascadian cities: bike commuting doubled in Seattle and tripled in Portland as a share of all commutes from 2000 to 2010, according to the League of American Bicyclists. This growth helps make roads a lot safer for everyone—even roads that lack cycling infrastructure.
6. We don’t have time to compensate.
Most people reading this article are sitting in front of a computer. More and more of us are “knowledge workers” who sit in front of computers for much of our careers. If you also choose to use passive forms of transportation such as driving or taking the bus, doctors recommend that you compensate for your sedentary lifestyle by “working out.”
Unfortunately, I don’t find much time in my schedule to compensate—and I’m not alone. The Center for Disease Control reports that 80 percent of Americans fail to meet federal guidelines for physical activity, despite the $19 billion we shell out for gym memberships each year.
Why can’t activity just be engineered into our daily lives so that we can stay healthy without the added chore of working out? Cycling has been the solution for me. I typically burn about 500 calories a day pedaling myself to the places I need to go, and going to the gym is never on the to-do list anymore. Having one less chore means I have more free time to spend with the people I love.
7. Focus on women.
Women are the “indicator species” of a city’s cycling ecosystem. Studies have shown that women are more risk-averse than men, so a profusion of women pedaling in a city shows that cycling feels safe there.
Women are also far more likely to participate in and benefit from cycling encouragement and training programs than men. A study done in London showed that 73 percent of London residents who participated in on-road cycling training programs were women. The same study interviewed female cyclists and found that “cycling helps bolster a self-confident, independent identity” for many women.
An Australian study shows that cycling outreach and support events have a greater positive impact on behavior change among women than among men. Why else is it important to get more women riding? American women make more major household decisions than men do and can hence influence the entire family to get out of the car and onto bikes. Some people also assert that more women cycling can contribute to a more visually pleasing urban environment.
None of these ideas is revolutionary. I’ve witnessed each across the world. What’s important is that sometimes it’s not just about infrastructure. Getting folks to fall in love with cycling will take more than signage and street paint (although those are important, too!).
What bicycling could really use is a good marketing department.
Like what you're reading? Check out more great cycling tips from Christine Grant here.
All photos are courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.
Christine M. Grant is a senior associate at Collaborative Efficiency. You can learn more about her travels and see more of her pictures of great cycling cities on Shift, her personal blog.The Progressive Conservative party is not only well ahead of Kathleen Wynne's Liberals in the polls, it also comfortably won the fundraising race this year, just as new restrictive rules on political donations come into force in Ontario.
Patrick Brown's PCs collected $9.7 million in donations so far in 2016, according to the latest figures compiled by CBC News, using data reported by Elections Ontario.
The same figures put the Ontario Liberal Party at $5.75 million raised in 2016, with the Ontario NDP a distant third at nearly $2.7 million in contributions.
The numbers may rise, as the parties are not required to disclose contributions to Elections Ontario until two weeks after the donation is made. The totals only include donations made to the central parties, not to their constituency associations.
Political donations reported in 2016 Party Amount Progressive Conservative Party $9,706,357 Ontario Liberal Party $5,753,674 Ontario NDP $2,667,742
It's a significant fundraising turnaround for the Ontario PCs, amounting to more than double what the party raised in 2015.
In 2015, the PCs raised $4.4 million, while the Liberals collected $9.2 million and the NDP $2.8 million.
Significant changes to the political donation rules come into force on Jan. 1 in Ontario. Corporations and unions will be banned from contributing to political parties. The maximum an individual can donate to a party in a non-election year will be reduced to $1,200 from the current limit of $9,975.
To compensate for the loss of corporate and union donations, the parties will receive an annual taxpayer-funded subsidy based on the number of votes they received in the 2014 election.
For 2017, that subsidy will amount to $2.71 per vote. Based on the 2014 election results, that works out to:
$5.1 million for the Liberals
$4.1 million for the PCs
$3.1 million for the NDP
The subsidy will drop slightly each year. For instance, in 2018 it will be $2.54 per vote.
The new year will also bring an end to Ontario's cash-for-access fundraisers, which drew outrage for ticket prices of up to $10,000 that give donors face-time with top politicians. Under the new law, MPPs, candidates and senior political staff are banned from attending fundraising events.
As of January 1, corporations and unions will be banned from contributing to all Ontario political parties. The parties will begin receiving an annual taxpayer-funded subsidy, proportional to the number of votes they received in the 2014 election. (CBC)
The push for donations in 2016 was aided by the four byelections held during the year. Under the existing rules, a single donor (whether a corporation, union or person) could have donated as much as $39,900 to each party in 2016.
The limits allowed a donor to contribute the maximum $9,975 for the 2016 annual period, as well as $9,975 during each of the three byelection campaign periods: Whitby-Oshawa in February, Scarborough-Rouge River in September, plus the two byelections held on the same day in November in Niagara West-Glanbrook and Ottawa-Vanier.Roughly 20,000 to 25,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers will combat the Islamic State group in Mosul, Iraq. AP
The U.S. military headquarters overseeing the ongoing war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria announced Thursday the rough size and timing of a massive spring offensive against the extremist network focusing around the key town of Mosul.
A senior official with U.S. Central Command said Thursday a force of roughly 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqis, retrained by the U.S.-led coalition, will ultimately lay siege to Mosul, likely in April or May. The strategic city is considered the capital of the Sunni provinces of Iraq, much of which came under Islamic State control during their summer offensive from Syria last year.
The military estimates the Islamic State group currently has about 1,000-2,000 fighters in Mosul.
The offensive force will comprise five attack brigades of Iraqi troops, three reserve brigades, three brigades of Kurdish fighters, and a few police brigades and special counterterrorism commandos, the official said, speaking by phone with a group of reporters on the condition of anonymity.
The announcement was an unusual and perhaps unprecedented move. U.S. military spokesman and officials rarely comment on future operations, citing the importance of maintaining secrecy and the security of American and allied troops.
When asked why he chose to reveal these details, the official offered: “Just to describe the level of detail that the Iraqi security forces are doing and the level of commitment that they have to this, and the significance of the upcoming operation.”
“They are absolutely as committed to this,” he added. “There are a lot of pieces that have to come together and we have to make sure the conditions are right. This is their plan. They have bought into it, they are moving forward as if they will execute in the time frame I just described.”
It remains unclear whether the U.S. or any foreign nation will contribute ground forces to the operation. When asked, the official said the coalition has “not closed the door” on the Iraqi request that the U.S. contribute Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or JTACS – the elite commandos trained in guiding in air strikes to ground targets.
The official provided a fairly optimistic appraisal of combat operations against the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL, ISIS or the derogatory Arabic acronym “Daish.”
“In the degradation that we have applied to ISIL in total, where we thought we would be today, it’s almost double in seven to eight months what they have lost compared to 14 years in Iraq and Afghanistan for U.S. in total,” he said. “There is no organization in the world that can suffer those kinds of casualties and not have a tremendous impact on their ability to achieve their long-term aims.”
Extremists now face an offensive on three fronts, he said: The U.S.-led air campaign, the Iraqi army, and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. It remains unclear to what extent the U.S. operates with the Syrian miltiary, operating under a regime President Barack Obama has said is no longer legitimate.
The Islamic State group is now having to make zero-sum decisions on where to deploy its forces, he said, particularly following the devastating air campaign to protect the town of Kobani on the Turkish border from falling into extremist hands.
“He’s in the land of ‘ors’ versus ‘ands’ now,” the official said of the enemy forces.
The official confirmed reports this morning that the U.S. had finalized a deal with Turkey to create one of the training camps for to-be-determined moderate elements of the Syrian opposition ultimately to fight the Islamic State group on their native soil.
He also confirmed reports that Iran has dispatched ground forces to Iraq, though declined to offer any further details.
“We know that there’s an Iranian presence in Iraq,” he said. “It’s largely advisers, to the knowledge that I have.”
They are not working with the Iraqi army “in a condoned way,” he said.By Niall McCusker
On the back of a vital mid-week win, the Timbers rewarded the Urruti/Fernandez duo who had contributed very effectively to that result with another start. Despite only 3 days recovery time, the two, who had been more than adequately rested over the course of the season, put in another good performance.
The Timbers attack started quite well, but were restricted to a few efforts from distance. As the first half wore on they started to find a lot of room on the right side of Colorado’s defense, the goal looked to be coming and it was Fernandez arriving from deep who struck first, with his partner Urruti this time turning provider.
Colorado were given plenty of possession in the second half, this looked a viable tactic for the visitors, as the Rapids main avenue of attack was rather unconventional – passing the ball straight out of bounds.
They did not look dangerous at all and the second half was a pretty tepid affair up until the last ten minutes, when the home side pushed their 6’7″ Swedish center back Axel Sjoberg up front to see if their was any pillaging he could indulge in.
“If you don’t put them away Colorado hangs in there”
Thus spake the prescient mind of Marcelo Balboa about 15 seconds before the Rapids equalized. While not quite as profligate as last week the Timbers did have a few good chances to extend their lead instead of relying on Jewsbury’s late heroics. In truth they should have won both the last two games much more easily – but if that is worst criticism that can be leveled they will gladly take it.
Here are the individual ratings:
Adam Larsen Kwarasey 6.5: He did well to safely hold a downward header from Sjoberg near the end, but had no chance for the excellently struck goal shortly afterwards. Up until that time he had yet another comfortable outing with not much work to do.
Alvas Powell 6.5: Normally a more attacking player, the Jamaican sat back a lot more than usual in the this game and had an easy enough time securing his wing. If the coaches had a word with him before the game about conserving energy, given the schedule and altitude, they were wisely heeded. He did have one good burst out of defense with 20 minutes to go, linking with Fernandez who set Urruti up for a shot.
Nat Borchers 6.5: Colorado were so poor in their attack that he really didn’t have much to do in this game until near the end, when Sjoberg’s arrival as an auxiliary forward caused a few uneasy moments.
Liam Ridgewell 7: Sanchez looked lively in brief moments early on, Ridgewell pulled out wide left to close him down when Villafana was getting forward. Much like a good old fashioned London ‘bobby’ on his beat, Ridgewell is starting to make a habit of being in the right place at the right time. Colorado’s best move of the game in the 36th minute ended in an excellent cross – ‘not down my manor you slag’, he may or may not have been saying as he cleared it.
Jorge Villafana 7: The left back made some nice runs in the attack and with switching passes now arriving in a more timely fashion, the runners do not have to break stride and predictably pass the ball back up the line as they did earlier in the season. Perhaps slightly fortunate not be called for a penalty for hanging onto an attackers arm as a ball dropped at the far post, but he has been out-jumped in that position too many times, so it was good to see him win out by whatever means it took.
He could have been a little sharper on some countering opportunities near end, like a few of his colleagues, but overall a decent showing.
George Fochive 7: In his first start since the disastrous Orlando home game, in which he may have unfairly paid the price for some shortcomings in team tactics, the youngster put in a solid shift. Colorado’s Irish DP Kevin Doyle was playing quite deep, looking for shooting chances, but found no space between Portland’s defensive and midfield lines in which to work.
Even before his goal LaBrocca had been sneaking forward and looking for shooting chances all game – Fochive and Jewsbury could have been a little more proactive in looking out for that.
Jack Jewsbury 8: A little too conservative, a little too slow in setting the tempo and not enough runs to support the attack. These were among the reasons trotted out to replace Jewsbury with a returning Will Johnson as the Timbers sought a spark. Yet these were the very reasons why Jewsbury was effective in this game – frenetic pace and wasted ‘hustle’ are the last things needed when playing in Colorado.
Veteran energy conservation is exactly why he had the legs to break forward in the 94th minute and net the winning goal. He will have been relieved to get it as he had let LaBrocca stroll right past him a minute earlier to score his equalizer.
Dairon Asprilla 6.5: After an excellent game in midweek Asprilla did not bring as much to the table on the attacking side on this occasion. He had a great chance to hit the target from a close range volley when he got on the end of a Nagbe flick, but sliced it badly. In the last two games his runs have been effective in stretching defenses and he did get some good defensive work done in the second half. His tracking back has prevented teams from targeting Powell – which Toronto and Houston had both done to good effect in recent losses.
Gaston Fernandez 8: Two starts for “la gata” – two wins for Portland. Who needs Diego Valeri? Joking aside, it took an ankle injury to his returning compatriot to see Fernandez finally start in the 13th and 14th games of the season. Unfortunate circumstances often come with a beneficial side-effect and signs of a rapprochement between Porter and Fernandez can only be good for the team.
They will need to be judicious about the opponent and the tactics employed, but in the right circumstances Fernandez will put points on the board.
Just like Jewsbury his slower playing tempo attracts criticism from those who favor ‘hustle’, but letting the ball do the work is the way to go in challenging conditions. The Argentine dropped deep into midfield to start moves and then showed up at the edge of the box late to reconnect with the play – exactly the sort of player the Timbers defense often struggles against. Urruti dropped off too and the Timbers enjoyed some extra numbers in the middle as well as pulling the Colorado midfield and defense out of shape.
It was simple stuff, but enough to create the space for his goal, which he finished with a confidence belying a man who had been allowed to languish on the bench for so long.
Darlington Nagbe 7: It might not be sustainable in the long term to have a notoriously right-footed player on the left wing, but Nagbe had a good first half. As the forwards dropped deep overloading Colorado’s right side they looked for chances to spring runners on the left. Nagbe cut inside on several occasions, but even on his favored right foot could not muster enough venom in his shots, though he did flick one blocked effort on to Asprilla very nicely.
Nagbe was on the wrong end of a naughty two-footed tackle from James Riley 3 seconds into the second half – Riley did well to beat a certain Vincent Jones’ record of 5 seconds for a caution from a kick-off, though 25 years later the card color is normally red.
Maxi Urruti 7.5: He took up were he left off on Wednesday night: showing well, simple, one-touch play for easy linking with his midfielders. He seems to be relishing the chance to play with his more experienced compatriot and this time he provided the assist and the senior partner the finish.
He picked off a back pass on 55 minutes and should have found Nagbe charging through the middle – Portland’s early season counter-attacking form seems to have deserted them at the moment. But having an effective, team-wide, primary attacking strategy for the first time this season more than compensates for that.
Substitutes:
Rodney Wallace (on in 57′) 6.5: A good early substitute from Porter, Wallace worked hard and laid out for a crucial block from Cronin with five minutes left as the Rapids finally served a good ball into the box. He had a chance to score on the counter but took a touch when he normally hits those first time. If rediscovers his attacking mojo he will be a good late game substitute as he tries to find his way back into the starting line-up.
Fanendo Adi 5.5 (on in 72′) 5.5: As Colorado threw caution to the wind in the last ten minutes Adi did not offer enough in the way of an outlet. He did turn a defender well two minutes into injury time as Colorado sought a winner, he forced the foul but got back to his feet as the referee correctly allowed advantage (despite Porter’s colorful protestations) – sadly for him he could only find the side-netting. The DP will have to be content to come off the bench as the attack is looking better without him at the moment.
Ishmael Yartey (on in 88′): Not on long enough for a rating, but did a couple of good things as Portland pushed to regain the lead. He played an excellent ball up the left for Wallace and then a minute later was on hand to poke the ball across for Jewsbury’s late winner. He likely had a lot more fun out there than he anticipated when he came in as a late-game, time-wasting change.Every so often, you read a novel that knocks it out of the park. And I’m not talking about the obvious classics, or the much-hyped new releases that also deliver on what they promise. I’m talking about the ones that sneak up on you. Arcadia is one of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long while—more than that, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a year already burgeoning with good reads. Iain Pears takes what could have been a good, converging story of multiple characters and times
Every so often, you read a novel that knocks it out of the park. And I’m not talking about the obvious classics, or the much-hyped new releases that also deliver on what they promise. I’m talking about the ones that sneak up on you. Arcadia is one of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long while—more than that, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a year already burgeoning with good reads. Iain Pears takes what could have been a good, converging story of multiple characters and times and turns it into a transcendent love letter to literature and storytelling itself.It all starts … actually, that doesn’t really work for recapping the plot of a book about time travel. Arcadia’s universe is very much a block-time one, wherein, as Angela explains, all moments are happening simultaneously: time is simply a limiting illusion we humans have to put up with. Pears keeps most of the technical details around how Angela’s machinery works vague, but I think that’s for the best. But here are the settings: 1960s Oxford, the late 22nd century, and Anterwold (the temporal location of which I best not divulged for fear of spoilers). The inciting force, if you will, takes place in the second of these settings: Angela Meerson has invented a machine her boss believes will let them access (and exploit) parallel universes, but she believes it “merely” enables time travel within our universe. She proves this, at great personal cost, and turns herself into a fugitive in the process. Hiding out in the twentieth century, she continues tinkering with the machine, creating Anterwold in the process from the notes of her temporally native friend, Henry Lytten. There are, of course, complications.Arcadia possesses a certain level of self-deprecation, or at least, of insouciance towards to the sacredness of a text. It is filled with allusion and intertextual shenanigans. Take Rosalind, for instance, the fifteen-year-old girl who feeds Henry’s cat and subsequently stumbles into Anterwold, setting into motion a series of events that have profound repercussions for the universe as a whole. Pears goes beyond merely lampshading the allusion to As You Like It in Rosalind’s name by making the parallels much more explicit. There are all the Shakespeare standbys of cross-dressing and mistaken identity, complete with Rosalind disguising herself as “Ganimed” and hanging out in a forest with Aliena until she falls in love with an exiled nobleman. Done so deliberately, this could still be seen as derivative—if it weren’t for the fact that Anterwold is itself a construct, a fake reality Angela’s machine has generated, in which these patterns of plot are destined to play out.It’s this essential paradox, the idea that Anterwold is both an imagined and real place at the same time, that blows my mind. In some ways Pears draws on modern ideas of procedurally generated universes now becoming more popular in games: Anterwold comes from a set of rules Henry has dreamed up in his attempt to create a “better” fantasy society. It’s Tolkien without the dragons; Lewis without the talking animals. The inhabitants and the way they act are supposed to feel somewhat artificial, because aside from the “major” characters Henry sketched himself, they literally are stock characters. Yet at the same time, Rosalind’s interference means that Anterwold has also become “real” in the sense that it is connected to the 1960s timeline in some way. It is the 1960s’ past or future. So we have this literary creation now reified, with people who were once creations of another person’s mind. It is all very meta.Meanwhile, in the future, there are those who would like to track down Angela and the data she took with her. Pears’ 22nd century is a terrifying place where “science” has been co-opted into state-sponsored scientism. The population is kept happy with mood-altering drugs and cognitvely-boosting implants; they live to work and produce and consume. Anyone who wants to think for themselves or question this status quo is a “renegade” and either arrested or, if they are lucky, barely tolerated in one of the several Retreats dotted throughout the world. Angela, born into this society and fortunately among the elite herself—albeit with a strong streak of individualism—admits she only began questioning it after experience the comparatively liberal, if technologically primitive, 1930s through 1960s.My favourite part of Arcadia’s incredibly complex, interwoven strands of narratives have to be Rosalind’s interactions with Anterwold’s inhabitants. She is a fierce, intelligent, uncompromising young woman—in short, every bit the heroine of her namesake, transported into the 1960s and born to parents who just |
Goodwill both pulled up at the same time. By then, Car 5, Car 6, Patrol 3, and Salvage 3 had already arrived. Ruby stepped out of the ambulance on air as she ran over to Engine 202 to help pull a second hand line off the rig with 2 other Goodwill firefighters. By now, the first hand line's crew had entered the building from the side as another firefighter used Engine 202's deck gun to partially knock down the raging inferno in the front.
As Ruby and the 2 Goodwill firefighters, both of them also on air, reached the building, they got low and crawled through the front, spraying inside to help cool down the walls as a unit from another company arrived. Ruby thought to herself, "This should be a quick knockdown. This shouldn't take more than half an hour to knock down completely."Starbucks and Spotify have just announced a huge, multi-year deal that will make the subscription service a central element of Starbucks' in-store music experience. It'll also let customers earn free drinks if they subscribe to Spotify Premium.
All told, the agreement will link 7,000 Starbucks locations in the United States with Spotify's 60 million users to create what the new partners call "a first-of-its-kind music ecosystem." Starbucks employees (or "partners" as the company calls them) will all receive complimentary access to Spotify Premium and be able to influence the in-store playlist at Starbucks locations. They'll do this "using tools provided by Spotify," though the press release doesn't get more specific than that. Those playlists will then be made available to all Spotify users through a dedicated Starbucks section of the app.
We're pumped to be @Starbucks music partner—taking your coffee breaks to a whole new level! ☕ http://t.co/o9vRl1MMVE pic.twitter.com/ekSZpo883V — Spotify USA (@SpotifyUSA) May 18, 2015
Clearly Starbucks is getting some special treatment (and big exposure) here, but so is Spotify. For the first time ever, Starbucks is opening up its loyalty program to a third-party service. Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to earn "Stars as Currency," though the specifics on this aren't yet clear. How many months will you have to pay for Spotify before you're rewarded with a free frappucino or latte? We don't yet know. Starbucks will also promote Spotify Premium via marketing materials in its stores, which should help the company as it competes against the likes of Tidal, Apple, Google, and others.
The Spotify / Starbucks partnership will be rolled out in phases starting this fall in the US before expanding to Canada and the United Kingdom. Earlier this year, Starbucks announced that it would stop selling CDs in its stores. "Music will remain a key component of our coffeehouse and retail experience, however we will continue to evolve the format of our music offerings to ensure we're offering relevant options for our customers," the company told Billboard. Spotify just became a huge part of that strategy.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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Perhaps someone should enlighten Chris Zylka about Johnny Depp‘s “Winona” tattoo.
On Thursday, Paris Hilton revealed her boyfriend of several months permanently etched her name on his forearm, using lettering inspired by the House of Mickey Mouse.
“Such a lucky girl!” Hilton gushed on Instagram. “My love surprised me & got my name tattooed in Disney font. Cause I’m his most magical place on Earth & he finally found his fairy tale princess. #BoyfriendGoals #ParisForever.”
Hilton, 36, later praised the 32-year-old “Leftovers” actor with a heartfelt post celebrating their anniversary — seemingly not knowing the meaning of the word, which honors the date on which an event took place in a previous year.
“Happy Anniversary my love! Thank you for making me feel like a Disney Princess every single day,” Hilton wrote Friday. “You are my knight in shining armor & I have never felt so safe & secure. You have changed my life in so many ways & shown me what true love really is. You are my best friend, my other half & made me see that fairy tales exist & dreams really do come true.”
Linked since February, Hilton is so fond of her prince charming she’s decided to cut her summer residency in Ibiza short to spend more time with Zylka.
“Now that I am in a serious relationship and my boyfriend has film projects, I can’t do the residency for the full five months,” Hilton told the Daily Summer in May.
The heiress split from millionaire Thomas Gross last April after a year of dating.Updated estimates on the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population were published here on Nov. 27, 2018.
Most of the United States’ 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants live in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in New York, Los Angeles and Houston, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on government data.
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The analysis shows that the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population is highly concentrated, more so than the U.S. population overall. In 2014, the 20 metro areas with most unauthorized immigrants were home to 6.8 million of them, or 61% of the estimated nationwide total. By contrast, only 36% of the total U.S. population lived in those metro areas.
But the analysis also shows that unauthorized immigrants tend to live where other immigrants live. Among lawful immigrants – including naturalized citizens and noncitizens – 65% lived in those top metros.
By far the biggest unauthorized immigrant populations were in the New York and Los Angeles metro areas (1.2 million and 1 million, respectively). No other metro area approached a million. Among the top 20 areas, the smallest unauthorized immigrant populations included Orlando (110,000) and Austin (100,000).
Five of the 20 metros with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations are in California: Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose. Three – Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin – are in Texas.
Some of these areas could be affected by the Trump administration’s promise to take action against localities that do not cooperate with federal officials in identifying unauthorized immigrants. The president’s executive order promises to cut federal funds to these “sanctuary jurisdictions.” Mayors in several big cities have said they will not comply with the order.
The top 20 metropolitan areas for unauthorized immigrants have been remarkably consistent over the past decade, according to the Center’s analysis. Nineteen of the 20 top metropolitan destinations for unauthorized immigrants in 2014 ranked among the top 20 each year over the previous decade.
The Census Bureau dataset used for this analysis does not separate cities from the larger metro areas that contain them in all cases. But such a distinction is possible for 11 of the top 20 metro areas. Within those areas, the cities with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations include New York City, with an estimated 525,000 unauthorized immigrants; Los Angeles, with an estimated 375,000; and Chicago, with an estimated 140,000. Other cities with available data are Miami (55,000), Denver (55,000), Philadelphia (50,000), Boston (35,000), San Francisco (35,000), Washington, D.C., (25,000) and Seattle (20,000).
Among the top 20 metro areas, only one city for which data were available – Phoenix – was home to a majority of the unauthorized immigrants in that metropolitan area, with about 140,000 out of a total 250,000. In the others, most of the unauthorized immigrants living in the metro area lived outside the borders of the largest city.
The Center’s analysis relies on augmented data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, using the same residual method as its previous reports on unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrants include people who either crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas.
Because these estimates are from a sample, they have margins of error, so some apparent differences in unauthorized immigrant populations between metros or cities may not actually be significantly different. In 150 of the 155 metro areas analyzed, individual metro areas do not differ in rank from those immediately below them. The metro areas that do differ in rank from those immediately below them are New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington and San Francisco.
Nationally, unauthorized immigrants made up 3.5% of the total population in 2014. The Philadelphia metro area is the only one of the top 20 metropolitan areas for unauthorized immigrants that had a lower share, the Boston metro area had a roughly equal share and the rest had a higher share than that, including 8.7% in the Houston metro and 8% in the Las Vegas metro.
Unauthorized immigrants account for about one-in-four foreign-born U.S. residents. They make up a somewhat higher share of immigrants in the Houston (37%), Dallas (37%), Atlanta (33%), Phoenix (37%), Las Vegas (35%), Denver (37%) and Austin (34%) metro areas. They make up a somewhat lower share of all immigrants in the New York (19%), Miami (18%), San Francisco (17%) and San Jose (17%) metro areas.
Note: A complete table based on data for the 155 metropolitan areas in the dataset that had foreign-born populations of at least 20,000 people – enough to provide a reliable estimate – can be found here and in this Excel sheet. The Center’s methodology for estimating unauthorized immigrant populations can be found here.
For an interactive graphic showing unauthorized immigrant population estimates and trends for the U.S., states and countries of birth, click here.
Related posts:
5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.
As Mexican share declined, U.S. unauthorized immigrant population fell in 2015 below recession level
Topics: Unauthorized Immigration, Immigration Trends, Population Geography, Global Migration and Demography, Population Trends, Migration, ImmigrationThe two most American cars aren't, well, American, according to a new ranking by our friends at Cars.com. For the third straight year, Toyota Camry, a product of Japan's largest automaker, is the "most American car," as determined by Cars.com's formula. Honda Accord, the flagship of Japan's second largest automaker, is second.
The highest car on Cars.com annual ranking from a Detroit Big 3 maker is General Motors' Chevrolet Malibu.
Cars.com's annual American-Made Index ranks the most-American vehicles based on percentage of their parts that are made domestically, where they are assembled and how many are sold to U.S. buyers.
Both Camry and Accord are made with 80% of their parts coming from the USA. And most are assembled in the U.S. Camrys are made in Georgetown, Ky., and Lafayette, Ind.
The Ford Explorer comes to the list, reborn as a crossover, with a higher percentage of domestic parts, 85%, than a Camry or Accord and is made in a Chicago factory. But it doesn't sell in as great a numbers as they, meaning also that it probably results in fewer American factory jobs.
"In today's global economy, there's not an easy way to determine just how American a car is," said Patrick Olsen, Cars.com editor in chief. "Most cars built in the U.S., for example, are assembled using at least some parts that come from somewhere else. Additionally, many U.S. automakers assemble vehicles in Canada and Mexico, while foreign automakers have opened plants on U.S. soil. Our index is another resource that car buyers can use to help guide their purchase decision."
Besides Camry, Toyota also has the Tundra (No. 9) and the Sienna (No. 6) on the list. GM also has three vehicles on the list -- the first time since 2009. In addition to Malibu, they are Chevy Traverse (No. 8) and the GMC Acadia (No. 10). Honda held two spots in the top 10, while Ford and Chrysler each held one.
"Despite the disaster in Japan, and General Motors usurping Toyota as the world's largest automaker, we're not surprised to see the Camry in the No. 1 position again," said Olsen. "The Camry remains an incredibly popular vehicle, and higher total sales require a higher number of U.S. factory workers and a larger number of U.S. suppliers – all of which contribute to Toyota's ranking."
Here's the list of the top 2011 model-year vehicles on Cars.com's list, and their percentage of domestic parts:×
Kevin Feige Reveals When To Expect Avengers: Infinity War Previews
The Marvel Cinematic Universe will have its pinnacle moment when Avengers: Infinity War rolls around in May of 2018. Less than a year from the film's release, very little information regarding the movie has been released by Marvel Studios.
This is because there are still three films standing between Marvel fans and the next major ensemble flick coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther. Speaking to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, ComicBook.com learned the events of these three films will influence the third Avengers movie "very heavily."
"Very heavily," Feige said. "Very heavily, as Iron Man and Captain America influenced the first Avengers. More so than the movies leading into Age of Ultron, even. They really build up to that." UP NEXT: Homecoming Director Teases Spider-Man's Avengers 3 Role
This is likely part of the reason why fans have not learned much about the film which is 10-months away aside from some concept art and a massive cast list. However, that will likely be changing in the fall of 2017. Asked when the Avengers: Infinity War promotion train would leave the station, including the first official trailer popping up, Feige says Marvel Studios has plans to unveil some new looks at culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the very near future. "It's a good question," Feige said. "I'm not sure. I think it would be late summer, early, mid fall? Ragnarok, probably."
Thor: Ragnarok is set for release on November 3, 2017. By then, we will certainly have a new Black Panther trailer to be attached to the film but apparently also something for Avengers: Infinity War. The contents, however, will likely be quite vague as the teaser trailer won't look to spoil any events of the third Thor film or Black Panther movie which follows in February. At least, we can confirm Ragnarok is the latest Marvel Studios would be dropping the first look at the film. Both of Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, however will be heavily featured at San Diego Comic Con. "We just put up some street signs around San Diego to give you a pretty good clue as what we're going to be doing there," Feige said, in reference to the Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther banners spotted outside of the San Diego Convention Center.
As for Spider-Man at San Diego Comic Con, "maybe next year," says Homecoming executive producer Amy Pascal. Feige expects work on the Spider-Man sequel to begin in about a month.
With both Disney's D23 Expo and San Diego Comic Con playing host to Marvel Studios and thousands of avid fans, the likelihood of exclusive footage for the Avengers film (which is wrapping production in the next couple of weeks) being unveiled to the dedicated crowds is high.
MORE SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING: Peter Parker Confirmed To Have Appeared In Iron Man 2 / Jon Watts Involved With Avengers: Infinity War / Uncle Ben Never Considered For Homecoming / Homecoming Director Likely To Return For SequelPeter Guber has written a masterful additional to the storytelling library shelf with his book, Tell To Win. In the course of showing you how to research, use, prepare, share, borrow, set, mine, and kill with a story, Guber tells a hundred wonderful stories himself, about his career in the movie business, and about many other celebrities along the way. My only complaint is that he doesn’t tell you how to craft a story beyond the familiar three-part opening challenge – struggle – resolution that is the stuff of hundreds of similar books on the scene. Maybe he’s saving that for his next book. But there’s so much good stuff in this volume that you should pick up Tell To Win without delay and devour it because great stories make great speeches and this book will be enormously useful for anyone interested in communicating better as a speaker, writer, or business person.
Beyond beginning, middle, and end, what are Guber’s insights? Here are some of his takeaways:
1. Beware the power of the backstory. Guber relates a number of stories where paying attention to the client’s or customer’s backstory won the deal – and ignoring backstory lost it. Guber himself tried and failed to steal Larry King away from CNN a number of years ago. Ted Turner kept Larry at CNN with 5 words, “Just tell me, ‘Good bye’.” That worked because of Larry’s issues about loyalty over his struggles with his father. Turner knew what button to push – the power of the backstory.
2. Who’s your audience? With Guber’s stories, it becomes clear that he does his homework. You’re never ready to tell a story until you know your audience better than it knows itself. What does that audience fear? Long for? Dream about? Loathe? You’ve got to do the research. You’re simply not ready for prime time otherwise.
3. Who’s the hero of your story? Who are you going to put in the role of hero? A good storyteller knows that you have several options. You can put yourself in the role of hero, and rely on the empathy of the audience to make the transference. Or you can cast a figure from history, or a fictional character as hero. Most powerful, often, is to put the audience in the role. That way, you make it easy for your listeners to take over the story and make it their own.
4. Mine everywhere for sources of story. As someone with a long history in the movie business, Guber knows that stories come from just about everywhere – personal experience, history, myth, the classics, the news – wherever human intent and effort are involved. Don’t limit yourself. Be prepared to find stories everywhere.
5. When you’re telling the story, get into the right frame of mind. Storytellers have to be fully present, feeling the emotions of their stories, so that the magical transference of emotion to the audience will happen when it’s supposed to – and not when it isn’t. You don’t want unintended humor – you want the audience to respond on cue. To get that response, you have to earn it by being completely in the moment with the story.
6. Props can help tell a powerful story; they can also kill one. Guber tells the story of presenting former President Reagan and former President Mikhail Gorbachev with Tiffany-designed jackknives and reminding them of playing mumblety-peg as boys. The prop, and the story worked. But when candidate Michael Dukakis rode in a tank to show he was tough on defense, the prop shot down his campaign, because it didn’t feel real for the peace-loving Dukakis.
7. In the end, you have to surrender control. Good storytelling means giving the story to the audience. The audience has to own it or you haven’t succeeded. That’s brilliant advice, and a nice cap to a valuable book.
As I said, Guber leaves the structure of a story at the simple level that most other writers do. For a more nuanced, thorough explanation of what makes a good story, see my (free) article, "How to tell powerful stories in your speeches."To the casual observer, it might seem as though Mexico were going through an identity crisis.
In one of his last acts before leaving office on December 1, former President Felipe Calderón proposed that the country change its official name from the “United Mexican States” to simply “Mexico.” It was a signal to the world that Mexico no longer needs to emulate its northern neighbor and a move that created a stir on both sides of the border.
Ten days earlier, however, in an announcement that went unnoticed in the U.S. media, Miguel Ángel Mancera, the incoming mayor of Mexico City, proposed an official name change for his own jurisdiction: from “Federal District” to “Capital City.” Unlike Calderón’s proposal, Mancera’s idea has nothing to do with symbolism, or the United States. Rather, it seeks to change Mexico City’s legal status from a dependency of the federal government (like Washington, D.C.) to an autonomous political unit with a governor, a legislature and a constitution—all of the institutions of a Mexican state.
Supporters of the plan argue that the capital’s residents are getting a raw deal from the federal government. Although the Federal District’s roughly nine million residents enjoy full representation in the Mexican Congress and can vote in presidential elections, they have little control over their own laws. The federal government establishes the city’s debt ceiling and appoints its chief of police and attorney general. It also determines its budget—perhaps the biggest source of frustration for chilangos, as people who live in the capital call themselves. As Mexico’s largest city and its commercial and financial hub, the Federal District contributes over half of the country’s total income tax revenue and nearly half of its Value Added Tax receipts. Yet for every peso that Mexico City pays in federal taxes, it receives a paltry seven cents in return. The city is a veritable cash cow for the federal government, and many of its public services are seriously underfunded as a result.
This imbalance is partly due to the fact that Mexico City, for the past two decades, has been a bastion of support for Mexico’s leftist opposition party, the PRD. Both the PRI, the party that ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century and was just returned to the presidency last year, and the conservative PAN, the party of Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, had little interest in conceding power to their political adversaries in the local government. Yet the roots of this inequity run much deeper and speak to an unresolved kink in the federal system, which affects countries from Australia to Argentina to the United States: the question of what to do with the federation’s capital.
The issue at stake is how to create a seat for the national government that does not give an unfair advantage to a particular state but nonetheless ensures that the citizens who live in the capital district have the same political rights as those in every other state.
In Mexico, as in the United States, national governments historically dealt with this problem by simply denying residents of the capital those rights. When Mexico’s framers established the Federal District in 1824, shortly after the country’s independence from Spain, they preserved the city’s colonial-era city council, an elected body, but left the jurisdictional boundary between the local and national governments ill defined. Authoritarian governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resolved this ambiguity by systematically whittling away at the council’s autonomy until finally dissolving the body altogether in 1928, replacing it with a regent appointed by the president. For most of the twentieth century, then, Mexico City had no local government at all. It was not until 1997 that the city was able to elect its own head of government, a position comparable to, but with less authority than, a mayor (though it is commonly referred to as such, in both English and Spanish). The Federal District also has an elected legislative assembly, with similarly circumscribed powers.
Mancera wants to see this historic injustice rectified and to give Mexico City its own constitution and control over its purse strings for the first time. Yet he has been somewhat vague about the exact legal identity he is seeking for the Federal District. Although he previously expressed support for transforming Mexico City into the country’s 32nd state, he told participants at a forum in November that his goal was actually something slightly different: he wants to give the capital “a juridical character distinct from the rest of the states but with homologous rights.” It would continue to serve as the nation’s capital but no longer be controlled by the federal government—hence the politically significant if linguistically uninspiring new designation, “Capital City.”
The difficulty of coming up with an appropriate name for this entity speaks to just how vexing the problem is. Mancera, though, appears to have the wind at his back. Fresh off a landslide win in which be bested his closest opponent by 44 points, he has declared that resolving Mexico City’s legal status is, along with public safety, his top priority, and has promised to deliver a major political reform within his first year in office. That may be overly optimistic, but the issue is certainly gaining traction.
In recent weeks, Mancera has broached the topic in meetings with President Enrique Peña Nieto and members of Congress from all three major political parties. There is broad support for the principle of political reform for the capital, even if there is not yet widespread agreement on the details. If Mancera succeeds and Mexico City becomes the kind of autonomous capital city-state he is seeking, it could resolve a centuries-old snag in Mexican federalism.
Andrew Konove is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. His research focuses on the political and economic history of Mexico City.
Image: WIkimedia Commons/ ProtoplasmaKid. CC BY-SA 3.0.An SAS jeep of the type used in Operation Loyton
Operation Loyton was the codename given to a Special Air Service (SAS) mission in the Vosges department of France during the Second World War.
The mission, between 12 August and 9 October 1944, had the misfortune to be parachuted into the Vosges Mountains, at a time when the German Army was reinforcing the area, against General George Patton's Third Army. As a result, the Germans quickly became aware of their presence and conducted operations to destroy the SAS team.
With their supplies running out and under pressure from the German army, the SAS were ordered to form smaller groups to return to Allied lines. During the fighting and breakout operations 31 men were captured and later executed by the Germans.
Background [ edit ]
The Vosges is a region in north-eastern France close to the German border. In 1944 it was sparsely populated and consisted of wood covered hills, valley pastures and small isolated villages, an ideal area for a small mobile raiding force to operate.[1] In late 1944 it was also the area that General George Patton's Third Army was heading towards, but outrunning their supplies they had stopped at Nancy.[1] To counter the American advance the Germans had moved reinforcements, including the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, into the area.[2]
Mission [ edit ]
A small SAS advance party commanded by Captain Henry Druce was parachuted into the Vosges on 12 August 1944. The drop zone was in a deeply wooded mountainous area 40 miles (64 km) west of Strasbourg. The advance party's objective was to contact the local French resistance, carry out a reconnaissance of the area, identify targets for an attack and locate a suitable dropping zone for the main force.[3]
The main party under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Brian Franks arrived 18 days after the advance party on 30 August 1944. Their landing was not without incident. A parachute equipment container filled with ammunition exploded on contact with the ground.[1] A member of the resistance assisting to move the parachute containers killed himself by eating plastic explosive, believing it was some sort of cheese.[2] A Frenchman who was found in the area supposedly picking mushrooms, who the resistance believed was an informer, was detained. In the confusion following the explosion of the ammunition container, he managed to snatch up a Sten gun and was shot trying to escape.[4]
The following day the SAS started patrolling and set up observation posts. Almost immediately they became aware that their presence had been betrayed to the Germans.[3] There were far more Germans in the area than they expected and a force of 5,000 Germans were advancing up a valley near the village of Moussey just a short distance from the SAS base camp.[2] The SAS's aggressive patrolling, sabotage attacks and the number of fire fights they had engaged in, led the Germans to believe they were up against a far larger force than there actually was.[2] Over two nights, the 19 and 20 September, reinforcements were parachuted in which consisted of six Jeeps and another 20 men. The Jeeps, armed with Vickers K and Browning machine guns, allowed the SAS to change their tactics.[5] The Jeep patrols shot up German road convoys and staff cars. A patrol under the command of Captain Druce even entered Moussey, just as a Waffen SS unit was assembling. Driving through the town, they opened fire and inflicted many casualties.[3]
The Germans, unable to locate the SAS base, were aware that they could not be operating without the assistance of the local population. To gain information about the location of the SAS camp, all the male residents of Moussey between the ages of 16 and 60, a total of 210 men, were arrested.[5] After being interrogated they were transported to concentration camps, from which only 70 returned after the war.[5] On 29 September 1944 Captain Druce was sent to cross back over into the American lines, with the order of battle for a Panzer division which had been obtained by a member of the resistance. Together with F/O Fiddick, R.C.A.F 622 Sqn, they passed through the German lines three times before they eventually reached safety.[3][6]
At the start of October, with Patton's army stalled and supplies running out, the likelihood that the Americans would relieve the SAS had dwindled. It was decided to end the operation, which had only been intended to last two weeks and had now lasted over two months. Lieutenant Colonel Franks ordered his forces to split up into small groups and make their own way back to the Allied lines 40 miles (64 km) away. One patrol was ambushed by the Waffen-SS, killing three men. The fourth, Lieutenant Peter Johnson, was wounded but managed to escape. Another 34 men failed to reach Allied lines.[7]
Aftermath [ edit ]
At the end of the war Franks began investigating the fate of his missing men. All that was known for certain was that three men accompanying Lieutenant Johnson had been killed, and that 10 men had been buried in the cemetery at Moussey.[7] The SAS was officially disbanded in October 1945. Prior to this the 2nd SAS War Crimes Investigation Team (2 SAS WCIT) had been formed to, amongst other things, look into the events after Loyton.[8] 2nd SAS Intelligence Officer Major Eric 'Bill' Barkworth had been informed of the existence of the Commando Order, which called for the execution of all captured commandos when he was interviewing captured German officers in 1944.[9] In July 1945 Franks was informed by the French that the bodies of some SAS men had been found in the French occupation zone at Gaggenau.[10] Franks ordered 2 SAS WCIT, under the command of Major Beckworth, to travel to the area. Their investigation discovered that of the 31 missing SAS men, 30 had been murdered by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), some of them at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the Vosges mountains. One man's fate was never discovered.[11]
Erich Isselhorst, head the Sicherheitspolizei in Strasbourg, was sentenced to death by a British military tribunal in June 1946 for the murder of the British POWs but handed over to the French. He was once more sentenced to death in May 1947, now by a French military tribunal, and executed in Strasbourg on 23 February 1948.[12][13] While posted in Strasbourg, Isselhorst was part of the Operation Waldfest, a scorched earth operation in which villages in Alsace and Lorraine were destroyed to eliminate shelter for Allied troops for the upcoming winter and inhabitants deported as forced labour or to concentration camps. In a coordinated operation by the Wehrmacht and SS, villages were raided, French resistance fighters and the captured SAS soldiers were executed.[14]
Isselhorst ordered the execution of the captured British SAS members, as well as a number of French civilians, three French priests and four US airmen. The prisoners were taken over the Rhine river on trucks to Gaggenau on 21 November 1944. The leader of the execution commando, Karl Beck, thought it unwise to leave mass graves of shot allied soldiers in an area so close to the front line. The prisoners were initially kept in a local jail but then, on or shortly after 25 November, unaware of their fate, taken to a local forrest and, three at the, shoot in the head in a bomb crater. One prisoner attempted to escape but was killed as well. Apart from Isselhorst, his second in command, Wilhelm Schneider was also executed for the war crime in January 1947. Beck initially escaped punishment but was sentenced to death in the 1950s.
In 2003 a memorial was erected at Moussey to commemorate those who had been murdered. It details the three men from Phantom, the 31 SAS men, the 140 French civilians and one British and two French service women of the Special Operations Executive that had also been caught up in the search for the SAS camp.[16] A memorial to the operation also exists at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.[17]
References [ edit ]
NotesAugust 23, 2016
Will Searby looks at what "sharing economy" workers can learn from the victory of Deliveroo couriers, in an article published at the revolution in the 21st century website.
IN MID-August, the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) announced a victory. For six days Torrington Place had been filled with couriers and supporters from the Deliveroo strike, and Bloomsbury, of all places, was a primary node of class struggle.
Of course, we can take heart from an inspiring win today, but it would be a mistake not to try and take a lot more from this; the Deliveroo strike gives us an invaluable insight into how "independent" workforces are managed in the modern economy, and how we can build class power in these new conditions.
Deliveroo had been trying to move their couriers from hourly paid wages, at an already measly rate of £7 an hour (about $9), onto piecework, paying just £3.75 per order. Some workers would then be earning as little as £30 (about $40) for a 12-hour shift.
The business model Deliveroo operates on really just relies on brand recognition, given that the constant capital employed is really very little more than an app and a brand name. This makes them very sensitive to publicity campaigns and boycotts. Earlier in the strike the company had tried to address this by publicizing an offer that the workers had already rejected as a victory for the strike, thereby sapping momentum from the boycott campaign.
Deliveroo workers at a strike rally in central London (Steve Eason)
Much of the dispute hung on the interpretation of the contract that Deliveroo couriers are employed on. The company insists that all of its staff are "self-employed." This allows the company to outsource costs and risks to the individual drivers, who don't receive sick pay, holiday pay or national insurance contributions.
Most importantly, the management insist that since each of their drivers are "entrepreneurs," they are not legally entitled to the minimum wage. The payment scheme that was ostensibly being "trialed" in London is already in place across the country.
This is one-half of the disciplinary structure of these forms of business; by isolating workers the business structure forces increased competition between them, and in turn increases overall productivity.
This is also, however, an age-old strategy in the form of piecework and overtime pay, where, rather than being managed collectively in relation to a production process, workers are isolated and rewarded based on their output and individual productivity; either through the amount of "pieces" they can get through on a shift, or how much overtime they can contribute above their fellow workers. The reality of these methods of pay is the reduction of gross labor costs as workers strive to outcompete each other.
THE ONLY response to this form of discipline is solidarity, and that's one of the reasons the couriers won: Mohammed, a part-time worker who'd been with Deliveroo only three weeks, admitted that the new pay structure would actually benefit him, but he told me that that wasn't the point, he was striking and picketing because he said it was a question of solidarity with his fellow workers, and he told me that if management could get away with this, then they could get away with anything. This was his first time taking strike action in any job.
But aside from the attempts that have already been made in unionizing workers in companies like Uber, there's a real novelty to this dispute. On the one hand, it is a simple question about the introduction of piecework wages being used as a disciplinary mechanism to increase exploitation as workers compete for orders.
On the other hand, however, given the business model that Deliveroo and similar companies use, the strike raises far more complex questions about how new technology is being used to enforce coercive employment structures and intensify labor controls.
One of the main stumbling blocks in the expansion of the so-called "gig economy" is how to reconcile an increasingly precarious and spontaneous employment structure with the kind of level of supervision that centralized workplaces allow for. In the case of Deliveroo, the app that couriers use mediates their relationship with the employer, telling them about orders in their vicinity, which they either "accept" or "decline."
More interestingly though, the app also logs the drivers in a ranking which is published regularly, encouraging further competition between workers and therefore increasing the rate of exploitation across the company. Additionally the app logs the ratio of offers that are "accepted" and "declined," and workers face having their contracts terminated if this ratio demonstrates a reluctance to take orders.
Though couriers can log out manually on most shifts, on busy days they are required to call in to end their shift, and Deliveroo's call center workers (also ostensibly self-employed) are required to ask the drivers for the reason they are logging out. The app even sends management data on the battery level of each of the drivers phones, meaning that it's almost impossible for couriers to voluntarily "switch off."
It's easy to see how factory work disciplines workers, both mentally and physically; office work and hospitality or retail work, too, have an entire hierarchy of supervisory positions to maintain a given rate of exploitation. What |
a fun place!" Thorin protested.
"Yeah! Let the girl drink as much as she wants! It's one of life's great pleasures!"Qrow agreed, nodding enthusiastically.
"Shut up, Qrow, this is probably you're fault!" Tai snapped.
"Why are you blaming me?!"
"Because you're you!"
Yang: Strawberry Sunrise. No ice. Oh, and one of those little umbrellas.
Junior: Aren't you a little young to be in this club, Blondie?
"That better be non-alcoholic. And she better stay far away from that man. He looks really sleazy." Summer commented.
"If he tries anything, I'll kick his ass." grunted Tai.
"Non-alcoholic? There are drinks like that? Have I been duped?" asked Thorin, genuinely bewildered and staring at his beer as if he was wondering if that was one of said non-alcoholic drinks.
'Yes, Thorin. Don't worry, that is legitimate beer." Mei responded patiently.
Yang (giggles): Aren't you a little old to have a name like Junior?
Junior: So you know who I am. You got a name, sweetheart?
"If he's hitting on her, I'm going to rip his arms off." Tai announced, strangely calm.
"Get in line, I'm going to get to him first." Summer seethed.
"Mom, Dad, you're kinda scary." commented Adam.
"Parents are protective of their children. It's part of the job description." Jeanne said smiling, Summer and Willow nodding in agreement.
"Besides, Yang is far too young for a boyfriend, let alone that asshole. She should be careful about relationships." Tai said firmly.
He then noticed that Qrow and Summer were looking at him with extreme disbelief in their expressions,
"What?" he asked, blinking in confusion. Why were they staring at him? He didn't say anything wrong, right?"
"….You're a gigantic hypocrite, Tai." grunted Qrow.
"WHAT DID I SAY?!"
Ozpin seemed to be holding back his laughter. It seemed the headmaster was remembering the..stories…that circulated about Taiyang's time in Beacon.
Yang: Yes, Junior, I've got several. But instead of sweetheart, you can just call me sir.
She grabs his groin and squeezes it painfully causing Junior to cry out in pain comically.
The entire male population of the room winced in pain and Willow smirked. Tai recovered first and made a sound that was halfway between a proud laugh and a terrified whimper.
"Go, Yang?"
"She got that from Rae. Remember the time she-?" Summer asked, an uncertain expression on her face.
"As if I could forget! No need to remind me, thank you!" Tai interrupted, his voice rising an octave. Holy crap, Raven was scary when she's mad!
"Rae?" asked Patroklos curiously.
"My sister." Qrow answered for the married couple, who were now both looking awkward.
She brings her scroll up to his face, showing him a picture.
Yang: Tell me where I can find her and I'll let you go.
Junior (straining): I've never seen her before, I swear!
Yang: Excuse me?
Junior (straining): I swear, sir!
Tai almost yelled in surprise. That picture….why did Yang have it? And why was his daughter looking for her? Did Yang find out? Argh, this vision was giving him lots of questions and he didn't like it one bit!
He looked at Qrow and Summer, both looking troubled as well.
"Who is she…?" asked Patroklos.
"None of us know." Ozpin answered suddenly.
Patroklos nodded, and Tai looked gratefully at the old headmaster. Those past wounds did not need to be revisited…
Yang: Excuse me?
Junior (straining): I swear, sir!
Junior's henchmen begin to gather around.
Yang: Hmm, looks like we have an audience. This must kind of embarrassing for you, huh? Awkward...
Junior (straining): Listen, blondie sir. If you want to make it out of this club alive, I suggest you let me go. Now!
She lets go and Junior sighs in relief.
Junior: You'll pay for that!
He puts on his sunglasses and walks away from her. Yang follows closely behind.
Yang: Oh Junior, I was just playing with you! Don't be so sensitive! Come on, lets kiss and make up, okay?
Junior stops and turns around.
Junior: Huh? Uh, okay.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Tai demanded, standing up in parental outrage and alarming Adam so much that he promptly clung to Summer's arm.
"Tai, you're scaring Adam!" Summer admonished.
"SIT DOWN YOU IDIOT!" yelled Qrow.
"WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?!" That was Thorin.
"SHUT UP!" Willow.
As he leans in, she punches him in the face sending him flying across the room. The surrounding henchmen respond by charging at Yang, who deploys Ember Celica and jumps up into the air only to slam a fiery punch into the ground, sending a ripple through the dance floor that knocks the incoming henchmen off their feet.
"MY SISTER IS AWESOME!" cheered Adam, rising to his feet and jumping up and down wildly.
"OH YEAH SHE IS!" Tai yelled just as enthusiastically, jumping up and down as well, all dignity forgotten.
Willow looked affronted. Especially when Thorin yanked Patroklos up from his eat and promptly joined in.
Summer only shook her head, smiling. "My boys…."
As the henchmen get up, Yang charges at one, jumping into the air and performing a somersault kick on her first victim. She then turns around and uppercuts a second one, following it up with a spinning kick that sends another two tumbling away.
As the rest charge at her, Yang shoots at the first one in front of her and kicks behind her at another. Another henchman swings at her from behind, but she sweeps his legs out from under him and punches him up into the air, only to slam him into the ground. She then takes a couple steps toward an oncoming henchman to jump up and launch herself off of him, allowing her to deliver a flying punch to another henchman. This is quickly followed by her rushing forward as she dispatches yet another nearby opponent. As the fallen henchman collapses, he lands on the henchman behind him, sending him stumbling back. He attempts to block the oncoming punch from Yang, but to no avail, as Yang simply breaks straight through her opponent's guard before delivering an uppercut.
She then notices several more assailants approaching from behind and fires a shot, using the recoil to send her flying towards yet another group of enemies. She elbows the first henchman and kicks him away while another attempts to swing at her, but is promptly blocked and shot in the face. Yang then swings around under his arm and punches him once more. This is followed by another spin as she kicks, punches, and kicks him again, with the final hit sending him flying backwards through a glass pillar.
Yang turns around to see the final henchman charge and swing at her. She promptly blocks the blow and punches his chin, stunning him and allowing her to follow up with a flurry of blows that conclude with an uppercut that launches him into the air. Yang then delivers a final punch that sends him flying back.
Upon clearing the dance floor, she spots the DJ pulling out a machine gun before firing down at her from his booth. Yang charges towards the booth, dashing from side to side in order to avoid the incoming fire. Once close enough, she jumps up, firing her shotgun-gauntlets at the floor for additional propulsion. As she lands, she places a hand on the mixing desk before swinging her legs around, kicking the DJ in the face. This sends him stumbling back. Yang then spins and lands with her back facing him, only to fire once more to elbow him in the face. She then slams his face into the table, picks him up, and launches him off by firing. He lands at Melanie and Miltiades Malachite's feet, unconscious, with his "helmet" rolling away.
"Another skilled Huntress. It seems that Mister tai and Miss Summer's children are both naturally gifted." Patroklos commented, impressed.
"Indeed, and it seemed young Yang has inherited her father's fast-paced fighting style." Ozpin added.
"SHE FIGHTS LIKE ME!"
"DAD, TEACH ME HOW TO PUNCH ALL THE THINGS!"
"OF COURSE, SON!"
Summer laughed, shaking her head. She looked at her husband and son fondly. "Yes, yes, I'm happy for you, but I am a bit disappointed that neither Ruby nor Yang took after my fighting style."
"You can teach Blake!" Adam immediately replied.
"If she accepts, why not?"
Miltia: Melanie, who is this girl?
Melanie: I dunno Miltia but we should teach her a lesson.
'Ugh. Valley Girls." Qrow grunted in disgust.
"That was a long time ago, Qrow. Let it go." Tai said, smirking at his best friend. That particular mission still brought him to tears of laughter. The look on Qrow's face…
"Shut up, Tai."
"Dad, what are you talking about?" Adam asked curiously.
'Don't ask, kid." Qrow grumbled, glaring at Tai.
Yang jumps from the podium, unleashing a barrage of shell-shots in mid-air at the Malachite Sisters, which they evade by backflipping away. After recomposing, the sisters charge at Yang as she lands on the dance floor, continuing her barrage. As the sisters split to opposing sides, with Yang focusing her barrage on Melanie, they begin their counterattack, with Melanie dodging and deflecting Yang's bullets while Miltia takes a swipe at Yang from behind.
Ducking to avoid Miltia's strike at the last second, Yang turns and fires at her, only to have Miltia jump to avoid it as Melanie lands behind Yang and retaliates with a heel-kick. Yang blocks the kick with her gauntlets forcing herself back a distance away from the sisters.
Yang quickly grounds herself and fires a round at them, which Melanie deflects with a frontflip heel-kick off into a pillar. Miltia quickly closes in on Yang and delivers a couple of swipes that Yang defends against, only to have Melanie follow up with a series of jump-kicks while Yang is off-balanced. Blocking each attack, Yang quickly fires a round in response, which Melanie ducks to avoid. Miltia swoops in with a downwards swipe while Melanie sweeps Yang's right leg and finishes with a series of kicks that make contact, launching Yang across the stage.
Yang rolls and quickly regains her footing, firing both gauntlets to propel her back across the stage and landing a hard right punch onto Melanie's face, knocking her down. While Melanie lies stunned on the floor, Yang confronts Miltia in close-range melee combat, with Yang firing rounds with each punch thrown and Miltia defending with her claws. However, Yang overwhelms her with a low kick, a series of boosted body shots, and a final round from Ember Celica, blasting Miltia off the stage.
Melanie finally recovers from Yang's punch just in time to see her sister get flung into a pillar overhead. Yang confronts her by firing off a round at close-range, which Melanie again avoids by backflipping. After avoiding another round into the ground, Melanie retaliates with an upward leg swipe before kicking a third round point-blank in order to deflect it. Both Yang and Melanie resort to close-range melee combat, with Yang throwing boosted punches and blocking with her gauntlets while Melanie kicks and swipes as she defends with the blades of her boots. A hard side-kick pushes Yang away as each take a second of reprieve before Melanie closes in on Yang.
Feinting with her boots to keep Yang off-balanced, Melanie shifts herself along the stage, forcing Yang to back-step continuously. This leaves Yang unable to ground herself while defending against Melanie's feints and kicks. A longer series of kicks from Melanie allows Yang to finally ground herself, spin to dodge Melanie's last kick while retracting Ember Celica, and land a body blow with her left elbow. Yang quickly grabs Melanie's right arm and uses it to twist and spin the rest of Melanie's body, using the built-up momentum to land a final devastating jump-kick to Melanie's face. The current fight ends, and another begins.
"Nice. I saw some mistakes, but nothing major. Plus, she's still getting blindsided by kick attacks. I should teach her how to counter those." Tai said thoughtfully. He had been meticulously studying how his daughter fought. It wasn't just vanity, after all. One's fighting skills let them survive as a Hunter. Yang needed to be the best she could be out there.
"I love how you suddenly encourage Yang's fighting when you found out she had your style." Summer said dryly.
Tai shrugged. "Hey, we're changing this future anyway. This isn't going to happen. Still, I'm going to train her anyway. Better safe than sorry, after all."
Summer nodded. "Good point."
The holograms in the club suddenly turn off and a spotlight shines on Junior as he brings out his Bazooka.
Junior: You're gonna pay for this.
"Break his stupid face, Yang!" Tai cheered, glaring at the sleazy man in front of his daughter. Really, if he wasn't stuck here, he'd hunt the man down himself. Perving on his underaged girl? What kind of sicko did that?!
"Calm down, man!" snapped Qrow.
"I think he's rather justified in his anger." Willow commented, much to Tai's surprise. Did Schnee just take his side?
Junior fires off a stream of rockets from his weapon's bazooka form, and Yang backflips and siderolls to dodge several. Upon righting herself, Yang then destroys several more incoming rockets with well-placed shots from Ember Celica.
Advancing, Junior changes his weapon to its bat form and strikes at Yang multiple times, with the latter managing to defend and block all but one, causing her to recoil and stumble. This gives Junior an opening to hit her in the face, sending her flying backwards into a glass structure.
"Shit!" snarled Tai, worry for his daughter and anger at Junior flaring up inside him. Summer noticed and immediately took his hand in hers, rubbing it soothingly.
"She'll be fine. You trained her well." Ozpin said, smiling reassuringly.
"Yes, the children in these visions always stay safe, right? Your daughter won't be hurt…" Jeanne said, also smiling reassuringly.
"Hmmph. The girl won't lose to that ape." Willow said confidently and once more Tai was surprised. So the woman could be nice!
Yang pushes herself to her feet, her hair ablaze and shining gold. She then slams her fists together, creating a minor shockwave, before dashing forward. Junior arms his rocket launcher and starts firing wildly, each shot missing as Yang sidesteps and evades them. She quickly closes the gap between them, dodging a strike from Junior before laying into him, landing seven punches, each amplified by her weaponry. The final punch sends Junior flying back, his weapon broken in two, one piece of it in one hand, a lock of Yang's hair in the other.
"That's her Semblance? I wonder what it is?" Patroklos observed, looking closer at the screen.
"Looks to me like it boosted her power! Haha! A true warrior's Semblance!" Thorin replied excitedly.
"Well, whatever it is, Junior is dead meat. Yang hates having her hair messed with." Tai commented with a smirk. Yeah. His little girl was strong. She'll get out of this okay! She wasn't going to get hurt! He had to believe in her!
The sight enrages Yang, who promptly engulfs herself in a huge explosion of fire, which shatters the dance floor. She then charges Junior at an astonishing speed, landing one final blow square in the jaw, which sends him flying through a window into the street, incapacitated, effectively ending the fight.
Tai let out a sigh of relief. The fight was over. He wouldn't have to worry about Yang any more. But still….she was looking for Raven? What did that mean? And in this future with Summer…gone…maybe he was as well? It disturbed him, quite frankly, what this future had in store for his family.
He needed to find a way to change this. Whatever it takes.
He flies out the window, landing in front of Ruby. Yang comes outside shortly after.
Ruby: Yang? Is that you?
Yang: Oh! Hey sis!
Ruby: What are you doing here?
Yang sighs before the screen cuts to black.
Yang: (Sighs) It's a long story.
The RWBY title pans from the left of the screen before unveiling all four characters: Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long. The screen changes to a black background with a flaming effect on the botton edge and the announcement to "SEE THE PREMIERE at RTX 2013: AUGUST, TX JULY 5-7" appears before the screen fades to black.
"Ruby! Oh, that's your other sister, Adam. You'll meet her soon." Summer said, smiling at her son, who smiled back.
"Yeah, it was a long story." Tai muttered.
So that was another vision, huh? It was frustrating that they still knew almost nothing about this future…except for the parts that really sucked. Still, his resolve was firm. For his family. For his family.
He would do whatever it takes.In what is very quickly becoming a major November 1st tradition in Toronto, pumpkin parades took place in parks across the city last night as a last hurrah for all the creative carving done in the lead-up to Halloween. But as these various pumpkin death marches multiply, it's still the Sorauren Park parade that gets the gold gourd.
Sorauren was the first pumpkin parade back in 2004, but it's a trend that quickly caught on with well over 30 post-Halloween lantern displays now all over Toronto.
Sorauren's event had over 2,000 pumpkins on display with hundreds of people slowly walking in procession to take a look at the lit up pieces of art on both sides of the park's pathways.
Pumpkins lined up didn't quite make it all the way around the park, which was the goal, but they'll have no problem reaching that goal by next year.
Cameras and phones were flashing all night as people tried to capture the art and beauty of some of the amazing carvings. A few trends this year were white pumpkins, huge pumpkins, as well as Raptors- and Raccoon-themed pumpkins.
There were only a few Trumpkins in what quickly became known as the political pumpkin zone at the south end of the park.
Hundreds of kids roamed the trails and grassy field in the middle of the park waiting for the 9:30 p.m. pumpkin dumpster toss, when everyone helped throw the gourds in the giant compost bins provided by the city.
Check out more photos below!
Photos by Hamish Grant.Now that we've factored in the new battery-life measurements, the laptops' overall scores have risen, and all three machines now fall well within the recommended range in Consumer Reports ratings.
Consumer Reports is out with an updated report on the 2016 MacBook Pro, and following retesting, the magazine is now recommending Apple's latest notebooks.In the new test, conducted running a beta version of macOS that fixes the Safari-related bug that caused erratic battery life in the original test, all three MacBook Pro models "performed well."The 13-inch model without a Touch Bar had an average battery life of 18.75 hours, the 13-inch model with a Touch Bar lasted for 15.25 hours on average, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar had an average battery life of 17.25 hours.Consumer Reports originally denied the 2016 MacBook Pro a purchase recommendation in late December due to extreme battery life variance that didn't match up with Apple's 10 hour battery life claim.Apple worked with Consumer Reports to figure out why the magazine encountered battery life issues, which led to the discovery of an obscure Safari caching bug. Consumer Reports used a developer setting to turn off Safari caching, triggering an "obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons" that drained excessive battery.The bug, fixed by Apple in macOS Sierra 10.12.3 beta 3, is not one the average user will encounter as most people don't turn off the Safari caching option, but it's something done in all Consumer Reports tests to ensure uniform testing conditions. A fix for the issue will be available to the general public when macOS Sierra 10.12.3 is released, but users can get it now by signing up for Apple's beta testing program.Each of the three 2016 MacBook Pro models, including the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, and the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bars, are advertised as achieving 10 hours of battery life on a single charge when watching iTunes movies or browsing the web.Real life Battery usage can vary significantly, however, based on factors like screen brightness and the applications being used.Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has an intriguing auditory processing profile. Individuals show enhanced pitch discrimination, yet often find seemingly innocuous sounds distressing. This study used two behavioural experiments to examine whether an increased capacity for processing sounds in ASD could underlie both the difficulties and enhanced abilities found in the auditory domain. Autistic and non-autistic young adults performed a set of auditory detection and identification tasks designed to tax processing capacity and establish the extent of perceptual capacity in each population. Tasks were constructed to highlight both the benefits and disadvantages of increased capacity. Autistic people were better at detecting additional unexpected and expected sounds (increased distraction and superior performance respectively). This suggests that they have increased auditory perceptual capacity relative to non-autistic people. This increased capacity may offer an explanation for the auditory superiorities seen in autism (e.g. heightened pitch detection). Somewhat counter-intuitively, this same ‘skill’ could result in the sensory overload that is often reported – which subsequently can interfere with social communication. Reframing autistic perceptual processing in terms of increased capacity, rather than a filtering deficit or inability to maintain focus, increases our understanding of this complex condition, and has important practical implications that could be used to develop intervention programs to minimise the distress that is often seen in response to sensory stimuli.“I had some hope that the Comcast merger would have an increase in quality of service,” she said, “but I guess I’m just going to keep living in the 1990s of Internet and cable service with TWC.”
Some of the frustration with big, expensive cable television packages has helped to fuel the trend of cord-cutting and increasing competition from different services, with newcomers like Apple TV, Hulu and Amazon, and single-channel offerings like HBO Go. Still, users need strong Wi-Fi and Internet access, pressuring Time Warner Cable, Verizon and others to improve the delivery of streaming services.
Analysts say that the ill-fated Comcast deal could lay the groundwork for significant improvements in customer service and satisfaction at Time Warner Cable.
The company spent the last year preparing its network to be turned over to Comcast in the best shape possible. Today, said Richard Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at BTIG: “Broadband speeds are higher. Customer service has improved. I think they’ve gone out of their way to invest in their consumer experience to position for if the deal didn’t happen they could simply move forward.”
In an interview, Robert D. Marcus, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, listed improvements to customer service he said the company began in the last year. They include introducing TWC Maxx — which has significantly faster Internet speeds (up to six times faster in some cases), “enhanced DVR” with more storage and more on-demand video choices — to roughly 10 markets, including New York and Los Angeles, which he called a “tremendous improvement of customer service across the board.”
Mr. Marcus said that the company was focused on increasing broadband speeds to industry-leading levels, and that Time Warner Cable’s standard tier of service was faster than Comcast’s standard tier. He also said the company was committed to making “meaningful” improvements to its video product, with more video on demand and digital offerings. And he said the company had enhanced its phone product recently, with free calls to more foreign countries, including Mexico, Canada, China and India.
“We are firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Marcus said. “Customer service is getting way better as well.”Valve are introducing a new Steam feature that lets you manage your library and trigger remote downloads from anywhere in the world! Anywhere with an internet connection and browser that is. The feature is currently available via the new Beta client. To get involved, just click File/Settings from within Steam and get downloading. Expect the feature to hit the main Steam client soon.
This means you could feasibly spot a bargain while browsing PCGamer.com in work and start it downloading on your home machine within seconds. You can even check the status of your downloads throughout the afternoon, making it a lot easier to accurately plan your evening's entertainment and maximise your fun-time.
For even more instruction, check Valve's dedicated Steam Support page. Thanks to RPS for pointing out the original Steam beta discussion.Atomicity (in the sense of “ACID”) states that for a series of operations performed against a database, either every one of them commits together, or they’re all rolled back; no in between states are allowed. For code that needs to be resilient to the messiness of the real world, it’s a godsend.
Instead of bugs that make it to production changing data and then leaving it permanently corrupt, those changes are reverted. The long tail of connections that are dropped midway from intermittent problems and other unexpected states while handling millions of requests might cause inconvenience, but won’t scramble your data.
Postgres’s implementation in particular is known to provide powerful transaction semantics with little overhead. And while I’ve used it for years, it’s never been something that I’ve understood. Postgres works reliably enough that I’ve been able to treat it as a black box – wonderfully useful, but with inner workings that are a mystery.
This article looks into how Postgres keeps the books on its transactions, how they’re committed atomically, and some concepts that are key to understanding it all.
Say you build a simple database that reads and writes from an on-disk CSV file. When a single client comes in with a request, it opens the file, reads some information, and writes the changes back. Things are mostly working fine, but then one day you decide to enhance your database with a sophisticated new feature, multi-client support!
Unfortunately, the new implementation is immediately plagued by problems that seem to especially apparent when two clients are trying to access data around the same time. One opens the CSV file, reads, modifies, and writes some data, but that change is immediately clobbered by another client trying to do the same.
Data loss from contention between two clients.
This is a problem of concurrent access and it’s addressed by introducing concurrency control. There are plenty of naive solutions. We could ensure that any process takes out an exclusive lock on a file before reading or writing it, or we could push all operations through a single flow control point so that they only run one at a time. Not only are these workarounds slow, but they won’t scale up to allow us to make our database fully ACID-compliant. Modern databases have a better way, MVCC (multi-version concurrency control).
Under MVCC, statements execute inside of a transaction, and instead of overwriting data directly, they create new versions of it. The original data is still available to other clients that might need it, and any new data stays hidden until the transaction commits. Clients are no longer in direct contention, and data stays safely persisted because they’re not overwriting each other’s changes.
When a transaction starts, it takes a snapshot that captures the state of a database at that moment in time. Every transaction in the database is applied in serial order, with a global lock ensuring that only one is being confirmed committed or aborted at a time. A snapshot is a perfect representation of the database’s state between two transactions.
To avoid the neverending accumulation of rows that have been deleted and hidden, databases will eventually remove obsolete data by way of a vacuum process (or in some cases, opportunistic “microvacuums” that happen in band with other queries), but they’ll only do so for information that’s no longer needed by open snapshots.
Postgres manages concurrent access with MVCC. Lets take a look at how it works.
Here’s the data structure that Postgres uses to represent a transaction (from proc.c):
typedef struct PGXACT { TransactionId xid; /* id of top-level transaction currently being * executed by this proc, if running and XID * is assigned; else InvalidTransactionId */ TransactionId xmin; /* minimal running XID as it was when we were * starting our xact, excluding LAZY VACUUM: * vacuum must not remove tuples deleted by * xid >= xmin! */... } PGXACT;
Transactions are identified with a xid (transaction, or “xact” ID). As an optimization, Postgres will only assign a transaction a xid if it starts to modify data because it’s only at that point where other processes need to start tracking its changes. Readonly transactions can execute happily without ever needing a xid.
xmin is always set immediately to the smallest xid of any transactions that are still running when this one starts. Vacuum processes calculate the minimum boundary of data that they need to keep by taking the minimum of the xmin s of all active transactions
Rows of data in Postgres are often referred to as tuples. While Postgres uses common lookup structures like B-trees to make retrievals fast, indexes don’t store a tuple’s full set of data or any of its visibility information. Instead, they store a tid (tuple ID) that can be used to retrieve a row from physical storage, otherwise known as “the heap”. The tid gives Postgres a starting point where it can start scanning the heap until it finds a tuple that satisfies the current snapshot’s visibility.
Here’s the Postgres implementation for a heap tuple (as opposed to an index tuple which is the structure found in an index), along with a few other structs that represent its header information (from htup.h and htup_details.h ):
typedef struct HeapTupleData { uint32 t_len; /* length of *t_data */ ItemPointerData t_self; /* SelfItemPointer */ Oid t_tableOid; /* table the tuple came from */ HeapTupleHeader t_data; /* -> tuple header and data */ } HeapTupleData; /* referenced by HeapTupleData */ struct HeapTupleHeaderData { HeapTupleFields t_heap;... } /* referenced by HeapTupleHeaderData */ typedef struct HeapTupleFields { TransactionId t_xmin; /* inserting xact ID */ TransactionId t_xmax; /* deleting or locking xact ID */... } HeapTupleFields;
Like a transaction, a tuple tracks its own xmin, except in the tuple’s case it’s recorded to represent the first transaction where the tuple becomes visible (i.e. the one that created it). It also tracks xmax to be the last transaction where the tuple is visible (i.e. the one that deleted it).
A heap tuple's lifetime being tracked with xmin and xmax.
xmin and xmax are internal concepts, but they can be revealed as hidden columns on any Postgres table. Just select them explicitly by name:
# SELECT *, xmin, xmax FROM names; id | name | xmin | xmax ----+----------+-------+------- 1 | Hyperion | 27926 | 27928 2 | Endymion | 27927 | 0
Here’s the snapshot structure (from snapshot.h):
typedef struct SnapshotData { /* * The remaining fields are used only for MVCC snapshots, and are normally * just zeroes in special snapshots. (But xmin and xmax are used * specially by HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty.) * * An MVCC snapshot can never see the effects of XIDs >= xmax. It can see * the effects of all older XIDs except those listed in the snapshot. xmin * is stored as an optimization to avoid needing to search the XID arrays * for most tuples. */ TransactionId xmin; /* all XID < xmin are visible to me */ TransactionId xmax; /* all XID >= xmax are invisible to me */ /* * For normal MVCC snapshot this contains the all xact IDs that are in * progress, unless the snapshot was taken during recovery in which case * it's empty. For historic MVCC snapshots, the meaning is inverted, i.e. * it contains *committed* transactions between xmin and xmax. * * note: all ids in xip[] satisfy xmin <= xip[i] < xmax */ TransactionId *xip; uint32 xcnt; /* # of xact ids in xip[] */... }
A snapshot’s xmin is calculated the same way as a transaction’s (i.e. the lowest xid amongst running transactions when the snapshot is created), but for a different purpose. This xmin is a lower boundary for data visibility. Tuples created by a transaction with xid < xmin are visible to the snapshot.
It also defines an xmax, which is set to the last committed xid plus one. xmax tracks the upper bound of visibility; transactions with xid >= xmax are invisible to the snapshot.
Lastly, a snapshot defines *xip, an array of all of the xid s of transactions that were in progress when the snapshot was created. *xip is needed because even though there’s already a visibility boundary with xmin, there may still be some transactions that are already committed with xid s greater than xmin, but also greater than a xid of an in-progress transaction (so they couldn’t be included in xmin ).
We want the results any committed transactions with xid > xmin to be visible, but the results of any that were in flight hidden. *xip stores the list of transactions that were active when the snapshot was created so that we can tell which is which.
Transactions executing against a database and a snapshot capturing a moment in time.
When you execute a BEGIN, Postgres puts some basic bookkeeping in place, but it will defer more expensive operations as long as it can. For example, the new transaction isn’t assigned a xid until it starts modifying data to reduce the expense of tracking it elsewhere in the system.
The new transaction also won’t immediately get a snapshot. It will when it runs its first query, whereupon exec_simple_query (in postgres.c ) will push one onto a stack. Even a simple SELECT 1; is enough to trigger it:
static void exec_simple_query(const char *query_string) {... /* * Set up a snapshot if parse analysis/planning will need one. */ if (analyze_requires_snapshot(parsetree)) { PushActiveSnapshot(GetTransactionSnapshot()); snapshot_set = true; }... }
Creating the new snapshot is where the machinery really starts coming to life. Here’s GetSnapshotData (in procarray.c ):
Snapshot GetSnapshotData(Snapshot snapshot) { /* xmax is always latestCompletedXid + 1 */ xmax = ShmemVariableCache->latestCompletedXid; Assert(TransactionIdIsNormal(xmax)); TransactionIdAdvance(xmax);... snapshot->xmax = xmax; }
This function does a lot of initialization, but like we talked about, some of its most important work is set to the snapshot’s xmin, xmax, and *xip. The easiest of these is xmax, which is retrieved from shared memory managed by the postmaster. Every transaction that commits notifies the postmaster that it did, and latestCompletedXid will be updated if the xid is higher than what it already holds. (more on this later).
Notice that it’s the function’s responsibility to add one to the last xid. This isn’t quite as trivial as incrementing it because transaction IDs in Postgres are allowed to wrap. A transaction ID is defined as a simple unsigned 32-bit integer (from c.h):
typedef uint32 TransactionId;
Even though xid s are assigned only opportunistically (as mentioned above, reads don’t need one), a system doing a lot of throughput can easily hit the bounds of 32 bits, so the system needs to be able to wrap to “reset” the xid sequence as necessary. This is handled by some preprocessor magic (in transam.h):
#define InvalidTransactionId ((TransactionId) 0) #define BootstrapTransactionId ((TransactionId) 1) #define FrozenTransactionId ((TransactionId) 2) #define FirstNormalTransactionId ((TransactionId) 3)... /* advance a transaction ID variable, handling wraparound correctly */ #define TransactionIdAdvance(dest) \ do { \ (dest)++; \ if ((dest) < FirstNormalTransactionId) \ (dest) = FirstNormalTransactionId; \ } while(0)
The first few IDs are reserved as special identifiers, so we always skip those and start at 3.
Back in GetSnapshotData, we get xmin and xip by iterating over all running transactions (again, see Snapshots above for an explanation of what these do):
/* * Spin over procArray checking xid, xmin, and subxids. The goal is * to gather all active xids, find the lowest xmin, and try to record * subxids. */ for (index = 0; index < numProcs; index++) { volatile PGXACT *pgxact = &allPgXact[pgprocno]; TransactionId xid; xid = pgxact->xmin; /* fetch just once */ /* * If the transaction has no XID assigned, we can skip it; it * won't have sub-XIDs either. If the XID is >= xmax, we can also * skip it; such transactions will be treated as running anyway * (and any sub-XIDs will also be >= xmax). */ if (!TransactionIdIsNormal(xid) ||!NormalTransactionIdPrecedes(xid, xmax)) continue; if (NormalTransactionIdPrecedes(xid, xmin)) xmin = xid; /* Add XID to snapshot. */ snapshot->xip[count++] = xid;... }... snapshot->xmin = xmin;
Transactions are committed through CommitTransaction (in xact.c ). This function is monstrously complex, but here are a few of its important parts:
static void CommitTransaction(void) {... /* * We need to mark our XIDs as committed in pg_xact. This is where we * durably commit. */ latestXid = RecordTransactionCommit(); /* * Let others know about no transaction in |
seems to have skipped the female members of the group who spent time there…at least for now.
Barry takes Axel to jail…but he also believes in Axel’s innocence and begins a search for evidence that will clear the Trickster of murder. But, time is running short to do so, because we find that Trickster has found a new “family” after being kicked out of the Rogues…and that family is coming to call to free Axel from jail by force! As that battle starts we find a twist that leads directly into the next issue of Dial H – and it certainly explains Flash’s involvement in that title.
Flash #18 is scripted by Brian Buccellato (who also handles the colors) while Francis Manapul takes a couple of issues off. This story is a little more linear in its approach than some recent issues, while still setting up some interesting side stories for the future. The quality of writing does not miss a beat here – and the idea of new Speed Force “rookie heroes” has the potential for very interesting conflicts as we move forward. Marcio Takara handles the pencils and inks this issue – and while I am a raving Manapul fan, I have to admit that every time I see Takara’s art I like it more and more. The page is more dependent on traditional panels than in a Manapul issue, but there are still creative uses of the page and the artwork is spot on in keeping with the overall look we’ve come to expect in this volume of The Flash.
SUMMARY: After all the events of Gorilla Warfare, Flash #18 provides an excellent change of pace…and a great starting point for conflicts to come. Brian Buccellato’s scripting here does not miss a beat, and Takara’s artwork is more than credible in keeping with the standards we’ve come to expect from this excellent series.
ShareIn the middle of the large Chilean Atacama desert, a team of Polish astronomers are patiently monitoring millions of celestial bodies night after night with the help of a modern robotic telescope. In 2013, the team was surprised when they discovered, in the course of their survey, stars that pulsated much faster than expected. In the following years, the team that included Dr. Marilyn Latour, an astronomer from the Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte Bamberg, the astronomical institute of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), studied these stars in more detail and concluded that they had stumbled upon a new class of variable star.
Many classes of star exhibit variations in brightness. Unlike our Sun, these stars are not stable; their surface oscillates, meaning that the surface expands and shrinks by a few percent. This is what happens in the case of the more familiar Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars, which have oscillation periods that extend over a few hours to hundreds of days.
The researchers discovered a dozen stars that seemed at first sight to show variations that were very similar to those of the Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars but have much shorter (20-40 minutes) oscillation periods and, at the same time, are much bluer in colour. This indicates that the newly identified stars are hotter and more compact. It was because of these characteristics that it was proposed to give this new class of variable stars the acronym BLAPS, i.e. Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators. What kind of stars these were, however, remained an enigma.
The nature of the newly discovered stars
For the astronomers, these new stars posed a riddle. At first, they assumed that BLAPs could be hot dwarf stars since they have similar oscillation periods. Hot dwarf stars are old stars approaching the end of their lives. They generate their energy by means of the thermonuclear fusion of helium to form carbon. The Sun, being in an earlier phase of its life, is currently converting hydrogen to helium.
In order to find out whether BLAPs are actually hot dwarfs, the astronomers used two of their largest telescopes to make observations. They were able to capture suitable spectra of some BLAPs using the large Gemini and Magellan telescopes, both located in the Chilean Atacama desert. Latour analysed these spectra using sophisticated physical-numerical models. She was able to show that the variations in luminosity are attributable to temperature changes on the surface of the stars. The temperature of the BLAPs turned out to be five times greater than that of the Sun - something that is characteristic of hot dwarfs.
However, the BLAPs are significantly bigger than hot dwarfs, meaning that they form a new class of stars that are similar to hot dwarfs but have a more bloated envelope than the latter. Why BLAPs oscillate like Cepheids and why they are bloated remain puzzles, as does their origin. Further investigations need to be undertaken to solve the mystery of how BLAPs come into being.
###The 2014-15 season saw Martin Reway finish third in team scoring, earning 37 points in 34 games with HC Sparta Praha of the Czech league. It's worth noting that Reway played 14 fewer games than the team's leading scorer. Reway also captained underdog Team Slovakia to an enormous Bronze medal win at the 2015 World Junior Championship, contributing nine points in seven games.
Photo credit: HC Sparta Praha
It is unlikely we will see Reway make the jump to North America for another year or two, as he has committed to developing his game on the larger ice in the Czech Republic. Before moving back to Europe last year, the 20-year-old completed two strong seasons with the Gatineau Olympiques in the QMJHL.
Reway has produced every where he's played, from a young age. A quick look at his career statistics will show that he averages more than a point per game on a consistent basis, both on large and small ice surfaces.
The biggest challenge for Reway will be maintaining that consistency at the NHL level, if and when he makes the jump.
Votes
The highest rank Martin Reway received for this year's Top 25 Under 25 was Scott's vote in the top five. The Prague born left-winger had four top-10 votes and none lower than number 20.
Whether his size dropped him in some rankings or his skill propped him up in others, one thing is clear: the Eyes on the Prize crew are confident he is a skilled prospect with enough upside to garner consideration as a valuable player for the Habs.
Top 25 Under 25 History
In his first opportunity to crack the Top 25 Under 25, Martin Reway fell short. After being drafted in the fourth round by the Habs in 2013, Reway came in 33rd overall in our rankings. However, a strong showing at the 2014 WJC helped him leapfrog his peers to 14th overall in last year's rankings.
Another year later and Reway finds himself one position better at number 13. Considering there were some graduates ahead of him, the jump is modest at best.
Strengths
Reway's skill set draws comparisons to that of a familiar name: Alex Kovalev. Martin's stick-handling ranks highly among the Habs prospect pool. He will continue to hone that talent playing first-line minutes in the Czech Republic, where he will surely see quality ice time, including valuable power play minutes.
A playmaker at heart, Reway has great vision on the ice, and is incredibly elusive. With that kind of talent at their disposal, coaches need only support the winger with linemates blessed with strong positional instincts, so as to be ready when his puck finds their tape.
During the 2015 World Juniors, Slovakia leaned heavily on their Captain. Watching the games, it seemed as though he was on the ice every other shift (and perhaps he was). While the assignments did seem to weigh on him, his determination propelled his success.
Possibly the most impressive part of the final WJC appearance was a deviation from an offensive focus to a more rounded two-way game. As a returning player, Slovakia looked to Reway to neutralize the opponents' best players. Reway's ability to diffuse plays followed by his natural offensive instincts powered Slovakia's counter attack on route to a Bronze medal win over Sweden.
Weaknesses
Stop me if you've heard this one before. If only Martin Reway had Joe Thornton's frame, right?
Currently listed as 5'8" and 170 lbs on the Canadiens website, the stakes are stacked against Reway. Like most prospects his age, he will need to find the perfect balance in order to bulk up while maintaining his finesse. The scouts saw something in Reway, a raw talent, maybe, that convinced them to overlook his size in favour of skill.
A high risk, high reward prospect - Reway will need to look to other successful NHLers who overcame small frames to provide big production. Habs fans need look no further than Brendan Gallagher who gives nearly as much as he takes night in and night out. Even David Desharnais can be looked to as a role model, or the recently retired Martin St. Louis.
It won't be impossible for Reway to make the NHL - far from it - but it will be tough. With the right support from his coaches and teammates Martin will be able to focus on his strengths. Thanks to some extra work this summer, he did manage to tack on almost 20 lbs to his frame.
Projection
Martin Reway has the talent and consistent production numbers of a top-six winger. It remains to be seen if he will force his way into that role with the Canadiens, particularly with so many similar prospects knocking on the door.
Thus, remaining with HC Sparta Praha is probably the best course for his career at this time, so he can focus on becoming a first-line talent before making the jump back to North America.
The speedy left-winger may need to continue to develop his two-way game to secure a spot with the Habs. If recent history is any indication, Reway will need to work his way up through the lines before claiming a spot in the top six. With Max Pacioretty and Alex Galchenyuk currently occupying those left wing slots, there isn't a lot of room for Reway to make his mark.
If and when Galchenyuk moves to centre, the door will open for Reway. As is the case with most potential NHL players, Reway will face stiff competition for any open roster spot along the way.The report says Manchester United's tour to China last year has played a part in their rise
Manchester United have replaced Bayern Munich as the most popular team online in China, according to a new report.
The sixth edition of the Red Card, which analyses the influence of 53 European clubs on China's social media platforms, has Arsenal and Liverpool joint third with Manchester City fifth.
The German Bundesliga remains the most influential league online.
Arsenal's Mesut Ozil is the second most popular player behind Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo.
United forward Wayne Rooney, who has been linked with a move to China, also features in the top five, along with Old Trafford team-mate Anthony Martial.
Real's Wales international Gareth Bale is third, but Lionel Messi is a notable absentee. The Barcelona forward does not have a social media presence in China.
The study took its data from Chinese social media platforms WeChat and Weibo, the latter a cross between Twitter and Facebook, as well as audience figures from live streams of games and how the respective club websites perform in the country.
David Hornby, head of sport at Mailman which produced the annual report, told BBC Sport: "The Premier League is complacent. Its clubs have decent numbers of followers on Weibo, but not as high engagement.
"The Bundesliga clubs are far more active. The German league tells its clubs what to do, whereas the respective Premier League clubs are in control of what they do."
Regarding United's ascent to the top for the first time since the report began, Hornby said: "There was a gap between following and engagement.
"United were the most followed, but Bayern were a country mile ahead regarding activity online. But United have taken big strides with fan events and a tour last year."The working title for my hands-on impressions of Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade following our PAX Prime demo session changed multiple times over the course of the weekend. At one point I considered calling it “Warhammer 40K: Worst. Demo. Ever” but I thought it might be a bit too on the nose.
Before I dive into the gory details behind what brought me to that particular thought process, allow me to indulge in a brief anecdote from our E3 appointment for W40K earlier this summer. I promise it won’t take long, but should help give some context as to why I have little faith in the project at this point.
It had been nearly a full year since I’d had met with studio head Miguel Caron for the first time. Hot on the tails of the initial game announcement, the two of us sat on the dirty stone steps of the convention center for that first meeting, and chatted for nearly a full hour about the potential for the property to provide the basis for one heck of a compelling MMOG.
Rolling into E3 2014, I was eager to see how far the project had progressed over the course of its first full year in development. Three key takeaways from that fateful day helped set the stage for what was to follow this past weekend during PAX Prime.
1. Our team was forgotten in the waiting area for our appointment because apparently someone perceived as more important than us distracted the demo team like a dog chasing a tennis ball. Because of this, our appointment was cut dramatically short before we were whisked away without so much as a thanks and a handshake.
2. During our demo, we were shown two videos. The first featured footage from a tech demo that used primarily placeholders for everything from the character models and animations, to the environments in which a multiplayer match was being played.
3. The second video illustrated the practical work completed on the real game up to that point. Character models were blocky and lacked texture, and nearly everything else was using gray box placeholders. In other words, typical pre-alpha build stuff.
Let’s Pretend
I wish I could say that I was impressed by any part of our Warhammer 40K hands-on session during PAX Prime 2014. I wish I could report that it wasn’t based on that proof of concept tech demo rather than what felt like a real game. I also wish that I could wax poetic about the real character models, combat animations, or core gameplay that were woefully absent while we played our demo match (but were at least shown to exist within the game client following our hands-on session).
I wish I could say that any of these things were true, but the sad fact of the matter is that I can’t. Sure, most games tend to be pretty darn rough around the edges at earlier stages of development, but you’d expect to see at least something to prove a product will eventually exist by the time developers are accepting cash payments for founders packs.
Similar to our E3 2014 appointment, things got off to a bad start before they really even began. While we weren’t left waiting indefinitely in a meeting room lobby, we might as well have been. We knew it was going to be one of those appointments again the moment we stepped into the meeting space to discover Miguel paying fan service to Angry Joe.
I absolutely respect the many YouTubers out there that have managed to make a name for themselves in pretty volatile market conditions. At the same time, being summarily ignored in favor of one of them sitting across the room caused more than a little anger in Team Hammer. At one point during our match Skylatron may or may not have spawn camped Angry Joe until he finally asked her to stop. That was about the most attention we were given during the hour-long appointment, unless you count the warm bottle of Coors Light offered to me as a form of consolation prize.
Following a lightning-fast introduction to combat (that made pretty much zero sense to us but was augmented by a handful of second-generation Xerox copies of what appeared to be game info on one of the tables in the room) we were divided up into two teams of three. The map we played on featured two capture points that my team started out defending.
What we did get to experience was a very, very incomplete map that looked and felt a heck of a lot like that proof of concept demo we were shown during E3. Combat was somewhat sluggish, but if nothing else I could see what’s being aimed for.
PlanetSide 2 has been name dropped more than a few times in reference to what they’re aiming for with Warhammer 40k, and the fortress where our battle took place seemed set up with exactly that type of gameplay in mind. Mind you, the fortress and some surrounding terrain were all that existed on the map, so it was difficult to get a proper sense of scale.
Lessons Learned
Most of the time I’m elated to get my hands on an in-development title for the first time. Having played MMOGs since the late 1990’s and covered them professionally for the past seven years, I’d like to think I’ve developed an eye for compelling new games even in their very primitive pre-alpha stages. However, being exposed to pre-alpha builds is dangerous water to tread, because you really don’t have a lot to work with in terms of assessing how things might improve moving forward.
If there is one thing we discovered about Warhammer 40K during our PAX demo, is that there is definitely plenty of room for improvement. The vision, monolithic IP, and development team are all variable components that could still prove that this will be a solid MMO experience worthy of the 40K brand given time. But at this early stage, it’s hard to say if we were looking at a diamond in the rough, or something else entirely.
At the conclusion of our demo time, we were forced to wander off without so much as an acknowledgment or thanks for stopping by, and I honestly wonder if Miguel even realized we had left. One of the other people in the room was at least polite enough to hand me a business card on our way out.
If our demo time with Gigantic represented the best hands-on experience of PAX Prime 2014 for us, our Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade demo was unfortunately the polar opposite. Much like the warm bottle of Coors Light handed to me during our appointment, the whole thing mostly left a bad taste in my mouth.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
An Orange County mother helped realize her son’s goal of earning an MBA despite a debilitating accident that left him a quadriplegic. Over the weekend, they both earned degrees.
Judy O’Connor attended every class with 29-year-old Marty O’Connor, taking notes for him as he worked toward his master’s of business administration degree at Chapman University.
Shortly after pushing Marty in his wheelchair across the stage, Judy was called out as a “special individual.” The crowd cheered.
The announcer became choked up as she read about the decision by the faculty, administration and board of trustees to award the elder O’Connor an honorary degree.
“Mrs. Judith O’Connor has attended all the classes with her son Marty,” the announcer said. “She has taken notes and worked with Marty throughout his academic career.”
The degree was a surprise, according to the university, but the retired elementary school teacher managed the spotlight gracefully, video from the ceremony showed. Judy O’Connor smiled and posed for photos with her son, blowing a kiss toward the crowd.
Her son suggested his mother receive the degree, the announcer said.
"I was just so excited for her because she deserved it so much," Marty O'Connor said.
Marty, who grew up in Anaheim Hills, fell down a flight of stairs in 2012, two years after earning his undergrad degree from University of Colorado, according to Chapman University’s blog.
His primary focus at first was physical therapy, five days per week. That helped him heal physically but he still felt lost mentally, he said. Graduate school became a goal.
Judy O'Connor was living in Florida and teaching at the time of the accident, but she came to Southern California to help her son.
O'Connor was awarded a $10,000 annual scholarship through Swim With Mike, an organization started to benefit USC All-American swimmer Mike Nyeholt, who was paralyzed in a motorcycle crash in 1981.
During his studies at Chapman, Marty used voice recognition software and other aids, but he couldn’t take notes or hand-write test answers. That’s where his mom came in.
"As a mom, you just want to help your kids get through things," Judy O'Connor told KTLA. "I always believed in him. I knew he could do it and I just wanted to have his back."
She loved the experience, she told a writer for Chapman’s blog.
“I’m a geek. I love being in school,” she said. “I’m not going to lie. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”There is a glorious naivety in motor racing circles that the FIA can somehow warrant Bernie Ecclestone and Jean Todt to “fix the sport”. Judging by some of things I have read, it seems that the duo can now don their Batman and Robin gear (after a fight over who wears which costume) and, after a fight over the car keys, and adjusting the driver’s seat, they can accelerate into the F1 world (after an argument over the route to take) and zap all the problems, like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo taking on the evil empire.
It is not quite like that… The problems that they have is that there is a vast spider’s web of legally-binding interconnected and overlapping contracts that no cartoon hero is going to fix without wading into battle as OC of the 1st Battalion of the Legal Eagles. You cannot just zap binding commercial contracts without fear or favour, as the BBC and Austin, Texas are currently finding out. If you sign a deal with the Formula One group and you do not keep to that deal, the other party seeks compensation and even damages.
The irony here, of course, is that the system was created by those who are now seeking to un-make it. It is a bit like the French attacking the Maginot Line.
They created these structures in order to ensure the steady flow of money to the shareholders in the Formula One group, by tying in the big F1 teams until 2020, but in order to get their support there was a price to pay and terms and conditions that were not what was needed. However, a quick buck is much admired in the money world. The sport is now paying the price for this short-term botching. The problems can be fixed, of course, but that will cost the Formula One group money, as it discovered recently when trying to get Renault to stay in the F1 fold. That is the shape of things to come. If we are lucky, someone else will buy the mess from CVC Capital Partners and set about fixing the problems, but the price of $8.5 billion, plus around $5 billion in debt, is pretty high for what you are getting. So the primary focus of the sport should really be to explain to CVC Capital Partners and their fellow investors that they have taken enough and if they want to get out with their trousers, they need to reduce the price they are asking. If not, they are going to get a load more pain and reputational damage as their high-profile investment spins out of control and eventually smashes itself up against the crash barriers of reality. However, the problem here is that they have probably promised the earth to their investors and must now deliver…
The manufacturers are a powerful bunch and they do not want to mess the sport up. It is not in their interest to do that, but they feel that they have been exploited for far too long (which they have – although it is their own fault) and they want a fair share. They have not been smart in grabbing only what they want and not helping the smaller teams – and so there has always been a question of unity (or, rather, the lack of it) and that has been skilfully exploited by the money-grabbers. It is ironic that Ferrari should be leading this challenge because the Italian firm would not recognise a fair share if it landed on its foot. They have been the primary reason that the system developed because they understood their power and exploited it and then, at the right moment, dumped the other teams and got the best deal they could. Good business, perhaps, but short-sighted and now a problem. The argument that the sport needs small teams to survive because manufacturers come and go, is only valid if there are not huge penalty-laden contracts that tie the car-makers to the sport, and the rules are such that they want to be there all the time – even if they are not winning. If the rules and technology are right they will be there.
To be fair, Ferrari has been in the World Championship non-stop since the start, Mercedes has been a solid F1 supporter for more than 20 years (allowing for disguised early efforts) and Renault has been in the business pretty solidly in one form of another for nearly 40 years, so you cannot call them disloyal. Yes, Honda has come and gone, BMW too, but the small team argument is not as valid as once it was. As we have seen with Brawn, Sauber and Lotus F1 when a manufacturer departs, there are usually people ready to step in and try to win…
The first thing that we must establish in order to fix the sport is to define its purpose. The besuited vampires of The City see it simply as blood bank to be sucked dry so that they can impress pension fund managers and thus get massive commissions and bonuses to allow them to afford shooting parties on country estates. The competitors and fans see it rather differently. The sport is their passion. A game they love to take part in or to watch – and make a living from if they are lucky. They don’t want it to be a pawn in the shekel-shoving world which excites the vampires, they want it to open, sensibly-priced, sensibly-run and just good fun. When it ceases to be that, they turn away and the audience dissipates and the game is over. The money stops coming, the world moves on and some other form of entertainment becomes “the in thing”.
None of us want that, although some believe that certain parties would prefer to by buried with the sport, so that history will see them as having been important. Hmmm… Not sure about that. Can anyone name the promoter of chariot racing in Roman times? No, I didn’t think so. If we dig around, we can name a few charioteers, at best. A good lesson.
So, we have the solution of the problem staring us in the face and the FIA, the self-appointed guardian of the sport, should polish its rose-tinted spectacles and peer into reality and face the facts. They probably cannot do much because of the 100-year deal that was signed, but perhaps within that deal there are clauses that could be used to terminate the agreement. That would require a fight and the federation has no real appetite for conflict, as appeasement of the commercial forces massed on the borders has paid OK up to now.
Of course, it this warrant thing works then it is good news for all concerned because we can then fix everything easily. We can fix the fact that the sport is about as transparent as the skyline in Beijing. We can make all the deals public so that we know how the sport operates; we can have someone explain us to us why there are two parallel FIAs (one in France and one in Switzerland), we can know who pays for what and we can know the wording of the celebrated Ferrari veto.
Transparency is a good thing because it shows that there is nothing to hide. It attracts business and makes sponsors feel safe and secure. Obviously, there needs to be some cost-cutting and budget-capping, but beyond that there is nothing much wrong with this great sport. We must go with the technology if we wish to remain relevant, but we must also remember what sport is and why opening the doors to the greedy people was such a very bad idea.Blog Archive September 2018 (2) June 2018 (1) March 2018 (1) December 2017 (1) November 2016 (1) October 2016 (1) September 2016 (1) August 2016 (1) July 2016 (1) June 2016 (1) March 2016 (1) February 2016 (1) December 2015 (1) October 2015 (1) July 2015 (2) June 2015 (1) May 2015 (3) March 2015 (1) February 2015 (1) January 2015 (2) December 2014 (1) November 2014 (1) October 2014 (2) September 2014 (2) August 2014 (2) July 2014 (8) June 2014 (4) May 2014 (9) April 2014 (2) March 2014 (2) February 2014 (5) January 2014 (6) December 2013 (9) November 2013 (4) October 2013 (5) September 2013 (6) August 2013 (6) July 2013 (2) June 2013 (2) May 2013 (4) April 2013 (3) March 2013 (5) February 2013 (9) January 2013 (6) December 2012 (8) November 2012 (3) October 2012 (12) September 2012 (1) August 2012 (6) July 2012 (11) June 2012 (9) May 2012 (9) April 2012 (13) March 2012 (15) February 2012 (15) January 2012 (11) December 2011 (11) November 2011 (16) October 2011 (8) September 2011 (6) August 2011 (11) July 2011 (11) June 2011 (16) May 2011 (10) April 2011 (8) March 2011 (11) February 2011 (10) January 2011 (15) December 2010 (12) November 2010 (10) October 2010 (9) September 2010 (10) August 2010 (9) July 2010 (15) June 2010 (17) May 2010 (13) April 2010 (16) March 2010 (8) February 2010 (9) January 2010 (8) December 2009 (14) November 2009 (18) October 2009 (17) September 2009 (13) August 2009 (10) July 2009 (7) June 2009 (14) May 2009 (16) April 2009 (15) March 2009 (17) February 2009 (15) January 2009 (15) December 2008 (20) November 2008 (17) October 2008 (19) September 2008 (20) August 2008 (26) July 2008 (34) June 2008 (37) May 2008 (23) April 2008 (26) March 2008 (39) February 2008 (17) January 2008 (39) December 2007 (31) November 2007 (42) October 2007 (45) September 2007 (63) August 2007 (45) July 2007 (43) June 2007 (23) May 2007 (53) April 2007 (47) March 2007 (13) February 2007 (7) January 2007 (5) December 2006 (3) November 2006 (15) October 2006 (2) September 2006 (1) July 2006 (3) August 2005 (1) July 2005 (1) June 2005 (1) May 2005 (4) April 2005 (5) March 2005 (5) January 2005 (4) December 2004 (10) November 2004 (5) October 2004 (4) August 2004 (16) May 2004 (1)Circumcision increases the population growth rate by killing masturbation
The percentage of newborn boys in the U.S. who are circumcised has dropped from 83% fifty years ago to 77% today. The U.S. mainstream media present this nearly undetectable change as the end of the world (one of fifty ends of the world that they frequently cover). MSNBC's title reads
while others offer even more dramatic summaries:You may see that this hysteria is largely generated by real physicians with real degrees, MD. You may imagine that I find this propaganda stunning because I would subscribe to Penn and Teller's Bullshit, episode Circumcision (30-minute video).In fact, even though I have spent 10 years in the U.S., I just didn't know that most American newborn boys were being mutilated in this way until I returned back to Europe – if I remember well. If I look back, I am surprised that the American women were not more thrilled by the gift of God – meaning boys and men from Europe – assuming that they realize that most American men are cripples. OK, more seriously, it's being said that the procedure brings many more health advantages than "risks". Some studies have argued that the procedure reduces the risk of urinary tract infections, HIV/AIDS from heterosexual sex, penile cancer, and other things. There are other papers that equally self-confidently state that no such a relationship exists.The reduction may exist or not but its magnitude is surely tiny relatively to other consequences of the procedure. Just study the list of countries according to life expectancy. Compare the U.S. with any European country, e.g. Germany. (Less than 1% of boys and men in Europe are estimated to be circumcised.) Or with Denmark. The U.S. had 77.4/82.2 years for men/women; Denmark had 77/82 for men/women. You see that it's pretty much identical. If there were a significant impact on the life expectancy, you would see it in these numbers. There's none.The question whether one may measure the reduction of very dangerous and lethal diseases is a purely academic question with no significant implications for a vast majority of people. In the ancient times, it may have been difficult to maintain good rules of hygiene but our infrastructure is better these days and allows the men to remain pretty much clean with or without the foreskin.But there are many other implications of the procedure.An organ's size gets reduced, along with lots of nerves that are concentrated in the foreskin. The nerves in the foreskin have a stimulating effect on the men while, in the case of a certain contact that I won't describe in detail, the foreskin itself has a tickling effect on a woman. Nature has evolved in this way. It has a reason. In the past, I would think that the circumcised men must have completely different (or missing) ideas about pain and pleasure. Later I realized it cannot quite be the case. America as well as Israel are clearly alive and kicking and the Muslim countries manage to scratch out a living, too. ;-)So in Europe, we think of circumcision as a cruel and painful ancient ritual that is surviving in countries that just haven't switched to the modern era yet. In a Bundesland of Germany, it was legally identified as a crime of mutilation of a baby without his consent – it is not too far from a rape against a child. Quite generally, people in Europe would think that circumcision is a barbarism – if nothing else, it's so painful for the boy. Even if you decided that that circumcision is sufficiently or highly beneficial, there is no important enough extra advantage in performing it very early. Why wouldn't you allow the boys to wait and decide whether they want to undergo the execution when they are already able to think for themselves?Yes, indeed, I do think that most boys would prefer to avoid it if they were given the choice at the age of 15 or so – primarily because it's painful, irreversible, and "against Nature's intentions". And because the advantages are just too minor. If the free boys decided – after thinking about all costs and benefits – that the better answer is "avoid it", how can the right answer be "undergo it"? The "right answer" is "undergo it" only because it neglects some costs that actually matter and because it imposes a cruel societal group think on an individual who can't defend himself. And if you don't care about the boy's pain, why don't you consider rape against boys to be equally OK?But what I consider the most important consequence of circumcision is its impact on masturbation. It must be much harder, right? It was really the motivation why this ancient Middle Eastern barbarian ritual was transferred to some Christian countries. Someone in the Catholic Church just wanted to reduce the heretical masturbation. Don't you think that the ability to do this rather well-known activity is a more important question than the question whether your chance to get a rare, esoteric diseases decreases by 0-10 percent?I must have discovered the wheel but look at the map of the population growth rate above. It is spectacularly correlated with the rate of circumcision pictured on the first map. The correlation is especially impressive in the patterns going through Africa. If you don't find other sources, please quote me as the discoverer of the relationship.What is my explanation? It's simple. In countries where circumcision is dominant, the boys or men just can't masturbate as easily as they can in Europe. So when they need something, they are much more likely to make sure that they find a female partner. In some cases, a child is born 9 months later. If this explanation is right, we could also "easily" revert the decreasing population trend in some countries of Europe such as mine. Just import circumcision. I wrote the word "easily" in quotes because it wouldn't really be too easy to convince the people that they should be doing something to their sons that no one has been doing to them and to their fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers.Even more so than in the case of the recommended ski helmets, the libertarian scientist inside me cannot swallow that some physicians pretend to be "deducing" that some (not really too statistically significant) papers "directly imply" that boys should be mutilated in this way. Even if the probability of some of the diseases decreased after circumcision, this probability is an entirely different question from the question whether it should be done. Science just cannot answer moral questions, questions "what is good for us".Moreover, the modified sensitivity and |
Chi Omega's national office and will update when they respond. nullA second web-based effort linked to Russia attempted to promote protests in Baltimore last year — this one during a hearing for a police officer charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.
CNN reported Thursday that an online campaign called “Don’t Shoot Us” — which posed as part of the Black Lives Matter movement — used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and even Pokémon Go in an effort to exploit racial tensions and sow discord among Americans.
The campaign contacted reporters in Baltimore, including those at The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore City Paper, to promote a protest in July during a court hearing for Lt. Brian W. Rice, one of six officers charged in Gray’s death.
The six officers were cleared of criminal charges in the case. Gray, 25, died in April 2015 from injuries sustained while in the back of a police van. His death sparked large protests, rioting and national attention on the issue of police abuse.
But unlike in 2015, there were no large protests during the officers’ trials in 2016. The Russia-linked account apparently tried to change that.
“This is “Don’t Shoot” — an online community against police brutality. We raise awareness of police violence against people of color,” stated an email sent to a Baltimore Sun reporter promoting a protest. “We have over 180k subscribers, and a lot of them live in Baltimore. Recently we've started receiving lots of messages where people ask us to help demand justice for Freddie Gray. As you probably know, a hearing of Lt. Brian W.Rice, one of the police officers involved in Freddie's death, is scheduled for July 5. The idea is to protest in front of the Baltimore City Circuit Courthouse on that day during the hearing and demand justice for Freddie Gray. We are looking for some media coverage for the event and it would be great if you could help us with that.”
The Twitter and Facebook pages the email linked to have been suspended. However, its website — http://donotshoot.us/ — is still active.
No one from the email address responded to a request for comment.
Brandon Weigel, an editor at City Paper, was among those who received the email. He said he didn’t take it seriously at the time because it looked suspicious.
“It was really strange,” he said. “I had never heard of this group before. I didn’t take it seriously at the time.”
Even so, Weigel said he was surprised to learn the account was linked to Russia.
“I never would have guessed it was linked to a Russian operation. I thought it was a national group trying to make a name for itself,” he said. “How effective it was is debatable.”
CNN reported that the campaign “appears to have been run from one source — the shadowy, Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.”
A source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN that the Don't Shoot Us Facebook page was one of the 470 accounts taken down after the social media company determined they were linked to the IRA.
It was the second time in 2016 that Russia-linked accounts had attempted to promote protests in Baltimore.
When a Facebook page called Blacktivist promoted a rally to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray in April 2016, some Baltimore activists were immediately suspicious. CNN reported earlier that the Blacktivist effort had ties to the Russian government and used both Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to heighten racial tensions during the 2016 presidential campaigns.
That Twitter account also reached out to journalists, asking for contact information, and got responses from reporters at The Sun, City Paper and New York Times.
But local activists did not embrace that effort. Several told The Sun they dismissed and rejected the outside influence.
“We don’t need people not from Baltimore using Freddie name. Are you working here to fix the issues?” the Baltimore BLOC group wrote at the time.
Baltimore Sun reporter Alison Knezevich contributed to this report.
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Heads up, canned-food eaters: A report released today by the Environmental Working Group details which canned food brands use bisphenol A (BPA) in the lining, and which don’t.
Most of us know BPA as the plastic additive that mimics the hormone estrogen and has been removed from things like water bottles and baby formula packaging. But BPA lines an estimated 75 percent of canned foods in North America, protecting the metal from corroding and preventing bacteria from getting in. This has environmental advocates concerned, because the chemical leaches into the contents of cans at far higher rates than it does into, say, the water in your water bottle.
A 2011 Harvard study found that those who ate canned soup every day for five days had levels of BPA in their urine that were ten times those who had fresh soup. Another study from the same year found BPA in 71 out of 78 canned food samples, with concentrations varying drastically between food types and even within the same product. The Food and Drug Administration maintains that BPA is “safe at the current levels occurring in foods,” though scientists have linked low-dose, long-term exposure of the chemical to to breast cancer, changes in the reproductive system, and other health problems.
There isn’t as much research on canned beverages, like beer or soda, but existing studies have found that the contents don’t tend to interact with the lining in a way that leads to leaching. Also less concerning, at least at the moment, are Tetra Paks—the cardboard cartons lined with aluminum and polyethylene, a different kind of plastic. The liner isn’t known to cause cancer or disrupt hormones.
The report released today by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) shows the results of a survey of 252 canned food brands. Of the companies that answered, a little more than half reported using BPA lining in all canned products, and another 24 percent use BPA in some products. The companies that use BPA in all their canned products, listed below, include familiar brands like Progresso, Hormel, Green Giant, Ocean Spray, Wolfgang Puck Organic Soups, and Manischewitz.
The EWG report also found that 31 brands use BPA-free linings for all their products. But before we get to those brands, it’s worth noting that some BPA replacements may not be any better than BPA itself.
“We can tell you that BPA is definitely toxic,” says Renee Sharp, research director at EWG. “What we can’t tell you is exactly what people are shifting to, or really what the impact of those chemicals are.”
Some BPA replacements are also hormone disrupters that have similar effects to BPA. (For more on the health impacts of BPA-free plastics, check out my colleague Mariah Blake’s stellar feature on the subject.) Existing natural substitutes, like oleoresin (a combination of oil and the resin of plants) don’t always hold up for storing more acidic foods, like tomatoes.
In its recommendations to consumers, the EWG suggests subbing in fresh, frozen, or dried food for canned food; purchasing food in alternative packaging, like glass; and, if canned food is unavoidable, never heating food in the can.
With that said, here are the brands that the group found to use BPA-free lining in all canned goods:(CNN) "I've been on the low / I been taking my time / I feel like I'm out of my mind / It feel like my life ain't mine / Who can relate?"
The opening lines of Logic's most successful song to date are, quite literally, a cry for help. The title of the track, "1-800-273-8255," is the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
In a series of tweets the week the song was released, the 27-year-old rapper explained the motivation behind his music. "Over the years so many of you guys have told me that my music has helped you through so many tough times," he wrote. "Many of you have told me its even saved your life. I'm beyond humbled. But I felt I haven't done enough.... I made this song for all of you who are in a dark place and can't seem to find the light."
Logic found himself in his "dark place" in late 2015, according to an interview with the New York Post.
"I was so scared because I was thought I had to work, work, work, because I thought I might only be around for five years," Logic said. "I thought I wasn't good enough to last."
Logic found his proverbial "light" by learning the power of one word to deal with his anxiety: no.
"I turn down really well-paid shows all over the world because I want to spend more time with my wife and myself," he told the Post. "I could sit here and think, 'I got all these people around me that I need to pay,' which is true... but ain't nobody getting paid if I'm dead."
Logic performed Sunday night on MTV's 2017 Video Music Awards.
The first verse of "1-800" is sung from the perspective of a person who has given up on their life and is ready to end it. The second verse, fronted by Alessia Cara, showcases the response of a suicide hotline crisis worker.
"It's holding on though the road's long / And seeing light in the darkest things / And when you stare at your reflection / Finally knowing who it is / I know that you'll thank God you did"
The song ends with a verse featuring Khalid, again from the perspective of the suicidal caller but who now realizes the endless possibilities of the future.
"I don't wanna cry anymore / I wanna feel alive / I don't even wanna die anymore / Oh I don't wanna / I don't wanna / I don't even wanna die anymore"
As part of a contest to be featured on the cover of Logic's album "Everybody," fans submitted videos detailing how much the the rapper's music means to them. He shared some of them on Twitter.
"When I was alone with myself, the stress was unlike any other time of the day," said Faith Martinez, 18, fighting back tears. "I'd put my headphones in, and it would all subside, because I knew that there was someone out there that cared for their fans so much that if I took away my life the way I had thought about, he would be hurt, and somebody would care that I was gone.
"I put it on until the end, and I stood up, and I kept going," she said. "His music helps people keep going, and I'll forever be grateful for that."
John Draper, director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, said, "The impact has been pretty extraordinary. On the day the song was released, we had the second-highest call volume in the history of our service." Overall, calls to the hotline are up roughly 33% from this time last year.
"We can certainly attribute and have seen call increases relative to tragic events and alarming portrayals of suicide in the media -- anywhere from (musicians) Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington's suicides, and (the Netflix show) '13 Reasons Why,' " Draper said. "But here's what's really important: Logic is generating calls with a song about getting help and finding hope. It's not focusing on tragedy or suicide. In fact, he's starting conversations about suicide prevention, as opposed to suicide."
The video for "1-800," released last week by Def Jam Recordings and Visionary Music Group, has racked up more than 15 million views on YouTube. The seven-minute short film illustrates the story of a young man, beginning when he is just a baby.
His happy childhood is followed by difficulties in high school -- extreme bullying and struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity -- which cause serious strife with his friends and family. One day, he decides he's had enough, collapses in tears and raises a gun to his head, ready to pull the trigger -- but he doesn't. Instead, he calls the suicide hotline.
The story flashes forward to the man's wedding, where his father is standing by his side. The plot comes full circle, ending with the birth of his own son.
The message: It gets better. It always gets better.
"In many ways, Logic's video and song completely embody this message that everybody can take an action to prevent suicide," Draper said. "A lot of people think that it requires a professional or even a hotline. But the fact is that while those are extremely helpful -- and I would always counsel somebody to consider those options -- what we also know is that most suicides are prevented by people being caring with one another.
"How, when a person in your life is in crisis, can you help them get through it?"
Logic delivered a powerful performance of his hit song Sunday night on MTV's 2017 Video Music Awards. On stage with him were suicide attempt survivors, wearing T-shirts with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's phone number and the message "You are not alone."
The lifeline reported a 50% increase in call volume after the show.
"This past year, our audience was forced to say goodbye to musicians too soon because of suicide," said Garret English, executive producer of the 2017 VMAs. "We want to do more than remember these artists. We want to remind people that suicide is preventable and that there are ways to get help and feel better if you're struggling emotionally.
"Logic's song '1-800-273-8255' is not only a phenomenal track, but it has struck a chord with its inspiring message of hope, and we are honored to offer the VMA platform so it can reach even more young people."
Draper said, "It's not just about the calls; it's about increasing awareness about suicide, and suicide prevention in particular. The calls don't even begin to count the number of people who, just by listening to the song and hearing the lyrics, feel more hopeful and less alone. There's really no measuring that impact."Have your say
EDINBURGH is set to dominate the Scottish category of the British Kebab Awards after bagging nearly every spot on the shortlist.
A total of eight restaurants across the city netted a place in the final ten vying to win one of the industry’s top gongs - Best Scottish Kebab Restaurant.
Javit's is hoping to defend its title. Picture: Ian Georgeson
They are last year’s winner Javit’s Takeaway in Granton Rd, Samsun’s Speciality Kebab and Pizza House in Ferry Rd, Hanam’s Restaurant in Johnston Terrace, Nawroz Restaurant in Potterrow, Pera Turkish Restaurant in Elm Row, Hanedan Turkish Restaurant in Preston St, Verdo Turkish BBQ in Newington Rd and Yeni Restaurant in Hanover St.
Only two Glasgow-based restaurants made the shortlist.
Kebab houses around the country are vying for the industry’s top culinary accolades as hordes of kebab cravers vote for the most delectable doners.
Voting closes on March 10 and votes can be cast on the British Kebab Awards website at www.britishkebabawards.co.uk.
Kebabs are now a British institution with an estimated 1.3m sold every day.
DOWNLOAD THE EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS APP ON ITUNES OR GOOGLE PLAYWhen Pauper Leagues hit I was at a loss with what I was going to play for my first runs. I went with Esper Combo, which exposed my lack of practice with the deck or patience to click my way to victory. Next came a winless run with Jund which was the product of too little sleep and too many misclicks. After an inauspicious start I decided to take the information I had gleaned from my own games and combine it with the data I was seeing from the published lists. In an effort to not simply try Delver or Mono-Black Control, I went with a fringe strategy which was not unknown to me: White Weenie Tokens.
White Weenie Tokens is an evolution of White Weenie. The original deck was a midrange aggressive strategy that would eke out advantage with cards like Squadron Hawk and Kor Skyfisher picking up a transformed Loyal Cathar. The plodding deck was highly resistant to spot removal and could use its flyers in conjunction with Bonesplitter to defend against Delver decks and their air force. The deck was also strong against Mono-Black Control as it could sidestep removal with resilient creatures or run sideboard snipers like Obsidian Acolyte to completely blank certain kill spells.
So what happened? Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Gary represented a change in the way MBC operated. It stopped being a deck that tried to leverage removal to help enable wins through Chittering Rats and its ilk. Instead MBC became a deck that was about keeping permanents on the board long enough to chain Gray Merchants together for victory. White Weenie was able to run Journey to Nowhere and Sunlance, but that was not nearly enough to allow the deck to take its normal plodding route to victory in the new world.
The answer came with Vintage Masters and the rarity shifted card of Battle Screech. Battle Screech represented a backup to Squadron Hawk as a way to flood the air with bodies. The sheer number of tokens allowed Guardian’s Pledge to turn itself from a fringe player to an archetype staple. In a similar moment, Triplicate Spirits was released, giving White Weenie a top end token producer and a reason to build towards one shot anthems. Suddenly the deck was no longer a midrange beater. Now White Weenie Tokens, the deck is far closer to a Burn deck on the Philosophy of Fire scale but still allows for some flexibility so that not every card has to be a Lightning Bolt.
This is my latest build of the deck and it varies from the norm in some meaningful ways. I’ll get to those in the core card discussion.
White Weenie Tokens is a “go wide” aggressive deck with some combo deck elements. The goal is to assemble enough tokens to deal lethal damage aided by the deck’s anthem effects. Because many of the cards in the deck are capable of producing more than one threat, the deck does not fear pinpoint removal taking out a key creature on the anthem turn. White Weenie Tokens is a deck that can win on turn four regularly and turn five consistently.
One of the bigger challenges with the deck is knowing when to develop the board as opposed to applying pressure. Battle Screech and Triplicate Spirits both ask for offensive resources to be invested in creating more creatures. Often it is correct to take a turn off from attacking to add more threats to the board because it will mean a lethal attack on the following turn. Tokens can also come back from a failed attack simply by rebuilding with more tokens.
In my opinion, these are the key cards to any White Weenie Tokens deck in the current metagame.
4 Doomed Traveler: The best one drop for the deck. Doomed Traveler can attack with abandon in the early game and leaves behind an evasive threat. Traveler allows the deck to apply pressure and crash into blockers without fear of losing potential power. The Traveler also matches up well with Chainer’s Edict, Lightning Bolt, and other commonly played removal.
4 Squadron Hawk: One of white’s best cards, this is probably your best turn two play. Why? Because it draws you more Hawks. The cast is one of the better cards against Delver as they can team up to take down an Insectile Aberration while a single one can take down a faerie. Squadron Hawk is a card that can win a game on its own against a slower opponent as it provides a steady stream of threats.
4 Raise the Alarm: One of the least appreciated white cards in Pauper. The ability to put two threats on the board at instant speed cannot be understated as it can represent extra damage that an opponent was not expecting. Raise the Alarm is at its strongest against Delver decks as it can be cast on their upkeep and forces the blue deck to spend mana at an inopportune time. Forcing their hand can set up a turn where you then deploy additional threats.
4 Battle Screech: Four creatures for a single spell, the rate on Battle Screech is hard to beat. The fact that it can be split over multiple turns gives Tokens another element of reach. The ability to store two creatures in the graveyard for later can help reload after an especially violent attack phase. Battle Screech is an ideal top end for the deck as it can both be the final nail in the coffin or the first brick in a new foundation.
4 Journey to Nowhere: I started with none of these main and then two in the sideboard. Eventually I kept adding the cards to both my maindeck and sideboard until I finally realized that they were better than copies of Gather the Townsfolk I was running. The ability to take out a blocker or an offending utility creature is too valuable to pass up.
3 Guardians’ Pledge: One of the best cards in the deck, but unlike inclusions the Pledge is not ideal in an opening hand. Instead you want to ensure that you draw one during the course of the game and three is the ideal number in my experience. That being said, I could easily see versions where I would want a fourth.
No Veteran Armorer: I understand that many decks include this natural toughness buff but I prefer Ramosian Rally. Here’s why: Veteran Armorer sticks on the board and can be handled by just about every removal spell in the format. Ramosian Rally, being an instant, can catch an opponent off guard if they’ve invested in an Electrickery.
Some notes on other cards:
Suture Priest: A card that helps to slow down Esper Combo until they can find an answer, Suture Priest also allows you to pad your life total and survive until an anthem is found.
Cenn’s Enlistment: Retrace lets the deck trade later land drops for more tokens. When facing down an Envicar’s Justice this is not great, but in many other matchups Cenn’s Enlistment gives Tokens an out to exhaust an opponent’s resources and answers.
Cliffside Lookout: The newest card in the deck, Lookout acts as another mana sink. Lookout has the advantage of coming down on turn one to peck for damage and then site back. Once five lands are on the board Cliffside Lookout now has threat of activation, meaning any turn provides the option for more damage. I found Lookout to be a great inclusion in that it provided an Anthem I actively wanted on the first turn of the game.
Sandsteppe Outcast: Without many great options for a three drop, I turned to Sandsteppe Outcast due to its ability to generate a flying token. Alternatively it can be a 3/2 creature that can survive a one toughness sweeper.
The goal with White Weenie Tokens is to have the same game every time. Sticking a one drop into a two drop and then playing more threats until an anthem resolved. Keeping this in mind, many plays become obvious. When in doubt, develop your board unless a lethal attack is present.
It is also important to be able to leave tokens back to block when needed. Tokens is a deck that will often trade blows back and forth and get into damage races. In these situations you can be at an advantage since you are able to generate more defense as well as offense. The key is to be sure to leave behind enough blockers to survive any potential removal as well.
So why should you run Tokens? It has a rather good Delver matchup. The ability to operate at instant speed in certain aspects in addition to cards like Cenn’s Enlistment and Battle Screech makes it very hard for Delver to stop all of Tokens’ threats. Delver itself is not an offensive powerhouse so the goal becomes trading off tokens until you are at an advantage, then turning the corner to attack for victory. Similarly you can race MBC and can often fight through the first Gray Merchant of Asphodel hitting the board.
Conversely, Esper Combo is a nightmare matchup. Holy Light and Beckon Apparition can slow them down but if timed incorrectly they are useless. Izzet Blitz is also a tough matchup if they can draw Flaring Pain post-board. If not, your sideboard will often trump theirs.
White Weenie Tokens is an interesting deck that has game against Pauper’s top dog. If you’re looking for something a little different, why not take this deck out for a spin.
Keep slingin’ commons-
-Alex
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Discuss Pauper on Reddit at /r/PauperBurkina Faso coup leaders have agreed to return to their barracks and said they would restore the deposed president to power, signing a deal with the army that apparently defuses a tense standoff sparked by last week's coup.
The breakthrough came on Tuesday night after marathon talks in Nigeria's Abuja, where West African heads of state had sought to break the impasse fuelled by angry threats on both sides.
The deal was signed a day after troops entered Burkina's capital of Ouagadougou, turning up the pressure on the elite presidential guards (RSP), who staged the coup.
Under its terms, the RSP agreed to step down from the positions they had taken up in Ouagadougou, while the army also agreed to withdraw its troops 50km from the capital and guarantee the safety of the RSP members as well as their families.
The deal was presented to the Mogho Naba, or "king" of Burkina Faso's leading Mossi tribe, in front of the media early Wednesday.
Burkina Faso plunged into crisis last Wednesday when the powerful RSP detained the interim leaders who had been running the country since a popular uprising deposed iron-fisted President Blaise Compaore last October.
The elite unit of 1,300 men loyal to Compaore officially declared a coup on Thursday and installed rebel leader General Gilbert Diendere, Compaore's former chief of staff, as the country's new leader.
The breakthrough came as Diendere told AFP news agency that interim President Michel Kafando, who had been seized by presidential guards, but later was released, would be returned to office on Wednesday.
The return of "Kafando is already a done deal. The [African] heads of state arrive tomorrow to put him back in office," Diendere said late Tuesday.
In a statement, the Economic Community of West African States said it planned to reinstate and demonstrate solidarity with the Kafando, who was kidnapped last Wednesday along with his interim Prime Minister Yacouba Isaac Zida. Kafando was released on Friday
The release of Zida on Tuesday, an apparent olive branch, came hours after army soldiers entered Ouagadougou without resistance.The rise and fall of Baron Ungern-Sternberg is one of the most demented, savage and grotesque stories of modern times.
In 1920, a sadistic, mystical Russian warlord obsessed with Genghis Khan, Buddhism and anti-Semitism, conquered Mongolia with a ramshackle army of Russian and Mongol cavalry. His reign was barbaric and short.
Ungern has long fascinated connoisseurs, who learnt of him from Peter Hopkirk's Setting the East Ablaze, from the memoirs of those who encountered Ungern and from sensationalist factual-novels such as Vladimir Pozner's Bloody Baron.
The lack of a biography of such a meteoric nutter is a gap that needed filling. I should admit here I myself planned to write Ungern's biography but young Stalin intervened. Now, in an enjoyable debut, James Palmer delivers an account that will introduce this Kurtz-like psychopath to a new audience.
Ungern's life may be a biographer's gift but the challenge with such minor yet flamboyant subjects is to find new material, or one ends up simply sketching intriguing ghosts without flesh.
Ungern's early life as a Baltic nobleman revealed an early taste for violence. He joined the Russian Army serving in the disastrous Russo-Japanese War and earned demotions for his thuggery. His aristocratic connections repeatedly saved him.
Meanwhile his service in the Far East as well as the fashion for Buddhism in society circles started his fascination with a version of the religion that bears little resemblance to the trendy peacenik faith of film stars today; it was already linked to the anti-Semitism that would attract the then Dalai Lama to Nazi racial theories.
War is always a boon for violent maniacs: during the First World War Ungern rose to become a cavalry general. When the Bolsheviks seized power, Ungern joined the Whites in the Far East and fought under another fascinating psychopath, the Cossack Ataman (chief) Semenov, who was backed by the Japanese.
Ungern was appointed governor of a small town, Dauria, where he presided over a hellish crew of bloodthirsty torturers who killed any Bolsheviks or Jews they could find. The period was known as the Atamanschina - the time of the Atamans.
Ungern, eventually turning against Semenov, created a private army of Buriats, Tartars, Cossacks and Tsarist officers that resembled a medieval host; it is graphically described by Palmer.
Ungern was obsessed with his role in history, which he saw as restoring Nicholas II's brother, Michael (who had, in fact, already been killed by the Bolsheviks), to the Russian throne and to restore Genghis Khan's glory and the rule of the living god-king, the perverted Bogd Khan in Mongolia.
In a savagely inept campaign, Ungern managed to expel Chinese troops from Mongolia, take the capital Urga (now Ulan Bator) and restore the Bogd Khan with himself as dictator (aided by Tibetan troops lent by the Dalai Lama).
Ungern's reign was tyrannical and his tortures, described by Palmer, were sadistically, chillingly bizarre.
His unfortunate victims, whether Communist, Jewish or merely the well-off, included women and often children, particularly Jewish ones - 'because the Jews are not protected by any law... neither men nor women nor their seed should remain'. They suffered frenzied beatings ('did you know men can still walk when flesh and bone is separated?'), being dragged by a noose behind moving cars or hunted through streets by Cossacks; there were beheadings, burnings alive, dismemberments and disembowelments, exposure naked on ice, the rending of bodies by wild animals, being forced naked up trees until they fell out and were shot and, finally, in Palmer's evocative description, Ungern'sometimes ordered his men to bend back a tree, then bound the victim to it to be ripped apart by the branches when it was released'.
Such was the surreal fiesta of torture and murder that within three months Ungern was hated and fled back to Russia where he was defeated, captured, tried and shot.
This is quite a story but James Palmer's book has its flaws. While he has travelled widely in Mongolia he can't seem quite to decide whether he is a historian or a travel-writer. He is fascinating on his own visits to Mongolian temples but despite the Mongolian climax, Ungern was a Russian antagonist and Palmer's Russian material isn't always quite right.
His analysis of the German Baltic lords as outsiders from the Russian borderlands misses the point that these noblemen were the backbone of the Tsarist military state - they were more 'insiders' than most Russians.
From the early 18th century, they provided the generals and bureaucrats who ran the empire. Nicholas I was brought up by a Lieven whom he raised to a princess; his most powerful minister and secret policeman was a Benkendorff.
Palmer has, however, found new documents, including letters and Ungern's doctor's memoirs; and I was gripped to learn that Ungern's prosecutor was Emelian Yaroslavsky, a Stalinist henchman.
The problem is that the fullest account of Ungern's misdeeds remains Ferdinand Ossendowski's unreliable memoir Beasts, Men and Gods, a work which Palmer criticises as totally untrustworthy yet uses prolifically.
The lack of material on Ungern himself leads to passages like this: 'Picture the little Ungern-Sternberg (floppy hair, skinned knees, clear blue eyes, schoolbag) and within him are wound-up futures: burnt villages, skinned bodies, lynched Jews. Such images are not irreconcilable; as anybody with an unclouded memory of their own childhood knows, children are frequently uncaring... We have no evidence of Ungern's childhood character... In class, I imagine him not to have been a bully as such, but rather one of those pupils of whom even the bullies are afraid... '
Nevertheless, Palmer, with his special knowledge of Mongolia and enthusiasm for Ungern's blend of lunacy, politics and war, delivers an enjoyable, exciting biography that recounts the crimes and conquests of this monster compellingly, colourfully and with cinematic relish."Netflix's newest capital raise reflects the continuing cost escalation of its streaming business," one analyst writes.
Netflix, which is spending billions of dollars to license and create content to feed its massive streaming business, said Tuesday it will raise $400 million in debt.
Netflix recently reported that it had 27.2 million subscribers to its domestic streaming business and its contractual obligations for the movies and TV shows that its streaming users watch is $5.6 billion, with more than $2 billion due within a year.
STORY: Netflix Stock Hits 52-Week High
The company said Tuesday it will offer $400 million in notes to qualified buyers, and $225 million of that will be used to pay off existing debt.
Investors seemed mildly enthusiastic about the plan, as shares rose 4 percent Tuesday to $169.12.
Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, who predicts Netflix stock could plunge to $55 in the next year or so, nevertheless said that its plan to raise $400 million is a good one in the short term because it "will likely provide interest rate relief and temporary breathing space from hefty content deals."
He didn't change his "underperform" view of the stock, though.
"Netflix's newest capital raise reflects the continuing cost escalation of its streaming business," he wrote Tuesday. "We believe that lack of free cash flow and the risk incurred by increasing debt makes Netflix a risky investment."A green myth is on the march. It wants to blame the world’s overbreeding poor people for the planet’s peril. It stinks. And on World Population Day, I encourage fellow environmentalists not to be seduced.
Some greens think all efforts to save the world are doomed unless we “do something” about continuing population growth. But this is nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense.
For a start, the population bomb that I remember being scared by 40 years ago as a schoolkid is being defused fast. Back then, most women round the world had five or six children. Today’s women have just half as many as their mothers — an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.
This is getting close to the long-term replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Women are cutting their family sizes not because governments tell them to, but for their own good and the good of their families — and if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.
This is a stunning change in just one generation. Why don’t we hear more about it? Because it doesn’t fit the doomsday agenda.
Half the world now has fewer than the “replacement level” of children. That includes Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, most of the Far East from Japan to Thailand, and much of the Middle East from Algeria to Iran.
Yes, Iran. Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York — and a quarter as many as their mothers had. The mullahs may not like it, but those guys don’t count for much in the bedroom.
And China. There, the communist government decides how many children couples can have. The one-child policy is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more. Chinese women round the world have gone the same way without compulsion. When Britain finally handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility in the world — below one child per woman. Britain wasn’t running a covert one-child policy. That was as many children as the women in Hong Kong wanted.
What is going on? Family-planning experts used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated or escaped poverty — like us. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh.
Recently I met Aisha, Miriam, and Akhi — three women from three families working in a backstreet sweatshop in the capital Dhaka. Together, they had 22 brothers and sisters. But they told me they planned to have only six children between them. That was the global reproductive revolution summed up in one shack. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest nations. Its girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. Yet they have on average just three children now.
India is even lower at 2.8. In Brazil, hotbed of Catholicism, most women have two children. And nothing the priests say can stop millions of them getting sterilized. The local joke is that they prefer being sterilized to other methods of contraception because you only have to confess once. It may not be a joke.
Women are having smaller families because, for the first time in history, they can. Because we have largely eradicated the diseases that used to mean most children died before growing up. Mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation, so they don’t.
There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational — they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields.
But most of the world now lives in cities. And in cities, children are an economic burden. You have to get them educated before they can get a job. And by then they are ready to leave home.
The big story is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with tough government birth-control policies or none, most countries tell the same story: Small families are the new norm.
That doesn’t mean women don’t still need help to achieve their ambitions of small families. They need governments or charities to distribute modern contraception. But this is now about rights for women, not “population control.”
It is also true that population growth has not ceased yet. We have 6.8 billion people today, and may end up with another 2 billion before the population bomb is finally defused. But this is |
on flora and fauna, she also announced that she'll be conducting a systemic review of the aquatic rodents.
"Capybaras have been introduced to northern Florida. Several sightings suggest they have been breeding," Congdon told Red Orbit. "They might be able to make a go of it in the United States."
Florida is no stranger to the catastrophic capabilities of invasive species. Experts estimate that 500 types of non-native fish and wildlife roam the state, though not all of them are considered harmful. Many of these invaders entered Florida legally through the exotic pet trade, and one way or another, crept into native ecosystems. Earlier this year, I wrote about Florida's Burmese pythons, which are so prolific and threatening that biologists now host annual culling festivals to spread awareness about their presence.
Still, when it comes to invasive animals—especially those often kept as pets—humans aren't always willing to do what's best for the environment, according to science. After I covered Florida's Burmese python cull, I received a slew of emails from passionate snake owners, condemning the event for being unnecessarily cruel. While these critics couldn't provide evidence that pythons weren't wreaking havoc on Florida's ecosystems (they are), they were certain that killing them was the wrong answer.
Here's what a nutria looks like. Image: Flickr/Beatrice Murch
Congdon suspects that capybara could mirror North America's invasive nutria—a semiaquatic rodent that caused extensive damage to marshes and wetlands. The species was first introduced for the fur trade in the late 19th century, and has persisted ever since. Like the nutria, it's possible that Florida's capybara could ravage aquatic ecosystems by overgrazing, and disrupt the marshy areas along riverbanks. If capybara are free from natural predators, they could also displace native wildlife that occupy similar ecological niches.
Capybara aren't endangered in their native South American habitat, but they are extremely vulnerable to over-hunting, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. In some regions, capybara have been effectively wiped out for their meat and skin.
Still, without any evidence of their invasive effects, there's no need to panic over Florida's capybara yet. But if you see one roaming the swampland, you should definitely contact a local biologist. Hopefully, in the near future, we'll be able to learn some fascinating things about the world's largest rodent.
"We want to keep them from spreading," Congdon added, "but can we please not kill them all so I can study them?"
I somehow suspect that won't be a problem.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Ms Lario and Mr Berlusconi, seen here in 2004, broke up in 2009
An ex-wife of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been ordered to pay him back €60m ($70m; £53m) in alimony after a court ruled that she did not need the money.
He will also no longer need to pay €1.4m a month to Veronica Lario, mother of three of his children.
His lawyers said Ms Lario was wealthy enough to support herself with her €16m fortune. She has not commented.
They split in 2009 after he was seen at the 18th birthday of an aspiring model.
A court in 2012 initially awarded Ms Lario, 61, alimony of €3m a month. That was cut to €1.4m in 2013, but Berlusconi, 81, complained it was still too high.
An appeals court in Milan voted in his favour, saying she did not need additional income. Her wealth includes cash deposits, jewels and a real estate business.
The decision followed a ruling by Italy's supreme court this year that divorce settlements should no longer guarantee spouses the standard of living they had during the marriage but rather ensure their financial sufficiency.
Berlusconi is Italy's fifth richest man, with a fortune estimated at $7bn by US magazine Forbes.
The couple met in a dressing room in 1980 after Berlusconi saw Ms Lario perform in a Milan theatre.
They wed in 1990 and were married for 22 years. In 2007, Ms Lario demanded an apology for one of his flirtations in a letter carried on the front page of national newspaper La Repubblica.
She began divorce proceedings in 2009, accusing him of consorting with minors. Before Ms Lario, he was married to Carla Dall'Oglio for 20 years.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Berlusconi is the leader of the centre-right Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party
The four-time prime minister, who remains the leader of the centre-right Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party, has been embroiled in financial and sex scandals.
In 2013, he was convicted of tax fraud and ejected from the Italian Senate. He was also banned from holding public office ever again.
In 2015, he was acquitted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute after initially being convicted in what became known as the "bunga bunga" case.
He has two other children from his first marriage and is currently engaged to 32-year-old Francesca Pascale.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker said there would be specific conditions for specific banks
Eurozone finance ministers have agreed to lend Spain 30bn euros (£24bn; $37bn) this month to help its troubled banks.
It will be the first instalment of a bailout of up to 100bn euros, which was agreed in June.
The ministers will need to get approval from their own parliaments and hope to make the payment by the end of July.
The eurozone finance ministers also agreed to extend the 2013 deadline for Spain to cut its budget deficit to the EU limit of 3% by one year.
The yield on Spanish bonds rose sharply on Monday ahead of the meeting, with many fearing that little concrete action on Spanish banks would be reached.
"We are aiming at reaching a formal agreement in the second half of July, taking into account national parliamentary procedures, allowing for a first disbursement of 30bn euros by the end of the month to be mobilised as a contingency in case of urgent needs in the Spanish banking sector," Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker said.
"There will be specific conditions for specific banks, and the supervision of the financial sector overall will be strengthened," he added.
The exact amount that Spain needs for the bailout of its banks may not be known until September.
The conclusions of the finance ministers from the 17 countries that use the euro will be submitted to a meeting of all 27 EU finance ministers later on Tuesday.
Crisis jargon buster Use the dropdown for easy-to-understand explanations of key financial terms: AAA-rating AAA-rating The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower's debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is minuscule.
Mr Juncker also said that Madrid should implement measures needed to bring its public finances into line with EU norms.
On Saturday, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that he would take further steps soon to cut the country's public deficit.
In a news conference at the end of Monday's marathon meeting, a number of appointments were also announced.
The ministers reappointed Mr Juncker as their chairman and picked German Klaus Regling to head the permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which is due to come into force this month.
It was meant to begin operations on Monday, but has not yet been ratified by the required number of member states.
The finance ministers meeting in Brussels also agreed that, once the single European banking supervisor has been set up next year, banks may be helped directly by the ESM without the need for state guarantees.
This was seen as a key part of attempts to stop the aid being given to weak banks from adding to countries' debts.
But there had been some objections to the measure from northern European countries.
Meanwhile, Germany's constitutional court will be sitting in Karlsruhe to hear objections to the ESM on Tuesday.Back in 2010 when I moved to the Sacramento area, I was a bit worried that I would not be able to highline as frequently as I was before. For the past few years I had a set of dormant volcanos within walking distance of my home that I could go setup a highline on whenever I had spare time. Sacramento is as flat as it gets, not a mountain around. However, after a few hours of searching online, I soon discovered that the foothills of the Sierras were a short drive away. This very large area of land was riddled with potential locations that I could setup many different highlines. One place that stood out in particular was the Cosumnes River Gorge (CRG), which was just south of Placerville, just 40 miles East of Sacramento.
This was the first location that I went to check out. When you arrive to CRG, there is a very short trail from the road to get down to the gorge. About 300 feet from the road is a small perch point that looks down on the entire gorge. This is the first spot I went. From this point, there was a seemingly HUGE gap going all the way across the gorge. I saw this gap and thought to myself, "Some day, I will walk this line." Well, that day has come!
On September 28th, we had a longline festival in Sacramento, which was a great success (blog post coming soon)! After this festival, we all decided to have a day of highlining at CRG on some of the newly established lines. We setup 5 highlines: a 75 footer, 115 footer, 175 footer, 240 footer, and a 704 foot behemoth! It was a great day of fun for all involved. Lots of people got on their first highline and many earned their personal bests! I was focussed a lot on going around and spending time with all the people that came out for the festival rather than walking my project. I knew that this would be a line that I would have to spend some serious time on to conquer, so I wasn't worried so much with trying it a bunch of times.
Going big on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson Going big on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
From start to finish, it took 2 days to get the big line up. On the first day, I got a rope across the gap. This wasn't as hard as I initially thought it was going to be, but not easy either. I had to throw a rock over 4 sets of trees, scramble on the most slippery rocks I have ever encountered, and haul 700 feet of rope up a 45-degree angled cliff. It was super cool to see this rope across the gap. It was at this point that the shear size of this project started to become more apparent to me. This was no small accomplishment I was going for, this was 253 feet longer than I had ever walked before. I was scared, unconfident, and very unsure of myself at this point. At the same time, I was anxious to get on this monster of a highline!
The next step in the process was to get the actual webbing across and finish the rigging! For this I would need a full team of guys. Hauling 700 feet of taped webbing across a gap of this size is no easy task. Preston Alden, Dan, and Ryan Robinson all were on one side of the gap with Cody Terrell, Chris Wilson, and Me on the other side. It took us about 30 minutes to carefully pull that line across the gap. Once it was across, anchoring and tensioning were a breeze.
A side-view of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson A side-view of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
Now that the line was rigged, it was time for my first attempt. I had very low expectations when I first got on the line. This thing wasmassive! I couldn't even fathom walking this thing, no matter how hard I tried. This actually helped me fight my way across as I wasn't expecting anything. Interestingly enough, I made it across with 7 falls. At the end, I still felt very unconfident about the line. However, I didn't have much time to ponder it as I wanted to focus on the festival rather than this project during this day. So, this was the only attempt I made on this first day that the line was up.
At the end of the day, it was decided that this line would stay up so that I could project it over the next couple of days in a more focused environment. I had a crazy weekend with throwing the festival, so I needed a bit of rest before I could make more attempts. I took the next day off and then came back to the line fresh on Tuesday morning. A good friend and professional photographer, Travis Burkedecided that he would stick around to document this project until completion. At this point, I made the commitment that I would leave this line up until I crossed it. Little did I know that it would be the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life.
Cruising on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson Cruising on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
After retensioning the line to my desired tension on Tuesday morning, I got on the line with a bit more confidence than before. The first time I stood up, I instantly fell. The line was moving in what felt like a totally uncontrolled way. I had no idea how to deal with all that movement beneath my feet. Because of the tension, length, and material type, the time it took for a movement to travel down the line and back was around 4 seconds. That's a long time to wait for your mistakes to come back to you. If you aren't aware of this frequency of the line, it can start to move in a seemingly random way, causing you to fight yourself from a few seconds before. It's a crazy sensation that can only be stopped by stopping yourself.
This is one of the things that I really enjoy about long highlines. It forces you to calm yourself in the now in order to prevent any sort of unnecessary fighting. It's a moving zen sensation that encapsulates slacklining as a whole: Less is More. You move less, the line moves less, making it more walkable. It's a crazy idea that fascinates me. I love that about slacklining! The more you focus on yourself and what you are doing at that very second, the better you will do on the line.
Struggling through the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson Struggling through the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
This whole idea took me several days to learn. This second day I was out there, I kept falling over and over and over again. In fact, I fell 76 times before I could take more than a single step! This frustrated me to the extreme. I was loosing confidence on this line very quickly. I couldn't figure out this line! In the first time in a very long time, I felt like a beginner. I felt as if I had never stepped foot on a slackline before. My body would shake, I would be totally out of control, I wouldn't be focused at all. It was terrible! I went home that day with shame and failure in my head. I thought that there was no way I would be able to get this line.
That night I dreamt about the line. Not in the way that I usually do, but I dreamt of failing over and over. I was scared...this line had powers over me that I couldn't control. Little did I know, it was myself that was the issue...not the line! I needed to somehow center myself and narrow my focus to be able to conquer such a project. This is where I started to realize the importance of focusing on the now.
Chongo mounting in the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson Chongo mounting in the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
I came back the next day (Wednesday) with a bit more confidence. I tensioned the line, got on, and had a bit more fun! I was able to get across the line this time with 6 falls! A new best!! I was feeling good now. Now I had seen the whole line a few times and was starting to get the hang of it. I got back on to walk the other direction, then I saw him. The Goat! There he was! There is a lone white Goat that lives at CRG that I always see. Seeing this guy gave me a bit of hope. Every time I have worked a project at CRG, this goat shows up and gives me power. After seeing him, I stood up and walked the line with only 2 falls! This was amazing!! Progress!! Oh man, my confidence shot up. I was excited now. I knew that this project would go.
Now that I had given the line several tries for two days straight and my confidence was high, I knew that I needed to rest a bit then come back full force. So, I took Thursday off and spent some time in the office. I had a wonderful stretch session that night, then woke up early with the intention to send a big highline on Friday morning.
Staying steady on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson Staying steady on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
I made my way out to the line, tensioned it up, and immediately gave it a go. I got across with 5 falls. Okay, good start, better than all the previous days. However, when I made it to the other side, the wind started to howl. When I say howl, I mean HOWL. The line was arcing 8 feet (2.5 meters) to the right from the wind. This scared me a little bit. How the hell was I supposed to deal with this gnarly of winds in the middle of a 700 foot highline?! Oh well, I was there on a mission. So, I started my way across in the other direction. Holy crap...the wind. Never in my life was I working so hard to take a step. My lower back was going crazy, my shoulders were super tense, my head was not above the line at all, my exhales were super shaky, I didn't know what to do! I felt back at square one again on this thing. I was getting super frustrated with this line and how windy it was. My best attempt this day was 3 falls. I couldn't believe it. I ended the day with very low confidence.
I knew I needed to be away from this line longer than I was. I needed to not think about it for more than a day. So I decided to go camping in a remote location with my wife and a few friends. This proved to be exactly what I needed: a day in the sun on a lake with not a worry on my brain. Away from stress, away from discouragement, away from everything. When I returned on Sunday, my head was clear.
In the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson In the middle of The 13th Crossing - Photo by Grant Thompson
We got a very late start on Sunday, but it actually was a good thing. The weather was nicer, the light was perfect, and I brought encouraging friends with me! My confidence wasn't super good, but I was at the point with this line that I really didn't care anymore. My goal was to just find a comfort with it and take from it what I could. What really powered me through this was that every single person that came with me the CRG that day came up to me individually to tell me that hey had a feeling that I was going to walk the line on this day. Preston, Damian, Ryan, and my wife Susan all told me that they visualized me getting across with no falls today. This was very powerful for me. I had a sudden sense of confidence and started to believe myself that I could get across this line.
Since I knew that I was doing a lot better on the line when I was coming towards the tensioning side, I decided to glide across in order to preserve energy as much as I could. I wanted to be sure that on this day, all my energy would be put towards getting across this line. On the many days before, I wasn't taking many breaks between attempts, which I think was a very bad idea. When I tied into the line each time, it was going to be at least 1.5 hours on the line. Taking breaks after something as exhausting as this monster highline was absolutely imperative.
A lot of sag on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Travis Burke A lot of sag on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Travis Burke
After gliding across and taking a small break. I got on the line and started my attempt. The wind was very calm at this point, which is something that I hadn't had much experience with on this line. Every day before, the wind had been howling like crazy. It was strange to be able to see the line move exactly with me rather than in an uncontrollable way. This was very refreshing actually. As I made my way across the line, I started to be able to feel more confident. I was walking very steadily and extremely controlled. My head was high, my shoulders relaxed, my lower back tight but not shaking, my legs were strong, my breaths were controlled: everything was solid. I made it about 1/3 of the way before I fell. I felt really good about that though. This was the best first attempt I had made yet! I stood up again with a smile on my face and walked the rest of the way without any problems what so ever. One fall! That was the moment I realized that this line was going to be walked...today!
After taking an hour break and talking amongst my friends for a while, I decided it was time for another attempt. Damian wanted to glide across first to see what the line felt like, so he put on his harness and roller and made his way across the 704 foot gap. Gliding across this line is no easy task. Since there was so much sag in the middle, the first half was super easy. However, the second half was considerably more difficult. By the time you made your way all the way across the line, your arms were completely done. I had to take a good 15 minute break after each time gliding across!
Focusing on The 13th Crossing - Photo by Travis Burke
Once Damian made his way across the gap, I decided to glide over as well. Once I was there, I started to talk to Damian about this line. I was telling him how this line was making me feel very anxious and that it was difficult to get out of my head just how monumental this line would be if I walked it. He said one thing that stuck with me during the whole walk I was about to do, "Take yourself off the frontier." This phrase got me thinking about how many others in the world had done things like this, but WAY more incredible. For instance, Nik Wallenda recently walked a gap that was 1,600 feet long over Niagra Falls, on the first attempt! A few months later, he walked a 1,400 foot gap 1,500 feet high over the Grand Canyon...leashless! This sort of thing reminded me just how minuscule this line is in the scope of the funambulism realm (the art of walking on a rope). This brought me back to realize exactly what I do this for: for fun! I slackline because it's fun. I would not be doing this line if I didn't get some sort of enjoyment out of walking it. This allowed me to let go of the anxiousness of wanting to get across as well as the pressure I felt to do well. It made me want to just get out there and enjoy this big line!!
Damian then went back to the other side to watch my attempt. After he had made it across, I got on the line feeling the best I had felt all week. I was ready to get up and enjoy this monster! I stood up and immediately began to walk. I felt solid. Step after step, the line was responding exactly the way I wanted it to. The wind was null, the air was still, there was nothing but calmness in the air. I could feel my body know exactly what to do at every point along the way. With every breathe, I could feel the breathe of my friends watching me. I could feel there energy empowering me through this walk. Never had I felt something that strong before. The strength of your friends believing in you and being there with you through something as big as this, it was astounding!
Halfway across The 13th Crossing - Photo by Travis Burke Halfway across The 13th Crossing - Photo by Travis Burke
Half way across the line, my confidence was high. I could feel myself starting to slip a little into my anxious thoughts, but I knew that this was not the best idea. I silenced those thoughts as soon as they came in. Now, my focus was at it's peak. I felt as if that line was a part of me. I could watch the line react to me with every single step. There was a point where I was able to harmonize with the line, stepping at the optimal time to allow for easy transitions between steps. This line was mine.
Fourteen minutes after standing up, I took the last step. An overwhelming feeling of joy, confidence, pride, and relief took over me. I did it, I crossed that horrendous highline. I shed a tear after that walk. That was by far the most rewarding moment I have ever experienced. Without the help and presence of all my friends and family, this sort of project would not have been possible. For that, I want to thank Susan, Damian, Preston, Ryan, Gail, Grant, Travis, Dan, and Michael. You guys are awesome!
It took me 13 crossings to finally be able to walk this line. Thus I named the line "The 13th Crossing". This line will always hold a special place in my heart...it's been the hardest project I have ever attempted.
CRG has been a very special place for more over the last 3 years. I have set 3 world records, established 7 highlines, and grown exponentially as a slackliner there. It's a source of pure enjoyment and fulfillment in my life and I hope many others in the future can experience this place or somewhere similar.
Line-SpecsMore evidence of provocations, repression of Barcelona protests
By Alejandro López
20 June 2011
The demonstration in Barcelona last Wednesday by up to 3,000 protesters outside the Catalán parliament was subjected to a vicious police attack. Now more evidence is emerging of the use of undercover police provocateurs.
The protests were peaceful, seeking to prevent the 2011 budget from being passed by blocking the adjacent streets and not letting the deputies of all political parties from entering and voting. Those involved chanted, “You don’t represent us” at all the deputies, until a few groups of individuals started throwing empty plastic bottles, paint and bananas at the politicians and police.
The police attempted to disperse the crowds with batons and rubber bullets, leaving 21 injured. Five arrests were made. These protesters may face up to five years in prison.
The police actions ordered by Catalán Internal Affairs Minister Felip Puig were supported by his counterpart in the central government, Alfredo Rubalcaba, who threatened, “If the demonstrations develop peacefully, we will act prudently. If someone wants to do otherwise, we will be firm.”
Rubalcaba was responsible last December for ordering military intervention against striking air traffic controllers.
Amateur videos posted on YouTube show at least 10 police infiltrators in the demonstration, one with an illegal extended baton. They were identified by the protesters and surrounded until the police came to their rescue and escorted them behind the security lines.
Another video shows one of these agent provocateurs throwing stones at a police van.
Photographs posted on line show a provocateur speaking with a policeman in one frame and, in the next, throwing objects at a police van.
Infiltrating demonstrations in order to either provoke or instigate violence is a long-established method of legitimizing violent intervention by the police in otherwise peaceful demonstrations and bringing in repressive legislation.
The methods used by the Mossos d’esquadre, the regional Catalán police, bring to mind the stated mission of the Francoite police, Los grises (the greys): “Permanent and total vigilance, and repression when necessary.”
Of the 600 police, a ratio of one to every five protesters, many had their faces covered with balaclavas and identification numbers concealed. The police are obliged by a law passed by the previous regional government in 2008 to have their identification on display.
Failure to display identification has been a common police practice since the smashing of student protests against the university reform implemented in 2009. Dozens of court cases involving students affected by the police charges during the demonstrations in March 2009 ended up being closed for lack of police identity. Some judges asked the police to provide the identities of the officers involved, but these requests were all rejected. The same has happened in the recent court cases against the police charges last May against the camp in Plaça Catalonia, which left 121 injured.
A major attack on democratic rights is recorded in another video that shows how the police surround the press, forcing them to one corner and blocking their access to the demonstration. Chants can be heard by the protesters calling, “Let the press in.” One journalist says to another, “What is happening?” and another says, “We are making calls”—most likely to their editorial department or the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The video shows how some journalists are behind the police lines, suggesting that they have been allowed to report while others were not. These reporters were the ones who would take the photographs and film the choreographed scenes of violence.
The Internet user who first posted the video revealing the 10 infiltrated agents, and who then posted the video on the journalists, stated in a public email:
“Friends, after uploading the video ‘Who are the violent ones,’ I have received several threats of possible criminal charges, which is why I have withdrawn it [the video] from my YouTube account.
“Very serious things are happening because they are not respecting the most basic democratic rights. The government is spreading lies and acting with mafia style methods. I am scared, really.
“I send you another video [the one of the journalists] with evidence of blatant anti-democratic practices. [Neither] TV3 [the Catalán public television] nor any other media has said anything or said the whole truth: I filmed this at first hand. I urge maximum distribution, but don’t mention me, please.”
These threats are not surprising. Catalán Internal Affairs Minister Puig recently stated in an interview that he was going to ask YouTube to stop posting the videos in which the infiltrated agents are seen, contradicting his initial statement made the day after the demonstrations that there were no police infiltrators in the demonstration. “The YouTube film is false, it has been orchestrated,” he declared.
Puig has also threatened legal action against Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Professor Arcadi Oliveras, president of the Justice and Peace Association, a member of the Monthly Review editorial board and of the advisory board of ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action), for implying that the violence might have been the result of agents provocateurs, “because in previous events there had been similar situations.”
Oliveras has achieved a degree of prominence since 2008 for his lectures on the financial crisis, the bailouts, war and attacks on democratic rights. He is admired by youth within the 15 May movement for his public support and lectures at the different camps set up in the main squares around Spain. The attack on Oliveras is symptomatic of the fact that the ruling class will not tolerate any political dissent or even theoretical criticism of its austerity measures.
The media has dutifully lined up to condemn the protesters, portraying them as violent thugs. They have ignored the YouTube videos, which have been viewed by thousands.
On its daily morning program “El Circulo,” TeleMadrid showed images of violence from Greek protests, while saying that these were from the demonstration in Barcelona. The journalist can be heard commenting sarcastically, “They are armed with sticks. Very peaceful, huh?”
Another story repeated throughout the media was that the protesters attacked and tried to take the guide dog of a blind deputy of the ruling right-wing party. Another YouTube video shows that the protesters blocked the deputy’s way, and his bodyguards simply got him and went in the opposite direction.
Most importantly, the media has written virtually nothing about what is being voted on within the Catalán parliament, and even less of a critical nature. The budget cuts for 2011 are the largest in the history of Spain since the death of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. It poses the devastation of the already precarious living standards of millions of workers.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned last December, when the military was sent in against the striking air traffic controllers, “The events in Spain and other European nations reveal that the scale of social cuts being implemented—in order to make working people pay for a crisis not of their making—cannot be imposed on the basis of democratic rule.”Internet giant Google and its chief executive Eric Schmidt have been convicted of defaming a Frenchman through its "suggest" search function.
The man, who was not identified for legal reasons, sued Google, claiming the words "rapist", "rape", "prison" and "satanist" were suggested when his name was typed into the company's web search portal, a French legal website revealed.
The man had been convicted of corrupting a minor and sentenced to three years' jail, but was still considered innocent under French law because he was appealing against his sentence, London's Telegraph reported.
Google argued it was not liable for the defamation, as it used algorithms that reflected the most common terms used in the past with words that were entered, and so did not involve Google making the suggestions itself.
But a Paris court found this month that the technology company was guilty of the "public slandering of a private individual".An Illinois woman has made a life changing decision by making her dying best friend's last wish come true and adopting her three young children.
Sara, 36, is in the final stages of ALS in hospice care and is not expected to make it to Christmas.
'She said she can deal with the fact that she's dying, but she can't deal with the fact that her kids will be split,' her best friend, Missy Armstrong told WQAD.
The two women have been inseparable for over a decade after first meeting in 1999 while attending cosmetology school.
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Missy Armstrong (left) has made a life changing decision by making Sara (right), her dying best friend's last wish come true
Sara (left), 36, is in the final stages of ALS in hospice care and is not expected to make it to Christmas. Armstrong has decided to adopt Sara's three children (pictured together right), 11-year-old Cayden, 9-year-old Micah and eight-year-old Amara
'(We) automatically became best friends,' Armstrong said.
Taking their friendship a step further, Armstrong, 42, is in the process of legally adopting Sara's three young children, 11-year-old Cayden, 9-year-old Micah and eight-year-old Amara.
'She would do it for me,' Armstrong, who is already a mother to two of her own children, said.
When she told Sara that she was going to take care of her kids, Armstrong said, 'She just balled and was like are you kidding me and she said 'you swear' and I said 'yeah'.'
As Armstrong prepares to take on the huge task, one of her longtime friends, Rhonda DeBruyn, is lending a helping hand.
Armstrong (above), who is already a mother to two of her own children, said: 'She would do it for me'
As Armstrong prepares to take on the huge task, one of her friends, Rhonda DeBruyn, is lending a helping hand by asking for Christmas gifts to be donated for the children (above)
DeBruyn posted a status on Facebook asking for gifts to be donated so the growing family can have a great holiday.
'My main focus was to make sure that the kids had a good Christmas because I wasn't sure that Sara was going to be here,' DeBruyn said.
Since posting the status, donations have been pouring in for the family.
'I know there`s good people out there, but to see it happen for me is just kind of overwhelming,' Armstrong shared.
'They deserve it, they really do, it's been a rough road.'
'Missy is an amazing friend and person,' DeBruyn told DailyMail.com. 'I've known her 11 years and she has never been anything less than what you see.
'This doesn't surprise me one bit that she stepped in. Her and Sara's friendship is one of a kind.'
Armstrong currently lives in a three bedroom home, which is not large enough for the growing family.
'Missy is needing a ton of support...we have a deadline for the 5 bedroom house she plans to purchase by Dec 26th and have a goal to reach for the down payment which is due that day,' DeBruyn said in a Facebook post.
'Her current 3 bedroom will not be enough room for her growing family. We are not even a 1/3 of the way to our goal.
'Once we get her into her new house, then everything left over that we raised will go to future financial expenses...Every little bit helps.'
To donate, an account has been created at the Southeast National Bank under the name of Melissa Armstrong.In the modern era of mixed martial arts, a fighter's strategy outside the octagon matters almost as much as their performances inside the cage.
Traditionally, to move into title contention a fighter would need to slowly chip away at those fighters above them in the UFC's official rankings and eventually when they've hit the number one contender slot, they are invited to compete for the title.
There are certain fighters out there, however, who can talk their way into the right spot at the right time. The growth of social media now means that fighters can interact with each other and generate fan interest that would have previously been the role of the promoter. Essentially, mixed martial artists are their own best promoter.
There are extremes to each of these ideas. Volkan Oezdemir lets his hands do the talking and the UFC's rankings adjusted according to his performances. Kevin Lee, on the other hand, has just talked his way into an interim title fight with Tony Ferguson.A federal appeals panel has ruled that New York City has a right to ban churches from holding worship |
and ready for Rikers Island at worse. It’s like the old joke, “The food was terrible and the portions were small.” We were surprised that the couple running the party didn’t just say, “This was an off night, come back another time on us.” Avoid it.
Snctm: Never been; got “approved,” then discovered their outrageous four- and five-figure prices. What a joke. After that we ignored everything about them; really, if we wanted to hire escorts to be the party we could do that ourselves and cut out the middleman. Clearly this party has incredible PR and two groups who might attend: insiders who get comped and marks who pay full price. We are unlikely to be the former and unwilling to be the latter.
Heaven Circle: Loved it, but the party seems very UK-centric; in NYC parties are intermittent. Music is overly loud at times. We plan to attend their next party. Heavily body conscious, which may be a plus or minus depending on who you are, but like most parties they are less “elite” than their marketing suggests. We loved it and hope for another one.
La Trapeze: Never been, heard terrible, terrible reviews. The marketing emphasis on their “hot and cold buffet” is off putting. Sex is great. Restaurants are great. Together they are not so great. Snacks are great but a buffet in the same space as a bunch of naked, fucking people seems off.
NS-FW: Have not been but have heard mostly good things. This is one piece that reads like a PR promo placement, but it does sound promising. I think this is being done by the same guy who does Snctm. They don’t seem to have a good ticket and credit card situation, however.
Our favorite parties are still private. People who show up and make friends at public parties tend to find their way into the better private ones. Feeld also has some interesting people on it in NYC. If you know of parties we’ve missed, please let us know.THE smaller-than-promised crowd at yesterday's Convoy of No Confidence rally was enraged by the allegation that their numbers were depleted because the police had turned back a convoy of trucks at the border - even though rally organisers knew it was not true.
The Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce and Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella repeated the accusation that the police had prevented trucking protesters from attending and broadcaster Alan Jones said a truck convoy two kilometres long had been stopped at the border, and that this was ''the most disgraceful thing that has ever been done to our democracy''.
Roll on down the highway... one of the protesters displays a clear message while driving past Parliament House yesterday. About 200 trucks arrived in Canberra in convoys from around Australia, including Port Hedland and Darwin. Credit:Andrew Meares
About 200 trucks arrived in Canberra in convoys from around Australia, including Port Hedland and Darwin, but organisers had been predicting many more.
The ACT police quickly clarified no trucks had been stopped and in fact the convoys had been given a special escort into the national capital.Gone Home’s success last year revived interest in the point-n-click adventure style with which the Nancy Drew franchise has experimented since the first title Secrets Can Kill came out in 1999. Since then HerInteractive releases two games annually. The first title of 2014 is The Shattered Medallion, which is also the 30th title in the franchise. That’s right, 30. Nancy Drew is one of the longest running gaming franchises with a female protagonist, second only to Barbie. Nancy Drew’s longevity, financial success, and unanticipated breadth of appeal argues that a primary female character is no hindrance to a videogame series and might in fact be an asset. Although some developers would like to convince us that the work needed to provide the option of playing as a woman is too difficult, for 16 years HerInteractive has built a truly singular female lead.
What better way to tell the stories of an endlessly curious girl detective than to play as her in-game?
Nancy Drew was first introduced in the 1930s, through the series of novels written by an inconsistent string of ghost writers called Carolyn Keene. Since then, the character has appeared in countless novels, a couple television adaptations, and that movie starring Emma Roberts which no one saw. Of all these incarnations, HerInteractive’s 30-game long series suits Nancy the best. What better way to tell the stories of an endlessly curious girl detective than to play as her in-game? Nancy has been poking her nose in people’s business since the ‘30s: eavesdropping from secret passageways, sneaking into hotel rooms to rummage through suitcases, reading private journals and notes. In the games, the player acts out this sleuthing through the mechanics of puzzle solving, exploring the environment, interviewing, and playing minigames aligned to the theme of the mystery.
From an outside perspective, Nancy Drew games appear to be for a young audience. While that remains true for the most part, like all good franchises, the games have consistently appealed to players of all ages. This is partially due to the many different mechanics working in concert, a form which allows the experience to be more customizable. This sense of personalization has only become more pronounced in recent releases. Newer titles show that HerInteractive’s slight alterations to the design of the core Nancy Drew experience accommodate the diverse range of player ability and preferences. So, if puzzles aren’t your thing, an in-game hint system gradually helps you solve the puzzle or provides the solution if you’re stumped or just hate number puzzles. There is also a dialogue fast-forward button for players who hate talking to NPCs, as well as optional mini-games and object collecting, if so inclined. These innovations yield a game that is never too easy or too difficult. Thus, players are never so overwhelmed that they abandon the story, a common problem in many older Nancy Drew titles where the difficult puzzles would prompt players to seek answers from the Internet (guilty).
The puzzle solving, clue-collecting mechanics work in a mystery game and they also work in Shattered Medallion’s primary setting: a reality TV show. The game starts with Nancy and her best friend being selected for the show Pacific Run: New Zealand, a parody of programs like Survivor and The Amazing Race. As in most Nancy Drew games, The Shattered Medallion educates the player on its geographical setting without fetishizing that locale. In this case, the show’s challenges are New Zealand-related tasks, like sheep shearing and panning for gold. I never knew there were so many breeds of sheep—yet another fact to add to the long list of “Things Nancy Drew has taught me,” which includes the folk history of Lycanthropy and what shoes Marie Antoinette was wearing when she died.
While the challenges educate players on New Zealand, the primary narrative unfolds at base camp through interactions with the other characters. The game may have benefitted from the game tasks directly aligning to the plot: like many other Nancy Drew games, this format makes The Shattered Medallion a game about its characters rather than about a mystery. Even so, many Nancy Drew games end with a standard mystery climax, but this game builds toward a much more complex ending, due in part to the narrative focus on the characters, specifically a series regular background character named Sonny Joon.
It is the narrative focus on Sonny Joon that sets the tone for the Shattered Medallion as a game primarily for long-term Nancy Drew fans. Since first appearing in the sixth game, Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Nancy has found Sonny’s doodles of aliens and notes on conspiracies in drawers and notebooks of her various travels. Despite never appearing onscreen, he’s become a fan favorite, which is why he’s been introduced in The Shattered Medallion as the producer of Pacific Rim: New Zealand. The game gives him a background story worthy of the build-up. The plot centers on him, even though the supporting cast is equally complex: a government code breaker and linguist, a clueless rugby player descended from a long line of mystics, and a ruthless serial Reality TV star. The game also features Nancy’s best friends Bess and George, who provide assistance as well as comic relief. All Nancy Drew games feature an equally eclectic cast, but no other title delivers a cast this memorably well-written. Eventually, each of these characters’ quirks congeal into an important plot device—which I am obviously not about to spoil.
Shattered Medallion’s rich cast holds with HerInteractive’s history of creating great characters, the greatest of which is Nancy Drew. Due to the first-person perspective, Nancy’s physical appearance has not been revealed once in 30 titles. Nancy’s anonymity is another campy running joke in the series. Her face is conveniently obscured in photos that appear in-game, any mentions about her appearance from other characters are brief and unmemorable. Leaving Nancy’s silky smooth voice (provided by Lani Minelli, who has been in pretty much every videogame since 1994) proclaiming “It’s Locked” has been one of the few diegetic traits associated with her character for the entire series. Last year’s The Silent Spy hinted to the appearance of her character by introducing Nancy’s mother, absent since the introduction of the original girl sleuth in the 30’s. Few games focus on the mother-daughter relationship (actually, do any?), but in The Silent Spy learning more about Kate Drew gives players further insight to Nancy’s character, appearance and otherwise.
Nancy Drew is not a strong female character. She’s flawed; she’s not always strong.
Like her mother before her, Nancy is the kind of girl that girls are taught not to be. She’s always rubbing people the wrong way by asking too many questions. She makes honest, clumsy mistakes. She refuses to let her relationships get in the way of doing what she loves: solving mysteries. She’s the girl who cannot stay out of trouble, because she insists on following her burning curiosity, even if it means putting herself in danger. Sure, she solves the mystery to help people, but that’s secondary to quenching her thirst for adventure. Nancy Drew is not a strong female character. She’s flawed; she’s not always strong. Her character has a realness most videogames, films, or other media don’t bother to allow female characters. We’re always asking for more “strong female characters.” What we should be asking for is more characters like Nancy Drew.Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) Two ambassadors and the wives of two other ambassadors were among seven people killed when a helicopter crashed Friday into a school in northern Pakistan. Others -- Pakistanis and foreigners alike -- were injured.
One big question: Was it an accident, or was the helicopter attacked?
Pakistan's military believes a mechanical problem caused the Mi-17 helicopter to go down, army spokesman Gen. Asim Bajwa told CNN, citing an initial investigation.
But a spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, known as the TTP or Pakistani Taliban, insists this was no accident. Members of his militant group used a surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missile, Mohammed Khurrassani said.
The Taliban spokesman said militants had "a special plan to target" Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during his anticipated visit to Pakistan's Naltar Valley. Sharif wasn't part of the delegation in Naltar, but the TTP -- according to Khurrassani -- carried through nonetheless.
Khurrassani appeared to warn of future attacks using SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles.
"We will soon unveil to the entire world the shoulder-launch missile SAM-7 and its training," he said.
Filipino, Norwegian ambassadors killed
Those killed include Norwegian Ambassador Leif Larsen and Philippines Ambassador Domingo D. Lucenario Jr., as well as the wives of Indonesia and Malaysia's top diplomats in the Asian nation, and the two pilots, according to Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In a statement from the Philippines' foreign affairs department, the 54-year-old Lucenario was remembered as a decorated "career ambassador" who had worked out of Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, Afghanistan and Kenya, where his jurisdiction included 12 African countries.
"Ambassador Lucenario was one of the few career Filipino diplomats who had the rare distinction of having been awarded by the President of the Philippines with three major presidential awards," said the department, which noted the diplomat is survived by his wife and three children. "...The Department of Foreign Affairs offers its deepest sympathies and condolences to the family of Ambassador Lucenario at this time of mourning."
Indonesia's foreign affairs ministry identified the late wife of its top diplomat in Pakistan as Heri Listyawati Burhan Muhammad, adding, "May her family be given strength."
Bajwa tweeted that there were "13 survivors with varying degrees of injuries." Those hurt include the Dutch, Indonesian, Malaysia and Polish ambassadors to Pakistan, according to the first three countries' governments and Pakistan's foreign ministry.
Malaysia's foreign ministry said that its ambassador, Hasrul Sani Mujtabar, was being treated in Gilgit Hospital.
It is not known how many people on the ground, if any, are among the casualties.
The helicopter that had, in Bajwa's words, "a crash landing" was one of three carrying visitors to Pakistan's Naltar Valley. The two other helicopters landed safely, the Pakistani army spokesman said.
Pakisani leader offers condolences
The chopper convoy was carrying diplomats and their families on a three-day tour to familiarize them with the region in conjunction with the launch of a tourism project. Located in Pakistan's Gilgit region, Naltar is known for its scenic mountains and lakes.
Pakistan's foreign ministry that they were among representatives from more than 30 countries who joined Pakistani dignitaries on the tour. The trip began with a flight to Gilgit on a C-130 aircraft, followed by helicopter trip to Naltar.
"Such excursion trips are regularly organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in consultation with the Diplomatic Corps," the ministry said.
While it's still in dispute why the helicopter went down, there is plenty of precedence for terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
Most incidents of such violence have occurred in cities like Peshawar or areas near the Afghan border, such as the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Naltar Valley, by contrast, has been relatively peaceful.
After Friday's crash, Pakistan's Prime Minister said he had asked health officials to provide the best medical treatment to the survivors and expressed solace to relatives of those killed.
"The prime minister has extended heartfelt condolences on the sad demise of ambassadors and spouses who died in the helicopter crash," Sharif's office said in a statement. "He also expressed concern over the injured diplomats and prayed for their speedy recovery. "BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq plans to build a pipeline network to carry oil products across all its territory as an alternative to expensive and hazardous transport by tanker truck, Oil Minister Jabar al-Luaibi said on Saturday.
The network is part of a “strategic” plan for oil transportation that includes pipelines to deliver crude and oil products to neighboring countries, he said.
The only crude pipeline now in operation in Iraq links the northern, semi-autonomous Kurdish region to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
All other crude pipelines were shut down or destroyed in the past 35 years as a result of wars and conflicts. Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia, once had an extensive network of pipelines to export its crude.
One of them carried Iraqi oil across Syria to Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast, another to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, largely bypassing the Kurdish region, and one to the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia.
Iraq earlier this month announced plans to build a crude pipeline to fellow OPEC member Iran.Android Saw Twice As Many Buyers As iPhone Over The Past 3 Months
Head down into the bunkers and lock the door, friends — there be flamewars a comin’.
Nielsen released a new mobile research report this morning, with at least one big landmark stat within: over the past 3 months, Android has pulled in twice as many new smartphone buyers as the iPhone.
The new-buyers breakdown, over the past 3 months:
56% of those buying a new smartphone bought an Android device
28% bought an iPhone
9% bought BlackBerry
6% bought “Other” (which contains Windows Phone, amongst others)
Of course, these stats really should have a little asterisk tucked somewhere inside. The iPhone is one phone (or two, counting the 3GS), by one manufacturer. Android is, at this point, hundreds of models, across dozens of manufacturers. That’s not said to knock Android in any way — but it’s worth noting that when the pie is split so many ways across so many manufacturers and models within, the iPhone is probably making exponentially more money for Apple than Android phones are for anyone.
Also worth noting, but immeasurable: how many would-be iPhone buyers held off with the knowledge that a new iPhone was not only on the way, but was actually behind its normal release schedule? It’ll be interesting to see these numbers for the next three months.A Netflix co-founder says that both product and spin are important, so long as you believe in both.
By Marc Randolph, contributor
Last week, a friend of mine publically called me out as a Huckster. I think the exact term he used was “world class bullshitter.”
Well, he was right. In fact, I’m happy to go on record as saying that the ability to create a reality distortion field is right up there alongside optimism as an entrepreneur’s most valuable weapon.
It has certainly worked for me! It has helped me to convince superstar hires to leave comfortable positions, get huge multi-nationals into co-promotions with my tiny startup and get A-list investors to bet their real-cash-money that my company might be the next big thing.
But even though my friend is right, he’s only half right. It is certainly important to be able to talk a good game, but you’ve got to have the goods too.
Fourteen years ago, when Netflix was only a few months old, I needed to choose a codename — something to use for our test site, our email and our legal documents. As I was struggling to come up with something catchy, one of my mentors gave me two great pieces of advice:
“First, pick a name that’s so bad, that you won’t even be tempted to use it when you run into difficulties finding your real domain name. Second, pick something meaningful. It’s a great way to start aligning everyone around what you think is really important.”
So I called it Kibble. Kibble.com. Like the dog food. Unlaunchable name? You betcha!
But ultimately I chose Kibble for a more important reason: It was to remind me (and everyone else at Netflix) never to forget that old Madison Avenue chestnut:
“No matter how good the advertising, it’s not a success if the dogs don’t eat the dog food.
In other words, you have to have both. Product and promotion. Steak and sizzle. Substance and spin.
It hasn’t always been like that in Silicon Valley. When I first arrived here in the late 1980’s there was no question about the hierarchy. Engineers were king. Product uber alles.
At that time Silicon Valley was the closest thing this country has ever had to a true meritrocracy. If you were an engineer, all that mattered was the quality of your code. What you looked like, dressed like or smelled like was irrelevant. It got to the point that at Borland International, the software company where I worked in the early 1990’s, that the engineers were the ones who got the big offices with windows and balconies on the third floor. Us marketing and sales guys were in the airless cubicles below.
But slowly and surely the pendulum began to swing back the other way. One year, for instance, we got the great news that one of our products had won PC Magazine’s Technical Excellence Award. Flushed with excitement, we rushed to see who some of the previous years’ winners had been. As we read the list, you could feel the excitement draining out of the room. Who? What? Didn’t they go out of business two years ago? Oh my God, this award is the kiss of death!
As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language. It became fashionable to hire product managers from places like Proctor and Gamble. Or Clorox.
It drove the engineers crazy. It was best when you had iron-clad test data demonstrating something purely ridiculous; like that software in the blue box sold twice as well as the exact same product in the red box. It made their head explode. On the one hand, they knew with absolute conviction that there was absolutely no reason why the color of the box should make the least bit of difference. But, on the other hand, they also knew with absolute conviction that data didn’t lie. After puzzling over this paradox for a few hours they had no choice but to conclude that maybe us marketing people had some value. Or practiced a kind of black magic. Or both.
These days, the soft bigotry of anti-hucksterism can be seen every day on HackerNews. And there are still plenty of hustlers not quite getting how important their technical co-founder actually is to their success. The truth of the matter is that both sides need each other. We always have and we always will.
When it comes right down to it, being a world-class bullshitter doesn’t mean anything if all you ever spout is bullshit. Eventually you have to deliver. Pitching a concept well is certainly important, but ultimately you have to build it.
So be confident. Spin some dreams. But be prepared to back them up.
Back in the early days at Netflix, it wasn’t unheard of for me to tell prospective hires that I could see our stock going to a hundred dollars someday. I was telling this story to an interviewer a few years later when he asked, “Don’t you feel a little funny? Lying to people like that?”
I had to think for a minute. Then I said, “It isn’t lying if you really believe it yourself.”
Not to mention if it eventually comes true.
Marc Randolph (@mbrandolph) is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, high tech executive and startup consultant. Most recently Marc was co-founder of the online movie and television streaming service Netflix, serving as their first CEO. He blogs at www.marc randolph.comFour-star JUCO defensive end Darrius Caldwell made it known that the only thing standing between him and a commitment to South Carolina was an official offer from the Gamecocks. That finally came on Wednesday, when defensive line coach Deke Adams stopped by to visit Caldwell and check up on his academic situation.
Caldwell originally came out of Atlanta (Ga.) Mays High School and signed with Illinois before transferring to Pearl River Community College in Poplarville, Miss. two years later.
The 6'6, 240 weakside defensive end becomes the fourth defensive lineman to commit to the Gamecocks' 2014 class and is South Carolina's third defensive line pledge from the JUCO ranks, joining three-star end Jhaustin Thomas and four-star tackle Abu Lamin (who has already enrolled). Carolina hasn't traditionally relied very heavily upon JUCO prospects under Steve Spurrier, but the Gamecocks are trying to replace Chaz Sutton and a pair of All-Americans, so they'll take all of the ready-to-play talent they can get.Taxi Driver who Drove into 10 Fellow Drivers at Logan Airport will be Charged Criminally
Massachusetts State Police Release — 07072017 — Taxi Driver to be Criminally Charged
The Massachusetts State Police are seeking a criminal charge against the taxi driver who drove into and injured 10 fellow drivers at the Logan Airport taxi pool Monday.
State Police are seeking to charge the driver, LUTANT CLENORD, 56, of Cambridge, with operating to endanger. The decision to seek the charge follows an investigation that determined that the cause of the crash was operator error.
As a result of the decision to seek a criminal charge, a hearing will be scheduled in the near future in East Boston District Court. At that hearing, a clerk magistrate will determine whether to issue a criminal complaint against CLENORD.
Additonally, State Police filed an immediate threat notification with the Registry of Motor Vehicles seeking to have CLENORD’s license revoked at this time. As well, we have suspended his hackney license indefinitely. The driver’s hackney license has been turned over to Boston Police.
No further information is being released at this time.
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Like this: Like Loading...Albany Devils' #13 Jim O'Brien, left, and Utica Comets' #10 Brendan Gaunce battle it out during Game 2 of their playoff series sat the Times Union Center Saturday April 23, 2016 in Albany, NY. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) less Albany Devils' #13 Jim O'Brien, left, and Utica Comets' #10 Brendan Gaunce battle it out during Game 2 of their playoff series sat the Times Union Center Saturday April 23, 2016 in Albany, NY. (John Carl... more Photo: John Carl D'Annibale Buy photo Photo: John Carl D'Annibale Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Iorizzo: NHL talent could spur Albany Devils' playoff run 1 / 9 Back to Gallery
Albany
Who says there are no major league sports in Albany?
That sure looked like an NHL team on the ice Saturday evening at Times Union Center, where the Albany Devils pasted the Utica Comets, 5-1, to take a 2-0 lead in their first-round American Hockey League playoff series.
The Devils now can finish off this best-of-five by winning one of the next two games in Utica, which seems like a foregone conclusion given the way Albany had a stranglehold on the final two periods of Game 2 and the fact that the Devils are fielding something close to an NHL-caliber lineup.
It's the silver lining to New Jersey missing the playoffs. With the Stanley Cup no longer in play, the organization went all in chasing a Calder Cup, sending a cadre of players to Albany who spent a significant chunk of the season in the NHL. All told, the Devils have 17 guys on their roster with NHL experience.
And it shows.
Albany's first goal was set up by Damon Severson, who has played almost all of the past two seasons in New Jersey. He stole the puck near the blue line then slid a pass to Ben Thomson, tying the score at 1.
The Devils later scored on two of their three power plays, which shouldn't be a surprise, considering the unit includes Severson, Reid Boucher (who played 39 NHL games this past regular season) and Pavel Zacha, the sixth overall pick in the 2015 draft.
Some perspective: Remember Paul Thompson, who was the AHL's second overall leading scorer last year? On this team, he's on the third line.
The only thing that felt minor league about Saturday's game was the announced attendance of 5,104, but the Devils may build momentum both on the ice and in the stands if their run continues. After all, we're not exactly used to playoff hockey.
It's been a long time since an Albany pro hockey team showed the potential to make a deep postseason run. The Albany franchise has gotten out of the first round only once since 1998 and not since 2010.
Few, if any, Albany teams since the 1995 Calder Cup champions boasted this kind of talent, but better still, the Devils sound genuinely excited about trying to extend the hockey season into May. Players like Severson, Boucher and Joseph Blandisi have played a significant number of NHL games, but none in the postseason. They're excited for playoff hockey.
"You could go home and sit out on the couch and watch the Stanley Cup playoffs," Severson said. "Some guys might not take the opportunity (to play in the AHL) in a good way, but I was excited."
It's worth noting that this was a pretty good team even before all the reinforcements arrived. The Devils finished second in the North Division, with a record of 46-20-8-2. And they allowed the second-fewest goals (167) in the league.
"They've got one of the better teams in the league," Utica coach Travis Green said. "We knew going into this series it would be a tough task."
The task will be just as tough for whomever the Devils play next, even if it's the Toronto Marlies, the only team in the North Division to finish ahead of Albany in the standings.
Read Full ArticlePhoto by Ben Schumin on Flickr.
Years of anticipation have led up to this weekend: The Silver Line will officially open to passenger service. Don’t miss a ride on the first train! On Wednesday, drink to rapid transit in Montgomery County or discuss Pennsylvania Avenue or Arlington’s Courthouse Square.
And at long last… it’s here!: The first Silver Line train taking passengers on the new tracks will leave at noon on Saturday, July 26. Let’s ride together! We’ll be congregating at the new Wiehle-Reston East station leading up to the noon train.
We had been organizing carpools, but it’s not necessary to drive there any more: Fairfax Connector is running shuttle buses all morning from West Falls Church to Wiehle Avenue, so Metro on out to WFC and hop on a bus (or bike, or drive yourself) to get to the opening.
We’ll meet at the north entrance to the station. From the Fairfax Connector bus bays, go up the escalators to the glass enclosed area of the plaza. There’s a large space here, and we’ll have signs to help you find us. See you Saturday!
The future of America’s Main Street: Pennsylvania Avenue is a major symbol of our nation’s capitol, but poor urban design and aging infrastructure inhibit activity there. The National Capital Planning Commission and other federal agencies are hosting a workshop to kick off a new study for the street. It’s Wednesday, July 23 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at 401 9th Street NW, Suite 500 North.
Rapid transit happy hour: Join the Coalition for Smarter Growth, Communities for Transit, and Friends of White Flint also on Wednesday, July 23rd at 5:30 pm at Paladar Latin Kitchen (11333 Woodglen Drive, Rockville, 20852) to hear the latest news about the MD 355 corridor and our booth at this year’s Agricultural Fair. Did we also mention that Paladar has $5 Mojitos and Margaritas at happy hour? RSVP here.
A new Courthouse Square: Come and get a first look at the future of Courthouse Square. Planners will unveil three draft plans based on input from the public and a working group. See them on (once again) Wednesday, July 23rd at the 1310 N. Courthouse Road Office Building, third floor, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm (Metro: Court House).
Remember Southeast Southwest: Come out of the heat and watch the latest in the Summer in the City Film Series Thursday, July 24th, from 6:00 to 8:30 pm at the Southwest Library (900 Wesley Place, SW). This week’s film, Southwest Remembered, follows the effects of urban renewal in Washington during the 1940s. Southwest was one of the first neighborhoods to undergo this effort, which displaced more than 23,000 residents in the process.
Do you know of an upcoming event that may be interesting, relevant, or important to Greater Greater Washington readers? Send it to us at [email protected] Flares Filament.io 0 Flares ×
Greg Abbott unveiled his latest policy proposal in Dallas yesterday, a border security proposal that Abbott called his “Securing Texans Plan.” Abbott's proposal would double spending on border security, costing $300 million over the next 2 years. He has called for hiring 500 more state troopers and spending millions on new high-tech security equipment.
In his speech, Abbott justified his proposal by comparing the South Texas border region to a third-world country. Said Abbott: “This creeping corruption resembles third world country practices that erode the social fabric of our communities and destroy Texans' trust and confidence in government.”
His entire proposal was replete with militaristic rhetoric that characterized South Texas as a war zone that wasn't really part of Texas. In describing his border plan, Abbott said, “We must do more to protect our border going beyond sporadic surges…I'll add more boots on the ground, more assets in the air and on the water, and deploy more technology and tools for added surveillance.” He instead proposed a “continuous surge” of state troopers to the region.
Abbott's comments about South Texas are yet another example of his hostility toward the Latino community. He has refused to take a firm stance on the DREAM Act. One of Abbott's former staffers was responsible last fall's racist “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” game at UT, and the Abbott campaign seemingly lied about how long he was on Abbott's payroll. Now, he's referring to South Texas as a third-world country, offensively stereotyping a region where millions of Latinos live. Greg Abbott has shown that he prefers to rely on xenophobia to provoke his right-wing base rather than reach out and include all Texans.
Understandably, Abbott's distasteful comments have provoked a major backlash across Texas.
Grassroots activists responded quickly to Abbott's remarks. The Travis Country Democratic Party helped organize a protest outside Greg Abbott's Austin office this afternoon to speak out against his offensive mischaracterization of South Texas.
Soon after Greg Abbott's border speech, Wendy Davis's campaign released a statement condemning the remarks. Said Campaign spokeswoman Rebecca Acuña:
“Actions speak louder than words, and Greg Abbott's actions are downright hostile. Greg Abbott's positions don't vary much from the'stop the invasion' rhetoric we're hearing from his allies. Abbott even went as far as comparing the Texas border to a third world country. Unlike Greg Abbott, Senator Davis has a strong record of fighting for all Texans.”
Battleground Texas Deputy Field Director Daniel Lucio saw the remarks as yet another reminder that Greg Abbott is out of touch with millions of Texans:
“Greg Abbott's plan for South Texas is both offensive and completely out of touch. By dismissing the Rio Grande Valley, my home, as a third-world country and thinking that more state troopers and investigations will fix everything, Abbott has made it clear that he has no idea what day to day life is like for millions of Texans that he claims to want to represent. Like all Texans, people in the Rio Grande Valley want opportunities to pursue education, access to healthcare, and good jobs. Abbott and the Texas GOP have done little to address those fundamentals. But they've excelled at painting a caricature of the Valley to play to those in their base who are hostile to Texas' diverse culture and values. Texas can do better. And the Rio Grande Valley will do its part to prove that this November. Somos Tejas.“
State Rep. Terry Canales (D-Edinburg), who represents part of South Texas, called on Abbott to apologize for the offensive remarks:These days, choosing a carrier is more about data than it is calls or messages—so a new report about which one provides the fastest 3G and 4G download speeds makes for interesting reading.
OpenSignal has published the results of its recent data network tests to establish which carrier provides the fastest downloads. And the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is... T-Mobile.
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The carrier effortlessly wins out on 3G download speeds, shown below, offering an average speed of 3.5Mbps. That’s way faster than second-placed AT&T, which offers 2.2Mbps, and leaves Verizon and Sprint in the dust, with their paltry 0.66 Mbps and 0.64Mbps respectively.
Things are a little closer when it comes to 4G, shown below. T-Mobile just squeaks a victory, with an average download speed of 12.26Mbps, while Verizon lags behind with 11.98Mbps. AT&T and Sprint languish, with 7.93Mbps and 6.56Mbps respectively.
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The data used here is collected by OpenSignal using a network testing app, and it’s based on data taken from 181,927 US devices. So, a reasonable sample size.
For a little context, those figures peg the average LTE connection speed in the US at around 9.9Mbps—way behind the international average of 13.5. But then, if you want super-fast mobile data, you should move to New Zealand, which offers a zippy 36Mbps average. Probably because sheep can’t use mobile phones very well.
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One last note about coverage, which is important—even super-fast speeds aren’t any use if don’t have a connection. In that race, Verizon wins with 87 percent of its customers picking up 4G, while T-Mobile and AT&T both hit around 82 percent. Again, Sprint sucks: just 70 percent of its customers can get a 4G connection.
If you’re about to get a new contract and treasure data speeds above all else, it looks like T-Mobile is your best bet—at least for now.
[OpenSignal via The Verge]
Original image by Blackzheep/ShutterstockThrawn. It’s a word that describes the Scots well. Indeed, we can be world beaters at being perverse and contrary.
It was many people’s instinctive response to the Prime Minister’s intervention in the independence debate yesterday. David Cameron is promising threatening that the UK Parliament will take charge of the referendum, determine the wording of a basic yes/no question and if the Scottish Government runs it within eighteen months, it will be binding. Delay and it will only be advisory, in the sense that the UK Parliament might not heed its result.
Labour also entered the fray with a move to give expat Scots living elsewhere in the UK a say in the referendum. If it did not have the backing of an actual amendment to the Scotland bill, I would have sworn this story was a contender for the annual Tartan bollocks award. But no, there it was, Scotland on Sunday’s splash, with Tom Peterkin’s by-line and supportive remarks from named and un-named Labour sources. The amendment would mean that anyone born in Scotland could participate in the referendum.
The SNP has been rubbing its hands with glee since. The prospect of ghosts of Thatcher past, like Lord Forsyth, leading the No campaign in Scotland under an enforced referendum with wording decided by the UK and not the Scottish Government and an explicit threat attached to it will have many instinctively reaching to vote yes to independence without any rational consideration of the arguments for and against. Our thrawn side will come into its own.
Depending on your poll, support for independence sits somewhere between 30 – 40% which means the SNP needs an additional 20% to reach the finish line. It’s probably secured |
the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: "Where do they get the time?" We both think that's a silly question.
Shirky: It is. People have had lots of free time for as long as there's been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.
Pink: The numbers on that are astonishing.
Shirky: Staggering. Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.
Pink: You've just described our boyhoods.
Shirky: Yes, sitting in front of the television.
Pink: Passively watching Gilligan's Island and The Partridge Family.
Shirky: Oh, that walk down memory lane is painful. Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world's educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It's what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.
Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.
Shirky: That's what's happening. Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who've previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.
Pink: Any sense of how much of that giant block of free time is being redirected?
Shirky: We're still in the very early days. So far, it's largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That's a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.
Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.
Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.
Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.
Shirky: That's for sure.
Pink: We have a biological drive. We eat when we're hungry, drink when we're thirsty, have sex to satisfy our carnal urges. We also have a second drive—we respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But what we've forgotten—and what the science shows—is that we also have a third drive. We do things because they're interesting, because they're engaging, because they're the right things to do, because they contribute to the world. The problem is that, especially in our organizations, we stop at that second drive. We think the only reason people do productive things is to snag a carrot or avoid a stick. But that's just not true. Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.
Shirky: That's what's behind people who are writing fan fiction or organizing ride-sharing online or using mobile phones to report on natural disasters or political upheaval. They're motivated by something other than money.
Pink: But when the most powerful medium in the world was geared around consumption and passivity rather than creation and sharing, that kind of motivation often remained latent.
Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it's very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn't change that quickly. It's quite likely that the opportunities have changed.
Pink: Think about open source software in general—whether it's Linux or Apache. Suppose I'd gone to an economist or management consultant 25 years ago and said, "I've got a cool new business model for making software. Here's how it works: A bunch of intrinsically motivated people around the world get together to do technically sophisticated stuff for no pay. And then after working really hard, they give away their product for free. Trust me: It's going to be huge."
Shirky: He would have thought you were insane. When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn't surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.
Pink: Which is nonsense. Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in "if you do this, then you'll get that"—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.
Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.
Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don't want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.
Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you'll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.
Pink: Same goes with organizations. We don't realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I'm running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won't do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that's the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.
Shirky: The power of the default setting.
Pink: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I've never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who's not active and engaged. That's how we are out of the box. And if you begin with this presumption, you create much more open, flexible arrangements that almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals and great innovation for organizations.
Shirky: I agree.
Pink: You say something else about organizations that I found especially compelling—about their instinct for self-perpetuation.
Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn't committed to solving transportation problems. It's committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can't easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can't easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.
Pink: Let's go back to the cognitive surplus for a moment. What are the stakes for businesses, and what, if anything, can they do about it?
Shirky: Businesses need to recognize that this isn't going away, that there's a tremendous resource—the cognitive surplus of millions—being coordinated using networks. One of the things that my book is trying to do, and your book as well, is to show that there are forces at work that we often don't see and that if organizations can tap into these forces, those organizations can actually benefit.
Pink: You haven't had television since you were 17. How have you deployed your own cognitive surplus?
Shirky: I read. Back in the 1990s, when I was a kid with a bachelor's degree in painting and a career in theater, I came across the Internet, which blew my mind on contact. I had 100 hours a month to surf through engineering documents, histories of the Internet, Perl manuals, mailing lists, and so on. By substituting my browser for 3rd Rock From the Sun, I was able to figure out the stuff I've made my living on since.
Pink: One final question, which I have to ask: What's your favorite Gilligan's Island episode?
Shirky: The one where they nearly get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don't.
Pink: [Laughs] Mine too!A week ago, Seattle made history when it bumped its minimum wage to $15 an hour, and yesterday Mayor Ed Murray defended the city’s move, trumpeting it as a “model for the nation.”
Murray argued that the minimum wage hike is key to Washington state’s recovery.
“If we want to regain our economic strength and be competitive in the nation,” the mayor told ABC News’ Neal Karlinsky, “the minimum wage is going to have to raise.”
Murray described the increase as an attempt to bolster the middle class and once again kick start “a vibrant economy.”
A longstanding proponent of the living wage, Murray rode public support for the measure into office during the 2013 mayoral election. Now, the newly elected mayor views Seattle as a national example, “a laboratory for democracy.”
Many question Murray’s experiment. In a roundtable discussion led by George Stephanopoulos, Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, argued that raising the minimum wage, “prices a lot of people out of the labor market, particularly the young and least experienced.”
James Sherk, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, warns of a more elemental danger. When labor cost increase, Sherk said, businesses likely will raise prices, subsequently diminishing the real wages of consumers. Some experience a temporary boost, he said, but “the effective purchasing power of everyone will go down. And the purchasing power of those who lose their jobs will go down even more.”
But Murray remains optimistic. “I actually feel pretty excited about the work we did.” He said Seattle “reached a good balance.”Image caption The 19-year-old claimed he had been stabbed by three men on a canal towpath
A teenager who claimed to have been stabbed on a canal towpath has been fined after video revealed he injured himself in a failed stunt.
The 19-year-old, who has not been named, told police he was stabbed in the chin with a knife and then thrown into a canal in Dudley on 17 May.
But a video on his stepfather's phone later showed he injured himself in a failed attempt to jump over the canal.
The teenager and his stepfather were fined for wasting police time.
West Midlands Police said they had published the video online to deter others from attempting a similar stunt.
They said the young man had called officers out of embarrassment, to avoid telling his family the truth.
'All fabrication'
Detectives launched an investigation, searching for three men in hooded tops on a canal towpath.
It was thought the offenders could have been distant relatives, who had allegedly sent threatening text messages to the 19-year-old's stepfather.
The force said that as part of the investigation, officers carried out a forensic examination of his stepfather's phone and were shocked by what they found.
Det Sgt Jim Munro, from the Force Criminal Investigation Department, said: "That's when we knew he'd actually made the whole thing up and that even his stepfather was in on the conspiracy.
"Both were arrested for perverting the course of justice and immediately admitted that it was all fabrication.
"They were both fined but they were lucky, because wasting police time carries a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment."Eating disorder patients commonly complain of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms including bloating, abdominal pain, and constipation. This is, of course, not surprising. After all, disordered eating behaviours such as self-induced vomiting, laxative abuse, and restriction are bound to have negative effects on the digestive system.
But just how common are GI complaints and functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) like irritable bowel syndrome among ED patients? And is there more to the relationship than simply ED behaviours causing GI disturbances? Luckily, a growing number of research studies are beginning to shed some light on these questions.
In a study published in 2010, Catherine Boyd and colleagues examined the prevalence of FGIDs among ED patients admitted to a hospital Eating Disorders Unit. They found that out of the respondents (73 in total), 97% had at least one FGID (as evaluated using the Rome II questionnaire). More specifically, on admission, 73% of the participants had esophageal disorders, 32% gastroduodenal disorders, 81% had bowel disorders, and 33% experienced anorectal disorders. At 12-month follow-up, the numbers decreased to 34%, 18%, 66%, and 18%, respectively.
Overall, despite significant improvements in weight, psychopathology, and disordered eating behaviours, 77% of participants had FGIDs at follow-up:
Neither change in BMI nor change in ED behaviors (self-induced vomiting, laxative use, and objective binge eating), and psychological variables (anxiety, depression, and somatization) had a significant interaction with change in individual FGIDs or in FGID regional categories from admission to 12-month follow-up.
In 2011, Dejong et al. published a study investigating the prevalence of irritable bowel disease in outpatients with bulimia nervosa. Out of 64 participants, 44 (68.8%) had IBS. This is compared to around 10-15% in the general population (in the US) (Saito et al., 2002).
That same year, Abraham and Kellow (2011) published a study looking at how FGIDs affect the quality of life among eating disorder patients. The prevalence of FGIDs was 93% in their sample. Interestingly, they found that only IBS, but not other FGIDs, correlated strongly with quality of life scores.
A couple of years prior to these studies, Perkins et al. (2005) examined the temporal relationship between one FGID in particular, IBS, and eating disorders. That is, in addition to determining the prevalence of IBS, they were interested in finding out what came first: the ED or the IBS. They were also interested in identifying any predictors of IBS symptoms among ED sufferers.
Perkins et al. hypothesized that the relationship between IBS and EDs might be more complex than meets the eye in part because
it is has been noticed that there are a number of shared demographic and clinical features between populations with EDs and IBS. Women are overly represented in IBS [8] and ED populations [15]. In addition, these two conditions have a high prevalence of physical and sexual abuse [12]. Finally, the individuals with these conditions tend to have personality characteristics of perfectionism, negative self evaluation, self-blame and feelings of ineffectiveness [16–20].
Out of 225 respondents, 64.4% had met the criteria for IBS (using the Manning criteria), although only 24.8% had been given a formal diagnosis of IBS. Out of the 89 participants who reported both the age of ED and IBS onset, 87.6% had an onset of their ED prior to IBS symptoms, 6.7% had onset of IBS prior to ED, and 5.6% had onset of EDs and IBS the same time (See figure below).
The bigger (longer?) the bar, the greater the difference (in years) between the onset of IBS and ED.
Note the difference in age of ED onset between those who developed IBS first and those who developed the ED first:
The group developing IBS after the onset of their ED had the typical teenage onset of their ED (mean age 15.8 years) and a lengthy time period between the onset of the ED and the IBS (mean 10.4 years). In contrast, the small group that developed IBS first had a late onset of the ED (mean 25.5 years).
Out of those reporting current IBS symptoms, 63% had a current ED.
What about predictors of IBS symptoms? Perkins et al. found that inappropriate laxative use was significantly correlated with severity of ED symptoms and the number of IBS symptoms. Neither ED duration nor lowest BMI predicted the number of IBS symptoms.
The high prevalence of IBS (and other FGIDs) among patients who have (at least to some extent) recovered from an eating disorder ED populations is interesting. Perkins et al. suggest that perhaps “hyper-vigilance to internal sensations” has a part to play in this.
Just as FGIDs are overrepresented in ED populations, EDs are overrepresented in FGID populations: In a study of 127 patients seeking treatment for an FGID, 15.7% were found to have a history of an ED (Porcelli et al., 1998).
Taken together..., our findings suggest that EDs may be predictive of the later development of IBS, irrespective of the persistence of the ED symptoms, but that where there are current EDs, the severity of these correlates with the number of IBS symptoms.
While disordered eating behaviours and other ED symptoms clearly play a role in GI disturbances, it is possible that other factors, such as chronic stress and personality traits, may play a role in causing and/or maintaining EDs and FGIDs:
There seems to be considerable overlap between the personality and early developmental factors cited as increasing the vulnerability to both types of disorders, such as anxious-avoidant personality type or childhood trauma [14,35]. Moreover, recent models of IBS [13] and of AN [36], which have tried to integrate findings from psychological and neurobiological research, have highlighted the pivotal role of chronic stress in the origins and maintenance of both disorders, with a combination of central and peripheral mechanisms working in tandem.
All of this is quite interesting and I look forward to future research exploring the relationship between GI symptoms and EDs. (Or perhaps it is already out there and I just haven’t looked hard enough? This is very possible.)
Importantly, a lot of these studies relied on self-reported questionnaires and potentially biased samples, so caution is warranted when interpreting these results (and extrapolating to other populations).
Finally, although it is a bit out-of-date now, Zipfel et al.’s 2006 review of gastrointestinal disturbances in eating disorders is quite good. I couldn’t find a pdf online, so drop me a line if you are interested.
References
Abraham, S., & Kellow, J. (2011). Exploring eating disorder quality of life and functional gastrointestinal disorders among eating disorder patients. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 70 (4), 372-7 PMID: 21414458
Boyd, C., Abraham, S., & Kellow, J. (2010). Appearance and disappearance of functional gastrointestinal disorders in patients with eating disorders. Neurogastroenterology and Motility, 22 (12), 1279-83 PMID: 20718945
Dejong, H., Perkins, S., Grover, M., & Schmidt, U. (2011). The prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome in outpatients with bulimia nervosa. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 44 (7), 661-4 PMID: 21997430
Perkins, S.J., Keville, S., Schmidt, U., & Chalder, T. (2005). Eating disorders and irritable bowel syndrome: is there a link? Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 59, 57-64 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2004.04.375"Nope, I haven't watched the game," Thurston says. "Because I wasn't very happy with how I played."<!--[if!supportLineBreakNewLine]--><!--[endif]-->So you didn't deserve the Clive Churchill Medal, as the best player on the field? Face of the game: Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston handled the NRL season launch with confidence and aplomb this week. Credit:Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images "No, I thought Jakey [hooker Jake Granville] was our best. I thought he was outstanding. There were a couple of errors that I made that put us under the pump, that's what I didn't like about it. That's why I won't watch the game." Last year is last year. The 2016 season will start in less than a week. But let's hold the brandy glass in our fingers and swirl it around just a little while longer as we reminisce about that epic grand final. Thurston does not have to watch the match because it is all there in his mind, in full high definition colour and surround sound.
And when he relives those final moments out loud, he suddenly takes us right back there to ANZ Stadium, watching the impossible become possible … Doubts: Johnathan Thurston looks on during the second half of the 2015 NRL Grand Final. Credit:Cameron Spencer First of all, at no stage in the second half did he believe his side could not win. Not after centre Kane Linnett spilt the ball over the line in the 61st minute. Not after fullback Lachlan Coote was denied a try for a double movement minutes later. "When they [the Broncos] started kicking it out, with half an hour to go, that's when I knew we were still in this," Thurston recalls. "That negative style said to me they were trying to save the game instead of trying to win it. We'd been in that position many times throughout the year and scored on the buzzer to win the game, so it never crossed my mind that we weren't going to win." Apart from his defensive slips in the first half, this is where much of the criticism of Thurston's game is levelled; that he tried so hard in the second half, with the premiership on the line, he overplayed his hand and stunted the attack.
Some of us take a different view: without Thurston's heavy involvement, as he tried to singularly drag his teammates onto the dance floor, the Cowboys would have become a pub trivia question in years to come … Who did the Broncos beat in the 2015 NRL grand final? Instead, with 15 seconds remaining, Thurston found himself with the ball and under siege, ducking and weaving and pirouetting out of tackles to find five-eighth Michael Morgan, who found Kyle Feldt, who found the try that levelled it all up. Thurston had one of his signature arcing kicks from the sideline to win the premiership, after the siren to seal the deal. It arced and arced and arced … And of course, it pinged off the upright. No deal. "I was shattered," he recalls. "But the boys ran over and snapped me out of it pretty quickly, because I had to turn my focus to golden point and let it go. And that's what I did."
Let it out: Johnathan Thurston after missing the final conversion kick during the 2015 grand final. Credit:Cameron Spencer/Getty Images When the mayhem eased, Thurston won the coin toss and elected to kick off for the start of extra-time. Broncos halfback Ben Hunt knocked on, gifting the Cowboys the first opportunity to ice it with a field goal from close range. "I had an opportunity straight off the scrum, but I wasn't comfortable with it so I took the tackle. Set-up again with Cootey. He wasn't comfortable so we took another tackle. Then we came back to the middle with Jimmy Tamou. He gets an unbelievable play-the-ball. It was so quick. Felt like I had all the time in the world to slot it..." And then came that bullshit moment in sport when luck and skill and fate all come together to create history. "Then I dropped it out of my hand, but because it was windy I could see the ball going over on its side..."
Thurston illustrates with his hands how the ball was slipping underneath him as it fell to the earth. Ideally, you want the ball to be upright so you have greater control. Otherwise, you are likely to shank it like a weekend hacker off the first tee. "Watch Cooper [Queensland teammate Cooper Cronk] drop it – he's perfect. When I dropped it, I could see it going under. How I've struck it in the belly of the ball to go through, I don't know. It's lucky I struck it fair in the belly of the ball, because anywhere else and it would've shanked." The ball sailed between the uprights. Premiership secured. The moment: Johnathan Thurston kicks the field goal to win the 2015 grand final.
"Then," he says, "it was just chaos." For about a month. Some will argue that Thurston didn't deserve the Clive Churchill Medal as the best player on the field that night, and he would agree with them. But let's not forget the not-so-minor play of him landing the match-winning field goal, despite a rogue gust of wind almost preventing the most dramatic finish to a grand final in history. That was 9.40pm on October 4 last year.
Here, in the foyer of the Pullman Quay Grand on Macquarie Street just hours before the NRL season launch on Thursday, Thurston is more than prepared to reminisce about the past with one eye on the future. So now, with the business of notching a victory that confirms his future status as an Immortal, there's nothing left to do. He and the Cowboys can kick back and... "If only it was that simple," he says, cranking up his chainsaw-like laugh. "That's the challenge now: for us as a club and a squad, to go back-to-back. We're under no illusions that's in front of us. It hasn't been done for many years." Since the Broncos in 1992-93. Motivation and injury loom as the only factors that can stop the Cowboys from creating more history. Oh, and the Broncos and a handful of other strong contenders.
But, unlike most sides, they have stability because they have made minimal changes to their squad. "We're in a unique position in that we haven't had a high turnover of players," Thurston says. "We can still field the same 17 from that grand final this season, which apparently hasn't been done since the 1980s. We're in a unique position and we should make the most of it." Perhaps the most significant decision during the off-season involved the coach, Paul Green. He could have fulfilled a "lifelong dream" if he had accepted the job as Mal Meninga's replacement as coach of Queensland for this year's State of Origin series. There were reports the Cowboys board wanted him to reject the approach. "They wouldn't have stopped me if I really wanted to do it," Green has said.
The decision was his and in the end Green said no because he wanted to focus on his club. It sent the strongest of messages to the players, says Thurston. "He put his own personal ambitions aside to concentrate on us," he says. "It was the right decision in the end. I'm sure he's too good a coach to not get another opportunity. But it speaks volumes about the type of person that he is." King of North Queensland: Johnathan Thurston bringing the premiership back to Townsville. Credit:Getty Images Maybe Green saw the influence of the grand final win on the North Queensland region, just like Thurston. Over Christmas, people were still patting the captain on the back whenever they spotted him in the street.
"I didn't realise the impact it would have," he says. "The natural disasters the area has had over the years, from Cyclone Yasi to the farmers doing it tough with drought... By winning the grand final they felt normal." Some North Queensland fans bristle when they hear their football side referred to as "JT's Cowboys" – but his importance cannot be understated, notwithstanding arguments about the Clive Churchill Medal. It remains unanswered how much longer he will continue playing. He turns 33 this year and is off-contract at the end of next season. He did not require off-season surgery for the second time in a row. That hasn't happened in 14 years of first grade. "I'd like to go around in 2018 but I'll wait and see how the body is first," he says. "At this stage, mentally and physically, I feel like I can go around again." It would be nice if he stuck around.
Young pup: Johnathan Thurston at Bulldogs training at Belmore Oval in 2004. Credit:Simon Alekna If you had suggested a few years ago that Thurston would become the elder statesman of the game, some would tell you it's time to get off the brandies. Tell him that not many of us ever envisaged him as "the face of the game", he chuckles. "Neither did I. There are incidents I haven't been proud of. I'd like to think I'm learning and evolving …" We are not referring to that. Thurston was always the cheeky player when the cameras and tape recorders had been put away, but seemed too shy when they were on to become the game's voice.
Loading Soon after our interview, he was standing alongside the other club captains, officially opening the season with confidence and aplomb. "Yeah, I am comfortable with being that person," Thurston says. "I feel like I've grown into that. It's been hard work but I'm comfortable with where I am in the game, and who I am."Updated: 3.38 pm
AS PART OF our GE16 FactCheck series, we’re testing the truth of claims made by candidates and parties on the campaign trail.
If you hear something that doesn’t sound quite right, or see a claim that looks great, but you want to confirm it, email [email protected].
Tonight was the big one – the final Leaders’ Debate, hosted by RTE’s Prime Time, with just two days to go until the election.
Here’s a comprehensive rating of all the truth and lies from the final, high-stakes battle.
Source: RTE
CLAIM: Almost 1,000 people take their own lives on the island of Ireland each year – Gerry Adams
Verdict: Mostly TRUE
First, a correction. In the liveblog last night, we incorrectly rated this claim as FALSE. Without the benefit of a replay, we misheard Adams’ claim as 5,000 suicides per year in the Republic of Ireland.
These things can happen in the context of a live event, and we’re happy to correct the record at the outset of this article.
What was said:
There are almost 1,000 people every year recorded as taking their lives through suicide across this island.
The facts:
According to the CSO, there were on average 505 suicides a year in the Republic of Ireland, from 2007-2014.
According to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), there were on average 279 suicides a year in the North, during the same period.
That’s a total of 784 on average, throughout the island of Ireland. So the Sinn Féin leader’s claim is Mostly TRUE.
Housing & Homelessness
Source: RollingNews.ie
CLAIM: 1,000 social housing units were built by local authorities last year – Joan Burton.
Verdict: Very, very FALSE.
What was said:
Confusion was rife during this section of the debate, so let’s clear a few things up. Miriam O’Callaghan and Joan Burton had this exchange:
MOC: Last year, your government built just 28 local authority social and affordable houses. Isn’t that a damning statistic?
JB: Well I think your statistic is not quite correct, it doesn’t show the full picture, because if you look at how many families and individuals got social houses through the local authority, there was actual over 4,000 social houses given out via local authorities.
Now, 1,000 of those were new builds. I don’t know where you got your figure from…
The facts:
Source: Dept of the Environment
O’Callaghan correctly insisted that the figure of 28 came from the Department of the Environment’s own statistics, but data is only available for the first nine months of the year, and 28 is the number built by local authorities alone.
Including voluntary and cooperative housing, there were 246 units built up until September.
So Burton’s claim about 1,000 new local authority houses is FALSE by a very large margin.
Burton also stated that before Christmas, 22 social housing units were built in her constituency, and another 22 were built “in the first couple of months of this year.”
Assuming this is correct, the 22 built before Christmas would not show up in the official statistics yet, because they don’t cover the fourth quarter of 2015.
The 22 built since January would obviously not factor in the numbers for 2015, so this is something of a moot point.
O’Callaghan then claimed that social housing construction “ground to a halt” under Fianna Fáil. There’s no precise definition of “grinding to a halt,” of course, but this seems a slightly unfair description.
Between 2008 and 2010, as mentioned by O’Callaghan, local authority social housing construction did fall by 73%, from 4,905 to 1,328.
Including voluntary and co-operative housing, the decrease was 69% – from 6,801 to 2,081.
But in absolute terms, Fianna Fáil’s last period in government (2007-2010) saw almost six times more social housing construction than that of Fine Gael and Labour (2011-2015), namely 20,380 as opposed to 3,512.
Indeed, as we have noted before, local authorities built 1,328 social houses in 2010, Fianna Fáil’s last year in government. That’s the same number that has been built throughout Fine Gael and Labour’s entire tenure.
For full details on this issue, check out this article.
CLAIM: 2,300 ghost estates have been opened up since 2011 – Joan Burton
Verdict: Almost entirely TRUE
What was said:
When we came into government there were thousands of ghost estates, and we have actually refinished and opened up 2,300 ghost estates…
The facts:
Source: Housing Agency
According to the Housing Agency’s December report, the number of unfinished housing developments going into 2011 was 2,876, and the number going into this year was 668.
That’s a reduction of 2,208 – just short of the 2,300 claimed by the Tánaiste.
CLAIM: 1,000 families left homelessness last year – Joan Burton
Verdict: Very likely FALSE
What was said:
Last year, Miriam, and I’m happy to say this in one way, 1,000 families left being homeless…
We had thought this might have been a misstatement, conflating “families” and individuals. However, the Labour leader followed up later on in the debate, specifying:
…Last year, 1,000 families left being homeless, that was almost 2,000 people.
The facts:
The Department of the Environment’s Social Housing Report for 2015 found that 2,000 people had left homelessness last year.
There is no breakdown of how many of those were families, and 1,000 probably overstates the case quite significantly.
Since a family contains more than one person, the figure would, by definition, have to be at the very least 2,000 people for the claim of 1,000 families to be accurate.
We know that the average number of persons in a family in emergency accommodation, for example, is 3.45, so the likely maximum number of families in that figure of 2,000 would be 580.
And since single adults would also have been among those moving out of homelessness, the number of families would be even lower than 580, which makes Burton’s claim very likely to be FALSE.
CLAIM: In 2015, 13,000 families were provided with social housing – Joan Burton
Verdict: Half-TRUE, she may have misspoken.
What was said:
Last year, we housed 13,000 families, the majority of them through social renting.
The facts:
The Tánaiste appears to be using “families” liberally again, here.
In 2015, according to the department’s social housing output report, 13,141 tenancies were agreed.
Again, no breakdown of families or individuals is offered, but it is safe to assume there were at least some single adults placed in social housing rental, meaning Burton’s claim can only really be regarded as Half-TRUE.
Economy & Tax
CLAIM: Gerry Adams appeared to think someone earning more than €100,000 would pay only 7% in tax under Sinn Féin’s plan – Miriam O’Callaghan
Verdict: TRUE, but he may have misspoken |
will run continuously as you play the game. Parameters and player's interactions will drive music and keep it fluid and in emotional context with the visuals and events that occur in the game.
The Music
Spencer Nilsen will team up with Bear McCreary (Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica) to compose the Big Blue's musical score. We couldn’t get Bear for the video but he had this to say:
"Spencer Nilsen's groundbreaking videogame scores not only changed the industry, but also my idea of what videogame music could be when I was a kid. His scores were years ahead of their time and their influence can be heard in all the most popular videogame scores of today, especially the ones I composed! I'm thrilled to collaborate with him on Ed Annunziata's exciting new project, The Big Blue, and look forward to combining our unique musical sensibilities into one cohesive musical vision."
Original sound track downloads and extended, boxed CD collections will be available to backers as a reward for helping us make this game.
The Game
The Big Blue is a massive adventure game. The basic game play involves the following:
Exploration
Quests
Collection and spawning of life forms
of life forms Action puzzle solving
The Big Blue will be a highly unique play experience and will include these unique game play features:
All Creatures are controllable
Control multiple creatures at the same time (like a swarm)
Aquascape and populate your own small sea
Breed and multiply creatures to be used for various purposes (like quest assistance)
The world
The world of the Big Blue is vast, alive, beautiful but at the same time alien. The deeper you go the darker it gets. The Big Blue is an immense environment to explore.
Gameplay
The moment-to-moment gameplay will be action oriented. Some creatures will be very fast, and can breach the surface like the dolphins. Some can swim very deep and have no need to surface for air. Choosing the right creature for the right quest will be critical.
Creatures
The world of the Big Blue takes place a million years in the future. This futuristic time frame allows new creatures to evolve. A key member of the Big Blue team is Jon Berg, who designed the walkers in the Empire Strikes Back, and the chessboard creatures from the original Star Wars.
Jon will design our BIG creatures, such as the Leviathans, sea dragons, and evil Gyreforms. We are very lucky that he is interested in working on this project. Here are a few creatures that we are designing:
Singers (Sea Mammals)
These are dolphins, killer whales, and whales. These creatures are our our playable characters and Non-Playable characters.
Leviathans
Leviathans are massive creatures, which can only be described as sea monsters. In the world of the Big Blue nothing is bigger than a Leviathan, which make blue whales of today look like minnows.
Sea-Dragons
Sea Dragons are a new species of creature. They are fast and able to fly above the surface for short distances. Sea Dragons are extremely intelligent and are able to swim to depths that no other creature can. Sea Dragons are very rare and elusive. You may play the big blue for months and never see one. If you do, beware, they could be deadly.
Gyreforms
Gyreforms are strange malignant life forms that evolved from the accumulation of plastic trash in the pacific gyre. Since it evolved from plastic, this parasitic life form is NOT organic.
Creature-Cards
All creatures are controllable in the Big Blue, and many can be spawned as pets or helpers. The game will feature a system that allows alphanumeric codes to share creatures outside of the game.
Creature-Cards allow players to collect creatures and share and trade with their friends. Some creatures will be common, some rare, and some extremely rare. For example white dolphins will be extremely rare, because they will only be available to KS contributors.
Stretch Goals
If we exceed our goal by 50% the game will get multiplayer, cooperative game play. Players will be able to share environments, creatures, and complete quests as teams.
Earth Day 2014
The Big Blue will launch April 22, 2014. Our backers will get early previews, and insider information during the development of the game. This gives us just over a year for development. There will be many subsequent updates to the game. This will lead the Big Blue to support multiplayer and then finally a massively multiplayer game.
4/22/2014
Platforms: Where you can play the Big Blue?
The Big Blue is being developed in Unity. A huge benefit of using Unity is that we can compile to different platforms. The Big Blue will run on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS and Android platforms.
Big Blue: Pocket Ocean
Once we are done with the first version of the game I will convince Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to embrace the game. We want the Big Blue everywhere.
Check out the Prototype
We have a VERY early prototype that you can check out now. Click the link below to go to the Big Blue page. Remember this early stuff but its just a taste of what you can expect:
Big Blue Prototype
The Team
We have the best game programmers and 3D artists in the world. All our team members have years of game making experience. We know how to work together well and we know how to make games. The Big Blue will take 10 people a year to make. It's an enormous amount of work but its our dream project.
Here are the key people on the team:
Ed Annunziata (me)
Ed Annunziata
I have been making games professionally for 20 years. As a game producer and designer, my title list is long and with many are original titles. My passion is to create original games with original play mechanics. This is what gets me up in the morning and pushes me through the day.
I am extremely lucky to have an excellent team. After 20 years most of the original Ecco the Dolphin team still works with me to this day.
Laszlo Szenttornyai
Laszlo Szenttornyai has been my partner on more than a dozen games, including the Ecco games. Laszlo is a genius at turning my crazy ideas into implementable development plans. He decides all the technical approaches of the features and is the expert with tools and server side development. I consider Laszlo my better half in creating games and I affectionately refer to him as the Doctor House of programming.
Spencer Nilsen
Spencer Nilsen, (my brother of another mother), knows how to affect emotion during game play. Did you ever notice how easy it is for games to drive aggressive feelings? Spencer helps us to drive OTHER feelings such as awe, wonder, and love. Just like what he composed and produced with the Ecco games, the Big Blue will be epic with feelings that go beyond just aggression.
Jon Berg
Jon Berg, Creature designer - His approach to creature design and animation is genius. With nature as his Master Teacher, Jon thinks about how a creature evolved, lives, moves and what it does to fulfill its function. He uses all that to inspire the design of a living creature. Jon understands the spark that fires the imagination as he did when he brought the Imperial Walkers to earthshaking life in the Empires Strikes Back. Jon will design our Leviathans and Sea-Dragons.
Proud to Kick it ForwardListen to your favorite radio stations for free with TuneIn Radio. With over 100,000 stations, TuneIn has the largest selection of sports, news, music and talk radio from around the world.
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The script has some comments to aid in understanding. I am just learning about this so there are probably more efficient ways of doing the same. It worked though.
The code below took probably around 12 hours to render on my 3-4 year old PC (HD, 25fps). I would practice with smaller values.
import bpy import random # randloc states how high the cubes will go randloc = random.randint(-3,3) # frame_num shows every how many frames the cube location will be set frame_num = 10 # loop through x and y coordinates, adjust to your liking. range(1,20) for x and y will fill up a nice 20x20 area with cubes # note: z coordinate is set with randloc for xposition in range(1,20): for yposition in range(1,20): #starting frame frame_num = 10 #add cube bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add() cube = bpy.context.object # name the cubes uniquely cube.name = "Cube.00"+str(yposition) cube_do = bpy.data.objects[cube.name] # create a default material called visuals. without this you cannot set color mat=bpy.data.materials.new('visuals') # Set length of animation. With 25 fps mine was around 4 minutes with 600 set here for frames in range(1,600): # set which frame is being changed bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame_num) # give the material a random color and assign to cube mat.diffuse_color = (random.random(),random.random(),random.random()) cube.data.materials.append(mat) # set cube position cube_position = (xposition*2-20,yposition*2-20,random.choice([2,0,-2])) cube_do.location = cube_position # set the location to the frame in question cube_do.keyframe_insert(data_path="location", index=-1) # set the material and color to the frame in question cube_do.active_material.keyframe_insert("diffuse_color") # increment the frame frame_num += 10
I set the camera position manually to focus in on the generated cubes.
Here is the result in a music video:Telkom chairman Jabu Mabuza has warned that the expropriation of “white monopoly capitalist establishments”, land, and banks will lead to economic disaster.
This was in response to Professor Chris Malikane’s article Our chance to complete the revolution, which advocates drastic ultra-left and communist actions.
Malikane’s suggestions include establishing a “broad anti-white monopoly capitalist united front”, and the “expropriation of white monopoly capitalist establishments, such as banks, insurance companies, and mines”.
He also proposed the expropriation of all land without compensation, the establishment of a state bank, and the nationalisation of the South African Reserve Bank.
Mabuza said Malikane’s column is “an insult to our intelligence, disrespects our achievements, and threatens our plans for the future”.
“In a way typical of extremists, Malikane imagines that all our country’s social and economic problems are the fault of a conspiracy made up of white monopoly capital and its black puppets,” said Mabuza.
“What an offensive concept – South Africa’s black entrepreneurs and professionals are nobody’s puppets.”
The Telkom chairperson said there is overwhelming evidence which shows that nationalisation and large-scale land expropriation leads to economic disaster.
“No one wants to spend money on something that can be taken away from them,” said Mabuza.
“Threats of nationalisation prevent domestic and foreign investment, and raise the cost of borrowing – for individuals, for businesses, and for the government.”
Mabuza’s column followed similar comments from Altron CEO Mteto Nyati, who warned that radical economic transformation will destroy South Africa’s economy.
Nyati said “radical economic transformation” discussions have morphed into an “us and them” situation.
“You have people talking about white monopoly capital, clearly painting large companies as entities which are not required, or that should be attacked or destroyed,” he said.
He said the “us and them” situation is taking the country in the wrong direction, where we will end up “really destroying our economy”.
“The current businesses are an important asset for this country and we need to protect that.”
He said there is a need to create new opportunities, but warned that this process should not mess with what is working.Pro-Russian separatists are continuing an onslaught on Avdiivka, in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass, after launching the attack on Sunday, Polish media reported.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry has called the onslaught a Russian "war crime."
Missiles allegedly fired from civilian districts of Donetsk and Yasynuvata, in eastern Ukraine, have fallen on the town, cutting its power, water and heating and injuring at least one citizen, according to Polish Radio.
Local authorities have not ruled out evacuating civilians, while Kiev has demanded a ceasefire.
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine has confirmed that tanks, artillery and missiles are being used around Avdiivka.
Meanwhile, SMM observers reportedly heard more than 400 explosions and many series of machine gun fire over four hours on Sunday night.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has cut short an official visit to Germany. At least eight Ukrainian soldiers have died and a further 30 have been wounded in Avdiivka since Sunday. (vb/pk)
Source: IAR, PAPAt some point in life, we've all found ourselves in one of those horrifying social situations where something occurs unexpectedly, and it's almost impossible to recover from the awkwardness that ensues. I'm talking about those rare scenarios so awkward, nobody has ever found a good way to deal with them. Lucky for you everything I do is awkward, so I'm able to look these moments square in the eye, and at the very least describe them for you... Advertisement
5 Pooping in Public Science tells us nearly 73 percent of the population poops, so this is a pretty common endeavor. Of that 73 percent, not a single one of us is happy to use someone else's toilet. On the surface this is a bit of a mystery. It's not like we're afraid of using it incorrectly, since pretty much every toilet in the world operates the same way. But as simple as the apparatus is, there are just too many potential ways for something to go wrong. Generally speaking, when you're at a friend's and you have to deuce, you have that horrible moment of trepidation before you go in, unless you're a social malcontent who enjoys pseudo-exhibitionist defecation. Those of us normal folks have three major fears running rampant in our head; Time: What if this is a long haul production? We're all hoping for that quick and to the point squirt, but you know there's a chance it's going to be one of those moments where the movie is on pause waiting for you to get back, and eventually the DVD player just can't hold out on pause anymore so it stops the movie, and everyone you left behind stops to consider how you've been shitting for so long, modern technology couldn't keep up with you. It had to just stop what it was doing lest it permanently damage something, because your bowels are so intensely sloth-like. And in that instant you, and everyone in the building with you will, for a second, be focused solely on what your ass is doing. And no one will be happy about it. Science tells us nearly 73 percent of the population poops, so this is a pretty common endeavor. Of that 73 percent, not a single one of us is happy to use someone else's toilet. On the surface this is a bit of a mystery. It's not like we're afraid of using it incorrectly, since pretty much every toilet in the world operates the same way. But as simple as the apparatus is, there are just too many potential ways for something to go wrong. Generally speaking, when you're at a friend's and you have to deuce, you have that horrible moment of trepidation before you go in, unless you're a social malcontent who enjoys pseudo-exhibitionist defecation. Those of us normal folks have three major fears running rampant in our head;What if this is a long haul production? We're all hoping for that quick and to the point squirt, but you know there's a chance it's going to be one of those moments where the movie is on pause waiting for you to get back, and eventually the DVD player just can't hold out on pause anymore so it stops the movie, and everyone you left behind stops to consider how you've been shitting for so long, modern technology couldn't keep up with you. It had to just stop what it was doing lest it permanently damage something, because your bowels are so intensely sloth-like. And in that instant you, and everyone in the building with you will, for a second, be focused solely on what your ass is doing. And no one will be happy about it. Now you know what he was thinking. Stench: The laws of the universe dictate that if you're embarrassed by the fetid, nearly tangible stank you've implanted into the very floor tiles, you will have no suitable means of covering it up, and someone will go to the washroom within a minute of you leaving. Accept that, and try to think up a reasonable excuse, like you ate bad Cambodian last night, or you have stomach leprosy. If someone does enter the bathroom after you, try to avoid eye contact. Odds are they won't say anything, they're just going to have that look on their face that says, âI know what it smells like about a foot inside of you and I'm not happy with that.â Don't acknowledge it. The Clog: Possibly the worst outcome of all and for good reason. Here's a true story: About a month ago, someone exploded in my bathroom. I literally had to clean shit off of the light switch. I should point out that my light switch is no where near the toilet bowl. It's on a wall. Just below shoulder height. There was shit on my floor, behind the toilet, on the mat and I boiled the hell out of my toothbrush, and then threw it away. The toilet itself has been blocked from my memory but I do seem to remember what, in my opinion, was a little less toilet paper than was probably necessary to deal with what I was viewing. I can't say for sure if the person who did that to my toilet felt bad about it after, but they should have. Because I did. Clogging a toilet is the ultimate lavatory faux pas and there's no graceful way to deal with it. The plumbing, which works in literally millions of other buildings around the world, choked on whatever hell you unleashed on it. The best thing you can hope for is to plunge it out yourself and hope no one hears the terrible racket you're making. At worst, you have to move at exceptional speeds away from the incoming tide of your insides and let someone else know the situation has escalated beyond the scope of your expertise. They will appreciate this later, or they will if they've ever had to clean poop off a light fixture.
4 Ill-Timed Erections If you're a man with a penis that currently or has some time in the past functioned, you've probably had that moment when you needed to stay seated while everyone else was standing. Indeed, while you may be concentrating on your taxes or how so many people at grandma's funeral wore the same outfit, your penis can, at any moment, start playing out porno scenes for itself and respond in kind. There's no rhyme or reason to it, although it's possible you're just a bad person. In some cases, hiding an erection is as easy as feigning laziness. Why get up when sitting is so much easier? Alternately, you can use the old high school standby of holding your books at crotch level. Just be aware that everyone on Earth knows you're doing this to hide an erection and the only thing less conspicuous would be if you actually hired someone who stood in front of you and explained to others that they were your erection shield, and could they please take one step back. If you're a man with a penis that currently or has some time in the past functioned, you've probably had that moment when you needed to stay seated while everyone else was standing. Indeed, while you may be concentrating on your taxes or how so many people at grandma's funeral wore the same outfit, your penis can, at any moment, start playing out porno scenes for itself and respond in kind. There's no rhyme or reason to it, although it's possible you're just a bad person. In some cases, hiding an erection is as easy as feigning laziness. Why get up when sitting is so much easier? Alternately, you can use the old high school standby of holding your books at crotch level. Just be aware that everyone on Earth knows you're doing this to hide an erection and the only thing less conspicuous would be if you actually hired someone who stood in front of you and explained to others that they were your erection shield, and could they please take one step back. The boner isn't seeing anyone right now, please leave. Dealing with this is trickier than you'd think thanks to a number of factors. Biologically, if you're some kind of half-horse who elected to wear soccer shorts the only real option you have is to swiftly and discretely lay your penis on a flat surface and punch it. Like seriously, kick its ass. That'll teach it. Alternately, if you're more on the average end of the scale and are wearing man clothes, you could always flip it up and tuck the tip under your waistband.
3 Accidental Pissings Losing bladder control isn't just for incontinent grandparents. Even the best of us leave one in the chamber before we holster our weapon from time to time and end up walking into a room full of people who may have gathered for some kind of urine-phobic meeting only to leave them all aghast by the oatmeal cookie-sized whiz spot seeping into your denim like an accusatory finger pointing directly at your lazy ureter as if to say, âHey look everyone, I have piss on me.â Curiously, a piss spot is generally more embarrassing than an actual, full-on pissplosion, insofar as if you totally piss yourself, you can claim drunkenness, or a punch to the kidneys or the hilarious comedy stylings of Gallagher as the culprit. A piss spot just means you're not on the ball enough to actually finish pissing before you do up your pants. That's like stabbing yourself in the face with a fork before you open your mouth because you're not so good at eating. There's another word for that, incidentally: fucktarded. Losing bladder control isn't just for incontinent grandparents. Even the best of us leave one in the chamber before we holster our weapon from time to time and end up walking into a room full of people who may have gathered for some kind of urine-phobic meeting only to leave them all aghast by the oatmeal cookie-sized whiz spot seeping into your denim like an accusatory finger pointing directly at your lazy ureter as if to say, âHey look everyone, I have piss on me.â Curiously, a piss spot is generally more embarrassing than an actual, full-on pissplosion, insofar as if you totally piss yourself, you can claim drunkenness, or a punch to the kidneys or the hilarious comedy stylings of Gallagher as the culprit. A piss spot just means you're not on the ball enough to actually finish pissing before you do up your pants. That's like stabbing yourself in the face with a fork before you open your mouth because you're not so good at eating. There's another word for that, incidentally: fucktarded. Hey, where the fuck are all the watermelons? Again, if you don't relish the glares from people who have just dropped their opinion of you down to somewhere above a hobo who's trying to use the heat from his own shit to cook a robin's egg, you need to act quick to deal with piss spots. If it's a minor infraction, grabbing a towel or a handful of toilet paper and just mercilessly squeezing the excess moisture from your pants may do the trick. If you really fucked up and left the better portion of a squirt in there, it's time to get crafty and blame faulty plumbing. Proceed as usual to the sink, because people who don't wash their hands after using the toilet are worse than hepatitis, and wash up. Then just dump a good handful or two across your shirt and pants, ensuring you totally obscure that piss spot. Now, feign indignity and exasperation, maybe work up a quip like âI just went to wash my hands and now it looks like I pissed myself.â Then you can laugh on the inside due to the irony of you actually pissing yourself.
2 CHUD Flirting The downside of social interaction is the people you have to interact with. Sometimes it's awesome and you're having a beer with Jesus and Voltron or whatever, but sometimes it's lame as shit because creepy people express interest in touching your pubic region. If you've never experienced an awkward pick-up, it might be because you're hideous to look upon. But maybe you're just one of a precious few lucky people who have never met one of those unfortunate folk who's a nauseating mix of overconfidence and a prolapsed rectum-like visage. I'm not a particularly attractive man, I've been mistaken for Dick Van Patton before, so this isn't the kind of thing that happens to me as often as it happens to the beautiful people out there, but I was once propositioned at a bus stop by who I assume at the time was a very sweaty Danny DeVito. Now at a bar you might get a CHUD asking to buy you a drink or to dance, the sort of preamble we expect in these situations, but Mr. DeVito actually just asked if I wanted to have horrifying sex right then and there. For all I know, he meant while we waited for the bus. The downside of social interaction is the people you have to interact with. Sometimes it's awesome and you're having a beer with Jesus and Voltron or whatever, but sometimes it's lame as shit because creepy people express interest in touching your pubic region. If you've never experienced an awkward pick-up, it might be because you're hideous to look upon. But maybe you're just one of a precious few lucky people who have never met one of those unfortunate folk who's a nauseating mix of overconfidence and a prolapsed rectum-like visage. I'm not a particularly attractive man, I've been mistaken for Dick Van Patton before, so this isn't the kind of thing that happens to me as often as it happens to the beautiful people out there, but I was once propositioned at a bus stop by who I assume at the time was a very sweaty Danny DeVito. Now at a bar you might get a CHUD asking to buy you a drink or to dance, the sort of preamble we expect in these situations, but Mr. DeVito actually just asked if I wanted to have horrifying sex right then and there. For all I know, he meant while we waited for the bus. Condoms? Fuck no, whatever you got, I want! The short answer to this is to simply say âno thanksâ and start the slow but wholly essential process of clenching. Clench everything you have. But as any woman can tell you, sometimes no isn't enough. The drunker or less infused with the proper medications someone is, the more likely they are to assume that ânoâ means they just haven't tried hard enough to seduce you, and perhaps more persistence or vulgarity is in order to get the job done. Quick thinking is always good in a situation like this. Can you vomit on command? This would be an opportune moment. Likewise, if you can take a few moments in your week to design a certificate that confirms yes, you do have gonorrhea, you may want to carry that around with you. Do they laminate those? Check into that and put one in your wallet.
1 Parental Sexuality Obviously your parents engaged in coitus at some point, unless you're one of those lab babies, but if that's the case you were born without a soul and probably have no sense of humor, so you're on the wrong website. Nowadays, just like Old Faithful, your parents probably have a set schedule for having sex, something like once every equinox. And while that may be great for them, it's bad news for you if you pop your head in their room looking for the Fruit Roll Ups or a C battery or whatever and you end up catching a glimpse of your dad piloting your mom's backside around the bed like he's C3PO trying to get a stubborn R2 in motion. Obviously your parents engaged in coitus at some point, unless you're one of those lab babies, but if that's the case you were born without a soul and probably have no sense of humor, so you're on the wrong website. Nowadays, just like Old Faithful, your parents probably have a set schedule for having sex, something like once every equinox. And while that may be great for them, it's bad news for you if you pop your head in their room looking for the Fruit Roll Ups or a C battery or whatever and you end up catching a glimpse of your dad piloting your mom's backside around the bed like he's C3PO trying to get a stubborn R2 in motion. R2 says that the chances of orgasm are 725 to 1. And even if you're one of those ultra-careful types who always knocks, in this modern age traumatic familial boning is more dangerous than ever. One unlabeled DVD or a mysterious folder on the computer when you're looking for pictures from last year's Christmas dinner could lead straight to a pillar of madness if you're confronted with digital evidence that your parents actually do know what teabagging is. Likewise, there are far more people than are willing to admit it out there who have, either innocently or while on the hunt for hidden gifts, cash or otherwise, gone rifling through a parent's drawers only to run afoul of full on dildos. Whose hands totally made real, physical contact with their own mother's rubber dong. They don't make soap that can wash that off. Keep tryin'. Ain't gonna happen. By the time you're old enough to realize you shouldn't wander into your parent's room or go looking through their shit, it may be too late, but from then on your best weapon is your own scarcity. You can't be traumatized by trauma that happens when you're gone. Best to leave home early and schedule any return visits well in advance. Keep them brief and cordial, shake hands, wash up and leave before anything untoward happens.
More BlogsNot a month goes by without reports of a new cyber attack.
But while it's no secret either that countries across the world are beefing up both their offensive and defensive cyber security capabilities - what often doesn't get documented is how many of the major security breaches around the world are, in fact, the work of governments.
Well, not directly.
State-sponsored hacker groups have the ability to worm into media networks, major corporations, defence departments and - yes - other governments and wreak havoc.
There's even a sense of glamour now attached to the word hacker - popularised by groups like Anonymous, TV shows like Mr Robot and books such as Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.
This overview is based on known attacks: there will, obviously, be others that governments have kept secret.
Sadly, attribution is also tricky in several cases as most attacks that occur in the cyber sphere are anonymous. The international media and security agencies can only be left guessing in such cases.
Here's the breakdown on the world's hacking superpowers.
North Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un retains tight control over the country's internet infrastructure; therefore all attacks originating from the country are almost certainly state-sponsored.
Countless resources have been poured into developing a sophisticated cyber warfare unit called Bureau 121.
Founded in the 1980s, Bureau 121 has grown exponentially to become one of the world's largest cyber organisations.
It's based in Pyongyang, but also reportedly works out of the basement of a North Korean hotel and restaurant in Shenyang, China. The unit is estimated to have recruited nearly 6,000 programmers.
A 2014 investigative report by Hewlett Packard identified Bureau 121 as being able to deliver multi-staged, coordinated attacks that could spread malware and disable or evade antivirus protections.
The bureau specialises in sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS), encryption obfuscation, spear phishing, watering holes, and zero day attacks.
Defense:
This May 2015 Reuters report found that five years ago, US intelligence agents were unable to penetrate North Korean networks. The 2010 attempt to deliver the Stuxnet virus was part of a simultaneous attack on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programmes.
Offense:
North Korea has directed the bulk of its cyber attacks at South Korea and the US; focusing on military installations, banks, broadcasting companies, financial institutions, and government DNS servers.
In 2013, North Korea was reportedly behind a widespread attack on three South Korean broadcasters and a major bank. The attack froze thousands of news broadcasters' computers and ATMs across the country were unable to disperse cash.
In March 2015, South Korean authorities blamed North Korea for a massive data breach on Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power - the company that operates South Korea's 23 nuclear reactors.
A 2014 data breach report found that nearly half of all US companies had been hacked. Even so, there is limited evidence however of any North Korean involvement - except for the Sony Pictures case where all the executives' dirty laundry was hung out in public.
Iran
Over the past five years, under the leadership of President Hassan Rouhani, funding for cyber security has been hiked from $3.4 million to $19.8 million.
The only official cyber activity recognised by the government is conducted by the Cyber Defense Command, a branch of the military that claims to exist solely to provide defensive security to the country and its infrastructure against cyber threats.
At the attacking end, the bulk of cyber attacks executed by Iran originate from the Iran Cyber Army.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), spear phishing, viruses, and brute force attacks are the most common weapons in an Iranian hacker's toolkit.
Recent research has shown that Iran's cyber warriors control thousands of systems outside the country whose IP addresses are used frequently to launch attacks.
Cloud and hosting services like Amazon and GoDaddy have also been used to create websites that infect visitors with malware designed specifically for surveillance and data exfiltration.
Defence:
The definition of cyber security for the country changed after the US launched Stuxnet - a mutating computer worm - against them in 2010. It infected the industrial control systems monitoring the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility.
Two stealthy malware programmes, Duqu and Flame, engineered to gather troves of data about Iran's nuclear programme for further sabotage efforts, were subsequently discovered in 2011 and 2012.
Since 2010, Iran's funding for cybersecurity has been increased from $3.4 million to 19.8 million
A cyber attack against Iran's Oil Ministry and several of its affiliates was also launched in April 2012, leaving the hards disk at the ministry's headquarters completely wiped. Although both have denied official involvement, the United States and Israel are believed to have been behind these attacks.
Offense:
Iran has progressed from basic website defacements in 2010. Now, it uses malware-based espionage aimed at exfiltrating or destroying data.
An attack named "Shamoon" that struck Saudi Arabia in 2012 is thought to be one of the most destructive acts of virtual sabotage ever recorded. Hackers used malicious software to delete the data from 30,000 computers.
In June, Saudi officials blamed Iran for the theft of over half a million confidential Foreign Ministry documents, nearly 70,000 of which have since been posted on Wikileaks' website.
The US has also been a prime target for Iran's cyber warriors |
see Suleiman-bin-Daoud with his magic stick and the two Butterflies behind him. The thing that looks like a lion is really a lion carved in stone, and the thing that looks like a milk-can is really a piece of a temple or a house or something. Suleiman-bin-Daoud stood there so as to be out of the way of the dust and the smoke when the Djinns lifted up the Palace. I don't know the Djinn's names. They were servants of Suleiman-bin-Daoud's magic ring, and they changed about every day. They were just common gull-winged Djinns. The thing at the bottom is a picture of a very friendly Djinn called Akraig. He used to feed the little fishes in the sea three times a day, and his wings were made of pure copper. I put him in to show you what a nice Djinn is like. He did not help to lift the Palace. He was busy feeding little fishes in the Arabian Sea when it happened.
So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump. The sun shone on the dark-green orange leaves; the fountains played among the pink Egyptian lilies; the birds went on singing, and the Butterfly's Wife lay on her side under the camphor-tree waggling her wings and panting, 'Oh, I'll be good! I'll be good!'
Suleiman-bin-Daoud could hardly speak for laughing. He leaned back all weak and hic-coughy, and shook his finger at the Butterfly and said, 'O great wizard, what is the sense of returning to me my Palace if at the same time you slay me with mirth!'
Then came a terrible noise, for all the nine hundred and ninety-nine Queens ran out of the Palace shrieking and shouting and calling for their babies. They hurried down the great marble steps below the fountain, one hundred abreast, and the Most Wise Balkis went statelily forward to meet them and said, 'What is your trouble, O Queens?'
They stood on the marble steps one hundred abreast and shouted,'What is our trouble? We were living peacefully in our golden palace, as is our custom, when upon a sudden the Palace disappeared, and we were left sitting in a thick and noisome darkness; and it thundered, and Djinns and Afrits moved about in the darkness! That is our trouble, O Head Queen, and we are most extremely troubled on account of that trouble, for it was a troublesome trouble, unlike any trouble we have known.'
Then Balkis the Most Beautiful Queen—Suleiman-bin-Daoud's Very Best Beloved—Queen that was of Sheba and Sabie and the Rivers of the Gold of the South—from the Desert of Zinn to the Towers of Zimbabwe—Balkis, almost as wise as the Most Wise Suleiman-bin-Daoud himself, said, 'It is nothing, O Queens! A Butterfly has made complaint against his wife because she quarrelled with him, and it has pleased our Lord Suleiman-bin-Daoud to teach her a lesson in low-speaking and humbleness, for that is counted a virtue among the wives of the butterflies.'
Then up and spoke an Egyptian Queen—the daughter of a Pharoah—and she said, 'Our Palace cannot be plucked up by the roots like a leek for the sake of a little insect. No! Suleiman-bin-Daoud must be dead, and what we heard and saw was the earth thundering and darkening at the news.'
Then Balkis beckoned that bold Queen without looking at her, and said to her and to the others, 'Come and see.'
They came down the marble steps, one hundred abreast, and beneath his camphor-tree, still weak with laughing, they saw the Most Wise King Suleiman-bin-Daoud rocking back and forth with a Butterfly on either hand, and they heard him say, 'O wife of my brother in the air, remember after this, to please your husband in all things, lest he be provoked to stamp his foot yet again; for he has said that he is used to this magic, and he is most eminently a great magician—one who steals away the very Palace of Suleiman-bin-Daoud himself. Go in peace, little folk!' And he kissed them on the wings, and they flew away.
Then all the Queens except Balkis—the Most Beautiful and Splendid Balkis, who stood apart smiling—fell flat on their faces, for they said, 'If these things are done when a Butterfly is displeased with his wife, what shall be done to us who have vexed our King with our loud-speaking and open quarrelling through many days?'
Then they put their veils over their heads, and they put their hands over their mouths, and they tiptoed back to the Palace most mousy-quiet.
Then Balkis—The Most Beautiful and Excellent Balkis—went forward through the red lilies into the shade of the camphor-tree and laid her hand upon Suleiman-bin-Daoud's shoulder and said, 'O my Lord and Treasure of my Soul, rejoice, for we have taught the Queens of Egypt and Ethiopia and Abyssinia and Persia and India and China with a great and a memorable teaching.'
And Suleiman-bin-Daoud, still looking after the Butterflies where they played in the sunlight, said, 'O my Lady and Jewel of my Felicity, when did this happen? For I have been jesting with a Butterfly ever since I came into the garden.' And he told Balkis what he had done.
Balkis—The tender and Most Lovely Balkis—said, 'O my Lord and Regent of my Existence, I hid behind the camphor-tree and saw it all. It was I who told the Butterfly's Wife to ask the Butterfly to stamp, because I hoped that for the sake of the jest my Lord would make some great magic and that the Queens would see it and be frightened.' And she told him what the Queens had said and seen and thought.
Then Suleiman-bin-Daoud rose up from his seat under the camphor-tree, and stretched his arms and rejoiced and said, 'O my Lady and Sweetener of my Days, know that if I had made a magic against my Queens for the sake of pride or anger, as I made that feast for all the animals, I should certainly have been put to shame. But by means of your wisdom I made the magic for the sake of a jest and for the sake of a little Butterfly, and—behold—it has also delivered me from the vexations of my vexatious wives! Tell me, therefore, O my Lady and Heart of my Heart, how did you come to be so wise?'
And Balkis the Queen, beautiful and tall, looked up into Suleiman-bin-Daoud's eyes and put her head a little on one side, just like the Butterfly, and said, 'First, O my Lord, because I love you; and secondly, O my Lord, because I know what women-folk are.'
Then they went up to the Palace and lived happily ever afterwards.
But wasn't it clever of Balkis?Yemenis stand around a piece of wreckage from a Saudi airstrike in a western suburb of Sana'a, Yemen, on April 24, 2015. (Photo11: Yahya Arhab, epa)
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — A United Nations report said on Friday that civilian causalities have mounted since the start of the Saudi-led offensive against Shiite rebels in Yemen, with more than 500 civilians killed in the nearly monthlong conflict, including at least 115 children.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Rupert Colville said 1,185 civilians have been injured between March 26, when the airstrike campaign began, and April 22.
The killings, the agency said, resulted from both airstrikes and armed conflict on the ground between the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, and their allies on one side and tribesmen and militias on the other. The two sides have been engaged in heavy battles in several cities, particularly in the south.
In one incident, the agency said, a bridge was hit twice by warplanes on April 22 in the western province of Ibb killing 40 civilians, including seven children. The deaths included people killed while rushing to help casualties of the first strike only to get hit by the second.
Another large incident, was in Sanaa, the capital, where bombings of Fag Atan mountain, which houses the capital's largest weapon depot, flattened houses and killed at least 20 civilians, the rights office said. The bombings also partially damaged a number of UN offices, including the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Yemen. A day after the strike, medical officials gave The Associated Press an updated toll from the blast, saying 38 civilians were killed.
On March 31, Human Rights Watch said a diary factory came under attack by Saudi airstrikes, killing 31 workers in the western port city of Hodeida and blamed forces of Houthis of putting civilians at risk, saying that the factory is about 100 meters from a military air base controlled by Houthis.
On Friday, airstrikes continued with warplanes bombing civilian sites suspected of being used by Houthis, to store weapons or deploy troops.
Witnesses say that a stadium and small villages near the southern town of Zinjibar were bombed. In the town of Lahj, coalition planes bombed a court house, the headquarters of police commandos and farm lands near the airport in the city of Aden.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1GprVOuHealth Overhaul: Jonathan Gruber isn't the only one who got rich off ObamaCare. Several big government contractors are raking in megabucks to help the government take over the nation's health care system.
Gruber made news when it came to light that the Obama administration had paid the stupid-American-calling MIT economist roughly $400,000 to help build ObamaCare, and several states paid him big bucks as well to build their exchanges.
But this is just the tip of the ObamaCare bonanza.
In the last fiscal year, Health and Human Services spent $21 billion on contracts with private firms. That's more than it spent on ObamaCare exchange subsidies ($17 billion), or new Medicaid enrollees ($20 billion), the Congressional Budget Office reports.
And this largesse is climbing. Fast.
A report from Kaiser Health News finds that spending on HHS contracts has shot up more than 50% since 2008. Compared with a decade ago, it's up 148%.
Defense Department contracts, in contrast, are down since 2004 and by nearly 40% since 2008.
As a result, HHS is now the third-largest contracting agency in government, behind only Defense and the Energy Department.
The Kaiser report also shows that traditional defense contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen are increasingly turning to HHS for business, thanks to cutbacks in defense and the explosion in ObamaCare spending. Last year alone, six of the biggest cleared $2.3 billion.
General Dynamics got $814 million mainly to help with ObamaCare call centers. Defense giant Serco got more than $400 million, much of it for collecting paper applications after the online marketplaces failed.
What's the rest of the money for? "Buying medical-record software, insurance websites, claims processing, data analysis, computer system overhauls, consumer education and consulting expertise," Kaiser says.
In other words... overhead. Worse, this is overhead that didn't exist before ObamaCare.
Remember that Democrats promised ObamaCare would wring out bureaucratic waste and inefficiency from health care, not add to it.
What it's done instead is redistribute money from millions of businesses, workers and families across the country to a handful of well-heeled and well-connected government contractors orbiting Washington, D.C.Download the compressed image from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/ports/releases/
Check the md5sum to verify the image
Writing the image
You should write the raw image to a blank SD card. Make sure you're using at least a 4G SD card (desktop image is 2G uncompressed).
Linux
Steps:
Place the SD card at your host computer. Make sure the SD card is not mounted (just umount it if needed) Identify the correct raw device name (like /dev/sde - not /dev/sde1) Run the following command to write it:
(replacing omap4 and sde with the right values i.e. just omap for a beagle image.)
zcat./ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img.gz |sudo dd bs=4M of=/dev/sde ; sudo sync
Some people have reported issues with this method. If this doesn't work, try the following commands:
gunzip ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img.gz sudo dd bs=4M if=ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img of=/dev/sde sudo sync
MAC (OSX 10.x)
Download the image and extract it with the system archive utility, you should get a.img file if the disk is mounted disk1.. disk2.. not - disk0, unmount it with the following code.
sudo diskutil unmountDisk disk1
Then use the following code to write the image to disk1 (not - disk1s1..)
sudo dd bs=4m if=ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-server-armhf+omap4.img of=/dev/disk1
If you get any errors trying to run the following code then try reinserting the SD card and trying again after unmounting the disk, or try formatting it first with DiskUtilities
Windows (XP/Vista/7)
Download the image and extract it using WinZip or some other archive utility. Then use Win32ImageWriter to write the unzipped img file to your flash device.Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
The Judea Military Court on Tuesday convicted Ali Saada of the murders of Asher Palmer, 25, and his baby son, Yonatan, in 2011.
Saada is the second defendant to be convicted of murder, following the previous conviction of Waal al-Arjeh for the same murders. Arjeh was sentenced to two life sentences plus an additional 58 years in prison in July 2013.
Arjeh’s conviction had set a legal precedent as it was the first time a military court has handed down a verdict of murder for rock-throwing, a precedent strengthened by the conviction of Saada.The Palmer family’s lawyer Adrian Agassi said that six military court judges on two separate panels affirming the trend could be a powerful deterrent to this method of murder in the future.He added that Saada was also convicted of 21 terrorist offenses, including six further attempted murder counts.According to the IDF, Arjeh and Saada intentionally threw stones from a moving taxi, at least one of which went through the front windshield of Asher’s vehicle. The stone broke the windshield, causing Asher to lose control of the car that eventually overturned.Initially, security forces thought Palmer and his son died in a car accident on Highway 60 outside Kiryat Arba on September 23, 2011. It took days before the Defense Ministry recognized them as terror victims.Palmer’s father Michael spoke at Arjeh’s trial, recalling arriving at the family home to see “a gurney with Asher’s body wrapped in a tallit [prayer shawl], and a little box on top, in the box was Yonatan’s body.”According to Agassi, this was not an incident in which a random small roadside stone was tossed. The object thrown at Palmer’s vehicle, he said, was more like a block, in that it was 18 cm. by 11 cm. and 5 cm. thick.“It was thrown from an oncoming vehicle that was traveling in the opposite direction. At that velocity, it was like shooting a bullet,” Agassi said.Arjeh was the ringleader of a gang that developed this method of killing Jews, Agassi said. They had tried it many times before, he added. The attorney said that Arjeh had worked for the Palestinian Authority security forces as well as a taxi driver, and he knew the roads in the area very well.Leading up to Arjeh’s sentencing, Palmer talked about an enduring picture in his mind of “Asher, Asher’s wife, Pua, and their son, Yonatan, sitting together on Shabbat,” and of the “tremendous love between father and son.”He remarked that “Yonatan, like his dad, loved to smile, to be happy and he was just starting to talk – that is when Arjeh killed him.”He said that Asher and Yonatan’s lives “were taken by people who did not know them, who had never even seen them, for the simple reason that they were Jews.”
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Line-up /
Horror Inc. LIVE a.k.a Akufen
Mike Shannon
Vincent Lemieux
Cesare vs. Disorder
Julietta
Sassmouth
Navbox
Jubilee
More tba
This will be a 2 Room event in a fully secure and legal venue.
tickets at the door will be $20 before Midnight, $25 after
ages 21+
Sound by Burst
-HORROR INC. LIVE-
Latest EP review:
http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=8184
Horror Inc. is one of the many aliases of Canadian Producer/dj, Marc Leclair. Mostly known for his work as Akufen, his Horror Inc. productions started in 2003 with a release on Revolver Recordings followed by some things on the Berlin based imprint "Perlon". A label of which he is to release a full length album later this year, under the Horror Inc. moniker. This will be some of the only things we've heard from Marc in quite awhile, aside from his Horror Inc. release,"Aurore" that was released in 2010 on "Haunt", a newer label started by fellow Canadian Mike Shannon.
Be ready to not be ready for anything. Who knows where Marc will take us on this special occasion?
-MIKE SHANNON -
DJ sets:
http://soundcloud.com/r_co/mike-shannon-live-watergate-berlin-08-05-2010
Any historian who takes it upon themselves to pen the tale of Canadian electronic in the years to come will most certainly find the name Mike Shannon figures early and often in it’s telling. From his humble beginnings in the sleepy suburban town of Kitchener Ontario, the last 15 years have seen him become an internationally lauded producer with albums on 3 of the industry’s most respected labels (Plus 8, Force Inc, ~Scape), as well as a steady stream of consistently charted singles and remixes.
A true “DJ’s DJâ€, he has won legions of fans and the respect of his peers alike for his deep crates and lightning fast mixing skills. And while some may suggest he has gravitated towards smoother, deeper selections as the years go by, those in the know will tell you he has few equals when it comes to whipping dance floors into a relentless techno frenzy should you catch him on a night with that mischievous twinkle in his eye.
Those fortunate enough to catch one of Mike’s rare live performances are encouraged to do so with an open mind, as it is in this context that the breadth of his creativity truly shines. From the shuffling house and techno of his solo performances to the narcotic jazz of his new Blue Fields project alongside singer Fadila and guitarist Takeshi Nishimoto, his is a musical vision which easily wriggles free of the usual genre signifiers and pays grand dividends to those with the good sense to get nice and close to the speakers; the devil is most certainly in the details as the old saying goes.
Yet beyond all of this, perhaps his greatest achievement has been his unfailing support of the music and people he loves. As head A&R and damn near everything else of Cynosure and formerly Revolver Canada Recordings (alongside Jeff Milligan) for over 10 years, Mike has shown an uncanny ability to select and release tracks which have become go-to fixtures in the sets of the industry’s best DJs, as well as introducing the world to the work of some of his nearest and dearest before anyone knew their names (Akufen, Deadbeat, Ernesto Ferrerya). Far from pursuing the next one hit wonder or sound of the season, his steadfast curatorial vision and passion for the music have earned him the trust of discerning music connoisseurs the world over.
-VINCENT LEMIEUX-
DJ sets:
http://soundcloud.com/cyn-bookings-1/vincent-lemieux-dj-o-soir-e
For almost a decade, Vincent Lemieux has played an integral role in Montreal’s internationally acclaimed dance-music community. Lemieux is man who wears many different hats: curator, label owner, DJ, producer, taste-maker… this is a man who has done it all and inflected every project in his association with an indelible personal style.
Internationally, Vince is probably best known as one of the curators behind Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. Since 2000, he has helped shape his hometown conception of progressive electronic music through the acts he brings to town. When not programming the festival, Lemieux hosts two of the most cutting-edge techno weeklies in the city. His long-running Tuesday night at Salon Daomé, where he DJ’s alongside world-class talent, has become a staple in Montreal’s nightlife. Claude Von Stroke, Ricardo Villalobos, Luciano, Zip, Sammy D, they’ve all graced the decks at Daomé courtesy of Vince.
As label owner of Musique Risquée, which he started with Akufen’s Marc Leclair, Lemieux is also responsible for fostering local and international talent. The label has released work by Atom TM, Akufen, Bruno Pronsatto, The Mole, Jichael Mackson, Guillaume & the Coutu-Dumonts, Philippe Cam, and others. Musique Risquée tracks have been featured on compilations by Crosstown Rebels, Tigersushi, Fabric, and Freud Am Tanzen. Vince has also spawned the city’s Soirée Risquée nights, now with over 30 incarnations, showcasing the label’s fine roster to enthusiastic fans.
Yet it is his work as a DJ that has caught the ears of the most listeners. Lemieux has toured the world as an ambassador for Montreal’s distinctive brand of micro-house. As the official MUTEK DJ, his sets have been a staple of festival showcase from China to Paris to Berlin and back. His DJing skills have found fervent followers all over the world, at events in Spain (Sonar), Mexico (MUTEK_MX), Chile (MUTEK_CL), and Argentina (MUTEK_AR).
Since 2005, Lemieux has been expanding into music production through collaborations with Guillaume Coutu-Dumont (as Flabbergast) and Stephen Beaupré (as Brandy Snifter). In the next year, focus will shift increasingly to recording music and moving into the one domain of electronic music he has yet to conquer.
--CESARE VS. DISORDER-
Dumb Unit, Vakant, Serialism /// Berlin
Over the past few years, Italian producer Cesare Marchese aka Cesare vs Disorder's (also Queen Atom/CEZ/Sire Cactus) unique productions and performances behind the decks have gained him recognition within the underground house and techno worldwide community.
In addition to the demanding job of running labels Mean and Serialism together with a Lon- don/Berlin based team, he consistently releases on internationally recognized labels such as Vakant (Germany), Dumb Unit (Canada), Clink (USA) Stock5 (Germany), Thema (USA), Safari Elec- tronique (Uk), SthlmAudio (Switzerland), Archipel (Canada), Remake Musique (France), Resopal (Germany), to name a few.
Since being named one of Beatport's Ones to Watch' in 2009, Cesare has traversed the globe, playing at some of the best clubs alongside some of the biggest names in the industry. This summer he built upon his growing international profile with a successful debut at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival as well as the usual showcases at Sonar in Barcelona.
When he's not traveling, Cesare spends his time in the studio, the fruits of his labor included in a number of compilations. In 2009, his track "Mean Land" (Thema) was featured on the Co- coon compilation "Sound of the Tenth Season: mixed by Sven Vath. As Queen Atom, his track "Enemy Of Time" was included on the 3rd Watergate CD mixed by Konrad Black. This year, a track from his "Le Plaisir" EP on Clink Recordings, co-produced with Mikael Stavostrand, was added to Camea's well-received Clinkology compilation and also included on the acclaimed Damian Lazarus' "Get Lost Vol.4" compilation on CrossTown Rebels.
Currently, Cesare continues to add to his prolific body of work, by dropping two EP's on Dumb Unit with Jeremy Caulfield and Mikael Stavostrand, a ep with Inxec, Konrad Black & Cesar Merveille that will hit the street in the next months. Never slowing down, he also just completed a remix for Bang On out on Ninja Tune's hip-hop imprint, Big Dada.
Having lived for many years in London, last year Cesare relocated to Berlin, a city that he's always held close to his heart, and is currently working on his first album due in Winter 2012. With a new residency at Kater Holzig (new Bar25), a Serialism label night at Watergate and a Mean re- cord night at Weekend Club, Cesare continues to set
Berlin's nightlife ablaze.
.
--JULIETTA-
Sushitech, Harry Klein /// Berlin
When Julietta discovered the first House parties in the early nineties, Moodymann and Maurizio were two of the producers who captivated her so strongly that she began digging for electronic music by herself. Regularly she remained in miscellaneous record shops, always in search for some new chicago house and detroit records – at that time still without any dj ambitions. She did an interstation at the radio, where she moderated one of the first shows for electronic music throughout south germany. At the end of the nineties she had her first gig at the legendary Ultraschall in Munich, where she was offered a residency straight away.
She always was an activist in Munich nightlife and over the years she already gained an excellent reputation far beyond the German borders – at renowned venues like for instance Panoramabar (Berlin), Watergate (Berlin), Robert Johnson (Frankfurt), Rex (Paris), Fabric (London), Eleven (Tokyo), Arma17 (Moscow), Flex (Vienna), Club 11 (Amsterdam), Bar13 (New York), Kontrol (San Francisco), Cocoliche (Buenos Aires), Cocoon (Frankfurt) as well as festivals like Love Parade or Sonnemondsterne. In the meantime, after almost 100 gigs worldwide in the year 2007, she counts besides the famous Harry Klein an increasing number of resident clubs in Europe.
Her style varies somewhere between House and Techno with all its facets and stands out with a mind-blowing mixture of rare old and modern tracks. she has a specific intuition for the right record on the dancefloor, where she manages to build a set that hooks the listener until the last record.
2009 she founded the in-house label Harry Klein Records, together with the rest of the residents of the club. The first record was released beginning of 2010.
The same year she was asked to become part of the eminently respected label Sushitech, one of her favourites for a long time. She is going to release a 2 x 12“ compilation together with Sushitech’s labelhead Yossi Amoyal in spring/summer 2012 and started to play for their label nights all around the world.
-SASSMOUTH-
DJ sets:
http://soundcloud.com/sassmouth
Dear Everybody, Ms. Friendly Quality Sassmouth played the freshness tracks there and everywhere around the world. Now Sassmouth arrived here!! She always stay near you on the dancefloor, and steals in your mind to lead you to a good situation. Kids are happy with her. Their humming makes you feel happy. You will feel it and sound special. The best quality and fancy sounds. A gift to you from good design. Enjoy! your happy life.
Many parties rocked firstly in Chicago and Detroit causes Sassmouth's confidence of creating deliciousness grooves. This tastiness of her techno and house beats cannot be carried even by both hands. When you're feeling energetic, with a smile on your face, and in love...that's when Sassmouth's bass lines and melodies are the perfect goods to climax a happy occassion. Wonders of electricity are displayed for all to be easily digested at the club and underground parties. Enjoy refreshing time.
Nature gives dancers the feeling of the super-first class satisfaction of Smart Bar where Sassmouth enjoys the Chicago residency. Levitation and heart since 2000. All of Sam's base are belong to London where she creates high sense originals for Hej Records. Take it easy they will never hurt you on her friendly and supportive online home for the electronic dance music community website naughtybadfun.org. To fast too live, to young too happy. Sassmouth is ecologically minded. This biography will self-destruct in Mother Earth.
-NAVBOX-
DJ set:
http://soundcloud.com/navbox
Navbox is usually either sleeping or listening to music. Dj’ing since 2000 and collecting music for much longer, he’s spent the last few years trotting up and down the east coast while finishing a sound engineering degree at Berklee in Boston, recording bands, composing and remixing. Along with partners, his Stranger Than Paradise parties have seen many memorable sunsets and sunrises in DC.
Holding it down from Woodley Park in Washington DC, the Washington City Paper Reader’s Poll voted Navbox Best DJ in ’09.
-----JUBILEE-----
Hidden Recordings/// Washington D.C.
DJ set;
http://soundcloud.com/jubilee
Born in Casa Blanca, Morocco, Jubilee grew up listening to his father play instruments and old records.Ten years ago, Jubilee came to the U.S.A., bringing his culturally infused sense of rhythm, beats, and
sounds to the streets of DC as a club promoter for Panorama. His interest in becoming a Dj started when he would watch the Djs play for 6 hours a crack, just watching every movement, learning.
In 2001, Dj Alex Kelly was playing at DC’s former club, Spot (one of Panorama's weekly events). Jubilee was watching him play until the Dj handed the headphones over. Stunned and feeling likeaday-dream, Jubilee put on the headphones and started mixing. Daylight couldn’t come faster.As soon as he could, Jubilee went out and bought about ten records and asked Alex if i could open for him till he got to the club. Shortly after, he bought his first turntable set.
Everyday, Jubilee would just play the records over and over and over again. Listening. Feeling the sound and making it work. Jubilee has been creating impressionable sounds over the past 2 years, gearing
toward becoming one of the musicup and coming artists. Between his liveperformances and unique DJ sets, Jubilee has created quite a following in DC, earning credibility with some of the industry's top venues.
Support has been a phenomenal instrument is generatingJubilee’s success. With pal Gabriel Rojas, and residency with Mnmlife Jubilee has put together eventsat venues Napoleon and Red Loungepremiering local and global talents and played with artist such as Josh Wink, Adultnapper, MR.C, Matthias Tanzmann...The more you follow, you’ll see it’s more than just music.BEIJING (Reuters) - At one of the most treacherous and least restored stretches of China’s Great Wall, a line of pack mules halted upon emerging from the gloom of a dense forest draped in mist and dew.
Laden with 150 kg (330 pounds) of bricks each, the seven animals finally got moving in response to the coaxing and swearing of their masters, eager to gain altitude before the sun climbed high in the sky.
For more than a decade, mules have been crucial in the effort to restore Jiankou, a serpentine 20-km (12-mile) section of the wall about 70 km (44 miles) north of central Beijing that is notorious for its ridges and perilous slopes.
“The path is too steep and the mountains are too high, so the bricks can only be transported by mules,” said local mule owner Cao Xinhua, who has worked on Great Wall restoration projects in the mountains north of Beijing for 10 years.
Where they could, workers used the original bricks that had broken off the wall over the centuries. When they found none, they used new bricks made to exacting specifications.
“We have to stick to the original format, the original material and the original craftsmanship, so that we can better preserve the historical and cultural values,” said Cheng Yongmao, the engineer leading Jiankou’s restoration.
Cheng, 61, who has repaired 17 km (11 miles) of the Great Wall since 2003, belongs to the 16th generation in a long line of traditional brick makers.
A government clampdown on pollution has forced the closure of almost all brick-making factories in Beijing and nearby provinces, Cheng said.
Cheng Yongmao, the engineer in charge of the reconstruction project on the Jiankou section of the Great Wall, looks as the sun rises over the wall, located in Huairou District, north of Beijing, China, June 7, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj
If he ran out of bricks, Cheng added, he would have to look for bricks left elsewhere or request the central government to consider reopening some brick factories.
CONCRETE PAVEMENT
Famed for its rugged beauty, Jiankou, which is Chinese for an arrow’s nock, or notch for a bowstring, was built in the twilight years of the Ming dynasty in the 1600s, but is young compared with other sections dating back two millennia.
Intensive repairs on the Jiankou section in the past year have been led by the district government keen to preserve the wall’s natural beauty and shore up its disintegrating steps.
The restoration began in 2005 and is now in its third phase, making slow progress because the uneven terrain allows use only of basic tools such as chisels, hammers, pickaxes and shovels.
Authorities’ meticulous approach followed widespread outrage last year sparked by botched restoration efforts on some stretches.
Authorities in the northeastern province of Liaoning, home to a 700-year-old section of the wall, paved its ramparts with sand and cement, resulting in what critics said looked more like a pedestrian pavement.
Slideshow (25 Images)
Soon after, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage said it would investigate any improperly executed wall preservation projects.
Just a tenth of the wall built during the Ming dynasty has been repaired, said Dong Yaohui, vice president of the China Great Wall Association.
“In the past, we would restore the walls so that they would be visited as tourist hot spots,” he said, by contrast with today’s objective of repairing and preserving them for future generations. “This is progress.”At a dark moment in postcolonial history, when many US-backed despots seemed indestructible, the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose centenary falls this year, wrote: "We shall witness [the day] when the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton". That miraculous day promised by the poet finally came in Egypt and Tunisia this spring. We have since witnessed many of the world's acknowledged legislators scrambling to get on the right side of history.
Addressing – yet again – the "Muslim world" last month, Barack Obama hailed "the moral force of non-violence", through which "the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades". But Obama failed to acknowledge to his highly politicised audience the fact that the United States enabled, and often required, the "relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity". And he gave no sign that he would respect the moral authority of non-violent mass movements ranged against America's closest allies, India and Israel.
Let's not forget: before the Arab spring of 2011, there was the Kashmiri summer of 2010. Provoked by the killing of a teenage boy in June last year, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris took to the streets to protest against India's brutal military occupation of the Muslim-majority valley. Summer is the usual "season for a face-off in Kashmir", as the Indian filmmaker Sanjay Kak writes in Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, a lively anthology of young Kashmiri writers, activists, rappers and graphic artists. There is little doubt that Kashmiris, emboldened by the Arab spring, will again stage massive demonstrations in their towns and villages.
The chances of a third intifada in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel are just as high, as Binyamin Netanyahu devises ever greater hurdles to self-determination for his Arab subjects. In the next few months we will see more clearly than before how India and Israel – billed respectively as the world's largest, and the Middle East's only, democracy – respond to unarmed mass movements.
Certainly, they have shown no sign of fresh |
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Andorra has been created to assist you in showcasing your inner fantasy and demonstrating to the world the depth of your creativity. It has been designed with a mobile-first approach so whatever you plan to build, a blog, portfolio, photography, or travel, Andorra is the theme for you.
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Lakshmi – Multipurpose WordPress Theme is a responsive theme with all features You need. Lakshmi has different layouts, page builder and demo contents. Imagine Your website and build it with Lakshmi.
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Restaurant WordPress Theme 2018
Best Food
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Construction WordPress Theme 2018
Ample Construction
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Architect Lite
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Structural
Structural is a constrcution based theme. It is an attractive, modern, easy to use and responsive WordPress theme with colorful design and sThis is the moment we’ve been waiting for. After years of prototypes, the age of foldables has finally arrived. They’re here. I’ve seen them, and even, briefly, touched one.
And that’s about as far as it goes, to be honest. A week after Samsung kicked off its S10 event with an in-depth look at the Galaxy Fold, the device made its IRL debut at MWC, this week. We got to the show an hour early on the first day, only to find four devices trapped behind glass cases.
The weren’t doing much of anything at all. Two were splayed to show the backs of the devices and two showed off the screens. We were able to get within a few inches of the things, before security swooped in and put up the ropes. The Fold has a release date that’s just under two months away, and yet here were are, stuck admiring the thing from afar.
Huawei was a bit better. Another morning session yesterday found us backstage at the company’s booth, getting up close and personal with the Mate X. But things got a little weird..What does “Abbey Ale” mean? To over-simplify, they’re beers brewed in the style of traditional beers made in European monasteries, which are well-respected and popular. A man in Florida has filed a class action lawsuit against brewing giant AB InBev over its Leffe beer, which he claims is marketed as a monastery-made craft brew when it’s really produced in the Stella Artois mega-brewery in Belgium.
Leffe beer does date back to 1240, with the recipe created by monks at the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Leffe. The abbey and the brewery were destroyed in the 1790s in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that any monks moved back in.
The brewery didn’t return with them. Back in the 18th century, making beer was a common household task, since beer was much healthier to drink than potentially-contaminated water. In the 20th century, people delegated that task to breweries, and the monks at Leffe licensed their recipe to a local brewer in exchange for royalties.
Through a series of mergers, that local brewer became part of the AB InBev mega-operation, which now brews it in an automated plant where other European brands like Stella Artois are made. It’s this robo-brewing and mass production that seems to especially upset the lead plaintiff in this case.
“Consumers believe they are buying something that is limited quantity and very high quality. That is not the case,” his lawyer told Reuters.
You might remember last year’s lawsuit against AB InBev over the version of Beck’s sold in the United States, which is brewed in Missouri but a quick glance at the label would make one assume that it’s an import.
The shelves of your favorite craft beer store are full of beers described as abbey ales that aren’t personally made by monks, but the plaintiff points out that the AB InBev version is marketed as a craft brew when it isn’t.
Your main clue about the identity of the owner and importer is the reference to the “Import Brands Alliance, St. Louis, MO” on the back label. That’s only a clue if you remember that Anheuser-Busch headquarters is in St. Louis.
Competitors, the plaintiff notes in his complaint, refer to their beer as an “Abbey style ale” if they aren’t actual monks, and “Abbey ale” when they are. He also requests monetary damages to make up for the beers that customers purchased assuming they were buying a monk-made craft brew.
Anheuser’s Leffe is not Belgian ‘abbey’ beer: U.S. lawsuit [Reuters]
VAZQUEZ et al. v. ANHEUSER-BUSCH COMPANIES, LLC [PDF]
FURTHER READING:
The Plot to Destroy America’s BeerMOUNT VERNON, Virginia (CNN) -- President Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday called on Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to hold planned elections and to step down from the military.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined President Bush in demanding elections in Pakistan.
"My message was very plain, very easy to understand: The United States wants you to have the elections as scheduled, and I want you to take the uniform off," Bush said of his telephone conversation with Musharraf earlier in the day.
On Saturday, Musharraf imposed an emergency order in the country -- suspending the constitution and arresting hundreds of human rights activists and lawyers -- in what he said was a necessary move to fight terrorism.
Sarkozy agreed that the elections must take place as scheduled.
"We need to have elections [in Pakistan] as swiftly as possible," he said. "This is a country of 150 million people, which happens to have nuclear weapons. This is very important for us that one day, we shouldn't wake up with a government, an administration in Pakistan which is in the hands of the extremists."
Responding to a reporter's question about the absence of Iraq in his speech to Congress earlier in the day, Sarkozy said he sent his foreign minister there recently to show solidarity with the Iraqi people.
"France wants a united Iraq. It's in no one's interest to see Iraq dismantled," the French president said.
Sarkozy pledged Wednesday a renewed alliance and friendship between his country and the United States. Watch Sarkozy explain how France will stand by the U.S. »
In his speech to a joint meeting of Congress, the French president promised to stand firm with Washington on the war in Afghanistan and against Iran's nuclear program.
Facing problems back home as he tries to implement campaign promises on immigration and economic issues, Sarkozy recalled the long history of friendship between the two countries.
"In times of difficulty, in times of hardship, America and France have always stood side by side, supported one another, helped one another, fought for each other's freedom," he said.
In his first few months in office, Sarkozy has been at pains to show he is an ally of the United States, backing Bush's hard-line stance on Iran's nuclear program and attempting to heal the wounds over his country's opposition to the Iraq war.
Lawmakers greeted Sarkozy's entrance into the chamber with a standing ovation and lengthy applause -- evidence of the renewed hopes for Franco-American relations.
"Let me tell you solemnly today: France will remain engaged in Afghanistan as long as it takes, because what's at stake in that country is the future of our values and that of the Atlantic alliance," he said. "For me, failure is not an option. Terrorism will not win because democracies are not weak, because we are not afraid of this barbarism. America can count on France."
Sarkozy also promised to help in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, citing Iran's nuclear program.
"Let me say it here before all of you: The prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is unacceptable," he said.
"The Iranian people is a great people. It deserves better than the increased sanctions and growing isolation to which its leaders condemn it. Iran must be convinced to choose cooperation, dialogue and openness. No one must doubt our determination."
But Sarkozy made it clear that while his government will work with Washington on many issues, the relationship will be on an equal footing.
"I want to be your friend, your ally and your partner. But a friend who stands on his own two feet. An independent ally. A free partner," he said. Watch Sarkozy define what friendship means to France »
Sarkozy also addressed the situation in the Middle East, calling on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to "risk peace. And do it now."
"The status quo hides even greater dangers: that of delivering Palestinian society as a whole to the extremists that contest Israel's existence; that of playing into the hands of radical regimes that are exploiting the deadlock in the conflict to destabilize the region; that of fueling the propaganda of terrorists who want to set Islam against the West," Sarkozy said. "France wants security for Israel and a state for the Palestinians."
He called on Washington to pay attention to the dollar's latest woes, to stand with Europe in the fight against global warming and to take the lead in shaping reforms in the United Nations, the World Bank and the Group of Eight nations.
"Our globalized world must be organized for the 21st century, not for the last century. The emerging countries we need for global equilibrium must be given their rightful place," the French president said.
He closed his comments with a request for the United States to "trust Europe."
"In this unstable, dangerous world, the United States of America needs a strong, determined Europe."
Sarkozy said he sees a need in the future for Europeans to "shoulder a growing share of their defense."
"All of our allies, beginning with the United States, with whom we most often share the same interests and the same adversaries, have a strategic interest in a Europe that can assert itself as a strong, credible security partner," he said.
Sarkozy's speech to Congress marks the first address by a French leader since President Jacques Chirac's appearance in 1996. E-mail to a friend
CNN's Jill Dougherty contributed to this report.
All About Nicolas Sarkozy • FranceBelgium has fined Skype €30,000 for failing to comply with a court request to intercept users' communications, something Skype claims was technically impossible at the time of the request.
According to Het Belang van Limburg, a Dutch-language newspaper in Belgium, the fine was delivered by the court in Mechelen because Skype had failed, in September 2012, to deliver up anything more than metadata in response to an investigation into a criminal organisation.
The gang under investigation mostly used Skype to communicate, and those communications were requested by the court. Skype provided the court with metadata, but explained that it was impossible in 2012 to provide access to users' conversations because of the architecture it used.
Additionally, the Microsoft-owned company argued that it actually didn't fall under Belgian jurisdiction. Microsoft has no infrastructure in Belgium, nor any Skype employees. The corporation argued that if law enforcement needed data it should have engaged in the regular Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process with Luxembourg.
Het Belang van Limburg quoted prosecutor Tim Hoogenbemt as saying: "Skype offers services in our country, so it needs to know the laws. And therefore know that the court may ask interception measures." Skype refuted this claim, however, arguing that the legislation cited did not apply to it as it was a software provider, rather than a service provider.
A spokesperson for Skype told The Register: "Law enforcement plays an important role in keeping communities safe, but legal process must also protect personal privacy and respect international borders. We are reviewing the decision and are considering our legal options."
Skype has up to three years to appeal the decision, at which point the case may escalate up the proverbial municipal ladder. ®Sometimes a glowing screen can’t replace the feel and flexibility of old fashioned pen and paper. We’ve already talked about some of the best pens for the job, but when you need a good notebook to jot down those thoughts, drawings, or doodles in, you have tons to choose from. This week, we’re going to check out some the best paper notebooks money can buy, based on your nominations.
Five Best Budget Pens Those of us who love our pens know that they can be more than just a writing instrument that we… Read more Read
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Earlier in the week we asked you which paper notebooks were your favorites—the ones that you turned to when you needed to take notes at work or in class, get your thoughts on paper, or work on that brilliant novel you’ve been planning to write. We collected your nominations, tallied them up, and here’s what you said, in no particular order:
Best Paper Notebook? Taking notes with a computer or a tablet is fast and easy, but it's not always the best way to … Read more Read
The polls are closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these five great notebooks took the top spot, head over to our Hive Five followup post to see and discuss the winner!
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Leuchtturm1917 has been making high quality notebooks for close to 100 years, and those of you who nominated them couldn’t sing their praises enough. Like most of the other contenders in the rundown, they make notebooks in all shapes and sizes, from pocket-sized notebooks to full-sized journals, reporter’s note pads that flip up instead of to one side or the other, and they’re also the makers of the Jottbook, which many of you praised specifically. If you’re interested in journaling or logging your life, you may like their five year memory book, designed specifically for the purpose.
All of Leuchtturm1917's notebooks come in flavors with various paper types, including perforated, grid, ruled, blank, numbered pages, table of contents, gusseted pockets in the cover, and more. They’re also relatively affordable compared to other premium notebooks, and they’re just as beautiful and made with an attention to detail and high quality paper and cover materials. Prices vary based on the specific size, style, and type of notebook you want, but you can either use their store locator to find a shop in Europe, or easily find them over at Amazon.
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Whitelines makes a number of different notebooks, including traditional hard and soft-bound organizational notebooks (their hard-bound cloth notebooks as especially nice), but they’re also notable for their high-quality spiral notebooks that lay perfectly flat on either side, or their wire and glue flip-up notebooks that can be used from any direction. One thing they’re notable for is—as their name implies—their paper is |
to make their pages look better, of course, will likely see a far more significant drop than the average.
Will The Great Facebook Purge be as dramatic as the Instagram purge? Will those who bought the most fake Facebook fans and will they be the most severely punished? We’ve marked a few pages of curiously… suspicious… accounts ourselves; it’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out.During Apartheid, Rian Malan (right) employed his pen like a surgeon does the scalpel, fearlessly dissecting and exposing ugliness of an indefensible political system. For decades one of South Africa’s most talented writers, as you will read below, Malan has lost none of his sharp edge, his ability to put today’s headlines into context. The controversial leader of the EFF, Julius Malema, is the focus of Malan’s attention in this article which first appeared in Africa in Fact, the journal of Good Governance Africa. A superb expose of SA politics’ supreme opportunist. – AH
By Rian Malan*
“Today was a great day for democracy,” said Julius Malema. It was August 21st 2014 and the portly commander-in-chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was talking to a TV crew outside South Africa’s National Assembly, an “august chamber” whose decorum had just been shattered by Mr Malema and his comrades, 24 young black men and women sporting red overalls and matching industrial hard hats.
South Africa’s Parliament is a venerable institution, established in 1853. One does not wear boots and overalls in such a place. Nor does one cheek the presiding officer, refuse to shut up when ruled out of order or hammer one’s desk with a red miner’s helmet while chanting, “Pay back the money!”
As the entire world now knows, the money in question was the 246m rand (about $22m) used to upgrade the private rural residence of President Jacob Zuma in Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal. Public Protector Thuli Madonsela had ruled that some of this expenditure went beyond what was needed to protect the president and that he should refund a portion of the money spent.
At the start of question time on August 21st, Democratic Alliance (DA) opposition leader Mmusi Maimane rose to inquire about Mr Zuma’s position on another matter, only to receive an airy brush-off: the matter had been referred to the appropriate committee, Mr Zuma said, and therefore, the question was not really a question. Mr Maimane nodded and sat down again.
@alechogg fantastic article. A must read. Amazing how hooligans are given power by the illiterate. — Patriot (@VZPatriot) December 15, 2014
This was par for the course in an assembly where Mr Zuma’s African National Congress (ANC) has been dominant for two decades: opposition parties demand accountability; ANC leaders ignore them. Then Mr Malema leapt to his feet to ask about Nkandla. Mr Zuma attempted to fob him off with more procedural waffle. But the young challenger had a very different game in mind. “We want a date when we will get the money,” he thundered. “We are not going to leave this house before we get an answer!” Lesser fighters leapt up behind him, shouting “Where’s the money?” Other members of Parliament (MPs) rose up too, and pandemonium ensued. “I will throw you out if you don’t listen!” shouted the speaker, Baleka Mbete. Struggling to make herself heard above the noise, she ordered the sergeant-at-arms to evict Mr Malema’s rabble. But they stood their ground, jeering, hammering on their desks and chanting insults. In the end, Ms Mbete declared an adjournment and called the riot police, who seemed unsure as to what law had been broken, if any. According to Mr Malema, there was also an attempt by ANC staff “to beat us up but we barked at them and they disappeared because they are cowards”. He and his red squad remained in their seats until the uproar died down and then left of their own volition. The man at the centre of this electrifying piece of guerrilla theatre was born into desperate poverty in 1981 and raised by his grandmother, a domestic servant in the northern town of Polokwane. He joined the ANC at age nine and became president of the ANC Youth League 18 years later. In a country where nearly half the population is under 25, the youth league has always been a springboard to greater things for ambitious young men. Mr Malema was clearly one of those, an aggressive hustler who constantly drew attention to himself by staking out positions to the left of his party’s leadership. Nationalise the mines, he declared. Seize white-owned farmland without compensation. Fulfil the promise of the Freedom Charter by taking over banks and monopoly industries. By 2011 Mr Malema had become such a threat to his elders that they booted him out. Political obituaries were written but Mr Malema secured funding from anonymous kingmakers. He came back in 2013 as the founder of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a political party billed as an “army of the poor”. Despite a late start, the EFF won 6.35% of the vote in the 2014 general election—enough to send 25 fighters to mau-mau the National Assembly. After the “Battle of Question Time”, Mr Malema declared that he had made history. “There has never been opposition since 1994,” he said, referring to the date Nelson Mandela became president. “Today was the first time the ANC saw it. Well, not really. From its first day in power, the ANC has faced opposition from mature politicians skilled at duelling with points of order, committee manoeuvres and procedural technicalities. These rites made sense in Britain, from whence they came. But in South Africa, the ANC’s unassailable majority rendered them largely pointless. Consistently returned to power with at least 60% of the vote, the ruling party was always able to control parliamentary committees, outvote challenges and shield leaders like Mr Zuma from hostile scrutiny. This idyll has now ended, according to Mr Malema. The ANC “has met a real match”, he said. “We are here to make them run for their money.” This was vintage Malema. “Juju”, as he is known to friends, is a charismatic populist in the tradition of Juan Perón of Argentina, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and perhaps Idi Amin of Uganda. He is short and heavy, with a shaven head and bulldog jowls. When he says, “We are not going to be bullied by the ANC,” you believe him. And when he adds, “If they are looking for a fight in the streets, we are ready,” you believe that too. But is he really the champion of democracy he claims to be? There is no doubt that millions of South Africans were thrilled to see someone standing up to the government and demanding an explanation for at least one of the myriad corruption scandals currently facing us. Equally pleasing was the spectacle of smug ANC leaders growing incandescent with rage as they assailed Mr Malema’s followers as “hooligans” beset by “infantile disorders”. The result was extraordinarily enthusiastic press coverage. News24’s Georgina Guedes gushed that Mr Malema was doing a “brilliant” job. Eusebius McKaiser of The Star found him “very impressive”. Gareth van Onselen of Business Day compared Mr Malema to the DA’s parliamentary leader and found Mr Maimane desperately lacking: “Does [Maimane] set the oppositional agenda? Is he the most forceful leader, the most charismatic? Do his words command attention and his actions necessitate change? The answer to all these questions seems to be a resounding ‘no’…. Maimane is the glow of a dying ember; Malema is a blowtorch.” In short: only Mr Malema is tough enough to stand up to and defeat the mighty ANC. Maybe so. But what then? Mr Malema is quick to condemn corruption these days, but during his Youth League heyday, he was pork-barrelling with the best of them, miraculously acquiring houses, cars and a farm on his modest Youth League stipend. (South Africa’s tax authorities have confiscated most of these assets; and Mr Malema has yet to stand trial for the allegedly rigged tenders that financed them.) Mr Malema is also quick to present himself as a staunch constitutionalist. “The rot has eaten away the government of this country,” he said earlier this year. “The only thing left for us is the constitution. Let us protect it with everything we have.” Another fine sentiment, but does he really believe it? Mr Malema’s very first appearance in South African newspapers in 2002 involved a student protest in downtown Johannesburg that degenerated into looting and violence. According to his biographer Fiona Forde, his campaign for the ANC Youth League presidency relied heavily on intimidation. Back in 2007, when he and Jacob Zuma were still allies, he famously declared himself willing to kill on behalf of the president. There is implied violence in his support for Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, and in his depiction of whites as “thieves who should be treated as such”. In September 2014 he was at it again, threatening to take up arms if the ANC used violence to block his rise to power. “This man is a democrat? I certainly hope so,” says Anthea Jeffery. “But I wonder. Democrats usually argue with their opponents, rather than threaten to kill them.” Ms Jeffery is head of policy research at the Institute of Race Relations, a Johannesburg-based think-tank. Like many South Africans, she was hugely amused by Mr Malema’s mau-mau campaign, which has turned “Pay back the money!” into a catchphrase gleefully deployed against all manner of dubious characters by South Africa’s stand-up comedians. On the other hand, she feels the media has overstated Mr Malema’s significance. “The wily old guard of the ANC saw Julius coming a mile off and began stepping up their own radical rhetoric,” she says. “They saw that Julius was trying to challenge from the left, but they had their own leftist prescriptions to counter this. Unlike Malema, they also had the power to start translating these ideas into law.”
@alechogg@TonyBeamish Ok. Will do. I am just so tired of hearing about every word Malema speaks every day on every news bulletin on 702 — Karin (@KarinSouthAfric) December 15, 2014
In a new book titled “BEE: Helping or Hurting?”, Ms Jeffery tracks this process back to 2011, when the ANC first suspended Mr Malema. She shows how it gained traction at the ANC’s 2012 national conference in Mangaung (formerly Bloemfontein), where Mr Zuma famously announced that the second phase of the South African revolution was about to begin. The rest of the media reported his speech and fell asleep. Ms Jeffery, almost uniquely, kept her eye on the ball, tracking radical policy proposals as they moved into draft bills and, in most cases, into measures since adopted by Parliament, if not yet signed into law by the president.
According to Ms Jeffery, it is naïve to believe that the ANC remains committed to the National Development Plan (NDP), a programme whose moderate precepts were warmly applauded by the World Bank, the IMF and foreign investors. She believes the party has quietly abandoned the NDP and is poised to move rapidly leftward, a move that could render Mr Malema irrelevant.
Since Ms Jeffery’s analysis is not exactly conventional wisdom, sceptics might wish to suspend judgement until they have read her dissection of the 2013 Protection of Investment Bill, which strips foreign investors of the right to appeal to international arbitrators if the South African government seizes their assets. Or the 2013 Mining Amendment Bill, which allows the government to take control of oil or gas fields developed by private companies and pay whatever compensation it pleases. Or a new land reform proposal that requires farm owners to give up 50% of their land, effectively without compensation.
Also of interest is the draft 2013 Expropriation Bill, which empowers thousands of officials at all three tiers of government to expropriate property of virtually any kind. This should be read alongside the aforementioned Investment Bill, which seeks to allow the government to do so without compensation—provided that it is acting as “a custodian” for the previously disadvantaged.
This would in theory enable the state to confiscate any business as “custodian” and then invite blacks to apply to run it without paying anything. The process could be expedited if the property on which this business stands is subject to a land claim. So it is perhaps not coincidental that the ANC has recently re-opened the land claims process and expects to receive close to 400,000 new claims over the next five years.
Lay these ANC laws alongside the EFF’s manifesto and it becomes clear that any ideological differences between the parties are less significant than the rivalry between their respective leaders. This clash produces showers of sparks, but does the outcome really matter? If Mr Malema wins, South Africa will become a socialist people’s republic, devoid of economic growth and foreign investment. If Mr Zuma prevails, ditto. If the nation is to avoid this fate, we have to look for salvation elsewhere.
Since June 2014, when the EF Fighters made their parliamentary debut, the DA has taken a public battering simply for being itself—a sober, hardworking party staffed by MPs and researchers whose heads are perpetually buried in dull position papers and whose leader, Mr Maimane, is a politician in the suave Barack Obama vein; a thoroughbred alongside Mr Malema’s dray horse. It irked me to see him belittled simply because his manners are better than Mr Malema’s. Would we really prefer a blustering charlatan?
At the last election, the DA won the support of about 23% of the electorate. With majority support in the white, coloured and Indian communities and three-quarters of a million black voters, the DA is the only truly multiracial party in South Africa. With 89 members of Parliament, it is also the only party whose embrace of rule of law and at least relatively free enterprise seems to offer an alternative to policies presently dragging South Africa into deepening crisis.BEAUTIFUL BLOOD, the new, short novel from the late, great Lucius Shepard, is the story of a Latin American drug dealer. Although trained as a physician, the book’s protagonist, Richard Rosacher, stumbles upon a substance whose efficacy suggests an alternative, and far more lucrative, career path. He follows this path, gaining in wealth and influence, eventually joining the ranks of the local political elite. Yet Rosacher’s position is far from secure, and by the novel’s end, his fortunes have undergone a dramatic reversal.
Such a narrative arc, the rise and fall of a criminal, is a familiar structuring device in crime fiction and film. It is a less familiar feature of fantasy fiction, and Shepard exploits this in Beautiful Blood. The novel is his latest fiction set in his invented version of Teocinte, Honduras, a location he first imagined in his 1984 story, “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule.” The landscape of Teocinte is dominated by the form of the titular beast, who is a mile long and paralyzed after his conflict with a powerful magician millennia before. The residents of the town have constructed it on and around the dragon’s body. The enormous Griaule is the kind of sublime image found in much of the literature of the fantastic, the dragon to end all dragons. But it is typical of Shepard’s sensibility that, having envisioned this titanic creature, he subverts it by presenting it as immobile, a feature of the landscape. Griaule seems cousin to the dormant volcano, the slumbering fault line, possessed of the potential for cataclysmic violence, but of little daily concern to those living in his presence. At the end of that first story, Shepard would kill the dragon, but its hold on his imagination was such that, over the next three decades, he returned to it seven times, writing stories set before and alongside the events of that inaugural one. In the process, Griaule’s symbolic dimensions would expand. The dragon would come to represent the figurative terrain upon which the structures of our lives are constructed, and which therefore exerts a profound influence upon the shapes they assume. Indeed, the later stories in the sequence explicitly raise the question of Griaule’s effect upon the characters’ actions. In this way, Shepard makes the notion of fate, a staple of so much fantasy narrative, one of the central concerns of the stories.
To this unique setting, Shepard brings the character of Richard Rosacher, a newly-graduated doctor with an interest in hematology. Beautiful Blood begins with Rosacher’s investigations into the properties of Griaule’s blood, samples of which can be drawn from the dragon’s great tongue. A disagreement with the man Rosacher has hired to retrieve the blood for him leads to Rosacher being beaten by the man’s associate and injected with the subject of his research. The substance acts as a powerful hallucinogen; Rosacher experiences a vision of his mundane surroundings supercharged with beauty, in a passage that allows Shepard to demonstrate his gifts for description:
“Everything in sight had acquired a luster. Spiderwebs glistened like strands of polished platinum; the boards gleamed with the grainy perfection of gray marble; his broken glassware glittered with prismatic glory, a scatter of rare gems; his possessions scattered across the floor seemed part of a decorative scheme, as if the apartment’s sorry condition were the work of an artist who, guided by a decadent sensibility, had sought to counterfeit shabbiness by using the richest of materials.”
After the blood’s effects have subsided, Rosacher hits on the idea of selling the substance, and while he feels a momentary qualm at so profound a betrayal of his professional ethics, his reservations are quickly overwhelmed by the prospect of the enormous wealth awaiting him.
And wealthy Rosacher becomes. The lower classes in particular take to the drug he offers them, which they christen “mab.” The name, Shepard explains, is an acronym for “more and better,” a succinct description of the substance’s effect on individual perception, but the word also evokes the queen of the fairies whom Malvolio describes in the first act of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Queen Mab roams through the sleeping minds of various types of people, from lovers to lawyers, bringing them pleasing dreams. In a similar fashion, Rosacher’s drug brings its users a pleasant illusion. (It is possible the name points in the direction of Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes [1813], but if so, the allusion is deeply, even savagely, ironic, as Shelley’s poem envisions the ways in which humanity’s lot will be improved in the future, a concern at odds with the substance of Shepard’s narrative.)
For Rosacher, however, there is an unexpected and disconcerting side-effect to his own indulgence in Griaule’s blood, namely, that at unexpected moments, times seems to skip ahead for him, often for a period of years. These blackouts have a peculiar nature. Once aware of the future moment into which he has awakened, Rosacher finds himself possessed of memories of the time that has elapsed. Yet the retrospective view of an experience is not the same thing as the original experience, and these gaps in his life become a source of anxiety for Rosacher. The side-effect serves as a counterweight to the blood’s immediate effect—the price, as it were, that its bliss requires. It also permits the narrative to leap forward, showing us the progression of Rosacher’s career in condensed and accelerated form.
This career is impressive. The former doctor succeeds in having his drug business recognized as a legitimate and lawful enterprise by the town council. In the process, he convinces the members of the council to authorize the creation of a town militia, with one of Rosacher’s men in command. Subsequently, he negotiates with an official of the local religion—a hybrid of Catholicism and animism—to endorse the use of mab by granting Griaule a place in its pantheon. (Seldom has Marx’s famous aphorism about religion as the opiate of the masses been so trenchantly illustrated.) Although Rosacher’s activities are thoroughly criminal, his motivations cynical, he pursues his goals with a calm reasonableness that makes him seem almost admirable. Later in the narrative, Rosacher will encounter the ruler of a neighboring municipality, Carlos, an enlightened monarch who seems his double, a version of what he might have become had his interests tended in a more benevolent direction. But Carlos does not survive the novel, a fact to which we are free to attach whatever significance we choose.
In the midst of his rise to power, Rosacher meets Meric Cattanay, the protagonist of the original Griaule story. Prior to Rosacher’s first audience with the town council, he and the artist discuss Cattanay’s scheme to kill Griaule by painting a huge mural on the dragon’s side using paint laden with toxic chemicals, in order to poison Griaule slowly. During his meeting with the council members, Rosacher voices his support for Cattanay’s project, thus helping to set in motion the events of the story to which his own is the bookend. Given that Beautiful Blood is likely the last of Shepard’s tales of Griaule—unless another should be discovered in his files—it seems fitting that it should cycle back to the beginning of the sequence.
While Shepard works with many of the familiar images and concerns of the fantasy genre in Beautiful Blood, he does so in a manner that constantly holds them up for examination and interrogation. The novel’s central conceit, of the dragon’s blood as a powerful drug, evokes the generic device of the magical element that transforms daily life in order to treat it as escapist in the worst sense of the word. This impulse to upend the traditions of fantasy fiction appears to lie behind Shepard’s decision to give us Rosacher’s adult life from start almost to finish. Rather than fitting his protagonist’s experience to a ready-made, three-act drama, Shepard allows it to follow a more episodic course. In so doing, he echoes the design of “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” which traces Meric Cattanay’s adult years from beginning to end. Both narratives display an underlying concern with time, and it may well be that time in its myriad of dimensions is one of the threads that runs through the Griaule stories.
With Beautiful Blood, Lucius Shepard demonstrates the ability of a fantasy narrative to address the complexities of human experience. That the novel is Shepard’s last is cause for sorrow, as it displays his considerable gifts for language, the portrayal of character, and philosophical rumination as well as anything he wrote. That we have the book—that we have all of Shepard’s work—is a cause for joy. Shepard’s words burn like the blood of a dragon, racing through fantastic narratives that coil their muscles, open their wings, and leap into flight.
¤
John Langan is a writer whose most recent collection of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, was published by Hippocampus Press in 2013.At the same time, the site has also enabled a variety of creators in the adult space to earn cash for the erotic material they've made. But a new change to the site's conduct policies, published October 17th, threatens to shut down many of those performers who rely upon the site for revenue.
Patreon has always been against pornography, but the site's previous content policy covered the matter in very broad-brush terms. Creators were asked to flag their content as not safe for work, but otherwise there was a wide latitude as to the material published. Patreon's corporate position was that the company recognized the need for art to depict "nudity and sexual expression."
The distinction it drew, at the time, was that it was happy to turn a blind eye to the sort of content you'd find in an R-rated movie, but not porn. Otherwise, it would only go after otherwise-illegal material, such as depictions of incest, bestiality, children and the suchlike. Of course, it's very hard to determine what is pornography and what is artistic, and the goalposts are shifting on a near-daily basis.
But the gray area that the company previously allowed has now been erased with a far more proscriptive policy. Users are now prohibited from selling "pornographic material," as a reward for their patrons. In addition, they cannot use cash from the site to "produce pornographic material, such as maintaining a website, funding [...] movies or providing a private webcam session."
Google "Patreon + Webcam Session" and you'll find plenty of adult content providers that offer such incentives to their users. It's not just webcams, as some offer access to, for instance, a private Snapchat account that may do a similar job. It's not clear how many performers are affected by the change, but it's likely that we'll be seeing the effects of the crackdown in the near future.
Patreon's legal head Colin Sullivan explained the difficulties of creating a policy that empowers creators without harming the site's "ability to be a home for all creators." Sullivan said that the platform is being more explicit on banning adult content concerning incest, bestiality, children and sexualized violence.
Sullivan also detailed, that rather than simply erasing offending profiles, Patreon's Trust and Safety team will work with creators to moderate their content. There will also be an appeals process, and users will have personal guidance from a Patreon employee to help them get their page reinstated.
What's not clear is why this crackdown has also blocked apparently legitimate activity like webcam sessions and subscription websites that do not include illegal content. We've reached out to Patreon to try and understand the broader meaning of the rule change and to clarify its position. For now, it appears as if the site has joined the network of online businesses that specifically exclude sex workers from their payments platform.
Update: A Patreon spokesperson has clarified that its stance hasn't changed, just the way it articulates the policy around pornography and other adult content. Which is to say that producers of pornography and sex workers more generally have always been "operating outside of the Community Guidelines." The decision will leave a number of sex workers looking for yet another way to secure payment for their labor.Android is getting security fixes for more than 100 vulnerabilities, including 29 critical flaws in the media processing server, hardware-specific drivers and other components.
Android’s monthly security bulletin, published Monday, was split into two “patch levels,” which are represented as date strings on the “About” page of Android devices.
The 2017-05-01 security patch level covers fixes for vulnerabilities that are common to all Android devices while the 2017-05-05 level covers additional fixes for hardware drivers and kernel components that are present only in some devices.
This month’s update patches six critical vulnerabilities in Mediaserver, an Android component that handles the processing of image and video files. This component has been a source of many flaws over the past few years, being a regular presence in the monthly Android security bulletins.
The Mediaserver flaws can be exploited by tricking users to download specially crafted media files on their devices, or by sharing such files via email or some other messaging app. It’s not even necessary for the user to open the file because its mere presence on the file system will cause Mediaserver to process it.
By exploiting such flaws, attackers can achieve remote code execution in the context of the Mediaserver process, which has special privileges compared to regular apps. On some devices it can even lead to a complete compromise of all data.
Mediaserver vulnerabilities can theoretically be exploited through multimedia messages (MMS), which is why Google has disabled the automated display of such messages in the default Android text messaging app and Google Hangouts. However, third-party applications might still be exposed to this attack vector.
In addition to the patches for the six critical flaws, the 2017-05-01 patch level also includes fixes for eight high-risk vulnerabilities, five moderate severity flaws and a low severity issue. Some of these vulnerabilities are also located in the Mediaserver component.
Another interesting vulnerability in the Android file-based encryption implementation could have allowed an attacker to bypass the lock screen. If left unpatched, this moderate-risk flaw can allow thieves or law enforcement authorities with physical access to a protected device to extract data from it.
The 2017-05-05 security patch also contains a fix for a remotely exploitable flaw that’s related to media processing. The vulnerability is located in GIFLIB, a library that’s used by the OS for reading and writing GIF format images.
The GIFLIB flaw is rated critical, but its inclusion in the second patch level suggests that it might not affect all devices.
Other critical vulnerabilities covered by this patch level are located in the MediaTek touchscreen driver, the Qualcomm and Motorola bootloaders, the Nvidia video driver, the Qualcomm power driver, the kernel sound and trace subsystems and various other Qualcomm components.
These vulnerabilities can be exploited by a malicious application to execute arbitrary code inside the kernel—the most privileged area of the OS—leading to a complete and permanent compromise of the device. Recovering from such an attack requires reflashing the firmware on the affected device.
Many high and moderate severity vulnerabilities were fixed in other hardware components and kernel subsystems. For some of them, the fixes are only included in the binary files that chipset manufacturers share with device manufacturers and are not publicly available.
In fact, some of flaws included in this bulletin were already covered by patches released by chipset vendors over the past few years. However, Google decided to include them in its own bulletins now in order to associate their fixes with an Android security patch level.
Google only releases firmware updates for its supported Nexus and Pixel devices and then makes the relevant patches available to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)—the code that serves as a base for the firmware produced by device makers. Users should look for firmware updates for their specific devices from their manufacturers.A field of wheat in Godewaersvelde France. (Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)
One of the biggest concerns about climate change is the effect it will have on agriculture. Many studies have suggested that rising temperatures could be harmful to farms around the world, although there’s plenty of uncertainty about how bad things will get and which food supplies we should worry about most.
Now, a new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change reiterates concerns that wheat — the most significant single crop in terms of human consumption — might be in big trouble. After comparing multiple studies used to predict the future of global crop production, researchers have found that they all agree on one point: rising temperatures are going to be really bad for wheat production.
Scientists use a wide range of techniques to make predictions about the future of the environment, including a variety of models and statistical analyses. Often, though, there’s debate about which technique produces the most accurate results.
The authors of the new study, who included dozens of scientists from institutions in China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere around the world, decided to compare three different methods used to assess the impact of temperature changes on wheat production. These included a type of statistical analysis that relies on historical observations of climate and global wheat yields to make inferences about the future, as well as two different types of model simulations.
For the purposes of this comparison, the researchers focused only on the effects of temperature, without incorporating other climate-related factors such as rising carbon dioxide levels or changes in precipitation. Specifically, all the techniques suggested that a global temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius would lead to a worldwide decline in wheat yield by between 4.1 and 6.4 percent. The world currently produces more than 700 million tons of wheat annually, which is converted into all kinds of products for human consumption, including flour for bread, pasta, cakes, breakfast cereals and more. A reduction of just 5 percent would translate to a loss of about 35 million tons each year.
And that could spell big trouble for the global food supply. A new report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projected that world wheat production for the 2016/17 year would hit 741 million tons, nearly 500 million of which is destined to be used directly for human consumption. While global production of coarse grains, including corn, does outweigh the production of wheat, a significantly smaller proportion of it goes to human consumption worldwide, with the rest being used for animal feed and industrial purposes. According to the FAO, global human consumption of coarse grains comes to about 200 million tons annually.
The various studies also produce similar findings on a country level for the world’s largest wheat producers, including the U.S., China, India and France. For instance, all of the study methods suggested that China will see yield reductions of about 3.0 percent per 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature. And India was projected to experience much greater declines of about 8.0 percent.
In general, the results suggest that warmer regions of the world will experience the greatest temperature-related losses. However, the agreement among the different study methods on exactly what these losses will be was less consistent for smaller countries than for the larger producers.
“The consistent negative impact from increasing temperatures confirmed by three independent methods warrants critical needed investment in climate change adaptation strategies to counteract the adverse effects of rising temperatures on global wheat production, including genetic improvement and management adjustments,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
There are still some major uncertainties, though. For one thing, the researchers note, the agreement among the different types of studies became less consistent above 1 degree Celsius of warming. And there was also less agreement at local and regional levels.
Senthold Asseng, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at the University of Florida and one of the paper’s authors, also stressed the fact that this study only looked at the effects of temperature. Future climate change is likely to include a wide range of other complex factors, he said, some of which may even positively affect crop cultivation in some parts of the world. Research has suggested that rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, for instance, may enhance the growth of some plants.
“It might be difficult to understand that some of the factors might bring these numbers down, other factors bring them up,” Asseng said. Whether the combination of all these factors translates to a net increase or decrease in production may vary from one location to the next. Generally, experts believe that climate change will have a negative influence on global agriculture, but the way that all the different climatic factors interact with one another in all the different regions of the world is still far from clear.
Finding better ways to account for these complexities in our models and statistical analyses will help scientists gain a better understanding of the interactions among various climate factors. For the time being, though, multi-method assessments can serve as a good way to check on current assumptions about the future effects of climate change and can “improve reliability of the assessment of climate impacts on global food security,” the researchers write.
“It’s really about building confidence,” Asseng said. “And I think it’s a good way for the future to try to not just rely on a single method. If you have different ones, use different methods if you can.”Former UFC competitors Pat Healy (33-22-1) and Leandro ‘Buscapé’ Silva (19-5-1) will return to action at Absolute Championship Berkut 51 (ACB 51) in Irvine, CA, a source employed by the organization told Mmanewsline.com.
Silva is a seven-fight UFC veteran and last competed in September at UFC on FOX: Arlovski vs. Barnett, where he lost a unanimous decision to Rustam Khabilov.
Healy is coming off of a seven-month layoff following his fight at Titan FC 39: Cavalcante vs. Healy, where he suffered a first-round knockout as he failed to take the Titan FC Lightweight Championship from Cavalcante. Healy is a six-fight UFC veteran, but hasn’t competed inside the octagon in over two years.
It was also announced that Bellator and WSOF veteran Luis Palomino would meet Russian Musa Khamanaev in a featherweight bout.
The January 13 event will be headlined by light heavyweight bout featuring former UFC fighter Thiago Silva, as he will meet Jared Torgeson at ACB 51.
Silva (Thiago) was cut from the UFC following a 2014 arrest in which he was charged with aggravated battery and non-violently resisting an officer. All charges were later dropped.
Bren Events Center will host the event and the updated card is for Absolute Championship Berkut 51 (ACB 51) is listed below.Advertisement
Supported by The Daily Listen to ‘The Daily’: Steve Bannon’s War Image In an exclusive interview with The New York Times, Stephen K. Bannon talked about Senate Republicans, white nationalism and the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times By Michael Barbaro Nov. 10, 2017
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device : Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher
Stephen K. Bannon has declared war on the Republican Party. He may no longer be in the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist, but he says that only makes him stronger.
In an exclusive interview with The New York Times, he shares his battle plan for the soul of America.
On today’s episode:
• Jeremy W. Peters, a Times reporter based in Washington, interviewed Mr. Bannon. (He’ll talk about that interview on this weekend’s episode of The New Washington, one of our other podcasts.)
Video In an exclusive interview with The New York Times, Stephen K. Bannon talked about Senate Republicans, white nationalism and the day President Trump was elected. Published On Nov. 10, 2017 Credit Image by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Background reading:
• Key takeaways from Mr. Bannon’s interview with The Times.
• A group of renegade Republicans who successfully made Nancy Pelosi into a boogeyman for their base is now trying the tactic with one of their own : Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.
• Is Breitbart News, the incendiary media company at the nerve center of Donald Trump’s America, simply provocative — or dangerous?
Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected]. Tweet me at @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with “The Daily,” write to us at [email protected].
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level, race, and depression, these variables were entered in the first block. Gender, Emotional Closeness, and Punitive Reactions were entered in the second block, and the two-way interactions of Emotional Closeness X Gender, Punitive Reactions X Gender, and Emotional Closeness X Punitive Reactions were entered in the third block. The three-way interaction term of Gender X Emotional Closeness X Punitive Reactions was entered in the fourth block. Results revealed a significant three-way interaction (see ) indicating that young men and women differed in the way in which emotional closeness and maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions predicted trait anger.
Because less than 5% of data was missing overall, single imputation using SPSS v. 20 was implemented. When implementing single imputation, an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to replace missing data with a probable value based on other available information. Predictor variables, dependent variables, and demographics were included in the imputation model to maintain unbiased associations between the variables of interest ( Sterne et al., 2009 ). Given the age range in our sample, as well as previous research that has indicated racial differences in emotion socialization behaviors ( Nelson, Leerkes, O’Brien, Calkins, & Marcovitch, 2012 ), age, academic level, and race were included in all analyses as covariates. Further, because our measure of parental punitive reactions is recollected and individuals may recall events more negatively if they are depressed or are experiencing depressive symptoms, participants’ current depression was also entered as a covariate. Descriptive statistics and correlations among study variables were analyzed. The means of emotional closeness and trait anger were not significantly different between young women (M = 4.21, SD =.90; M = 1.90, SD =.60) and young men (M = 4.14; SD =.97; M = 1.93; SD =.61). However, men (M = 3.35, SD = 1.12) did report that their mothers used more punitive reactions than women (M = 3.02, SD = 1.00), t(639) = −3.618, p <.01. Correlations among study variables and controls are presented in.
Discussion
The association between parents’ emotion socialization and children’s social and emotional development has been well established. However, the way in which emotion socialization in childhood has lasting effects on social and emotional outcomes in adulthood is less understood. The current study attempted to address this gap in the literature by examining whether emotional closeness moderated the relation between young adults’ recollected reports of their mother’s punitive responses to their negative emotions and their current trait anger. Further, a three-way interaction was tested to determine whether emotional closeness influenced this association in the same way for young men and women. Results indicated that for young women, emotional closeness moderated the association between recollected reports of maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions in childhood and adult anger expression. Specifically, maternal punitive reactions to women’s negative emotions in childhood were significantly associated with increased anger only when they reported low maternal emotional closeness with their mothers. For young men, there was no interaction between emotional closeness and punitive reactions but main effects were apparent; men’s reports of maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions were directly associated with increased anger expressions.
Previous research has indicated that parents use a greater number and variety of emotion terms with daughters than with sons (Adams, Kuebli, Boyle, & Fivush, 1995; Kuebli, Butler, & Fivish, 1995), and Benenson, Morash, and Petrakos (1998) found that mothers were physically closer, engaged in more mutual eye contact, and were rated higher on global enjoyment with their 5 year-old daughters than with their 5 year-old sons. Although men and women reported similar levels of maternal emotional closeness in the current study, the differential context in which men and women’s emotions are socialized could lead to a more complex and nuanced emotional connection between mothers and daughters that protect daughters from the negative effects of maternal punitive reactions to their negative emotions. Men and women may define emotional closeness differently based on these differential socialization experiences. In the current study, participants were simply asked how emotionally close they felt to their mother. Thus, a higher score on emotional closeness reflects participants’ perceived emotional closeness and does not reflect the characteristics that define the emotional bond. It is possible that even though young men and women in the current study reported similar emotional closeness to their mother, the characteristics of that emotional connection may be what buffers against the negative effects of punitive reactions.
Relatedly, young women are also thought to place a higher value on interpersonal relationships than men (Buhrmester & Furman, 1987; Ryan et al., 2005). For example, Kenny and Donaldson (1991) found that parental attachment, or a strong emotional bond, was more important to the well-being of daughters than sons. Thus, the value and internalized nature of a strong emotional connection may allow for a greater impact on developmental outcomes for young women. This idea is further supported by Chodorow’s (1999) theory that the mechanism that produces a more relational orientation in females as compared to males is that mothers bind themselves more closely to their daughters than their sons, and may even unconsciously identify more with their daughters; thus implying that mothers’ treatment of daughters makes them more dependent and more relational than males. Although the current study supports emotional closeness as a protective factor in the association between parental punitive reactions to children’s negative emotions and women’s trait anger in young adulthood, further research is needed to disentangle the specific mechanisms through which this takes effect takes place.
Results revealed that men reported that their mothers were slightly more likely to react punitively to their negative emotions than women, and empirical work has shown that in general boys display negative emotions such as anger more than girls (for a review refer to Brody & Hall, 1993). Therefore, in addition to being more likely to receive a punitive reaction to expressed anger, it is possible that there is a much greater frequency in the number of punitive reactions boys receive compared to girls. In the current study, we asked participants to report on how likely their mother would punish their negative emotions in childhood and did not assess how often they experienced these reactions. Thus, it could be that men encountered such situations more frequently in childhood leading to a stronger influence of the socialization of anger on men’s later anger expression. Given that men tend to express anger more frequently than women, it may be particularly important for young men to be provided with childhood opportunities that allow for the development of the necessary regulatory skills to display anger appropriately. Thus, regardless of emotional closeness, frequent and repeated punitive reactions to boys displays of negative emotion that do not allow for opportunities that teach adaptive regulatory strategies or expectations regarding appropriate display of anger may be associated with increased trait anger in young adulthood.
Although this study extends current literature and provides valuable insight into the association between the socialization of negative emotion in childhood and adult emotional functioning, it is not without limitation. First, adult children reported on their recollection of their mothers’ punitive reactions to their negative emotions in childhood. Although perception of maternal emotional socialization is important and provides a preliminary understanding, we cannot be sure that participants’ accounts of their mothers’ emotion socialization strategies coincide with the actual behaviors mothers’ employed during childhood. Further, although we attempted to account for the fact that young adults’ mental health might influence the way in which they recalled their parenting experiences, memories may in fact be shaped by later experiences. Specifically, the shifts that occur in the way that parents support and scaffold their children in late adolescence and early adulthood may impact the way in which young adults remember parents’ behaviors during childhood more generally. Therefore, longitudinal work from early childhood to adulthood is needed to assess whether mothers’ reports of emotion socialization during childhood is associated with later adult social and emotional outcomes in young adulthood, and future research is needed to determine whether frequency of the messages matters differently for young men and women. In addition, although large in size and likely more representative of the larger student body than typical samples of Psychology undergraduates, the sample utilized in the current study is one of convenience and comprised of students from one university in the southeastern United States. Thus, it is possible that findings may not be entirely generalizable. Finally, the current study is limited in that only self-report measures were utilized to assess all constructs. Therefore, there may be some conflation of effects given shared responder bias. Moreover, because it is socially undesirable to express high degrees of anger, participants may not have been entirely truthful or accurate when indicating how likely they were to respond in ways such as “flying off the handle” when angered. Although not exempt from social desirability bias, future work examining observed anger and parent reported anger would provide important additional insight.
The findings of this study raise a number of questions related to parental emotion socialization, emotional closeness, and gender differences. For example, what specific aspects of emotional closeness are most salient when considering it as a protective factor and how might the way in which men and women operationally define emotional closeness impact the extent to which emotional closeness can serve a buffering role. In addition, how might the socialization of positive emotion be related to later adult outcomes and how might gender be related to its impact. More exploration into these questions will provide additional insight into important nuances and lasting influences of emotion socialization across the lifespan.AP Photo/Tim Hales
LeBron James spoke candidly about his 'Decision,' his legacy and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert.
LeBron James does not give many one-on-one in-depth interviews. It fact, it almost never happens. There are a number of reasons for it, ranging from the demand to time to public relations to personal reasons. This is usually true overseas as well; James regularly conducts controlled media sessions in China.
Last week, however, James sat for a lengthy discussion with The Guardian’s Donald McRae in London. It was a promotional stop for James, a Nike event at the London School for Basketball. Kobe Bryant visited there last year. England is almost completely devoid of basketball journalists and James’ profile there has increased recently only because he’s taken a fractional ownership stake in the soccer club Liverpool as part of a larger business deal earlier this year. In a display of just how different James’ popularity is in England from the rest the world, The Guardian waited eight days to publish the interview.
McRae was able to get some insightful answers from James. Some revealed some thoughts James had not talked about before. Several excerpts stood out:
Q: Did you feel vindicated by the way that Dan Gilbert responded (to Decision)? A: I didn't need that to vindicate my decision. I think Dan Gilbert was talking out of anger. And I don't take anything personal. As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals. Q: You've been quoted as saying it's not impossible you could play for Cleveland again? A: It's not impossible [smiling]. Q: But unlikely? A: It's not impossible [laughs]. I still love the city. I have so many great memories of all those fans – so it's not impossible.
When James previously had been asked about Gilbert’s infamous letter – in the last such interview he did over a year ago with GQ – he said “You will see the light of people when they hit adversity. You'll get a good sense of their character. Me and my family have seen the character of that man.”
Gilbert and James obviously have a complex relationship, both before and after his time in Cleveland. There’s still plenty of tension. The two were in the same room for several hours recently during a negotiating session in New York. One observer said James would not look at Gilbert. In this interview, James seems to have moved past some of the animosity. Not that the two will be sending holiday cards.
On the seemingly far flung notion that he might return to the Cavs someday, James has been consistent on this issue. He has always left the door open, much in the same way he always left the door open that he might not re-sign with the Cavs when he was asked in the two-year build up to his free agency.
Q:Great players before you, from Magic Johnson to Larry Bird to Michael Jordan, all seem to have said that they would never have wanted to team up with their rivals. A: Right, right. Q: Do you think their argument has no substance - because the game has changed so much? A: Um, well I believe that when Magic was drafted to the Lakers he had Kareem and, as the team was built, James Worthy was part of that team, as was Jamaal Wilkes, and Bob McAdoo so he had four Hall of Famers right there on his team. And Jordan went through his bumps and bruises coming up with Chicago but they were eventually able to draft Scottie Pippen and then they got Horace Grant – two great players – and then they got Dennis Rodman – another Hall of Famer. So that team was built for Jordan. Same with Larry Bird. He had Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Danny Ainge – all great players. And eventually Bill Walton went to the Celtics. So I know the history of the game. Individuals get a lot of the spotlight. But there's never just been one individual who has done it by himself. You can go all the way back to when Oscar Robinson dominated at a high level and he was averaging triple-doubles season after season. But it was not until he teamed up with Kareem that he was able to win a championship. Same thing goes with Jerry West. Not a lot of people know that Jerry West went to the finals nine times and lost the first eight times. He won it at his ninth try.
Now this is the answer James probably should’ve given the night the Finals ended and not saying "At the end of the day, all of the people that were rooting for me to fail, tomorrow they'll have to wake up and have the same life they had before they woke up today. They got the same personal problems they had today and I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things I want to do.”
James instantly regretted that quote, which was said rather clearly as a defense mechanism in the moments after one of the most bitter defeats of his life. The next day he tried to take it back but it was too late. With months to reflect by now, James combines eloquence and a sense of history to continue to express his thinking leading up to his decision.
Coming to that decision created such a wave of reaction with many questions about James’ methodology. It took him months to start to articulate his thought process and make it public. It started the night the Heat beat the Celtics in the playoffs when James said:
"I knew deep down in my heart, as much as I loved my teammates back in Cleveland and as much as I loved home, I knew it couldn't do it by myself against that team. The way it panned out with all the friends and family and the fans back home, I apologize for the way it happened. I knew this opportunity was once in a lifetime. To be able to come down here and pair with two guys and this organization -- in order for me to move on with my career, that team that we just defeated, we had to go through them."
James goes further with The Guardian, referencing how much history played a role with his choice to join up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. He also talks about two players he seems to truly relate to, continuing to offer an in-depth window into his mindset.
Robertson had some of the best statistics in history but waited until his 11th season -- five of which he didn’t even make the playoffs -- before getting a title with the Milwaukee Bucks. The West comparison is new and telling. Now eight years into his career with the ninth season in doubt, James is clearly feeling his legacy.
In a way, this is a defense mechanism too. It is James bringing up all-time greats and comparing their individual histories to his own. It’s a valid point, a response to critics and a personal buttress all in one swoop. It may be just an answer to a question to an interview but James has clearly thought about this prickly topic.
Q: When you met Pat Riley, before deciding to join Miami, and he showed you the Championship rings he had won, was that a key moment? A: Definitely. It was a great moment. I know the history of the game so I knew how many rings he has won as a coach and how he was a player at Kentucky – and all those other intangibles that go with a great career like he's had. But what made me a really big believer in the team and the franchise was the fact that they talk a lot about family. They take care of their guys and it's not just all about winning. That was a huge thing for me.
There have been both veiled and direct references to potential tampering by the Heat before James became a free agent. There were reports of clandestine meetings and the like. There is little doubt that the most important factor was Wade selling James on joining him and doing it in Miami, not in Chicago or anywhere else. Even Wade, he has told friends, was surprised James actually pulled the trigger on it. Regardless, James has referenced his official meeting with the Heat and its importance several times over the last year.
The Heat were the third team to meet with James on the morning of the second day. Their entourage arrived nearly an hour before James did on that morning and Riley paced the halls of James’ Cleveland offices preparing himself for the sale. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra talked, owner Micky Arison went to the extreme measure of wearing a suit and tie, and Alonzo Mourning cried.
But Riley’s move of pulling out his title rings and putting them on the table resonated with James then and apparently continues to this day.Amnesty International has condemned what it says is a new practice in Iran of broadcasting ‘confession’ videos, most notably used to justify the mass execution of 25 people earlier this year.
The hangings of between 20 - 25 Sunni men accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in the western Kurdish region in August was one of the largest mass executions ever carried out in the country, and was the subject of renewed criticism when it emerged that the men’s families and lawyers were not notified before they were killed.
However, a new report from the rights group says that videos featuring “coerced confessions” coupled with foreboding music and unrelated footage of attacks carried out in Syria and Iraq by Sunni extremists Isis, have been circulated in the Iranian media in the wake of the mens’ deaths.
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The clips, produced by and widely disseminated by Iranian state media, are apparently intended to both justify the executions and exploit fears of Sunni extremism in the Shiite majority country, Amnesty says, using sensationalist titles such as “In the Depth of Darkness” and “In the Devil’s Hands.”
In the videos the men confess to being members of the illegal Sunni extremist group Tohid and Jihad. There are several inconsistencies, Wednesday’s report said, such as prisoners admitting to crimes committed after they had already been sent to prison, or contradicting accounts of planned attacks and assassinations.
Shape Created with Sketch. New York protests against Iran nuclear deal Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. New York protests against Iran nuclear deal 1/10 New York A woman holds a poster as she takes part in a rally on Times Square in New York opposing the nuclear deal with Iran 2/10 New York An inflatable mushroom cloud stands among demonstrators during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 3/10 New York Protesters rally against the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square 4/10 New York A member of the Neturei Karta Orthodox Jews sect is escorted away by New York City Police during a rally near Times Square to demand that Congress vote down the proposed US deal with Iran in New York 5/10 New York A woman shouts slogans during a rally against the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square in New York 6/10 New York A protestor holds a placard during a demonstration and rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square 7/10 New York Some of several thousand protestors crowd into 7th Avenue at 42nd street as they demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 8/10 New York A woman holds a placard as she joins several thousand other protestors to demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 9/10 New York Protesters rallied against the Iran nuclear deal in New York's Times Square KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images 10/10 New York Protestors shout slogans as they demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 1/10 New York A woman holds a poster as she takes part in a rally on Times Square in New York opposing the nuclear deal with Iran 2/10 New York An inflatable mushroom cloud stands among demonstrators during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 3/10 New York Protesters rally against the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square 4/10 New York A member of the Neturei Karta Orthodox Jews sect is escorted away by New York City Police during a rally near Times Square to demand that Congress vote down the proposed US deal with Iran in New York 5/10 New York A woman shouts slogans during a rally against the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square in New York 6/10 New York A protestor holds a placard during a demonstration and rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran in Times Square 7/10 New York Some of several thousand protestors crowd into 7th Avenue at 42nd street as they demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 8/10 New York A woman holds a placard as she joins several thousand other protestors to demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran 9/10 New York Protesters rallied against the Iran nuclear deal in New York's Times Square KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images 10/10 New York Protestors shout slogans as they demonstrate during a rally apposing the nuclear deal with Iran
The men describe themselves as “terrorists” and “criminals deserving of punishment,” saying that if given the chance they would have “committed atrocities worse than Isis if we had not been stopped.”
“By parading death row prisoners on national TV, the authorities are blatantly attempting to convince the public of their ‘guilt,’ but they cannot mask the disturbing truth that the executed men were convicted of vague and broadly defined offenses and sentenced to death after grossly unfair trials,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s research and advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Human Rights Watch also criticised the new trend. “It seems Iran has joined the region’s propaganda industry, producing slick videos featuring the apparently forced confessions of men they later executed as ‘terrorists,’ Sarah Leah Whitson, the watchdog’s Middle East director, said in reaction to the report.
Iranian media agencies are “implicated” in the “rather macabre and ugly form of abuse,” she added.
Iran has implemented the death penalty for a wide variety of charges since the 1979 Revolution, including drug trafficking and religious offences.
Iranian officials did not immediately respond to The Independent's request for comment.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowAdam Lee over at Daylight Atheism considers that fact that so many atheists are liberals.
All these data points show that, while there’s no necessary connection between atheism and progressive political views, in practice it usually does work out that way. I leave it up to you, readers, to weigh in on why that is. Are these the correct views, and atheists, being the most rational people around, are more likely to hit on them? (That’s obviously the most self-serving possibility.) Are we driven by an instinctive rejection of the political views that have most commonly been supported by religion? Absent a belief in heaven, do we put greater emphasis on compassion and fairness in this life? Or is there another explanation I haven’t considered?
I tend to think that the connection between atheism and liberalism is a product of our history. I think it’s telling that when we look back at American history, we see freethinkers, agnostics and atheists becoming most prominent during moments of great religious conservatism. The Freethinkers – call it the first wave of atheism – showed up during the Second Great Awakening. Frances Wright, Abner Kneeland and the rest argued for women’s equality and abolition as much as they argued against religion.
The second wave, with folks like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Robert Ingersoll, came during the retrenchment of conservatism following the shock of the Civil War. We shouldn’t forget that Ingersoll did speeches for the radical Republicans as well as speeches against Christianity, and Stanton is one of the more interesting thinkers in America’s liberal tradition.
And of course this current wave, if I can call it that, could be a reaction to the rise of the Religious Right.
It seems to me that it takes something to get atheists to join together and shout. The lack of a belief in God is not enough to rally the troops. It’s when religion is being used to perpetuate inequality that you really start to see some pushback.
American Christianity has been used to underwrite the status quo, with all of its little hierarchies and inequalities. As Corey Robin has pointed out, the preservation of these hierarchies has been the role of the people we call conservatives. As he put it in the NTY Review of Books:
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.
It is not always true that, as Ophelia suggests, “god stands for hierarchy and obedience.” There have been radical egalitarian versions of Christianity. But it is true that the conservatives have generally carried the argument in Western society.
With Christianity being combined with conservatism, it’s not surprising that a rejection of religion should sometimes come alongside a rejection of conservatism. I suppose the rejection of both is part of the grand tradition of American freethought. It’s a tradition we continue as we fight for women’s equality and equality in marriage.The premise of the app, from German startup Sonormed, is neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to adapt and constantly learn new things. The app analyzes individual tracks and filters the frequency that causes tinnitus for each user. On playback, the listener's hearing adapts to the audible alteration (or notches) and over time the hyperactivity in the brain is toned down. Essentially, it takes three steps: select music files from personal collection, filter tinnitus frequency and upload a personalized track to an MP3 player to start therapy.
Tinnitracks was one of nine winners at SXSW's Accelerator startup competition this past weekend. The therapy breaks ground by going a step beyond conventional methods of managing symptoms and effectively treats the condition that affects 50 million Americans. The prescribed music listening experience is one to two hours a day for at least six months. With consistent effort, the therapy could treat subjective, tonal and even chronic conditions. For those who still insist on taking on the high-decibel concert season without earplugs, this might be a good app to bookmark.
[Image credit: Tinnitracks]Cities is supported by
Cuando una tormenta se abate sobre la Ciudad de México, la lluvia no sólo cae, sino que insiste. Comienza a media tarde como un ligero golpeteo sobre ventanas y parabrisas, después arrecia con una precipitación vespertina que convierte los salpicones en charcos, hasta que finalmente –mediante un clímax nocturno de truenos y relámpagos que caen desde los distantes volcanes– el aluvión borbotea por el desagüe y las hondonadas, hasta convertir el goteo sobre los riachuelos en torrentes bajo los túneles. Las inundaciones sirven para recordar el orden natural de las cosas: el agua es oriunda de aquí.
Este hecho geológico, histórico, es una de las razones por las que los aztecas construyeron aquí, hace 700 años, una ciudad de jardines flotantes que llegó a ser conocida como “La Venecia del nuevo mundo”. Sin embargo, los grandes lagos que alguna vez ocuparon la llanura fueron gradualmente secados por los pobladores. En el siglo XVI, los conquistadores españoles aceleraron el proceso a pasos agigantados, y los ingenieros modernos casi han finalizado la labor, al reemplazar las ciénagas lacustres con un océano gris de concreto, pavimento y acero que, tan sólo en el cuadrante central de la ciudad, hoy acoge a casi nueve millones de habitantes.
Como resultado, el abastecimiento de agua para ser bebida, para lavar, cocinar y limpiar debe ser bombeado de manera subterránea por cientos de metros, o desde una distancia superior a los 100 kilómetros. Proveer los miles de millones de litros que requiere esta megalópolis – situada a 2,400 metros por encima del nivel del mar– es una de las grandes hazañas mundiales de ingeniería hidráulica. Si el dominio sobre el agua es un parámetro civilizatorio, entonces ciertamente la Ciudad de México es uno de los más espectaculares logros de la humanidad.
Al mismo tiempo, desde el punto de vista de la sustentabilidad y de la equidad social, se trata también de uno de sus más absurdos fracasos. Desechar un recurso que cae libre del cielo, para reemplazarlo por exactamente la misma H 2 O traída desde lejos es caro, ineficiente, un derroche de energía y en última instancia inadecuado para las necesidades de la población. También produce una paradoja: a pesar de que la Ciudad de México tiene más días lluviosos que Londres, sufre de una escasez comparable con la de un desierto, lo que hace que el precio de cada litro de agua sea de los más elevados del mundo, a pesar de que su calidad a menudo sea baja.
Los crecientes costos – sociales, económicos, sanitarios y medioambientales – son una fuente de estrés y conflicto. Los líderes políticos y las grandes corporaciones impulsan proyectos de ingeniería hidráulica aún más voluminosos, que son rechazados por los conservacionistas y por grupos indígenas. El Congreso y las ONGs se enfrentan en cuanto a la posible privatización del agua. Entretanto, la escasez y las inundaciones crean tensiones sociales en el Distrito Federal y en los estados aledaños.
A nivel mundial, el agua es más valiosa, y se le pone mayor atención, que nunca antes. Jamás ha existido una mayor necesidad por encontrar nuevas formas de abordar el problema. Existen pocos lugares que demuestren lo anterior con mayor claridad que la Ciudad de México, donde este vital elemento corre por un sistema que cada día se vuelve más largo, complejo y rebasado. Desde su fuente original hasta llegar al desagüe, la trayectoria de cada gota expresa una historia heroica, trágica, inacabada, de crecimiento urbano y desarrollo humano. A lo largo de una semana, The Guardian siguió esta trayectoria, revelando los triunfos del pasado, las batallas actuales, y la crisis que se avista en el futuro.
Cutzamala: la fuente
Nos ponemos en marcha antes del amanecer rumbo al Sistema Cutzamala, la mayor fuente de agua para la Ciudad de México. Se encuentra ubicada a 120 kilómetros del Distrito Federal, por lo que conducimos a través de la mancha urbana durante horas hasta que la penumbra matinal comienza a ceder, y de pronto nos adentramos en un valle verde, plagado de girasoles rosados y púrpuras, laderas pastosas y bosques de abetos.
Es la tierra de los mazahuas, una de las 62 principales etnias de México. Desde la llegada de los primeros españoles, los mazahuas han sufrido la constante erosión de su territorio y sus recursos naturales, al principio en nombre de la “civilización”, ahora en el del “desarrollo”. Actualmente, esto implica que se les fuerza a compartir sus ríos, arroyos y manantiales con una de las ciudades más sedientas del mundo.
La primera presa – Villa Victoria – fue construida en 1962 como una planta de energía hidroeléctrica, pero aproximadamente una década después cambió su papel, cuando los planeadores urbanos se dieron cuenta de que el agua era más valiosa que la electricidad. Hoy en día, la electricidad generada por la presa se utiliza para bombear un pequeño lago todos los días desde el nivel del mar hasta una altitud de 1,100 metros, superior al punto más elevado de toda Inglaterra.
Se trata de una operación tanto militar como energética. Subrayando la importancia estratégica, hay una base militar dispuesta a un costado de la planta de tratamiento de agua y estación de bombeo en Cutzamala, llamada Los Berros, que se encuentra rodeada por altos muros, alambre de púas y guardias apostados. El propietario – la Comisión Nacional del Agua (Conagua)– nos niega el permiso para realizar una visita, a pesar de varias solicitudes por adelantado.
En vez de ello, los mazahuas nos guían alrededor del perímetro, y después nos llevan en auto a lo largo del canal que lleva el agua de la reserva Victoria a la planta de purificación. Se encuentra rodeada en su mayoría por bloques de concreto, pero existen algunas brechas. En algún punto, una cisterna sin marcas reconocibles es llenada.
“Nos sentimos invadidos,” dice Manuel Araujo, un miembro del grupo indigenista Frente Mazahua. “Antes vivíamos rodeados por la naturaleza, ahora estamos rodeados por torres de alta tensión y alambre de púas.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lilia Crisostomo Maldonado del Ejército Zapatista de Mujeres Mazahua para la Defensa del Agua.
Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Los mazahuas se encuentran en pie de lucha. Recientemente, varias decenas de mazahuas ocuparon el sitio de la planta de cloración durante 15 días para demandar que cada hogar de la comunidad reciba agua potable. Entre los ocupantes se encontraba Ofelia Lorenzo, quien recibe agua sólo un día a la semana por una delgada manguera que corre subterránea hasta emerger en su jardín. Los demás días se ve obligada a llevar una cubeta hasta un riachuelo situado más abajo, en el valle, para poder bañarse y lavar su ropa. “Me molesta que se llevan el agua de aquí y no obtengo nada a cambio. Ni siquiera hay suficiente agua para mi casa,”dice.
Lorenzo es miembro del Ejército Zapatista de Mujeres Mazahua para la Defensa del Agua, que encabeza las protestas públicas de su comunidad. Se visten con trajes tradicionales y posan con pistolas falsas, y su objetivo principal es crear conciencia en la Ciudad de México acerca de los problemas que enfrentan las comunidades ubicadas cerca de la fuente primordial del agua: “Nos dimos cuenta de que el gobierno no hacía mucho caso a los hombres, así que decidimos unirnos a la lucha,”dice. “Me uní al grupo en 2003 porque nuestros ríos estaban siendo fuertemente dañados. Nuestras cosechas se han visto afectadas. Ya no hay tantos peces como antes. Debido a que tomaron el agua subterránea, la tierra está seca. Es por culpa del Sistema Cutzamala. Ahora le pedimos al gobierno que nos pague lo que hemos perdido. No estamos peleando, sólo defendemos nuestros derechos.”
El agua y la tierra se encuentran dentro de las preocupaciones principales de los indígenas en México, y no solamente en Cutzamala. El Movimiento Zapatista, que se levantó en armas contra el Estado mexicano en 1994, también se ha unido a varias campañas de “Defensa del agua”, incluidas protestas en el municipio de Xoxocotla, en el estado de Morelos, así como de los yaquis y los o’odham en Sonora.
Han obtenido concesiones. En Cutzamala, el gobierno ha construido para los mazahuas un centro comunitario, granjas pesqueras, pavimentado carreteras y provisto de agua potable en pipas a algunos hogares. Pero los líderes aún consideran que esto es insuficiente, pues nuevas tierras se encuentran amenazadas.
Hay otra protesta planeada pronto en contra de la prevista expansión del Sistema Cutzamala, que actualmente provee alrededor del 30% del agua de la Ciudad de México. Las autoridades quieren que este porcentaje se incremente, para poder reabastecer los acuíferos del centro de la ciudad, que han disminuido a niveles |
theme: ‘Clinton for prosecution, not president’
Hillary Clinton has dismissed questions about the FBI’s investigation of her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state by describing it as a “security review.”
But diGenova told WND it “has moved passed being a security inquiry or a security review.”
“Federal prosecutors do not immunize witnesses in a security review,” he said.
“This is a criminal case, and with Pagliano the federal prosecutors have somebody at the bottom of the case that the prosecutors need to interview in the process of building their case against Hillary Clinton and her top aides,” he said.
DiGenova noted that Pagliano took the Fifth Amendment to avoid giving testimony to the House Benghazi committee last year.
He said the granting of immunity to Pagliano also indicates to him that the Department of Justice has convened a grand jury.
“It is unlikely the Justice Department prosecutors would seek to compel testimony from Pagliano without first getting documents, and to get documents you need a grand jury to issue a subpoena,” diGenova concluded.
“In order to protect themselves later, Justice Department prosecutors would have opened a grand jury so their subpoenas have the force of law.”
Who is Bryan Pagliano?
Pagliano served as the information technology director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008.
His résumé on Linkedin.com notes he worked for Clinton from 2006 to 2009. In 2008, he “headed the design and build of the campaign headquarters’ data center and orchestrated the continuous movement of technical equipment and staff among nationwide field officers in response to ever-changing organizational needs.”
When Clinton’s presidential campaign disbanded, Pagliano moved to working for her political action committee.
As reported by the Washington Post in September 2015, Bill and Hillary Clinton personally paid Pagliano $5,000 for “computer services” prior to his becoming a State Department employee, according to a financial disclosure form Pagliano filed in April 2009.
The payment evidently was for establishing a private server for the Clintons in their home in Chappaqua, New York.
In May 2009, the State Department employed Pagliano as a special adviser.
The record shows Pagliano lied to the State Department hide payments the Clintons continued to make to him privately to maintain the Chappaqua e-mail server.
The Washington Post article further reported that even after he became a State Department employee, the Clintons continued paying Pagliano privately to maintain the server for Hillary Clinton.
Pagliano neglected to list the outside income in the required financial disclosures he filed with the State Department each year until concluding his full-time employment in February 2013, coincident with Hillary Clinton’s departure as secretary of state.
‘A web of deceit’
“Because of the complex legal questions regarding Pagliano’s dual employment by the State Department and the Clintons privately, that is one of the reasons he had to be granted immunity,” diGenova observed.
He said Pagliano also needed immunity because he neglected to disclose to the State Department, as required, his outside income with the Clintons,”
He said Pagliano’s actions are “evidence of this web of deceit that has grown up around the creation of Hillary Clinton’s private server.”
DiGenova stressed that Pagliano’s testimony will go a long way to establishing that Hillary Clinton intended to violate national security laws by setting up a non-secure private network over which classified information would be transferred.
He also expects Pagliano’s testimony to affirm former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden’s point that the “original sin” of creating Hillary Clinton’s private server as the sole communications device for the secretary can never be fixed.
“That starts it and ends it – it’s over – the original sin of the private server creates the crime and ends the investigation. The rest is icing on the cake,” diGenova said.
“Pagliano’s testimony will establish clearly his conflicts of interest working at the same time for the Clintons privately while he was a State Department employee, as well as false statements in his failure to disclose to the State Department his outside private income with the Clintons,” he said.
Time to ‘lawyer up’
DiGenova emphasized that Pagliano clearly needed immunity before he testified under oath.
“Pagliano is a small enough fish in the pyramid the FBI is investigating, yet he is central to the investigation – a real smart fish and a very important fish – making it important enough to the Justice Department prosecutors to get his testimony under oath that they were willing to grant him immunity,” he said.
DiGenova said Pagliano’s testimony will show that Hillary Clinton “knew exactly how the private email server was installed, who was involved in making the decision to establish the private email server, who if anyone was spoken with at the State Department, and who on her staff was aware of the private email server.”
The Justice Department’s granting of immunity to Pagliano, diGenova pointed out, means everyone who was on Clinton’s State Department staff knows now that he is talking.
“I doubt the Justice Department prosecutors have yet begun interviewing Hillary Clinton’s staff,” he said. “But knowing that Pagliano has been given immunity, you better believe that everybody on Hillary Clinton’s State Department staff is now lawyering up, if they haven’t already done so.”Conflict between Win7/8.1 patches and Carrizo DDR4 machines
woody
In today’s Security TechCenter release notes, there’s a sobering entry that looks like this:
Symptom
If the PC uses an AMD Carrizo DDR4 processor, installing this update (KB 4015549 (the Win7 Monthly Rollup), KB 4015546 (the Win7 Security-Only patch), KB 4015550 (the Win8.1 Monthly Rollup), KB 4015547 (the Win8.1 Security-Only patch) will block downloading and installing future Windows updates.
Workaround / Resolution
Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release.
Sound familiar? On March 22 I wrote about Microsoft’s reprehensible approach to forcing Win7 and 8.1 off the newer 7th generation Kaby Lake/Ryzen processors.
Two days later I pointed folks to companies that are maintaining lists of supported PCs — ones that wouldn’t run afoul of the blocked updating. At the time I said:
I don’t know what Microsoft intends to do with AMD chips. The way the announcements stand, AMD Bristol Ridge PCs won’t have Win7 or 8.1 support, and there’s no magic list of manufacturers or machines that are exempt from the ruling.
Now it appears we have a real-world example of a supposedly-protected 6th generation chip, AMD’s Carrizo, which got zapped by the 7th generation police.
Microsoft’s own Lifecycle Policy FAQ says:
What is the support policy for prior generations of processors and chipsets on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1? Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 will continue to be supported for security, reliability, and compatibility on prior generations of processors and chipsets under the standard lifecycle for Windows. This includes most devices available for purchase today by consumers or enterprises and includes generations of silicon such as AMD’s Carrizo [emphasis added] and Intel’s Broadwell and Haswell silicon generations.
(Thx @radosuaf)
Even more distressing: It looks like this obnoxious behavior extends to both the Monthly Rollup patches (which I expected) and to the Security-only patches (which I did not).
What a massive screw-up.
(Can anybody point me to a commercial machine that uses Carrizo with DDR4?)Declan McCullagh/CNET
IBM's cooperation with a National Security Agency surveillance program caused sales in China to "abruptly halt" and the company's stock price to decline, a shareholder lawsuit claims.
In a complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension and Relief Fund accused the company of defrauding investors by concealing its involvement in the agency's PRISM program, leading to a dramatic drop in sales in China. The program, which was revealed in classified documents leaked to the press by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, allowed the agency to collect and process foreign intelligence that passed through servers belonging to US tech companies.
The disclosure of the program led China to sever its business relationship with IBM and a handful of other companies, resulting in IBM reporting a 22 percent drop in sales in China for the third quarter. The lawsuit also accuses IBM of lobbying for Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which would allow IBM to share customer data with the NSA.
"The company knew but misrepresented or concealed from investors that the disclosures of its lobbying and its association with the Prism and NSA spying scandal caused businesses in China as well as the Chinese government to abruptly halt doing business with IBM, leading to an immediate, and precipitous decline in sales," the pension fund said in its complaint.
IBM said the lawsuit is "pushing a wild conspiracy theory."
"This lawsuit seeks to confuse IBM's support for a U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposal -- which has yet to be enacted -- with the completely unrelated NSA surveillance program called PRISM," IBM general counsel Robert Weber said in the statement. "Even a cursory reading of the legislative proposal, known as CISPA, makes clear that it has nothing to do with the recently disclosed NSA surveillance program."
The pension fund is seeking to represent investors who bought IBM stock between June 25 and October 16.Villa (right) scored 23 goals for Barcelona in his first season at the Nou Camp Photo: Adidas
Barcelona forward David Villa believes he has improved as a result of playing alongside Lionel Messi.
Villa joined the Catalan giants from Valencia last summer and has become an integral part of Pep Guardiola’s side, scoring 23 goals in his first season at the Nou Camp.
The Spain striker admits it is a privilege to play alongside Messi, who scored 53 goals and set up 24 for his team-mates last term, and says he has become a better player since he began lining up in the same team as the Argentine.
“Messi is a player who demands a lot from those who are around him because you always need to be alert,” Villas told El Pais.
“Sometimes, it seems impossible that he has seen you, but he has. You must be ready for the impossible when you are playing with Messi because, it is not about what he does, but about what he makes others do.
“Honestly, I have improved by playing next to him. In the future, when I look at photos of Messi in which I am next to him, I will be able to say: ‘I played with Leo Messi’ – that is a privilege.”
Villa has been deployed in a wider role at Barcelona than the position he was used to at Valencia, and the 29-year-old admits the change took a bit of getting used to.
“I have other tasks and although it is the same offensively, it is not the same in defence,” he continued. “I am proud to be doing well and to be enjoying football from a position that was not my own until recently.
“Pedro has helped me a lot. When I had doubts, I observed him. When I was a bit lost on the field, I would look to see what Pedro was doing on the other side and he would guide me.”Department of Health and Human Services Public Health Service
Food and Drug Administration US Custom House, Room 900
200 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
215-597-4390
WARNING LETTER
15-PHI-06
January 2, 2015
UPS OVERNIGHT DELIVERY
RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED
Jason S. Christoffersen, Plant Manager
Nestle Purina PetCare
2050 Pope Road
Allentown, PA 18104-9308
Dear Mr. Christoffersen:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted an inspection of your low-acid canned food (LACF) manufacturing facility located at 2050 Pope Road, Allentown, PA, from September 15, 2014 through October 1, 2014. The inspection revealed that your firm manufactures a variety of low-acid dog and cat foods. The inspection also revealed that your facility has significant deviations from the LACF regulations, Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Parts 108 and 113 (21 CFR Parts 108 and 113).
As a manufacturer of low-acid canned food products, you are required to comply with the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) and the federal regulations relating to the processing of low-acid canned food products. These regulations are described in 21 CFR 108, Emergency Permit Control, and 21 CFR 113, Thermally Processed Low-Acid Foods Packaged in Hermetically Sealed Containers. The Emergency Permit Control regulations were issued, in part, pursuant to Section 404 of the Act, Emergency Permit Control, 21 United States Code (USC) § 344. A temporary emergency permit may be required for low-acid canned foods whenever a processor has failed to fulfill the requirements of 21 CFR 108.35, including registration and filing of process information, and the mandatory requirements in 21 CFR Part 113.
Based upon certain criteria in 21 CFR 113, low acid foods may be adulterated within the meaning of section 402(a)(4), [21 USC § 342(a)(4)] in that they have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby they may have been rendered injurious to health. You can find the Act and the low-acid food regulations through links on FDA’s Internet home page at www.fda.gov
We acknowledge receipt of your October 15, 2014, written response to the FDA Form-483, Inspectional Observations, issued to your firm on October 1, 2014. Our comments regarding the adequacy of the actions you took to correct the objectionable conditions and practices observed during the inspection are detailed after each violation that is noted below.
The significant violations are as follows:
1. Your firm failed to process each low-acid canned food in conformity with at least the scheduled process filed with FDA, as required by 21 CFR 108.35(c)(3)(i). Specifically,
Your firm’s filed scheduled process (SID # (b)(4)) for Alpo Chop House Rotisserie Chicken flavor in Gourmet Gravy includes (b)(4) different process times for (b)(4) different minimum initial temperatures (IT) of (b)(4) at a minimum sterilization temperature of (b)(4). The process specified for a minimum IT of (b)(4) is (b)(4) at (b)(4) with a minimum IT of (b)(4) and (b)(4) at (b)(4) with a minimum IT of (b)(4). However, on March 14, 2014, the Daily Process Record - (b)(4) identified a recorded IT of (b)(4) with a recorded cook time of (b)(4) for Lot (b)(4). This is less than the filed process of (b)(4) required for the recorded IT of (b)(4). Further, comments on this processing record state (b)(4) Low IT (b)(4) QA NOTIFIeD (b)(4) Cook satisfied…” The critical factor of process time filed with FDA must reflect the actual time required for delivery of the scheduled process.
We acknowledge that your written response states that your (b)(4) Thermal Process Authority evaluated this process deviation and stated that this product received a sufficient thermal process to achieve commercial sterility. Further, your response states that this instance and actions taken were recorded in a deviation log, on October 3, 2014. Additionally, the response states that, in the future, process deviations will be documented. We do not consider this response acceptable because your firm did not provide documentation associated with the evaluation of the entire lot of product affected by the process deviation and did not provide documentation and/or the specifics of your corrective action plan in order to ensure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
Your firm’s filed scheduled process (SID #(b)(4)) for FCC Mariner’s Catch 5.5oz. cans and FCC Mixed Grill, 5.5oz. cans for the (b)(4) Retort ((b)(4)) lists critical factors that require the in-feed leg to be at (b)(4), the steam dome (b)(4), and exit leg at (b)(4). However,
o On February 25, 2014, FCC Mariner’s Catch temperature chart in-feed leg (top) fell below the required (b)(4) to approximately (b)(4), to approximately (b)(4), and to approximately (b)(4). Further, handwritten on the temperature chart is: “(b)(4) Both chain (b)(4)…” and “Both chains down (b)(4)…Both chains down (b)(4)…” Additionally, your firm failed to document indications of a temperature drop at either time on the (b)(4) Retort Daily Process Record.
o On March 25, 2014, FCC Mixed Grill temperature chart in-feed leg (top) fell below the required (b)(4) to approximately (b)(4). Further, handwritten on the temperature chart is: “(b)(4) Both chain shut off (b)(4)…” Additionally, your firm failed to document indications of a temperature drop on the (b)(4) Retort Daily Process Record.
We acknowledge that your written response states that your (b)(4) Thermal Process Authority evaluated these process deviations and stated that the products received a sufficient thermal process to achieve commercial sterility. Further, your response states that these instances and actions taken were recorded in a deviation log, on September 19, 2014. We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to insure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
Your firm’s filed scheduled process for formulated pet food chunks in gravy style (SID #(b)(4)) lists a critical factor of (b)(4) as a pouch thickness for the (b)(4) retort. On September 18, 2014, during the loading of Friskies Gravy Sensations with Turkey and Giblets in Gravy into crates, our investigators observed (b)(4) pouches stacked on top of each other entering the retort. Our investigators then obtained (b)(4)previously processed pouches of Friskies Gravy Sensation with Turkey and Giblets in Gravy, Lot #(b)(4), and measured the pouch thickness, which ranged from (b)(4). These processed pouches were from the same production batch as the ones observed entering the retort.
Additionally, pouch thickness is a critical factor for this filed process, and your firm failed to monitor or document pouch thickness as required by 21 CFR 113.100(a). For example, our review of the batch records for Friskies Gravy Sensations with Turkey and Giblets in Gravy 3 oz. pouch processed on March 20, 2014 (Lot #(b)(4)) revealed that pouch thickness was not monitored or documented. This observation was previously discussed with your firm during the FDA inspection in 2007.
We acknowledge that your written response states that your (b)(4) Thermal Process Authority evaluated this process deviation on October 8, 2014 and confirmed that the products received a sufficient thermal process to achieve commercial sterility. Further, your response states that this instance and actions taken were recorded in a deviation log, on October 8, 2014. In addition, your response states that, within the next (b)(4), your processing authority will file the revised SID to ensure the stack height critical factor accounts for the pouch placement process variation noted in this observation. Your response failed to state whether your firm plans to discontinue manufacturing this product until your process authority files the revised process.
2. Your firm failed to identify, from a processor check or otherwise, deviations from the scheduled process of critical factors which are out of control and failed to record these deviations in a separate log, as required by 21 CFR 113.89. Specifically, for the instances identified above in item #1, your firm failed to identify devi ations from your filed scheduled processes and critical factors. In addition, these process deviations were not recorded in a separate file or log that details both the deviations and actions taken.
We acknowledge that your written response states that your (b)(4) Thermal Process Authority evaluated these process deviations and determined that the products received a sufficient thermal process to achieve commercial sterility and that these instances and actions taken were recorded in a deviation log, as stated in item #1 above. Further, your response states that the HACCP Corrective Action Plan will be reviewed and revised by October 31, 2014. We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to insure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
3. Your firm failed to chlorinate or otherwise sanitize cooling water as necessary for cooling canals and re-circulated water supplies, as required by 21 CFR 113.60(b). Specifically, on September 16, 2014, our investigators observed that you failed to sanitize the cooling cushion water that is re-circulated in your (b)(4) Retort System during the processing of Friskies Supreme Supper, Lot #(b)(4), in your (b)(4) Retort System.
We acknowledge that your written response states that your firm is actively working with your chemical supplier representative to achieve and implement a solution within the next ninety (90) days. We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to insure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
4. Your firm failed to establish a system for product traffic control in the retort room to prevent un-retorted product from bypassing the retort process, as required by 21 CFR 113.87(b). Specifically, we observed that your can conveyors and the reject chute do not have adequate protection in place to prevent an unprocessed can from falling into the cooling canal in the case of a can jam or other equipment malfunction in your (b)(4) Retort System. This observation was a discussion point during our November 7, 2007 inspection.
We acknowledge that you informed our investigators that you are in the process of structuring a cover to prevent unprocessed cans from falling into the cooling canal. Additionally, your written response states that you shared this plan with our investigators and that this plan will be completed within the next (b)(4). We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to insure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
5. Your firm failed to install the mercury-in-glass (MIG) thermometers in a location where they can be accurately and easily read, as required by 21 CFR 113.40(a)(1)(v). Specifically, the angle of installation and the location of the permanent ladder system on the (b)(4) and (b)(4) rendered the MIGs unreadable by our investigators. Further, during the inspection, your Corporate Quality Assurance Division Manager attempted to read these MIGs, and he could not provide an exact reading during the inspection.
We acknowledge that during the inspection it was stated that the firm was confident that the trained (b)(4) Retort Operators could accurately read these MIGs and that your written response states that a plan will be developed with your (b)(4) Thermal Process Authority to begin transitioning to alternate Temperature Indicating Devices (aTIDs) for the (b)(4) Retorts in 2015. We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to insure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.
6. The records of all processing and production records were not signed or initialed by a representative of plant management who is qualified by suitable training or experience, as required by 21 CFR 113.100(b). Specifically, processing records, production records, and recording temperature charts for various products were stamped with a rubber stamp that read QA REVIEWED, date reviewed, and the name of QA reviewer. The responsible QA reviewer did not initial or sign the records reviewed. The following products, lot codes, and dates were associated with these records, as follows:
(b)(4) Retort System:
(b)(4):
Alpo Chop House Originals Roasted Chicken, Lot (b)(4)
Friskies Indoor Chicken, Lot (b)(4)
Mighty Dog Chicken Egg & Bacon Country Platter, Lot (b)(4)
Mighty Dog Chicken & Smoked Bacon Combo, Lot (b)(4)
Alpo Chop House Originals Filet Mignon, Lot (b)(4)
Mighty Dog Lamb and Rice, Lot (b)(4)
(b)(4):
Friskies Mixed Grill, Lot (b)(4)
ProPlan Senior Beef and Rice Entrée, Lot (b)(4)
Friskies Salmon Dinner, Lot (b)(4)
(b)(4) Retort System:
(b)(4): Alpo Chop House Rotisserie Chicken in Gravy, Lot (b)(4)
(b)(4): Alpo Prime Cuts with Beef, Lot (b)(4)
Alpo Chop House Originals Filet Mignon, Lot (b)(4)
(b)(4) Retort System:
(b)(4): Gravy Sensations with Turkey and Giblets in Gravy, Lot (b)(4)
This letter is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of violations. It is your responsibility to ensure that all of your products comply with the Act, the low-acid canned food regulation (21 CFR 108 and 113), the Current Good Manufacturing Practice regulation (21 CFR 110), and other applicable regulations. You should take prompt action to correct the violations described in this letter and establish and implement procedures which will prevent them from occurring in the future. Failure to take appropriate corrective action may subject your firm and products to further actions, such as emergency permit control, injunction, or seizure.
You should notify this office, in writing, describing the corrective actions that you will take to bring your firm into compliance within fifteen (15) working days of receiving this letter. Your response should include each corrective action that you have or will take to correct these violations and, in particular, what methods and controls you will implement to prevent their recurrence. Please include copies of any documentation that demonstrates the corrections have been implemented. If corrective actions cannot be completed within fifteen (15) working days of receiving this letter, please state the reason for the delay and the time frame in which they will be completed.
Section 743 of the Act, 21 U.S.C. § 379j-31, authorizes FDA to assess and collect fees to cover FDA’s costs for certain activities, including re-inspection-related costs. A re-inspection is one or more inspections conducted subsequent to an inspection that identified non-compliance materially related to a food safety requirement of the Act, specifically to determine whether compliance has been achieved. Re-inspection-related costs means all expenses, including administrative expenses incurred in connection with FDA’s arranging, conducting, and evaluating the results of the re-inspection and assessing and collecting the re-inspection fees, 21 U.S.C. § 379j-31(a)(2)(B). For a domestic facility, FDA will assess and collect fees for re-inspection-related costs from the responsible party for the domestic facility. The inspection noted in this letter identified non-compliance materially related to a food safety requirement of the Act. Accordingly, FDA may assess fees to cover any re-inspection-related costs.
Your written response should be sent to Lynn S. Bonner, Compliance Officer, at the address noted above. If you have any questions concerning this letter, please contact Compliance Officer Bonner at 215-717-3074 or by e-mail at [email protected]
Sincerely,
/S/
Anne E. Johnson
Acting District Director
Philadelphia District
cc:
Mr. W. Patrick McGinnis
President and CEO
Nestle Purina Petcare
801 Chouteau Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63102
Mr. John Bear
Vice President and Director of Manufacturing
Nestle Purina Petcare
801 Chouteau Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri 63102
Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture
Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services
2301 North Cameron Street
Harrisburg, PA 17110-9408
Attention: Dr. Lydia Johnson, Director, Food Safety DivisionFrançois Philippus Lodewyk Steyn (born 14 May 1987) is a South African rugby union player for Montpellier Hérault Rugby in Top 14. He usually plays at inside centre or fullback.
He was a key member of the South African team that won the 2007 Rugby World Cup. He is known for his long distance kicking ability and strong tackling.
Club career [ edit ]
Sharks (2007–2009) [ edit ]
In his debut season of Super 14 rugby for the Sharks, Steyn was selected on the right wing, however, was moved to fullback when Percy Montgomery was injured. He played as the last line of defense until Percy Montgomery returned for the game against the Blues in Round 11, and was moved to fly-half for this game.
Racing Metro (2009–2012) [ edit ]
In April 2009, Steyn signed a two-year contract with French Top 14 club Racing Métro 92 for an estimated €750,000 per season.[2]
Sharks (2012–2013) [ edit ]
Steyn rejoined The Sharks by signing a 3-year deal on 29 May 2012. Back with his old team, Steyn played in the Sharks' final two league matches of the 2012 Super Rugby season, helping them to make the finals series. Unfortunately for the franchise, Steyn was not available to them for the knock-outs due to his late entry into the squad. The Sharks went on to lose in the final to The Chiefs.
The player made his return for the Sharks in the 2013 Super Rugby competition, captaining the side in the first few matches in the absence of regular skipper, Keegan Daniel. Steyn struggled with form early on in Super Rugby, but as the season progressed, he began to regain the form that first earned him Springbok honours. Once again though, Steyn was injured in the Sharks league match against the Highlanders in Dunedin, which they lost. Steyn would have to wait until the Currie Cup semi-final of 2013 against the Free State Cheetahs to make his next appearance. He was subbed early on in the match, but was again selected for the final against DHL Western Province. Steyn's contributions on attack were good, but it was his immense defense that really marked his successful comeback, and helped the Sharks to Currie Cup victory in 2013. After only 2 matches back, Steyn was not selected for the Springbok end of year tour in 2013.
Toshiba Brave Lupus (2014–2016) [ edit ]
On June 3, 2014, Steyn signed a two-year deal with japanese club Toshiba Brave Lupus.[3]
Montpellier (2016–present) [ edit ]
On February 2016, Steyn joins french club Montpellier Hérault Rugby.
South Africa [ edit ]
Francois Steyn in the Springbok change kit, after a pre-match warmup at Murrayfield, 2008
After playing only ten matches for the Sharks in the 2006 Currie Cup Premier Division (at fly-half), Steyn was, at 19 years old, selected to represent South Africa in the Northern Hemisphere touring squad by national coach Jake White. He debuted at wing against Ireland, he scored a try on his debut. In his next international match he was moved to fullback against England, scoring a long range drop-goal, from his own half.[citation needed] Steyn has shown to possess superb goal kicking qualities as well.
He kicked two drop goals in the 2007 Tri Nations opener against Australia at Newlands Stadium in Cape Town, to win the game for the Springboks. One of these, a 42-metre effort from a fielded clearance kick next to the sideline, and another three minutes from time next to the posts about 30 metres out.
In South Africa's first game at the 2007 Rugby World Cup, their centre Jean de Villiers got injured. Steyn replaced him, playing only his second[citation needed] game at professional level at inside centre, but he made a break on first touch of the ball and his inclusion sparked the Springboks to a 37–0 second half demolition of Samoa.
On 24 September 2007 Steyn was cited to appear before a disciplinary hearing for allegedly biting Tongan winger Joseph Vaka during the Springboks v. Tonga 2007 Rugby World Cup game on 22 September. (Match report). Both players were sent to the sinbin in the 60th minute for an off-the-ball incident.[4] He was subsequently cleared of the charge, due to insufficient evidence and Vaka conceding that the apparent "bite mark" could have been received during normal play.
Steyn was the starting inside centre for the Springboks in the 2007 Rugby World Cup Final, he made a fantastic break that resulted in a penalty for the Boks and also converted one himself later on in the game. He is therefore the youngest player to win a Rugby World Cup.
In the Springboks' final match of the 2009 Tri Nations against New Zealand, his last match with the Boks before his departure for France, he converted three penalties from within his own half of the field; he is believed to be the first player ever to do so in a Test match.[5]
Reaching his 50th test cap against Argentina in Cape Town in 2012, Steyn is the youngest South African to reach the milestone. Steyn was injured during the 2012 Rugby Championship, missing the final 2 matches, along with the Currie Cup, and the end of year tour to the UK.
Steyn was re-called for South Africa for the 2017 series against France due to the injuries of Pat Lambie and Handre Pollard, after a 3-year absence from international rugby.Just like Information Superhighway and cyberspace, the terms hyperlink and hypertext seem to have dropped out of fashion. Despite this, hypertext is still the foundation of the Web — one of its core features. The humble HTML <a> tag is the sole element that produces the hyperlinks that change plain text into hypertext. It still surprises and annoys me when such a central feature of a web page seems to be taken for granted. Poor linking practices are common — editorially and visually — and it has a direct negative impact on usability.
The Rogues Gallery
It’s time to out these outlaws, so here is my rogues gallery of hypertext — all of them wanted criminals for crimes against usability!
The Tautology
--ADVERTISEMENT--
The tautology link is not a new innovation, but it may appear suddenly, without warning, in a block of hypertext. You may have seen hypertext that looks like this:
You can find two great examples <a href="/">here</a> and <a href="/">here</a>. <a href="/">Click here</a> for another one!
A hyperlink implies a destination that is reachable by clicking the link; the tautology link only serves to state the obvious!
The Leisure-suit
The leisure-suit link just points vaguely. If you want to follow it, you’re on your own. Here’s an example:
In fact, you can <a href="/">find</a> <a href="/">so</a> <a href="/">many</a> <a href="/">examples</a> of poor linking you may think the world no longer cares.
Too lazy to write meaningful hypertext? Just link a whole bunch of words and let the user deal with it.
The Middle-man
Some authors prefer to contract their hypertext out to a middle man. There’s a place for URL shortening services, sites like Twitter, for example, but there’s no excuse for using them in your hypertext. In the absence of any other context the user can fall back to examining the URL of a link. Taking that away by using a URL shortening service is the equivalent of sending them down the river without a paddle.
The Interference
You often see this in web sites like Wikipedia and Everything2 — words that are linked to information that has little relevance to the surrounding text. For example:
Hyperlinks are the <a href="/a_page_about_glue">glue</a> that holds the Web together.
The Departed
Against the departed, hypertext never has a chance. Have you noticed that many mainstream news media web sites refer to other web sites without providing links in the article body text? Call that hypertext? It’s a massacre!
The Stalker
You’ll only see a stalker link when you’re right on top of it! This one is becoming less common, but you still see examples occasionally. The stalker link is so similar in appearance to the surrounding text, you’d never even know it’s there.
The Telemarketer
The scourge of hypertext, the telemarketer link includes a hovering box displaying a thumbnail preview of the target web page. What possible use is there for a small blurry thumbnail of the link target that pops-up and obscures the surrounding text? And what about those double-underlined advertising links? Users should never have to experience those.
The Good Hyperlink
Poor quality hypertext is a usability disaster causing annoyance, confusion, and anxiety. Users expect links, and that the links will be relevant and useful. A good hyperlink is relevant to the surrounding text and provides enough information for the user to make an informed decision about whether to leave the current page they’re on and follow.
Here’s an example of a useful hyperlink:
For excellent examples of finely crafted hypertext look no further than <a href="http://kottke.org/">kottke.org, the online home of Jason Kottke</a>.
The linked text must have relevance, as it’s the first hint the user will receive as to the nature of the link. The test of good link text is whether it can stand alone on a page, outside of the hypertext of which it’s a part, and still make sense.
Links must also be styled differently to the surrounding text. They can be another color than blue, as long as it’s different to the normal text, and that all the links in the page are the same color, so they’ll be clearly visible.
A title attribute is optional, but should be used independently from providing a context because the tool tip only appears when using the mouse. If the link text is sufficient, it’s unnecessary anyway.
Well-crafted |
their money, that power is magnified by the sheer lack of public will for governments to fix our most pressing problems. Given the amount of effort it took to make an incremental fix to our health insurance system in the form of Obamacare, the next drastic steps in health care reform may very well come not from government but from the private sector doing an end run around the big insurers. There is a massive investment void in America, and with our political system’s inability to utilize it, it is inevitable that private parties will start to fill it. Their judgments may be reasonably good (I’ll give this one to Gates), or they may be bad (hello, Koch Brothers!), but they definitely will be autocratic. But that’s not on them. It’s on us.
Ironically, asking Gates and Zuckerberg to try to fix the problems of climate change, income inequality, wealth redistribution, and the failing welfare state only confirms this thesis. The futility of public works has become so ingrained as an idea that the return to a Cold War–era public-private partnership—the kind of partnership that drove the creation of the free, public, unified Internet rather than the fractured landscape of cloistered social media sites we have today—never even enters our minds. Even Bernie Sanders’ suggestions for free college are far less radical than the postwar GI Bill and other programs designed to fight the Soviets. (This was a time, remember, when the CIA was funding abstract expressionism as a means to fight communism.) American’s commitment to making smarter Americans was one of the best things to come out of the Cold War (even if it brought with it xenophobia and nuclear terror), and for a time it was a reasonably successful effort. Gates has tried to do the same and is beginning to find that the education system is far too broken for one person, or even one education-reform movement, to fix. As Massing notes, for example, Gates has backed off of demands for teacher assessment based on test scores in the face of its utter failure as a metric.
It is the more blatantly political efforts of people like Ken Griffin in Illinois that promise to remake America more thoroughly, gutting public-works infrastructure even further by pushing rabidly anti-tax candidates into local and state office. By stacking local and state governments with allies, they will weaken the public and the government’s ability to resist any intrusion by the ultrarich, good or ill. Gates and Zuckerberg, I presume, lack the appetite to shove their own ideological allies into fighting those of Griffin; we still could be headed toward a kind of large-scale billionaire proxy war, one in which conservative and neoliberal plutocrats duel to influence our most pressing issues while governments become limper and limper. While Republicans have taken over local and state governments to an unprecedented degree, progressives are fighting culture wars over Halloween costumes and video games. For now, we can’t set a safe emissions target, we can’t raise our debt ceiling without throwing a hissy fit, and people can’t figure out that Kynect and Obamacare are the same thing. There’s only so much blame you can put on the billionaires for this.
Gates and Zuckerberg constitute a massive improvement over the likes of the Kochs, whose interest in criminal-justice reform only went as far as reducing sentences for white-collar crime. And of course there’s Donald Trump, who is using his money to treat the presidential race as a cross between Citizen Kane and The Great Dictator. The hacker philanthropists do seem to share something of a genuine utilitarian sensibility, and in the annals of the uber-rich that speaks rather well of them. We should fear them less than their possible successors. The world coughs up a lot more Kochs than Zuckerbergs.
Gates and Zuckerberg don’t need me to defend them, of course. What’s important is that we not allow their generosity to make up for our own lack of agency. Their flaws are not the flaws of horrible men, but of people, period. The real flaws in our world are structural.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.By James Cook on September 11th, 2013
My escort rushes me out of the way of the Omani delegation as he informs me that no, I absolutely cannot take a photograph of Chilean military commanders sipping wine with a British general. I pretend to take a photograph of the ceiling and slip my phone downwards, grabbing a blurry shot as I bring the phone down to my chest.
Right now, the DSEI weapons conference at the ExCeL centre in London is one of the most secure places in the world. Armed police appear as you near Greenwich and reaching the red carpet that leads to the ExCeL centre’s main entrance involves five different security checks and an escorted march past four vehicles full of police officers.
Vanishingly few journalists are granted accreditation for DSEI, which is why reporting from the inside is so rare, but somehow my application was approved this year. (Two colleagues at The Kernel were not so fortunate.)
As my personal security escort hands me over to my personal PR escort, I realise I am not going to be able to peruse the drones, guns, boats, planes and tanks at will. If I’m going to be able to take some photos of the more controversial parts of the conference, I will have to be clever about it.
My ex-army companion immediately leads me outside, where an international flotilla of cruisers and destroyers is stationed. “These people here, they’re top brass,” he says, waving his arm in the direction of the grand stand, where portly men stand, dressed in military uniforms.
A series of speed-boats is being shown off on the canal while an announcer tells us over the tannoy that they can deal with “any bad guys”. The assembled military high-ups chortle. The serious business takes place nearer the canal, where suited arms dealers are thrashing out bulk purchases of boats bristling with machine guns.
Away from the armed speed-boat demonstration, a solitary Korean naval officer strolls along the quay to his boat. Displayed on the side of the Dae Jo Yeong is a banner thanking the United Kingdom for the Korean war.
I ask my PR handlers if I can go inside to view some actual weapons. They say yes.
The conference floor is split into areas for each country, with the US occupying the largest amount of floor space.
Everything you could possibly need to kill someone is here. As I try to take photographs of the heavier weapons, my handler encourages me to move away, and walk with him to “check out some nice life-saving defence technology”.
I take a few photographs as I am hurried out.
DSEI is home to a mind-boggling array of weaponry. Missiles, assault rifles and drones are all on show.
I ask my handlers what kind of people attend a weapons conference and they look mildly uncomfortable, before eventually telling me that as well as representatives of foreign governments, there are also private defence contractors shopping for weapons.
As the battalion of PR representatives and former military servicemen steer me towards another product unveiling, I spot a gathering of fancily-dressed men in the distance. But it is made clear to me that I am not part of the impromptu midday wine and nibbles session hosted by a Chilean delegate.
The sternest look of all comes as I attempt to photograph a cluster of top brass chatting cordially over wine. I surreptitiously snapped this photo anyway.
Deeper in the conference jungle, I reach the armour section. A spinning silver door riddled with bullet holes rotates next to some kind of armoured truck. American men in suits are keen to view inside the truck, and they scribble notes furiously.
One burly man excitedly tells me his helmet will save lives in Iraq because it protects against shrapnel from explosions. The former military PR man accompanying me nods happily. “Those roadside bombs are a real problem nowadays,” he says.
Land Rover has a large display here, but these are not vehicles to drop the kids off at school with. British army soldiers peer inside the door of a shiny new Range Rover that I’m told can survive multiple rounds from an assault rifle.
Do you ever half-bury your laptop in sand? Unlikely, but this can be a problem for some visitors to DSEI. There is an entire row of stalls devoted to rugged laptops that run what looks suspiciously like Windows 98.
Wandering around the conference floor, I begin to notice something slightly odd happening at every large stall. Groups of suited weapons dealers would peruse the goods on offer, huddle together, nod earnestly, and then be ushered into a small meeting room. Over and over again, I saw groups of men disappear into little rooms.
They usually closed off the entrance with a curtain, which is when I presume the real negotiation began.
Hearing applause, I walk towards a large group of men in suits clapping as a new armoured troop carrier is unveiled. Two sales representatives emerge next to the vehicle and are immediately inundated with questions.
Only once does my security escort take their eyes off the ball. (The ball being me.) Looking around, I can’t see them in my immediate vicinity. Free at last of minders, I have visions of sneaking into a diplomatic cocktail party and souring international relations.
Eventually, though, I spy the PR handler talking rapidly into a walkie talkie that I hadn’t noticed before. He is striding around with purpose. Not wishing to get hunted down by military-trained security guards in a giant room filled with assault rifles, I smile and waved at him and he immediately collects me and hustles me toward the next stall.
We reach the heart of the conference. Rack after rack of guns gleam between semiconductor displays. Weapons dealers and exotically dressed army officers examine rifles in detail, pulling triggers, staring down barrels and occasionally making “pow” noises before they place them back on the perspex rack.
I inform my handler that I am hungry. He checks his watch, and leads me to some more stalls. Eventually I have to stride in the direction of the central lunch area before he gets the message. What I don’t realise is that lunch at a weapons conference is one of the most surreal experiences in the world.
Having gained the necessary permission required to eat lunch, I select a small sandwich stall and stand in line behind a Navy officer and the Swedish Minister of Defence. A man dressed as a British Army officer cuts the line in front of me, turning his head as means of apology. I choose not to make a thing of it.
After the Swedish Minister of Defence eventually selects his sandwich (he doesn’t like cheese), I grab a snack and hope to find a table to eat in solace and check my emails away from the constantly prying eyes of my handler. Who immediately sits down in front of me.
Directly behind me is a group of American military personnel. Silently munching on my lunch, I eavesdrop on their conversation.
I tell you man, the collateral was so bad, I literally cried.
Guffaws are heard from the American table as they describe a botched helicopter attack somewhere in the Middle East. I am in Julian Assange’s wet dream.
Not wanting to pry too much, I ask my handler what kind of weapons aren’t allowed to be exhibited at DSEI. He told me that some “Asian” nations often try and sell illegal weapons here in London, including cluster bombs and chemical missiles. If they are caught, they are not invited back again.
Perhaps realising that he has said enough, he stands up and asks if there is anything else that I would like to see. Otherwise, it is hinted, it would be a good time for me to leave.
With one last look at the racks of guns, fake missiles, dealers and braying American officers, I decide that it is indeed time for me to surrender my pass and I trudge back through the five security checks on my way out of the fortified gates.By Todd Quinones
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (CBS) – Two female tourists were stabbed to death in what appears to have been a random and unprovoked attack in Atlantic City Monday.
At about 10 a.m., an officer on patrol in the 1900 block of Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City saw a 44-year-old woman, identified as Antoinette E. Pelzer, stabbing another woman. The officer drew his gun and ordered Pelzer to drop the knife. She complied and was taken into custody.
Police say an 80-year-old woman and a 47-year-old woman, both Canadian residents, were stabbed multiple times in the upper body region and taken to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center where they succumbed to their injuries.
It is unclear if the victims are related; their names are being withheld pending family notification.
Witnesses say Pelzer was attempting to rob one of the victims of her purse. There is no indication the victims and suspect knew each other, according to investigators.
Pelzer had a driver’s license from Pennsylvania and police are looking into where and how long she has been staying in Atlantic City. Those who knew Pelzer are shocked to hear of the news.
“She’s a very good girl, she’s very upstanding and has been a very good friend of mine,” said one woman who did not wish to be identified.
Pelzer is charged with unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose and robbery. She was also charged with two counts of aggravated assault, but it is anticipated that there will be additional charges due to the deaths of the victims. Bail was not set as of 6 p.m. Monday.
Anyone with information about this incident is urged to contact the Atlantic City Police Department Criminal Investigations Unit at 609-347-5766.China absolutely dominates the rest of the world when it comes to the number of patents it produces, thanks in part to a system of government rewards that encourage inventors with everything from cash to early release from prison. Wait, what?
The unusual policy came to light last month when Beijing Youth Daily published the results of an undercover investigation into an emerging industry of patent application businesses that cater to an unusual market: prisoners. Specifically, wealthy prisoners can pay these small businesses anywhere from £500 to £5,000 to have inventors' ideas patented as their own -- everything from cigarette holders to geothermal energy innovations.
Why? Because the Chinese government offers sentence reductions for "important technical innovations," which could be demonstrated by obtaining a patent for an invention. According to the paper, prisoners can essentially buy a path towards early release.
The Beijing Youth Daily is published by a youth group run by the Communist party, and unsurprisingly, its report focused on needling incarcerated corrupt former officials. One former health bureau secretary in jail for accepting bribes, it said, has filed 11 patents since getting locked up. Probably the most famous jailed official Nan Yong (who ran the national football league before he was busted for, yep, corruption) has patented many inventions, including a smartphone holder.
So corrupt officials continued to be seemingly corrupt, even in jail. No big surprise there. But I was curious about the law. Was it turning jails into hotbeds of amateur inventors? Are there other unusual laws that aim to boost China's reputation as an innovation powerhouse?
Carl Minzner, a Fordham professor who specialises in the Chinese legal system, explains that the law stems from Section 78 of Chinese criminal law, which describes a few reasons why sentences may be reduced. One is helping prevent crime and saving lives. Another is "inventions or important technical innovations," which can include patented technologies.
But as Minzner was quick to point out, China definitely isn't leaning on its prisons for its technical innovation. "True, China is exhibiting a tendency to use administrative rewards to prompt innovation," he added, but the recent exposé on prisoners buying patents definitely isn't a good or indicative example of it.
Patents numbers are exploding in China, even outside of this criminal justice loophole. In 2013 (the most recent year for which there are stats) there were more than 600,000 patents published in China. In 2003, there were just 40,000. Compare that to 302,948 applications granted in the US in 2013, for instance, and you'll get a sense for the scale of the boom.
The director of the US Patent and Trademark Office described the number as "mind-blowing" in a New York Times article about the trend a few years ago, in part thanks to incentives that include "cash bonuses, better housing for individual filers and tax breaks for companies that are prolific patent producers." In December, Thomson Reuters released a report showing that the strategy is working in spades.
But do more patents necessarily mean more innovation? These policies have had unintended consequences, like an influx of patents that are filed just for the incentives or to block competition. It's unclear how many of these patents actually end up leading to real-world innovation, since there's no data on how they are ultimately used. And since the government also rewards inventors for filing patents in other countries, the problem is seemingly spreading to places like Australia, which has a relatively lax policy on granting patents and has seen a major influx of "junk" patents seemingly filed just for the subsidy.
So it's unclear if the big push to file more patents will ultimately lead to more great ideas -- especially when, for example, the ideas are being bought to pay for an early release. In the end, ideas -- the spark that start the fire of any patent -- are wily and illusive objects of imagination; fascinating as it is to see how governments go about trying to incentivise the inception of them. And who knows? Maybe the next big technology will come from a prison.That's not the only piece of evidence on the rap sheet, either. UKRokuChannels discovered a 4K Showcase offering on the platform's channel store, which was swiftly pulled by the company. It'll come as no surprise that the company is embracing the standard, since it revealed in January that it was working on a 4K reference design. In addition, now that Amazon has added the feature to the new Fire TV, it's only a matter of time before Roku joined in. The firm wasn't able to respond in time for publication, but we'll keep a beady eye on the FCC's website over the next few weeks -- just in case.
Update: A new theory has emerged, suggesting that the Roku 3 might remain the flagship, but get a hardware refresh to include the new tech.About You Don't Know Bo:
A close look at two-sport athlete Bo Jackson and the creation of a legend. Even without winning a Super Bowl or World Series, Bo will forever be known as a cultural icon and one of the most famous athletes of all time. This film will examine the truths and tall tales that surround Jackson, and how his seemingly impossible feats captured our collective imagination for an all-too-brief moment in time.
Director's Take
I am not a sports fan. So when the idea of making a film about Bo Jackson -- someone who played not one, but two sports professionally -- first came about, I was very intrigued, but more than a little intimidated.
I began reading about Bo, watching highlights of him in action, and speaking with a wide array of people about him. And I noticed something I'd never experienced before. At the mere mention of the name "Bo Jackson," people -- including Bo's contemporaries on the diamond and gridiron (some Hall of Famers) -- immediately lit up in excitement, wonder, and awe. I soon came to understand that the story of Bo Jackson isn't really a sports story. It's a superhero story. A legend.
Bo's year-round omnipresence in the late 80's and early 90's -- not only on the playing field but as a cultural icon due to Nike's landmark "Bo Knows" ad campaign -- made him a star even to people like me who never followed sports. But when I talked to anyone under the age of thirty, even sports fans, I realized that unless you were alive during that time, you may never have heard of Bo Jackson. Bo never won a championship. He doesn't appear in many record books and he never won any major awards in the pros. Instead, he captured people's imaginations.
The writer Jeremy Schaap told me that Bo Jackson was, "like something out of Homer." His story is an epic, classic hero's journey that would seem cliché if it weren't (mostly) true. And because we only had him at his full power for a fleeting moment, the legend of Bo Jackson forces us to continue dreaming, perpetually wondering about what else he might have done that would cause us to marvel.I keep reading a ton of incorrect information online about the impending doom of Irwindale Speedway so I talked to several people close to the situation and built this story. The rumors of it all being a fancy ploy to sell tickets is flat out not true sadly and soon our beloved Irwindale Speedway will come crashing down from the Los Angeles County map. Here is a timeline of what happened and why the structure is still standing to this day. In fact, last season at Irwindale I helped produce an awesome tribute video to Irwindale Speedway with Mobil 1 that should be released shortly.
This first blip of news came to my attention in October 2013 just days after Michael Essa narrowly won his first championship in a BMW E46 chassis. A friend of mine sent me a link from CurbedLA indicating that a real estate group in Pasadena called Lindom Company purchased the 63.47-acre site of the San Gabriel Valley with plans to repurpose it. The company Nu-Way Industries sold the land to them who purchased it in 1966 and built the very racetrack that stands before us today.
The sun beginning to set on Irwindale Speedway probably started a little before this sale in 2013 so let me just rewind a little bit. In 2012, Irwindale Speedway was won back in US bankruptcy court from a company called Irwindale Speedway, LLC who had filed papers indicating it was more than $331,000 in debt. (Pasadena Star News) This is what would explain the lose of track sponsorship and the changing of the name to Irwindale Events Center. We first picked up the story in February 2012 when even Formula Drift didn’t know if the track would continue to operate per Jim Liaw (Formula Drift founder). The first hint of a property sale was mentioned in this exact Pasadena Star News story with “We would considered (selling) it, but we’re not actively pursing it right now,” Jay Garrett of Nu-Way Industries said.
Once the sale in October 2013 was complete we didn’t hear much about the track situation until March 23rd, 2015 when CEO Jim Cohan says Irwindale got a green light for a 2015 racing season that seemed to be in question until that announcement with the new landlords. The LA Times runs an article about the closure and creates panic among social media and shares some important nuggets of information. On March 25th, the city council voted to approve the rezone of the land for a stupid ridiculous 700,000 square foot strip mall. The plan was to break ground in 2016 on the stupid mall and be completed in 2017. This is documented in the LA Times piece.
I have no inside knowledge of how the $500,000,000 loan will work for the new stupid strip mall at Irwindale Speedway but I spoke extensively to an old friend who is in the business of $100 million+ commercial loans for a top five major bank. How these loans generally work is that the mall owners, Lindom Company, would need to get a certain percentage of commitments from stores to fill the place before a $500,000,000 loan would be issued for the property. That percentage could greatly vary on the existing relationship the company has with the bank or how much collateral they can put forth to leverage against the loan. I was told at a minimum he imagined they would need 20% of the units sold to break ground. This reality was clearly stated in the LA Times article as well.
“The existing lease at Irwindale Speedway will proceed until the owner secures a certain number of tenant shops for the outlet, Romo said, which means it’s possible the lease could be renewed for the 2016 season.” – LA Times
As the Formula Drift Irwindale Speedway event in 2015 approached the track had no 2016 lease agreement or permission to continue into the next racing season. This stirred the speculation that the track was coming to an end and for quite some time it seemed that was reality. The great news for race fans is that after the bank did its own evaluations on the deal and it has gotten cold feet about the $500,000,000 million dollar loan for one reason or the other. This permitted a 2016 race season to take place. Assuming the bank and Lindom Company sort out their collective issues the track still wouldn’t close right away at this point. I have been told by a source that the racing contract is on a rolling 12 month agreement at this point. So, if the mall moved forward today – the racing season would continue and be available for 365 days from today. This ensures the 2016 Formula Drift event will happen in October. That also means the fate for 2017 should be known by the time Irwindale rolls around this year.
So the sad reality is Irwindale Speedway will more than likely be closing down sooner than later for a stupid 700,000 square foot shopping mall. At a ridiculous cost of $500,000,000 I can only hope it goes bankrupt and we can get a new racetrack back by 2020 in LA county over the abandoned shopping mall land.SINGAPORE - As his girlfriend needed money, a man suggested that she steal and sell cough mixture from the clinic she was working at.
Ms Ho Min Pei, a student who was then working as a part-time receptionist at T P Sim Family Clinic and Surgery in Bishan Street 11, agreed.
The arrangement was for her to hand the misappropriated bottles of cough mixture to Yap Kailshen, 27, who would then look for buyers.
On Thursday (Oct 12), Yap was given four months' jail for instigating Ms Ho to commit criminal breach of trust of 684 bottles of Dhasedyl cough mixture worth $6,840 from the clinic between July 2015 and January 2016.
He was sentenced to three weeks' jail, to run concurrently, for having 24 bottles of a brown liquid containing codeine for sale without a licence on Jan 25, 2016.
The pair had agreed that Ms Ho would receive $25 from each sale and Yap would keep the rest of the sales proceeds.
The "market value" of illicit cough mixture on the black market was $35 to $40, according to Yap, but he has failed to properly account for how much he sold each bottle for, the court heard.
Ms Ho's services were terminated in January 2016 as a result of her offences. The 23-year-old has since completed her three-month jail sentence.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Randeep Singh Koonar said that the misappropriation occurred on at least 67 occasions.
Ms Ho's profit was at least $16,500.
On the day of the pair's arrest, on Jan 25, 2016, Ms Ho misappropriated 24 bottles of cough mixture from the clinic. She kept some of the bottles in her bag and the rest in her pocket.
She left the clinic at about 9.20pm and passed the bottles of cough mixture to Yap, who was seated on a bench outside.
Health Sciences Authority officers moved in and detained them.
The side effects of codeine, an opiate, include drowsiness, stomach upset, loss of appetite, nausea or vomiting, diarrhoea, dizziness, blurred vision and tinnitus (ringing in the ears). Prolonged use may cause tolerance and dependence, and has been associated with drug abuse.
Yap's lawyer, Ms Choo Yean Lin, said in mitigation that her client secured a three-month work contract as a customer service officer last month. She said he regrets his actions, and that he committed the offencesout of love and infatuation for Ms Ho, and merely wanted to lighten her financial burden.
District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan granted the application for Yap to defer his sentence until Dec 13.
Yap could have been jailed for up to 15 years and fined for abetting in criminal breach of trust. Under the Poisons Act, he could have been fined up to $10,000 and/or jailed for up to two years.In the films there have been varying interpretations of Bond's military rank but in the books at least, it was not a cover or an honorarium but a reflection of Bond's service during World War II, in the Royal Navy (though it is also thought by Bond scholars that his background must reflect service with SOE, the Special Operations Executive). Daniel Craig's Bond appears to have served in either the SAS or SBS (Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, refers to "ex-SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches") before joining MI6, but in You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Tomorrow Never Dies (this year marks the 50th, 40th, and 20th anniversaries of the three films respectively) Bond is portrayed in his Royal Navy uniform.Looking for news you can trust?
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On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee invited activists from two prominent groups within the Black Lives Matter movement to organize and host a town hall forum on racial justice for the party’s presidential candidates.
In recent months, the movement—which began with protests in response to the August 2014 killing of black teenager Michael Brown but has since grown to political organizing nationwide—has become increasingly influential in shaping the Democratic Party’s stance on racial and criminal justice.
In August, the DNC passed a resolution declaring its support for the movement. Bernie Sanders introduced a criminal justice platform days after activists from the Black Lives Matter network, which was founded after the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, interrupted him at a rally in Seattle over the summer. And members of the police-reform group Campaign Zero, which is also affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, introduced a well-received criminal justice policy agenda.
In one of several letters to leaders of the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero, DNC Chief Executive Officer Amy K. Dacey wrote, “We believe that your organization would be an ideal host for a presidential candidate forum—where all of the Democratic candidates can showcase their ideas and policy positions that will expand opportunity for all, strengthen the middle class and address racism in America.”
The letters, which were obtained by the Washington Post, come a day after leaders of the Black Lives Matter network called on the DNC to hold an additional debate focused exclusively on racial and criminal justice. “We deserve substantive responses and policy recommendations,” Elle Hearns and two other leaders of the collective wrote in an online petition—which, just one day after it was posted, had garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.
While the DNC gave a green light to a racial-justice-themed town hall discussion, committee leaders said the organization would not add another debate to the six presidential debates already scheduled, according to the Post.
Reactions to that news from Black Lives Matter movement leaders were mixed. In her interview with the Post on Wednesday, Hearns called the town hall invitation “unsatisfactory.” Campaign Zero leader DeRay McKesson, however, indicated that he is already in talks with DNC officials to coordinate the town hall and has reached out to potential venues and corporate partners.
He has also been in touch with the Republican National Committee to explore including Republican candidates in the town hall as well. “We want to bring together all of the candidates, not focused on either political party, to have a conversation centered on race and criminal justice,” McKesson said.Earl Griffin, Contributor
Activist Post
The mighty Mississippi river is beautiful to behold, terrible in its fury, and of tremendous importance for shipping. The United States is both fed and fueled by the commodities shipped on that great river.
Like any river it depends upon the run off from regular rain to sustain it. Ongoing, persistent, and worsening drought interrupts the regular feeding of the Mississippi.
In the photograph above a coyote rests in the sun on the bed of the Mississippi river. Notice in the background the red buoy laying on its side on the dry ground. It should be floating in the water marking the channel for the boats navigating the river.
Drought now threatens shipping via barge traffic on the Mississippi river. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, “Commerce on the river could come to a halt between Jan. 5 and Jan. 15, when the nine-foot draft required for most towboats will fall to an eight-foot draft,” (JOC).
Have you ever seen towboats moving barges deliberately up and down the river? It is a sight to behold. Each fuel barge holds 30,000 barrels of fuel. A towboat may have as many as six going at once. For those of you counting, that is 180,000 barrels of fuel being moved by a single boat. That one boat is typically operated by a crew of just six.
Keep in mind that a barrel of fuel holds 42 gallons. A single barge moves 1,260,000 gallons of fuel at a time. A towboat handling six barges at once is moving 7,560,000 gallons of fuel.
A tow boat moving corn up and down that critical waterway may easily handle thirty barges at once. Each barge holds 1,500 tons of corn for a total of 45,000 tons (more than 1,750,000 bushels) of corn carried in thirty barges.
There are hundreds of towboats moving many more hundreds or thousands of barges on the Mississippi river everyday. It is difficult to imagine the volume of food and fuel being moved gently along that river. Food and fuel that may stop moving if the Mississippi’s water level continues to drop.
If river traffic stops – everything stops.
Think about that a moment. If, for whatever reason, barge traffic on the Mississippi river stops moving, the commodities that Americans depend on also stop. There is no other infrastructure in place to move that much food and fuel. There isn’t enough road to hold all the trucks that would be required. Never mind that there are neither trucks nor drivers enough to move it anyway. There aren’t enough trains either.
Oh some of it would go on road and rail, and the cost of moving it would go way up. Remember, each towboat is crewed by six people. That is to say that just six people are being paid wages to move all of those commodities per boat. It would take far more than six to move an equivalent amount of goods by road or rail.
If barge traffic stops, you can expect the price of food and fuel to go up. If barge traffic stops for more than a few days, you can expect the price of food and fuel to to through the roof followed by shortages of both.
What will you do if you can’t get fuel? I expect you will do the same thing the rest of us will – walk or stay home.
What will you do if there are food shortages? When food is in short supply people get hungry. Hungry people grow desperate in short order. Desperate people do desperate things – like riot in the streets and perpetrate violence on other people.
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It is outside the means of most people to prepare for an ongoing fuel crisis. It is a good idea to keep your vehicle’s tank full if you think fuel may be in short supply. Beyond that, you can certainly keep a few cans of gas or diesel handy, but for most of us that is about it.
The same is not true for a food crisis.
There are many foods that will store well for years at a time if put up properly: Rice, beans, cooking oil, wheat, powdered milk, and sugar are a few examples. If you buy it in bulk and store it yourself there is a great deal of money to be saved for your effort. If money is less important to you than your time, there are many companies who will be glad to ship it to you already packaged.
Are you a gardener? If so – great! If not, this is a great year to learn to garden. In doing so, you become less dependent upon a system that appears to be less and less dependable. I believe there is no greater path to self reliance than growing your own food.
The Mississippi river is very low. Traffic on the river may be halted if it drops any more. Is this just a short-term problem? Will 2013 bring an abundance of rain, or will it be yet another drought-plagued year? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the river will be at a historic low on January 15, (Weather.gov).
Survival Solar Battery Charger - Free Today! If drought conditions persist through the year, shipping on the nation’s important waterways – including the Mississippi river – may become an ongoing problem. More and more the weather is less predictable; less reliable. Climate change, geo-engineering, and solar maximum are all possible influences on global weather patterns. In the end, the cause of unpredictable weather is less important to practitioners of self-reliance than the reality that we face: If we are to ensure that our families have access to the basic necessities of life, we must must not rely on the unreliable. We must rely on ourselves. Cited in this Article:
http://www.joc.com/maritime-news/short-sea-shipping/mississippi-river-shutdown-could-cost-barge-industry-28-billion_20130102.html
http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=lsx&gage=eadm7 This article first appeared at Barking Window Earl Griffin’s site Barking Window presents news that affects us all. Real news. Real issues. You’ll like some of the sources. You’ll hate others. You’ll probably feel the same about the articles. But it’s all here for a reason – to inform. You won’t find partisanship here. You will find news that defies the right/left paradigm. You will find articles critical of government and industry. More still, you will find news here that rails against tyranny – in all its ugly guises. Make Barking Window part of your day, everyday. var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’LONDON (Reuters) - India’s gasoline consumption has flattened out in recent months after tremendous growth between 2014 and 2016.
A worker holds a fuel nozzle at a petrol pump in Mumbai June 11, 2010. REUTERS/Danish Sidd |
with English graduate faculty members and students at would-be top programs similar to ours, I’ve had innumerable conversations with otherwise rational but anxious people who consider those involved in the renaissance of comp-rhet or digital publication as dullards not good enough to read poetry, as lowbrow opportunists, or—worse—as saintly philanthropists who "should be appreciated for their love of teaching first-year writing."
Sometimes the discourse seems paranoid. Not long ago, a department administrator explained to me why he had declined to cooperate in a search that would have recruited some of the best young scholars in composition: "We just don’t want to hire any of those people who hate literature, who want to come here and tear everything down." Telling him that I’ve never met an actual comp-rhet scholar who hated literature—that most enjoy literature and sometimes teach it—wouldn’t shake his determination.
The odd thing is that one hears little informed discussion from the Modern Language Association or most of its elected leadership about the role of comp-rhet research faculty members in the revival of English majors, minors, and graduate programs.
The moral panic doesn’t exist in the hundreds of programs that have kept up with the changing conditions of textual production.
It has its home in programs that have had enough institutional power to keep themselves insulated from epochal change, the handful of graduate programs that have retained enough prestige and maintained their old-boy network sufficiently to keep placing most of their students. It also survives in places that, like Emory, had that kind of placement muscle a couple of decades ago.
If universities like mine are still offering doctorates in English 10 years from now, the programs won’t resemble the lit-only degrees at Yale or Columbia. They’ll emulate those at lower-ranked institutions that have more success in placing their students, like Clemson or the University of Pittsburgh, where English has tracks in media and comp-rhet, together with top research faculty members selected only for expertise in their fields, not loyalty to a pedagogy from the 1950s.Cheng Siwei, head of Beijing's International Finance Forum and a former deputy speaker of the People's Congress, said interest rate rises and credit curbs to cool overheating were inflicting real pain on thousands of companies used by local party bosses to fund the construction boom.
"The tightening policy is creating a lot of difficulties for local governments trying to repay debt, and is causing defaults," he told a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Dalian. "Our version of subprime in the US is lending to local authorities and the government is taking this very seriously."
"Everybody assumes that they will be bailed out by the central government if they default, but I disagree with this. It means that the people will ultimately pay the bill for it all, at a cost to the broader welfare."
"Those who are not highly indebted are forced to help those who are," he said, echoing the debate over moral hazard that has divided opinion in the West since the banking rescues.
Local governments have created more than 6,000 arms-length companies to circumvent restrictions on bond issuance, creating a huge patronage machine for party bosses that has largely escaped central control.
The audit office said the loans have reached $1.7 trillion (£1 trillion). While some of the money has been used to finance much-needed investments in water systems and roads, a large part has fuelled unbridled construction with a dubious rate of return.
The local governments depend on land sales for 40pc of their revenue so the process has become incestuous and self-feeding. Such reliance on property sales revenues has greatly aggravated the post-bubble crisis in Ireland.
Mr Cheng said China is entering a "very tough period" as growth runs into the inflation buffers, threatening the sort of incipient stagflation seen in the West in the 1970s and leaving the central bank with an unpleasant choice. "The inflation rate and the growth rate are conflicting with each other: it is very troubling," he said, describing what is known to economists as the Phillips Curve dilemma.War Crime: Regime Helicopters Dropping Chlorine Barrel Bombs
first published on October 26, 2016 by Josh
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War Crime: Video evidence shows members of the Assad Regime dropping barrel bombs, filled with chlorine gas, on targets in Al-Lataminah, Syria.
In the past, we have underestimated the Assad Regime, and the Syrian Arab Army. We know they drop barrel bombs on locations that still contain civilians, this in and of itself is a war crime. However, recent video footage has been released that shows the regime using barrel bombs full of chlorine gas.
If you think this isn’t a big deal, you’re wrong. Here’s a quick quote from the 1917 book “Medical Diseases of the War” by Arthur Hurst, M.A., MD (Oxon), FRCP.
The first effect of inhalation of chlorine is a burning pain in the throat and eyes, accompanied by a sensation of suffocation; pain, which may be severe, is felt in the chest, especially behind the sternum. Respiration becomes painful, rapid, and difficult ; coughing occurs, and the irritation of the eyes results in profuse lachrymation. Retching is common and may be followed by vomiting, which gives temporary relief. The lips and mouth are parched and the tongue is covered with a thick dry fur. Severe headache rapidly follows with a feeling of great weakness in the legs; if the patient gives way to this and lies down, he is likely to inhale still more chlorine, as the heavy gas is most concentrated near the ground. In severe poisoning unconsciousness follows; nothing more is known about the cases which prove fatal on the field within the first few hours of the “gassing,” except that the face assumes a pale greenish yellow colour. When a man lives long enough to be admitted into a clearing station, he is conscious, but restless; his face is violet red, and his ears and finger nails blue ; his expression strained and anxious as he gasps for breath; he tries to get relief by sitting up with his head thrown back, or he lies in an exhausted condition, sometimes on his side with his head over the edge of the stretcher in order to help the escape of fluid from the lungs. His skin is cold and his temperature subnormal; the pulse is full and rarely over 100. Respiration is jerky, shallow and rapid, the rate being often over 40 and sometimes even 80 a minute ; all the auxiliary muscles come into play, the chest being over-distended at the height of inspiration and, as in asthma, only slightly less distended in extreme expiration. Frequent and painful coughing occurs and some frothy sputum is brought up. The lungs are less resonant than normal, but not actually dull, and fine riles with occasional rhonchi and harsh but not bronchial breathing are heard, especially over the back and sides.
Doesn’t exactly sound like a walk in the park to me. If this video doesn’t convince you, here’s a few links you can check out about the UN accusing Syria of conducting these actions in the past before there was video evidence of it happening on the battlefield.About
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smthngdiff; / from the ill minds of Bizarro /
exactly what we are, and exactly what it is;...something different.
here's our about page, and our home page. you can also view our collection as a slideshow, or thumbnails
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we are a brand, as well as an idea. a collective of individuality.
we fly through the cosmos, amidst all the weird shit in this world, in search of uniqueness and creativity; of something crazy or awesome or mind boggling or ridiculous or insane. of something new, something revolutionary...
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okay so, let me introduce myself, my name is Mario AF, i turn 19 today actually, on june 11th. i was born in puerto rico, but i moved to fairbanks, alaska on july 2007. i'm of chinese and dominican decent, but i'm puerto rican, born and raised.
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any questions? email them to: [email protected], anti-gay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis was released from jail and almost immediately took the stage at a campaign rally for Mike Huckabee, arm-in-arm with the GOP presidential candidate and with her attorney, Mat Staver, the head of Liberty Counsel.
This is the moment that Staver has been waiting for. The former dean of Liberty University’s School of Law has repeatedly urged public officials to break the law when it comes to gay marriage, and with Davis he finally has his test case.
Much of the public attention on Staver has focused on his bizarre, and so far unsuccessful, legal argument that Davis should be able to order her entire county clerk’s office to follow her personal religious views, even in defiance of several court orders. Staver has gone all-in on the Religious Right’s claim that LGBT rights is leading to the persecution of Christians, claiming that obeying gay marriage law is tantamount to handing over a Jewish person to Nazi enforcers and comparing Davis to victims of the Holocaust.
But it’s important to remember that when Staver is not playing the victim of LGBT rights, he is spouting virulently anti-LGBT rhetoric, going so far as to suggest that supporters of gay rights are ineligible to hold public office and defending laws criminalizing homosexuality in the U.S. and abroad.
As these 10 anti-gay comments make clear, Staver isn’t seeking a live-and-let-live world, but rather one where the government is a religious tool of conservative Christians and LGBT people are forced into the shadows.
1) Labels Gays ‘Demonic’
For Staver, the battle against gay rights is part of a spiritual war, since he believes that the gay rights movement is “doing the bidding of the Devil” and is part of the spirit of the Antichrist and “demonic.”
2) Defends Bans On Homosexuality
While he has portrayed himself as a defender of freedom and liberty at home, Staver has actually praised moves in Russia, India, Malawi and Nigeria to outlaw homosexual relationships or speech in favor of gay rights. The group also defended U.S. anti-sodomy laws by citing [PDF] a satirical essay that joked about how gays “will sodomize your sons.”
3) Compares Gays To Terrorists
The Liberty Counsel founder has claimed that there is no need to negotiate or compromise with gay rights supporters because they are acting like terrorists.
“It’s kind of like with these terrorists, it’s hard to negotiate with terrorists because they have a zero-sum game,” he said of gay rights advocates during the debate about Indiana’s so-called religious freedom law. “It’s hard to negotiate with these people who simply are irrational and are inventing things that just simply don’t exist.”
4) Thinks Gays Will Force Us To Be Gay
Prior to the 2012 election, Staver warned that the Obama administration was planning to impose “in-your-face forced homosexuality” upon the nation.
He also charged that society would “just simply cease to exist” under marriage equality.
5) Paints Gays As Child Molesters
Staver, who once warned that gay people seek to “groom” and “entrap” children, recently claimed that the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to “allow homosexual young boys in the Scouts and allow homosexual leaders in the Scouts” will lead to “all kinds of sexual molestation” as the organization transforms into “a playground for pedophiles to go and have all these boys as objects of their lust.”
6) Wants Gay Rights Supporters Out Of Office
Staver had strong words for members of Vermont’s legislature who voted for a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in the state, saying that they were unfit for office: “It is a sad day in America when elected officials are clueless about the definition of marriage. If they cannot understand this basic human relationship between a man and a woman, then they are not competent for public office.”
7) Warns Gay Marriage Will Cause A Crime Wave
Staver predicted that the legalization of gay marriage will lead to a new generation of criminals, claiming that the children of two women are more likely to turn to a life of crime:
He even claimed that transgender people will use the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to rape and kill women and girls: “So you can go into these restrooms or changing rooms, if you’re a man, and want to go in and molest, or watch, or sexually assault young girls…. This will ultimately, in addition to colliding with religious liberty, in addition to forcing a radical agenda on people, this also will put individuals at risk and ultimately result in significant damage and even death of some individuals.”
8) Blames Gay Marriage For Bank Failure
During the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, Staver said that the failure of two of the country’s biggest banks, Washington Mutual and Wachovia, was a price they had to pay for supporting gay marriage: “Washington Mutual and Wachovia, both of which actively promoted the homosexual agenda, have come to realize that anti-family policies will bankrupt the bottom line.”
9) Warns Gay Marriage Will Destroy Civilization
Staver believes that marriage equality will “has a catastrophic consequence for our religious freedom, for the very function of the family, for marriage, for our human existence, for civil society and for any area of our liberty” as it leads to “the unraveling of the United States.”
“Same-sex marriage is the beginning of the end of western civilization,” he said in an interview last year. “It really is, it’s that serious.”
In 2013, Staver claimed that gay marriage would be “the beginning of the end of America.”
10) Wants War To Fight Gay Marriage
Staver’s opposition to gay marriage is so fierce that he has even threatened to wage a revolution to fight it:
This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of. This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing. This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.
He said that while he would prefer a non-violent revolution, “you never know what happens.”Narek Margaryan and Sergey Sargsyan want their fellow Armenians to know that it's OK to make a joke. It's not personal.
The two academics-turned-comedians are the creators, writers and co-anchors of ArmComedy, Armenia's first satirical news program — and yes, it's compared to The Daily Show, like, all the time. Sargsyan says the format took a while to find an audience in Armenia.
Narek Margaryan and Sergey Sargsyan, the hosts of Armenia's first satirical news program, ArmComedy, discover Target on a recent visit to the United States. Credit: Courtesy ArmComedy
It seems to be working. They now get letters from politicians who ArmComedy has made fun of, offering them material.
Margaryan and Sargsyan aren't doing comedy for comedy's sake. They're using it as a kind of democratic experiment.
"We're actually looking at the news daily and thinking of places where we can improve. And you know, bringing it to light," says Margaryan. "For example, the [capital city's] town hall was spending $30,000 a year on cognac. We thought it's a little bit too much to waste on cognac."
So ArmComedy riffed on it for a while and the cognac budget was cut. "The cognac manufacturers probably don't like us anymore."
Sargsyan says they're using comedy as a form of whistleblowing. "We don't really have the word for whistleblower yet but we're trying to put comedy to use there. So whenever we see too much taxpayer money spent on something we don't like, we just whistleblow about it, bring public attention to it through satire. They get embarrassed and they stop spending money on that."
In another incident ArmComedy exposed deficient public toilets — very expensive public toilets. "About $300,000 was spent on two bio toilets." Margaryan explains: "It's a toilet that's installed on the street. You go and do your business there and then it's somehow transformed into something that's not harmful to the environment. But ours played music so your process is more delightful."
One of the two wco-friendly toilets installed in Armenia's capital, Yeravan. The city spent $300,000 on the toilets, which features music, but neither works. Credit: Narek Margaryan
Sargasyan says Armenians have some favorite targets for mischief. "We like to joke about oligarchs, about the new money people and we like to show how ancient we are. We like to exaggerate that too."
Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity and boasts the world's first church. Armenia has its own alphabet. It's home to the world's oldest winery. Chess is a compulsory subject in Armenian schools. And then there's Kim Kardashian.
"We have a huge history and we're mesmerized by the past. We're, like, always nostalgic and enjoying our great history but now let's build some future, some nice juicy future."
Margaryan says there's one thing you can't joke about in Armenia: "We want Turkey to recognize the Armenian genocide, which for some reason they still haven't 102 years later."
And neither does the US government: "President Trump uses every possible synonym for the word genocide like'massive massacre.' But they never use that G-word, none of the speeches by the Obama administration or the Trump administration, because they don't want to offend Turkey, for diplomatic reasons."The Crusaders’ defense, in the same blistering form they have had all season, held the Lions down long enough to secure the 2017 Super Rugby Championship. The defensive strength of Sam Whitelock and Kieran Read allowed the Crusaders to hold off the Lions’ roaring comeback that has tripped up many teams this season. Whitelock and Read both matched up for 14 tackles on the day, although Read did end up with four missed tackles.
A winning defense does not mean a flawless one
The defensive performance was very good, even considering the Crusaders had an alarmingly low 72% tackle completion. The Crusaders made many mistakes in the middle portions of the field. While this allowed more running room for the Lions, it was offset by the Crusaders’ strong performance inside their own 22m. The Lions used their big forward pack to drive through the Crusaders defense at midfield. Although this was almost guaranteed to allow the Lions down into the 22m they did not progress well after that. The Crusaders would allow the Lions to run head first into a brick wall until eventually they would turn over the ball.
Even though the defense was very strong inside their own 22, both Lions tries did come from big forwards crashing across the line. These two tries, though, came from low phase attacks on goal, the more phases the Lions put together the less successful they were.
Kwagga Smith red card severely hindered the Lions
Just before the half time whistle, Elton Jantjies put the ball high. David Havili went up for the ball, and Kwagga Smith came underneath him and inverted Havili as his body headed for the ground. Although not a malicious play by Smith, it was a very dangerous play and earned him a red card.
Although the resurgence from the Lions did not occur until significantly later in the match, Smith’s presence would have considerably helped. The Crusaders’ try during the second half was strongly the product of the ability to get wide overlaps. An additional defender would have given Crusaders a significantly harder time in those scenarios.
Ross Cronje was kept in too long
Ross Cronje had a very difficult day on the pitch. His speed getting the ball out and decision-making was not up to his normally high quality. It is no coincidence that the Lions scored their first try within two minutes of Faf de Klerk coming on. Although de Klerk has struggled on the international scene, he has performed very well with the Lions. It is a shame to see de Klerk reduced in his role with the Lions considering his contributions there. There was discussion late in the first half of bringing on Faf De Klerk, but he did not make it on until the 60th minute. The change out was too late to have the necessary effect on the match.
Crusaders have been waiting a long time to regain the championship
While the Crusaders are the most successful team in Super Rugby, it’s been a while since they’ve tasted championship gold. 2008 was the last season that the Crusaders won Super Rugby. Every other New Zealand team besides the Blues have won a Super Rugby title since then. It has been a dominant time for New Zealand rugby and now the Crusaders are a part of it. The Lions were not able to seal the win, but have made good progress since last season. The Crusaders have been dominant all year long and are well deserving of the title.
Congratulations to both teams on a very impressive season. It will be great to see how both teams progress in the future.The rising tab has prompted warnings from the Treasury that the Congressionally mandated debt ceiling of $12.1 trillion will most likely be breached in the second half of this year.
Last week, the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of industry officials that advises the Treasury on its financing needs, warned about the consequences of higher deficits at a time when tax revenues were “collapsing” by 14 percent in the first half of the fiscal year.
“Given the outlook for the economy, the cost of restoring a smoothly functioning financial system and the pending entitlement obligations to retiring baby boomers,” a report from the committee said, “the fiscal outlook is one of rapidly increasing debt in the years ahead.”
While the real long-term interest rate will not rise immediately, the committee concluded, “such a fiscal path could force real rates notably higher at some point in the future.”
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In some ways, ballooning deficits should not matter. Deficits are a useful way for governments to use public spending to stimulate the economy when private demand is weak. This works as long as a country closes its deficit and pays back its borrowings after its economy starts to recover.
The trouble is that government borrowing risks crowding out private investment, driving up interest rates and potentially slowing a recovery still trying to take hold. That is why the Federal Reserve announced an extraordinary policy this year to buy back existing long-term debt — $300 billion over six months — to drive down yields. The strategy worked for a while, but now the impact of that decision appears to be wearing off as long-term interest rates tick up again.
Then there is the concern that the interest the government must pay on its debt obligations may become unsustainable or weigh on future generations. The Congressional Budget Office expects interest payments to more than quadruple in the next decade as Washington borrows and spends, to $806 billion by 2019 from $172 billion next year.
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“You’re just paying more and more interest and having to borrow more and more money to pay the interest,” said Charles S. Konigsberg, chief budget counsel for the Concord Coalition, which advocates lower deficits. “It diverts a tremendous amount of resources, of taxpayer dollars.”
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Of course, no one is suggesting the United States will have problems paying the interest on its debt. On Wednesday, even as it announced its huge financing needs for the latest quarter, the Treasury said financial markets could accommodate the flood of new bonds. “We feel confident that we can address these large borrowing needs,” said Karthik Ramanathan, the Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for financial markets.
One worry, however, is that there are fewer eager lenders to buy all that American debt. Most of the world is in recession, and other nations have rising borrowing needs as well. As other nations’ surpluses turn to deficits, America will face competition in global financial markets for its borrowing needs. For the moment, the United States is actually benefiting from a flight to quality into Treasuries brought on by the global financial crisis, which helped reduce rates to record lows this winter. But the influx will not continue forever.
China has lent immense sums to the United States — about two-thirds of its central bank’s $1.95 trillion in foreign reserves is believed to be in United States securities — but it has begun to voice concerns about America’s financial health.
To calm nerves and fill the deficit hole, the government is getting creative. The Treasury is ramping up its auction calendar, holding more frequent sales of government debt and selling the debt in expanded amounts. It is now holding sales of its 30-year bond each month, up from four times annually.
It is also resuscitating previously discontinued bonds, such as the seven-year note and the three-year note, to try to mop up any available money all along the yield curve. There is even talk of issuing billions of dollars of a new 50-year bond, though the idea has not won official approval.
On a second front, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are trying to bolster the mechanics of the market — to make sure every auction goes smoothly. With such enormous sums involved, every extra basis point on the interest rate the government pays could mean extra billions of dollars for the taxpayer. Earlier this year, when demand was hesitant at a Treasury auction and when a British bond auction went poorly, investors grew nervous that the government might struggle to sell its mountain of debt.
To avoid such an outcome and to keep borrowing costs low, the government is trying to expand the group of firms that bid at Treasury auctions. After the demise of such names as Lehman Brothers, the number of these firms, called primary dealers, has shrunk to 16, the smallest since this elite club was formed decades ago. Now the government is in discussions with smaller firms like Nomura and MF Global to persuade them to join.“Why does nobody ever go to jail?” asked Mandy Grunwald, a messaging guru for the Hillary Clinton campaign, in an email in 2015 to eight other top campaign officials.
She was responding to a settlement announced by the Department of Justice with several large banks that had manipulated foreign exchange markets. Though the banks pled guilty as institutions, no individual banker was punished.
Grunwald’s email thread petered out with no response to her question, which is not surprising.
A few months later, Clinton campaign manager John Podesta was having an email discussion about why Clinton’s platform on banking reform didn’t really resonate with voters. “People don’t get it,” he said. “It’s not like sending people to jail which people really love.”
There are many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election last November, but one significant factor was that Clinton suffered from a perceived closeness with Wall Street — a closeness that consistently worried the campaign.
Clinton Democrats were, of course, not in charge during the aftermath of the financial crisis; the Obama administration was. And what happened to Clinton was not isolated to her, or even to 2016. The reluctance to take on Wall Street has been a hallmark of the modern Democratic Party — and has served as an electoral headwind up and down the ticket.
Democrats are currently debating how to structure themselves as an opposition party. And Tom Perez, a leading candidate for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship, has an established record of not taking on the banks; both at the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor.
Soldier Suicides and Foreclosures
In February 2010, a JP Morgan vice president, Stephanie Mudick, told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on behalf of her bank, “I would like to express to the men and women serving our country, and to the members of this committee, Chase’s deepest regret over the mistakes we made in applying these protections.”
Mudick confirmed allegations that J.P. Morgan had foreclosed on active duty soldiers in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). The SCRA was first enacted during the Civil War and is designed to cap interest rates and prevent foreclosures for active duty troops. Violations can potentially be charged as misdemeanors, punishable by up to a year in prison.
Both Democrats and Republicans at the hearing lambasted Mudick, with Rep. Bob Filner suggesting the bank was responsible for “homicide” against soldiers who killed themselves after being foreclosed on. “Shouldn’t someone go to jail for that?” he asked. “And who should? Who is responsible? Are you, as the executive VP who was given us from the bank to answer for this stuff, should you go to jail?”
Mudick pledged to find out who at her bank was responsible and would be held accountable. But her performance didn’t impress attorneys defending soldiers against illegal foreclosures. Richard Harpootlian, a foreclosure defense attorney, echoed Filner at the hearing. “Put somebody in jail, then banks will stop doing it,” he said.
The SCRA is rarely used for jail time, and other parts of the government were more well-suited for pursuing criminal charges against bank executives. Yet the foreclosure crisis, with the ensuing mortgage documentation fraud, was also unprecedented. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency documented 1,622 SCRA violations, including over 1,000 completed foreclosures of active duty troops.
No one ever did get convicted of a crime. And the person who was running the division of the Department of Justice with jurisdiction over the SCRA at the time was Tom Perez. From 2009 to 2013, he was assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Perez himself continually touted his division’s work on the SCRA. But in 2011, Congressmen Brad Miller and Walter Jones wrote to the Justice Department about these violations, noting: “The continued failure to pursue criminal charges in the face of flagrant violations of the criminal law is destroying Americans’ faith in their government and democracy.”
The Justice Department later reached a settlement with banks over these violations, including J.P. Morgan, offering monetary payouts to soldiers. But no individuals were held accountable.
In 2013, Rep. Miller accused bank regulators and the Justice Department of refusing to investigate, saying “They consciously decided not to continue an investigation because what was revealed was so damning.”
One banker who profited through these illegal foreclosures was Steven Mnuchin, whose bank OneWest was caught violating the law. OneWest had 54 documented SCRA violations. Mnuchin is now Donald Trump’s treasury secretary after winning confirmation despite nearly united Senate Democratic opposition based on his profiteering from the foreclosure crisis
Waivers at Labor
Perez left Justice to become secretary of labor in 2013. The Department of Labor has significant bank regulatory authority involving pension funds. Financial institutions found guilty of certain crimes, for instance, are barred from managing pensions unless granted waivers by the Department of Labor.
In 2015, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters asked Perez to hold off such a waiver for large banks that had pled guilty to conspiring to rig the foreign-exchange markets. But UBS, Barclays, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, and Citigroup received waivers, letting them go right back to managing pension money.
Perez’s track record at the Department of Labor was generally respected by unions, a bulwark of the Democratic Party, although union density overall dropped during the Obama administration. For example, Perez implemented a conflict of interest rule to stop financial advisors from cheating people. He adopted a regulation to help more people earn overtime time. He advocated for a rule for home care workers to aid their bargaining leverage.
But all of that is likely to be overturned, because Democrats lost up and down the ballot in 2016, handicapped in part by their aversion to take on the banks.
Perez’s main competitor for the DNC chair is Rep. Keith Ellison, who serves on the Financial Services Committee. Ellison signed a letter strongly criticizing Perez’s decision to grant the waivers to the big banks that were guilty of market manipulation. He co-sponsored a bill to break up the banks. And in September 2016, after Wells Fargo was found to have committed fraud in opening up millions of false accounts for customers who did not want them, he proposed that bank workers should unionize to fight fraud.
Races for party positions like the Democratic National Committee chairmanship tends not to hinge on issues like financial services policy. The DNC contest is a race where insiders who care about party building, consultants, messaging, and the guts of the Democratic apparatus try to make their voices heard. In this case, however, the clearest difference between Perez’s and Ellison’s approaches may come down to how they approach financial power.
Both Perez and Ellison support pro-labor policies. But Ellison shows that he also wants to oppose concentrated financial power. Perez represents the finance-friendly status quo that has relegated Democrats to minority status.(CNN) A former adviser to Donald Trump's campaign referred to reports that Russia tried to influence the US election as possibly "a political stunt" on Saturday in remarks largely dismissive of questions about the issue.
CNN is exclusively reporting that the FBI gathered intelligence last summer suggesting that Russian operatives tried to use Trump advisers, including Carter Page, to infiltrate the Trump campaign, according to US officials."There are certain questions I have, frankly speaking, just reading that report... that makes me wonder whether this was really just a political stunt," Carter Page told CNN's Michael Smerconish. "We've seen that looking back at the history of political intelligence operations going back many decades."
U.S. officials have been clear that they don't know whether Page, who has called himself a junior member of the Trump campaign's foreign policy advisory team, was aware that the Russians might have tried to use him to gain access surreptitiously to the Trump campaign. Because of how Russian spy services operate, however, it is possible that Page unknowingly communicated with Russian agents.
Page disputes the idea that he has ever collected intelligence for the Russians, saying he helped the US intelligence community.
"My assumption throughout the last 26 years I've been going there has always been that any Russian person might share information with the Russian government... as I have similarly done with the CIA, the FBI and other government agencies in the past," he said in a statement CNN reported Friday, which the FBI and CIA declined to comment on.
The intelligence suggests, however, that Russia tried to infiltrate the inner-workings of the Trump campaign by using backdoor channels to communicate with people in the Trump orbit, US officials say.
Page is one of several Trump advisers that US and European intelligence found to be in contact with Russian officials and other Russians known to Western intelligence during the campaign, according to multiple US officials. The scope and frequency of those contacts raised the interest of US intelligence agencies.
As CNN first reported, Page gave a speech critical of US policy toward Russia in July 2016 at a prominent Moscow university, which drew the attention of the FBI and raised concerns he had been compromised by Russian intelligence, according to US officials. They also feared that Russian operatives maintained contact with him both in the United States and Russia, US officials say.
Page has repeatedly denied any impropriety, which he emphasized again Saturday.
"If there was any meddling in the election, all of the false narratives that has been out there is the ultimate meddling," he told Smerconish.
The CNN host continued the line of questioning on Russia and the election: "Unless you tell me, 'Hell yes! That would be bothersome,' which I think is the simple answer, I'm going to assume that Carter Page, frankly, doesn't care if there was a black hand in the election of Donald Trump," he said.
"I care about the negative hands that were all over this thing," Page replied. "And you talk about propaganda and also meddling in the election -- in each of those cases there was significant steps that have hurt the Trump campaign last year and have continued to be a cloud over the new administration, and really have had serious national security implications for the new administration and really put our nation at risk."
Smerconish asked, "Are you aware of attempts by Russia to use you to infiltrate the Trump campaign?"
"The beauty of that report -- and that really is breaking news and I was so excited to read it -- Russia tried to use Trump advisers to infiltrate the campaign," Page replied. "There certainly were many tries, and I think the dodgy dossier is the ultimate try and swing and a miss thus far, but we'll see what happens."
Page was referring to a leaked dossier of unverified information, including allegations of Russian ties to the Trump campaign, compiled by a former British intelligence official for Trump's political opponents.
"Nothing I was ever asked to do, no information I was ever asked for was anything beyond what you could see on CNN... " he added after Smerconish repeated the question. "Nothing I've talked about with any Russian official extends beyond that publicly available immaterial information."
The FBI used the dossier as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.
In some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, FBI Director James Comey has cited the dossier as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.
Trump mentioned Page as a foreign policy adviser to his campaign in an interview with The Washington Post in March 2016. Under pressure to name some national security advisers, campaign staffers produced a list of names for Trump to refer to, according to a US official close to the campaign. Trump mentioned Page, in part because he had a Ph.D. listed next to his name, the official said.
Trump had never met Page. Sam Clovis, co-chairman of the campaign, helped gather the names that the candidate used.
Campaign officials say there's no indication Page ever attended any national security meetings at Trump Tower. They insisted he played a junior role and was not an influential figure.
But in |
aws? I think it's good if it improves a little but if it gets too strong it could be just as infuriating to play against.
This is something that is mostly a prediction rather than a result of testing. Whether or not Jade Druid and Rogue will be 'good' is meta dependent. I don't think these changes will magically make Jade decks strong against aggressive decks, but I think it's safe to say the meta slowing down at any % is a good thing for Jade. (Source)
Wait you guys didn't test these changes in a ladder environment?
Of course we do, what I mean by prediction is not predicting how good or bad particular matchups are, but predicting what people will actually choose to play. Jade decks still aren't great vs highly aggressive pirate decks, even after changing small-time buccaneer. If pirates are still played at the same volume they are now, I don't imagine Jade will be very strong. We can playtest every matchup in the game between the 3-4 of us but that won't tell us the exact rate at which each deck will be played on ladder, though it does put us in a good position to make a reasonable prediction. (Source)
There are only 4 guys on the balance team?!
Yes. Design team is around 15 people now. Live Content (Brawls, Firesides, Other Events), Initial Design (Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme), System Design (Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems), Final Design (Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design), and Mission Design (Mission Design, Card Design). We also have Ben that directs the ship and another sort of jack of all trades designer than works a lot on new player experience, matchmaking, and flavor things. That said, well all help each other out quite a bit and the real list of things each individual person does is more like 20 bullet points rather than 2. That's the general jist though. (Source)
Thanks for the answer! Part of me really hope that with such a small team every single one of you are millionaires. The other part kinda thinks this number is really low! But I am just a Internet dude. One more question! I think is safe to say that the vocal community is tired of losing to aggro, do you guys think is fair criticism to say that the team could be doing a better job at balancing aggro?
To clarify, this is also just the design team I'm speaking to. There are many other people of various disciplines like art, engineering, production, community, QA, customer support, marketing, business, etc that make an equally large impact on the game. (Source)
Why waiting until the end of February? Why not nerf the cards today?
I'm not an expert in this area, but it has a lot to do with being a game on multiple platforms. In order to patch simultaneously on PC/Mobile there are a number of things that have to be submit and approved being we can release a new patch to the public. (Source)
If the wolf population is keeping the rabbit population in check and you weaken wolves, that will probably increase the frequency of rabbits?
This isn't too far off. The hard part is determining how many rabbit-eating-animal decks will appear as a result of the increase of rabbit frequency, and if the introduction of said-animal-rabbit-eater introduces a new animal we've never heard of. (Source)
So why not do something regarding jade now then just wait for us to have to deal with 2 months of jade being infuriating to play against in any control matchup?
Jade is fairly weak to aggressive strategies, and I don't think those are going to go away as a result of STB change. There is still some room between hyper-aggressive pirate things and heavy control things that will keep us pretty far from all-jade-all-the-time meta. At least that's the idea. If we thought as a result of these changes Jade would be all (or half of all decks) that were relevant, we would have gone a different route. (Source)The campground host came around riding on his little 4 wheeler and stopped to chat with the family at the next site over. I cracked a beer and set a rock over the tent stakes for added stability. The wind was picking up and clouds were slowly moving north over the lake. The Bibler mountaineering tent I’d set up had already been damaged in a wind storm once before, I don’t take chances. The Dude was tromping around in the dirt, climbing trees, throwing sticks.
The campground host pulled up in a rumble of ATV noise, shut it off and said, “I just wanted to let you know that there is a storm coming in. Could be lightning, thunder and 30 mile winds.”
“woah,” I said. “Well, I’ll batten down the hatches. Thanks!” The camp host pulled off, and I started getting things squared away. I hadn’t checked the weather. Summer storms in the mountains aren’t unusual, and at 8900 feet it wouldn’t be at all surprising for it to snow, even in August. But the tent I brought for the two of us to sleep in should be able to withstand the storm. It does still have a rip in the floor, and one of the rain ownings, and one of the poles is bent, but most of the major damage from the wind storm that blew it into the sage several years ago I’d repaired with seam grip. And as long as I could find some tent stakes to fix it to the ground, we should be OK…
If not, we were only 20 minutes from home, no big deal.
For the second weekend in a row, my son and I have camped out at the closest campground to our house. It’s far cooler and nicer up at Mt. Rose pass at 8,900 feet than it is at our south Reno ranch. And though it would be extremely easy for us to recreate the Samsung Nexus 7 camping video right from our own backyard, I prefer real camping.
Mt. Rose Summit Campground
The Mt. Rose Campground, just above the highway at Mt. Rose Summit was recently renovated, redesigned and rebuilt into what is the poshest campground I’ve ever been too. [It doesn’t have showers, it doesn’t have RV hookups or pull-throughs cause that isn’t camping.] But it does have
fire rings cook tables picnic tables bear boxes bbq grills leveled tent pads.
There are USFS vault toilets and water spigots. The campground has 19 standard non-electric sites, some of which are double or triple sites, and 6 tent-only walk in sites. I got a double site and by 6:00 Saturday evening we had 5 cars and 12 people including 5 kids grilling hot dogs and devouring potato chips.
Campground Amenities
As I said, this is a really nice campground and even though it is small with just 25 sites, I’ve arrived late two weeks in a row and found a site available. It’s not close to the lake or a major river for fishing, and it doesn’t have RV amenities, so for most people it might not be ideal. But it is close to some of the best scenic hiking and mountain biking in the Tahoe basin, so for me it is a perfect place for the last minute camping trip.
My parents and my sister and her husband and son came up from Reno just for dinner and went home leaving my friends Mark and his daughter, and Kevin and his two boys to brave the stormy night. [pullquote]The double sites have two tent pads big enough for anything short of a M*A*S*H hospital tent.[/pullquote] Mark and I shared one with our two mountaineering tents while Kevin and his boys filled the other with their giant Kelty dome.
In addition to being really close to Reno, Mt. Rose campground is right under the relay towers on Relay Ridge and Slide Mountain, so we had full broadband bars on both Verizon and AT&T, so I was able to do my instagramming.
The storm came in as I was finishing off “A Time Of Wonder” and Bowie nodded off (temporarily) to sleep. There were flashes of lightning and thunder though it never got that close to us. We got the cooking and food gear stowed away as the rain let up and the kids all quieted down allowing the three dads to crack a few more PBRs, Oly’s and Icehouses and stoke the fire for a few more hours.
The Dude has been sleeping in his sleeping bag enough recently that he slept well all night. So well that he was ready to rock at 7:00… The dads made coffee, bacon and pancakes while the kids romped all over the hillside above the campsite. Faces were covered with dirt, then syrup.
Things to do at Mt. Rose Summit
The first time we camped at the summit we got up early and rode the Tahoe Rim Trail. The campground is just off the east end of Tahoe Meadow. The Tahoe Rim Trail can be accessed right from the campground entrance. Heading north you cross the highway and head up towards Mt. Rose and in 2.5 miles you can reach Galena Creek Falls, well worth the hike (even if you have to carry your dude) or in 5 miles you can get to the top of Mt. Rose.
Heading down into the meadow from the campground you can hit the Tahoe Rim Trail south to Chickadee Ridge (map), for great lake views, or continue the 9 miles of stellar singletrack to the world famous Tahoe Flume Trail.
For a shorter hike, you can do the Tahoe Meadows Interpretive Trail (map) nature loop that is about a mile in length. Bowie and I took this loop with him hiking and riding his strider bike for the entire trail. There are interpretive displays, bridges and boardwalks that make the trail fun and engaging for little kids. There is no real elevation gain to speak of so it isn’t particularly strenuous. It’s closed to bikes, but accessible to wheel chairs and strollers. I figure it’s ok for toddlers to ride their strider bikes though.
The closest place to hit the Tahoe beaches from Mt. Rose campground are:
The town of Incline village has all the services you would want including:
Mt. Rose Campground charges $17 per site and $34 per double site. Reservations can be made at Reserve America. If you’re a Reno local, this is a great place to escape the heat and have some fun with your hiking or biking buddies and your kids. If you’re visiting tahoe from farther afield, it would be a good spot to camp in style away from the hubub of peak season Lake Tahoe.
Last Minute Camping
When throwing your gear together for a last minute one nighter in the mountains, you have to either be good about packing your stuff so you don’t forget things, or be happy to go without the things you forgot (or invite friends so that at least one of you brain dead dirtbags will remember something). Here are some tips:
Find a campsite that is less than a 45 minute drive away. use duffle bags and gear organizers like the REI kitchen tote to keep your gear ready to grab and go. Get your kid in his/her jammies and leave after bath time. This makes the quick overnight pretty painless, and when day breaks you’re already at the trailhead for a nice early start. Have an activity planned/Plan on nothing: Nothing is worse than a trying to decide what you want to do at the last minute. Have an activity in mind for the next day. A short loop hike, a greuling summit bid, or just pancakes are good plans. “We’ll figure it out in the morning” is a bad plan. Invite your friends for dinner. If the camp site is close, invite your friends up for dinner or breakfast. They’ll think it’s weird, but then when they get there, they’ll think it’s awesome.
After a quick hike up the Mt. Rose Ski Area, we got home in time for lunch and a nap. I don’t know if it was the cool mountain air, the stellar lightning show or the campfire beers that made it such a great trip (it could also have been the pancakes), but we’ll be back.
-MikeSacred Geometry Introductory Tutorial by Bruce Rawles
In nature, we find patterns, designs and structures from the most minuscule particles, to expressions of life discernible by human eyes, to the greater cosmos. These inevitably follow geometrical archetypes, which reveal to us the nature of each form and its vibrational resonances. They are also symbolic of the underlying metaphysical principle of the inseparable relationship of the part to the whole. It is this principle of oneness underlying all geometry that permeates the architecture of all form in its myriad diversity. This principle of interconnectedness, inseparability and union provides us with a continuous reminder of our relationship to the whole, a blueprint for the mind to the sacred foundation of all things created.
The Sphere
(charcoal sketch of a sphere by Nancy Bolton-Rawles)
Starting with what may be the simplest and most perfect of forms, the sphere is an ultimate expression of unity, completeness, and integrity. There is no point of view given greater or lesser importance, and all points on the surface are equally accessible and regarded by the center from which all originate. Atoms, cells, seeds, planets, and globular star systems all echo the spherical paradigm of total inclusion, acceptance, simultaneous potential and fruition, the macrocosm and microcosm.
The Circle
The circle is a two-dimensional shadow of the sphere which is regarded throughout cultural history as an icon of the ineffable oneness; the indivisible fulfillment of the Universe. All other symbols and geometries reflect various aspects of the profound and consummate perfection of the circle, sphere and other higher dimensional forms of these we might imagine.
The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, Pi, is the original transcendental and irrational number. (Pi equals about 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937511…) It cannot be expressed in terms of the ratio of two whole numbers, or in the language of sacred symbolism, the essence of the circle exists in a dimension that transcends the linear rationality that it contains. Our holistic perspectives, feelings and intuitions encompass the finite elements of the ideas that are within them, yet have a greater wisdom than can be expressed by those ideas alone.
The Point
At the center of a circle or a sphere is always an infinitesimal point. The point needs no dimension, yet embraces all dimension. Transcendence of the illusions of time and space result in the point of here and now, our most primal light of consciousness. The proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” is being validated by the ever-increasing literature on so-called “near-death experiences”. If our essence is truly spiritual omnipresence, then perhaps the “point” of our being “here” is to recognize the oneness we share, validating all “individuals” as equally precious and sacred aspects of that one.
Life itself as we know it is inextricably interwoven with geometric forms, from the angles of atomic bonds in the molecules of the amino acids, to the helical spirals of DNA, to the spherical prototype of the cell, to the first few cells of an organism which assume vesical, tetrahedral, and star (double) tetrahedral forms prior to the diversification of tissues for different physiological functions. Our human bodies on this planet all developed with a common geometric progression from one to two to four to eight primal cells and beyond.
Almost everywhere we look, the mineral intelligence embodied within crystalline structures follows a geometry unfaltering in its exactitude. The lattice patterns of crystals all express the principles of mathematical perfection and repetition of a fundamental essence, each with a characteristic spectrum of resonances defined by the angles, lengths and relational orientations of its atomic components.
The Square Root of Two
The square root of 2 embodies a profound principle of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. (The square root of two equals about 1.414213562…) The orthogonal dimensions (axes at right angles) form the conjugal union of the horizontal and vertical which give birth to the greater offspring of the hypotenuse. The new generation possesses the capacity for synthesis, growth, integration and reconciliation of polarities by spanning both perspectives equally. The root of two originating from the square leads to a greater unity, a higher expression of its essential truth, faithful to its lineage.
The fact that the root is irrational expresses the concept that our higher dimensional faculties can’t always necessarily be expressed in lower order dimensional terms – e.g. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (from the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 1, verse 5). By the same token, we have the capacity to surpass the genetically programmed limitations of our ancestors, if we can shift into a new frame of reference (i.e. neutral with respect to prior axes, yet formed from that matrix-seed conjugation. Our dictionary refers to the word matrix both as a womb and an array (or grid lattice). Our language has some wonderful built-in metaphors if we look for them!
The Golden Ratio
The golden ratio (a.k.a. phi ratio a.k.a. sacred cut a.k.a. golden mean a.k.a. divine proportion) is another fundamental measure that seems to crop up almost everywhere, including crops. (The golden ratio is about 1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720309180…) The golden ratio is the unique ratio such that the ratio of the whole to the larger portion is the same as the ratio of the larger portion to the smaller portion. As such, it symbolically links each new generation to its ancestors, preserving the continuity of relationship as the means for retracing its lineage.
The golden ratio (phi) has some unique properties and makes some interesting appearances:
phi = phi^2 – 1; therefore 1 + phi = phi^2; phi + phi^2 = phi^3; phi^2 + phi^3= phi^4; ad infinitum. phi = (1 + square root(5)) / 2 from quadratic formula, 1 + phi = phi^2. phi = 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/…))))) phi = 1 + square root(1 + square root(1 + square root(1 + square root(1 + square root(1 + …))))) phi = (sec 72)/2 =(csc 18)/2 = 1/(2 cos 72) = 1/(2 sin 18) = 2 sin 54 = 2 cos 36 = 2/(csc 54) = 2/ (sec 36) for all you trigonometry enthusiasts. phi = the ratio of segments in a 5-pointed star (pentagram) considered sacred to Plato and Pythagoras in their mystery schools. Note that each larger (or smaller) section is related by the phi ratio, so that a power series of the golden ratio raised to successively higher (or lower) powers is automatically generated: phi, phi^2, phi^3, phi^4, phi^5, etc.
phi = apothem to bisected base ratio in the Great Pyramid of Giza
phi = ratio of adjacent terms of the famous Fibonacci Series evaluated at infinity; the Fibonacci Series is a rather ubiquitous set of numbers that begins with one and one and each term thereafter is the sum of the prior two terms, thus: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144… (interesting that the 12th term is 12 “raised to a higher power”, which appears prominently in a vast collection of metaphysical literature)
The mathematician credited with the discovery of this series is Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci and there is a publication devoted to disseminating information about its unique mathematical properties, The Fibonacci Quarterly
Fibonacci ratios appear in the ratio of the number of spiral arms in daisies, in the chronology of rabbit populations, in the sequence of leaf patterns as they twist around a branch, and a myriad of places in nature where self-generating patterns are in effect. The sequence is the rational progression towards the irrational number embodied in the quintessential golden ratio.
This most aesthetically pleasing proportion, phi, has been utilized by numerous artists since (and probably before!) the construction of the Great Pyramid. As scholars and artists of eras gone by discovered (such as Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, and Pythagoras), the intentional use of these natural proportions in art of various forms expands our sense of beauty, balance and harmony to optimal effect. Leonardo da Vinci used the Golden Ratio in his painting of The Last Supper in both the overall composition (three vertical Golden Rectangles, and a decagon (which contains the golden ratio) for alignment of the central figure of Jesus.
The outline of the Parthenon at the Acropolis near Athens, Greece is enclosed by a Golden Rectangle by design.
The Square Root of 3 and the Vesica Piscis
The Vesica Piscis is formed by the intersection of two circles or spheres whose centers exactly touch. This symbolic intersection represents the “common ground”, “shared vision” or “mutual understanding” between equal individuals. The shape of the human eye itself is a Vesica Piscis. The spiritual significance of “seeing eye to eye” to the “mirror of the soul” was highly regarded by numerous Renaissance artists who used this form extensively in art and architecture. The ratio of the axes of the form is the square root of 3, which alludes to the deepest nature of the triune which cannot be adequately expressed by rational language alone.
Spirals
This spiral generated by a recursive nest of Golden Triangles (triangles with relative side lengths of 1, phi and phi) is the classic shape of the Chambered Nautilus shell. The creature building this shell uses the same proportions for each expanded chamber that is added; growth follows a law which is everywhere the same. The outer triangle is the same as one of the five “arms” of the pentagonal graphic above.
Toroids
Rotating a circle about a line tangent to it creates a torus, which is similar to a donut shape where the center exactly touches all the “rotated circles.” The surface of the torus can be covered with 7 distinct areas, all of which touch each other; an example of the classic “map problem” where one tries to find a map where the least number of unique colors are needed. In this 3-dimensional case, 7 colors are needed, meaning that the torus has a high degree of “communication” across its surface. The image shown is a “birds-eye” view.
Dimensionality
The progression from point (0-dimensional) to line (1-dimensional) to plane (2-dimensional) to space (3-dimensional) and beyond leads us to the question – if mapping from higher order dimensions to lower ones loses vital information (as we can readily observe with optical illusions resulting from third to second dimensional mapping), does our “fixation” with a 3-dimensional space introduce crucial distortions in our view of reality that a higher-dimensional perspective would not lead us to?
Fractals and Recursive Geometries
There is a wealth of good literature on this subject; it’s always fascinating how nature propagates the same essence regardless of the magnitude of its expression…our spirit is spaceless yet can manifest aspects of its individuality at any scale.
Perfect Right Triangles
The 3/4/5, 5/12/13 and 7/24/25 triangles are examples of right triangles whose sides are whole numbers. The graphic above contains several of each of these triangles. The 3/4/5 triangle is contained within the so-called “King’s Chamber” of the Great Pyramid, along with the 2/3/root5 and 5/root5/2root5 triangles, utilizing the various diagonals and sides.
The Platonic Solids
Here are LOTS of math details and images of the Platonic Solids and Archimedean Solids.
The 5 Platonic solids (Tetrahedron, Cube or (Hexahedron), Octahedron, Dodecahedron and Icosahedron) are ideal, primal models of crystal patterns that occur throughout the world of minerals in countless variations. These are the only five regular polyhedra, that is, the only five solids made from the same equilateral, equiangular polygons. To the Greeks, these solids symbolized fire, earth, air, spirit (or ether) and water respectively. The cube and octahedron are duals, meaning that one can be created by connecting the midpoints of the faces of the other. The icosahedron and dodecahedron are also duals of each other, and three mutually perpendicular, mutually bisecting golden rectangles can be drawn connecting their vertices and midpoints, respectively. The tetrahedron is a dual to itself.
From April, 2000 through (at least) December, 2003, we conducted a poll on which Platonic Solid folks liked best; here’s the results from that period. If there’s interest, I’ll start another poll to see if the preferences has shifted! 🙂
Here are some animations of counter-rotating polyhedra and images of the Platonic solids showing their relationships as duals.
Here are fold-up patterns for the Platonic Solids.
The Archimedean Solids
There are 13 Archimedean solids, each of which are composed of two or more different regular polygons. Interestingly, 5 (Platonic) and 13 (Archimedean) are both Fibonacci numbers, and 5, 12 and 13 form a perfect right triangle.
Here are fold-up patterns for the Archimedean Solids.
Stellations of The Platonic Solids and The Archimedean Solids
This is a stellation of a dodecahedron where each pentagonal face is capped with a pentagonal pyramid composed of 5 golden triangles, a sort of 3-dimensional 5-pointed star.
Here are more images of polyhedra (Platonic and Archimedean Solids.)
Metatron’s Cube
Metatron’s Cube contains 2-dimensional images of the Platonic Solids (as shown above) and many other primal forms.
The Flower of Life
Indelibly etched on the walls of temple of the Osirion at Abydos, Egypt, the Flower of Life contains a vast Akashic system of information, including templates for the five Platonic Solids. The background graphic for this page is a repetitive hexagonal grid based on the Flower of Life. Below is an example of Flower of Life jewelry.
For further information about sacred geometry and many related subjects, visit my Resources page.If you’ve ever tried to teach someone how to play Netrunner, you know Netrunner is a complicated game. There are a huge amount of mechanics, most of which aren’t fully explored by every deck. You can play Netrunner without knowing about tags or viruses or traces or meat damage or bad publicity.
I maintain a pair of decks that I call “teaching decks”, which I built from mostly cards from the Core Set; an HB taxing deck and a Kate big-rig deck. Still, even with those decks, there’s a lot of material to cover; consider a card like Ichi 1.0:
Type: ICE: Sentry - Bioroid - Tracer - Destroyer
Cost: 5
Faction: Corp Haas-Bioroid
Faction Cost: 2
The Runner can spend [Click] to break any subroutine on Ichi 1.0.
[Subroutine] Trash 1 program.
[Subroutine] Trash 1 program.
[Subroutine] Trace 1 - if successful, give the Runner 1 tag and do 1 brain damage.
There are about 7 things going on here, and you need to know about them to use the card properly - even after you know what ICE is and what it’s used for.
This ICE doesn’t end the run. Players naturally expect their ICE to end runs. This is a Bioroid; it can be clicked through without breakers. Players will often ask about strength when Bioroid ICE is clicked through. This ICE trashes programs; new players often install and rez Ichi on turn 1 and are disappointed to learn that this ICE does nothing for them. Players will blindly trust that their cards are good for them, even if they don’t fully understand the ramifications This ICE performs a Trace. A Trace is a complicated sub-game. If the Trace succeeds, the runner is tagged. What’s a tag? Well it has to do with resources. What’s a resource? This ICE applies brain damage. What’s brain damage? This ICE is a Sentry - Bioroid - Destroyer - Tracer. What do all those words mean?
While this card is a 3-of in the Core Set and a very solid piece of taxing ICE, it has far too much complexity for one single card.
What are we trying to teach with a first game of Netrunner? The following:
-Netrunner is a game about two players with wildly different cards and playstyles.
-The corporation player defends servers and tries to protect his cards, while the runner attempts to break through and steal those cards.
-Money is at the heart of all interactions, and the player with an economic advantage will often win.
-There is hidden information; ambushes and bluffs can be performed with devastating results.
That’s it. If you can show this to a player, they will enjoy Netrunner; even if you don’t tell them about memory or currents or recurring credits or link.
I usually give the new player the corporation deck, since corps have access to all the hidden information. Sadly, the corporation cards are the ones with the most irreducible complexity. I try to avoid cards with more than 2-3 lines of text.
Corporation:
Cards: 49 / 45
Agenda points: 21 / 20
Influence points: 15 / 15
Identity: Engineering the Future
Agenda (9)
3x Accelerated Beta Test
3x Priority Requisition
3x Project Vitruvius
Asset (15)
3x Adonis Campaign
3x Melange Mining Corp
3x PAD Campaign
3x Jackson Howard ●●●
3x Shock! ●●●●●●
Ice (17)
3x Viktor 1.0
3x Rototurret
3x Neural Katana ●●●●●●
3x Enigma
2x Wall of Static
3x Eli 1.0
Operation (8)
2x Archived Memories
3x Hedge Fund
3x Green Level Clearance
I would like a blank or simpler identity, since EtF comes with a lot of bookkeeping, but its power-level and usefulness makes it acceptable. Base Weyland might turn out to be simpler, but Weyland revolves around an unnatural playstyle of threatening lethal meat damage.
The agenda suite is the part I’m least happy with; I wish I could just remove all the text from the 3/2s. They’re blank most of the time, and players always feel betrayed when Accelerated Beta Test screws them over. PriReq is perfect in terms of complexity. The 3/2s are in there to enable never advance play and bluff any kind of asset as an agenda; melange, jackson and adonis can be very comfortably placed in a scoring server to entice a wasteful run.
Adonis Campaign is too wordy to be easily understood, but it’s a useful demonstration of a taxing economy card. Melange has a single line of text and a potent effect, making it an ideal card for this type of deck. PAD campaign is a simple, taxing economy card.
Jackson Howard was initially excluded from the deck for being too complicated. However, a second look at the card makes this debatable. Click: Draw 2 cards is as simple as assets get. The exiling ability is funky and unnatural. However, the ability to rework agendas into R&D and combat agenda flood are critical to not losing. Plus, he’s a key part in every game nowadays, so you might as well get new players used to it quickly.
Shock! is the simplest ambush in the game. It always works, always hurts, and while it’s not as devastating or lethal as Snare or AggSec, it teaches the players a key thing: you can bluff. You can install a thing and pretend it’s something else.
For a while, Aggressive Secretary was in the deck; it’s a potent example of a trap card, masquerades as priority requisition and can completely swing a game around, creating huge scoring windows and blowing out an overconfident runner. The problem is that it’s really hard to play correctly. It’s often accessed and trashed from R&D or HQ, which just feels terrible. If installed, players often don’t understand they have to advance it; or they advance it when the runner has no programs, or they advance it and put themselves below the 2c threshold necessary to activate it.
The ICE suite is okay; not great. I really struggled to find a simple Sentry; Neural Katana has only one line of text, and while it necessitates the introduction of the damage mechanic, it brings enough to the game to justify its inclusion.
Viktor 1.0 is an iffy inclusion; it’s the only card that references Brain Damage. Still, Brain Damage is flavourful and players tend to latch onto it; it gives the game an air of lethality. Viktor and Eli are the only two bioroids. I don’t like the bioroid mechanic for new players; they feel betrayed when the runner can just click through their server and don’t appreciate the taxing nature of the cards. I considered swapping Viktor for Hourglass and Eli for Bastion; much simpler cards, requiring the introduction of no new mechanics, but the dynamics of the game would suffer too much, I think. I may revise this choice after a few games.
Enigma and Wall of Static are perfect, simple ETR ICE. I played a lot of games with Tollbooth, and while the taxing of Tollbooth creates good dynamics, it’s wordy and I wanted to stay within influence limits. Tollbooth was a fantastic PriReq target though, which this deck now completely lacks.
Archived Memories is very simple to understand, and although players often play it badly (Archived Memories for Green Level Clearance) it never slows down the game. Hedge Fund and GLC are perfectly simple cards; it’s possible I should have them play restructure instead of some economy asset; possibly swapping out Adonis Campaign. It creates worse dynamics, but removes text.
I’ve managed to eliminate the following mechanics while keeping the heart of the game intact
-Traces
-Tags
-Keeping money up for Snare
-Meat damage (private security force was a head-scratcher for many)
-“On encounter” ICE, such as Tollbooth. All ICE effects are subroutines.
-“Do-Nothing” ICE like Ichi, which fail to do anything on turn 1.
-Expensive ICE like Tollbooth and Heimdall, which do nothing to protect you on turn 1.
-Upgrades. I used to have 1 corporate troubleshooter in there. Not worth the complexity.
-Fast Advance (Biotic Labor was one of the first cuts. It is never played correctly.)
-Advanceable Traps (I’m sad about cutting this, but there’s no good way to introduce it)
-Bad Publicity
-ICE with power counters (data raven, viktor 2.0)
-Doubles
-Currents
-Tutors (never give a new player a tutor. It slows down the game too much.)
Things I would like to cut:
-Overadvanceable Agendas
-Double-edged effects, like Beta Test
The Agenda suite is really the part with the most complexity. Gila Hands Arcology is both simple and creates good dynamics, but there are not enough cards like it to fill out a deck.
This post is getting long enough; in the next post, I’ll detail the runner deck, which I’m much happier with.To get into the spirit of this post, you should probably skim through the first few slides of this presentation by Daniel Bohannon and Le Holmes given at Black Hat 2017. Who would have thunk that making PowerShell commands look unreadable would require a triple-digit slide deck?
We know PowerShell is the go to-tool for post-exploitation, allowing attackers to live off the land and prosper. Check out our pen testing Active Directory series for more proof.
However, IT security is, in theory monitoring user activities at, say, the Security Op. Center or SoC, so it should be easy to spot when a “non-normal” command is being executed.
In fact, we know that one tipoff of a PowerShell attack is when a user creates a WebClient object, calls its Downloadstring method, and then executes the string contained in the remote web page. Something like the following:
Why would an ordinary user or even for that matter an admin do this?
While this “clear text” is easy to detect by looking at the right logs in Windows and scanning for the appropriate keywords, the obfuscated version is anything but. At the end of this post, we’ll show how this basic “launch cradle” used by hackers can be made to look a complete undecipherable word jumble.
PowerShell Logging
Before we take our initial dive into obfuscation, let’s explore how events actually gets logged by Windows, specifically for PowerShell. Once you see the logs, you’ll get a greater appreciation of what hackers are trying to hide.
To their credit, Microsoft has realized the threat possibilities in PowerShell and started improving command logging in Windows 7. You see these improvements in PowerShell versions 4 and 5.
In my own AWS environment, the Windows Server 2012 I used came equipped with version 4. It seems to have most of the advanced logging capabilities — though 5 has the latest and greatest.
From what I was able to grok reading Bohannon’s great presentation and a few other Microsoft sources, you need to enable event 4688 (process creation) and then turn on auditing for the PowerShell command line. You can read more about it in this Microsoft document.
And then for even more voluminous logging, you can set policies in the GPO console to enable, for example, full transcription logging of a PowerShell (below).
No, I didn’t do that for my own testing! I discovered (as many other security pros have) that when using the Windows Event Viewer things get confusing very quickly. I don’t need the full power of transcription logging.
For kicks I ran a simple pipeline — Get-Process | %{Write-Host $_.Handles} — to print out process handles, and generated … an astonishing 114 events in the PowerShell log. Ofer, by the way |
(@jaketapper) March 21, 2017
The “Fox & Friends” Twitter account earlier Tuesday seemingly suggested Comey’s recent appearance before the House Intelligence Committee was not required viewing.
“If you missed yesterday’s congressional hearing with FBI Dir. James Comey, you didn’t miss much…,” the show’s tweet reads.
A video included in the program’s post shows 20 instances of Comey declining to comment in various ways. Comey repeatedly states “same answer” and “I’m not going to comment on that” during a recap of his remarks Monday.
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Comey confirmed Monday that the FBI is probing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race, including any potential ties between Trump’s campaign and Moscow.
The FBI director also revealed the Department of Justice has “no information” backing Trump’s claims former President Obama wiretapped him last year.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told Comey at the end of Monday’s hearing his remarks left “a big, gray cloud” over the Trump administration.
“This is a big, gray cloud you’ve now put over people who have very important work to do to lead this country,” the House Intelligence Committee chairman said. "And so the faster you can get to the bottom of this, it’s going to be better for all Americans."Andy Park is an electrician from Melksham, Wiltshire, England, who styles himself "Mr. Christmas"[1] after claiming to have celebrated Christmas Day every day since July 1993.[2]
Personal life [ edit ]
Over the years Park has sent himself more than 235,500 Christmas cards.[3]
In 2005, he released a single entitled "It's Christmas Every Day", with a video featuring Mike Read and produced by Andy Whitmore.[citation needed]
He claims that each day he eats breakfast (turkey sandwich and mince pies), then goes to work, until returning around at lunchtime to eat a full roast turkey dinner before watching a recording of the Queen's Christmas speech, sherry in hand.
In an interview published in 2006, Park was quoted as saying that, over the previous 13 years, he had consumed 4,380 turkeys (one a day), 87,600 mince pies (20 a day), 2,190 pints of gravy (half a pint a day), 26,280 roast potatoes (six a day), 30,660 stuffing balls, 219,000 mushy peas, 4,380 bottles of champagne, 4,380 bottles of sherry and 5,000 bottles of wine. However, in 2001, he was warned by his doctor that the diet was affecting his health after his weight increased to 19 stone (270 lb; 120 kg).[citation needed]
Mr Christmas also sent in his song via post to The Scott Mills show on BBC Radio 1 and was opened live on air on 9th August 2018. It was played until listeners text in requesting the song to be stopped. Chris Stark and Scott Mills exchanged talks over how it could be a number one if it was recorded in a studio.
In the media [ edit ]
On 15 December 2007, in an interview on the BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live, Park said he was still celebrating every day.[citation needed]
On 25 November 2008, the Daily Mail reported he had to change his celebrations somewhat due to the credit crunch.[4]
On 22 December 2009, he appeared on talkSPORT radio. He was a guest on the Ian Collins' Late Show to discuss his lifestyle.
In 2009, Park appeared in former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read's Christmas single, "My Christmas Card To You".[5]
On 8 December 2015, Park appeared on the Channel 5 documentary Crackers about Christmas. The show explains how Park wanted his single to reach Christmas number one and he still follows his daily routine now in 2015, however, following recent reports in the Daily Mirror, he has decided to stop celebrating daily after Christmas 2015 due to wiping out his savings and being at risk of losing his home.[6] However, after just two weeks of abstention, Park returned to celebrating every day, citing his love for the holiday being too great.[7]The cross-platform developer advertising network AdDuplex has released data for the month of February which details some interesting findings and trends for Windows Phone. We've previously looked at data leading up and closing off 2012, but what about the start of this year? We've also recently covered Windows Phone 8 taking over Windows Phone 7 hardware in the US, but how does this reflect worldwide?
As one can see in the above chart, Windows Phone 7 still holds the ground worldwide, with the Nokia Lumia 800, Lumia 710 and Lumia 610 taking just over 50 percent combined. It's clear Nokia owns the Windows Phone ecosystem in terms of usage. The Lumia 920 is in fourth place, which is also a promising jump for Windows Phone 8. The handset is currently sat on 10 percent, just 6 percent behind the Lumia 610 in third. Other notable jumps in share include the Lumia 820, which leaped from 3 percent to 5 percent, while the Lumia 822 and HTC 8S both entered the top ten. It's interesting to note in the above chart the absence of Samsung. Neither its legacy or latest hardware is present. This can be blamed on poor availability of the ATIV S and overall sub-par platform marketing.
Compared to the report released early last month, Windows Phone 8 is slowly catching up with legacy hardware and if its momentum continues, we could well see a global takeover within the next few months. The chart below goes into country penetration and how quickly the new platform has been adopted by consumers.
France, USA and Australia are launch markets for Windows Phone 7, and all have passed the 50 percent barrier. As one would expect, emerging markets including Peru, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are in a position entirely opposite to the markets in the above chart. 95 percent onwards for Windows Phone 7 is reported. Update penetration The Windows Phone 7.8 update is slowly being released with more consumers being able to enjoy the new start screen experience, but it's still lagging slightly with only 16 percent of Windows Phone 7 devices running the latest version. Microsoft has some way to go to get the remaining hardware up to speed. It's worth noting that rotten luck may be at play here with the selection of handsets used in the AdDuplex report in a similar situation surrounding the update. This may not represent the actual percentage or picture on the update roll out worldwide. But it's not all bad news. Here's a chart showing Windows Phones that have the Portico update:
This is a positive sign. Of the number of Windows Phone 8 included in the reports, 54% were running the latest update. With the OTA process kicking in on the latest mobile platform from Microsoft, the company is able to minimise delay between engineers and the end-consumer. What's packing the punch in the states? With the US passing over the 50 percent marker in Windows Phone 8 penetration against its predecessor, which mobile devices took most share in the AdDulex report?Two friends in Utah have recorded footage of a mysterious ice circle filled with egg-like objects. The peculiar phenomenon, which was found by the teenagers in the middle of a frozen lake, consists of a circular feature filled with strange white crystals that seem to defy explanation.
In the video the two youths can be seen inquisitively poking and prodding at the objects while jokingly referring to them as 'alien eggs' due to their 'gross' and'slimy' consistency.
The footage has proven quite popular since appearing online with Internet users offering explanations ranging from a frozen puddle of paint to a meteorite impact crater.
Some have even suggested that it could be some sort of viral marketing campaign.
So far however no definitive explanation for the phenomenon has been found.
The pair film the giant object before poking at it with their fingers and confirming its'slimy' texture. Bizarrely, the icy mass was a perfectly circular shape, permeated with small holes radiating from the centre.
A voice is heard saying: "You don't just see s*** like this man. Maybe it's aliens. Maybe it's alien eggs."
There is a widespread belief that alien beings have traveled to Earth from some other planet and are doing alien sex and reproductive experiments on a chosen few. Despite the incredible nature of this belief and a lack of credible supportive evidence, a cult has grown up around it. According to a Gallup poll done at the end of the twentieth century, about one-third of Americans believe aliens have visited us, an increase of 5% over the previous decade.
The Ovomorph, known colloquially as the Egg, is an egg-like capsule containing a Facehugger, generally considered to be the first stage in the life cycle of the species Xenomorph XX121. They are produced and laid by a Queen.
Xenomorph Eggs by themselves are seemingly inert, although they apparently posses some ability to "sense" or otherwise detect when a potential host creature approaches, at which point four "petals" at the top of the Egg will open up and the Facehugger within will launch itself out at the nearby victim. Xenomorph Eggs are produced by Queens in their Egg sac, and then laid through the trunk-like ovipositor at the rear of the sac. Eggs stand around two and a half feet tall and are typically brown-black and leathery in appearance, although older specimens have been seen to exhibit a drier, grey-white exterior. The capsule itself is incredibly durable — experiments have shown it is possible to drop one from the top of a tall building at Earth's gravity, and it will bounce upon impact with the ground without causing any harm to the Facehugger within; even at three times Earth's gravity, the Egg will maintain its integrity. Likewise, the tough outer skin is difficult to cut through, and doing so will cause acid to spray defensively from the incision.
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Submit News/Videos/Links | Discuss article | Article Link | More Unsolved and Unexplained MysteriesThe federal government can tell you how many "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders" stole a car, the precise number of "American Indian or Alaska Natives" who were arrested for vagrancy or how many whites were busted for counterfeiting in any given year. But the government agencies that crunch crime numbers are utterly unable -- or unwilling -- to pinpoint for the public how many illegal immigrants are arrested within U.S. borders each year.
In the absence of comprehensive data, FoxNews.com examined a patchwork of local, state and federal statistics that revealed a wildly disproportionate number of murderers, rapists and drug dealers are crossing into the U.S. amid the wave of hard-working families seeking a better life. The explosive figures show illegal immigrants are three times as likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population and account for far more crimes than their 3.5-percent share of the U.S. population would suggest. Critics say it is no accident that local, state and federal governments go to great lengths to keep the data under wraps.
"There are a lot of reasons states don’t make this information readily available, and there is no clearinghouse of data at high levels," said former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams, who has conducted exhaustive research on the subject. "These numbers would expose how serious the problem is and make the government look bad.”
“They should have been sent back to their home country instead of being allowed to stay here and have the opportunity to kill Americans.” — Jessica Vaughan, Center for Immigration Studies
Adams called illegal immigrant crime a "wave of staggering proportions." He and other experts noted that the issue has been dragged into the spotlight by a spate of cases in which illegal immigrants with criminal records killed people after being released from custody because of incoherent procedures and a lack of cooperation between local and federal law enforcement officials. The murders, including the July 1 killing of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco, have left grieving loved ones angry and confused, local and federal officials pointing fingers at one another and the voting public demanding secure borders and swift deportation of non-citizen criminals.
“Every one [of the recent cases] was preventable through better border security and enforcing immigration laws,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. “They should have been sent back to their home country instead of being allowed to stay here and have the opportunity to kill Americans.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement told FoxNews.com that comprehensive statistics on illegal immigrant crime are not available from the federal government, and suggested contacting county, state and federal jail and prison systems individually to compose a tally, a process that would encompass thousands of local departments.
FoxNews.com did review reports from immigration reform groups and various government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Government Accountability Office, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and several state and county correctional departments. Statistics show the estimated 11.7 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. account for 13.6 percent of all offenders sentenced for crimes committed in the U.S. Twelve percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences and 16 percent of drug trafficking sentences are meted out to illegal immigrants.
There are approximately 2.1 million legal or illegal immigrants with criminal convictions living free or behind bars in the U.S., according to ICE's Secure Communities office. Each year, about 900,000 legal and illegal immigrants are arrested, and 700,000 are released from jail, prison, or probation. ICE estimates that there are more than 1.2 million criminal aliens at large in the U.S.
In the most recent figures available, a Government Accountability Office report titled, "Criminal Alien Statistics," found there were 55,000 illegal immigrants in federal prison and 296,000 in state and local lockups in 2011. Experts agree those figures have almost certainly risen, although executive orders from the Obama administration may have changed the status of thousands who previously would have been counted as illegal immigrants.
Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals are being deported. In 2014, ICE removed 315,943 criminal illegal immigrants nationwide, 85 percent of whom had previously been convicted of a criminal offense. But that same year, ICE released onto U.S. streets another 30,558 criminal illegal immigrants with a combined 79,059 criminal convictions including 86 homicides, 186 kidnappings, and thousands of sexual assaults, domestic violence assaults and DUIs, Vaughan said. As of August, ICE had already released at least 10,246 criminal aliens.
David Inserra, a policy analyst for Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at The Heritage Foundation, said letting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes go free while they await deportation hearings is putting the public at risk.
“While it is not certain how many of these individuals were here illegally, most of these individuals were in deportation proceedings and should have been detained or at least more closely supervised and monitored until their deportation order was finalized and executed,” Inserra said.
Adams opened a rare window into the dearth of public data when he obtained an internal report compiled by the Texas Department of Public Safety and revealed its contents on his Pajamas Media blog. The report showed that between 2008 and 2014, noncitizens in Texas -- a group that includes illegal and legal immigrants -- committed 611,234 crimes, including nearly 3,000 homicides. Adams told FoxNews.com that other states have also closely tracked illegal immigrant crime, especially in the wake of 9/11, but said the statistical sorting “is done behind closed doors.” States closely guard the statistics out of either fear of reprisals from the federal government or out of their leaders' own insistence on downplaying the burden of illegal immigrant crime, he said.
"There are a lot of reasons states don’t make this information readily available and there is no clearinghouse of data at high levels," Adams said. "These numbers would expose how serious the problem is and make the government look bad."
A smattering of statistics can be teased out of data made public in other states heavily impacted by illegal immigration, although a full picture or apples-to-apples comparison remains elusive.
■ In Florida, there were 5,061 illegal immigrant inmates in state prison facilities as of June 30, but neither the state Department of Corrections nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement track the number in county prisons, spokesmen for those agencies told FoxNews.com.
■ In Illinois, where state prisons house 46,993 inmates, some 3,755 are illegal immigrants, according to Illinois Department of Corrections figures. Once again, state officials do not compile figures for county jails, although a Cook County official estimated that nearly 6 percent were illegal immigrants.
■ In Arizona, neither state public safety officials nor the governor’s office could produce figures showing the number of criminal illegal immigrants held in county jails, but state prison figures released by the Arizona Department of Corrections show out of 42,758 prisoners held in state facilities in July, about 10.8 percent were illegal immigrants.
■ In California, there were 128,543 inmates in custody as of Aug. 12, but the state, which has been criticized for its leniency toward illegal immigrants, no longer keeps track of the citizenship status of inmates. As of July 31, 2013, the last time figures were documented, there were as many as 18,000 “foreign-born” citizens in California state prisons of 133,000 incarcerated. The Board of State and Community Corrections provided figures to Fox News from 2014, showing there were 142,000 inmates in 120 county prisons, but while everything from mental health cases to dental and medical appointments are closely tracked, the number of illegal aliens -- or even non citizens -- is not.
“Frankly, this is something every state should track, but they don’t. Not even ICE publishes this much information on offenders and immigration status,” Vaughan said.
Several pro-immigration groups contacted by FoxNews.com declined to comment on the outsize role illegal immigrants play in the U.S. criminal justice system. One group that did insisted that even illegal immigrants provide a net benefit to the U.S.
“Immigrants, regardless of their legal status, make valuable contributions to our economy as workers, business owners, taxpayers and consumers,” said Erin Oshiro, of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “We need an immigration system that that keeps families together, protects workers, and prioritizes due process and human rights."I’m pretty sure there is nothing better than downing a glass of cold, sweet horchata on a warm day. There also isn’t anything better to drink alongside a plate full of too many tacos. These two were made for each other.
I’ve had a good time eating my way from taco truck to taco truck in Los Angeles and it’s no surprise that the trucks serving the best tacos also have the best horchata. The horchata is always a tad bit too sweet (that’s ok!), spiced with loads of cinnamon and is served ice cold. Three tacos on a paper plate with a cold horchata is a Los Angeles dream.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to make my own horchata–it seriously couldn’t be easier. It’s simple in its preparation but the ratios are what’s important. I asked one of the owner’s of my favorite truck for some tips and she told me to always add a bit of lime zest. It’s not easily detected but adds a bit of brightness to an otherwise creamy drink. I think it’s imperative. Since there is a lime shortage going on, I swapped in a lemon strip (feel free to use a lime strip, if they’re available!).
In this recipe, there are more almonds than rice, making it deliciously creamy. I love the flavor that toasting the almonds provides–it’s a bit nuttier and richer. And I usually draw back sugar in my recipes but this one is admittedly sweet. I think it’s good in this context, but feel free to scale back to 3/4 of a cup, if you like. The vanilla bean isn’t all that common and if you’d like, you can definitely skip it, but I really do think it gives it this amazing essence that I’m in love with.
Oh and if you make this and the drink starts to separate, don’t get freaked out; simply mix it until it marries back together. A lot of commercial almond milk and rice milks have binders that prohibit this. It’s natural for the homemade stuff to separate a bit.
From Adrianna Adarme of the Fresh Tastes blog: This horchata recipe is a Mexican beverage topped with cinnamon and served iced cold. Ingredients 1 1/2 cups almonds
1 cup long grain white rice
1 cup pure cane sugar
1 large cinnamon stick (or 2 small cinnamon sticks)
1 lemon strip
1/4 vanilla bean, scraped
Pinch of salt
5 cups filtered water Directions Place a medium saucepan over moderately medium heat. Add the almonds to the pan to toast, tossing them every few seconds to ensure even browning, for 5 minutes and until the almonds are golden brown. In a large bowl, combine the toasted almonds, white rice, sugar, cinnamon stick, lemon strip, vanilla bean caviar and pod, pinch of salt and filtered water. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and transfer to the fridge to sit for at least 6 hours, ideally overnight. Remove the lemon strip, vanilla bean pod and cinnamon stick from the mixture. Place a cheesecloth-lined sieve atop a large bowl and set it aside. (Note: I found it necessary for the cheesecloth AND the sieve as it gets a bit gritty if not.) Transfer the mixture to a blender, in batches, and pulse until the horchata is nice and smooth, about 2 minutes. Pour the horchata into the sieve and discard the almond bits. Transfer the horchata to a pitcher and refrigerate until cold, about 1 hour. Serve horchata over ice with a few dashes of ground cinnamon on top. Yield: Serves 4 to 6 glasses of horchata
Adrianna Adarme is a food blogger and author living in Los Angeles, California. She writes the blog A Cozy Kitchen, where she shares comforting, everyday recipes from her kitchen. She recently authored her first cookbook, PANCAKES: 72 Sweet and Savory Recipes for the Perfect Stack. She’s a lover of breakfast, pie (and sometimes even pie for breakfast), corgis and cute things. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” ― Blaise Pascal
Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) My Philosophical Position
3.) How Female Emotivity Manifests In Disagreement
4.) How Women Form Opinion
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading
1.) Introduction:
The claim that woman’s capacity for reason matches man’s is humorous, and yet be it espoused by radical feminists or well-intentioned humanists, the “equality of reason” myth persists.
It was only the other week I observed two men debating woman’s logical capacity, one man insisted women were less reasonable, whilst the other disagreed whilst conceding “all women are like that“. Yet in spite of this concession, said man went to the lengthy effort of recalling instances where he had observed women exercising reason. It was as if this particular man wasn’t quite willing to accept women are the less reasonable sex, which ironically is an unreasonable position in and of itself.
There is of course a discrepancy here, a gentle person can get angry and a frugal man can make a large purchase in the same way that an unreasonable person can demonstrate logic; a capacity for something does not equate to a propensity for it. The man who could not believe women are less reasonable is naive, the claim was not that women never make logical decisions, even a broken clock is right twice per day, the claim was that women are governed so strongly by emotion that their capacity and proclivity for reason is greatly vitiated, ergo, their reason is inferior to man’s.
Even in the comments section of this very publication, the notion women are just as logical as men is oft dispelled, for women are quick to offend and be offended by nature of their volatile reactivity. Now of course the same principle applies to man, an angry man cannot reason too well either, but here is my contention: the average woman becomes emotional far more easily than the average man, and thus whatever reason she does possess is quickly lost when even a modicum of pressure is applied.
I believe less intelligent women are simply incapable of reasoning to any elaborate degree, whilst smarter women can only do so whilst their emotions are in check, eg: they have managed to encounter something unsettling without taking offence to it. Nevertheless, I do not believe smarter women are any less emotional than their lower IQ counterparts, but only that they have better impulse control. This is why although smart women can exercise reason, they often do so with less frequency than even the average man.
2.) My Philosophical Position:
In my analysis of women’s behaviour I try to minimise my sexism as much as possible, for I do not wish my weaker expectations of women to sustain an untrue personal delusion, but rather, I wish for my view of man as the primary sex to be grounded in sound observation and empirical evidence. For example, I observe men making sounder judgements more often than women, debating better, skewing more to the right on the IQ bell curve, as well as making the majority of discoveries and inventions that elevated us out of the stone age.
In my inquiry into male and female differences I have discovered women’s sole biological reason for existing is to reproduce and nurture the young, whilst man’s is to reproduce, protect his mate (oft dying in wars in an attempt to do so) and contributing to the grand project known as civilization.
In case any wish to contest the point on civilization, do so bearing in mind you contend the point with a machine invented by a man, using a power source discovered and refined by a man, in a house designed and built by a man. As women are and have historically been preoccupied with child rearing and maintaining social ties, the elevation of the human condition can thus be credited almost solely to man.
Even since half a century of woman’s emancipation, women have done little but accrue more money, in terms of major intellectual and civilizational achievements, few have achieved anything of significance. Yes, women have entered highly prestigious professions such as medicine and law, but do the majority of women make major contributions to their fields, or do they just teach and practice the work of men who came before them, rather than endeavouring to truly excel in, innovate and push the boundaries of their chosen disciplines?
In case it is not clear, my intent is to make a philosophical inquiry into man and woman’s complementing nature as to allow for the refinement of my view, the goal is not to arbitrarily denounce one sex whilst heralding the other. If women are thereby described as being secondary or lesser in some form, it is because this is what reality is indicating to me, not because I want it to be so.
3.) How Female Emotivity Manifests In Disagreement:
As somebody who likes to be proven wrong by reason and empiricism (because I can learn from this) it is disappointing but nevertheless predictable the majority of comments women have made in my time writing have been subpar. If it is disjointed emotional babbling, I hastily remove it to prevent an explosion of vitriolic derailment from occurring in the comments section.
Despite my desire for an open forum and strong ethical appreciation for freedom of speech, not all speech is equal in its reason or value and thus I do not permit the dregs of human thought to manifest and take root within my comments section, censorship be damned. Offending comments are not removed on the basis of whether they agree or disagree, but rather, whether they are well argued or not. If you disagree but make a compelling argument, I won’t remove a comment. But if the person knows no better than to try to play mind games with me on my own blog, I will vibrantly dispose of their trite.
The women who are offended and disagree with the content here oft do so on a profusely emotional basis, with typically little in the way of cogent reasoning in their attempts at refutation. I imagine due to the choice of topic and depth of language, my comments section attracts a higher IQ female than average, and even from this pool of women, 3 kinds of comment tend to be made:
– “I agree with what you’re saying because I’m a traditional woman (usually she is Christian or highly conservative) and my emotions/upbringing agree with your world view. I arrived at similar conclusions I couldn’t verbalise, reading what you’ve deduced has confirmed my intuitive beliefs and suspicions.”
– “I disagree with what you’re saying because I cling to the interpretations of reality indoctrinated into me by feminism, your criticism of women is misogynistic and what you say represents everything that is wrong with society.”
– “I disagree with what you’re saying because my solipsistic point of reference is more valid to me than your reason, I don’t fit neatly into your world view because I’m different from most women and thus your world view cannot possibly apply to most women, you must be wrong.”
A woman who makes a very well-reasoned comment is a rarity, but when it happens it is a welcomed delight regardless of whether there is consensus, nevertheless, such a thing is rare enough that one does not hold their breath waiting for it to occur.
If Illimitable Men was contingent on women making reasonable comments for sound discourse and new topic ideas, as a platform for unorthodox ideas it’d die with much haste. Now I am not going out of my way to be offensive here, but I am emphasising a point: women just aren’t all that reasonable, logic is not their primary mode of function and this shows emphatically in their contributions.
In case you think this site is read exclusively by men, you would be mistaken, I receive enough page views that if even a meagre percentage of my readers are female, that’s a good few thousand women.
4.) How Women Form Opinion:
Time and time again, be it a televised debate, a private argument or even in universities where the female IQ skews higher, I see little in the way of reason espoused by women. This does not mean women do not say correct or truthful things, but rather that they do not rationally deduce truth so much as they intuit it, intuition being the vague sensation that something feels or sounds right.
Likewise women will hold untrue and irrational beliefs because said irrational thing feels good to believe. You should begin to see a pattern emerging here, whether a woman holds an opinion based in truth or an opinion that isn’t, this opinion is almost always held because it feels good to believe, or her peer group believes it and thus she adopts their view. Scarcely does she hold a view because she has rigorously investigated a topic with reason and come to a conclusion she believes to be true; this is not impossible but I believe it improbable.
Often when the veracity of a woman’s viewpoint is being challenged, if she believes her opinion to be true out of no more than an intuitive emotional conviction, she feels the validity of her emotion is being disputed rather than the credibility of her reasoning.
When a woman’s reasoning is disputed, she oft perceives this as the invalidation of her emotion, the deprivation of her “right to feel” because her opinion and its hasty conclusion is oft founded upon an instinct or feeling rather than a deduction or investigation.
Women have a tendency to defensively double down on their position when they feel bad, employing Machiavellian fallacy such as shaming (eg: reductio ad absurdum) rather than opening themselves to greater scrutiny and taking the time to step back and re-evaluate their opinion.
Essentially, women trust their emotions far too much, they act on their emotions almost entirely without restraint, and often fail to question, analyse, check and hold their emotions to account. For a woman if it feels right then it is right, a woman does not consider that perhaps although some things feel good to hear or believe, they may be logically unsound, false, outright incorrect or otherwise verifiably false.
One can make such discernments by comparing how men and women back up their arguments, for example, an incorrect man is generally able to devise a chain of reasoning to explain his thinking, whilst a woman is scarcely capable of producing any such evidence of reasoning. Why? Because even when a man is wrong he’s thinking in a way that is logically congruent even should his conclusion prove to be false. A woman on the other hand merely felt the thing to be true, so has no cogent basis for communicating why she believes her opinion to be correct, “it just is!”.
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:
It appears to me that women just hold opinions, and that they have these opinions because they feel intuitively correct, and if anybody presents them with evidence counter to what they feel to be correct, rather than accept the evidence presented to them and adopt a world view more aligned with reality, they lash out and refuse to internalise the uncomfortable truth.
Women would appear prone to correcting emotional inconsistencies rather than logical ones, that is rather, women are better adapted to coping with things than understanding them. Of course woman can understand things, it would be idiotic to claim otherwise, but an underlying ability to understand does not always translate to a desire to understand. Generally, a woman won’t even make the attempt to understand something if she believes the truthfulness pertaining to it will upset her emotionally.
In accordance with AWALT theory, I believe this to be true of all women but to differing frequencies, that is to say, some women are like this most of the time, whilst others are only some of the time. I’m not saying men are infallible and do not do blunder or even indulge in the exact same ignorance either, I believe they do, just with less frequency, reckless abandon and fervour than do women.
I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so in part 2 expect me to explain how conformity, shame and female evolutionary psychology almost compel women into Machiavellian/emotive responses rather than honest or logical ones. It should be noted this article has been designed as an introductory piece for a more substantive follow-up, which can be found here.
Books:
The Manipulated Man
The Rational Male
The Rational Male: Preventive Medicine
Blog:
A Most Solipsistic Nature
How Women Argue
Solipsism, Emotion & Arguments
The Nature of Women
The AWALT MisconceptionTexas Rep. Ron Paul
Texas Rep. Ron Paul slammed Republican rival Newt Gingrich for his eagerness to send American troops into harm's way even though he avoided service in Vietnam as a young man.
In an interview with Fox News, the former flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force told host Megyn Kelly that the former House speaker is as "aggressive with the military as anybody."
"He supports all of the wars in the Middle East, a thousand times more than I would, but you know in the 1960s when I was drafted in the military he got several deferments. He chose not to go. Now he will send our kids to war. But at that time he said that one person wouldn't make a difference. He didn't know how he could make a difference. So I see that as important information. People should know that. And it reflects on him," Paul said of Gingrich.
Dr. Paul, as his supporters refer to him, served as a flight surgeon in the U.S Air Force in the 1960s. He is a longtime outspoken critic of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gingrich is the son of a career Army officer, and during the 1960s studied history at Emory College, before earning his doctorate from Tulane University.
The attack is just the latest jab at Gingrich from Paul. Paul earlier accused Gingrich of "serial hypocrisy" in a campaign ad in Iowa, noting that he collected fees from mortgage giant Freddie Mac and healthcare industry. Another Paul ad called Gingrich a career politician who sold access to politicians to enrich himself. Paul denied that running these ads constitutes negative campaigning, saying "negative campaign is calling people names, demagoguing issues and misrepresenting people's views. But pointing out different positions, that is my responsibility."
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Gingrich, for his part, has vowed to run a positive campaign, pledging not to attack other candidates.
"I'm, frankly, taking the gamble that the American people care about actually solving our country's problems, not just watching politicians beat each other up," Gingrich told reporters in Iowa yesterday.
Real Clear Politics' poll average shows Gingrich leading in Iowa with 27.2 percent. Romney is in second place with 18 percent and Paul is in third with 16.7 percent, 19 days before the first voters make their choice.Workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded this week, in a groundbreaking ruling that provides new protections for LGBT Americans.
In a decision dated Thursday, the EEOC said that employers who discriminate against LGBT workers are violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.”
In the past, courts have ruled that Title VII does not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation because it’s not explicitly mentioned in the law, but the EEOC’s ruling disputes that reasoning. “Sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination because it necessarily entails treating an employee less favorably because of the employee’s sex,” the EEOC concluded. The committee argued that if an employer discriminated against a lesbian for displaying a photo of her wife, but not a straight man for showing a photo of his wife, that amounts to sex discrimination.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts hinted at similar reasoning earlier this year when considering the same-sex marriage case, even though he ultimately dissented on the court’s June 26 ruling in support of gay marriage. “If Sue loves Joe and Tom loves Joe, Sue can marry him and Tom can’t,” Roberts argued in April. “And the difference is based upon their different sex. Why isn’t that a straightforward question of sexual discrimination?”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also argued this week that since courts have consistently ruled that the racial protections of Title VII apply to relationships, the sex protections should apply to relationships as well. Under Title VII, employers can’t discriminate against employees based on the races of their spouses or friends (so, for example, you couldn’t be fired for being in an interracial marriage). The EEOC’s Thursday ruling ensures that the same standard applies to sex as well, which means you can’t be fired based on whom you choose to date or marry.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created to enforce and implement the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This new interpretation radically expands the scope of those protections.
The ruling could be seen |
Id Software is also high up on the suspect list because of John Carmack’s involvement with the project.
If I had to choose a developer who I’d want to be involved, it would definitely be Bungie. And how about the readers? Let me hear in the comments your best guesses and hopefuls!Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., left, accompanied by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., speaks during a mews conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 6, 2014, following a Senate vote on military sexual assaults. The Senate blocked a bill that would have stripped senior military commanders of their authority to prosecute rapes and other serious offenses, capping an emotional, nearly yearlong fight over how best to curb sexual assault in the ranks. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) The Associated Press
By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bowing to the Pentagon, the Senate agreed after impassioned debate Thursday to leave the authority to prosecute rapes and other serious crimes with military commanders in a struggle that highlighted the growing role of women in Congress.
The vote was 55-45 in favor of stripping commanders of that authority, but that was short of the 60 necessary to move ahead on the legislation sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Her bill would have given the decision to take serious crimes to courts-martial to seasoned military trial lawyers, independent of the chain of command.
The debate and vote were the culmination of a nearly yearlong campaign to curb sexual assault in the ranks, led by female senators who have questioned whether the military's mostly male leadership understands differences between relatively minor sexual offenses and serious crimes that deserve swift and decisive justice.
Thursday's rejection is unlikely to be the final word. Defeated but unyielding, Gillibrand and her allies vowed to seize the next opportunity to force another vote, probably in the spring when the Senate starts work on a sweeping defense policy bill for the 2015 fiscal year.
"Many people said to me, 'Kirsten, I'm going to watch this, and if it doesn't get better in the next six months, I'm with you next time,'" she said at a news conference.
"We will not be stopped. Look, I've been here long enough to see how sometimes change is painful and slow. But it happens. I've seen it. And we will see it again," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
Pentagon leaders vigorously opposed the measure, as did former prosecutors and military veterans in the Senate who argued that commanders should have more responsibility, not less, for the conduct of the men and women they lead in war and peacetime.
"We can't let the commanders walk away," insisted Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who bemoaned the tenor of a policy debate that pitted her against fellow Democrat Gillibrand.
Backers of the measure insisted that piecemeal reforms have had only a limited impact on a problem that even the military has called an epidemic. Survey results have suggested that some 26,000 women may have been sexually assaulted in the most recent accounting with thousands unwilling to come forward for fear of inaction or retribution.
"The people who don't trust the chain of the command are the victims," Gillibrand said.
The New York lawmaker was relentless in lobbying her colleagues, even in the final minutes of the vote. Standing in the well of the Senate, she tried to persuade a wavering Sen. Mark Kirk, an original sponsor of her measure. Kirk also got an earful from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., arguing against the measure.
Kirk, an Illinois Republican, said after the vote that he was concerned the bill would "jeopardize our readiness and our military stationed in the field."
Among the Republicans voting with Gillibrand were Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who faces Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes in his re-election bid, and Mike Enzi of Wyoming.
In fact, Gillibrand's effort divided the Senate in ways that smashed conventional lines on both gender and political party.
Conservative Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky backed her effort, while the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, opposed it. Including Gillibrand, the bill had the support of 17 of the Senate's 20 women.
In two hours of debate, proponents and opponents argued on the Senate floor based on personal experiences, growing frustration with what they dismissed as fixes around the edges and horrific stories from the ranks.
"The current system is failing the men and women in uniform," said one of the Senate's newest members, John Walsh, D-Mont., who spent 33 years in the Montana National Guard and is the first Iraq War veteran in the body. "We have moved too slowly."
On the other side was Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a West Point graduate who served in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantry platoon leader and company commander. Reed said stripping commanders of the authority to discipline the troops would be "detrimental to the effectiveness of the force and common goal to reduce sexual assault."
After blocking Gillibrand's bill, the Senate moved toward overwhelmingly passage of a measure sponsored by McCaskill and two Republican senators — Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Deb Fischer of Nebraska. That bill would eliminate the "good solider defense" — that a service member's character and military performance can be used in a case — unless it is directly connected to the allegation. And it would allow sexual assault victims to challenge their discharges or separation from service.
The bill also calls for a civilian service secretary review if a prosecutor and commander disagree over whether to litigate a case.
The Senate voted 100-0 to move ahead on that bill. A vote on passage is scheduled for Monday.
Three months ago, Congress cleared and President Barack Obama signed a defense policy bill that included several changes to military law, including stripping commanders of their ability to overturn jury convictions and criminalizing retaliation against victims who come forward about sexual assaults.
The Pentagon came under pressure last month to disclose more information about how sexual assault cases are adjudicated following an Associated Press investigation that found a pattern of inconsistent judgments and light penalties for sexual assaults at U.S. bases in Japan.
Gillibrand, who chairs the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee, called on Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in a Feb. 10 letter to turn over case information from four major U.S. bases: Fort Hood in Texas, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in California and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Such records would shed more light on how military commanders make decisions about courts-martial and punishments in sexual assault cases and whether the inconsistent judgments seen in Japan are more widespread.
The AP's investigation, which was based on hundreds of internal military documents, found that what appeared to be strong cases were often reduced to lesser charges. Suspects were unlikely to serve time even when military authorities agreed a crime had been committed. In two rape cases, commanders overruled recommendations to court-martial the accused and dropped the charges instead.
The Army is investigating sexual abuse allegations against an officer who trains military prosecutors who handle sexual and physical abuse cases. Lt. Col. Joseph Morse is accused of groping a female Army lawyer while both were attending a legal conference in Northern Virginia in 2011, according to a senior defense official.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.MUMBAI: Eman Ahmed, formerly the 'heaviest' woman in the world, passed away at 4.35am on Monday due to comorbid conditions, including heart disease and kidney dysfunction, according to medical experts at the Burjeel Hospital in Abu Dhabi, The National reported.The Egyptian national, who earlier weighed 500kg and suffered from a rare thyroid condition since childhood, had been transferred to Burjeel Hospital from India in May to continue rehabilitation from bariatric surgery.She had lost more than 300kg after the surgery.Eman Ahmed, who lost about 330 kilograms after undergoing weight-loss surgery in Mumbai's Saifee hospital, had left for the United Arab Emirates for long-term treatment on May 4.Eman Ahmed, who weighed more than 500 kilograms when she was flown to Mumbai for treatment in February, was reportedly the world's heaviest woman.The 37-year-old was discharged from the Mumbai hospital for further treatment in the UAE, bariatric surgeon Muffazal Lakdawala had said. A green corridor was created for transporting Eman from Saifee Hospital to Gate No. 5 of Terminal 2 at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International airport in Mumbai."The management of Burjeel Hospital is deeply saddened by the death of Eman Abdul Atti, the heaviest woman in the world.Eman died on Monday, September 25, 2017 at 4:35am due to an intestinal shock and kidney failure. She was supervised by a team of more than 20 doctors from different disciplines who had successfully improved her health since she arrived in the UAE.She breathed her last early in the morning.We offer our prayers and sincere condolences to the family of the deceased."Adelaide coach Don Pyke has fired a broadside at Brisbane Lions coach Chris Fagan for flagging his interest in Crows flyer Charlie Cameron, declaring he's staying at the Club next year.
Cameron is signed with the Crows until the end of 2018, but he's reportedly interested in moving to Queensland at the end of this season for personal reasons.
Fagan said he would love to have Cameron at the Lions, leaving Pyke far from impressed.
"Very disappointing, he's under contract so he's going nowhere," Pyke said on Wednesday.
"It's unusual you would see comments about players who are under contract.
"I don't think it's appropriate you talk about players at other clubs that are under contract."
Pyke said he hadn't spoken to the Lions about Fagan's comments and wouldn't entertain letting Cameron leave if he requested to be traded.
Fagan spoke on Melbourne radio on Tuesday he would be keen on bringing Cameron to the club.
Cameron, 23, has played 68 games for the Crows since making his debut in 2014.
The Crows also face a battle to retain out of contract duo Jake Lever and Mitch McGovern.
Lever reportedly met with Melbourne officials – a claim he denied – while the talented defender has also been linked to the Western Bulldogs and Collingwood.
McGovern has attracted interest from Fremantle.
Pyke said ideally the Crows would re-sign Lever and McGovern before the start of the finals to avoid any distractions from achieving the ultimate goal of breaking the Club's 19-year premiership drought.
"It's probably more to the individual," Pyke said.
"I think the team is in a space where their full focus is what is coming up in the next six weeks."
The Crows re-signed Jake Kelly, Riley Knight, Alex Keath and Tom Doedee until the end of 2019 during the week.A pro-Duterte blogger has backed out of his contract as consultant to the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), less than a week after being called to a Senate hearing on fake news.
Rey Joseph Nieto announced on Monday through his social media account, Thinking Pinoy, that he had asked the DFA to terminate his contract, and that he would donate to charity the at least P36,000 salary he was supposed to get from the agency.
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The DFA did not respond to requests for comment.
“I have already contacted the DFA to request for the termination of my consultancy contract,” Nieto said.
“While I have yet to receive any remuneration for the services I have rendered since July 2017, I have decided to donate prospective earnings to a suitable charity organization if and when I get compensated,” he added.
At the hearing conducted by the Senate committee on public information and mass media on Oct. 4, Nieto said he was hired as DFA consultant and given the job of “head of strategic communications for migrant workers’ affairs” last July.
His employment came barely two months after Foreign Secretary Alan Cayetano was appointed by President Duterte.
The DFA has not provided details nor officially confirmed Nieto’s status as consultant despite media queries.
‘Working as slaves’
During the Senate hearing, Nieto said:
“We are like slaves there and I only get P12,000. It’s not even enough to pay for taxi. It’s just that the DFA needs me more than I need them and I want the government to succeed.”
DFA spokesperson Robespierre Bolivar declined to comment, but shrugged off Nieto’s remark as “his personal opinion.”
Nieto and another pro-Duterte blogger, now Press Assistant Sec. Mocha Uson, were included as official government delegates to the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York held last Sept. 19 to 23.
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They were also with the government delegation during Cayetano’s official visit to Washington D.C. Cayetano, who has extended his stay in the US to a month or until Oct. 15, has not given any comment on his hiring of Nieto.
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MOST READThe latest federal gang sweep of 214 Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang thugs has turned up quite a panoply of the people President Obama sought to encourage and accomodate in the U.S. during his last years in office
Nearly one third, or 64 arrestees, were Obama's much-vaunted 'unaccompanied children' - otherwise subjects of teary news stories and images of cute little toddlers playing pattycake in immigration detention centers. Like this one here. In reality, quite a large number of these 'unaccompanied children' were more like this.
Ninety-three of the arrestees were wanted for state and federal crimes and will likely do time here before being thrown out.
One hundred ninety-three of the 214 arrested were illegal aliens, more than 90%, people who came here to do harm.
The "unaccompanied minors" who were encouraged and let into the country by Obama back in 2014 and up until his last day in office are worth a look, because Democrats did so much to browbeat Republicans and neighborhood groups who tried to stop it. such as the multiracial (this fact was never noted) people of Murrieta, Calif., who protested the dumping of these 'unaccompanied minors' in their community, unwilling to turn their small city of 100,000 into 'another Pomona' as one told me.
Here's what got the press narrative on CNN:
"It is deplorable that people espousing anti-immigrant hate language created unnecessary tension and fear for immigrant mothers and their children," Pedro Rios, a community representative of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, said in a statement. "Even more concerning is that elected officials in the City of Murrieta instigated this tension. Mothers and their children on these buses have suffered through enough trauma."
Here are the kinds of pictures that got printed:
Here's what came along with them as they were all lumped in one big group we owed our 'compassion' and 'justice' to:
Here's the mendaciously treacly narrative promoted by the Obama-linked Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress:
1. Violence is causing these children to flee Violence is the leading factor forcing unaccompanied children from Central America to the United States. Honduras has become the murder capital of the world and gang violence has increased dramatically—including in El Salvador and Guatemala—over the past few years. In fact, El Salvador and Guatemala rank fourth and fifth, respectively, in terms of the highest worldwide murder rates. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of State describes the violence level in Honduras and El Salvador as “critically high.” Interviewing more than 400 unaccompanied minors, researchers found that many of them had fled forcible ‘join or die’ gang recruitment or gang threats against themselves and their families. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, 58 percent of unaccompanied minors “raise potential international protection” claims. This means that they have a viable claim to refugee protections under international law. One 17-year-old interviewed by the UNHCR fled El Salvador after gang members who had killed students at his school told him “if [he] returned to school, [he] wouldn’t make it home alive.” 2. Smugglers and traffickers prey on these children, who are increasingly younger and female... 3. This is a regional crisis... 4. There are no free passes into the United States as unaccompanied minors can be deported... 5. Some in Congress are playing politics with a humanitarian issue...
Blah blah blah. So they're all innocent, eh? Will bet you money they aren't going to say anything about these current revelations showing that so many of these vaunted'minors' were full-blown gang members.
Obama, meanwhile, said they'd all be treated humanely and deported fast, and his press allies at PBS insisted that they were just fleeing violence, not bringing it in:
The administration has worked to send a clear message in recent weeks that new arrivals will be targeted for deportation. But immigrants arriving from those countries say they are fleeing pervasive gang violence and crushing poverty.
Well, the Breitbart report shows a very different picture. Far from being universal objects of compassion, they were a mixed bag, as any unscreened and non-law-abiding group would be expected to be. Hoodlums, toddlers, DREAMers, political activists looking for 'justice' - all lumped in as a special interest group championed by the left.
It's about time the truth came out instead.I was cruising /r/fitness today and came across this thread about videos, movies, and documentaries about fitness and lifting. Obviously, the top rated comment is Pumping Iron. That link to Pumping Iron is the full documentary on Youtube and it is absolutely amazing. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding’s coveted Mr. Olympia competition in 1975. It is incredibly motivating and I highly recommend it.
Additionally, there is this amazing Youtube video that was posted in that thread as well. It’s 5 minutes long and is probably the most inspiring video I’ve ever seen on Youtube. It has 7.1+ million views.
And finally, I just purchased Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, The Education of a Bodybuilder. I’m about 20% done with it so far and this is the book I’ve needed. Arnold talks about the mindset of a champion. What it takes to have that drive to do what you want to do. The attitude that is required to be all that you can possibly be. He holds no punches. It is so damn motivating too. It is the complete opposite of the Forever Alone mindset. For example, let’s take a comment from /r/ForeverAlone:
What about those of us who really don’t have anything better to do than wallow in self-pity? I’ve tried pretty much every avenue available except for drugs, and came up with nothing. I have no way of improving my life further. There’s no way for me to lead a more productive lifestyle. Why can’t I let off my steam in a community for people like me?
And now let’s contrast this with an excerpt from Arnold’s book:
I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else. The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice. Every day I hear someone say, “I’m too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can’t. I never seem to improve.” I’d hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. I can lose ten to forty pounds rapidly, easily, painlessly, by simply setting my mind to it. By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything…
Holy shit that is a powerful statement. The principles that Arnold learned through bodybuilding, he has applied to everything else in life. That is how he became who he was. What kind of mindset do you want to have? A Forever Alone mindset or the mindset of a champion? This has so much more to do than with just lifting heavy weights. It has to do with how we carry ourselves through life.
I am so glad I am reading this book. It also contains his workout and diet suggestions. Check out the reviews on Amazon as well.Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the Scrooge McDuck of envelope piles, announced Monday that new subscribers to his company's streaming service will soon be paying a bit more than those of us who already consider it a basic utility. During his first-quarter earnings report yesterday (note: Netflix earned a lot), he revealed that new memberships would go up a dollar or two, an effort to increase development of new original programming. Prices for existing members will reportedly remain untouched for another couple years or so. For now, old Netflix accounts will be the rent-stabilized apartments of shut-in binge-watching.
It's not all bad news from the conference call, though. Hastings also used the opportunity to come out publicly against that rotten Comcast/Time-Warner Cable merger, warning of the "anticompetitive leverage" that would obviously create. "I don't know that we want anybody to control half of the U.S. Internet," he added. Let us be wary placing too many amusing gifs in too few hands. Such are gods made.At low Reynolds number,is an important predictor of fluid mixing. This is especially true in laminarwhere diffusion may be ignored, such as the staggered herringbone mixer designed for microfluidic channels.This mixer consists of alternating grooves in the channel that produce rotating and counter-rotating vortices, which exemplify periodically driven laminarSince suchare only well-mixed in the presence ofan understanding of the origin ofin such systems can help designprotocols. The system studied in this paper is a modelmotivated by the herringbone mixer.Chaoticrequires positive topologicalwhich in 2D is the exponential growth rate of a material line.We interpret the origin of topologicalthrough the “stirring” of the fluid by virtual, or “ghost,” rods attached to heteroclinicAn understanding of this stirring process could thus help design more efficientprotocols for fluids at low Reynolds number.
I. INTRODUCTION
mixing of fluids at very low Reynolds number, i.e., in the Stokes regime. Understanding mixing in such flows has many physical applications ranging from microfluidics 6 362, 1019– 1036 (2004). 6. M. A. Stremler, F. Haselton, and H. Aref, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London, A, 1019–(2004). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2003.1360 7,8 20, 017516 (2010). 7. J.-L. Thiffeault, Chaos, 017516 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3262494 70, 4030– 4040 (2013). 8. T. Haszpra and T. Tél, J. Atmos. Sci., 4030–(2013). https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-13-069.1 flows in which the fluid velocity field is periodic in time, which means that the dynamics of passive tracers in the fluid exhibit chaotic trajectories. The amount of chaos in the tracer dynamics can be quantified through the topological entropy. In a compact 2D phase space which is not necessarily area-preserving, the topological entropy is equal to the exponential stretching rate of a material line embedded in the fluid 5 72, 1331– 1351 (1993). 5. S. Newhouse and T. Pignataro, J. Stat. Phys., 1331–(1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01048189 L ( t ) = L 0 e h t, (1) where h is the topological entropy, L 0 is the initial line length, and L(t) is the length of the line at time t. We study theof fluids at very low Reynolds number, i.e., in the Stokes regime. Understandingin suchhas many physical applications ranging from microfluidicsto oceanic and atmospheric circulation.We focus specifically onin which the fluid velocity field is periodic in time, which means that theof passive tracers in the fluid exhibit chaotic trajectories. The amount ofin the tracercan be quantified through the topologicalIn a compact 2D phase space which is not necessarily area-preserving, the topologicalis equal to the exponential stretching rate of a material line embedded in the fluidgoverned bywhereis the topologicalis the initial line length, and) is the length of the line at time
entropy means more chaos, and hence more “mixing.” In addition to the stretching rate of a material line, the topological entropy equals the growth rate of periodic orbits as a function of period 9 9. L.-S. Young, Entropy ( Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2003), pp. 313– 327. 5 72, 1331– 1351 (1993). 5. S. Newhouse and T. Pignataro, J. Stat. Phys., 1331–(1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01048189 entropy provides an upper bound on the metric entropy. Practical applications of computing topological entropy include guiding the search of periodic orbits, 10 61, 1353 (2000). 10. R. L. Davidchack, Y.-C. Lai, E. M. Bollt, and M. Dhamala, Phys. Rev. E, 1353 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.1353 mixing rates in microfluidic mixers, 11 53, 684– 693 (2010). 11. A. Beuf, J.-N. Gence, P. Carrière, and F. Raynal, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 684–(2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2009.10.024 12 241, 95– 105 (2012). 12. M. R. Allshouse and J.-L. Thiffeault, Physica D, 95–(2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2011.10.002 mixing from atmospheric velocity data. 8 70, 4030– 4040 (2013). 8. T. Haszpra and T. Tél, J. Atmos. Sci., 4030–(2013). https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-13-069.1 Roughly speaking, more topologicalmeans moreand hence more “mixing.” In addition to the stretching rate of a material line, the topologicalequals the growth rate of periodicas a function of periodor the maximum amount of information lost per unit time in a system using measurements with finite precision.Furthermore, the topologicalprovides an upper bound on the metricPractical applications of computing topologicalinclude guiding the search of periodiccomputingrates in microfluidic mixers,extracting coherent structures in fluid flows,and identifying global regions of highfrom atmospheric velocity data.
What is the origin of topological entropy? Much like how Li and Yorke 13 Period three implies chaos,” Am. Math. Mon. 82, 985– 992 (1975). 13. T.-Y. Li and J. A. Yorke, “,” Am. Math. Mon., 985–(1975). https://doi.org/10.2307/2318254 orbit implies the existence of orbits with arbitrary period, whose growth rate is bounded below by a minimum topological entropy, we study chaos through the existence of certain topological structures that are “responsible” for the topological entropy. More specifically, the presence of some structures implies a certain minimum amount of topological entropy. We seek those structures that give us the best lower bound. The important question we address isMuch like how Li and Yorkeshowed that for interval maps the existence of a period-threeimplies the existence ofwith arbitrary period, whose growth rate is bounded below by a minimum topologicalwe studythrough the existence of certain topological structures that are “responsible” for the topologicalMore specifically, the presence of some structures implies a certain minimum amount of topologicalWe seek those structures that give us the best lower bound.
entropy in a fluid flow is to associate the topological entropy with periodic orbits, i.e., the presence of a given periodic orbit of a passive tracer implies a minimum topological entropy for the flow. 12,14–17 241, 95– 105 (2012). 12. M. R. Allshouse and J.-L. Thiffeault, Physica D, 95–(2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2011.10.002 403, 277– 304 (2000). 14. P. L. Boyland, H. Aref, and M. A. Stremler, J. Fluid Mech., 277–(2000). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022112099007107 175, 69– 95 (2003). 15. P. Boyland, M. Stremler, and H. Aref, Physica D, 69–(2003). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2789(02)00692-9 94, 084502 (2005). 16. J.-L. Thiffeault, Phys. Rev. Lett., 084502 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.084502 25, 087407 (2015). 17. M. Budisic and J.-L. Thiffeault, Chaos, 087407 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4927438 orbit may be imposed externally on the fluid by stirring the fluid with rods following the periodic trajectory. 14,15 403, 277– 304 (2000). 14. P. L. Boyland, H. Aref, and M. A. Stremler, J. Fluid Mech., 277–(2000). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022112099007107 175, 69– 95 (2003). 15. P. Boyland, M. Stremler, and H. Aref, Physica D, 69–(2003). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2789(02)00692-9 orbit may already exist within a fluid driven by some other means, and one may imagine virtual, or “ghost,” rods following this orbit; for example, it is particularly natural to consider ghost rods placed at stable orbits within a periodic island chain. 7,16,18,19 20, 017516 (2010). 7. J.-L. Thiffeault, Chaos, 017516 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3262494 94, 084502 (2005). 16. J.-L. Thiffeault, Phys. Rev. Lett., 084502 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.084502 73, 036311 (2006). 18. E. Gouillart, J.-L. Thiffeault, and M. D. Finn, Phys. Rev. E, 036311 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.73.036311 19, 103602 (2007). 19. M. A. Stremler and J. Chen, Phys. Fluids, 103602 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2772881 entropy of the fluid flow implied by the ghost rods is exactly the same as the topological entropy implied by actual stirring rods. All that matters is the presence of the orbit in the flow. A recent approach to explaining topologicalin a fluidis to associate the topologicalwith periodici.e., the presence of a given periodicof a passive tracer implies a minimum topologicalfor theSuch a periodicmay be imposed externally on the fluid by stirring the fluid with rods following the periodic trajectory.Alternatively, a periodic tracermay already exist within a fluid driven by some other means, and one may imagine virtual, or “ghost,” rods following thisfor example, it is particularly natural to consider ghost rods placed at stablewithin a periodic island chain.The topologicalof the fluidimplied by the ghost rods is exactly the same as the topologicalimplied by actual stirring rods. All that matters is the presence of thein the
et al. 4,20 22, 043135 (2012). 4. P. Grover, S. D. Ross, M. A. Stremler, and P. Kumar, Chaos, 043135 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4768666 106, 114101 (2011). 20. M. A. Stremler, S. D. Ross, P. Grover, and P. Kumar, Phys. Rev. Lett., 114101 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.114101 flow, a chaotic 2D double-vortex flow. The flow depends on the driving period τ f, which can be varied. Grover et al. found that over a particular range of τ f a period-three orbit produced most of the topological entropy. However, outside this range either the periodic orbit did not exist or the orbit existed but the topological entropy significantly exceeded that of the orbit. Grover et al., examining the former case, accounted for the topological entropy when the period-three orbit did not exist through the presence of almost cyclic sets. 21–24 Detecting and locating near-optimal almost-invariant sets and cycles,” SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 24, 1839– 1863 (2003). 21. G. Froyland and M. Dellnitz “,” SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 1839–(2003). https://doi.org/10.1137/S106482750238911X 200, 205– 219 (2005). 22. G. Froyland, Physica D, 205–(2005). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2004.11.008 238, 1507– 1523 (2009). 23. G. Froyland and K. Padberg, Physica D, 1507–(2009). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2009.03.002 24. G. Froyland and K. Padberg-Gehle, Ergodic Theory, Open Dynamics, and Coherent Structures ( Springer, 2014), pp. 171– 216. orbits where shown to exist within the almost cyclic sets, the topological entropy of the nearly periodic motion of the sets, viewed as though they were true periodic orbits, nevertheless generated a lower bound to the topological entropy of the fluid flow. Furthermore, this bound was tight for the lowest τ f value for which particular almost-cyclic sets existed, but excess topological entropy, not explained by the almost-cyclic sets, was found for higher values of τ f. The origin of this excess topological entropy remained unexplained. The method of ghost rods was applied by Groverto the “lid-driven” cavitya chaotic 2D double-vortexThedepends on the driving period, which can be varied. Grover. found that over a particular range ofa period-threeproduced most of the topologicalHowever, outside this range either the periodicdid not exist or theexisted but the topologicalsignificantly exceeded that of theGrover., examining the former case, accounted for the topologicalwhen the period-threedid not exist through the presence of almost cyclic sets.Such sets are nearly coherent regions of the fluid that are advected in a nearly periodic fashion. They were discovered through an analysis of the Frobenius-Perron operator. Even though no periodicwhere shown to exist within the almost cyclic sets, the topologicalof the nearly periodic motion of the sets, viewed as though they were true periodicnevertheless generated a lower bound to the topologicalof the fluidFurthermore, this bound was tight for the lowestvalue for which particular almost-cyclic sets existed, but excess topologicalnot explained by the almost-cyclic sets, was found for higher values of. The origin of this excess topologicalremained unexplained.
entropy of the lid-driven flow, namely, through heteroclinic orbits that connect two fixed points on the boundary of the fluid cavity. (Note that “fixed point” throughout the text refers to period-one orbits, i.e., fixed points of the flow map, and not points of zero velocity of the fluid flow.) These heteroclinic orbits persist even for lower values of τ f where the period-three orbit fails to exist. In fact, they persist all the way down to τ f = 0. Like periodic orbits, heteroclinic orbits also have an associated topological entropy that provides a lower bound to the topological entropy of the fluid flow that contains the orbit. Roughly speaking, the heteroclinic orbits that we consider are “remnants” of the period-three orbit that exists at higher τ f values. We compute the topological entropy from these heteroclinic orbits using the technique of homotopic lobe dynamics (HLD). 25–28 13, 892– 902 (2003). 25. K. Mitchell, J. Handley, J. Delos, and S. Knudson, Chaos, 892–(2003). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1598312 221, 170– 187 (2006). 26. K. A. Mitchell and J. B. Delos, Physica D, 170–(2006). https:// |
les.
4. 3 base factors for Diadem
Q: What changes will we see in the Diadem?
Y: Before I talk about new features, I would like to talk a bit about the old Diadem. There was a lot of discussion among players and staff on how FFXIV is played. FFXIV has strict rules written into the gameplay and it is shown quite strongly. We received a lot of feedback from players that played games such as FFXI, that XIV’s dungeons are boring and that you can’t get lost or find hidden treasure. However, for example with Toto Rak, there are multiple roads you can take, and if the tank were to try and take the longer route, he would get scolded by the players that there is a shorter one. To avoid that, we removed the “unimportant” parts. People are busy nowadays, and if you can’t finish a dungeon in 20 minutes, you really won’t have time to play other content. We thought about that when we made FFXIV.
Q: So there are players that don’t like that style.
Y: There are players that don’t feel free enough and feel bored. We received feedback that it’s fine that dungeons are linear but that they wanted content where they can get that feeling of freedom. Some of the staff shared that opinion, too. During the development of 1.0, most of the staff members didn’t play WoW, so 1.0 was filled with that kind of content. We wanted to try out whether or not that kind of content was still possible in ARR, which was brought to the global standard of MMOs. That’s what lead to the first Diadem.
Even during the development of Diadem, everyone wanted to voice out what they thought was fun in an MMO. Some said that there is no fun in a game where you can’t do combos on raid bosses, while some said that grinding mobs that seem like they can have good loot is fun and very casual. Some said that players need at least some kind of objective, otherwise it would turn into a warzone. That’s why we tried to make a zone without any specific rules on how to play the content.
Q: In the end, it didn’t turn out too great.
Y: I can’t say specifically what was wrong, or that it was unplayable. It’s just that there was too large of gap among players, who were used to FFXIV’s design by then. Some people wanted to grind in one spot the whole time, some wanted to get the spoils and finish it as soon as possible, while some just wanted to do gathering. And it’s hard to unify players in that regard. We found out that even though it had rules, having the freedom of doing anything you wanted just didn’t work out. We also didn’t balance the item level of the equipment or pop times of monsters too well, so by the time we made the appropriate adjustments, players lost their interest. Also, even though the map was huge, doing dinosaur hunting all the time really didn’t feel like doing exploration.
Q: A lot of problems became clear.
Y: “Match with players with the same goal”, “Guaranteed minimal reward” and “Feeling of exploration”. With these three things as the base, we tried to recreate the feeling of freedom, yet again. Also, the reason why we were making adjustments for half a year is because we think that one fun factor of Diadem was players gathering in one spot. So this time we even better use of that aspect.
Q: How will the new Diadem ultimately look like?
Y: First, when you enter, flying is unlocked right from the start. This time you will constantly receive telegrams from House Haillenarte which will give you objectives. For example, please investigate a point in the NE area, or please bring me an x amount of something from this mob. With that as a guide, you will explore the islands. After finishing a set amount of objectives, you will be returned to the base and receive a certain amount of scrips, tomestones, etc.
Q: Ah, that’s the guaranteed minimal reward.
Y: While doing those objectives, you will see regional FATEs pop. By sidetracking, you can get bonus rewards or maybe treasure.
Q: Monsters won’t drop treasure chests anymore?
Y: Monsters will drop them as well. However, this time you will receive a new kind of item which you will exchange for a lottery reward. (like the Palace of the Dead). If you want to finish with the Diadem quickly, you can exit it as soon as you’re done, or if you want to stay, you can stay with the remaining players.
Q: What about people who want to gather?
Y: Gatherers and battle jobs will have a different entrance this time. Gatherers will be able to make parties that consist only of gatherers. You can also change into a battle class, finish the exploration and then return to gathering if you want.
Q: So you can change to a battle class inside even in a party of gatherers?
Y: Yes. The matching is divided so that players with similar goals are in the same party.
Q: How many objectives will you need to do?
Y: Four. It won’t take you 20 minutes.
Q: First you clear the objectives and then you go from one content to another?
Y: Something like that. You can re-enter and do the objectives again. Or maybe 3 players have left and you do FATEs with the remaining 5. It is designed so that after you finish with the objectives you receive, you can play freely with the remaining players, until the time limit of 60 minutes runs out.
Q: What will the boss fight from the trailer look like?
Y: When the color of the sky of the area changes, you will be able to enter the mysterious ruins. The boss fight is something you haven’t seen so far in FFXIV. You will need at least 4 parties to defeat it. People who played “Everquest” might feel nostalgic.
Q: And what if you go with less than 4 parties?
Y: Shouts will be heard in the entire area, so in case you don’t have enough members, you can call for help, or maybe let the area know you started fighting and that people should gather up.
Q: Are there any requirements to enter the zone?
Y: There are no requirements. If you want to go with 9 parties, you can. We want to make use of this feature in the upcoming Eureka.
5. We need more discussion on the jumping potion
Q: You posted a long forum post about jumping potions the other day. What was the intent behind the timing of posting?
Y: After an interview at Las Vegas, many players have been doing a lot of discussing about the jumping potion. However, because the system behind the jumping potion is not well known, there was a lot of noise, but not much moving forward. Also many players thought of the problem as black and white, which lead to a lot of fighting. Because players are discussing the future of FFXIV, I wanted to explain the jumping potion system we currently have in place for the Chinese and Korean versions of the game.
Q: The jumping potion really divides the players?
Y: There are players that think that all new players will buy jumping potions and get to level 60. I wanted to clear that misconception up. Also, there is no gathering or crafting jumping potions, so it won’t have any influence on the economy of the game. Besides, even if players use the jumping potion, they won’t be at the level cap immediately. They still have to do the last part of leveling by themselves. The price of the potion is also quite high, so not everyone will be able to buy it, nor will it be given out lightly. We have data from the Korean and Chinese versions, too, so we will make final decision by the end of January on whether we will implement the potion in 4.0 or at a later time.
Q: Does the development team want the potion implemented?
Y: Well, we are developing it regardless, because we will need to upgrade the already existing potion to a 4.0 version for the Korean and Chinese version of the game. The problem is whether or not to release it in the global version.
Q: Are you giving out free potions to new players in the Chinese and Korean versions?
Y: No, but we did have a campaign where new players could buy the potions cheaper once, but that also had a price and was limited time only. Players playing the free trial can’t use the potion. It’s made for people who have the motivation to play the game for a long time. In regards to the implementation, we had a lot of discussion with Chinese businesses which have experience in the Chinese market, so it went quite well. In Korea, there was a lot of discussion about the player gap before it was implemented, but the implementation happened without any problems. I think it will be the same for the global version, but we will know the facts only if we do so.
Q: In Wow, many players gave up because they were suddenly level 90 or 100 and had no idea what to do. How will you handle that if it happens to FFXIV?
Y: When it comes to FFXIV, the Main Scenario Quests are in some ways tutorials because it is based on solo play. I also know that there are players who want the users of the potions to be forced into doing dummy trials.
Q: I think there will be people who won’t want to use the Duty Finder because they are scared as gained 60 levels in an instant.
Y: After using the jump potion, all of the dungeons will be unlocked automatically up to that level. If you want to train, you can go to low level dungeons. Also there is the Hall of the Novice. There is feedback (suggestions) for The Hall of the Intermediate, too, but I think that for this case, Hall of the Novice is much more useful. Players will get to understand skill rotations at some point or the other, but completely new players usually get confused with concepts such as avoiding enemy attacks, or keeping/gaining hate from enemies. I think it’s necessary to have some kind of guidance in that aspect.
Q: So it’s good to play low level content to learn how to play if you use the potion.
Y: People who usually but the jumping potion are players who have high motivation to play it. It’s usually players who have experience with MMO’s. Completely new players usually get to level 30 or 40 before they buy the potion, and I think by that time, many of them are used to the gameplay. Many players also do research on the rotations. These are just data results, and I’m not trying to tell players to not discuss it. If players really don’t want the potion, we won’t implement it with the release of 4.0.
Q: Is there any chance the potion will come before 4.0?
Y: No.
Q: If it were to be implemented, it would be at the timing of 4,0’s release?
Y: If we were to implement it before the release, many people would think it’s Pay to Win. WoW did that with Legion. They implemented the potion before the release of the expansion, but they can do that because they are used to jumping potions. That is not the case for FFXIV. It would destroy the game.
Q: So it’s definitely not coming beforehand.
Y: Yes. The merit of doing that however is that you would be matched with people who got used to the game to some extent and don’t have to start 4.0 completely fresh. However, we won’t be doing that this time.
Q: Do you have any message for the players?
Y: It’s still before the FanFestival, so I can’t say I’m relaxed. (laugh) But there will be a lot of new information coming at Fan Fest. There’s a lot of things that we want to do that are new and haven’t been done before.
I’m sorry to say this, but part 1 of 3.5’s story will end with a cliffhanger. I hope we can share the excitement for 4.0 together. Please look forward to the new information we have in store for you.
In 3.5, there is a large amount of casual content. There will also be new equipment for gatherers and crafters with special effects. I think it will give a good closure to the 3.x series and a good opening for 4.0. With the end of the game release rush, many players will be coming back to the game, so it’s great timing for 3.5.
Also, the Returning Player System will also be implemented in 3.5. They will be able to use the Beginner’s chat and get help from Mentor players. I think it’s a good strategy to give players a smooth return.
Lastly, the cross-world party finder is also coming, so there won’t be so much need to be on high populated servers. Entire Free Companies might do server transfers to lower populated servers to seek free housing lots. It is time to start preparation for changes of gameplay elements. We are working very hard to deliver Stormblood by early summer. 2017 will be challenging but we will do our best.10. September 2012,
Hinrichtung von mutmaßlichen Schwulen im Iran
Eine staatliche iranische Nachrichtenagentur verbreitet das Gerücht, dass israelische Juden mit westlicher Hilfe Homosexualität verbreiteten, um die "Weltherrschaft" zu übernehmen.
Die Mashregh-Nachrichtenagentur berichtete nach Angaben der "Huffington Post" in einem Enthüllungsartikel über den Geheimplan des "jüdischen Finanz- und Humankapitals, das vom Westen, insbesondere aus Amerika und Großbritannien, unterstützt wird". Dabei attackierten die Autoren insbesondere liberale jüdische Gläubige wegen ihrer Akzeptanz von Homosexualität. Dahinter stecke der Plan, Homosexualität zu einer weltweit akzeptierten Lebensform zu machen und daraufhin Homo-Gegner zu verfolgen. Auf diese Weise könne der Westen im Namen der Menschenrechte andere Länder unterjochen.
Iran: Propaganda für Homosexualität in Hollywood und Universitäten
Insbesondere Hollywood mache Propaganda für Homosexualität, aber auch "jüdische Universitäten". Viele Literaturpreise würden zudem von "Zionisten" kontrolliert und daher besonders oft an Homosexuelle gegeben. Zudem würden amerikanische Internetseiten wie Facebook homosexuelle Paare gezielt glorifizieren.
Das Wohlergehen der homosexuellen Menschen, so der Artikel, sei dem Westen dabei egal: "Wenn die Unterstützung für Homosexuelle wirklich aus humanen Gründen durchgeführt wird, würde man ihnen individuell Hilfen anbieten, damit sie mit einer medizinischen Behandlung von ihren unmoralischen Aktionen gerettet werden können, die die Familie unterminieren."
Artikel rechtfertigt Todesstrafe
In der "Jerusalem Post" erklärte der Iranexperte Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, dass der Text wahrscheinlich auch eine Rechtfertigung für die iranische Innenpolitik sei: "Der Artikel legitimiert die Todesstrafe für Schwule im Iran. Er macht sich nicht nur über den Westen lustig, sondern gibt auch Gründe, warum der Iran Schwule exekutieren soll."
Israel, das mit Abstand homofreundlichste Land in der Region, wird immer wieder beschuldigt, aus niederen Beweggründen Schwule und Lesben zu unterstützen. So glauben einige linksorientierte Gruppen im Westen, dass Israel Homo-Rechte nur unterstütze, um sich von anderen Menschenrechtsverletzungen reinzuwaschen. Sie bezeichnen diese Politik als "Pinkwashing" (queer.de berichtete). (dk)Brexiteers have demanded a clean break from Brussels after it was revealed every single new EU law opposed by Britain since the referendum has been passed.
Campaigners said the figures showed why the UK needs to break free from EU regulations.
Since the Brexit referendum in June 2016, Britain has taken part in 102 votes of the EU’s Council of Ministers.
Brexiteers have demanded a clean break from Brussels after it was revealed every single new EU law opposed by Britain since the referendum has been passed
In 17 of those, the country either abstained or voted against the proposed measures. All were subsequently pushed through, bringing in a raft of rules that disadvantage the UK’s interests.
Research by campaign group Change Britain found the new regulations added £473.3million to the EU budget, of which the share paid by British taxpayers works out at £63.6million. Motions the UK refused to endorse – but has nonetheless been forced to accept – include new common rules for ports.
Prior to becoming Brexit Secretary, David Davis warned that this measure ‘will interfere with the commercial freedom of our ports and undermine their ability to attract investment in essential national infrastructure’, claiming that up to 400,000 jobs could be affected.
Gisela Stuart, chairman of Change Britain, said: ‘Those who argue we should stay tied to the EU’s single market in order to influence policy are deluding themselves.
‘The fact is that Brussels already ignores our concerns, and this will only continue if we remain answerable to EU law without being a member of the bloc.
‘This is why we must take back full control of our laws and deliver a clean Brexit.’
Boris Johnson last week warned that keeping Britain shackled to EU laws after Brexit would be ‘madness’.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the ‘Brussels way of regulation’ cannot keep pace with the needs of the high-growth industries of the future
The Foreign Secretary said the ‘Brussels way of regulation’ cannot keep pace with the needs of the high-growth industries of the future.
He said maintaining full alignment with EU rules would make a mockery of Brexit, adding: ‘I think the argument is gaining ground that it really would be madness to leave without taking back control of your regulatory freedoms.’
Mr Johnson is leading the charge in the Cabinet for a clean break from the EU.
During talks last week he faced resistance from Chancellor Philip Hammond and Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who fear moving too far from EU regulations could damage existing export markets.
The Foreign Secretary was backed by Michael Gove and Liam Fox, who argue that Brussels’ red tape helps explain why Europe has failed to produce a technology giant such as Microsoft or Google.
Mrs May reserved her position on the matter, telling ministers there would be further discussions before she reaches a final view. The Cabinet meeting reached a broad agreement that the UK should be free to diverge in some areas after Brexit.Donington Park will once again play host to the season launch of the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship with organisers announcing Tuesday 22 March for the event.
The Leicestershire circuit has hosted the annual event for the last four years and will give media and fans their first glimpse at the 2016 competitors.
While the morning will see the teams and drivers take part in media duties, the afternoon will be open to the public as the cars take on the National circuit in the only official pre-season test.
“We’re delighted to welcome back the BTCC for its annual Season Launch in 2016.” said Christopher Tate, Managing Director of Donington Park.
“The fact that this will be the fourth consecutive season that Donington Park hosted this important event is testament to how well it has been received by everyone involved in the BTCC, as well as the media and fans alike. It’s a fantastic way to launch what I’m sure will yet another unforgettable season for the BTCC and Donington Park.”
2016 BTCC Season Launch
22 March – Donington Park
2016 BTCC Calendar
Sat 2/Sun 3 April – Brands Hatch (Indy), Kent
Sat 16/Sun 17 April – Donington Park, Leicestershire
Sat 7/Sun 8 May – Thruxton, Hampshire
Sat 4/Sun 5 June – Oulton Park (Island), Cheshire
Sat 18/Sun 19 June – Croft, North Yorkshire
Sat 30/Sun 31 July – Snetterton, Norfolk
Sat 13/Sun 14 August – Knockhill, Fife
Sat 27/Sun 28 August – Rockingham, Northamptonshire
Sat 17/Sun 18 September – Silverstone, Northamptonshire
Sat 1/Sun 2 October – Brands Hatch (Grand Prix), KentThis photo taken Friday July 12, 2013, shows the Salyers' produce stand in Council, Va. Four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and a vanishing American Dream. Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.” (AP Photo/Debra McCown)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
___
Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
Story continuesThe Mayor of the island of Salamis, Isidora Nana Papatahnasiou told Proto Thema that the leakage of petrol from a tanker that sank on Sunday in the Saronic Gulf was an ecological catastrophe. Tanker “Agia Zona II” had sailed from the Aspropyrgos refineries with 2,200 metric tons of fuel oil and 370 metric tons of marine gas oil. Until now, the causes of the shipwreck remain unclear, but unconfirmed information suggests that the ship’s engine room may have taken in water. The ship sank in the area southwest of Atalanti in the Saronic Gulf, at 2:45 in the morning of Sunday.
The images from the beaches of Salamina yesterday revealed the extent of the ecological damage on the coastal line of the island. The beaches of Salamis from Cynosura to Selinia were black covered in fuel oil, while oil and tar had spread over a length of 1.5 kilometers.
Protothema.gr contacted the Mayor of Salamina, Isidora Nannou – Papathanasiou, who spoke of a huge ecological disaster but also of a significant delay from the competent bodies in dealing with the problem.
“There is a great ecological disaster in Salamis, not just pollution, it is a disaster, because the oil has reached the outside, it has covered the coast. It is the entire area of the Selinia and the area of the Cynosoura. The smell is unbearable”, she said.
On his part the manager of the company assigned with part of the cleaning up process, Mr, Mamalukas was reassuring, dubbing the word “destruction” an exaggeration as he claimed there will be a complete restoration of the coastline and the environment: “The ship was quickly sealed off which stopped further leakage. When the ship sinks and oil leaks, you do not have time. It spreads at a rapid pace. The fact that oil appeared a few hours later has nothing to do with the speed of the reaction, but rather with the speed at which the blob moved due to winds and the currents”, he said.
There are currently twenty-three privately-owned ships operating in the Selini area and five anti-pollution vessels. More are expected to arrive to speed up the cleaning process and contain the leak to other parts of the island.
The captain and the first engineer of the tanker were released by authorities after being arrested. They are scheduled to stand trial at a later date.Hello everyone!!
Huge interview with Andy about the Necromunda box and the future of the game:
Andy Hoare:
Project manager,
Specialist Games Team of seven - started last year with Blood Bowl.
They were working on Necromunda since a long time.
Favorite game of Andy, still plays it.
When all the plastic terrain was ready he asked his boss to do a new Necromunda and they said Yes!
They are talking about Underhive no the 3D campaign today - next week is about the Supplement book.
Background:
First version was Confrontation in WD.
Then 1995 classic boxset, played since then.
Revisited in 2000 by the old fanatic studio.
Dedicated groups are still playing the old version today.
Andy Hoare group plays it, house rules it, amends it, created new stuff.
Models:
Duplicate sprues but 10 different models can be made!
2 for each gang.
Objectives and tentacle sprue,
traps (used with gang tactic cards)
Priority marker.
Hatches and doors: designed to fit with zone mortalis and other FW scenery.
Rules book: you need it, even if you want to do 3D only. Underhive is a complete game.
9 tiles same size as Zone Mortalis tiles.
Andy says:
They played Necromunda so much on mortalis that the 2D tiles weren't a compromise.
Beta tester really liked the game in 2D, and it didn’t felt like a starter set used to learn the game.
Even if you see square on the tiles you still use inches in game, so it’s really necromunda on tiles.
Punch counter:
-Ready and pinned counter are recto verso
-Pre generated gangs are on cards to get started super fast.
-Fire is back in the game,
-You can go prone and remove fire.
-Vision arcs: because models have facing (like warmachine)
-place a duct between walls to go through it - you can even launch a grenade, fire through it etc.
-Lot of skills allow you to by pass overwatch, backstab ppl.
Custom dice:
-2 sets
-Gang specific dice. (adding pics soon)
Cards:
22 blank cards
Are already laminated!!!! so you can erase
Gang tactics: Generics, esher, goliath. Future gang will get future cards.
They have extra set of gang tactics cards ready to sell, not the same in the box, they are extension cards.
Differentiation:
Andy Hoare plays rogue trader all the time!! so he added the old stat (int and all) to grant a lot of different options/
Stat line of different gangs set them apart and with gangs tactic’s they play really different.
Zone Mortalis bases, designed to match the tiles of the boards but also with details of mechanicus
terrain.
Book:
Can’t buy the rulebook on it’s own. Because dice needed, but good values.
LEGACY RULES:
PDF on the web site, live on the game release date, for orlock, van sar, etc.. but only for the weapons the original metal models got. So don’t get too hyped.
Future
Orlocks are next year.
One plastic team every quarter +possible few wd, pdf article.
Brand new gangs are hyped.
John blanche made a book a of 80pages of fluff but the book went missing. And then new archivist of GW TIM found this book for andy. SO LOT OF inspiration.
Box set available in: eng, fren, german.
They have stock of the box - don't be scared, you should get your box if you pre-order.
/////////////
Rules:
Total rewrite of the rules for underhive. Gang war 3D, is built on the underhive rule set.
It’s a "I go, you go": “interleave turn” system. So you can active more than 1 models (no details on how).
Gang tactics:
All scenario use them in a different way : choose, drawn at random, weak side can draw more or choose. There is a lot of granularity with these.
Dice:
Fire power dice : Each time you roll to hit, you roll 1+ fire power dice (depending on the weapon). Work as a sustained fire dice and ammo dice.
Red tiles: The box is a necromunda loading dock. It’s a training room at start and will be used for multiplayers 3+ (pit fight style) or future scenario.
Lvl up:
Gangs are more than the 15 players you used to have in necromunda classic.
Now you can select a crew before each scenario.
Specialist, juvie and champion get skills, gangers can’t but can be promoted to champ or specialist.
Rules for juvie will be in gangs war book, with a lot of importance. If the juvie survive a few games it became the star of the gang(no more details but lot of hype around the juvie.)
WW preparing a map of underspire in 3D.
Gang war games use a 4by4 size table.
Support class: doc, ratling cook, ….(4 planned)
FW upgrade are already on the way to new weapons, iconic item …
House weapons blitzer will be made with rules to them!
They want to make rules for everything possible to allow kitbashing a goliath with a driller!
Champions are the new heavy!
Genestealer and Chaos Cults will get rules down the line. Maybe quite early via online or WD!!
All the Genestealer Cult weapons are usable by all other gangs too, so have fun kit-bashing stuff!
/cheers.
bob.Rule Would List All Chimps As Endangered, Even Lab Animals
toggle caption Sven Hoppe/DPA/Landov
This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a new rule that would extend "endangered species" protections to chimpanzees held in captivity. Nearly half of all the chimps in the U.S. live in research facilities, and the regulation changes would make it more difficult to use these animals in medical experiments.
But don't expect an outcry among most scientists. In the past decade or so, "there has been a significant shift away from using chimpanzees in research," says Kathleen Conlee, the vice president of animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States.
Scientists first became interested in studying chimps in the 1920s to gain insights into primate psychology — including, they hoped, the psychology of humans.
And then came the Space Age. In 1961, the U.S. sent a chimpanzee named Ham into space, and soon the primates became the animal of choice for getting a sense of how humans might fare in rocket flights beyond Earth's atmosphere.
It wasn't until around the 1970s that chimps became a popular model for studying some infectious diseases — and for testing new drugs and vaccines.
"It's not hard to understand why chimpanzees would have been chosen from a scientific point of view," says John Pippin, a cardiologist who is with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. "They do share 98 percent of our DNA."
Sometimes chimpanzees did lead to important breakthroughs, researchers say, for example in understanding and treating hepatitis B and C. But more often, as in HIV research, those chimp studies didn't reveal much.
In the 1980s, chimps became very popular among scientists trying to develop a vaccine for AIDS. But as it turned out, Pippin says, chimps don't get AIDS in the same way as humans. "Two decades of research produced 90 or so candidate vaccines," he says. "They have been tested in more than 200 clinical trials and, as you know, we still don't have an HIV vaccine."
Our growing knowledge in genetics and genomics help explain why the animals have been less useful than previously thought. Their genes may be very similar to ours, Pippin says, but "how genes are organized, and how they're turned on, turned off, how they contribute to diseases and to responses to treatment [for] diseases is very different between chimpanzees and humans."
And, over time, animal rights groups and the public seem to have become more concerned about using chimps in research. "The question now is being asked in a different way," says Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Not, 'Is it useful to do research involving chimpanzees?' But [rather] 'is it necessary?' "
In 2011, Kahn was chairman of an Institute of Medicine committee that looked into that question. The committee found that the answer was no, because there are alternatives such as human-cell cultures and other animals. Genetically altered mice, for example are already used to study human diseases. Rodents aren't a perfect proxy for humans, but new genetic tools are making mice more humanlike in the way they respond to microbes and drugs.
"There's work being done, for instance, at the Rockefeller [University] to develop a mouse with a humanized liver," says Kahn. Such mice, he says, would make a great model for studying human diseases like hepatitis.
Animal-rights groups see the proposed Fish and Wildlife rule as a move in the right direction. "The cost of using these animals and the availability of other ways of doing this research are leading to an end of their use," says Conlee, the Humane Society vice president.
In the very few cases where scientists feel they must rely on chimps, the new rule would require a permit. And the researchers would need to prove that their work also benefits chimpanzees.
The agency is taking public comments on the proposed rule until Aug. 12 and hopes to finalize the regulation within a year.
Though chimp research is winding down, Conlee says, the federal government has yet to figure out what to do with the hundreds of chimpanzees no longer needed that still live in research centers around the country.www.patreon.com/djthed
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OpenGL 50% Speed:
Was messing around with lighting again and I found just leaving the rim lights on had a pretty pleasant look to it. I rolled with it and animated something to go with it. If you wish to support me, here's my Patreon link:Paypal Alternative:OpenGL 50% Speed:Was messing around with lighting again and I found just leaving the rim lights on had a pretty pleasant look to it. I rolled with it and animated something to go with it.
This is also the first time I've animated a perfect loop animation since the Trot Cycle animation I did months ago. I missed doing these. Idles are a pretty easy way to go about making a looped animation too, and that's also a thing I haven't really done with ponies yet too. Even though it is an idle animation, it certainly doesn't mean the animation has to be super simple. Sp |
, or Lou Gehrig's disease. In the past decade or so, nine potential drugs have been tested in people who have this degenerative nerve disorder. Not one has been effective.
So Steve Perrin, who runs the ALS Therapy Development Institute in Cambridge Mass., decided to take a close look at the mouse studies that had initially suggested these drugs were promising.
"We tried to replicate those findings precisely by talking to the authors and trying to repeat the experiments in an identical fashion," Perrin says. "And what we found was that we couldn't replicate a lot of the experiments."
Perrin says that if scientists had been more careful with their initial mouse studies, they would have realized that these drugs were never good candidates and that it made no sense to try them in people.
Scientists who did those early studies would have known that — if they had done the studies correctly, Perrin wrote in the journal Nature. Instead, it ended up wasting a huge amount of time and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's also a rough deal for the patients who have diseases like ALS, which can progress rapidly to paralysis and death, if they choose to try an experimental treatment.
"Patients have one shot on goal," he says. "If it doesn't work for them, they've lost that one shot. They might not qualify for the next trial that looks promising, or they may lose their battle with the disease."
And this is not just a problem for ALS. It's true for cancer research as well.
C. Glenn Begley worked at the drug company Amgen in Thousand Oaks, Calif., to develop cancer drugs. He also noticed a lot of faulty animal studies in the early stages of drug development. His rule of thumb was that 60 percent of them were no good.
But when he actually sat down to review more than 50 studies that had come in over the transom, "I was frankly shocked to find that the number was more like 90 percent of papers that we were unable to reproduce."
Because Amgen and other big pharmaceutical companies know that many animal studies are dubious, they always redo them before deciding whether to go ahead with human studies. So the company did not end up wasting hundreds of millions of dollars or years on a dead end.
But that's not always the case.
"For small companies that have limited resources, they probably do go ahead with studies that ultimately will burn out," Begley says. (Since he did that analysis, he has moved to Tetralogic Pharmaceuticals in Malvern, Pa.).
Begley says this problem doesn't apply to drugs that make it all the way through the approval process. But these early errors clearly slow the search for new drugs. He says it's not that scientists doing these tests are deliberately sloppy.
"Fundamentally, it's the way we as human beings operate," he says. "We really want results to be positive. We really want to discover something that's going to improve human health."
So scientists are too eager to seize on hopeful results, and not skeptical enough about their own work.
Drug studies in human beings take that into account by making sure scientists running the tests don't know who's getting the drug and who's getting the comparison pill. Begley says that same standard should be applied to animal studies. Scientists doing this research need to be rewarded for getting it right, he says, not just for getting it published.
It will cost more in the short run to do it right, but that will avoid wasting time and money in the long run, Perrin says. "We can't possibly keep living under the same system that we have been for the last decade or so."Eibar to appoint Caparros?
By Football Espana staff
Eibar are just an official confirmation away from appointing Joaquin Caparros as their new Coach, according to Marca.
The Basques are currently without a trainer as Gaizka Garitano quit the club in wake of their 3-0 win against Cordoba on the final day of last season, which was initially not enough to keep the side afloat.
However, Elche’s demotion for non-football reasons has seen Eibar reinstated to La Liga, and the newspaper claims they have picked an experienced head in the 59-year-old to lead the team out in their sophomore campaign.
Caparros made his name at Sevilla between 2000 and 2005, establishing the team as a top-flight force and laying down the foundations for future success, before moving on to Deportivo La Coruna.
Since then, he has coached the likes of Athletic Bilbao, Mallorca, Levante and Granada with mixed results, having been dismissed from the Andalucians last January.Gov. Nikki Haley asked S.C lawmakers to put more attention on fixing K-12 schools, rather than spending more money on the state’s colleges, during her State of the State address Wednesday.
Haley advocated borrowing $200 million to repair K-12 schools, a year after opposing borrowing for a number of other projects, including, she said, “hundreds of millions of dollars to fill a wish list for our already bloated higher education system.”
“No one can look at the tuition hikes parents and students have seen over the last decade and tell me that higher education doesn’t have enough money,” the Republican governor told the GOP-controlled Legislature.
“And no one can drive the campuses of Clemson, South Carolina and so many others, see the brand-new facilities and massive new construction projects, and tell me that they represent our greatest need.
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“That is not true of elementary, middle and high schools in Denmark. Or Clarendon. Or Abbeville,” said Haley, who has spent the past year looking at colleges for her daughter, a high-school senior. “But if we don’t focus on K-12, and focus on it now, higher education won’t even be a possibility for far too many South Carolina children.”
Haley also called for letting the governor appoint the state superintendent of education.
To end high turnover among teachers in rural and poor school districts, she proposed to pay for the state college tuition of teachers who agree to spend eight years in rural or poor districts.
“Children deserve to know that teachers believe in them enough to stay,” Haley said. “We have to slow this revolving door.”
‘Angels living here on Earth’
Haley also used the 41-minute speech to share her plans to fix the state’s roads, curb domestic violence and make lawmakers more accountable. She also spoke about how the state handled tragedies last year.
The shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston dominated the governor’s address. A self-avowed white supremacist was charged with killing nine parishioners, including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, a Jasper Democrat who was the church’s pastor.
She asked legislators to follow Pinckney’s example as a lawmaker.
“I knew him to be a man who never seemed to speak against anyone or anything but, instead, to advocate for the people and the ideas that he believed in,” she said with Pinckney’s family in the gallery. “We should all spend a little more time getting to know the people behind the policies.”
Haley read the names of the nine victims killed at the church and acknowledged the three survivors, two of whom attended the address. “For reasons only God knows, we lost nine amazing souls that night,” Haley said. “So too, for reasons only He knows, God decided He wasn’t ready to take three more, that He still had work for them to do.”
Haley became emotional after delivering those lines. Her voice started to shake, and she took a sip of water.
“These two women, and the precious little one who was with them that night, are proof that we have angels living here on Earth,” Haley said,fighting back tears in the House chamber.
Haley’s speech did not address her successful call to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds after the Charleston shooting. The issue divided the Legislature, especially the House, which debated more than 12 hours before voting to banish the Civil War banner.
Haley also thanked the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American motorist who was killed by a white North Charleston police officer last year, for helping the state focus on “justice and progress,” avoiding civil unrest.
“They started the calming of our community,” she said with Scott’s family in the House gallery. “Their words and actions allowed South Carolina the chance to right this wrong, the best we could, without the influence of outsiders.”
The governor also praised the work of state leaders in handling October’s historic flood.
“This team knew they couldn’t sleep until we made sure we had done everything in our power to keep people safe, provide aid to those in need, and strengthen our citizens with the information and the resources to move forward,” Haley said.
But she did not mention requests by farmers who asked her to seek federal aid after they lost more than $300 million in crops. Haley has said she did not want to play favorites among business owners hurt in the storms.
‘What the vote might look like’
On road repair, the top issue with many lawmakers, Haley insisted she would veto a bill that does not roll back state income taxes or reform the agency that sets road priorities. She did not mention that her proposed budget includes the start of a 10-cent-a-gallon state gas tax hike to help pay for road repairs and a far larger income-tax cut.
On domestic violence, Haley offered recommendations she unveiled two weeks ago, included adding prosecutors so police officers no longer have to prosecute some cases.
“Domestic violence is an issue that has plagued us for far too long,” she said. “Tonight, I say it will plague us to that extent no more.”
Haley clearly was aggravated at the failure again of lawmakers last year to pass stricter ethics laws.
The House passed ethics bills, but the proposals sat in the Senate. Most senators have balked at allowing anyone but other senators to investigate allegations against them.
The governor went off script during her address, asking senators who back income disclosure and independent investigations to stand. Some House members rose to applaud the few senators who stood.
“This is what the vote might look like,” Haley said.A video of what appears to be a particularly violent case of road rage in downtown Vancouver has surfaced online.
The footage, shot on June 6 and uploaded to YouTube Wednesday, captures one driver seemingly choking another on Howe Street. (Watch above.)
At the beginning of the video, the alleged attacker is standing at the side of the other man's car, shouting at him. Then he quickly reaches out and grabs him by the neck.
The angry driver lets go after several seconds, swears at the alleged victim, and leaves in a black BMW.
The Reddit user who originally posted the clip said the men got out of their cars "after a verbal fight," but it's unclear how what unfolded before the recorded altercation.
Vancouver police Const. Brian Montague told HuffPost B.C. that there's no record of anyone calling police, or a complaint being filed with the force.
In March, a YouTube video caught an angry driver punching a motorist — with Vancouver police responding to another case just across the street. The man was charged with assault.
Generally, police advise that anyone who sees erratic or aggressive driving to report the behaviour to them.
(H/T Reddit /r/Vancouver)
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Also on HuffPostTHE new £1 coin has been dubbed the “most secure in the world” - but some have already been found to have a major flaw.
Dozens of new 12-sided coins where the centre has come loose are being flogged on eBay, with many hoping to cash in on the error.
2 The "most secure coin in the world"...but some centres have been coming loose
Ebay 2 Sellers on eBay have been trying to flog the coins for a few more quid
The new £1 coin is made of two metal rings and includes a hologram, as well as a hidden security feature to protect it from counterfeiting.
But it appears that a minting error has caused a small number of the coins to separate.
The Royal Mint plans to strike a total of 1.5 billion coins with the new design by the end of the year.
Despite tight quality controls there a small number that slip through with mistakes.
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Coins often become valuable when they are made with an error. The small and subtle minting mistakes means they are more sought-after by collectors.
But how much will a coin with a loose centre fetch? The most one of these coins has sold for is £13.50, while others have been selling for just £3.
Other new £1 coins with minting errors, such as missing have sold for as much as £295 on eBay.
WHAT TO DO IF YOU'VE GOT A RARE COIN Firstly, you need to make sure the coin is legit and not counterfeit. The Royal Mint is unable to value a coin but it can confirm whether it is real or not. They will usually supply you with a letter to confirm this. Once you’ve found out whether the coin is real or not, you have a number of options - either selling it through a coin dealer, at auction or on eBay. If you want to sell the coin you’ve found in your spare change on eBay then you need to know the risks. Remember to set a minimum price that is higher or at the very least equal to the face value of the coin. Even if your coin “sells” on eBay for a high price there’s no guarantee that the buyer will cough out. It its terms and conditions, the auction website states that bidders enter a “legally binding contract to purchase an item”, but there’s no way to enforce this rule in reality. For more information about what to do if you've found a rare coin, read our guide.
Earlier this year, The Sun Online squashed claims that new £1 coins with the 2016 date were worth as much as £250.
Since the coin was launched on March 28, hundreds of 2016 new £1 coins have been listed on eBay.
The sellers say they are rare, claiming they have been misprinted with the 2016 date.
Some have even tried their luck by listing them for as much as £750,000.
But these estimations have been vastly overblown. Some coins have even gone for LESS than their original value as sellers forget to put a minimum limit on their eBay listing.
The Sun Online contacted the Royal Mint for a comment.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Money team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 78 24516Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Russell Westbrook has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. If you haven’t already done so, please stow your carry-on luggage underneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin. At this time, we request that all mobile phones, pagers, radios and remote controlled toys be turned off for the full duration of the flight, as these items might interfere with the navigational and communication equipment on this aircraft. Air Westbrook, the most exciting young Point Guard in the NBA is ready to take flight. If you have any questions about our flight today, please don’t hesitate to ask one of our Posterizes flight attendants. Be cautioned for turbulence due to thunder. Thank you.
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Designed By Ishaan Mishra of Source24designs.This late-night lamp takes your laziness and turns it into a virtue. When you are propped up in bed reading and you can no longer keep your eyes open, let alone fumble for a light switch, just drop your book on top of the bedside light. The wedge-shape of the Reading Lamp will let your book hang over it, keeping your place, and an infrared switch detects the book and kills the power. Too hot? Scared the book might hit Fahrenheit 451? The compact fluorescent inside keeps things cool-ish and the polycarbonate shade is tough enough to last.
The Reading Lamp is part of a group project by designers Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse, Vincent Vandenbrouck and Jun Yasumoto, and looks to us very much like the lights inside the railroad trains of childhood, when the windows had curtains, the seats had ashtrays and the conductors called you sir. Well, they called my father sir. I was always to busy throwing up my ice-cream lunch from the window (an opening window, at least).
This is a concept which should be snapped up right now. Muji and Ikea, I’m looking at you.
Product page [Jun Yasumoto via Core77]Former president Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation is undergoing a $35-million renovation to demonstrate that enslaved lives matter. Monticello historian Christa Dierksheide described the makeover as an investment to ensure visitors to the historic site “understand that there was no place on this mountaintop that slavery wasn’t.” “Thomas Jefferson was surrounded by people, and the vast majority of those people were enslaved.” Although Jefferson held captive more than 600 Black people over his lifetime, their existence has mostly been concealed from visitors to this Virginia landmark.
Even Sally Hemings, the enslaved Black female who gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children, “wasn’t mentioned,” according to Dierksheide, “because [she] was viewed as something that could taint Jefferson’s reputation.” The Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson highlights the tackiness of the concealment: “The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom.”
Incorporating Hemings’ experience is one of the primary objectives of the revamp. Thompson explains, “Monticello historians hope the restored room will humanize the image of Hemings beyond the gossipy old accounts of Jefferson’s so-called ‘concubine.’”
The Post and other media outlets employ a gambit of descriptors to define the tragic arrangement between Jefferson and Hemings that produced six offspring. Dierkshiede labels the pairing a “40-year relationship.” Others dub this a “long-term” affair or an “owner-slave relationship.”
No one calls it rape.
Robert Jensen, a white University of Texas at Austin professor and author of “The Heart of Whiteness,” reveals that he gets “the most hateful reaction from white people” when he declares that incontrovertible logic dictates that Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemings. “Any sexual contact between a slave and a master is essentially a case of rape,” Jensen notes this reasoning is generally accepted in an abstract manner, but this becomes intolerable “for some people to recognize when it’s applied to a specific white person.” Especially one of the country’s white Founding Fathers.
The indigestibility of calling the author of the Declaration of Independence a rapist motivates a fusillade of reactions. Jenson pinpoints how a number of whites will “talk about how he and Sally had a loving relationship and all of these attempts to gloss over the fact Thomas Jefferson owned her.” Plantation romances between white enslavers and shackled Black bodies are racist fabrications that camouflage the torture and suffering inflicted by the likes of Jefferson and other slave masters.
Speaking with Atlanta Black Star, Rev. Erica Evans Whitaker, a Louisville, Ky., pastor and local activist, categorizes narratives of an affectionate pairing between Jefferson and Hemings as “propaganda for the current environment we live in.” She couldn’t recall a single novel or film portraying a Nazi-Jewish romance with a World War II concentration camp as a backdrop, but could immediately think of dramatizations where Black people in bondage become smitten with their white “owners.”
The 2000 “historical drama” “Sally Hemings: American Scandal” provides a four-hour illustration. Writing for Variety, Laura Fries says the epic drama would have viewers believe the “Hemings-Jefferson relationship was, in fact, a love story for the ages.” The movie does not address the more than 25-year age difference between the two. Hemings was an adolescent teen when the overseer of Monticello began sexually exploiting his “property.”
Ned and Constance Sublette’s “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry,” reminds us that Jefferson raped Hemings and, more broadly, stresses that, “To own a slave was to have a license for libertine behavior because sexual violation was intrinsic to slavery. The slaveowner had the full legal right to do with his property as he saw fit and sexual use was part of the portfolio of privileges.”
The Sublettes don’t just employ nifty financial metaphors. They quote Jefferson’s code for the successful fiscal operation of a plantation. The former president wrote: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm.” Meaning the taking and forced breeding of Sally Hemings — all enslaved Black females — was what Jefferson believed to be essential to sustaining a slave empire.
Thomas Jefferson is one of the four sculpted figures of Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the founder of the University of Virginia. To correctly brand his actions should mandate a re-valuation of his reputation — and of those who revere his words and deeds.(Adds background on Roshen, context on crisis)
KIEV, April 28 (Reuters) - Russian authorities have seized the assets of a confectionery factory owned by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the Russian city of Lipetsk in order to block their sale, parent company Roshen said on Tuesday.
Since March 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and pro-Russian rebels rose up in eastern Ukraine, the Lipetsk plant has been raided by armed police, boycotted and accused by Russian politicians of supporting extremism.
“It is safe to say the Russian side is deliberately taking all possible steps to prevent the company selling its assets in Russia,” Roshen said in a statement. It said it would appeal against a decision by a Russian court to seize the assets, which it valued at 2 billion roubles ($39 million).
Poroshenko, nicknamed the Chocolate King, promised when he was elected last May to sell Roshen, which takes its name from the middle two syllables of his surname and had pre-crisis annual sales of $1.2 billion.
However the eastern conflict and resulting economic crisis are likely to have complicated the sales process and no deals have yet been announced.Savji Dholakia, a generous diamond tycoon in Gujarat, is once again giving away hundreds of cars and flats to his employees as a bonus for meeting company targets.
Dholakia, who runs a diamond export firm in Surat, announced his company will give 1,260 cars, 400 flats and pieces of jewellery to his employees ahead of Diwali, which falls on the weekend.
“Our aim is that each employee must have his own home and car in the next five years. So we have decided to gift cars, homes and jewellery to employees,” Dholakia, owner of the Hare Krishna Exports, said.
Read | From cars to flats to jewellery for staff: Meet the super generous Savji Dholakia
“...We are arranging for houses for those who already own cars, while those who don’t have a four-wheeler will get one,” he said.
He said the rewards were in recognition of the outstanding performance and dedication shown by employees in the last five years.
The company will be spending an estimated Rs 500 million (Rs 50 crore) under the loyalty programme to reward an unknown number of staff from a total workforce of 5,500.
Most employees receive presents of some kind from their bosses during Diwali, the festival of lights, but they are usually boxes of Indian sweets.
But Dholakia has been making headlines by giving expensive gifts to his employees since 2012, when three employees received cars for their performance.
The generous boss gave 491 cars and 207 flats to his employees under a similar programme in 2014.
The company will exclude previous year’s beneficiaries from the new scheme.
Dholakia’s firm is one of the leading polishing companies in India’s diamond hub Surat and exports diamonds to some 75 countries.
The diamond merchant, who hails from Dudhala village in Amreli district in Saurashtra region, established and nurtured his business using a loan from his uncle.
First Published: Oct 28, 2016 10:02 ISTSome of the most outstanding works from NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s permanent collection of African art will be featured in a new exhibition on view July 24 through October 23, 2016. African Art: Highlights of the Permanent Collection explores the diverse highlights of NSU Art Museum’s collection of traditional art from Sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on the art of West Africa. The exhibition is organized by NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and curated by Marcilene Wittmer, Professor Emeritus and Curator, University of Miami, and includes approximately 60 pieces drawn from over 300 African works acquired by the museum over the past 45 years.
One of the unique aspects of NSU Art Museum’s African art collection is the number of works it contains by artists whose identity is known. Included among these are works by important masters of a regional style or workshop. Current African scholarship seeks to recognize and identify individual artists’ identities rather than display works as anonymous or a tribal style. Among the most important works in NSU Art Museum’s collection is a ritual figure of a kneeling woman supporting a bowl above her head that is attributed to the renowned Yoruba carver Areogun of Osi-Ilorin (1880-1954). Many West African Yoruba religious groups employ such figures of devotees supporting platforms or bowls. This particular piece was used on an altar for Shango, the powerful god of thunder.
The museum’s collection represents the variety of scale of traditional African art including monumental carved wooden doors, and an array of styles from a wood Mende figure, whose realistic facial figures, neck rings, hair and round body, reflect ideals of Mende physical and moral beauty — to abstract plank masks from Burkina Faso used in ceremonial events. The exhibition includes a variety of shrine pieces and ritual objects, as well as outstanding examples of African textiles, beadwork, pottery, iron and copper alloy.
The majority of the exhibition’s works are from the late Colonial and post-Colonial periods of the mid to late 20th Century. Some such works, such as the brightly-colored Dogon Kanaga masks, are still in production in various parts of rural Africa, as are the collection’s outstanding works by Yoruba carvers of Nigeria and Benin. Among the exhibition’s earliest works is a ceremonial Dogon trough from the 19th century decorated with images of primordial ancestors and a crocodile emblematic of earth’s water.
African Art: Highlights of the Permanent Collection is made possible with support from Wells Fargo and the Wege Foundation.Is there any demographic that Donald Trump has not alienated to the point where he’s more hated than a sexually transmitted disease? Despite closing in on 1,237 delegates for the GOP nomination, he’s a reaching a point when it comes time to debate Hillary Clinton, she will walk on stage, cackle, point at Trump and walk away.
One of the more solid pro-Republican voting blocs in the USA can be found in the Miami-Dade county of Florida and the large Cuban-American population there. Of course, it’s not so solid when Trump is figured as the nominee:
Donald Trump is the catalyst who could force a decisive break between Miami-Dade County’s influential Cuban-American voters and the Republican Party, a new poll has found. Local Cuban Americans dislike Trump so much — and are increasingly so accepting of renewed U.S.-Cuba ties pushed by Democratic President Barack Obama — that Trump’s likely presidential nomination might accentuate the voters’ political shift away from the GOP, according to the survey shared with the Miami Herald and conducted by Dario Moreno, a Coral Gables pollster and a Florida International University associate politics professor. Thirty-seven percent of respondents supported Trump, a number that is still higher than the 31 percent who backed Clinton — but also “the lowest in history that any potential Republican candidate polls among this traditionally loyal demographic,” according to Moreno.
Some won’t bother voting if he is the nominee:
About 10 percent of poll respondents said — unprompted in an open-ended question — that they wouldn’t vote at all if Trump wins the nomination. Voters are usually reluctant to admit that they plan to skip an election. “If you’re in a swing district and 10 percent of the Republicans aren’t going to vote — 10 percent of the Cuban Americans aren’t going to vote — that’s very dangerous,” Moreno said.
Of course, Trump supporters think that because he won a primary in Maryland, he’s some kind of unstoppable force.
Then reality sets in. Look at these negatives!
Moreno surveyed 400 likely Miami-Dade Cuban-American voters from April 21-23, conducting more than three-fourths of the interviews in Spanish. His results mirror those from a national poll conducted last month by Latino Decisions, a firm that has worked for Clinton, on behalf of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice organization. That poll found, among other things, that 73 percent of Florida Hispanic voters have a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump.
Who has unfavorables in the 70’s and wins?
Not anybody and particularly not Donald Trump.Europa NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
The search for alien life has recently taken a surprise twist away from Mars and toward Europa, an ice ball of a moon in orbit around Jupiter. To understand why, you just need to look at these three numbers: Zero
1.33 billion
3 billion The first is the volume of known water on Mars (sorry, permafrost and billion-year-old riverbeds don’t count). The second is the volume of water on Earth, measured in cubic kilometers. The third is the inferred volume of water sloshing around just beneath Europa’s frozen surface. Sure, Mars may have had oceans billions of years ago, but Europa has them right now—and they are more than twice as large as all of Earth’s oceans combined. Everything we know about life says that it needs water. Conversely, every place on Earth where water exists, life does too. The conventional thinking, then, is that if you want to find alien life, the first thing you look for is alien water. Europa is the wettest known world in the solar system. Life also needs food and energy. Europa scores there too: Its ocean might be nourished by a drizzle of organic chemicals and stirred by volcanic vents like the ones dotting the mid-Atlantic ridge. If any place in the solar system holds the answer to the “Are we alone?” question, it’s a good bet that Europa, not the Red Planet, does. Which is not to say that getting the answer will be easy—not by a long shot. To give you a sense of exactly how hard it will be, consider three more numbers: 600 million—the average flight distance, in miles, from Earth to Europa, meaning that the journey there could take at least six years; 500—the average radiation dose, in rem per day, on Europa’s surface, enough to fry unprotected spacecraft electronics within a matter of days; and 10—the average estimated thickness, in miles, of Europa’s ice shell, more than four times as thick as the glaciers covering Antarctica. Overcoming those numbers will test the limits of human ingenuity. But a growing chorus of scientists has argued that we must try. 500: the average radiation dose, in rem per day, on Europa’s surface—enough to fry unprotected spacecraft electronics within a matter of days This past May, NASA finally agreed and began the development of a probe to visit Europa sometime in the next decade. Many details of the mission, including its name, are still up in the air. But NASA has selected the nine scientific instruments that will ride aboard the craft to collect data, and Congress has put up the cash to get the potentially $2 billion project underway. For the Europa faithful, this news has prompted celebratory toasts, along with more than a little giddy disbelief. “We understand how special Europa is. It’s worth the investment. It’s worth the risk,” says Louise Prockter, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Prockter has already made that investment herself, having spent half her career studying Europa’s unique, frosty terrain. “I just hope we can get something there while I’m alive.” *** Sometimes great discoveries begin with what you do not see. Such was the case when Voyager 2 flew past Europa in 1979. It radioed home images revealing a world as white as a glacier, slashed with enigmatic brown streaks, and utterly flat. “No craters. It just looked like a huge ice pack. That was a big surprise,” recalls Ed Stone, Voyager’s long-serving project scientist. A lack of craters indicated a fast-changing surface that quickly erases the scars of asteroid impacts; that, in turn, implied that there must be some unrecognized energy source driving the activity. We know now that Europa’s gravitational interactions with Jupiter’s other large moons stretch and squeeze its interior, producing frictional heat (akin to rubbing your hands together) and creating a vast, warm ocean. The ice pack is merely frosting on top. Three years after Voyager’s flyby, the writer Arthur C. Clarke was so captivated by the discovery that he set his novel 2010 on Europa. He imagined it as a world inhabited by primitive aquatic creatures and guarded by the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They issued a warning to humans: “All these worlds are yours—except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” Among planetary scientists, these words have become both an in-joke and a taunt.
Not a modernist painting This close-up of Europa, taken by Galileo in 1997, has been color-enhanced to reveal surface features. Blue-white terrain shows relatively pure water ice; reddish stripes may contain salts from an ocean. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft went into orbit around Jupiter, and Europa came into sharper focus—up to a point. A series of new, much-closer images showed the moon’s streaks appear to be glacial fissures that have been flooded from below. Other regions resembled sea ice that has broken apart and refrozen. But Galileo was hobbled by a faulty radio antenna that restricted its data transmissions to a trickle. Over much of Europa it was unable to capture any details less than roughly 1 mile wide, and the probe left some regions almost entirely unmapped. No other spacecraft has gone to visit since the Galileo mission concluded in 2003. Prockter has made the best of a difficult situation, meticulously knitting together the two-decade-old imagery to show that Europa’s surface ice circulates down to the warmer layers below and back up—a colder version of Earth’s plate tectonics. Britney Schmidt, an astrobiologist at Georgia Tech, has found evidence of Lake Erie-size bodies of water embedded within Europa’s crust that could act as conduits between ocean and surface. Taken together, these discoveries point to an intriguing model. As the crust slowly churns, the surface ice could transport oxygen, minerals, and organic chemicals deposited by comets into the ocean’s depths. Meanwhile, upwelling ice or rupturing lakes might carry evidence of life to the surface. “If we can really understand how the ice shell works, that will tell us about Europa’s ability to support life, about where to look,” Schmidt says. Recent long-range studies have added to Europa’s mystique. Nearly two years ago, researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope sighted a huge vapor cloud hovering over Europa’s southern hemisphere. Evidently liquid water is able to break through the crust and blow into space, meaning that either there is water close to the surface or there are very deep cracks in the ice. Also, this past May, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported on experiments that reproduced the red-brown color of Europa’s streaks: The markings seem to be the result of oceanic salts that reached the surface and were discolored by Jupiter’s radiation. A salty ocean is just what you’d expect if water interacts vigorously with a rocky seabed, picking up dissolved salts. And well-stirred mineral-rich waters bode well for life. If any place in the solar system holds the answer to “ Are we alone?” it’s a good bet Europa does. All of which would make Europa a fascinating destination even if it were a freaky outlier, but it isn’t. Broadly similar icy worlds—including moons, dwarf planets, and giant asteroids—are the norm in the vast outer zone of the solar system. According to the latest research, at least nine of these bodies have inner oceans too. Even Pluto might be wet on the inside, a suspicion bolstered by the 11,000-foot ice mountains and other dramatic surface geology recently found by the New Horizons probe. Put another way, most of the liquid water in the solar system is found not on the surface of rocky worlds like Earth but inside icy bodies like Europa. That raises the stakes for NASA’s upcoming mission. If we find evidence of life on Europa, it would point to a whole new class of habitable worlds across the solar system, and probably across the universe. *** Pretty much from the moment Galileo reached Jupiter 20 years ago, Europa proponents have been thinking about how to go back and study the moon in proper detail. Along the way, they have worked on three separate mission concepts that NASA initiated and then canceled. At this point, they know the challenges of Europa backward and forward. Distance is the simplest one to address because it has a straightforward, brute-force solution. Using an off-the-shelf Atlas V rocket, the voyage to Europa would take at least six years—a painfully long time for academics and political supporters alike. The current Europa concept therefore calls for hitching a ride on NASA’s upcoming rocket, the giant Space Launch System (SLS). In its initial configuration, SLS will be 321 feet tall and pack 8.4 million pounds of thrust. That’s good enough to potentially cut the travel time to Europa at least in half. In NASA’s current schedule, the first SLS will be ready for a test flight in 2018—plenty early for a |
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